At Last!

Yes, it's here. Deep-fried butter

I wouldn't kid you about this. Thanks to Salvelinas for sending me this article.

Julie and Julia

Tuffy P wanted to see this film. I resisted, but today agreed to go.

On the basis of Meryl Streep's very fine performance as Julia, I found the film charming. I would have preferred it if it were Julia's story without the Julie part, but I also understand that the Julie part is the hook that got the piece made.

I remember Julia Child's television shows very well. I watched them with fascination growing up. Let me say that I have made Beef Bourguignon and it rocks.

Made up BBQ corn and chile chowder

The other day found myself with half a dozen cobs of fresh Ontario corn and a hankering for some corn chowder, so I went to work, making it up as I went along.

I put the cobs on the bbq (I use charcoal) and browned them nicely all over. I've read that some people go to great lengths to cook their bbq corn in the husk, and others soak their corn. I don't do any of that. I cut right to the chase and simply grill those cobs.

Meanwhile, I chopped up a handful of jalapenos, seeds and all, some celery, a green bell pepper and some garlic and tossed it into a pot with some olive oil. I didn't use onions because, well, I'll admit it - I was out of onions. Feel free to add onions at will.

Stop what you're doing. Do you have some tunes on? This soup tastes best with tunes. You can choose. I had Vince Collins on, playing Newfoundland accordion music and it made the soup taste just fine. Check the drawers of the fridge. If you find something that looks like it might be excellent in the soup, by all means, don't let me stop you from using it. Cut the kernels off the bbq-ed cobs and toss them into the pot. Add some stock. I can't give you a measurement because I was making it up as I went along.

Slice up some Portuguese sausage. If you use chorizo or andoulle instead, I won't tell, but I think the Portuguese sausage rocks in this soup. I know there are some vegetarians and some vegans out there, but I don't know how to come close to what this sausage does to the soup without using it. You could substitute, and you'd have a good soup, but I don't think you'd have this soup. How much sausage do you need? Here's the thing. You don't need a lot of it to get the flavour. On the other hand, each of your guests really ought to have a slice or two or three in their bowl. Avoid overpowering the soup with the sausage though.

Cook the soup for half an hour. Meanwhile, make up a little roux using butter and flour. Cook it up together for 10 minutes or so at a low heat, stirring more or less constantly. Add the roux to the soup, stir it around and cook it for a while longer. Taste and adjust the seasonings.

Serve with the home-made bread you've been working on while the soup is cooking, along with a cold beer. This soup is even better the second day when the chiles really come into their own.

Dinner

We postponed dinner tonight and had a snack instead. I sauteed up some wild mushrooms in butter. Meanwhile, Tuffy P toasted up some bread - last night I made some hot banana pepper bread that rocks. And we enjoyed wild mushrooms on toast!

For dinner, I'm making wild mushroom soup, with three varieties of wild mushroom. It's cooking now and it smells divine, delicately seasoned with a hint of chipotle. Yum!

Whiffing?

Chocolate you inhale?
What will they think of next. Thanks spicecat for passing on this important news.

Charcoal for the BBQ Freak

I know many people who grill food outside with propane or other gas fired appliances. Some of them are even pretty good at it. They tell me they have more control than they would with charcoal, and that it's more convenient. Unable to resist pushing buttons, I tell them it's like cooking on a Coleman Stove. I've always preferred cooking over charcoal, and then several years ago after Tuffy P and I bought a Big Green Egg ceramic cooker, I've been cooking everything from pizza and breads to whole turkeys on the thing. Serious BBQ.

This morning I stumbled across a website that demonstrated that in the scheme of things I have a long way to go to become a true BBQ freak.

Check out The Naked Whiz's Ceramic Charcoal Cooker page

Digging deeper, I discovered The Lump Charcoal Database. I've already explore a few different charcoals available in our area. Some of them are similar, but some are quite unique. The Naked Whiz actually reviews many brands of charcoal.

It goes without saying that we don't use briquettes.

Any other charcoal hounds out there?

Coffee-can Paska

I didn't take the time this year to mess with the fancy decorations on top, but still this is tasty Easter bread.

Yesterday morning, we visited our Landseer Newfoundland pup Memphis. Memphis was born on February 28, so she's about 6 weeks old. The breeder is a two hour drive away, but it was a nice day to get out. Memphis is doing fine. I think she's grown since I saw her last Sunday, and for sure she's become more playful and interested in the world around her.

When we got home we started in on a job we've been stalling - sorting through our many boxes of books and filling our book-shelves. We got a lot done, maybe two-thirds of it, but there are plenty of boxes still to go through.

We've decided to release some books into the wild. In fact, I'm going out to release some right now.

Sourdough

I've been making bread every week or so over the past few months, using the starter Spicecat gave me. It's amazing, flavourful bread. I've been baking it in a dutch oven, which retains the steam and develops the crust beautifully.

Stickers on Fruit

I was peeling the sticker of a plum yesterday and wondered if the world knows who it was that decided it was the right thing to do to inflict a sticker on every piece of fruit in the universe? I read on the inner-nets (so it has to be true) that the sticker can give you insight into how the fruit was grown. From the article:

For conventionally grown fruit, (grown with chemicals inputs), the PLU code on the sticker consists of four numbers. Organically grown fruit has a five-numeral PLU prefaced by the number 9. Genetically engineered (GM) fruit has a five-numeral PLU prefaced by the number 8. For example,

A conventionally grown banana would be:
4011

An organic banana would be:
94011

A genetically engineered (GE or GMO) banana would be:
84011

The numeric system was developed by the Produce Electronic Identification Board, an affiliate of the Produce Marketing Association, a Newark, Delaware-based trade group for the produce industry. As of October 2001, the board had assigned more than 1,200 PLUs for individual produce items.

Apparently, the adhesive is food grade, but you shouldn't eat the stickers.

Dinner out

Café du Lac - a taste of Québec

We've been aware of Café du Lac, located just down the road in Mimico, since we moved to Longbranch, and tonight we finally dined there to celebrate Valentines Day. There were two seatings tonight, at 6:00 and 8:00 and a fixed price limited menu for the occasion. The restaurant was busy. Service was friendly and the food quite good.

I particularly enjoyed their poutine, something I don't have very often. They make it with bits of pulled short ribs of beef. Nice texture, and very tasty with a cool natural ale from Quebec!

Anatolia

Last night, we went for dinner with my aunt to Anatolia. This Etobicoke restaurant features excellent Turkish food, moderate prices and pleasant service.

For appetizers, we enjoyed Sigara Boreği, which are pastry fingers filled with feta cheese, and also grilled kalamari, which come with roasted peppers. Tuffy tried a lentil soup and also the gozleme, a crepe filled with spinach and cheese. My aunt ordered the Anatolia mixed plate, which included grilled chicken shish kebab, flame broiled Izgara kofte and Kiymali pide, served with salad, bulgur rice and Haydari. She really enjoyed this, although the portions were much bigger than her appetite. I had the mixed grill, flame broiled beef Kofte; kebab, spicy Adana kebab and lamb kebabs served with rice, Domatez Ezme, garnishes and homemade yufka.

I've only had Turkish food a couple times, and to be honest, I don't know my gozleme from my yufka, but I've really enjoyed my dinners at Anatolia. The food is well prepared, interesting, varied and all very tasty. I give it the mister anchovy stamp of approval. The restaurant is located in a strip plaza on Dundas St. (next to a vacuum cleaner store!), not far from that strange little bit of the universe where Dundas and Bloor cross for the second time.

famous blueberry muffins

...Tuffy P fires an email over to me asking if I was going to make my famous blueberry muffins tonight. Yeah, I thought, my famous blueberry muffins. What a great idea. Wait a second...I'm not famous for blueberry muffins. I've never even made blueberry muffins. They can't be all that hard though, can they? I mean I did OK making butter tarts.

Thanks go out to Spicecat for an excellent recipe. The muffins are excellent, and I can smell fresh coffee....

Making Butter Tarts

I made a post a few days back about butter tarts. I had never made them, but I was up for the adventure, thinking every good Canadian ought to be able to whip up a batch of the best, eh?

I don't have my mom's recipe, and since nobody was forthcoming with their mom's secret recipe, I did the next best thing and turned to the inner-nets for assistance. Now my problem was two-fold, in that I had not only never made butter tarts, neither had I ever made pastry dough. Over the years I had heard it was a minor art-form, something refined from years of practice. I couldn't just try it, could I? Surely disaster would be imminent.

Here's the recipe I used for the pastry:

2.5 cups flour
1 rounded tablespoon sugar
1 rounded tablespoon salt
1/2 cup chilled unsalted butter
2/3 cup frozen vegetable shortening
4-6 tablespoons ice water
2 teaspoons cider vinegar.

I combined the four, sugar and salt, then cut the butter and shortening into little chunks and cut them into the mixture until the whole business was kind of mealy. I added the water and the vinegar and stirred it around to make moist clumps, then formed two balls. I flattened each ball, wrapped them in plastic and chilled. It turned out that this recipe was enough for a couple dozen tarts. However, my filling recipe was enough for half that, so there's some pastry dough in my freezer, awaiting a new adventure. I rolled out the chilled dough, and made 4 inch rounds using a glass, and I shaped these rounds in a tart tin, then I put the tin in the fridge and went to work on the filling.

I decided to make my butter tarts with currants. Some people use raisins instead. Some people use neither. Some people even use nuts but in my book that crosses an invisible threshold into some other kind of tart. I soaked half a cup of currants in warm water for half an hour. Next time I do it, I'll use about a third less currants.

OK, so I added the following to a bowl....1/4 cup butter, 1/4 cup packed brown sugar, 1/2 cup of corn syrop, a pinch of salt, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla...and I mixed it all together (all by hand by the way...I didn't use any mixing devices for the whole business...was that wrong?) until it was more or less homogeneous. Then I lightly beat an egg with a fork and added it into the mix and stirred it around for a bit.

I took the tart tin from the fridge and divided up the currants by placing some in each tart. Then I added the goop to each tart. My recipe said to cook them at 400F for 15-20 minutes (shorter if you like them runny, longer if you like them firm). I'm pretty much convinced that this temperature (or my oven) is a little high, and next time I'll try it at 375F. Tuffy voted for firm, so I baked them about 18 minutes. On a few of the tarts, some of the filling boiled up over the pastry and hardened some. I think if I baked them at a slightly lower temperature, I could control this better.

Overall, I'm giving my first attempt a B+. The pastry was remarkably good, much better than I imagined it would be. I'm not sure what exactly I did right here, but I did something right for sure. I like the tarts with the currants. They add a nice texture. I seemed to recall that my mom used to make them sometimes with currants and sometimes with raisins. I'll use currants again next time, but as I suggested earlier, I think I'll go with fewer of them (meaning I'll need to make up more filling to compensate).

Product of the Week

I am not making this up.

I was in my local grocery store a few days ago, shopping about in the breakfast cereal section looking for just the right combination of crunchy tastiness and promised good health, when I came across the best cereal box I've ever seen, for some breakfast cereal called Ezekiel 4:9. This is seriously righteous breakfast cereal. Allow me to share with you, kind readers, everything it says on the front of the box:

All Natural
No Preservatives
Food for Life
The Original - 100% Flourless
Ezekiel 4:9
Sprouted Whole Grain Cereal
Golden Flax
As described in the Holy Scriptures
"Take also unto thee Wheat and Barley and Beans and Lentils and Millet and Spelt and put them in one vessel and make bread of it..." - Ezekiel 4:9
Certified Organic Grains
An Organic Sprouted Whole Grain Cereal
the Sprouted Grain Difference!
454g

In the bottom right hand corner there is a graphic which might be a pigeon...no, make that a dove, and in small print under the graphic, it says, "serving suggestion". This doesn't make any sense to me at all because I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to enjoy the cereal with squab or anything like that...

Naturally, I immediately took out a second mortgage on the house and bought me a box. This morning I enjoyed some with some fresh berries and 1% milk. Now I'm not going to tell you people I've been reborn, that I've caught the spirit or anything like that. But I will say it has a nice crunch, and tastes good too.

Proud Canadian Moments - the butter tart

We didn't just invent the Robertson screwdriver you know. We aced it when we figured out the magic of the butter tart.

My mom made awesomely unbelievable butter tarts. Food of the gods, perfection on a plate. Alas, she's been gone a long time now. I learned from her how to cook many things but she never showed me butter tarts. I'm confident though that somewhere out there someone has been holding onto the perfect butter tart recipe complete with step-by-step instructions for the butter tart novices among us... Please and thank you!

City Beat: More than just hot dogs?

I recall an announcement a while back that city officials were planning on allowing street cart food vendors in Toronto to sell more than just hot dogs and sausages. I hadn't realized this was regulated, but I guess I should have figured out that if there were no regulation, somebody would be out there selling something a little more interesting than street meat by now. This morning I came across an article by Dave McGinn in the Globe and Mail about obstacles to the new plan.

Potential licensees are complaining that there are too many rules, and also that the fees are way too high. If you want to run a cart selling alternative foods, you have to buy one of three different carts that cost between $15,000 and $28,000. On top of that there is a loction fee between $5,000 and $15,000 and a $375.61 fee for the license. You have to sell a lot of fajitas or pupusas or tamales or whatever you're cooking up to make any money.

I support health regulations on these carts. I think you should be well assured that if you buy a tasty treat from a food cart that you won't end up in the hospital. I don't understand why vendors need to use a particular cart. What if you wanted to build your own, or have a more interesting or artistic food cart? Why not simply have some basic safety and size specs in the regulations. Finally, if the fees are too high, it's only going to drive down the quality because vendors will need to find margin somewhere.

Up early...

I was up early this morning to shovel out, put out the recycling, and drive Tuffy P to the Go train. Then, it was off to the 24 hour grocery store for a few last minute things I need for cooking dinner Christmas day. I drove by Village Butcher (our local most excellent organic butcher) at just after 8:00, and was surprised he was open this early. I had ordered a crown roast pork to cook on Christmas day, so I stopped in to pick it up. That place is going to be crazy today as everyone picks up their turkeys.

Last night's snow was significantly heavier than the previous batch, and it even drizzled on me a little as I shoveled out.

So now I'm ignoring all the things I have to get done today, enjoying a coffee and some surfing. I found a nice clip on YouTube of Steve Earle on Letterman in 1988. Let's see if there are any other Steve Earle gems kicking around on there. Here's one performed in a Prison - Bob Dylan's It Takes a lot to Laugh It Takes a Train to Cry.

Fort Worth Blues is one of my favourite Steve Earle Tunes. OK, one more.... Here's Mr. Earle with the Del McCoury Band playing I Still Carry you Around. Beautiful.

I hope you all enjoy whatever it is you're celebrating. Have fun. Be safe.

Dinner at the Anchovy's - Patychky

Some time ago, a couple years ago in fact, I posted a family recipe for a dish I grew up with called Patychky, or Meat Sticks. Over the past couple weeks, there have been quite a number of searches for this recipe, so I thought I would feature it again.

To my vegetarian and vegan friends...best just to not look...

Part 1
Part 2

Sour Dough and Pot Roast

Dinner at the Anchovy's


It's been a while since I've had a sour dough monster growing around the house, but yesterday Spicecat gave me some of hers, so I hatched a plan...make sour dough bread, make a little pot roast. Enjoy hot pot roast sandwiches on warm just out of the oven sour dough.

Spicecat also passed on the suggestion that I bake the bread in a dutch oven, something I've never done before. The idea is that you preheat the dutch oven then drop in the dough, and keep it covered for the first 20 minutes of baking. The dutch oven maintains steam and that makes for really excellent crust. Most recipes that suggest this are of the "no knead' variety, which suggest a very wet dough and rising times of 18+ hours. I can be a patient man, but I didn't want to wait 18+ hours for my sandwiches. So I'll fess up; I kneaded my dough.

The result was a fantastic loaf with a crunchy crust and nice open crumb. And did I mention tasty?

For the pot roast, I recalled this morning I had half a cross-rib roast in the freezer, so I took it out early to thaw in the fridge. I browned the sides, and deglazed the pan with beer. I added a chopped up onion and a carrot, and some salt and pepper and a splash of Worchestershire sauce, then poured in the rest of the beer and a splash of stock and let it simmer for 3.5 hours.

I enjoyed dinner with a cold beer.

Dinner at the Anchovy's

From time to time we make a big pot of veggie chilli. It goes like this:

Add a splash of good olive oil to a heavy bottom pot, put the heat on medium, and add onions, shallots and garlic. Leeks are good in it too if you like. Let it all cook together while you chop up some other stuff.

Inspect the fridge for veggies. Each batch is different depending on what I find in the fridge. Let's see, I have some cauliflour here, some big old carrots, a zucchini, a red pepper, oh and look, I have a celery root. Chop it up the way you like it.

Add the carrots, then add in a generous amount of ancho chile powder, some salt and pepper, some cayenne or dried red chiles (go as insanely hot as you like but remember the heat increases on the second day quite a bit), and a little cumin powder or seeds. The cumin adds a little sumpin-sumpin to the chilli that makes it just so.

Add a tin of diced tomatoes and a tin of red kidney beans. This is about the only dish I cook which includes any canned veggies, and I think they work just fine. If Tuffy P isn't looking, you can add a splash of beer. Then mix it all up and judge the thickness of the chilli. I usually add maybe three cups of water. Add in fresh herbs like thyme and basil or even fresh oragano. Be generous with these.

Let it all simmer together for a while with the lid on. Stir now and then. No hurry. In fact, this chilli is even better second day.

When I decide it's ready, I sometimes add some corn right at the end.

I like it with fresh French bread and a cold beer.