Vanilla

My vanilla extract has been ready for a few weeks now, and I've been racking my brain trying to think of the best way to showcase it. Much like bitters in a cocktail, vanilla is often a background flavour, bringing other flavours together into a unified whole without always making its presence acutely felt. What's more, when vanilla is the star of the show, I often find the dish - or, worse, candle or bath product - to be cloying and unpleasant.

Not tonight, though. I was in the mood for something warm and comforting and, eschewing my normal inclination toward hot toddies, steamed some milk and mixed in a half teaspoon of the vanilla extract. It really added that little extra something to the pre-bedtime mug of warm milk.

I think I'm going to like having my own vanilla extract on hand.

The many facets of pot pie

Growing up, the only kind of pot pie I ever knew was the frozen, individually packaged kind. I'm sure we didn't eat them that often, but I feel like there was always a supply in the freezer for those nights no one felt like cooking. The fact is, I was never a big fan.

The reason? In a word: pastry.

Let's face it, pot pies are all about the pastry, otherwise they would just be stew. And the pastry on the pre-fab pot pies from the freezer case was essentially flavourless with a not-great texture.

When making pot pie at home, there are a couple of pastry options to consider: Single-crust or double-crust? Regular pie crust or puff pastry? But the choices don't end there. There's the question of individual portions vs. one large pie, and what exactly goes in the filling. (I once made a quite successful pot pie using leftover coq au vin.) There are so many variables to pot pie that it would be hard to ever become completely bored with it.

The night before last, we had individually portioned, single puff pastry-crusted, classic chicken pot pies. The recipe was from Anita Stewart's The Flavours of Canada, and it hit the spot on a chilly winter's evening. (Full disclosure: I used frozen, store-bought puff pastry, so the dish wasn't entirely "from scratch." It's been a long time since I made my own puff pastry, but I've been thinking about doing it again soon...)

My digital camera is currently on life support, which isn't a huge deal because it wasn't that great a camera to begin with. For a variety of reasons, I won't be able to buy a new one until at least April. I've decided that it doesn't make sense to stop posting altogether just because I can't post pictures but, well, I won't be posting any pictures in the near future.

Ice cream, sauce and texture

Ice cream may not be the first dessert food you think of in the middle of winter: This is a season for molten chocolate cakes and warm tartes Tatin. But things change if you think about ice cream differently: ice cream is a sauce.

Sure, there's nothing wrong with having a big bowl of heavenly hash all on its own, and nothing beats an ice cream cone in the middle of summer at the amusement park. But I believe that ice cream really comes into its own when it forms one element of a composed dessert plate. It can provide an invigorating counterpoint in temperature and texture to the other items on the plate, and it provides an element of dynamism as the diner tries to eat it before it melts.

Or maybe that's overthinking it just a bit.

A while back, I was discussing a local gelateria with a friend in Ottawa. She mentioned that they sold carrot gelato, and the first thought that occurred to me was that, if carrot gelato was good, parsnip gelato would be even better, since parsnip is just as earthy, but sweeter and perhaps a little more delicate than carrot.

In an amusing example of serendipity, I ended up having parsnip gelato on a "steamed winter pudding" at Toronto's Canoe restaurant a few weeks after that discussion, and all my suspicions were confirmed. I asked the server if the pastry chef would be willing to share the recipe, but he didn't seem optimistic...

Fast forward to the other night. One of my favourite Christmas gifts this year was David Lebovitz's book The Perfect Scoop. Although there's no recipe for parsnip ice cream in the book, there's enough general information that I was able to cobble one together. (Actually, I just used the sweet potato ice cream recipe, substituting parsnips for the sweet potatoes.) For a first try, I was really happy with the result. If I hadn't had the guidance of Lebovitz's book, I probably wouldn't have thought to put vanilla in it, but I think the vanilla is really important to the flavour. I haven't sprung this dessert on anyone but my husband yet, but because the colour is so neutral, it'll be interesting to see if my first victims tasters can figure out what it is without being told.

I'm still working on the other elements of the composed plate, though...

Parsnip Ice Cream
This recipe is a close transcription of how I made the ice cream this time, with a couple of additional notes. It should be considered a work in progress

Ingredients:
1 lb. parsnips, diced
9 fluid ounces whole milk [It might be a good idea to use a little more than this]
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract [1/2 tsp. is probably sufficient]

1. Cook the parsnips in water to cover until tender. Drain.
2. Heat the milk with the sugar just until the sugar is dissolved.
3. Run the parsnips through a food mill into the milk mixture. [It would be a good idea to run it through a fine-mesh strainer to make sure it's completely smooth.]
4. Add the vanilla and mix well.
5. Chill thoroughly and process in your ice cream maker.

Lemons all year round

"Buy local (unless you're buying exotic)." This sentiment seems so ubiquitous these days that it's almost not worth mentioning. Still, the growing season in many parts of Canada is so short that a lot of fruits and vegetables can reasonably be considered "exotic," since it's not possible to grow them here.

Take the lemon.

In Canada, the lemon is always imported, never grown. So, although its price may fluctuate from month to month, the concept of lemon seasonality is quite foreign here. In places where they do grow, though, a bumper crop of lemons means finding a way to keep them from spoiling until they can be used. Drying is one option, but I like Moroccan-style preserved lemons, which also go by the French name "citron confit" or the hybrid "lemon confit" and could accurately be called pickled lemons.

Preserved lemons are used throughout North Africa and the Middle East, but they're absolutely indispensable in Moroccan cuisine, where they're frequently paired with olives and chicken in a whole family of tagines.

I've only ever lived in one place where preserved lemons were easily available commercially (Montreal), so I've long had to make my own. Fortunately, they couldn't be easier - as long as you're used to planning your meals a month or more in advance. But you'll only have to plan that far ahead the first time, since they keep so well. (I mean, they're preserved!) And they're definitely a good thing to have on hand at all times, since they're so versatile and have such a unique taste.

Indeed, it's hard to describe the taste of a preserved lemon. It's lemony, sure, and salty. A little bit tart. But there's an extra complexity at work that puts preserved lemons in a class by themselves, as well as making them totally addictive.

And what do you use them for? Well, once you're tired of chicken tagine, you can use them as a garnish for other chicken dishes, as well as fish, pork or veal. They make a great addition to spicy soups, especially lentil soup. Chop them up with some of those wrinkly, dried olives you sometimes see at the olive bar of your local supermarket, mix in some garlic and parsely and bake them in little phyllo purses for a cute party canapé, served with some harissa dipping sauce. Put them in a vinaigrette. Heck, you could even use them to garnish a cocktail.

Preserved Lemons
Adapted from Paula Wolfert's Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco
Lemons, preferably organic, and unwaxed if you can find them. If not, simply scrub them well under hot running water before proceeding. The usable part of a preserved lemon is the rind, not the pulp, so clean them well!
Kosher or pickling salt
Spices, such as cinnamon sticks, cloves, coriander seeds or peppercorns

Take a mason jar large enough to fit the number of lemons you have. (Depending on their size, I usually get about 2 or 3 in a 500 ml jar, or 5 in a litre jar.) Put a tablespoon of salt on the bottom of the jar. Take each washed lemon and cut it lengthwise into quarters, but don't cut all the way through the end. Keep the quarters attached to each other. Pack each lemon with a tablespoon of salt and place it in the jar. (You can squish them to make them fit.) Throw on a little more salt if you like. Add the spices, if you're using them. Top off the jar with fresh-squeezed lemon juice (not bottled), making sure the lemons are completely submerged. Keep the lemons at cool room temperature for 30 days, shaking every day or two. After 30 days, they're ready to use and you can (and probably should) move them to the fridge.

To use them, remove them from the brine and rinse well. Scrape off the pulp and use the rind as desired. (Apparently some people it, but I'm not clear on how.)

Bitter, bitter, bitter on the inside...

When I put up that teaser post about vanilla, I had honestly intended to blog again before the vanilla was ready! Unfortunately, although I've engaged in a good number of cooking projects since then - indeed, I've been cooking faster than I can blog about it - I've also been slammed with paid work, which has left me with little time or energy to write about those projects. It's one of the funny things about writing: when you do it for money all day long, it makes it hard to motivate yourself to do it for fun after hours. After working with my brain all day, I like to work with my hands after 5 o'clock, which is one of the reasons I enjoy cooking so much.

Anyway, on to the post.

I've mentioned a couple of times on this blog that I've become something of a cocktail aficionado, but I think it's now safe to say that I'm a full-on cocktail geek: I've made my own bitters.

Bitters are one of those things that cocktail geeks get excited about in a way that civilians never really understand. Any time a cocktail geek posts about bitters, they'll usually have a title with a pun on the word "bitter," and somewhere in the post they'll point out that originally, a cocktail had to have bitters by definition, as the earliest documented definition of the word "cocktail," from the May 13, 1806 issue of the Balance and Columbian Repository, was as follows: "Cock tail, then is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters it is vulgarly called a bittered sling" (source). They'll also point out that, in the cocktail's heyday, there were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of varieties of bitters, almost all of which are now defunct.

Now, when discussing bitters, there's an important distinction to be made between "potable" and "non-potable" bitters. Potable bitters are intended for drinking on their own, and they include apéritif and digestif bitters like Campari, Cynar, Underberg, Unicum, Fernet Branca or Amer Picon; some would even include vermouth. Non-potable bitters are used in small dashes to liven up other drinks, and are by definition too bitter to be drunk on their own - that's why Angostura, which actually has a pretty high alcohol content, can be sold in grocery stores in Canada.

I caught the bitters bug fairly early on in my explorations of the mixed drink. Some would say this is because I'm a bitter person myself. (See! What did I say about those puns?) Everyone knows Angostura bitters, and for good reason: they're one of the best on the market, and they're available everywhere. For years, I've always kept a bottle around. But I learned early on that one of the more popular types of bitters (back when bitters were popular) was orange bitters. And a small company in upstate New York managed to keep them alive for years, to finally land in the modern cocktail revival. So my first act as a bitters fiend was to order some Fee Brother's West Indian Orange Bitters, along with their Aromatic Bitters (analogous to Angostura bitters). While I was on the phone, their customer service representative also talked me into ordering the Peach Bitters. By then, I was well and truly smitten, so on my next trip to New York, I picked up a bottle each of Peychaud's bitters (a New Orleans brand that's essential for a Sazerac cocktail) and Regan's Orange Bitters No. 6, a spicier, more complex orange bitters than the Fee Brothers version. Now, I have 8 different kinds of commercial bitters in my liquor cabinet, and am always on the lookout for opportunities to acquire more. (Which invariably causes my husband to roll his eyes.)

The next logical step was to make my own. Well, I suppose it's not completely accurate to say I've made "my own" bitters; in fact, I've made Robert Hess's. The process is simple, involving nothing more than assembling some herbs, macerating them, simmering them, then mixing the liquids together with a little caramel syrup. It takes only about 2 weeks, and is very much worth it: the end result is wonderful. The only problem was acquiring the herbs. Many bitters recipes call for uncommon bits of roots and bark that you won't find at your local grocery store. (In fact, if anyone knows where I can find things like quassia, angelica, cinchona and wormwood in Toronto, I'd be grateful if you'd drop me a line!) On my most recent New York trip, I stumbled across some gentian, so I picked it up. Fortunately, the other spices called for in the Hess bitters were easy to find; in fact, I already had most of them on hand.

How do they taste? Wonderful. They're spicy and complex, and unrelentingly bitter. They're very well suited to Hess's signature drink, the Black Feather, but my personal favourite use for them so far is the Martinez.

Martinez Cocktail
2 oz. gin
1-2 oz. sweet vermouth
1/6-1/4 oz. maraschino liqueur (No, this isn't the juice from your maraschino cherry jar, it's a fantastic liqueur that isn't currently available in Canada. Pick some up on your next trip to the US, or try substituting Cointreau or a bit of simple syrup. It won't be the same drink, but it'll still be good.)
2 dashes Hess House Bitters

Stir all the ingredients together with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Cheers!

For more information about cocktail bitters, you can cruise around the burgeoning cocktail section of the blogosphere: start with Robert Hess's own article here, Paul's thoughtful entry in the bitters themed Mixology Monday blogging event here, Jay's taste-test posts here and here, this post at Bar Mix Master (which includes a recipe for Hess House Bitters), and last but not least the dedicated eGullet thread here. That should give you plenty of starting points!

Vanilla extract

Just a teaser, actually, because my vanilla beans just arrived today. I measured out roughly 60 grams of them (20 beans), split them lengthwise and halved them, and put them in a 500 ml mason jar, then covered them with vodka.

It should be ready in about 6 months.

Dill pickle redux

When I left off last October (wow, time really flies!), I still hadn't quite achieved the kosher dill experience I'd been looking for. So when I saw pickling cucumbers in the Guelph Farmers' Market a few weeks ago, I knew I had to give it another shot.

This year, though, I had a number of advantages on my side. For one, I made my own pickling spice mix, using the recipe in Charcuterie. For another, I bought a bunch of 1-litre jars for various projects, some of which will be making an appearance on this blog before too long, so I wasn't forced to repurpose a previous pickle jar.

But the biggest advantage was the basement of our current house. When we were in New Brunswick, we were living in a two-bedroom apartment, which didn't leave a lot of room for controlling the temperature to suit pickle fermentation, rather than personal comfort. Here in Guelph, though, we have a basement that's always a few degrees cooler than the rest of the house. So I knew I had to give the "natural pickles" a shot.

Unlike the pickles I made last year, which used vinegar to provide a sour flavour, natural pickles use naturally present Lactobacillus bacteria. You immerse the vegetables in a 5% brine (that's 50g of pickling salt per litre of water) along with whatever aromatics you like and leave them in a room that's between 18 and 22 degrees Celsius. The bacteria begin to produce lactic acid, which gives the vegetables their characteristic sour flavour. You can use this technique for any vegetables, not just cucumbers.

Right after I bought the cukes, we were hit with a heat wave, so I put them in the fridge and held off for a few days. Once the heat broke, I put a thermometer down in the basement and waited a couple of days, to make sure we were in the right range. Apparently you can get some nasty bugs in the brine if you go over 23C.

Once it was clear I wasn't going to kill myself with bad pickles, I boiled up the brine with some pickling spice and garlic, cooled it in an ice bath, and poured it over the cukes and some fresh dill in a couple of jars, using the Charcuterie-approved method to make sure the cukes were fully submerged and would stay that way. Seven days later, I opened one of the jars for a taste test. The brine was fizzing lightly, but smelled just fine. Better than fine, actually, it smelled downright appetizing! So I pulled out one of the pickles, ate part of it, and shared it with my husband and a visiting friend. It was crunchier than any commercially produced kosher dill I've ever tasted, but not quite as sour as I wanted. So I gave them three more days of fermentation.

I had taken a few of the cukes and made some vinegar dills, partly in case I messed up with the natural ones and partly because the basket of cucumbers was much bigger than I'd anticipated. As it turned out, this was unnecessary, which means that the vinegar dills are likely to sit in the fridge until I use up the natural dills. One thing's for sure: we won't be buying commercial dill pickles for a while.

Now that I've seen the whole process in action, though, I feel confident that I can pickle a variety of different vegetables. Maybe I'll try making my own sauerkraut and do a choucroute garnie redux...