East Meets West...Africa!

West African Peanut Curry and Grilled Sweet Corn at Spork

After a nice relaxing vacation and some other big life events, I decided it's time to start cooking and blogging again!  Our vacation also inspired me to want to go on more vacations, but since we can't always be traveling around the globe I decided I could still cook dishes from all over the world.  So I walked over to our local library and picked up three globally inspired cookbooks - Jamie Oliver's Food Escapes, Cooking Light Global Kitchen, and Mark Bittman's The Best Recipes in the World.  I was in the mood to travel to Africa this weekend after eating some West African Peanut Curry we had in our travels to Bend, OR at a cool little place called Spork (although to our disappointment we did not see any sporks there to eat with).

I decided to begin my journey by checking out one of my favorite cookbooks - Cook's Illustrated's The Best International Recipe.  Flipping through the "Africa and the Middle East" section, I found exactly what I was looking for!

West African Sweet Potato and Peanut Soup

While it wasn't quite the same as the curry, it was pretty tasty.  I went against the advice of the book which says to stick to orange-fleshed varieties of sweet potatoes, otherwise the soup can have an unappealing color.  I bought white ones and I can see what they mean, it was very....drab looking.  But it didn't hurt the flavor at all!

We also needed a little meat in our meal and for that we had to travel all the way to the other coast of the continent.  I flipped through Cooking Light Global Kitchen's "The Middle East and Africa" section and found the perfect pairing to the soup.  That's the only section I've browsed, but so far I'm LOVING the beautiful pictures in it.  While I really like Cook's Illustrated writing style and advice from the Test Kitchen, I really do wish they had more pictures.  That's also the reason I refuse to get Kindle versions of cookbooks because drooling over all the delicious food is my favorite part of cookbooks.  It helps with the experience of wanting to travel to the different parts of the world as well.

East African Braised Chicken

This one I changed up a little bit.  Instead of doing the different chicken pieces, I only did thighs.  Also, instead of opening a bottle of wine just to use 1/2 a cup, I decided to dump in a bottle of beer....because, why not?  While it was braising, I checked online to see if anyone had reviewed it and sure enough, it gets rave reviews! As of today there are 13 5-star reviews which is pretty darn good.  We liked it a lot too.  The sweetness of the raisins and dates were a great combination with the slight spiciness and other Indian inspired flavors. I was a little afraid I'd ruin it with the beer, but I couldn't tell the difference!  Sometime I'd like to do a braising test with water, chicken broth, wine and beer and see if the liquid makes a difference at all.  Maybe I just have a poor palate though, who knows.

All in all it's been a successful journey so far.  Tomorrow night we plan on traveling across the ocean to Brazil so stay tuned!

Build-A-Font Workshop

My dreams have finally come true!  That's right, today I created my very own fonts.  It was so easy and fun, I might just make some more tonight!  I'm very thankful that the makers of iFontMaker decided to make a Windows 8 version of their app.  I was seriously contemplating getting an iPad just so I could use it.

What better way to show off my cool new fonts than on some of my delicious food pictures?  On the left is a font I called "SkinnySnowmen" featured on a bowl of Spicy Southwest Pumpkin Soup I made last fall.  I made the soup for my brother and his girlfriend when they came to town to visit, and it was a big hit!

And on the right we have my new font called "Snowmen" on a plate of crispy, flaky catfish that I made while the boyfriend was away.  It was the first time I'd used my little deep fryer in a while, and it was a huge success.  I couldn't believe how great the fish turned out.  My favorite part though was the dipping sauce.  It was a great spicy alternative to tartar sauce.

Obviously I have snowmen on the brain today.  My house is still full of them...I think there are about a dozen of them staring at me right now while I type this.  And we got way more than enough snow the last few days to go make a real live Frosty, but instead I stayed inside creating these cool fonts.  I hope they push out some updates to the app as I think it could be even better.  The main thing I noticed is that it seems to only create fixed width fonts.  You'll notice that the i's take up the same amount of room as the w's and m's, which I'm not a huge fan of.  It makes the words too spaced out.  But I have faith that they'll fix that and some other things, hopefully soon!

Menu Item Numero Uno

If I ever open my own restaurant I think I found the first thing that will definitely be on the menu, especially during the winter. This Butternut Squash Soup will warm you up on even the chilliest of days. It's the perfect menu item, no matter what type of restaurant - little soup and sandwich bistro, specialty baked goods and treats, five star gourmet. I could see people coming back again and again just for this soup.

Butternut Squash Soup with a Kick

It would be a great appetizer as it wakens all your taste buds. At first you taste the sweet butternut squash and coconut milk, then you get a hint of thyme and sour cream before the heat of the jalapeno fills your mouth. Every bite is a journey for your mouth.

Quick & Dirty

Changes:

• I didn't remove ALL of the jalapeno seeds because I wanted to make sure it had enough "kick".  I left about half of them in, and it was just about perfect for my taste buds
• Sprinkled some dry thyme on top, didn't have any fresh
• Also ate it with whole wheat crackers mixed in, very very tasty

Yuminess:

• The mix of sweet and spicy is my favorite, and this is a new combo of the two for me
• Both the warmness and the spiciness of the soup is perfect for a cold winter day
• I ate it all too fast to try it, but this would probably freeze well if you made a huge batch of it

Sadness:

• I was selfish and ate it all myself, next time I'll try to make enough to share
• Butternut squash is kind of a pain to work with, otherwise I would make this all the time
• Making soup like this makes me want to get an immersion blender...just what I need, another kitchen gadget!