Weekend Challenge Results

Well, this has apparently been a lot of fun for some people, and certainly for myself. The Weekend Challenge was really meant to be more of a mental excercise than anything, and I know that a lot of people really enjoyed that. I had a couple of people ask me if they could use vinegar because they keep it in their spice cabinet. I had a couple more people ask me if they could use flour. A common thought among most people was, "this dish would be really good if I could add x and/or y ingredient."

Before I get to the entries, I'd better tell you what I came up with. My list was deliberately vague in a lot of areas, and much more open than I think some people realized. For instance, I allowed any cooking fat. Why one might have bacon fat laying around with no bacon may remain a mystery, but that's the cooking fat that I decided to use. I started with a chicken breast that I had thawed overnight in the fridged. I diced it up, salted it and sauteed it in the bacon fat in an attempt to give it some real color, but not overcook it. As it turns out, I had too much fat and I ended up not getting any really good color. I removed the chicken from the pan and set it aside.

Next up, I added in a small handful each of frozen carrots and broccoli. I let those sweat it out for a few minutes before tossing in a couple of handfuls of frozen diced potatoes. I cranked the heat to high and sauteed, in an attempt to give it all a little color. Again, it didn't quite work. I lowered the heat and added a can of "cream style corn". I had been hoping for something a little creamier, but that was not to be. I also added a couple of cups of chicken broth and let it all simmer for a while. The broth made it pretty loose, but it tightened up after a few minutes. I finally added the chicken back in and stirred to warm it up a little. I even added a couple of grinds of fresh black pepper. Voila! Chicken Corn Chowder!



After taking the picture, I added in some crumbled bacon. It was good on its own, but now that the challenge was over, I decided that I was finished with rules for the day. It ended up being a relatively simple dish that I may spend some time improving on. My wife even expressed interest in making it herself, and believe me, she doesn't like to cook much.

Now, looking at the entries, I found some interesting things. First of all, Harley's entry reminded me of a casserole I made just before getting married. In fact, were he to mix in cream of muchroom soup, replace the string beans with broccoli and replace the pineapple with shredded cheddar, he would have had exactly the same casserole. In fact, said casserole won 2nd place at a cookoff, so I think it's safe to say that people like it.

Art had so much fun, she submitted two entries. Her first entry was based off of a dish that she had made her family recently. She told me in email that she had to leave out soy sauce and vinegar because they weren't on the list. And yes, apparently it was a hit with her family. The interesting thing to me was that she assumed that you just knew how to make rice. In fact, Harley did the same thing too. Then again, anyway that's been reading my blog from the beginning would probably have a pretty good idea of how to cook rice anyway. Same goes for the potatoes in Art's second entry. I liked that she added cocoa powder to her Mexican Hash. I'm always up for a good molé. I think though that were I to add corn to the crockpot, I would wait until the end of the cooking process.

The thing I liked about TuxGirl's entry was that it was based off of exactly the sort of situation I had in mind when I came up with my ingredient list: her cupboards were next to bare, and these were the only ingredients left. Seeing as she was in school at the time, and most certainly a starving student, shopping was likely out of the question. Her dish, which also assumed you know how to make rice already, also looked kind of like a Mexican Hash, but with rice instead of potatoes. In fact, it reminded me of several similar dishes I have made in the past using leftover rice.

What caught me off-guard with Tensai's entry was that he actually went so far as to create three seperate dishes, the last of which made a couple of assumptions about the contents of his spice cabinet that I would not have guessed (nor allowed within the rules), such as eggs and bread crumbs. But hey, this is a friendly little excercise, hardly a competition. I've never been a big fan of making chili with "flying meat" (fowl) in it, but if I was stuck with this list of ingredients, then I don't think I'd mind his suggestion. I would, however, eschew the broccoli. Nothing personal, I just don't like the stuff. I think I might like his Korokke, however.

I think this was a successful challenge, and I'm already planning another for this weekend. Since Ali and James gave me such a hard time, I'm tempted to do something like require wheat flour and continue to disallow vinegar. We shall see.

Weekend Challenge

I thought this might be something fun to try. Depending on the response I get this weekend, I may try this every weekend. Get ready for...

The Weekend Challenge!

You only have the following ten items in your kitchen:

• Canned or frozen corn
• Canned or frozen beans (your choice)
• Canned tomatoes
• Canned pineapple
• Canned or boxed broth (your choice)
• Long grain rice (white or brown)
• Frozen cubed potatoes
• Frozen broccoli
• Frozen carrots
• Frozen chicken breast

You're hungry. Maybe you have friends coming over. Maybe you just need to feed your family. You don't have to use everything on the list, but you do need to make something and you don't have the means to go out and buy any more food. Fortunately, you also have your spice cabinet handy and even a little cooking fat (again, your choice). What are you going to make?

You're welcome to use any cooking method you would normally use. You could even use the deep fryer if you thought it would do you any good. You have this weekend to come up with something and send the recipe back to me. On Monday morning I will compile the recipes and post them here. If there are too many, then I will choose my favorites and post only them.

For now, go ahead and use the comment form to send me your recipes. Good luck to you all!

Quick Curry Veggies and Shrimp

We all need to eat. How often we eat depends largely on where we live in the world. In some areas, people place a huge focus on lunchtime, and really don't eat the rest of the day. In other areas, lunch is important, but dinner is the main event. Some areas never even bother with breakfast. In America, the standard is three meals: breakfast, lunch and dinner. Some people add "snack" in there somewhere, and certain fast food restaurants are trying to convince us that there's a "fourth meal" that happens late at night when we really should be eating. Regardless of when we eat, there's a certain amount of calories that we need to consume on a daily basis. If we eat too many of them, we gain weight. If we don't eat enough of them, and certainly of the right kinds, then we get malnourished. This is especially important for expectant mothers to remember.

This is why I make my wife eat more than just a candy bar for dinner. She doesn't usually want to eat dinner at all, so I have to try and convince her otherwise. Last night I came up with a quick and easy meal for her that I knew she would love, and that I would hate. That's okay, I already had my own dinner covered, and it didn't include broccoli.

I hate broccoli. I don't like the flavor, I don't like the texture, and there's plenty of other veggies out there that work just as well. I do enjoy the occasional cauliflower. My wife loves both, and so a while ago she bought a bag of frozen broccoli and cauliflower. Regardless of how much I like or dislike them, I do have a favorite method of cooking them: steam. I also know that there's a spice blend that goes really well with them, but especially with cauliflower: curry. And what else also goes nicely with all of this? Shrimp.

This is one of the quickest and easiest meals I've ever prepared, especially off the cuff. I took a small 7-inch non-stick skillet, tossed in a handful of frozen veggies, gave it about a quarter inch of chicken broth, a couple of teaspoons of Madras curry power and three pieces of frozen shrimp. I slapped the lid on and brought it to a boil. Since I was using a clear lid, I was able to look at the shrimp and tell when it was done. Since shrimp gets rubbery when overcooked, I pulled it out as soon as it got pink, and set it aside. I let the broth reduce down to almost nothing, put the shrimp back in, turned off the heat, and stirred occassionally until the liquid was pretty much gone. I poured into a bowl and brought it to my grateful wife.



The whole process took somewhere between five and ten minutes. I had a lot working to my advantage here. First of all, because everything was so small, it didn't really matter so much that it was frozen. The fact that I was cooking it with steam, which is actually a pretty gentle method, didn't hurt either. I didn't really need to stir the curry powder in, because the steam was all over the place, and it was taking the curry with it. The broth was already salty, even though I was using a lower sodium variety, so I didn't have to add any additional salt. And because I let the broth reduce down all the way, the chicken flavor concentrated and infused itself into the rest of the food. And of course, because everything was just sitting in my freezer, there was no prep time involved. It was quicker, easier, tastier and a good deal more healthful than a number of microwave dinners out there. Bonus for some: it was also low-carb. But it would be really perfect served with rice.

So stop limiting yourself to bad food or no food, just because you've had a long day and are too tired to prepare anything. Keep some frozen veggies on hand and maybe some frozen shrimp too. Try making up a big old batch of rice on the weekends and portioning it into little containers. If you're going to microwave something for dinner, it might as well be something that you prepared yourself. Then you'll have a few carbs to go with your shrimp and veggies.

Utah Bakers Dozen: Pumpkin Desserts

The next Utah Bakers Dozen meeting is coming up! This meeting will be on Monday, October 16, from 3 to 6 pm at the Kimbal Distribution Center (2233 South 300 East, Salt Lake City).

Mary Cech, author of Wine Lover's Dessert Cookbook and the forthcoming The Art of Savory Baking and Pastry, will be talking about custards and high altitude baking. Everyone is invited to bring their favorite pumpkin dessert and the recipe to share with everyone else.

Details and a flyer are available at the Utah Bakers Dozen website.

Crossroads Plaza Rewritten

And now for a bit of local news for Salt Lake City. I remember one day in New Hampshire, as I was just becoming acclimated to my temporary home while in school, but still feeling homesick for my real home in Salt Lake City. The news was apparently rampant in Salt Lake, and yet I had not yet heard until that point: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints had purchased the Crossroads Mall, aka Crossroads Plaza.

This was the mall of my childhood. Well, one of them. When I was a very wee lad, we lived down the street from the Fashion Place Mall in Murray, UT. When I was still in my pre-teen years, we moved to Magna, UT, where the closest mall was Valley Fair Mall in West Valley City, UT. But on those special days that we got to go with dad into work, we were literally within walking distance of the Crossroads Mall. I still remember fondly going there early in the morning, when the only store open was Orange Julius, and buying chocolate-glazed chocolate donuts for breakfast. I remember working as a gopher (go fer this, go fer that) at my dad's office in my high school years, and walking over to the music store to purchase They Might Be Giant's Miscellaneous T album. More recently, I have fond memories of going to Agnes Poetry's in-store performance at the Borders store at the mall. And every so often, my wife and like to head down to that area to walk around the mall and just enjoy being there together.

When the LDS church made their announcement, I was a little surprised. Their reasoning made sense to me: the current owners were no longer interested in owning it and had offered it up for sale, and the LDS church purchased it in an effort to maintain the beauty of the area near the famous Temple Square across the street. No church tithing money was used to make the purchase. As it turns out, the LDS church owns a variety of private businesses, such as Bonneville Communications, which runs local TV and radio stations KSL. Such businesses were the source of the purchase money.

As time moved on and I graduated from school, I moved back to Utah and still made various trips to the area. There was a new mall in town, the Gateway Mall, just down the street. Several stores had already migrated to the Gateway, and Crossroads wasn't offering any new leases. Then one day at the Hot Topic store at Crossroads, a clerk explained to my wife and I that the majority of the stores would be clearing out. In fact, only high-end retail was expected to remain. In my mind, that meant that the beloved mall of my youth was about to become very boring. Still, in retrospect, I don't suppose the LDS church had really released a whole lot of official detail on the future of this property.

Now, a good three years or so after the purchase of the mall, the LDS church has announced its plans for reconstruction and renovation. The plans include a retail spaces, including a few national department stores such as Nordstrom and Macys. There will be new office space , and even some residential units. There will be underground parking, pedestrial walkways, gardens, fountains, a mock city creek, and even a grocery store. Not unexpected for property owned by the LDS church, the stores will be closed on Sunday, but many restaurants may choose to remain open on that day. The plan includes twenty acres of development, and will take five years to complete.

I'm still a little in a state of shock. I haven't even finished reading all of the news and releases about the project, and I'm still taken aback. Several historic old buildings will be torn down and replaced, as it would be significantly more expensive to just renovate them. The face of Salt Lake City has already changed a lot, even just in the decade since I graduated from high school, and it has more change to come. I already wouldn't recognize a lot of it if my childhood self was to suddenly be transported from the past into today. I'm sad to know that so many memories are about to be demolished. And yet, I'm not entirely disappointed.

Anyone who has visited Temple Square in Salt Lake knows the LDS church's penchant for beauty. The somewhat recent construction of their Conference Center north of Temple Square is a thing of wonder. While many may expect what in other areas would be a giant bunker of reinforced concrete, a harshly square example of minimalist architecture, the Conference Center is in fact a beautiful structure, littered with trees and other decorative vegetation. The inside is even more beautiful, and surprisingly more spacious than one would even expect looking at its outer walls. Around the same time the Conference Center was built, the LDS church replaced a section of Main Street with a walkway full of flower gardens, fountains and statues. Every year for as long as I can remember, the LDS church has decorated Temple Square with Christmas lights, and scores of visitors flock to the area to see them. The Main Street plaza and the church office buildings to the east are also decorated with lights, and visitors can now walk freely amongst all of it without having to wait for lights and risk crossing what can frequently be heavy traffic.

Yes, the LDS church knows what they're doing with it comes to things like this. Whatever they do in this project will be a sight to behold. In my short lifetime alone, Salt Lake has shifted from an old, dirty collection of buildings that some may call ugly, to a modern, clean, and undeniably beautiful area. Somebody around here knows what they're doing, and I think I'm going to have to be content to let them keep doing it. I'm entirely convinced it isn't Mayor Rocky Anderson. Somebody with a lot more vision has been following a more straight and narrow path, and I hope they never stop.

More Tux Cakes!

When I originally posted the Tux Cake tutorial, I never really expected anyone to actually make one of their own. Sure, I expected a few people to like it. How could you not like a 3D cake in the form of a penguin? I had people linking to me from not only the United States, but also Hungary, Poland, Italy, Germany and even a few places in languages that I couldn't identify. But that was a crazy project. Who in their right mind would actually want to go through all that just to make their own? But just a couple of weeks later, I found an interesting link in my web stats. As it turns out, somebody else was crazy enough to make one. Kudos to GreyDreamLand for his efforts! I am truly impressed.

If anyone else decides to make a Tux Cake of their own, go ahead and drop me a comment on this post and I'll link back to you on the last page of the tutorial. Thanks again to everyone that visited and enjoyed the tutorial!

Bacon Canapés

Once a month my wife and I head down to her parents' house, along with her sisters and their families, and we have dinner. Each family is assigned to bring a certain item, and this month our item was some kind of appetizer. Any kind, really.

My wife told me to just buy something. Apparently her mom told her to tell me that I didn't have to make anything, and that we could just buy something. I think you all know me well enough by now to know that I wasn't too keen on cheating like that. But when I searched my brain for ideas, I came up empty. Undaunted, I headed to the grocery store with my wife in search of, well, something. Anything. But I couldn't even find anything pre-made that sounded good, much less any ideas for something to make. I was being pretty moody too, so that probably didn't help.

Then I saw it: a package of little toast crisps! What a perfect canapé base! What I needed was something to pipe onto them. Some kind of savory mousse. Maybe a cream cheese mousse. What could be more perfect? I headed down to the pickle isle and found a little jar of diced pimentos and a jar of green olives. With any luck, I could process these into a paste that would go smoothly into the cream cheese. Last but not least, I grabbed a little half-pint carton (why don't they just call it a cup?) of heavy cream and headed home.

The next day, a couple of hours before we were to leave, I started on some bacon from the freezer that I had out thawing. I laid the strips out on a sheet pan and put them into a pre-heated 500F oven. Every few minutes, I would pull the pan out, give the bacon a flip, and then put it back in. Every couple of times I did this, I would also drain the excess fat into a grease can. On another day I might have saved this for a bacon vinaigrette or something, but not that day. It took more time than frying the bacon in a skillet, but I soon had long, straight, crispy slices of bacon cooling off to the side on paper towels.

While the bacon baked, I turned my attention to the olives and pimentos. For those of you who don't know, pimento is really just another word for roasted red pepper. I pureed about two or three tablespoons of pimento and a small handful of olives together in a food processor, and added about half a block (that's 4 oz) of cream cheese. It was a little on the bland side, so I added half a dozen capers for seasoning. The salt from the capers was just about perfect, and while the concoction was a little more olivey than I wanted, it still tasted fabulous.

Now it was time to try and make a mousse. The cream cheese mixture was a lot softer than I wanted, so I stuck it back in the fridge for a few minutes. Still, I knew it would be too soft to just pipe with a star tip like I wanted. I needed extra help. It was time to employ gelatin. Fortunately, I keep sheet gelatin in my pantry, but you can use powdered gelatin too. It just won't be as easy to work with. I wasn't working with very much, so I decided to just use one sheet. I put it in a metal measuring cup with a little cold water to soften (bloom). When it was nice and soft, I wrung it out , dumped out the water, and added a little cream. Just a little. Those of you out there stuck with powdered gelatin (and that will be most of you), just let your gelatin bloom in the cream.

I put the measuring cup over very low heat and gave it the occassional stir, until all of the gelatin had dissolved. I let that cool just slightly, while I turned my attention to whipping the rest of the cream. My (metal) bowl and beaters had been hanging out in the freezer, so they were nice and cold. I started whipping the cold cream, and then slowly drizzled in the stuff with the gelatin. I whipped to medium peaks, and then folded the whipped cream into the now slightly-chilled cream cheese mixture. It was still too soft! I put the mixture into the fridge for a little while, with the hopes that the gelatin would do its thing.

While that chilled, I went back to the cooled bacon. It wasn't perfectly crispy, so I could still cut it with a knife. I cut it all into squares, and then counted out enough squares so that each toast crisp would have one. Then I cut all the rest of the squares into little bits. I pulled out the mousse, moved some of it into a piping bag with a star tip, and then put a little dab on each toast square. I put a square on each piece at an angle, and then piped a little star onto each one. It worked pretty well for the first one, and even for the second one. But by that point, little pieces of olive and pimento had started to clog up the tip, and the weak mousse started to come out in little almost star-shaped blobs. Eventually, most of those blobs lost their star shape. Still, they looked kind of cool and I didn't have much of a choice, so I stuck them in the fridge and let the gelatin finish firming up. Well, after sprinkling them with the bacon bits, of course.

The trip from our house to my wife's parents is always scary for me when transporting cold foods. Chilled desserts are like geeks; they need to be kept out of direct sunlight if at all possible. Fortunately, the gelatin had finally set up enough that nothing melted onto or off of anything, and the twenty minute drive went without incident. Everyone loved them, and nobody said anything about them having blobs of mousse instead of stars. And come to think of it, it wasn't really mousse, was it? There were still bits of olive and pimento throughout it all.



There was plenty of the non-mousse left over, and I kept it in the fridge in the hope of using it elsewhere. When I checked on it this morning, the gelatin had firmed it up enough that it was the perfect consistency for piping. But since there was so little in there, it was still soft. In retrospect, I suppose I should have made it a few hours earlier. Something to remember for the next time, I guess.