The continuation of my participation in the online cooking contest “Iron Chef” and “Chopped” mashup.
This was my entry for Round 2: entrees. Rules for this round were as follows:
Anise
Chili
Coffee
Flour
Lamb
Onion Soup Mix (DOES NOT COUNT AS SALT)
Pine Nut
Salt (must be a prominent ingredient- enough for it to be in the course’s title)
Watermelon
Use at least five. The contest ends at 11:59 PM on August 3rd, meaning you have exactly one week. Make up to two courses, both of which have five.
Feel free to push the limits of each ingredient’s definition. Flour isn’t just wheat, and you can of course use it to make doughs or batters, for instance. Use any type of anise or onion soup mix, or any part of the watermelon. If you find a way of making watermelon flour, that counts for both!
Include at least one local specialty ingredient. It can be a thing grown in your back yard, a regional cheese, local beer, Tim Tams, whatever. Doesn’t need to be organic or a small production, just local. If you can get it and somebody else somewhere in the world cannot, or if your community was involved in the growing/raising/fermenting of it, it’s local.
Identify the ingredients you chose and the local ingredient in your entry, and post a link back to it in this thread.
Chairman’s prize will be awarded to the best execution of “____ riding a watermelon raft.”
So at first, there was a lot of joking that “chili” meant canned chili. I was unsure of whether they were serious, but by the time they clarified I had already thought of a thing to do with canned chili, so I used it anyway. I also included chili peppers.
Basket Ingredients Chosen: Chili (including dried, fresh, and canned), star anise, coffee, flour, watermelon, salt, onion soup mix, lamb, pine nut. AKA all of them
Local ingredients: Home garden grown Thai bird chilies and mint, home roasted coffee.
Watermelon is used in both courses, almost in its entirety, only the skin is discarded.
Primo: Chili “cheong fun”
ginger-soy lamb mince, Sichuan salt pickled watermelon rind, sweet soy-black vinegar sauce
Sichuan Salt Pickled Watermelon rind
Watermelon rind, peeled and cut into thin strips
Sichuan peppercorns
Star Anise
Thai bird chilies (Local ingredient, grown in my backyard)
Dried chilies
Cinnamon stick
Himalayan Pink Salt
Vodka
Sugar
Ginger
Peel the watermelon rind.
Cut into matchsticks.
Cook watermelon rind slices until tender in heavily salted water. Drain and cool with cold water. 
To some water add salt and sugar, heat and stir until dissolved. Add to drained, cooled watermelon in a sealable container along with the aromatics. 
Place a weight on top of the rind or place plastic wrap on the surface so that the rind is completely submerged in the brine. Store in a cool dark place for at least a day, longer is better.
Mince and top with chili oil.
Ground Lamb
ground lamb
dark soy
minced ginger
white pepper
cornstarch
Add all ingredients to a bowl.
Mix to combine. Fry in a pan with a bit of oil.
Noodle sheets
vegetarian chili
rice flour
tapioca flour
Strain chili, pick out tomato pieces, discard. Rinse remaining sauce off of beans thoroughly.
Puree beans in a blender with rice flour, tapioca starch, and enough water to reach the correct consistency. 
Set aside for an hour. Grease a metal cake pan. Pour batter into cake pan and float in a wok of boiling water. Cover and steam for a few minutes. 
Remove pan and place in a water bath until cool enough to handle (few seconds).
Sauce
light soy
black vinegar
toasted sesame oil
sauce strained from vegetarian chili
Sichuan peppercorns, ground
sugar
Whisk all ingredients together, use sauce from chili sparingly.
Assembly
Place cooked lamb on noodle sheet. 
carefully roll up the sheet. Top with pickled watermelon rind and sauce, garnish with scallions and cilantro.
Secondo: Pan Roasted Lamb chops.
Watermelon, star anise, and mint gastrique. Pine nut and onion soup brittle. Coffee flour.
Pine nut onion soup brittle
Ingredients:
Pine nuts
Onion soup mix
Sugar
Water
Cinnamon
Cayenne Pepper
Sift onion soup mix to remove onion solids
Toast pine nuts in a dry skillet until golden. Toss in a bowl with onion soup mix powder, some ground cinnamon, and a dash of cayenne pepper.
Add sugar, onion soup mix powder and water to a pot on medium heat and stir to dissolve. Bring to a boil, cover and boil for 5 minutes. Remove cover and boil until a thermometer reads 300 F (Hard crack). Add seasoned toasted pine nuts and stir, then quickly turn out onto buttered silpat lined sheet pan. Use a spatula to smooth out brittle. 
Allow to cool then break into pieces.
Watermelon gastrique
watermelon flesh
star anise
mint (local ingrediet, from backyard garden)
sugar
red wine vinegar
Puree watermelon
Strain watermelon puree
Filter strained watermelon puree
In saucepan, bring watermelon juice, vinegar, and star anise to a boil. 
Reduce until desired flavor is reached. Balance tartness with sugar to taste. Allow to cool and add chopped mint.
Lamb chops
Cut shallow hash marks into fat cap of lamb roast. Season with salt. In a dry stainless steel skillet, render fat side down on medium high heat until browned. Place skillet in a 400 F oven and cook until medium. Let rest. 
Cut into individual chops.
Coffee flour
Made from another local ingredient. I buy my coffee green and unroasted. I roast once or twice a week for myself. This week’s coffee is a Papua New Guinea Waghi Peaberry, roasted to a full city roast. The flour is made by grinding the coffee beans in a mortar and pestle until fine.
Assembly
Place some gastrique on the plate. Rest lamb chops on top. Dust with a few pinches of coffee flour. Garnish with a few pieces of brittle.
Tasting thoughts
The flavor of canned chili is very pervasive, though I think I managed to tame it slightly. The noodle rolls definitely had a tinge of can chili flavor, but the pungency of the pickle and the sauce really restrained it and the cumin in the strained chili sauce really worked well with the sichuan peppercorn. The pickle was awesome, but sichuan pickled vegetables usually are. This is actually not that much of a stretch for the palette, rice noodle rolls are a very established thing and making noodles from beans isn’t anything new.
The lamb was awesome. I wish I’d have made the gastrique a bit thicker. Also, watermelon has a very interesting flavor when cooked. I think AIIAZNSK8ER noticed this too, and I agree, kind of squash-like, not what I was expecting, but interesting. Watermelon and star anise play nicely together, as does the mint and lamb (duh). The coffee was very surprising with the watermelon. I’m not sure if I liked it or just thought it was interesting. It wasn’t offensive anyway, didn’t taste bad. The brittle was the most surprising thing. It was actually pretty good. Sweet and savory and very potent, however it worked quite well. My fiancee hates onions and she liked this brittle. Overall, cinnamon, coffee, and lamb are the big flavors, cut with the watermelon gastrique’s fruitiness and acidity and the aromatics of the mint and anise.
So I recently participated in an cooking contest held in the cooking section of an internet forum. Previous incarnations of this contest were based on the cult TV cooking competition show “Iron Chef,” the round I competed in, however, added the twist of having elements of the Food Network show “Chopped.” The rules were as follows:
There are six secret ingredients in the basket, and you must use at least four of them. This round’s ingredients are:
Gin (or any number of gin spices)
Horseradish
Mint
Miso
Rhubarb
Scallop
You may also use any other ingredients you deem necessary.
Moreover, your entry must feature at least one raw component. Raw components are elements of a course that have not been heated to a core temperature above 45C (113F) or seared. A component must have its own recipe. Meats that have been cooked chemically (with acids) are not raw, but quick pickled vegetables are. Other foods, such as nuts, cannot be used as the main raw component. No “I made a raw quenelle of butter!” please
Each entry may contain up to 2 courses, including drinks but not including sides. If it requires its own serviceware, it’s a course. If you include a second course, it must be a single component which compliments the other course, such as a drink or sorbet as a palate cleanser. One course must contain 4 of the secret ingredients. Both regular entries and video entries are welcome! Videos entries should be accompanied with a brief explanation of the components of the courses and pictures of the final dishes. Joint entries are also welcome.
Contestants may enter all three rounds, but are not obligated to do so; there are prizes for each round. This round’s prizes are still to be determined, but will be sorted by the time this round’s voting thread goes up! There will probably be something special for everyone who enters all three rounds.
My entry:
Ingredients chosen: Scallops, Miso, Mint, Horseradish, Rhubarb
Seared scallops, rhubarb chips, mint-horseradish caviar, miso sesame dashi
Mise en place (forgetting a few things when I took the pic, but I’ll mention them as I go)
Ingredients:
Horseradish
Sea Scallops
Mint
Awase Miso
Rhubarb
Katsuobushi
Unflavored Gelatin
Canola Oil
Moscato (not pictured)
Juice from a lemon (not pictured)
Toasted Sesame Oil
Scallions (not pictured)
Sesame Seeds (not pictured)
Making the Caviar:
Put some oil in a spill proof lidded container and put in the freezer. Go shopping for the rest of your ingredients, come home and soak the gelatin in cold water:
Wonder why use water as a base when you can use wine, then realize you have some moscato vacuvin-ed in the fridge. Decide to use that instead:
Heat moscato to 110 F, add to gelatin, stir to dissolve. Add some grated horseradish:
and some rough chopped mint, and salt. Puree in a blender and taste. Realize that it needs an acid. Add the juice of one lemon:
strain:
Put into a syringe or a dropper or even a squeeze bottle and drip slowly into the cold oil. 
Let the caviar sit in the oil for a bit to assure that it has set. Strain out the caviar 
Making the rhubarb chips
Slice some rhubarb thinly:
fry in oil at 350 F:
Remove, season with salt, and drain on a paper towel.
Making the broth
To some boiling water, add katsuobushi, stir and simmer for a few minutes, skimming foam. Strain and return to pot. Add a heaping tbsp of miso. Stir and bring to a boil. Shut off heat and add some toasted sesame oil.
Searing the scallops
Season the scallops on both sides with salt. Heat cast iron griddle. Add some oil. Sear the scallops on both sides until cooked about medium, medium well.
Assembly
Place three scallops on the bottom of a shallow bowl. Pour in broth. Top with rhubarb chips, and a scoop of caviar. Garnish with some sliced scallions, a bit more toasted sesame oil, and some toasted sesame seeds.
Impressions:
So the inspiration of the dish is to play on timing of flavors in addition to overall flavor profile. The first things that hit you: the very familiar smell of miso and dashi with a tinge of sesame oil. Upon tasting you first get the nutty, savory taste of the broth, then the sharp tart almost lemon-like rhubarb chips with a delicate crunch (very cool I may do this with seafood again). The horseradish and mint are actually very subdued until you pop a few spheres and small bursts of pungent horseradish hits your sinus with each pop backed up with the refreshing aromatics of the mint. All with the background of the clean shellfish flavors from the seared scallops.
Kare Kare
Peanut butter stew, commonly made with oxtail, tripe, assorted cuts of beef or goat, eggplant, sitaw (Chinese long beans), bok choy, and banana blossoms and is served with sauteed bagoong mixed with calamansi. This dish is comfort food for many, but is strangely foreign to me. I’m allergic to peanuts, and was never able to even taste it when my mom would make it. I would usually eat adobo or bistek while my family feasted on vegetables slathered in a gelatin rich, almost pudding-like, yellow stew coating just as easily the tender meat and tendons attached just barely to vertebrae after a long barrage of braising, periodically dipping their spoons in a hot pink paste. Today, I had kare kare for the first time, and I get it now, though it’ll still be a while before I consider it as comfort food. For now it will have to just be something I can’t wait to try again.
I’m still allergic to peanuts, I made this with cashew butter as well as with oxtails, eggplant, and bok choy.
Pancit Bihon. Angel hair thin rice noodles, stir fried with nappa cabbage, farmer’s market yellow carrots, and minced pork loin.
Sissy’s Sisig. Normally made with pig parts like ear, snout, cheek, etc. I made this with pork loin (hence, it’s a “sissy’s sisig”). Not that I have an aversion to pig parts, just I didn’t have any.
Visiting my parents this week. Mom made a homestyle Filipino dinner.
Lumpiang Shanghai, pork eggrolls.
Crispy Pata. Braised some pork knuckles, then deep fried them. They were braised a bit too tender and started falling apart. Still really delicious. Served with seasoned vinegar. mmmm, crispy fried cartilage, skin, and tendons…
Catfish Adobo. Fried catfish steaks, simmered in a garlic, soy, vinegar, and pepper sauce.
Halo halo. Pronounced hal-o, not hail-o, it is Tagalog for “mix mix” and is comprised of various sweet condiments, served with shaved ice and topped with evaporated milk and ice cream. This one had sweet chickpeas, leche flan, natta de coco (coconut jelly), and palm seeds on the bottom, and was topped with ube/macapuno (purple yam and young coconut) jelly.
Crispy Salmon in a Fragrant Dashi Broth
Made a broth out of dashi, shoyu, scallions, ginger, kaffir lime leaf, sliced jalapeno, garlic, and a few drops of toasted sesame oil. Cut a skin-on salmon fillet into serving sizes, seasoned with salt, dusted the skin side with “Wondra” flour and pan-fried in grapeseed oil.
Served the salmon skin side up (to keep the awesome crust from getting soggy) on top of the broth and garnished with some julienned scallions and ginger.
Inspired by chef Eric Ripert’s Crispy Black Bass that I saw on “Best Thing I Ever Ate.”
Made this for lunch today. Asian fusion food, for sure.
Kalguksu (fresh Korean wheat noodles), nappa cabbage, wakame (seaweed), and bo vien (Vietnamese beef balls) in a broth seasoned with dashi and awase miso, topped with a mabo beef, mabo tofu without the tofu (I didn’t have any in my fridge), made by stir frying ground beef with hot bean paste, white pepper, ground sichuan flower peppers, ginger paste, and shoyu.
I doubled the amount of cilantro and cumin, used shallots instead of onions, and added the juice of one lime after draining before serving with tortilla chips.
Barbo a la Gallega (Galician Catfish)
A few weeks ago I had a rather delicious authentic Spanish dish called “Pulpo a la Gallega” (Galician Octopus) at a tapas restaurant. I had some catfish so I decided to try the same kind of thing with it in place of octopus. Seasoned with a little salt and pepper and quick seared, served with sliced potatoes and topped with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, paprika, and Sel Gris with Dulse. Also served with a side of “No Knead” Bread and a homemade Allioli.
Homemade Cioppino.
Made a sauce with canned tomatoes, garlic, shallots, onions, celery, bay leaf, thyme, basil, oregano, and a dash of cinnamon. Sauteed some shrimp, squid, bay scallops, and mussels in a bit of butter with some garlic, saffron, and a splash of a late harvest riesling. Served with:
Took a stab at the infamous no knead bread. The stories are all true. Easiest and best bread I’ve ever made. Google “no knead bread” for a bazillion resources.
