August Goal: 30 Days of New Recipes

Month eight is complete! August was a month of learning about new ingredients, trying new recipes, making a few mistakes in the kitchen, and filling our hearts and bellies with happiness and deliciousness. I’m so glad I made the eighth month of my twelve month long challenge/journey, a culinary challenge. Last month, in July, my challenge was to document delight…I documented it everyday for thirty days and then neglected to document my DELIGHT journey on the Blog. It could still happen…

August is my youngest sons birth month. He loves to cook and bake and cause general chaos in the kitchen so it seemed appropriate that I make August the month of new recipes. Also, I love books…to include cookbooks…which I seem to have a pretty nice collection of. Anyway, I have all these cookbooks and many of them hadn’t even been cracked open or recipes attempted…until now. Most all the cookbooks turned out to be winners (with only a couple of non-winners).

Trying to decide between only thirty new recipes was proving to be difficult so finally I decided to break each week of the month of August down into recipe categories. The categories included Breakfast, Snacks, Lunch, Dinner, and Dessert. Thirty days, five categories…you see where I’m going with this? So each category had six days devoted to finding, making, tasting, and documenting a new (to me) recipe. Each step of the process was a unique and creative endeavor. I found it just as fun finding ingredients, scanning through my cookbooks, and cooking as I did eating said recipes and seeing my family enjoy new meals too.

Breakfast. First meal of the day, so let’s start there. I made six new breakfast recipes at the start of August.

1. Orange Blossom Dream Smoothie

2. Soft Scrambled Yuzu Kosho Eggs with Crispy Avocado Salad

3. Not Ya Mamma’s Corn Muffins

4. Asparagus and Fontina Quiche

5. Huevos Rancheros

6. Baked Egg Puffs

I tried to choose a variety of breakfast foods to keep things interesting. The stand out breakfast was Huevos Rancheros from the Magnolia Table series of cookbooks. I have ordered this breakfast once, maybe twice, out to eat. I never thought too much of it and in Hawai’i, it isn’t a standard menu item. The sauce and of course a soft egg were what had me at Hola. Yum doesn’t cut it. I’m hoping to travel to Texas to have someone make this delight for me, but in the meantime, what I was able to create based on the Magnolia recipe…chef’s kiss.

The least favorite of the breakfasts goes to Deceptively Delicious Baked Egg Puffs. Until that moment, I never met an egg I didn’t like…this dish was simply, terrible. I followed the recipe but determined hiding vegetables isn’t for me. I’m an upfront and honest kinda gal, especially when it comes to food. No thanks to the egg puff with hidden squash. Blech.

The next six new recipes were SNACK foods.

1. Candied Grapes

2. Beck’s Crackers

3. Steak Bruschetta

4. Black Bean Salsa

5. Smoky Squash Hummus

6. Granola Bars

A lot of effort was made in order to have a snack. Usually, we grab some kind of pre-packaged item (read as: chips) to satisfy that late afternoon hunger (read as: boredom). But for mid August we were in the kitchen trying that latest Tik Tok craze of candied grapes (loved them) and realizing O’ahu is too humid for proper granola bar making (easy hack…just pour it on yogurt and its granola minus the bar). The star of the snack show was the Smoky Squash Hummus, surprising since it was the failed star of breakfast. This hummus was one of my favorite things of ALL the recipes from this month, not just the snack category. If I’m lucky, I’ll get invited lots of places this Fall and I’ll have an opportunity to recreate this recipe time and time again.

For the third installment of new recipes…LUNCH! Lunch already has good things going for it because I feel you can get away with eating typical dinner items for lunch AND you can get away with eating typical breakfast items for lunch. Lunch can easily be turned into a healthy moment too—which we tried with four out of six items being salad. The lunch new recipes did not disappoint.

1. The King Classic Caesar

2. Dorothea’s Corn Salad

3. Rainbow Couscous Salad with Chickpeas and Feta

4. Migas Caserole

5. Pimiento Cheese

6. Friday Salad

The lunch star was the King Classic Caesar. The dressing alone was ready to drink. The pan cooked chicken was flavorful, protein packed, and the perfect conduit for…that DRESSING. Did I mention how good that dressing was? I think every salad could incorporate that dressing. And I am now re-naming it Drool Worthy Dressing (I’m so clever.)

The almost end of the month portion of the challenge…DINNER. This is where the new recipe challenge got real. Grease on the floor, other dinner plans getting canceled by family members in an effort to stay home for whatever was being cooked up for the night, trying to think of ways to have more dinner, wishing the whole month was just a NEW DINNER challenge…

1. Japchae

2. Nutty Fish

3. Baby Got Back Ribs

4. Mango Glazed Pork Chops

5. Stuffed Chicken

6. Smash Burger

There were three contenders (I wanna say four, but I’ll narrow it down to three) for the dinner top spot. Japchae, a Korean noodle dish was easy to make based on the recipe I used. It was healthy. It was tasty. It was totally different than our usual plan for dinner. Baby Got Back Ribs. I have never seen my family lick their fingers with such exuberance. It was if I had NEVER made anything so delicious. I’ll admit it was good, but it evidently caused amnesia since they were all having a hard time remembering that I have made other delicious dinners. Smash Burger…well, it was a smash. It was messy and juicy and filling and aromatic and picture perfect and well, there’s a reason why burgers are such a hit. They just hit the spot sometimes and with this recipe in hand, well, it just elevates an already delicious meal.

The grand finale, for any meal and for this challenge was DESSERT. I was hesitant to incorporate desserts in this new recipe challenge because they tend to get me in trouble (read as: zero self control and can not stop indulging). But, I wanted to be fair…and let’s be honest, I wanted dessert!

1. Peanut Butter Pie

2. Mud Pie Trifle

3. Baileys Bundt Cake

4. Birthday Ginger and Molasses Cupcakes

5. Rolls Royce Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

6. Festival of the Ancestors Cookies

The crowd favorite was the Mud Pie Trifle. Gabe’s (my oldest son) favorite was the Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies (despite their failure to rise). My favorite was the Ginger and Molasses Cupcake. It tasted like a Gingersnap cookie and I was transported to Thanksgiving and Fall and Uggs and cheesy Hallmark movies all in one bite. I was happy to find a new addition for my Holiday baking rotation. The Ginger satisfied the spice. The Molasses satisfied the sweet. And Martha Stewart successfully merged the two with this recipe.

This culinary adventure/challenge helped me to manage my time (cooking takes planning y’all). It introduced me to new flavors. It renewed my confidence in the kitchen (the summer had us eating out way too much). And this challenge brought the family together around the kitchen table. It was nice to share in the food I had prepared and not just ordered. This August thirty day challenge was nourishing on many levels—-belly, heart, and home.

As each months challenge gets accomplished, I realize that I’ve been cultivating happiness. I have simply been creating “a beginners mindset”, an environment where curiosity is king and trying, learning, experiencing things from a novice point of view can really enhance your overall perspective. With each ingredient, each bite, each recipe I was figuring something out—-lessons in nostalgia with certain aromas and flavor profiles. Lessons in measurement. Lessons in budgeting. Lessons in what my family likes to eat. I’ve spent twenty years feeding them and I’m still learning, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.

I hope next months challenge brings as much joy as I found in August. I know my family will miss eating as well as we did this past month. Hopefully the memories of these recipes will be sustenance enough…until the next culinary adventure.

And speaking of adventure…a MOST EXCELLENT one awaits for September…