Archive for October, 2010
I still don’t get the appeal of red velvet cake, but other people do – it’s hugely trendy right now – the It-Girl of bakery cake (because when you buy them you don’t see all that bottled red food colouring going in) – and so I posted a recipe for red velvet cupcakes over at Family Kitchen. These have less food colouring than most (it’s not unusual to see a recipe call for an entire bottle) – if you’re thinking beets might do the trick naturally, sadly they don’t – while the batter is a brilliant pink, they turn reddish brown upon baking. Yes, it was a great idea.
Sorry to send you over there for the recipe, but they gave me a regular gig, which means I can do what I love and our electricity stays on. Silver lining: I’ll have something new for you here every day too, even if it’s in the form of a tasty breadcrumb trail.
October 11 2010 | leftovers | 19 Comments »
Is that a plate of dinner or is that a plate of dinner? I have decreed that for every Thanksgiving meal from now on the dress code shall be sweatpants. All belts must be removed at the door.
Big feast tonight, despite my best intentions to streamline and keep it simple. It wasn’t that complicated, really – the usual roast turkey, a Winter’s bird stuffed with the same stuffing my mom always made – sauteed onions and celery, cubed bread and sage. A quick cranberry sauce – one bag dumped into a pot with a splash of cranberry juice and a heaping cup of sugar, and a couple big plums chopped and thrown in – I’ve never done this, but it worked smashingly, and gelled more than usual, possibly on account of the plums? It was a good switch from the usual orange.
There were Brussels sprouts with candied pecans (cook them and do the nuts in advance and then finish the lot right before dinner – they were met with great fanfare for something so supposedly universally hated – I posted the recipe over here), carrots (from our garden!) and parsnips cooked in a hot pan with butter, oil and thyme, another loaf of that cheesy garlic batter bread, and sweet potatoes tucked into the oven alongside the turkey and then mashed with butternut squash I did quickly in the microwave – all it needed was a drizzle of maple syrup and dab of butter.
After dinner there was much running around and screaming and playing hockey on the front sidewalk and throwing crab apples at the house. The kids had fun, too.
And there may have been some hanging around in the kitchen dunking chunks of leftover stuffing into the bottom of the gravy, which was particularly dark and sticky tonight. The drippings in the bottom of that pan was the stuff dreams are made of – my dreams, anyway – with really no grease to skim off. It would have sufficed for dessert.
Which, naturally, was pie. It has to be upside-down pear gingerbread or pie – and I may have mentioned in years previous my feelings toward pumpkin. I cheated this year, but then again not really – in Kelowna last Friday (for the day, another story I’ve yet to tell) I spotted a freezer full of homemade pies – apple raisin (reminiscent of my great aunt Noreen) and cherry – with handwritten instructions for baking on little slips of paper on each one. I could only manage two in my carry-on bag. It’s a good thing they were raw is all I can say, because my flight was delayed.
There remains downstairs one slice of cherry I imagine will go very well with thick yogurt and hot coffee in the morning. (After my 10k run, of course.)
October 10 2010 | leftovers | 23 Comments »
I may have mentioned my lifelong obsession with recipes. Even as a kid I read cookbooks (and-yes-Archie comics), tore recipes out of magazines and at times snooped through the kitchens of families I babysat for (hey, they said I could help myself to anything!) in the hopes of finding recipe boxes or those community cookbooks for me to flip through during Fantasy Island.
I still have a lot of my old hand-written recipe cards and filed-away magazine pages, some neatly cut out and pasted on paper sorted into binders. (I was a bit of a recipe nerd. I still am.) The memory of an old batter bread that came in a Fleischmann’s leaflet had been flitting in and out of my head for a year or so, since all that no-knead bread hoopla. This week I went so far as to dig them up – yep, I still have those binders – and put them in the proximity of the kitchen. And then yesterday a new recipe booklet arrived in the mail – the sort of thing I love to get – a collection for Bake for the Cure, an initiative of the Susan G. Komen Foundation. In it, the recipe for dill batter bread I had been thinking of! Could there have been a clearer sign? I recall an oatmeal version too, but this is a good start. Did I mention it’s no-knead? It’s so ahead of its time.
I’m not a fan of dill, but wasn’t as a kid, either. My foggy memory remembers leaving it out – it obviously isn’t a structurally essential element of the bread anyway. It also contains cottage cheese, which I generally don’t have on hand, but it has a way of disappearing into the loaf, and so I picked some up. I added grated Parmesan thinking a cheesy loaf would go well with the parade of soups that has kept all my largest pots in heavy rotation for the past week.
The bread itself isn’t like no-knead bread at all – you don’t leave it on the countertop overnight to come into its own, you beat it with an electric mixer and then leave the sticky lump of dough for an hour, then bake it – no punching down, no spending three hours in its service.
The resulting loaf wasn’t as crusty as no-knead bread, having been baked in a casserole dish rather than a lidded pot, but has a great dense, moist texture, and for some reason I love loaves you cut into wedges to dip into soup. Tomorrow morning I’m totally trying a cinnamon-raisin version.
Cheesy Garlic Batter Bread
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 pkg. (2 1/4 tsp.) Fleischmann’s rapid rise yeast
1/4 tsp. baking soda
2 Tbsp. sugar
1 tsp. garlic powder
1/4 cup warm water
2 Tbsp. butter, melted
1 cup cottage cheese
1 large egg
1/2 tsp. salt
1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
In a medium bowl, stir together 1/4 cup flour, yeast, baking soda, sugar and garlic powder. Add the warm water and melted butter and stir on medium speed with an electric mixer (I used a stand mixer with the paddle attachment) for 2 minutes. Add the cottage cheese, egg, salt and 1/2 cup flour and beat for another 2 minutes. Add the remaining 1 1/2 cups flour and the Parmesan cheese and beat until you have a stiff, sticky batter. Place in a greased 1.5 L casserole dish, cover and leave for an hour.
When ready to bake, preheat the oven to 350F. Bake the loaf for 45 minutes, until golden and hollow sounding when tapped on the bottom. Cool slightly before cutting, if you can manage to wait. Makes 1 loaf.
October 09 2010 | bread | 15 Comments »
My good pal Pierre and I decided today was the day to make a little announcement: we’re working on a book project together – an illustrated version of Alice in Wonderland, set to food.
It was Pierre’s brainchild – a project he kept talking about and I kept pushing him to do until he invited me to join in the fun. Lucky me. I’ve always wanted to do a kids storybook with recipes, and Lewis C. Carroll’s classic is well-loved and packed with food imagery, and so we’ve been working like Mad Hatters on a book we’ve called Alice Eats. I’ve been mixing up crumpets and marmalade and little tea cakes that say “Eat Me”. Pierre has been working on the layout and illustrations and doing a lot of poking me with a stick. (Public apology: sorry you have to deal with me and my lack of time management skills. I’m glad you’re on the ball with schedules and deadlines and outlines and have general organizational prowess. I’m chronically running late for my important dates.)
Pierre is well known for his food and illustrations in Swerve, and won a Gourmand World Cookbook Award this spring for Kitchen Scraps: A Humourous Illustrated Cookbook that is all it claims to be – I can’t think of anyone better to bring Alice to life. See his little sketch up top? There are a lot more where that came from. I hear the tea party spread took him a good five days in the basement.
If you work at Chronicle Books, Phaidon UK or Ten Speed Press. Keep your eyes peeled for a new arrival. Call us!
October 08 2010 | leftovers | 111 Comments »
Today’s post is more of an introduction to some friends of mine you may not have met yet than a report on dinner (if you’re dying to know, we got home after 7 from picking up the very last of our CSA boxes and I made pork tenderloin with apples – in under 20 minutes – which we ate with carrots from the farm and cherry tomatoes from the back yard). Thanksgiving is imminent, and I’ve been chatting with them, wondering how they can stay so upbeat and chipper the busiest week of their year, and realized I never did share the farm visit we made over a month ago now – on the first day of school, in fact.
If you’ve not yet had the pleasure of their acquaintance, this is Darrel and Corrine. They raise turkeys on the 480 acre farm Darrel was born on (not literally, but he lived there from that day on) in the southern Alberta hamlet of Dalemead, just 3 km south of highway 22X along a Canadian Pacific Railway line.
Darrel and Corrine are always at food-related events, supportive of our community, offering up help to anyone who needs it and welcoming visitors to their farm, where they keep a flock of about 11,000 birds. They’re always smiling – and leave me (and W) smiling each time I see them.
All Winter’s turkeys are free-range (meaning a meat-free diet and access to forage in a large outside yard), hormone and antibiotic-free. Their diet consists of whole grains – wheat and hay grown in fields alongside the turkey houses and garden – blended with soy, flax and canola meal. The turkeys live on the open, sunny farm, with lots of room to roam and new straw bedding provided regularly by Corinne, Darrel and their daughter, Laurel.
Their turkeys take 17-19 weeks to grow, although some Toms (male turkeys) can take 29 weeks to reach their full size. (To compare, commercial turkeys are sent to market at 13 weeks, far before their prime.) The birds are processed in a small family-owned facility in St. Paul, Alberta and frozen naturally-many commercial varieties are immersion or spray-frozen in food-grade propylene glycol.
I’m a turkey fan, so their birds aren’t limited to once or twice a year around here. (And luckily they’ve decided to make the foray into turkey sausage – it’s lean and wonderful!) If you’re looking for a good-quality, locally raised and processed bird for your dinner table, pick up one of Darrel and Corrine’s. Winter’s turkeys are available at Calgary Co-op stores, and can be ordered at smaller groceries like Valta Bison and Planet Organic.
OK, I have a recipe for you too. I did this for a recent issue of Swerve magazine, the one that comes out every Friday in the Calgary Herald.
Roasted Coronation Grape & Pear Chutney
A change from the usual cranberry sauce, this deep indigo sweet-tart chutney is delicious on roast turkey, chicken or pork. It keeps well, so you can make some now for the holidays – a large batch ensures a stash to give away, too.
3 cups Coronation grapes, washed and stemmed
canola or olive oil, for cooking
1 purple onion, peeled and chopped
1 Tbsp. grated fresh ginger
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 tsp. curry powder or paste
2 medium ripe pears, coarsely chopped
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup balsamic or cider vinegar
pinch dried red chili flakes (optional)
Preheat oven to 450°F. Place grapes on a rimmed baking sheet, drizzle with oil and toss to coat. Roast for 15 minutes, or until they release their juices and turn soft and squishy.
Meanwhile, heat a drizzle of oil in a medium pot set over medium-high heat and sauté the onion for about 5 minutes, until soft. Add the ginger, garlic and curry powder and cook for another minute. Add the pears, brown sugar, vinegar, chili flakes and roasted grapes, scraping any juices that have collected in the bottom of the pan into the pot, and bring to a simmer.
?Cook, stirring occasionally, for about 30 minutes, until thickened. Cool completely and refrigerate for up to 2 weeks or freeze for up to 3 months. Makes about 4 cups (1 L).
October 07 2010 | preserves | 10 Comments »
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