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!

From Soup to Burgers

First group post for the 2023 cooking challenge!

Week 4: instant

I knew immediately I wanted to make something new in the Instant Pot, since our IP doesn't get enough use, and this potato corn chowder was delicious. It tasted very much like a spring soup since I also added some chopped asparagus into the mix, but that was not unwelcome, even in the depths of January. 

Week 5: mustard

I initially thought about making my own mustard, since during the pandemic I did a virtual class that taught you how to make mustard, but then I got a little scared off when I read someone's comment about needing proper ventilation (our kitchen has no windows). What I ended up making was probably even better though since these smoked salmon toasts with homemade mustard-dill compound butter (well, the combination was homemade, not the butter itself) I found on Food52 were amazing. Like cocktail hour hors d'oeuvres amazing in flavor, so now not only do I have a great toasts recipe, but also a recipe for compound butter that I can put on all sorts of things.

Week 7: dyed

I've been trying to avoid artificial food dyes, so I wasn't sure exactly what to do for this challenge. Then I found a recipe on The Healthy Family & Home for vegan and naturally-colored chocolate coconut eggs, and that seemed like the best option. I used turmeric, matcha, and ube powder for the colorings, although the ube one turned out a little more reddish-brown than purple, which was a little disappointing. They were pretty good though and kept well in the freezer for future snacks, which was another plus.

Week 8: celebrity chef

Years ago, I was an audience member at a few tapings of Beat Bobby Flay, so I decided to make some Bobby Flay recipes from his cookbook, Sundays with Sophie. So many recipes there sounded good, and I made some crunch burgers with BBQ mushrooms and quick pickled onions with a side of pan-fried asparagus with garlic-lemon bread crumbs. Two dishes, but four different recipes in the cookbook, so lots to do but very tasty results. I've already made the asparagus again, and would make the burgers again on a day when I had some extra time to cook.

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 2 (2023) - Cabbage

Coming off a challenge year where I made a lot of salads including shredded cabbage, I did not want to do that for the week 2 cabbage challenge. I searched cabbage recipes for a bit until I found one on The Kitchn for a caramelized cabbage butter pasta. That sounded delicious and cozy for a winter night.

I am not a huge fan of buying whole cabbages. I think my hourlong cleaning adventure with a Savoy cabbage back when I first started cooking for real is probably the cause of that, even though working with the green cabbage from our cabbage rolls a couple of years ago wasn't as bad. Since the recipe offered an alternative of buying pre-shredded cabbage to save time, and since the cabbage was going to end up shredded anyway, that sounded like the best option for convenience. I ended up getting a cole slaw mix with carrots in it too, but more vegetables are always welcome.

It did take a little bit of time to soften and caramelize the cabbage, and I didn't start with quite enough butter in the beginning, but once it was finished, it tasted really good. We don't usually make plain buttered pasta, but I definitely see how it is a comfort food for so many people. This was really good, especially the parts where the cabbage combined with the melted parmesan cheese. I don't know if we would make it again any time soon, since B hasn't been interested in cabbage yet, but it's good to know this recipe is here if we ever need/want it.

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 21 - Stone Fruit

I'm not the biggest fan of mixing fruit with savory dishes, but I was hoping to find something for this challenge week that wouldn't be too sweet. It wasn't really stone fruit season here when I did this challenge, so I decided to go with some preserves. We had apricot preserves left over from Easter when A made hot cross buns, so I went with apricot chicken, based on a recipe I found on Savory Nothings.

The first step was to brown the chicken and then add onions. This step unexpectedly took a while, and the chicken got a little overdone, because apparently this chicken was super watery, maybe because it was super huge. I think we got it from BJ's, where the four chicken breasts were over five pounds, and maybe the biggest I had ever seen. But once the chicken finally browned, it was time to deglaze with some orange juice, add a cup of apricot jam (had just enough left), a couple tbsp of soy sauce and BBQ sauce, and a tbsp of honey, reduce the sauce, and then top everything with scallions.

We thought this was really good. I could taste the sweetness of the apricot, but it wasn't cloyingly sweet. instead nicely balanced by the other ingredients. It was also not as sticky as I thought it would be. B didn't eat any of it (the whole sauce thing again), but we liked it. It reminded us of the sauce for sweet and sour chicken. I'm not as into sweet sauces, so we might not do it again, but it was good for the challenge

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.

Week 49 - Modernist

Back in 2014, the first year I (unofficially) did the 52 week cooking challenge, one of the themes came up as molecular. It was one of the few challenges that year that I skipped (more here), since I didn't want to buy any new ingredients or equipment that I was probably not going to use again, and I also just couldn't find anything I wanted to make. Fast-forward to 2022, and my philosophy about it hasn't really changed, but now I actually had to do the modernist challenge if I wanted to complete the challenge for the year. What was I going to make?! Thankfully, someone linked recipes from the Modernist Cuisine site/cookbook, and there were a couple there that piqued my interest.

One thing I hadn't realized until scrolling through those recipes was that food made in microwave could also fall under the umbrella of modernist cooking. That made a huge difference in getting this challenge done! We've made fish before in the microwave, so I didn't want to do that again, but I was very intrigued by their recipe for a microwaved eggplant parmesan. 

The ingredients for this challenge were:

- eggplant, about 1 lb

- olive oil

- garlic marinara sauce

- ricotta cheese

- mozzarella cheese rounds

- 1/2 cup torn basil leaves

- grated parmigiano reggiano

- panko breadcrumbs

We ate some tomato parmesan focaccia from Trader Joe's on the side (was hoping for more olive fugasse but they had none). I intended to price this out, since I was curious about how much these challenge meals were adding up to considering the increased price of groceries, but it's been over three months now, and that's just too much work to figure out.

I was actually impressed by how this turned out and how simple it was to make in the microwave. The first steps of microwaving the eggplant were easy, and it really did end up with very tender slices. The only issue with our eggplant was that it wasn't "strong" enough to hold the rest of the ingredients in the stack, but I had to use baby eggplant because all the larger eggplant at two different stores that day looked terrible. So instead of one large circle wherever eggplant was required, I had two or three smaller pieces instead. Still turned out okay!

As far as flavor, we thought it reminded us a little more of lasagna than eggplant parmesan, but that could be because the ricotta was a pretty dominant flavor and the eggplant got a little bit lost since the pieces were so small. Either way, it was delicious. Would I make it again? Not sure. It was pretty simple to make, and it did taste good, but I haven't made eggplant parmesan the "regular" way, so I don't know yet which way we like better.

Week 51 - Georgian

When I think of Georgian food, the dish that immediately comes to mind is khachapuri. We've never been to a Georgian restaurant to try it since we've often seen egg included in the middle of the boat with the cheese, but in researching dishes for this challenge, I learned that there are actually multiple variations of khachapuri! I guess it's just the general name for Georgian cheese-filled bread (learn something new every day). The one we're most familiar with (the cheese boat one) is adjaruli khachapuri, but I found another type - imeruli khachapuri - that, based on recipes, didn't have to include egg. I did check out a bunch of other dishes, but kept coming back to this. After all, khachapuri is Georgia's national dish, so a logical first choice to start our exploration of the country's cuisine.

I looked at three different sites to see how they made imeruli khachapuri (1, 2, 3), and from there, came up with an adaptation of it which I hoped would work. Having never eaten it before, I have no idea how close it is to the real thing. The ingredients I used were:

- 300g all-purpose flour

- 150g oat milk (lukewarm)

- water (added little by little)

- 6g instant yeast

- 6g salt

- 16 oz shredded mozzarella

- 2 flax eggs

- 2 tbsp melted butter

To make the dough, the flour, milk. and yeast were mixed together, with water added little by little, and then salt at the end. After kneading the dough for a while, I let it rest for about 2 hours. I was aiming for more but I got a little sidetracked by watching the Netherlands-Argentina World Cup match and started far later than I planned. Well, that and the time spent trying to figure out if our yeast was still alive. We bought it back during the bread-baking stage of the pandemic and froze it, taking it out a little at a time, but this batch was in the fridge for a while and I wasn't sure if it would work. (Thankfully it did, but that was another 10 minutes' delay.)

I was a little concerned when I pulled the dough out after it rested, because it did expand a little in size but nowhere near as much as I was expecting it to. I split it in two pieces, rolled them out, and then made the cheese mixture to go inside. This is where most people seemed to add eggs, so I added a couple of flax eggs to help bind the mixture together. I was going to do a mix of half mozzarella and half feta, since that seemed to be the recommendation if you couldn't get actual Georgian cheese, but our feta didn't smell so great anymore, leaving us with just mozzarella inside. We didn't have any other cheese at home besides shredded Mexican cheese or jalapeño goat cheese, so didn't have much choice.

Rolling out the dough with the cheese inside was easier than I thought it would be, although I did get some holes in the dough from overstuffing it. After the first one burst in two spots, I put less cheese in the second one, but the same thing happened again (but smaller holes). I baked them at 375 degrees for about 17 minutes, and then after they came out, brushed them with butter and let them sit on the pan for a bit longer while I cooked other things.

I didn't have high hopes for this after the dough not rising much, not having the feta cheese, and all the leaking cheese on the baking sheet, but we thought they came out really well! The dough had a good chew to it, and it was fluffier than I was expecting. The cheese tasted good, but it really was missing that saltiness and brininess from the feta.

Week 9 - Thai

So behind on catching up from last year's challenge! I've already made Week 9's dish for this year, so I really need to get going!

The Week 9 challenge was Thai, one of our favorite cuisines but one that we haven't had as often in recent years. Although I made larb gai back in 2017 when the challenge theme was also Thai, and in 2015 when the challenge theme was ground meat, it had been so long since I'd made it that I thought it was time to try it again. I used the same recipe from Eating Thai Food, and it was just as good as I remembered. I always forget that I can make this at home, and that I should do it more often.

Our adapted version of the larb recipe consisted of ground meat (used chicken here), roasted rice powder, lime juice, sugar, fish sauce, shallots, red onion, scallions, mint, and cilantro. Usually, there would also be Thai chili flakes, which I've used in the past, but we skipped that here in the hopes that B would eat it (but I can't remember if he did). Larb just makes me so happy, so I was very glad to make it again.

Since I had made larb before for two other (unofficial) challenges, I wanted to add on something else to make this Thai night different - mango sticky rice! Larb is one of my favorite savory Thai dishes, and mango sticky rice is one of my favorite desserts, so they were a good match. It's been over a year now since we made this, so I don't remember any specific recipe that we followed, or if we mostly went from our memories of what mango sticky rice should taste like.

For mango sticky rice, you need a nice, ripe, sweet mango (and we had a perfect Ataulfo one ready for it). The other main components are glutinous rice and a coconut sauce, made from heated coconut milk with sugar dissolved in it. The hardest part of this was making the glutinous rice because we didn't really have a perfect steamer for it. I guess we could have put the rice on parchment paper in our regular steamer, but instead we tried a method I found online from She Simmers, where you put the rice on a splatter guard over boiling water, cover it with a metal bowl, and steam it. It worked far better than we expected. Whenever we get good mangoes, we may have to make this again, since it's such a great dessert. Very happy with our Thai night!

Gandana Bolani

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I love, love, love garlic chives. In reading the Parwana cookbook, I learned that in Afghanistan, there is a type of leek called gandana that is often used as a filling for bolani, and that outside Afghanistan, it's often substituted with garlic chives (similar taste and texture). That sounded delicious. I had made bolani once before for the 52 week cooking challenge, and since we already revisited one dish for the AtWCC from this cookbook, why not do another (and another and another)? In addition to the gandana bolani, I also decided to do kachaloo bolani, which was bolani stuffed with potato.

The first step for bolani was to make the dough. This version consisted of flour, yeast, water, oil, and salt. This was different from the last version which was not a yeast dough. After proofing twice, the dough is rolled out into circles, then filled and sealed. Unlike the last time, where I got mostly strips and ovals, I did get a few circles this time and other almost-circles or shapes that somewhat resembled circles. I guess over that two year span, I got a little bit better at that.

For the filling last time, I made mashed potatoes and mixed them with scallions, spinach, and seasonings. For the potato one this time, I added onions (from the recipe) and scallions (because I had extra), and I will confess that I used instant mashed potatoes. There was enough to do with the dough rolling and making two fillings that I just didn't think I had the time to peel and mash potatoes too. (I was right.) The filling was fine with instant. Instant mashed potatoes are so underrated.

The chive filling was the one I was most excited about. It called for 2 cups of finely chopped garlic chives, along with a bunch of cilantro, scallions, onion, and seasonings, so lots of chopping, lots of time-consuming prep. This filling was fantastic, even eaten alone by the spoonful, so I was at least relieved that even if the bolani didn't turn out that well, the filling would be good. Our bunch of garlic chives was gigantic (wish I had taken an ingredients picture, but I was short on time and space), but it was far more than 2 cups of garlic chives. I guess I should have found a second recipe to use them in, but instead I used them all here. The leftover filling was amazing mixed into oatmeal for breakfast. I could eat that all the time if I had a daily-replenishing bowl of chive filling.

The last time I made bolani, I baked them, but this time, they went into the air fryer. That process took a little longer since the air fryer could only fit two or three at a time, but I think we liked the results better. The last time, the outside was crispy like a cracker, and everything was kind of bland, which was not the case here. It still didn't look like a thin flatbread, but it was just like eating a stuffed bread roll. The potato filling here was also a little on the blander side, but the chives one was wonderful. I have no idea how the bolani in the recipe photo (or what we had at the restaurant) were so flat while ours were huge, but at least these were tasty.

The last component was a chutney for dipping. A few days before I made these, Eater had published an article about bolani (talk about timing). In it, they profiled a refugee in Albania (funny coincidence, we were in the Albania part of the AtWCC as well when we made this) who started an Afghan restaurant that served bolani. I didn't want to make two days of bolani, so I decided to try the chutney recipe from the article even if I didn't make the bolani itself. The chutney was a blend of tomatoes, jalapeño, garlic, vinegar, salt, and sugar.

Usually, we would try to tone down the spice of these dishes for B, but he hadn't been very into dipping or sauces, so we just made it the same way but with one jalapeño instead of two and removing all the seeds. We were right in our prediction, and he had no interest in the chutney, but we really liked it. It was such a good match for the bolani. It reminded us a little bit of the salad dressing at our favorite Yemeni spot which we have always loved, and now we have the recipe for something close to that!

Even though they didn't turn out looking like the photo, we deemed our second Parwana experiment a success, and couldn't wait to see what else was in the cookbook!

Parwana

I've mentioned the Parwana cookbook here before, and besides the pizza, it was a big reason why we revisited our exploration of Afghan cuisine. The cookbook existed back when we cooked the first time in 2020, but somehow, in all my googling, I never found out about it until early 2022. I usually like including recipes from a cookbook in the challenge when I can, so it didn't feel right to leave it out just because I didn't find it in time. Looking through the cookbook, I found a recipe for a meat kofta sauce which accompanies aushak, and it sounded remarkably similar to the one we had tried at Ariana. I wondered, even though that was meant to go with the aushak, if I put it over noodles, would that actually get a little closer to what we remembered about aushe burida?

The first thing I noticed about the Parwana recipe was that the meat sauce included chana dal, a component that I remembered from Ariana but didn't have in our previous version. It also included pureed tomatoes, onion, garlic, ground lamb (which I substituted with Impossible), turmeric, curry powder, crushed coriander seeds (I used ground), tomato paste, and white vinegar. The spices were a little different from the first time, but the general flavor profile was very similar.

The third component to the dish, after the noodles and the meat sauce, was the yogurt topping. I had forgotten when I made this that the Ariana description specifically included mint in the yogurt sauce, so I decided to try out a yogurt dressing in the Parwana cookbook that just consisted of plain yogurt and garlic powder. This came from a recipe for aush, a thick soup with hand-rolled, knife-cut noodles and seasonal vegetables. That also reminded me a lot of the dish from Ariana since it included the noodles, the same meat kofta sauce, and the yogurt dressing, but it was in more of a soup form with additional vegetables. Could it be that this dish is more common in this form, and maybe that's why I couldn't find any recipes for the dish we got at Ariana itself? B doesn't really eat soup still, so I stuck with just trying to replicate the noodle dish by itself, but I was certainly intrigued by the (possible) connection.

The sauce was wonderful. At the time we had this, it had been even more years since we had the original dish, so it was even harder to compare, but we were very happy with this kofta sauce over some fettuccine (because I still didn't have time or space to add on a pasta-making project to this one). The yogurt sauce didn't add as much as the last one with the fresh garlic and the mint, so I think in the future, we'll probably mesh the two recipes together and make the meat kofta sauce from here plus the yogurt sauce that we had before. Whether or not that's authentic, and even close to what we tried originally that made us fall in love with this sauce, we're happy with what we have now!