Archive for the ‘Daring Cooks’ Category

Daring Cooks September Challenge

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010

Apple Butter

The September 2010 Daring Cooks’ challenge was hosted by John of Eat4Fun. John chose to challenge The Daring Cooks to learn about food preservation, mainly in the form of canning and freezing. He challenged everyone to make a recipe and preserve it. John’s source for food preservation information was from The National Center for Home Food Preservation.

I come from a family of canners, but I have never actually canned anything.  My mom and sisters have all made jams and fruits and I never seem to be around when they are doing it.  I had thought this year would be the year that I finally made some jam, but it just didn’t happen, so I was really quite happy to hear about this months challenge.

Unfortunately for me I don’t really have the cupboard space in my little kitchen to store anything that is canned so I decided to go the route of making the apple butter and freezing it in some ziplock containers.  I also made a half recipe because I figured there was no way my husband and I could eat an entire recipe of apple butter.

When cutting the recipe in half I wasn’t paying attention when it came to the sugar and put the full amount of sugar in.  I was worried that it would be way too sweet, but surprisingly it was not sweet at all.  The process was really quite easy and after only a few hours I already had warm apple butter to put onto some toast.

All in all it was a successful challenge for me this month and it makes me want to try my hand at actually canning next summer.

Apple Butter

6 apples, cored peeled and cut into eights

1/2 cup apple cider or water

1/4 cup sugar or honey

1/2 tablespoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon all spice

1/8 teaspoon cloves

Wash apples well and remove stems. Cut apples into quarters or eighths and remove cores.   Note: I ended up peeling the apple at this step.  Combine unpeeled apples and cider in 8-quart (about 7 ½ litre) saucepan. Cook slowly and stir occasionally to prevent sticking. Cook until apples are very soft (falling apart). 

Mash apples in the pan and add sugar.  Simmer over low heat, stirring frequently.  Leave the lid ajar during this step to allow for evaporation.

To test for doneness, spoon a small quantity onto a clean plate; when the butter mounds on the plate without liquid separating around the edge of the butter, it is ready for processing. Another way to test for doneness is to remove a spoonful of the cooked butter on a spoon and hold it away from steam for 2 minutes. It is done if the butter remains mounded on the spoon.

Pour contents into desired storage container or multiple containers. I stored my apple butter in 1-cup (250ml) plastic containers with screw on tops. Refrigerate up to 2 weeks, freeze up to a year, and home canning is good for a year.

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Posted in Breakfast, Daring Cooks |

Daring Cooks August Challenge

Saturday, August 14th, 2010

Indian Inspired Pierogi

The August 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by LizG of Bits n’ Bites and Anula of Anula’s Kitchen. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make pierogi from scratch and an optional challenge to provide one filling that best represents their locale.

Who ever know that making pierogie by hand could be so easy.  It is yet another food that sounds too difficult to tackle and turns out to be a relatively quick and easy meal to make.  Especially if you make lots and then you can freeze them and heat at a later time.

When first looking at this challenge I knew that I wanted to do something interesting, what that was I still hadn’t decided.  So for the next two weeks I thought about it and decided that an indian inspired pierogi would be delicious, especially if you dipped it in a cucumber raita.

The dough was very easy to work with and surprisingly easy to roll out.  My experience with rolling out dough has been with pastries and let me just say that I have had very little luck rolling out pastry dough.  My husband can attest to my difficulty with this task as he is usually the one dealing with me frustrated in the kitchen.  So needless to say I was very happy when it rolled out nice and easy.

Since I didn’t really have a recipe to work from I decided to look for a indian potato dish and take the spices from that to come up with an adapted potato pierogi.  Now these spices were great in theory but when added to the mashed potatoes I didn’t quite end up with what I had been envisioning.  Now a bit part of that is my fault because I added WAY too much chili powder to the spice mix making it so spicy it burned your mouth.

Thankfully I had also made some more filling which was just mashed potatoes and cheddar cheese which ended up being best of the two, partly because of the melty cheddar cheese.

I don’t have a pierogi press so I opted to use cup to cut the circles out and then a fork to seal them and it worked great.  After a quick egg wash they were ready for the oven, which I figured was a little healthier than deep frying and more texture than boiling them.

Although the flavours weren’t quite what I had wanted the pierogis were still quite delicious.

Dough

2 to 2 1/2 cups flour

1 large egg

1 teaspoon salt

about 1 cup lukewarm water

Place 2 cups flour in a large bowl or on a work surface and make a well in the center. Break the egg into it, add the salt and a little lukewarm at a time (in my situation 1/2 cup was enough). Bring the dough together, kneading well and adding more flour or water as necessary. Cover the dough with a bowl or towel. You’re aiming for soft dough. Let it rest 20 minutes.

On a floured work surface, roll the dough out thinly (1/8” or about 3 millimeters) cut with a 2-inch (5 cm) round or glass. Spoon a portion (teaspoon will be the best) of the filling into the middle of each circle. Fold dough in half and pinch edges together with a fork. Gather scraps, re-roll and fill. Repeat with remaining dough.

Place pierogis on baking sheet and bake until golden brown in 350 degree oven.

Filling

3 large potatoes cooked and mashed

2 tablespoons butter

1/4 cup milk

1/2 teaspoon coriander, tumeric and chili powder

2 cardamom pods ground

1/4 teaspoon cloves and garam masala

Combine all ingredients for the filling and set aside until ready.

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Posted in Baking, Daring Cooks |

Daring Cooks July Challenge

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

Nut Butter

The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe.

Who ever realized that making your own nut butter could be so easy.  For my first challenge in quite a few months I was happy to see that it was for something that I could see myself making on a normal day.  Although I do like the challenge of trying things that are completely new and foreign to me for these challenges, sometimes it is nice to make something that is similar to my non-Daring Cooks meals.

The dish I chose to make with my almond butter instantly sounded to me like the butter chicken recipe that continues to elude me.  You see, for close to a year I have been making butter chicken whenever I come across a new recipe and it always lacks something.  As the ingredients were simmering away I could tell this was going to definitely be a repeat recipe.

I never would have thought to use a nut butter to give the sauce that thick consistence the many other recipes had been lacking.  But once the almond butter went into the sauce I was delighted to see that the sauce was nice and thick.  So thick in fact that the recipe calls for the use of water or chicken broth to thin it out.  I was scared to thin it out too much for fear it would resemble my runny butter chickens of the past so I used the liquid sparingly.

When making this dish again I would change a few things like thinning out the sauce a bit more and add some spice with either some green chillies or chili powder.  This recipe was beyond yummy and with those few tweaks next time I am sure to have the perfect chicken dish.

Chicken with Curried Tomato Almond Sauce

2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts

1.5 tablespoons garam masala

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon black pepper

4 tablespoons butter

1 large onion, diced

2 cloves garlic

1 15 ounce can tomato sauce

1/3 cup almond butter

1/3 cup milk

1/2 to 3/4 cup chicken broth or water

Stir garam masala, ginger, cinnamon, and pepper together in a small bowl. Set aside.

Melt the butter in large nonstick skillet over medium-low heat. Add the onion and cook gently for several minutes to infuse the butter with onion flavor. Keep the heat low to avoid burning the butter; a little color is fine. Add the spice blend and garlic and cook for 1 minute or till fragrant, stirring constantly. Add the tomato sauce, stir well, and bring to boil. Reduce heat to simmer. Whisk in almond butter and milk until thoroughly combined with tomato sauce. The almond butter is thick so it takes a while to make a smooth sauce.  Add chicken breast to sauce and return to simmer. Add broth (or water) to sauce to reach desired consistency; return to simmer.

Serve over rice.

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Posted in Chicken, Daring Cooks |

Back to the World of Blogging

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

This blog has been badly neglected over the last 6 months.  I went from posting multiple times a week to once every few months.  I found that I was just not inspired by the things I was cooking and that I was becoming lazy with taking pictures.  Also since starting a blog to chronical my pregnancy I have been so focused on that I just didn’t have the energy to update here.  But that is changing, I am going to jump back in the saddle and start this blog back up. 

The funny thing is that I am still trying new and different recipes almost every night for dinner, so it isn’t like I don’t have an abundance of opportunites to get some pictures taken.  So I am going to go through the archive of pictures that have been taken off and on since starting this blog and write up the ones that were forgotten.  So be prepared for some long overdue posts that so deserved to be mentioned here, which includes a food blog photography class I got for Christmas but never wrote up.

So without further adieu there is a new post going up later for the Daring Cooks July challenge, which I will be cooking tonight.  Just a little sneak peak…it involves homemade almond butter and a yummy indian inspired dish.

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Posted in Daring Cooks |

Daring Cooks May Challenge

Friday, May 14th, 2010

Stacked Green Chili and Chicken Enchiladas

The May Daring Baker’s Challenge was hosted by Barbara of Barbara Bakes and Bunnee of Anna+Food have chosen a delicious Stacked Green Chile & Grilled Chicken Enchilada recipe in celebration of Cinco de Mayo! The recipe, featuring a homemade enchilada sauce was found onwww.finecooking.com and written by Robb Walsh.

I was so excited to make this recipe.  For those of you who know me in the real world you know that I could eat mexican food pretty much every day and not get sick of it.  Since moving to Canada my choices of mexican food have been severely limited.  Basically there is one restaurant that I know of that is about 20 minutes from our house, and we don’t live in the middle of nowhere, so you can imagine my dilemma.  I have resorted to making mexican food as often as possible, usually enchiladas.

What I like about this month challenge was not just that we were making mexican but that we had to make our own green chili sauce.  I have made red enchilada sauce quite a few times but since it doesn’t call for fresh chilies it was never much of a challenge.  The challenge sauce wasn’t difficult by any means but it was fun to start from scratch and use ingredients that I don’t always use, tomatillos.

So after charring them both black, which I unfortunately didn’t get a picture of, I combined them with the other sauce ingredients and let it simmer while making the rest of the dish.

As I mentioned before mexican food is hard to come by here thankfully the grocery store has a decent mexican section to find the staples.  Unfortunately my store doesn’t seem to carry corn tortillas, oh don’t worry there are about 10 varieties and sizes of flour tortillas but for some reason I have never been able to find corn.  If I hadn’t been in a rush to get this recipe done last night I would have gone to the local mexican grocery store which has everything a person could need.  So I settled for flour tortillas.

There are a few things that I changed about this challenge in the spirit of being a little bit healthier.  Although I am normally all about cheese and fried things, especially french fries, I am trying to each healthy during my pregnancy and there fore I used about half the amount of cheese and did not fry the tortillas.

Once the chicken was cooked I set out to stack everything up and bake it in the oven until the cheese was melted.  From start to finish it really didn’t take that long especially considering making your own sauce.  In the end this recipe was great.  I was a little worried when I tasted the chili sauce because it was really spicy but once it was added to the whole dish it was toned down a bit.  I look forward to trying this again and added a bit more personalization to it.

Here’s to a successful challenge which for some reason has eluded me the last few challenges with both Daring Cooks and Daring Bakers.  I am happy to be back into the groove of cooking and look forward to blogging more.

Green Chili Sauce

4 fresh anaheim chilies

4 tomatillos

2 cups chicken broth

1 clove garlic

1 teaspoon yellow onion

1/2 teaspoon oregano

salt and pepper

1 tablespoon cornstarch dissolved in 1 tablespoon water

Coat each chile with a little vegetable oil. If you are doing only a couple chiles, using the gas stove works. For larger batches (as in this recipe), grilling or broiling is faster.

Lay the oiled chiles on the grill or baking sheet (line pan with foil for simpler clean-up). Place the grill or broil close to the element, turning the chiles so they char evenly. They should be black and blistered.  As they are completely charred (they will probably not all be done at once), remove them to a bowl and cover with plastic, or close up in a paper bag. Let them rest until they are cool.

Pull on the stem and the seed core MAY pop out (it rarely does for me). Open the chile and remove the seeds. Turn the chile skin side up and with a paring knife, scrape away the skin. Sometimes it just pulls right off, sometimes you really have to scrape it.  DO NOT RINSE!

Put a medium saucepan of water on to boil and remove the papery outer skin from the tomatillos. Boil the tomatillos until soft, 5 to 10 minutes. You can also grill the tomatillos until soft. Drain and puree in a blender or food processor.

Return the tomatillos to the saucepan along with the chicken broth, chopped green chiles, minced onion, oregano, garlic, salt and pepper.  Bring to a boil over medium-high heat and then reduce the heat and simmer for 10 minutes.

Add the cornstarch/water mixture and stir well. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the sauce is thickened and reduced to 4-5 cups, another 10-15 minutes.  Adjust seasonings and add hot sauce if you want a little more heat.

Stacks

2 chicken breasts, grilled or baked

6 corn tortillas

cheese

In a baking dish large enough to hold two separate stacks of tortillas, ladle a thin layer of sauce.  Lay two tortillas in the dish and ladle sauce over the tortillas.  Add chicken, cheese and then more sauce.  Continue stacking until you have used all ingredients.

Bake until the sauce has thickened and the cheese melted, about 20 minutes. Let rest for 5-10 minutes.  To serve, transfer each stack to a plate. Spoon any leftover sauce over the stacks and sprinkle with cilantro, if you wish. The stacks may also be cooked in individual gratin dishes.

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Posted in Chicken, Daring Cooks |

Daring Cooks April Challenge

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

Brunswick Stew

The 2010 April Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Wolf of Wolf’s Den. She chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make Brunswick Stew. Wolf chose recipes for her challenge from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook by Matt Lee and Ted Lee, and from the Callaway, Virginia Ruritan Club.

I have always been a bit fan of any sort of thick and chunky soup or stew so when I saw this was our challenge I was very excited to make a version I had never tried.

There were two recipes that we could choose from but I liked things about both of them so I decided to do a bit of a combination.    The recipes called for rabbit and since I have no idea where I would even get rabbit I decided to substitute with something I knew I could get my hands on, beef.  One of the recipes called for making your own stock and since I made stock for a previous challenge I didn’t really want to try and make stock again so I went with store bought stock.

Speaking of the stock, I have a bit of a problem when it comes to changing the protein in a dish but forgetting to change the stock to go along with it.  So since the recipe called for chicken stock it wasn’t until I put it in that I realized I was cooking with beef and therefore I should have used beef stock.  Thankfully all of the spices masked the chicken taste and it turned out pretty good.

Overall I can’t say it was one of my favourite stews and that could be in part to the whole stock issue, but it was still good.  I think if I was to do it again I would try adding some new and exciting vegetables instead of the traditional ones found in a stew such as carrots, potatoes, onions, celery.

Brunswick Stew

1/4 lb bacon, rough diced
2 Serrano stems trimmed, sliced, seeded, flattened
1 lb stew meat
1 Tablespoon sea salt for seasoning, plus extra to taste
4 cups Beef Broth
2 Bay leaves
2 large celery stalks
1 lb Yukon Gold potatoes peeled, rough diced
3/4 cups carrots chopped
1 1/2 cups onion chopped
1 cup frozen corn
1 14 ounce can mixed beans
1 14 ounce can diced tomatoes
1/8 cup red wine vinegar
Juice of 1 lemons
Tabasco sauce to taste

Fry bacon until crispy.  Add all other ingredients and  cook until vegetables are tender.

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Posted in Beef, Daring Cooks |

Daring Cooks March Challenge

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

Caramelized Onion and Lemon Risotto

The 2010 March Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Eleanor of MelbournefoodGeek and Jess of Jessthebaker. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make risotto. The various components of their challenge recipe are based on input from the Australian Masterchef cookbook and the cookbook Moorish by Greg Malouf.

For my first Daring Cook’s challenge I was pleasantly surprised to see risotto.  Risotto is something that I have tried on a few occasions in the past and found it to be quite easy.  I had resisted making it for a long time because of the countless cooking shows where they talked about risotto in a way that it took a world class chef to be able to prepare.

The best thing I find about risotto is that you can use a basic risotto and spice it up with any ingredients you want.  I have a recipe that I have made on many occasions that is seriously one of the best dishes I have ever made, Italian Sausage and Kale Risotto.  Since I know the flavours are amazing in this dish I decided to use that as the inspiration, secret is that the lemon zest is my favourite part.

So for this months challenge I decided on Caramelized Onion and Lemon Risotto, and boy was I excited for this dish.  You may be thinking right now that none of this sounds like much of a challenge so I guess I will take this opportunity to mention the part of the challenge that was just that a challenge for me.

Homemade stock

Reading the instructions it doesn’t seem like a particularly difficult task except for the fact that I do not like meat off a bone.  I can admit that I was a bit spoiled when I was little and I really only remember eating boneless skinless chicken breasts.  Until this challenge I had never purchased a whole chicken and just the thought of working with it didn’t make me very excited.

Okay enough complaining, it was time to get going on my first ever experience making homemade stock.  After rinsing the chicken and placing it in the pan I realized that I definitely didn’t have a pot large enough for the instructions that said both a chicken and chicken bones, so I improvised with just the chicken.  After adding all the vegetables and spices I turned it on and let it cook for the next few hours.

As the chicken was cooking the apartment started smelling so good with the cinnamon, bay leaf and all spice; maybe this whole homemade stock wasn’t going to be so bad after all.  When the chicken was all cooked I pulled it out and took the chicken off of the bone and set aside for other recipes this week.  Then I put the bones back in the stock to keep cooking for another hour.

When it had cooked for what seemed like an entire day I turn it off and strained the broth to later be used in my risotto.  All in all it was a very successful first attempt at homemade chicken stock.  Something that I might just try again in the future, although I have to say that the stuff I buy at costco is much easier.  None the less it was a great first challenge for Daring Cooks.

Chicken Stock

1 large chicken

2 onions, roughly diced

1 medium leek – white part only

2 stalks celery

2 cloves garlic, halved

1 cinnamon stick

1 teaspoon whole peppercorn

2 bay leaves

peel of half a lemon

1/4 teaspoon allspice

Wash the chicken and place in a pot, cover completely with water and bring to a boil.  Skim away any scum that comes to the top.

Add the vegetables and bring back to a boil.  Add the remaining ingredients and simmer very gently uncovered for an hour and a half.

Carefully lift out the chicken, set aside (or in my case take the chicken off the bones and add the bones back to the stock).  Simmer the stock for another hour.  Ladle the liquid into a fine sieve, the less it is disturbed the clearer it will be.  Freeze what you don’t need for future use.

Caramelized Onion and Lemon Risotto

4 cups homemade chicken stock

2 teaspoons olive oil

2 cups chopped onion (about 1 large)

2 teaspoons sugar

1 cup Arborio rice

1/3 cup red wine

1 lemon zested

fresh grated Romano cheese

Heat olive oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat.  Add chopped onions and sugar to the pan, saute until onions are golden.  Place onions in a bowl and set aside.

Add Arborio rice to a pan and saute for 30 seconds.  Stir in red wine, allow to cook until the liquid had nearly absorbed, making sure to stir constantly.  Once liquid is almost absorbed stir in 1 cup of broth cooking that until nearly absorbed.  Continue by adding 1/2 a cup of broth at a time allowing it to nearly absorb before adding the next portion of broth.  Making sure through out this process to stir constantly.

Once the rice has absorbed all of the liquid remove from the heat, stir in onions, cheese and lemon zest.

Serve with your favourite protein and vegetables.

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Posted in Chicken, Daring Cooks |