Daring Cooks :: Pork Satay

We are huge fans of Thai food.  If we order food, 95% of the time it is Thai.  We love the spices and flavors in Thai food. So I was excited to see that the Darking Cooks challenge for this month was Pork Satay.

We have made several variations of chicken satay but haven't tried pork.  And we were both overall happy with this dish.  It was very yummy and pretty simple.  Even if you haven't spent much time in the kitchen, this would be a good recipe to try as the directions are very straightforward and all the ingredients are easily found in any major grocery store.  My only adjustment would be to cut back on the cumin.  While I love cumin in some things, it was a little overpowering in satay.

We made the "long version" of the marinade and it was still pretty quick to mix up.  And the peanut sauce was very easy, providing a great alternative to a bottle of the processed stuff.  We will definitely be making this again.

Thank you, Cuppy for sharing this great recipe!

The January 2010 Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Cuppy of Cuppylicious and she chose a delicious Thai-inspired recipe for Pork Satay from the book 1000 Recipes by Martha Day.

Making Sushi: The November Daring Cooks Challenge

The November 2009 Daring Cooks challenge of making sushi was brought to you by Audax of Audax Artifex and Rose of The Bite Me Kitchen.

This was our first Daring Cooks challenge and I was so excited that it was sushi.  Sushi is Dan's very top favorite type of food, I would say he is a sushi fanatic.  And the first time that I had sushi was going out to dinner with Dan way back in college when we started dating.  We have talked about making sushi at home for years and somehow it became one of those things that we just hadn't gotten around to yet.  So this challenge was the perfect excuse to stop procrastinating and to learn how to make one of our favorite foods. We invited over a couple friends for a very interactive dinner party.

All the ingredients were pretty easy to find at the grocery store.  One of our friends had worked at a sushi restaurant and contacted them to get the sushi grade fish; it is available at other local markets but this allowed us to get it at a substantially lower price.  Even if we had paid the retail price for the fish it would have still been a very inexpensive dinner compared to an equal amount of sushi at a restaurant.

The sushi rice was the first step and we timed our evening so that we would have this ready to go before our friends arrived.  We followed the steps exactly but left out the optional dashi kanbu and sake; it turned out to have a very nice flavor and was quite sticky.  There are quite a few steps involved with the sushi rice so Dan and I alternated quite a few times as one of us would always be started on a new prep task when the next step was ready.  This worked well, as long as you communicate so something doesn't get missed or a timing off.

Once our friends arrived we immediately started making rolls; everyone was so excited to try their hand at making sushi.  After we had all made one of the rolls we instinctively started to take stations as if we were running a little restaurant.  One was cutting the fish, the other kept the rolls going, one was keeping the veggie bowls filled, and the other slicing the finished rolls.  We made the dragon roll, several decorative rolls, and the nigiri sushi pieces.  Then we just kept going until we ran out of rice which left us with a few sashimi pieces.  Once the final piece of sushi was eaten we all kind of collapsed into a sushi coma. 

The combos that we made for rolls (of which I can remember) included:

• California rolls: crab meat, cucumber, avocado, carrot
• Tuna, avocado, cucumber
• Salmon, avocado, asparagus, green onions
• Crab meat, avocado, carrots, cucumber
• Dragon: unagi, avocado, asparagus, cucumber; on outside unagi, avocado, and soy glaze
• Rainbow: asparagus, cucumber, carrots; on outside salmon, red snapper, and tuna

I highly recommend hosting a sushi making dinner party.  It was such a fun evening.  The perfect blend of interaction, good food, good company, and learning a new skill together. 

Dan is already trying to get a sushi night on our menu plan for this next week... This may have created a little monster.

Thank you for such a great challenge, Audix and Rose!  For the challenge recipes and details click here.