The 2010 April Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Wolf of Wolf’s Den. She chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make Brunswick Stew. Wolf chose recipes for her challenge from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook by Matt Lee and Ted Lee, and from the Callaway, Virginia Ruritan Club. She offered two recipes – one a longer more tedious one, and one a simpler one.

I decided to adopt the more tedious one, seeing how I already had some homecooked chicken broth in the freezer. I replaced the rabbit’s meat with pork. The stew was one of the most flavourful I’ve ever tasted. Hubby thought that it was simply bursting with flavours! The addition of lemon juice and red wine vinegar gave the stew some tang. Even those most seemed to like it that way, I somewhat preferred the stew before the sourish stuff were added. Maybe it’s just because I do not have much of a preference for sour foods.

Enough said. Here are some pictures. They say that when correctly done, the stew is so chunky and thick that a spoon will stand straight when placed in it. Here is the evidence!

It has been some time since we had friends over for a nice dinner. After some planning, we finally managed to fix a date where our three lovely couple friends could join us. I spent some time pondering over the dinner menu, and finally came up with the following. It’s a mixture of different kinds of cuisines really. A little bit of spanish, a little western, but mostly french.

For appetiser, we decided to serve up some lovely Jambon Iberico that we had received from a lovely lady we stayed with in France. Jambon iberico comes from the black Iberian Pig. It is very expensive and hence not widely available, especially in Singapore. The generosity of our friend in France will always be remembered. We served the Iberico ham with some very sweet and juicy melon and baby spinach.

Next up for soup, we had Chorizo and potato soup. This was not very successful as we could not find Kale here. I am very sure Chinese Kale would not have worked for the recipe. Anyway, with a few tweeks from the husband (he made this), the soup still turned out very nice.

The main course was boeuf bourguignon, served with tri-pepper butter rice and french beans. This recipe was taken from Julia Child’s book – Mastering the art of french cooking. Even though the recipe was rather time-consuming, and involved a fair number of steps, the results were very rewarding. A piece of advice? Use a good red wine. You will not regret it.

And of course, who can forget dessert? Endings must always be sweet. I decided on a warm chocolate tart from Pierre Herme’s book – Desserts. Though the original recipe called for bananas, I decided to use raspberries instead. I think the tartness of the raspberry compliments the bittersweet chocolate very well. And of course, as with all desserts made from Pierre Herme recipes, there were no leftovers.

Most people enjoy a good Miso Cod despite the fact that it usually carries a fairly hefty price tag. And come on, what’s not to like about it? The moist flavour of the black cod steeped in miso that has just the right blend of sweetness and saltiness. Delicious.

I came across some nice cod (at a very good price) at a hokkaido fair and decided to try the dish out. It’s really simple. The only catch is that you do have to plan ahead as you need to marinate the fish in miso for 2-3 days, for the flavours to penetrate fully. The recipe is courtesy of epicurious and can be found here.

The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca.

I didn’t attempt the gluten free recipe but used wheat flour instead. The graham crackers turned out surprisely nice! Unfortunately, I forgot to take pictures of them before proceeding to make the bar. The bar was very yummy too. In fact, a colleague who has eaten nanaimo bars from Nanaimo, Canada gives them a 10/10.

The November 2009 Daring Cooks challenge was brought to you by Audax of Audax Artifex and Rose of The Bite Me Kitchen. They chose sushi as the challenge.
I kinda waited till the eleventh hour to complete this month’s challenge. With the overseas trips and all, I hardly had time to cook, bake, let alone make sushi. Anyway, I steeled my resolve and managed to complete this in the nick of time. I’m still not happy with my dragon roll though. The avocados were too raw and couldn’t adhere to the rice. Otherwise, everything else was tasty. I would however, add a little more water to the rice during cooking. It was not soft enough, in my opinion.

The 2009 October Daring Bakers’ challenge was brought to us by Ami S. She chose macarons from Claudia Fleming’s The Last Course: The Desserts of Gramercy Tavern as the challenge recipe.

I have always enjoyed making macaroons, though they don’t always turn out well because of the lovely humid weather in Singapore. I realised, through a couple of tries, that the Italian Meringue method of making macaroons seem to yield more consistent results. The problem with those are that there is sometimes an air pocket between the base and the shell.

Anyway, since this challenge involved the French meringue method, I decided to give it a shot, yet again. To be honest, even though I was disappointed that I didn’t get macaroons (what resulted after the baking hardly qualify as macaroons to me), I wasn’t quite surprised. The meringue started to bleed pretty quickly, and no feet formed. Even though the bottoms were nice and slightly crisp, the top didn’t have that flat, smooth look that I love.

I made some lovely passion fruit jivara ganache, but decided not to use it. Instead, I chose to fill these macaroons with macadamia ice cream. Hopefully this week, I would have some time to bake up proper macaroons using the Italian meringue method, and fill them with the passion fruit milk choc ganache.