Oh how I love a good read, and good ideas about food, so this monthly cooking event always gets the juices flowing. From a master list posted on Paper Chef, I randomly selected three ingredients – raspberries, zucchini/courgettes, and beans — and I added grains. The ingredients seemed innocent enough, but it seems that the raspberries were a challenge. Not for long since the Paper Chefs each came up with an inventive and delicious entrée. I picked some green zinnias at our CSA to congratulate you all on another stunning episode of Paper Chef.
All of the contestants are known for their great stories, and I could well imagine each of them as they recounted their culinary adventures. Kizzy of Culinary Annotations always has interesting quotations and literary references and I savored the image of her running the grains of couscous between her hands a la Claudia Roden, as she made an ambitious dish of stuffed courgettes baked over tomatoes and raspberry oil.
Trish from Jonski Blogski made a delicious salad – similar to mine – but with snippets of herbs that you could imagine tasting from the description. I enjoyed the link to her CSA and cracked up over her forgetting the pine nuts on the way out the door to middle son’s baseball game and then coming back to finish the post and reporting the score. Yay! Reminds me of the fun times with the good little athletes in my household.
And there was Alessio from Recipe Taster, whom I was pleased to see submitting again for Paper Chef. I judged it the last time he submitted and still remember the great chocolate sauce that I made from his recipe. He has outdone himself with the musings of several possible ways to use the ingredients. What a way to inspire imagination. I could cook with that list for quite some time. In addition to the flavorful cowpeas and zucchini-rice timbale, he roasted salmon with a raspberry sauce. The list of ingredients for the sauce sounded odd –cumin, raspberries, marmite, soy sauce etc. — so once again, I had to make it to find out. It was another amazing and provocative result.
Congratulations Alessio, Recipe Taster wins this month’s Paper Chef challenge.
This was a lot of fun and I hope to see you and a bunch of other folk back here for the August challenge even though you’re probably mostly on vacation.
Categories: Paper Chef
PROSPECT THE PANTRY 
Awww I am really humbled from your words and I hope that my list of wondering gastronomical thoughts will inspire you. 🙂
Didn’t realize that you judged also my first time entry in the context eheh life sometimes is funny 😉 At least this way you had the opportunity to try another of my sauces 🙂
Thanks a lot for choosing me as winner now I need to check the duties that this gold ribbon bring with it 😉