#something fancy

Today I made Double Beef Chili with Black Bean and Sweet Potato, recipe from the Five Marys Family Style cookbook by Mary Heffernan. It counts as fancy because it took like four hours.

Hi, Stamper. Welcome to the Stampin’ Pretty Pals’ Blog Hop, where I use the Two-Tone Flora bundle. This month’s theme is Flowers in the Garden. We hope you are inspired by all the wonderful creations the Pals share with you! As you hop from blog to blog, we love reading your comments. Then, you will find the lineup at the end of my post to help you “hop” along from Pal to Pal. Two-Tone Flora Fun…

The previous fancy thing (dulce du leche) was made to be an ingredient in this Russian Honey Cake. I made it on request for my sister's birthday and it made her very happy. It's by far the fanciest cake I've ever made - ten layers, five and a half hours work (including three hours to make my own dulce du leche), thickened cream and burnt wildflower honey.

I made ginger pancakes from this recipe on wikipedia (it turns out wikipedia has recipes!). Anyway, this counts as fancy because it involves putting chopped up bits of crystalised ginger in the pancakes while they're cooking. I didn't know you could do that...

It's pretty tasty. I would prefer a little more ground ginger in the batter (I'm always a slut for ginger, 1 teaspoon just isn't enough), but the crystallised ginger bits were giving me some flavour in almost every bite.

My food photography is still bad. In real life the pancakes were significantly more golden than they look here.

Two fancy things within one weekend! If I keep this going I might actually catch up with my challenge by the end of the year! This one is roasted broccoli with sweetened gochujang sauce. The recipe was from Korean Barbecue at Home by Sara Upshaw. I had it with some kangaroo sizzle steak.

It counts as fancy because I used a new ingredient, the gochujang, which is a Korean fermented chili paste. It was supposed to be mixed with plum syrup, but I used pomegranate molasses instead because I still have a bunch I need to use up.

Today's fancy thing is sage roasted butternut squash and mushrooms with feta and tomato, plus rocket/spinach mix with a lemony, mustardy dressing. Recipe from Dinner's in the Oven by Rukmini Iyer.

I'm super behind on this challenge, but whatever. My latest fancy thing is Butterscotch and Potato Chip Balls from a recipe in The Vintage Baker by Jessie Sheehan. They strike me as the sort of thing a five year old might think is impressive (not self-deprecation; I'm taking them to a five year old's birthday party).

The recipe calls for butterscotch chips, and I think those might be an American thing because I've never seen them in a shop in my whole life. Instead of trying to find some online, I bought butterscotch drops and chopped them up small. It seemed to work OK.