Archive for February, 2012
Seeing as the house has been officially brought down by the flu – the Who’s Teenage Wasteland is stuck in my head, only with Kleenex in place of teenage – and we’ve (conveniently) been living on soup and smoothies, it occurred to me that there were some other recipes you may have missed this month. Like these Slutty Brownies (sorry, I didn’t name them) I made for the bake sale – they’re made with layers of chocolate chip cookie dough, Oreos, and brownie batter.
Or these Nutella swirl brownies, made for no particular reason.
These Panko baked cheese sticks would totally be on the menu for tonight’s Oscars, if I had the gumption. (I don’t.) Luckily, soup is sippable on the couch.
And this no-knead cheese bread is completely divine with this surplus soup. You wind up with cheesy tunnels and pockets throughout the bread, which is also pretty fab toasted with grape jelly.
My most popular post this month has been the strawberry cheesecake bites – hulled berries filled with sweetened cream cheese and sprinkled with graham crumbs, if you have them. These took approximately ten minutes to make – and look how adorable!
Seeing as it was Valentines’ Day, I posted a recipe for basic chocolate ganache truffles – the same ones I brought in little Chinese takeout boxes to the bake sale a couple weekends ago.
And heart shaped chocolate chip cookie pops – which really don’t need to be relegated exclusively to Valentine’s day. Any day calls for heart shaped cookies on a stick, don’t you think?
Nor do heart-shaped pretzels.
And there were those mugs of hot chocolate with raspberry whipped cream hearts. Did you know you could spread out and freeze whipped cream, and cut it out with a cookie cutter? Me neither. Methinks there are plenty of applications for this.
The red wine caramel sauce was not as popular as I thought it would be. Red wine caramel sauce!
I’m pretty sure my favourite thing this month was the real baked beans with bacon. Honestly. There’s nothing better. And the best time for it is the bleak midwinter. Bacon counts as a local vegetable in February, right?
February 26 2012 | Family Kitchen | 11 Comments »
See that lovely skillet full of bacon, cream and kale? After taking that photo I set it back on the burner to heat through again and went upstairs to check my email. And answer a few. And work on a story that’s overdue… and yep, I burned the hell out of it. My cast iron skillet has gained another half inch of solid blackness that will take some serious chipping at to remove. Par for the week.
Regarding the snooty name, bacon béchamel sounds far better than bacon sauce, which sounds like something you might pump out of a vat at 7-11. Béchamel is just a hoity-toity name for that white sauce your mom may have made when you were a kid in order to make cheese sauce to pour over your broccoli. It’s just white sauce. Unless you’re a contender in Top Chef, in which case you’d better know your béchamel from your velouté.
Traditionally a basic béchamel is made by whisking milk into a roux (equal parts butter and flour – really, do we even need a fancy name for butter and flour?) and in this case, made with bacon drippings instead of butter. If you feel weird about this, remember that lard – pig fat – has 40% less saturated fat than butter.
It appears that I – who loves to not waste food – have wound up with a surplus of cream and pre-chopped veg left over from our day of soup making on Wednesday, when a bunch of you -and you know who you are- came down to the Cookbook Company to chop, sauté and stir up twenty six batches of soup to photograph for the Soup Sisters Cookbook, a fundraiser for the organization that’s scheduled to release in October. It was a fantastic afternoon with lots of laughs, and we all had the opportunity to do what we love, together, for a great cause. And I got the chance to meet more of you, which is always so awesome. I couldn’t have asked for a better day. Half of the 40 photos are done (!) with more of the prepped soup still to photograph and a few left to make, it looks like we’ll actually make our end of the month deadline. Thanks to all who came to chip in at the soup sweatshop.
And now to tackle the contents of the fridge…
Creamed Winter Greens with Bacon Béchamel
inspired by this one here – which with its browned butter sounds fantastic too – but I needed to streamline it a little bit, and given the opportunity couldn’t not make bacon béchamel to go atop winter greens..
4-6 slices bacon, chopped
2 Tbsp. flour
1 1/2 cups milk
2 Tbsp. minced shallot or onion (optional)
1 bay leaf (optional)
6 black peppercorns (optional)
1 large bunch of winter greens such as kale or beet greens
canola or olive oil or butter, for cooking
1 onion, chopped
1/2 cup heavy cream
2 garlic cloves, minced
pinch red chili flakes
salt and freshly ground black pepper
In a large, heavy skillet, cook the bacon until crisp; remove with a slotted spoon and set aside.
Whisk the flour into the bacon drippings. Whisk in the milk and if you like, the shallot, bay leaf and peppercorns. Bring to a boil, whisking often. Let simmer for a few minutes and then pour it into a bowl to set aside. If you added the flavour bits, you’ll need to pour it through a sieve to get rid of them. Wipe out the pan.
Roughly chop the greens, ditching the tough ribs.
Heat a drizzle of oil and/or butter in the pan and sauté the onion for 5 minutes, until soft and starting to turn golden. Add the kale (or other greens) and cook until it starts to wilt; add the garlic, béchamel, cream and chili flakes and stir to coat; cover and cook for 5-7 minutes, until the greens are tender. Season with salt and pepper and serve with the bacon scattered on top.
Serves 4-6.
February 25 2012 | veg | 12 Comments »
It’s going to be all soup all the time for the rest of this month, so what’s another pot among friends?
Tomorrow is Soupapalooza (you should see the shopping list in front of me), so there will be plenty to share. But I made this one two days ago and sipped the last out of a mug at my desk this afternoon, and it’s almost better than coffee. The chickpeas make it thick, and pureeing them make it sippable. Peanut butter enriches it – peanut butter may be my new favourite soup ingredient – but you can leave it out. It’s soup – you can do anything you want.
Also? It’s even better the next day.
Curried Chickpea Tomato Soup
canola or olive oil, for cooking
1 onion, diced
4 garlic cloves, crushed
1 19 oz. (540 mL) can chickpeas, rinsed and drained
1 tsp. curry paste (or to taste)
1 tsp. chopped fresh rosemary
Pinch red pepper flakes
4 cups (1 L) chicken stock
1 19 oz (540 mL) can crushed tomatoes
1/2 cup cream (half & half or whipping) or plain yogurt
1 heaping spoonful peanut butter (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
fresh lime wedges
In a pot set over medium-high heat, sauté the onions until they start to turn golden. Add the chickpeas, rosemary and garlic. Add a bit of crushed red pepper flakes if you like.
Spoon half the chickpea mixture into a bowl and crush them roughly with a fork.
Add the chicken stock and tomatoes to the pot. Bring to a simmer and cook for about 30 minutes.
Add the cream and peanut butter and using a hand-held immersion blender, purée the soup until smooth. Stir the crushed chickpeas back in, add salt and pepper to taste and serve with a squeeze of lime.
February 21 2012 | soup | 16 Comments »
Sometimes the soup just isn’t as photogenic as the flowers.
But yet: a pot of homemade soup exemplifies nourishment, comfort and sharing, doesn’t it?
(Deep Thoughts for a Sunday night.)
You may have heard of Soup Sisters, an organization that started in Calgary in 2009 (and has since grown to operate 15 events in 9 cities across Canada every month), where participants gather in local professional kitchens for a soup-making event under the guidance of a chef facilitator, producing 150-200 servings of nourishing soup that are packaged in reusable lidded glass bowls and delivered to a local shelter. It’s half class, half kitchen party – events are social evenings with lively conversation, chopping, laughter and warm kitchen camaraderie that culminate in a simple, sit-down supper of soup, salad, bread and wine. Since March 2009, Soup Sisters has delivered over 60,000 containers of soup to 20 shelter recipients across Canada. I’ve been a Soup Sisters chef/facilitator myself, and it’s fun.
And now I’ve been asked to take photographs (gratis!) for their new cookbook. Scheduled to release this fall, it’s a wonderful collection of recipes Soup Sisters groups have made at their events across Canada, as well as recipes contributed by celebrity chefs, with proceeds going to the Soup Sisters organization. But – extenuating circumstances mean I have to get all the photos done by the end of the month. This month. So that’s 40 photos in under 2 weeks. I’m so happy to be involved, but yeah.
The time-consuming part, of course, is the preparation of all that soup. And so I called up the Cookbook Company and asked if we might take over their kitchen for a day, thinking I’d enlist some of my favourite people to come and cook pots of soup, Soup Sisters-style. The sunny upstairs kitchen is all ours this Wednesday, if anyone would like to come by and help chop, stir and simmer.
I thought I’d reserve it from 12-8, so that anyone who wants to come after work can do so. Come for the whole thing, for a bit, or for ten minutes to say hi. I’ll bring some music, buy some wine, dig up some nibbles, and pick up all the ingredients we need.
Since I’ll only need a bowlful per shot, excess soup can be brought home, so you’ll get dinner out of it.
Plus, we can hang out and cook. Which sounds to me like the most fun ever. All hands on deck!
Want to come? We’ll be in the upstairs kitchen of the Cookbook Company Wednesday from 12-8pm; come on down anytime, and leave a comment here if you could, just so I get an idea how many(ish) to expect. Maybe we’ll set up a movie in one corner for any kids who come along.
This vanilla parsnip soup isn’t in the book, but Michael Allemeier tweeted it to me awhile ago to make for a dinner party I was auctioned off to cook for, having been published in the Herald. It’s really wonderful, and so is he. The secret is to slowly sweat off the parsnips to bring out the natural sweetness, he says. I’ve made this as-is, and with a small bundle of asparagus tossed in.
The vanilla is a deliciously unique addition, something we’re used to tasting with sweet, but you can leave it out and still have a pretty fab pot of parsnip soup. If you like, add a wee dollop of curry paste and swap a small sweet potato or a couple carrots for one of the parsnips.
Michael Allemeier’s Vanilla Parsnip Soup
2 Tbsp. canola or olive oil
2 Tbsp. butter
1 onion, peeled and diced
1 leek, white part only, washed and thinly sliced
2 garlic cloves, sliced
3 large parsnips, peeled and chopped
2 L (8 cups) chicken stock
1 vanilla bean (or a small dollop of vanilla bean paste)
1/2 cup cream (optional)
juice of half a lemon (or a tablespoon or two)
salt to taste
In a large pot set over medium-high heat, heat the oil and butter. When the foam subsides add the onion, leek and garlic. Slowly sweat the vegetables until they’re tender and soft but not browned – 5 minutes or so.
Add the parsnips and continue to cook, stirring often. After about 5 minutes, add the stock and bring to a simmer.
Cut the vanilla bean in half lengthwise and scrape out the black seeds. Add pod and seeds to the simmering soup. Simmer for 30 minutes until parsnips are tender.
Remove the vanilla pods and discard, and stir in the cream. Puree the soup well using a hand-held immersion blender or in batches in a regular blender. Add the lemon juice and season with salt.
Serves 6 to 8.
February 19 2012 | soup | 34 Comments »
Let me tell you a story about a cauliflower. It was a sad and depressed cauliflower, who lived in the back of the fridge, and was quite neglected, much like its cousins living in other refrigerators, in other houses in other cities. Despite its inoffensive flavour and nutritional benefits, no one much liked it. Few people disliked it, mind you, but no one truly loved it.
Then one day, it got together with some oil and Parmesan cheese, and peoples’ opinions of it changed. It made a lot of friends. People started to see its delicious potential. And it moved up from the back of the fridge to one of the penthouse drawers up front, and hardly ever saw the inside of the compost bin again. The end.
If you want to rekindle your relationship with the cauliflower in the back of your fridge – get to know it better, even fall in love with it – break it into florets and spread it out on a baking sheet.
Drizzle it with oil – olive or canola – sprinkle with salt and pepper and toss it about with your hands.
Roast it at 425F for about 10 minutes, until it’s starting to sizzle and turn golden. Take it out, toss it a bit and shower it with freshly grated Parmesan cheese.
Slide it back into the oven for another 10 minutes or so, or until the cheese melts and the edges of the cauliflower are good and golden.
If you have a few lime wedges sitting around from those G&Ts you were so enamoured with last night, a squeeze overtop is not a bad thing.
I’ll leave you alone with your cauliflower now.
February 18 2012 | veg | 23 Comments »
Next »
