Monday, June 21, 2010

The Daring Kitchen Challenge #2







I hate that this post is late. I don't like being too busy for things.
Ok, so here we go.
This month's challenge was to make pate and bread. This challenge got me very excited because I absolutely adore pate, especially with brie and baguette! 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.
We were given the opportunity to do a couple, and I chose the chicken liver pate. Of course being an inexperienced cook, I did have some issues.
One recurring theme that seems to be prevelant, is that I need a food processor. I have a teeny little dinky one that I bought to make baby food, and it did just fine chopping up beans, peas, spinach, broccoli... but I had to process bacon and bacon and more bacon.

So, first I cooked the chicken livers. It took 4 grocery stores to find them. Farm Boy. Who knew? (Am taking a frustrated moment to say that my pictures are not uploading properly. I apologize in advance for this craziness.)

Then when they started the cooking, the smell was absolutely horrendous and I convinced RockStar Hubby to cook them for me. He did so willingly. Then I tried shoving all the bacons into the food processor and that just made a disaster. So I took them out and then tried chopping them all into fine little bits. Ha! Then I threw everything into the bowl, along with the pureed chicken livers. Then I couldn't find a proper mold for it. So I figured I'd put it into the smaller roasting pan and then put that into the larger roasting pan as it needed to cook in water. Two and a half hours later, it smelled great!

The baguette, I was allowed some free reign so I made my usual baguette with flour, salt, yeast and water. I threw the whole thing in the breadmaker and let it mix it and then instead of letting it rise for just half an hour, as it is supposed to, I let it rise for ten hours. I don't usually plan on letting bread rise for that long, but I always manage to forget about it. But it always turns out light and fluffy so I'm never concerned.

And here's the finished product. At the top of the page of course, because these pictures uploading are not listening to me...

















1 comment:

Meg said...

Wow That looks great!!