Archive for July, 2010
It really sounds like the very best day of the year, doesn’t it? In 2003 Anita Stewart (whom I was lucky enough to finally meet in person a few weeks ago in Calgary) launched Food Day -a national celebration of restaurateurs, suppliers, growers, farmers and eaters- to be held the first Saturday of the first weekend in August. On this day each summer Canadians are encouraged to eat whatever is local and in season, and to share it online. Click here to share your own Food Day stories. (Even if it’s just to report what you had for dinner.) I love that Food Day not only allows us to share ideas and share what grows in each region of the country, it helps us Canadians define our food culture – and exactly what Canadian cuisine is, anyway.
Being out in Tofino, on the furthestmost west end of Canada, we celebrated the day with some crab plucked from the waters outside our window, fished from kayaks, and wee grilled cheese sandwiches made with BC aged white cheddar and leaves of fresh basil from a plant bought at the Tofino Saturday morning market, on thinly sliced baguette baked at Jupiter. (Breakfast was bagels from the Six Hundred Degree Bakery – a naturally leavened, wood fired bakery here in Tofino – some of them turned into bageleggs.)
For dinner we ate salads made with a head of red leaf lettuce snipped from the side yard of our ninetysomething next-door neighbours, who maintain an impressive garden filled with tomatoes, beans, beets, beautiful heads of lettuce and rows of chard (I have chard envy) beside their sundial. In it, roasted beets and crumbled feta from Nanaimo.
For dessert, I ran over to Beaches grocery and picked up a bag of BC peaches and a paper tub of tiny blackberries that just arrived from Nanoose Bay. We debated what to do with them – oh the pressure! – crisp? buckle? pie? I’ve made two cobblers this summer already. As I dithered (and dished up dinner) it got late, and so a quick crumble won. And really, as I thickly sliced and piled the unpeeled peaches and berries into shallow ramekins (bigger surface area) alone – we eat the fruit straight out of hand and find it plenty sweet enough – why add sugar and cornstarch to bake it? – and topped it with the rubble of flour, sugar, oats and butter I had hastily mashed together with a fork and my fingers, I knew it was exactly what I wanted it to be.
As usual, I didn’t follow a recipe. I sliced up the fruit and put it in ramekins as is, and the crumble was equal parts (I used a 1/2 cup measure) flour, sugar and oats – generally I use brown sugar, but we’re out, so I used white and added a tiny dribble of molasses, and it worked fine – with about half as much (about 1/4 cup, although you could go ahead and use more) butter. If I had pecans, I would have thrown some in too. Blend it all together with a fork and scatter over top of the fruit – squeezing as you do to make bigger clumps – and bake it until the juices run out and the topping is golden (for me, it was 40 minutes at 375F). That’s it.
You can’t really underbake a crumble or crisp – you’d eat peaches and blackberries raw, wouldn’t you? You just want to make sure the topping is golden, and thus crisp. There’s a big window so it won’t need babysitting – I pulled one out early, after about 25 minutes, for my sister, who was hopping into the tub and wanted some to take with her. That one was firmer – more like warmed, soft fresh fruit – but still golden on top and no less delicious. The ones that baked longer released more of their juices and the fruit was softer and crumbs darker golden; both more than worthy for a Food Day Canada feast. We topped them with vanilla bean gelato from Chocolate Tofino.
Happy days.
July 31 2010 | dessert | 18 Comments »
It wasn’t raining when we woke up this morning, but the mist was so heavy it was like the clouds stretched all the way to the earth. W said, as we drove to the beach, that it was just sparkles falling from the sky.
At the north end of Chesterman, when the tide is ultra low (there are two low tides per day – the first much lower than the other), caves are revealed around the point whose access is most often obstructed by water. Early in the morning though, at this time of year, the tide backs off enough to let us around the end of the rock and through the caves, even the smooth-walled one that’s just wide enough to fit us walking in single file and cuts straight through barnacle-covered rock (you’ll have to duck toward the end) to the sea anemone-filled tide pools on the other side.
Later, we made cookies. There are plenty of BC blueberries around right now, and the question of whether or not blueberries would go well in cookies (why should they be limited to muffins?) arose. Only one way to find out.
Chewy Blueberry Oatmeal Cookies
1/4 cup butter, softened
1/4 cup canola oil
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 large egg
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups old-fashioned oats
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup (or so) fresh blueberries
Preheat the oven to 350°F. In a large bowl beat the butter, oil and brown sugar until creamy; beat in the egg ad vanilla.
Add the flour, oats, baking soda and salt and stir until almost combined; add the blueberries and stir just until blended. Drop large blobs on an ungreased baking sheet and bake for about 15 minutes, until set around the edges but still soft in the middle.
Makes 1 1/2-2 dozen cookies.
July 29 2010 | cookies & squares | 33 Comments »
There’s a fire ban in BC, which means an end to our late-night s’more making. We’ve been cut off. Which is probably a good thing – s’mores are something I could get along just fine without. But then I thought to impress the kids with a s’mores pie – something I’ve seen around this here world-wide inter-web. As usual I took some guidance, and then did a bit of improv. We still had bags of marshmallows left, including mini ones (that it turns out don’t roast so well) and so rather than whip up a batch of marshmallowy topping from scratch (I’d rather be playing or reading or kayaking) I scattered an easy truffle-filled crust (hot cream and chopped chocolate, whisked until smooth, with an egg whisked in and baked) with mini marshmallows and broiled it.
*NOTE: marshmallows brown VERY QUICKLY under the broiler. Don’t, for example, slide the pie under the broiler and go sit down at your laptop to document the recipe, or after a mere 3 minutes billowing smoke will emerge from the oven, and it will be coming from this:
(Fortunately it made a charred cap I merely lifted off and started again with new marshmallows. No one noticed the blackened crust edge I picked off.)
Start with a premade crust if you need to – but they’re simple to make from scratch. Bake it just until set while you heat up the cream; add chopped chocolate to the pot, take it off the heat and let it sit for a few minutes, then whisk until smooth. Whisk in an egg and a pinch of salt and pour it into the crust, then bake. Top with marshmallows and broil. Easy.
Chocolate S’mores Pie
To make a graham crust mix 1 1/4 cups graham crumbs with 1/4 cup melted butter and press into the bottom and up the sides of a pie plate. To bake it, stick it in a 350°F oven for 5-8 minutes, until just pale golden around the edges. Adapted from this one.
1 graham cracker crumb crust, baked
Filling:
1 cup whipping cream
8 oz. good-quality bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1 large egg
pinch salt
2-3 cups mini marshmallows
Preheat oven to 350°F. Bring the cream to a simmer in a small saucepan, and put the chocolate in a bowl. Pour the cream over the chocolate and let sit a few minutes, then whisk until smooth. Whisk in the egg and salt. Pour into the crust.
Bake for 25 minutes, until filling is softly set but still trembles slightly in the middle when you gently shake it. If it starts to darken around the edges, loosely cover the edge of the pie with a pie shield or foil. Cool completely on a wire rack. (Keep the pie shield or foil in place – it’ll come in handy when it goes under the broiler.)
Pile the marshmallows on top of the cooled filling and preheat the broiler. Broil the pie for a minute – it browns quickly, so check it after 30 seconds – until the marshmallows are golden brown. Cool for 10 minutes before slicing with a sharp knife dipped in hot water, then wiped dry (do this before you cut each slice). Serves 8.
July 27 2010 | dessert | 20 Comments »
The mornings are the best part. Invariably tired (there are no early nights in Tofino) there are boys padding around in their PJs, excited to be in Tofino, wanting pancakes or poached eggs on toast.
Some mornings we take Lou alone to the beach, but there is also the lure of the boathouse, set on stilts two flights of stairs below the house, just above the rocky inlet. I go down in the cool air with a new cup of coffee and a book to sit in one of the pair of pale green Adirondack chairs (not so comfortable, but well-suited to this particular scene) overlooking the water. Lou follows me down and dozes on the warm wood in scattered sunlight. Crows caw testily at me (or at Lou, for being a dog and snoozing rather than pay attention to their presence a few feet away in the branches?) and wildlife goes about its business of living.
Meares island sits quietly across the water as it always does – there are cows living on Meares, their descendants having swum to shore from a sinking ship in the 1800s with sailors who were later rescued by another ship that didn’t have space for cattle. The tide is out, leaving the mudflats an open buffet for sea birds and buoys left sitting on the muck. Sometimes you can see the tide turn, and barely-there waves tentatively begin to tiptoe back toward the shore. Today, it made me realize I had promised the boys we’d drop the crab trap – best done at low tide, and pulled up when it’s high, the ocean having brought crabs along with it.
I stay down as long as I can, resisting thoughts of the boys and what they might be up to – what plans are being made – everyone else must be anxious to start their day, to go on outings. Sunscreen and towels and dry clothes and snacks and bottles of water must be packed. Eventually I go up and we head to the beach, or the park, or the little aquarium in Ucluelet.
Today ran long, and by dinnertime after too much sun and sand no one had the gumption to come up with a meal plan. There was enough in the fridge, so we steamed corn, cooked spaghetti and tossed it with pesto from the beach grocery, made up a salad from the head of lettuce the 90 year old next door neighbour offered from her garden, peas in their pods, slivered purple onion, strawberries, avocado and crumbled feta, toasted kale chips and roasted the tiniest potatoes we bought at the Saturday morning market. Creamy yellow and red the size and colour of radishes – some as small as peas.
All they needed was to have their dirt rinsed off and to be tossed with canola oil and salt, then roasted at 450F for 20 minutes, until tender inside and crispy out.
I’m hooked, in case I haven’t told you this already, on kale chips.
To make kale chips: wash, dry well and tear kale into big bite-sized pieces, tossing out the thick stems. Spread on a rimmed baking sheet and drizzle with canola oil; toss with your hands to coat them well, and sprinkle with salt. Rearrange in a single layer and roast at 400F for about 10 minutes, until crisp and starting to turn golden. (Watch them closely – if your oven is too hot they can burn quickly!)
July 26 2010 | cookies & squares | 18 Comments »
The power of suggestion is strong with me. Plant an idea and it sits there, taking up space that could very well be used for something far more useful, until I do something with it. Case in point: the St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake.
All the cool kids are making it. It was, in fact, on my decades-old to-make list, but the version I had utilized a sugary, buttery goo poured over a particular brand of (stale) packaged coffee cakes that aren’t available in Canada. Which is why it sat there for eons on my to-make list. Now most of the versions making the rounds are made entirely from scratch, with either a cake or sweet yeasted bread base, but the crazy high butter-sugar content kept me from making it. Mostly out of fear for my thighs.
But the large-batch amalgamation of butter, sugar and flour (exactly the sort of thing that makes me want to reorganize my life so that I can be a professional athlete or mountain climber or someone who needs to pack as many calories into a day as possible in order to keep up with my high calorie output) is a perfectly suitable thing to make when you have 9 people under one roof, including teenagers and ravenous boys who have spent the bulk of their day surfing, running, kayaking and jumping in the waves. Also – there is sufficient competition to keep me from eating the lion’s share of it myself.
Still – it seemed too plain – too straight-up – on its own, like something was missing between the butter-sugar-egg-flour base and (altogether different) butter-sugar-egg-flour topping. I figured it would make the perfect ballast to tart, juicy fruit like plums, which cut nicely through the richness of butter and sugar. (Of which, by the way, I cut the quantities down a bit.)
As I puttered around making it, everyone asked what it was going to be. To tell them it was a coffee cake seemed too meh – and in fact it isn’t really a cake at all, with a yeasted, sweetbreadlike base, but then again it can’t really be labeled bread, as it’s cut into wedges and eaten much more like a cake than any sort of loaf. I suppose it should retain its rightful name – St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake – but with the streamlining and the layer of tart fruit that transformed it into something far more summery, the barefooted sandy-haired kids helping me arrange wedges of plum on the base before it went into the oven, who then ate it warm, straight from the pan, before heading out to fish from the rowboat, it didn’t seem right to be named for a city in Missouri. This cake belongs in Tofino.
I imagine it would go just as well with juicy apricots or sour cherries, and as she stood at the counter eating a wedge, my mom said, “this seems like it needs to have rhubarb in it.”
Tofino Gooey Plum Butter Cake
adapted from a few sources (with thanks)
Cake:
3 Tbsp. milk
1 3/4 tsp. active dry yeast
1/4 cup butter, at room temperature
3 Tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 large egg
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
Topping:
3-6 plums, thickly sliced
3 Tbsp. honey, light corn syrup or maple syrup
2 tsp. vanilla
1/2 cup butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1 large egg
1 cup plus 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
Make the cake dough: In a small bowl, mix milk with 2 tablespoons hot water (this will make the lot lukewarm – easier, I think, than bringing your milk to room temperature); stir in the yeast and let it sit until it foams a bit.
Beat together the butter, sugar and salt, then beat in the egg. Add flour and milk mixture alternately, beginning and ending with the flour mixture. Stir until you have a sticky dough, then turn it out onto the countertop (resist the urge to add more flour) and knead for a few minutes, until soft and smooth.
Pat, press, stretch and nudge the dough into a buttered baking dish that is around 9″x13″ and at least 2 inches deep. Cover with plastic wrap or a tea towel, and let it rise while you go to the beach – 2-3 hours.
Preheat oven to 350F. Lay the slices of plum in rows over the surface of the dough, which really won’t have risen that much. In a small bowl, stir the honey, 2 tablespoons water and the vanilla together with a fork. In a larger bowl beat the butter, sugar and salt until smooth and light, then beat in the egg. Add half the flour, then the honey mixture, then the rest of the flour, scraping down sides of bowl between each addition and stirring just until blended.
Spoon the topping in large dollops over the plums and gently spread overtop with a spatula. Bake for about an hour, until golden; it will still be slightly soft (gooey) in the middle. Cool completely before serving – really, do – plums hold onto their heat and you won’t be able to taste it properly until it’s cooled. Serves 10-12.
July 26 2010 | breakfast and cake | 9 Comments »
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