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It is now located at http://blog.tmrose.com/. – JRR
July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge – Nut Butters
Posted by aaronjen | Filed under Recipes
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. Their sources include Better with Nut Butter by Cooking Light Magazine, Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, and Food Network online.
Initially I wasn’t too ‘wowed’ by this month’s challenge – grind up some nuts to a paste, and then cook a recipe similar to what I’ve already made before. But then Jen came up with a recipe for West African groundnut stew from the vegetarian restaurant, Moosewood (‘ground’ as in nuts that grow in the ground – ironically, we ground the groundnuts). There are several variations to the dish, and I thought it was interesting because I’d never explored the peanut soup/stew route, having not even been aware there was such a thing.
We found unsalted peanuts (without husks) at Coles, and they were quite inexpensive and worked well. After having roasted them for about 10 mins on 180 degrees, I let them cool a little before putting them into a food processor and began the rather long but rewarding process of turning these solid peanuts into peanut butter. For a while there I didn’t believe it was going to work, but after several ‘scrape downs’ to keep the now chopped nuts moving in the processor, suddenly the graininess of the nuts started to turn to paste. Amazingly enough, the peanuts had become peanut butter!! And that was the easy part.
Groundnut stew is a vegan dish, and gets much of it’s liquid from the veggies and tomatoes/tomato juice you put in it. Having my mum as my sous chef, we got the onions, garlic, herbs and spices, and ginger going. Also added during cooking were yellow squash, sweet potatoes (that I pre-boiled), green capsicum, tomatoes, water (instead of vegetable stock), and eggplant. The stew got a bit of a kick from cayenne pepper that I forgot to add until Jen reminded me about 15 minutes out from the dish being ready!
In the mean time I had made a couple loaves of focaccia (I’ve been loving bread making lately) that just needed to be put in the oven for 20 mins, although my timing didn’t quite work and we had the stew before the bread was ready, over some white rice. The groundnut stew was quite hearty and filling, and it was amazing that I’d enjoyed a vegan dish (including the focaccia!) so much.
And now I know (and believe!) I can make peanut butter! – ALR
Tags: Daring Cooks, groundnut stew, peanut butter, vegetarian
June 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge – Pâtés and Bread
Posted by aaronjen | Filed under Recipes
Our hostesses this month, Evelyne of Cheap Ethnic Eatz, and Valerie of a The Chocolate Bunny, chose delicious pate with freshly baked bread as their June Daring Cook’s challenge! They’ve provided us with 4 different pate recipes to choose from and are allowing us to go wild with our homemade bread choice.
What a challenge! I hadn’t realised the detail that goes into making bread. While it doesn’t involve complex skills, it does involve quite a bit of organisation, coordination, and patience!
I used the French baguette recipe provided to make the bread – leaving the starter overnight (and then a bit longer) before adding it to the final mixture. It perhaps had been left a bit too long, but the colder weather here in Sydney probably didn’t harm that too much. Rolling the dough out seemed to work quite well for me for once, and I had nice (mostly) shaped baguettes. I think I was let down a bit by not converting the temperature for a fan forced oven (or for our oven, anyway – I just assumed everyone used fan forced these days so made no adjustments to temperature or timings) because I think my baguettes were a bit on the overdone side (while possibly a little underdone inside). 
The flavour was amazing though, and I’ll definitely try to make them in the future, just with a lower temperature and longer cooking time I think. The tricolour vegetable pâté was quite good, too, although I think the raw garlic was a bit too much. If I was to make it again, I would use less garlic and roast it first. My favourite layer was the roasted red peppers and fetta, which was simply marvellous! (The recipes can be sourced here.)
All in all, it was a great challenge and certainly exposed me to some processes I’d not tried before, and that is always worthwhile gain from these challenges.
Looking forward to next month’s challenge now, and await the next time I try to make my own bread! – ALR
Tags: baguette, bread, Daring Cooks, pate, terrine, vegetarian
May 2010 Daring Bakers’ Challenge – Croquembouche (Piece Montée)
Posted by aaronjen | Filed under Recipes
So given one of my favourite desserts is profiteroles, I decided to take over the DB challenge for Jen this month. The first run through of the recipe was almost a disaster. The creme patisserie was FANTASTICALLY sweet and smooth, but the choux was MILES too runny, so after piping a tray of pancakes, I put the pastry back into the mixing bowl and added more plain flour…which helped with the consistency, but when the choux puffs were pulled from the oven and piped with the AMAZING pastry cream, the result was less than satisfying (although Noah and Caleb were very glad for this!), they WOLFED them down!
So a bit of research showed that we need to not use so many eggs in the choux. So the second time I made the pastry, this time with the help of my very capable sous-chef Noah, we used only 3 eggs instead of the 4 we originally used (Jen suggested that the 4 eggs in the recipe include the egg for the egg wash, which I didn’t use, but the method wasn’t clear on only using 3 of the eggs IN the pastry).
Anyway, second time was the charm…mostly…I think 20 mins at 220 degrees was too long and would try it at 200 degrees next time, as the choux was a bit on the overdone side. Still, the flavour was, for the most part, spot on, and the texture, once again, of the pastry cream was beautiful!
I piped in the pastry cream, and found the choux was too thirsty, so ran out well before filling the 25 choux puffs I had made. A bit of improv meant I constructed a mini-croquembouche in a 5-4-3-1 structure. Which the boys will be happy with, because it means they have more left over for them! I dripped melted 70% Lindt dark chocolate over the ‘tower’, and then lightly dusted it with icing sugar.
Overall it was a fun project, and next time I make choux pastry, I’ll cook it at 200 degrees instead to see how it goes. You can find the recipe here. – ALR
The May 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Cat of Little Miss Cupcake. Cat challenged everyone to make a piece montée, or croquembouche, based on recipes from Peter Kump’s Baking School in Manhattan and Nick Malgieri.
Tags: Crème Patissiere, Croquembouche, Daring Bakers, Pate a Choux, Piece Montée, Profiteroles
March 2010 Daring Bakers’ Challenge – Orange Tian
Posted by aaronjen | Filed under Recipes
The 2010 March Daring Baker’s challenge was hosted by Jennifer of Chocolate Shavings. She chose Orange Tian as the challenge for this month, a dessert based on a recipe from Alain Ducasse’s Cooking School in Paris.
This French dessert may look simple, but there are several components here that make the entire thing quite challenging to make, yet the result is an elegant, restaurant-quality dessert! The dessert is assembled upside down, set in the freezer and then unmolded. The bottom layer is a pate sablee – which is basically a sugar pastry crust, similar to a sugar cookie. Next is a marmalade made from scratch – I chose to do lemon rather than orange (because I’ve never been a fan of orange marmalade and LOVE lemons) and it turned out SO nice!!! Then there’s a whipped cream layer with a tablespoon of the marmalade mixed in, which I was happy wasn’t sugary. Then a layer of segmented oranges that sat overnight in an orange caramel sauce. Drizzled over the top is the orange caramel sauce which has been reduced further to thicken it.
The hardest part of the dish was segmenting the oranges – I simply hate working with knives (I’m too scared I’ll lose a finger) so I’ll have to admit I whimped out and got Aaron to do it instead. And for never having segmented an orange before, I thought he did a great job, and it put his knives to good use! The pate sablee dough was quite thick and difficult to roll out, and the finished biscuit turned out a bit tough. Not sure if I did something wrong there, but it was still nice. My caramel sauce didn’t seem to thicken either, but it darkened a lot, so I probably pushed it too far; that said, it wasn’t bitter.
In spite of those difficulties I mentioned, overall, I was very pleased with the result, and if I were to make it again, I think I’d do it the same way, but pay closer attention to the caramel sauce and possibly try a different pate sablee recipe. It certainly wasn’t as hard as the tiramisu last month, but it wasn’t easy either – a great challenge recipe! – JRR
Tags: Alain Ducasse, Daring Bakers, marmalade, tian
March 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge – Risotto
Posted by aaronjen | Filed under Recipes
While I have made risotto before (only once though!), I was excited by this challenge because I was looking for an excuse to make my own chicken stock for risotto.
This recipe seemed to be a little easier than the previous two I’ve done. I did a variation on the stock theme which involved a chicken carcass (‘chicken frame’ at Woolies), onion, garlic, leek, carrots, celery, peppercorns, thyme, parsley, bay leaves, salt, and water, and simmering there for about 40 minutes. When it was ready, the stock smelled FANTASTIC and I was very much looking forward to using it in the risotto. I strained the liquid into a jug, and came up with just over 2 litres of chicken stock gold!
I decided to go with the pumpkin and feta risotto recipe in the MasterChef Australia cookbook (volume 1) as it sounded nice and we have the book (and the DVD!). I watched through once on the DVD to see the technique used, and then went to work. One small onion and a crushed clove of garlic (or teaspoon of crushed garlic in my case), sauteed with about a tablespoon of margarine until the onion was translucent, and then in with the rice to get it nice and covered in margarine. This didn’t work quite as well as I would have liked (I probably should have had it on a lower temperature – it was probably medium-high where it should have been medium, and could have used a little more margarine), so I used a spatula to mix it around a bit (very gently though). Then in went in the white wine, around the edges as suggested. I agitated the rice to mix in the wine, and then added a ladle of (heated) chicken stock to cover the rice.
Between agitating and adding more stock as the level dropped below that of the rice, I grated 200 gms of pumpkin for the pumpkin component of the dish. Grating the pumpkin means it cooks much quicker, and retains a lot of its flavor. The grated pumpkin with about a tablespoon of margarine took around 7 mins to cook on a medium heat (with the lid on the saucepan to retain the steam/cook faster).
When the last of the stock was added to the risotto, and it was ready, I added a tablespoon of margarine to the rice, 1/2 cup of grated Parmesan cheese, pureed the pumpkin and added it, and folded them all into the risotto.
The last step was to crumble some (low fat) feta over the top, and add some basil. All-in-all, this challenge was quite a bit less stressful than the previous two, but the results were fantastic and I’m a big fan of making my own stock now, and Jen LOVED the results – “best risotto I’ve ever had” I think was her statement! – ALR
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.
Tags: chicken stock, MasterChef risotto, pumpkin risotto, risotto
February 2010 Daring Bakers’ Challenge – Tiramisu (from scratch)
Posted by aaronjen | Filed under Recipes
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.
Tiramisu is one of those desserts that can be made the easy way or the hard way, yet is always a joy to eat. That said, I was unprepared to attempt to make it the hard way myself! I really didn’t think I’d be able to pull this off, as there are six different components to this dish – mascarpone, zabaglione, pastry cream, savoiardi, sweetened espresso, and whipped cream – NONE of which I was familiar with, and so there is little surprise that I had a little bit of trouble, but LOADS of surprise that I ended up with a completed dessert that looks and tastes so good – Aaron’s assessment was that it was the nicest tiramisu he’s ever had!!!
I went with the traditional version (using tia maria for the alcohol components) – can’t imagine tiramisu any other way (and to be honest the fruity variations that have been attempted by others remind me more of a trifle or parfait or fancy sponge cake than a tiramisu). The biggest hiccup I had was with the mascarpone – I don’t know what I was thinking, but I put the lemon juice in with the cream at the very beginning, rather than waiting until it reached the right temperature. It was late at night and I was just off my game I think. However, I am surprised to say that it still turned out fine (probably because it hardly took any time for it to reach the appropriate temperature thanks to pre-boiled water). How I love a forgiving recipe!!!
Mascarpone cheese – ready to be used – and a fraction of the store bought price!
The only other issue I had was working out what creams I was meant to use (Australian cream names are so different to their American counterparts). Anyhow, I can’t believe I attempted to whip double thick cream – I’m such a goose!!! It was fun planning ahead to what I wanted the finished product to look like, and thanks to Aaron and his willingness to attempt those things I cannot fathom, I got my chocolate curls for on top. I was also very surprised that I already had a majority of the components for this dish in my pantry (I only needed to buy the fresh ingredients – ie the creams, milk, and lemon).
These savoiardi were super simple to make, and are so much nicer than store bought!
The complete recipe can be found here, along with a slide show of other Daring Bakers’ finished desserts. While I will certainly make the savoiardi and the mascarpone again next time I make a tiramisu (or other desserts for that matter), I doubt I’ll use the same components for the mascarpone mixture. It just seemed like an awful lot of work to end up combining it all together in the end, and I would have loved the mascarpone to come through to the finished product a bit more. I think I’d probably tweak the espresso mixture too, or rather, revert to my old favourite recipe that I’ve used many times before. Overall, with only a few minor hiccups, I really enjoyed this challenge and look forward to the next one! – JRR
Tags: Daring Bakers, mascarpone, savoiardi, tiramisu
February 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge – Mezze!
Posted by aaronjen | Filed under Recipes
This month’s challenge seemed quite intimidating to begin with – making hummus didn’t seem too overwhelming, but my own pita bread? How on earth was I gonna pull that off?
The recipe actually seemed quite easy – all but a two or three ingredients I’d worked with before, so I thought the technique would be more challenging than I’ve tried before. I decided that since, in the past, I’ve preferred baba ganouj (baba), I’d make that as well as the hummus and pita bread.
In a classic display of multi-tasking, I decided I’d just knock everything outta the park in the one morning. The baba required a roasted eggplant, so I popped it into the oven, after spiking it with a fork, for about 40 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius. While the eggplant roasted, I got the first part of the pita bread ready – about half the flour with the yeast mixed together and left to rest for about 20-30 minutes while I made the hummus.
The hummus called for pureeing the chick peas, which I did with a ‘whizz stick’ rather than a food processor, as the (small) amount (I thought) didn’t warrant the food processor. The pureeing went well, and after adding the rest of the ingredients and stirring, a quick taste test left me amazed – I couldn’t believe how much nicer it was than the stuff we’ve bought in the past!
By the time the hummus was cooling in the fridge, the dough was ready to have the rest of the flour added, along with some salt and olive oil, then kneaded, then covered and left to rise for about an hour and a half (in the bottom of the computer cabinet which is nice and warm and conducive to proofing). During this process I took a quick time-out to pull the eggplant from the oven and dunk it in cold water to stop the cooking process, and get it ready to be peeled and then pureed with the rest of the baba ingredients.
With the dough proofing, I finished off the baba, and upon tasting it was again surprised at just how nice it was.
After the dough had risen, I punched it down, split it in half, and then covered one half (which we’ll have tomorrow or the next day), then split the remaining half into eight roughly equal parts. I rolled these all out, while pre-heating the oven and two pizza stones to 230 degrees Celsius, then put pairs on baking paper, and into the oven (four at a time). The first batch I pulled out after about 3 minutes (they had all ballooned), and thought they could probably go a bit longer, so the second batch I put in for 3 and a half minutes, with the ones on the lower shelf in the oven needing another 30 seconds again.
As pictured, I served the pita bread with the hummus and baba ganouj all together and they went down VERY well! Another recipe to add to the collection of favorites! – ALR
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.
Tags: baba ganouj, baba ghanoush, Daring Cooks, hummu, mezze, pita bread
January 2010 Daring Bakers’ Challenge – Graham Crackers and Nanaimo Bars
Posted by aaronjen | Filed under Recipes
I was very excited when I found out my very first Daring Bakers’ Challenge would involve making my own graham crackers. Having lived in Australia for the past 10 years, it is one of those staple grocery items that I miss the most from the US. I have grown used to substituting them for Arnott’s Shredded Wheatmeal biscuits (they’re the closest thing I’ve found in taste and texture to graham crackers here). But they’re just not the same!!! How am I honestly meant to introduce my boys to S’mores on anything but a graham cracker?!?
I didn’t attempt the gluten free version we were encouraged to try, but I was very pleased with the result, especially since Caleb loves them! It was a fairly straight forward recipe, one I would try again (although I think I’ll attempt to lower the fat content by replacing the butter with low fat margarine next time and see if they still come out ok), and the only snag I had was rolling out the dough. It was a disaster!!! It resulted in my having to call in Aaron to help me through it, and it made me so cranky that I’m thinking of coining the term ‘Baker’s Rage’. Poor Aaron! But he saved the day, the good super hero husband he is, and I think they turned out great for a first attempt!
Yet that wasn’t the end of my challenge. No! The reason we made the graham crackers was to crumb them for a Canadian slice called Nanaimo Bars (in the spirit of the Winter Olympics being hosted by Canada this year). I’d never heard of them before, but it’s basically a cocoa and graham cracker crumb base with almonds and coconut, a custard butter icing centre, and a chocolate top layer. They are very yummy, and very rich! You only need a bite size piece to be satisfied, and I’m glad to know that they freeze well, so that I can pull them out when people stop by for a cuppa, or take them with me when I visit others.
Experienced as I am with making slices, this was a fairly easy challenge. The only thing that didn’t work well was the chocolate top. The recipe called for melting 2 tablespoons of butter with 115g of chocolate, and for some reason, it seemed to curdle instead of come together. It was very late at the time, so I ended up giving up and omitted the butter, but on reflection, I think I should’ve just melted the chocolate and then mixed the butter in. Doesn’t really matter – they still turned out great! Now I just have to find some Canadian friends to give them to, in order to see if they pass for the real deal! – JRR
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.
Tags: Arnotts, Baking, Daring Bakers, Graham Crackers, Nanaimo Bars, S'mores, Shredded Wheatmeal Biscuits
January 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge – Satay
Posted by aaronjen | Filed under Recipes
I started right on the deadline for this challenge, and have just managed to scrape through AND blog about it! The challenge for January was satay which is something that I have made before, but only with pre-made satay sauce etc., so I was keen to make it from scratch.
The guidelines allowed any meat or tofu, and with or without skewers. I opted for chicken and no skewers.
I made up the marinade this morning in the food processor, although it seemed that most of the ingredients ‘flew under the radar’ of the processor blade so I had to engage in the dangerous practice of ’tilting’ the processor to get maximum amount of marinade going through the blades (please don’t try this at home).
After the marinade was semi-passable, I zip-lock bagged it up with the cut-up chicken nice and air tight and put it in the fridge to marinate for about six hours.
As dinner time approached, I prepared the peanut sauce, which turned out to be a lot easier and a lot quicker than I thought it would, so it was almost ready as I started to cook the chicken, and started to cook the rice (2 cups of Jasmine, 3 cups of water, press “sensor cook rice/pasta” once then start, stir when it tells you to, add another cup of water, then throw it back into the microwave for the remaining time).
The timing on the rice was a bit out, so it was the last thing ready, which meant I probably pushed the chicken a little too far, but it was still passable.
Through this process I’ve come to really like the combination of lemon and ginger…the chicken (even without the sauce) was amazing because of it. There was a lot more depth to the flavor than you get from any of the pre-made stuff I’ve used in the past – the peanut sauce was there throughout the mouthful, and first off was the garlic, then the lemon and ginger finished – almost refreshing – each mouthful.
This is definitely a recipe I would try again – I was surprised at how easy it actually was! I will explore other ways to get the marinade to a saucier consistency next time (probably with a whizz stick), and will start cooking the rice before the meat, and the meat before the sauce. – ALR
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.
Tags: daring cook, satay
