I like a good challenge and whenever I see those lovely food blogs with results from the Daring Bakers Challenge, I’m in awe and envy. When I finally got around to joining the group, I froze when I saw my first challenge for March 2009: Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna (Lasagne Verdi Al Forno). I was expecting to make dessert or bake cakes — something for my insatiable sweet tooth…something easier. But no, it turns out my “initiation” into the Daring Bakers would be a very laborious one. I was as scared as I was decades ago when the swimming instructor asked us to jump into the pool at the 6″ feet mark on our first class. Are you serious? What did I get myself into?!

THIS, dear readers:

YUMMMMMMM. As with life’s big challenges, this challenge has great rewards. This lasagna melts in your mouth. There’s homemade lasagne, and then there’s memorable homemade gourmet lasagne. I could not believe how delicious it was! I can still remember the taste of the ragu, the nice tenderness of homemade pasta, the rich bechamel sauce.

This lasagne marks a few firsts for me:

1) Very first lasagne. You read that right: I’ve never made lasagne in my entire life. It just looked like it was too much work. Yeah, look what I ended up doing! Haha.

2) Bechamel sauce.

3) Handmade pasta and without the aid of a machine, too. Oh, dear, this is a biggie. The whole thing was a workout.

4) Ragu sauce. I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than two hours to make a pasta sauce. No sir.

Woohoo!

Would I make it again? YES! But not without a pasta machine. ;-) The challenge did not require us to buy one, but god, I wish I had. Oh well, that’s done. I can now say that the very first lasagne I made entailed a back-breaking 2-hour manual pasta rolling ordeal. No wonder I put it off for more than a week! I had to muster enough courage and strength to get the ball rolling. Literally. This started out as a dough ball that you flatten with your rolling pin if you do it by hand. It has a gorgeous green color because of the spinach.  I used frozen chopped spinach and this is an egg pasta.

I dried it as cut sheets for 24 hours before cooking. I dared not to take photos of the transformation of our dining room into a pasta drying area with the sheets hanging on freshly cleaned table cloth-covered chairs.

It’s more delicate than store-bought pasta, understandably. I had some tears here and there. It looked very pretty as I assembled the dish. This is how one layer looks like, beginning with the spinach lasagna sheet overlapping each other:

Rich and creamy bechamel sauce:

The MMMMM-inducing ragu sauce:

More bechamel on top of the ragu sauce.

Topped with grated parmigiano reggiano cheese:

And this is the topmost layer of my lasagne, with a generous amount of bechamel and grated parmigiano reggiano cheese:

Our kitchen smelled amazing while it was cooking:

Here, the fruit of my labor:

I started making this 4pm (for the pasta sheets) and we ate this at 11pm the next day. It’s no walk in the park, but I’m glad I did it! WHEW!!!!!!

I will post a PDF recipe tonight. :)

The March 2009 challenge is hosted by Mary of Beans and Caviar, Melinda of Melbourne Larder and Enza of Io Da Grande. They have chosen Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna from The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper as the challenge.

People close to me know that I laugh and joke a lot. In fact, I incessantly crack myself up for reasons that only I will understand. Take for example, when we were at Whole Foods I prodded Dan to ask where we could find “black eyed peas” because I couldn’t say it without giggling and thinking about the hip hop group. Hehe. Childishness aside, this black-eyed peas dish got the last laugh because…it was so good! It was flavorful with a bit of punch, and it is hearty enough to be eaten as a meal.

I had not cooked beans in a long time and this marked my first time to use [giggle] black-eyed peas [/giggle] in a dish. I haven’t eaten beans cooked this way either, so I didn’t know what to expect.

I just trusted the recipe — this is new territory for me not only for the unfamiliarity of dish but also because I rarely follow the recipe.

Little did I know that a couple of weeks later, I’d find myself strictly adhering to the bread recipe to get it right. This is how progress starts for someone who has aversion to rigidity and structure.

See? I promptly followed the instruction to cook the shrimp and then add wine.

And mix the bean mixture again.

My self-control on changing the recipe paid off:

It looks like it has curry, but it doesn’t. It just has the perfect touch of spiciness from the red pepper flakes, garlic and black pepper. It will warm and fill you up on a cold night. You can enjoy it warm on its own or with rice, or store in the freezer or refrigerator for later consumption. We noticed that it tasted even better the next day.

This soup is definitely a keeper!

Here’s the recipe: Continue Reading

This is an Irish Chocolate cupcake from Sprinkles Cupcakes: Belgian dark chocolate cake topped with Bailish Irish cream cheese frosting. It’s very good! If you’re anywhere near one of their shops and want to try this (I highly recommend it), it’s available only until today. We’ll post a review later…but for now, enjoy your St. Patty’s day and party responsibly! :-)

Hurray!

It’s true, it’s right up there with making a flaky pie crust: I didn’t think I’d ever make it — my own bread. I used to break out in a cold sweat when I thought about it.

While I was in Vancouver a months ago I learned of the book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day [also popularly referred to ABin5 in Twitter] through Elle. I made a note to myself to buy it when I go back to the US, because I was too busy at the time.

So here I was, got the book, baking stone (well I used a pizza stone), oven thermometer and single edge blades from the hardware store and started baking boulés using the book’s Master Recipe. In fact, I made 8 boules to date. I’m a perfectionist, what can I say? I still have to work on the boules looking like Hershey’s kisses, though. Then I moved on to another recipe: whole wheat bread. The first one in the oven was a disaster because I used the wrong size of pan, so the bread was half loaf, the bad kind — halved horizontally. It looked like a recession bread, haha.

I made another one the following evening using the proportion for two loaves for make up for the larger pan. [Insert angelic chorus...] See:

The hardest part for me with these breads is waiting for the bread to cool down so I can slice it. I waited 1.5 hours to slice this brown babe.

The crust is not hard, but not too soft, either. It’s perfect. The bread has a hint of sweetness from the honey, but you can barely taste it. It is perfect for making sandwiches. I’m completely happy just slathering butter on it. It’s a very filling snack, too. One slice is enough.

I’m so happy. I did it, I did it! I made a loaf bread and it didn’t suck. I fully credit the book, which I think you should get right now if you’re even thinking about trying to make bread. It is no knead bread. You don’t need a stand mixer with a dough hook. The latter is important to me because my Kitchenaid is in Vancouver, hehe. And you know what — and trust me when I say that I can’t believe I’m saying this:

Making bread is easy!

I’m now one of those who join the chorus in praising Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day as THE book that changed my attitude towards baking breads and completely turned me into that Crazy Bread Baking Lady.

This is also our very first entry into any cooking/baking challenge among the food blogging community. It really is hard for me — for us — to join them because of everything going on, including my regular travel. But I’m committing to 3 challenges per month, including Ben‘s Homemade Food Challenge. This month is for Homemade Bread. I think when I saw Ben’s announcement, it was after I baked my first boule, and it couldn’t have been better timed!

Here’s the recipe from the book: Continue Reading

The past couple of weeks, I’ve made a dent on my very long list of Things-To-Cook from Scratch, crossing out homemade bread, caramel popcorn, granola and risotto. You could say I’m feeling very adventurous these days.

I made this a couple of weeks ago and it was pretty dang good. I put it on top of some greens and together they worked out quite well. I know…what the heck of a combination is that, risotto with a bed of greens? Well, it just came up because we had leafy greens to eat or they will go bad. Are you guys like that, too? I hate throwing out food especially since we go to Whole Foods, which is not exactly cheap. During these times, we are lucky to be enjoying good food so I try to get what we buy onto the plate and into our mouths where we meant to put them. Admittedly, if Dan and I were to let ourselves go buy what we want, we’d easily rack up $300 a week in groceries. And that’s just for the two of us. It’s so easy to get carried away in the supermarket when they make everything just look so enticing.

So there, that’s the story behind that. Many of the concoctions we’ve had has some similar reasoning somewhere.

I loved the risotto, which is a given since I enjoy rice dishes. Dan loved it in spite of him not being a mushroom person (as I’ve mentioned many times). I hope you don’t think I’m dissing him, I just want to let you know in case you are serving someone with the same taste preference, that perhaps they just might like it.

The yellow hole-y chips on the risotto are parmesan crisps. They’re a combination of grated parmesan and panko breading that I thought of adding to bring a variation in texture to the dish. Too much creaminess can be so unappealing.

I used a cookie cutter to “shape” them.

The ‘stenciled’ crisps did not turn out as good as I planned, but they looked pretty decent. I’m glad I skipped using some other intricate shape. It would just be a loss.

If you don’t have panko bread, just make the crisps out out plain parmesan. This would not be an issue. I just added panko as an experiment. :-)

Here’s the recipe for you to try. And be sure to let me know how yours turns out. We do love getting feedback (just not spam, please). Continue Reading

So now is the moment of truth! We have a winner for the MixMyGranola Contest:

Here’s how we picked the winner out of all the comments, tweets, blog posts and newsletter subscriptions: First we listed everything on a spreadsheet: 1 entry for each except for the newsletter, which entitled each entrant to 2 entries. That means their email address were entered twice in the list. Next, I put the list in the List Randomizer to make it fair for everyone. I will not paste the entire list here because of the email addresses.

After the list goes through the List Randomizer and has numbers 1-97, I used the Number Generator to pick a number in that range:

It picked 88. Who could that be? **DRUMROLL ** Continue Reading

Don’t forget to join in the fun to win a MixMyGranola gift certificate! There’s still time! Contest ends March 3, 5PM PST. :)

Here’s a quick, easy and tasty recipe for those of you out who like fried fish fillet. As a child, I remember feasting on crispy fish fillets during our summer outings to various tourist locations in the Philippines. My grandfather played host to these trips for the international students (mostly Koreans) in the school he used to head and I, of course, would not miss any of it. And some of these students have children my age. It was so funny in the beginning because us kids could not understand each other — they were still learning English and so we were all just nodding, smiling, laughing, playing and eating! The language barrier did not keep us from enjoying each others company.

So where was I.. yes the fish! One of my favorite packed lunch order at the Korean restaurant that catered for us was the spicy fish fillet with steamed rice. I have distinct memories of tastes of food from childhood and this is one of them. I have been so desperate for decades to find this taste or replicate it until I stumbled upon the basa fish and this simple concoction. It sounds ridiculous that I have been craving this for more than 10 years! I’m so relieved to “find” it once again and be able to satiate this craving. I cooked and ate this two days in a row! It was that bad.

I have to tell you something else: it tastes so close to McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets! I promise I was not hallucinating. So FYI, this could be a good alternative McNuggets fix.

Here’s another accidental discovery that accompanied this dish: I ran out of flour and resorted to using cornstarch for dredging. It gave a really nice, crackly-crispiness that I have been looking for a very long time. Perfect!

As for the fish, you might be wondering how in the world I decided to pick basa fish. I didn’t know this fish until it called out to me at the Chinese supermarket. This was sold frozen and although I don’t usually buy frozen fish, I was curious to try it. The meat is white (compared to the orange-coral-red-ish color of salmon) with thick flakes, compared to the finer tilapia meat. It keeps its shape during pan frying and is not as delicate as some fish fillets. I makes perfect sense for making fish sticks. It won’t fall off your fingers or fork as other fish varieties would.

You can also try the following recipe with the fish of your preference. Don’t forget to let me know if it worked out for you! Continue Reading