So the challenge was set. Dan informed me that I was to cook:
a) tuna steaks with cauliflower ajo blanco and
b) waldorf salad
To begin with I was thinking, "Really? I don't really like cauliflower that much."
Shopping was interesting. We went to the supermarket for all the usuals, the deli for 'meaty black Spanish olives' and sherry vinegar and to the fishmongers where there was NO tuna steaks. That really puts a spanner in the works when you are cooking tuna steaks and you don't have any! Luckily, Maxi Foods came to the rescue and we bought the last 4 tuna steaks in the shop.
Once home, the enormity of the challenge began to set in.
Our bench space is not all that huge and I had it completely covered. To begin with the recipe for 'tuna steaks with cauliflower ajo blanco' said to make the ajo blanco first, which meant that I had to have 1/2 cup of roasted black olives. So I had to roast the black olives.
No where in the recipe did it say that I had to take the pips out first but I did. The olives were mixed with olive oil, thyme and garlic and roasted until the olives were shriveled.
To make the ajo blanco I had to cook the cauliflower in a pot with thyme, vegetable stock, garlic and cream. This is where i first began to have doubts. For some reason I thought that the cauliflower should have been covered up with the liquid while it was cooking and yet, when everything was in the pot, the cauliflower was only half covered. I waited until Dan had taken the dog for a walk and sneakily called Anna, my foodie friend who knows everything.
She told me not to add more liquid because in the end it would be too runny and watery, instead of the 'very thick soup or puree' that the recipe talked about.
I shouldn't have worried really because really what was happening was that the cauliflowers were getting steamed in that pot and therefore they don't need to be covered with the liquid. It's been that long since I've officially steamed vegetables that the thought of it had completely left my mind!
When it came to using the food processor to blend the cauliflower with almond meal, it all began to get more messy in the kitchen and not so much fun. Cooking with friends is so much more entertaining that cooking for judges.
I had to cook bulb spring onions. I chopped the stalks and then the bottom hairy bits and then thought, "I shouldn't have cut the hairy bits. In the picture, they still had the bottoms, just the hairy bits were washed off, not cut". This is what this challenge has come to. I care about the hairy bits on the bottom of bulb onions!
When it came time to 'plate up', as they say (hee hee... sounds silly when I say it), the bulb onions weren't becoming golden and glazy in the sherry vinegar, butter and sugar. It was also time to put the tuna on the hotplate.
Here, I should probably mention that our stove has only two hotplates that work. One had the very slowly glazing onions, the other was being used to reheat the ajo blanco. Enter Mr Foreman and his grill.
I was supposed to cook the tuna for 2 1/2 minutes each side for medium rare. After two and half minutes there was still extremely rare sections on the outside of the steaks, let alone the inside! I kept it cooking a bit and then realised it was probably too long.
I'm happy to say that my dish looked exactly like the one in the book (which by the way is called cocina nueva - the new spanish kitchen.
(Small note: The waldorf salad entailed chopping the ingredients and mixing it together with mayonaise.... not that difficult, so therefore I haven't bothered writing much about this)
As this dish was Spanish, I decided to have churros or Spanish donuts, with a chocolate fudge sauce and strawberries and cherries.
The fudge sauce came from the recipe book 'Chocolate' by Christine McFadden and Christine France. All it included was chocolate, cream, sugar and butter (I left out the brandy). It was really quite easy. Unfortunately, I have to admit that i cheated with the churro
s. I bought them from a shop. This of course meant that by the time they were being eaten they
weren't fresh and so not all that nice.
The hardest thing about this whole challenge was timing everything properly and also making it look nice. I'm not the greatest with presentation, which I think is what Dan is hoping for throughout this challenge.
Overall though, overwhelmingly good results. The biggest compliment from Dan himself saying, "Wow, you did heaps better than I thought you were going to do!"
Now to decide what he will cook next week!
