Pickle Pea

Just the other day

2010-06-18T19:41:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in a diner and they're playing diner music in the background: ooh-maw-maw-mama-ooh-maw-maw.... It's a tired cliché, like the only reason people visit diners anymore is to relive the 1950's. I'm sure half of Flo's Diner's clientele was born after 1965 and our memories of diner culture come from watching Happy Days, not from living the real thing. It's Thursday afternoon, and Flo's is empty except for me and the waiters. They mill about in their matching black slacks and blue T-shirts, refilling ketchup bottles and restocking napkin dispensers, or whatever it is that diner waiters do when there's a lull. I'm in the corner by the window that overlooks the street from the second floor reading my book and drinking tea. A dust-filled fan oscillates, blowing air on me from across the room.

Hummus for everyone!

2010-06-17T06:36:00.000-07:00

I came across this article in today's New York Times, reminding me that I long ago promised the ladies at my sister's bridal shower to post my recipe for hummus. (Sorry!) The article, chronicling the increase in popularity of hummus for Americans over the last decade or so, highlights the basic principle of this middle eastern spread: anything goes. Making hummus is not a science. There is no exact recipe. As the matriarch to the Holy Land hummus-making enterprise Mrs. Wadi suggests, it's "eat, eat, eat, taste, taste, taste." If it's a dip that tastes good and has chick peas somewhere in the ingredients list, you can call it hummus.

I've been making hummus for a while now and my method is fairly straight-forward. Unfortunately, using a food processor for this recipe is non-negotiable. Blenders, whether hand-held or standing types, are more frustrating than this simple recipe is worth. If you like eating, however, I recommend investing in a food processor. Aside from the toaster and tea kettle, it's the one kitchen gadget I consistently use.

BASIC HUMMUS
Makes approx. 2 cups

1 can (14 oz.) chickpeas, drained
1/4 c tahini (sesame seed) paste
1 tiny piece of garlic (about 1/2 a small clove)
juice of 1 lemon (1/4 c from bottle)
1 tsp cumin powder (optional, but tastes good)
water
salt to taste
cayenne for heat, if desired

In a food processor, pulse the chickpeas, tahini and garlic until a coarse paste. Add lemon juice and cumin keep pulsing. Add small amounts of water to the mixture, about 1 Tbsp at a time and pulse until the hummus has a smooth creamy texture. Taste and adjust seasoning.

I remember November

2010-06-11T14:14:00.000-07:00

I remember November when I was eight: the sky getting dark earlier every evening, waking up before sunrise and eating breakfast while it was still night. In November, my mother would start making Christmas cake. She would take my sister and me to Nutcracker Sweet, the bulk dry goods store where she would buy candied peels, green and red cherries, Thompson and Sultana raisins and sliced almonds. She used her huge aluminum canning pot, big enough to bathe a toddler in, to hold all of the fruitcake ingredients. I remember her working the mixture with the long handled wooden spoon she would use to mix bread dough. She would turn over the fruits and nuts like she was mixing cement, resting the pot on a dining room chair so she could reach inside. Once they had been baked, I remember wrapping the cakes in aluminum foil, though not before dousing them with rum or brandy. She would put the stacks of cakes in the cold cellar, the small room in the basement that was originally used to store coal, with its hanging lightbulb and cinderblock walls. Mom kept everything she made in the cold cellar: every flavour of jam and jelly you could think of, plus the cakes. I remember my dad coveting the fruitcake once Christmas rolled around: cutting pieces for himself to go with his coffee and balancing the sticky slices on the rim of his mug.

I remember sorrel

2010-06-09T14:04:00.000-07:00

I've been living on grilled cheese and tuna lately and obsessing over my art. The result is not much to add to this blogaroo in the way of insights and inspirations regarding all things culinary: I'm only entering my kitchen out of necessity. However, in the movie in my mind, I'm seeing the calendar pages flip away in a clichéd "time is passing" montage, so I'm here. Fortunately, I came up with a structure to at least get me writing.

My favourite book on writing remains Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg. She applies her Buddhist philosophy to writing: as meditation means showing up to sit down, writing practice means showing up to the page and moving the pen. (There was a time when I put this book on reserve at the library, waited for my turn, read it, returned it and put my name on the reserve list again. This would have me re-reading Wild Mind every six weeks or so for over a year.) One of my favourite exercises is "I remember". It's very simple. Start a timed writing session (five to 10 minutes) with the words "I remember..." and let 'er rip. Whatever comes to mind, write it down. Be specific.

So, for lack of anything else to write, I'll do a five-minute "I remember":

I remember the taste of sorrel. My parents had a backyard vegetable garden at our house on Castle Knock Road. The plot was rectangular, located behind our garage and beside our cement paver patio. I remember being given the green silky leaves and told to eat them. Perhaps this was my father who gave them to me, but I can't recall. The leaves tasted sour, not repellent, but curious, and I couldn't decide if I liked them. My mother used the sorrel leaves for dinner that night. She cooked them gently in cream and served them with a pork cutlet. They had lost their bite and were a bit phlegmy, but the flavour was mellow, green and slightly sour. I recall the addition of sorrel to our meal as an event, an unusual occurrence, and surely I don't remember another time it was served. It was summer and hot, and we ate our dinner on the back patio accompanied by wasps that my father would smash with the pancake turner until he finally snapped it in two. Then, he used his bare hands, clapping the wasps between his palms so fast they would fall dead on the table.

A little housecleaning

2010-05-16T13:37:00.000-07:00

I keep accumulating these links for interesting food-related tidbits I've read or heard on the interweb lately. Here they are:

Just this morning I listened to my first episode of Spilled Milk, a food podcast by Matthew Amster-Burton and Molly Wizenberg. This one is all about peas, from mushy to crisp, snow to snap. They're a funny pair - lots of witty banter - and there's some good information in there too. Worth a listen.

I also happened by the debate about the dirty dozen: twelve fresh produce items that, according to some, absorb too much pesticides and thus should be purchased organic whenever possible. They say you can reduce your pesticide intake by as much as 80 percent by avoiding conventionally farmed (using chemical pesticides and fertilizers) thin skinned fruits such as berries, pears and peaches, as well as water filled veggies like celery and spinach. Now, I'm no scientist and I'm both lazy and skeptical. I eat way too much celery to go tromping all over town to find organic variety that doesn't feel like I'm eating tree bark. I think I'll continue my old standby rule that if the produce looks, smells and tastes healthy, it probably is, and is still way better for me than living on chips and beer.

Still at Salon Magazine, check out food editor (and former contributing editor to Gourmet Magazine, RIP) Francis Lam's weekly column The Eyewitness Cook for great recipes and food debates.

Finally, this recent article in the New York Times goes a long way to clarify the difference between food allergy and food sensitivity, or intolerance. While 30 percent of the population believes they have food allergies, the true incidence is only about 8 percent for children and less than 5 percent for adults. This is a big discrepancy, and the article explains that everything from inaccurate testing to confusing an allergy for an intolerance is to blame. For the record, an allergy is an immune system response to food, producing anything from hives, itchy mouth, runny nose, sneezing and difficulty breathing, to full-blown anaphylaxis. If eating a certain food gives you a stomach ache, or gas, etc., it's an intolerance, not an allergy. I learned this only after avoiding foods I thought I was allergic to for years, until finally seeing an allergist and having her explain the truth.

I can't believe it's not boring

2010-04-28T12:49:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd quickly post this link to the best food blogger I've read in ages. In browsing Salon magazine's companion public blog service, Open Salon, I came across iamsurly (her alias says it all). Her bio reads: "Charming young lady, with sharp tongue and vocabulary of a seasoned longshoreman, who carries in her handbag worn and tattered membership cards to the Mayflower Society and Daughters of the American Revolution, for which her dues are in arrears." A real-life Lorelai Gilmore? I'm in love.

Look for her catalogue of truly hideous recipe cards from the 1970's ("Barley Casserole" takes the cake) and her previous winning entries to the Kitchen Challenge (marked by "Editor's Pick"). By pure luck, however, I found this post, "You can never have too many dress rehearsals for a swan song," a deliriously funny and tragic account of sitting at her sister's death bed while the rest of her family went crazy.

I'm looking forward to reading her nemesis, 1_Irritated_Mother (the two bloggers often battle against one another when vying for Open Salon's weekly Kitchen Challenge grand prize). Her winning KC entry this week chronicles her abandoning the challenge of developing a granola recipe and, in the true spirit of granola's origins in 1960's iconoclasm, made pancakes instead.

Patience, grasshopper

2010-04-26T12:30:00.000-07:00

We planted grass seeds around our front steps almost two weeks ago. Each day, I would go outside to check on their progress. On my hands and knees, I would examine the grass seeds laying inert on the dirt, say "c'mon guys, grow!", add some water, get up and go back inside. I was really just following the directions on the bag they came in (with the addition of verbal encouragement) but saw nothing for my efforts and was beginning to doubt we would ever succeed. Until today. This morning I looked out the front window and saw these delicate 1-inch sprouts standing tall and proud.

I hate following directions. I'd rather do something wrong my way than plod step-by-step toward someone else's successful result. This gets me into all kinds of trouble, but after so many years of being me, I've accepted my peculiarities. What's my method for achieving a successful result? I do everything twice. The first time, I learn how not to do it, and the second time I do it right.

Although this quality serves me well as an artist, it is an impediment for more activities than I care to think about. (I would make a terrible accountant.) In the kitchen, I play to my strengths: I throw most of my meals together on the fly, adding a pinch of this and a smidgen of that, tasting as I go and relying on experience of what I know works. Baking, however, has always eluded me. For as much as I would love it to be otherwise, to succeed in baking means following the directions.

A couple of months ago, I made the worst muffins I have ever tasted. Seeing a pair of bananas turning black on the counter, I decided to use them in some baking. I imagined light fluffy muffins risen to perfection, golden brown and steaming, waiting to be broken open and smothered with butter. Armed with nothing more than my big glass mixing bowl and an idea, I proceeded to throw together some ingredients I thought belonged in my fantasy muffins: flour, soda, mashed banana, yoghurt, some honey, spices. After hastily filling some muffin tins, I baked the batter, which rose successfully but didn't brown, and the muffins I pulled from the oven after 20 minutes were dense and shiny white domes. Undeterred, I broke one open, added the butter and took a bite: sour and chewy with a hint of banana, only the too-green taste rather than sweet ripeness. They were so bad, we decided it would have been cruel to feed them to the animals, so they went in the bin.

When the opportunity for baking scones for my sister's bridal shower arose a few weeks ago, I decided I had to go against my instincts and follow directions. I wanted them to be great and I didn't want another muffin fiasco on my hands. I went to the source of foolproof cooking: Canadian Living's "Tested Til Perfect" recipes were the only ones I would consider for my task. Fortunately, Canadian Living magazine now has a vast online database of their wonderful recipes with the added features of recalculating for different portion sizes and auto-generated grocery lists. I chose their "mini lemon scones" for my baking project and followed the directions to the letter. They turned out perfectly. In fact, I was so impressed with the result, that I tried other recipes: sugar cookies, vanilla cupcakes with chocolate buttercream frosting, lemon poppyseed cake, pecan shortbread, all step-by-step and with grand results.

So, I'm bending a little. I'm beginning to see the benefits of relying on someone else's perfected method. It's not easy, and I have doubts; one more day, and I would have declared our grass project hopeless and the seed manufacturers a bunch of idiots. Today, those fine green shoots reminded me yet again of the value of occasionally trusting another, a task made far easier on a stomach full of fresh-baked scones.

Whew! Extraction complete

2010-04-19T13:08:00.000-07:00

I know: It's been a while. Forgive me when I use the old saying, "I've been meaning to write...." As we all know, however, intentions amount to nothing more than a great big pile of guilt when not followed by action.

I've had Willie Nelson's "Shotgun Willie" lyric in my head of late: "You can't make a record if you ain't got nothin' to say." (You said it, Willie.) I think I would sing my song like this: "You can't write your food blog when you're living on frozen dumplings, cold cereal and celery sticks and waiting for winter to be over." Next time, I'd better just write anyway.

What got me going today finally was the blinking red caged submarine light accompanied by the honking "man the battle stations" sirens going off in my head as I calculated the time elapsed from my last post: four months minus two days. Yikes! Two more days and my blog will be officially considered defunct. Fortunately, I've moved out of my winter stasis of late and started cooking again, so I have lots to write about. Stay tuned for my ode to the food processor, a laundry list of considerations for hosting an afternoon tea, a baking primer, and much more.

So, thank you for being patient while I got my head out of my butt. The view is way better now.

KP:)

Happy Solstice

2009-12-21T06:08:00.000-08:00

Well, we did it. Once again, we've completed our journey to the shortest day of the year. Today, at 13:47 EST, you can raise your coffee mug to the cosmos. The winter solstice signals that from now until the end of June, every day will include a few more seconds of daylight. From this day forward, our frozen land will begin to thaw and new things will be coaxed into existence.

Lately, I've felt the appeal of hibernation. We've had our first below-zero weather of the season for the past week or so, and the few centimetres of snow that fell earlier in the month have solidified into ice. I bought my first proper winter coat, a shin-length down-filled monstrosity that, though a tad unwieldy, has proven very warm indeed. And even though I'm using my new cold-weather technology to move from place to place without becoming an icicle, all I really want to do is sit in my living room, fire crackling away in the hearth, and knit. I want to be surrounded by wool, feel it move through my fingers as I knit the world's largest afghan, big enough to cover its country of origin. All the while, elves will be busying themselves in my kitchen, brewing hot cocoa with cinnamon, baking spice cake spiked with brandy and softly singing hallelujah.

This is also the time of year I feel inclined to watch long, epic movies while wrapped in a blanket on the TV room sofa. Last year, I spent the requisite 14 hours to complete yet another viewing of the Lord of the Rings movies, and the year before, Byron and I unplugged the phone for several days while we blazed through the first three seasons of Lost. I don't know what I'll feel like watching this year, but come Boxing Day, the day after all our family holiday obligations are fulfilled, I'll have made my choice.

Whatever your holiday traditions, I wish you the best of everything. May your season contain visits with family and friends, great food and whatever makes you smile. See you in 2010.

Panettone

2009-12-09T15:59:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the greater Toronto area's significant Italian population, these lovely Christmas treats are in our grocery stores right now, so get them while there here. This seasonal Italian pastry is a sweet, light bread dotted with raisins and candied citrus peel. Traditionally, panettone is served with mascarpone cheese and a sip of fortified wine, but I like mine toasted with butter.

Panettone (sometimes called Pandoro) is usually packaged in big shiny boxes with ribbon loops at the top for hanging. You'll probably find them stacked high near other seasonal foodstuffs in your grocery store.

Hello December

2009-12-02T05:13:00.000-08:00

Hurrah! November is finally over. The bookends of winter, November and March, are the hardest months for me. November signals the beginning of the long haul, whereas March feels never-ending, as cold grey winter reluctantly makes its sluggish retreat.

This is a two-season city: warm and cold, or if you prefer, green and grey. This November has been unusually warm, perhaps delaying my acceptance of the inevitable. (I dreamed earlier in the month that it was mid-February and the ground had not yet frozen. I stood in the warm winter sun on green grass regretting that I had pulled out my annuals.) Yesterday, however, I awoke to frost on the grass and one degree weather. The freeze is on its way.

December, at least, has great food to its credit. The flavours of Christmas are my favourite of the year. I ate my first clementine orange yesterday and was reminded of the season. I love watching the oils mist in the air as I remove the peel. I'll be making Nigella's clementine cake again this year and can already taste its moist orange-scented goodness. I'll also try to recall how I made my stovetop Christmas cake, a concoction I threw together last December and of course didn't write down, but resulted in a beautiful, rich and boozy fruitcake that I'll desperately try to recreate for the rest of my life.

I'll also visit Sandra Juto's photo blog to remind myself to notice the beauty of winter. Her daily pictures of Gothenburg, Sweden, where she lives, are always astonishing in their simple aesthetic. Winter, there as here, has a lovely palette of muted, mixed greys, blues, greens and purples all perfectly complemented by the low dim light of the winter sky. This is the perfect backdrop to enjoy white steam rising from a cup of hot chocolate while wrapped in wool and sitting on a park bench.

November is always the hurdle. Now I'm settled in.

Gnocchi with chicken and cream

2009-10-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

Now that fall is in full swing and the temperature is continuing to drop, I've added a whole chicken to my grocery list and am enjoying the ritual of the weekly roast chicken cycle.

Roasting day is my favourite. I love preparing the bird for the oven. I take the chicken out of the fridge an hour or two ahead of time to let it come to room temperature. Then, while the oven is preheating (to 325ºF), I rinse and dry the bird, lay it in the roasting tray, and rub a wad of butter over the entire surface. The white skin feels smooth and cool, and the muscle and bone underneath is firm. I examine the fat at the tail end and remove the excess. Salt and pepper inside and out. If I'm so inclined, I'll slice half an onion or pick some thyme from the garden to insert into the cavity for extra flavour. While in the oven, the chicken roasts away slowly, eventually bubbling and sputtering, sending its delicious aroma into the air. Once finished, and having rested for a quarter hour under a tea towel, the chicken is ready to eat. This is when to enjoy the crisp, freshly roasted skin, and, my favourite bits, the wings. I eat these standing over the stove in the kitchen.

I keep the chicken in its roasting dish in the fridge, covered with plastic wrap, so that the roasting juices congeal at the bottom. Never throw these away. They are rich in flavour and nutrition and add depth to any sauce. My new favourite thing to make with leftover chicken and the juice is gnocchi with cream. This recipe is so simple, delicious, and fast with a prep time of only 10 minutes. I encourage you to try it.

Finally, the end of the chicken cycle is when all of the meat is picked away and the bones go into the stock pot. Again, glorious smells fill the house as the stock pot gurgles. I yield about a litre of stock per chicken carcass, enough to make an easy lentil soup for the next day.

GNOCCHI WITH CHICKEN AND CREAM
Serves 2

1/2 pound gnocchi
two handfuls roast chicken, torn or cut into bite-sized pieces
roasting pan juices, fat removed
1/4 c whipping cream
chopped fresh parsley (optional)
salt and pepper to taste

In boiling salted water, cook gnocchi until they rise to the surface. Drain. In the same saucepan, add the pan juices and cream, bringing to a boil. Add gnocchi and chicken, stirring to coat and heat, 30 seconds with the lid on. Remove from heat. Add parsley and season. Serve with steamed broccoli, or a side salad.

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-10-09T14:11:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd share a few insights about preparing Thanksgiving dinner for those of you lucky enough to be doing so this weekend:

1) Go with the flow
In my eight years of preparing this feast, something has always gone wrong. Last year's error was perhaps the most spectacular: an exploding turkey. I lovingly made the most divine lemon-scented mashed potatoes and sealed the whole lot into the main cavity and neck of the bird. I was unaware that the potatoes expand in the turkey and create a heck of a lot of steam, and as such they ceremoniously squirted out of both ends and lined the bottom of my oven. Fortunately, my husband noticed this before they managed to burn and catch fire. We saved what we could, and stuffed the rest back inside the turkey. The result, despite the in-oven theatrics, was a delicious tender turkey and glorious lemony potatoes.

This year, I've already had to modify one of my recipes, since the directions printed in the cookbook resulted in something other than what was advertised. (Note to Nigella: In what universe does simmering cranberries for even a moment not result in gloopy sauce? Please revise your Cranberry and Cornbread Stuffing recipe in Feast.)

2) Simple food makes for great eating

Steamed brussels sprouts with butter, nutmeg and lemon juice. Baked yams mashed with butter and lime juice. Yukon gold potatoes mashed with cream and butter. These turkey accompaniments are not complicated yet are wonderful to eat. Their success relies only on the quality of the ingredients and your attention to make sure they aren't overcooked. Save the labour-intensive recipes – the ones with twenty steps and a thousand futsy ingredients – for when you don't have fifty other dishes to prepare at the same time.

3) Let your guests help you

Not only will some of your dinner guests – your friends and family, people who love you – offer their help out of the goodness of their hearts, but they will usually hover around you in the kitchen until you give them something to do. This is a sign: They want to help. My sister's fiancé is case in point. He's cleaned my kitchen, made the mustard for roast ham, cleaned my barbecue, and done all manner of chopping and dicing. Helping makes him feel great. Remember, there's no prize for slaving feverishly to bring a feast to table all by your lonesome, especially if you arrive at your place wilting with exhaustion. As a result, your guests will focus on your well being rather than the food and eachother, and that's just not fun.

4) Never criticize your own food

Even if you are eating not only the worst thing you've ever made but also the worst food in the history of the universe, never say so to your guests. I learned this from Julia Child and I agree with her completely. Again, the point of the meal is to be together, not to focus on your own culinary shortcomings. Of course, you're your own worst critic: What tastes terrible to you might be the best thing your guests have ever eaten.

5) Have fun

If you're not having fun, then what's the point? If you don't like cooking, then do a potluck Thanksgiving, have it catered, order Thai food, roast weenies, whatever floats your boat. There are no rules, so create a day that makes you happy. If you're happy, then your guests will be too.

I'm making my pumpkin cake again, soaking my turkey in brine overnight, and stuffing it with cornbread. I'm also doing as much as I can before the day of, so I'll have lots of energy to enjoy Thanksgiving as much as possible.

Have a great weekend!

Goodbye Gourmet

2009-10-08T05:04:00.000-07:00

Ever since reading Ruth Reichl's fabulous memoirs, I have been comforted by the notion that she is at the helm of Gourmet magazine as editor-in-chief. She's still out there, I think to myself, connecting ideas to food and sifting through our culture's culinary habits for the meaning of life. Alas, as reported this week, Gourmet magazine is no longer; Condé Nast finally pulled the plug on what was probably a very unprofitable subscription. The Globe and Mail featured a pair of opinions (one for and the other against) by two of its food writers on the demise of this 68-year-old publication. Much is made of Condé Nast's decision to keep Bon Appétit, its other food magazine, while scrapping the veteran. The writers' comparisons of the two magazines is entertaining.

As much as I love Ruth Reichl, I never once even glanced at a copy of Gourmet under her direction. My only memory of Gourmet is of flipping through the odd issue kicking around my parents' house and marveling at the utter insanity of some of the recipes. My thought was always the same: Who really cooks like that? In the mid 90's at least, Gourmet was about bringing fine dining to our homes, teaching us how to make the dishes requiring hours and hours of preparation, like the ones we might sample at Le Cirque if we were charmed enough to dine there. I imagine the current version of Gourmet isn't much different. Perhaps the element of fantasy was always the point; by featuring food to drool over rather than recipes to add to your arsenal for quick dinners, Gourmet lifted readers out of the everyday slogging that is feeding. By comparison, I continue to buy Vogue, another Condé Nast publication, yet I will likely never dress off the pages in head-to-toe designer togs.

I feel a little funny saying farewell to a magazine I've never read, but I feel a twinge of sadness at its loss. I feel for Gourmet's devotees. I remember my own disappointment at the recent loss of Blueprint and Domino, two similar lifestyle and home decor publications targeted to a reader exactly like me, a stylish 30-something woman, cut to improve some bottom line. As will likely be the case with Gourmet, there are no magazines in print that can replace the ones lost, none to fill the void, none that match the needs of the specific reader so perfectly.

And so, I raise my keyboard first to Ruth Reichl. Thank you for being fearless in your writing about food. And to the readers of Gourmet: I hope you find what you're looking for.

Salt redux

2009-09-21T07:58:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read the multi-part special feature on salt in the Globe and Mail, have a look. The series was first published during the summer, but is still available on their website and well worth examining.

In case we need reminding, Canadians consume on average twice the amount of salt required for a healthy diet. While we've become obsessed with monitoring our fat and sugar intake, we continue to scarf down 3,092 mg of sodium daily. Low fat and "healthy" choice prepared foods such as President's Choice Blue Menu products have up to 600 mg of sodium per serving, almost half-way to the 1,500 mg per day quota for optimal health. A diet high in sodium is particularly detrimental to individuals who have high blood pressure or are prone to hypertension. (Watch this narrated video diagram on how salt affects your body.) Clearly, if consumers were as attentive to the negative health impact of salt as they are to the effects of sugar and fat on their waistlines, manufacturers would be forced to redefine what constitutes a "healthy" choice.

The Globe feature includes a number of interesting articles. Who knew, for instance, that you can limit your salt intake by seasoning your food at the end of preparation rather than at the beginning? Apparently, we require less salt to taste when we salt previously unsalted food at the table verses food prepared with salt. Also amusing is Dave McGinn's The Sodium Diaries, a daily blog devoted to his efforts to stick to the 1,500 mg per day quota, which he fails miserably. I guess no one pointed out that if you want to stick to the daily limit, you can kiss eating prepared foods goodbye: everything from instant oatmeal to canned tuna, our ideas of "healthy" choices, contain heaps of salt.

The bottom line, as always, is that healthy living requires commitment and forethought. All we can hope for is that over time, our governments will consider excessive salt intake a national health crisis, as it did with smoking in the 1980's, and will throw its weight behind the awareness campaigns, incentives and bans this issue deserves.

Chocolate collard green pie

2009-09-16T09:32:00.000-07:00

My next post is taking longer to write than I anticipated, so in the interim, here is something to read:

Chef Harry Eastwood has created Red Velvet and Chocolate Heartache, a book of baking recipes that hide vegetables in cakes, pies and cookies and apparently taste great. This article in the The Globe and Mail is a tad misleading, suggesting that Eastwood's recipes are healthy because they replace butter and sugar for veggies. While there are lots of specific starchy vegetables (not a kale cake in sight, I'm sure) in each recipe, they are also loaded with nuts to replace the butter, and they still contain sugar. Perhaps readers, sensing that "Muscavado" sugar must be exotic and therefore healthier than the plain old, are the same people who also think "evaporated cane juice" is somehow not sugar either. Regardless, almond flour baked goods are always a treat, so it's nice to have a new recipe.

Mass vs. volume... mass wins!

2009-09-03T12:37:00.000-07:00

At last, the perfect loaf of bread. I've been waiting a long, long time for this. I had almost given up on being able to bake a light, fluffy loaf of bread. Even my husband was starting to get a little disparaging. After chewing thoughtfully on a slice of my last loaf, he admitted: "Maybe bread just isn't something you're good at making." Oh, how I hated hearing that. But a part of me thought that he might be right.

Until today, all of my bread has been leaden. "Dense" would be a compliment for my bread, suggesting the healthiness of whole grain rather than what the loaves really were: edible door stoppers. It seemed that each loaf I made was heavier than the last. Although they all contained the same amount of flour, less and less air puffed its way into the dough, compressing more and more grain into every slice. I followed my recipe book slavishly, measuring accurately, kneading accordingly. I would wait patiently at the oven door, hoping the dough would make its final ascent in the heat and heartbroken when it didn't. All of these efforts to no avail. My bread was a failure.

Today, I put my bread book away and thought I'd try one last time. I had nothing to lose, and so I followed the simple direction given by Michael Ruhlman in his book Ratio. His bread dough ratio is so simple: five parts flour and three parts water. Add some yeast, salt for flavour and oil if you like. Knead and let rise as you please.

I used my kitchen scale and measured out 20 oz of flour (mostly white; about 1/4 whole wheat) and 12 oz of lukewarm water. I added two packages of yeast, about 1/2 Tbsp of salt, a glug glug glug of olive oil and a long squirt of honey. I also threw in a handful of whole grains (millet and Scottish oats) for some crunch. Then, I kneaded the dough for about 10 minutes and put it in a bowl, covered with plastic wrap, and set it in the stereo cabinet to rise. After about an hour, I punched the dough down, wrapped it back up, and let it rise again. After another hour or so, I took the dough to the kitchen, kneaded it for about another minute or so, cut it in half to form into two loaves, and let them rise covered with a kitchen towel for about 30 minutes. Then I baked them for 35 minutes in a 375ºF oven. Done.

I surmise that the problems I had been having with my previous breads is that my recipes had too much flour and not enough liquid. By measuring the bread to liquid ration by weight and not volume, I will be able to make bread with consistency, I hope. As you may know, the volume of flour changes dramatically over time; sifted flour, light and lofty, will take up more volume per ounce than unsifted flour. Any European cookbook I have ever read always measures baking ingredients by mass, not volume. But for some reason, North American recipes have always relied on imperial volumetric measures for dry ingredients.

All this to say that if you like fresh bread, go out to Canadian Tire and buy a kitchen scale, measure out your ingredients and have fun. It's really easy, and will surely be the best bread you have ever tasted.

Eggs and broccoli

2009-09-03T08:10:00.000-07:00

I went for a proper brunch the other day, and by proper I mean for a meal I could never be bothered to make at home. I had eggs Florentine, a life-long favourite: poached eggs on English muffin with steamed spinach and hollandaise. Making this dish at home, though possible of course, is fraught with difficulty. While steamed spinach and toast are fairly simple to manage, the other two components are a nightmare of timing and precision.

I've made hollandaise sauce once in my life: successfully, though not without the requisite bother. Setting aside the concern of the shocking amount of butter needed to make hollandaise, the sauce also requires feats of strength and patience to complete. The mixture of butter and egg yolk, once combined in a bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water (a bain marie), must be whisked continuously to avoid separation or over cooking. In addition, hollandaise must be served immediately after it has been made, for it continues to thicken if left on the heat or separate if unattended. Unless I either hire a sous chef or grow another pair of arms, poached eggs (a task requiring an equal amount of attention and care) and hollandaise is a meal best left to professionals.

And yet, now that I've had a taste for unctuous butter mixed with the tang of lemon juice and the smoothness of egg yolk, I can't go back to plain boiled eggs for breakfast. And so, I have invented my own poached eggs hollandaise: two soft boiled eggs with butter and a squirt of lemon juice. It's cooking down to the basic ingredients, and it certainly will never replace the original. But, cooking is about making something to eat, not driving yourself crazy, so I am pleased that my minimalist version is so satisfying.

From the web
Ever wonder how long mothers have been forcing their kids to finish their broccoli? Eight thousand years, give or take. This food time line tells us at what point in human history different food items found their way onto our plates. We've been eating wheat for 10,000 years, though ravioli is a 13th century invention. Some items I've never heard of, like the emmer and einkorn grains of 17,000 and 16,000 BC, respectively. Also listed is the first cookbook, a Dutch "kitchen book" called "Good and Noble Food", published sometime in the 15th century. Given Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in 1440, it must not have been long before someone noticed such books would be appreciated.

P.S. I took a break from Pickle Pea over the summer, as regular readers may have noticed. (Sorry for the lack of notice. Thanks for your patience!) I'm back now. Expect a return to my usual schedule of 3-4 posts/month.

Made in Canada... I mean, Kerplackistan

2009-07-07T07:32:00.000-07:00

In light of last week’s recall of several President’s Choice beef products for e-coli contamination, I realized that my sporadic reading of local news may prove one day to be detrimental to my health. Were it not for my father telling me about the recall before biting into his hamburger at our backyard barbecue, I would have never known about the recall at all. (Fortunately, our food was among the items not on the recall list.)

I have since discovered, however, that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has an RSS feed for all food recalls and allergy alerts. Once you subscribe, you will be notified via email or through your RSS reader of any items that are contaminated. Isn’t technology great?

While we’re on the subject of information about what we eat, I also found this article in last week’s Globe and Mail. It references the PC beef recall to inform us that as consumers, we never really know where our food comes from. Items that say “Made in Canada” may mean that the food is only packaged in Canada but the raw materials are produced or grown in another country altogether. For those of us who want to eat Canadian beef to support our local industries may have to look further than the product packaging to find out if a box of frozen burgers fits the bill. I am again reminded of Paul Robert’s The End of Food and the economics of modern food production: companies now search for the lowest price on raw materials from around the globe, awarding supplier contracts to the lowest bidder, whether they be from Red Deer or the Red Sea.

The sky is still falling, right?

2009-06-24T07:54:00.000-07:00

Agribusiness is in the news. Perhaps my attentions are tuned in after having read Paul Roberts’ The End of Food and I’m noticing articles that were previously off my radar.

We have this article in today’s Globe and Mail about engineering tastier vegetables to meet consumer demands. Initially, I can’t help agreeing with Jamie Reaume, executive director of the Holland Marsh Growers' Association: “The overriding concern that always pops up when you start to deal with vegetables is what was wrong with the original taste and why are people trying to improve it?” Then I remember that we are human, always striving to create something better, whether it be to sell or to savour.

I’m certainly not as gloomsday centered as the target Star reader, given the tone of this article on the California über-strawberry. Those big red strawberries we see in grocery stores, available nine months of the year for as low as $2 a pint are obviously bad news, given that they’re grown 5,000 km away and are engineered in every possible way. Packed within a tiny paragraph, however, is the truth of food production on a large scale: high volumes and crop specialization yields fruit that is more efficient and produces fewer greenhouse gases per pound than fruit I would grown in my backyard. But forget about that. They’ve got to be bad in other ways, so keep feeling guilty that we’re all ruining life as we know it.

Speaking of California strawberries, I’ve got some in my fridge that I bought on sale for a couple bucks the other day. Time for a smoothie.

Two Things

2009-06-19T06:16:00.000-07:00

I have been preoccupied with other writings this week. I do have two things I wish to share before the weekend arrives.

Ruth Reichl
I have been reading the memoirs of food writer Ruth Reichl over the last couple of weeks. I completed Tender At the Bone on Wednesday and ran out to purchase another of her books the following day. I love her writing. She has created a life devoted to sensation, of following her instinct to find something as basic as food that tastes good. In Tender At the Bone, she recounts growing up under the tyrannical rule of the Queen of Mold, her manic-depressive mother who would routinely serve green sour cream and fuzzy bread. Her stories of her mother’s most memorable and horrific occasions, including an engagement party for her brother that sent 29 people to hospital with food poisoning, are almost impossible to believe. While most food writers highlight personal backgrounds that encouraged good eating, Reichl reveals that storytelling was prized in her family. I find myself reading her words slowly, savouring them as I would a good meal. I have yet to understand this response and I am curious to discover what makes her writing so different.

Vegetable Love
New ingredients create new opportunities for discovery. I have been shopping at Loblaws with the weekly sale flyer in hand, so I have been buying a lot of things that I wouldn’t normally eat and in large quantities. One of the results of my shopping trips was six hearts of Romaine lettuce (five bucks!) as well as a bag of avocados. As such, I dug out my copy of Barbara Kafka's Vegetable Love and realized I had been ignoring a treasure trove. Her “Shrimp and Avocado Salad on Lettuce and Sorrel” was the inspiration for my recipe below, seeing as I had several pounds of shrimp in the freezer from another shopping spree. I haven’t made her version, but I highly recommend her combination of soy sauce, lemon juice and avocado, three ingredients I never before thought to marry. My version is served warm and thus much easier to make.

WARM SHRIMP AND AVOCADO SALAD
Serves 1

1 Romaine heart, chopped
1 small or 1/2 large avocado, peeled and sliced
1 Tbsp chopped basil (or mint, parsley or coriander)
2 tsp oil
1 clove garlic, sliced
pinch hot pepper flakes
handful of frozen uncooked shrimp (about 3 oz.)
2 tsp tamari or soy sauce
juice of 1/4 lemon
salt and pepper to taste

Prepare salad by chopping clean lettuce and placing leaves in a salad bowl or dinner plate. Arrange avocado slices and chopped basil on top. Set aside.

Heat the oil and garlic in a small frying pan on medium high heat. When the garlic starts to sizzle, add the shrimp. Fry five minutes, turning shrimp to cook both sides. When shrimp are pink, add soy sauce and lemon juice and heat for another few seconds. Remove from heat and pour directly over vegetables. Season with salt and pepper to taste and enjoy!

Toast and tea

2009-06-04T05:58:00.000-07:00

I have an olfactory memory I can’t quite place. I bought a loaf of egg bread the other night, prizing the soft glowing challa over the other sub-standard offerings at my local market. I can’t remember the last time I bought a challa; most of my childhood memories of egg bread are of being at my best friend’s house on Friday nights, breaking a fresh-baked challa hidden under a kitchen towel as part of her family’s weekly Shabbat ritual. This week, I’ve been enjoying my egg bread toasted with butter. The moment I smell the slices starting to brown, however, I have a memory of eating challa toast with butter and honey and drinking peppermint tea. My memory is purely sensory, activating my taste buds and providing no visual cues. I recall my mother serving us toast with honey and tea whenever we had the stomach flu. She would give us whatever bread she had, and like me she rarely bought egg bread either. Perhaps there was one rare moment when she too selected a spongy glistening challa over all the other breads on display, a day when I just happened to be needing some toast and tea.

Some things to read in The Globe and Mail today:

This article about cooking oils. It’s quite thorough, explaining the difference between the Omega fatty acids and where to find them, “good” and “bad” cholesterol, etc. At the end of the day, you can’t go wrong with having a cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil in the pantry.
Ever wonder about the state of Canadian street meat? This article showcases a Vancouver hot dog stand, Japadog, that serves everything from fried okra to daikon radish and wasabi on wieners and sausages. Vancouver, like Toronto, limits the kind of food available on movable kiosks.

We must always eat

2009-05-23T12:24:00.000-07:00

I had decided earlier in the week to write my next post about cabbage, an entry I have been meaning to create for some time now, though one I have put off for several months. Even now, as I am finally beginning my cabbage post, I am overcome with boredom. Such is the nature of most of our everyday cooking: We cannot escape drudgery. No matter how great our moments of culinary inspiration may be, when our zest for cooking is boundless and we delight in the entire process of preparing a meal, these moments surely pass, but we must always eat. Cabbage is one of my fallback vegetables, perfectly suited for the most listless, uninspired moments in my workaday life.

Cabbage is the only vegetable with the resilience to outlast everything else in the fridge. It can sit patiently on the bottom shelf wrapped in plastic for weeks - even months - crisp and new as the day it arrived. While green brassicas like kale and collards turn yellow, and more tender leaves mold and rot, cabbage remains true. Even carrots and parsnips, though long in shelf life, eventually shrivel and grow brown in the crisper. Cabbage is a miracle.

I have been buying napa cabbages to keep in the fridge. The leaves are frilly, like lace, easily shredded and cook quickly. I have been stir-frying them with garlic and hot pepper flakes, adding some salt to help release the water to create steam, and sprinkling with a few chopped coriander leaves at the end before serving. Sometimes I throw in a handful of frozen peas for good measure. I eat this with boiled pork dumplings you can find in the freezer section and dipping sauce made from a combination of soy sauce, sesame oil and chili sauce.

I present cabbage not necessarily to entice you to include it in your lineup of kitchen staples. We all have the items we fall back on when we can’t think of something thrilling to cook. I could tell the story of my first failed attempt at making cabbage rolls, the filling folded ineptly between the thick, unyielding leaves of conventional white cabbage. Or I could reveal my source for my current method for preparing napa leaves: a casual Chinese luncheon celebrating the successful arrival of a new baby. Instead, I invite you to consider the ways you cook without thinking: how you squirrel things away in the fridge, freezer or pantry to prepare when you just need to eat.

Fight the power

2009-05-14T07:16:00.000-07:00

If I wasn’t completely smitten for Jamie Oliver before purchasing his latest cookbook, Jamie’s Food Revolution, I am now. I was always impressed by his infectious enthusiasm for all things culinary; he’s like the energizer bunny of celebrity chefs. I’ve enjoyed watching him bounce from one project to next, heralding simple “naked” cooking using fresh ingredients and straightforward methods.

More than anyone else, I think, Jamie’s food philosophy is about empowerment. He recognizes that cooking your own food in today’s world is not just a political act: It’s downright radical.

I wonder if he’s read Paul Roberts’ The End of Food, an impeccably researched treasure trove of information for anyone concerned by how reliant westerners (and now emerging markets like China and India) have become on heavily processed (or, as Roberts calls them, “high margin”) foods. According to Roberts, the items in our supermarkets with the lowest nutritional value (pop, cookies, chips, snacks, etc.) and made with the cheapest ingredients (corn syrup, vegetable oils, synthetic thickeners and flavourings, etc.) have the highest profit margins available to the manufacturer. This is why these items are so heavily marketed to us. (The numbers one and two most recognized brands in the world are Coke and Pepsi, two very high margin items.) Making your own salad dressing, then, becomes not just a quest for superior ingredients and eliminating chemical additives. It’s an act of rebellion, an idea I think Oliver is beginning to communicate more effectively than ever before.

Oliver’s idea for Revolution is to bring the power of cooking to the people. He kick-started his “pass it on” movement by traveling to Rotherham, England, and teaching recipes from his new book to a handful of working class, processed food dependent non-cooks. He then charged them, and all of his readers, with the task of instructing four friends their one recipe, who in turn pass it on to four friends, and so on and so on. After seven repetitions, he says, there will be enough people who know how to cook one good recipe to fill Yankee Stadium one and a half times (that’s almost 80,000 people).

The recipes, as usual, are simple and tasty, like spaghetti bolognese, omelets, fish baked in foil packets and chopped salads. As such, there’s nothing much new, though their presentation (step-by-step photographs, variations on a theme) is really useful.

On the food side, I’m interested in two pantry staples Oliver uses in Revolution: quick oats and cream crackers. I’m always in search of new tricks. On first glance, I see Oliver throwing handfuls of quick oats into everything from smoothies to topping baked salmon. And the cream crackers smash up to make killer toppings and breadcrumbs. Already I have made a smoothie with some oats, and it didn’t turn into a gooey mess. I’m eager to try the rest of the recipes. I’ll let you know how they fare.

Thank you, Jamie, for being a champion of culinary self-empowerment. Rock on.

The nocebo effect

2009-05-09T07:46:00.000-07:00

Nocebo effect: The power of negative thinking. This idea comes my way via Margaret Wente’s column in today’s Globe and Mail. She is in support of the once radical now less incendiary view that our obsessive attention to the minutae of our health and nutrition is unnecessary. I believe she refers to this article in Maclean’s magazine, though one need not look far to find yet another writer claiming that we’re killing ourselves with our seemingly harmless habits. Have a read to get in on the discussion.

I also picked up two books in the airport last Sunday, displayed side-by-side on the non-fiction centre table: Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, and Paul Robert’s The End of Food. Funnier still is the front cover quotation by none other than Pollan in defense of Robert’s book: “For anyone concerned about the future of food, this is an indispensable book.” Now I’m intrigued: Are these seemingly opposite views really the same book? I’m curious to learn how similar they are rather than how different.

Spring things

2009-05-02T04:33:00.000-07:00

Over the past week, my garden has sprung into action. I have a sizable plot mixed with perennial flowers, herbs, shrubs, rocks and empty spaces for annuals and edibles. My garden is a consistent source of joy and woe, as are most creations, although after seven summers toiling in the soil, I am confident I have worked out many of the problems.

Truth be told, I’m not much of a gardener. I have soaring bucolic fantasies, including an impulse every few years to move to the country and live off the fat of the land. In practice, however, I avoid working in the garden like I avoid vacuuming or washing the shower curtain. Weeding, as any gardener knows, is a never ending almost Sisyphean task requiring constant vigilance and commitment. I also have an irrational fear of worms. Much to my dismay, in any outdoor garden, worms are unavoidable: toothless, sightless and prehistoric, lurking in the darkness, waiting to pounce.

I am looking forward to this year’s garden, the maintenance of which I have now entirely subcontracted to my landscaper. He is a proper artist whose loving attention to garden beauty and bounty makes up for his bureaucratic failings. We have devised a system we will test out this year I'm hoping will satisfy both my need for financial order and his desire to create at will. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Through the years, we have grown a sampling of edibles with varying degrees of success. In the beginning, I imagined growing enough vegetables to preserve and consume all year long, keeping step with my prairie ancestors. In reality, the abundance of tall Norway maples in our neighbourhood prevent the maximum sun exposure such a venture requires. That's a good technical reason for my failure. I would be remiss not to mention, however, that my ancestors were farmers, a seven days a week, sun up to sun down job, whereas I have many other things I want to spend my time doing. Such is the distraction of the city.

Of all the vegetables we’ve planted, only a few are worth repeating. Many were more trouble than they were worth. Lettuce, for instance, tastes wonderful when freshly picked, but comes in quickly. Unless you are skilled at timing your crop, planting seeds every two weeks throughout May and June as the package demands, you will have all of your lettuce available at once. Then, after a week or so, it will bolt, become tough or bitter, and unwieldy. Radishes require lots of sun and resowing to leave space for the roots to form, as do carrots. The chore does not yield produce any better than can be purchased at the green grocer.

Two items in particular warrant the fuss of home growing. One, swiss chard, is hardly a fuss at all if you don’t mind earwigs and sprinkling the slug bait once a week or so. I have been growing a bed of swiss chard for several years, enjoying the tender fresh leaves once or twice a day from July through the end of October. Their flavour is unmatched by the leaves you buy in the store, and as such to my mind worth the effort.

The other item we grow is cherry tomatoes. Truth be told, all tomatoes grown in the garden are unparalleled by ones bought in the store. Cherry tomatoes, however, are far less effort and frustration than their larger bretheren. Squirrels, for some reason, bite into tomatoes when they're green, then leave them to rot on the ground, uneaten. They don't do this with cherry toms. So unless you’re into building cages for your plants, cherry tomatoes is the way to go: the squirrels seem to ignore them. Remember to prune your tomato plants every few days, removing the dud sucker shoots that only serve to drain the plant of its resources. They are easily snapped off with your fingers, resulting in exponentially more fruit.

Of course, growing fresh herbs is a no-brainer, such as the lemon thyme I have pictured above, already available for use this early in the season. Whatever you choose to grow, you will be pleased I'm sure with the feeling of independence and power that comes with providing for yourself.

Banana break

2009-04-27T06:28:00.000-07:00

This piece of culinary genius comes from my husband. He rarely cooks, though as I have said before, when he does the results are inspired.

We are preparing for a vacation to the Cayman Islands for a friend’s wedding. Given the high cost of everything from toothpaste to dry goods on the island, we have been planning to bring a suitcase or two of non-perishables to prepare in our kitchenette. We leave in a week, and so far we've eaten about half of everything I have bought for our trip, including a box of PC Organics Original Pancake Mix.

I am interested to discover all of the possible uses for pancake mix. Not only does it make great pancakes, but as we have now learned, a thicker batter with double the egg works as a delicious frying batter for sweet treats. B cut up several not-too-ripe bananas we had sitting on the counter and dipped the pieces in the batter before frying them for several minutes per side in hot oil.

I remember being slightly horrified when I watched Nigella Lawson dropping battered mini Bounty bars into her deep fryer and gobbling them up straight from the vat. Now I’m more concerned for us never leaving the house and dipping everything we can think of into pancake batter. It tastes so good.

For those of you who are regular follows of my blog or know me at all may wonder why I am now embracing the wheat, so to speak. I wrote about my no wheat policy several months ago as I began questioning the necessity of my personal ban. Since then, I have visited an allergy specialist who quickly concluded I am not allergic. She gave me a good earful about not just food allergies, but also how the digestive system works, and I can see that my personal fluctuations had more to do with stress than anything else. I have subsequently been eating all things gluten-filled for two months now with no change in my general health and well-being.

If you are one of the many people who has been recommended by an alternative health practitioner to avoid certain foods, I invite you to consider verifying their claims with your family doctor. After all, why live life without all of the tastes our culinary world has to offer if you don't have to?

Ratio + imagination = freedom

2009-04-13T07:26:00.000-07:00

Good news! There's a new book out called Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. The author, Michael Ruhlman, went through the trouble of writing down what every good cook knows. Each recipe, whether it be for bread or soup, is developed in accordance of basic ratios between the ingredients. Once you learn these ratios, you can ditch the recipe books and cook freely according to your taste and whim.

To adopt this method, dust off those kitchen scales, or break down and finally spend 30 bucks on this indispensable tool. The ratios are measured by mass, not volume. This is a vital distinction when it comes to flour since depending on humidity and settling, a single cup can vary in weight by several ounces.

The ratios are simple. In this article, Ruhlman shares the 3-2-1 ratio for making cookies: 3 parts flour, 2 parts fat and 1 part sugar. Use white flour, butter and white sugar and you have a basic sugar cookie. Replace some of the sugar for brown sugar and you have a darker cookie. Add molasses and some ginger and you have a gingersnap. Increase the fat and add some eggs and you have a richer cookie. The possibilities are endless.

I am eager to try the ratio, shared by Ruhlman in this video, for making levened dough: 5 parts flour and 3 parts water. The amount of yeast, he says, is not critical, and salt is for flavour. I have been experimenting lately with making my own bread, feeling tied to my recipe book, following the steps and hoping I haven't missed a critical ingredient. My book, Bernard Clayton's canonical The Complete Book of Breads, may be interesting and thorough, but it nonetheless uses volumetric measurement for dry ingredients. I am frustrated by this lack of precision.

I love how automatic I am at making soup, or adding salt to meats, ratios I have learned and absorbed through trial and error and are now second nature. Now, I will try my hand at the bread ratios. I have a feeling I will see instant results.

Orange food

2009-04-04T10:57:00.000-07:00

I was reading the Health Canada Food Guide again the other day, and noticed the fine print on their recommendations for fruits and vegetables. We may all have the “five-to-ten servings” advice knocking around in our heads, most likely from the V-8 commercials that suggest drinking their “vegetable” juice is the best hope some of us have for fulfilling our daily quota. Health Canada’s fine print, however, says that of those five-to-ten servings of fruits and vegetables, one vegetable should be dark green and another should be orange. So much for V-8.

In terms of fast and convenient eating, the green veg is far more accommodating than the orange. Frozen spinach bought in pellets is easily prepared and can be added to soups and omelets. The fresh variety, especially when bought as washed baby spinach, creates the beginnings of a great salad. In addition to baby spinach, several other dark greens can be eaten raw, especially swiss chard, whose tender leaves, when shredded, also make terrific salads and slaws.

Unless you enjoy eating carrot sticks, however, the preparation of orange veg requires more planning. Aside from carrots, in the orange variety we really have two other options: squash and yams. Neither can be enjoyed in their raw form and both require peeling, which is unfortunate when you are trying to prepare food quickly.

There are solutions. Yams are best eaten baked, when their flesh is soft and the sugars have begun to caramelize. Accomplish this by placing scrubbed yams on a baking sheet in a 375ºF oven for about an hour or until they feel soft and are easily pierced with a fork. Baked yams can be stored in the fridge for up to a week, in their skins and sealed in an airtight container. (I haven’t tried freezing them, since they usually don’t last long enough to make it to secondary storage.) So, if you like yams, bake a whole tray full at a time and save the rest for later. At mealtime, scoop the baked yam out of its skin and reheat in the microwave, adding butter and salt once it’s hot. One orange veg serving done.

Squash and yams also make great quick soups. For a fast yam soup, put some cooked yam in a saucepan and add water or chicken stock, enough to cover. Bring to a boil, then purée with an immersion blender, season and serve. The same can be accomplished with uncooked squash, peeled and cubed and simmered for five minutes in water or stock until the pieces are tender. Purée and season as with the yam soup, then serve.

Breakfast redux

2009-03-25T07:44:00.000-07:00

When it comes to breakfast, we all have our habits. Nigella Lawson cleverly wrote that first thing in the morning she would “rather make breakfast than a decision.” She eats the same breakfast every day, as I’m sure most of us do. My parents have been following the same breakfast schedule for years: porridge on weekdays, fried eggs and bacon on Saturdays and waffles on Sunday. There’s a certain comfort I get from knowing that wherever they are, I know what my parents had to eat that morning.

Lately, I've been enjoying soft boiled eggs and buttered toast for the most important meal of the day. I have taken the guesswork out of cooking the eggs by employing my egg-cooker, an ingenious contraption that looks more like a UFO than a kitchen appliance. I like that I am following the same ritual as Nigella, several hours later and with notable exceptions: the Italian eggs and Poîlane toast she demands are not available here. Poor me, unable to fully appreciate the domestic goddess's daily feast. Only in England, it seems, are the nationality of eggs of vital consideration. Said the Queen: “I myself prefer New Zealand eggs for breakfast.” Don’t we all....

I looked up some other notable breakfast quotations. (There aren’t many.) My favourite is from Arnold Schwarzenegger: “My body is like breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I don't think about it, I just have it.” I took moderate offense to Oscar Wilde before wondering what exactly he really meant by “only boring people are brilliant at breakfast.” I also realized that, in this modern life of eating breakfast at my desk, I am perhaps avoiding a potential minefield. After all, according to A P Herbert, “the critical period of matrimony is breakfast-time.”

Other breakfast links:

Sample breakfast menus from Health Canada
Breakfast of champions: the boring version from CNN, the cereal, the novel, and don't forget the true BoC from my university days (Shreddies and beer)
Edible breakfast links

What’s your breakfast routine?

Spring green

2009-03-20T10:25:00.000-07:00

We had a much awaited and highly anticipated arrival this morning. At 7:44AM, after a long and particularly cold winter, spring began! We are overjoyed and look forward to growth and abundance over the next few months. Hurrah!

The weather today is sunny and crisp. It's cold: the thermostat is barely above freezing. But no matter. The sun is high in the sky and there isn't a cloud to be seen. Spring is here.

To celebrate the occasion, I wanted to eat something green and fresh for lunch. It needed to be hot and comforting, since it's still cold out, but crisp and new tasting as well. I had bought a bunch of coriander and some limes at the grocery store the other day, sensing my impending need for something fragrant and green.

I made a puréed pea soup, a soup I make all year long. Today's version, however, I've never tried. It marked the occasion perfectly. The green of the peas is piercing and the coriander and lime complete the verdant triad.

This is a quick soup: five minutes or so to prepare. If you don't have coriander and lime, you could improvise: parsley and lemon, dill and sour cream, basil and some parmiggiano. Anything that adds spring to your soup!

SPRING PEA SOUP WITH CORIANDER AND LIME
Serves 1

1 cup frozen peas
1 cup water
1 handful of coriander leaves, minced
juice of 1/2 lime
1 tsp oil
salt and cayenne to taste

Put the peas and water into a saucepan and bring to a boil. Simmer for several minutes until the peas are cooked. Remove from heat.

Using an immersion blender, purée the peas. (If you don't have an immersion blender, you can pour the soup into a conventional blender.) Add the coriander, lime juice and oil. Season to taste and serve immediately.

O Mighty Taco, Harbinger of spring!

2009-03-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

I’m home from my vacation. Toronto has greeted me with below-zero temperatures and a light dusting of snow. Charming. I’ve been miserable all day and wishing I could be back in vacationland, a.k.a. Scottsdale, AZ, to soak up more sunshine and smell the glorious, jasmine scented air. I’m sure I’ve been a delight to be around since I’ve returned. Poor B, excited to see me, has been heroic while I regale him with remarks of how great Arizona is and how much I hate being back in the Great White North (except for seeing him, I reassure).

It’s amazing how much weather influences how and what we eat. While in Arizona, I craved the tastes of the southwest: corn, refried beans and jalapeños. I bought bunches of cilantro put it on everything. I devoured the grapefruits I could pick off the neighbourhood trees. But mostly, I wanted fish tacos. I both made my own, and sought them on the menu at restaurants. I think I ate one a day.

Here in Canada, we are generally deprived of quality Mexican cuisine. Until a few years ago, my understanding of tacos was that they were those hard shell disasters filled with greasy ground beef, soggy iceberg lettuce and pale tomatoes that would fall apart at first bite. Having gotten the stomach flu after one taco night when I was 10 aided to cement my belief that Mexican food was for people who also liked Cheez Whiz, balogna and ranch dressing. In other words, it was for people who were unaware that it was possible to eat something better.

A couple of years ago, while visiting relatives in Chicago, my cousins took us to their local taqueria. I was delighted to discover that I could purchase a taco in a soft, handmade corn tortilla filled with meats such as pulled pork and roast chicken, and even spicy white fish. These tacos stayed intact while I ate them. They tasted fantastic. I was hooked.

In Toronto, we don’t have 10 varieties of soft corn tortillas in every supermarket. (In Chicago, they sell fresh soft tortilla shells in pharmacies and convenience stores!) Last summer, after another taco-filled Chicago visit, I bought a tortilla press and some masa harina to make my own. This is surprisingly simple to do so long as you have the proper equipment (make sure to line the tortilla press with plastic wrap). I think I will make some this weekend, filled with the leftover chicken I am roasting this afternoon. I’ll pick up some jalapeños and cilantro on my walk. Perhaps I can entice spring to arrive a little early.

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Incidentally, for those who despise the taste of cilantro (also called coriander), the perfect omnivore directive applies to training oneself to enjoy this strong and fragrant herb. I don’t know of anything that tastes more green, but it is surely an acquired taste. I urge you to commit yourself to learning to love this distinctive herb. (Remember, it only takes 8-10 tries.) Once you do, you will be glad as there is nothing that tastes like it. It belongs in Mexican salsas as well as east Indian curries and big bowls of Vietnamese pho.

Have you had your eggs today?

2009-03-02T10:00:00.001-08:00

Eggs are in the air! Must be a sign of spring, I guess. Just days after sharing my recipe for uova in purgatorio, I have waiting for me in my blog reader this morning recipes for, you guessed it, eggs poached in sauce. This one is from one of my favourite food blogs, I'm Mad and I Eat, and explains how I used to get my tomato-y egg fix: done ramekin style in the oven (the fussy method I now have no patience for most days). She lists several other fellow bloggers’ versions including this one from Buff Chickpea done in a skillet with tons of veggies. Lots of chopping, but it looks great.

I’m heading to warmer climes on Wednesday and in my flurry of pre-vacation preparations, I am appreciative of fast food more than ever. My old favourites are serving me well (Death Row Beans in particular). My standby lunch is tuna with beans and celery, something I've made for years and was reacquainted with in David Rocco's Dolce Vita. I realize that I have neglected to share a recipe I make for myself at least three times a week. Yikes! It goes something like this:

1 4oz. can of tuna packed in olive oil, drained and emptied into a salad bowl (Callipo or Rio Mare brands are good)
1 rib celery, chopped
1/2 c canned beans, drained and rinsed (navy, white kidney or Romano beans work well)
juice from 1/4 lemon
1 glug of good olive oil
chopped parsley and salt and pepper to taste

Put all of these things in your bowl, toss them a bit and dig in. I make this for myself to go as well, throwing everything in a plastic container before leaving the house. It takes about three minutes to make.

P.S. Sorry for the weird title. What can I say? My head is already on vacation....

Blasphemy and best ever

2009-02-26T05:53:00.000-08:00

I had to showcase B’s amazing BLT from yesterday lunch, his “best ever.” He doesn’t cook very often, but when he does he pulls out all the stops. This version had escarole (a bitter green) for the foliage and smoked salt to season. The bacon is our fave: low-salt and house smoked from Pusateri’s. I love when B cooks for himself. He takes such delight in his creations. Though his repertoire is limited, his attention to his craft is impeccable.

A couple of interesting links today:

This article from the New York Times’ Harold McGee (a.k.a. The Curious Cook) is on how much water you really need to cook pasta. He argues in favour of reducing the amount from the traditional 4-6L to 1.5L per pound of pasta, as well as putting the pasta in the cold water and allowing it to cook as the water heats. His point is green: less water means less energy consumed. I imagine waiting less time when cooking pasta to be a stronger incentive for most. As well, the resulting pasta water will have a more concentrated starchiness and taste that is perfect for thickening any sauce. His notes on these tips plus his canvassing of the Italian cooking elite (this method is “blasphemous”) are worth a read.

Sometimes we need to be reminded that even the greats have a run of bad luck. Molly Wizenberg over at Orangette gives us this candid account of her recent culinary disasters, photos included. Earlier this month, The Times of London declared Orangette top of the heap for food blogs (there are 33,000 of us) and for good reason. Her stories of her life in the kitchen are humorous and warm and her recipes are inspired. Try not to fall in love with her.

Presto indeed

2009-02-25T08:30:00.000-08:00

Restrictions necessitate creativity. I guess the more familiar saying is “necessity is the mother of invention,” but I like my version better. Where would we be without our ability to make something great out of almost nothing? This is true for all art forms and, as I have discovered, cooking is no exception. Perhaps we could expand the maxim: laziness causes restrictions. Or, winter blahs nets fewer shopping trips which causes restrictions and thus necessitates creativity. Oi, my aching brain.

There are mitigating factors when it comes to cooking, the most obvious being hunger and available materials. I love to cook, experimenting with new flavours and ingredients, but as I have said before, sometimes I'm just too hungry to perform acts of culinary greatness. Or so I think. The wonder of cooking is that our common restrictions—nothing in the fridge, exhaustion, etc.—often produce miraculous (or if you prefer a less sensational adjective, unexpected) results.

Lately, I have been encouraged by the almost too enthusiastic Italian-Canadian David Rocco in his cookbook David Rocco's Dolce Vita. He corroborates my claim by pronouncing in his introduction that magic (or in his parlance, “alchemy”) is the method in cooking. Make your food and pay attention to the process. “Suddenly,” he writes, “you've created alchemy using the most ordinary ingredients.”

This morning I made his recipe for uova in purgatorio, or “eggs in purgatory,” a dish I had often made for myself before I had his book, though using a far more complicated method. I would make mine as you would œufs en cocotte, using warmed buttered ramekins submerged in a bain marie and baked to perfection in the oven, replacing the cream for tomato sauce. (The French, it seems, complicate everything.) In the crisp snap of fall last October, I must have made this three times a week. Now, deep in the fatigue of winter, this method is too involved. My head hurts just to think of performing the many steps to complete the recipe. Rocco to the rescue. In his version, simmer a 1/2 cup or so of tomato sauce in a pan, crack in the eggs, add some grated cheese, cover and turn off the heat. In about 5 minutes you have beautiful eggs poached in sauce. Presto.

My tomato sauce, another super-fast concoction, is also inspired from his book. It's another non recipe: too simple to require one of those annoying list of ingredients that make my eyes glaze over and my hand turn the page. Smash a clove of garlic and add it to a saucepan with about 3 Tbsp of olive oil. Wait for it to sizzle, then add one 26-oz. can of plum tomatoes, undrained. Crush up the tomatoes a bit with a utensil. Add any herbs of your choosing, fresh or dried (oregano, basil, parsley, bay leaf...). Bring to a boil and then simmer for at least five minutes, or the time it takes you to prepare whatever it is you're serving the sauce with (cooked pasta, meatballs, fried eggplant, sausages, etc.). Season to taste with salt and pepper. What could be easier?

I have other such instant discoveries I will be sharing with you over the next few days. In the meantime, do you have any fast food inspirations to share with me?

A note about canned tomatoes
ONLY BUY SAN MARZANO TOMATOES. This is the great secret of Italian tomato sauce. Mama Rosa told me so (though I had heard it years before by the owner of Positano). San Marzano tomatoes are D.O.P. certified in Italy, grown and packed in the traditional manner. They are more expensive than standard canned tomatoes (usually around $4/26-oz.), but they are worth it. I'm not a food snob per se, but in the case of canned tomatoes, there really is one kind. Since it’s a non-perishable, I don't mind buying something I know won't go to waste before I have a chance to eat it. After all, we would spend $3 minimum on a jar of prepared tomato sauce, something that invariably sits half-eaten and rotting at the back of the fridge. Trust me: You won't be able to resist eating your own sauce made with San Marzano tomatoes with everything. Several brands (Unico, Pastene and others) offer San Marzano tomatoes in their canned tomato family. I buy mine packaged by Pastene in yellow-labeled tins at Loblaws.

News about storing fresh parsley!
In the photo above, you can see a bunch of beautiful, fresh parsley leaves filling the top of the frame. Would you believe that bunch has been sitting in a vase on my counter for a week? No joke! I have taken to arranging my parsley in a drinking glass or small vase when I bring it home from the grocery store, putting a half-inch or so of water at the bottom of the jar to keep the ends moist and replacing the water every few days. I'm so happy I made this discovery. It’s pretty and such a time-saver: One less thing to pull out of the fridge when I'm cooking! If you try this, I guarantee you'll be adding fresh chopped parsley to every dish you make.

Nemesis, thy name is Headcheese

2009-02-23T06:22:00.000-08:00

My list is shrinking.

I have discovered that my aversion to eating great-tasting foods because I think they are bad for me is a nuisance. B and I had a lovely Sunday morning coffee and croissant (pain au chocolat, no less!) and, miraculously or not, I have lived another day. Thus, I have amended my list to only include the foods that I cannot bring myself to eat, that cause an instant gag-reflex in my mouth. This list is relatively small, as it probably is for most people. But we do all have our culinary kryptonite.

Texture is a deciding factor for whether or not we enjoy our food. A Google search of "Why we hate certain foods" will return pages of testimony from individuals on the items they cannot abide, including the reasons for their revulsion. I have a friend who can't stand yoghurt. "Too phegmy," is her criticism. I've put natto in that category for myself, as well as improperly cooked oatmeal. When the spoon leaves the bowl, there should be no viscose attachments clinging to the underside. Otherwise, it's gross.

Sometimes it's a question of temperature and state: solid or liquid. I once had a co-worker who couldn't eat cold butter. If the butter was applied to hot toast and melted, that was fine. If he could feel the cold slick of butter in his mouth, however, he'd have to spit it out. As a child I had the same rule about cheese: melted only, please. Cold cheese, especially when served in cubes on the ends of toothpicks, disgusted me. I would only eat cheese that was still bubbling and runny, fresh from the oven, and never allowed to cool.

Of course, there are the foods that just freak us out. Yesterday, I met a woman who has an irrational fear of dried fruit: "anything larger than a raisin." I suppose on a conceptual level, dried fruits are like the bog people of the food world. They have an unnatural almost mystical moistness that contradicts the nature of their preservation. Yet they are indeed mummified: brown, shriveled and old.

I have grouped my feared foods according to what I think bothers me about eating them.

Too slimy and/or gelatinous: brie, okra, natto, sea urchin, kefir, shark fin soup, beef liver (if cooked medium), real Chinese food (corn starch sauces), some prepared yoghurts, sea urchin

Too rubbery: seaweed, mushrooms, tripe, beef liver (if cooked well)

It freaks me out: processed cheese food, ranch dressing, sweetbreads, headcheese, tongue, durian, furry/moldy cheese

Taste: cream cheese, rum

Leftover lessons

2009-02-20T09:10:00.001-08:00

It's the morning after the night before. I'm laughing at myself.

After yesterday's epiphany via Jeffrey Steingarten that I have been letting my food phobias run (ruin?) my life, Byron and I went out for dinner. I discovered two things:

1) Some food just isn't worth eating
I remember my cousin Brenda, a lifelong healthy eater, once telling me that if she were to leave her regimen for a piece of cheesecake, it had better be a pretty darn good piece of cheesecake. I thought of her last night. Fresh from my commitment to become a perfect omnivore, I dutifully ate from the plate of breads placed on our table. The foccacia, normally soft, was dry, and the lone dinner roll was uninspired. As I chewed on pieces of stale foccacia I first soaked in olive oil (to no avail), I was reminded of Brenda's adage and subsequently reinterpreted Steingarten's message. The point of becoming the perfect omnivore is to free yourself of restrictions so you can choose from everything being offered with neither fear nor remorse. Instead, I had interpreted his direction as go forth and consume the foods you are afraid of eating whenever they are put infront of you. I am pleased with my amendment: Eat it if it's worth eating.

2) Eating food you find repulsive takes extraordinary feats of strength
Byron, as usual, ordered the cheese plate for dessert. One of his selections was taleggio, a supremely stinky cheese with the odor of, for lack of a more polite analogy, butt crack. He gladly consumed this cheese among the others (marscapone and an aged pecorino) and then enjoyed sneaking his unwashed fingers under my nose for the rest of the evening. Even now I feel a tad queasy. I understand what Steingarten meant when he said he had to sit down alone and eat a plate of chickpeas, one by one. I will need to buy my own wobbling slab of taleggio and eat it piece by smelly piece, recommitting myself to the cause after every bite. As such, I am going to amend my list of feared foods, removing the items I clearly enjoy when they're worth eating and leaving the ones I cannot approach without the automatic dry heave. I will tackle this list in a schedule to be determined.

For dessert, I happily ordered tiramisu: not the best I'd ever had, but certainly delicious. Even though I was already full, I ate a few bites, then brought the rest home for breakfast.

Oh the hardship.

How to become a perfect omnivore

2009-02-19T11:56:00.001-08:00

I came across this article by food writer Jeffrey Steingarten on overcoming food phobias. He argues that since human beings are omnivores--that we are basically designed to digest anything--our recent hyper diligence in controlling what we eat is nothing short of mass hysteria. According to Steingarten, only a very small percentage of us have true food allergies such as lactose intolerance or celiac desease. Instead, our fear of the consequences of eating forbidden foods rather than physiological necessity prevents us from consuming freely. Informing others of our food "intolerances" is our way of managing these fears to our detriment. We forgo the pleasure of sharing food with one another in favour of feeding what separates us--what makes me unlike you--all for the illusion of safety. With great humour and humility, he recounts how he overcame his own food phobias--including dill, chickpeas and coffee ice cream--ultimately training himself to be the perfect omnivore, free to enjoy all of the tastes life has to offer.

Of course his argument struck me. I have lived a virtually wheat-free diet for almost 10 years. One day out of the blue, I stopped eating wheat because a nutritionist told me I should. I have never been medically diagnosed with a food allergy or intolerance. I don't even know if such a thing is possible. I simply took her word as truth and believed with all of my energy that she was right.

Looking back, her words were music to my ears. The shock of her pronouncement lasted about a minute before I began scheeming how I would enact such a restriction. I have remarkable will power and enjoyed the challenge of removing one of our staple foods from my life. During the last decade, I have credited my growth and success in part to my careful and conscious nutrition. In the story of being me, life before eliminating wheat was fraught with illness and insecurity. By eradicating my enemy, I could finally flourish.

If I think about it, I can see why I have enjoyed this story. I am the heroine of my own epic saga: me vs. the wheat-obsessed world. I have overcome adversity, challenged the status quo, forgiven people their trespasses. Only occasionally do I consume the odd slice of bread. These moments are usually in a restaurant, a fresh-baked loaf sitting before me, waiting. I am by myself, separated from anyone who knows what I never do, and I devour the crusty baguette or the pillowy foccacia feverishly and with wild abandon. I know I am doing something forbidden: something I will regret.

Steingarten says that people can learn to eat anything if they try it eight times. Any child given spinach often enough will learn to like it. Regarding adults, I have only ever heard this said about olives: that if you can stand to eat eight olives in a row, you'll eat them for the rest of your life. To achieve his goal of becoming the perfect omnivore, Steingarten took his list of feared foods and overcame them one by one: eight sprigs of dill, eight chickpeas, eight scoops of coffee ice cream.

When I first read his article, the foods he claimed to have once feared seemed absurd, almost frivolous. How could he not like chickpeas? I imagined my own list of foods that I don't like or are afraid to try and chuckled at the obscurity: okra, natto, lapsang souchong tea, durian, etc. Not in a hundred years would these foods ever appear at a family gathering or at a friend's dinner party; I could easily live an unencumbered life without training myself to enjoy sea urchin or shark fin soup. But now, I'm filled with dread knowing that my real food phobias are of the ones people eat all the time, things like like birthday cake and ice cream, pasta, coffee, wine, milk, macaroni and cheese. These are the foods I have defined myself by in their exclusion from my life. To embrace what I fear, I would be changing who I know myself to be.

I am unsure how I will proceed. I am hesitant to commit myself to the challenge of conquering my food phobias. The excitement I feel at the prospect of being free to enjoy all of life, however, is a powerful incentive. Here is my list of feared foods:

wheat, yeast, milk, coffee, any stinky cheese, brie, cream cheese, buttermilk, ranch dressing, okra, natto, sea urchin, sweetbreads (i.e. pancreas, or is it adrenal gland? they're both on the list), brain, tripe, durian, lapsang souchong, blood pudding, oatmeal, processed cheese, mushrooms, kefir, Guinness, rum, dulse, seaweed, mocha, capers, iced coffee, ice cream, anchovies, raw fish, yak butter tea, real Chinese food, bitters and beef liver

(I'm sure there are other foods to add that I'm forgetting.)

Husband and I have just agreed to eat tonight's dinner at Grano, one of our favourite Italian restaurants. Although I love their food, given my restrictions, I usually have a total of five items on the menu to choose from. I see a grand opportunity to begin this new quest.

What are your feared foods? Leave a comment with your list and see if you take on the challenge of becoming a perfect omnivore. As scary as it may seem, I think in the long run it's going to be fun.

More greens please

2009-02-18T06:40:00.000-08:00

Even though it's snowing outside, I felt for the first time this week the beginnings of spring. I don't know what it is: whether the sun is higher in the sky, or the days are slightly longer, or because the snow has mostly melted there is less cool air evaporating from the streets. Regardless, spring is in the air. Soon, the ground will thaw and new shoots will push through the once-frozen earth. I can sense them getting excited.

Perhaps this feeling of spring prompted my craving for spice. I have added hot pepper flakes to every meal this week. I even bought a prepared sauce, which I rarely do, and have enjoyed adding it to everything. It's a sweet teriyaki sauce, deep red speckled with pepper flakes and sesame seeds, all organic. The bottle was awkward, so I decanted into a jam jar and promptly took the original vessel to the curb. I don't recall the brand name or the ingredients list.

Buying prepared sauces is such a tease: the promise of the miracle sauce, everything you could ever want to taste in one bottle, and the disappointment upon realizing that you will be adding another mediocre confection to the angry mob of bottles already crowding your refrigerator. But, I fell for the new bottle the other day, perhaps because it was tall and thin like me, or that it promised organic goodness.

I also bought some new dishes from Ikea and have felt a flush of inspiration for new cuisine. Sautéed asian greens and napa cabbage, rice vermicelli, spicy rich chicken broths, and pulled chicken. My new dishes are pure white porcelain and showcase any meal so brilliantly. I especially love the plates I bought with little bowl-holders. I now imagine meals according to how I will configure food into this arrangement, and consequently I'm cooking differently than I normally do. Who knew that buying a few new dishes could inspire so much innovation?

As for methods, I have mothballed my steamer basket and am sautéeing leafy vegetables in garlic and oil. I use the Italian method, slicing a clove of garlic thinly, letting the slivers brown in hot oil and adding a pinch of hot pepper flakes before adding the chopped greens. Turn the greens in the pan, adding a few drops of water as needed if the pan is too dry. Finish with salt and/or any sauces you have vying for your attention in the fridge.

I love the velocity of this kind of preparation, the loud woosh sound the moist greens make as they hit the hot oil. I feel like a pro.

I'll leave you with this list from the New York Times of the top 11 healthy foods “you aren’t eating.” Hmm. Is that a challenge? I think so.

Instant risotto

2009-02-12T06:42:00.000-08:00

February sucks. There's no way around feeling the blahs, especially when it's grey and raining like it was yesterday. I lose my inspiration for just about everything, especially cooking, so I'm glad when opportunity takes me by the hand and leads me in a new direction.

In this case, a combination of laziness and financial constraint has kept me at home and fending for myself by living off of the foods in my freezer. I arrive in the kitchen fainting from hunger and needing to fill myself with comforting food ASAP.

This risotto did the trick. Ordinarily, cooked from scratch, this dish would take about 25 minutes, which is too long by my hungry-meter. I mocked myself (as probably some of you did) when I said I freeze cooked rice in portions. Well, this recipe is the best reason I can think of to do so. I also have bacon frozen in two-strip quantities and frozen peas. Risotto in about 8 minutes. What could be better?

Now, to assuage the purists, this is not risotto. It's not arborio rice cooked in broth for just the right amount until the grains become little toothsome pearls in an iridescent sauce. It's mockzotto.

The key is with the egg. If you've ever made spaghetti carbonara (which you can watch my friend Linda make here) you'll remember that adding a beaten egg quickly to the pasta and bacon creates a velvety sauce, but cooked to long and it turns into scrambled egg. The same goes for this recipe. Make sure to remove your pan from the heat before you add the egg, mix it in quickly and serve. If not, you'll have fried rice with the eggy bits cooked solid.

Incidentally, I made mine with brown rice, verboten to true risotto, but it tasted really good.

INSTANT RISOTTO WITH BACON AND PEAS
Serves 1

1 tsp olive oil
2 strips bacon, cut into pieces
1 clove garlic, smashed
1/2 c cooked rice (brown or white)
1/4 c frozen peas
1 egg, beaten
1 Tbsp butter
2 Tbsp shredded hard salty cheese (Romano, Parmesan)
1 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley (optional)

In a skillet over medium heat, fry the bacon in the oil with the garlic. Be careful not to burn.

Defrost the peas and rice in the microwave for a couple of minutes if they are frozen solid. When the bacon is crisp, add the rice and peas to the pan. Cook until heated through, stirring frequently so the rice doesn't stick, about 5 minutes. Turn off the heat.

Add the egg, butter, cheese and parsley to the rice mixture and stir quickly to coat and heat through. Taste for seasoning, adding salt and pepper if desired. Serve immediately.

The Salty Truth

2009-01-02T07:49:00.000-08:00

The Globe and Mail gives us a report of this year's nutritional winners and losers. I was interested by the section on nutritional information in Canadian fast-food chains, particularly the statement that a Kelsey's fajita dinner contains 4,550 milligrams of sodium. Given my interest in salt, as well as a family connection to the Kelsey's franchise, I was intrigued by this number. I realized, specifically, that I had no idea it means. So, I did some digging.

According to Health Canada, the average adult requires 1,500 mg of sodium per day for basic functioning and recommends daily consumption of no greater than 2,300 mg. They also stress that Canadians on average consume twice the sodium they require for good health.

But, how much sodium is in salt? My first guess was to translate the Kelsey's figure 1:1, which sits at just shy of a teaspoon of salt. That seems excessive by my taste, but I'm a salt lightweight, so I figured the average taste buds would want more.

Then I learned the actual conversion. Every teaspoon (6 g) of table salt contains 2,400 mg of sodium. That means that the Kelsey's dish contains almost TWO teaspoons of salt. By comparison, I would use that amount of salt for a huge pot of soup, enough to feed 8-10 people. That's a lot of salt!

The Health Canada link above gives lots of tips on how to avoid excess salt intake, such as ordering salad dressings on the side in restaurants and consuming more fresh, unprocessed foods. Of course, if you cook your own food from these fresh ingredients, you'll only add salt to your taste, which in my very un-scientific opinion is the true measure of how much you really need.

Lambtastic

2008-12-07T09:07:00.000-08:00

Stew made from lamb shanks is another winter favourite of mine. It is rich and hearty: a real stick-to-your-ribs kind of meal. This stew, like any meat stew, requires several hours of simmering until the meat is tender and falls off the bone. I prefer making stew from the shank rather than pieces cut from the shoulder. The bones add lots of gelatin and flavour and create a thick gravy without having to add any additional flour.

You can buy lamb shanks in the freezer section at the supermarket or from your butcher. Ontario lamb is wonderful and usually available by special request from any reputable butcher. The Healthy Butcher gets its hands on the most divine Certified Organic lamb. It costs a fortune (about $15/lb) but is incredibly delicious. Ontario lamb tends to be less barnyard tasting that the frozen New Zealand lamb you find in the freezer section. If you don't like lamb because of that barnyard taste, then only buy the freshest Ontario lamb you can find.

This recipe is concocted from the stew made by Mama Rosa at 7 Numbers restaurant on Eglinton in Toronto. She told me her recipe ("I use garlic, onion, white wine and rosemary" she explained, gesticulating widely). I interpreted her explanation as the following, adding red lentils for additional sustenance. Very tasty.

LAMB STEW WITH RED LENTILS
Serves 2-4

1 Tbsp olive oil
2-4 lamb shanks
3 garlic cloves and 2 shallots, minced
2 cups water
2 cups white wine
1 tsp salt
1 tsp fresh rosemary, minced
1 tsp fresh thyme, minced
2 bay leaves
1 Tbsp tomato paste
1/4 cup dried red lentils
salt & pepper
Extra virgin olive oil

In a heavy large lidded pot, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Sear the lamb shanks on all sides until they are brown, about 10 minutes. Remove shanks from the pan and set aside. Reduce heat to medium and saute garlic and shallot, being careful not to brown or burn (add more oil if necessary). Return shanks and their juices to the pot, then add the wine, water, salt, herbs and tomato paste. Bring to boil, then simmer covered for 3-4 hours. If the liquid doesn't cover the meat entirely, turn shanks every hour or so.

Once the meat is tender, add the lentils and stir, then simmer another 30 minutes. Remove from heat. If desired, or if serving for more people than there are shanks, remove the bones. Taste liquid for seasoning and finish with extra virgin olive oil.

Serve alongside boiled green peas (this is how Mama Rosa serves hers), soft polenta, or steamed winter greens such as kale, collards or rapini.

Banana Walnut Muffins

2008-12-02T11:03:00.000-08:00

I have gotten so behind in my posts! I have several recipes I have been making lately that I will be sharing within the next few days.

Here is one of my favourites: a banana muffin recipe I love. It took a while to hone. Some recipes out there, especially sugar-free ones, use bananas in every muffin or cake. I wanted a recipe that did bananas justice. Nutmeg is key. Adding the walnuts may seem excessive for a recipe made with almond flour, but it's important. Walnuts have a distinctive taste perfect for bananas.

I also recommend using muffin cups to line your muffin tin. The almond flour is delicate and these muffins tend to split when extracted even from a greased silicone tin.

BANANA WALNUT MUFFINS
Makes 12 muffins

DRY INGREDIENTS:
330g almond flour (about 3 cups)
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 cup chopped walnuts

WET INGREDIENTS:
2 ripe bananas
2 eggs
1/4 cup yoghurt
1/4 cup honey

Preheat oven to 350ºF.

In a large bowl, combine dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, mash the bananas and add the other wet ingredients, mixing well (I use an immersion blender for this). Add wet mixture to the dry ingredients, combining everything with quick strokes.

In a regular-sized muffin tin lined with large muffin cups, distribute the batter evenly between the 12 cups. The batter is sticky. I use two tablespoons to do this.

Bake 25-35 minutes or until they are golden and the tops pop up when pressed lightly with your finger.

Whey more to eat

2008-11-17T05:53:00.000-08:00

Aren't these pickles beautiful? I packed them yesterday and am patiently waiting for them to ferment so I can have a taste. They are pickled with salt, water and whey extracted from the yoghurt I have been making, a pickling process called lacto-fermentation. Right now, the jar is sitting at room temperature in a kitchen cupboard, pickling away. I get to taste them tomorrow evening.

I got my recipes for pickling from a cookbook called Nourishing Traditions. It's a political cookbook, designed to “challenge politically correct nutrition and the diet dictocrats.” The author, Sally Fallon, argues in favour of a diet high in animal fats, gelatin-rich broths, raw meat and lacto-fermented foods such as pickles and yoghurts to support good health. She explains herself in just under 700 pages, providing not just recipes but loads of references and justification for her version of the ideal diet. Regardless of whether or not she's right, I'm grateful to have found a philosophy of eating that is based on how my ancestors ate. It tastes right.

I have been enjoying eating two other foods lately:

1. Yoghurt cheese
I have been making yoghurt for several months now with my yoghurt maker, a very simple process that yields fabulous fresh yoghurt with no added thickeners or gelatins. Yoghurt cheese (or Greek yoghurt, or labaneh) is simply strained plain yoghurt. I put 500mL of plain yoghurt into a sieve lined with paper towels and let it stand over a bowl on the counter for several hours. The liquid that drips out of the yoghurt is whey, which is high in lactic acid and bacterial cultures and can be used for pickling, so keep it if you're interested (you can also drink it: it's very nutritious). The resulting yoghurt cheese will be thick like cream cheese and can be spread on bread, muffins and pancakes, added to dips and dressings or enjoyed on its own with honey (this is how the Greeks eat it). Two cups of yoghurt strained yields one cup of yoghurt cheese.

2. Chick pea soup
I've been making this recipe weekly for over a month and we don't get tired of it. It's filling and hearty: just the soup for cold fall days. Use vegetable stock or bouillon cubes if you prefer to chicken stock. The resulting soup will lack the animal protein but will be just as tasty.

CHICK PEA AND TOMATO SOUP
Serves 4

1 Tbsp olive oil
1 large garlic clove, peeled and smashed
1 28-oz can chick peas, drained and rinsed
1/2 28-oz can whole tomatoes
1 L chicken stock
1/2 tsp each dried rosemary and thyme
1/4 c extra virgin olive oil
1/4 c chopped fresh parsley
salt and pepper to taste

In a large pot over medium heat, warm the oil and add the garlic. When the garlic starts to sizzle, add the chick peas, tomatoes, stock and herbs. Turn the heat to high and bring to a boil then simmer, lid on, for 20 minutes.

Remove from the heat and add the oil and parsley and season with salt and pepper.

The Chicken Diaries

2008-11-06T08:01:00.001-08:00

This is me and Kiyan, fellow chicken lover. I met Kiyan last night on the bus platform at St. Clair West station. He was sitting on the wooden bench with several grocery bags open beside him, eating feverishly. Inside one of the bags was a roast chicken, and he was pulling strips of meat off with his hands and slapping them between pieces of torn baguette before shoving them into his mouth. I could not resist meeting a person I recognized as my doppelganger, someone who shares a primal need for poultry. When I motioned to him that I wanted to sit, he moved some of his parcels aside to make room for me, all without interrupting his consumption. I said, pointing to the bird: “That is my absolute favourite thing to eat in the world,” and without hesitation, he asked me if I wanted some. He must have sensed my sincerity, recognized a fellow compatriot. How could I refuse?

As we ate, we told chicken stories. We shared memories of past chicken feasts. I told him of the divine combination of roast chicken and hummus, along with my Death Row Chicken meal, which he heartily agreed would be his last request as well. We identified our favourite parts of the chicken (he the drumsticks, which he had already eaten; me the oysters on the back, which he graciously shared). He proclaimed his love of Swiss Chalet gravy, only to be intrigued by my tales of St. Hubert, a rare find in this province, and their more subtle, savoury sauce.

When the bus arrived, we moved our meal inside, and continued talking and eating. The woman across from us offered napkins, which proved woefully inadequate in wiping off the grease that dripped off our hands. When my stop arrived, I left, reluctantly. I felt sad knowing that this encounter was rare in our neat, reserved, business-as-usual city. Kiyan, thanks not just for the chicken, but for reminding me that sometimes it's worth getting a bit messy to enjoy the things you love.

Fake baked beans

2008-10-24T08:57:00.000-07:00

I have already admitted my love affair with beans. When it comes to baked beans, however, I am particularly nostalgic.

I have two childhood memories of baked beans. My mother used to make the real deal, the true baked beans soaked overnight and then slow cooked in the oven all day. She would use the same white Corning casserole dish for the beans that would scorch on the rim as the liquid reduced in the oven. The smoky sweet smell of bacon and maple syrup would fill the house all afternoon, and I would wait in anticipation for dinnertime. Back then, I was impressed by foods that were the result of hours of preparation. To my young mind, the caché of baked beans was only surpassed by pierogies, made from scratch only by my grandmother on her indulgent yet infrequent visits.

My second memory of baked beans is of the canned variety, which I also adored. This instant version, accompanied by steamed weiners and buttered toast, was often served for lunch at my then best friend's house by her English nanny. These lunches, along with others such as Kraft Dinner, Alphaghetti and instant chicken noodle soup, were my interpretation of high class food. Somehow I was aware and impressed by the expense of purchasing prepared food at a higher price. Strange though how at age eight, fine dining to me was either the result of hours of preparation or none at all.

And so, my beans. Until recently, I have satisfied my baked bean cravings by cracking a can of Heinz: Cravings are rarely met by cooking food that requires 24 hours of preparation. I have now created a recipe for fake baked beans, cooked on the stove in 20 minutes rather than in the oven for 8 hours. They taste better than canned, though probably not as good as the real thing. Slow cooked food, no matter how hard I try, can never be replaced.

FAKE BAKED BEANS
Serves 3-4

1 Tbsp oil
1 small onion, diced
1 19-oz can navy beans, drained and rinsed
1 cup water
1 Tbsp blackstrap molasses
1 Tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp Dijon mustard
Salt and pepper to taste
1 Tbsp pure maple syrup (optional)

In a medium-sized pot over medium heat, cook the onion in the oil until soft and translucent. Add the beans, water, molasses, tomato paste and mustard. Bring to a boil and stir until all ingredients are incorporated. Reduce heat and simmer 15-20 minutes with the lid off until the liquid has reduced by half. Season with salt and pepper. If using, stir in maple syrup.

NOTE: If you want to add bacon, dice two strips and fry in the oil before adding the onion. Continue with the rest of the recipe as described above.

Photo: Fake baked beans.

Fast food for one right now

2008-10-21T07:10:00.000-07:00

As much as I love to cook, most of the time I don't have the energy to create new culinary masterpieces: I just want to fill my belly. As I invariably get swept away in whatever I'm up to in my life, my meal planning skills lie dormant somewhere, forgotten, unused. I inevitably find myself in the kitchen, shaking with hunger, realizing I've already eaten all the leftover Indian takeout and having to make something or starve. I haven't done the grocery shopping yet, so all that's left in the fridge are a few pieces of whatever vegetable I've committed myself to that week and my essentials.

Ah, the essentials. Every cookbook that considers itself a tome devotes a chapter to staple items no kitchen should ever be without. I recently purchased Alice Water's The Art of Simple Food to judge her take on the subject. Her list is quite extensive, divided into two categories (pantry staples and perishable staples). Clearly her list is to serve cooking in general rather than simply fast food. And, apparently she doesn't own a freezer, or doesn't condone using one, because freezer staples are absent from her list. Still, her direction is simple: “If your pantry and refrigerator are stocked with these ingredients, you can be secure in the knowledge that no matter what time it is, and no matter who shows up hungry on your doorstep, there will always be something to eat.” Here, here.

When it comes to fast food there are mitigating factors. One cannot wait for rice to cook, let alone overnight to soak beans, or several hours to defrost a whole pack of chicken breasts when you only want one. Sometimes, I can't bear waiting the 45 minutes it takes for the Indian food to arrive.

And so, here are my essential items, listed in no particular order. With these things, I have the keys to the kingdom, as the saying goes.

Tuna packed in olive oil, single serving size. This, to my mind, is the miracle food. Pop open the can (no can opener required), squeeze with lemon juice, and eat with a fork. It's the perfect protein to add to bean salads, toss with cooked pasta, mixed with egg and leftover cooked potato and fried into fish cakes. I find it in most supermarkets, usually up high or down low on the shelves. Look for Rio Mare in the salmon pink tins or Callipo in bright red. They're both made in Italy.
Canned beans. Soup or salad, done in ten minutes. Hearty and filling. Beans are peasant food for a reason. They are cheap and sustaining. As for the purists out there that think that beans cooked from soaked dried are better than canned, I have this to say: They taste different, not necessarily better, and when you're hungry, who cares? Search for the canned varieties and brands that you like for their texture, taste and price, and buy them in bulk.
Frozen single servings of meat. If you really want to conquer fast food, buy selection of resealable bags in various sizes and freeze everything in single servings. When you bring home meat from the market, take a few minutes to divide some or all into single portions. Even if you're cooking for more than just yourself, you'll appreciate the time it takes to defrost several individually-bagged chicken breasts by throwing them in a sink full of warm water for 15 minutes, versus the alternative: waging war with the defrost setting on your microwave, then prying apart half-frozen, half-cooked meat from the butcher tray. Buy a variety so you always have selection: chicken breasts, boneless chicken thighs, sausages, fish filets, chicken livers, even bacon. I began to use bacon so much more when I froze it in two strip packages. It adds instant flavour to any fast-food dish.
Frozen peas. This can really mean frozen vegetables, but I like peas the best. It is a myth that frozen vegetables are less nutritious than fresh, as vegetables from the freezer are usually processed right after harvest. Peas are sweet and cheerful, make instant soup with water and bouillon and add colour to any dish.
Frozen cooked brown rice. This may sound crazy, like a granny who freezes birthday cake bought on sale three months before the party, but it is such a time saver. Brown rice takes 40 minutes to cook, but its flavour and nutritional value far surpass white rice that it is worth the trouble. I have recently discovered that I can cook vast quantities of brown rice at one time and freeze it in small packages without any affect to taste or texture. I have also included my method for cooking brown rice, which is never clumpy or mushy, below.
Lemons. I feel incomplete and unprepared if I don't have lemons in the house. Hot water and lemon is my tonic of choice. Add the zest and juice to a chicken breast fried in butter you have a quick, flavourful favourite. Lemon is indispensable when cooking with beans or fish.
Flat-leaf Italian parsley. My husband and I have an ongoing disagreement that has become a joke. He argues that parsley has no flavour, whereas I think it's hugely fragrant and is my indispensible herb. The joke now goes like this. Me: Do you like your food? He: I don't know if I can taste this (insert main ingredient). It's so overwhelmed by the parsley. Ignore him. Parsley not only adds flavour, it adds colour, which is important for food to feel complete.
Eggs. I hope everybody knows this. Omelet or scrambled eggs is the fastest meal in the west. Take 5 minutes to heat the pan over medium-high heat, then add a nob of butter then the two beaten eggs and swish it around. In about 15 seconds, your eggs are ready. Season and serve.
Dried red lentils. This makes my husband's favourite soup, prepared in under 20 minutes. Bring 2 cups water to a boil in a saucepan, add 1/2 cup dried lentils and a chicken bouillon cube and simmer 15 minutes until the lentils have fallen apart. Finish with lemon juice and garlic- and/or chili-scented oil and serve.
Garlic- and/or chili-scented oils. Really, you don't need to worry about garlic, peeling, chopping, storing, if you finish or start your dish with garlic-scented oil. And if you feel like adding zing to your meal, sprinkle over some chili oil. Both are easy to make (see my instructions at bottom of this post) and keep on hand.
Chicken bouillon cubes. Find your favourite brand and keep them on hand. I like the one by McCormick in the dark green and white box. It's all-vegetable, MSG- and gluten-free, and it's tasty.
Butter. Salted for eating with baking and unsalted for cooking.
Oil and vinegar. Extra virgin olive oil for finishing and dressings, light olive oil for scented oils and sweet dressings, coconut oil for frying, white wine vinegar for full-bodied dressings and rice vinegar for sweet ones.
Tomato paste in a tube. This is another amazing Italian invention. Who wants even a small can of tomato paste when you only ever really use a tablespoon at a time? You can keep the tube in the fridge almost indefinitely and impart any dish with the sweetness of tomato without slopping in the real thing, canned or fresh. Again, you have to search in the tomato section, but this item is available in most supermarkets.
Dijon mustard. Emulsifies any dressing, making it creamy, smooth and full of flavour. Instant salad dressing: 1/4 cup oil, 1 Tbsp vinegar and a squirt of Dijon, salt and pepper. Combine ingredients in a glass jar, put on the lid, and shake.
Salt and pepper

Everyone has their own list. What's yours?

MAKING FROZEN BROWN RICE
I soak my rice for several hours before cooking because apparently it produces rice that is more nutritious and easily digested (though it's been a while since I've verified this claim). Nutrition aside, it also reduces the cooking time by half.

3 cups long grain brown rice
water

Fill a large pot with cold water and add rice. Soak the rice at least 1 hour or overnight in the fridge. Once soaked, drain and refill the pot with fresh water. Bring to a boil and then simmer for 20 minutes or until the grains are tender. Drain and rinse. Allow to cool before putting in bags and freezing.

Thanksgiving redux

2008-10-15T03:51:00.000-07:00

My favourite holiday. We have one holiday on our calendar that is entirely devoted to worshiping food. And thank goodness, not just for nature's generous bounty but also for our wherewithal to recognize the miracle of a successful growing season.

Our meal was divine. We served turkey and the works to our immediate family plus one cousin, 11 of us in all. We ate and drank, remembered those who are no longer with us, and reminded ourselves why families matter.

The meal preparation, extending over three days, went far from smoothly, but resulted in incredible fare. At the advice of my new butchers, I followed their directions for preparing a turkey, which included brining it overnight and rubbing an herb butter between the skin and the breast meat before roasting. The addition of these extra steps increased my workload, but the effort rewarded a remarkable bird. And despite my mashed potato stuffing expanding in the oven, rupturing the neck cavity and spilling all over the bottom element, then having the turkey sit in a room temperature oven for over an hour until I realized I had turned the oven off when I cleaned up the potatoes, thus delaying our meal by about 90 minutes, the roasting process was remarkably stress-free. It was the best turkey I have ever tasted.

My mashed potato stuffing was also incredibly tasty, though next time I won't pack the cavity so tightly. I made Nigella Lawson's potato-stuffed goose last Christmas and thought that I would create a potato-stuffed turkey as well, hoping no one would miss traditional stuffing too much. The addition of the lemon zest and herbs create potatoes that are so good they could easily be enjoyed without the benefit of being roasted inside a bird.

Here was our menu:

Healthy Butcher organic free-range roast turkey
golden mashed potato stuffing
gravy
baked yam casserole with marshmallow topping
brussel sprouts with nutmeg and lemon
spinach and apple salad with an orange ginger dressing
orange cranberry relish

A fine meal. Truth be told, I think I've finally outgrown the marshmallow yams. They are cloyingly sweet, and I found myself following my dad's example of scraping off the white fluff and leaving it on the side of my plate. However, tradition is what it is, and my sister insists the marshmallow yams are an integral part of her holiday meal.

The directions for the turkey are available on the Healthy Butcher website, a fine purveyor of organic meats raised in southern Ontario.

GOLDEN MASHED POTATO STUFFING
Serves 10

4 lbs. yellow potatoes (Yukon Gold or similar variety)
1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 onion, diced
1 large rib celery, diced
2 shallots, diced
1 Tbsp each fresh parsley and sage, finely chopped
1 tsp fresh thyme, finely chopped
zest of two lemons
1 tsp ground black pepper
4 Tbsp (1/2 stick) unsalted butter

Peel and quarter potatoes and put in a large pot of salted water. Bring to a boil and simmer 15-20 minutes or until potatoes are easily pierced with a fork or knife. Drain.

While potatoes are cooking, in a skillet heat the butter and oil. Add the onion, celery and shallot and cook until translucent, about 10 minutes. Turn off the heat. Add the herbs, lemon zest and pepper.

Add the onion mixture and butter to the drained potatoes and mash with a potato masher. Stuff inside the turkey, or serve. NOTE: This stuffing will expand significantly inside the turkey, so do not pack it into the cavity. Leave room for expansion, then if there is remainder, heat in the oven in a separate casserole before serving.

Cheese biscuits on a rainy day

2008-10-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve been making these cheese biscuits whenever I want a pick-me-up in the afternoon. I also served them for brunch a couple weekends ago with scrambled eggs and steamed greens and they were a big hit.

I have been tweaking this recipe over the last month or so since buying the Grain-free Gourmet cookbooks. Their recipe for plain biscuits is wonderful. Their cheese biscuit recipe, included in Everyday Grain-free Gourmet, is also good, but I wanted a cheese biscuit that was less sweet and with fewer ingredients. I use pecorino cheese in mine: a mild, slightly nutty sheep-milk cheese that complements the sourness of the yoghurt. Cheddar, though higher in fat, would also be good. The resulting biscuits are moist and soft and taste great on their own, with butter or jam. You can also use them like English muffins for eggs benedict (I haven't tried, but can you imagine? Yum!).

GRAIN-FREE BISCUITS WITH PECORINO AND GREEN ONION
Makes 8 biscuits

220g almond flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
80g shredded pecorino
2 green onions, finely chopped
2 eggs
1/2 c plain yoghurt

Preheat the oven to 160C/325F.

In a bowl, mix the almond flour, baking soda and salt. Mix in the cheese and onions. In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and yoghurt until mixed. Add the egg mixture to the dry ingredients, stirring with brisk strokes to incorporate. The batter will be thick.

Using a soup spoon, drop biscuit batter onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet forming eight equally sized biscuits. They will spread a bit in the oven, so leave about 1 inch of space between.

Bake 22-25 minutes until golden.

Soup by the bathtubful

2008-10-02T10:07:00.000-07:00

I could have devoted my entire blog to soup. I love soup: making it and eating it. I am not alone.

I recently purchased a cookbook written by Pierre and Janet Berton, The Centennial Food Guide, published in 1966. According to his wife, Pierre – Canada’s renowned historian and author of The Last Spike – was smitten with soup, requiring 3 or 4 bowlfuls a day. The first page of text in the cookbook, sandwiched in between the table of contents and the introduction, is a recipe for “Janet’s Soup”, under which is inscribed: “The male editor of this book unconditionally guarantees this soup. In twenty years of marriage he has drunk bathtubfuls of it. Moreover he has never seen anyone content with but a single bowl. It demands seconds, thirds and even fourths, which is why we urge that it be made is vast quantities.”

Certainly the Berton household required “vast quantities” of anything given the nine-member family vying for sustenance. Janet’s Soup is somewhat of a time capsule, requiring one large beef heart to prepare the stock and, among other oddities, Angostura bitters and monosodium glutamate for flavouring. While I doubt I’ll ever make Janet’s Soup, Pierre’s resounding endorsement notwithstanding, I do heartily appreciate the intensity of sentiment surrounding this family favourite.

Which brings me to my love of soup. Were it not for summer heat and humidity, conditions which apparently did not affect the Bertons as they do me, I too would eat soup every day. (I can’t abide chilled soups, no matter how hard I try.) The arrival of fall is the return of soup: comforting, savoury, and inspiring soup.

Making and eating soup is a commitment to an idea of how to sustain oneself: completely, and in one bowlful. The restorative properties of soup were its original marketing strategy. The French origin of “restaurant” apparently comes from “restaurer”, the term applied to the Parisian street vendors who exclusively sold soup, an inexpensive concentrated broth they claimed was the antidote to physical exhaustion. The notion of frugality is often applied to soup, but I like to think that economy is a matter of stripping life of anything extraneous, leaving behind what is essential and indisputable. Perhaps this is why I love soup: it is an exercise in selection.

I mentioned in my last post that I reserve my homemade chicken broth for vegetable soups. These are soups that require usually two or three ingredients in addition to the stock. They are quick, simple and hearty. This is one I have been making and enjoying now that fall is truly upon us. The Romano beans are a lovely pinkish brown and have a rich flavour and the kale is a robust complement. To “kick it up a notch,” fry some diced bacon or pancetta with the garlic to add smoky flavour to an already divine soup.

ROMANO BEAN AND KALE SOUP
Serves 3-4

1 Tbsp olive oil
1 garlic clove, smashed
1 14-oz can Romano beans, rinsed and drained (or white kidney, or Borlotti)
750 mL chicken stock
1 Tbsp chopped herbs (rosemary, thyme, parsley, or 1 tsp dried)
1 cup kale, finely chopped
salt & pepper

In a medium soup pot, heat the oil over medium heat and add the garlic, cooking until the garlic is fragrant. Add the beans, stirring to coat with the oil. Heat for one minute. Add the stock and herbs, bring to a boil, then simmer with the lid on for 15-20 minutes.

Using an immersion blender of the back of a spoon, pulverize some of the beans to thicken the soup base. Do not purée: there should be some whole beans left in the soup.

Add the kale and simmer 5 minutes longer until the kale is tender. If soup is too thick, add more stock. Season with salt and pepper. Serve and finish with extra virgin olive oil (optional).

Two soups and a stock

2008-09-29T08:37:00.000-07:00

The convergence of several factors inspired Saturday’s food preparation. It was a rainy day, and nothing suits a grey day better than a bowl of soup. Also, I had over half a neglected roast chicken in the fridge that I had to use or lose. I ended up making two chicken soups from what I had on hand and used the bones to make another batch of chicken stock.

When making soups with leftover roast chicken, I tend to use water rather than chicken stock. The cooked chicken has enough juices from the roasting process to flavour and thicken the soup as a stock would, so I save my stock for vegetable soups. As with any meat, chicken needs to be simmered in liquid for at least 25 minutes before it will soften and fall apart. If it is not cooked long enough, it will be tough and chewy.

These are both hearty, meal-in-a-bowl soups.

CHICKEN SOUP WITH WHITE BEANS, TOMATO AND SWISS CHARD
Serves 3-4

1 Tbsp light olive oil
1 large clove garlic, peeled and smashed
1 14-oz can white kidney beans, drained and rinsed
1 large tomato, chopped
1 1/2 cups cooked chicken, chopped
1 L water
1 Tbsp chopped fresh herbs or 1 tsp dried (e.g. rosemary, thyme, parsley)
4-5 leaves swiss chard, chopped
salt & pepper
extra virgin olive oil

In a medium-sized pot, heat the oil and garlic over medium heat. When you can smell the garlic cooking, add the beans and stir for one minute. Add the tomato, chicken, water and herbs. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and put the lid on the pot, allowing the soup to simmer for 25-30 minutes, or until the chicken is tender.

Once the chicken is tender, add the chard. If the soup looks too thick, add some hot water. Replace the lid and allow to cook another two minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Remove from heat and finish with several tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil.

CHICKEN SOUP WITH RICE

This recipe is my version of the soup Carole King sings of in her song of the same name. I have her voice in my head whenever I make this: “Cooking once, cooking twice, / Cooking chicken soup with rice.” Her song doesn’t contain a recipe per se, and I add lemon and parsley for simple, essential flavour.

1 Tbsp light olive oil
1 celery stalk, diced
1 large carrot, diced
1/3 c white rice
1 1/2 cups cooked chicken, chopped
1 L water
1 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley
juice of 1/2 lemon
salt & pepper

In a medium-sized pot, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the celery and carrots, and cook for five minutes. Do not brown. When the vegetables are beginning to soften, add the rice, stirring to coat with oil. Cook another minute until you can smell the rice beginning to toast.

Add the water and chicken and increase the heat to bring mixture to a boil. Once boiling, reduce the heat and simmer 20-25 minutes. Check the soup periodically to ensure that the expanded rice has not used all of the liquid, adding more hot water if necessary.

Once the chicken is tender and the rice is cooked, add the parsley, lemon juice and season to taste.

CHICKEN STOCK
Makes about 1.5 L

In a 3 L soup pot, place the bones of one roast chicken, removing any items left inside the cavity (such as whole lemon or bread stuffing). Add half a peeled onion, one peeled carrot and one celery stalk. Fill to the 2.5 L mark with water. Bring stock to a boil slowly over medium heat, then reduce the heat to low. Allow the stock to simmer all day or overnight. Check the liquid periodically to ensure the heat is not too high and evaporating the water too quickly. There will be some evaporation, but not much. After 8 hours or so, strain the liquid into a large bowl, cover with plastic wrap and place in the fridge. Remove any fat that collects at the surface. Divide into containers or freezer bags and freeze up to one year.

NOTE: Prolong the shelf life of stock left in the fridge by bringing to a boil for several minutes. This will kill off any bacteria and allow the stock to be returned to the fridge to remain available for use for another 5-6 days.

Death Row Chicken

2008-09-21T18:28:00.000-07:00

This is my death row meal: roast chicken with roast potatoes and boiled green peas. That I have roasted a chicken once a week for several years without tiring of it says a lot about the pleasure of this simple, essential feast. During the summer months, when the weather is too hot to warrant turning on the oven, part of me longs for the return of cooler temperatures and thus my weekly ritual.

Knowing how to roast a chicken is a basic life skill as far as I'm concerned (that is, if your life includes eating meat). There are few things more satisfying than pulling a fragrant roast chicken from the oven, hearing the crackle and pop of the juices bubbling in the roasting dish and tucking into your favourite parts of the bird before it has even reached the table.

Roast chicken is good economy as well. Leftover meat can be used in sandwiches and salads, or simply picked off the carcass in the fridge as a late-night snack, dressed with mayo. Save the roasting juices to make insanely good roast potatoes on a day when you need a culinary hug. And of course, once you have picked the bones clean, throw them in a pot of water with an onion and some celery to make chicken stock, the basis of the easiest and most comforting and delicious soups.

Everyone has their own chicken roasting recipe. Certainly, cookbooks are no help to finding the essential roasting method. Roasting temperatures will range from 325F to 450F depending on who you consult, and the variations of preparations are endless.

There is also some debate over cooking position (of the bird, not the cook). As a flightless bird, the breast muscle is unused by the chicken and as a result, the meat is lean and flavourless. The back and legs, which get all the action, are sinewy, riddled with blood vessels, and full of fat and thus flavour. Some cooks compensate for the breast meat's lack of flavour by roasting the chicken breast-side down, the theory being that the back fat will permeate the breast on its way down to the bottom of the roasting pan. Some cooks position the bird breast-side down for the first half of roasting, then flip it over for the remainder of the cooking time to brown the breast. (This, incidentally, is how I roast my turkey, which is never dry and always tasty.)

I've roasted chickens in several different configurations of breast up or down, and in every position, the meat tastes pretty much the same to me. I stick to breast up now. No result warrants neither the sacrifice of crisp, golden breast skin, requiring prolonged exposure to the oven heat to achieve perfection, nor burning my hands trying to wrestle with a hot, slippery, half-roasted bird. This effort I perform only once a year, usually with the assistance of my father, as we coordinate our movements to turn a 16-pound stuffed turkey in its roasting tray. No easy feat.

Through all of the experimentation, I have found a system that is simple and easy: no flipping or fuss. I like cooking that requires minimal effort to achieve grand results. My method is largely based on Nigella Lawson's direction save a few details, specifically the oven temperatures. Perhaps my oven is hotter than hers, but if I roast my chicken at 450F-425F, the fat splatters so much that my kitchen is filled with smoke within half an hour. Here is how I roast a chicken:

DEATH ROW CHICKEN
Serves 3-4

1 4lb (2kg) roasting chicken
1 lemon
salt and pepper
1 tsp butter

Remove the chicken from the fridge 1 hour before cooking so that it reaches room temperature. Preheat the oven to 400F/200C.

Most chickens come from the butcher or supermarket already trussed. If the chicken has been in your fridge for a couple of days, then rinse it with cold water and dry it inside and out with a paper towel. Place it breast-side up in a roasting tray deep enough to collect the roasting juices. I use a 9 x 12 in. oven-safe glass dish.

Reach into the chicken cavity (located between the legs) and pull off any large fat pieces. (The fat looks like butter and is located just inside the cavity.) Generously sprinkle the cavity with good salt and pepper (about 1 tsp large-flake salt). Cut the lemon in half and stick half directly into the cavity. You may need cut the half-lemon into smaller pieces to fit it into the cavity without having to untie the bird. If you need to truss, do this next.

Spread the butter over the breast and legs and sprinkle generously with salt and pepper (again, about 1 tsp large-flake salt). Put the chicken in the oven and set the timer for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, reduce the oven temperature to 375F/180C. Roast for one more hour. Test for doneness by piercing the thigh with a knife. If the juices run red, return the chicken to the oven for another 10-15 minutes. When the juices run clear, the chicken is done.

Remove it from the oven. Squeeze the remaining half lemon over the chicken and sprinkle with a pinch more salt. Let the chicken sit under a kitchen towel for at least 15 minutes before carving.

NOTE: Cooking time is roughly 15 minutes per pound, plus 15 minutes for a room-temperature bird. However, I always forget to check the weight of my chicken before throwing the butcher label into the trash, so I don't slavishly follow this guideline. I just roast for anywhere between 1.25-1.5 hours, depending when I remember to take it out. After an hour, it's generally done. Another way to tell if the chicken is done without releasing its juices with a knife is by the amount and quality of the juices at the bottom of the pan. If there is very little juice or if it is either clear or bloody, then the chicken is not done. The juices should be golden brown, plentiful and bubbling.

ROAST POTATOES
Serves 2

2 baking potatoes (such as russett or yukon gold)
salt
leftover chicken drippings, duck fat, or oil

Preheat the oven to 400F/200C. Put the drippings/fat/oil (about 1/4c) into a baking dish and put in the oven to heat.

Bring to a boil a medium-sized pot of salted water. Peel the potatoes and cut them into chunks, size depending on your taste. Boil the potatoes for 10-15 minutes or until they are tender when pierced with a fork. Drain.

Remove the baking dish from the oven and add the potatoes, ensuring to cover the potatoes on all sides with the hot fat. Return to the oven for 30 minutes or until the potatoes are crisp and browned.

If roasting the potatoes alongside a chicken, add the boiled, drained potatoes to the roasting pan 30-45 minutes before the chicken is to come out of the oven.

Photo: Death Row Chicken, before and after roasting.

Have your pie filling and eat it too

2008-09-17T13:51:00.000-07:00

I love pumpkin pie. Or rather, I love pumpkin pie filling. Since I don’t eat wheat flour, I eat my pumpkin pie with a twinge of guilt, scooping out the filling with my fork and leaving the empty pie shell behind.

I look forward to eating pumpkin pie every Thanksgiving, which will happen here in a few weeks. But, I’m getting impatient. The pumpkins are now in the store (another of my favourite orange vegetables). They beckon me.

Several weeks back, I had an idea to create a pumpkin cake with almond flour. I imagined the cake would taste like pumpkin pie filling: moist, spiced and mildly sweet.

I was inspired by a cake I make every Christmas: Nigella Lawson’s clementine cake (How to Eat), a dense flourless cake made with almond meal and egg, as well as whole clementine oranges. I thought pumpkin could easily replace the oranges, and brown sugar could replace the white sugar, add some spices, and voilà! Pie filling that can stand on its own.

The result, which I baked today, was a grand success. It tastes like pie filling with its eggy, almost custardy richness. It is moist yet firm, sweet and spiced. If you love pumpkin pie, you must try this cake. And, because it’s made with almond flour and eggs, it’s high in protein and fibre. I am so proud of this cake.

PUMPKIN CAKE

6 eggs
zest and juice of 1/2 orange
225g dark brown sugar
250g almond flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp each ground nutmeg, allspice and ginger
375g cooked pureed pumpkin

Preheat the oven to 375F/190C. Prepare a springform cake pan (8-10 in. dia.) by greasing the inside with butter and lining with parchment paper.

Beat the eggs with a wire whisk or electric beaters. Stir in the zest, juice, sugar, flour, baking powder, and spices. Add the pumpkin and mix well. The batter will be quite liquid.

Pour the batter into the prepared cake pan and place in the middle rack of the oven. Bake for 50-60 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the centre of the cake comes out clean. If after 40 minutes or so the top begins to burn, lay a piece of aluminum foil over the pan and continue to bake until done.

When baked though, remove the cake from the oven. Leave the cake in the pan on a rack to cool. When cool, remove from the springform tin.

Serve either plain or with whipped cream or crème fraiche.

NOTES:

On the pumpkin: Cooked pureed pumpkin is available in cans at the supermarket, however I cooked mine from scratch. If you are cooking your own pumpkin, DO NOT buy a Jack-o-lantern pumpkin. Make sure you get your pumpkin from the produce department. It will be labelled as a “pie” or “cooking” pumpkin. To cook, cut pumpkin in half, remove the seeds and place each half cut-side down in a large casserole dish. Add water to the dish (about 1/2 in.) and place in a 400F/200C oven for 45 min or until the flesh is easily pierced with a fork. Scoop out the cooked flesh and puree in a food processor or with an immersion blender.

On the measurements: I got a kitchen scale a year or so ago and will never go back to measuring with cups when baking. If you are a fan of British cookbooks, you will already know that their recipes only give measurements for dry ingredients by weight, not volume. It's more accurate, and quite frankly way easier than leveling off measuring cups. You can get a good kitchen scale for under $30. Here's one at Canadian Tire.

Photo: Pumpkin cake.

It's yam time

2008-09-16T19:40:00.000-07:00

The arrival of fall signals the return of locally-grown orange vegetables to the produce department and thus, to my table. Of all the orange vegetables, my favourite by far is the yam.

I have read many arguments on the distinction between sweet potatos and yams. Scientifically, there are two species: sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) and yams from the genus dioscorea. Why don't supermarkets list their vegetables by their Latin names to avoid the confusion? (Just kidding.) In North America, we tend to use the terms yam and sweet potato interchangeably, which doesn't help matters. The tuber I am writing about here has dark red skin and bright orange flesh.

I call them yams because I like the word.

Yams are best baked in the oven, at 400F (200C) for 45-60 min until they pierce easily with a fork. If you're pressed for time, cut each yam in half lengthwise and place them cut side down in a greased baking dish. This reduces the cooking time by half. Serve them hot with lots of butter and the best salt.

Yams are also great peeled and sliced, then baked or fried in oil. They turn soft in the middle and dark on the edges, the yam sugars caramelizing in the heat. Bake them in the oven at 425F (210C) and turn them once in the oil to ensure they brown evenly. On the stove top, add enough oil to the frying pan to fill the bottom by a couple of millimeters and heat the oil before adding the yams. They should sizzle when added to the oil. Again, turn them periodically to cook evenly.

I made this soup the other day, a double hit of orange. Given that most of the work is done in the oven, it's a cinch to make and tastes fragrant and sweet.

DOUBLE ORANGE YAM SOUP

4-5 medium-sized yams
1 L chicken or vegetable stock
zest and juice of 1 orange
salt and pepper

Bake the yams in the oven. When they are soft, scoop out the flesh into a soup pot and add the stock, zest and juice. Use an immersion blender to puree the soup in the soup pot, or if using a blender, puree in batches and return to the soup pot. Once pureed, heat the soup to the desired temperature. Add salt and pepper to taste. If the soup is too thick, add more stock or water.

Serves 3-4

Photo: Double Orange Yam Soup.

Ode to a smørrebrød maiden

2008-09-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

When it comes to open-faced sandwiches, the Scandinavians are hard to beat. According to Wikipedia, in the United States, a sandwich must have at minimum two slices of bread to be legally considered "sandwich." Too bad for them. In Denmark, smørrebrød (pronounced smur-er-BREWTH) is literally "butter-bread": a thin slice of dense, whole-grain rye bread covered with butter, then adorned with a selection of traditional toppings (roast beef, shrimp, mackerel in tomato sauce, pickled herring, liver, breaded fried sole filets, and others). The butter, applied thickly, prevents the bread from becoming soggy.

The smørrebrød maker is loyal to tradition, as certain toppings are always combined with specific condiments. The frickadeller (Danish meatball) smørrebrød comes with red cabbage. The roast beef is topped with pickled cucumber and crisp, deep fried onion pieces. Soft white bread is used for the shrimp salad, beautiful pink shrimp topped with a dollop of mayonnaise, roe, a lemon slice and a sprig of dill. Smørrebrød are eaten with a knife and fork, and washed down with shots of Aquavit, a strong dill-flavoured schnapps. These shots are sipped in unison: someone at the table lifts her glass and taps the edge of table with her fingers, waiting until everyone has their glass ready in the air before shouting "skol!"

The smørrebrød shops in Copenhagen proudly display their beautifully assembled butter breads in their windows in neat, abundant rows. The smørrebrød makers, typically women, are called smørrebrød jungfru, or "smørrebrød maiden." They are akin to the sushi chef, as the smørrebrød maker is trained in the craft of smørrebrød and makes nothing else.

According to Birgitte Toft, a smørrebrød specialist at the Manhattan restaurant Aquavit, smørrebrød must be piled high with toppings: ''One important rule is that the bread must not show. It must be completely covered with ingredients to suggest abundance. It has to look much bigger than it is.''

We ate our smørrebrød this afternoon at Sunset Villa, a Danish association village in Crieff, Ontario. My husband's father is Danish, born and raised on Bornholm before arriving in Canada as a teenager in the early 1960's. Both of his parents, recently deceased, now reside in the mausoleum at Sunset Villa, and we visit them periodically, always enjoying a smørrebrød luncheon in their honour.

This New York Times article includes lists of the different traditional smørrebrød combinations as well as recipe for Danish liver pate.

Photo: This smørrebrød is made with smoked mackerel in tomato sauce, lettuce, chives, cucumber and sour cream.

Baking feeds the soul

2008-09-11T07:38:00.000-07:00

One of my inspirations for starting this blog came by way of an old friend and her fabulous cookbook.

About eight years ago, tired of chronic daily allergies and colds every 6-8 weeks, I visited a nutritionist who told me to stop eating wheat (as well as any other glutinous grain: rye, spelt, kamut, titricale, semolina, oat, and barley). I complied, desperate to rid myself of waking up every morning with sneezes and a runny nose. Within several months, my allergies disappeared completely, but I was left with a huge, gaping chasm of loss: no baking.

I dealt with the absence of baked goods in my life as best I could. I bought gluten-free cookbooks to replace traditional baking, but found rice flour unpalatable and the reliance on gluten-replacement substances like guar gum unsettling. I would sometimes fall off the wagon, indulging in croissants and cookies, only to regret my actions when my body revolted. I would finger through my favourite cookbooks with sadness, longing for the satisfaction the writers felt with the simple baking and eating of a coffee cake. Eventually, I resigned myself to accept life without cookies, scones, breads, muffins. I would be okay.

A few weeks ago, I did a Google-search of "grain-free" and found a familiar name. Jenny Lass, my classmate from senior kindergarten through grade 8, is now a diagnosed celiac and co-author of the Grain-free Gourmet cookbooks. I ran out and bought her books and, with trepidation, began testing the recipes. The baked goods rely on almond flour for their substance, which, to my surprise, is readily available and tastes great. The introductions to each book are simple and informative, imparting the science and philosophy of the specific carbohydrate diet as well as the personal journeys of the co-authors. I'm looking forward to reconnecting with Jenny tomorrow afternoon after more than 20 years.

Yesterday, I made Basic Biscuits from the second cookbook, Everyday Grain-free Gourmet. I realized through this process that baking is not a result. It's a complete experience, from feeling the craving for something warm and comforting to eat, through preparing the dough, preheating the oven, and watching the baking rise and turn golden brown. I remember now being eight years old and waiting with anticipation, watching my cakes and cookies rise through the plexiglas window of my Easy Bake Oven, swelling under the heat of a 60 watt bulb. The completion of the baking experience is extracting the goods from the oven and eating them, warm and fresh. They are tiny miracles: the product of intention and patience.

I ate my biscuits with butter, yoghurt cheese, jam and a cup of tea. They were warm and soft and tasted exactly as I remember. Thank you, Jenny.

NOTE: The best way to buy almond flour is in bulk. It is available for as low as $6 per pound through jkgourmet.com and can be frozen to maintain its freshness indefinitely. Almond flour is also available in small quantities at health food stores, though is much pricier. I have also found almond flour in the health food section of my local supermarket.

Death Row Beans

2008-09-09T16:10:00.000-07:00

There are certain meals in our home that we esteem beyond all others. We call these dishes our "death row" meals, the ones we would want to eat our last night on earth. Yes, it's a morbid classification. The system, however, has us continually attuned to some of life's essential experiences. This is one of my husband's selections. For me, this dish is a staple I make once or twice a week. I crave these beans. When I'm really hungry and desperate for sustenance, nothing else will do.

DEATH ROW BEANS
Serves 2-4

1 Tbsp light olive oil
1 clove garlic
1 14 oz. can cannellini beans (aka white kidney or tuscan beans), drained and rinsed
6-10 cherry tomatoes, halved
1/2 Tbsp each fresh rosemary and thyme, chopped fine (or 1/2 tsp each dried)
1 cup water
2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
handful flat-leaf Italian parsley, stems removed, roughly chopped
salt and pepper to taste

Heat the oil in a medium-sized skillet over medium heat. Peel the garlic clove and smash once under the base of the unopened can of beans. Add the garlic pieces to the oil. Once the garlic starts to sizzle, add the beans, tomatoes, herbs and water. Increase the heat to bring the beans to a boil. Once boiling, reduce the heat to low and let simmer, uncovered, for 10-15 minutes. The beans should continue to bubble.

Once the liquid has reduced and thickened, turn off the heat and add the extra virgin olive oil and parsley. Season with salt and pepper. Serve in large bowls with steamed greens, fresh crusty bread, or on their own.

NOTE: If the sauce doesn't thicken, mash some of the beans with the back of a spoon and stir the mash into the rest. This will do the trick. Also, if the beans lose too much water, don't be afraid to add more. They'll be fine.

VARIATION: If you have some bacon or pancetta in the fridge, cut a few slices into small bean-sized pieces and fry them with the oil and garlic until browned before adding the beans. The smoky flavour tastes unbelievably great with the beans.

This will be the first of many posts about beans. There is so much to say about the world's perfect food: debates to weigh in on, stories to share, information to impart. Stay tuned.

Photo: Death Row Beans with steamed kale.

It's pannekoeken time

2008-09-08T04:56:00.000-07:00

When I smell fall in the air, I think of Amsterdam. This morning, the outside thermostat read 13 degrees and the house was cool and fresh. I felt like we were back in Holland where we spent our week-long honeymoon in October, 2002.

We stayed in a houseboat on a street called Achtergracht, a word that when properly pronounced summons vast amounts of phlegm. We realized once we arrived to the city that we had chosen our ideal honeymoon destination. We recovered from our wedding by spending our days wandering through museums and outdoor markets, recharging ourselves in "coffee shops," and walking along the canals. Fall had already settled on the city, as the trees had lost most of their leaves and the autumn winds gathered intensity with each passing day. The day before we returned to Canada, we were treated to a massive storm that whipped rain and debris around the city and made walking next to impossible. Our little houseboat held fast, though we could feel the canal waters churning beneath.

One of our favourite meals in Amsterdam was at one of the many pannekoeken huis, eating the large crepe-like pancakes they served with fresh fruit. In the photo above, my husband's fork is a blur, proof of how fast we gobbled down these Dutch treats.

I found many recipes for pannekoeken online. This one seems quite basic, and I saw this gluten-free one as well. Since I no longer cook with grain flour, I made my own version using almond flour and maple syrup. I can't remember if they taste like the Dutch version since it's been so long. No matter: They were really tasty.

GRAIN-FREE PANNEKOEKEN
Serves 1

1/4 c almond flour
1/8 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp salt
2 eggs
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
1 Tbsp maple syrup

Combine the almond flour, baking soda and salt in a bowl. Using a wire whisk or fork, beat in the eggs, vanilla and syrup. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and place in in the fridge for 10-15 minutes to thicken.

Heat a large skillet or crepe pan over medium heat. Brush melted butter onto the heated surface (the butter should sizzle on contact when the pan is hot enough) and spoon out a third of the batter, swirling the pan around to distribute it evenly. Flip the pancake when the batter is no longer liquid and the edges start to brown and curl. Remove to a heated plate.

Serve with chopped fruit, syrup, ice cream, jam, ham and melted cheese, chocolate sauce, cinnamon and sugar, or anything else you can think of.

Makes 3 pannekoeken.

NOTE: If you like pancakes, a crepe pan is both inexpensive and indispensable. I bought mine several months ago and am amazed how pancakes never stick to the surface. Never wash your crepe pan -- only wipe it with a paper towel after use -- and never use it for anything except pancakes. It will be yours for life.

Photos: At top, my husband eating pannekoeken in a cafe in Amsterdam, October, 2002. Above, my well-seasoned deBuyer crepe pan.

Seasoning with salt

2008-09-05T19:20:00.001-07:00

Learning how to season your home cooking with salt is your secret weapon. Food over salted is, of course, too salty. But under-salted food is tasteless and boring.

The first meal I cooked for my husband -- the dish we call “carrot and vermicelli” -- is famous only for being the blandest meal I ever made. The soup, inspired by the rice noodle pho we enjoyed at the Vietnamese restaurant near where we worked, was my offering to my then boyfriend of my skills as a potential life partner. My version was cooked rice noodles, shaved carrot and ginger, green onion, chicken breast and chicken stock from a can.

I remember preparing our meal in my tiny apartment kitchen so carefully. I assembled all the ingredients, thinly and evenly slicing the carrots, following the package directions on the vermicelli, and unwrapped the Japanese noodle bowls and chopsticks I had bought for the occasion. The result was beautiful to behold: a tangle of rice vermicelli beneath modest slices of carrots and chicken resting in broth and garnished with onion and ginger. It tasted, however, like carrot peelings with a vague hint of starch. I provided soy sauce for the seasoning, and toasted sesame oil for pizazz, but to no avail. I think we ended up ordering a pizza.

Just as the salt you use is a personal choice, so too is how much of it you add to your meals. My taste buds are fairly sensitive to salt, whereas my husband, who can scarf down plates of olives and hunks of asiago cheese, likes his meals saltier.

As you cook, you will learn how salty you like your food to be. I add salt to a dish based on the number of servings, measuring approximately 1/8 tsp ground salt (or 1/4 tsp large flakes, or one generous pinch) per serving. I provide salt at the table for additional seasoning to suit individual tastes.

I remade carrot and vermicelli the other night, tipping my imaginary toque to my first lesson in seasoning. I cooked the noodles, put a handful in a large soup bowl and ladled in a cup and a half of hot homemade chicken broth. I cut pieces of leftover chicken breast and sliced the carrots and green onion. (I was out of ginger.) Then, I salted everything with Maldon and added garlic chili oil for pizazz. It was wonderful.

With the leftover cooked noodles, I made this simple and delicious noodle salad for an afternoon picnic. I used chicken simply because it's what I had in the fridge, but you could use pork tenderloin, steak slices, tofu cubes, or leave out the protein altogether. Here is the recipe:

CHICKEN, RICE VERMICELLI AND LIME SALAD
Serves 2

1 cup cold leftover cooked rice vermicelli
1 cup cold cooked chicken, sliced or pulled into thin strips
1 large peeled carrot, sliced into ribbons with a potato peeler
2 green onions, chopped
1 Tbsp chopped fresh herbs (try cilantro, basil, parsley, mint or combination)
1 small yellow zucchini, sliced into thin discs
2-3 leaves swiss chard, sliced into ribbons (discard stems)
zest and juice of one lime
1 Tbsp flavourful oil (I used chili garlic oil. Toasted sesame would be great. Light olive oil would also be fine.)

Combine ingredients in a bowl, toss and serve.

NOTE: To make chili garlic oil, buy a 500mL bottle of light olive oil, open the lid and break back the inner plastic pouring guard with a knife. Add to the bottle 5-8 peeled garlic cloves and 3-6 red chili peppers cut in half lengthwise. Before adding the garlic, mash them a bit using bottom of a heavy can or mug to release the juices; the cloves should be broken open but not completely pulverized. You can also use dried chilies. Let the oil steep for several days to reach maximum potency. If it's too strong, add more oil; too weak, add more garlic/chilies.

Salt

2008-09-05T07:17:00.000-07:00

There is only one ingredient in great cooking that is indispensable: good natural salt. Table salt -- the iodized variety, that nasty collection of mean, uniform crystals -- imparts a sour, metallic taste to food that is unnecessary and to my mind unforgivable. Salt should enhance and support the natural flavours in a dish, not smack those flavours into submission.

I feel for ingredients when they are unfairly overwhelmed by bad salt. I think of tomatoes growing on the vine, developing their redness, their tangy sweetness, preparing themselves for their day in the spotlight, only to be relegated to fifth fiddle.

There are many opinions on the kind of salt you should use in your kitchen:

Martha Stewart: “Coarse kosher salt has the best taste to my way of thinking. It imparts a better taste and consistency and it enhances natural flavor. I use it in all my recipes.”

Robert Carrier: “I prefer rough-ground seas salt, gros sel. I find food cooked with sea salt is far superior to food cooked with ordinary powdered salt, so I always have quantities of glistening white flakes on hand to grind into casseroles and salads.”

Nigella Lawson: “I want my salt to be Maldon.”

Alice Waters: “I keep two kinds of sea salt close by: a very coarse one sold in bulk (the gray kind, with its high mineral content, is especially good) for salting boiling water and brine, and a finer, flakier one for seasoning and finishing dishes.”

Giorgio Locatelli devotes three pages of his massive Made In Italy to the lowly mineral, with “natural sea or rock salt” as his preference.

As you can see, selecting your salt is a personal choice, however iodized table salt is not on the menu. I use two kinds of salt at home: Maldon salt for seasoning and finishing, and kosher or coarse sea salt for salting potato and pasta water, depending on what’s available in the supermarket.

Food is precious. Throw out that old box of table salt and buy some natural, non-iodized sea salt and notice the difference. You will like it.

Next post: Seasoning your food.

References: Feast (Lawson), The Martha Stewart Cookbook (Stewart), The Robert Carrier Cookbook (Carrier), The Art of Simple Food (Waters)

Photo: I keep my Maldon salt in a salt cellar by Mario Batali's cookware line. It has two compartments. I use a pestle to grind the salt in the top for baking.