Strawberry Shortcake

With a recent batch of my perpetual buttermilk biscuits, Pamela fashioned a delicious strawberry shortcake with strawberries and whipped cream. Simply macerate the strawberries by letting them sit in a bowl with some squirts of lemon juice and a spoon of sugar for a bit, and then throw some on a half-biscuit and add whipped cream and some of that maceration juice on top.

Accidental Paneer

     The other night I had the good fortune of being able to base an entire meal on an experiment gone awry. 

     I make my own yogurt, because the tubs you can buy in the store are like a single mouthful for me. To get even cheaper, I decided to try making yogurt from rehydrated dry milk. Instead of yogurt, I ended up with a bucket of water with a smaller bucket-shaped cylinder at the bottom. The substance seemed to be cultured properly, but the texture was denser and grainy, almost like hummus. My ever-positive mom was fortunately around to say "I bet that would be GREAT with some salt and garlic", and a fantastic cheese-like substance was born. 

     I put it over salmon (with honey) and scalloped potato with mouthwatering, cheap, and nutritious results. 

Red Velvet Cupcakes

For Susan's birthday I made the Smitten Kitchen Red Velvet Cake recipe and adapted it for cupcakes. They're delicious. I've also learned that the secret for the best cream cheese frosting ever is to whip it! It's much lighter and fluffier that way. I always used to just stir and ice; no more!

The Perfect Scrambled Eggs

I just made this delicious recipe for scrambled eggs. Probably the best I've ever had. It's Gordon Ramsay's "Perfect Scrambled Egg" recipe. I substituted cream cheese for the creme fraiche, and fresh basil for the chives. Next time I'll use quite a bit less butter because they were soooo rich. Delicious! It's also a lot of fun to watch Ramsay cook.

Cakers

I have a website that I think some of you will like, (and may just be the answer to the question, "What is Canadian food?"). It's by an author, Brian Francis, whose book Natural Order I really liked. Anyhoo, on the side he runs this hilarious blog called Caker Cooking.

"It's not about cakes. From casseroles to canned corn, this is the best of the worst of mangiacake cuisine."

 He makes food from old recipe books by Enbridge, auxillary clubs, church groups, etc. It reminds me a lot of the Pause For Living magazine. Good stuff for sure. Funny writing too. Some favourites? Spaghetti pie, coca cola salad, dump cake, and mock apple pie —"You have to make it to believe it."

Ten Foods I Dislike

How about we list the foods – or, to be precise, ingredients or flavours – that we dislike? I have been a very picky eater for most my life, but recently I have begun to love a lot more food (saliently almost all vegetables). I think I have come a long way so that now there are very few foods I dislike (though a small number of ingredients at the top preclude the enjoyment of a lot of dishes [saliently Indian and Mexican cuisine]). As you can see, I think one could generalise that I am more sensitive to bitterness and other sharp flavours than most. Here are the food items I most dislike in order of distaste (beginning with most disliked):

1. Spiciness
2. Cilantro
3. Peppers
4. Alcohol
5. Grapefruit
6. Chocolate
7. Liquorice
8. Sweet potatoes
9. White mushrooms
10. Coffee

I Made Pretzels

I made pretzels. They were very good. It was fun bathing them in baking soda water. It was like a weird science experiment. I used this recipe.

Rapini, Sausage, and Mozerrella

Several weeks ago I made this, an imitation of a dish I had a Terroni. The original dish consisted of some kind of Italian sausage, a semi-soft cheese I don't remember the name of, dandelion, combined in an olive oil based sauce with fresh pasta. My version, despite having different ingredients, tasted remarkably similar. The basic formula of a bitter green, a savoury meat, and soft melty cheese seems easy to make palatable. If I went back to Terroni and noted the taste carefully, I'm fairly confident of being able to reproduce it at home. I wonder how I would made a vegetarian version. Sausage is a difficult item to replace without meat.

My New Favourite Sandwich

Recently I made a sandwich (pictured with fried tempeh) with the aforementioned buttermilk biscuits. I fried an egg inside the same shape-cutter that I use to cut/shape the biscuits, so that it would fit perfectly in the biscuit, and put buffalo ricotta on top. It was amazing. Does anyone have any suggestions for a vegetable that could be added? I think it needs a little crunch, is all.

Buttermilk Biscuits

For the past few months I have been regularly making a recipe for buttermilk biscuits from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home. I like it so much that I have seriously been making them almost every other day ever since I first made them (though initially I was making them every day). I will give you my own slight variation of the recipe, as I make half of what the recipe prescribes, and take a few shortcuts.

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup pastry flour

1/2 tablespoon kosher salt

1/2 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 cup butter (chopped into about 1 square centimetre cubes)

3/4 cup buttermilk

1. Preheat oven to 425 ºF

2. Prepare a pan for the oven (with aluminum foil or wax paper to reduce dishes)

3. Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl and stir it up

4. Add the little butter cubes, then mix it all (I do it with my hands) until the butter pieces (or shreds, as tends to be the case) are pretty small (the original recipe recommends “pea sized”)

5. Make a well in the centre, then pour in most of the buttermilk, and mix it in (but not too much)

6. Make the dough into a 2-2.5 centimetres-thick slab on the pan, then cut (or shape) biscuit shapes out of it

7. “Brush” the remaining bit of buttermilk over the tops of each biscuit (I drip it on and use my fingers to “brush” it around)

8. Put it in the oven for ten minutes on each side (sometimes I need 15 mins for the second side)

Before and after

Regional Foods: Maritimes

Alexander and I talk a lot about "local" cuisines, and he often expresses envy that I come from a place (Nova Scotia) that has many more "regional foods" than does Ontario. I have decided to compile a list of them here for the Eat My Love audience.*

For the purpose of this post, I am defining "Maritime food" as cuisine that originates in, or has specific relevance to, the gastronomic culture of Canada's Maritime region** The food of this region is influenced especially by its geographic proximity to the ocean, and the ethnicities of the people who have lived there. My examination of the food of the region will no doubt have a white, anglo Nova Scotian bias. For this, I apologize.


Donair

A variation of the meat-cooked-on-a-stick-in-a-pita genre. Created by Lebanese (?) immigrants in Halifax during the 1970s. "Donair meat" (beef cooked on a "spit") is served on a pita with tomatoes, onions, donair sauce, and often cheese.


Donair Sauce
A thick, white sauce made of evaporated milk, garlic powder, sugar and vinegar.


Donair Pizza

Pizza dough with mozzarella cheese, donair meat, tomatoes, onions and topped with donair sauce


Garlic fingers

Pizza dough with garlic butter and cheese, often served with donair sauce.


Fish and Chips from a truck

This may be a contentious entry since it is certainly not specific to the region, but it is the ubiquity of the fish and chip truck within the Maritime provinces as compared to other regions (for instance, there were two within a five minute walking distance to my suburban Jr. High school) that I think it should be included on the list.


Lobster rolls

A bun (often hot dog-shaped) filled with pieces of lobster meat mixed with mayonaise and spices. Nova Scotia lobster rolls differ from others in the East Coast region in that they often include pieces of celery in the lobster mix and usually also lettuce inside the bun.


Poutine Râpée

A boiled potato dumpling with pork filling. An Acadian dish that I have heard of, but as an anglo, never consumed.


Fayots au Lard
Acadian dish of baked dried beans and salt pork fat served with molasses.


Fish Cakes

Fish cakes are certainly not unique to this region, but the traditional Maritime version of the fishcake is, I believe, distinct from its global counterparts in that they are made with boiled fish- usually haddock and/or salted fish (like cod)- and potato, rather than breadcrumbs. As I child, I hated fishcakes the way bratty American kids on TV hate their mother's meatloaf. In my family, they were the ubiquitous, horrid, pasty, mushy-meat meal I dreaded.


Mini-Sips

Single-serve clear plastic bags of low-quality fruit-flavoured drink made by various local dairy companies. May be frozen and eaten as a popsicle-in-a-bag.


Fiddleheads

Young fern fronds harvested from the forest during the early spring. Usually boiled, steamed or pan-fried and eaten as a side vegetable.


Dulse

A thick, leathery seaweed that grows attached to rocks and snarls your legs up when you swim in the ocean. Eaten dried, as a snack.


Chow-Chow Pickles

A green tomato and vegetable relish, often eaten as an accompaniment to a traditional Sunday supper of roast meat and boiled vegetables.


Moon Mist ice cream

A combination of grape, banana and bubblegum flavors


Oatcakes

A Scottish creation made of rolled oats, flour, sugar, and shortening. In the Maritimes, they are baked into a hard, dry disk whereas in Britain they are, apparently, usually cooked on a griddle. Nearly any bakery, cafe or supermarket in the Maritimes will sell these as a sweet to consume with coffee or tea. You can find oatcakes in Ontario, but they are not nearly as popular here, and those that are available commercially are almost without exception imported either from the U.K. or from the Maritimes.


"Grunt"

An Acadian dessert, usually made with berries, that resembles a fruit cobbler. My first solo-baking endeavor was being assigned to cook a no-sugar, diabetic-friendly blueberry grunt at Girl Guide camp when I was 10. It was awful.


* This list will not be exhaustive, and I hope to add on to it as additional dishes spring to my mind.
** I have deliberately focused on the Maritime provinces rather than "Atlantic provinces" (which includes Newfoundland, a province with its own very unique and very rich gastronomic history that differs considerably from the Maritimes and about which I am largely ignorant). This food culture of this region blends into that of the States along the East coast, so there are many evident similarities and continuities between some of this food and that of New England.

Scones Part 2

After having made scones loosely based on a Bittman recipe for a while, last night I tried a new recipe from Smitten Kitchen. These scones were much fluffier and better overall. Without any clotted cream in the house I had to settle for crème fraiche, which is less similar to the former than I imagined (it’s almost like sour cream, though, fortunately, the slight sourness was perfectly eclipsed by the strawberry jam). The inside was slightly undercooked, despite having cooked them for twenty minutes (as opposed to the recommended maximum of 15) and letting them rest for ten minutes. Next time I will cook them longer. Either way, I think these will be my new scones.

Mozzarella en Carozza

Pamela and I had been wanting to try an Italian food called mozzarella en carozza, so yesterday we got the ingredients and made some. It’s like a grilled cheese that went through an Italian testosterone machine: Fresh mozzarella is sandwiched by two pieces of bread soaked in egg (and maybe milk) like French toast, and the whole thing is deep fried. It was ridiculous, needless to say. It gives my mouth separation anxiety to see these photographs. The bread was so crispy it was bubbly, and each bite would send strings of mozzarella out like spider webs.

100% Haligonian Garlic Fingers

In our recent trip to Halifax, Pamela and I returned to the local Greco Pizza chain in which I first lost my garlic fingers innocence. As crude as it may be, this particular item remains my favourite gastronomic experience of Halifax. I day dream about it often and longingly look through these pictures over and over. All our attempts at recreating this at home, though wonderful, have not equalled the pleasures granted by these unassuming rectangles.

This Echoes My Opinion of Annex (on Bloor) Food

“About time the Annex Bloor strip got a decent place to eat. [It’s] all fast food/frat food.”

-comment courtesy of “popsy” on an internet article about the former location of Burger King on Bloor near Bathurst becoming a Guu Izakaya

Today I found myself doing some research on pasta shapes because I have a bag of these big tube ones (which I have since learned are Rigatoni) and wanted to find out a good recipe for such a noodle. I love some of these pasta names. Behold:

Stringozzi - shoestring-like things
Elicoidali - Helicoidal ones
Marziani - Martians
Mezzi Bombardoni - Half bombards
Cannelloni - Big little canes
Mostaccioli - Moustache-like things
Pasta al ceppo - Log-type pasta
Cencioni - Large rags
Gramigna - Infesting weed
Strozzapreti - Priest-chokers
Maltagliati - Badly cut
Occhi di Lupo - Wolf eyes
Occhi di Pernice - Partridge's eyes
Stortini - Little crooked ones

Pan sauces

http://rouxbe.com/cooking-school/lessons/180-introduction-to-pan-sauces

Videos like this get me really excited about cooking.

Soda

I made some Cream Soda.

I brewed it with yeast, sugar, and artificial vanilla extract. The yeast taste is quite prominent, perhaps more so than the vanilla taste. There is also a nice lemon like taste. The aroma is much more noticeable compared to store bought sodas, probably because of the yeast. The carbonation is very good.

Starving Artist

Roughly two weeks ago my dad and I went to Starving Artist (584 Lansdowne Ave, just north of Bloor). Their claim to fame is making sandwiches using waffles instead of bread. My dad had the smoked salmon waffle sandwich, and I had the cheese and chive waffle plate with salsa, sour cream, and fruit salad. They mixed the cheese and chives into the actual waffle batter before it was cooked and it was much better than I was expecting (and I was expecting great things). It's a really fun menu, and a good alternative to pub food, nachos, or regular sandwiches. It's also a bar. It's inspired me to try adding savoury ingredients into my pancakes. I figure a sharp cheese and maybe rosemary would be good. The plates were roughly $10 or there abouts. They make excellent coffee as well, and have live soul and jazz nights often.

Xu's Collards

This is a flavourful way of preparing Collard greens.

Ingredients:

-A mild tasting oil

-Balsamic vinegar

-Honey

-Hot pepper sauce

I used a saute pan and about a third of a bunch of collard greens. Coat the bottom of the pan with oil and put the collard greens in when the oil is hot. Saute briefly, then put in about a teaspoon of honey, some vinegar, and some hot pepper sauce. This should give you enough liquid to cover the pan and braise on medium-low for a few minutes. The whole operation took me about five minutes. Cook longer if you like your greens soft.