Archive for February, 2009
I have decided that on top of my no-shop agenda I need to start posting more regularly again, lest I slip into the comfortable routine of just letting another night pass. After all, it’s those nights when I was too tired/didn’t eat anything interesting that I should be forcing myself to write, dontcha think?
Sadly, this week hasn’t been much less busy than the last few – I’m up at 4:30 every morning to do traffic on the Eyeopener, have three major deadlines that I’m trying to finish in the afternoons and events every evening except Friday. So yesterday morning I pulled a yogurt container full of chili out of the freezer to thaw. W will not eat chili, so at the last minute I spread some on a whole wheat pita (the second half of a too-large bag that is now too dried-out to do much with but toast as pita chips or use as base for a pizza), mashing the kidney beans a bit as I went, sprinkled it with some grated mozza and popped it in the toaster oven. I ate his remnants on my way out the door (I moderated a cafe scientifique event tonight – a discussion on food security) and they were bloody fantastic. I think I just may make chili pizza intentionally next time – it reminded me of sloppy Joes, but topped with cheese.
And oh: I’m upping my no-shop window to 2 weeks. One week seems far too easy, especially considering it’s already Wednesday, I’m attending a farm dinner at Forage tonight (their first) and teaching a cooking class tomorrow night. 2 weeks might be more of a challenge.
I do need to make the exception of (besides the aforementioned milk) bananas, apples and pears for W – I was going to add greens to the list, but I still have half a bag in the fridge, two bags of spinach in the freezer and a sack of peas the size of a polar bear’s pilllow. (You know you’re getting old when you start using phrases such as those. Also, I took a fall today on the ice and hurt my hip. Seriously.)
February 25 2009 | leftovers | 23 Comments »
We wrapped our final day of shooting yesterday – on location at Bernard Callebaut of all places – it was no accident that I took several takes – dozens, even – to get it right. I haven’t eaten so much chocolate since Christmas, and certainly not so much of the best stuff (in my humble opinion) on earth at one time. They were good enough to donate it all to my cause – standing amid all that chocolate, at the nexus of the chocolate universe, chomping on a giant dark chocolate “J”, it occurred to me that I must have saved a basket of drowning puppies or something in a previous life.
Because I saw on our shooting schedule that we’d be finishing up with chocolate, I planned of course to celebrate proper. (And yes, I do celebrate with food. Not exclusively, but I don’t believe in segregating food from emotions, sticking them in opposite corners of your brain lest they get together and gang up on you. Food is emotional; we eat to celebrate, to socialize, to calm and comfort ourselves and each other. If food wasn’t more than just a substance used to keep us alive, there would be no restaurants, no Food Network, no Gourmet magazine, no food blogs! Have I said this before? Anyway, it makes sense to enjoy your “sometimes food” at times such as the night after spending 18 days in front of a TV camera.)
Knowing I’d likely be downing plenty of the stuff straight up while I was there, I planned to take home a jar of BC chocolate hazelnut spread to eat with a spoon whilst lying down on the couch. Oh yes. Their chocolate-dipped pretzels didn’t even make it all the way home in my car.
Nutella lovers, take note: Nutella is not the wholesome blend of hazelnuts and skim milk it purports to be – the first two ingredients are sugar and modified palm oil. So really it would be more accurate to call it a not-so-wholesome blend of sugar and modified palm oil, with hazelnuts and powdered milk. Bernard sells a chocolate hazelnut spread made with chunky toasted hazelnuts and Bernard Callebaut chocolate. Pure heaven in a jar.
So dinner last night was mostly chocolate. I got home at dinnertime, fed M & W the last of the I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby pie, and we all ate a big bowl of salad. (With the exception of W, who screams and runs from fresh greens.) Shockingly, I hopped on the scale this morning and found I had finally crept past the 200 mark (in the right direction this time), marking 20 pounds lost! A little surprising considering the sheer quantity of chocolate I consumed yesterday, but proof positive that a day of eating chocolate and pastries will not undo the good you’ve done. (I can only conclude from this experiment that Bernard Callebaut chocolate is an effective weight loss aid – I prescribe as much as possible to combat the effects of too-tight pants. Worth a try.)
Tonight, dinner will be skipped (for me, anyway) due to a late lunch (I got to play mom today – made cupcakes with W and then went to gymnastics, and had the gang back for lunch afterwards) and the fact that I’m judging the Lawson Lundell Celebrity Hors d’Oeuvres Competition tonight. That means tasting everything – generally 40 or so hors d’ouevres, served up by the best restaurants in town – starting at 8:30. I think I may have written about it last year. Yes it’s a good gig, but a little eclectic, especially after 30 or so entries… I’m full just thinking about it.
By the way, have you seen the new Subaru ad with the sexy car wash Sumo wrestlers? I so downloaded that song onto my gym playlist. My only worry is that I may start grooving on the elliptical trainer. I do feel mighty svelte thinking about all those Sumo wrestlers. (If you’re looking for it, it’s called Danger! High Voltage by Electric Six. Wow, that almost makes me sound young and hip.)
Welcome back FREE STUFF FRIDAYS!
I think some B. Callebaut chocolate is in order here (sorry, you can’t have my BC hazelnut spread – not that you’d want half a jar anyway), and I thought I’d go ahead and get a waffle iron to put up, since so many of you don’t appear to have one, and it’s not exactly the sort of thing you tend to go out and buy yourself. I don’t have it yet, so don’t have a photo, but I’ll make sure it’s a nice one. Thanks so much for sticking around while I was MIA.
Question: What’s your favourite breakfast, when you have time? (Those who answer “waffles” will not be given preferential treatment…)
February 20 2009 | leftovers | 119 Comments »
I wanted to offer up something sweet for Valentine’s Day. Although I realize as I type this it’s technically too late to get any actual V-Day use out of this idea; no matter. Any day can be made better by anything served up in a chocolate bowl.
Chocolate bowls are dead easy to make. (And if you want to make a bunch of little girls ecstatically happy at a birthday party, let them all make their own, and then use them as vehicles for ice cream sundaes.) All you do is this: melt chocolate. Preferably dark or semi-sweet, which isn’t as soft as some milk and all white chocolates; chocolate chips work just fine. Do this gently; in a double boiler or bit by bit in the microwave.
Let it cool ever so slightly; you want it to be melty but not so hot that it will melt the rubber. Blow up as many balloons as you want bowls. Don’t blow them up huge, or you will have salad-bowl-sized chocolate bowls (unless this is what you’re going for). Also, barely blown-up balloons are thicker than those blown to capacity.
Dip them into the chocolate, then set on a piece of waxed paper or foil (they will stand perfectly upright, creating a nice flat base all by themselves) and leave them be until the chocolate cools and sets. That’s it. If you want to be fancy about it, swirl some white chocolate (not a lot) into the dark before dipping, or if you rock the balloon back and forth in multiple directions (it’s hard to describe this; you’ll know what I mean when you do it) you end up with a chocolate tulip that you might pay big bucks for in a pastry shop.
I have, I warn you, had one explode – KABLAM! – as I proudly held it up to a cooking class of about 25, leaving a Julie-shaped chocolate outline on the back wall behind me. I then received a long and hilarious email from an attendee of said class, who had the same experience at home (after watching me do it – go figure) that resulted in her having to REPAINT HER CEILING.
(Insert disclaimer here.)
So – proceed at your own risk. Although admittedly I haven’t had one explode before or since. We’ll see if one explodes on camera tomorrow. (Hopefully not – I don’t think fifty thousand dollar TV cameras like that much.)
February 14 2009 | leftovers | 25 Comments »
Today’s frozen mystery meat surprise turned out to be Buffalo Chicken Strips – which W was none to pleased about, so he had spinach pizza. All I did was lay them out on a cookie sheet and bake them for 20 minutes, then crumbled some blue cheese (I’m not a huge fan, but wanted to be authentic) into a bit of low fat sour cream and light mayo. We ate them with our fingers, and without much of anything else, unless you count finishing off W’s pizza crusts. To be honest I come home at the end of each day having not only worked around food for 10 hours or so, but having spent that time nibbling it.. we have to do several takes at the end of each recipe during which we “taste and reveal”, and because neither Ned nor I are stellar actors, we almost always have to do it over and over, attempting each time to take another spontaneously new and exciting bite. Not that I’m complaining.
We are in the final stretch of shooting – still every day early to late – tomorrow morning our call time is 5:30 due to a forecast for pandemonium at our location, being a Saturday that just happens to also be Valentine’s Day. (Our kitchen set is at Willow Park – the biggest wine and liquor store in Canada – so the noise of people and bottles and such interrupts our filming, even though it’s all cordoned off.) I just set my alarm for 4:30 (AM!) and it’s pushing 10, so I’m going to keep this brief. These seem like a weekendy sort of finger food though.
BBQ Buffalo Chicken Strips with Blue Cheese Dip
The classic formula for restaurant-style Buffalo chicken wing sauce is half butter, half hot sauce; using barbecue sauce cuts back dramatically on the fat and calories! I like to use a mild tomato-based sauce – it allows the flavor of the hot sauce to come through. If you want to make them in advance, you can freeze the dipped chicken strips on a baking sheet, then transfer to a plastic bag. When you’re ready to bake them place the frozen strips on a cookie sheet and bake as directed – there’s no need to thaw them first. If you want to skip the blue cheese dip, bottled low fat ranch or creamy cucumber dressing makes great dips too.
1 lb. skinless, boneless chicken or turkey breasts, cut into strips
1/4 cup flour
Salt & pepper to taste
1/2 cup barbecue sauce
1/4 cup hot sauce (such as Frank’s Red Hot sauce)
Blue Cheese Dip:
1/2 cup low fat sour cream or plain yogurt
2 Tbsp. light mayonnaise
2 oz. blue cheese, crumbled 1 green onion, finely chopped
Preheat oven to 400ºF. Season flour with salt and pepper in a shallow dish. Stir together the barbecue sauce and hot sauce in another dish.
Dredge chicken strips in the flour to coat, then dip into the barbecue sauce mixture and turn to coat all over. Place on a baking sheet that has been sprayed with nonstick spray. Bake for 20 minutes, or until cooked through.
To make the blue cheese dip, stir together all the dip ingredients. Serve warm, with blue cheese dip.
Makes about 1 dozen strips.
Per strip: 60 calories, 0.9 g total fat (0.2 g saturated fat, 0.2 g monounsaturated fat, 0.2 g polyunsaturated fat), 8.9 g protein, 3.4 g carbohydrate, 21.9 mg cholesterol, 0.7 g fiber. 14% calories from fat
And THANK YOU so much for carrying me along with your recipe ideas! I am dying to get back home into my kitchen and try some of them. To keep you in the loop on my weight loss progress, I’ve managed to keep somewhat of a tight reign on my magic number despite this crazy new eating schedule. I’ve been hanging around 200 for a week or so, likely because I haven’t gone completely overboard with my daytime nibbling (it’s hard to not finish each plate of food I’ve started after wrapping each take), managed a few brief trips to the gym, and have steadfastly not given in to snacking from the time I get home to the time I crawl into bed. Being upright and busy for so many hours of the day probably helps.
We shoot tomorrow and Sunday, then break for Monday and Tuesday and then I have two full days on location on the 18th and 19th, so I will be back soon. Very soon. And I can’t wait. And I’ll finally arrange for Book Club!
Today during a particularly stressful moment on set I tried to bring myself to my Happy Place, and it was here.
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February 13 2009 | leftovers | 14 Comments »
Nancy G has a brilliant suggestion. She proposed I have a “get out of posting free day” where instead of posting, I give my groupies (that’s you – I kind of always liked the term bleaders, a word Julie of the Julie and Julia project/book/movie to be released in August coined in reference to her blog readers) a theme instead and you all post your recipes for me? And of course for each other. Which I think is a really fun idea, because I’m always interested in what people eat. And make.
So please don’t feel obliged. But if you have a great recipe, one that you call into service a lot, or has been in your family for a long time (I love that kind) or even an idea, because not all food is the result of following a recipe, we’d all love to hear it!
February 11 2009 | leftovers | 38 Comments »
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