Cooking Digest 6/23-6/29

Below the fold: Bête Noire Bars and other thwarted cooking projects, Mexican Slaw, and Cherry Vinegar:

Bête Noire Bars:
Like revenge, best served cold!

Confession: I've spent the last 2+ weeks in a deep obsession over Anthony Bourdain and Nigella Lawson's new cooking show on ABC.  Do I ever watch cooking shows? No. Do I even watch TV? No. Do I plan to attend the open call anyway? Yes!  Because I can!

And eager beaver that I am, I immediately printed out the application they had posted on line and Got To Work on the three recipe challenges awaiting me there:

1. Turn a traditional spaghetti-and-meatballs dinner into a handheld snack.  Result: Capellini cups with meatballs, using this recipe for Spaghetti Frittatas and the insanely yummy meatballs and pan sauce recipe from The Complete Meat Cookbook.
2. Create a gourmet dish inspired by the flavors of Mexico.  Result: Martha Stewart's Mexican Corn Cakes topped with Robert Rodriguez's Puerco Pibil topped with lime-cilantro slaw.  Delicious, and I got a kick out of pairing Stewart and Rodriguez!  Much more successful than pairing Bourdain and Sandra Lee.  Ha.



Making the caramel.  Yes,
you see two thermometers.  :)



Slaw before tossing and
marinating.

3. Create a dish inspired by Film Noir.  Result: Bête Noire Bars, which are a twist on Twix bars.  I used this recipe for the shortbread, though I used ground forbidden rice for the color, and finished with dark chocolate and and coarse grey Celtic sea salt.  I haven't settled on a caramel recipe yet or whether I'm going to add nuts, so expect a long post on this recipe soon!

I served all three of these recipes Saturday night to friends, which took a LOT of time and energy--and then when I checked the ABC website on Sunday morning, they'd changed the application and removed these prompts!  THWARTED!!  But I now have some cool new recipes, right?  Right?

<crickets>

And then there's the 5-10 photos they requested on a CD, accompanied by descriptions . . . which I also noticed was removed after getting a lot of friends to vote on which ones were best, and accepting one friend's gracious offer to edit them.  At least all of this navel-gazing is over!

Very excited to have this
for use in a month!

After the big cooking extravaganza over the weekend, I have avoided big cooking projects and have instead been making quick salads from my CSA share.  The only other project I undertook was the pitting of a thousand cherries--my nearest Whole Foods had a one-day sale on organic cherries for $3.99 a pound, so I splurged on 10 pounds.  Pitting cherries, my friends, really is the pits--what a mess! But the bonus was finding a recipe for cherry pit vinegar--I now have a freezer full of pitted cherries and two jars of vinegar-in-the-making, so I feel like I got two food items from one purchase!