Mushroom Wellington- Daring Cooks December

Well after being 2 months (!) late on posting my last challenge I couldn't lame out and wait until February to post about December's challenge; which was to make some kind of savory puff pastry dish. The obvious application was either salmon en croute or beef wellington. Now I don't really like fish so salmon was out. And try as I might I couldn't get excited about the beef wellington. Maybe it was the fact that in the past two weeks I've worked my way through a 12 sticks of butter making Kwan/han/Chris/Festivus cookies for my many adoring family members, friends, classmates and even my professors. I made Chocolate Chip Cookies with Hawaiian sea salt, (I promise you these are the best cookies ever and even if you cut corners and use cheap nestle chips and don't refrigerate it for 72 hours they will still taste awesome) Molly from Orangette's chocolate rads, super wickedly easy peanut butter cookies and my godmother's raspberry bars. Not to mention I celebrated Hanukkah, which in addition to be the festival of light, is also the festival of frying things in oil. Oh yeah and there was thanksgiving in the not so distant past and Christmas in the not so distant future. So between all of that rich cooking and eating I just couldn't justify buying and eating filet mignon. Save it for another day.

So in the spirit of the challenge but not the letter, I decided to make my own recipe and creating my own Mushroom Wellington

For the puff pastry I used a recipe that I got from a savory pastry class that I attended at L'Academie Cuisine in Bethesda. This recipe from epicurious is close enough. You can also buy puff pastry from peperridge farms. It is not as good as the real thing but will do in a pinch. I only needed about a third of the dough, the rest is in my freezer for annother day.

For the filling, I created two different mushroom dishes. The base was a mushroom duxelle (which is often used as part of the filling for a traditional Beef Wellington) The recipe goes something like this:

Duxelles

1 tablespoons butter

1/2 pound cremini (aka baby bella) mushrooms, finely chopped (chop them as finely as you can)

1/4 cup minced shallots

2 tablespoons minced garlic

6 tablespoons wine (port would be best but all I had on hand was white wine)

black pepper and salt

1/2 cup of bread crumbs

Preheat oven to 375 degrees

In a large saute pan, heat the butter When it has melted and hot, add the mushrooms and saute for 6 minutes. Add the shallots and garlic and continue to saute for 4 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Add the port wine and cook until almost all the liquid has cooked off, about 4 to 6 minutes. Remove the duxelle from the pan and cool completely and then mix in bread crumbs.

Sauted Mushrooms:

4-6 oz of wild mushrooms (I used shitake and chantrelles) sliced

1 tbl butter

parsley

salt and pepper

Heat the butter in the pan and then throw in the sliced mushrooms. Mushrooms should soften in about 4-6 minutes. Throw in chopped parsley for a little color and season to taste.

To assemble:

Roll out puff pastry to about a 12 inches by 9. Place duxelle mixture in the middle of the pastry and then layer the sauted mushrooms on top.

With a sharp knife, cut the pastry either side of the filling, into strips. Start in the left hand corner and work at a forty-five degree angle towards the filling. Then repeat on the right hand side.

Fold in the pastry ends first and then cross over the pastry strips from alternate sides.

When the mixture is well-wrapped within the pastry, glaze the pastry parcel with the beaten egg. Bake in the oven for 30-40 minutes.

Serves 4

Better Late then Never... October Daring Cooks Challenge: PHO!

So you'd think that with all the time I spend online reading other people's blogs and surfing various forums I'd find the time to update my sad neglected corner of the Internets but then you'd be wrong. I hang my head in shame. It did not help that I plain skipped November's challenge but more on that in a little bit.

October's challenge was Pho, a Vietnamese beef soup. DC is home to many shopping mall center pho joints, some good and other mediocre. My first experience with pho was unfortunately at a mediocre place where the soup tasted kind of flat and non-dimensional. After that I just didn't really try the soup again for a couple of years. The next time I tried it was several years later. I liked the pho I had better but with so many wonderful restaurants competing for my meager paychecks I never really thoguht about another pho trip. And it never occured to me to try making my own, until Jaden of Steamy Kitchen challenged us to make it.

Probably the best part of this recipe was just finding the ingredients! I got to shop at two grocery stores I'd love to patronize more often. I went to my local co-op to buy spices whole sale. The co-op prices are very high but they have all kinds of items you can't get at other places. The other fun store was H-Mart. I've heard great stuff about that store and all of it was true. Their produce is super duper cheap and very fresh. My budget quickly went out the window when I saw all kinds of things I wanted to buy from udon noodles to pocky to korean style fried chicken. Yum!

This was one of the more challenging recipes I've made for Daring Cooks. I know that I say that almost every month but this was one time when I really thought I'd screwed up beyond all help. Part of the problem was that first I forgot to toast the spices, and then I was super busy and kept being interupted so I couldn't get the 3 hour block to make the darn soup. I ended up starting the boiling the soup and then putting the whole pot in my fridge to cook for later. The result was that since I didn't completly boil off the scum, the soup was grey and nasty looking and i was panicking that I had spent all this time and money on a total waste. Fortunatlly once I strained the soup and boiled off the nasty bits, the resulting broth was so flavorful and delcious that i couldn't wait to eat it! The soup was clear and full of complex flavors. With every spoonful you could taste the pure beefiness, the salt, spicy, sweetness of the different spicing on top of the freshess noodles and cilantro. It's the perfect dish for a cold rainy night in fall. And for a change, besides forgetting to toast the spices and not finding star anise, I didn't alter the recipe one bit. Sometimes following the rules works!



This desert was an optional challenge to try deep frying wontons and making some kind of desert. I wanted to make cream cheese wontons, which I occasionally order as a snack from a takeout joint in Northeast. All I had on hand with peach cream cheese my sister had brought up from wegmans. Since I wasn't wild about the cream cheese by itself I added in some chocolate. Chocolate makes many things better including this desert. My husband poo-pooed this desert every step of the way until he ate it and demanded seconds and thirds. Alas I had used the rest of the wontons (you can't seem to buy them in packs smaller than 75 or 100) in huge dumpling/wonton making extravaganza with my sister. This adventure was sadly undocumented by cameras but including me making the dumplings dough from a few months ago since she likes doughy dumplings and us struggling to steam said dumplings in the steaming tray of my rice cooker.

The desert was super easy. You just put a small amount of chocolate and cream cheese in a wonton, fold it up, seal it with egg wash (water will do just fine) and then deep fry it in about 2-3 inches of hot oil for about 3 minutes. Spoon the wantons out and blot them on a paper towel and then serve with a little sugar and (in my case) ice cream!

I'm sad to say that I lamed out of doing the November challenge, which was Sushi. I don't like sushi, don't like eating fish and just got too busy to think out non fish alternatives before the deadline.

Links

Jaden's recipe for Pho

Daring Cooks - Dosas!

I've just started school and a new job so posting my September entry for Daring Cooks. But lucky for my tastebuds I found the time to whip up dosa for this month's Daring Cook challenge.

I swear that when the challenge was unveiled I did a happy dance in my chair. I love love love Indian food. I'm lucky to live within a 10 minute drive of two really excellent Indian restaurants, Tiffins which is for omnivores and Udupi Palace which is vegetarians. And also omnivores who like incredible food. Whenever my husband and I got go to Udupi, in addition to complimentary papa-dams with sauce (which is the Indian equivalent of complimentary chips and salsa at a sit down Mexican joint) they also serve complimentary paper dosa with potatoes, which makes a delicious snack.

Since I am incapabple of following a recipe to a T, this time I tried to do something wacky and go traditional. The proposed recipe suggested using spelt flour but I thought I'd try the more traditional besa flour which is made from chickpeas, (I've heard that chickpea flour does wonders for soft skin, I might have to try that out...) As I understand it, Chickpea dosas are more popular in northern india while lentil/rice batter dosa are popular in southern india. And dosas are often popular as a breakfast treat.

The following week I tried the other traditional recipe using from my favorite Indian chef, Manjula. where you soak lentils for 4-8 hours and then blend it into a paste. Both versions tasted good but it could always stand for some more tweeking. Good thing I have a whole sack of chickpea flour and lentils to spare! Not to mention a spouse who loves Indian food!

I really love the filling, since chickpeas are quickly becoming a beloved staple in my house. They are cheap, versatile and filling. I wasn't sure about using a topping since the usual restaurant dosa didn't come with a topping but I found it brought the whole dish together and made it taste better.

I would also get on my soapbox and say that challenging yourself to cook as a vegan was a great experience. I don't really like the term flexitarian but I suppose I fall into that category because I cook meat maybe 5-6 times in a month. I avoid meat because of economic and ecological reasons and because I have grown to really enjoy the taste of vegetables and can always find new tasty ways to cook with them. I find that once you get out of a meat + side mindset it's a lot easier to plan meals and cook dinner.

Links

The original recipe from Debyi at Healthy Vegan Cooking

Video and Recipe of Manjula cooking lentil dosa, with potato filling.

Recipe for Chickpea Dosa

Daring Cooks - Spanish Rice with musrhoom, chorizo and artichokes

I don’t cook Spanish food very often so this was exciting to try a style of cooking that I’m not used to! I am somewhat familiar with author of this recipe, Jose Andrese who owns something like 6 restaurants in my home town. I’ve only been to Jaleo, his tapas bar and there I had some of the best spinach I’d ever tasted (sautéed with raisins, apples and pine-nuts) and these awesome ham and cheese croquets. Andres was on NPR a few months ago talking about recipes that cost under 10 dollars, and you must go listen to it, he by far more cute and charming than any middle aged chef ought to be.

One of the best parts of this dish was not just making a recipe I’d never tried before but even within that recipe were all kinds of chances to do new things –making aioli from scratch, making a sofregit, cleaning and cutting up fresh artichokes. I felt so satisfied with the end result which was the product of nearly two hours in the kitchen. The aioli took nearly half an hour of persistent pounding (quite the arm work out!) and I recommend making it while you are doing the sorfegit since the sofregit is a relatively hands off dish. You can even make them both ahead of time. Having never cut up artichokes before I was very slow at it and I put too many tough leaves in the dish, which was the only downside to the completed dish.

I ended up changing the recipe around because I don’t like fish, so I used homemade chicken broth in lieu of fish broth and chorizo in lieu of cuttlefish. I thought the final dish was delicious and the aioli adds a nice creaminess to the dish (all coming from the emulsion of the olive oil, no eggs allowed!) that completed the dish.

For the recipe, go to this month’s host Olga of Olga’s Recipes.

Daring Cooks Challenge - Potstickers

I have recently joined the Daring Cooks an offshoot of the Daring Bakers, a group I have admired from afar but lacked the culinary cojones to join. I admit my baking has improved a bit over the years thanks to all my shiny new tools like a KitchenAid and new mixing bowls and pans but I still felt leary about things like yeast and proofing and making caramel. But when I found out about Daring Cooks I knew I should give it a try.

So what and who are the Daring Cooks? We're a collection of food bloggers who ever moth are given a certain challenge to cook something, well daring. And this month it was potstickers. From Scratch. No wontons wrappers for us.

I really love anything savory encased in dough and I always keep some trader joe's gyoza potstickers on hand for those times when I can't be bothered to cook anything else so I jumped at the chance to make dumplings from scratch.

Verdict for me is that while they tasted good, they could have been better. My first error was with the fillling, I didn't mince everything fine enough. Also the recipe called for bamboo shoots and mushoooms which I omitted becuase I didn't have on hand, instead of napa cabbage and scallions I used regular cabbage and some leeks. The flavors were a little bit off.

My second mistake was that while initally I painstakingly wraping up each dumpling individually to a proper uniform size. According to the recipe, it takes about half an hour to fill each dumpling but I hit the hour mark and kept going! After a while I got impatient with the finicky work of wrapping each dumpling so I sped up the process and ended up with dumplings as long as my ring finger. Mr C my husband and number 1 taste-tester who has made potstickers from scrach when his family hosted a foreign exchange student from China and he commented that a proper dumpling was closer to pinky finger size.

Here is the proper recipe from "Use Real Butter"