Archive for October, 2010
Although I ate a ton this weekend, I didn’t actually cook any of it. For real.
(So then why is my kitchen still a total disaster?)
It’s not that the kitchen sat empty – Mike used it. He made me a peanut butter pie.
A month or so ago I stumbled across this, and emailed a few people who I knew may be on birthday cake duty with the subject line: I want this for my birthday. And so he made it.
I know – first meat hand, now peanut butter pie. Will the romance ever end? Give me coffee in bed and peanut butter pie over roses and diamonds any day.
And it was delicious, even. Ringed with salted peanuts he crushed in the mortar & pestle and carefully topped with chocolate curls Sue (who flew in from BC) and I could hear him struggling with from the other room. This is all that was left this morning – my mom and dad bickered over how much had been left and how teeny a sliver each had had from the already miniscule leftover wedge.
My parents had a small roomful of some of my favourite people over to -what else?- eat. The theme was duct tape. (If you look closely, A -above- is wearing a duct tape portrait of John Cusack. That girl knows how to accessorize.) My mom and sisters made Guinness pie, and a sweet, sticky, clove-y roast ham my sister makes once in awhile, surrounded by quartered Bosc pears and cranberries that wind up roasting in the ham juices, and scalloped potatoes, and a big salad, and there was another salad of teeny multicoloured tomatoes that my 20 year old nephew made. And spiced pecans, nachos and guacamole and soft apricots and sage leaves wrapped in bacon and broiled.
And now, closing in on 11 again, buzzing on mini Wonderbars while fading fast, still having not caught up on sleep (it seems even the knowledge of a parent’s birthday does not prevent 5 year olds from waking up on Saturday mornings when it’s still dark – and in fact is further encouragement to be even more pokey-in-the-face than usual) I’m drawing a blank on what else to tell you about it all. And I’m determined not to start this week with a severe sleep deficit. So I’ll pull a To Be Continued. (Although we all know I’ll more than likely go off on some other tangent next time I’m here.)
October 31 2010 | leftovers | 20 Comments »
Hey guys, meet hand. I mean – hey you guys! Meat hand!
I totally can’t take credit for this. I saw it over at Not Martha last year and thought she was a genius (the kind I love most), and was reminded of it yesterday while I was in Red Deer teaching cooking classes. I sent Mike an email with a link, asking if he had a chance could he possibly make a humanesque hand out of meatloaf while I was gone? For BT in the morning? Still on the foggy highway at almost 11, I didn’t want to be making a hand out of meat at 2 in the morning. (Not that making bloody custard sauce was much better. But that’s nowhere near as good a story.)
A dozen roses could not have said I love you more than walking in the door to a homemade meat hand. With real mashed potatoes, which really just serve to define meat hand. He shaped it himself, using my usual meatloaf recipe, and then carved a little potato into a severed wrist bone to stick in the end. After baking it had the texture of cartilage. He made a little nook for marrow, even. It was so realistic looking one of the grade 1 kids at school insisted it was real. “I saw the bone sticking out, mom. I saw the bone.” Shudder.
We got a lot of mileage out of meat hand – it made the rounds at BT, then went to school, where I presented it to the kindergarten class as their snack. They didn’t go for it, so we totally ate it for dinner. Come on – wouldn’t you?
It’s totally easy to make, and well worth the extra 10 minutes of labour to present a grody severed hand-shaped meatloaf to your family for a random Sunday dinner, don’t you think? Especially on a day when the kids have their friends over, or your daughter happens to bring her new boyfriend home for dinner. W isn’t embarrassed by me yet, but when he is I may as well go down in flames.
Here’s what some people are saying about meat hand:
“I give it two thumbs up!”
“It’s finger-lickin’ good!”
My sieve-like brain has not retained the rest. They were just as good.
October 29 2010 | leftovers | 78 Comments »
Back from a day full of classes in Red Deer – prepping for an early morning Halloween show on BT and party at W’s school – I’ve just made vats of icing (and while doing so stained my fingers a deep indigo) and divvied up little baggies of candies and shoestring licorice (for the chocolate truffle spiders) – and in my absence Mike made me a meat hand. Is that love or what?
But I was thinking on the drive back about beet cake – what else does your mind wander to on the highway? George Clooney? (Perhaps he was delivering me the beet cake for my breakfast in bed.. ) And I realized a lot of you asked for it but I didn’t post it. Here it is. (W decorated this one, and found it difficult to evenly distribute the sprinkles atop the cake.)
I’ll be wearing a whoopie cushion suit on BT tomorrow morning. (In approximately 6 hours.) I can’t wait to ask – does this whoopie cushion suit make me look fat?
October 29 2010 | leftovers | 8 Comments »
Yesterday was day 1 of Birthday Week. This week holds 6 birthdays of Scorpios I Know including a sister, a nephew, Mike, and yes – myself. The week wraps up with a big one that ends with a zero.
I don’t want to talk about it.
I planned for about 6 months, since seeing it in this book, to make this cake for my sister for her birthday. One guess which coffee chain she’s addicted to.
To be honest, I wanted to mess with this recipe right off the bat. I didn’t (much) and I’m glad – it was a mighty spectacular cake. I didn’t have buttermilk so used plain yogurt thinned with milk – and I’m certain you could swap any cold coffee for the double double. (Use instant, stirred into water, if you’re not in the habit of keeping cold coffee around.)
I did ditch the icing recipe, figuring the frosting is as good a vehicle for more coffee than anything. I used 1/2 cup of soft butter and a 1 lb bag of icing sugar, and added enough cold double double to make a spreadable frosting. (About halfway through it became clear that it wouldn’t do enough to spike the frosting on its own, and so I stirred another spoonful of instant coffee into the cup before adding more to the bowl.)
To go with – double double ice cream: pick up a large double double and chill it. Pour it into the ice cream maker, fill the cup with whipping cream, pour it in, and turn the machine on. No need for more sweetness or flavourings or a custard base. It turned out icy-slushy, like an ice cap.
Double-Double Chocolate Cake
Double chocolate. Double layer. And a cupful of “double-double”: Canada’s most popular preparation of Tim Horton’s coffee, boasting double the cream, double the sugar. This recipe makes a fabulous cake that’s worthy of the double ribbons Moira won at the Harrow Fair. Reprinted with permission from The Harrow Fair Cookbook, by Moira Sanders, Lori Elstone and Beth Goslin Maloney (Whitecap).
2 oz (60 g) bittersweet chocolate, chopped
2 cups (500 mL) all-purpose flour
1 1/4 cups (310 mL) granulated sugar
1/2 cup (125 mL) cocoa powder
2 tsp (10 mL) baking soda
1 tsp (5 mL) baking powder
1 tsp (5 mL) fine sea salt
1 cup (250 mL) buttermilk
1/2 cup (125 mL) vegetable oil
2 large eggs
1 tsp (5 mL) pure vanilla extract
1 cup (250 mL) double-double coffee
Melt the chocolate in a double boiler or a small saucepan set on low heat. Stir constantly until the mixture is smooth. Set aside to cool.
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter and flour two 8-inch round cake pans.
Sift together the flour, sugar, cocoa, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl.
Mix together the buttermilk, oil, eggs, and vanilla in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment.
Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients with the mixer on low speed. Add the melted chocolate and the double-double coffee and mix just until combined.
Pour the batter into the pans, spreading evenly. Bake for 35 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the centre of a cake comes out clean.
Cool the cakes in the pans until they are easy to handle. Invert onto a cake plate and spread with icing once completely cooled.
One Year Ago: Cranberry-Almond Linzer Hearts
October 24 2010 | cake | 31 Comments »
How you know you’re a grown-up, part 2: on a Friday night you review the Scholastic book catalog (why are there Star Wars video games in there, by the way? I don’t recall video games ever being part of the curriculum, or I’d have been a far keener elementary school student) and scrub the toilet, and eat parsnip soup.
Jocelyn shared this recipe for me, knowing, as we were members of the same CSA farm, that I had a glut of parsnips in the fridge. She made it and said it was the best soup she’s had in a long time. I’m all over that.
Parsnip Pear Soup
You’re going to puree everything anyway, so don’t worry about how you chop it.
canola or olive oil, for cooking
a blob of butter
1 onion, peeled and chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
1 ripe pear, chopped (don’t peel it)
1 tsp. curry powder
6 cups chicken stock
2 lbs parsnips, peeled and chopped
1 small thin-skinned potato, chopped
1 bay leaf
1 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper and nutmeg
1 can evaporated milk, or a big glug of half & half
In your soup pot set over medium-high heat, heat a drizzle of oil and spoonful of butter and saute the onion and celery for about 5 minutes, until soft. Add the pear and curry and cook a few more minutes.
Add the stock, parsnips, potato, bay leaf, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Bring to a simmer and cook until the parsnips are very tender. Puree with a hand held immersion blender (or transfer in batches to your blender) until smooth, adding the cream or evaporated milk at some point. Serves 4-6.
I’m sorry to say I need to take a bit of a hiatus from our Free Stuff Fridays – I seem to be spending a lot of resources these days (time + money) buying stuff and shipping/delivering it, which I totally don’t mind, but my less than stellar time management skills (coupled with Canada Post) have meant people aren’t receiving their stuff as speedily as I/they’d like, and so I’ve wound up disappointing people. Which is a) the worst feeling ever, and b) exactly the opposite of the whole point. I’ll have stuff again soon, I just have some catching up to do.
I still love comments.
October 23 2010 | soup | 26 Comments »
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