I remember November

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.

Patience, grasshopper

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.

Hello December

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.

Mass vs. volume... mass wins!

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.

Banana break

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

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.

Banana Walnut Muffins

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.

Cheese biscuits on a rainy day

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.

Have your pie filling and eat it too

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.

Baking feeds the soul

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.