Archive for February, 2010
Not surprisingly, the majority of food consumption in our house today occurred during the gold medal hockey game (yay Canada! that goes for the women’s hockey team, too) and was served from our coffee table. What a game. What a couple weeks. For Vancouverites, tomorrow is going to be the morning after the four years before. (By the way, if you’re in the Vancouver area and are up before 7am tomorrow, I’ll on CBC radio discussing that very topic! Having been through the same in Calgary in ’88 and all, I guess I’m somewhat of an expert on what to do when you wake up in the morning and the Olympics aren’t coming anymore.)
My mom brought a Hunter’s Pie, filled with lean elk simmered in dark ale gravy with mushrooms, carrots and pearl onions, from Wapiti Ways.
Ali made Greek salad and garlicky guacamole and I did up some potato skins – not that I ate much of anything after filling up on half a dozen chocolate puddle cookies, warm from the oven.
And wow, did I make fast friends with these. OK, favourite cookie might be a little extreme – I could never be faithful to any one cookie. I’m fickle. I have food moods. But although I can’t promise to be monogamous, I think it’s safe to say I’ll love the chocolate puddle cookie for the rest of my life.
I had seen them on 101 Cookbooks, which triggered a memory of a similar cookie I used to make a decade ago. Within days an email came from my mom in Tofino, raving about a particular nutty chocolate cookie they kept cleaning SoBo out of, and her description matched them exactly. So since they’re freshly home from a few weeks away and came over to watch the game, I made a batch. They’re as simple to make as any cookie – you stir together icing sugar, cocoa and salt, add chopped nuts, egg whites and vanilla, drop in glops and bake.
They don’t come across as meringues, and aren’t as ridiculously sweet as one would think they’d be with 4 cups of icing sugar. They were crackly on the outside but wonderfully chewy and intensely dark, likely due to my Bernard Callebaut cocoa – completely devoid of butter but loaded with nuts (read: healthy fats) – SoBo uses pecans, my Mom recalls – but I jammed them with nice fresh walnuts. Next on my to-do list: pecans or toasted hazelnuts. Trust me: make these.
Chocolate Walnut Puddle Cookies
adapted from 101 Cookbooks
3 cups walnuts, pecans or hazelnuts
4 cups icing sugar
2/3 cup cocoa
1/2 tsp. fine sea salt
4 large egg whites
1 Tbsp. good vanilla extract
Preheat oven to 350F.
Toast your walnuts or pecans, cool them and roughly chop them. In a large bowl, stir together the icing sugar, cocoa and salt. Add the nuts, then stir in the egg whites and vanilla. Stir until well combined.
Line a baking sheet with parchment and drop the batter in large mounds (about 2 Tbsp. each – I used a heaped soup spoon) spacing them well away from each other – no more than 6 cookies per sheet. Bake for 13-15 minutes – they will spread, puff, crack on top, get glossy and then turn matte. Slide the cookies on the parchment off the sheet onto a cooling rack and let them cool.
Makes 18 large cookies.
February 28 2010 | cookies & squares | 28 Comments »
It would appear I’ve erased the photos of our 24 hours in Banff; not sure how I managed this, but I have. It’s amazing what I can accomplish when I’m not even paying attention.
So I can’t even show you the blast from the past photos from our old-school Banff overnighter – we had a sleepover at the Banff Park Lodge last night, and dinner (strawberry margarita and Loco Gringo Salad – hey, it’s tradition) amid snowboarders at Magpie & Stump.
W had his first introduction to chocolate bear claws and Rundle rock (chocolate dipped sponge toffee named after Mt. Rundle) at The Fudgery in the Sundance Mall. (As kids, this was our post-ski stop before the drive back to Calgary or our hotel; my sisters always got candy apples, but I chose fudge or something chocolate-and-caramelly – I wasn’t about to get suckered into fruit on a stick, disguised as chocolate.) M and W spent much of the evening/morning in the pool, and I did a talk to a group of anesthesia residents, who were subjected to listening to me babble and make romesco dip and bean cookies for an hour or so.
But I guess I can tell you about the quickie I made when we got home and I needed some sort of ballast against our breakfast buffet, road coffees and far too much nibbling from the fudge bag. (I did not intend that to be a metaphor for ANYTHING, just to be clear.)
We weren’t much in the mood to eat or cook when we got home, but I needed something – so I skilleted a can of chick peas in hot oil and garlic, much the same way I do roasted chick peas with chard, but quicker, and with a dab of curry paste. I tore in a few sad chard leaves, then topped it with a poached egg, as W had required poached eggs on toast for dinner.
Honestly, it was one of the best things I’ve eaten in awhile.
February 27 2010 | eggs | 11 Comments »
For the boys, anyway. Uninspired but wanting to get rid of the wad of poorly arranged chicken thighs from my freezer, I skinned them and threw them in the slow cooker with a carrot, celery stalk, red pepper, lots of garlic, chicken stock and a couple handfuls of lentils and barley. The dry beans and grains absorbed almost all the liquid – almost like I planned it that way – but I couldn’t give the ratios here; aim to have the liquid come about halfway up the chicken, make sure the dry stuff is stirred in rather than propped on top, and you’ll be fine.
As for me, well, Chef Giuseppe Di Gennaro from Capo cooked for me tonight. There might have been some other people around too – I didn’t really notice. It was the Avenue Magazine Food Awards, where they revealed the much-anticipated March issue (and Paul is on the cover! Yay Paul! Yay Rouge!) which is famous for its list of the Top 25 Things to Eat in Calgary (by Cinda Chavich) and the city’s best restaurants, by vote. Rouge was named Restaurant of the Year and Capo once again came in as “Worth the Splurge” (it’s worth getting yourself a sugar Daddy – or sugar Momma, whichever the case may be). And so to celebrate, Giuseppe came to make us fresh ravioli:
(I think my knees just went weak typing that. And I’m sitting down.) They were made with fresh pasta of course, stuffed with mascarpone and ricotta and doused in some sort of pure meat heaven reduction. I did get the recipe but I’m not going to even bother relaying because I can’t imagine it could possibly hold a candle to going down there and having them make it for you. And it looks like it requires a lot of dishes.
As for the rest of the list, I could hardly relay it all here – but Avenue hits the stands any day now.
February 26 2010 | slow cooker | 9 Comments »
A fabulous meal of Buffalo Horn Ranch bison au jus, scalloped potatoes, roasted beets and house-made goat cheese, cucumber salad, braised red cabbage and thickly buttered baguette (all passed around twice); then Saskatoon cobbler with vanilla ice cream, tea and coffee: $49.
Bottle of wine: $35.
Leftover biscuits on the way out: free.
Getting to sit down to dinner and laugh with so many of you: priceless.
Beating Russia was pretty sweet too.
I realize that ripping off a MasterCard commercial was extraordinarily cheesy, but it’s all I’ve got.
I’ve been lulled into submission by too much red meat and red wine and a double serving of carbohydrates for dessert, and all of that is being pummelled by a 4 year old who has already turned sideways and gone all starfish in my bed and is repeatedly kicking me in the side of the gut.
But it really was a great night – I loved meeting the seventeen of you who came – the Farm Table Dinners at Forage are a great happy medium between going to a restaurant and eating at home, family-style. (As K put it, it’s like a big family dinner – without the fighting. Or the dishes. And Grandma is a spectacularly good chef.)
A huge thanks to Wade, Sue and the crew for making it happen and feeding us so well. (But honestly. Why do I have to be such a dweeb? Could I possibly turn down the crazy I-want-to-kill-and-eat-you-in-your-sleep expression on my face? It is in no way indicative of how my dinner made me feel. Have a good sleep, now.)
February 25 2010 | eating out | 25 Comments »
Reduce, reuse, recycle, right? Does that count toward recipes for Spaghetti Pie?
Because when I identified the bag of frozen-solid mystery meat as chunks of crumbled meatloaf (and the bag? it was a bread bag from a new line of grainy breads I’m currently enjoying – Silver Hills – I bought mine at Co-Op)
it triggered a memory of spaghetti pie, which fit my dinner profile perfectly considering I also had frozen spinach and a container of freshly made ricotta and half a can of diced tomatoes in the fridge. Will you forgive me if I recycle the photos from two years ago? Because it looked EXACTLY THE SAME.
I’ve seen many versions of spaghetti pie, some in which the pasta is tossed with the sauce and cheese, then baked, others that have the crust par-baked first to crisp it up, and others with layers of cottage cheese between the noodles and sauce.
So I improvised: tossed the leftover spaghetti with some beaten egg, a bit of grated Parmesan, a grinding of pepper and a big spoonful of pesto, just because there was some open in the fridge and W is such a fan, then spread the spaghetti into an oiled pie plate, pushing it up the sides a bit to make a sort of crust.
Then I proceeded as if it were a lasagna – I crumbled some ricotta and thawed, squeezed-out spinach over the crust,
topped it with crumbled meatloaf, diced tomatoes and some leftover sauce…
and a little extra Parmesan with the grated part-skim mozzarella, and baked it at 350F for about half an hour, until all was golden, crispy-edged and bubbly. A Big Green Salad to go with.
This isn’t the first time I’ve planned something like this poorly; my Freezer Week* (*sadly not as exciting as Fleet Week) is coming to an abrupt end after two days. Or perhaps we’ll just put it on pause? Because looking at my calendar I have our Forage dinner tomorrow, Avenue mag’s 7th Annual Food Awards and then CHARCUT on Thursday, and I’m in Banff on Friday to do an event on Saturday. Sunday I’ll be back in the kitchen.
And tomorrow! I’ll take lots of pictures at Forage. Can’t wait! There are a couple tickets left if anyone wants to join us! Call Forage at 403-269-6551.
One Year Ago: I Don’t Want Earl’s Baby Pie
February 23 2010 | leftovers | 17 Comments »
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