Week 12 (2023) - Three Sisters

In Native American culture, the three sisters were corn, squash, and beans, three crops that when planted together, all supported each other to grow and thrive. Those three ingredients were found throughout many Native American recipes, and although we eat plenty of corn, squash, and beans as a family, and it would be easy to find recipes that included any or all of them, I knew I wanted to make something indigenous to the Americas to truly represent this theme. I requested a bunch of cookbooks from the library, and after skimming through them, I settled on the three sisters salad with shallot vinaigrette from The New Native Kitchen: Celebrating Modern Recipes of the American Indian, by Chef Freddie Bitsoie and James O. Fraioli.

The salad included onions, garlic, carrots, celery, thyme, zucchini, corn, white beans, and spinach, with a vinaigrette consisting of lemon juice, shallots, garlic, and olive oil. The vegetables are all cooked, so this was more of a warm/room temperature salad.

We liked this salad, especially the flavors of the vinaigrette. It tasted light and healthy, and was a good match for the heavier components of our dinner (rotisserie chicken and garlic bread). The recipe intro stated that they couldn't match this summer salad (which we ate in early spring) to any particular community, but for us, this will be for the AtWCC for the USA. Since we're doing each state and territory separately, we'll be counting the indigenous recipes that we try there. Now that we've found a bunch of cookbooks, looking forward to trying more!

Week 6 (2024) - Normandy

Normandy is a region in Northern France, and while I have a general familiarity with French cuisine, I wasn't sure what dishes in particular came from Normandy. After reading through a bunch of recipes, I found a bunch of ingredient that were repeated over and over - cheese, cider, apples, and alcohol, specifically Calvados, an apple brandy that is only made in Normandy. I had no interest in cooking with alcohol for this challenge, which eliminated a bunch of dishes that seemed like they wouldn't be quite the same if modified, and my lactose intolerance doesn't really love creamy cheeses like Camembert, also from the region. So finding a recipe for this challenge ended up being far more difficult than I thought it would be!

I eventually settled on endives au jambon (endives with ham), a specialty of Northern France and Belgium, based on recipes from Pardon Your French and Complete France. The endives are cooked first until tender, then wrapped in ham, and then covered with a rich Mornay sauce (basically a béchamel plus grated cheese, which was gruyere in this case). The second recipe topped it with some breadcrumbs and cheese, which I also added. The endives are then baked and sometimes broiled, but I skipped the broiler step since we don't have any sort of bowl-like vessel that's broiler-safe. It turned out fine with just baking, but was missing that nice browned layer on the top.

The only real issue that I found when planning out the cooking was that I had three endives that totaled about 230 grams, while the main recipe I was following had four endives that were around 200 grams each. Big difference. That did mean that the endives cooked faster, but it also meant that I was going to have way too much sauce. Rather than cutting down the sauce recipe since my brain was feeling a little tired, I decided to just use the sauce on top of some celery we had in the fridge that needed to be cooked soon. Surprise celery gratin! I searched to find out the origins of celery gratin to see if I could link it back to Normandy in some way, but couldn't find anything that said that.

The endives were really tasty. Very rich and heavy, definitely not something we would eat all the time, but good. (I say that, but I said that the last time I made celery gratin too, and here we are again, a couple months later, with another celery gratin. It's a good way to use up warehouse club-sized packs of celery.) Perhaps in the future, whenever we get to France, I'll find some way to make some other dishes representing Normandy, but for now, satisfied with how this challenge turned out!

Start of the Year (2024)

First set of challenge blurbs for the 2024 challenge! Hoping to catch up on the other posts from this year before I get even more off track on the timing (again) ...

Week 4 - peeling

Peeling should have been an easy challenge to figure out, but I didn't want to just do something like potatoes because that was something I would use a peeler on. I eventually chose a shaved asparagus salad from Two Peas and Their Pod to be the starting point for our salad. I haven't had much raw asparagus, so this would be something new. Unfortunately, my plans to make a gigantic salad went out the window when my asparagus shavings didn't look nearly as good or robust as the recipe photos, and when the peeler would stop shaving anything but scraps once I got halfway through each piece of asparagus.  I have no idea what I was doing differently or wrong, but it became a bit tedious trying to get good pieces of asparagus, and I was still left with the question of what do with all the parts I couldn't peel. I ended up just doing a small side salad and roasting the rest instead.

I modified the recipe quite a bit for what we had and to simplify it. The salad itself consisted of asparagus, some baby greens (too expensive and rotted too quickly, probably could have skipped), crumbled feta cheese (my sub for shaved parmesan because that was pricey, and the grocery bill was already high due to the $6.99/lb asparagus plus the overpriced salad greens), chopped walnuts (recipe was pistachios, but we already had some open walnuts), and a dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, and some agave. The recipe also included avocados, but the ones at the store didn't look great either. The salad plus the roasted asparagus together cost about $11, which was more than the turkey cheeseburgers I served them with. All together, the meal was probably close to $19. I probably wouldn't make this specific salad again unless I figured out where I went wrong with the peeling, but the small batch I did make did taste good.

Week 5 - celestial

This was the first challenge this year that really puzzled me. All that came to mind was Celestial Seasonings tea, which I didn't really want to do for the challenge, and after reading more about it (here), really, really didn't want to do for the challenge. Ideas that came up in discussion included sun (like sun chips), moon (like mooncakes), planetary designs, and for a long time, the thing that made the most sense to do was something Star Wars-related (and there are some great recipes on their site). In the end, I wasn't feeling super artistic and I wanted to do something that would also work for dinner, not dessert, so I decided to go with zodiac signs, more specifically Pisces, and make fish. 

I found a recipe on Food & Wine for a baked flounder with Parmesan crumbs, and that sounded perfect for this challenge and a nice dinner. The fish was lightly seasoned with salt and pepper, and then topped with a mixture of melted butter, olive oil, parmesan cheese, and panko breadcrumbs. The dish was delicious and so simple to make, and it paired well with some roasted asparagus and smashed potatoes. Not the best for a low-calorie diet or the most affordable (the fish part itself was probably around $11, but not 100% sure because I can't remember the flounder price per piece, which meant a $24 meal when paired with the $8 asparagus and $5 potatoes, but we were absolutely stuffed and had leftover potatoes), but would definitely make all of it again.

Week 7 - discontinued

I was obsessed with the Wild Mountain chicken sandwich at Wendy's back in the early 2000s and so sad when they discontinued it. It was a crispy chicken sandwich with bacon, lettuce, tomato, onion, colby jack cheese (didn't realize we ran out of it before making this so had to substitute), and a southwestern sauce. I used the sauce from a copycat recipe of the Wild Mountain bacon cheeseburger, consisting of (vegan) mayo, paprika, cumin, garlic, lemon juice, cayenne, oregano, salt, and sugar, and I think it turned out pretty close to what I remember (but it has been about 20 years). Approximate cost was $8.95 for three sandwiches, so far cheaper than Wendy's would ever be. It was "only" a chicken sandwich, but I would absolutely make this again for the memories.

Week 10 - balling

My first thought for balling was meatballs, but then it became a challenge to figure out what type of meatball, since just about every culture has some version of meatballs. In the end, we were coming off a week of the flu and more illnesses, everyone was feeling fatigued, and we had to cancel a bunch of grocery trips, so the easiest thing to do was spaghetti and meatballs, something I personally really like anyway. These meatballs were a combination of Impossible burger, onion, garlic powder, breadcrumbs, flax egg, grated parmesan cheese (the green bottle kind), salt, pepper, thyme, and oregano, generally based on the recipe on the Impossible website. 

Rather than make my own sauce (school night, fatigue, etc), I just went with a caramelized onion and garlic jarred sauce and some whole wheat spaghetti. The total for dinner, including the roasted asparagus we ate on the side, was about $15.92, with some extra pasta and sauce left over. I doubt it would have cost this much five years ago (been cleaning out some old receipts), but 2024 prices are ridiculous, even for something basic like spaghetti and meatballs. But it is still cheaper than getting it at a restaurant though for the amount it made. Also, not sure if it was because our cheese was older or what, but our stomachs didn't respond too well to this, even though it did taste good. It did apparently reawaken some interest for spaghetti and meatballs from the little one, which was a nice surprise.

First 10 done (with some more individual posts to come)!

Week 9 (2023) - Palestinian

This one is a tough one to write, given current events. Back in 2022, the cooking challenge had a Ukraine theme (partially written, still haven't posted yet somehow). I think it was in direct response to the war with Russia and to support Ukrainian culture and cooking. In 2023, the Week 9 theme was Palestinian. At the time I made this, I was excited, because we have some Palestinian restaurants in the area that we love, I had a couple of cookbooks and websites bookmarked that focused on Palestinian cuisine, and it would be fun to try out something new. Week 9 of 2023 was the end of February, beginning of March, and while the region has never really been free from conflict, the world looked a lot different than it does now. Making Palestinian food now seems a lot more like the Ukraine challenge than it did at the time.

For the challenge, I decided to make a recipe called sayadieh from the cookbook, Dine in Palestine. The internet seems to mostly associate this dish with Lebanon, sometimes Syria, but the recipe intro in the cookbook said that the author was introduced to this dish while traveling in Jordan and Palestine, so that worked for me. Sayadieh is a cumin-spiced cod dish served with caramelized onions and rice, which this cookbook paired with a tahini salad, and that sounded to us like a delicious dinner.

We had already tried one recipe from this cookbook previously, za'atar spiced tilapia with lentil salad, that was amazing, so we had a feeling the sayadieh was going to be good too. I'm going to briefly mention that one here rather than making a separate post, so for the AtWCC, it'll just be one post about both Palestinian fish dishes. Za'atar is a common spice in Palestinian dishes (and the one we have is actually Palestinian from Z&Z with Palestinian-sourced wild thyme, sumac, and toasted sesame seeds) that we absolutely love. Here, the tilapia was seasoned with salt and pepper, and then baked in a sauce mix of za'atar, olive oil, butter, lemon juice, and garlic. The lentils were mixed with green onions, tomato, fresh parsley, garlic, olive oil, and lemon juice, and even without the fish, that was a great salad. Everything together was delicious and just worked really well. This dish immediately went onto our list of things we needed to make again sometime.

On to the sayadieh. The tahini salad came first so it could chill in the fridge, and that was about what you would expect - tomatoes, parsley, and garlic in a tahini-lemon dressing. Next up was caramelizing onions (can't remember if I did 2 or 3), which always tastes good but makes me think about just how little you get for how many onions you've used. Most of the onions went into the rice, along with olive oil, cumin, turmeric, and some bouillon, which made the rice really flavorful and yellow. The last component was the cod itself, which was seasoned with cumin, smoked paprika, salt, and pepper. The final garnishes were the remaining caramelized onions, slivered almonds, and parsley. A bunch of elements but a really nicely composed plate.

Overall, both fish dishes were good, but I think I preferred the za'atar fish with lentil salad a little bit more because it was a lighter plate. I'm very glad we tried both of them, and I'm looking forward to going through more of that cookbook another time.

Week 10 (2023) - Substitution

As a food allergy family, the easiest substitution to make is to swap in plant-based eggs for anything involving eggs, and that was what led us to roti john, a Singaporean omelette sandwich that is usually eggs, minced meat, and onions topped with a tomato-chili sauce on a baguette-like bread. Considering that the theme was substitution, I didn't just swap out the eggs, but also decided to make the sandwich vegan by using Impossible for the ground meat.

The recipe I followed was from the cookbook, The World Eats Here, about the Queens Night Market, one of my favorite food events in NYC that I haven't been to in a few years and very much miss. (It's a little more difficult these days between travel time and food allergies. Can't just take one train anymore!) The number of different cuisines you can try in one place while supporting small businesses is something that you can't really find anywhere else in the city at that level or price point. We never visited Native Noodles, the vendor who contributed this recipe to the cookbook, since they didn't start selling there until 2019, but if they had been there back when we went, I'm sure we would have.

To make the sandwich, you start by toasting the baguette, then heating up the garlic, onions, and then the meat-cumin mixture in a skillet until cooked. An egg mixture is added next (mixed with sambal oelek (only used a little bit), salt, and pepper) to cover the meat, and then the bread is pressed onto the mixture while the eggs cook (so that the eggs get absorbed into the bread). A spicy ketchup (ketchup, sriracha, and sugar) is spread on top of the finished baguette before it's closed up into sandwich form.

The sandwich was delicious. Messy, but so tasty. I'm sure the version at the night market was better when it could be made on a proper griddle, but I was happy with our version.

Week 6 (2023) - Icelandic

I wrote all of this last February. I have no idea why I never posted it!

Iceland has been on our "want to travel" list for years, between the hot springs and geothermal spas, beautiful landscape, possibility of seeing the Northern Lights, and the culture which led to their amazing crowd presence at the Euro back in 2016, but the closest we've gotten was our visit to Icelandic Fish and Chips back in 2017 (they have since closed, but will post about it someday). The Week 6 challenge was Icelandic, which I was excited for but also a little concerned about, since there weren't many recipes that seemed easy or in some cases, even doable. Fermented shark may be one of the national dishes there, but that certainly wasn't happening here.

I picked up a couple of cookbooks - one, North: The New Nordic Cuisine of Iceland by Gunnar Karl Gislason, looked delicious but was a bit too fancy and complicated for me, and the other, The Nordic Cookbook by Magnus Nilsson, covered all the Nordic countries and was over 750 pages. There were only a handful of Icelandic recipes in The Nordic Cookbook, especially compared with recipes for Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, but I was able to find more than enough there to pick out something for the challenge. That book is so heavy that you could also use it for strength training while cooking.

I decided to make plokkfiskur, a fish and potato mash, which the book said is commonly eaten with rye bread and with a lump of butter on top. The book also had a recipe for rye bread, rugbraud, but it was meant to be steamed in a geothermal area, which I obviously did not have access to in NYC. The alternative was to put it in the oven for 12 hours or overnight, neither of which I wanted or was comfortable doing. So I found a recipe for Icelandic rye bread on King Arthur Baking which took less than 3 hours in the oven, and that seemed like a far better fit. The King Arthur Baking recipe also noted that rye bread is usually served with smoked, cured, or pickled foods, and is also good with butter, so I thought a repeat of smoked salmon and the mustard-dill compound butter from Week 5's mustard challenge was in order.

Rugbraud (Rye Bread)

This rye bread was a no-knead dough (yay!) consisting of rye flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, buttermilk, honey, and molasses. I thought putting it together would be really easy since it was really just mix the dry, mix the wet, and pour the wet into the dry with no kneading, but it took far longer than I planned. Part of that was because the wet here was sticky honey, sticky molasses, and then buttermilk. It turned out fine, but it was messier and took longer to mix than I anticipated. The dough was super sticky when I added it to the loaf pan, plus our loaf pan was smaller than the recipe which I hadn't realized, so I had to add the rest of it to a second pan in an attempt to make some misshapen rolls. The original recipe also used a pain de mie/pullman pan with a removable lid, which we didn't have either, so our bread wasn't flat on all sides.

The bread bakes at a low temperature for about 2 hours, and then sits in the hot oven for a little longer. I left it in there for perhaps a few extra minutes because it was a little crustier than I thought it should be. It was okay for the most part, the inside was dense but soft, but some of the outside was very hard. I was worried when I first started cutting into it because of all the "brick bread" I've been making recently, but at least this one turned out edible, and with toppings, good. I don't know if I would make it again, since it's on the sweeter side and because it made the kitchen smell like molasses (and not bread) for a few hours straight (not my favorite aroma), but I'm glad we made it for the challenge.

Plokkfiskur

Searching "plokkfiskur" on Google turns up a lot of recipes for "Icelandic fish stew," but this cookbook's representation of it as a fish and potato mash seems more accurate for what we made. There are also Norwegian (plukkfisk) and Danish (plukfisk) versions that differ slightly, so maybe we'll revisit that whenever those countries turn up in the AtWCC (that's a big whenever, since we're still in the letter A).

To make the mash, you melt some butter, add some chopped onion, and then once cooked (but not browned), add a little bit of flour followed by milk (used oat milk). The mixture comes to a boil and then simmers for a few minutes, which I did until it started getting thicker. Then you add in some cooked, flaked fish (boiled some tilapia straight from frozen, only took 15 minutes), and next, boiled potato (will admit that I used instant mashed potatoes here and am not ashamed of it because it is such a time-saver for a similar enough result), salt, and pepper. The end result was basically mashed potatoes with fish in it, and it was delicious, especially with the butter on top. We ate this on top of the rye bread, and while the rye bread tasted very sweet on its own, it was so much better as a vehicle for eating this and the smoked salmon-butter combo. Very glad this was our choice for the Icelandic challenge!

Sopa de Amendoim

We kicked off 2024 with our first dish for Angola! I had initially planned to post the entire AtWCC "alphabetical walk around the world" in order, but it's Veganuary, and the source of this recipe was the cookbook, Vegan Africa by Marie Kacouchia, which I'm hoping to make more recipes from and post about. It seemed to make more sense to post this now to keep all the cookbook recipes in order, with the added bonus of being more timely than if I waited months.

I was a little nervous about starting our Angola unit. We were completely unfamiliar with the cuisine (although that's kind of the point of the AtWCC). We'd never been to Angola, or to a restaurant featuring Angolan food, and our knowledge of the cuisine was fairly limited. We knew they were a Portuguese colony until the 1970s, but that was about it. The Southern African nations (outside of South Africa) are probably the cuisines we know the least about generally, so definitely outside our comfort zone but kind of exciting from an exploration standpoint.

I had bookmarked a few African cookbooks in anticipation of this unit, so I decided the best starting point was figuring out if there was anything I could make in there. I didn't find much for Angola. There were also a lot of recipes inspired by specific dishes or ingredients, or recipes that covered general regions of the continent. That made sense, since a lot of regions share common dishes and ingredients even if they are different countries, but it does complicate the AtWCC, which we were trying to do by country. I did, however, find a recipe in Vegan Africa specifically for an Angolan peanut soup (sopa de amendoim in Portuguese, the official language of Angola), so that seemed like the perfect place to start.

One thing I really liked about this recipe (and cookbook) was that the ingredients were very accessible without needing to search out an African grocery store. We have those in NYC somewhere, but during the holidays and while sick, it was nice to not have to worry about finding more specialized ingredients.

The recipe itself was very simple, just took some time to prep. It consisted of chopped up onions, green peppers, and jalapeño peppers in a broth that combined vegetable stock and peanut butter. That was it, although the recipe notes did say you could add other vegetables like carrots or celery, which I did since we had both and I wanted to give it more bulk as a main dish instead of a starter (the section of the book it was in). The total cost for the soup was about $5.40 ($7.40 when you include the crescent rolls we ate on the side), one of the most affordable meals we've made in a long time, and we had a little bit left over for lunch.

The soup was amazing. So simple - just the vegetables, vegetable stock, peanut butter, salt, and pepper - but so much flavor. B didn't really try any of it, but that wasn't surprising since he was sick and also still not a fan of soup. Like every recipe and dish we're going to try for this unit, we have no idea if the end result was the same as what you would get if you had peanut soup in Angola, but we liked it a lot and would definitely make it again. It was a lovely start to the Angola challenge.

Week 1 (2024) - Beans

Time for the 2024 challenge! (And to finish writing about the other years...)

The challenge for Week 1 was beans. When the theme came up, I had just finished reorganizing the pantry (again) and come across a just-past-date bag of dry kidney beans, so obviously I had to use those so they wouldn't go to waste (and I had no plans for them, had just bought them because they were a good price). A quick search for kidney bean recipes came up with a lot of results for red beans and rice, which meant we could also explore Louisiana for the AtWCC!

Red beans and rice was traditionally made in Louisiana on Mondays, using bones left over from Sunday dinner on a day when there would be plenty of time to let the dish cook (apparently Mondays were wash days). I chose to follow a recipe I found on Allrecipes even though it did not use bones, since a lot of people claimed it tasted authentic, and planned to make it our Christmas Eve dinner (challenges announced a few weeks in advance), since we were staying in and would have time to soak and cook the beans all day.

The first step was to soak the beans overnight. Despite setting multiple reminders for myself, I almost forgot before going to bed until A reminded me. You can make the beans without soaking them, but it takes longer. You also have to make sure to fully cook kidney beans, because otherwise they could be toxic and no one wants that. Having never used dry kidney beans before, I really wanted to soak them for the best chance of success.

I sautéed some onions, green peppers, and celery, the holy trinity of Cajun and Creole cuisine, with some garlic, and then added them to the pot with the (drained and rinsed) beans along with some chicken broth and a whole bunch of seasonings, including bay leaves, parsley, thyme, oregano, garlic powder, paprika, cayenne (only a little so it wouldn't be too spicy for B), and sage. The recipe said to let it simmer for 2.5 hours (with some periodic stirring) before adding in the sliced Andouille sausage, but I probably added that in closer to the 2-hour mark. I think our burner runs hot, so I may have had the simmering temperature too high, because the beans were already soft enough to cut in half with a silicone spatula after about 40 minutes. I lowered it even more and did let it keep simmering to make sure they would be soft enough (and not toxic). When I tried it, I found that the skins were a little tougher and not as soft as I thought they would be after 2 hours, but maybe I needed to cook it lower and longer, or maybe they just weren't the highest quality beans.

The end result though was delicious, and it reminded us of red beans and rice we've had before, so it felt like we were giving B a real taste of Louisiana cuisine at home (the whole point of the AtWCC). The flavorings felt spot-on. We weren't sure if he would go for it considering the stew-like texture and sauce, but to our surprise, he loved it (other than a couple slightly too spicy pieces of sausage). The approximate cost for the red beans and rice was $12.89, which isn't that bad considering we had enough leftovers for part of dinner for another day. Week 1 was a success!