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!

Our Year in Food: 2023

Here we are at the end of another year, and it was another year of not updating nearly as much as we should have. 2023 brought a lot of difficult times, but also a lot to be thankful for, including being able to continue on our adventures and explorations through food as a family. At the close of the year, a look back at what was our 2023.

The first restaurant meal we ate in 2023: Technically, it was takeout from McDonald's on New Year's Day after a visit to urgent care, but since I don't count McDonald's in these recaps (or it would be the answer to many of these and therefore not a very interesting recap other than trying to figure out just how much we spent at McDonald's over the past year), the first would be a delivery order from local Palestinian restaurant, Ayat. We love their babaghanoush, kibbeh, and other appetizers, but are sad they no longer offer the oven pies (the pizza slice in the photo) for delivery from this location. Our first meal dining out as a family didn't come until halfway through the month at one of our South Indian favorites, Saravanaa Bhavan (delicious).

The first home-cooked meal we ate in 2023: Grilled Oaxaca cheese sandwiches for lunch on the second day of the year (mostly because we wanted to use up our leftover Oaxaca cheese from the tlayudas). Dinner that day was cotechino con lenticchie, the traditional Italian New Year's dish, but unfortunately thinking about that just reminds me of how we rushed through dinner and then took B to the hospital for his illness.

The last restaurant meal we ate in 2023: Excluding the donuts we brought home for snack on New Year's Eve, it would be a belated birthday dinner for my mom at Lobo Loco, where we enjoyed some fajitas, quesadillas, tacos, and fries. We were thankful to find another safe restaurant for B's allergies.

The last home-cooked meal we ate in 2023: A random assortment of pre-made appetizers along with air-fried potato pancakes from a mix and some Chinese vegetables for New Year's Eve dinner, but fully from scratch would be risotto with peas, pancetta, and mushrooms that started from the risi e bisi recipe I used for a challenge this year.

# of different restaurants we tried in 2023 (together and separate): 123 in person and 49 for takeout/delivery. These numbers seem back near 2019 levels, which is probably a good reflection of where we are as a society right now as well.

Places explored (outside the NYC metro area): Washington, DC; Arlington, VA (and a few other spots in Northern Virginia); Goshen, NY (and nearby towns); Beacon, NY; Chicago, IL.

Most frequented restaurant of 2023 (together, in person): If you exclude McDonald's (visit number in the double digits), it would be the Wendy's that we would go to on our Target and BJ's trips, which came in with 7 visits. If you exclude fast food, it would be Bricks Restaurant in Goshen, NY, the hotel restaurant at the Legoland Resort, because they had daily breakfast included, plus we had a couple dinners there during torrential downpours. If you want someplace local that is not fast food, it would be Ayat (mentioned above) with 3.

The massive family-style breakfasts at Bricks

Most frequented restaurant of 2023 (takeout or delivery): We ordered far less delivery this year, so if you exclude all our McDonald's orders to go (not even going to count how many those were), it would be a tie between the same Wendy's (we had a lot of breakfasts in the car on the way to BJ's) and Cloudy Donuts, the vegan donut spot in Brooklyn Heights that we love. Their donuts, cinnamon rolls, cookies, everything are amazing.

Cloudy Donuts!

Progress on Around the World Cooking Challenge: Starting with Angola (unit 8) in the new year, which means we've gone through Afghanistan, Alabama, Alaska, Albania, Algeria (although I still have a couple desserts I didn't make yet and keep forgetting about), American Samoa/Samoa, and Andorra. We've definitely made some progress this year, which means there's a lot of posts that still have to be written/finished.

Pani popo (Samoan coconut rolls)

(We didn't post about any new or past WorldEats restaurants this year, so last year's numbers are still valid.)

Favorite overall meal of 2023: Dinner at Tupelo Honey in Arlington, Virginia on our spring break trip to DC. The service was fantastic, both while there and in advance when we were inquiring about allergens, and the food was delicious. We got the honey-dusted fried chicken, blackened mahi-mahi, sides of grits with goat cheese, braised green beans, and crispy brussels sprouts, and everything was fantastic. B loved his massive grilled cheese sandwich, and we started with their signature cathead buttermilk biscuits with whipped butter and blueberry jam, which were also special for another reason. I had done a Zoom session through Yelp learning about how to make those during the height of the pandemic, and it was so nice to finally try them in person (obviously better than mine). There was so much on the menu that we could order without any modifications that would be safe for B, and it felt so good to have a nice dinner out that was also safe. Truly wonderful dinner and our favorite meal for this year.

Wishing you a wonderful 2024!

40s (2023)

Time for some challenges from the weeks in the 40s!

Week 44 - Halloween

I'm not big into "decorative" food (kind of lacking in artistic ability), so I wasn't sure what to make for this challenge. A lot of internet searching led me to a Food Network recipe for white ghost pizzas, and that seemed doable so I went with that. Of course, Trader Joe's didn't have any plain pizza dough that week, so we ended up with garlic and herb pizza dough (which we normally like, but this was for ghosts). I consider this a semi-fail not because of that, but because of my inability to truly shape them as ghosts. The pizzas were topped with an olive oil and garlic base, ricotta and mozzarella cheeses, and some black olives for eyes. They tasted good, but I don't need to make these misshapen ghosts again.

Week 45 - drying

Another theme I wasn't especially excited about, because I had no intention of dehydrating food, and most of the already-dried food I could think of was fruit, meaning I had to mix fruit with savory, not my favorite flavor profile. I eventually settled on a caramelized onion and fig pizza from Taste of Home, which sounded like a good combination using dried fruit. The pizza had a cream cheese-olive oil-thyme base (which was useful, because I had a block of cream cheese in the fridge that I needed to use), and it was topped with caramelized onions (one giant onion I got from TJ's), chopped sun-dried figs, prosciutto, pine nuts, and cheese (quattro formaggi from TJ's). The combination was good, but other than pineapples (and I guess banana curry pizza), I still prefer my pizza without fruit.

Week 46 - gourds

I chose a bit of an easier route for the gourds challenge, opting to use canned pumpkin, and make a pumpkin pasta bake from Skinnytaste. It was a recipe we had tried before, mixing in some greens and canned pumpkin, and topped with breadcrumbs and cheese. I don't know where my head was at that night, because for some reason I threw on the breadcrumbs before the cheese instead of the other way around, which just wasn't as good. Lesson learned for next time.

Week 48 - grains

The grains challenge came up right around the time we needed to use up some just-expired wild rice in our pantry, so this wild rice stuffing from Iowa Girl Eats was perfect. I had tried using some of the wild rice blend previously on its own, following the package directions, and it was too crunchy and seemed undercooked despite doing everything we were supposed to do. I was kind of dreading making more of it in case the same thing happened, but this recipe was just right. The rice texture was great, chewy but cooked enough, and with lots of flavor thanks to everything added in (bacon, shallots, mushrooms, celery, cranberries, walnuts, and cheese). I would absolutely make this again.

Week 49 - clear

When I think clear, I think soup (also jello and broth, it hasn't been that long since my colonoscopy diet), and one of my favorite soups of all time is Italian wedding soup. I thought trying a new recipe for that would be perfect here, especially with the colder weather setting in. There was a wedding soup recipe on Once Upon a Chef, a site I have found good luck with before, that sounded a little different since it combined ground beef (used Impossible) and sweet Italian sausage (we had one in the freezer already) with garlic, herbs, cheese, and breadcrumbs for the meatballs. It really did make for some flavorful meatballs that were excellent both on their own and in the soup. Looking forward to making this again soon.

Week 50 - root vegetables

Back in 2015, I made a loaded baked potato salad based on a FoodieCrush recipe for the picnic food challenge, but since I wasn't officially participating back then, this root vegetables challenge seemed like a great time for the recipe to make a return. It has been years now since I made it, but it was just as good as I remembered. It could have used a little bit more bacon (some of ours was too overdone) and maybe some more cheese too (I don't think I used the full amount), but it was excellent and made enough leftovers for multiple lunches. I could have used multiple recipes that week for the root vegetables challenge since we left BJ's with a 5-lb bag of Idaho potatoes and a 3-lb bag of sweet potatoes, but it was nice to make this again.

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!

20s (2023)

Another group post! Some with great results, some stuff that we probably won't make again, but always good to try new things.

Week 21: hot sauce

Hot sauce was a tough challenge, trying to make something that would be palatable to a 4-year-old who doesn't really like spice yet. I didn't want to make my own hot sauce, didn't want to buy a new hot sauce that we weren't going to use much of, and didn't want to really make hot sauce the focus. After a lot of searching, I found a recipe for yuzu hot sauce pound cake on Ciao Bella Kitchen, and decided that would work. It used the yuzu hot sauce from Trader Joe's, which we already had and enjoy adding to various dishes, so at least it wouldn't be a purchase gone to waste. The cake was fine, but I learned I don't really prefer my cake with a little zing.

Week 23: boards

I'm not a huge fan of the "arranging" or "plating" type challenges, so A helped me choose what type of board to make that B might actually eat. We went with a chopped salad with red onions, tomatoes, olives, mozzarella cheese, pepperoni, cucumbers, and artichokes with a homemade vinaigrette consisting of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, maple syrup, and dijon mustard. Really good salad!

Week 24: most requested

This challenge choice was a little tough because what did it really mean? Who was doing the requesting? In the end, I consulted Food & Wine's list of the most popular recipes of 2022 and chose the first on the list, an Italian wedding risotto. I love risotto and have been making it more and more (got to use up all the rest of the arborio rice!). This turned out well, and we could see why it was so popular last year.

Week 27: alliteration

I was really ambitious for the alliteration challenge, at least with the name. I had started out with chicken corn chowder and carrot cake cookies, but then just kept adding to it until I ended up with cheesy chicken, carrot, celery, and corn chowder with crushed cheez-its covering + carrot cake cookies with cream cheese and confetti coating. The soup was based on a recipe from Lil Luna, and we really liked it. I would definitely make that again, although the cheez-its weren't really necessary. I just wanted more letter Cs.

The cookies came from Love and Lemons, and while tasty, I only have a mild like for carrot cake, so that one might not be repeated. We do still have some in our freezer though since it made a bigger batch than we could eat at one time, so we can still have more!

Week 29: candying

My original plan for this challenge was to make tanghulu, but I never got around to it and then made some candied lemons. I don't remember what recipe I followed, but I think most candied lemons are made the same way, so anything on Google would probably work. I think my expectations were completely off though, because I was expecting something like those sugary lemon slices that you could just eat as candy, and these were... not. The rind was a little too hard, and they were extremely sour, even with all the sugar that was added to them. I think maybe my brain and taste buds were expecting actual candy versus candied lemons, but once I realized how sour these were, I had no idea what to do with them. We tried eating some plain, but never figured it out before they were out too long and ended up tossing a bunch. I don't think I would do this again without a specific plan for them.

Week 43 (2023) - American Southwest

The dish for the Week 43 theme, American Southwest, was surprisingly hard to choose. You would think that, with all the research I've been doing over the years for the AtWCC, I could easily pick something from Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, or other areas considered to be part of the American Southwest, but there were all sorts of reasons why one dish or another didn't work for us right now (mostly having to do with spice level, since B doesn't like spicy at the moment). After some searching, I found a recipe for baked Santa Fe chicken on Kevin Is Cooking, a blog I've had success with following in the past, and figured that since Santa Fe was in the name, it should count.

I didn't really know what Santa Fe chicken was, and the only thing the name reminded me of was the Lean Cuisine Santa Fe-style rice and beans that I had eaten a lot of growing up, because I really liked the cheesy, creamy dish. Santa Fe chicken seemed to be similar - chicken with beans and melted cheese, but also assorted vegetables from the region (like corn, squash, peppers) and in this case, enchilada sauce for the salsa.

This recipe was super easy to make - a layer of black beans and seasoning, a layer of chicken pieces with seasoning, a layer of onions, bell peppers, green chiles, corn, and some enchilada sauce all baked, and then topped with pepper jack cheese and the rest of the enchilada sauce for a final bake once the chicken was fully cooked. It came together beautifully, and it was really tasty. B liked the chicken and some of the plain/raw vegetables, but was not much of a fan of the finished dish, probably because of the chiles, sauce, and mild spice. Maybe we'll try it again whenever his spice tolerance goes up!

30s (2023)

I really, really, really need to get better about posting and documenting things here before I am two years behind on cooking challenge memories. We're in Week 40 now, so this is probably as on-time as I've been in a while. This set is from the "30s" weeks and anything not covered separately/by the AtWCC.

Week 31: mint

I wasn't feeling very creative when the mint challenge came up, and even after doing some internet research, my best options seemed to be either a sauce with mint (similar to the yogurt sauces we were doing during the Afghanistan AtWCC) or a salad. Since it was the middle of July and I always want salads when it's hot, that was an easy choice. I decided on a summer salad with mint that I saw on The Clever Meal, with chickpeas, roasted red peppers, cucumber, feta, and of course, the starring ingredient for this challenge, mint (both chopped and whole leaves used as a garnish).

I don't often buy mint for salads, even though I know it's great in them, because it just goes bad so quickly, so this was a nice change. The dressing consisted of olive oil, fresh lemon juice, garlic, agave (swapped for honey), dijon mustard, salt, and pepper, and it went really well with the salad. Very nice, refreshing salad side dish. The only negative here was that the salad ended up costing around $12, with the cost of feta (since we ran out of our Costco-sized box and I had to get it from the local store) and mint being about 54% of that total. I haven't been doing the cost breakdowns as much as I used to (just not as much time with a little one running around and playing, which also shows in how rarely I get a post up timely), and it was a bit of sticker shock when I finished doing the math. Not the fault of the recipe, but the cost of groceries is just so high right now!

Week 33: Cutthroat Kitchen

I used to watch Cutthroat Kitchen back when we had cable, so when this theme came up, I had no idea how that would get implemented as a cooking challenge. Apparently, a lot of people wondered the same thing, so it was suggested that you basically sabotage yourself in some way. Considering I really hate food waste, and the chances of making something inedible were high if I were to use some of the actual Cutthroat Kitchen sabotages and be surprised by them, I decided to just use two "sabotages" from the start: using the microwave as the only cooking appliance and giving up my usual knives in favor of B's child-safe knives. This did mean I could plan in advance, but neither would have been my go-tos for the meal I chose.

I decided to microwave fish, since I remembered my mom used to do that when I was younger, and adapted a fish recipe from Chew Out Loud. Along with that, I made some microwaved green beans (recipe from Baking Mischief) and brown rice (instructions from Hungry Huy). I was most worried about the rice, because when I used to microwave rice, I had a specialized container that was used for microwaving rice. I wasn't sure how it would do with just a dish towel, but it turned out to be fine. Not as good as the stove or the rice cooker, but fine. I thought the green beans might be a little soft and overdone, but they were actually perfect. Greener than when I cook them on the stove, not overcooked mush, not too crunchy. I think I might do this more. I was pretty confident in the fish, since we'd done that before with other recipes, but I liked this so much that it might become a recurring recipe in our meal plan. I would use my own knives on the onions and scallions though, because these were a bit of a mess with kid knives. Pretty successful partially "sabotaged" meal!

Week 34: chips/crisps

This one was a tough one for me to choose, because I've been trying to choose some healthier meals to make (although the recent week that included both Swedish meatballs and shrimp and grits on the meal plan was a bit heavy...), and chips/crisps don't necessarily lend themselves to that. In the end, I decided to make Frito pie based on a Spend With Pennies recipe. 

A layer of Fritos, a layer of cheese, a layer of meat (used Impossible) mixed with onions, Rotel, tomato sauce. beans, corn, and taco seasonings, another layer of cheese all baked in the oven and then topped with Fritos. I debated counting Frito pie for Texas or New Mexico, but as of the time of the challenge, hadn't found a clear answer on where it originated and whether it started as a walking taco or not, so for now, not part of the AtWCC because I need to do more research (and maybe make it again).

Week 35: Afghan

Usually this type of challenge would lead to its own AtWCC post, but this time, I remade the kebabeh degee morgh that I made from Parwana and already posted about. It was just as good making it from my cookbook notes as it was from the original cookbook page, which felt like a success. Highly recommend this one if you're looking for an Afghan curry.

Week 36: reduction

I was really not inspired when I saw the reduction challenge, as my mind immediately went to sauces, something I don't tend to make much of when cooking dinner. After mulling it over with A, he mentioned making tiny sized versions of foods, and that sparked some ideas. Tiny was probably a bit more work than I had time to do (and no food tweezers), but a reduced size version of chicken pot pie made in a muffin tin? That would work. I used a recipe from AllRecipes and made one with condensed chicken soup, canned chicken, mixed vegetables, cheese, and seasonings stuffed into biscuits. They were delicious, no (reduced) sauce needed.

Week 38: wartime

I first learned of Depression cake (aka war cake) from B's preschool when discussing egg-free cake alternatives. I knew about rationing during the war and shortages during the Great Depression, but not specifically this type of cake which didn't include any eggs, milk, or butter. I wasn't sure what to make for the wartime challenge, but A suggested this immediately, and it seemed like the perfect idea. I followed a recipe from Budget Bytes, and overall it turned out good, except it completely stuck to the pan on the bottom and came out a bit messy. Not sure what I did wrong. Maybe slightly too much oil? The cake parts itself were fine, and the frosting wasn't bad, but it wasn't as "presentable" a cake as I was hoping it would be. At least taste and texture were good!

Another set of successful challenges!