You can't make everything from scratch

New home!

2011-01-02T17:22:00.003-04:00

In case there's anyone still checking in on the front page of this blog, I thought I should put up a note mentioning that I have, for all intents and purposes, moved to a new home at Kayahara.ca. Please come and visit me there!

New year, new equipment, new possibilities

2009-01-04T19:05:00.002-04:00

Happy New Year! This will be a year for new and exciting projects, starting with the made-from-scratch apple fruit leather I'm working on right now...

Choucroute garnie for one

2008-11-10T13:31:00.002-04:00

I continue to be amazed by the utter transformation that salt, water and time (and our microscopic friends known as lactic acid bacteria) can have on vegetables.

Making sauerkraut at home is easy: just thinly slice a cabbage, submerge it completely in a 5% brine - and I do mean completely; cover it with cheesecloth and weight the whole thing down with a plate, otherwise you'll get nasty mold - and leave it in a cool place for a few weeks.

Once it's ready, drain it and boil the brine. Cool the boiled brine and pour it back over the cabbage. Store it in the refrigerator. Making sauerkraut is easy; finding enough room in the fridge is hard.

Making sauerkraut is easy, finding people who are willing to eat it can be hard. How did sauerkraut get such a bad reputation? If you, like me, are the only person you know of who enjoys eating sauerkraut, don't let that stop you from making it. Once it's ready, sauté a diced onion and minced garlic clove in some duck fat or bacon fat and add some sauerkraut, a 50/50 mix of brine and chicken stock just to cover, and some spices: juniper berries, coriander and bay leaves are all good. Nestle a sausage or two into the sauerkraut bed, along with two thick pieces of home-cured, unsmoked bacon. Bring to a simmer, then braise in the oven at 300F for 30 minutes. (If you like your sauerkraut softer, braise it for longer on its own, then add the meats about 20-30 minutes before serving.) Serve with boiled potatoes and sharp mustard.

Thai red curry paste

2008-11-04T10:54:00.004-04:00

With some foods, there's a good reason they're not made from scratch more often.

Take Thai curry pastes. I recently found myself with a small pile of red chillis left over from a farmers' market purchase and, in an effort not to let them go to waste, I decided to make red curry paste. This is not necessarily a straightforward enterprise. Most of the Thai cookbooks I've looked at don't include recipes for curry paste; they all seem to recommend using the purchased product. For that matter, many Thai restaurants use commercial pastes, though I'm sure the best ones make their own.

Instead, the recipe I used comes from the Chez Piggy cookbook, which is quite global in its outlook. It notes that finding some of the ingredients may be a bit of a challenge, and boy was that true: they range from the relatively run-of-the-mill shallots and garlic, to the slightly more unusual, but still findable, lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves to the completely obscure kaffir lime rind and coriander roots. I managed to locate most of these ingredients at our local Asian market, at a total cost of about $15 - my husband loves it when I spend that kind of money so as not to waste $1.50 worth of chillis.

(Fortunately, the recipe also gives substitutions for some of the more obscure items. For instance, I used normal lime zest instead of kaffir lime rind, and extra coriander stems in place of the coriander roots.)

Once you have all of the ingredients, you then have to prep them, which is the other warning given in the book: it's time consuming. If you're looking for an excuse to practice your knife skills, this is a great way to do it! Here's the mise en place for Thai red curry paste.

(I admit that it might have taken me longer than absolutely necessary to prep everything, since I wanted to make it look nice for this photo.)

Once you've leapt the hurdles of locating the ingredients and cutting them up, though, everything gets easy: toss all the wet ingredients into the blender and blend them to a smooth paste, then add the spices and shrimp paste and blend again to combine. Freeze the result, and you're done. I wrapped the paste in plastic wrap and rolled up into a log shape to make it easy to hack off the portion I want to use.

Red curry paste has several uses - for example, it appears in one of the best peanut sauces I've ever tasted - but it seemed most appropriate, for my first use of the new paste, to make a simple red curry dish with coconut milk, chicken and pineapple. The homemade curry paste wasn't as spicy as the commercial ones I'm used to (although the chillis were definitely very spicy on their own!), but it was much more fragrant and complex. I wouldn't say that I like the homemade version better than the commercial ones, but it's definitely different, and definitely good.

Peanut brittle

2008-10-06T18:05:00.003-03:00

I was in Williams-Sonoma recently and noticed that they were selling peanut brittle. Now, I love browsing in Williams-Sonoma, dreaming of being able to afford all the shiny copper pots and pans, or the full line of Le Creuset products. But peanut brittle is one product you should never have to buy there - or anywhere else, for that matter. It's just too easy to make it yourself. The only special equipment you need is a candy thermometer, and if you like peanuts as a snack (or cook a lot of Thai food), you probably already have all the ingredients in your pantry.

The recipe I use is from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop, mostly because I know where to find it! I'd be surprised if I didn't have other recipes for it elsewhere in my cookbook collection, but this one has been consistently successful for me, so it's the one I turn to. It's pretty heavy on the peanuts compared to some I've eaten (presumably because it's meant to be an ice cream mix-in), so I imagine you could cut back if you want a higher candy-to-nut ratio.

First, assemble your ingredients. Clockwise from top: 1/2 cup corn syrup, 1/2 cup granulated sugar, 2 Tbsp. water, 1.5 cups peanuts, 1/2 tsp. baking soda. Make sure you have a sheet pan standing by, lined with a silicone baking mat.

Attach your candy thermometer to a medium saucepan and add the corn syrup, sugar and water. Bring it all to a boil.

Once it's boiling, add the peanuts.

Stir them in (I'm using a silicone spatula here) and keep stirring until the mixture reaches 300F to 305F, being careful not to let the peanuts burn!

Once it reaches 300F to 305F, remove it from the heat, add the baking soda and stir well. The mixture should start to foam.

Quickly pour the candy onto the prepared sheet pan...

...and spread it out as thin as you can. It will start to harden pretty quickly as it cools.

Once it's spread out, wait for it to cool completely, then break it into pieces and enjoy!

If you've never made candy before, this is a great place to start, because it's not finicky, and presentation isn't a big deal, since it's just going to end up broken into irregular pieces anyway. And if you still want to spend money at Williams-Sonoma (or your favourite kitchenwares store), you can always pick up a candy thermometer!

Concord Grape Fruit Jellies

2008-10-01T13:37:00.002-03:00

This summer has been very rainy around here, so when I asked my favourite fruit vendor at the farmers' market about Concord grapes, they were a little skeptical. "They need more sun! Ideally about 10 days more. Check back in two weeks." Two weeks later, still no grapes. Fortunately, the entire week after that was warm and sunny, so I finally laid my hands on some Concord grapes last weekend.

You may not know it, but you're already familiar with the taste of Concord grapes. Think Welch's grape juice or grape jelly. In fact, given how incredibly "grapey" the flavour is, I have a hard time believing anyone would bother using artificial grape flavouring.

A fresh, whole Concord grape is a slightly different matter. They don't smell like Welch's. They have an aroma that's musky and wonderful and all its own, that can be detected from several stalls away at the market: I knew the grapes were in before I even saw them. These grapes are not the easiest to eat, either, though they taste great. The skins have a tendency to slip off easily, but the flesh clings tightly to the seeds. Yes, grapes with seeds!

We bought 10 litres.

The first 8 were destined for grape jelly, which went off without a hitch. Grape jelly is easy, if you're comfortable making jam: take 4 pounds of grapes and half a cup of water. Crush the grapes and simmer for 10 minutes with the water. Strain through a jelly bag (without squeezing, if you want a clear jelly), then measure out 4 cups of the juice. Put in a pot with 6¾ cups of sugar and bring to a good rolling boil. Then add a pouch of liquid pectin, boil for 1 minute, and pour into sterilized jars and seal. The hardest part is waiting for the juice to strain.

The rest of the grapes were a bit more of a personal challenge. You see, during Concord season last year, I tried to make the grape jellies, also known as pâte de fruit, from The French Laundry Cookbook. I followed the recipe as closely as I could, but the end product was an indistinct mass of grape-flavoured ooze. (Apparently, I'm not the only one to have this problem.)

So I spent the intervening year doing a little research so that I would be ready when grape season rolled around again. I decided that the jellies needed to be cooked to a slightly higher temperature than is specified in the recipe: it calls for 219F, but the consensus seemed to be that 224F was closer to the mark for a standard fruit jelly recipe, so that's what I did.

The end result was certainly far from perfect, but it was a vast improvement over last year. For one thing, this year's batch of jellies can be picked up in your fingers, rather than having to be eaten with a spoon. The flavour is great, but the texture is a little too firm. Next year, I'll try it at 223F and see how it goes. Which really gives me a good reason to look forward to Concord grape season next year!

Liqueurs: Limoncello, damson gin and beyond

2008-08-29T09:11:00.002-03:00

So it turns out that distilling alcohol at home is technically illegal, which somewhat limits your options for making your own hard liquor. Only somewhat, though, because modern bar culture has spawned a wide variety of often fancy bottles that all hold what is essentially a blank canvas: vodka. Lacking a still, vodka is the next best thing you can use to make your own booze.

Vodka, being essentially a mix of water, ethanol and nothing else, is a great tool for extracting flavour out of other foods. Because of its chemical structure, ethanol can dissolve both water- and oil-soluble flavour compounds. (You can read more about this here.) In practical terms, this means that if you add an aromatic foodstuff to vodka and leave it to sit for a few weeks, you usually wind up with something that's pretty tasty.

I've written briefly about alcohol extractions once or twice before, but bitters and vanilla extract are not intended to be drunk on their own. The same principles apply to liqueur-making, though. (Indeed, there's no reason you couldn't make vanilla-flavoured vodka!) I've made several liqueurs in the past, but the most recent was limoncello. There's a great, detailed limoncello thread on eGullet that provides you with all the details you need to make this delicious post-prandial libation, but the basics are these: zest a bunch of lemons into some vodka, let it steep for a few weeks, filter, sweeten to taste, then top up with additional vodka to bring the alcohol percentage up to 30% for stability.

Ideally, you want to be working with 50% abv vodka, but I don't have access to any at a reasonable price, so I've been using "Prince Igor Extreme" vodka from Kittling Ridge which, despite the fratboy connotations of the "Extreme" moniker, is actually a quality product that's affordable and clocks in at 45% abv.

I recently finished my first batch of limoncello, and although I'm not blown away by the results - I blame mediocre lemons - I'm impressed enough that I'll be making it again as soon as this batch runs out. After that, I may try some variations: I'm thinking a spiced Seville Orangecello might make a nice Christmastime treat.

In the past, I've also made blueberry liqueur, damson gin (also based on an eGullet recipe) and, more recently, I put some sour cherries and sugar into gin, to produce both gin-soaked cherries and cherry-flavoured gin. To those of you who might object that gin is not vodka, I should point out that gin is basically just the original flavoured vodka, where the flavour in question is predominantly juniper.

To learn more about making liqueurs at home, check out the eGullet threads mentioned above, plus this one.

Just because it's homemade doesn't mean it's good

2008-08-09T11:47:00.002-03:00

One of my more recent projects was a first attempt at homemade ricotta cheese. The process couldn't be easier: just put milk in a saucepan, heat it to 200F (just below the boil), add acid (usually in the form of lemon juice, vinegar or citric acid crystals), turn off the heat and wait ten minutes. Drain the curds for an hour in cheesecloth over the kitchen sink, add a little salt (and some cream, if you like) and you're done!

I followed that process exactly, but was underwhelmed with the results. The problem wasn't with the process, though. (There are a couple of things that can go wrong, the big one being the addition of too much acid, which makes the curds rubbery.) It was with the ingredients.

I shouldn't still be finding this out the hard way, but it remains true that starting with mediocre ingredients will yield mediocre results. There's no way that mass-market grocery store milk is going to make a memorable cheese. Not that it was bad, mind you. It just had no character and made it seem like homemade ricotta wasn't worth the trouble. If I'm going to make my own cheese, I'm not going to bury it under mountains of pasta and tomato sauce: I want to be able to taste it. But if its taste isn't compelling in its own right, I'm not going to eat it simply with fresh figs and vincotto. (Actually, in this case I did, but I wouldn't do it again.)

It was a poignant reminder that simple preparations require top-quality ingredients.

The following week, I picked up some goat's milk from the cheese stand at the farmer's market that carries the Monforte Dairy products. The end result was much tastier, especially with that added "goat's milk" quality. This was a cheese that was worth the trouble, and that I could happily eat on its own. Next time, I'll try organic cow's milk. And I can't help but wonder what it would be like with raw milk...

Semi-From-Scratch: BBQ Chicken

2008-06-28T14:15:00.002-03:00

Cooking, like almost every other field of endeavour I've ever come across, is sort of like a fractal: the closer you look at it, the more there is to look at. When looking through the lens of this blog's theme, for example, there's the possibilty of "from scratch" at every level. Take pizza: you can buy frozen pizza, or you can go one level down by buying pizza dough, pizza sauce, pepperoni and mozzarella from the grocery store. If you're a little more adventurous, you can easily make the pizza dough yourself, like I do. And it's not really that difficult to take fresh or canned tomatoes and pass them through a food mill to make pizza sauce. Pepperoni and mozzarella are substantially more involved, but they too can be made from scratch. That said, there's clearly a middle ground between frozen pizza and dry curing your own pepperoni where you can still proudly say that your pizza is made from scratch. There's a reason Carl Sagan is said to have quipped, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

I recently made a batch of what I've been calling "semi-from-scratch barbecue sauce" using this recipe. The first ingredient it calls for is ketchup, which I've had on my "to make from scratch" list for some time, especially since reading Jeffrey Steingarten's article "Playing Ketchup" in The Man Who Ate Everything. This time around, though, I just used the red stuff from the Heinz bottle, and I think the results were still pretty tasty.

In the end, you have to ask yourself why you're interested in making things from scratch. Health can be one reason. By cooking from scratch, you can reduce your intake of preservatives and chemicals with unpronounceable names.* But flavour is another reason. Cooking from scratch is a great way to make the most of fresh, in-season, flavourful foods and turn them into something sublime. When you have control over the elements that go into a product, you can make the outcome taste the way you want it to taste. When you buy a frozen pizza, you're stuck with the number and type of toppings the manufacturer has chosen. When you make pizza from scratch - even if you buy pre-made pizza crust - that decision is yours.

Similarly, I could easily buy a Bourbon barbecue sauce. But by making it myself, I can decide if I want to add a little more garlic powder, or substitute real garlic instead. Even though it's based on store-bought ketchup, there are lots of ways I could tweak it to bring it closer to my ideal barbecue sauce.

Next time, I think I'll add more Bourbon.

*Of course, there's a whole argument to be had about whether or not those chemicals are actually "unhealthy." As I've delved into learning about hypermodern cuisine, I've come to appreciate that many chemicals with unpronounceable names are perfectly safe and incredibly useful.

Thoughts on seasonality

2008-05-21T00:00:00.002-03:00

Last Thursday, May 16, I bought the first local asparagus of the spring.

Eating seasonally is hard at the best of times, but it's even harder when you live in a region - in an entire country - where there is effectively no growing season for more than six months of the year. (The growing season around here seems to be about 139 days, with an average last frost date of May 11.) I literally don't understand how inhabitants of Canada, whether European or First Nations, made it through the winters in the days before canning, chest freezers and February cherries from Chile. I suspect the answer involves a lot of unbroken monotony, a steady diet of the same winter-storage foods day in and day out, and (likely) quantities of salt that would make modern physicians frown.

I count myself lucky not to have to labour under such restrictions. I try to "eat local" with some regularity, but I don't deny myself the pleasure of a bell pepper in the middle of January. Of course, many fruits and vegetables suffer so much from intercontinental transport that I can't be bothered to buy them, because they don't taste like anything. Others, like asparagus, are so intimately associated with the seasons that even though I can buy reasonably tasty versions at other times of the year, I tend not to.

These thoughts come at an interesting time for me. The week before last, I was in San Francisco, where I visited the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market and experienced unbridled jealousy toward California's bounty. I visited my local farmers' market on Saturday and was, as always, disappointed to see the same array of fruits and vegetables as can be found at any major grocery store. None of them, as far as I could tell, were clearly labeled as to their origins. What's the point of a farmers' market if the produce isn't local? What incentive do I have to choose it over the one-stop convenience of the supermarket, where I can also buy toilet paper, batteries and (if I so choose) lawn furniture?

It's not like there's no local produce to be had, either: I went to the market looking for rhubarb, which the Foodland Ontario Availability Guide assures me is available, but there was none to be found. (Fortunately, it doesn't look like this will be a problem in future years, since the house we've just purchased comes fully equipped with its own rhubarb patch.)

I was immensely pleased to see so much local asparagus, though. I'd been mostly resisting the urge to buy the bunches at the grocery store that had been shipped in from Mexico or the US, and I think last week's bunch tasted all the sweeter because of it, and I have high hopes for the bunch that's sitting on my counter right now.

I'm not sure what seasonality really does or should mean in Canada, in Southern Ontario, in the winter. But I have a much better idea what it means in the summer, and I'm determined to make the most of it this year.

(This post has been inspired in part by Russ Parsons' book How to Pick a Peach, which I've been reading recently, and by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon's book The 100-Mile Diet, which I just started tonight. You can read some interesting, often contrary, opinions about the 100-mile diet on this thread at eGullet, in addition to many other places.)

Vanilla

2008-04-15T22:37:00.001-03:00

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

2008-02-28T09:21:00.002-04:00

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

2008-02-13T09:33:00.002-04:00

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

2008-01-19T11:23:00.000-04:00

"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...

2007-10-16T23:21:00.000-03:00

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

2007-09-07T15:15:00.000-03:00

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

2007-09-01T13:45:00.000-03:00

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...

BLT

2007-08-28T21:13:00.000-03:00

Recently, I took some of the bacon I cured and made it into a BLT for dinner. Just for fun, I thought I'd do a little pictorial.

First, take a loaf of nice bread. This is sourdough from Cave Spring, a really excellent winery in Ontario's Niagara region. They serve the bread in the associated restaurant, called On the Twenty, and sell loaves in the winery shop.

Then, fry up your home-cured bacon. I actually ended up making four BLTs with the bacon shown here.

Wash and dry some red leaf lettuce...

...and slice up your ripe, red, farmers' market tomatoes.

Cut a length of bread and split it in half.

Top with the bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayo, and serve with a homemade dill pickle. About which, more soon...

Bacon!

2007-08-17T00:53:00.000-03:00

For many people, bacon is the ne plus ultra of, well, food. There are bacon bandages, bacon candy, even bacon Martinis. Bacon nearly has a cult-object status.

The idea of curing my own bacon was one of the reasons I bought Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's Charcuterie. (Don't you love how this blog is almost, but not quite, a cook-everything-from-Charcuterie blog in the same vein as the Julie/Julia project or French Laundry at Home?) Not that I think commercial bacon is bad, but it just seems incredible to me that it's something you can make at home.

To do that, though, I needed two ingredients that you won't find at your local supermarket (unless your local supermarket is much better stocked than mine): pork belly and curing salt. The pork belly I was able to order from one of the butchers at the Guelph farmers market, and the curing salt from Stuffers Supply Co. in British Columbia.

Curing salt, also known as pink salt (because it is frequently, though not in my case, tinted pink to prevent confusion with regular salt), is a mix of table salt and sodium nitrite. The nitrite is the important part here: it's what keeps the meat pink and gives it its characteristic "cured" flavour, not to mention its longer shelf-life.

Setting up the bacon to cure is easy: just mix up the basic cure given in the book, add the suggested chopped garlic, bay leaves and black pepper for a "savoury" cure, dredge the belly, and put the whole mess in a big Ziploc bag for a week.

The hard part was knowing when it was done. The book says that you should check after 7 days, but that thicker bellies might need a little longer. And I was definitely working with a thicker belly - around 2.5 inches at the thickest point, which was almost exclusively fat. When the bacon is cured, it's supposed to feel "firm." But how firm is firm? By the time I decided to just move on to the next step (since I was leaving town the next day), it felt firmer than the raw product, but still slightly squishy.

Traditionally, bacon is smoked, but Ruhlman and Polcyn provide alternative instructions for those of us who haven't yet convinced our spouses of the necessity of buying a smoker. The alternative involves roasting the bacon in a very low oven until its internal temperature is 150 degrees Fahrenheit. They say this should take 2 hours, but I found it took closer to 5. This just goes to show my depth of commitment to the project: do you know what happens when you leave your oven on for 5 hours in the middle of summer? Yeah, me neither; I passed out from heat exhaustion around hour 3.

Once the bacon got up to temperature, I pulled it out of the oven, cut off a piece and ate it. It was really different from any bacon I've ever had before, partly because of the lack of smoke, partly because of the savoury cure, and partly because it actually tasted like meat rather than just salt. It's not the sort of bacon that I'd serve with eggs or pancakes (my next batch will definitely be a sweeter cure), but I have really enjoyed it in pasta (carbonara and amatriciana, so far) and look forward to using some in coq au vin or a frisée aux lardons.

All in all, I wasn't as completely blown away by it as some people (based on the blogs and eGullet post I've read), but I was quite pleased with it as a first effort. I may try and track down pork belly from a different source, since, with a preparation this fundamental, the quality of the raw materials makes all the difference in the world.

When life hands you cherries...

2007-07-24T15:05:00.001-03:00

I suppose the punchline should be, "Make cherry lemonade." But it's not.

Last year, it was blueberries; this year, it's cherries. Fortunately, we were marginally more restrained this time around, buying only about 6 pounds of the most fragrant sour cherries we could find at the Guelph farmers market to see what they would inspire.

Once we got them home, the cherries began to deteriorate quickly, even after we put them into the fridge. (And the ones we threw out along the way were quickly adopted by our local fruit flies, who eventually converted our garbage can into a fruit fly nursery. You know what they say: time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a cherry!)

Anyway, we had to act fast. The first thing I did was ask my husband to make me a clafoutis, a traditional French dessert that's sort of like a cross between a cherry pie and a very thick crêpe. We soon followed that with a batch of cherry sorbet, drawing on the method described by Thomas Keller in the Bouchon cookbook. (I'm hesitant to call this his method, since it's so simple that it's likely used by cooks everywhere, even if they've never heard of Keller.) The sorbet was absolutely amazing, with excellent flavour, a great balance of sweet and tart and a wonderful texture. The recipe is below.

Lastly, though, I decided to try my hand at making jam. I've always been hesitant to make my own jam, not because I was worried the jam itself would be hard to make, but because it seemed like so much work to sterilize, fill and process all those jars. Plus I'm a germophobe, so I'm more than a little worried about accidentally my family and friends.

I had a hard time finding a recipe that I liked, but ended up going with this one from Gourmet magazine. We followed the directions to a proverbial T, with the exception that we made only a partial batch, but I ended up quite disappointed with the outcome. Why? Because the jam didn't set! So much for the jam itself not being hard to make.

(In fact, the recipe is for "preserves," which I always thought this was a synonym for "jam," perhaps with slightly larger pieces of fruit. However, I am reliably informed that "preserves" refers to whole pieces of fruit in thick syrup. So maybe it did set as much as the recipe writers intended. If so, though, why add the pectin at all? Clearly I have a lot left to learn about jams, jellies and preserves.)

We also ended up with only 5 jars of... ahem... preserves, and I was right that it is a lot of work to sterilize, fill and process the jars, even though my husband very gamely gave me a lot of help with the whole thing. I'm not one to be daunted in the kitchen, though, and it occurs to me that sterilizing 15 jars can't be a lot more work than sterilizing 8, so I'm going to try again later in the summer. When apricots come out, I'll be sure to set aside enough time to do it properly, and make sure I have enough fruit to make a full batch.

Oh, I also saved a handful of the best cherries in the bunch to dunk into some bourbon. They're sitting happily in my fridge, awaiting their fate at the bottom of my next Manhattan.

Sour Cherry Sorbet
2 pounds sour cherries, net weight (i.e., after you pit them)
1.25 cups granulated sugar
2 Tbsp. lemon or lime juice (We used lime, because it's what we had on hand. You may think the cherries are sour enough on their own that you don't need this ingredient, but we tasted the sorbet mixture both with and without, and it really is necessary for balance.)

Wash the cherries well and pit them, discarding any that are insect damaged. Make sure you have two full pounds of pitted cherries, then puree them with the sugar in batches in a blender. Transfer to a bowl, add the lime juice and stir well. You should have about 5 or 6 cups of mixture. Chill in the fridge overnight.

The next day, process in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's directions. Transfer to an airtight container and place in the freezer. It should keep about a week - if you can keep your hands off it that long!

Playing with my food

2007-06-26T14:18:00.000-03:00

It may not be evident from the posts I've put up so far, but I'm actually a fan of the food movement controversially known as "molecular gastronomy." For those of you who aren't familiar with it, this movement primarily involves using food science knowledge to have fun in the kitchen. Molecular gastronomy chefs often produce a food that is trompe l'oeil, or deconstructed versions of classic dishes, and just generally like to play with their food and make people reconsider their preconceptions of how food should be, while still making sure that it tastes great.

A lot of the chemicals and equipment they use can be hard to come by for the home cook, but some are very easy to find, provided you know where to look. One of those things is agar. Agar is a seaweed derivative that is very similar to gelatin. One important difference between the two is that agar jellies are stable to a much higher temperature than gelatin is, so you can produce hot jellied items, a novelty that many chefs have used in the playful spirit of molecular gastronomy. Fortunately, agar also has a long history in East and South-East Asian cuisine, so acquiring some is as easy as heading to your local Asian grocery store. (Of course, if you live in the town I just moved out of, there is no Asian grocery store, and you'll have to drive the 2 hours to Halifax. I'm glad to be back in Ontario!)

I decided to experiment with agar because I have an idea for a deconstructed breakfast dish that I want to try. Of course, I've never used it before, so I thought I'd start with a recipe that someone else has gone to the trouble of testing and working the kinks out of. My trial run was a coffee jelly from Elizabeth Andoh's excellent Japanese cookbook Washoku.

The recipe couldn't be easier: make coffee, add sugar and powdered agar that's been moistened in a bit of cold water, bring the whole mess to a boil to fully dissolve the agar, then pour into a mold or molds, let it come down to room temperature (at which point it will set), and chill it to improve the flavour. Dice it up, top with whipped cream, and enjoy!

The end result is a very intriguing product: it jiggles the way gelatin does, but it has a very different texture in the mouth. Because gelatin melts at around body temperature, it's very smooth on the tongue. Because agar does not, it maintains its structure while you chew. Clearly, while gelatin and agar are similar, they are not completely interchangeable. Also, the agar jelly began to weep some liquid as it warmed. I've read that this is what happens if the concentration of agar is too low, and since I wasn't using the most accurate scale in the world, this explanation seems plausible.

The flavour of this particular dessert was very good: the agar didn't impart a noticeable flavour at all while the jelly was cold, and although it took on a slight bitter quality as it warmed, this could just as easily have been from the coffee as from the agar.

Which brings me to the main technical challenge here: I know that it's possible to warm agar jellies, but I have no idea how to do so! I tried microwaving the cubes, but the outsides melted while the insides were still cold. I've considered putting them in simmering water or steaming them, but I don't like the idea of having to blot them. I imagine the best approach would be sous vide, but I can't really afford to buy a vacuum sealer and immersion circulator. Clearly, more experimentation is in order.

Home-ground beef burgers

2007-05-21T09:24:00.000-03:00

Thanks to this post over at Cooks Korner, I was inspired to make hamburgers last weekend. Fortunately, now that my husband eats red meat again, I can devote a little time to doing it right, since I don't have to worry about making a separate meal for him.

These burgers were made from scratch with beef blade (that's "chuck" if you're American) that I ground myself. They were tasty, spiked with chopped garlic, canned chipotles and oregano, and I'll probably make them again some time. With the summer grilling season just around the corner, I don't imagine "some time" will be that far in the future. This time, though, it was just easier to pan-fry them, because the weather outside wasn't really appropriate to grilling.

I was surprised by how well they held together despite the total lack of any binder. I'm tempted to think this has something to do with the use of fresh-ground beef of known origin, but I don't actually have any scientific basis for this belief. And since I haven't made burgers with store-bought ground beef in a really long time, I don't really have any basis of comparison either. (Nor is that likely to change!)

Even after making four 150-gram burgers, there was roughly a pound of beef left over that I used to make tacos the next night. All in all, not bad for less than $8 worth of beef blade!

Oh, and I also managed to start an interesting - if at times heated - discussion on Cooks Korner about the virtues of undercooked hamburgers and the risks of E. coli.

Spice is the variety of life

2007-04-28T12:48:00.000-03:00

Or did I get that backward?

Spring seems more or less to have arrived, at least here in New Brunswick and in Ottawa, where I was visiting friends last week and where the nice weather put me in the mood for grilling. Specifically, it put me in the mood for some jerk pork.

In the past, whenever I've made jerk at home, I've used the reliable, blazing hot sauce from President's Choice called "Memories of Montego Bay." I had almost gotten as far as the bottled sauce aisle at the grocery store before I thought to myself, "If I make the jerk sauce from scratch, it'll give me blog fodder!"

A quick search of the Internet later, I had a short list of the key ingredients in jerk paste: scallions, thyme, allspice (known in French as "piment de Jamaïque," or Jamaica pepper) and, of course, scotch bonnet peppers. These particular peppers have a reputation for being, roughly, the Hottest Peppers in Existence, so I was surprised to see that most jerk paste recipes online called for anywhere between 6 and 20 of them. Thinking I knew better, I scaled it back to two peppers for my jerk sauce.

Well, I was rewarded with a superlatively ho-hum jerk sauce. The other flavour elements were all in place (though it was maybe a little heavy on the thyme), but there was zero heat. In the future, I think I'll trust the Internet more. But at least I now have something to tweak!

Oh, and I do recommend serving it with mango salsa and Jamaican rice and peas. You can find lots of recipes for both of these in various corners of the Net.

(Sorry kids, no photo this time.)

Jerk Paste No. 1 (Not Recommended)
1 small onion, chopped
9 scallions, chopped
4 garlic cloves
1.5 tsp ground allspice
1 Tbsp. dried thyme [Ed. note - Too much!]
2 scotch bonnet chilis [Ed. note - Not enough!]
1 tsp. dark soy sauce
1 tsp. brown sugar
salt and pepper

Grind to a paste in a food processor. Marinate meat (pork, chicken, goat, whatever). Grill. Eat.

Hot Cross Buns

2007-04-08T12:18:00.000-03:00

Though my religious beliefs these days tend toward the agnostic, it would be disingenuous to say that Christian culture does not continue to have an impact on my life, even if only by determining what holidays I recognize. I don't want to get into an extended meditation on what this means; suffice it to say that, when Easter rolls around, I still enjoy hot cross buns, but don't really focus on their religious significance.

The last time I made hot cross buns at home, I struggled with them quite a bit. Since then, I've gained much more experience with yeast-leavened breads. This time, I had only two problems: I can't do arithmetic (18 is 2 x 3 x 3, not 2 x 2 x 3), and the recipe is so loaded with currants and raisins that kneading the dough inevitably leads to a small shower of dried fruit all over the kitchen.

Hot Cross Buns
Adapted from The Chez Piggy Cookbook

Buns:
2 1/4 teaspoons (1 envelope) instant yeast
5-6 cups flour
3/4 cup superfine sugar
1 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. ground cloves
1/4 tsp. ground allspice
3/8 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. ground cumin
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1 Tbsp. coarse salt (or to taste)
1 cup powdered milk
1 1/2 cups currants
1 1/2 cups sultana raisins
1 cup candied citrus peel
1/2 cup softened butter
2 eggs, beaten
2 cups warm water

Icing:
2 Tbsp. fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 1/2 cups confectioner's sugar
Zest of 1 lemon (zest the lemon before you squeeze it for juice)

In a large bowl, stir together the yeast, flour, sugar, spices, salt, milk powder and dried fruits. Add the butter, eggs and water and mix thoroughly. Turn dough onto a well-floured board and knead until smooth. Place dough in an oiled bowl, cover with plastic wrap and leave to rise until doubled in size, about 2 or 3 hours.

Punch dough down, divide into 18 pieces (divide it in half, then divide each half into 3 and each of those thirds into 3). Shape the pieces into buns, place them on a baking sheet lined with a Silpat or parchment paper, cover with plastic wrap and leave to rise until almost doubled in size, about 1 hour more.

Preheat oven to 375F. Just before putting the buns in the oven, slash their tops. If you want, you can brush the tops with a mixture of 1 beaten egg and 2 tablespoons of milk. Bake the buns for 17-20 minutes, until golden brown.

For the icing, warm the lemon juice in a small saucepan, then add the sugar and mix until dissolved. Stir in the lemon zest. Transfer to a zipper-seal bag, trim the corner, and squeeze crosses (or another, non-religious shape of your choice!) on the buns. It helps if the buns aren't still hot when you do this, but warm is OK.

Happy Easter!

Year of the Pig

2007-03-26T20:05:00.000-03:00

One of the few easily available top-quality products here in rural New Brunswick is sauerkraut. By a quirk of history, there is a large population of German extraction in this part of the country, and sauerkraut is a way of life for Germans.

So what do you do when faced with a large quantity of fresh sauerkraut? Make food whose pedigree is from the most German part of France: choucroute garnie, a classic dish from Alsace. (Pure German cuisine, while hearty, usually has little else to recommend it.)

Literally, choucroute garnie means dressed or garnished sauerkraut. In practice, it means sauerkraut heaped with pork in every conceivable form. Plus a little bit of veal, for good measure.

In the Les Halles Cookbook, Anthony Bourdain notes that the hardest part of making choucroute is gathering the ingredients. For me, it involved buying some sausages on our last trip into Montreal, freezing them, and flying them back home. Almost everything else was available locally.

You don't really need a recipe for this dish at all, though I nominally used Bourdain's, since I felt like I needed training wheels for my first time out. The basic process is this: Boil some waxy potatoes. Rinse a couple of pounds of fresh sauerkraut and let it drain. In a large pot, melt some goose or duck fat and sauté an onion. Throw the sauerkraut in the pot, and dump in a bottle of wine (Riesling or Sylvaner from Alsace, de préférence). Add a bay leaf, a garlic clove and some lightly crushed juniper berries and coriander seed; next time, I'm going to add some cloves, too. Bring it to a simmer, then nestle the meat in the sauerkraut. Let it all simmer for an hour or two, heat up the potatoes and sausages (if they're fully cooked; otherwise, add them to the sauerkraut a little earlier). When everything is cooked, put it all on a serving platter like the one pictured above. Dig in. Share with friends, 'cuz you're not going to be able to eat it all on your own.

You can easily switch up the meats in this dish, but I stuck to the letter of the recipe, opting for Weisswurst, frankfurters, smoked pork chops and salted pork belly. It seemed especially appropriate to go with the porky theme given that we're now in the year of the pig by Chinese reckoning.

(Well, no, not as appropriate as if we'd made a pork dish from Chinese cuisine, now that you mention it...)

Anyway, you're probably wondering how this relates to the overall theme of my blog. The one ingredient I couldn't find here and didn't bring back from Montreal was salt pork. However, the local supermarket carries fresh pork belly. Following Bourdain's instructions, I mounded salt over it and let it sit in the fridge for a couple of days. Voilà!, salt pork from scratch.

This is not a sausage McMuffin

2007-02-24T19:49:00.000-04:00

When I started this blog, one of my goals was to make my own sausage. In fact, part of the original inspiration for creating my own blog came from Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's book Charcuterie, which focuses on, though is not limited to, sausage in all its various forms. If you've read many of my previous entries, you may have noticed that this book is something of a theme for me. A touchstone, if you will.

There were a couple of obstacles to me making sausage at home, though. Chief among them was the fact that I didn't have a meat grinder. This problem was finally rectified in December, when my parents gave me the meat grinder attachment for the KitchenAid stand mixer as a birthday gift. Ever since I returned home, I've been dying to try it out, but didn't have a chance to do so until a couple of weeks ago. (OK, so it's taken me longer than planned to get this post up.) I was at the local farmers' market and managed to pick up a few pounds of pork butt, then hit the grocery store to grab all the other ingredients I needed to make my first batch of sausage.

I decided to go with the breakfast sausage for a couple of reasons: first, because Ruhlman explicitly states that it's easy. Second, because it didn't need to be put in casings and I didn't want to invest in a sausage stuffer right away. (Besides, I haven't found a local source for casings yet). And third, because it's a necessary ingredient in the breakfast food pictured above.

When I was growing up, it was always a major event to have more than cold cereal for breakfast. In fact, Christmas morning was the only day of the year we could be guaranteed a hot breakfast. Sure, there were other mornings - usually on the weekend - when Dad would make eggs and English muffins or we would head out to McDonald's, but these occasions were the exception, not the rule. When it did come to pass, though, sausage patties were always one of my favourite treats. I wanted to see if fresh ones were substantially better than the frozen-in-a-box variety.

In Charcuterie, Ruhlman and Polcyn point out that sausage-making takes some time, so I was surprised how easy it all seemed. In fact, the most time-consuming step was boning and dicing the meat, though part of the time consumption stemmed from my worry that I wasn't trimming off enough of the connective tissue, which would jam the grinder. As it turned out, I only had to stop it once to untangle bits of sinew from the blade.

I ended up with slightly less than the five pounds of meat the recipe calls for, but forged ahead anyway. After prepping all the seasonings, I mixed them in with the diced meat and left it all in the fridge overnight. The next evening, I ground the meat into the KitchenAid bowl set in ice, then added ice water to the ground mixture and mixed it with the paddle attachment, a step known as the "primary bind." (I did this in two batches, even though the book says that the KA can do it in one. Maybe they had a different model in mind?) A quickly fried test batch showed that the sausage was a little salty, but insanely delicious - definitely better than frozen.

Once I had made my first sausage muffin, pictured above, I portioned off the rest of the meat, flattened it into it patties, and froze it in anticipation of those mornings when I feel like having something a little special for breakfast. Then, I started flipping through the book to see what kind of sausage I'd be making next...

Winter comfort food

2007-01-20T16:13:00.000-04:00

Until this past week, the weather here in New Brunswick had been unseasonably warm. But that didn't mean I wasn't craving solid, hearty winter food. Even though there was no snow, the days were still short which meant I still had an urge to cocoon.

Winter is all about leaving the oven on for long periods of time. And baked beans seemed like a good excuse to do so.

For me, baked beans have always been a canned food item, so they fit in very nicely with the theme of this blog. They also scream comfort food, so they're perfect for this time of year. This was my first attempt at making them, and I didn't really know where to begin. In my preliminary searches for a recipe, I had one overriding criterion: no molasses, because my husband doesn't like the flavour of them. I ended up using the recipe from the Gourmet cookbook, which calls for maple syrup instead.

The end result was okay, but I don't think I'd use the same recipe again. They were definitely hearty, but a little on the sweet side for my tastes. Also, the bacon produced some grey foam as it simmered, so I'd make a point of blanching or frying it next time. Fortunately, it looks like it's going to be a long, cold winter from here on out, so I imagine I'll have some opportunity to experiment with variations.

Mixology Monday: Drinks for a Festive Occasion

2006-12-11T20:42:00.000-04:00

Although this blog is not primarily about cocktails, I've been on something of a cocktail kick for the past few months. Some of my friends tell me I've just been drinking more, and I say to them: "You're right!" But I've also been drinking more widely and more creatively. Moreover, I've been eyeing the Mixology Monday event for a while now; I just hadn't gotten my act together to participate until today.

The theme for this month's Mixology Monday, hosted byThe Spirit World, is "Drinks for a Festive Occasion." My husband and I pride ourselves on our annual Christmas party, but we usually restrict our alcohol offering to wine and BYOB. MxMo could have provided us with the impetus to create some new drinks for this year's party - except that we had friends who made egg nog for us to serve. And it was both delicious and greatly appreciated!

Nonetheless, there are a couple of drinks that we have served at past parties that are probably due for renewal. When serving drinks at a party, the key is to be able to get them out fast, especially if you want to spend any time with your guests, rather than behind the bar. There are a few ways to ensure this: allow your guests to serve themselves, for example, or make a big bowl of punch. Our preferred method is to offer a house highball with only two ingredients. That way, it's quick and easy to assemble, requires no shaking or stirring, and allows you to offer that personal touch of making a drink for your guests.

Our favourite highball at this time of year is cranberry juice and amaretto. It's a festive colour and a festive flavour, and comes together in a flash. I don't think I've ever seen a name for this particular combination, though we've toyed with "Cramaretto" (which doesn't sound so great). Mostly we just refer to it by its component ingredients.

Cranberry and Amaretto
Put 1.5 oz. of amaretto in a highball glass filled with ice. Top with cranberry juice.

We don't usually insist on a garnish, but if you wanted, you could add a half-slice of orange skewered with a fresh cranberry in the middle. If you find the above version of the drink too sweet, you could replace some of the amaretto with vodka, making it a little drier while keeping its kick.

Since I'm here, I'd also like to talk about another favourite drink of mine in the winter months: the hot toddy. At their simplest, my hot toddies consist of a shot of whisky (Scotch or Canadian, depending on my mood), a spoon of sugar, and a mugful of hot water, garnished with a lemon twist. Around Christmas, you can festive it up by adding a couple of whole cloves and a cinnamon stir stick to the glass.

If you want to party-size it, though, there's another approach you can take. I always offer hot mulled apple cider at our Christmas party, and have been known to leave a bottle of rum conspicuously near the stack of mugs. After all, there's nothing that says a hot toddy has to be made with water, right?

Hot Mulled Cider
Sweet apple cider (i.e., the non-alcoholic kind)
Assorted whole spices: cinnamon sticks, cloves, allspice, etc.

Put the cider in a large pot. Add the spices. Bring almost to a boil, then reduce the heat and allow to simmer for at least 15 or 30 minutes. The cider improves as the evening wears on, unless it runs out! Don't let it stay at a boil for very long, or a sediment will form. If you don't want to worry about that, use filtered apple juice instead of apple cider.

To make a hot toddy with the cider, simply put a shot of the rum (or whisky) of your choice in a mug, ladle in some of the mulled cider, and garnish with a small piece of lemon and a cinnamon stir stick.

Cheers!

This will probably be my last post for the year, since I'm going to be on the road until January 4. Happy holidays! I'll see you in 2007.

Spiced holiday nuts

2006-12-06T10:06:00.000-04:00

For me, Christmas and nuts have always been closely related. During the holiday seasons of my childhood, my parents always had a bowl of nuts around, usually with their shells still intact. Fighting to break through that protective layer and pick out the bits of sweet meat from inside was something I always loved doing, and it was a tradition I continued after I left home.

In recent years, however, I've discovered an even better treat, and one that requires less work: spiced nuts. Specifically, the Sweet & Spicy Holiday Nuts from Bridgehead. (No, I don't work for the company, I'm just a happy customer.) These nuts don't provide the satisfaction of a shell to break through, but they make up for it with a crunchy coating of salt, sugar and spices, including one spice with a bit of kick to it that makes them more interesting than mere cinnamon would.

This year, though, my timing (or theirs) was apparently off: even though I was in Ottawa at the beginning of the holiday shopping season, the nuts were not available for sale yet in any of the four Bridgehead stores I visited. It was time to make my own.

I knew I'd never be able to match the exact seasoning, but I figured that gave me the freedom to tweak it to perfection. The real challenge was figuring out exactly how to get the clumps of sugar and spice to stick to the nuts. A little poking around online turned up the answer: egg white!

The recipe I ended up using was loosely based on this one at Epicurious. I changed it by by mkaing up my own spice mix, a combination of cinnamon, cloves, ginger, allspice, ancho chile powder and cayenne pepper. I also omitted the crystallized ginger, even though I love it; it just wasn't what I was looking for in my holiday nuts. The spice proportions weren't quite what I was looking for (next time I'd use more cayenne), but the results were certainly tasty.

I would note two things in particular with this one: First, make sure your nuts are fresh. I had a small bag of age-unknown filberts in the cupboard, and mixed them in with the new bag I had just bought. I had tested one of them, and it seemed fine, but I've since come across some pretty rancid ones in the finished product. Second, make sure your spices are fresh, or at least all of the same freshness. We just opened a new tin of allspice, and its flavour ended up dominating all the other spices in the mix.

The recipe makes a lot, but keeps well. Serve it at your Christmas party!

Spiced holiday nuts

A few teaspoons of your favourite spices (I used something like 2 tsp. cinnamon, 1/2 tsp. each of cloves, ginger, allspice, nutmeg and ancho chile powder and 1/4 tsp. of cayenne)
2 tsp. salt
2 large egg whites
6 cups mixed nuts (I used unsalted ones from the baking aisle so I could control how salty they were. I used a mix of almonds, filberts, cashews, pecans and brazil nuts. Walnuts would be good, too, but they didn't have any walnut halves at the store where I was shopping.)
1/4 cup sugar

Preheat oven to 225F. Line a large baking sheet with a Silpat or parchment paper. Mix the spices and salt in a small bowl. In a large mixing bowl, whisk the egg whites until foamy. (I didn't whisk them long enough, and they collapsed when I added the spices. So get them good and foamy.) Whisk in the spice mixture. Add the nuts and stir to coat. Add the sugar and stir to coat again. Spread out in a single layer on the baking sheet, and bake, stirring every 20 minutes, until they're good and roasted and the coating is dry, about 1 hour 20 minutes total. Sprinkle with additional salt if desired. Cool and store in an airtight container at room temperature.

Pretending to get ready for winter

2006-11-06T22:14:00.000-04:00

It may look as though I've been neglecting this blog of late, but in fact I haven't. Or at least, I have a good excuse: I've been hunting ducks.

Okay, I haven't actually been going out with a gun to shoot them down out of the sky, but I have been prowling all the local grocery stores to find some. I've spent the better part of the last month on a mission to make duck confit, and given that I live in a town with a park devoted to all manner of waterfowl, it's been surprisingly difficult to find ducks.

A week ago Friday, I finally found some Brome Lake ducks at a nearby Sobeys and immediately set to work.

Duck confit is essentially duck (usually the legs, although apparently you can confit the breasts as well) that has been cured with salt, slow cooked in rendered fat (usually duck fat, although you can mix in some lard as well) and then left in the fat, which hardens as it cools, forming a natural seal to keep the air out. This effectively preserves the meat ("confit" is just French for "preserved"). In Charcuterie, the book whose confit recipe I used (although I have at least four others), Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn write:

"Ducks and geese may have been the raison d'être of the confit. When it came time to harvest the foie gras, the valuable fattened liver from specially raised birds, French farmers would have had far more meat than they could eat or sell. Happily, the birds produced extraordinary amounts of fat. So they first cured the meat with salt, then poached it in its own fat and left it to cool submerged in that fat."

This presumably explains why I associate confit so strongly with autumn and winter. Since this is the season for slaughtering the ducks, which would have spent all summer getting fat, it's the right time of year for making and starting to consume confit. Of course, we don't need to preserve meat in fat anymore, since we have freezers and other such modern contraptions, but we continue to do so because it still tastes good. And with preparations as, well, arcane as confit, that sense of its relationship with the season hasn't quite gone away for me. I could have made this recipe at any time of the year, but it's nice to pretend I'm getting ready for a long, cold winter.

When I got my ducks home, they were frozen, so I immediately put them into a sink full of cold water to thaw. Once they were mostly thawed, I transferred them to the fridge to finish thawing overnight. Two days later, I set aside lots of time to work with them. First, I broke them down into legs, boned breasts, fat and carcasses.* The breasts went back into the freezer (something that I'm sure would offend many food safety experts), the legs went into their overnight salt-and-spice cure, the carcasses went into roasting pans en route to the stockpot, and the fat went into a pot to render.

The next day, I rinsed off the duck legs, patted them dry and placed them in my large Le Creuset dutch oven. I took the rendered fat, plus some additional fat I'd bought in Montreal, melted it in a saucepan and poured it over the duck legs. Once I was satisfied they were covered (I had to add a little bit of lard as well), I put them in the oven on it's lowest setting for 6 hours. After that, the fat was clear, the juices were all at the bottom, and the legs were tender. Into the fridge it went. For a week.

Last night was the big night, when I finally pulled the confit out of the fat, cooked it up and ate it. We had a couple of friends over, and served it over a risotto spiked with fresh shiitakes and dried cèpes. In my excitement, I forgot to take any photos, but that's alright, because the plate was entirely monochromatic.

The taste and texture, though, were amazing. Rich, and salty, and meltingly tender. My husband, who had had a bad experience with duck confit in the past, had set out steak knives, but one of our guests rightly observed that you could have eaten it with a spoon.

If this is preparing for winter, I think I can handle the snow.

*Note: To find out more about how I boned the ducks, check out this thread on my new favourite culinary website, Cooks Korner. I haven't yet figured out how the site differs from eGullet, except that there are a lot fewer members, so I get more attention!

Fun with grenades

2006-10-06T19:36:00.000-03:00

Grenade: Baie ronde de la grosseur d'une orange, à saveur aigrelette, renfermant de nombreux pépins entourés d'une pulpe rouge

Grenadine: Sirop fait du jus de grenade ou imitant le sirop de grenade

(Source: Petit Robert)

Sometimes, relationships that are clear in one language are obscure in another. For example, I never used to know what grenadine was made of. The ingredient lists on most commercial grenadines offer no insight, since they contain no fundamental differences from, say, the ingredient list on a bottle of soda.

In French, however, the connection is clear: the root of grenadine is grenade, which, in English, is a pomegranate. Hence greandine's red colour, which experience suggests is its only distinguishing feature. The definition of grenadine given above also underscores another point, however. It defines grenadine as a "syrup made from pomegranate juice or imitating pomegranate syrup." And imitating is the key word here, since, again, most commercial grenadines have never even been in the same room as a pomegranate.

As my husband will tell you (probably while sighing and rolling his eyes), I've been on a cocktail kick recently. One standard ingredient I make for cocktails is simple syrup. At its most basic (I'm tempted to say, at its "simplest"), simple syrup is just equal parts of sugar and water, mixed (and often heated) to dissolve the sugar. The resulting syrup is then used to sweeten cocktails without leaving a film of grit in the bottom of your glass. When I made my most recent batch, I wanted to store it in a capped squeeze bottle in the fridge. The only such item available in the local hardware store was a pair of bottles, one yellow, one red, intended to be used for mustard and ketchup. "Hmm," I thought to myself as I poured the simple syrup into the yellow bottle, "What can I put in the red one?"

Then one day, it hit me. I could make my own grenadine -- real grenadine, made from pomegranates! At its most basic, grenadine is just simple syrup, with pomegranate juice in place of the water. There are a number of variations: many recipes suggest adding some vodka or neutral spirits as a preservative, and some recipes suggest reducing the pomegranate juice by half before mixing the sugar in. I followed the most complicated approach, reducing the juice by half, heating to dissolve the sugar, and adding a tablespoon of vodka as a preservative.

You can find pomegranate juice at most major grocery stores these days, thanks to the rising popularity of pomegranates as a source of antioxidants. So there's really no excuse for using commercial grenadine. Just make sure the juice you buy is 100% real pomegranate juice; otherwise, you may as well just use the commercial kind, since it has a longer shelf life. (There are also a number of real-pomegranate commercial grenadines on the market. Fee Brothers' American Beauty grenadine is one. I've ordered a bottle of it, and am curious to see how it will stack up.)

There are lots of cocktails that call for the red syrup; The Internet Cocktail Database lists 538 of them. One that's recently gotten my attention (and is currently sitting on my desk) is the El Floridita. It's sort of like a fancy Daiquiri, but with a hint of chocolate and a nice red colour. You can learn more about it at The Spirit World blog.

El Floridita
1 1/2 ounces white rum
1/2 ounce lime juice
1/2 ounce sweet vermouth
1/2 teaspoon white crème de cacao
1/2 teaspoon grenadine

Place all ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with cracked ice. Shake hard. Strain into a chilled martini glass.

Cheers!

A dilly of a pickle

2006-10-02T21:43:00.000-03:00

Generally, I'm not much of a home canner. I know that it's a great way to do the whole "eat local" thing through the long, cold winter (see, for instance, this post on Accidental Hedonist), but there's something about the whole process of sterilizing jars, filling them, and sealing them properly that always strikes me as being too much effort. Especially when I lack the space to store large numbers of jars, full or empty.

However, a craving for good kosher dills and a trip to the Dieppe Market a few weeks ago means that I now have my first-ever bottle of homemade dill pickles in the fridge.

The recipe I used comes from Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's Charcuterie, a book that I can't praise highly enough, even though I've barely scratched the surface of what it has to offer. (To see some of the more impressive projects from the book, check out this thread on eGullet.) In the book, Ruhlman and Polcyn put pickles in the section on brined foods, which I've written about before.

The closest thing I've made to pickles in the past is Moroccan preserved lemons, which I make fairly regularly (and will make more of, once I reclaim my lemon jar from the blueberry-infused vodka that's currently in it). I also tried making some Japanese daikon pickles last winter. They were pretty tasty, but there were only so many I could eat, and my husband didn't have a taste for them, so I ended up disposing of a good part of the jar, something that it pains me immensely to do.

Fortunately, home canning is the one culinary endeavour that seems to be popular in my little corner of the country (as my downstairs neighbour, who very graciously offers me some of his own home-canned pickles and fruit from time to time, will attest). Consequently, supplies for it are quite easily available; it was no trouble finding dill seed, pickling spice or coarse pickling salt, though the fresh dill required a short trip to a neighbouring town.

So how did they taste? Fairly dilly, though I found the pickling spice I used to be a little overpowering, contributing too much allspice flavour to the mix. Next time, I might try making the picking spice mix in the book, rather than using a commercial mix. In a real testament to the quality of the cukes that went into the jar, the pickles were very crunchy and - the biggest surprise - had a distinct cucumber flavour, which is like nothing I've ever tasted in a commercial pickle. In the end, they weren't quite the kosher dill experience I'd been looking for. To get that, I think I'll have to use the recipe for "The Natural Pickle" on page 69 of Charcuterie, which calls for them to be fermented at room temperature (but no more than 23 degrees Celsius) in a 5-per-cent salt solution for 7 days. Or maybe I'll just buy a jar of Strub's.

Oh, and if you recognize it, please ignore the label on my re-purposed jar. Those name-brand kosher dills, while not bad, decidedly did not satisfy my craving for kosher dills, which is why I turned to homemade. Frankly, I found the jar's original contents preternaturally crunchy.

Sorry, no recipe this time. If you really want it, you can find it on page 71 of Charcuterie, which you can get from your local bookstore or library.

A good use for smoked salmon

2006-09-26T16:09:00.000-03:00

(Not that there's a bad use.)

One of our friends here in town brings us a little gift every time she comes over, even though we've told her she doesn't need to. Most recently, she brought us a package of hot-smoked salmon. When I saw it, my mind immediately went to pasta, because it's one of the things I most love making with smoked salmon. And since it's been quite a few weeks since I last did homemade pasta, I thought it was time for another try.

My interest in learning to make homemade pasta has always been to make filled pasta, like ravioli and tortelli. I have no problem using dried pasta for basic noodles, but I've always wanted to be able to come up with my own fillings, especially since many commercial versions use red meat, which my husband can't eat. So this time, I made smoked salmon-stuffed ravioli with lemon-cream sauce. (And yes, that's "ravioli stuffed with smoked salmon," not "ravioli stuffed with salmon and then smoked," though that could be fun, too.)

For the pasta, I mixed together semolina flour and eggs, added a bit of water to smooth out the texture, and let it rest for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, I flaked the smoked salmon, and added a minced shallot and enough ricotta cheese to hold it all together. I also threw in a couple of tablespoons of grated Asiago (although I don't think it ultimately had much effect on the flavour). While the filling chilled in the fridge, I divided the ball of pasta into quarters (halves would probably have worked, too), and rolled them out into thin sheets. I topped one sheet with dollops of filling at regular intervals, used a pastry brush to wet the spaces in between the dollops, and covered it with another sheet. Using my new ravioli wheel, which I picked up the last time I was in Montreal, I cut out the squares. After each batch, I took all the trimmings and recycled them until there wasn't enough dough left to be useful.

For the sauce, I took some heavy cream and white vermouth, grated in some lemon zest, and reduced everything in a frying pan. Once it was thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, I mixed in some lemon juice, and poured it over the cooked pasta. Voilà! Dinner.

As predicted in my last post on pasta, using semolina instead of all-purpose flour, as well as dividing the ball of dough, made it a lot easier to roll it out nice and thin. Indeed, it worked so well this time that I've decided to forego seeking out a pasta machine any time soon, though it would have been helpful in ensuring uniform dimensions for the sheets, so that they would match up exactly when one is laid on top of the other, and a uniform thickness, so that they would cook more evenly. As it turned out, some of the ravioli were slightly undercooked, so that's something to watch out for.

As for the filling, it was very tasty, and very salmony. If you're feeding a larger group, you could definitely add more ricotta to stretch the salmon further, though you'd end up with a less fish-intensive dish. You could also try adding lots of salmon-friendly seasonings, like fresh dill or capers. The sauce was very tangy, which made a nice counterpoint to the richness of the filling.

And my apologies for not having a photo this time around. There are a number of reasons for this. First, one or more of the ravioli burst while cooking, which meant that the whole batch of pasta ended up decorated with small salmon flakes, detracting from what should have been a pristine white dish. Also, the ravioli themselves were very irregular, a function of the irregular shape of the pasta sheets and my inexperience in cutting perfect squares. But most importantly, the batteries in my camera were dead! I guess I'll have to make sure I charge them before embarking on my next culinary adventure...

Smoked salmon-stuffed ravioli with lemon-cream sauce
For the pasta:
200g semolina (300g might work better, since I ended up with extra filling)
2 large eggs (add another one if you're using 300g of semolina)

For the filling:
1 small shallot
227g fully cooked hot-smoked salmon (you could probably use cold-smoked, or even canned salmon in a pinch)
Ricotta cheese
Asiago or other hard, flavourful cheese such as Parmigiano-Reggiano
Salt and pepper

For the sauce:
1/2 cup whipping cream
1/4 cup white vermouth (I used Noilly Prat)
Zest of half a lemon
Juice of half a lemon
Salt and pepper (use white pepper to keep black specks out of your white sauce)

1. Make the pasta: mix the semolina and eggs until dough comes together. Knead briefly, adding water if necessary to achieve the right texture. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside for 15 minutes.

2. Make the filling: Mince the shallot. Flake the salmon. Grate the Asiago or other cheese. Mix everything together in a medium bowl with enough ricotta to bind, season, and chill in the fridge.

3. Divide the ball of pasta dough into quarters, and roll each one out very thin. (If you have a pasta machine, there's no better time to break it out!) Take one of the sheets and lay it on a work surface. Place a small amount of filling at regular intervals along the pasta sheet. Using a pastry brush dipped in water, wet the spaces between the filling. (Don't forget about the edges of the dough!) Place a second sheet of pasta on top, press down around the filling, and crimp with a ravioli wheel. Save the scraps.

4. Once all the pasta dough is used up (and hopefully all the filling, too), place the ravioli on a cookie sheet to dry. While they're drying, bring a large pot of heavily salted water to a rolling boil. Once the water is boiling, put the pasta in to cook. Cook until al dente, or to taste.

5. In a frying pan, mix the cream, vermouth and lemon zest. Bring to a boil, stirring, and simmer until thickened enough to coat the back of a spoon. Season with salt and freshly ground white pepper.

6. Drain the cooked pasta. Right before serving, mix the lemon juice into the sauce, heat through, and pour over the pasta.

Enjoy!

Blueberry season

2006-09-06T17:40:00.000-03:00

Has it really been more than 3 weeks since I last updated this blog? I've been extremely busy with for-pay work over the last little while, which has really limited my ability to play around in the kitchen, not to mention my desire to write anything in my spare time. Fortunately, the immediate busy season is nearly over, and my pots and pans are calling...

This is not to say I've completely avoided cooking over the past three weeks. In fact, my husband and I took advantage of the recent blueberry season in Western Nova Scotia to pay a visit to Oxford, the self-proclaimed wild blueberry capital of Canada. Not knowing exactly where to get the best blueberries, we decided to consult the people who would be able to tell us: the Oxford tourist information centre (and wild blueberry and maple museum). The staff member at the desk was exceptionally friendly and knowledgeable: he was able to tell us that the blueberries they were selling, at $10.75 for 5 pounds, were from Amherst, about 20 km closer to home than Oxford. He also explained that the "blueberry capital" distinction is earned on the basis of Oxford's processing/freezing plant, which handles blueberries from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Maine.

We ended up buying 10 pounds of the berries, learning that this would be enough for about 5 pies. Well, we discovered that 10 pounds of blueberries was a lot more than we thought it would be. Our 10 pounds went into the following recipes:

2 blueberry pies

2 batches of blueberry muffins

1 blueberry-orange loaf

1 blueberry-orange cake

1 blueberry buckle

1 "pouding renversé des bleuets" (blueberry upside-down cake)

1 batch blueberry sorbet

I'm also going to infuse some vodka with the small blue berries, with the ultimate goal of making a liqueur. After that, there will still be a small number of berries left - just enough to go on my yogurt in the morning.

The centre is devoted to both blueberries and maple syrup because Nova Scotia also has a small, but apparently devoted, maple syrup industry, with a lot of cross-over between the blueberry farmers and maple syrup producers. Our friend at the tourist information desk told me that the producer of the maple syrup they sell had had a stroke of bad luck recently, losing their entire sugar shack operation in a fire started by a lightning strike. This was on top of their having lost their mechanical blueberry harvesters last year in a similar accident. But he couldn't say enough good things about the quality of the product, which was still made the old-fashioned way, by boiling the sap over a wood fire, rather than using the reverse osmosis process that many Quebec syrup operations apparently use.

With that kind of a sales pitch, I couldn't help but buy two litres of the sweet stuff. The first item on my to-do list is maple pie, but I'm sure I'll find out that 2 litres of syrup is about as hard to use up as 10 pounds of blueberries. Fortunately, the syrup has a much longer shelf life!

Pouding renversé aux bleuets
Adapted from A Taste of Quebec by Julian Armstrong

2 cups blueberries
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp. grated lemon zest
1/4 cup shortening
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1.25 cups all-purpose flour
1.5 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
2/3 cup milk

Preheat oven to 350F. Mix the blueberries, 1/4 cup sugar and the lemon rind in an 8-inch square pan. Cream the shortening and remaining sugar in a bowl, then add the egg and vanilla. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, salt and baking powder. Add the flour mixture and milk, in alternating additions, to the creamed shortening, forming a smooth batter. Spoon over the prepared blueberries, and bake for 40 minutes or until your cake tester comes out clean. Let cool a little and turn out onto a plate. Serve warm or room temperature with whipped cream or ice cream.

Hands-on learning

2006-08-14T23:06:00.000-03:00

I had always intended to try my hand at making fresh pasta for this blog. Pasta, especially in its dried form, is the ultimate in convenience foods: cheap, fast and easy to cook. If you can boil water, you can do pasta. Yet there's so much more to it, because fresh pasta is a completely different animal from dried, and something that few home cooks in North America make. Naturally, it seemed like a good fit with my theme.

My first attempt at homemade pasta, undertaken a few weeks ago, could best be described as "not a complete disaster." I used the recipe for fresh pasta in The Silver Spoon, which calls for a ratio of two eggs to 1 3/4 cups flour. The dough came out extremely stiff, with lots of uncombined flour, and because I'd never made pasta before, I had no idea what texture I was aiming for. We were in full-on guesswork here.

After letting it rest 15 minutes, I took the whole ball of dough and rolled it out. Naturally, I couldn't get it as thin as I wanted to without it springing back. I suppose I could have let it rest multiple times, but I was getting hungry by this point, so I just rolled it as thin as I could, cut it into wide noodles, and cooked it up. I served it with black-olive "tapenade for pasta" from the Chez Piggy Cookbook. I've included the recipe below.

While this attempt was reasonably tasty, I knew there was more to pasta making than I had managed on my own. So I took advantage of our trip into Ottawa two weeks ago to consult with a friend of mine, who makes his own pasta regularly. Because Jean-Pierre is a great guy, rather than just giving advice, he offered to walk me through the process.

The first change we made was the type of flour. I had used all purpose, because The Silver Spoon said that it was the closest approximation to Italian Type 00. Jean-Pierre favours semolina, largely because of its lower gluten content. (And because it's what he knows.) He also suggested a ratio of 100 grams of flour per egg, and thinning the dough with a little water from there.

After letting it rest, Jean-Pierre cut the ball of dough into quarters, and demonstrated how to run it through the pasta machine, a quarter at a time. I think the technique of rolling it out in smaller portions is extremely useful, even (especially?) if you're not using a pasta machine. It allows you to roll a much thinner dough over the same surface area, as well as giving you the time to dry each sheet as you roll out the next.

After they had dried a little, we took each sheet, cut it into linguine on the roller, cooked it, and served it with Jean-Pierre's homemade pesto. It was delicious.

With all the variables we changed, it's hard for me to know how much difference the pasta machine made. The process certainly seemed easier, and the dough ended up much thinner than I could ever get it by hand. But I don't think I'm ready to plunk down the cash for one just yet.

In the end, I think the hands-on approach with an experienced pasta maker was incredibly valuable. When you spend as much leisure time as I do reading about food and cooking, you sometimes forget that there are some things you just can't learn from the printed page. This was a great reminder of the advantages of having someone watch over your shoulder as you work.

When I was in Montreal on the way home, I stopped in one of the markets on St-Laurent in Petite Italie and picked up both a ravioli wheel and a bag of semolina flour. Ultimately, my heart is set on making ravioli with some braised lamb shank meat, pecorino cheese and fresh rosemary. Now that I have a better idea of how the pasta-making process should go, I don't think it'll be that much longer until I give this recipe a try.

(For a handy guide to pasta making, check out this course on eGullet.)

Tapenade for pasta
1/4 cup olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
1 lb. kalamata olives, pitted and chopped
1/4 cup capers, chopped
2 anchovy fillets, chopped (optional - leave them out if you're vegetarian)
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp. dried thyme
2 tsp. brandy
1 Tbsp. Dijon mustard

In a frying pan, heat the oil and sauté the onion slowly until soft. Allow to cool, then mix with all the other ingredients. Toss with cooked pasta (the original recipe calls for 2 pounds) and garnish with freshly grated cheese.

Getting to the heart of food dislikes

2006-07-25T20:38:00.000-03:00

Whenever someone asks me if there are foods I don't like, I draw a blank, as there are very few foods that I will out-and-out avoid. (Sometimes I even seek out foods that I don't like so that I can train my palate to appreciate them. Blue cheese is such a food. Edited to add: Apparently I'm not the only one who does this.) There are, however, some foods that I don't prefer. Until tonight, artichokes were at the top of that list.

Every time I had been exposed to artichokes, they were in canned and/or marinated form. And every time, I found them metallic, sour, and generally unpleasant. I always ate them when faced with them, but I never sought them out by, for example, ordering them on pizza.

They'd been on my mind lately, though, because I think of them as a very Italian vegetable, and I'd been hoping to have the chance to try them in various preparations while in Italy. Unfortunately, no such opportunity presented itself - the one time I encountered them on a menu, the restaurant had run out before I got there.

Then, this past Sunday, I noticed a large stack of quite nice-looking artichokes at Pete's Frootique in Halifax. And I thought to myself, "Why not just buy a couple and see what they're like at the source?" So we did.

I prepared them tonight (after doing some research) by simply slicing off the stems, slicing off the top couple of inches of the leaves, and steaming them in a couple of inches of water acidulated with half a lemon. Then we peeled off the leaves, dipping each one in butter and scraping them between our teeth, until we had worked our way down to the hearts. (Though I am given to understand that this is not how the Italians eat them!) They were great: quite sweet, with that very distinctive artichoke flavour. They struck us as a perfect alternative to offer vegetarian friends at a lobster boil, since they take about as much work to eat as a lobster does.

Score one for overcoming food dislikes!

Killing your own food

2006-07-24T17:18:00.000-03:00

One of my fundamental principles as a meat-eater is respect for the living beings that die to sustain us. This principle has a number of implications on the way I eat. One is not being afraid of offal, and I've worked hard over the past few years to appreciate "the nasty bits." (Successfully, I might add: I'm now never without some boudin noir in my freezer, and I eagerly agreed with the waiter in Siena who suggested I try the tripe.) Another is minimizing cruelty by using as little factory-farmed meat as possible. This is a much harder one for me, especially because of supply chains where I live, but it's one I'm working on.

A third implication is the importance of recognizing where food comes from. As part of that, I believe that I should be willing to kill my own food. Not all the time, but at least once, and without being squeamish or sentimental about it. Until last Sunday, I had never taken a live animal and personally turned it into meat. (Unless you count oysters. I don't.)

Now, granted, lobster is a pretty mild case, because even otherwise-squeamish people are willing to kill their own lobster, or at least watch it be done. After all, in its live state, lobster is not exactly cute and cuddly the way that lambs or piglets are. (And I have a firm belief that people's objection to killing animals is directly proportional to the perceived cuteness of the animal in question, though they're also willing to make specific exceptions for "luxury foods" like lobster and foie gras.) Also, it's not like you're intimately connected with the death of the lobster; you just throw it in the pot, toss on a lid, and you're done.

But it was an important psychological moment for me. We bought the lobster the day before cooking it, and I was very meditative about the whole thing. How did I feel about having six living creatures in my fridge overnight? Was I going to grow attached to them? When the moment came, how would I feel about placing a live, wriggling creature into boiling water and watching it die? There was a moment when I considered the possibility of converting to vegetarianism. So even if many others are willing to make lobster a specific exception to their general preference for shrink-wrapped meat on a styrofoam tray, I felt very deeply about the whole experience, and it was an important moment when I put that first crustacean in the water.

In the end, I was quite comfortable with the process. I felt no morbid fascination with their deaths (though the tone of this entry might lead you to believe otherwise!), but I felt no remorse either.

And the lobster was very tasty.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation, part III: Bologna and Venice

2006-07-24T17:13:00.000-03:00

Bologna had the honour of hosting both a "best of" and "worst of" experience. The "best of" was the gelato: on the recommendation of our Lonely Planet guidebook, we went to La Sorbetteria Castiglione at Via Castiglione 44. It was a little bit out of the way, but every bit worth the walk. They have an "open-kitchen" concept, so you can actually watch them make the gelato you're about to enjoy. The end product itself is incredibly creamy and rich, and many of the flavours have chunks of goodness (chocolate, house-made pralines, candied fruit). This may well have been the best ice cream I've ever had in my life.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the rabbit my husband had had for dinner the night before. We happened across an ad for Trattoria del Rosso (Via Augusto Righi 30) in Bologna's gay-oriented magazine, and thought it would be nice to support a business that supports the community. That turned out to be a mistake. My meal of lamb was fine, but my husband's roast rabbit with potatoes was awful: the potatoes were improperly cooked french fries, and the rabbit was overcooked, to the point of shoe-leather consistency. I don't think I've ever seen my husband simply put down his fork and refuse to eat a meal before - it was that bad. So I complained to the waiter in a mix of English and broken Italian. He promptly consulted with one of his colleagues, and then they both left. When a third waiter came to clear our plates, he noticed that most of the rabbit and fries was left, and politely inquired "Non e' buono?" To which I replied, with verve, "No! Non e' buono! E' troppo cotto! Molto, molto troppo cotto!"

To the trattoria's credit, they struck it from our bill, but the whole experience left us with a mixed opinion of the Bolognese food scene. We may just have a conference there for my husband (who's a university professor) so we can investigate further.

Venice was probably our favourite city of the whole trip. I suspect this was partly because our expectations were low (we had been warned off it by a couple of friends), partly because the weather was much cooler there than anywhere else we'd been, and partly because of the incredible graciousness of our host, Antonio, at his bed and breakfast (called Alle Guglie B&B, not to be confused with the hotel of the same name). Because the B&B is essentially a private apartment (Antonio rents out the spare bedroom), we were even able to prepare dinner for ourselves one night. So we had an insalata caprese (tomatoes, basil and organic bufala mozzarella), some prosciutto crudo, and some walnut and radicchio ravioli dressed with olive oil. All of that, washed down with a bottle of Amarone, made for a nearly perfect evening.

In addition to providing us with impeccable recommendations for sights, Antonio also suggested a couple of restaurants. My favourite in this latter category was Bentigodi. We went here on our last night in Venice, so ordered the full deal. We started with spritz cocktails (prosecco and Aperol) and the most perfect octopus salad ever, with warm octopus on a bed of cold greens, with orange segments to round it out. For mains, my husband had a very fresh, perfectly cooked sea bass and I had baccala' with polenta. For dessert, we shared the house "chocolate salami" and I had a glass of grappa. It was a wonderful meal to end the trip.

I would add to the general observations I made in my last post that we found the flavours of some of the vegetables too really stand out. Maybe we just fell victim to the same syndrome of confusing our state of mind with the state of the food, but the tomatoes really do taste different - and much better - in Italy. Another vegetable that surprised me was arugula. I don't think of myself as being a big fan of arugula in particular, though I do like my bitter greens in general. But on our first night in Rome, I ordered a pizza with bresaola (dry-cured beef), arugula and parmigiano-reggiano cheese. It was an eye-opening experience: the arugula tasted very peppery, with only a slightly bitter flavour. Definitely a vegetable to explore.

I want to close with a word on Italy's coffee culture. The coffee was generally excellent, with a shot of espresso ranging from 85 cents to €2.50 (the latter being a price we paid less than happily to sit at a table in Florence). We liked the Bolognese tendency to serve a shot glass of sparkling water alongside the morning coffee, presumably in case there are any grinds that have made their way into the cup. My husband, who was a strictly drip-coffee-and-occasional-cappucino man before the trip, has now started drinking moka (stovetop "espresso") with me in the mornings. Indeed, the moka pot has surpassed our regular coffee maker in usage since we returned. There's even been talk of buying a home espresso maker. So the coffee culture in Italy gets two enthusiastic thumbs up!

Now back to your regular, unscheduled, made-from-scratch food blogging. Don't be surprised if you notice a higher concentration of Italian cuisine in the next little while.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation, part II: Rome and Florence

2006-07-19T17:29:00.000-03:00

It's extremely difficult to summarize our time in Italy, if only because we spent two weeks there, with a multitude of extremely different food experiences in a wide variety of cities. So I've broken this leg of the trip into two posts, in which I offer one or two highlights from each of the four cities we stayed in, with some general observations thrown in for good measure.

First, Rome. It’s hard to single out one meal as the best based solely on the quality of the food, so I’m going to talk about the meal that was the best experience. As so often happens, it earned that status because it was shared among friends. Our friend André, who lives in Rome, took us out one night with a small group of his friends to a trattoria whose owner, Paolo, they know. The only name I ever saw on the building was something to the effect of "Trattoria Antica," which seemed unusually generic. The food, however, was anything but.

We were all served prosecco shortly after our arrival. Menus were placed on the table, left there without being consulted, and then removed. As if by tacit agreement, we were served mixed fried fish, followed by a variety of perfect vegetable dishes. (At least, the ones that made it to my end of the table were perfect. I can only imagine that the others were even better!)

The selection of secondi was a serious affair: Paolo asked whether we wanted meat or fish, and then made a suggestion based, apparently, on his mood or our appearance or how our appearance affected his mood. Or maybe it was the alignment of the stars. In any event, I had beef straccetti with arugula and my husband had an enormous piece of tuna with tomato sauce. All of this was washed down with excellent house red wine, and finished off with limoncello.

Besides the food being excellent, you couldn't beat the atmosphere: we were sitting out on the uneven street, with the occasional car driving by inches behind us. We had arrived quite late, so the weather was beautiful. The conversation was in a mix of Italian (which we don't speak), French (which we do speak) and English. Also, the evening spun off into one of our better dining experiences in Florence.

Rome being Rome, we had more than one great dining experience. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention another excellent meal, at a small restaurant called "Eduardo II". We were taken here by André as well, though it was just the three of us for this meal. It was another case of André knowing staff at the restaurant, so menus were, again superfluous. Our waiter, Mario, said he would "take care of us." And he did: this may have been the only meal on the whole trip where we had antipasto, pasta, secondo, dessert, wine, coffee and limoncello. And each dish was very well executed. My only regret is that I don’t know the address of the restaurant to recommend it to anyone, though it was near the Piazza Margana.

Next on our itinerary was Florence. On the whole, we found this city rather disappointing as a destination. The place was overrun by tourists, with food prices and quality to match. (I suppose I can't complain too much, since I was a part of the tourist crush.) Among the best things I ate were the lampredotto sandwiches (as discussed in this eGullet thread). I had them from two different stands, one right next to the Mercato Nuovo and the other right next to our hotel on Via Dante Alighieri. I preferred the latter.

In terms of sit-down meals, though, the best had to be at a restaurant called Maso. We ended up here at the suggestion of one of our friends at our big dinner in Rome: Maso is owned by a friend of his, Paola, whom he called from our dinner table that night in Rome to get the restaurant's address. So when we went to Florence, we made a point of dropping in. I also made a point of seeking out Paola and acknowledging her, feeling it would be rude not to. We managed to meet her, and we managed to convey in broken Italian that we were friends of Luc and André, but with no common language between us, conversation was pretty limited. However, we still got the VIP treatment. Based on our experiences in Rome and Florence, it would seem that VIP treatment at a neighbourhood trattoria in Italy consists of the owner sending you a glass of prosecco to start the meal, then allowing you to order what you want, only to whisk away the bill at the end and charge you whatever they feel like - usually an amount that seems barely sufficient to cover their costs.

The food at Maso was excellent all around. The Tuscan crostini (topped with mashed chicken livers) had a wonderful depth of flavour, and the house-made pasta with porcini mushrooms showed both main ingredients to great advantage.

Our time in Italy suggested a few things about food culture there. The first law of Italian dining seems to be Wine Is Cheap, And House Wine Is Good. Nowhere did we pay more than 5 euro for wine for the two of us at dinner, and since the house wines tended to be locally produced, they also tended to be the best accompaniment to the local foods. It’s too bad Canada has the wrong environment for wine to be so casually consumed!

Another thing we noticed was the almost complete lack of chicken dishes on restaurant menus. Given the my husband can't eat red meat, this could have been quite a difficulty, if not for the fact that there were ample fish and vegetarian options at most places. But with respect to the Tuscan crostini mentioned above, one has to wonder where all those livers came from, if the chicken itself is nowhere to be seen on the menu! (And surely any sauce that can be poured over pounded-flat veal could be poured over pounded-flat chicken breast...)

Stay tuned for some thoughts on Bologna and Venice. Hopefully I won’t break the 1,000-word mark on that one, too!

What I Did on My Summer Vacation, part I: Ireland

2006-07-16T17:23:00.000-03:00

I've been meaning to write up a trip recap ever since we got back, but I've been having trouble deciding just how much detail to put in, and how to divide up the entries (after my attempt to compress it into one entry failed). I think I finally have something I'm comfortable sharing with the world. Unfortunately, these will be food porn-less entries, since I didn't take my (obsolete) digital camera with me. So enjoy some nice scenery pics!

Usually, when we travel, my husband and I just eat at whatever restaurants we happen across, unless we have a local's point of view, in which case we tend to eat wherever they recommend. (As it turned out, this came in very handy in Italy.) So I didn't have any particular food plans for this trip, other than to try as many different things and regional specialties as I could find. Our restaurant instincts aren't always great, and sometimes it's more important to find somewhere, anywhere to eat rather than tear each other's throat out.

For this entry, I thought I'd concentrate on Ireland. Sadly, we didn't have very many memorable food experiences there, though the food wasn't as bad as people like to joke. Indeed, I think we went entire meals without even seeing a potato! And I never did find a restaurant willing to sell me colcannon...

Galway was a beautiful location with a very tourist-oriented food scene. It was here that I had my first taste of the "full Irish breakfast," which consisted of eggs, bacon, breakfast sausages, black pudding, white pudding, toast, tomato and coffee. With a breakfast like that, who needs lunch or dinner?

Galway also exposed me to the wonders of Irish soda bread. I'm sure I've eaten it before, but the two slabs of it that accompanied my otherwise pedestrian seafood chowder that night convinced me that I've never tasted it before. Does anyone have a good recipe for this stuff?

In Dublin, there were two particular food experiences that stand out. The first was at the Elephant & Castle pub in Temple Bar: we had been to the Manhattan branch of this establishment back in April, so thought it fitting to visit the Dublin outlet as well. The place was hopping with a mix of tourists and locals, but there seemed to be one constant: almost every table had a basket of chicken wings. We decided to go with the flow and order some. They were among the best chicken wings I've ever had in my life: plump and juicy, with a crispy, spicy exterior. And the finger bowls were a great touch! It's too bad we were seated so close to a group of American tourists whose politics were, shall we say, diametrically opposed to my own.

The other good Dublin experience was at Gruel, on Dame St. This unpretentious little eatery is exactly the kind of place I would want to own if I ever entered the restaurant business: open kitchen, tightly packed tables, chalkboard menus. My meal of "seared" tuna on salad wasn't fantastic (the tuna was barely pink on the inside with not enough of a crust on the outside), but my husband's Thai-style fish cakes with chili-lime sauce were quite good. And the restaurant's particular vibe made up for the uneven food. When we entered, one staff member had to inquire with another staff member as to whether they were still seating diners, so I assume they were not necessarily at the top of their game.

Generally speaking, Ireland is a very expensive place to eat out and, while there may be a nascent "foodie" culture there, it's not very obvious to the casual observer. The Ireland leg of the trip was always intended to be quick (not to say cursory); we were there because my husband was presenting at a conference. If I ever go back, I'll be sure to set aside at least one evening for a top-end meal there, just to see what the Irish can do when money is no object.

Next up: Italy, which was a much more interesting food destination.

Karei raisu

2006-07-14T19:47:00.000-03:00

Ever since we got back from Italy, my husband has had a strong urge for Asian food. I think it's because he feels a need to balance out all the Italian food we ate while we were away.

So tonight he requested that I make curry rice, a Japanese stew of meat and vegetables with a curry powder-based sauce. Normally, I make curry rice from the bars you can buy in just about any Asian market (the names Glico and Golden Curry may sound familiar). We don't seem to have one of those bars kicking around right now, and the nearest Asian market is a half-hour drive away (and overpriced), so I dusted off one of my Japanese cookbooks and decided to make curry rice from scratch! (OK, so I cheated a little bit by using Campbell's tetra-pack chicken broth, but the rest of the dish is from scratch.)

I've made this recipe once or twice before and generally like it, although the texture isn't quite as thick (some might say "gloopy") as it is with the bar. I suspect this may be related to the relative water content of chicken (which we use) and pork (which the recipe calls for), so I might try reducing the amount of stock next time. Because we use chicken, I've reduced the cooking time in the recipe below. I imagine you could also use tofu, but I don't know how long you'd have to cook it for. (In fact, I imagine it would be quite tasty with some leftover deep-fried tofu... maybe next time.)

It's traditional to serve curry rice with Japanese pickles, especially rakkyo (pickled onions) and fukujinzuke, which is a mix of vegetables pickled in a soy sauce-based mixture. We can't get those locally, but I brought some canned fukujinzuke back from Toronto in the summer, which rounded out the meal quite nicely.

Curry rice
Adapted from Japanese Cooking for the American Table by Susan Fuller Slack

Ingredients:
1 Tbsp. butter
1 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1 pound boneless skinless chicken breast, diced
1 onion, diced
2 carrots, cut into pieces
1 small green pepper, diced
1 potato, peeled and diced
4 cups (or less) chicken stock

1 Tbsp. butter
1.5 to 2 Tbsp. Japanese curry powder (We use S&B brand "Oriental curry powder." I'm not convinced that regular curry powder wouldn't work just as well.)

3 Tbsp. cornstarch or potato starch
1/2 cup half-and-half cream

1. Heat butter and oil in saucepan or skillet over high heat. Brown chicken. Add vegetables and cook for a couple of minutes, until softened slightly. Add the stock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 15 minutes.

2. In a small pan, melt additional tablespoon butter, then add curry powder and cook, stirring, for 30 seconds. Add to stew. Rinse the pan with a couple of tablespoons of water, then add that to the stew as well.

3. Mix cream with starch. Bring stew to a boil, then mix in the cream-starch mixture. Cook for one minute (or until thickened), stirring often. Season to taste.

4. Serve over rice, with pickles on the side. You could also serve over udon noodles.

(To make with pork, the original recipe says to omit the potatoes in the first step, simmer the mixture for 35 minutes, then add the potatoes after the curry powder and cook for another 10 minutes before adding the cornstarch.)

Serves 4-5

Experiments in brining

2006-07-12T22:42:00.000-03:00

I don't often eat red meat at home, because my husband is intolerant to it. This isn't to say that he's a radical vegetarian, but his digestive system tends to... reject all things beef, pork and lamb. I'm an inveterate carnivore, though, so I occasionally buy some meat on a whim, and throw it in the freezer until the spirit moves me to cook it (and cook something else for him).

This particular story is about some pork tenderloins I had bought a few weeks ago. When we returned from vacation, we found ourselves smack in the middle of barbecue season, but I get easily bored with our usual selection of sausages and President's Choice burgers. So this isn't so much a "made from scratch" thing as a "what I had for dinner" thing. But we never make the burgers or sausages from scratch, so maybe this is a "made from scratch" thing!

This was also my first attempt at brining meat. I used the instructions given in Brian Polcyn and Michael Ruhlman's Charcuterie. Because it was my first time using this technique, I wanted to keep things to their most basic, so I avoided using any aromatics and stuck to the basic brine, though I did use brown sugar instead of white. I figured I could always use a dry rub after the fact.

Then I realized that dry rubs almost invariably call for salt and sugar, which were already provided in the brine. So I ended up just rubbing the tenderloins with olive oil and coating them with some Spanish smoked paprika and black pepper.

The results were delectable! The pork was salty, but not unpleasantly so. (I'm a salt fiend. In fact, my husband keeps threatening to have a salt lick installed to keep me happy!) The paprika lent a wonderful smokey note that I wouldn't otherwise have been able to achieve on my tiny little propane grill. And the meat was incredibly moist.

And what did I cook for my husband? I took some boneless chicken breasts, brined them (separately from the pork, but using the same batch of brine) and grilled them with a glaze made from lime juice, Thai fish sauce and hot red pepper jelly. He tells me it was good, but didn't seem especially enthusiastic about it. I thought there was too much fish sauce in the glaze, but the brine seemed to keep the chicken moist as well.

All in all, I think brining is a technique I'll be using again soon. It's too hot to try it right now, but I'm eager to see what effect it will have on a roast chicken.

Brined pork tenderloin
2 litres water
125 grams kosher salt
75 grams brown sugar

2 pork tenderloins (total about 800g)

vegetable oil (I used olive)
freshly ground black pepper
paprika

1. Mix the brine ingredients in a pot, and bring to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar and salt. Once dissolved, take the pot off the heat, let it cool completely, then put it in the fridge until chilled.

2. Once the brine is chilled, place the tenderloins in the pot, ensuring they are submerged. (I didn't actually need the full quantity of brine for my two tenderloins.) Return the pot and tenderloins to the fridge for two hours.

3. After two hours, remove the pork from the brine, rinse in cold water and pat dry. Place the pork on a clean plate and return to the fridge, uncovered, for at least one hour. Discard the brine.

4. Rub the pork with oil, sprinkle the paprika and black pepper on, and rub in.

5. Grill the pork over medium heat for approximately 15 minutes (or until it reaches an internal temperature of 130 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit), turning once halfway through cooking.

6. Allow to rest for 5 minutes, then slice and serve. (As you can see in the photo, I served mine with quinoa mixed with parsley and green onions.) Enjoy!

I'm planning a post about our trip to Ireland and Italy, but tales grow in the telling, and I'm having a hard time deciding how much detail to provide. Keep checking back!

Viva Italia!

2006-07-09T20:20:00.000-03:00

As a rule, I don't follow football/soccer. In fact, I don't even really know all the rules. (I had to get my husband to explain "offside" to me. What can I say? I'm bookish.) But having been in Italy for two weeks during the World Cup this year, and with Italy in the final game, I figured I should watch it.

After the first half, I turned to my husband and said, "For dinner tonight, why don't we have the national cuisine of whichever team wins?"

We had pizza.

Congratulations, Italy!

Interlude

2006-06-11T12:06:00.000-03:00

Tomorrow we head off for three weeks in Europe, but I just wanted to post a nibble for my faithful reader(s) before I leave.

While I was in Toronto, I had a great conversation with my sister-in-law about choices and responsibilities, and the possibility of having an impact on the world, especially in terms of a sustainable food supply. It was a long and rambling discussion, but one of the points she raised was that every little bit helps, and good choices beget more good choices. The upshot is that, when I discovered this week that we were out of eggs, I bypassed the grocey store and instead went to our local health food store to pick up a dozen locally grown free-range eggs.

And this morning, I made myself an omelette à la québécoise: a couple of free-range eggs spiked with some herbes salées du Bas-du-Fleuve (salted herbs) and filled with a little of my favourite goat cheese, le Bouquetin de Portneuf.

Life is good.

I'll be back in the saddle after July 4, hopefully with some wonderful food stories from Ireland and Italy...

Trips and holidays

2006-05-18T13:16:00.000-03:00

Just to let you know, I'm going to be on the road in central Canada for two weeks as of tomorrow (May 19). There is a chance I will do some cooking while I'm there - and a much slimmer chance that I'll blog about it - but for all intents and purposes, I'm on hiatus during that time.

After that, I'm back for a week before we leave for three weeks in Europe. I know, it's a tough life!

But I'll be back for good as of July 4, so check in then!

Panna Cotta with Basil Syrup and Passionfruit

2006-05-16T20:54:00.000-03:00

Originally, I had intended to write this post to participate in the Spice is Right II foodblogging event. Then last night, mere hours before the deadline, I read the rules and found out that my recipe was ineligible for inclusion, because I used a herb instead of a spice. But that doesn't mean I can't post about the results anyway!

The theme of the event was "Sweet or Savory," and was based on the idea that, in certain cultures, some spices are used primarily in sweet dishes (e.g., cinnamon in most of Western European culture) and some in savory foods. The challenge was to take one of these assumptions and turn it on its head, by using a "sweet" spice in a savory dish or vice versa. (This isn't a tremendous challenge for me any more, since I have been dabbling in Moroccan cuisine for a few years now, which liberally uses cinnamon - not to mention sugar - in its savory dishes.)

For the event, my mind immediately went to one place: the vanilla panna cotta with basil syrup and passionfruit that is the signature dessert at Montreal's Brunoise. I was really impressed with it at the time, because the idea of using basil in a dessert seemed pretty unusual. But one bite and I was convinced. It was astonishing how well the basil paired with the passionfruit; it was almost as though they were one seamlessly integrated flavour. So I decided I would try to recreate the dessert at home.

You know how, some days, you just don't have kitchen karma? Yesterday was one of those days for me. First, the pizza I was making for dinner was giving me all sorts of trouble. Then, as I was struggling to roll out the dough, my husband walked into the kitchen and said, "What's this green thing?"

"It's basil syrup, for dessert," I replied.

"But it's solid."

Sure enough, it was. My basil syrup, a wonderful little super-structure solution of water, sugar and basil essential oils, had crystallized.

Everything else was ready, though, so I diluted some of the still-liquid part of the syrup and served the dessert anyway. The fact that it was only my husband and I eating it helped in that respect.

Despite the problems with the syrup, I liked the way it turned out. Naturally, the balance of flavours wasn't as good as it was at the restaurant, but it was a good starting point. The appearance was a little off-putting: my husband said it look "like a pond" (with the passionfruit seeds as tadpoles) and the basil syrup was slightly crunchy and insufficiently green. But the flavour was pretty good, despite my having used inferior vanilla and basil.

I left the remainder of the syrup overnight, and this morning it had completely crystallized, leaving me with basil candy instead of basil syrup. So this evening, I melted it in the microwave, diluted it with water, and cooled it off, and this time, it worked.

And there are worse fates than having panna cotta with basil syrup and passionfruit two nights in a row.

Panna cotta with basil syrup and passionfruit
Note that I provide these recipes for reference only. I'm including this disclaimer because the basil syrup didn't really work.

For the panna cotta
1 3/8 tsp. gelatin
1 Tbsp. cold water
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup half-and-half
2 Tbsp. + 2 tsp. sugar
1 vanilla bean, split and scraped

For the basil syrup
3 or 4 sprigs basil
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup water

1 passionfruit

1. Make the panna cotta: In a small bowl, sprinkle the gelatin over the water to soften. In a pot, mix the heavy cream, half-and-half, sugar and vanilla bean and bring just to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Transfer some of the cream mixture (say, 1/4 cup) to the bowl with the gelatin, and stir to dissolve. Transfer the cream-gelatin mixture back to the pot, and stir. Remove the vanilla bean. Divide the contents among four ramekins, leaving space for the syrup and passionfruit. Cover with plastic wrap and cool to room temperature (about 30 minutes). Transfer to the fridge and chill until set, about 4 hours.

2. Make the basil syrup: combine all ingredients in a small pot, bring to the boil, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Boil for 10 minutes to infuse. By following these directions, you might end up with basil candy too, so it might be a good idea to cover the pot while infusing and/or increase the water content to, say, 3/4 cup. Cool the syrup.

3. To serve, pour some of the cooled basil syrup over the panna cotta (still in the ramekins). Halve the passionfruit, and scrape out the pulp, dividing between the ramekins. Enjoy!

Serves 4

Thoughts on seasonal cooking

2006-05-13T12:54:00.000-03:00

Lately, I haven't been posting very consistently, but there's a very good reason for that: I don't really like cooking in the spring.

Or, more to the point, I don't know how to cook in the spring. I have very clear - not to say fixed - ideas for every other season, but spring just doesn't inspire me in the same way.

Summer is easy, with its plethora of fresh fruit and veggies, especially the highly perishable kind. Summer is the season for going to the farmer's market (or, around here, the farm) and making the most of what's ripe and available while it's still ripe and available. It's a very spur-of-the-moment kind of time. It's the season of salads and cold soups, food that doesn't require cooking or that can be cooked on a grill outside, without heating up the apartment.

Autumn is possibly easier. Indeed, autumn has long been my favourite cooking season. There's something about the crispness of the air and the impending winter that makes food taste that much better, and you have access to all the foods that have a long growing season. It's a time to feast on summer's bounty, or preserve it for the cold, dark winter ahead. Autumn food provides an opportunity for reflection and recognizes the ephemeral nature of, well, nature. Autumn is when soups and stews start to look mighty tempting, and the baked dishes come out as it becomes more possible to use the oven.

In recent years, I've started to become very fond of winter cooking. Winter is the season of long, slow, simmered dishes: soups, stews, braises. For me, winter is all about meat. This can be difficult with a husband who eats only poultry and fish, but I managed to get in my share of beef, pork and lamb this past year. I'm sure that winter was once a season of very boring and repetitve meals, based largely on hardy root vegetables that overwinter well, but with most of our food now coming from other places anyway, it's easy to have a variety throughout the season. And yet, I still feel that my cooking is rooted in the season, even when I'm using produce flown in from Chile or Mexico.

But spring? Spring is a tough case for me. It's too warm and sunny for those hearty winter meals, but there's not enough great produce to inspire the way that summer does. Spring is a transitional time, a time of restlessness - "Winter is over, let's go outside!" - but culinarily, I haven't learned how to express that. I recognize some of the ingredients people associate with spring (rhubarb, asparagus, fiddleheads and artichokes for example), but in Canada, many of these ingredients don't come into their own until later in the season. Besides, these are just ingredients, and I need spring techniques: grilled asparagus? To me, that says summer. Asparagus gratin? That's an autumn or winter approach. How do you cook a spring ingredient using a technique that reflects the season?

French bread, attempt No. 2. Now with a thermometer!

2006-05-12T20:06:00.000-03:00

My second try in my ongoing quest to make good French bread took place last Sunday. This time, I changed a few things around. The first was the shape: because of what I wanted to use this bread for (more on that later), I went with a basic boule shape. The second, and arguably more important, change was my use of an instant-read thermometer.

The recipes in The Bread Baker's Apprentice all make copious references to specific temperatures: the water, the dough, and the final loaf are all given specific ranges they should be in. Last time I made bread, I just went by feel, because I didn't yet own an instant-read thermometer. Now I do.

How much difference did the thermometer really make? Honestly, I don't think it was that significant. I could sit here and rattle off all the temperatures indicated during the process (the water was bang-on 98 degrees, the pâte fermentée and dough both registered slightly warmer than the book recommends, around 88, and the baked bread came out warmer as well, around 214). But does that really tell you anything? The proof of the baking is in the eating, says I. In this case, the final product was much like my first try: it seemed a little too moist, a little too heavy. The holes in the crumb were generally pretty small, with a couple of exceptions. The taste was still very good, but I haven't quite arrived with the texture yet. My husband preferred the first batch, and attributed that to the shape.

On the whole, the process went much more smoothly this time. I wasn't as worried about degassing the dough, because the results last time were sufficiently encouraging. I remembered to oil the bowl well, to prevent the dough from sticking, and continued to guess when it had reached twice its original size. I very generously dusted my makeshift peel with cornmeal in order for things to slide off it nicely; I've been practicing with pizza, which I make about once a week, and have more or less determined how much I need. The boule shape is also rather more forgiving than my bâtards: I managed to transfer them from parchment to peel with a minimum of deformation. On the other hand, they ended up kind of flat, and I haven't quite figured out why. Surface tension? Overproofing? Underproofing?

The only real mistake I made, as far as I can tell, was forgetting to slash the first boule before I put it on the baking stone. But I did a couple of quick slashes on it as soon as I realized, and it seemed to turn out OK.

As for the reason underlying the choice of shape, I had decided to slice it thinly, toast it, and serve it with the smoked mackerel rillettes I last Saturday, using the recipe in Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's Charcuterie. I finally caved and bought this book, but negotiations are still ongoing with my husband over the acquisition of a meat grinder to get into the serious sausage making. In the meantime, smoked fish rillettes seemed like a good thing to make, since smoked mackerel is so easy to come by out here, and so tasty!

It's funny how I think nothing of making smoked mackerel rillettes, but get a real sense of pride out of spreading them on my own freshly baked bread. It made it feel like a real from-scratch kind of snack! And it was exceptionally delicious, to boot.

Oh, and no picture this time. The batteries for my digital camera died on me when I went to take a picture, and the bread and rillettes were both too good for me to wait for the batteries to recharge.

On bread

2006-04-26T09:17:00.000-03:00

I didn't update this past week, because I was off in New York City, enjoying an all-too-brief return to civilization, instead of sitting at home cooking. But I came across the following in Near A Thousand Tables by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, and thought it was sufficiently relevant to my last post to be worth excerpting here:

"[W]hat is so special about bread? In terms of nutrition, digestibility, durability, ease of transport or storage, versatility and appeal for texture or flavour, the balance of advantages and disadvantages, compared with other potentially equivalent foods, seems nicely poised. Yet the trouble, time and technical expertise which have to be invested in successful baking are enormous. Professional bakers seem to have emerged early in every bread-eating culture. The many hobbyists who make bread at home, in conditions resembling those of early agrarian society, without exact means of measuring quantities, temperatures and timings, know how easily the process can go wrong, and how exact the baker's judgment has to be" (p. 97).

French bread, attempt No. 1

2006-04-16T16:28:00.000-03:00

When I decided on my theme for this blog, bread was one of the first things that came to mind. While bread is considered an essential part of life in the Western world, it seems to be relatively unusual for people to make it at home. Despite the fact that it is a staple food, we don't make it from scratch, but rely instead on specialized producers to make it for us.

Indeed, bread has a reputation for being difficult to make, and it's a reputation that is not entirely undeserved, in my opinion. The last time I tried to bake bread, I was working from a recipe that called for all the ingredients by weight. Unfortunately, I was also working with a scale that was not nearly sensitive enough to weigh the ingredients in question, and the end result was inedibly salty. This time, on the recommendation of The Foppish Baker, among others, I decided to invest in Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice to gain a real understanding of the processes at work in breadmaking.

The book itself is beautiful, detailed and compellingly written. There were a few gaps in it, to my mind, but given their nature, I'm beginning to think they're gaps that could only be filled by a hands-on baking class. For example, the description of how to knead dough by hand is very cursory, and the instructions frequently say that the dough should be "tacky but not sticky," without giving any frame of reference for where the line between them is. On the other hand, I was pleased to learn that you can easily ferment dough at room temperature, and that it is impossible to overknead it by hand.

I entered this project knowing that it will likely take many attempts before I arrive at a loaf that satisfies me, so I decided to pick a type of bread that won't quickly bore me. To that end, I chose basic French Bread.

For my very first attempt, I wanted to focus on the basics, which meant not trying to shape the loaves into full-on baguettes just yet. Instead, I used the preliminary shape that is later formed into a baguette, called a bâtard. Of this shape, Reinhart writes that it is "a viable and popular shape in its own right, delivering a nice balance of both crust and crumb." It's also short enough to fit on the pizza stone I would be using in lieu of a real baking deck.

The pâte fermentée went off without a hitch (it was rather like making my usual pizza crust) and went into the fridge to retard overnight. The next day, I mixed up the dough and kneaded for about ten minutes. When I tried the "windowpane test" by stretching out a small piece of dough, it ripped before becoming thin enough to see daylight through it, so I went back and kneaded a couple of minutes longer. This time, it seemed to work better, so I threw it in an oiled bowl, covered with plastic wrap, and left it for two hours.

Problem #1: How do you tell when dough has risen to twice its size? Well, I guessed. After 90 minutes, it looked like it was there, so I degassed it slightly and left it for anouther half hour. I probably should have used a straight-sided container marked with an elastic, like Alton Brown suggests, but I couldn't find one handy.

Problem #2: What happens if you haven't put a sufficient amount of oil into your bowl? Well, your dough sticks, and your attempts to unstick it will inevitably degas it pretty thoroughly.

At this stage, I was rather worried that I had degassed the dough too much for it to bake properly, but I pushed on nonetheless. I divided the dough (not too evenly, it turned out) shaped it, and put it in a makeshift couche made out of parchment. I'm still not convinced that I did this part correctly, and I may try using a cloth couche (read: tea towel) next time. I left it to proof until it was one-and-a-half times its size (there's that size thing again!), which I considered to have arrived by the 45-minute mark.

Problem #3: How the heck do you get dough off parchment and onto a peel without massively degassing it!? By the time I had transferred them, the beautifully shaped and risen loaves had become uneven and flat. At this point, I was doubly sure my first attempt was going to be a failure.

Problem #4: What happens if you don't put enough cornmeal on your makeshift aluminum peel? Well, you end up coaxing, cajoling and ultimately dropping your dough onto your too-samll pizza stone, thereby degassing it still further and causing the baker all sorts of worry about the end result.

In fact, the end result was surprisingly good, which I understand seems to mean that I got great "oven spring." One of the loaves was slightly overhanging the stone, which was on the lowest rack in my oven, and so it burnt slightly. Because I could smell it, but didn't realize what was going on, I ended up taking all three out before they were quite done, worried that the bottoms would burn to a crisp if left longer. So the crust was maybe a little lighter and softer than I would have wanted, and the crumb was just a shade too moist. The holes were a little small too, though I got a few nice big ones. Next time, I think I'll raise the oven rack one notch and leave the bread in a little longer.

And what was the fate of my first-ever loaf of French Bread? My husband and I adorned it with some great applewood-smoked cheddar cheese we picked up on our last run into Halifax.

The real victory of this attempt, though, was proving to myself that I can indeed make bread from scratch.

Kitchen library (located right next to Kitchen Stadium?)

2006-04-02T17:20:00.000-03:00

Less than a month into blogging, and I've already been tagged for a meme! Specifically, the Foppish Baker tagged me for a cookbook meme. And a good thing, too, as it's been a very busy week (and weekend) for me, with lots of translation contracts to work on, so I haven't had a lot of time to come up with anything else to blog about. The upside is that this means I can afford to buy more cookbooks and the kitchen gadgets that go along with them.

The picture above shows our cookbook shelf. (As a bonus, you can see the front row of my single-malt scotch collection; the more expensive stuff sits at the back, so that it doesn't accidentally get knocked off.)

How many cookbooks do you own?
Books are like candy to me. Except for cookbooks: they're more like crack cocaine. A quick count of our cookbook shelf shows that we have about 42 cookbooks. Of course, that doesn't count cookbooks that may be strewn around the house, our healthy supply of back issues of Bon Appétit, Gourmet or Food & Drink (shown at the very top of the picture), or other books that happen to have recipes in them, such as Untangling my Chopsticks by Victoria Abbott Riccardi or The Collected Traveller: Morocco by Barrie Kerper.

Which cookbook did you buy most recently?
The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart, in an attempt to improve my bread baking skills and on the recommendation of the Foppish Baker, among others. If I had waited another week before posting this, the answer would most likely have been Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking and Curing, by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn, since that's almost definitely the next cookbook I'm going to buy. Why? See this eGullet thread and maybe you'll understand.

Which is the cookbook that you read most recently?
Depending on what is meant by "read" here, I'll say The Bread Baker's Apprentice again. I may have briefly consulted one of my Japanese cookbooks for advice on the soba I made the other day for lunch and The Silver Spoon to confirm something about fresh pasta, but The Bread Baker's Apprentice is the last cookbook I sat down with and read like a novel.

Name 5 cookbooks that mean a lot to you.
1. Simply Thai Cooking by Wandee Young and Byron Ayanoglu
This one is simply indispensable in our house. Whenever we don't feel like cooking, my husband will reach for this book, because it's so easy, as long as you have a few Thai staples around. Unfortunately, one of those staples is basil, so it has begun to play a decreasing role in our lives since we moved to New Brunswick, where fresh basil is in very short supply.

2. The family cookbook
This was put together by my sister-in-law as a Christmas gift to us a couple of years ago. It's great, because it puts a number of our most-used recipes together in one place, and it contains a lot of my husband's family history, mostly in the form of recipes he hated as a kid and continues to hate today (Rob Roy cookies come to mind). I only wish I could get a copy or two for my own siblings...

3. Joy of Cooking
This is generally my go-to cookbook whenever I want to confirm the basics, such as roasting times and temperatures for turkey or how to store mussels in the fridge. (For what it's worth, apparently you don't need to store them on ice, but you do need to let them breathe.)

4. Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook
Yeah, I'm a Bourdain groupie. What can I say? I think he has one of the most compelling voices in English-language food writing today, and it is used to great effect in this book. The recipes themselves aren't great - I wouldn't recommend them for beginners, although they tend to be OK if you already know how to cook - but the writing is just so engaging that it really doesn't matter.

5. The Big Book of Breakfast, by Maryana Vollstedt
This one has everything you've ever wanted to know about omelettes, frittatas, stratas, waffles, pancakes, bacon, scrambles, hashes, french toast... On a long weekend, when I'm looking for something more than my usual toast and coffee, this is where I turn.

I know I'm now supposed to tag someone else to keep the meme going, but I don't think there's anyone out there who reads my blog and keeps a food blog of their own. If I'm wrong, leave a comment, and I'll be happy to tag you!

The week in review

2006-03-27T17:41:00.000-04:00

Last week was pretty slow for me professionally; consequently, it was pretty busy for me in the kitchen. That doesn't mean it was necessarily a good week in the kitchen.

It started last Saturday, when I decided to make chicken stock. Generally, we use tetra-pack chicken broth from Campbell's, which is a reliable substitute. But I suddenly found myself in possession of six leek tops, and chicken stock is the only thing I know how to make from leek tops. (I'm open to other suggestions). Unfortunately, I fell asleep on the couch in the middle of the process, which is the best way to bring your stock to a boil. Fortunately, I'm not that picky when it comes to stock.

On Sunday, I made salmon burgers with hoisin and ginger. I don't have anything to say about them, except that I used trout in place of the salmon and they were tasty. Maybe I'll do a taste-test comparison between them and PC Atlantic Salmon Burgers this summer.

On Tuesday, I finally succumbed to my desire to bake some bread. I had twigged to a recipe for brioche provided by the good people at ...an endless banquet, so I took it out for a test drive. I spent the whole two-day process convinced it was going to fail, and in fact it didn't seem to rise as much as it could have, but it baked up nice and brown, and it sure tasted good! Apparently brioche can't smell your fear the same way hollandaise sauce can. You can see the results pictured above.

What's more, I think my bread baking skills are about to take a quantum leap forward: on Friday, my copy of Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice arrived. I proceeded to spend every spare moment over the weekend with my nose buried in it.

On Friday, we had a group of people over for a deep fry party, using our T-Fal EZ Clean Deep Fryer, which was our Christmas gift to ourselves. I made spring rolls using rice paper wrappers and filled them with glass noodles, cloud ear mushrooms, carrots, ginger, garlic, cilantro, green onions and sesame oil. They were pretty tasty, but I think they still need some work. I'm not convinced that rice paper makes the best spring roll wrappers.

On Saturday, we picked up some cultivated mussels in Moncton, and made moules frites for dinner, using Anthony Bourdain's recipe for moules marinières. Score another one for the Les Halles cookbook!

Finally, yesterday, I attacked our wok in yet another attempt to season it properly. This has been an ongoing saga in my relationship with my husband, since he failed to follow the instructions for properly seasoning it when he bought it (12 years ago), and all subsequent attempts have failed miserably. Here's hoping this one worked!

Puff pastry from scratch

2006-03-18T14:03:00.000-04:00

I love puff pastry. I'll take advantage of any recipe I can find that uses it: pot pies, cheese straws, various types of tarts. If I have some puff pastry in the freezer begging to be used up, and I can't think of anything else to do with it, I'll make apple turnovers.

Puff pastry is also the ultimate convenience food for me. I can't bring myself to buy pre-made pie shells, even though my homemade pastry isn't that great, but the mille feuilles ("thousand layers") of puff pastry always made it seem far too complex to make at home, so I felt no guilt buying the "little yellow box" version. I was even more excited when I learned that President's Choice had released a butter puff pastry, thereby cutting down on the amount of shortening I would consume (although margarine is listed among the ingredients). Not to mention that it was conveniently prerolled into thin sheets.

Then I came across a couple of blog posts talking about how easy it is to make your own, and how much better the end result. Then I was browsing through Jacque Pépin's Complete Techniques, and saw his instructions for making it...

...and I thought, I could do that. I might need to set aside a whole day, but I could do it.

So I did. I cleared last Sunday's schedule and planned to make chocolatines out of homemade puff pastry.

The basic instructions are really quite easy: take equal weights of flour and butter, make a flat block out of the butter, make a dough out of the flour, and encase the butter in the dough. Then roll out, fold over, rotate, roll out, fold over... rinse and repeat. You can see something of the process here, though it's in French. The details are a little trickier than that, and there are a few things to watch out for, but the core process is simplicity itself.

It seemed to go quite well. I did get tripped up by a couple of the problems I was warned about, notably that I ripped the dough in places, causing butter to leak out. (Note to self: flour the board heavily.) The dough also became quite elastic, presumably either because I overrolled it or because I was using all-purpose flour rather than pastry flour. After I was done making it, I chilled it in the fridge for half an hour, then rolled it out to make my chocolatines.

Ah. Here was a problem. It had become too elastic for me to roll it out properly: I couldn't get it to the 1/8" thickness I've seen recommended for absolutely everything that uses puff pastry. I rolled it as thin as I could manage, and cut into wide strips for my chocolatines. As you can see in the photo, I didn't do a very good job at cutting it into even strips, but it worked nonetheless. I then threw some chopped Callebaut semisweet chocolate into the centre of each one, rolled them up, flipped them over, brushed with an egg wash, and popped them into a 425-degree oven for about 20-25 minutes.

They puffed up quite nicely, which pleased me tremendously. They also leaked large volumes of melted butter all over the sheet pans. But they smelled wonderful. I found the pastry to be just a bit brittle right after the came out of the oven, which could again be a result of the type of flour or me overworking it, but they softened somewhat as they cooled, and I found the slightly chewy texture they developed after a night spent in airtight plastic containers to be quite pleasant. Some of them weren't as well cooked in the centre as they might have been, which I'm sure was a result of the too-thick pastry.

And the taste? Well, to be honest, I didn't notice much of a difference on the "tester" I ate right away. But then, I haven't eaten "little yellow box" puff pastry in a long time, and I'd never made chocolatines out of frozen pastry before, so I wasn't really doing a true comparison. The next morning at breakfast, however, I was surprised at how sweet they tasted, despite the fact that there was no refined sugar at all in the pastry.

All in all, I will probably continue to buy frozen puff pastry for the convenience factor. It's easy to make your own, and the flavour is probably superior, but it is time consuming. Next time, I will definitely make a full batch (I only didn't one pound of butter this time, which is half the batch size in Pépin's book), and freeze part of it for future use. But this experience has done nothing but strengthen my love affair with puff pastry.

Polenta photos

2006-03-14T08:53:00.000-04:00

Further to my last post, here are a couple of photos of my polenta with caraway seeds.

I should note that I'm still very new to food photography, and my digital camera is an older model (with only 2 megapixels), so the photos aren't going to win any awards, but they give you an idea of what the polenta looked liked. Another thing to work on, I guess!

First up: the polenta served with milk-braised pork chops and braised cabbage garnished with bacon. You can just see the polenta peeking out from underneath the bed of cabbage, and the pork chops are the whitish thing in the upper left-hand corner... they didn't photograph too well.

Next, the polenta appetizer I made the following night, fried polenta with roasted red pepper, feta cheese and balsamic reduction. I found the feta cheese didn't go overly well with the rest of the elements, and next time I might try doing a parmesan tuile on top instead, which could also make for a more dramatic presentation!

Polenta with caraway seeds

2006-03-12T10:16:00.000-04:00

The backstory
For my first post, let me tell you a little story about polenta. Back in December, I paid a long-overdue visit with two good friends to Montreal's Brunoise restaurant. For the Christmas season, Brunoise was offering a prix fixe lunch special, the special being that they usually aren't open for lunch.

After much debate among the three of us over the menu - we didn't all want to order the same thing, because where's the fun in that? - I finally settled on the braised beef cheeks with porcini, asparagus and polenta.

Now, there were many superb aspects to that meal (especially the dessert, which probably deserves a whole post of its own), but it was the polenta that caught my attention for the main course. I haven't really eaten a lot of polenta in my life, but this particular version was stunning. It was the "cooked, set and fried" variety, beautifully creamy but firm on the inside, and with a crisp skin on the outside. It was also the most flavourful polenta I've ever eaten. On impulse, I asked the waiter if he knew what it had been fried in.

"I'm not sure," he replied. "Probably butter, but it may have been duck fat."

My friends gave me a look, as if to say Duck fat! As a frying medium? Who ever heard of such a thing?

I said to the waiter, "Would you mind finding out for me?"

Once he left, I turned to my friends: "I sort of suspected it was something like that. It would explain the incredible richness."

So imagine my surprise when the waiter returned to inform me it had been fried in simple vegetable oil. (Of course, I am open to the possibility that I was being misled of a belief that I was asking for health reasons, rather than flavour reasons.) I still don't know what made that polenta taste so good.

Meanwhile, back at home...
Cut to this week. With my husband out of town, I've had the run of the kitchen. This invariably means lots of red meat, because my husband has a sensitivity to it, and so we tend to avoid it. One thing I decided to try, after seeing a post Accidental Hedonist, and the follow-up post on Meathenge, was milk-braised pork (chops in my case, since I can't eat a whole roast by myself). As sides, I thought I'd do braised cabbage and fried polenta. Originally I toyed with the idea of tossing caraway seeds into the cabbage, because I like them, and because when I polished off the half-loaf of caraway rye I picked up at Pete's Frootique, I was sad.

But then fate conspired against me: apparently, you can't get the pre-made logs of polenta around these parts. (OK, so I only checked two grocery stores.) I had to make it myself. And if I was going to do that anyway... caraway polenta was born!

The recipe
To make the polenta, I poked around for a few recipes to see how it was done. The essential ratio here seems to be four parts liquid to one part cornmeal. Most of the recipes seem to call for salted water as the liquid, but I thought I'd see if I could approximate the richness of the Brunoise polenta by cooking it in chicken broth instead. So I tossed

2 cups chicken broth (I use the Campbell's tetra-pack variety)

into a pot, brought it to a boil, and whisked in

1/2 cup coarse cornmeal
1 tsp. caraway seeds

continued whisking for 2 minutes, then reduced heat to low, covered and let simmer for about 45 minutes, stirring for 1 minute once every 10 minutes. (This is apparently an unorthodox method of cooking polenta, suggested by the Gourmet cookbook, which in turn credits it to Paula Wolfert. I liked it because it let me continue working.)

Once it was cooked, I spread it into a parchment-lined 8x8 pan (which was actually too big for the amount of polenta I had) and placed it in the fridge to chill. A couple of hours later, I pulled it out, cut it up, and fried it in some butter on medium-high until crispy on the outside and warmed through.

The results
I was quite pleased with it. Cold, the texture was rather rubbery, but once it was fried up, it became much softer on the inside, and provided that nice crispy skin. Next time I might use a little more liquid. The taste wasn't quite as good as at Brunoise - not that I really expected it to be - but I think it definitely benefitted from the chicken broth. The caraway ended being a beautiful touch, providing both a textural contrast within the polenta, and a flavour element to play off the rest of the meal. Definitely a make-again.

I ate some of it that night with the milk-braised pork chops and braised cabbage, and used some of it the next night (i.e., last night) as an appetizer with roasted red pepper, feta cheese and a balsamic reduction. Photos will follow in the next entry, once I get around to cropping them and posting them on flickr. That may not happen today, because I'm taking my first stab at making my own puff pastry. Stay tuned!

(...and don't worry: not all of my posts will be this long.)

Introduction

2006-03-10T07:31:00.000-04:00

Hello, and welcome to my blog!

Having enjoyed many other people's food blogs over the past year, I recently decided it was time to give something back, even if that only meant adding my voice to this burgeoning Internet phenomenon with a blog whose readership consists solely of my family. (Hi Mom and Dad!)

What is this blog about?
Drawing on a recent post by Makikoh Itoh at i was just really very hungry, I thought it was a good idea to have a specific goal for my own blog. So my focus is going to be on the fact that we all rely to some extent on food that has been processed or prepared, whether it's as commonplace as tea or bread, or as complex as frozen pizza or a President's Choice entrée. In other words, as the name of my blog says, you can't make everything from scratch!

In exploring this theme, I intend to both look at prepared foods and try to recreate some of them at home. This will probably involve both product reviews (for which I am not compensated) and comparisons of prepared products to the from-scratch version: the fact that we do rely so heavily on processed foods doesn't mean we can't try making them from scratch, even if it is only once in our life. And, of course, I'll also just write about some of the things I'm cooking and eating.

Who am I?
Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I'm a 27-year-old professional translator with a strong interest in food. I don't know where this interest comes from, but it has been developing in leaps and bounds over the past few years, to the point that I now feel comfortable calling myself a "foodie." This can be a bit of problem these days, because I'm living in small-town New Brunswick (for the moment, at least), where good food (in both its raw and restaurant-prepared forms) can be really quite hard to come by.

I have no professional culinary training beyond Techniques culinaires I (that's "Cooking 101," for those of you who don't speak French) at Montreal's Institut de tourisme et d'hôtellerie du Québec. I tend mostly to cook from recipes, although I'm starting to spread my wings by adding my own touches to those recipes and even inventing whole meals, based on the skills and techniques I've acquired over the years.

For the time being, I can't promise that I will update a particular number of times a week, so check back often. If I haven't written anything since your last visit, check out the links on the side to some of my favourite food blogs to read.

Enjoy!