Well, I’ve done it, folks — joined Daring Kitchen. This is the first recipe I’ve cooked for the site! The post started out with an intro from our host:

Hi all, this is Olga from Las Cosas de Olga and Olga’s Recipes and I’m pleased to be your host at August Daring Cooks Challenge. I’ve chosen a delicious Spanish recipe, Rice with mushrooms, cuttlefish and artichokes by José Andrés, one of the most important Spanish Chefs at the moment.

I have very little need for Lots of Food on my own, so I made this for my parents at their house. They both expressed grave doubts about the edibility of squid in general, and especially the squid I made after it had been cooking so long. But in the end, we all were pretty happy with the way it came out; they even asked for seconds.

My mom is on the “Sugar Busters” diet, so the one major substitution I made was to use brown rice; accordingly I left out the saffron/turmeric, since I’m not really sure what it would have been coloring.

As you’ll see, it came out looking pretty much like a big plate of glorp, something Calvin would stab at and make disgusted faces — but it tasted great! This was my first time making aïoli (I’ve actually made it since), and I’ll freely admit that I probably should have worked it up a bit more to try to get some creaminess going, or maybe used the more modern recipe with raw eggs. Ah, well — next time… here’s the original recipe:

Rice with mushrooms, cuttlefish and artichokes
Cooking time: 45 minutes

4 Artichokes (you can use jarred or freezed if fresh are not available)
12 Mushrooms (button or Portobello)
1 or 2 Bay leaves (optional but highly recommended)
1 glass of white wine
2 Cuttlefish (you can use freezed cuttlefish or squid if you don’t find it fresh)
Sofregit (see recipe below)
2 cups short grain rice (Spanish types Calasparra or Montsant are preferred, but you can choose any other short grain. This kind of rice absorbs flavor very well) – about ½ cup per person
Water or Fish Stock (use 1 ½ cup of liquid per ½ cup of rice)
Saffron threads (if you can’t find it or afford to buy it, you can substitute it for turmeric or yellow coloring powder)
Allioli (olive oil and garlic sauce, similar to mayonnaise sauce) - optional

1 ) Cut the cuttlefish in little strips.
2 ) Add 1 or 2 tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan and put the cuttlefish in the pan.
3 ) If you use fresh artichokes, clean them as shown in the video in tip #7. Cut artichokes in eights.
4 ) Clean the mushrooms and cut them in fourths.
5 ) Add a bay leaf to the cuttlefish and add also the artichokes and the mushrooms.
6 ) Sauté until we get a golden color in the artichokes.
7 ) Put a touch of white wine so all the solids in the bottom of the get mixed, getting a more flavorful dish.
8 ) Add a couple or three tablespoons of sofregit and mix to make sure everything gets impregnated with the sofregit.
9 ) Add all the liquid and bring it to boil.
10 ) Add all the rice. Let boil for about 5 minutes in heavy heat.
11 ) Add some saffron thread to enrich the dish with its flavor and color. Stir a little bit so the rice and the other ingredients get the entire flavor. If you’re using turmeric or yellow coloring, use only 1/4 teaspoon.
12 ) Turn to low heat and boil for another 8 minutes (or until rice is a little softer than “al dente”)
13 ) Put the pan away from heat and let the rice stand a couple of minutes.

Sofregit
Cooking time: aprox. 1 hour
(a well cooked and fragrant sauce made of olive oil, tomatoes, garlic and onions, and may at times
different vegetables such as peppers or mushrooms)

2 tablespoons of olive oil
5 big red ripe tomatoes, chopped
2 small onions, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped (optional)
4 or 5 garlic cloves, chopped
1 cup of button or Portobello mushrooms, chopped (optional)
1 Bay leaf
Salt
Touch of ground cumin
Touch of dried oregano

1 ) Put all the ingredients together in a frying pan and sauté slowly until all vegetables are soft.
2 ) Taste and salt if necessary (maybe it’s not!)

Allioli is the optional part of the recipe. You must choose one of the two recipes given, even though I highly recommend you to try traditional one. Allioli is served together with the rice and it gives a very nice taste.

Allioli (Traditional recipe)
Cooking time: 20 min aprox.
Ingredients:

4 garlic cloves, peeled
Pinch of salt
Fresh lemon juice (some drops)
Extra-virgin olive oil (Spanish preferred but not essential)

Directions:

1 ) Place the garlic in a mortar along with the salt.
2 ) Using a pestle, smash the garlic cloves to a smooth paste. (The salt stops the garlic from slipping at the bottom of the mortar as you pound it down.)
3 ) Add the lemon juice to the garlic.
4 ) Drop by drop; pour the olive oil into the mortar slowly as you continue to crush the paste with your pestle.
5 ) Keep turning your pestle in a slow, continuous circular motion in the mortar. The drip needs to be slow and steady. Make sure the paste soaks up the olive oil as you go.
6 ) Keep adding the oil, drop by drop, until you have the consistency of a very thick mayonnaise. If your allioli gets too dense, add water to thin it out. This takes time—around 20 minutes of slow motion around the mortar—to create a dense, rich sauce.

José’s tips for traditional recipe: It’s hard to think that, when you start crushing the garlic, it will ever turn into something as dense and smooth as allioli. But don’t give up. It’s worth the extra time and effort to see the oil and garlic come together before your eyes. Just make sure you’re adding the olive oil slowly, drop by drop. Keep moving the pestle around the mortar in a circular motion and keep dreaming of the thick, creamy sauce at the end of it all.

This is a family recipe, but I’m really not sure where it’s from. I’d sort of assume The South, but who knows? From a random sampling of my friends, though, I’ve determined that it’s not exactly a common dish… or one that they think sounds even remotely tasty… but once I’ve cooked it for them, they agree: it’s absolutely delicious. And it can be breakfast, lunch, dinner, or your midnight snack. It’s the every-hour meal!

Fried Egg Sandwich

Two slices sourdough bread
1 Tbs Mayonnaise
2-3 garlic pickle slices
2 eggs
1 Tbs butter

1) It’s pretty simple, really. Fry the eggs in the butter over medium heat. Break the yolks, or you’ll have one messy sandwich! Make sure it’s firm, but not brown at all. Flip it if you need to; grind some pepper in if you feel like it.
2) Toast the sourdough; spread mayo on one piece.
3) Place the pickles and eggs on the bread. Make a sandwich. Eat it.

I’ve probably eaten about a hundred of these in my life, and I never regret it. It’s tangy, savory, wheaty, salty… entirely satisfying.

Mmmmmmmmm, cheese. I’ve always liked nibbling on various sorts of cheese, but it’s only recently, as I’ve become significantly more gastronomically adventurous (I blame Anthony Bourdain), that I’ve become really interested in trying and enjoying cheeses that I previously would’ve found too stinky or scary-looking. Oh, I’m not abandoning my old favorites: fresh mozzarella, a simple swiss, and a soft chevre all have permanent places in my heart. But I’ve found some others that are pretty excellent contenders. Here are some recent, favorite discoveries:

Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam - probably the best Triple Cream I’ve had. I couldn’t get over this stuff. It weighs in at a somewhat balk-worthy $18 for a small round, but a little goes a long ways, and every bit is worth it. It’s buttery, nutty, and subtle, and has a flavor that somehow blossoms as you let it melt in your mouth. It’s also got an extremely creamy, soft texture (even moreso than your average brie). Slice up a good baguette with it, open a rosé,* and you’ve got yourself a delicious meal. If you like creamy, brie-style cheeses, you’re going to love this.

Cypress Grove Midnight Moon - This is an aged, firm goat’s milk cheese with a lot of zingy, goaty flavor. It’s better with fruit or preserves than with bread or crackers, because the sharpness of the flavor and drier texture plays well against sweet, juicy things; I could see it going well in certain types of pasta sauces or in salads, though.

Beecher’s Blank Slate (Honey) - From Beecher’s (Seattle shout-out!) comes this very soft, very mild honey-flavored cheese. It’s really spreadable, and goes beautifully with sourdough, though I’ve also used it in salad (see recipe below). It’s remarkably friendly, and will go with practically any fruit or soft bread… and I’d like to try making a cheesecake of it one day.

Blank Slate Salad
This is a sweet, summery salad, which makes a nice end to a meal.
Makes: 4 side salads | Prep time: 30 mins.

1 6 oz. tub Beecher’s Blank Slate (Honey) cheese
2 medium red onions
2 soft, semi-firm peaches
1 head green-leaf lettuce
1 1/2 Tbsp champagne vinegar
3 Tbsp walnut oil
2 Tbsp almond slivers
1 Tbsp olive oil
dash of salt
salt and pepper to taste

1) Heat olive oil in a large frying pan on medium-high heat. Slice onions into semi-thick rings, and throw them into the pan. Throw a dash of salt on top of them. Break up the rings and let them start to fry; keep moving them, but give them plenty of time to cook down. The goal is to cook them until they’re cooked through and don’t have too much spicy-onion flavor, but not to the point where they’re limp and browned all over.
2) In a separate, small pan, heat about 1/2 Tbsp of the walnut oil on medium-high heat and roast the almond slivers in it. These will brown fast, and you want them to get golden-colored on the outside, but not to smoke or have any burnt flavor, so make sure to have a small bowl ready so that you can get them out of the frying pan as soon as they have reached the right color.
3) Wash and tear lettuce; wash and slice peaches.
4) Mix together the remaining walnut oil and the champagne vinegar as a dressing.
5) When the onions are done cooking (it takes 20-30 mins), assemble salads: a bed of lettuce, then the sliced peaches, then the onions, and the almonds. Crumble the cheese on top of each, dress them, and salt and pepper them to taste.

* This post wasn’t supposed to be about wine, but I can’t let this go without mentioning that I’ve recently fallen hard for rosés of pinot noir. Pinot’s such a meaty grape, but dry enough that when you make a pinot from it, you get a light, friendly, but entirely tasty (and not too sweet) lunchtime-y wine. In this field, C.R. Sandidge makes a reliably good Great Gams, although earlier years have been better. This weekend, I also tasted a lovely pinot rosé from Elk Cove, which makes such an amazingly fine reserve pinot (warning: that one’s not a $20 bottle) that you know they have a good feel for the grape overall.

As promised, here’s the almost vegetarian French onion soup recipe!

I started off with this Basic Vegetable Stock, which I let cook on the stove for a few hours:

3 Carrots (chopped)
2 Celery stalks (chopped)
1/2 cup Green Onions (as I was saving the white ones for the soup itself)
1/3 cup Parsley
3/4 cup dry Sherry
1 Bay leaf
a bouquet (about 8 sprigs) of Thyme
1 Tbsp. Peppercorns
1 Tbsp. Butter
About three quarts of water

While that was bubbling away on the stove, I roasted in a large casserole dish at 450° F:

1 medium Eggplant (cubed)
a dozen Cherry Tomatoes (each cut in half; they don’t have to be cherry tomatoes, it’s just what I had on hand)
a dash of Smokey-flavored Salt
1 Tbsp. Olive oil (just enough to coat the vegetables)

When the roasting vegetables had started to get brownish, I removed them from the oven. I removed the carrots and other vegetables from the stock pot, and added the roasted vegetables to it. The stock had already been a nice tan-ish color, but once I added the roasted vegetables, it started to get really dark. I let it go for awhile (probably an hour) and then came back to taste it. It was at this point that I took a page from one of my favorite Roald Dahl books (and that’s quite a competition!), and started moving around my kitchen, opening up my cupboards and pulling things out at random to see what I had that could go into it. It was clearly lacking something.

I added some spices (Herbs de Provençe, Basil, and a few Cloves), a bit more salt, and then the thing which made it taste almost-perfect but which also makes it not totally vegetarian: about two tablespoons of Worcestershire Sauce. It gave it a zing, a bite, and a lot of character, while the roasted vegetables gave it more substance than a regular vegetable broth generally has.

Full of hope that I’d created a good enough stock, I started in on the vegetables. First, I cooked the onions…

and then I cooked them some more…

And then finally started the actual assembly process: a slice of bread into the onion soup crock, then some of the onions, then the broth, and finally, about 3/4 of a cup of grated swiss cheese (I decided on a mixture of Gruyere, Emmentaler, Appenzeller) to completely cover the top. I baked it for just over 10 minutes at 450° F. Here’s the finished product, just prior to me digging in:

All in all, it was delicious, if I do say so myself. Was it beef stocky enough? Probably not. And I failed in my quest to make a totally vegetarian stock. On the other hand, it was extremely flavorful and added much to the soup that would not have been there if I’d gone with your average thin veggie stock. The butter gave the stock an oiliness and creaminess that was extremely appealing; the roasted eggplant made it seem meatier. It was an awful lot of work just to get to a bowl of onion soup, though, so I’d say if you’re going to bother going through all this, you should definitely make a large batch of stock. Luckily, I have quite a bit left, so all I really have to do is buy some more onions, and I’ll be in onion soup for a week or two!*

*(I also used the stock for a veggie-version of pho, which, I gotta tell you, was near-heavenly. Stock, rice noodles, bean sprouts, sliced green onions, mint, cilantro, basil, lime, and Sriracha sauce all came together for a very good cause.)

After reading a zillion different articles, recipes, and entire websites devoted to the idea that fondant is so hard to get right, I decided to just bite the bullet and do it. I didn’t put my fondant on a happily iced cake because I honestly didn’t have an occasion for cake-baking. I just wanted to play with fondant!

If I had had an occasion for fondant-making, it would have been for my mom’s recent birthday, or Mother’s Day. But she has been on a no-sugar diet. Still, the occasion made me think of possible ways to create a cake she’d love, and so I decided to go with her favorite fantastical animal: the dragon.

Ideally this little fella would be sitting on a pile of “gold” of some sort. I almost wanted to build some wacky construction of variously-sized mini, medi, regular, and humongous into a great big cupcake cake for him. If only I wasn’t so dreadfully terrified that any CCC invariably ends in wreckage.

There are tons of fondant recipes out there. Here’s the basic formula that I used, which is based on several different websites:

Fondant

3 Tbsp softened butter
3 Tbsp corn syrup
1/2 tsp anise extract (yep, I used anise. Next time I’ll probably go with almond for a pseudo-marzipan experience!)
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 lb sifted confectioner’s sugar
Food coloring as desired (for brighter colors, I’d say about 3-4 drops per 1/2 cup fondant).

1. Mix together the wet ingredients with a mixing paddle (not a whisk attachment!)
2. Slowly add sugar until it starts to look dry enough.
3. Keep mixing until it forms a lump around the mixing paddle. It shouldn’t be sticking to the sides of the bowl much.
4. Break off as much fondant as you need for each color. I rolled each ball of fondant up and then poked my finger into it to create a hole that went to the middle of the ball. Then I put the food coloring in the hole, closed it up, and kneaded it until it was a consistent color. (This didn’t take long.)

Have fun!

I feel like I owe Bea at La Tartine Gourmande a link, because I have started stealing, and thoroughly enjoying, recipes that she’s posted. I’ve been on a Foodie Blog kick lately, and hers is my favorite. Her recipes range from fairly easy to oh-so-very fancy, and the photography is delightfully tasty.

Last night I made the Bohemienne, which is quite a bit like Ratatouille, but simpler, and lighter. And, my goodness, it was tasty! I didn’t have rustic bread, but I did have a failed French bread experiment (it tasted fine, it just wasn’t quite so light and airy as French bread ought to be). So I diced and turned that into garlic croutons, and put them atop the Bohemienne. It was a very hearty thing to have on a cold snowy night, and I’m sure I’ll be enjoying the leftovers all week.

A little over a week ago, I made a dinner of her Fennel Salad (though I left out the beets, and used blueberries, which are in season, rather than cherries) and Sole Roulades, both of which were terrific. Next time, though, I’ll slice the fennel a bit thinner… and also check the fish with a thermometer instead of just assuming the inside was done just because the outside was.

Next on my to-cook list from Bea are the Potato Nests with Avocado and Smoked Salmon. And I can’t wait to see her cookbook.

With all these foodie blogs a-stewin’ in my brain, it’s fairly inevitable that I would start spewing out some recipes myself. Here’s one I tried out a few days ago:

Risotto with Roasted Red Pepper and Goat Cheese
(Serves 4)

1 cup Arborio rice
2 cups vegetable broth
1 yellow onion, diced
1 cup sliced roasted red bell pepper (I used the kind that comes in a jar and can be found next to the pepperoncini at the market, but you could roast them yourself)
6 oz goat cheese, broken into chunks the size of cherries.
2 Tbs butter
3 Tbs raw pine nuts
3 Tbs olive oil

1. Start by combining the butter, rice, and onions in a large saucepan on high heat. Stir until the onions are cooked (but not browning) and the rice is looking a nice golden color.
2. Slowly add the broth, stirring as you go. Allow the rice to cook for about 20-25 minutes, but keep stirring so that it doesn’t stick. Once the rice is cooked, turn the heat to low.
3. Add the bell pepper, and stir so that it is warmed.
4. Heat the olive oil in a small frying pan on high heat. Roast the pine nuts, making sure to keep them moving. This happens faster than you might think. As soon as they are looking a roasted-brown color, add them to the risotto.
5. Take the risotto off the heat, and add the goat cheese. Stir as little as possible. Enjoy!

I’m contemplating adding a bit of lemon juice, and perhaps some tarragon to this mix. We ate it alongside salmon with a mesquite rub and a great Pinot Noir, which went quite well with the pine nuts in the risotto.

I’m also mulling over some sort of pasta concoction involving Drunken Goat cheese and almond slivers. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I made this one up awhile back as a tasty breakfast food. I have a problem with breakfast foods in that most of them are sweet and/or warm to an extent that makes me just want to go back to bed. Anyway, this one’s best with chilled apples, and the lemon juice adds a good bit of zing, as well!

Apple nut salad

Ingredients:

2 to 10 apples. Go crazy if you want.
1/8 to 1/4 a cup of almond slivers
1 Tbsp walnut or almond oil — it’s counter–intuitive, but I prefer walnut oil
1 Tbsp brown sugar
1 tsp. lemon juice

1. Cut Granny Smith apples into small cubes, about 1/2″ each. Pour Lemon juice over apples, and stir them so that the lemon juice coats them amply.
2. In a frying pan, heat up walnut or almond oil. Roast almond slivers in it until they turn a light brown, sprinkling in brown sugar an allowing it to slightly caramelize. When these are finally done, take them off the heat and let them cool for a few minutes, then stir them into the apples. This is ready to serve!
3. If it doesn’t all get eaten, it keeps in the fridge pretty well. Just add extra lemon juice if you are worried that the apples will turn brown.