Week 14 - Alphabet

The Week 14 challenge was alphabet, which had so many interpretations. You could make actual letters of the alphabet. You could challenge yourself to use one ingredient from each letter of the alphabet (no thanks). As a casual viewer of Guy's Grocery Games (great background show), I was pretty familiar with the ABC Game, where every ingredient had to begin with the same letter of the alphabet picked at random. Rather than leave it to RNG and end up with, say, Q or Z, I decided to just find a bunch of things that started with the same letter.

Looking at that plate, you might be thinking that it's not possible that all of those things started with the same letter of the alphabet. You might be right, except, taking precedent from Guy's Grocery Games, starting with the same letter is kind of a flexible concept. It would always amuse me just how many things could fit into the letter G when you count every "ground" spice as G, no matter what it was. Thinking about it that way, here you had:

- chicken stuffing (Stove Top)
- chopped turkey meatballs (didn't have any chicken ones available)
- carrots
- canned green beans

A meal for the letter C! I didn't apply the rule to seasonings, because I couldn't find a way to make freshly ground black pepper and garlic powder fit, but didn't want unseasoned vegetables. We eat some variation of this meal fairly regularly, since stuffing is one of my favorite foods that B seems to enjoy as well (and Stove Top is just so easy for a quick dinner), but it was nice to be able to use it for a challenge.

Week 12 - Peppers

I love stuffed peppers, so when the Week 12 challenge came up as peppers, choosing what to do for the challenge was so easy. We've had some amazing stuffed peppers (and other vegetables) at restaurants, especially the ones we had in a small village in Greece, but the only ones we had at home before this challenge were the ones we bought at Costco, in which the peppers always came out underdone and not soft at all (but the filling was good). I quickly found a delicious-sounding recipe for turkey stuffed peppers on Skinnytaste, and the thing I liked the most was that people commented about how soft and juicy the peppers were. Exactly what we were looking for.

The ingredients for the stuffed peppers were:

- 1 lb ground turkey ($4.50)
- olive oil ($0.20)
- about 6 cloves of garlic, minced ($0.30)
- 1 small onion, chopped ($0.79)
- garlic powder ($0.05)
- cumin ($0.10)
- salt & freshly ground black pepper ($0.03)
- oregano ($0.05)
- 4 bell peppers ($5.34)
- 1.5 cups of chicken broth (bouillon + water in our case) ($0.50)
- about 3/4 cup of tomato sauce ($1)
- about 1.5 cups of cooked brown rice ($1)
- canola oil spray ($0.03)
- a few handfuls of shredded cheese ($1)

The total cost for the stuffed peppers was approximately $14.89 (right on par with so many of our challenge meals). We've made it a few times since then, and the price might have been slightly less those times since we only used three peppers instead of four. (The prices fluctuate so much though, and depends on where we can get our groceries from!) For a meal that's just the right size for our family of three, that works for us.


The steps to make the stuffed peppers were:

1. Prep - Mince onion and garlic. Wash peppers and chop in half from top to bottom, pulling out the seeds and ribs.

2. Add olive oil to skillet, and cook onions and garlic until soft.

3. Add turkey, garlic powder, cumin, salt, black pepper, and oregano, and cook, breaking up the turkey as it cooks, until meat is fully cooked. Adjust seasonings if needed, to taste.


4. Add tomato sauce and 1/2 cup of chicken broth, and simmer for a few minutes. Adjust flavors to taste.

5. Add rice to turkey, and mix well. [Note: We used some rice that had been thawing out in the fridge for a few days, but was apparently still frozen. Make sure the rice is fully thawed out (or never frozen) or this will add a significant amount of time, as we learned the hard way...]

6. Spoon meat and rice mixture into the bell pepper halves and place in baking dish that has been sprayed with canola oil. [We used two 13x9 baking dishes for 4 peppers (and still do even with less peppers).] Top with cheese.

7. Pour 1/2 cup of chicken broth into the bottom of each baking dish. Cover with aluminum foil (making sure it's tight, but also not resting on the cheese), and bake for 40-45 minutes.


The stuffed peppers were everything I hoped they would be. The peppers themselves were so soft and juicy, and the vibrant taste of the peppers, plus the seasoned turkey and rice mixture, plus the cheese made for an excellent combination. If we would change anything about the way we made it that time, it would be to add a little more seasoning to the meat, but it was still good as it was. We were so happy with how this turned out and put this technique for stuffed peppers into our repertoire, with the intention of mixing up the fillings depending on what we were planning for the week.

Since the time we did this challenge the first time, we've now made stuffed peppers a couple more times, experimenting with different variations, but each time using only three peppers. The second time, we used beef-less ground beef from Trader Joe's instead of ground turkey, and omitted the tomato sauce (didn't have any) and the shredded cheese (didn't have any open packages). The two ingredients that we were missing seemed to make a difference, so the third time, we used Gardein beef-less ground (no idea if that's the same manufacturer as TJ's, but it's frozen instead and tastes different), tomato paste, and shredded parmesan, and it was much better. Considering the various meat supply issues during the pandemic, we're really glad that all the meat alternative products work so well in these stuffed peppers, and everyone in the family, including B, loves them. Definitely something we're going to keep in our rotation as long as we can get good bell peppers!

Weeks 11 and 20

I knew the day would come when I would need to write this post. As much as I hoped to do the entire 52 week cooking challenge, I had a feeling that not all 52 weeks were going to click with me and that I was going to end up skipping at least one at some point. I gave myself complete permission to do that when I decided to restart the challenge, even if the reason for skipping it was just "I don't want to do it," but I think some part of me, the completionist part, still hoped I could do it all.

Of course, that was in January, before the COVID-19 pandemic, before grocery shortages, back when I thought I could drop into any specialty grocery store in the city to pick up whatever I needed (fully recognize this was a privilege and luxury of living in a diverse urban center with lots of immigrant communities; hopefully those shops will survive this pandemic!). Now, in addition to challenges I just didn't feel like doing, there were challenges that needed to be postponed. I postponed some because of ingredient shortages (like missing yeast), but others because the dishes I really wanted to try required going to specialty stores that I just can't visit right now, like the Week 19 (Sri Lankan) and 22 (Nepalese) challenges.

I'm sure it won't be as good, and probably won't be a pyramid, but how can I not try to make my favorite Sri Lankan dish?

As for skipped (and not postponed), so far there's only two (since I was able to figure out a third). Once I realized I was going to be skipping more than one challenge though, I decided to give myself two more chances to complete each week. Since I had missed the 2018 and 2019 challenges, why not see what the challenges were for the same week during those years? Going forward, the plan for any skipped 2020 challenges would be to first check those years to see if there was a good substitute, and if not, then the week would be skipped without any guilt.

Those two skipped challenges are still skipped, and here's why:

Kawaii (Week 11)

Cute cupcakes at Whole Foods

Week 11 was mid-March, and while the dates of the challenge line up perfectly with when I began self-quarantining for months, that wasn't why this one was skipped. I love looking at photos of meals that would qualify for the kawaii challenge, but I didn't actually want to make any of them myself. Considering the time crunch we're usually in for dinner and all the other stuff we need to do all the time, taking the time to make food look cute just for the sake of the challenge wasn't appealing. I have the utmost respect for people who do make such cute stuff since I love to see it, but it's just not for me, at least not right now. (I had also assumed B would be too young to really appreciate food coming out of the kitchen looking like one of his favorite characters or animals, but then he saw some food on Instagram that looked like dogs, and well, I was wrong.)

The two Week 11 challenges that I missed were Arctic (which sounded interesting, but just making some salmon didn't really feel in the spirit of the challenge), and inspired by video games (which I did in 2016). Week 11, skipped.

Puree (Week 20)

Purees can be really useful in elevating dishes, but I really didn't want to make one. I didn't want to break out the blender or the food processor because they take up a lot of space. Our counters are full because the groceries are in various stages of quarantine, and they just leave so little room for other prep work. (I was also reminded from a later baking experiment that the loud mini food processor terrifies B because of the noise, so another reason not to use these loud appliances!) Also, B spent many months eating purees for every meal, and I don't think any of us really wanted puree for dinner. If it was just a puree for an accompanying sauce, it felt like a lot of effort for something so minor. I just wasn't feeling this one at all.

Similar to Week 11, the two Week 20 challenges from the past year also didn't really appeal to me: lattice (no desire to make a pie right now) or multi-course meal (have I mentioned how slow I am in the kitchen and how little prep space there is?), so Week 20 was skipped.

Hopefully the rest of the year will bring challenges I won't want to skip and less postponements!

Around the World Cooking Challenge

Remember WorldEats, that challenge we were doing that we haven't posted about in nearly three years?

Progress slowed considerably in recent years thanks to the whole pregnancy and having an infant thing, but we didn't actually quit doing it. We just owe the blog a lot of posts about our adventures, old and new (besides all the trip recaps; who knows if we even have any memories of those trips left?).

That said, the one thing that did effectively pause our WorldEats exploration was the COVID-19 pandemic. Self-quarantine, plus trying to limit the amount of contact with the outside world, plus a bunch of restaurants temporarily closing for safety reasons (or in some cases, sadly permanently closing), plus most of the restaurants we would want to try for WorldEats being outside our delivery radius, means that we haven't done much over the past few months.

Love exploring our giant world through food!

I was stuck in a bit of a rut in the spring, and I was thinking about how much I missed our WorldEats exploration, especially how much I missed introducing new flavors and foods that we loved to baby B, and started wondering if maybe we should start another challenge (yes, I like challenges; they give me focus) for home cooking. As if the 52 week cooking challenge and WorldEats and the periodic World Cup challenges weren't enough, what if we did WorldEats but in a cooking challenge?

Say hello to our Around the World Cooking Challenge (AtWCC), which we kicked off this month (June 2020)!

The current plan is to go in alphabetical order just for some sort of structure, but I might break that if I find a cookbook in the (virtual) library that I can't wait to try and decide to cook (part of) the book. I'm also planning to mix the US states and major territories into that alphabetical order (we're part of the world too, even if we don't always act like it!). I've always felt that you gain a greater appreciation for other cultures through food, and the US is so regional that some areas might as well be separate countries, so it makes sense to add the different states and territories in here.

I had forgotten this was on the wall of Eataly! I had already decided to try to make bread for each of our exploration locations, and this map is going to come in handy on our journey!
I know this challenge has been done before, and I've found various blogs and Instagram accounts doing the same, but I'm excited to see how ours turns out! I anticipate some hurdles when it comes to figuring out egg replacements or my disinclination to cook red meat at home (don't really eat that much of it anyway, and interestingly we've become more and more plant-based as the pandemic rages on) or to deep fry at home (and we haven't tested our new air fryer yet), but hopefully we'll find some great things that work for our family and the challenge. I'm not planning on a strict time schedule (pinning it down to once a week is too much structure and pressure for me) or limiting myself to one recipe/meal per country, so we might never make it to Zimbabwe, but it'll be fun along the way! I'm really looking forward to researching all these new foods, dishes, and places, and I know we'll learn so much on this journey.

First up is Afghanistan (which as of the time of this writing, is already in progress). All posts will be labeled with AtWCC, we'll keep a status list in the sidebar, and maybe we'll also manage to finally catch up and write some of the dine-out WorldEats posts for the same countries as we continue on our journey. Hope you'll join us on our newest food adventure!

Week 10 - Fermented

When I hear fermented, my first thought is usually kimchi, but for the week 10 fermented challenge, kimchi was out since it would be too spicy for B. I didn't want to actually ferment anything myself, since I didn't want to unintentionally land us all in the hospital, so I decided I would use a recipe with a fermented product, but what? I considered pickles, but figuring out fermentation versus brining and which pickles were which was too much for my sleepy brain to figure out at the time, so pickles were also out. Tempeh was the next thing on the list, something I'd never cooked with before, and after finding a recipe for a marinated peanut tempeh on Minimalist Baker, I decided to go for it. Although the original recipe baked the peanut tempeh, I just used that as our starting point and made our very first peanut tempeh stir-fry!

The ingredients for our adapted recipe were:

for the marinade:
- 1.5 tbsp sesame oil ($0.45)
- 2 tbsp peanut butter (used pb2) ($0.50)
- 3 tbsp soy sauce ($0.60)
- juice of 1 lime ($0.29)
- 2 tbsp agave ($0.15)


everything else:
- 8 oz tempeh ($1.99)
- 3 zucchini, chopped ($2.29)
- 12 oz of white mushrooms, chopped ($2.25)
- 1 yellow onion, chopped ($0.50)
- 3 bell peppers, chopped ($3.99)
- 4 scallions, chopped ($0.65)
- 1 can of cut green beans ($0.69)
- freshly ground black pepper ($0.05)
- garlic powder ($0.05)

The total for dinner was about $14.45 (really surprised at just how consistently we're coming in at family meals for $15 with these challenges, making me think I should also price our non-challenge meals), which made enough for dinner for three plus a tiny portion that I ate for snack another day. We probably could have dropped the price a little bit with cheaper bell peppers (or less vegetables, like the second time we made this), but the quality of the peppers at Costco was amazing, so we splurged a little.

Since this was the first time I had ever worked with tempeh, I was a little intimidated! First, the package stated outright, "Occasionally dark areas on tempeh are a result of the natural culturing process and do not indicate spoilage." What if the entire thing has gray dots all over it? Also, if it says occasionally, are the dark spots supposed to be rare? Thanks to the internet, I learned that if it's slimy, if it's not firm, or if it smells terrible, you should be concerned, but otherwise the dark spots are just the spores as a result of the fermentation. Ours was very firm, had a best by date over three months away, smelled fine, and didn't seem slimy (just a little wet from the packaging), so I kept going.


Apparently, tempeh has a bitter taste, which I vaguely remember from trying it in a dish one time (don't remember what kind or where) and thinking it had a strange aftertaste. According to the recipe I was following, steaming or boiling the tempeh would get rid of that bitterness. I followed along, filling a pan with an inch of water, bringing it to a low boil, adding the tempeh, and boiling it for 6 minutes per side. The instructions then said to rinse it (not sure why, but I did it), pat it dry, and then cut it up. I intended to cut it into cubes, but it seemed easy enough to crumble so I just tore it up with my hands rather than creating more to wash with another knife and cutting board. Once it started crumbling, it just kept crumbling though, so instead of cubes, I really just had crumbled tempeh. That probably worked out better for B anyway, but it wasn't my intention at the time.


As I tore the tempeh apart with my hands, I added it to the bowl of marinade, and then stirred it up well. The recipe said to refrigerate for 2-24 hours, stirring occasionally, so that was what I did. It ended up being refrigerated for about 18-19 hours.


Outside of the preparation of the tempeh, the rest of the dish was a relatively straightforward stir-fry. Prep the vegetables, cook them with a little black pepper and garlic powder, add the tempeh with all of the marinade, and then let it cook covered until everything is soft (or not so soft if you want some bite to your vegetables, but we lean toward the softer side for B). We were originally going to eat this on its own without any grains, but we had a little bit of leftover rice from the moqueca, so we each ate this with a scoop of rice but otherwise on its own.


This was pretty good. It tasted really healthy with all the vegetables, and I really liked the marinade. None of us had very strong feelings on the tempeh itself, but I will say that that boiling method did take away any bitterness that might have been in the original product, so it did work. After the challenge meal, we weren't in love with tempeh, but definitely open to trying it again.

Considering all the meat shortages that have happened since then during the pandemic, we've been eating more and more plant-based foods and gave both tempeh and this sauce another try. This time though, I didn't crumble it and instead sliced the tempeh into chunks, which worked so much better. We had it in a stir-fry with a yellow pepper, green beans, and onions over rice, and it was a really tasty dinner. Although we've been gravitating more towards vegan meat substitutes lately, the tempeh was good as a nuttier, firmer, chewier alternative to tofu, so I could definitely see us using it (and this sauce) again!

Week 9 - Brazilian

I was excited when the week 9 challenge came up as Brazilian, because B had never had Brazilian food before! I wasn't sure what to make since one of my favorite Brazilian foods, pao de queijo, has eggs as a pretty central ingredient, but I was sure we could find something we would all love. I looked around for something that wouldn't be too meat-heavy, and came upon a recipe for a Bahia-style moqueca prawn stew on BBC Good Food. We'd been meaning to introduce B to shrimp for some time, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. It sounded delicious and simple to make, so it was an easy choice.

Previous Brazilian challenge meal from 2016

A few days after I made our recipe choice for the challenge, I looked back at what we did for the last Brazilian challenge. I remembered that it had involved fish and a soup or stew of some sort, and that we had not really been fans of how the fish turned out. As I read over the post, it occurred to me that the ingredients and the steps sounded very similar to the moqueca that we were going to make this time. Well, it sounded similar because it was. It was almost the same thing but with fish instead of shrimp (and some other ingredient variations like cumin and the amount of lime juice), but I didn't realize it when picking this one because the recipe last time had just been called Brazilian fish stew and not moqueca. I decided to make it anyway, since this time it would have shrimp, and it would also be a chance to do it better.

The ingredients for our adapted version were:

- 1 package of frozen raw shrimp (about 450g) ($9.99)
- juice of 2 limes, divided ($0.58)
- 6 cloves of garlic, finely chopped ($0.33)
- a few tbsp coconut oil ($0.50)
- 1 onion, chopped ($0.50)
- 4 scallions, chopped, whites and greens separated ($0.65)
- 2 bell peppers, chopped ($2.67)
- a couple tsp paprika ($0.10)
- 1 can diced tomatoes with juice ($0.89)
- 1 can (about 400 ml) coconut milk ($1.50)
- salt and freshly ground black pepper ($0.05)
- rice ($2)

[Note: The original recipe also included a couple tbsp of chopped cilantro, but the grocery store was out of cilantro and we were a little too busy to go hunting for it. It would have been a nice addition to brighten it up even more.]

The total came out to approximately $19.76, more than recent challenge meals, but that's to be expected when almost $10 of that cost is the shrimp by itself. It was enough for the three of us for dinner, plus a little left over for lunch for me and B (chicken nuggets went really well with it).


The steps for our version were:

1. Marinate shrimp: Place in a bowl with about 2 tbsp of lime juice and 1 tbsp of chopped garlic. Chill for about an hour.

2. Heat coconut oil. Add onion and the whites of the scallions, and saute until soft. Add peppers, scallion greens, the rest of the garlic, and the paprika, and cook until the peppers begin to soften. Season with some freshly ground black pepper.


3. Add the can of tomatoes with juice, coconut milk, and a little salt. Bring to boil, and then simmer on low for 10 minutes. [Note: I added another 1/2 cup of water along with the coconut milk because it didn't look like enough liquid for the shrimp. It didn't need it. It was more than enough so it ended up being more like soup than stew, but it was some delicious broth!]

4. Add shrimp with the marinade and the rest of the lime juice, and cook for about 3 minutes (or enough time for shrimp to turn white and opaque).

5. Garnish with chopped cilantro (if you have it, unlike us) and serve over rice.


We really liked this recipe, much more than when we made it last time. Cilantro would have made it even better, but it was vibrant, bright, and full of tropical flavors, especially lime, transporting our minds and tastebuds to someplace warmer in the middle of winter. (We made this back in February.) The prep took a little bit of time, but it was a pretty straightforward recipe and easy to make. All three of us liked it a lot, and it seemed like B's first time having shrimp was a success! Would definitely make this again.

Week 8 - Used to Dislike

The challenge for Week 8 was called "used to dislike." The first year I did the challenge in 2014, there was a challenge for an ingredient you hated as a kid. I chose lima beans and made two lima bean recipes (here and here), neither of which convinced me to jump on the lima bean train. I didn't really want to do that again, but I had a bit of trouble coming up with foods that I disliked at one point and loved now.

Eventually, I settled on cilantro and eggs. As a kid, I didn't love finding cilantro in dishes. I don't think I thought it tasted like soap, but just that it was strong and overpowering. One day, it was like a switch flipped, and I suddenly realized how amazing cilantro was and couldn't get enough of it. I also didn't love eggs when I was younger, other than omelettes. Didn't like the texture or taste hardboiled, found them boring scrambled (and whatever they were in those "scrambled egg" dining hall trays), and didn't like runny eggs at all. Omelettes were fine, filled with meats and veggies and cheese, but why would I choose those other types of eggs when there were so many more interesting things I could eat? Combining herbs and eggs led me straight to kuku sabzi, a Persian herb frittata usually eaten at the start of spring for the new year. (Note: We made this in February, and I'm just a little behind in posting...)

Kuku sabzi wasn't really a perfect answer to this challenge. First, frittatas are similar to omelettes, so not exactly something I would have disliked. Second, I couldn't actually make eggs due to B's allergy, and I didn't dislike chickpeas at any point (garbanzo flour would be the substitute for eggs). Was this really the best thing I could make? In the end, I decided to go with it for two main reasons. One, I'd never made it before, and the point of the cooking challenge generally was to expand my cooking horizons, and two, I may have disliked how strong some herbs were when I was younger, but maybe I could avoid that for B by continuing to introduce them to him at a young age. Looking around, I found a vegan version of kuku sabzi on Golubka Kitchen and decided to start there. It sounded delicious.


Before I go any further, a quick plea for help if anyone is reading this and has any ideas. This challenge, out of all the ones this year so far, took the longest to prepare. I didn't take any breaks or play games and just worked the entire time, but somehow it took 2.5 hours to prep everything and get it in the oven, with the majority of that time spent prepping three things - parsley, cilantro, and dill. How can I get faster at washing herbs, picking them off the stems, and chopping them up? What are we doing wrong? How could it possibly take so long? There has to be something we're missing, but internet sleuthing and YouTube haven't turned up anything yet. We just don't understand how it could have taken so long. Anyway, on with the challenge.


The ingredients for our adapted version of the vegan kuku sabzi were:

for the frittata:
- 2 cups chickpea flour ($1.50)
- salt ($0.02)
- turmeric powder ($0.15)
- freshly ground black pepper ($0.05)
- 3 tbsp grapeseed oil ($0.50)
- 2.5 cups water ($0)
- 1 onion, finely chopped ($0.79)
- 1 cup of leeks, chopped ($1)
- 2 garlic cloves, minced ($0.10)
- 1 bunch of cilantro, chopped ($0.99) *
- 1 bunch of parsley, chopped ($1.49) *
- 1 bunch of dill, chopped ($1.99) *
on the side:
- 1 box of grape tomatoes ($3.99)
- 1 container of garlic spread ($2.99)

* The recipe said 1.5 cups of each of these, chopped, and I really tried to do that. We had some giant bunches of cilantro, parsley, and dill that we bought from Wegmans, larger than what we would ever get at Trader Joe's. I felt sure that this would be way more than 1.5 cups, so much so that I only washed half the parsley initially, and then was shocked when it didn't even fill an entire cup. In the end, it probably came out to just under a cup of cilantro, just over a cup of parsley, and about 1.25 cups of dill.

All of that came out to $8.58 for the frittata and $15.56 for the total. It seems most of our challenge meals are coming out around $15 these days. It did last for two dinners though, so no complaints there and more economical than some of the other stuff we've made lately.

The steps for the recipe itself weren't difficult, but it just took a lot of time to make, with the bulk of that time being prep as mentioned earlier. The steps for our adapted version were:


- Prep the onion, leeks, garlic, and herbs.
- For the batter, combine the chickpea flour, salt, turmeric, black pepper. Whisk in the oil and water, and then let it sit while preparing the other stuff.
- Saute onion, leeks, and garlic until soft, and then add to the batter.
- Add the chopped herbs to the batter, and mix in well.
- Oil a pie pan (two in our case), and then pour the batter into the pan.
- Bake at 425 degrees for 30 minutes.
- Serve with garlic spread (looked for a yogurt dip or yogurt-based tzatziki, couldn't find what I wanted, but this worked so well) and chopped tomatoes.


The final product here tasted good, but we thought there wasn't as much flavor as there should have been considering there were all those herbs plus garlic plus leeks plus onions. If we made this again, we would add more garlic, more leeks, and green onions. Honestly though, there probably won't be a next time for this exact recipe unless we can figure out how to process the herbs faster. It took way too long to prepare something that should be so simple.


That said, the texture was good, and we all liked it, so we decided to reuse this as a framework for other "frittatas" that would be easier to prep. We've already done that once now with a combo of mushrooms, onions, and Mexican cheese, which was definitely easier to make, but also came out with far less flavor than we thought it would (and zero cheese taste). Something to work on for the future, I guess. Another bright spot from this kuku sabzi experiment, besides finding a way to make vegan frittatas, was that B ate plenty of it and at this point in time, doesn't seem to have an aversion to herbs and stronger flavors. He was so willing to try it, and that made me so happy!

Week 17 - From Scratch II

For the Week 17 "from scratch" challenge, I originally intended to bake bread, which I couldn't do because we had no yeast. After I wrote up a whole explanation about that (here), Week 21 was announced as flour. Making bread twice didn't seem like it would really be in the spirit of the challenge, plus we still had no yeast, so I decided to make bread at some later date for the flour challenge instead and do something else for "from scratch."

I follow a lot of chefs on Instagram, and one of the posts I bookmarked was a recipe for a vegetarian bolognese from Chef Eric Ripert. We love bolognese, but this point in the pandemic wasn't really a great time to buy meat for a whole bunch of reasons, so a vegetarian version sounded perfect for a Meatless Monday dinner. Most of the pasta we've been making lately is using sauce from a jar, since pasta has become one of our go-to recipes when we need something quick and convenient, so making this would definitely qualify as making something from scratch that we normally get store-bought. I didn't really think this through until I had already started making the dish, so unfortunately I don't really have a lot of pictures other than the finished product. Also, our counters are cluttered with groceries in various stages of quarantine, so sadly we don't really have much space for ingredient photos anyway.

To make the sauce, you need:

- olive oil ($0.35)
- 1 onion ($0.79)
- about 5 cloves of garlic ($0.20)
- mushrooms ($2.29)
- bell pepper ($1.50)
- tomato ($0.29)
- can of crushed tomatoes ($1.59)
- seasonings: salt, pepper, thyme, oregano, rosemary (his original had herbs de Provence but we got rid of ours recently in our pre-pandemic spice cabinet clean-out) ($0.50)
- pasta ($1.99)
- parmesan cheese ($1)

At an estimated cost of $7.50 for the sauce, it's more than a store-bought sauce would cost us, but we usually do add vegetables and sometimes meatballs to those sauces, so it's not significantly more. The entire thing cost us about $10.50 for dinner for three (with a small bowl of leftovers for lunch), so not bad at all.


It was a pretty simple sauce to make, but just took some time to come together. The first layer of the sauce was the onion, garlic, and seasonings, followed by the mushrooms (until the water evaporated), then the pepper, tomato, and crushed tomatoes, with seasoning adjusted throughout. Once all the ingredients were in and the sauce was simmering, it was time for the pasta which got drizzled with olive oil once drained. The whole thing was topped with parmesan (grated or shredded) at the end. Not as quick and easy as sauce from a jar, but a lot more vegetables!

How did we like the sauce? As a mushroom pasta sauce, pretty good. It was a little light on the seasoning, since I didn't add a ton of salt because it's not great for toddlers, but it tasted healthy and like the vegetables it contained. As a bolognese, it didn't really work for us. For bolognese, we really love that richness and those nuances of flavor that just didn't come through when meat was substituted with mushrooms (at least not the ones we got from Trader Joe's). I think in the future if I wanted to turn a meat sauce vegetarian, I might stick with the meat substitutes, like the beef-less crumbles or an Impossible Burger, because there is just that expectation of certain flavorings with a meat sauce that can't be replicated by only using vegetables. Good recipe for a mushroom pasta sauce though!

Week 17 - From Scratch

My initial reaction to the Week 17 theme, from scratch, was, "But if we're doing a real home-cooked meal, it's all from scratch!" While true, the focus of the challenge was "finding a product that you'd normally buy pre-made, and going that extra step to make the thing from scratch," quoting from the weekly introduction thread on Reddit.

Although they had some suggestions there like ketchup, cream cheese, and udon, there was only one thing I wanted to make for this challenge: bread. We've been wanting to make bread from scratch for a while, and B loves bread, so homemade bread seemed like the perfect answer to a "from scratch" challenge. I even found a recipe for a focaccia that sounded delicious.

But we're in the middle of a pandemic, and everyone is baking bread.

And we don't have any yeast at home.

And the stores don't have any yeast (thanks to the nationwide shortage), outside of very expensive one-pound packages of yeast, and we do not need that much yeast unless we're going to start baking bread on a regular basis. We've never even made bread before. Who knows if we'll be any good at it? A one-pound bag of yeast just seems like a waste for a cooking project of unknown success.

So this post is more of a placeholder, a part I to acknowledge the existence of this challenge and note that we had a plan for it, and we'll have to wait to execute this plan until we get some yeast. One day, when yeast is back in the store, hopefully we'll be able to do part II of this challenge post. This, unfortunately, isn't going to be the only challenge with a placeholder on our list, but we're really going to try to get back to finishing them once the situation allows.

Week 16 - South African

Skipping ahead to the current challenge and will fill in the posts for the other challenges later...

I was really excited that the Week 16 challenge was South African. During our WorldEats and other general restaurant exploration, we had tried quite a few South African dishes that we liked, and I thought maybe I could make something like bobotie or bunny chow for the challenge. The only real issue with that is the current pandemic. Grocery shopping is one of my favorite activities, but grocery shopping during the pandemic is not fun at all. Lines are long. With the virus everywhere, the best course of action is to pick one store, go in with a big list, get as much as you can, and get out, not visit multiple stores picking up all sorts of specialty ingredients. Also, you never know what will be sold out on any given day.


If you want to make a specific recipe these days, it's just challenging, because you don't know if you're actually going to get what you need or if there will be any good substitutions for the things you're missing, so it's better to pick something flexible or one where you already have most of what you need. Bobotie, especially since we would already need to make changes to make the bobotie egg-free, just seemed like too difficult of a task right now. Instead, I decided to try Durban chicken curry, representative of South Africa's Indian cuisine, based on a recipe I found on The Spruce Eats.

Ingredients:

The ingredients for our modified version of Durban chicken curry were:

- 2 tbsp butter ($0.20)
- 1 tbsp grapeseed oil ($0.10)
- 1 tbsp curry powder ($0.35)
- 1 tbsp ground coriander ($0.20)
- 1 tbsp ground cumin ($0.20)
- 2 cinnamon sticks ($0.25)
- 1 onion, chopped ($0.79)
- 1 tsp ginger paste ($0.10)
- 8 cloves of garlic, finely chopped ($0.25)
- 3 boneless skinless chicken breasts (about 1.5 lbs) ($7.05)
- 1 can diced tomatoes (undrained) ($0.99)
- 4 medium gold potatoes, diced ($1.15)
- 1.25 cups chicken stock ($0.30)
- freshly ground black pepper ($0.05)
- 4 scallions, chopped ($0.60)
- 1 tbsp chopped cilantro ($0.80)
- 2 cups (uncooked) brown rice ($1)

The recipe also called for whole cumin, which I skipped because we tossed our very old cumin seeds in our spice cabinet clean-out a few weeks ago, cayenne pepper, which I skipped so it wouldn't be too spicy for baby B, curry leaves, which I skipped because they don't sell them at Trader Joe's (our store of choice for our most recent stock-up), and a small rutabaga, which I skipped because they don't sell them at Trader Joe's and I forgot I needed to put a substitution on the shopping list, like parsnips. Despite not having all of these ingredients included, I think the finished product ended up true to the spirit of the curry recipe and didn't suffer without them. It ended up coming out to about $14.38 for dinner for the three of us with a little bit of rice and maybe a bowl of curry left over, which isn't too bad considering that half of that cost was the chicken by itself.

Steps:

The steps for the curry, adapted from the original recipe, were:


1. Melt butter in grapeseed oil over medium heat. Add spices and stir until fragrant, about a minute.

2. Add onions, garlic, and ginger. Cook for a few minutes until onions have softened.

3. Add chicken and brown over high heat, coating the chicken in onions and spices.

4. Add the tomatoes, stir, and cook for a few minutes.


5. Add potatoes and chicken stock. Check seasoning, and add black pepper if needed (we added a little).

6. Bring to a boil, lower heat, and simmer for about 30 minutes (making sure all the potatoes are covered by broth). Add scallions about 25 minutes in.

7. Test to make sure potatoes are fork tender, remove from heat, and add cilantro. Stir well and serve over rice.

Conclusion:


We really liked this curry, and it made our kitchen (and whole apartment, really) smell so good! I was a little concerned partway through when I was checking for taste that it would be bland and not live up to the fragrant aromas wafting around from step one of cooking, but while the flavors weren't super strong, they were really good and well-balanced. The potatoes especially picked up the cinnamon, thanks to the cinnamon sticks floating around in the broth, and added to the cozy comfort food feel of the dish. It took a little bit of time to make, somewhere between one to two hours, but that's not surprising considering the 30 minute simmer time at the end. All three of us seemed to like this, and it felt good to make something new. Even though we've been cooking almost every day (in a complete 180 from last year at this time, we've ordered delivery/takeout once for dinner since the lockdown started), I haven't actually made a new planned-out recipe in some time, and I'm glad that this was a success!

Week 7 - Braising

The Week 7 challenge came up as braising, and while I knew it was a repeat of a challenge I'd done in a previous year, I wasn't unhappy about that because I remembered that experimenting with braising recipes was something I had enjoyed. Of course, that's probably because I was thinking about the beer and onion braised chicken carbonnade I made in 2014, which was actually for the Belgian challenge. That was the first time I had really intentionally braised anything, and it became the first of many, as I discovered I really liked how the dishes came out. For the actual braising challenge, I had done a Korean braised tofu that was part of our regular rotation, so not really an experiment but still a great dish.

Three cup chicken and bok choy

For this challenge, I looked around for a while for something that would work for our family of three, and once I stumbled upon three cup chicken (san bei ji), I knew that had to be it. I've always been intrigued by three cup chicken, named for its focus on three main flavors - sesame oil, soy sauce, and rice wine, and although I've still never been able to try three cup chicken from any Taiwanese restaurant, I hoped that whatever came out of our kitchen would be a good approximation of it. The recipe I found on The Woks of Life looked amazing, so I figured that would be a good starting place.

Ingredients:

I followed the recipe for the most part, and I actually measured things here to try to get the proportions right. Of course, we made some adaptations, most notably substituting chicken thighs for chicken wings since that worked better for our little one, and omitting the red chili in the aromatics so it wasn't too spicy for baby B.


- 1 tbsp sesame oil ($0.30)
- 2 tbsp grapeseed oil ($0.30)
- about 1 tbsp ginger paste ($0.20)
- 6 cloves of garlic, chopped ($0.33)
- about 1.5 lb boneless chicken thighs ($7.60)
- 1/4 cup warm water ($0)
- 1/4 cup shaoxing wine ($0.20)
- 1 tbsp dark soy sauce ($0.15)
- 1.5 tbsp light soy sauce ($0.20)
- 2 tsp sugar ($0.10)
- 1 small batch of scallions, chopped ($0.99) *

* We intended to use both Thai basil and scallions, but neither Wegmans nor Whole Foods carried Thai basil when we visited. I probably should have known that since Whole Foods through Amazon didn't have Thai basil as an option to buy, but I thought I had remembered seeing it at Wegmans before. Alas, I was wrong, and we ended up with no Thai basil, which we think would have been great in the dish.

The chicken portion of dinner cost approximately $10.37, and when combined with our second dish (bok choy with garlic) and rice, the total was about $13.38. We didn't have any leftovers, but still not a bad price for dinner for three. The chicken thighs were the bulk of that price, but if we made this again with chicken, I'd probably just defrost some boneless skinless chicken breasts, which would drop the price by a few dollars. The original used wings, and I thought the boneless flavor equivalent would probably be chicken thighs, but prepping those fatty chicken thighs was no fun and I don't really want to do it next time when chicken breasts would work just fine.

Three cup tofu experiment

Since the time we made this for the challenge, we've used the same recipe but made it with tofu instead and some of our modifications, adding an extra tbsp of sesame oil with the soy sauce and wine, adding a bell pepper and an onion, and using basil (regular basil, not Thai basil since we still haven't gotten a hold of that, but the internet was right and regular basil worked just fine). The total for the three cup tofu was a little over $8. It was so delicious that this may be the way we do it more often in the future!

Steps:

I generally stuck to the recipe for the steps as well to try to make this as accurate as possible, since I couldn't use any memories of the dish or its flavors as my guide. The steps were:

1. Heat wok over medium heat. Add 1 tbsp sesame oil, 2 tbsp grapeseed oil, ginger, and garlic. Stir the ginger and garlic in the oil for a few minutes until fragrant.

2. Add chicken and stir-fry until mostly cooked. [Note that the recipe raised the heat to high here, but our medium seemed to be pretty high, so we just left it where it was. Next time, would probably use a slightly lower heat on the aromatics and then raise it.]


3. Add 1/4 cup warm water, 1/4 cup shaoxing wine, 1 tbsp dark soy sauce, 1.5 tbsp light soy sauce, and 2 tsp sugar. Stir so that all the chicken is well-coated and covered with the sauce. [Note: I would add another tbsp of sesame oil here, since that flavor was mostly overpowered at the end without it.]

4. Cover the wok and reduce heat to medium low, letting it simmer for about 20 minutes.

5. Remove cover and add scallions. Mix well. Turn the heat up to reduce the sauce, stirring the chicken the whole time so it doesn't burn. [Our sauce was almost completely reduced already, so this step did not take very long.] Add chopped up basil and remove from heat.


The actual cooking didn't take that long here, and the steps were simple to follow. As alluded to earlier, the thing that took the longest was the chicken thighs prep, cutting off the fat and slicing the meat into chunks. Not sure how it took the better part of an hour to do, other than the fact that I don't do it very often, plus these were really, really fatty chicken thighs.

Conclusion:

Three cup tofu going into the family cookbook...
We really liked the way this turned out. Is it like the three cup chicken you'd find in a Taiwanese restaurant or home kitchen? No idea, but it tasted good to us. The strongest flavor in the end was the soy sauce, which made the dish a little on the salty side, but we knew it could be worse in the sodium department considering this was the day after our falafel mix experiment. Even with all the soy sauce, it still didn't taste as salty as the falafel. The clean and light-tasting bok choy sautéed with garlic on the side was the perfect thing to offset any saltiness, and together it all worked really well. As mentioned before, we made this again with a couple of tweaks (substituting tofu, adding a little extra sesame oil, basil, bell peppers and onions), and are so happy to have another dish to add to the repertoire!

Week 6 - Jamaican

The last time the 52 week cooking challenge came up with the Jamaican theme was back in 2014, the first year I participated. I was so excited for it and made jerk chicken with rice and peas. We still went out for Jamaican food a fair amount at that time, and our conclusion was that, while we were glad we tried to make it ourselves, it was easier and tastier to just continue to go out for professionally-made jerk chicken. Since I didn't want to repeat that experiment or make jerk anything again for this challenge, I decided to try something different and make a black eyed pea curry based on a recipe I found on The Curious Chickpea.

The ingredients for our adapted recipe were:

- 1 yellow onion, chopped ($0.40)
- 6 cloves of garlic, minced ($0.33)
- 1 lb of mini yellow potatoes, peeled and chopped ($3.49)
- 2 cans of black eyed peas, drained and rinsed ($2.78)
- grapeseed oil for sautéing ($0.25)
- a couple tsp of dried thyme ($0.20)
- 2.5 tbsp of mild Jamaican curry powder ($1.70)
- salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste ($0.05)
- 1 can of coconut milk ($1.50)

The recipe called for 1 cup of coconut milk, but I used the entire can, (a) figuring that would dull the heat a little more for B, (b) because I never know what to do with the remaining coconut milk and it always ends up in the trash, and (c) because this current coconut milk we have doesn't mix in the can no matter how much you try to shake it or stir it, so you almost have to use the whole thing. The recipe also included 1/4 cup of lime juice at the end, which I had been expecting to do (it's even in the ingredients photo!), but by the time the food was ready, everyone was so hungry and I was in such a rush that I just forgot. Oops.

Anyway, we made plain brown rice alongside this, as well as some garlic zucchini, so the total for the recipe was $15.70 ($10.70 for the curry, $2 for the rice, and $3 for the zucchini, all approximate amounts). Considering the meal was vegan, I was expecting the final cost to be less than this, instead of more than the rice challenge we did for week 5 that included chicken sausage and cheese. It did make a lot of food though, and we had enough curry left over for other meals, but I still thought it would be far less.


The steps for making the curry were:

- prepare rice so that it's done when curry is finished
- prep (onions, garlic, potatoes)
- add oil to pot over medium heat, and add onion and garlic, cooking until soft
- add thyme, curry powder, salt, and pepper, and stir to coat, cook until fragrant (not long)
- add potatoes and cook for another minute or so (ours got a little dry here so I added a little bit more oil. Even though I don't really like doing that in the middle of the cooking process, I didn't want everything to burn)
- add black eyed peas and 2 cups of water
- partially cover, bring to simmer and cook until potatoes are tender
- remove cover and add coconut milk
- cook with lid off until liquid reduces
- remove from heat and add lime juice and salt to taste (forgot to do this...)


Overall, we thought the curry was okay. The curry powder we got had a decent amount of heat in it considering that cayenne was the last ingredient, but despite all the spices listed, didn't have as much flavor as I was expecting, even before the coconut milk. (Another strange thing was that, even though the curry flavors themselves seemed a little dulled after the coconut milk, the underlying heat still persisted a little bit, which was not what we wanted for B.) The final product, other than that mild underlying heat, turned out a little bit bland, maybe from using the whole can of coconut milk, but even if we had used less, I still don't know how much we would have liked it. It still wouldn't have been as good as any of the curry we've gotten out at restaurants, which may be part of our problem, the fact that we've had excellent Jamaican food over the years and that's our basis for comparison. No matter the recipe, I'm not sure anything coming out of our kitchen is going to compare to some of that deliciousness. We probably wouldn't make this again, but we're going to have to figure out something else to do with that curry powder in the future, since it wasn't cheap!

Falafel Mix

We made a falafel mix from Trader Joe's recently, one that was sitting in our pantry for over a year, mostly because it didn't expire until March 2020 and we had so much else to eat in the meantime. We had been putting together a lot of pantry meals this month since we had some long stretches without grocery shopping, and the falafel mix sounded like the perfect thing to try out for a Mediterranean dinner, paired with some other TJ's sides that'll be in another post at some point - the dolmas and the giant white beans.

I hadn't really paid much attention to the nutritional content of the falafel mix when we bought it, and since then, only checked the ingredients to make sure there was no egg (there isn't any; it's vegan) and we could give it to B. We figured that we would make the whole box, and if there were any falafel left over, it would be good for lunch. I started mixing, and since I had nothing else to do, started reading the nutritional facts. My jaw dropped when I got to the sodium number. That couldn't possibly be right, could it?


(Disclaimer: Nothing in this post is intended to be health or nutrition advice, but just our take on what was provided on the package.)

One serving size according to the box was 180 calories and 810 milligrams of sodium. 810 milligrams of sodium?! That's a lot in my book, especially considering a serving size is 1/3 cup of mix. The box has 9 servings (3 cups of mix), which meant that the entire box was 1620 calories and 7290 milligrams of sodium. 1620 calories isn't nothing either, but if you divide that by 3 (two adults, one toddler, and maybe some leftovers), that's 540 calories each, so not that terrible. But even if you divide that sodium number into thirds, that's 2430 milligrams of sodium and much, much more than any person should really be eating in a day (not my judgment; it surpasses the American Heart Association's recommended daily max) and far more than any toddler should be ingesting. Sometimes things with high sodium counts on the package don't taste that salty though, so I hoped for the best. I don't think I realized when I picked up the box at the store that the sodium content could be this high. I am so glad the new FDA labels this year recommend giving the numbers for the entire package and can't wait to start seeing those become more common.


Putting together the falafel mix was easy. One cup of mix, 3/4 cup of water, mix well, let it sit for about 45 minutes, shape the falafel into balls or patties, bake for 25 minutes, done. Far easier than making falafel on your own from scratch. They smelled so good as they baked in the oven, and when I pulled them out after about 25 minutes, they had puffed up nicely and texturally were dense but soft. (We weren't going for crispy and opted not to fry them.)


Then we tried them, and they were more salty-tasting than we thought they would be, even knowing the sodium content. All we could taste was salt. So much salt. All those delicious spices we could smell when they were baking? Gone and overpowered by salt. We had an entire tray full of baked falafel patties, and after having a few each, couldn't bear to eat any more. We put on some hummus to try to kill the salt, but it didn't work. We unfortunately didn't have any yogurt or tzatziki to see if that would work better. The entire time we ate the falafel, we tried to figure out what we could possibly eat it with that would counteract the insane amount of saltiness, and all we came up with were lightly dressed salads and plain yogurt. They were just unbearably salty, and if I hadn't bought them so long ago, I would have considered bringing them back for a refund. They were that inedible for us.


The other thing I did while eating the salty, salty, salty falafel was read every review of the falafel mix I could find on the internet to see if there was a general agreement that they were salty. I know I probably cook with less salt than the average American, and even more so now, cooking for a toddler, but I was still surprised how in the minority we were on our opinion. Most people never even mentioned the salt, the majority of people raved and loved the mix overall, and I think I found maybe three people who thought they were salty. In almost every case, other people responded that they did not find them salty at all, or that maybe there were just abnormally salty packages, something I find unlikely considering that the package was actually intended to have over 7000 milligrams of sodium. I don't even know the last time we didn't finish a meal and tossed it, because we just don't do that and we operate under the general principle that most things are salvageable, but we just couldn't finish these. We couldn't even eat 2/3 of them.

Buy again? A very sad but enthusiastic no. We wanted to like these so much, since a simple falafel bake would make for such an easy weeknight dinner. But unless the nutritional facts have changed since we bought them (which would account for all the raves if true, and I'll update this post if that's the case), I can't see us getting these again.