For Cantonese week I made Char Siu, noodles with scallion-ginger and oystersauce, water spinach like greens with ginger and eggplant with pork and sauce. Recipes by Made with Lau.
It was all delicious, but for the Char Siu I'll pick another cut next time as this was a little thin.
This week I tried out something called bread enhancer. I used the same recipe for bot breads, same amounts of water same temp, same yeast, same flour and methods except in one bread I replaced 6% of the flour with bread enhancer to see if it actually makes it better.
The breads on the left are with enhancer and as you can see it rose less during proofing but sprung up in the oven and got a little less dense in structure and a darker crust. Taste seemed pretty much the same.
I made one of the best snacks we have in the Netherlands: Frikandel.
These fried meat logs are usually made with mechanically seperated meat, basically all leftovers on the bones from slaughter.
I made these with chicken thighs and pork belly.
They were spiced more than usual and tasted great. They were a bit pulled out of shape by the boiling and frying.
I planned to make fry bread but I was catsitting and didn't want to smell up the house by frying. So, I made hardtack that people used to bring on long travels as the dry biscuit don't perish easily.
They are very dry and bland, but quite doable when soaked in broth.
First I planned to do something Moroccan as The Netherlands lost to them, but I went to Germany for a weekend and spotted Planted vegan steaks on discount so I thought it would be a nice opportunity to try them as they're usually too expensive at home.
So, I made chimichurri with green onions and chives mixed with the parsley as I hate parsley. The steak was already marinated but I marinated it again which made it turn out a little salty. But the texture was great and they were very juicy.
Black bean tacos with pico de gallo without cilantro because ew, and avocado crema and feta within.
I don't do a lot of gardening, but I did come across this cute little sloth chia pet and I grew my own lions mane mushrooms from a kit. The endive comes from my mothers vegetable garden.
The patty's were very tasty, just a mix of some online recipes, and I also included some (bought) oyster mushrooms as the lions mane shrunk quite a bit.
The endive was just prepared with some anchovies, red pepper and garlic.
This experiment failed but still tasted good. I drew three cards from the deck, the knight of wands, the hermit and the six of cups. I found a website with food related cards so I checked them against that: cayenne, tea and plums.
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So, to combine I made a plum cake with rooibos tea in it and a rooibos tea syrup with a dash of cayenne. The taste was great, the cake was too wet unfortunately due to overripe plums.
I followed Gordon Ramsey's steak ramen broth loosely but added tahin as it was too spicy for someone and added a coffee rub to the steak. This was a great dish, but I would eat the steak differently next time as the flavour of the rub kinda drowned in the miso, gochujang and tahin.
Originally made a green curry with tofu but that took too long to make, so I felt like I had to do over.
So, I fabricated breakfast in 15 minutes with pre-made pizza dough.
My dad retired this week, so I made him a pie. The pâte a bombe with mascarpone and gelatin was a little lumpy and the dots could've been more symmetrical but it tasted great and dad was happy.
The crackers were too soft but tasted good. The chilli jam was a succes and has been used on a lot of stuff since.
I've been wanting to make Injera, an Ethiopian teff flour pancake, for a while now. So, I thought why not three differently coloured stews!
As, I'm not much of a planner I made the injera in this picture with instant yeast and added a little vinegar to replicate the sour taste. But I made enough stew to serve another time during the week so I planned to make real fermented injera then.
The first few instant injeras failed badly and stuck to pan. Only the last two stayed relatively unbroken.
Nearly all of the fermented injeras failed later on as well.
For the stews i made:
Yellow: kik alicha - a split yellow pea stew with tumeric
Green: gomen wat - a green leaf stew woth ginger and garlic cooked in niter kibbeh (a homemade ghee with spices, delicious) this should be collard greens vut we don't have them here, so I subbed 2/3 kale and 1/3 spinach.
Red: doro wat - chicken stew with homemade berbere spice blend which turned out a little spicier than anticipated, but nobody really minds in this house. Also used the niter kibbeh in this.
I would definitely eat these dishes all again <3
So, two weeks ago (I forgot to post again) I got to go to Greece and I could stripe that one off my bucket list. But this challenge coincided with my trip there so I could't use Greece anymore.
Another place I've always wanted to visit is Ankor Wat, and while I was telling my friend who was joininh the trip to Greece about this challenge, she said that she got a recipe from a Cambodian lady during her trip there in September.
So, I brought all ingredients that I thought would be difficult to find there in my hand luggage and tried to decipher and follow this recipe in our holiday home. Apparently it resulted in something quite different from what she ate there but it was very tasty.
(I've also included Greek stray cat tax I called Bob)
I couldn't get the traditional Roblochon cheese, so I subbed with something resembling a Delice de Bourgogne which was really good.
The Bozener sauce was like a more vinegary, more liquid egg salad.