Archive for September, 2010
I think I may have just blown my mind a little bit. What’s left of it, anyway. I’m pretty sure there’s still a scrap in there somewhere.
I spent the day with Eric Akis today, a writer for the Victoria Times-Colonist for the past 14 years, who was in town promoting the 6th in his cookbook series, Everyone Can Cook Slow Cooker Meals. This involved me prepping the food last night for his appearance on BT this morning, and reassembling it for an interview with Gwendolyn this afternoon, which meant making a couple batches of his slow cooker pulled beef and onions. Easy. And it’s no secret that I’m a die-hard fan of the slow cooker. I don’t have to tell you they’re great, right?
But.
There was the extra batch he assembled on air. (This is how it happens on TV – all the ingredients are ready to go, the cook shows the audience how to do it, and voila – the precooked dish is whisked out. Typically there’s then the uncooked but assembled ingredients left to clean up and take home or toss out. Guess which I lean towards?) But they needed to recruit every spare slow cooker I had (turns out I have 3) for the class he was teaching this evening, and they had to get them going this morning so that the food would be ready by dinnertime. Which meant I had this raw sauced roast and onions and no slow cooker to toss it into. No matter – I pulled out my Le Creuset knockoff (have I mentioned I forgot to marry rich?), dumped it in and slid it into the oven set at 280F and left it there from late morning to late afternoon.
Again, this is something I already know. You can braise (cook for a long time over low heat with some liquid) on the stovetop or in the oven or in a slow cooker. I suspected it would come out a little thicker than the slow cooker versions, having a lid but not as tight a seal – a slow cooker really traps all the moisture in a dish-in fact you generally wind up with more liquid than you started with.
But look. Do you see? The dark stickiness? The meat joy? Have I captured it?
It was wonderfully thick and intense. The boys ate it scooped into buns straight after school, as did the 12 year old next door who forgot his house key, and his friend, and they all oohed and aahed and told me how rad it was, and I’m sure I ruined their dinners. But it was pretty rad.
And easy. You couldn’t get much lower maintenance. I didn’t even time the thing.
Eric’s book is somewhere downstairs, and so I’m going to try to summon the recipe by memory, as my legs have ceased to work and are lying there thumping like a cartoon thumb that has just been whacked by a hammer. I’ve finally crawled into bed, having started the day at 5:30 and finished with a 4-hour schmoozy sneak peek at the new Chinook Centre expansion, at which it must be said there’s a (first? only?) stand-alone Le Creuset store, right around the corner from Phil & Sebastien. Now that I’ve rekindled the flame, I may just be able to justify dropping some dineros on the Real Thing. Some girls buy shoes and sunglasses – I’d rather buy a pot. I can better justify spending money on food than fashion. (As anyone who saw me at the event tonight can attest…)
And hey, I might as well have the most fashionable beef on the block.
Eric’s Slow-Cooker (or Oven-Braised) Pulled Beef
canola or olive oil, for cooking
1 eye of round or top round beef roast
2 onions, halved and thinly sliced
1 1/2 cups beef stock
1 1/2 cups barbecue sauce
2 Tbsp. brown sugar
2 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar
2 Tbsp. grainy mustard
a few cloves of garlic, crushed
In a heavy skillet, heat a drizzle of oil over medium-high heat and brown the roast on all sides. Meanwhile, toss everything else together in a slow cooker or ovenproof casserole; top with the browned meat. Cover and cook on low (in the slow cooker) for 6-8 hours, or cover and bake at 275F-300F for 6ish hours. Using two forks, pull the meat apart in the sauce and serve on soft buns. Serves about 10 (depending on the size of your roast).
September 28 2010 | beef | 40 Comments »
The pox had descended on our house. Although Mike’s over it, he’s still got the gout, and W needs to have a roll of toilet paper fashioned into a necklace for easy nose access, and I’m even less coherent than usual. We all have coughs that won’t quit. I’ve either been sneezing or been right on the verge of for approximately 36 hours. It’s still been a full weekend though, with my parents (finally!) moving into their new house and all that goes along with a move of that magnitude (ie. by someone who has been out of college for at least 3 years), so there has been moving, packing and unpacking, many hours trying to resurrect our own kitchen into something usable and enough leftover work to make today feel like a weekday anyway.
We went to Mike’s mom’s house for dinner – Chinese food bought from Safeway and microwaved – during which we discussed the fact that the third floor bathroom at the Bay downtown has really gone downhill in recent years, and that none of the bathrooms are anywhere near as nice as the old Woodward’s (Woolworth’s?) bathroom, which was beautiful, wasn’t it? Until they hired all those contractors (?) and then boy did it ever go downhill too. She put away a sandwich baggie full of her spare elastic bands (saved from her newspapers) to give to us, so that’s something.
I made this at some point over the weekend, having found it on a torn-out magazine page I stuck on the fridge before corn was in season. Now that corn season is almost over, I finally got around to making it. It originated here, but I did my own thing – boosted flavour by charring the corn in my cast iron skillet (why settle for boiling it?), knocked down the mint a lot, and figured while melting the butter, why not give it an extra minute to turn a nutty brown? My sister said it tasted like wedding cake. W threw it up. I think it would have been great with crumbled feta.
I just noticed that I used my old Woodward’s bowl. Eerie.
Quinoa with Charred Corn, Scallions, Browned Butter & Mint
1 cup quinoa, rinsed in a fine sieve
canola or olive oil, for cooking
2 cobs of corn, kernels scraped off directly into a skillet
1/4 cup butter
zest and juice of a lemon
1 Tbsp. honey
salt & pepper
2 green onions, chopped
a few leaves of fresh mint, torn or chopped
Cook the quinoa in a pot of boiling water for 15 minutes; drain in a fine sieve and dump back into the pot while still steaming. Cover with a tea towel, then the lid and leave it to steam (this will make fluffy quinoa). Meanwhile, heat a drizzle of oil in a heavy skillet set over medium-high heat and cook the corn for about 10 minutes, until starting to turn golden. Set aside to cool.
Melt the butter in the skillet (preferably the one the corn was just cooked in) and cook it for an extra few minutes, until it turns golden and smells nutty. Stir in the lemon zest and juice, honey and some salt and pepper. Try not to eat it all with your finger.
When everything has cooled down, mix the quinoa, corn, green onions and mint. Drizzle with the warm dressing and toss to coat. Serve immediately. Serves 6.
September 26 2010 | salads and vegetarian | 14 Comments »
There are days when the entrepreneur with an office in her spare room will find herself, still clad in her pink polka-dot flannel PJs in mid-afternoon (she has been sitting there since 6am) trying to conduct a telephone interview for a story that’s due like right now while two boys attempt to wash a 100 pound dog in the next room, having just spread poo all over him in the back yard.
She may then wind up mopping up a muddy bathroom when she should be working, because her husband has had gout since Wednesday and has a knee the size of a melon. She may run out on an errand without looking in the mirror and remembering she has neither showered nor rid herself of her raggedy-ann eyes (mascara above and underneath) nor brushed her hair for two days, and greasy strands are sticking out sideways all over her head. And then realize she has eaten nothing but coffee, cake scraps from a photo shoot and those little square caramels since 6 am.
There are days when the self-employed mum may end the day applying Malbec liberally to her face by Tim Horton’s cup, sitting in bed with her laptop and a new brace that she hopes will help her plantar fasciitis, but isn’t helping with the prospect of expanding the family any further.
But then there are days when she gets to make a tomato tarte tatin and call it work. This came from a lively (and at times, nasty) debate over whether or not a tomato can be used in purely sweet dishes, like a tarte tatin. Turns out they can, with sublime results. A tarte tatin, if you’re not yet acquainted, is an inverted pie made with caramel and fruit cooked first in a skillet then topped with puff pastry and baked. It’s like pie extreme. The tomatoes are brilliantly different.
Tomato Tarte Tatin
adapted from a recipe torn from an issue of Bon Appétit, where it is credited to Brooklyn-based food writer Ian Knauer.
8 large Roma/plum tomatoes
3 Tbsp. butter
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
1 sheet frozen puff pastry (half a package of 2 blocks), thawed
Preheat the oven to 425?F and bring a large pot of water to a boil. Cut an X in the bottom (not the stem end) of each tomato and blanch them for about a minute, plunging into cool water afterward and slipping off the skins. Cut them in half lengthwise and remove the seeds.
Set a heavy 9″ cast iron skillet over medium high heat – add the butter to the pan and swirl it around as it melts and foams. Sprinkle the sugar evenly over the bottom of the pan and arrange the tomatoes rounded side down in concentric circles, fitting them tightly together and filling the pan (don’t worry if you have leftovers). Place the skillet over medium heat and cook for 15-20 minutes, until the juices are released from the tomatoes, then bubble and cook down and turn golden. (Lift the tomatoes up occasionally and let the caramel run underneath them to keep them from sticking and burning.) Meanwhile, roll the pastry out to about a 9″ round.
Remove the pan from the heat, drizzle the vanilla over the tomatoes and cover with the pastry, tucking in the edges (no need to be neat about it). Cut a few slits in the top and bake for about 20 minutes, until golden and bubbly around the edges. Cool for about 10 minutes before inverting onto a plate (do it while the tart and pan are still quite warm or the tomatoes will stick) – replace any that don’t come out of the pan, and scrape any caramel and juices that have stayed behind over top. Serve warm, with ice cream or whipped cream.
And yes, I’ve remembered that it’s Free Stuff Friday, and I have some loot! The folks at Bernardin sent over a pretty marvy canning set – an enamel canning pot filled with all your canning needs – a canning rack, jar lifter, funnel, lid lifter, bubble remover/headspace gauge, 4 mason jars with lids, pectin, and canning DVD. And ’tis the season.
I’d love to hear all about what you’re preserving, or making for dinner, or cleaning off your dog. As always, I’ll pick a name from the comments at random next Tuesday.
September 24 2010 | appetizers and dessert | 110 Comments »
I think I may have found my new favourite end-of-a-long-day-don’t-feel-like-cooking-but-very-much-feel-like-eating comfort food sort of dinner. It’s easier to make than reheating a jar of spaghetti sauce. And probably costs in the vicinity of a buck. Which means more for the coffee fund.
And we have peas. Lots of them. Mike and W shelled them on the living room floor, with Lou catching the strays. I wanted to use them as more than green filler for our dinner plates – to show them off a little more – and I remembered a Jamie Oliver recipe for cheesy peas.
Just the sort of recipe I tend to look at, mentally nod and move on, because I know the gist of it already. Peas, butter, lemon and cheese. I could do that, easy. But do I ever? No.
It seemed like a good pairing for pasta, and I’m a fan of tossing peas into pasta water for the last cooking minutes and draining – it’s like dinner multitasking. So I morphed the two, taking his advice to scoop out some of the starchy water before draining it, then tossed the noodles (linguine, but it could be anything) with a splash of it, butter, juice of a lemon and grated Parm. Lots of pepper. Divine. I wish I had another bowl of it in bed.
Pasta with Jamie’s Cheesy Peas
Really, don’t even worry about the measurements. Make as much pasta and peas as you like, and dress them up with butter, lemon and cheese, adding enough pasta water to make a sauce.
enough pasta for 3-4
4 big handfuls of fresh or frozen peas
a knob of butter
lots of freshly grated Parmesan cheese
a squeeze of lemon juice
freshly ground black pepper
Bring a big pot of water to a boil and add the pasta; cook until al dente, adding the peas for the last 4 minutes of cooking time. Before you drain it, scoop out some of the water with a measuring cup.
Drain the pasta and peas and put it back in the pan – add a knob of butter, a squeeze of lemon and lots of freshly grated Parmesan cheese, and enough of the pasta water to make a saucy consistency. Serves 3-4.
September 23 2010 | pasta and vegetarian | 14 Comments »
Got tomatoes? Me too. And even though I have them in my back yard, I can’t help but pick up more when there are so many overflowing bins of them at the market. And so this year I made ketchup (takes up less space than sauce or whole tomatoes – not that I’ve ever preserved my own that way anyway) – since W is such a ketchup fan, and because the bottled kind you get at the store is largely liquid sugar, I thought I’d make my own before he gets old enough to discriminate against any ketchup that doesn’t start with an H and end in a Z. I posted it over at the Family Kitchen, and it went a little bit viral – turns out it’s not just me who thinks homemade ketchup is a good idea. We talked about it on CBC yesterday morning, along with the issue of tomato classification.
To recap: Botanically, tomatoes are indeed fruit, but they are also vegetables. The term is purely culinary, referring to any plant whose fruit, seeds, roots, tubers, bulbs, stems, leaves, or flower parts are used as food. So from a culinary standpoint, a tomato is a vegetable. In the garden, it’s a fruit. Whatever you call it, I’m just happy that my plants are producing some. (Emphasis on some.) In case you do get pulled into the fruit vs. vegetable debate, you can play the Supreme Court card: legally, tomatoes have been considered vegetables since the late 1800s when the US imposed tariff laws that included a duty on vegetables but not fruit, forcing a court decision. (Furthermore, tomatoes are the state vegetable of New Jersey – 8,682,661 New Jerseyers can’t be wrong.)
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September 22 2010 | freezable and preserves | 18 Comments »
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