Christmas Cookery

24 Dec

We all have our Christmas traditions (by that I mean, those of us who celebrate, observe or exploit Christmas not those who are otherwise inclined). Growing up, our Christmas morning tradition was warmed apple cider and a cinnamon bun ring. I never noticed but am now hoping the adults got something more interesting to drink.

Somewhere along the line someone introduced a more substantial option. It may have been my mother who was tired of cooking a full breakfast only to clean up and start cooking turkey. Either way, it’s brilliant.

Bagels. Cream cheese. Capers. Lox. Red onion, if you must.

Yes, the irony is rich.  But sometimes Christmas is about making illogical food choices. Take, for example, the pot luck to which we’ve been invited this evening. What would one normally take to such an event? Parsnips? Butter tarts? I actually have no idea. For some reason my brain came up with broccoli salad. This is in keeping with my tradition of vegetable promotion. If you invite me to a pot luck, I will most likely bring vegetables. If you ask me out for Chinese, I will always pick four kinds of vegetables in oyster sauce. In other words, if you want scurvy don’t invite me to your party.

Broccoli and Raisins
Anyway, broccoli salad just seemed like a quintessential pot luck option. It’s the kind of thing you’d find in a 1950s Betty Crocker cookbook. I, of course, found it on the world wide interweb. I made a few adjustments. I used crispy prosciutto instead of bacon (put it on a cooling rack on top of a baking pan under the broiler until it’s crispy).

Crispy Prosciutto
I toasted the sesame seeds and I used apple cider vinegar instead of white. Now that I’m thinking of it, some chopped green apple would be a nice addition.

Broccoli Salad

  • 5 to 6 cups fresh broccoli florets
  • 1/2 cup raisins
  • 1/2 cup sunflower seeds, toasted
  • 1/2 cup cooked, crumbled crispy proscuitto

Dressing

  • 1 cup mayonnaise
  • 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
  • 1/2 cup sugar, or to taste
  • 1/4 cup of red onion, chopped

Do we really need instructions here? Mix the dressing. Put it on the ingredients. Put it in the refrigerator until everybody in the bowl gets to know each other.

Dressing

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Peanut Butter Brownies

28 Nov

I am a recovering peanut butter addict. When I think back to different stages of my life, peanut butter was always there. My favourite sandwich as a kid was peanut butter and grape jelly. Peanut butter and banana was a close second. I couldn’t fathom eating those loathsome, pulpy, pasty fruits without the sticky, salty, sweet fly-trap mixture to hold the slices in place. My sister is allergic to nuts. She would get plain banana sandwiches. I never understood the allure. I’m sure the feeling was mutual.

I took a peanut butter sandwich every day for lunch in grade nine. Kraft smooth. 60% whole wheat bread.

One summer when I thought being a vegetarian would make me skinny, I went to work at a camp that year. What do vegetarians eat at camps? TVP  or peanut butter. I couldn’t understand why someone who doesn’t want to eat meat would decide eating fake meat would be a good alternative. So I ate peanut butter.

For a time, the only reason I wanted to go to NYC was the Peanut Butter & Co. I was perfectly willing to trek to the city that never sleeps just for the joy of paying $5 to eat PB&J. I also secretly wished that Carrie Bradshaw would end up there one afternoon in her Manolo Blahniks just so I could see how it looked in “real life.” Obviously, protein wasn’t her thing.

Then I got knocked up. Despite the competing theories, I decided to stop eating nuts. My family doctor said there was no real science to back me up. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease’s new guidelines on the management of food allergies even states: there is no need to for pregnant or nursing moms to avoid certain foods in order to prevent the onset of allergies. But I was six-months along when I heard all this, without having eaten even a finger-lick of the stuff since seeing the faint blue line. I was too engrained in the opposing theory to let go.

Finally a friend of mine told me about a beautiful alternative. My prayers for an interim sticky fly-trap goo were answered. Sunflower butter was the new king. However, this royalty is much harder to find and it’s more expensive. Being the frugal foodie that I am, I eventually thought to heck with it. Nearly two years into my hiatus, I cracked a jar of my former obsession. I felt strangely uneasy. Here in this jar was a vast quantity of relatively healthy food that most kids love. In that same jar was the potential to kill my friend’s adorable kid and my own sister. I was kind of turned off.

There I was with a jar of PB and no love for its contents. Enter husband who may very well be Harry Reese reincarnated. My baking project was born. I wanted to make brownies with a peanut buttery swirl. Martha Stewart has a recipe for just such a thing. But I didn’t have the ingredients for her brownies. So I made Nigella’s instead, adding Martha’s PB flare.

The babe born of these two divas of delicious is an über rich, super dense brownie with gobs of sugary peanut butter lazing throughout. Unlike revenge, this is best served warm with a scoop (or two) of vanilla ice cream to help you manage the intensity.

My two bibles
Nigella’s Everyday Brownies (which I really hope are not an everyday occurance in anyone’s household)

  • 150g unsalted butter
  • 300g light brown muscodavo sugar
  • 75g cocoa powder, sifted
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • Pinch salt
  • 4 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 150g chocolate chips

Melt the butter over gentle heat in a medium-sized pan. Add the sugar, stirring with a wooden spoon (still over a low heat) to help it blend.

Cocoa
Whisk together the cocoa powder, flour, baking soda and pinch of salt, and then stir into the pan; when mixed (this will be a very dry mixture, and not wholly blended at this stage), remove from the heat.

Whisk the eggs with the vanilla extract and then mix into the brownie mixture in the pan. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Both sides now
Now turn your head to Martha for the PB Solution. Stir these together until blended.

  • 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted
  • 1/2 cup confectioners’ sugar
  • 3/4 cup smooth peanut butter
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Pour one-third of the brownie batter into a 13×9 inch foil-lined pan. Spread evenly with a rubber spatula. Drop dollops of peanut butter filling (about 1 tablespoon each) on top of batter, spacing about 1 inch apart. Drizzle remaining batter on top, and gently spread to fill pan. Drop dollops of remaining filling on top. Gently swirl peanut butter filling into batter with a butter knife, running the knife lengthwise and crosswise through layers.

Match made in heaven
Cook in 325°F oven for 35 min. It will look set, dark and dry on top, but when you feel the surface, you will sense it is still wibbly underneath and a cake tester will come out gungy. This is desirable. Transfer the pan to a rack to cool a little before cutting into 16 pieces.

As you can see, I didn’t do a very good job of making the swirls look pretty. This is because I neglected to read the part in Martha’s recipe where she tells you how to make it look half-decent. I guess I figured it was intuitive. Also, I used a 5×5 inch square pan. It was way too small. The brownies still worked, but they would be better if they were less thick. Besides, then I’d have more of them!

Design flaw

C is for Cookie

15 Aug

It’s also for Compost. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

First let me say this: Cookie Monster has always been a monster after my own heart. Growing up, wondering whether monsters actually lived in closets, I secretly wished that big, blue, furry soul mate was lurking in mine with a package of Mr. Christie’s under his arm. As if a package of Mr. Chrisite’s would last five seconds in his lovable paws.

My general rule of thumb with cookies is that they must have chocolate chips in them. Anything beyond that is gravy. Or hot fudge. Using the word gravy in a post about cookies feels wrong.

My problem with cookies, as I’m sure many of you have experienced, is mastering consistency. The best cookie is one five minutes out of the oven with a crispy outer shell and a delectably chewy inside. But so often they either end up like hockey pucks (not enough butter) or flat, bubbly amoeba-like blobs (too much butter – yes, there is such a thing). Thankfully, the goddess of all things devilish has come up with a perfect combination of sinful simplicity.

Quarter Cup of PromiseThere’s no pussy footing around with Nigella’s cookies. The recipe only makes 14, despite calling for ingredients that could make twice that many. This is because she asks that you to use a quarter-cup measure to make your cookies, not some pansy teaspoon. This is a latte-sized cookie. I can’t stand running out of cookie half-way through the joe.

This recipe is the likely only one I will ever use for chip-based cookies from now until the end of time, in part because it allows for spontaneous cookie baking. In other words, the eggs are supposed to be cold. This is from her book, Kitchen, with some additional commentary on my part. She lists all measurements in weight, which is good in a way but mostly a pain in the ass until you break down and spend $20 on a scale. I converted them, but they’re all over the place in terms of Metric/Imperial.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

  • 10 tbsp (150g) soft unsalted butter
  • 3/4 cup packed (125g) soft light brown sugar
  • 110 ml (100g) caster sugar
  • 2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 egg, fridge-cold
  • 1 egg yolk, fridge-cold
  • 2 cups (300g) flour
  • 1/2 tsp baking soda
  • 1 x 326g packet milk chocolate morsels or some other such thing

Melt the butter and let it cool a bit. Put the brown and white sugars into a bowl, pour the slightly cooled butter over them and beat. Beat in vanilla, the cold egg, the cold egg yolk until your mixture is light and creamy. Slowly mix in the flour and baking soda until just blended. Fold in the chocolate bits.

Scoop cookie dough into a quarter-cup measure or 60 ml ice cream scoop and drop 8 cm apart onto a large baking sheet that’s lined with parchment paper.* You’ll probably need to do two batches, keeping the bowl in the fridge while the first batch bakes.

Bake 15-17 min in a 338°F (170°C) or until edges are lightly toasted. I usually take them out when they look like an Irish tan (ie. still pretty white) because I always tend to over-bake cookies. Allow them to cool on the baking sheet for five minutes before you transfer them to a wire rack, if they make it that far.

A Variation

This is where the compost part comes in. I can’t remember the context but sometime ago a friend of mine suggested I try making compost cookies. I had no idea what she was talking about. My next-door neighbour had just been telling me about the compost tea her husband was making for the garden. So naturally I thought, compost tea with a compost cookie… for the tomatoes?

But no. A compost cookie is, surprisingly, something you eat. Why anyone would want to eat something named after rotting plant matter is beyond me. But the concept was a winner: take any treats you’re trying to forget you own, bSecret Ingredientsash them with the frustration of someone who can’t resist temptation and throw them into a batch of cookie dough.

Make sure there’s something for everyone. Some salty, some sweet. And while this may seem like an opportunity to combine all the great things Cadbury, Nestle, and Lays have ever made, I advise you to use restraint. Think of it like putting together the perfect outfit for a cocktail party (0r in my world, a trip to the free play-zone at the mall): you don’t want to overdo the accessories.

As I was Googling around for some combo suggestions, I noticed a lot of people complaining that their you-know-what cookies were flattening out like they’d lost all hope. I knew exactly what to do. Rather, Nigella did. I took a quick perusal of the island (cupboard) of misfit snacks and finalized my cookie combo. Pretzels, chocolate wafer cookies, chocolate chips, peanut butter chips and a Wunderbar. The finished product was the perfect balance of all things snackable, perfectly plump, crispy around the edge and chewy in the middle.

Oh, and I’m changing the name. They’re called Kitchen Sinkers, as in anything but.

Finished Masterpiece*Just in case you are ignorant like me, waxed paper is NOT the same as parchment paper. It is a very bad idea to make this mistake, especially if your smoke detectors are hard-wired into the house and three feet above your jumping capabilities.

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Mama Muffins

29 May

I am officially embarrassed by how long it’s been since I posted something here. My life seems to go in waves. Sometimes I’m all about the murmlings in my mind. Sometimes I’m all about the murmlings in my tummy. Today, I’m about both. Am I a cross-posting cheetah with a bowl full of batter? Heck yeah.

I have always loved baked goods. I wouldn’t qualify it as a sweet tooth, per se. I don’t like pie because it’s too sweet. I don’t like lemon curd because it makes me feel like my heart is going to jump out of my chest to go run around the block without me. I have only recently come to enjoy small doses of intensely chocolatey things most likely because they include caffeine which has gone from being the subject of an innocent crush to a full on obsession in my postpartum world. But put a muffin in front of me and I’ll be damned if I can’t keep my hands off it.

I should clarify. I’m not some loosey-goosey muffin floozy. I have standards. Those “muffins” you get from Costco? *shake head* Come on, people. Those are cakes. And not even small ones. They’re like four muffincakes in one. Starbucks muffins? Starbucks should stick to coffee, cookies and “artisan” sandwiches. Truthfully, there are few if any store-bought muffins that I enjoy. Most of them are either too sweet or so filled with oil that you may as well be eating a cupcake.

Yes, my preferred fistful of fluffed flour is homemade. And guess what people do when you have a baby? They make muffins (or lasagna). Imagine my delight when I realized that having a baby meant the vast majority of my meals for the first few months could be comprised of muffins, no excuses required. Muffins with cream cheese. Muffins with sunflower butter. Muffins with jam. Muffins with muffins. Our freezer was full of variety thanks to the confectionery contessas I have as friends.

Blueberry Muffin
I still need to get the recipe for Janet’s carrot muffins. I can still remember their heavenly nutmeggy aroma. In the meantime, I will share two others which are perfect for new moms (the second recipe is my 2D4 fave). Both boast bran, which I’m sorry to say is a true necessity in the weeks after a kid’s trip out the ol’ potato canon. They’ve also been adjusted to use apple sauce instead of oil. This allows for a reduction in sugar which is good if you happen to be eating six of them a day.

Okay so the bran/no oil/low sugar thing doesn’t come across as a ringing endorsement. You’ll just have to take it from someone who fancies herself a connoisseur of such things that these are really freakin’ good. I usually put some in the freezer, not because the recipe makes too many but because one has to actually give thought to consumption when the object of desire is harder than a hockey puck.

Yoghurt Fruit Bran Muffins

  • 2 cups plain yoghurt
  • 2 tsp baking soda
  • 3/4 cup brown sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup apple sauce
  • 2 cups natural bran
  • 2 tsp vanilla
  • 2 cups flour
  • 4 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp salt
  • 1 cup blueberries or other fruit

Mix the yoghurt and baking soda together and set aside. In a large bowl beat the sugar, eggs and apple sauce then add the bran and vanilla. In a different bowl sift the flour, baking soda and salt together. Add the flour and yoghurt mixtures to the sugar bowl, alternating a bit from one then a bit from the other. Fold in the fruit.

Pour into greased muffin tins and bake at 35oF until firm to the touch. The recipe I have says 35 minutes but I easily shaved 10 minutes off that last time I made them. As usual, it depends on your oven. I’d check after 20 just to see how they’re coming along.

My other piece of advice is to use thawed frozen blueberries. I know this seems weird but last time I made them with fresh blueberries and they were a little dry. I attribute that to the fact that frozen blueberries are a) unavoidably wetter unless you dry each one with its own hooded towel and b) huge.

Blueberries before

Martin Muffins (a.k.a. Banana Chocolate Chip)

These glorious goodies came from my friend Christine. She got the recipe from her mom, did some fancy ingredient swapping, added some chocolate and ended up with this little bit of brilliance. This recipe is the reason why I now buy large bunches of bananas that I can’t possibly finish before they go brown. In fact, the last time I was so impatient I used what most would consider to be perfectly ripe bananas with just a few twinges of brown. My need-it-now mentality paid off as the resulting muffin had beautifully contrasting morsels of banana courting the meltiddy chocolate chips.
Chocolate and chunks of banana

  • 1/4 cup white sugar
  • 6 tbsp apple sauce
  • 1 cup mashed ripe banana (3 medium)
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 1/2 cup wheat bran
  • 1 cup whole wheat flour
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/2 cup chocolate chips (or a wee bit more if you’re so inclined)

Combine the first five and let stand while you mix the second five. Add dry to wet until blended. Spoon into greased muffin tin. Bake at 375 for 18-22 min, depending on your oven.

One other thing. It only makes nine muffins. That’s all fine and dandy if you’re making them for yourself as they’ll probably last long enough for the next batch of bananas to brown. But if you’re making them for someone else, you should probably double it. I can’t imagine going through the motions of making these and then giving them all away. That would just be plain tragic.

Bowl of Banana

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Meat This Loaf

3 May

Part of the point of this blog is to give you some ideas on how to make leftovers more interesting. I’m not that partial to a heaping plate of last night resurrected (perhaps killed) in the microwave. But meatloaf? I don’t know…  it always seemed like leftovers to begin with.

I am one of the few people of my generation who grew up without the pleasure of meatloaf. At least, I don’t remember meatloaf gracing our table. I do remember liver. Ugh. Every six months or so that indisputable odour would waft through the house. My sister and I would traipse down to the kitchen in a brief moment of sibling solidarity to question why, for the love of all things reasonable, was liver back on the menu.

“I’m doing it differently this time, ” Mom would say, as she carefully nudged the leathery organ around the angry pan.

I’m sorry, Mom. I love lots of your cooking. But in all the times you cooked liver, there was never a time when I thought, “Hmm you know, this isn’t half bad. Screw the ketchup. Now pass the kidneys!”

My point is meatloaf isn’t one of my nostalgia foods so I never get the urge to cook it. That and I’m not a huge fan of beef. But the other day I mentioned to Luke that one of our friends was making meatloaf for dinner and he got the look in his eye that Fred Savage got when his adult narrator started reminiscing about the wonders of youth.

You know what happened next. I decided to increase my ranking on the wife-o-meter and make Luke a meatloaf. I opted for a slow cooker recipe, I guess because it seemed befitting of the task to marry 1950′s food with a 1970′s appliance. In retrospect, it probably would have been easier to control the finishing time if I’d just put it in the oven. The meat thermometer said 180 an hour and a half before we were set to eat. Luckily the thing was sitting in a bath of its own fat so it did not, in the end, taste like the sawdust I was expecting.

Business end of a jar of salsa

It also helped that I picked a juicy recipe: a Mexican Meatloaf with salsa and cheese. If you follow me on Twitter (which you should) you may have seen my tweet about mistaking cayenne for chili powder. That was my meatloaf mishap. To correct my mistake, I added the chili powder, too. Smart I am.

The end result was a meatloaf so juicy that I actually thought it was underdone. I’m paranoid about undercooked meat. I’m always asking Luke to inspect my food because he is more likely to say something is safe if it hasn’t been cooked within an inch of becoming cardboard. Served up with some salsa and sour cream (possibly my favourite thing), it was actually quite tasty. But Lord oh Lord was it ever ugly. How one makes a giant log of cooked ground beef look nice enough to warrant a photo shoot is beyond me. So I have spared you any attempt.

Meatloaf Revisited, on the other hand, came out looking pretty snazzy. The Meatloaf Griller, I’ll call it.

Heat your panini press. If you don’t have one, pre-heat a frying pan. While you wait, put these things between a bun:

  • Mexican Meatloaf, reheated
  • Grated marble, cheddar or monty jack cheese
  • Ketchup (Luke insisted)

Put said concoction on panini press or into frying pan. Press. If using frying pan, put a lid on it to help the cheese get all melty before the bread gets too toasted.

Use sour cream and salsa for dipping. Maybe drink a Corona while you’re at it.
Meatloaf Sandwich

I haven’t really decided whether cookbook recipes are going to play a part in this blog since the point is supposed to be a bit more on-the-fly (let me know what you think). But this one seems necessary since I guess Mexican Meat Loaf is a bit of a stray from the usual ground beef and canned tomato soup. It’s from Judith Finlayson’s Delicious and Dependable Slow Cooker Recipes.

Mexican Meat Loaf

Start by soaking 1/4 cup rice in a cup of boiling water for half an hour. Line your slow cooker bowl with a doubled-over piece of foil. Then combine the following:

  • 2 lbs lean ground beef
  • 2 onions finely chopped
  • 2 eggs, beaten
  • 1 cup tomato salsa
  • 1 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese
  • 1 tsp chili powder
  • 1 tsp cayenne (my accidental addition)
  • 1 tsp fried oregano
  • 1 tsp ground cumin (I used a tbsp. It’s tough to have too much cumin)
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1/2 tsp cracked black pepper

Shape it into a loaf and plop it in your foil-lined stoneware. It will plop whether or not you want it to. Cook for 10-12 on Low or 4-5 hours on High until internal temp is 170F, not 180 like mine. Serve with salsa and sour cream.

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Scuttlebutt on Buttermilk

23 Apr

Buttermilk. Say it out loud. Buuttermmmillllk. Sounds sensuous, doesn’t it? Like something you want to slather all over yourself in an effort to prevent the inevitabilities of aging. Now turn your mind to the kitchen and think of buttermilk as something to be consumed. Think about pouring it into a cup and watching it go from stream to glop to stream to glop, glop… GLOP.

Not so appetizing.

I hardly ever buy buttermilk. I’ve never found it in anything smaller than a one litre carton and really, how often do you need an entire litre of buttermilk? I’m also cheap. So I always employ the tablespoon-of-lemon-juice-in-regular-milk-for-ten-minutes trick. That works great when you need, say, one cup of buttermilk. But once you get to two or three cup mark, frugality starts to fail.

I realized this a couple of months ago. The pakoras recipe called or three cups of buttermilk. Believe me, I squirted a good lot of lemon juice into that milk. But it was just not on. Poor Luke. I started down the pakora path too late in the day. Then baby dinner, bath time and bed boob came into play and guess who got stuck trying to deep fry soupy chunks of cauliflower and potato? I’ll give you a hint. It wasn’t me.

The results *tasted* wonderful but it was a rather frustrating experience for Mr. Voluntold Sous Chef. Dinner conversation was at a minimum, and not just because we were too busy devouring the tasty, tangled masses to bother talking.

Strangely, the exact same situation played out a couple of weeks later when I decided to try the recipe again with the Real McCow. The only thing that kept me out of the dog house that time was making yam tempura the next day with the oil that was left in the deep fryer (and the fact that using real buttermilk made the batter way easier to handle. Minor point).

And so this is how I found myself with one measly, leftover cup of buttermilk. Talk about taking the long road to get to the point. What to do, what to do. Biscuits? I love biscuits. Pancakes? Could do. Then a golden opportunity presented itself: we had people over for brunch, one of whom had a dietary restriction. Read: culinary challenge. Love those!

Our friend was suffering from a bad case of gout (not that there’s ever a good case). I always thought gout sounded like a tummy thing but actually it’s a kind of arthritis that can be made worse depending on what you eat.* According to my super-scientific research (Google), some of the foods you should eat while you have gout are fresh red-blue berries, bananas, low-fat dairy products and complex carbs like breads and cereals. Problem is the same site also says you should avoid whole grain breads and cereals. So I guess Wonderbread is finally getting dietary props.

 I decided to combine this challenge with a quest to use our waffle iron for the second time since we brought it home from the gift registry counter nine years ago. Friends of ours make waffles every weekend. It seems like a lovely family breakfast tradition to start. I can see it playing out in the years to come. Kids running around in their footed sleepers. Waffles piling up on a plate in the oven. Bacon spitting in a pan on the stove. Coffee brewing into an alluring aroma that promises a peaceful, relaxing day instead of the usual reluctant chaos. Ah…

Ok I’m back from my trip down delusional future lane.

Here’s how the gout-friendly brunch stacked up:

  • buttermilk waffles
  • strawberry-rhubarb compote
  • stewed blueberries with lemon zest
  • plain yoghurt with a touch of maple syrup
  • bananas
  • granola
  • bacon (this is not gout-friendly, though it is marriage friendly)

I got the waffle recipe out of one of my kitchen bibles: Mark Bittman’s How To Cook Everything. Funnily enough he puts the clobbering trick at the end of the recipe. Ha ha! I thought. I don’t need your silly tricks this time! But I did need his egg beating trick, in that you have to beat the egg whites in order to make good waffles. I’d say they came out… okay. I think waffles are one of those things that require some finessing of skills over time. Maybe by the time I get to that delusional future weekend morning I’ll have them down to a science, or better yet, an art.

In the meantime, I believe I’ve become a buttermilk convert. Yes, the lemon juice trick will still have its place, like last night when I made Barefoot Contessa’s potato salad. I only needed a quarter cup. With all the other ingredients at play, including a full cup of mayo, a quarter cup of real buttermilk is hardly going to seal the deal. But if you’re going to go all out and buy berries in the middle of winter or pull out the deep fryer to make your own pakoras, you might as well buy the good stuff. Because I have come to the same conclusion with buttermilk as I have with most special ingredients: you can always find something fun and tasty to make with what’s left.

*Please note I am no expert on gout. I’m telling you a mixture of what I read on the Interweb and what our friend told us about his condition.

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Stuck on Sushi

13 Apr

I remember the first time Luke took me for sushi. I kept wondering why on earth someone would purposefully put raw fish into their mouth without the potential for money to be won. But he had a good track record when it came to introducing me to new food, so I let trust trump the instinct to go, “eeewwww.”

We had recently moved from the peninsular province of Nova Scotia to the land-locked Albertan frontier. Why he picked this as the best time to introduce me raw fish, I will never know. He’s full of surprises.

At first, I was charmed by the adorable little boats dipsy-doodling along the makeshift moat at the bar. So cute! Each vessel toted two tasty travellers. They looked safe enough. Cooked shrimp, some salmon and tuna all lazing over a rice-formed chaise lounge. So far, so good.

I was just starting to get used to the texture of the sashimi, gettin’ all proud of my adventurism. Then the unagi came around the bend. The theme from Jaws played in my head as this brown, shiny, flop of something jerked closer and closer along the River Styx.

“What the hell is that?”

“Mmmm mumaamii,” Luke murmled through a mouthful of the object in question. “(*gulp*) Mmm. It’s BBQ’d eel.”

Say what? Eel. Seriously you just ate an eel. That’s just all kinds of crazy. And the funny thing was, of course, that it was one of the cooked options.

I don’t know how it happened but somewhere along my journey toward loving sushi so much that I have to keep track of how often I eat it to prevent mercury poisoning, unagi became my absolute favourite. My God it is so good. Sweet sauce, salty, crisped edges, a bit of fat. Who could resist (other than my former self)?

Bringing It On Home

In my own kitchen, sushi always seemed like an unapproachable project. It looked to finicky. I mean, how do you get rice to stick to the outside of a piece of seaweed and not to your hand? But as with most foods I come to love, the tickle on the taste buds sparked a sense of bravado. Think: anything you (the restaurant) can do, I can do… too (not necessarily better). I have even made unagi on occasion. It was decent but I think that one’s best left to the professionals. It’s the same as Vietnamese bunh. I have a crack like addiction to it but I don’t make it at home. Why bother when someone else has obviously mastered and is willing to sell for $7?

So we’ll leave the unagi and tempura rolls to the restaurants. But at home the possibilities are still quite extensive and relatively easy. Rolling it not as finicky as I once thought, though it did take me a while to develop a good technique. For one thing. I don’t use the bamboo things. I do use plastic wrap. And the key to getting the rice to stick to the nori and not you is to have a little bowl of water into which you can dip your fingers pre-roll. You don’t want them to be too wet, though, as then it’ll make the rice too wet to stick to the nori.

I’m really selling you on the “not so finicky” part, aren’t I?

A note about the rice: buy a rice cooker. You can get one for $20. Toss the cooked rice with seasoned rice vinegar until it tastes lightly seasoned to you (you don’t want it too wet or it won’t be sticky enough). Throw the bowl in the fridge with a wet paper towel over it so it will cool down and stick-i-fy.

Where Indecisiveness Is Your Friend

Just like when you make homemade pizzas, making your own sushi rolls means you can mix and match ingredients to your heart’s content. If you can fit it in the roll, you can make it into sushi.

Here are a few normal ideas:

  • smoked salmon, steamed asparagus and cream cheese
  • spicy shrimp: shrimp tossed in with mayo that has sriracha sauce mixed in.
  • california: chopped imitation crab, cucumber and avocado
  • spicy california: same as above but mix the crab with the mayo/sriracha sauce

Here are a few not-so-normal ideas:

  • char siu and gai lan drizzled in char sui sauce
  • teriyaki chicken and roasted peppers
  • sliced steak with caramelized onions
  • roasted yams or tempura with pickled ginger (why not put it on the inside?)

I’m not saying you purposefully grill a steak to put in a roll of rice. I’m saying if you happen to have some on hand… Sushi rolls can be a whole new way to look at left overs.

Roll Reversal

On that same note, left over sushi ingredients can be a whole new way to look at lunch. Inevitably you’re either left with too much roll filling or too much rice. On a recent post-sushi day I found myself with an abundance of the former with not enough time or determination to make rice. So I whipped it into a sandwich instead. It was an sushi-inspired interpretation of the seafood salad you can get at the deli counter.

  1. Mix chopped imitation crab, cucumber and avocado with a bit of mayo, wasabi and a bit of soy for the salt content. If you have scallions, you might throw some of those in, too. I didn’t.
  2. Roll in lettuce-lined wrap.
  3. Eat.

As you can see in the photo, I put mine on bread. I advise against this. The 12 grain bread was too competitive to act as a good host.

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Seven Layer Salad

10 Apr


We held an impromptu going away party for our friends last month. I had been floating down the river of denial leading up to their departure. I think part of me is still there. I keep hoping they’ll come back in a week or two and E and I will be able to drop by with some Five Guys take-out for a play date.

While the reasons for our taking on the last minute hosting role were far from happy, I was so glad to play a part in their send them off. But since we only had a couple of days warning, guess where we went? I’ll give you a hint. It starts with Cost and ends with Co.

We’ve held a few shindigs in the past year. For some reason we decided to wait until *after* we had a baby to hold house parties. Hello Chaos? Yes it’s your old friend me. So we’ve become pretty good at the Costco party run (this is not to say that we ONLY serve prepackaged crap when the crowds descend but it certainly helps pad a table).

One of the staples is the seven-layer dip, purchased along side the customary army-sized back of tortilla chips. To tell you the truth, I don’t think the SLD they sell there is all that good. I find it too bland. My friend Jen makes one that will knock your socks off. I promise I will get the recipe. Thing is she just had a baby so I have a feeling writing that out isn’t too high on her list of priorities.

Now, unless you have 50 people over and all you have is chips and dip, chances are you will have some (a lot) left over. As such, one might think the next night’s meal would require no more work than: open bag, extract chip, insert said chip into dip. Consume. Repeat. But as I’ve mentioned before, I hate eating the same thing two nights in a row, especially when there’s a chance to make something totally different with the same ingredients. A culinary reincarnation, if you will.

Sidebar: On that note, I find it oppositely odd that I’m perfectly willing to toggle between the same two options for breakfast day after day. In fact, I almost dislike having something outside of that small scope of sustenance.

So anyway instead of dining on chips and dip for the three days following the festivities I decided to make the combination seem at least somewhat healthy. And my isn’t that easy when you have a head of lettuce upon which to bed these buddies.

And so the seven layer salad is born.

  1. Clean your lettuce and place it in or on the salad receptacle of your choice.
  2. Dabble the lettuce with globs of dip.
  3. Add some chopped tomato and avocado.
  4. Take a handful of chips and pretend they are the head of your ex-boy/girlfriend’s best friend (because those people are sometimes even more annoying than the ex).
  5. Shred some marble cheese over top.
  6. Go to guiltless town and dream about the ice cream sundae you so will richly deserve for eating such a healthy dinner.

I would suggest tossing the lettuce in a Catalina-like dressing first. Some recipes suggest adding taco seasoning to the dressing which sounds awesome if you’ve got it kicking around. I didn’t, in part because I never buy bottled salad dressing (I hate the idea of being married to one kind of salad taste for the time it takes to use an entire bottle), but I also didn’t think of it until all was said and consumed. In ‘hindtaste,’ I’d say dressing would be a good move.

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Dave’s Gourmet Sauce

7 Apr

This was definitely one of those impromptu (read: impulse) buys at Costco. The bottle is so pretty. Who can resist? But seriously, you know you’re screwed when you make an impulse buy at Costco. If it sucks you’re stuck with a crap load of something you don’t really like. I remember buying a five gallon bottle of bean salad when I was pregnant. That craving lasted about as long as the drive home. Then I was onto pineapple and ice cream sundaes.

I think I’m in a butternut squash stage now (post-prego). Butternut squash soup. Butternut squash ravioli. And now butternut squash pasta sauce. I have to admit this sat in the pantry for a while before I finally decided to give it the time of day. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what to do with it. Butternut squash sauce on pasta just sounded weird. Yes, I know… then why did I buy it? I told you. The bottle is pretty.

I went to the Internet for inspiration and came upon a Giada De Laurentiis recipe for Penne with Butternut Squash and Goat Cheese. Goat cheese is brilliant. Love it. So I borrowed that and the basil idea but I opted to forgo the nuts. I love nuts. But I am still boobing the baby and despite there being no conclusive evidence one way or the other I decided not to eat them until that’s done. Thank God for sunflower butter. That stuff is like methadone for a peanut butter addict.

Anyway… back to the task at hand. In my mind, butternut squash anything and crispy prosciutto go together like peanut butter and banana (like I said, addicted). So I stuck some prosciutto under the broiler while the pasta was cooking. Warning: broiling prosciutto smells like enhanced foot stink. But it’ll be worth it.

The final dish was pasta, sauce, crispy prosciutto, goat cheese and fresh basil. I actually found the sauce to be a bit sweet. It is lovely with mild, squashy flavour but I can’t stand it when pasta sauces are sweet, which so many of the bottled kinds are. The prosciutto added a good bit of saltiness to the dish and the goat cheese gave it some twang. Nothing bad can be said about using fresh basil so nothing bad will be said about it here. I put way too much on my plate, finished it, then went back for more. So did my mother, who is more of a grazer than meal consumer. So I guess it was pretty darned good.

The Next Day

Serving three people (which was probably really enough for five) only used half the bottle of sauce. So the next day it came out for an encore at lunch. I’ve become a bit of a panini performance artist since I bought a press for my husband for his birthday. I’m always coming up with fancy new concoctions to put between those slices of bread. And to think I resisted buying one for the longest time because I didn’t want yet another appliance. I think I’ve used it almost as much as the stand mixer. Happy Birthday to… me?

The panini was basically the exact same as the pasta, only I put everything between two slices of bread instead of over a bowl of pasta. I think it could have used a second cheese. A panini just isn’t complete without gooey zip lines dangling between the two halves. I’d pick a mild cheese that has jalapeno peppers in it to add a bit of zing. Now that I think about it, you could also add some red pepper flakes to the sauce.

The Day After That

Still the bottle remained. It was the groundhog day of pasta sauce. A quick look in the fridge and I see an opened tetra pack of chicken stock just waiting for me to forget about it. I poured some into the sauce bottle, shook it up and dumped the duo into a pot. A few minutes later, sploop into the bowl, crumble goat cheese on top and add a sprig of basil.

The best part of that lunch was discovering a tiny wedge of triple cream brie in the cheese drawer. After I gave it a pedicure there was just enough to melt onto a couple of rosemary and onion crackers and dabble with ruby port jelly. Along side my reincarnated sauce/soup, it made for a truly sophisticated meal. I almost forgot that I was eating lunch in my pj’s with the world’s most hideous slippers on my feet.

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Welcome To My Den Of Deliciousness

4 Apr

What is it about food that makes so many of us want to dedicate our linguistic skills to its promotion? What is is about food that makes so many of us want to read what other have eaten, cooked, or dared to taste? Perhaps it’s born of the desire for community, family, friendship and inspiration in our digital, self-involved world. We all share the need for food. We might as well share our secrets, too.

Food is probably the one area of life where you can’t help but hold onto your personal desires. Sure you may have caved to the social autocratic mindset that would have us believe anyone can wear skinny jeans (present company included). Sure, you may spend an hour straightening naturally curly hair every morning to resemble the latest Cosmo covergirl. But try as you might, you will likely never decide to like liver no matter how many starlets or fashion magazines tell you it’s cool (you never know… organ meats could make a come back).

Wrapped up in the bite-sized, sometimes over-sized, morsels we slip onto our tongues every day is a sweet and savoury sensuality. Food is the manifestation of the most personal of our five senses: taste. You can see the same things others see. You can hear what they hear. But no one can taste exactly what you taste, which is probably why we’re so interested to learn how one person’s perception of a dish compares to our own.

As you may have gathered, I love food. I love cooking food. I love serving food to others. I love using my hands to mix, to knead, and yes, to eat. I also love to write. What will set me apart from all the others who put passion to paper or interest to the Internet, is the combination of that love with my other dominant trait: I hate to waste. The name of my culinary game is work with what I’ve got, but never be boring. If only I could abide by the same rule in my closet.

My hope is by reading some of my culinary adventures (and fewer of my mishaps), you’ll realize that just because you there isn’t a chicken frantically pointing its wrinkly wing at a bottle of barbeque sauce when you open the fridge, it doesn’t mean you don’t have the makings of a fantastic meal in the house. And frankly, if there was a chicken doing that in your fridge, I’d say it’s either time to pick a new butcher or maybe lay off the special mushrooms for a while.

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