I’d always admired Daring Bakers challenges on foodgawker but never had the nerve to join as I am so far from being a baker it’s not even funny. Then a couple months ago they added a new challenge, daring COOKS! Sadly, I signed up on the very worst day and had to wait a month to be able to do my first challenge. Which was a molecular recipe and required a food dehydrator (uh, nope, don’t have one) or a microwave (nope) or an oven that goes below 200 degrees (again, no) so I opted out. When you sign up, you are allowed to opt out of 2 challenges a year for no good reason-now, being equipment challenged may not be a good reason, I don’t know, but I waited yet another month…
Olga‘s recipe sounded perfect! Shannon printed it out for me and within a few days I went out and got all the ingredients I was missing. She posts it in a different order, but for continuity, here’s how I did it with my changes in brackets:
Sofregit
Cooking time: aprox. 1 hour
Ingredients:
- 2 tablespoons of olive oil
- 5 big red ripe tomatoes, chopped (I used 6 big plum tomatoes that I squeezed the pips out of and cut into 1/2″ dice)
- 2 small onions, chopped (I used one medium red onion-what we had)
- 1 green pepper, chopped (optional) (I used it)
- 4 or 5 garlic cloves, chopped
- 1 cup of button or Portobello mushrooms, chopped (optional) (I used a quart of brown button mushrooms)
- 1 Bay leaf
- Salt
- Touch of ground cumin
- Touch of dried oregano
Directions:
- Put all the ingredients together in a frying pan and sauté slowly until all vegetables are soft.
- Taste and salt if necessary (maybe it’s not!) (I pureed it a bit with my immersion blender)
Rice with mushrooms, cuttlefish and artichokes
Cooking time: 45 minutes
Ingredients (serves 4):
- 4 Artichokes (you can use jarred or freezed if fresh are not available) (I used canned artichokes, I used all that were in the can)
- 12 Mushrooms (button or Portobello)
- 1 or 2 Bay leaves (optional but highly recommended)
- 1 glass of white wine (I didn’t have any wine, so I skipped it)
- 2 Cuttlefish (you can use freezed cuttlefish or squid if you don’t find it fresh)
- “Sofregit” (see recipe above)
- 300 gr (2 cups) Short grain rice (Spanish types Calasparra or Montsant are preferred, but you can choose any other short grain. This kind of rice absorbs flavor very well) – about 75 gr per person ( ½ cup per person) (I used a President’s Choice brand of Arborio rice, 1 1/2 cups)
- Water or Fish Stock (use 1 ½ cup of liquid per ½ cup of rice) (I used a 900ml container of chicken stock plus 2 cups water)
- Saffron threads (if you can’t find it or afford to buy it, you can substitute it for turmeric or yellow coloring powder)(I used turmeric)
- Allioli (olive oil and garlic sauce, similar to mayonnaise sauce) – optional (skipped it-her recipe required 1 full cup of olive oil and I didn’t want to make it and then find out that the main dish was universally hated by everyone)
Directions:
- Cut the cuttlefish in little strips.
- Add 1 or 2 tablespoon of olive oil in a frying pan and put the cuttlefish in the pan.
- Cut artichokes in eights.
- Clean the mushrooms and cut them in fourths.
- Add a bay leaf to the cuttlefish and add also the artichokes and the mushrooms.
- Sauté until we get a golden color in the artichokes.
- Put a touch of white wine so all the solids in the bottom of the get mixed, getting a more flavorful dish.
- Add a couple or three tablespoons of sofregit and mix to make sure everything gets impregnated with the sofregit. (this seemed so vague to me, so I used about 3/4 cup of sofregit to flavour everything)
- Add all the liquid and bring it to boil.
- Add all the rice. Let boil for about 5 minutes in heavy heat. (Arborio rice takes a while to cook properly, I think mine simmered for about half an hour)
- Add some saffron thread to enrich the dish with its flavor and color. Stir a little bit so the rice and the other ingredients get the entire flavor. If you’re using turmeric or yellow coloring, use only 1/4 teaspoon.
- Turn to low heat and boil for another 8 minutes (or until rice is a little softer than “al dente”)
- Put the pan away from heat and let the rice stand a couple of minutes.
And it was GREAT. Thick, creamy, garlicky, amazing. Totally something I’d make again-not for every day as it was pretty rich-but a couple times a year for something special. No, I didn’t even bother serving any to Ari-she got mac ‘n’ cheese.
PS, sorry for all the screaming. When I edit in the ‘code’ on wordpress, it automatically does this, all caps instead of just a nice, normal, bold tag. And I even went through-TWICE-and changed it to a b tag, but it apparently switched itself back and I can not be bothered to fight the system.
Yum!! Your dish looks amazing =D. Wonderful job with your first challenge, I’m glad you enjoyed it!
It sounds divine. What a way to start…so many steps but it sure looks worth the effort.
Will your photo go on Food Gawker?
No…it’s not a very good picture, and to be perfectly honest, I didn’t even try (to make a good photo). And all the steps were totally worth it, the tomato sauce we ate the next day with meatballs and spaghetti. It was all super good!
I like the annotations to the recipe, even though it didn’t end up as intended.
Is it just the photo or did the dish end up looking as yellow as it is?
Hi Simon, yes, I do believe it was pretty yellow. I think that must be the turmeric? If I made the whole shebang again, I’d put in a lot more of the sofregit, not just for flavour, but for colour and appearance sake.
I’m just the opposite – pretty good at baking but also pretty far from being a cook! I’m too picky an eater to do anything like Daring Cooks. I’d love to do Daring Bakers but sadly my boyfriend does not have a sweet tooth and I’m on a diet, so anything I bake pretty much ends up going to waste. I suspect I also don’t have a lot of the equipment. I love reading food bloggers but have a feeling the majority of food bloggers are relatively wealthy!
Yeah, and have fully equipped kitchens, which would be nice.
What’s bugged me about this challenge is reading other people’s versions of the recipe: the whole point of it is to follow the recipe EXACTLY. Yes, I know I made some changes (the major one is that I used chicken stock instead of fish stock or water) but lots of people are adding completely new ingredients that don’t appear anywhere on the list. Or subtracting ones.
Maybe I am being picky, but it seems pointless to play a game if you don’t want to follow the rules.
Yeah, exactly, or can go out and buy a single-purpose tool to make something.
I didn’t know changing the recipes was such a frequent problem! That’s the big thing that makes me hesitate about joining – the fact that I’m so picky and making changes is against the rules. It’s a bummer when someone deliberately goes against the rules that way and makes something ten times fancier, too.
Well, there are a couple kitchen appliances that I wouldn’t mind having, namely a dehydrator, a mandolin and a food processor. Oh, I’d also love a 6 burner gas stove with built in grill. And maybe a panini press, that would be swell. Oh, I also need a new cupcake pan and a nice set of wooden spoons. And a barbecue for summertime.
Although, after tonight’s dinner (boiled new potatoes and boiled corn on the cob) it’s pretty obvi that I don’t need anything fancy to have good food!
I especially want a food processor. I’ve been thinking about getting a panini press, too – it seems like they’re not too badly priced. My kitchen is pretty small though, so I have to be somewhat picky about things that I buy even apart from what money is being spent.
We have a big kitchen with lots of storage space but because we move every 6 months, I am loathe to get more stuff that will need to be moved too.
Oh, if only we could find the perfect place to live…
a mandolin? I’m certain it’s a kitchen thing but am amusing myself with the idea that you need it as a musical inspiration.
That recipe looked DELICIOUS. Yum.