I am known amongst those closest to me to be a woman who loves to cook but also an extremely picky eater. It is these two things that led to this challenge.
With the help of my sister, I will cook every single one of the recipes from Allegra McEvedy's 'Around the World in 120 Recipes', aiming to do three recipes a week. Why this specific book you ask? Well, it's simple - we wanted adventurous and varying recipes and this book gets great reviews!!
Follow this blog and you will see how my tastes progress as I experiment and how we inspire our weekly menu. We're cooking each dish for a family of three adults and a toddler. Obviously some of the recipes won't necessarily be suitable for the toddler but we'll try and vary as many of them as possible so that she can enjoy the experiment too!
The whole household is looking forward to this challenge because, like many others, we have dug ourselves into a little bit of a food rut. With three working adults, all with their own favourite dishes, it becomes more and more difficult to come up with new and inventive dinners that aren't too time consuming to make.

So, challenge accepted! Lets see how this goes!

Wednesday, 11 June 2014

Corn Pancakes (China)

This was one of those recipes that sounds so odd until you try it. None of the ingredients presented a particular challenge to me, but still together they didn't sound particularly appetising.

 This recipe is a twist on a sweetcorn fritter which also did not sound appealing to me. Soph however had made them multiple times before and assured me that they're rather nice.


So we proceeded to make them - although I was a little unsure of how it would go.  

 The mixing of the ingredients posed no real problems, it's simply chopping and combining. The frying however is more complex - if not rather terrifying.  
An over popped corn kernel
According to the instructions, the pancakes are to be shallow fried in approximately 0.5cm of oil - so the end result is not particularly healthy. But, simply frying pancakes is not all that complicated. The challenge, as Allegra points out in the book, is that you're frying corn kernals - which have a tendency to pop when fried.  

So, what followed, was about 20 minutes of Soph being popped at by corn while I hid at what I considered to be a safe distance (Soph has more frying experience so it was only logical that she would be in charge of the corn). As it turns out, there really isn't a safe distance where popping corn is involved and my brother-in-law reported 20 minutes of apparently random shrieking coming from the kitchen before we emerged with the corn pancakes.




I can report that we did escape relatively unscathed, although our weekly menu plan now has a healthy coat of oil on it.
Our oily weekly menu plan
But, after the oiling and the corn popping, we did end up with some rather delicious (if unhealthy) corn pancakes.  The soy sauce gave them a lovely Chinese-style flavour and, as recommended in the book, we served them with sweet chilli sauce. As I'm sure I've mentioned by now, I absolutely hate chilli.  However, in the spirit of the challenge, I did dip my pancakes in the sweet chilli sauce and, to be honest, this actually made them more delicious.  

 I would recommend this recipe as it's quite easy and quick - the only challenge is finding a less dangerous and terrifying cooking method. 

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