Allez Blog!!!

So tonight, in honor of the inception of The Egg Plant into the quote-unquote blogosphere, we held our first weekly Iron Chef: New Brunswick! After an anxious couple of hours of me anticipating the secret ingredient and contemplating some basic templates, the ingredient was finally unveiled: Nopal! Nopal is a type of cactus, with flat, circular, meaty pads and large spines situated far apart from each other, which are relatively easy to remove. Dan wasn't entirely sure it was edible, so he had picked up an ancillary ingredient, "mexican squash," which is really just a small zucchini. For the uninitiated, nopal is definitely a challenge, and I had never worked with it before. Fortunately, I had recently seen a show which explained how to de-prick the vegetable, which took most of my hour-time limit and made me very nervous. I rushed to adjust my culinary templates to the ingredient as quickly as possible: I'd do a soup, a burrito with rice, and a desert. I was dealing with a great desert opportunity: nopal is full of oozy, gooey starches and has a great texture just waiting to be candied. I put Sous chef Dan to work making homemade flour tortillas, which he absolutely excelled at and which will be a household chore for him soon. The tortillas consist of flour, water, a little salt and water. They are rolled into balls, flattened and cooked in a skillet one by one. For the burrito filling, I chopped onions, garlic, and a little scotch bonnet pepper and sauteed them with some chili powder. I added the nopal and zucchini, which i had meticulously cut into nice, even matchsticks, and sauteed for a while. At the last moment, I added spinach and cilantro and cooked until just wilted. This mix went into Dan's tortillas with chopped red cabbage, onions and tomatoes. Alongside went some plain white rice.

Meanwhile, I had started a pot of water, sugar, and mint leaves, boiling with a tiny strip of pepper. To this I added some thinly sliced nopal and it boiled throughout the challenge. At the very end, I strained the mixture, tossed it in some caster sugar, and garnished with fresh mint leaves. It turned out great: It had the texture of a gummy, and tasted of citrus inside, which contrasted nicely with the mint. Overall, a positive dessert experiment.

The third dish, a soup, was meant to be a simple sopa de limon with some pretty little bundles of very very thinly sliced nopal and scallion, but turned into an abject failure. As my broth simmered and my neat little bundles awaited their dip, I decided it needed a little background flavor and grabbed some chili powder to put a pinch in. Except that it turned out to be cinnamon, And it turned out to be more like a quarter cup. And I valiantly tried to save the soup, immediately straining it to get the particles out and dumping more lime into it, including most of a whole lime's worth of zest. It turned out sour, bitter, and awful, although I must admit the tortilla strips and nopal bundles floating in it were kind of delicious, and cilantro is hard to ruin. Oh well, that's what happens when you're cooking under pressure.

Overall, our first weekly Iron chef was a success!