Archive for September, 2009
I’ve been part of a wife swap this week. As I may have mentioned in the past, my sister is a single mum of three and works (more than) full time as a teacher. These past two days she’s had more on her plate than usual, so I’ve gone over to play spouse, to be another grown-up to bounce things off of (luckily I’m very bouncy), to help with barfing kids and homework and laundry.
As a bonus, W and I have been fed dinner for two days straight – turkey meatballs with mashed potatoes, gravy and cranberry sauce today and stuffed chicken yesterday – both prepped at the end of summer vacation and stashed in the freezer. (Each August she puts away enough to not worry about dinner until Christmas vacation. She’s the Organized One. But I suppose she has to be.) I’ll tell you about the turkey meatballs sometime – I have some in my freezer, too.
But this afternoon when the crème brûlée withdrawl hit and I started fantasizing while sitting at my computer that if I turned into a chocolate Easter bunny I could chew off my own arm, I snuck downstairs and made two s’mores in the toaster oven.
Who needs a campfire, anyway? For that matter, who needs graham crackers? I wouldn’t serve them up with a pot of tea – it’s like good bread; if I’m going to eat a sticky chocolate marshmallow sandwich, it ought to be between cookies I actually like.
To make s’mores inside, put as many cookies as you want onto a cookie sheet, and top each with a large marshmallow (or two). Put them under the broiler for a few minutes, until dark golden and crispy on top, then take them out, top each with a thin square of chocolate (Lindt 70% cocoa works great) and top with another cookie; the chocolate will melt with the heat of the marshmallow. Yum.
One Year Ago: Chili-Lime Shrimp with Avocado
September 22 2009 | cookies & squares | 16 Comments »
I hear a lot about winery tours, and to be completely up front about it, it has never really jazzed me that much. I picture off-the-path roads winding up hot, dry, scrubby mainland-BC hills (I know, sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it?) to pretentious-ish clay buildings filled with un-disheveled people swishing wine around in glasses and using words like “nose” and “jammy” and “millerandage“.
You know what? Totally not.
Township 7 was right by the side of the road, their grapes growing up a sloping embankment beside the main building. A long table draped in white linen was set up outside, closed in by stacks of oak barrels. We chatted and introduced ourselves to each other over wine and thick wedges of fresh peaches wrapped in prosciutto (with a fresh basil leaf pressed against the side of the fruit before wrapping) and quartered tiny sweet pears topped with a local blue cheese, a bit of honeycomb (from Blair and Cheryl at the Similkameen Apiary) and toasted hazelnuts.
This meal was the highlight of the aforementioned 24 best food hours of my life (thus far) – a statement I don’t make likely, but which I may have to extend to 48 hours. The spread was put on by Cam and Dana of Joy Road Catering (cuisine du terroir). Remember that name: JOY ROAD CATERING. If I ever get married again, which is not all that unlikely after leaving Mike with W in the hotel room for days while I ate and drank at wineries and boutique hotels, I’m going to the Okanagan just so that they can cook for the wedding. I wouldn’t think it at all unreasonable to move to the region simply to be closer to them.
Dinner was served family-style: locally-raised lamb loin and braised lamb shoulder, served with homemade anchovy aioli (which I admit I spread onto my bread, it was so good); buttery corn, grown in fields we had driven past:
tiny, thin green beans of the sort none of us had seen before; thickly-sliced heirloom tomatoes; a just-plucked spinach salad, baskets of rustic bread with fresh, sweet butter. I could not stop eating. Between the food, wine, table setting, people around it and locale, it was absolutely perfect. I can’t honestly imagine a better meal. (When people ask what my most memorable meal was, I generally don’t have one. Now I do.)
We drank Black Cloud Pinot Noir and others from the Township 7 cellar. For dessert, Cam & Dana’s plum tarts were so divine I couldn’t believe my dinner companions weren’t fainting dead away as they ate them. Taryn brought hers up to her cheek and stroked it. I looked desperately around for someone who may have left a piece of one, or who had perhaps snuck off to the loo halfway through dessert so that I could swipe theirs. For the next two days Taryn and I would just look at each other and say “plum tart” and shed a quiet tear.
Luckily for us Joy Road has a stall at the Saturday morning farmers’ market in Penticton (an impressive one, I must add – blocks long and bursting with wonderful things, direct from the farmers, which you might assume is a given at a farmers’ market, but which is not). There was one lonely plum tart left when we arrived at close to 10 – Dana had saved it for us – tart and intensely flavored wedges of plum tucked into a thick but tender, buttery, shortbreadlike pâte brisée, with the subtlest baked custard of sorts to fill in the gaps. Since we had to share, we bought small galettes and sticky pecan buns to round out breakfast.
But that’s another story.
One Year Ago: Chicken Soup and Maple Pumpkin Panna Cotta
September 21 2009 | eating out | 22 Comments »
My muffin top has transformed this week into a full-on three-tiered wedding cake-top. (With me playing the girl bursting out of the top of the cake, if you can envision it – or at least bursting out of my capris.) But each tier is so totally worth it.
To refresh your memory, I’m at the Okanagan Food and Wine Writers’ Workshop – the first annual – a small group of 11 attendees plus a handful of presenters (me, Taryn, Michele and Craille) and Food Girl (Wonder Woman`s culinary cousin), who pulled this all together. The food is sublime. I mean truly-not just some of it, all of it, with wine always following close behind. (And before. And during. And after.) I’m going to crash head-on into food withdrawl tomorrow at around lunchtime. I’ve also just realized I haven’t made dinner in over a week. So not complaining.
Forgive me for backtracking here, but I just can’t keep up, and have to linger a bit over each venue to avoid diluting them all. Let me preface this by expressing publicly how IDIOTIC I am to have driven through the Okanagan approximately once a year for I don’t know, MY ENTIRE LIFE and not once curled around the bottom of the Okanagan Lake and paid a visit to Naramata.
Lunch today was received on the backyard patio of the century-old Naramata Inn, at the end of main street Naramata. (If you`ve never been, it`s a town totally worth poking around – they have a general store where you can procure fantastic local wines and a bag of sour gummy worms, and there`s a small grassy park and beach a few blocks away.) The tiny hotel itself, which back in its day was a girls`school, is something out of an old American sitcom or romantic comedy- the idyllic quaint-country-inn setting of a couple`s first weekend away together, where hilarity (or drama, or romantic angst) ensues.
For lunch they brought out warm rock oven-baked focaccia with olive oil and salt, with platters of local tomatoes, plums, trocedero melons, chantrelle mushrooms, purple basil from their garden, Poplar Grove double cream camembert, dry cured bison, shinkenspeck, bruleed chicken pate and duck rillette. We drank house-made sparkling cider and an `07 Reserve Chardonnay from Joie. Then two of us shared crispy chicken under a brick (served on polenta, with cubes of sweet potato) and a roasted squash and chicken pizza topped with fresh basil.
Dinner was at Township 7, but seeing as it`s five to one in the morning, you`ll have to wait for that installment. I can`t rush this one.
And also? I dropped $100 today on 8 bottles of vinegar. Don`t tell Mike.
September 20 2009 | eating out | 9 Comments »
Oh my, I have fallen behind, haven’t I? I ditched the rest of the Okanagan Food and Wine Writers’ group, who are heading for an interactive wine blending session at Laughing Stock Vineyards, so I could get you all up to speed. If you’d care to indulge me a bit, I’ll sum up the past 64 hours or so – I still have photos to upload from our last day in Vegas, where we went to Hash House A-Go-Go! Yes we did! And I can’t wait to tell you about it!
The week has gone roughly as follows: Monday I disconnected at 11am to check out of our hotel in Vegas. Our flight wasn’t until late that night, so we cabbed it off the strip to Hash House A-Go-Go, then to the outlet mall (again, no sign of recession there), and between customs and the cab home, then kissing W approximately a hundred thousand times, I didn’t crawl into bed until after 2am, at which point I promptly got insomnia.
Tuesday morning I was thrust back into the thick of it early – phone calls, emails, the accountant (did I tell you I’m being audited?), and then I left for Red Deer at noon to teach a class on cooking for kids with allergies to a group of day care cooks. Arrived home again at 8pm and read W stories before unpacking, doing laundry, repacking and doing a ton of prep for BT on Wednesday morning, which took until almost midnight. I did BT (cooking with rice) on Wednesday morning, then ran home to tape some segments for Good Bite, and left for the Okanagan at noon. We arrived at about 8pm local time (construction and a motorcycle accident that closed a chunk of the highway slowed us down quite a bit), having spent most of the drive filling out stacks of legal-sized documents for my accountant (they want to know how much I spent on everything in 2003 – food, cel phone, shoes-who remembers this?) – we arrived at the Delta around 8pm, an hour and a half after dinner started, so I peeled off my disgusting car clothes, put on what I had that was the least wrinkled, and ran over to RauDZ, where I arrived just in time for the entrees. (Even though I was late, they managed to bring mine along with everyone else’s.)
continue reading »
September 18 2009 | eating out | 10 Comments »
Vegas days are like dog years. We all just want to go home, but our itinerary won’t let us leave until late tomorrow night.
My roommates agree Mandalay Bay is a cash grab. I had to pay another $15 US to reconnect to the internet tonight to post this, and this time noticed the fine print – $15 per day, per room, PER LAPTOP. (So if A and I both wanted to connect, that would be $30 US. FOR AN INTERNET CONNECTION THEY HAVE ANYWAY.) And here I thought I’d be losing my money on the slots.
(I think I may have already mentioned that the TravelLodge offers free coffee, free airport shuttle, free breakfast AND free internet access, all for the low low price of $40. None of these come with our $189-$319/night price tag – only a cot on the first night when your room isn’t ready yet.)
Sorry to be so complainy. I know I’m lucky to be here. And we are having a lot of fun. But I’m not independantly wealthy, and I miss M and W.
Everyone but the three of us (A, S and I, who came together) left this afternoon, having arrived on Thursday morning. The three of us found a Walgreen’s and bought bags of prunes, dried fruit, trail mix and nuts. (That’s right, we ate prunes and had naps in Vegas. Now that stays in Vegas.)
We don’t leave until tomorrow night, so got tickets to a show (Cirque du Soliel’s Zumanity, which was great, as Cirque always is, but very exotic). I can’t believe how many shows are going on here at a given night – Donnie and Marie, Rita Rudner, Cher, Bette Midler, Carrot Top. We booked a late show so while we were cleaned up we could make a night of it and go to dinner first. A & S let me choose the restaurant. We stopped in at Bouchon this afternoon, but it closes in the afternoons and we were too sweaty to stick around – so that’s the plan for tomorrow’s breakfast.
Oh Chelsey. Thanks for the recommendation (you too Lisa), but you must have been luckier on your visit than we were. It certainly was memorable – just not in a good way.
I chose Mix - easy access, as it was on the 64th (!!) floor of our hotel, and it is really fabulous inside with incredible views (we peeked the night we got here). However. It will go down as one of the most expensive AND most disappointing meals of my life. (Sorry. But it was.)
The menu they have posted on their website is not the same as the one they had tonight, which was about half the size and not as interesting. but it does give you a sense of the prices. Of course, if we had an internet connection earlier we could have perused the menus and would have noticed how spendy it was before we pulled up a chair and ordered a Moscato.
A had a small, cold consomme that was pretty but plain, and an appetizer potato gnocchi that was, as she put it, “just OK”. (For $26, a small appetizer-sized bowl of potato gnocchi with mushrooms ought to blow your mind, or come with a steak, or something.) We got a kick out of the “fork-crushed potatoes” – FORK crushed? Wow!)
S had John Dory (fish, with zucchini ratatouille) and I ordered the duck – might as well get something I don’t normally have at home.
There were two slabs of breast meat, and the only thing that distinguished them from pork was the fatty skin – otherwise it had next to no flavour and was so sinewy it was difficult to cut through. The sauce, which was described as an olive sauce, tasted like no more than slightly thickened soy sauce (A and S agreed) and was slopped over the edge of the plate. There was a line of teeny olive halves down the middle that tasted as if they had been soaked in wine. (Not sure if they actually were.) The vegetable was a small rectangle of white daikon, topped with three peeled radish halves that, as A pointed out, looked like baby mice.
I gave up about a third of the way into one of the pieces of duck, and pushed my plate aside, the piece of meat I had been knawing at not so delicately mangled.
Our server walked by twice and looked at the plate, looked at me, and said nothing. Then he sent a busboy over to clear our plates (mine still hardly touched) without a word. He came and offered dessert and coffee in an overly smiley and insencere salesman-ish sort of way and when we said no, thanks, he brought the bill, without ever asking how our dinner was.
I’m not particularly picky but I’m of the school of thought that when you’re spending that kind of money the service should be a little better than what we get at Swiss Chalet. It was a sharp contrast to the genuine and superb service we had at Aureole last night.
When our bill arrived, A was charged $10 for her sparkling water (understandable), and S and I $10 for our still water. I really really hate when a restaurant does that – comes at the beginning and asks if you want sparkling or still and you just ask for plain old water and they then charge you $10 for bottled water that could have just come from the tap. Our bill, for three bubbly drinks, an entree for S and I and soup and an appetizer for A, and water – no nibbles or dessert or coffee – was $200. I spent $70 US on about four bites of very untasty food and a champagne flute of Moscato. And a glass of water.
We headed over to New York New York for our show and (finally!) found a great little pizza place that sold big, bendy slices for $3.50, and ate them in the theatre lineup. They were great – what we should have had to begin with!
We have to check out by 11, so I’m going to sign off so that I can shower and pack. If I can find a connection later today, watch for an update! Otherwise it’s back home by 1am, then off to Red Deer to teach another allergy class tomorrow.
September 14 2009 | leftovers | 40 Comments »
« Prev - Next »
