Archive for June, 2011
This is going to be my bubbly pink patio drink this holiday weekend. Fo sho.
It’s a good thing you can’t clearly see my oh so foxy reflection in the glass, all gussied up for a Canada Day Eve night in PJ bottoms and an old shirt I only wear to bed since a slice of peanut butter toast landed goods-side-down on my chest. (Which kind of reminds me of this Flight of the Conchords video.)
Thanks to my foxy ladyfriend for sharing her Grandma’s cocktail. Partly, I’m just envious that a) her Grandma is still around, b) she lives on Galiano Island, c) her nickname is Foxy Lady and d) she thusly has a boozy pink drink named after her.
Mostly C. And A.
Gwendolyn makes hers with vodka and soda water. Gin works. Or drizzle it straight into Prosecco.
The only problem with the Foxy Lady (besides the obvious) is that it uses up your stash of rhubarb so that you may not have enough left to make pies. But you won’t be able to bake after all those foxy ladies anyway.
Really, you should know how to make rhubarb syrup whether or not there is a Foxy Lady in your future. It’s divine drizzled into soda water or ginger ale, or ice water to make rhubarbade. Next on the agenda: pink rhubarb milkshakes.
You’ll need some rhubarb. The red stuff is best. Chop it up.
Add sugar and water and simmer.
It will turn soft and mushy, at which point scrape it into a fine sieve set over a bowl and strain it.
You’ll wind up with something that resembles the juice from a maraschino cherry jar but tastes far better. Don’t toss the leftover pulp – eat it with plain yogurt and granola. Trust me on this. Or turn it into ice cream. More on that later.
Put a lid on it and keep it in the fridge. Or throw it in your bag and bring it along to that Canada Day party, with a bottle of Prosecco. I’m not against pouring it over pancakes.
Pour rhubarb syrup into a glass, top with Prosecco or ginger ale or vodka and soda water. Drink. Repeat.
Foxy Lady Rhubarb Cocktails: 1 part vodka, 2-3 parts rhubarb syrup, 1 part soda water. Tall glass + ice.
Rhubarb Syrup
Thanks to the foxiest lady I know.
4 cups chopped rhubarb
1 cup water
Sugar to taste (up to 1 cup, depending on your taste and how tart the rhubarb is)
Bring everything to a simmer in a saucepan. Cook until the fruit is very soft. Taste it and add more sugar if it needs it. As Gwendolyn says, it should be a little tart. (That is, your Foxy Lady should be a little tart. Ha!)
Set a fine strainer over a bowl, pour in the rhubarb and let it sit to drain off the liquid. Once it’s done, scoop the stewed fruit into a container and eat or refrigerate for later.
June 30 2011 | beverages | 11 Comments »
Have you been to Jelly Modern yet? They have strawberry shortcakes built on sour cream cake doughnuts. With vanilla pastry cream inside. Hell-o. I don’t know if it’s on their regular rotation, but it exemplifies the kind if ingenuity going on in that kitchen. Organic mini donuts?? That may cause a stampede.
Also? This is a pretty bloody brilliant idea for your own kitchen. A cake doughnut is far preferable to those dry, spongy yellow hockey pucks you can buy at the grocery store (can you still?) and if you can’t bring yourself to crank up the oven for some homemade biscuits, you could pick up some (good) doughnuts instead and go to town. Or make some doughnuts yourself. Split, cream, berries, easy.
I posted more involved instructions and a recipe for homemade sour cream cake doughnuts over at the Family Kitchen.
There are also some pretty fab lemon cream biscuits, if you’re looking for a more traditional strawberry shortcake formula. (I’m thinking they would do well with blueberries, instead.)
June 30 2011 | dessert and Family Kitchen | 9 Comments »
We drove out to Aldersyde this afternoon to visit Tony and Penny at Highwood Crossing Farm. W was ecstatic to have the chance to meet the very people who grow his very favourite food – oatmeal. Which he would opt for a bowl of anytime over most anything else. Tony and Penny and the friends who help them out on their farm grow oats, flax, wheat, rye and other grains in rotation, and cold press organic (non GMO) canola and flax oils. They stone grind their flour, make pancake mix and power grains – a truly whole-grain breakfast cereal made with hulled oats, millet, sunflower seeds and flax – and bake enormous batches of granola every Monday using rolled oat flakes, whole flax and sunflower seeds, cold-pressed canola oil and amber maple syrup. It was baking day today, and we could smell the granola in the oven, wafting from a little building in the field as we got out of the car.
In their house, Penny made little rhubarb galettes, from a recipe on the cover of Good to the Grain, by Kim Boyce. They were phenomenal, with a sweet-crunchy crust made with cornmeal and in Penny’s version, oat flour. Lucky for us, Smitten Kitchen posted the recipe, as did Whitney in Chicago. So if you don’t have the book, there you go. She didn’t, by the way, do the hibiscus thing. I don’t think. Penny? Are you reading this? I didn’t detect any floral notes, and I’m generally super sensitive (not in an allergy way, in a my-great-aunt-used-way-too-much-lavender-way) to flowery things in my food.
She told me she makes and freezes them unbaked, then slides them in the oven whenever she wants them. Très genius.
She also made flax muffins for W, who immediately introduced himself, with a handshake, as a scientist. Who knew? She brought out plasticine and played with him. She’s awesome that way.
He went ahead and adopted them. I would.
I do love sitting at kitchen tables – or nooks, crannies, islands – and chatting about food. Especially over food. We talked about farming and cooking and beans and organics while W inspected every square inch of their house (from the bathroom: MOM! YOU HAVE TO COME CHECK THIS OUT!), and Tony took W for a ride out to the field in a golf cart. And Penny sent us home with a homemade flax loaf. Which we ate slabs of for dinner with spinach salad and rhubarb ice cream.
And now every morning when W eats his oatmeal we’ll be able to reminisce about the nice people -Aunt Penny and Uncle Tony, right?- who grew it for him. Talk about priceless.
June 27 2011 | bread | 9 Comments »
I don’t have much to report, food-wise, this particular weekend. Friday we ate pizza. Saturday night we ate braised pulled pork sandwiches (made smoky with smoked paprika in the spice rub) and rented a movie. Halfway through said movie Lou expressed particular interest in going outside to investigate whatever was scurrying around under our back deck. Yes, it was a skunk. Yes, he bolted back inside, leaving the skunk to continue defending itself directly outside our sliding glass doors, which yes do open directly into the dining room/living room/kitchen of our small house. Yes, our niece ran out the front door with a pillow over her face.
Now, if you have not yet experienced direct, unadulterated, undiffused skunk spray, it’s nothing like the cloud of rotten egg smell you may have driven through on the highway, when everyone unanimously goes ew! a skunk! and plugs their noses and rolls up their windows. No. In its pure, straight-from-the-skunk form, it’s a smell of burning tires with the acridity of onions that crawls down your throat and into your eyes, and seeps into anything in its path that will hold onto smell. Including glass and stainless steel.
And so it came to be that at midnight I wrestled a reluctant 100 lb dog into the shower to wash him with dishsoap and vinegar, then drove to the late-night drugstore in a PigPenlike cloud of skunk to buy hydrogen peroxide (vet advice: mix with baking soda + dishsoap for dog cure) and extra-strength Febreeze. (Tomato juice, it turns out, is a myth. Thankfully, as I’m not sure I’m prepared to buy several dozen gallons of it to then bathe a large dog in. After seeing what Lou + water did to the bathroom, I can’t imagine what Lou + tomato juice would do.)
Have you smelled wet dog? How about skunked wet dog? Word on the street is we’ll have to now keep him out of the rain for, like, ever.
Today, the house smells of truck stop bathroom (all that Febreeze) with notes of skunk and vinegar. (So do we.) And so I baked a cinnamon pull-apart bread – what else could I do? – to offset the smell. It’s something I made last week that for some reason smelled more divine as it baked than cinnamon buns or scones or even a fully stuffed turkey. Nevermind incense or potpourri – I needed to bring out the big guns. It helped, and the warm cinnamon-sugar bread was a good consolation prize for those of us kept up all night by a smelly dog whining to go outside and play with his new BFF again. (Lesson not learned.)
Because I posted the over at the Family Kitchen I can’t post it here, but I thought you should know about it. It’s worth a click.
June 26 2011 | bread and Family Kitchen | 17 Comments »
This was just one of the edible highlights of a week that has ended on the couch with my laptop, some sangria (a good compromise between orange juice and wine-both!) and a box of Kleenex. And, ironically, Mike ordering pizza on account of the cold that has just snuck up and smacked me upside the head. From the inside.
John Gilchrist, Tony Spoletini and I were enlisted to spend the week with Kristen and the BT crew in search of Calgary’s best pizza. Which meant a view similar to the one above at around 7 each morning – we visited Il Centro on Monday, Una on Tuesday, Tom’s House of Pizza on Wednesday and Without Papers on Thursday (the contenders were selected by vote, not by us), to sample a variety pies. A tougher job than I gave my gut credit for, actually. I could have very much used a nap each morning by 9.
Without Papers in Inglewood won by a slice.
This is Angelo.
There was lots of dough flipping under the skylight in between hits. Tony got the hang of it too.
Tony and Angelo played football together at St Francis high school howevermany years ago. They brought old helmets and yearbooks and told stories.
This is Kristen. I made her pose like this because of the shot on the back wall – see it? – one of the best parts about Without Papers is the old movies they project on the walls. Because there’s no sound, Mike often fills in the lines himself. Which is far funnier than having the sound on.
We ate a lot of pretty fantastic pizza this week. All of the contenders are well worth a visit.
I’m sad it’s over. I was getting used to pizza and laughing for breakfast.
But. Did I mention they named a pizza after me?
It’s only fair. You can get a John Gilchrist at Il Centro, and Tony claims the Hog Wild at WOP is named after him. So Angelo whipped up a sweet (!) dessert pizza with fresh ricotta, pears poached in red wine, and a drizzle of Nutella. It will be on the menu all this weekend, or until they decide to yank it and/or name it after someone else. Or replace me with a boozy tart.
So we’ll be there tomorrow afternoon – on Saturdays (at 3? 4?) they project kids’ movies on the wall, and sometimes they let W go to the computer and choose – you can bet I’ll be taking advantage of ordering a me pizza while I can. And another Prosecutor, and maybe a Hog Wild. But we’ll start with a Julie. Having your own pizza is better than having your own action figure.
(Wanna go? I have a $25 poker chip to give away for Without Papers!)
June 25 2011 | eating out | 15 Comments »
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