MTChallenge: Terrine!

Another month, another challenge. Welcome back to the monthly appointment with the MTChallenge. The last challenge was won by Giuliana, our vintage hen which is quite passionate with terrines.I must confess. Terrines scare me, they always did. I don’t like them. Blame it on the gelatin, which remind me of culinary horrors of the 70s which can be found on many pages of my mum’s culinary scrap books. I always considered terrines a too playful and poor of substance dish (forgive me Giuliana!). But MTC is MTC, one simply can’t escape from it. As a matter of fact, the more a subject is far from what I like the most, the more stress it generates and the more excited I feel. More or less. The roughest British sides of me started saying “No cold jellies… can’t you see you finally have the chance to try and bake your own pork pie? You don’t want to lose this opportunity do you?”. HI must come out of the pie closet and my beloved Van Pelt will be shocked, she will… I’ve never ever baked a pork pie in my whole life. I needed MTC to finally bake one! I have to be honest. I had many ideas mainly involving apples, oranges, beetroot and liquorice. Then I had a fennel, lying on its own in my fridge, and decided to flavour the broth with spices and the pig with herbs. No overthinking and simply following my gut.

A Spring Menu / Un menù di primavera

Spring arrived, at last! After a cold and rainy winter pleasant warm days have finally set in and thinner sweaters have replaced wool jumpers which have been stored in boxes for next year’s cold. To welcome spring I decided to dust off the drawer a small collection of recipes I put together last year, for a project that never came to life. The entire collection has been available for a few hours on the blog, then an opportunity made me decide to take it off in a hurry to see whether it was possible to have the work published. In the end, unfortunately, there was no further development but the recipes and photos are so beautiful that I decided to publish them on the blog this year,. I will post two menus a month, for a total of four, until the end of May. Without further ado I start with the first menu, which is composed by four recipes.

Depressed soufflé, Shrimp, Turnip and Redo Oranges zest Soufflé with Licorice sauce / Del soufflé deprimé o anche un soufflé ai gamberi, rapa bianca e scorza d’arancia rossa con salsa di liquirizia per l’MTC

I will be very straightforward and come clean to all of you. This month my participation to the MTC Challenge was more painful and depressing than ever. I’ll try to be brief and exhaustive listing the various problems that I encountered. I’m not a soufflé lover, which doesn’t help. Definitely more prone to be attracted to the sweet version of this recipe I had to deal with the strict rule imposed by Tiziana, aka Tagli e Intagli, MTC‘s hostess for this month: only savory recipes. Panic. I admit that although the blog post date had already been written down on my blog-schedule after the “recipe of the month post” came out (the last day of the contest as usual) I did not have a single idea until the end. Or rather, until the day that I set out to cook the recipe.