Here’s the deal. During the month of April, and subsequent months that I will be mostly home, I will be undertaking a project called Food Blog Cook-Off. Within the month, I will prepare eight recipes from eight different food blogs. At the end of the month, I will announce the recipe I liked best. (And maybe a runner-up or two.) To judge, I will take notes on the following: taste, presentability, adaptability, and ease of preparation. More on those in a minute… The recipes will vary widely–anything from stews to brownies–so they won’t be compared to each other, but compared to themselves. What do I mean by that? Quite simply, you can’t compare apples to oranges, but you can compare apples to apples, right? The judging categories should help explain in more detail…

Taste:

How does it taste? Good, bad, phenomenal, insert other adjective… Does it taste like it should? In other words, if it’s an apple, does it taste like an apple? Does that essence come through? Aroma. Aroma is part of taste. Balance. Are the different flavors apparent? Balanced?

Presentability:

Some dishes are naturally more beautiful than others. If you like red, red apples will appear prettier, for example. We all have these biases, and that is part of cooking, eating, and judging. Just because green isn’t your favorite color, however, doesn’t mean you should knock off points when the recipe calls for a green instead of red apple. You catch my drift?

The home cook probably isn’t going for competition gorgeous, either, so just because a recipe wouldn’t be placed on a magazine cover, doesn’t mean it’s not “presentable.” But yes, looks do matter. If the meat is gray, or the spinach slimy, people will not want to eat your dish. Of course, this could be the fault of the cook and not the recipe…

Much of what makes a dish presentable to me is balance and contrast. If I eat a salad, for example, I don’t want to see just green vegetables. I like color! Red peppers, orange carrots, flecks of black poppyseeds. And are those colors, those ingredients, balanced? Too many poppyseeds and someone might think the salad has fleas…

There are a myriad of other things that can make a dish presentable or not. Is it too runny? Grainy? Stiff?

Adaptability:

Again, some recipes will be more adaptable than others. If you’re trying to substitute the main ingredient, you are probably going to be in trouble, as all of the supporting ingredients are based on the main ingredient. But can you substitute a supporting ingredient? Say a recipe calls for dried cherries, but you only have dried cranberries. Can you swap? Or omit? Instead of grilling the chicken, can you bake it, broil it, pan-fry it? Flexibility is important for the home cook. If you’re recipe is too rigid, that’s bad, in my book.

Ease of Preparation:

Clearly you can not prepare osso bucco in the same amount of time you can make a quesadilla. No. What I mean by “ease” has little to do with the cook time or involvement in the recipe. Ease in my mind has more to do with written instructions. Is the recipe easy to follow? Does it omit steps? Is it unneccessarily complicated? One of my biggest pet peeves is to find a recipe that looks phenomenal, but is three pages of obscure methods and repetitive steps. Unneccessary! If you come to the kitchen prepared, have a map in your mind of when you need to start what, the preparation should be step by step. At the end of cooking, you shouldn’t feel like you stepped out of a war zone.

Those are my guidelines. If you want to cook along, you’re free to make your own judging rules that suit you better. If you want to find your own food blog recipes for your cook-off, you can do that, too. In any case, I hope you check back at the end of April and find out which recipe below won my cook-off contest. And if you conducted your own contest, tell me about that, too!!

April Recipes:

Big Sur Power Bars from 101 Cookbooks

Key Lime Cream Cheese Frosting from Coconut and Lime

Orzo and Wild Rice Salad from Running with Tweezers

Chile Verde from Simply Recipes

Apricot Cream Scones from Pinch my Salt

Ravioli Dinner Salad from Cooking with Amy

Tom Yum Soup from The Vagrant Epicure

Perfect Sausage Pizza from Stephen Cooks

Let’s get cooking!

A recent “Sips and Tips” on-line article led me to try a Carmanere with its selected pairing of BBQ country style pork chops. The featured Carmanere was good as was the BBQ recipe. I had actually bought three different Carmaneres to try and as it turned out my preference was the Casa Silva.

Then, having noted the hint of chocolate and cinnamon on the palate in this wine, I took the pairing a “big” step forward, at least in my opinion, and paired the Casa Silva with my own mole.

Over time I have been tweaking my years old mole recipe until I’m almost there. I need to find a local store that carries black chilis or chilis negro and then, coupled with a couple of “secret” ingredients, I will share the recipe - but first, I want to try it on Kelly.

The Casa Silva is very smooth. It is a very balanced Carmanere. It is dark in color, plenty of fruit on the nose - a little coffee?, a rounded palate of dark berries with hints of cinnamon and chocolate, a little oak and a soft finish. About $12-$13/bottle.

This wine should pair well with spicy Mexican food, roasted meats and BBQ.