I’m a couple of days late for this, but Rachel Dana was our October 2012 Daring Cooks’ Challenge hostess! Rachel brought Brazil into our lives by challenging us to make Feijoada and Farofa along with some other yummy side dishes traditionally served with Feijoada, which is a delicious black bean and pork stew.
This was a delicious meal, full of all kinds of tasty parts. Yum!
Last week we had the opportunity to have dinner with some good friends. I’m always impressed by how decadent the desserts and the appetizers are when we go to their house, and I wanted to try to create something equally rich and delicious.
Although my trust source of Martha wasn’t quite up to the challenge, Sunset magazine had a delicious pots de crème recipe that looked perfect. And I think it came out pretty well – we described it as crème brûlée, except with chocolate, and slightly creamier.
Don’t throw it in the trash, rename it!
… Instead of a culinary masterpiece, I was left with a soupy pot of pale duck bobbing under a slick of its own liquefied fat. Had the same thing happened to me today, I would have simply changed the name of the dish to “duck confit with potatoes and olives.” If people were expecting that layer of fat, it wouldn’t have bothered them. Or if I wanted to get fancy, I could translate the whole thing into French.
I’ll have to remember this technique. What’s that? Your steak has the consistency of a hockey puck? That’s not steak — it’s charred blackened hunk of cow. You’ll eat it all, and you’ll like it, dagnabit!
K: This post has been sitting in our draft folder for several months now, and I suspect we have no idea what we did any more. Except that it used lamb. And mashed potatoes. And that it was delicious. So drool away, friends. Drool away. =]
Although you may know me best as a baking and cooking fiend through this blog, I’m a chemist in my day job. Which means, I get especially excited when I see the pairing of chemistry and food. I admit that there are aspects of molecular gastronomy that completely freak me out (I have a hard time drinking out of beakers that other people have bought, so the idea of using a rotovap, which in my mind is linked to the synthesis of compounds in lab, to make food is bizarre). However, there’s a lot behind the movement from a chemical standpoint.
So, imagine my surprise when, a few months ago, Chemical and Engineering News published a story on cool blogs and books that focus on the molecular part of molecular gastronomy. The one that really caught my eye was a blog out of Norway that’s written by an organometallic chemist. He started exploring flavor pairings of foods that shared volatile components (these are the parts of the food that you smell and taste), but that you might never think of linking together. Like bananas and cloves. Or white chocolate and caviar.
In late July, a new challenge was posted! Unlike the previous challenges, where the two paired ingredients were listed, this challenge included only one: raisins.
This meant that the first step was to pick a paired element.
Using this handy-dandy chart, I picked mustard as my pairing element. After contemplating my meal for far too long (and for long-past the August 31th deadline!), I finally made this fairly tasty chicken, mustard, and raisin dish.
I don’t think the raisins featured strongly enough, but it was fun to come up with a mixture of (in my mind) disparate elements. And the mustard and raisins did go really well together! You can check out some other interpretations here.
A few weeks ago, we actually pulled out a magazine recipe that was delicious and easy enough to do mid-week. Yum!
(And for the record, that’s a sauce over the pork. It was quite done!)
(Also, the title is a lie. There is no balsamic in this recipe. Martha would be disappointed.)
Saturday morning at the farmers’ market was lovely – great weather, and excellent looking fall produce. We hit a few really cold days at the beginning of the week, but now we’re back to highs in the 70s, and it’s wonderful.
Our haul was pretty small this week, so this is just going to be a list (sorry – maybe I’ll update with a picture if I remember to take one).
Hope you’re all having a delicious, cooking-filled week!
Heyhey, it’s that time again! You know, that time of the month when I haven’t posted anything for freaking forever, I have a backlog of twenty gazillion things I made a long time ago and since forgot the recipes for, and no time to write anything? That’s right, it’s time for another recipe roundup!
This first dish was my attempt at doing stuffed peppers:
Every year, our friend A hosts a soup week on her blog. It’s a lot of fun, and last year featured an awesome mix of original posts and guest posts. (Including one of our favourite soups EVER. Yum.)
Anyways, it’s coming, and we’re guest blogging again, and I’m just generally so pumped about it that I thought I’d share the love. Plus, if you ever need a good place to start looking for soup recipes, this is a good place to go!
It somehow feels wrong to be posting another Daring Cooks challenge so soon after our paella effort went live, but here it goes!
Patri of the blog, Asi Son Los Cosas, was our September 2012 Daring Bakers’ hostess and she decided to tempt us with one of her family’s favorite recipes for Empanadas! We were given two dough recipes to choose from and encouraged to fill our Empanadas as creatively as we wished!
Now, I will say that this was not your typical empanada. That is to say, this is a family-style empanada!
