Curry, Curried turkey, Pizza, and Ice Cream Delights

This week I made:
Fall Vegetable Curry, Cooking Light October 2010
Pizza
Margarita Ice-Cream Sandwiches, Cooking Light June 2011
Salted Brownie Sundae Bites, Every Day with Rachael Ray (issue unknown)
Curried Turkey Sandwiches on Naan Bread, Every Day with Rachael Ray December 2013

On Monday I made this light vegetarian dinner. It's got a lot of good vegetables-- onion, sweet potato, cauliflower and tomatoes, with chickpeas for a little protein. It's very simple too, with some of the vegetables getting briefly sautéed in curry powder before being simmered in broth. This cooked faster than the rice, even on the "fast" setting. It was pretty light though, so when I ate it for lunch the next day I got hungry mid-afternoon.
The smell of the curry powder reminded me of this bread I made when I was in Japan and taking baking classes. The dough had curry powder in it and rolled up with cheese and chopped onion (sprinkled with more curry powder, if I remember correctly), then cut up like cinnamon rolls and baked individually. It sounds like a weird combination of flavors but was really good, so I ended up making it a lot. The selection of cheeses in Japan is pretty limited, this kind being called "factory cheese." I made it a couple times back in the states, but I can't remember what I substituted for factory cheese, ha.

There was  a pizza recipe in this issue of Rachel Ray which made me think of making pizza, but G said he'd prefer to just make pizza on our own. This one had pepperoni, sausage, marinara sauce, and cheese. Pizza is pretty fast when you can buy bags of dough at the grocery store!

Wednesday was our House Cup Competition. The House Cup is a competition between the different halls in our dorm. The competition changes each month, with scavenger hunts, trivia, cooking contests, food drives, etc. This was the dessert night. I brought a few recipes to share with my neighbors, and we selected these two ice cream recipes that might be unique enough to garner up some votes.
The margarita ice-cream sandwiches are not actually alcoholic, but are lime cookies sprinkled with salt and filled with lime ice cream (actually, lime sherbet mixed with vanilla. And by lime sherbet, I mean lime frozen Greek yogurt, because apparently lime sherbet isn't really a thing). The salted brownie sundae bites are a brownie halved vertically and filled with a mix of fudge sauce and coffee ice cream. This one is also salted.
So, both of these recipes demanded like 3-8 hours of cooling, freezing, etc. I just figured that this was a bit overkill and that we could make these both in a 2-hour window. Um, yes and no. The margarita ice-cream sandwiches came out fine. I skimped on the dough cooling (3 hrs -> maybe 30 minutes) with no apparent effect. The sandwiches were not assembled and then refrozen for 4 hours-- instead, at the event we scooped ice cream onto a single cookie for each person. The cookies were great on their own, too. The ice cream unfortunately melted as the event went on, and probably could have used some more time refreezing after warming and mixing together. All in all, these were pretty normal. The brownie bites were not very successful as the recipe stands. There were a few problems-- In particular, the brownie batter totally did not fill out a 9x13 baking pan as promised. It was not thick enough to cut crosswise, so we ended up folding it over on top of itself instead. Then, the recipe calls for 30 minutes of cooling in the pan, 30 minutes of freezing after being cut, and then another 30 minutes of freezing with the ice cream. I tried to collapse this into just maybe like 10 minutes in the freezer before adding the ice cream because we were running out of time. But the brownies apparently had a lot of internal heat still, and ice cream was also pretty warm at this point (we had put it in the fridge to make it spreadable, but then it got a little too spreadable), so when I went to check on it a bit later the ice cream was all melty and pouring out and/or soaking into the brownies. Basically, the two brownie halves were directly touching and sitting in a pool of coffee cream. And then it was time to go to the event!
I cut and plated the brownies, spilling out the remainder of the ice cream. It looked really messy and awful, but I quickly renamed them "salted brownie bites drizzled in coffee ice cream" and poured the rest of the liquid ice cream on top. It looked a little funky, so I grated some chocolate on top which made it look fancy. This ended up being a pretty popular dessert too!
People seemed really excited to try our desserts, but in the end we got 4th (first loser), so we were a little disappointed. We had dared to hope!

On Thursday I made these naan sandwiches. The recipe is for 6 for some reason, and while our grocery store does carry naan, it cost $12 for 6 pieces :-P G was the one who went shopping, so I didn't realize how much it was until he came back. But we probably should've just stopped by one of the many Indian restaurants in the neighborhood for a basket of naan! Oh well. The inside of this sandwich is a patty of ground turkey mixed with mint, spinach, garlic, yogurt, and garam masala. Since the patties are thin, they cook pretty fast. It's topped with a mix of more mint, tomato, and red onions. Pretty good! G dropped half of his naan into the kitchen sink and was very distraught! So I guess it is good that we had 6 servings :)