I am bored with pasta sauce, and wanted to try the aji amarillo paste we bought at the extremely well-stocked ethnic market last week. Aji amarillo is a pepper used liberally in Peruvian cooking. It is SPICY. I mixed it with a little olive oil and some parmesan, then added some whole-wheat penne.
It tasted like a spicy, slightly fruity version of mac n' cheese. Kind of weird, but I'd eat it again.
The pita was also from the market. Our favorite kind of pita comes encrusted with za'atar, a Middle Eastern spice blend that usually involves sesame seeds, sumac, and oregano, along with sundry other assorted spices. This was the last of ours. I'm contemplating making some from scratch, as we have some packaged za'atar left over from a trip to Phoenecia in Houston, and several recipes for pita and naan. Speaking of making bread, I've had this lovely starter sitting on my kitchen counter since Monday, fermenting. Yum...
Tomorrow will be my first-ever attempt at a sourdough-style bread. I love my sourdough super-sour, and no one seems to make it that way commercially anymore. Hence, my stinky kitchen enterprise.
But back to dinner. Why hot chocolate for dessert? I'm not even a hot chocolate person, really. But I found this blog entry yesterday, and was curious to see if it could replicate the amazing pudding-like hot chocolate we had in Eastern Europe a few years back. It's close. Tonight, I had to have more. The secret ingredient, brilliantly, is cornstarch. It's basically a watered-down pudding recipe, but it's delicious and way healthier than the "drinking chocolate" that's in vogue.
4 comments:
I love homemade sourdough bread. My mom makes the best ever! I can't even touch store bought crap after eating the real thing! (I, however, couldn't bake bread if my life depended on it)
Awesome! Let me know how the bread turns out. And also, excellent discovery on the hot chocolate! I would have just used chocolate pudding and thinned it out with milk (as I think that's what I've seen them actually do in Budapest!!)...
@Karissa, that sounds delicious! I'm thinking maybe it's better to start with a plain sourdough and work my way up. Baking isn't hard, but I'm starting to realize bread is kind of temperamental. A friend of ours here makes (excellent) homemade beer, and he says he gave up on wine because it's easy to make something drinkable, whereas it's hard to get beer just right. Bread is like that.
@Stephanie,
Thanks! I'm going to tweak the hot chocolate recipe a little more and see if I can get it about halfway between pudding and hot chocolate. Though it probably is easiest, at least in bulk, to just make pudding and thin it as needed.
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