You voted and we took on your challenge! This week’s challenge was the Alphabet Challenge – using only the first 5 letter of the alphabet to create our dishes.
Another beautiful Vancouver day. We started at the grocery store, planning out our ingredients and what we were going to make with them. My partner wanted to make a pie, so simple enough we decided on an Apple and Blueberry Pie. We decided to use as many ingredients as possible starting with the letters, A B C D and E. We decided to use Duck Breast as our main entrée ingredient, Couscous as our starch, and Corn as our Vegetable. We realized we were missing a letter… and how many common food items start with the letter E? Other than the obvious: Egg, Eggplant, and Eel. We didn’t want to use any of those, so we decided to make Earl Grey Tea Chantilly to go with our pie. We bought some Dates, Asian pear, Coconut milk for our Couscous and Dill for our Corn, but we were still missing something, sauce for our Duck. We were thinking of making a gastrique, but we weren’t going to go the traditional direction with an orange gastrique, so I thought of making a delicious pineapple gastrique. Problem was… the letter “P” it did not belong in our challenge. So we decided to make a Chutney. We bought a mango, Bird Chili, and Cilantro. It was time to go back and start working on our dish.
We started off with the pie because it would take the longest: Apples, Blueberries, Cinnamon, Cane sugar in a Butter pastry. Brushed with Egg whites and into the oven it goes.
While that was going on, we cut up the ingredients for the Chutney. Originally, I wanted to put in 2 Bird Chilies, but my partner convinced me to put in one and taste for heat before we add in another one. I took out the seeds, but did not remove the vein, hoping it would give it just a little more kick. Sure enough, we were able to taste the sweetness of the Brown sugar, the sourness of the mangoes and the heat from the Bird Chili was perfect after being cooked. After the Chutney was finished, I added in the Cilantro just to get the flavor, but not wilt it by over cooking it.
The Couscous contained Caramelized Asian pear, Dates, Brown sugar, Coconut milk, Bay leaf and just a dash of Cayenne to balance out the sweetness of the fruit. Unfortunately, we added a bit too much water to the Couscous. However, my partner came up with the brilliant idea to put it in the oven and bake it a bit. The texture came out great after baking it. The sweetness of the pear and Dates were great, but might have been a little overwhelming because the Coconut milk flavor did not come out as much as we wanted, and since the Chutney for the was also sweet, there ended up being a little too much sweet and not enough savory in our dish.
We made Dill Butter for the Corn and simply boiled the corn to keep its sweetness and natural flavors.
Finally, we seared the Duck Breast and finished it in the oven, which came out perfectly medium. Last and final touches, we needed some colour so we garnished our dish with colourful Confit of baby heirloom tomatoes which added a nice colour contrast to our dish.
After dinner, our dessert was ready, so as our pie cooled down we whipped up our Chantilly with Earl grey tea steeped into half of the cream, chilled and mixed with regular whipped cream. A touch of honey and our Chantilly was ready.
A delicious pie and flavorful Chantilly were great on their own, but not so much together. The flavor of the Earl grey seemed to over power the sweet Apple & Berry pie and the flavors didn’t mesh as well as we had expected it to. We will try our Earl grey Chantilly another time with a more Autumn flavored spiced dessert, which we both believe would go much better together.
There you have it. We conquered our Alphabet Challenge. We had so much fun that we decided on doing another Alphabet Challenge by picking letters out of a hat but not duplicating what we used for this challenge. We chose 6 letters: S P Z V R Q – That is going to be quite the challenge, but we are most definitely up for it.
Any new challenges are welcome and greatly appreciated down in the comment box. We will try to complete any challenges thrown our way.
Thanks for reading =]
Sincerely,
Eggs BeneDiCt
