Dips And Sauces |

Tomanade

Think tapenade, but with sun-dried tomatoes added in. I’m a huge fan of tapenade, the salty/sour/slightly bitter spread is just begging for some fresh baguette. When I saw a new-to-me spread called tomanade in the grocery store, I had to check it out. Much to my disappointment, it was literally puréed sun-dried tomatoes with absolutely no other ingredients. Talk about overly tart, and not part of my vision of tomato and olive blended goodness. Uggh. Well no matter, why don’t I just throw something together that is more of what I had in mind when I first found out about the existence of tomanade?

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Daring Cooks go Nuts! Grilled Kabobs with Cashew Butter Sauce

I should title this post, “the cursed food processors,” but then you wouldn’t get to know what I was making! This month’s Daring Cook’s challenge was to make a nut butter and use it in a dish. Well, nut butters mean one needs a food processor. I thought this would be a great challenge to do at home in the US visiting my parents (if I’m visiting can I still call it home?), because I knew that they would enjoy the flavors I was thinking of for this month’s dish.

Well, I get there and find that my parents’ puppy had decided that the cord of the food processor looked appetizing, and bit the cord right off of the machine! It’s quite hard to run a food processor if you have no way of plugging it into anything. Ok, so no homemade nut butters this time. Instead, I went to my nearest health store corporate giant and picked up some cashew butter. Why cashews? Well, everyone in my family loves them, and peanut butter is boring

This week I had thought about making my own cashew butter now that I am back en Suisse, but again with the cursed food processors! There was a mighty wind event the other day, and silly us left our windows open in our apt. all day. We’d gotten into the habit of this because it’s been so freaking hot lately – and trust me, you learn a totally different definition of hot when there is no A/C to be found, especially when your office faces the afternoon sun. I melt into a sweaty sticky puddle on a regular basis. It wasn’t until we left work that I thought things could be a problem. After all, tree branches don’t normally float. We got home to find so much stuff all over the floor of our apt., including the food processor!! The lid is cracked and in pieces. gahhhhh! Well, there goes making any nut butters this month. At least the wind kept our stuff inside the apt., I half expected to find our life’s belongings strewn out all over the street below.

So jarred cashew butter it is for this month. I’m ok with this, it was organic and quite tasty. As long as your’e also ok with my store-bought nut butter, onto the challenge!

The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe. Their sources include Better with Nut Butter by Cooking Light Magazine, Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, and Food Network online.

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Smoked Salmon Pâté

I don’t usually write about my failures in the kitchen – after all, who wants to try a recipe that didn’t work? However, at the risk of sounding cliché, I’m learning the slow lesson that life is not always about the end result, but about the process that one went through to get there.

Our hostesses this month, Evelyne of Cheap Ethnic Eatz, and Valerie of a The Chocolate Bunny, chose delicious pate with freshly baked bread as their June Daring Cook’s challenge! They’ve provided us with 4 different pate recipes to choose from and are allowing us to go wild with our homemade bread choice.

Daring Cooks always post on the 14th of the month, but I made this attempt over two weeks ago. So it appears a little out of order if you remember it was just last week that I had a miraculous find of guar gum in a natural foods store. This attempt happened before I had guar gum and before I found gluten free bread mix. We were charged with making baguettes, and after finding an awesome gluten free baguette recipe to try, learned that it would not happen without xanthan or guar gum. So, I took one of my sandwich bread recipes, and made a go without any binding agents by adding in some extra eggs and playing with the ratio of flours a bit. I have also since learned from one of my favorite gluten free chemists that gelatin or agar agar should never be used in baking, because they turn the products too brittle. I guess when making pitas or pizza dough it hasn’t been a problem for me because they are pretty flat to begin with, but for a crusty bread, brittle is definitely not a quality I’m looking for.

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