Daring Bakers April Challenge -- Traditional English Pudding

The April 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Esther of The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet.

Well, I wasn't going to do this challenge this month, it seemed complicated and my life has been so busy lately that I didn't want to stress about doing something I love to do.  But, when the last weekend before the reveal was coming up and I actually had some time, I decided at the last minute to do it.  Because of my last minute decision though I opted not to search for suet and I used lard instead.  Also, Al's been doing really good about staying allergen free, so I replaced the flour with a mixture of alternate flours and I decided to go savory instead of sweet and make dinner out of the challenge.  I decided to do the traditional steak and kidney pudding but altered it to be a steak and onion pudding. But maybe I should have taken a pass this month because my pudding failed miserably!!

Here is my rig as I pulled it out of the oven.

 And after 5 hours of steaming this muddy mess is what I got.

We scooped out the inside to try and salvage some of it, but it was not very tasty at all.   Maybe my bowl was too big, my dough too watery or maybe I caused an issue with substituting the flour.  Maybe I'll try it again.

Curry Chicken

This is one of the stable dinners in our house!  Pictured is 1/2 a chicken breast on top of the dish, I now typically serve the breast to the side.  Al found this recipe for "Country Captains Chicken" which we just call Curry Chicken from the website at the University of SC's culinary school restaurant, The McCutchen house.  Use the following link for the recipe from the McCutchen house, which is formatted nicely to print out and put in your recipe binder.  But I've also pasted it below so that I could add my comments of the changes we've made to the recipe and tips I have, those are in brackets and in italics along side the recipe.  Some changes are made to better the recipe, some due to my husbands allergies and some because of our preferences.
http://www.hrsm.sc.edu/McCutchen-house/Recipes/countrycaptainschicken.pdf


2 each onions, chopped [We love onions, I use 2 vidalia onions which are probably bigger and therefore more than the recipe calls for, but we're okay with that]
2 Tbs. butter [I use olive oil]
2 each green bell peppers, chopped
1 Tbs. curry powder [I used 2 TB--1 is just not flavorful enough; also beware that house brand curry at the grocery store is extremely bland, we bought some Indian curry from Amazon, but if you don't want 64oz of curry on hand--don't worry we got it for a deal--I'd look for some real curry at a local Indian grocery store or at least buy a name brand spice like McCormicks]
1 can (16 oz) whole tomatoes, roughly chopped [I just used a 14.5oz can of chopped tomatoes and if I have any fresh around I add a little more]
½ cup chicken broth [I grew up with bouillon cubes, but canned, boxed or homemade broth is WAY better--if you do use bouillon cubes I would double the number of cubes you use]
1 Tbs. parsley, chopped [I just used dried parsley-1 teaspoon]
½ tspn. salt
¼ tspn. black pepper
¼ tspn. ground mace [I never put this in]
1 clove garlic, minced
6 each boneless, skinless chicken breasts [I usually just put 3 breasts in but don't half anything else]
2 Tbs. flour [I use cornstarch instead, I'm pretty sure I use more than 2 TB, I just cover a small plate with cornstarch and lay the breast on top and coat both sides in cornstarch]
2 Tbs. vegetable oil [Again I replace this with olive oil]
(Serves 6 guests) [Using only 3 breasts it give us more veggies per serving and makes enough for dinner for 2 plus 2 lunches for my husband]
DIRECTIONS
In a large saucepan, sauté the onion in the butter until lightly browned, add the bell pepper and continue to cook an additional five minutes.
Stir in the curry and cook for a minute, add the entire contents of the tomatoes, chicken broth, parsley, salt, pepper, mace, and garlic. Bring the sauce to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook, covered, for five more minutes.
Flour the chicken breast and shake off any excess. Heat the vegetable oil in a large pan and brown the chicken on both sides. Add the chicken to the tomato mixture and continue to cook, covered, for another thirty minutes, stirring occasionally. If the sauce becomes too thick, water may be added.
Serve immediately over rice. [I use brown rice]

Hope y'all enjoy it as much as we do!

Pork Pinwheels

Al has SO many BBQ books that I decided we needed to really start going through them and trying the recipes.  So, I had him put sticky notes on recipes in 2 of his newest books, that he wanted to try and that were easy and semi-healthy enough for me to try on a weeknight.  One of which I tried the other day was pork pinwheels from his Big Bob Gibson BBQ book.  It calls for pork tenderloin, but being cheapskates like we are, we just used pork loin.  The pork is cut to approximately the size of a bacon strip, a bacon strip is placed on top, the pork is rolled up and toothpicks are put in to keep it rolled. Then, we brushed on top Al's mustard maple sauce creation (rather than BBG's sauce recipe).  Really you can use any BBQ sauce you want. Then on both sides you press in a 1/4 cup chopped pecan, 1 teas. salt and 1 teas. pepper mix.  Then grill for about 30 minutes.

Al gave it 1.5 thumbs up, I was not that big of a fan, maybe 1 thumb up for me.

Ratatouille

Have you ever seen this movie? Well we some friends that kept telling us we had to watch this movie, that Remy reminded them of Al. Well, Al was a little irritated that a rat reminded them of him. But after getting the movie for Christmas we finally watched it and within 3 minutes we knew exactly why Remy reminds our friends of Al. At the very beginning Remy is tasting food and can tell each ingredient that is in each dish--that's SO Al. So, it was only fitting that we should make Ratatouille ourselves don't you think?

We used this Eating Well Grilled Chicken Ratatouille recipe. I didn't take a picture of the grilled chicken, but it just looks like grilled chicken. Also, I didn't have any fresh marjoram and didn't care to buy any so I just used dried marjoram (which is actually in the family of oregano, so you could substitute oregano if you don't have any marjoram lying around). A little tip on converting fresh herbs to dried, 1TB fresh herbs = 1 teas. dried herbs.

Doesn't this look so colorful and delicious? I had more fun that I probably should've grilling up all these vegetables.I'm still deciding on whether or not I like eggplant but have recently learned that eggplants are best small, because they have no seeds. And eggplants should NOT be stored in the fridge.
The red (purple) onions are definitely a must that can't be substituted, I think they really make this dish!

And this is what we ended up with.
Now Al really likes vegetables despite his heavy meat eating tendencies, so he liked this dish enough to try it again some time, but not worthy enough for the menu rotation. I loved it because it was so fresh and summery and made me feel like I was eating so healthy.

Out of 10 Al would probably give this Grilled Chicken Ratatouille a 5 and I would give it a 7.