Daring Cooks Satays

Cuppy, of Cuppylicious chose a recipe for satays for this month's challenge. She wanted us to focus on the marinade. Options were presented, opportunities existed to marinade and cook just about anything you could put on a stick.

Her first example was a pork satay, which I have never made. I have made chicken, beef and shrimp satays. I actually think that the flavor of most foods improve when they are served on a stick.

The pork was cut into strips, placed in a ziploc bag with all the ingredients that had been quickly processed in the food processor.

1/2 small onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 Thai dragon (bird’s eye) chili pepper
2 T ginger root, chopped (4 cm cubed)
2 T lemon juice (1 oz or 30 mls)
1 T soy sauce (0.5 oz or 15 mls)
1 T fish sauce (0.5 oz or 15 mls)
1 tsp ground coriander (5 mls)
1 tsp ground cumin (5 mls)
1/2 tsp ground turmeric (2-2.5 mls)
2 T vegetable oil (or peanut or olive oil) (30 mls)

I wasn't sure what a Thai dragon was, but I had some dried red peppers that worked. I let it marinate over night and then grilled them.

I served them with the
Thai pepper dip

4 Tbsp soy sauce (2 oz or 60 mls)
1 Tbsp lemon juice (0.5 oz or 15 mls)
1 tsp brown sugar (5 mls)
1-2 dried red chilies, chopped (keep the seeds for heat)
1 finely chopped green onion (scallion)

Mix well. Serve chilled or room temperature.

and some peanut noodles. I am very tempted to try some of the tofu that I see presented.

Mushrooms, Artichokes and Cuttlefish

I signed up for the Daring Cooks Challenge. Several of the blogs that I watch are Daring Bakers. I'm not a big fan of pushing myself to new baking extremes. Baking a cake can drives me insane. Starting with folding in egg whites, really, do you fold? Like a towel? Too much and you don't get the lift, too little and your cake will rise funny. Then, cutting off the top of the cake so it is nice and flat seems so wasteful. Anyway, I like to cook more than I like to bake. So I joined.

There are all kinds of secretive rules surrounding the challenge, the web site, The Daring Kitchen, lists all the rules. But on the 14th of each month, we can all post our blogs about the challenge.

I have to type up the cooking experience before the 14th however, I would forget half of the details. This month's challenge was hosted by Olga from Las Cosas de Olga It is rice with mushrooms, artichokes and cuttlefish. Olga's blog has some beautiful pictures and is written in Spanish. It was great fun to make something clearly different from my usual fare.

However some of the ingredients were a little challenging to find here in the middle of Texas. Like cuttlefish, cuttlefish is in the same family as squid so I substituted squid. The recipe called for two cuttlefish, I wish there had been a size or weight associated with the ingredient. I added more squid than two since mine were small, but could easily have added even more. Artichokes were $3.99 a piece at my local grocery store, so I substituted frozen, already cleaned, I thought they were a bargain.

The dish involves a sofregit, cooked down onions, tomatoes, garlic, peppers. Which is added to the short rice and fish stock. I made that first and it filled the house with the arouma. The dish is finished with an aioli and Olga lists two ways to make it, the traditional method with only a mortar and pestle and the modern method with a mixer. Next time I will try modern. The 20 minutes of hand grinding was a little much for me.




We enjoyed the dish, we felt like we had a little piece of Spain in our kitchen.