It was a day for cheesy baked onion soup if ever there was one. I did take a stab at driving out to Red Deer this morning, the car loaded down with Boeuf Bourguignon, roasted tomato soup, chocolate-hazelnut-espresso shortbread and hot fudge sauce for 16, and managed to head out of town right when the storm hit. I did make it off the highway and turned around in Airdrie, although I pondered sitting in the Boston Pizza parking lot with a dozen or so other people sitting bewildered in their cars wondering what to do – instead I stuck it out and made it back, and in fact once back in the city pushed on to IKEA, since I was on the Deerfoot anyway and thinking no one in their right minds would attempt to go pick up a tree in all this. Apparently many other pre-weekend tree shoppers had the same idea. We now are the proud owners of a slightly malformed but delightful tree that will hopefully stay alive until Christmas. (Can’t complain, it was pretty much free.) If the needles start to prematurely start to fall off, we’ll spray it with green spray paint and call it fake.
The rest of the day was a marathon attempt at pulling the house back into some semblance of order, and looking back it’s a good thing we were shut in by the storm, because I have events tomorrow and brunch Sunday morning and then everyone arrives for our Julie & Julia party Sunday night. (We were hoping for advance copies of the movie to watch, but since they don’t ship out until Tuesday, Pierre has promised copies of Julia Child’s The French Chef on VHS.) So I’m proud to say that I’m lying on clean sheets right this very minute, and I cleaned off the top of the fridge (also known as our junk drawer) and even scrubbed the little space beside the oven where the cookie sheets go. As for the walls, we’re just going to have to paint them.
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December 04 2009 | soup | 85 Comments »
See how I did that there? Made dinner sound like something you’d pay a fortune for (or I would, anyway) if you ordered it off a restaurant menu? Really what “deconstructed” means is I ate what calorically counted as dinner standing up over the stove, mopping sticky, olive-oily tomato juices and teak-coloured cloves of garlic off the roasting pan with chunks of warm biscuit. It was so good I couldn’t even make it to the table. When Mike and W came downstairs, they got leftover warmed soup and eggs on toast, respectively.
I realize this sounds like far more of a summer meal than one you’d make while knocking on winter’s door. (Hell, winter opened its door and invited us in weeks ago – it was -17 this morning!) But I happened to have stopped in at Forage this afternoon to pick up the assorted 80s CDs they borrowed, and happened to notice the giant stack of freshly baked biscuits strategically placed beside the cash register. I mean LOOK AT THEM. Humuna humuna.
They totally taste like they look. I weaseled the recipe out of Wade, but it’s his aunt’s recipe, and so I was made to swear it would never leave my house. He does however teach biscuit-making classes, and they’re well worth the hour or so you get to spend hanging out with him in the kitchen. You can check out all his fun events here – I’ve been thinking too that we should all reserve their 20-seat table for a farm table dinner sometime after we’ve finished digesting Christmas and sit around the table and eat and drink wine together. What do you think?
Hey guess what? As I was typing that last sentence I got an email from Wade, completely unpestered on my part, saying OK fine, you can go ahead and post the recipe on your blog. Because your readers are so great. OK, that last part was just me.
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December 03 2009 | bread | 32 Comments »
Two years ago tonight I wrote about the loss of a great love in my life named Rachael. Looking
back I’m reminded of likening her to a guru – I had at the time, like everyone else, been reading Eat, Pray, Love, and learned that the idea behind having a guru is that the merits of your guru will reveal to you your own hidden greatness. I’ve never heard a better definition of true friendship.
Of course I have other friends who could be described in much the same way, but I’ll always miss Rachael. Her laugh. Her feet. Her wonky hair, and the way she lost only half of it, on one side, including one eyebrow. Her touchy-hugginess. Her stunning voice (that girl could sing). And her absolutely genuine enthusiasm for every little thing she’d come across in a given day, from the leftovers she brought to work for lunch to her rainy bike ride home. She was so enamoured with food that one day in late November, in the palliative care ward, barely speaking and having not had much actual food to eat, another friend fed her a perfect strawberry and she leaned her head back on her pillow and said the F word. I remember her laugh with perfect clarity some days, but as soon as it comes I worry that it may fade, like a photocopy of a photocopy, each time I replay it in my memory; that it might be tarnished and twisted into something that’s not quite right anymore. And other days I think about beet risotto.
Rach told me about a beet risotto she made once soon after we met – raved about it, even. It was in a copy of Australian Women’s Weekly or some such; she could never quite find it, but it always brought it up, oohing over how fantastic it was, how brilliantly coloured and just so delicious. She never did find me the recipe, but still I think about it more often than not when I pick up a beet.
I half-heartedly flipped through a few websites this morning to see if I could find one, but none jumped out. I kept thinking about it, and her, and when it came to be dinnertime and the boys were at the dog park, I decided that if I was going to think about it, and her, I might as well be peeling and grating a beet while I’m at it.
And that’s how the risotto came to be. I had a little over an hour before having to leave for my Artemis meeting, so it’s not like the evening stretched out before me in which to revel in creative dinner preparation. But risotto is the sort of thing that’s perfect to do while cleaning up Play-Doh, unloading the dishwasher, running down to the laundry, and jumping over to your laptop. You can step away from it. Just don’t forget it entirely while you check your email.
I gave the (large!) grated beet a turn in the pot with some butter and oil, then added about a cup of short-grain (Arborio) rice, and added a 1L tetra pack of chicken stock in bits, stirring as often as was needed, until it turned into risotto. I finished it at the end with a little blob of butter and a whack of grated Parmesan for good measure. I had a pork roast in the oven that had spent some time in a plastic bag with some balsamic vinegar, olive oil and barbecue rub, and some mixed greens. Mike loved the risotto – very intense he said, very potent. I wasn’t enamoured at first, but it grew on me. When I got home from my meeting I managed to shovel a few cold mouthfuls in before bed, so I must have liked it. I’m not sure I’ve done Rachael’s recipe justice, but at least I finally made it. And had she not planted that seed, the combination would never have occurred to me. (I mean look at it – it resembles some sort of fluorescent red ground beef or sea coral or something.)
Thanks Rach.
One Year Ago: Olives, Goat Feta, Roasted Carrot Hummus, Spiced Pecans, and Bubble and Squeak
December 01 2009 | grains | 24 Comments »
