Archive for June, 2009
Made dinner for 20 in Glenmore Park today, on a barbecue about the size of a double bed that fluctuated between 700 degrees and 100 degrees, having been blown out by the wind. Beef tenderloin, and lamb kabobs, and a lot of extras. It was fun, but I’m tired. I wanted to tell you though that a) that my sister shaved her head (bald) this morning for Kids Cancer Care (and she had beautiful, long, wavy, thick hair), raising over $745 to send kids to camp, and b) what I decided to do with that $6 burning a hole in my pocket.
I do appreciate the resounding call to donate to the food bank. Yes $6 turns into $24 worth’ of food. I am doing something else for the food bank though, a project that will (I hope) earn much more than $24, and provide a more long-term income stream. Or trickle, anyway. If all goes well.
Also, it occurred to me that by adding the $6 to the CIFB pot the “pay it forward” aspect would be lost. The whole point is to do something nice – out of the blue – for someone, thus inspiring them to do the same and pass it on. And so on. I think a donation to the food bank, albeit a fantastic cause, would stop that chain.
So, although you guys came up with an amazing number of suggestions, I kind of got stuck on Carolyn’s bread idea. And yes, I could sell them for $6 apiece and raise more money for whatever cause (which is exactly what Aviv is doing – and charging $6, even!), but to be honest I think my time is better spent in other ways. I’ve been directly involved with 12 different fundraising efforts since January and though I love doing it, I can’t create another long-term project! We all know how well I do with new commitments.
What really made me consider the magnitude of passing out homemade bread was a (legless) man I passed on the street downtown last Sunday. Suffice to say he really looked like he could have used that $6, and I actually rifled around my bag for it, but came up with only about 32 cents. But as I walked away it occurred to me that $6 would buy a single loaf of that quality, and more likely go toward a $4 loaf of crappy Wonder Bread at 7-11 or a few cheeseburgers at McDonalds – quantity tends to reign over quality in these situations. And none of those foods would come homemade by someone who cared about the recipient. Being baked for is a wonderful thing, and some people rarely experience that. Something I have learned over the course of my lifetime (you could say one thing I know for sure) is that nothing compares to the feeling that you are worth the effort.
So I bought a 10 kg. bag of flour for (around) $6 (OK it was $8, but it was a much better deal than the smaller bag). (I’ll have to cheat and donate the yeast and salt myself – a minor detail.) Estimating a cup of flour at 4 oz., the bag should produce around 29 loaves of bread, with enough left over to flour the tea towels. Not bad, hey? And I can’t imagine anyone not feeling better for being on the receiving end of a freshly baked loaf. Not only those living on the street – a couple days ago I dropped off my first, to a friend with a new baby (her third) who has just gone back to work. I’ve also printed off some recipes, so that those who get them can make them themselves (with a nod to Jamie’s Pass it On movement) if they like – a good skill for anyone to have, but particularly those with little money. I’ve labeled the bag and will bake from it and deliver the loaves until the flour is gone. I’m a little curious how long it will take to bake 29 loaves. I’m not in a huge rush to power through it.
It near killed me to not have any of the bread I had spent so long smelling as it baked and then cooled, crackling, on the countertop. (W likes to reenact the scene from Ratatouille wherein the French girl describes how to identify a good loaf of bread – “not the look, not the taste, but the sound – only great bread sound this way.” – You must say this in your thickest French accent.)
I hope these photos will inspire any of you who have not yet tried the no-knead to give it a whirl, even though it’s getting to be too hot to have the oven on. There’s rain in the forecast all weekend – as good as excuse as any to bake bread, I think. Honestly – look at it! Is that not a gorgeous loaf of bread?
No-Knead Bread
Adapted from Jim Lahey at the Sullivan Street Bakery in Manhattan
3 cups all-purpose or bread flour, plus more for dusting (I sometimes use half whole wheat and half all-purpose with a shake of ground flax seed)
¼ tsp. instant or regular dry yeast
1 tsp. salt
In a large bowl stir together the flour, yeast and salt. Add 1 ½ cups water and stir until blended; the dough will be shaggy and sticky. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a plate and let it rest on the countertop for 18-24 hours (yes, at room temperature).
When you’re almost ready to bake (the dough is ready when it has doubled in size and the surface is dotted with bubbles) generously flour a tea towel – the smoothest you can find – the dough will stick to a terrycloth towel – and scrape the dough out of the bowl onto it. Sprinkle the top of the dough with some flour and fold it over on itself once or twice, roughly shaping it into a ball. Generously flour it on top an fold the tea towel over to cover it. Let it sit for another hour.
While the bread is resting, preheat the oven to 450°F with a 6-8 quart heavy covered pot (cast iron, enamel, Pyrex or ceramic) inside as it heats. When it’s hot, carefully remove the pot from the oven, slide your hand under the towel and flip the dough over into the pot; it will probably look like a mess, but that’s OK. Cover and bake for 30 minutes, then remove the lid and bake another 10-15 minutes, until it’s nice and golden. Eat up!
One Year Ago: Black Bean Quesadillas
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June 04 2009 | bread | 26 Comments »
Tomorrow night, I get to play chef at an outdoor barbecue in Glenmore Park. In preparation, one of the hosts dropped off some lamb for me to prepare. Some beautiful 4H lamb. Thirty-eight pounds of lamb. An entire lamb, more or less. Minus the identifiable bits.
It’s all cubed for kebabs, but since there will only be 20 in attendance there’s a little surplus here to play with. I thought I’d grind some up in the food processor and make lamb meatballs as a starter. Rather than do my usual feta-oregano-currants-mint medley, the bottle of tandoori spice mix I just picked up (from a friend who just started his own spice company) caught my eye, and I shook a good dose of that over the meat instead, with a few cloves of garlic and a glug of olive oil, and then pulsed it to grind the lot.
And so just to make sure it was edible, since it is technically for company, I shaped some of the meat into patties, making them a little concave in the middle so that they don’t come out all domed, and grilled them as I would any burger. The tzatziki on top ensured we would all have garlic burps for at least the next 24 hours.
Except for W, who ate frozen blueberries and leftover cold and leathery quesadillas.
(With black beans squished in with the cheese. Sucker!)
P.S.: Good News! The Hillhurst-Sunnyside Farmers’ Market is open again, every Wednesday between 3:30-7:30 until Thanksgiving! Yahoo!
P.P.S: My sister is shaving her head (bald) tomorrow for the Kids Cancer Care Foundation of Alberta. (She is a grade 6 teacher, and letting her students do the shaving.) I was just re-reading her email about it, and think it’s worth sharing:
I had the honour, recently, of visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. As I walked through the museum, I reflected on the importance of bearing witness – on the value of seeing and knowing and empathizing, and of carrying that knowledge with me as I complete my life’s work. Leaving the museum, I was profoundly grateful never to have experienced those horrors in my own life – to have come so far without having suffered the tragedies experienced by others. Of the great many powerful images, personal accounts and words of wisdom I saw that day, one quote really resonated with me. Just at the end of the museum, there was the famous quote from Martin Niemöller which said – First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out — ?
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out — ?
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — ?
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.
Every year, the school where I teach hosts a charity head-shaving event to raise funds for cancer research and to send kids with cancer to camp. Every year I watch with pride as our brave young students step up to do their part to make a difference. I’ve never participated because my life has never been touched by cancer –
I am not a mother of a child with cancer;
I am not the daughter of a parent with cancer;
I am not the sister of a woman with cancer;
I am not the teacher of a student with cancer.
There has never been any particular reason for me to stand up to support those whose lives have been struck by the tragedy of this disease. This year, I looked at the opportunity to participate with a different perspective – I may not be a mother of a child with cancer, but I am a mother. I am a daughter. I am a sister and I am a teacher, and when I see the images and read the accounts of people battling this terrible disease, I know the wisdom of the saying, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’.
This year I am giving my hair in thanks – an act of gratitude for being so lucky as to have my children healthy and whole, my parents well, my sisters strong and my students thriving. It is my way of bearing witness to the suffering of others and to stand up, in some small way, to make things a little better. Just because I can. How fortunate am I?
One Year Ago: Roasted Chicken and Potatoes
June 03 2009 | lamb and on the grill | 18 Comments »
OK, the cake was last night. We were at a birthday party though, and were having too much fun to leave early, and so by the time we got home and got W into bed I found myself making strawberry-rhubarb blintzes at midnight for CBC this morning rather than letting you all know about dinner. It was sausages on the grill, by the way, and salads chipped in by everybody, and dessert was a cake I thought up awhile ago and needed an excuse to make. Lucky for me, our friend Mike was born on this day a number of years ago.
It occurred to me one day while I was, as usual, daydreaming/fantasizing about food, and chocolate and whipped cream in particular, that you could mound something more elaborate into the middle of a sunken chocolate cake than plain old whipped cream. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) To swirl some crushed raspberries into the cream first to make fool would be fab – although I’ve never been a huge fan of the raspberry-chocolate combo (I love both, but I find they interfere with each other when a perfectly good slice of chocolate cake is set atop raspberry coulis) everyone else seems to like it. So why buck tradition?
Unfortunately the market had no raspberries, so I defaulted to blackberries. I crushed them a bit with some sugar, but they didn’t have much oomph. Next time I will seek out raspberries – even the frozen kind in light syrup would work well with some of the excess liquid drained off.
Everyone loved it though – unless they were just trying to be polite. The cake itself is a keeper – and it contains no flour.
Sunken Chocolate Cake with Berry Fool
This cake is heavenly – intensely chocolate and ridiculously easy to make, which makes it the ideal cake to draw into service for birthdays and other special occasions. The cake rises in the oven and then sinks in the middle when you take it out, creating a perfect vessel for a mound of whipped cream. Not only does the cream ease the intensity of the chocolate, it counts as decoration so there’s – ta da – no need for frosting! If you want to fancy it up a bit, top the cake with a dusting of cocoa or chocolate curls. Sparklers are perfect – candles are easily lost in the cloud of cream.
Cake:
8 oz. (250 g) semisweet or bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup butter, softened or cut into chunks
6 large eggs
1 cup sugar
Topping:
1 pint raspberries or blackberries (optional)
1 1/2 cups whipping cream
1/4 cup sugar, divided
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line the bottom of a 9″ springform pan with a circle of waxed paper or parchment – use the bottom of the pan to trace a circle on the paper, then cut it out with scissors. Don’t grease the pan – the batter needs to be able to cling to the sides as it rises.
Gently melt the chocolate with the butter in a glass or stainless steel bowl set over a bowl or pot of hot or gently simmering water, or do it on low in the microwave. (If you have a double boiler, use it, but it’s not essential.) The thing to remember when melting chocolate is to do it gently, and not let it come in contact with intense heat; chocolate scorches and can seize up easily.
Separate 4 of the eggs, putting the yolks and whites in separate medium-sized bowls. Add the remaining 2 eggs and half of the sugar to the egg yolks. Whisk in the warm chocolate mixture and stir until it’s smooth.
Beat the egg whites with an electric mixer until foamy. Gradually add the remaining sugar, beating until the egg whites form soft mounds but aren’t yet stiff. Fold about one-quarter of the egg whites into the chocolate mixture to lighten it, and then gently fold in the rest, without deflating the egg whites. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top.
Bake for 35-40 minutes, until the cake is puffy and cracked on top, and the middle isn’t wobbly. Cool the cake completely in the pan without loosening the sides; the batter needs to cling to the sides of the pan as it cools so that it can properly sink in the middle and keep its high edges.
If you’re making fool for on top, gently crush the berries with half the sugar – I did this with a potato masher. Set aside to macerate for 10 minutes or so. When you’re ready to serve the cake, beat the cream with the rest of the sugar (if you are making fool – otherwise just with 2-3 Tbsp. sugar) until softly stiff and mound the whipped cream in the middle of the cake. Run a thin knife around the edge of the pan to loosen the cake, remove the sides of the pan and transfer it to a serving plate, leaving the cake on the pan bottom. Serves about 12.
For dinner tonight we used up the leftover grilled veg in sandwiches, built on grainy toast spread thickly with peppered Boursin cheese. It was a fridge cleaner of the very best kind.
One Year Ago: Pasta with Asparagus and Boursin Cheese, and Gluten-free Brownies
(anyone else see a trend here?)
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June 02 2009 | leftovers | 20 Comments »
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