Second weekly reflection

It was another fun and challenging week of cooking food for my senior project. I enjoyed cooking the dishes, making the videos, writing down the recipes, and especially the most interesting part out of all, eating my products. For this week, I continued my food journey around the world. I learned how to cook steak with mole sauce and homemade tortillas from Mexico, bulgogi and oi muchim from South Korea, mushroom risotto with pan-seared chicken, bruschetta, and pesto sauce from Italy, chicken kebab with Turkish bread and haydari from Turkey, falafel with pita bread and hummus from the Middle East, and chicken tagine and couscous from Morocco. This week, I was making a lot of bread and with my previous experience with naan bread; I figured out another way to knead the dough without making a mess. I decided to mix and knead the flour with the yeast mixture or just water in the dough to prevent the yeast mixture from spilling over everywhere. I benefit from this change of method because this will save up time for the clean-up. Everything went pretty well as expected. I understood that it would take me longer than the actual cooking time because I had to pay close attention to the recipes while also filming for my cooking videos. However, there was one thing that didn’t go as planned during my Middle Eastern day. I was meant to soak the chickpeas overnight for at least 12 hours, but I didn’t and only soaked them for 8 hours. Therefore, the chickpeas weren’t soft enough, so when I was blending them with other ingredients to make the falafel mixture, the chickpeas weren’t fully broken down. In consequence, I had to spend more time than needed to scoop out the mixture and separate the chickpeas, so I could deal with them alone. With access to different cuisines around the world, I was able to understand the varieties of ingredients, cooking methods, and flavors which would help to develop a fusion dish of my own. For the cooking videos and the cookbook, there weren’t any changes to the style or format at all. At the end of the second week, I have spent up to 50 hours and 15 minutes in total on the project. 

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