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!

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!

Week 51 - Hungarian

How is it already the last week of the year?! I better step up the pace on these challenge recaps, because there are still some unfinished/unwritten 2022 challenge posts, and I don't want to add another year to that list!

Another opportunity for some progress on two challenges at once! I hadn't made anything for Hungary for the AtWCC yet since we are still in the As (and will be for the foreseeable future), but our experience with Hungarian food in general is slim. We had chimney cakes at the holiday market one year (something that I have no idea how we would replicate for the AtWCC), I had goulash at a tiny cafe in Connecticut over two decades ago, and we had something called a Hungarian pancake years ago in Chicago, but at a Polish restaurant, so possibly not even really a Hungarian dish. This challenge was an opportunity to try out a dish I've been eyeing for a long, long time - chicken paprikash (paprikás csirke).

Chicken paprikash features chicken (obviously) in a creamy sauce with lots of paprika (also obvious from the name). In the recipe I followed from Daring Gourmet, you start by browning the chicken, and then putting together a vegetable base consisting of onions, garlic, tomatoes, and Hungarian bell pepper. We don't live in a heavily Eastern European area, so there were no Hungarian bell peppers here. But in the comments, I saw that they are relatively mild and similar to banana peppers or cubanelle peppers (aka Italian peppers), the latter of which we definitely have here, so I went with that. Seasonings were a lot of paprika (used regular paprika because our spice shelf is already overflowing with no room for new ones like the imported Hungarian paprika they suggested), and also salt and pepper.

The chicken gets added back in, then covered in chicken broth to cook for a while. Once the chicken has cooked through, the sauce is made by adding in a mixture of flour, sour cream, and heavy whipping cream (used the new vegan version from Trader Joe's for the whipping cream, which seemed fine, but I really have no basis for comparison). The sauce took far longer to come together and thicken than I thought it would, so dinner ended up being far later than planned. We ate everything over some pasta (can't do egg noodles here, so just used some mafalda corta, which was a good match), with roasted asparagus and onions on the side. The total cost was approximately $16.91 for the chicken alone, about $23-24 with the pasta and vegetables. Definitely not the most expensive challenge meal we've done, and I don't know how much of that is the ingredients themselves versus the inflated grocery prices right now. Guess I will have to price the dishes out more consistently like I used to if I'm going to figure that out.

The problem with trying out a new dish you've never had before is that you're never quite sure if you got the flavor right. It tasted really good, and the sauce was very creamy with lots of paprika, but was it right? No idea. It was very rich and heavy from the sour cream and heavy whipping cream, not our most-preferred flavor profile, so we probably won't make this that often (besides the fact that it took a long time to prep and make), but it was delicious. Looking forward to the day when we can try it at a Hungarian restaurant and see how we did!

Swedish Meatballs

I wanted to finish off our jar of lingonberry jam and an opened package of sour cream, so the logical choice was to make some Swedish meatballs. I figured I could count that toward the AtWCC since it didn't look like I had made Swedish meatballs for that yet (even though I remembered making them at some point before). I picked a recipe from Damn Delicious, got some Impossible Burger to take the place of the ground beef and pork, and then made a very decadent, heavy, but tasty version of Swedish meatballs.

Making Swedish meatballs in 2020

And then I did some looking through old posts and found something from the 2020 cooking challenge where I made Swedish meatballs for the retro recipes challenge... and it turns out I followed and adapted the exact. same. recipe. this time. I guess I hadn't counted that one for the AtWCC because, although we liked it, I was going to give it another try to get closer to the taste of the Ikea meatballs. We had used turkey there instead of beef/pork and wondered how it would go with Impossible Burger, which I did use this time without even remembering that was something I wanted to change. Going to count it now since we've made it twice and given it a good effort.

Swedish meatballs in 2023

The meatballs were good - made with Impossible, onions, panko, flax eggs, allspice, nutmeg, salt, and pepper - accompanied by a gravy of butter, flour, beef broth (also had used chicken bouillon here last time instead of beef, but had it this time), and sour cream. Overall, it was good, and I'm glad I made it (again), but still far easier to just get the frozen ones from Ikea if we want a Swedish meatball night at home.

Week 26 (2023) - Served Cold

Remember last year's deconstructed challenge when I made a spam musubi bowl and counted it for the AtWCC, because I was probably never going to make spam musubi without a mold? Well.... fast-forward a year to the Week 26 challenge for this year, served cold. I decided on a Hawaiian-style macaroni salad from the Tastemade Make This Tonight cookbook, and the only not-hot thing I could think to make with it was spam musubi. This turned out even better than the spam musubi bowls I made last time, so this is definitely also counting for the AtWCC.

To make the musubi, I used actual sushi rice and didn't marinate the spam this time, following a recipe from Noodles and Buns which used the can as a mold. It was surprisingly easy. Make the rice, pan-fry the spam and add the sauce, let it all cool a little bit, cut the strips of nori, and then line the can with plastic wrap for use as a mold. The rice gets packed in on the bottom, spam on top, and then it's lifted out, wrapped with nori, and it's done. I was shocked at how well it worked once I got into the rhythm of making them. They tasted really good, and there was also far less sauce than the other recipe which was good for my current need to lower my sodium intake. Now that I know how easy it is to make, the only "problem" is that I now kind of want to make spam musubi all the time, which is not exactly the healthiest diet.

For the mac salad, the main ingredients were elbow macaroni, white onion, vinegar, garlic powder, (vegan) mayo, milk, sugar, seasonings, scallions, shredded carrots, and celery. The recipe also had togarashi but I didn't have time to get that, so added some other seasonings to it instead. Made in advance and chilled for the entire afternoon and evening until it was time to eat, this was delicious. I may have had a small box of it on my own while making the musubi, because I couldn't wait. B may not have eaten much of these other than the spam itself, but A and I were so happy with our Hawaiian dinner!

Our Next Parwana Dinner

Our next experiment with Parwana recipes was also on Eid (last year), a couple hours after the khetayee fail. We hoped that we would have better luck with these two recipes: kebabeh degee morgh (chicken kebab) and naan flatbread.

The chicken recipe was really easy, especially since I adapted the recipe to use ground spices and omit the mortar and pestle. Just brown 1-2 pounds of chicken thighs, then make a sauce with all the other ingredients (tomato sauce, salt, ground coriander, ground cumin, crushed fenugreek, nigella seeds, ginger paste, minced garlic, cayenne, and Greek yogurt). The sauce then gets added to the chicken, coating it completely, and the whole thing simmers for about 15 minutes until the chicken is done cooking and the sauce is thick. Very, very simple instructions. I knew we had eaten fenugreek and nigella seeds before, but it was my first time buying them, and I was curious what specific flavors they would lend to the dish.

The finished dish reminded me of chicken curries we had previously ordered at Indian restaurants (and less of the one we used to order at our favorite Afghan restaurant), and we really, really liked it. It was the best of the three Parwana dishes we made that day. The flavors were deep and nuanced, and I wondered if some of the dishes we made before could have used the fenugreek and if that was the missing piece. At the time, I was excited to try more dishes with fenugreek and nigella seeds, but I don't know if I've touched them in the year since making this, so maybe it's time to find some more new recipes to try.

The cookbook recommended serving the chicken over naan flatbread, so trying out their naan recipe alongside the chicken was a no-brainer. This was my third attempt at Afghan naan. The first time I made it, it was relatively soft, a little buttery, a little fluffy, and pretty good, even if not that similar to the bread we had previously had at Afghan restaurants. The second attempt didn't go quite as well, but the best/salvageable parts of that one were still on the soft and fluffy side. This time... Well, let's just say my Afghan naan-making skills seem to be on a downward trajectory.

This naan was a yeast bread, so I made the dough, kneaded it, and then set it aside to rise using our usual warm microwave method. Once it was ready, I followed the instructions to divide the dough in half and spread it into the baking pans with my hands, evenly spread out and filling the entire pan. It seemed okay at that point even if not perfectly even. They were supposed to bake for about 15 minutes "or until the naans are golden brown and baked through." I ended up doing it for longer than 15 minutes because they weren't golden brown, but I guess I should have stopped earlier because they came out like a brick. (There was unfortunately a lot of brick bread in 2022...) The tops were softer, but that still meant most of the bread was barely edible because of the texture. It also didn't taste like anything special, just kind of a generic bread that was mostly hard as a rock. 

I was so disappointed with how the naan turned out, and it was the same day as the khetayee, which made it even worse. Thank goodness the chicken curry turned out good, because that saved the entire day from being a complete failure. Considering both the khetayee and naan didn't work, I started to think that maybe I should stick to cooking from Parwana and skip baking from Parwana, since that would still give me plenty to choose from.

Khetayee

After two great recipes from the Parwana cookbook (the meat kofta sauce and the bolani), I was really excited to try something sweet. I had bookmarked two different cookie recipes, one that was traditionally eaten around Nowroz (new year at the beginning of spring) and one called khetayee that was traditionally eaten for Eid. So to celebrate Eid (last year), I decided to make khetayee on our day off from school!

The recipe seemed pretty straightforward. Combine the dry ingredients (flour, milk powder, baking powder, confectioner's sugar) and then slowly add the oil while mixing everything together. Then shape the dough into balls, flatten them a little, make thumbprints where the ground pistachios would be added (side note: the pistachios in the recipe photo were bright green, but ours weren't - where do the bright green pistachios come from?), and then bake until lightly golden.

I was excited to make these for a bunch of reasons. First, I didn't really make any desserts for Afghanistan the first time around unlike all of our other geographic explorations. Second, B doesn't get much pistachio in his diet other than some ice cream, and I thought this would be a good way to increase exposure (for prevention of allergy purposes). Third, I had never made anything with milk powder before, and I was curious to see how that would affect baked goods.

Unfortunately, the cookies I made were not good. I think that's likely user error, because these cookies would not have been passed down for generations in Afghanistan if they had this texture. They were incredibly dry and hard to eat, so stick-to-your-mouth dry that I couldn't even think about giving them to little B for safety reasons. At least I was able to give him a spoonful of ground pistachios before I made the cookies.

So, what may have gone wrong? First, I used nonfat milk powder instead of whole milk, because I was able to get a big bag of that at Whole Foods. The specialty store had whole milk powder, but I wasn't sure that packet was going to have enough for the recipe in it, and I didn't want to run short. Looking online before buying, it didn't sound like there would be a dramatic difference between the two in baking, but maybe I got that wrong. Second, I had to keep adding flour during the mixing/shaping step, because it was impossible to shape the dough I made into balls. It just kept spreading and would not keep the shape until I added a fair amount more of the flour. Third, maybe I baked them too long. I added a minute or so to the time because they weren't golden on top, but I didn't think that would turn them into bricks of chalk.

Who knows what other missteps I might have made, but the cookies were not good. Edible, but not good. I'd say the best parts of the experience of making these was being able to give B some pistachios and just how soft the dough felt when mixing it. I probably won't make them again after the disappointing results, but I'm glad I tried.

Week 3 (2023) - Oaxacan

We had our first real taste of Oaxacan cuisine in LA over a decade ago (brief look here), and have tried to explore more of the cuisine on each subsequent visit to LA (like our dinner at EK Valley). NYC doesn't really have the depth of Oaxacan offerings that LA does (at least it didn't the last time we checked, back when we did more WorldEats eating), so we tried to take advantage of it every time we flew out there. When this challenge came up, the two things that came to mind based on our previous meals were mole, which we love but I was definitely not going to make right now because of its time-consuming nature, and tlayuda, which I very much wanted to try to cook. Easy choice here.

Tlayuda is like a Mexican pizza (so it counts as our pizza for Mexico for the AtWCC) with a masa base and toppings, usually beans, meat, and cheese with some fresh vegetables on top. The only restaurant one we tried (at EK Valley) was topped with black bean paste, chorizo, quesillo, tomato, cabbage, and avocado, and I aspired to do something similar. I found a Food Network recipe for a chorizo tlayuda that sounded perfect and easy to make, so I used that.

The ingredients were masa harina, salt, and vegetable oil for the tortilla base, refried beans (I forgot they were supposed to be black and just bought refried pinto beans), chorizo (used seitan chorizo because we already had it and it was expiring soon), and Oaxaca cheese for the toppings, and tomato, queso fresco, and cilantro for the garnishes. The recipe also had iceberg lettuce but we didn't remember having that on the ones we'd eaten in the past, and Mexican crema, which I kind of overlooked but also didn't really want to buy heavy cream.

Making the tortilla base was not as easy as it sounded from the recipe, and I found myself wishing we had a tortilla press, because rolling out the dough did not go well. I used the amount of masa specified, but could not make two tortillas that were 10 inches in diameter. Not remotely close. Also the rolling pin was a bit of a disaster, because the masa kept falling apart and coming off on the rolling pin. When I tried it with the layers of parchment paper like in the recipe, it broke apart even worse. What did I do wrong?! I ended up using my hands and making it as thin as I could, but they were definitely not as large or smooth as they were supposed to be.

After cooking the tortilla in the skillet, I spread on the bean paste (took far longer than it should have; it kept clumping), and sprinkled on the chorizo and Oaxaca cheese (which took longer to melt than I expected). It's possible the tortilla cooked too long as the finished product was a little solid and dense. But I guess it has to be solid to hold up all the toppings? (I had made Algerian bread the day before that came out like a brick, and this was at least better than that...) The garnishes were queso fresco, tomato, and cilantro, but I skipped cilantro on one of them for B (but he ended up not eating any anyway because he was sick).

Overall, it was tasty but definitely not as good in flavor or construction as the ones you would get at a Oaxacan restaurant. Both our beans and chorizo were vegan though, so not that surprising that it would taste a little different. I don't know if it would be possible for me to get the base as thin and crispy but also sturdy as the professional ones, and there's just something different about it when it comes off the griddle compared to our non-stick pan. I'm glad we tried it, but it just makes me wish I could get a restaurant tlayuda nearby.

Week 1 (2023) - Rainy Day

I haven't finished posting the 2022 challenge yet, so this might get confusing, but I've had most of this year's just sitting and waiting, so it seemed better to try to catch up a little bit here too.

First week of the new challenge! I tried to picture a day with gloomy pouring rain outside and what I would want to eat, and it was actually a fairly easy choice - grilled cheese and soup. I don't know if I ever actually eat that when it's rainy out, but I don't usually time our meal plan with the weather forecast (which changes anyway). But it's my top pick, for sure.

For the challenge, I decided to go with a Kappacasein-style cheese toastie (my favorite version of grilled cheese). I made this for a sandwiches challenge back in 2015 after we returned from London, and at that time, there was an official recipe on the Borough Market (where Kappacasein is) website. That recipe is no longer there, but thankfully I took good notes on it the first time, plus I found another similar version on Feast/SBS.

The biggest difference between this toastie and the last one I made was that I didn't have leeks. The frozen leeks we've had stored for years are getting a little too old and flavorless, so I sadly had to leave them out and just use red onions, because it was too late to go get fresh leeks. Luckily, Trader Joe's still carried the same cheddar-gruyere blended cheese blocks, which is the perfect cheese for this sandwich (if you can't get the local cheeses they use in the original). This toastie is really where I learned to make good grilled cheese sandwiches, so besides being delicious (which it was again this time), it really holds a special place in my heart.

For the soup, I decided to go with a squash, bean, and corn soup I found on the Borough Market website, because why not just go fully British? The basic ingredients were acorn squash, tomatoes, corn, black beans, kidney beans, onions, garlic, vegetable stock, cumin, smoked paprika, lime juice, cilantro, and salt, but I skipped the sour cream in favor of their listed alternative of adding cheese. I couldn't find the specific cheeses they mentioned (Wensleydale or Cheshire), but we went with a white cheddar which was a good match. It was a little more like stew than soup, but that fits my personal soup preference anyway. A lovely way to kick off the challenge, and a good meal for the England AtWCC!

Week 47 - Macanese

We've been to Macau once. It was a one-day excursion over 17 years ago during a trip to Hong Kong, and I don't remember much. (Of course, I was behind on recapping anything back then too, so I never got up to it and now most of those memories are gone.) I remember taking the ferry there, trying to go to a casino just to look around (Vegas-style) and having our water confiscated and then not staying long anyway, a lot of walking around and difficulty getting taxis, having more luck understanding things in Portuguese than Chinese, and having some traditional Macanese dishes for lunch.

Years ago with everything under construction ... It looks so different now

I have vague memories of what we ate (the photos help with that), but only one dish name persisted in my memory - minchi. (I know now that the others were some assorted fritters and African chicken, but that took some researching.) It seemed like an easy choice to make minchi for this challenge in honor of that trip. I couldn't remember exactly what it tasted like, but I was hopeful that following a recipe (like this one from What to Cook Today) might awaken some long-buried memories.

Minchi is a simple dish of ground meat and potatoes, often eaten with rice and topped with a fried egg. With B's allergy, we were definitely skipping the fried egg, but the rest of it looked doable. I substituted Impossible Burger for the ground beef, but otherwise generally followed the recipe, hoping that it would reawaken those memories. The first step was to air-fry the potatoes, then to cook onion and garlic in a skillet, add bay leaves and ground meat, add cumin and all the other seasonings (soy sauce, Worcestershire, brown sugar, and white pepper), and then when everything is cooked, add in the fried potatoes.

The dish looked fairly similar to our photo of minchi from Macau (other than the egg on top of that one), but did it taste the same? I don't know if I can say it's exactly like that one since it's been too many years, but it was close enough to taste somewhat familiar, which was good enough for me. It also just tasted really good, whether or not it was the same dish, so we were happy with dinner. B wasn't that into it, but he's kind of anti-sauce at the moment, so not that surprising. Very glad the challenge had a Macanese week so we could explore this, and would absolutely make this again.