If it ain’t Dutch, it ain’t much.

This month’s Daring Baker’s challenge was Tijgerbrood, or Dutch Crunch bread.  The term actually refers to the rice paste topping painted on top of a loaf of bread to give it a crusty, crunchy exterior texture and appearance.  It sounds like it’s kind of a big deal in the San Franciso Bay area.  I had ever heard of it before, which is a little surprising since both my family and the region in which I live are Dutch to the max.  I ground my own rice flour for the paste, and was concerned that I didn’t get it fine enough.  As it turns out, the topping was a lot more successful than the bread itself, for which I used a simple go-to recipe of mine.  I made it in haste, and when all was said and done, I couldn’t get it out of the pan for the life of me!  Oh well.  I might have to make some Dutch crunch rolls for Easter dinner with my Dutch family.  I think they’d get a real kick out of them.

Braised Short Ribs with Gremolata

For this month’s braising challenge, I made boneless short ribs with gremolata.  After searing the meat, I actually did the bulk of the slow cooking in a crock pot while I was at work.  It was exceptionally tender.  Unfortunately, the dish had already been largely consumed by the time I remembered to take a picture of it.  I forgot to photograph my initial braising experiment, cornish game hens with garlic and rosemary, entirely.

Talk About Quick Bread!

I honestly wish that this beer bread recipe was more difficult or time consuming, because this stuff is dangerously good.  This is how it happens.

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 3 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 12 + ounces beer *such as* Pabst Blue Ribbon *premium* lager

Mix it up. I had to use slightly more that one standard 12 ounce can of beer in order to get a dough that didn’t seem too thick.

• 1/4 cup-ish butter, melted

Use some of the butter to liberally grease a bread pan.  Pour the dough into the pan.  Top with the rest of the butter.  Bake at 375 degrees until the loaf is golden brown and firm – just shy of an hour in my oven.

Enjoy!!?!

Salmon Cakes with Herbed Aioli

So, this month, my boyfriend and two of his roommates found out the their fourth roommate has been embezzling the money they gave him to pay the utilities bills.  Maybe he’s been funneling the funds into his “charitable”  business.  Maybe he used the cash to pay for his recent trip to El Salvador.  It’s unclear.  All that we really know is that he is  a big weenie.  So, this month, my boyfriend moved into my living room, and the contents of his pantry moved into my kitchen.  Since then, we’ve been trying to eat enough of the things that we have so that squeeze the rest into the cupboards.  So, this month, when I read that the Daring Cooks challenge was to create some kind of patty, I immediately eyed a couple of cans of salmon stacked among the towers of victuals.  I had bought them a good while ago, probably on a whim, and they were taking up precious space.  I totally winged the recipe, mixing the drained, flaked salmon with egg, cracker crumbs, spices, and things like that.  I think that they turned out rather nicely, considering that canned salmon is actually a lot weirder than I had remembered.  Tiny vertebrae?  Ew.

A scone is a scone is a scone is a biscuit.

I’ve never really had much luck making biscuits that I’d want to eat more than, say, a slice of bread.  The best batch I had ever made were full of cheese and wild ramps, but ended up a little tough and dense for my taste. So when it was revealed that the January Daring Baker’s challenge was scones (and by scones I mean biscuits, and by biscuits I don’t mean cookies), I was determined to make something with taste and texture superior to all of my previous attempts. I was out of butter at the time, but had a lot of left over sour cream from a dip I made for a new years party, so I googled sour cream based recipes.  Lo and behold, this was the first hit.  I had been seeing biscuit recipes calling for 7-Up or other lemon-lime beverages all over Pinterest and was equally intrigued and disgusted by the concept.  I found a bottle of citrus drink in the back of the fridge that my friend had brought over for a party months ago, so I decided to roll with it.  I mixed things using standard dry ingredients and a little shortening instead of the biscuit mix, and when I added the soda the mixture became very light and airy.  I had a good feeling about this.  30 minutes later, I was pulling a baking sheet of perfect, fluffy biscuits out of the oven.  I tossed a few in a paper bag with a jar of jam, and walked to work.  Then tragedy revealed itself.  When my coworker and I set about the serious business of biscuit sampling, neither of us dared to eat more than a single bite.  The consistency of each biscuit was unbelievably tender and flaky, but the flavor was nearly non-existent until *BAM* each of us was hit by an unbelievably, almost metallic aftertaste.  As it turns out, the contents of the bottle in the fridge were lemon mineral water and some of the elements therein must have reacted to the baking powder during baking.  What a disappointment!  I was so encouraged by the texture of the biscuits, that I actually went out, bought a can of 7-up at a corner convenience store (a rarity), and tried again.  The results were acceptable, and rather nice smothered with leftover roast chicken and gravy, but, eaten plain, I thought I could still detect just a trace of that horrible taste that was so overpowering in the first batch.  Next time I’ll stick to butter, and other ingredients whose ingredients I understand.

A Little Corny.

For the January Daring Cooks Challenge, I made two types of tamales.  One filled with homemade chorizo that had slow-simmered in an ancho pepper sauce, and one filled with a mixture of sweet potato and black beans.  I had made tamales before with friends, and that was my vision for tamale making this time around.  However, as I am financially recovering from two weeks of “vacation” over the holidays, I couldn’t afford to buy the ingredients until the day before the challenge ended.  So I made the tamales last minute.   And by myself.  For those of you who are reading this and wondering if there’s a big difference between making tamales with your super snazzy friends and several units of alcohol and making them alone in your apartment, the answer is yes.  Making them on your own is about 213% less fun.  The end result was delicious, but the process seemed seriously more tedious and time consuming than I remembered.  I also don’t own a steamer basket, can’t currently afford to buy one, and had to wing it big time.  My first attempt involved a canning basket full of little nixtamalized bundles suspended from a wooden spoon over water boiling in a stock pot with the lid perched precariously on top.  It may not shock you to hear that this didn’t work out so hot.  Insert rimshot here.  Next, I used balls of aluminum foil to prop up the saggy side of a vegetable steamer with a missing leg in the bottom of a dutch oven.  I loaded the tamales onto their cattywampus support platform, and within 10 minutes, the they were cooked through.  So that’s good.  Oh, how I dream of a day when I will have disposable income.  And also, endless tamale parties.

Going Wild

So, I decided to kick things up a notch with the December Daring Baker challenge, sourdough bread, and create an entire sandwich chock full of fermented goodness.  I had dabbled with sourdough recipes early this year, and ended up with a nice starter… until it tipped over in my refrigerator creating one of the more memorable kitchen messes of 2011.  The sourdough recipe provided with the challenge yielded a loaf with a whole lot of that “sour” sourdough flavor, but it ended up being a little lacking in the leavening department.

The bread was beautifully tart, but rather moist, dense, and left a little something to be desired in the loft department.  I let my starter ferment in a very warm area, and I wonder if that engendered higher levels of acid and lower quantities of live yeast in the final leaven.  My dream was “wild” reuben with corned venison from the doe my boyfriend shot this hunting season and homemade sauerkraut.  The sandwiches were good, but not quite everything I had hoped for, as the bread was a little chewy even after it was toasted.  Sometime in the next month I think I’ll try again with a different starter aged in a cooler location and see how it compares.

I like your buns.

 

The December Daring Cooks Challenge was cha sui and cha sui bao, or Cantonese barbeque pork, and barbeque pork buns.  I prepared about two pounds of loin meat by marinating it all day in a mixture of sesame oil, soy sauce, honey, cooking wine, oyster sauce, and seasonings (no red food coloring or maltose for this girl!), then seared it on the stove over high heat and finished cooking it through in the oven.  The result was both aesthetically pleasing and unbelievably tender and juicy.  My boyfriend and I ate some of it for dinner straight from the oven, and he was a huge fan of the “fancy pork”.  The remaining meat was cooked with mushrooms and green onions saved for making baked cha sui bao the next day as part of my dad’s birthday dinner.  He bit into one of the buns as soon as brought them over, not realizing that they were filled.  Shortly thereafter, he proclaimed them the “best buns he ever had in his life”.  What a compliment!  I thought that they were especially good served with a little garlic chili sauce.

San Rival

Okay.  So maybe the sans rival I made ended up looking a little bit like that cake those fairies make in Sleeping Beauty by the time it arrived at my sister’s house.  Maybe it had to be photographed from its “good” side with “distracting” holiday decor in the background.  But maybe it was also super delicious cashew meringue layered with almond and coconut rum flavored buttercream frosting, and let’s just say it might have been coated in chopped cashews and coconut flakes.

No one complained.

Tease

I really like it when a Daring Kitchen challenge ends up being something that I was already considering making.  Last month, I had seen a picture of a Chinese tea egg for the first time.  I immediately decided that I had to try making some… but let’s be honest.  It probably would have taken me at least a year to get around to actually doing it if this month’s Daring Cook challenge wasn’t savory recipes with teas.  Not only do tea eggs meet the objective outlined, there was even a recipe for these stunning little guys right in the text of the challenge!  You may be wondering what “these stunning little guys” actually are.  Chinese tea eggs are cracked and steeped in a mixture of black tea and spices after an initial hard-boiling.

They look like this.  Or they do if you’re lucky.  This particular egg was from the second batch I made.  The first batch didn’t turn out so hot.  Mostly they were just exceptionally hard to peel.  I let them steep an extended period of time after trying and failing oh so miserably to remove the shell of the first one I tackled.  By the time I tried again, huge hunks of foul smelling brownish gray egg white came off with each piece of shell I removed.  It was pretty ugly.  So ugly, in fact, that I did something I rarely do and pitched them all.  With the second batch, I did a little more research.  Another Daring Cook who posted on the forum recommended using older eggs, and another recipe that I found on the interwebs involves shocking the eggs in cold water before putting them back the pan with the tea mixture.  Although the second batch turned out much better, I did not peel them all at once, and noticed that they became increasingly difficult to peel the longer they steeped.  When adequately peeled, the eggs were beautiful.  The taste was nice and subtle.  So subtle, in fact, that my boyfriend didn’t think that they tasted any different than a standard hard boiled egg.  Which is good, I guess.  He really likes hard boiled eggs.  However, the smell of the cooked eggs was, as my coworker put it, “kind of like bathroom”.I guess that I was really into eggs this month, because the second dish I made for this month’s challenge was poached eggs with matcha salt and toasted matcha milk bread on the side.  My friend Andrew, who is one of two real-life friends who knows I have a blog, came to visit me this month.  He helped me make the matcha bread, which was mild in matcha flavor, but very light and fluffy.  We used this Tangzhong method to get an nice airy texture.  He’s a much better dough ball roller than I am.  We took pictures.