Week T-7: Poppy seeds, Fume Blanc, peanut sauce

Well, it's time for creativity. I think in NASCAR they call this "Go Time" - so in NASCAR fashion, I am gearing up for the end of this challenge. One complicating factor is that I once again found something that should have been on the list in the first place. I now have spicy peanut sauce which I conveniently left off my list; this must stop or I will have to just start eating things straight out of the container.

Laboring under my (completely artificial) deadlines, I struggled with my next challenge: an Asian cooking night with friends and no Asian ingredients. It's a newish girls' cooking group - a group that is wonderful, fun, and in search of a better name. We decided to have a Chinese New Year theme, but since we have passed that by, we did more of a pan-Asian dinner.

Skipping to the end, after reviews of cookbooks (e.g., the unhelpful Mexican one), I made spring rolls. I had originally planned to use the ones I'd made from the "Cocktail Food with Attitude" book, but they are pork and at the last food group thing, there was way too much rich food. Instead, I did traditional shrimp ones.

One of the recipes I found had black sesame seeds, so I decided that poppy seeds would suffice. I altered the spicy sauce by adding some additional peanut butter and soy, to cut the spice. and it came out fine. You couldn't taste the poppy seeds, so they are merely decorative.

We also had the Fume Blanc, which was very rich in taste and color - almost like a Chardonnay. This was likely because it was a nice bottle to begin with, and it was also 10 years old. It was very good, though I think I was pushing its expiration a bit.

This leads to another struggle and longstanding question - how long does this stuff last? It's all at minimum one year old, and likely older than that. Alarmist posts on the web show that opened things last at maximum a week, or mere days if they have any sort of natural ingredients. There's very little in my fridge that's less than a month old, so I went through it today to see if I could both discard the scary/old stuff and also see if I there is anything else that should have been on the list. Good news: nothing to add to the list. Bad news: most stuff tastes fine so the list is still at twelve things.