Week 13: Muffins - Coffee Cake Muffins [Baking]

Intro from Baking Challenge: Muffins are incredibly simple and come in an insane amount of varieties. Sweet or savory they make greats breakfasts or snacks! Seriously, there's so many different flavors out there I'm not gonna bother linking examples. Just let your imagination run wild! If you need some help getting started here is a recipe for a master muffin mix which is incredibly customizable and has little breakdowns of all the main ingredients.

I finally got to put my nifty reusable cupcake/muffin cups to use!  The recipe was taken from Martha Stewart.  I somehow ended up with way too much topping and not enough muffin mix, but it wasn't too bad because the topping is my favorite part!  I think they got a little too crispy on top, but the insides were delicious and went perfectly with my morning cup of coffee.

Week 13: Potatoes - Potato and Pea Curry [Cooking]

Intro from Cooking Challenge: Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew! This Tuber of the nightshade family is filling and delicious! There are so many things you can do with a potato, from hasselback to pierogi stuffing to twice baked! SO MANY IDEAS! There are almost 4000 different kinds of potatoes, so feel free to branch out.

Made this along with last week's kati wraps, so I figured I would stick with the Indian theme!  Recipe from here, except I added more peas, because I love peas.

Week 12: Street Foods - New York Style Kati Wraps [Cooking]

Intro from Cooking Challenge: Street food is a very broad topic, but to try to sum it up succinctly, it’s food sold by a vendor at a location that isn't a restaurant (i.e. food cart, market, fair) which is usually cheap and easy to eat on the go. Generally you’ll find regional favorites and comfort food – no haute cuisine here. In the past few years, food trucks have become very much in vogue, and the variety of options has absolutely exploded. You can find amazing crepe carts, a truck cooking pizzas in a wood oven, Thai-Mexican fusion, and Brazilian BBQ, plus New York style Halal carts on damn near every corner. If it can be made portable and on the cheap, someone somewhere in this country is probably making it in a truck. Most countries have their own street food traditions, so if there are any styles of cuisine you have been looking to cook but haven’t had the chance to, this is the week for you. If you’re looking for inspiration, check out this overview of street food from around the world.

Kati wraps/rolls are one of my favorite street foods in NYC.  I wager they're better than the typically more popular chicken-over-rice (as delicious as it is).  Everything was made from scratch, which was definitely a labor of love.

I got the recipe for the parathas (the wraps) from here - they ended up being super fun to make, although the excruciatingly small, yet vague, step-by-step directions were a bit difficult to follow at times.

I adapted the recipe for the chicken from here.  I think the recipe was missing some steps (for instance, it calls for three tomatoes in the ingredients list, and then never mentions them again).  I basically did a dry roast of the spices and then sauteed the onions, added the chicken and cooked well.  We tried the "egg paratha" step and it came out terribly, so we scrapped that.  We just warmed up the bread, added the chicken, and drizzled with traditional NYC halal-cart white sauce (recipe here) instead of the suggested mint chutney.

All in all, definitely not as good as the street guys, but still tasty!

Week 12: Sweet & Salty - Salted Caramel Bailey's Milkshakes [Baking]

Intro from Baking Challenge: Mmmmm salty sweet... Such a good flavor combination! Salt bring a whole other layer of deliciousness to your baking and there's quite a few different ways to add it! You can add pretzels, a variety of nuts, chips, cheese, or even just salt like in these margarita cookies! Or for the pork obsessed there's always bacon! Another fun way to add salt to your creations is to try your hand at a homemade salted caramel sauce. A popular salty sweet dessert is the chubby hubby bar. If you want to go the other way and sweeten up some savory dishes, you can use corn, onion or some fig jam on blue cheese crackers.

So. Delicious.  I might have gone a little heavy on the salt, but I'm a glutton for salt and caramel.

Recipe for Salted Caramel Bailey's Milkshakes

Ingredients:
4 heaping scoops vanilla ice cream
1/2 cup caramel sauce, plus more for topping
3 teaspoons sea salt, plus more for topping
4 ounces Bailey's Irish Cream
3/4 cup milk
3-4 ice cubes
Whipped cream
Directions:
Combine all ingredients except the whipped cream in a blender and mix until smooth and creamy. Pour in a tall glass and top with whipped cream, drizzle of caramel sauce, and sprinkle of sea salt.

Week 11: Pie - Banana Coconut Cream Pie [Baking]

Intro from Baking Challenge: March 14 is Pi Day! Even if you barely remember high school math this is really an excuse to bake a delicious pie! The first step to making an awesome pie is an awesome crust! You can stick with the classic or perhaps switch it up with a pretzel crust or a fancy pants cinnamon roll crust. Step 2 is your filling. Sweet or savoury there are a million different flavours such as fruit, custard or meat! And finally, to finish off your pie try out some decorative crusts or pile it high with some fluffy meringue.

Fruit pies are usually my go-to, but since I already made mini fruit pies for Week 2's bite-sized challenge, I decided to go with a cream pie.  It ended up being a huge hit at work - I didn't even get a piece myself!

I used the recipe here and it ended up making enough to fill two pies (I doubled the bananas to layer the bottom and doubled the whipped cream, but there was definitely enough custard for both).  The Girl Scout cookies on top were a last minute spontaneous decision but ended up being the highlight of the pie!

Week 11: Molecular - Seared Scallops with Soy Sauce Foam and Carrot Ginger Pearls [Cooking]

Intro from Cooking Challenge: Molecular Cuisine, also known as Molecular Gastronomy or Modernist Cuisine, is style of cooking that involves the use of innovative methods, techniques and equipment in order manipulate foods in never before seen ways. Chefs across the country and globe have embraced these techniques to excite diners for years, but in the past decade the style has really started to proliferate. Nathan Myhrvold, the original Chief of R&D at Microsoft published Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking a few years ago, and is the end-all-bee-all tome of food science. The series also contains countless recipes for molecular cooking. While the $600 price tag can be daunting, the also offer a home version at a much lower rate, as well as a bunch of recipes on their website. Paste Magazine has also done an article with some great entry-level molecular recipes.

While not molecular in and of itself, one of the most iconic techniques of Modernist Cuisine is cooking food sous-vide: Food is vacuum sealed in a plastic bag, and cooked at a precise time and temperature to achieve maximum flavor and ideal texture. Sous-vide not only requires the use of a vacuum sealer, but an immersion circulator, which will heat and circulate water to a precise temperature. Traditional circulators can run upwards of $1000, but home-model verisons such as the Sansaire, Anova, and Nomiku run between $200-$300. If you want to try sous-vide but that price is still a little steep, Amazon sells Ziploc Vacuum Bags that are great for sealing your foods and a slow-cooker or crock-pot hold low temperatures incredibly well. If you're a gadget junkie, you can even try building your own immersion circulator. For additives and chemicals, Modernist Pantry and Amazon both carry a wide range of ingredients for any number of different techniques.

I was a little nervous about how my (lack of) molecular gastronomy skills would turn out, so I decided to cook one of my staples and add some molecular goodness on top.  The scallops are simply seared in olive oil.  I took the recipe for the carrot ginger pearls from here and used the soy sauce foam recipe from Modernist Cooking Made Easy.

I do have to say, the pearls/caviar were SO MUCH fun to make.  I got a little carried away.  All said though, I don't think my meal was drastically elevated by the addition of molecular science - it really was just a fun novelty add-on.  Plus, the ingredients and tools needed were definitely the most I've had to spend on a challenge so far.

Week 10: Australian - Mini Meat Pies [Cooking]

Intro from Cooking Challenge: Lamb is more common than beef in Australia, so if you're going for a meat dish this week, lamb is probably the way to go. Apparently, meat & three veg is popular in Australia. Seafood is also very popular in Australia because of the coastal cities, so seafood is another good choice for this week. Just remember, they're called prawns over there, not shrimp. For dessert, pavlova (a type of meringue dessert) is super popular. Here are a few links to get you started: Recipes from Australia's Best Chefs, About Australian Food, 40 Foods Australians Call Their Own.

I had never had authentic Australian meat pies before, but I fed these to a room full of Australia-philes and they went over fantastically.  I've already gotten requests for more.

I modified this recipe to make mini pies - I cut the pastry sheets into 1/6ths, put a dollop of meat filling in the middle, and folded/sealed.  It made 12 mini pies, plus a little extra meat filling (probably enough for about 3-4 more mini pies, but I didn't have anymore pastry dough).

Week 10: Carnival/Mardi Gras - King Cake [Baking]

Intro from Baking Challenge: Carnival is a crazy party festival held all over the world! But for the sake of this challenge we are going to focus on the 2 most famous places where it occurs. Brazil and New Orleans.
In Brazil, Carnival is celebrated with huge parades filled with costumes and Samba! They basically party non-stop for six days, which leads up to Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of lent. Nothing like a huge party before giving up something for 40 days. Some Brazilian recipes are Quindim (coconut flan), Brigadeiros (chocolate truffles), Queijadinhas and a variety of cakes called bolos. Some bolo flavours are cornmeal and passion fruit. On the savory side, you could try Coxinhas or Pao de Queijo. A few other Brazilian flavors are dulce de leche, tropical fruits or Brazil Nuts. Their local alcohol is cachaça which can be used to make Caipirinhas which are freakin' delicious.
New Orleans has also been partying pretty hard this season. They celebrate Carnival with parades, masquerade balls and king cake parties. The traditional colors of the New Orleans Mardi Gras are purple, green and gold. Those colors show up everywhere and will probably show up on your baking for this one! The main baked dish of Mardi Gras is a King Cake. A small plastic baby is hidden somewhere inside the cake and the person who finds it is in charge of getting the next king cake or throwing the next king cake party! A few other classic Louisiana recipes are Banana's Foster, Beignets, Bread Pudding and Pecan Pie.

My first time working with yeast, believe it or not!  This was a blast to make, especially the part where I used my bedroom as an incubator to let dough rise since it's the only room in my apartment with a heater.

I'm a huge king cake far and usually order from a bakery in New Orleans every year, so it was pretty awesome to make my own this time around.  The only downside was it's impossible to find tiny plastic babies in the Northeast!

Recipe found here.