Steph Food

This month’s Daring Kitchen challenge is Gumbo!

Gumbo is a stew from Louisiana that is often made up of meat or shellfish, and is thickened with a dark roux, okra and/or filé powder. I was already excited to try cooking a dark roux again (for the second time ever), but things got even more exciting when I realized I had to get a new seasoning – filé.
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A few weeks ago, while searching for Irish recipes for my St. Patrick’s day feast, I came across a recipe posted in celebration of Mardi Gras. I bookmarked it, and went along on my Irish expedition. With none of the anticipated ‘luck of the Irish’ I should naturally have, I found nothing that really piqued my interest. (Better luck next year?)

That weekend, I pulled out this recipe and decided it would be a great start to my discovery of Cajun food, with a new technique!

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Nice shrimps!

I love it when you find a new ingredient, and it inspires the whole meal. That happened this past weekend, after buying some Red Fife pasta at the St. Lawrence market.

The funny thing is that I wasn’t the one inspired – it was J who started searching for the perfect recipe!

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Today was a very summery day, so I decided to make a summer meal.

We pulled the wee BBQ out from hibernation, cleaned it off, and sparked it up. I didn’t realize how much I missed grilled vegetables until we started eating… somehow everything tastes better grilled.

Today’s meal was not unusual for us – I think I went a little overboard making orzo salads in the last couple of summers. I thought J might never want to see an orzo again, but luckily the winter was enough of a break for him.

This orzo salad starred some simple grilled vegetables, some nicely spiced grilled shrimps, and an assortment of fresh herbs from my garden. This dish doesn’t have to be complicated. For once, I didn’t mix a handful of spices together or carefully follow a recipe step-by-step to make sure I didn’t mess it up.

This is less like science, and more like art. You take what you like, and toss it!

Over the course of the summer, I will be featuring a number of different orzo salads. I already know what my next one will be… Hopefully I’ll also find some other fun grain or legume salads. That’s something I’m missing from my database o’ fun.

My new thing is to mix chopped tomatoes and avocadoes and put it on top of a dish. It adds colour and freshness that I really like. I also finished the dish with a salt lightly smoked in wood from Chardonnay barrels. I forget what it’s called, but it is subtle and sooo good.

Grilled Vegetable Orzo Salad with Shrimp

Ingredients

• 250g Orzo pasta, cooked and well drained
• 1lb med-large shrimp, peeled
• 1 medium red pepper, quartered
• 1 medium orange pepper, quartered
• 1 medium zucchini, halved lengthwise
• 1/2 medium red onion, halved
• 1 tsp paprika
• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1/2 tsp chopped garlic
• 1/2 c chopped herbs (I used basil, parsley, tarragon, mint)
• 6 tbsp olive oil, divided (1 for the veggies, 1 for the shrimp, 4 for the dressing)
• 3 tbsp apple cider vinegar
• 1 small avocado, peeled and chopped
• 8-10 grape tomatoes, halved
• 1-2 tbsp chopped green onion (green part only)
• salt and pepper, to taste

Preparation

1. Toss the vegetables in a bit of oil. (I use an oil sprayer to lightly coat them).
2. Grill until the vegetables are cooked through, and have nice grill marks. Take off the grill, allow to cool, and chop coarsely.
3. Toss the shrimp in a bit of oil (again, I use the sprayer for this), and the paprika and cayenne.
4. Put the shrimp on the grill, and grill until cooked through and have nice grill marks (only a couple minutes on each side).
5. In a large bowl, toss the chopped grilled veggies, shrimp, chopped garlic and chopped herbs with the cooked orzo.
6. In a smaller bowl, whisk together 4Tbsp of the olive oil with the apple cider vinegar. Add to the salad and toss.
7. Season with salt & pepper, plate the salad and top with the chopped tomatoes and avocado.

I have a bit of a history with pâté. Growing up German, I ate loads of Braunschweiger, which may be a liverwurst and not technically “pâté” per se… but kinda is pâté in its spreadable variations. I used to gross out my friends, who were normal and didn’t eat weird things like Braunschweiger.

One time in grade school, in particular, I had spooned some into a little lunch container and packed it with some crackers. Knowing what it was, and that people thought it was gross, I showed my friend Heather. She just smiled and made yummy actions. Confused, I asked her if she ate Braunchweiger… also confused, she told me she had thought it was chocolate ice cream. I totally grossed her out by telling her what it actually was. I never did figure out how she thought I kept the ice cream frozen in my bag.

Braunschweiger is one of the weirdest meat things that I missed when I stopped eating meat.

I can’t say I’ve tried to replace Braunschweiger with something veg. I sampled a couple of vegetarian pâtés at the Veggie Food Fair, but I never really felt the need to buy them. Now that I am an occasional meat eater, I haven’t jumped at the chance to have meat pâté again.

Not sure why, but it just hasn’t been on my radar.

Then I got the Daring Cooks‘ challenge for June. Make a pâté -  and like it! I chose to make the trout and shrimp pâté partly because it’s made up of seafood, and partly because the description claimed it was passed down through a variety of nameless people, and possibly their grandmas and their grandma’s neighbours or something. I like recipes that just randomly work their way through people.

The second part of this challenge is to make a bread, which is where the “Team Stephfood” silliness comes in. J is the bread maker in the house, and I’m very happy to leave that to him. We opted to complete this challenge together. For his part, he made a ciabatta bread with his sourdough starter and Vinifera flour. Vinifera is neat, because it’s made from the skins of grapes. It imparts a purplish hue (depending on how much you use, and what you mix with it), and adds a tart flavour.

The bread was amazing, and added some complexity to the pairing. The pâté was very mild, and I thought it needed some extra zazz. The bread definitely helped with that.

I enjoyed this challenge. It wasn’t something I would have looked for on my own, which makes it a good challenge for me. I don’t know for sure that I will make this regularly, but we thought it was tasty and different. It definitely goes well with our ‘spread’ dinners.

Our hostesses this month, Evelyne of Cheap Ethnic Eatz, and Valerie of a The Chocolate Bunny, chose delicious pate with freshly baked bread as their June Daring Cook’s challenge! They’ve provided us with 4 different pate recipes to choose from and are allowing us to go wild with our homemade bread choice.