Bronze Medal in the Two-Man Tiramisu

BLOG-CHECKING LINES: The February 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen and Deeba of Passionate About Baking. They chose Tiramisu as the challenge for the month. Their challenge recipe is based on recipes from The Washington Post, Cordon Bleu at Home and Baking Obsession.

Well I think it’s safe to say this was the most complicated dessert we’ve ever made. Make your own cheese??? Make your own cookies???  What do they call this thing again, that I’m whisking frantically over a double boiler?

Trying to watch the Olympics at the same time didn’t help!  Perhaps moving the spare TV into the kitchen while we were mixing and baking was not the best idea, if the goal was to do well at this Challenge. 

Our end product tasted OK, not fantastic – not enough for us to make this from scratch again. Although I am tempted to order tiramisu in a really good Italian café to remind what it should taste/look like. Ron says we made “tiramisoup”. Not quite that bad, but it was a bit runny.

Making the mascarpone cheese was fun. And relatively easy.  We seriously didn’t expect it to work, but the end product was delicious, and we’re still eating it.

For some reason our whipping cream wouldn’t whip. We froze the beaters and the bowl. We tried to create the 25% in the recipe by evenly combining the closest types we could find: 18% and 35%.  Then I tried whipping it. Ron tried. No luck. And Ron’s had a lot of practice recently, making liqueur-infused whipped cream for our night-time coffee treats.

Making the cookies was the best part, especially the fun of squeezing the dough through a hole in the corner of a Ziploc bag – who needs a pastry bag!  The cookies were good on their own – we tested the odd-shaped one before assembling the tiramisu. But I don’t know that home-made made such a difference in the end product. With all the other flavours I think they got a bit lost.

Mmmmmm Mezze

Blog checking lines: The 2010 February Daring COOKs challenge was hosted by Michele of Veggie Num Nums. Michele chose to challenge everyone to make mezze based on various recipes from Claudia Roden, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Dugid.

 

This month’s cooking challenge was mezze (Middle Eastern small dishes). Along with the pita and hummus, we made labneh (a delicious and very easy to make yogurt cheese),  tabbouleh, and Ron’s favourite, kibbeh (a ground lamb and bulgur (cracked wheat) dish).

It took us pretty much all day to make this meal – but it was worth it. So delicious. Pita, labneh and tabbouleh is my new favourite meal. The first time I had this combo was at my Mediterranean Cooking Class with Nabil. Nabil is the most amazing instructor – so full of life and so enthusiastic. His classes were a definite highlight of my year. (Nabil teaches through the Toronto School Board evening classes.)

To drink, we had a bottle of Mumm’s champagne Ron brought home from the Abu Dhabi airport duty-free. As we do not celebrate Valentine’s Day (For 19 years I’ve heard the same refrain: It’s a commercial holiday . . .  blah blah blah . . . ) we celebrated the Olympics! And Canada’s first gold medal as a host nation! Which is great in so many ways, but my favourite is that now we won’t have to listen to the sportscasters repeating ad nauseam that “Canada has never won a gold medal at a home Olympics.” But anyway, back to the cooking challenge . . .

 

Initially I did think, why make pita? It’s so easily available to buy – and really good, especially the brand at Falafel World on Bloor West in Toronto. But we were up for the challenge – and it was fun. It was a bit tricky to roll out the dough. And we ended up making half the recipe (8 pitas) and freezing the other half of the dough. Hopefully freezing is ok to do. We’ll find out. Watching the pita puff up in the oven was the most fun. And Ron enjoyed using his iPod to precisely time the baking. The pitas were good but not as chewy as what I’m used to. Was it something we did or didn’t do? Too much flour?

The hummus was super easy but I found the finished product a bit bland. Not sure what exactly was missing. Maybe we’ll throw in some roasted red pepper or hot pepper to spice it up.

Tabbouleh was so fresh tasting – and again so easy – just a lot of chopping. I used a recipe from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Anything. We couldn’t find any mint this time of year, after trying at a few different stores (which is half the fun of Daring Kitchen assignments: the shopping and exploring!)   So we omitted mint, and it was still delicious and photogenic.

 

To make the labneh, simply drain plain yogurt and some salt in cheesecloth overnight in the fridge. It transforms into a creamy, delicious cream cheese texture but has some of the yogurty tang.

The kibbeh recipe was from epicurious.com and called for baking rather than frying which I liked, and created essentially a kibbeh pie, rather than the usual football shaped kibbehs, which can range in size from an apricot to a grapefruit. It was surprisingly easy to make, and the aroma was amazing. The thought of allspice and cinnamon in a meat dish sounds odd but the results were very yummy.

We made enough mezze to last a week when it’s only two of us dining on it, but neither of us is complaining!

Found: Nanaimo Bars – Lost: Wedding Ring

The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca.

Finding the non-gluten ingredients for this recipe was the greatest challenge! We went to a number of bulk-food and health food stores (on what was pretty much the coldest day of the year) without much luck. We ended up finding most everything in the local grocery store (I guess we should have started there!)

We’re pretty sure we made one mistake. As we didn’t really know what tapioca starch/flour was, so we used tapioca. Not good. There was definitely a crunchy, pebble-like texture to the bottom layer of the Nanaimo bars. Although, that hasn’t stopped us from eating them, nightly. I probably wouldn’t serve them to anyone else.

We had one minor tragedy while making these. Several hours after making the graham crackers, and kneading the dough by hand, I noticed that the stone in my engagement ring was missing. I know, dumb to leave it on while baking. (In my defense, I’m not a baker and this holiday season was my first shot at baking in many, many years.) Well, we went through the unused dough, the garbage, the green bin, took the trap off the sink . . . No luck. We smashed up all the graham crackers by hand (good thing we needed crumbs) but an hour later and still no stone. I suspect it went down the sink into Lake Ontario or where ever the water ends up. Lesson learned.

I never thought I like Nanaimo bars. I find them too sweet, but I actually like these. Freezing them is a great idea. They’re hard to cut but taste great directly from the freezer.

Good challenge. Definitely challenging but we enjoyed making something we normally wouldn’t. (Although, to be honest, I have to admit that if I do make these again I would most likely buy graham cracker crumbs. Not sure making them from scratch was worth it. Could be our fault using the tapioca though.)

 

Daring Cooks – January 2010 Challenge

The January 2010 DC challenge was hosted by Cuppy of Cuppylicious and she chose a delicious Thai-inspired recipe for Pork Satay from the book 1000 Recipes by Martha Day.

This was our first challenge as new members of the Daring Kitchen (www.thedaringkitchen.com), an online community of cooks and bakers with secret monthly assignments designed to try new things and stretch our culinary skills.

This was delicious, easy and fun to make – a great first challenge for us.

Step one is getting the ingredients.  The recipe called for pork loin or shoulder cuts. Not being very well-versed in meat cuts, we were stumped at the grocery store. We finally asked the butcher who recommended pork tenderloin.

Next, it was time to cook. But first, we needed a cocktail. The season’s specialty was a raspberry vodka, white cranberry juice and crushed fresh raspberries.  It was so good, that we went through an entire bottle of raspberry vodka before the holidays were over.

We went with the more Thai option. We couldn’t find Dragon chilli, but did get some green chilli, 2 of them, which weighed a few grams and only added up to 20 cents on the bill – how does anyone make any money growing, picking and delivery chillies if they only cost 10 cents each?). We also included fish sauce. We love the flavour it adds to foods and have decided that we need to get it out of the fridge more often.

 To save time, and because, like the name of our blog implies, we are lazy, we used the cheater option — the food processor. Once we pureed the marinade, we thought it looked like it needed more liquid, did a review of ingredients, and realized we forgot the oil. Easy fix.  From that point, it was pretty easy to complete: cut the pork, marinade overnight, skewer them (soak the skewers first!), pop them into the oven.

 

The next day we had some friends drop by so that was the perfect opportunity to finish up the recipe.

 We served this to a mix of kids and adults and the unanimous opinion was that they were delicious. The pork was tender and flavourful — not dry at all.  We only wish we had made more — they were snapped up and our godson even ate his dad’s satay.

Comments from the kids:

“I don’t know what satay is, but these are delicious.”  (TL-Z)

“The sauce tastes like candy.” (EL-Z)

One down, countless more challenges to go!  It was a delicious recipe, and we must have done it right, based on the great reviews we got.

Next up, our first baking challenge . . .

Let the Games Begin!

First challenge has been received.  Even with Christmas less than a week away, we can’t wait and we start cooking, picking up the ingredients after picking up the Christmas Tree (from seemingly the only place in the neighbourhood that still has any!).

No entries regarding the Daring Cooks challenge until the appointed day (Jan. 14), but perhaps we’ll do some practice blog entries covering some other holiday cooking and baking.

Til then…

Hello world!

We started a blog so that we can join the Daring Kitchen.

Stay tuned for more!