Week 5 - Whole Spices

Challenge week: 5

Theme: Whole spices

What I made: Coconut chickpea curry, but since I made it in the beginning of February and decided while making dinner that it should count for whole spices because I was using them (whole cloves and cardamom pods, didn't actually use the cinnamon sticks in the picture), I don't really have any notes and am not 100% sure what recipe I was using as a starting point. (This is also why I should write things more timely!)

Challenge quick review: I do remember that we really liked this coconut chickpea curry and that I wanted to make it again, so I probably should have taken better notes on what I did. It's possible I have a handwritten note about it somewhere on my desk, so if I find something, I'll update it here. It was really hard to figure out what to do for this challenge that would "spotlight" whole spices, but I ended up deciding that putting them in curry was good enough. I've actually used whole spices plenty of times since then, mostly because we don't have non-whole cloves or cardamom, and one tip would be to make sure you find them before you serve the meal. Luckily, I was the one who crunched into the cardamom pod, but that's my takeaway from week 5!

Week 29 - Grilling

I really intended to catch up on all these challenge posts a couple of months ago, but my brain has had a really hard time focusing on writing these days. Probably because I aggressively moved my sleep schedule up by 3 hours in less than a month, breaking some bad sleep habits/schedules that I've had for over a decade. Anyway, still a little too sleep-deprived (and feeling jet-lagged without any traveling) to feel super inspired to write, but I do want to catch up on these challenge posts so I don't forget what I did (more than I already have). Maybe it'll spark something in my brain, and I'll be able to get back on the writing train.

Going backwards through the challenges (which I have mostly been keeping up with, even if I haven't been documenting it on time), here's Week 29!

Challenge week: 29

Theme: Grilling

Theme note: We have no outdoor space, so the closest we were going to get to grilling was to use the grill pan.

What we made: Grilled Impossible Hawaiian BBQ skewers using the recipe from the Impossible website (with some modifications, like using our open bottle of Trader Joe's sweet and spicy pineapple BBQ sauce instead of making their sauce)

How much it cost (with breakdown): $13.73 (dinner for 3 + a little leftover veggies for lunch)

- 1 package of Impossible Burger ($5.99)

- BBQ sauce, enough to baste the skewers, probably 2/3-3/4 cup ($1)

- 2 green peppers ($1.99)

- 1 orange pepper ($1.79)

- 1 red onion ($0.79)

- 1 can of pineapple chunks ($1.50)

- dried oregano ($0.05)

- onion powder ($0.05)

- garlic powder ($0.03)

- salt ($0.02)

- freshly ground black pepper ($0.02)

- avocado oil spray to coat grill pan ($0.50)

(Ingredients note: Probably should add a little for the skewers too but got those so many years ago that I have no idea how much they would have cost. Also, it did not need 3 bell peppers like the recipe said. Two would have been sufficient. We still had more peppers, onions, and pineapples after filling up our skewers, so we just cooked the rest on the side and had some leftovers for another day.)

Challenge quick review: Delicious skewers, and the BBQ sauce was a great match for them. A few of the burger pieces fell off the wooden skewers during the cooking process, but since it was a grill pan and not an actual grill, they ended up completely fine. I did mess up a little in prep when I forgot pineapples on one, but at least I remembered by the second one. We ate the skewers with a tarragon parsley potato salad (a vegan version loosely based on an Ina Garten recipe sans dill), and it was a very tasty, summery meal. The only negative was that it all took a little longer to make than I had originally planned, but I think part of that was making both the skewers and the potato salad at the same time in a limited amount of kitchen space. Would make both dishes again.

Week 9 - Korean

I wrote this back in March, but I think I was waiting to publish it until I had finished all the weeks in-between. I'm not planning to go in order anymore since I'm so behind, and this is posted pretty much as written two months ago.

We love Korean food, but I had a really, really hard time choosing a dish for this challenge. I wanted to avoid anything too spicy, so that eliminated a bunch of dishes, and I also needed to skip anything with ingredients that required a visit to a Korean grocery store, since we were doing our best to not go out while all the COVID variants spread around the city. (Present day note: We were not vaccinated at the time, and no timeline had been announced for our age range yet.) My initial thought was pajeon, but at the time I was trying to choose a dish, B was in the middle of an anti-green food phase, so that was out. Eventually, after watching a bunch of YouTube videos (in Korean and English), I decided to try out a type of hotteok that was potato pancakes stuffed with cheese. I didn't follow any specific recipe, but tried to put them all together for the ingredients we had.

The ingredients for the hotteok, which I decided to make vegan for my lactose intolerance, were:

- 2 large Russet potatoes ($1.23)

- 2 pinches of salt ($0.02)

- 1 tsp sugar ($0.03)

- 1 tbsp cornstarch ($0.10)

- freshly ground black pepper ($0.02)

- large handful of shredded mozzarella cheese ($1.67)

- 1 tbsp vegan butter ($0.16)

The cost for the hotteok was about $3.23. We ate it with a can of green beans and some smoked salmon, but not sure how much the whole meal cost since we bought the smoked salmon almost four years ago on a trip to Vancouver. My guess would be that the entire meal was under $10 though.

The steps for making the hotteok were:

1. Prep - peel potatoes and chop into large chunks.

2. Add potatoes to small pot of cold water with a pinch of salt, bring to a boil, and then cook potatoes until fork tender.

3. Drain potatoes, add to large mixing bowl, and mash.

4. Add pinch of salt, sugar, cornstarch, and black pepper to the mixing bowl, and mix well until smooth.

5. Take small handfuls of the potato mixture, roll into a ball, and then flatten out into a bowl shape in your hands. Add a little mozzarella, and then close up the potato to seal in the cheese. Roll into a ball again, and then flatten into a disc.

A bit of an uneven flame...

6. Melt butter in skillet over medium low heat, and then add the potato balls. Cook until both sides are golden brown.

The finished product tasted like mashed potatoes with a slight hint of cheesiness. It probably would have been cheesier if I had used non-vegan cheese or a different brand, because this one wasn't super cheesy in flavor. They were good for B, because it meant mashed potatoes without having to use a spoon. Overall, they just tasted like pan-fried mashed potatoes. Glad we tried it, but might try a different type of hotteok next time.

Week 20 - Julienning

How is it already mid-May?! The last time I finished a post here, it was the end of March, still cold outside, we hadn't been vaccinated yet, and most people were still taking the pandemic seriously (or at least pretending to). I'm so behind on the 52 week cooking challenge posts and the Around the World Cooking Challenge posts and the WorldEats posts that I think I might need to start doing shortened versions for some of them, so that I can still track/share our journey but not have it be such an overwhelming task. The Week 20 challenge seems perfect for a quick entry.

Challenge week: 20

Theme: Julienning

AtWCC country: Philippines (counting for both challenges, see below)

What we made: Pancit, based on a Filipino cooking class we took

How much it cost (with breakdown): $21.67 (dinner for 3 + two lunches for 2)

- 1 lb noodles - $3.99

- 1 package of Short Cuts roasted chicken - $5

- about 1/2 lb of shrimp - $3.87

- 1-2 lbs of carrots - $1

- 1 bunch of celery - $1.59 (probably only 1/2 bunch but the other 1/2 froze and had to be thrown out)

- about 1 lb of snap peas - $3.50

- 1 yellow onion - $0.37

- minced garlic - $0.05

- a couple big scoops of chicken broth - $1

- a few tbsp soy sauce - $0.45

- a few tbsp oyster sauce - $0.85

Challenge quick review: I could have done an entire dish of julienned vegetables, but we were already scheduled for a pancit cooking class, and the carrots needed to be julienned, so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to knock out this challenge without spending hours in the kitchen trying to precisely chop vegetables. I am not the best with making exact sizes and shapes when chopping things, since they're all going to end up in the same place anyway and close has always seemed good enough here.

As for the pancit itself, I did a lot of the prep and A did most of the actual cooking, and it was so good. It tasted like pancit you might get at a restaurant. Since the recipe isn't really public or ours since it was from a cooking class, we don't feel right going into any further detail on the "how" in another post, so I'm going to count this for the AtWCC here too. We did explore something new (for our kitchen), which is the whole point of that challenge. We have a lot more noodles, so I see a lot more pancit in our future!

Week 4 - Confit

Where has the year gone?! Behind on these challenge posts again...

I thought about skipping the Week 4 challenge, confit. It was a repeat of a challenge I had done in the past, and I don't think I was especially excited about it that time either. I think confit is delicious, but most recipes use a lot of oil, and that oil could go a long way if used in other methods of cooking. Especially during these pandemic times when it's harder to just drop by a grocery store on a whim, I can't see "wasting" that amount of oil on a confit recipe. After doing a lot of searching, I found a recipe for potato confit on Ricardo that only used 1/4 cup of oil, and that was something I was much more comfortable doing.

The ingredients for the confit portion of dinner, as adapted, were:

- 24 oz whole fingerling potatoes ($4.99)

- 1/4 cup olive oil + a little extra (unmeasured) ($0.50)

- 5 cloves of garlic ($0.33)

- dried rosemary ($0.10)

- dried thyme ($0.10)

- salt and freshly ground black pepper ($0.03)

The cost for the potato confit was about $6.05. We ate the potatoes alongside a Just Egg salsa scramble and some sautéed (neglected it when I got busy, so more like stewed) zucchini, for a total of about $13.15.

Making the confit was pretty simple. After washing the potatoes, add them to a large baking dish (probably too large for the amount of potatoes we had) with the olive oil, garlic, rosemary, thyme, salt, and black pepper. Bake at 350 degrees for about 80 minutes.

They seemed a little dry when I pulled them out, nothing like the soft, oily, luscious potatoes I was expecting from something called confit, so I added them to a bowl under a foil tent with some extra olive oil, hoping that letting them sit for a little while would help them soften.

After letting them steam a bit, the potatoes were softer, but still not as melt-in-your-mouth soft as I was expecting. The ones on the bottom in the oil were the best, so I guess the whole dish just needed more oil and/or a smaller baking dish so they could bathe in the oil in the oven more.

Overall, the potatoes were fine, but more like roasted potatoes than what I would expect from confit. Still happy that I did this instead of a recipe with more oil, but not sure I would make this again instead of my usual roasting methods.

Week 3 - Indonesian

The last time the Indonesian challenge came up (in 2015), I tried to make nasi goreng, and while it tasted like fried rice, it didn't taste like any nasi goreng we had had before. It was just missing something. For the Indonesian challenge this time, I wanted to make something different. I looked through lots and lots of delicious-sounding recipes, but wasn't sure what to make since there were many ingredients I didn't have access to, especially during a pandemic when we couldn't shop around at specialty stores. I eventually decided on mie goreng, a fried noodle dish, based on a recipe I found on Recipes Indonesia. Even though I knew I would need to make substitutions, it at least seemed doable. Also, unlike the last time I did the Indonesian challenge, this time I had a bottle of kecap manis (Indonesian sweet soy sauce) and didn't have to try to fake the flavor with other things.

I made a lot of substitutions, perhaps too many since the finished product (spoiler alert) wasn't like any mie goreng we had eaten in Indonesian restaurants before. (If you think this is sounding like a repeat of last time's nasi goreng, you would be right.) We couldn't get to an Asian grocery store before making this, so the only noodles we had were spaghetti. I used a can of chicken instead of an actual chicken fillet, trying to save a little money since our grocery bill that week was higher than usual. Instead of slicing up my own cabbage and carrots, I got coleslaw mix, something we've used as a substitution before when cooking that has done well. Instead of choy sum, I used a little baby bok choy. The store had no bean sprouts. I left out the chiles, except a little bit of sambal, because I didn't want it to be too spicy for B. We left out the eggs because of our allergy, fried onions, and parsley. With all the ingredient changes, it was a somewhat different dish, but they all seemed like similar enough substitutions that could potentially work at the time I planned it out.

Non-traditional ingredients for mie goreng

The ingredients for our version were:

- 1 package of whole wheat spaghetti ($1.39)

- 1 tbsp grapeseed oil ($0.10)

- 3 large shallots ($1.43)

- 6 cloves of garlic ($0.33)

- 1 can of chicken ($1.92)

- 1 bag of coleslaw mix (green cabbage, red cabbage, carrots) ($2.99)

- 1 baby bok choy ($0.75)

- 7 scallions ($0.99)

- 1 small spoonful of sambal oelek ($0.05)

- about 1 tsp chicken bouillon ($0.10)

- about 3 tbsp kecap manis ($0.84)

- about 2 tsp soy sauce ($0.10)

- white pepper to taste ($0.05)

The noodles cost about $11.04 on their own. We ate them with some stir-fried bok choy and red onion on the side that I made in the same wok right afterwards, and they tasted pretty good together. The total cost was about $13.73, a great price for dinner for three and a lot of food. There was a (very) little bit left for the next day.

I generally followed the same procedure to make the noodles as the original recipe, but with a couple of significant differences. One was skipping all the egg-related steps. The other was that, instead of grinding the shallots and garlic into a paste, I just fried them in the oil. I didn't have time to make a paste, and we only had a wooden mortar and pestle that I didn't want to forever smell like shallots and garlic. It probably would have been better as a paste, but I don't think it would have made so much of a difference as to change our final conclusions on our version of the dish. The steps we followed were:

The original recipe said five shallots, but this was three shallots, so I stopped there. Thankful for the goggles we bought and never used for COVID, because they have become onion and shallot goggles...

1. Prep - finely chop shallots, finely chop garlic, rough chop baby bok choy, chop scallion greens and whites into medium-sized pieces and keep separated, make sauce by combining the chicken bouillon, kecap manis, and soy sauce, boil water for spaghetti. [I started that last one way too late, which delayed everything and made our vegetables a little too soft.]

2. Heat grapeseed oil in a hot wok. Add shallots and garlic. Fry until fragrant.

3. Add chicken, stir-fry for a little bit, and then add the sambal oelek. [If using actual chicken fillets, this would obviously be a much longer step until the chicken was mostly cooked.]

4. Add the coleslaw mix, baby bok choy, and scallion whites. Stir-fry until beginning to soften. [That was the intention, but getting to step 5 took far longer since the water wasn't boiling yet.]

5. Add noodles, scallion greens, and sauce. Mix everything together well, and make sure sauce is evenly distributed. Adjust to taste. [It was a little too bland for us, probably because we had so much stuff in the wok. We added more kecap manis and more soy sauce here as well as a little white pepper.]

The noodles were good, a little on the blander side but with a nice mild flavor. They were not, however, something we would have ever guessed as mie goreng in a taste test. Similar to our last Indonesian cooking experiment, it just felt like there was something missing, and I'm really not sure what it was. The chiles? Too little sambal? Not enough sauce? Too much/too many noodles in the wok? They just tasted like lo mein to us with nothing distinctly Indonesian. Maybe next time I try making Indonesian rice or noodles, I'll finally get it right.

Week 2 - Meat Substitute

When I saw the Week 2 theme, meat substitute, I had every intention of using something like Impossible Burger or Beyond meatballs or Trader Joe's beefless beef to substitute for meat. But then I put a vegan meatloaf I really wanted to try (recipe from Nora Cooks) on the meal plan for the first week of the new year, and remembered that meat substitute didn't just mean some commercially-engineered meat substitute but also things like chickpeas that could stand in for meat. I was really excited to try out this recipe, since unlike some others it didn't need a food processor or a blender, and also because I love meatloaf.

The ingredients for our version of the meatloaf were:

- 1 small onion ($0.19)

- 3 medium carrots ($0.46)

- 2 large celery stalks ($0.30)

- large spoonful of minced garlic ($0.05)

- olive oil spray to grease pan ($0.10)

- olive oil for sautéing vegetables ($0.10)

- 2 cans of chickpeas ($1.93)

- about 1/2 tsp liquid smoke ($0.05)

- 1 cup panko bread crumbs ($0.75)

- 2 tbsp ground flaxseeds ($0.16)

- 3 tbsp nutritional yeast ($0.15)

- 2 tbsp soy sauce ($0.15)

- 2 tbsp + 2 tsp Worcestershire sauce ($0.60)

- 4 tbsp + 1/3 cup ketchup ($0.42)

The total approximate cost for the meatloaf was $5.41. I had to run the calculations twice, because I was in disbelief at the low cost. We paired it with a can of green beans, which meant dinner for three was under $7. It was only the second week of the challenge, but I think this might end up being our most affordable meal of the whole challenge year, based on how much our meals usually cost.

The steps for making the meatloaf were:

1. Prep - chop onion, carrots, and celery into small pieces. Drain and rinse chickpeas. Preheat oven to 375 degrees, and spray loaf pan (used 9 inch pan) with olive oil spray.

2. Heat olive oil in skillet. Add the onion, celery, and carrots along with garlic. Cook until onions are translucent. Remove from heat and cool.

3. In a large mixing bowl, add the chickpeas. Use a potato masher to break them up (but stop before they get pasty or mushy). [This step took far longer than I thought it would, mostly because I used one can of Goya chickpeas, which were soft and mashable, and one can of Trader Joe's chickpeas, which were hard and similar in texture to nuts. The latter refused to be crushed and only sometimes split in half, no matter how hard we mashed. They only got harder with baking too. I won't be using those again, partially because I would rather have a smoother texture for the meatloaf, and partially so I don't spend the entire dinner worried about the chickpeas being nut-like choking hazards.]

4. Add the vegetables to the chickpeas, along with the liquid smoke, panko, flaxseeds, nutritional yeast, soy sauce, 2 tbsp of the Worcestershire sauce, and 4 tbsp of the ketchup. Mix well, and then scoop into a loaf pan and smooth out the top.

5. Cover loaf pan with foil, and bake for 30 minutes.

6. Mix together the rest of the Worcestershire and the ketchup for the glaze.

7. Remove loaf pan from oven after the 30 minutes, remove the foil, and spread the glaze evenly on top. Return to oven, and bake for 15 minutes uncovered.

8. Remove from oven, and let it sit for about 15 minutes [it was late - we did 5-10 minutes]. Slice and serve.

The meatloaf was delicious. A little heavy on the Worcestershire flavor, but I personally like that, so I thought that was great. The texture wasn't the same as you would get from ground meat, but I don't know if that would have been different without the hard nut-like pieces of chickpeas that we had thanks to the TJ's chickpeas. I would absolutely make this again, but I will try to be wiser with my choice of chickpeas.

Sparkling Honeycrisp Apple Juice

I'm not a huge fan of carbonated drinks, so I've mostly ignored the seasonal sparkling beverages at Trader Joe's, despite the raves for previous flavors like watermelon and strawberry. But when the sparkling honeycrisp apple juice cans came in last fall, I knew we had to try them. We hadn't bought any honeycrisp apples during the season, and this sounded like it might be their version of Martinelli's, which was popular in my family during lots of holiday dinners.

The ingredients were simple - just honeycrisp apple juice, water, and carbon dioxide - and the flavor was great. It tasted just like a sweet, ripe, crisp apple, but not too sugary sweet. We found it really refreshing, although A noted it might not be the best use of so many honeycrisp apples. (It's been so long since we've had actual honeycrisp apples!) It was also nice that they came in four cans instead of one big bottle, so that you didn't have to drink too much at one time. (I thought the news said there was an aluminum can shortage, so I'm not sure how they got their hands on so much of this when beer distributors are having issues, but I'm glad they did!)

Buy again? Sure. I think we could pick up a box of these every fall and be happy with a nice bubbly treat. If all the other flavors are as good as this one, we might even try some of those too!

Week 1 - Last Meal

I felt all sorts of emotions when the first challenge of 2021 came up as last meal. I was sad, angry, and upset, because what kind of challenge theme was that?! Coming off of a 2020 that saw such tragedy, why would you start off the year with something so depressing, dark, and dreary? Why wouldn't you want to look ahead to 2021 and try to start it on a bright, optimistic note? [I wrote most of this post before the insurrection... What a start to the year.] Who wants to think about having their last meal at a time when COVID is surging? What an incredibly morbid theme. I was kind of surprised that they went there at all during a pandemic, but especially for the opening theme of the year. I also felt disappointed. I don't like skipping weeks, especially not the first one, but there was also no way I was going to participate in this thought exercise.

I apparently wasn't the only one that felt that way, and there were lots of comments on Reddit from people who found the theme similarly bleak. Some took it to even darker, sadder places, like what it would mean to have the same last meal as someone executed on death row. Not things I want to think about to set the tone for the year. Thankfully, other people came up with less negative lenses through which to view the challenge, one of which was the last meal of the Before Times, the last meal out before lockdown, the last meal at a restaurant before the entire world closed down. For us, the last time we ate out before everything started to get shut down was a family meal at Qdoba. It's a really happy memory for me, just being able to see and eat with family in the middle of so much uncertainty (as we could definitely feel the coronavirus dangers lurking at the time), and B was having a great time at that dinner, dancing to the music and enjoying his Mexican food. So, our challenge meal was set - copycat burrito bowls.

There were a lot of moving pieces for this dinner if we were going to make our own burrito bar, and I don't think I really anticipated just how involved it was, so I started making dinner way too late. The whole process took about 2.5 hours, which meant another late challenge dinner. Outside of the guacamole, for which we just used Kirkland guacamole singles, there were six different dishes made from scratch: copycat Qdoba grilled chicken, cilantro lime rice, fajita vegetables, black beans, corn, and pico de gallo. The black beans and corn weren't going to be replicas of Qdoba, just quick microwavable dishes since I did not have the time for that, but I wanted to make our burrito bowls as similar as possible otherwise.

The ingredients were:

for the chicken (adapted from recipe on Gimme Delicious, did not measure dry spices):

- 1.5 lbs chicken tenders ($8.99)

- big spoonful of minced garlic ($0.05)

- 2 tbsp olive oil ($0.20)

- about 1 tbsp chili powder ($0.10)

- about 1 tsp cumin ($0.05)

- about 1 tsp oregano ($0.05)

- salt and freshly ground black pepper ($0.03)

- adobo sauce ($0.58)

(Note that the recipe called for 2 tbsp of adobo sauce, but I didn't have any and wasn't sure if it would be too spicy for B, so I went with a substitute I found on Pepper Scale, omitting the cayenne. I ended up using about 1 tbsp tomato paste, 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar, about 1 tsp smoked paprika, about 1/2 tsp cumin, a pinch of oregano, and a pinch of garlic powder, again not measuring the dry spices, with the total approximate cost reflected in the list above. I mixed that together first, and it tasted far closer to adobo than I thought it would, lacking some of the depth and not very spicy, but that was just what I needed here!)

for the rice (adapted from Skinnytaste):

- 1 cup basmati rice ($1)

- juice of 1/2 lime ($0.25)

- 2 cups water ($0)

- about 1 tsp salt ($0.02)

- 1/2 big bunch of cilantro, finely chopped ($0.44)

- about 3 tsp olive oil, divided ($0.10)

for the fajita vegetables:

- olive oil spray ($0.30)

- 1 orange bell pepper, sliced into strips ($1)

- 1 red bell pepper, sliced into strips ($0.91)

- 1 large yellow onion, sliced into strips ($0.79)

- salt ($0.02)

- oregano ($0.05)

for the black beans:

- 1 can black beans ($0.94)

- a little olive oil ($0.05)

- salt, black pepper, garlic powder, oregano ($0.08)

for the corn:

- 1 can corn ($0.96)

- scallions (see note with pico de gallo) ($0.20)

- a little olive oil ($0.05)

- salt, black pepper, garlic powder ($0.06)

for the pico de gallo:

- 2 roma tomatoes, diced ($0.81)

- 1/2 red onion, finely chopped ($0.39)

- 1/2 big bunch of cilantro, finely chopped ($0.45)

- 4 scallions, greens finely chopped, whites thinly sliced on the diagonal - split with the corn (all the whites used in the pico, 1/3 of the greens used in the pico and the rest in the scallions) ($0.23)

- juice of 1/2 lime ($0.25)

The cost for our burrito bar was approximately $22.90 ($10.05 for the chicken, $1.81 for the rice, $3.07 for the fajita vegetables, $1.07 for the black beans, $1.27 for the corn, $2.13 for the pico de gallo, and $3.50 for 3 packages of guacamole). Two burrito bowls plus a kid's meal at Qdoba runs us about $20-25, but while their portions are large, this was still more food than we would have gotten there. Well, maybe not more rice, but definitely more chicken.

The first thing I made was the chicken because it needed to marinate. I was too tired to do it the night before, so it ended up only marinating for about 4 hours or so. It was still delicious, but next time I think I would try to marinate it longer. I mixed the substitute adobo sauce first, then added the rest of the marinade ingredients, and then added the chicken tenders, stirring them around until they were all covered with sauce. The covered bowl sat in the fridge until it was time to grill.

Prep was the thing that took the longest. (Wish I had taken a photo of that mountain of cilantro!) I worked on the tomatoes, onions, peppers, scallions, and cilantro the bulk of the time, but after that the pico de gallo was done and mixed, ready to sit out and meld until everything else was done. A started on the rice while I finished the prep, which definitely helped get everything done.

For the rice, we basically followed the Skinnytaste instructions, which were to add the rice, a tsp of oil, water, and salt to the pot, boil it until the water just skims the top of the rice, cook covered on low for 20 minutes, and then keep it covered with no heat for at least 5 minutes. (We left it covered and steaming until everything else was done.) The last step was to mix the rest of the olive oil with the cilantro and lime juice into the rice.

After prepping, I moved on to the fajita vegetables, cooking them in a grill pan that was sprayed with olive oil. This was my first time using the grill pan for active cooking after seeing someone doing that on YouTube. Previously, I only ever put things on the pan to grill like you would on an outdoor grill, but the vegetables cooked exactly the way I wanted them to this way. They were still a little harder and crunchier than I would have preferred when they came off the pan, but I put them in a bowl covered with foil to steam until everything else was done, and the texture was perfect.

Once the vegetables were done, it was time to grill the chicken. A took over at the grill pan, so I could put together the bowls of black bean and corn in the microwave, and the timing worked out well. Even though our meat thermometer said they were done, a few of the pieces of chicken weren't fully cooked when I went to chop them after resting, so we threw them back in the pan. Even after that, the chicken was still juicier than what you normally get from Qdoba and Chipotle.

I wish I had gotten a photo of A's first bowl, because he made it look exactly like the ones we would get at Qdoba, piled high with a dollop of guacamole on the top. We were all really happy with this meal. I love burrito bowls, and it felt so good to have a from-scratch burrito bowl that we made in our own kitchen (other than the guacamole). The chicken flavoring was delicious, the rice was fluffy, the fajita vegetables were texturally great but just needed a little more seasoning, the black beans and corn were easy and tasty, and the pico de gallo added a bit of freshness. Although I love pico de gallo, it was actually my least favorite part, although A might be right that my opinion here is biased by the fact that it was also the thing that took the longest to prepare.

What would I do differently, since I would love to make burrito bowls part of our regular rotation? I would marinate the chicken longer. Otherwise, the marinade was great, and I'm glad we got pre-sliced tenders from the grocery store, which were perfect for this. I would add a little more seasoning to the fajita vegetables, but otherwise change nothing. I would omit the cilantro and maybe the lime from the rice, because the cilantro takes so long to prep and regular rice would be fine. I would buy pico de gallo from the store or just use salsa instead. (They didn't have any this time, which is why I made my own.) I would do the same thing with the corn and the black beans, since they were simple and quick. Basically, I would use some shortcuts to make it so that burrito bowls wouldn't take me 2.5 hours. If I didn't make my own pico de gallo and didn't prep any cilantro, then I could just make the rice while cooking the vegetables, and make the black beans and corn while grilling the chicken, and the whole thing would be so much faster. Can't wait to try that out in the future!

Our Year in Food: 2020

2020 was a year like no other in our lifetimes, but I don't think I need to explain why to anybody reading this post because we all lived through (and are living through) the same global event. Writing up our year in review one year ago, thinking ahead to 2020, I don't think I ever could have imagined we would be where we are right now. Zero travel, barely any in-person restaurant visits, it was anything but a typical year (to the extent such a thing exists). But we made it through the year, and I'm incredibly grateful for that. After this unpredictable year, I have no expectations for 2021, and am just hoping for the best. Here was our 2020 in food:

The first restaurant meal we ate in 2020: The first restaurant food we all ate together was from Eons Greek Food for Life, getting some Greek bowls for takeout for a family gathering in early January. Our first non-takeout, non-delivery experience wasn't until the end of February at Boston Market. Three weeks later, lockdown.

The first home-cooked meal we ate in 2020: The first thing we made at home was a semi-home-cooked dinner of shawarma chicken thighs, dolma, Grecian eggplant, and giant white beans, all from Trader Joe's, but not requiring anything more than heating and plating. The first thing made from scratch were the chickpea omelettes I made for Week 1 of the 52 week cooking challenge.

The last restaurant meal we ate in 2020: Our last takeout/delivery meal was NYE lunch poke bowls from PokeBowl Station, and the last thing we ate out as a family were doughnuts from Doughnut Plant, B's first time having doughnuts. I guess technically that could be considered takeout, so then it would be pizza at Brooklyn Firefly (more on that later).

The last home-cooked meal we ate in 2020: A made shepherd's pie with a tomato, chickpea, onion, and feta side salad for our New Year's Eve dinner, and the pie was amazing.

# of different restaurants we tried in 2020 (together and separate): 17 in person (although half of that is places I went to solo), 43 takeout and delivery spots. A dramatic drop from previous years, but not surprising. We can count on less than two hands the number of dine-in experiences we had all year as a family, and since the start of the pandemic, we ate out 5 times (if you count the doughnuts).

Places explored (outside the NYC metro area): None. Since the start of the pandemic, we haven't even left the city.

Most frequented restaurant of 2020: In person, Qdoba. Takeout and delivery, a tie between Ginger House, a vegan Asian spot, and Next Level Burger, a vegan burger joint. We try to order delivery for our family dinners from vegan spots when we can because of B's allergies, so this result is unsurprising.

Progress on WorldEats challenge: Still 58/196, because we haven't written about any of the other countries yet.

Progress on Around the World Cooking Challenge: A few "random" meals out of order, but otherwise finished off Afghanistan and Alabama, and started on Alaska. I really need to post about these in the new year.

Favorite overall meal of 2020: Our outdoor lunch at Brooklyn Firefly in mid-November. We've been doing mostly takeout and delivery during the pandemic, only choosing outdoor (and in two anxious cases, indoor) dining when we already had to be out of the house for doctor visits and things like that. This meal is probably our favorite because, for one, it felt safe. We were sitting outside in the yard and not in the middle of the street, there was plenty of space, and it was also safe on the allergy front because they had vegan pizzas. This was the first time we'd gone out for pizza as a family, and B loved it. Just a really happy memory from this year.

Wishing you a happy and healthy 2021!

48 Challenges

Another challenge year in the books! I skipped three and postponed/skipped one, so I guess it was really another 48 challenges, but I'm really glad I got back to doing the challenge this year. It pushed me to try so many new recipes, and with so much time at home due to this quarantine year, I was even happier that I had chosen to try again.

Since I didn't post these in order (especially in December, what a mess of numbers that list of posts is), here's the whole 52 week challenge for this year with links:

Week 1 - hindsight 2020 (chickpea omelettes)
Week 2 - miso (ginger chicken meatballs in miso broth)
Week 3 - Russian (turkey stroganoff)
Week 4 - 24 hours (NYC deli-style potato salad)
Week 5 - rice (cheesy Italian rice with sausage)
Week 6 - Jamaican (black eyed pea curry)
Week 7 - braising (three cup chicken)
Week 8 - used to dislike (vegan kuku sabzi)
Week 9 - Brazilian (Bahia-style moqueca prawn stew)
Week 10 - fermented (peanut tempeh stir-fry)
Week 11 - kawaii (skipped)
Week 12 - peppers (turkey stuffed peppers)
Week 13 - deep frying (bolani)
Week 14 - alphabet (C comfort food)
Week 15 - beans (kidney bean curry)
Week 16 - South African (Durban chicken curry)
Week 17 - from scratch (vegetarian bolognese)
Week 18 - ginger (ginger scallion ramen)
Week 19 - Sri Lankan (postponed)
Week 20 - puree (skipped)
Week 21 - flour (focaccia; also the original post about postponement)
Week 22 - Nepalese (vegetable tarkari)
Week 23 - crunchy (baked onion rings)
Week 24 - black and white (black beans and rice)
Week 25 - Australasian (ika vakalolo and lolo buns)
Week 26 - proofing (Afghan naan)
Week 27 - retro recipes (Swedish meatballs)
Week 28 - soul food (johnnycakes with green beans)
Week 29 - emulsification (vinaigrette)
Week 30 - cartoon (Absentee Shallot burger)
Week 31 - cucumber (tzatziki)

Week 32 - Finnish (Karelian pie)

Week 33 - food in disguise (meatloaf cupcakes)

Week 34 - figs (baby spinach salad with dates and almonds)

Week 35 - Chilean (pastel de choclo)

Week 36 - caramelizing (roasted eggplant with caramelized onion and chopped lemon)

Week 37 - bacon (BLT pasta salad)

Week 38 - Yemeni (chicken zorbian)

Week 39 - dipping (pico de gallo)

Week 40 - local specialty (smoked salmon with scrambled "eggs" and diner potatoes)

Week 41 - Lebanese (shish tawook)

Week 42 - microwave (mug cake)

Week 43 - food mashups (quesadilla pasta)

Week 44 - apples (rosemary-apple chicken)

Week 45 - sous vide (skipped)

Week 46 - seasonal (cabbage rolls)

Week 47 - mushrooms (buttered balsamic mushrooms)

Week 48 - gourds (roasted delicata squash)

Week 49 - 30 minutes (teriyaki tofu stir-fry)

Week 50 - sage (sweet onion sage bread)

Week 51 - Jewish (chraime)

Week 52 - garnish (carrot flower failure)

Hopefully next year I won't have to skip any!

Week 52 - Garnish

I'm disappointed to be ending the challenge year on something that feels so lackluster, but with the Week 52 theme being garnish, there were few things my not-very-crafty self could do that would live up to how great some of the other challenge weeks were. I wasn't even sure what to do here. My usual garnishes are things like chopped parsley, but that seemed really low-effort for a challenge meal. Sprinkling herbs? Surely, that couldn't be what they meant.

I thought about it some more and then decided I would attempt to make a carrot flower. I followed the tutorial on Wikihow, and it turned out about as well as I expected (i.e., it wasn't good). I'm not the best at plating or artistic things with food, and my flower wasn't really much of a flower. I guess it could pass for a thick stem, but it was not very good at all.

When they put up the intro thread for the challenge week on Reddit, they talked about just making things pleasing to the eye, whether it was sprinkling salt or herbs or even non-edible garnishes. So I guess they really did mean something as simple as sprinkling some chopped parsley, even if that doesn't feel challenge-worthy to me. Since the carrot flower was a bit of a failure, let's end the year instead with a photo of a dish with a lovely sauce and garnishes of za'atar and parsley, which is the next installment in our Ottolenghi Jerusalem project that I'll hopefully write about soon.

Looking forward to another year of cooking challenges!

Week 51 - Jewish

The Week 51 challenge, Jewish, was technically the last challenge I completed in 2020. I had planned to do it earlier in the month, but just kept pushing it back since the original plan was to make challah, which is a many-hour-long affair. The time never seemed right, and then when it finally came time to make it, I just wasn't feeling it, plus we were running out of flour and I wasn't sure we would even have enough. I decided to scrap the challah plan and instead make chraime, a Sephardic fish dish I had never had or heard of before but was mentioned in the Reddit intro thread. I used a recipe from Breaking Matzo which seemed simple and tasty.

The ingredients for our version (approximations since I didn't measure anything) were:

- about 1 tbsp cumin ($0.10)

- about 1 tsp smoked Spanish paprika ($0.05)

- about 2 tbsp olive oil ($0.20)

- 1 yellow onion, chopped ($0.68)

- big spoonful of minced garlic ($0.10)

- 2 cans diced tomatoes, drained ($2)

- 1/2 of 16 oz jar of roasted red peppers ($2.50)

- juice of 1/2 lemon ($0.40)

- 1/2 cup of water ($0)

- 1 lb of boneless skinless pollock fillets ($5)

- salt and freshly ground black pepper ($0.02)

- small bunch of cilantro, leaves chopped ($0.25)

The cost for the fish was about $11.30, and we ate it with some microwave rice packets ($3.37), for a total of about $14.67. For a fish dish, it wasn't that expensive, although we had the same white rice problem we always have where we're still hungry not long after dinner. If someone knows the science for why that's the case, would love to hear it.

While making the chraime, it occurred to me that the cooking process was very similar to shakshuka. Make your tomato sauce, add the fish/eggs into the sauce, and then cook until they're done. The basic steps were:

- heat spices

- add olive oil

- add onions and cook until softened

- add garlic and cook for about a minute

- add tomatoes, red peppers, lemon juice, and water (I used less water than the recipe because I had canned tomatoes, and just added enough water to be sure there was enough sauce to surround the fish)

- bring sauce to a boil, lower heat, and simmer for 5-8 minutes

- add fish (after drying in a towel if needed, like ours did because it started out frozen)

- make little wells in the sauce and put the fish fillets in the pan, making sure the fish is surrounded by sauce

- cover and cook for about 6-7 minutes until fish is opaque and temperature is at least 145 degrees

- remove from heat, and add salt, pepper, and cilantro

- serve over rice

This dish was delicious, and I'm glad I did this instead of the challah this time around. It took far less time and made for more of a complete dinner all on its own instead of needing to figure out what else to make with the challah. B passed on it completely, so I'm not sure if I'll be making it again any time soon, but A and I thought it was really tasty. It also felt super healthy, which was much appreciated after our holiday eating.