Archive for the 'appetizers' Category
Confession: I’ve never made a sausage roll. Shocking, I know. (I had never made sausage before this week either, but that’s a whole other story.) Besides the obvious deterrent of the sausage-puff pastry double whammy, they always seemed heavy and greasy and far too eighties (but not in a faddish-yes that’s a word-sort of way) and why would I bother putting forth the effort? (Not that I seem to have a problem downing cheese, meat and bread with a side salad of crispy chicken skin and donuts for dessert.)
But then I was challenged to pull out the grinder attachment Mike bought me for my KitchenAid three Christmases ago and use it to make sausage from scratch, and being too lazy to head out to the butcher and pick up some pig intestine casings, I figured I’d much rather wrap the finished sausage in pastry. Good call.
But wait – I didn’t even use the grinder to make this. I had some nice ground Alberta lamb in the freezer, and squished in my add-ins as if I was making a meatloaf, and in very few minutes I was the proud momma of a batch of lamb sausage. Which I could have shaped into little patties and pan-fried, or rolled into balls and roasted, or extruded into casings. I went ahead and thawed some puff pastry – which is so charmingly rustic and forgiving, it looks fabulous no matter what you do to it – and made sausage rolls.
All you do is cut the rolled-out puff pastry into strips, make a long pile of meat on top,
pull up the pastry around it, pinch it closed, turn it seam-down and brush it with a little egg…
and cut the roll into whatever size lengths you fancy, then bake for about 20 minutes, or until puffed and golden. Beautiful. You could do these with any kind of sausage, but I loved the lamb-orange zest combo. They’d do well bite-sized, and you can freeze them ahead for partying later.
Lamb Sausage Rolls with Orange and Fennel
adapted from Canadian Living
1 lb (454 g) ground lamb
1 egg
1/4 cup fresh bread crumbs
1 shallot, minced (or 1/4 cup onion)
1 garlic clove, crushed
2 Tbsp. chopped fresh parsley
2 tsp. crushed fennel seeds
grated zest of an orange
1/2 tsp. ground coriander
salt & pepper
1 pkg (450 g) frozen puff pastry, thawed
beaten egg, for brushing tops (optional)
In large bowl, mix the lamb, egg, bread crumbs, onion, garlic, parsley, fennel seeds, orange zest, coriander, salt and pepper; set aside.
Divide pastry in half. On lightly floured surface, roll out each half into a 10″ square; cut each into 3 equal strips. Spoon the filling down the center of each strip, fold pastry over filling and press the edge to seal.
Arrange rolls, seam side down, on a rimmed cookie sheet. Cover and chill for about half an hour. Preheat the oven to 400F.
Cut each roll into 1″-2″ pieces. (Make-ahead: Layer between waxed paper in airtight container and freeze for up to 2 months.) Brush the tops with a little beaten egg and bake for 20 minutes, or until golden.
(They may need an extra 5-10 minutes if you bake them from frozen.)
March 04 2010 | appetizers and pork | 24 Comments »
Yes, hello. I’m still here. It’s funny how a mere 4 days’ absence can feel like a decade when I’m used to being umbilically connected to this place. I have missed you guys, but didn’t want to be the little raincloud that popped up over your head every time you stopped by for a visit.
(Also, I’ve been teaching in Red Deer the past two evenings, arriving home tonight and last at close to midnight. Yesterday, having been up since 5:30, I couldn’t bring myself to open my laptop.)
To bring you up to speed on the past few days, I’ll give you the Coles notes: I survived Saturday, in no small part due to Pierre. A chili cook-off at the Ramsay Christmas Fair on Sunday, more sad news from friends, and the arrival of other friends from BC, whose coming provided ample excuse to make beef bourguignon and open some wine.
Monday we baked dark fruitcake (the very best therapy, I’m telling you) and took the kids to see
A Christmas Carol (the movie) which – by the way? SCARY. Dark. Heavy. Very traditional Dickens (save for the occasional poke at religion, which I don’t recall in any versions I’ve seen) – spectacular effects, but all in all not as lightened/humoured by Jim Carrey or the Disney title as I expected. The kids aren’t particularly inclined to be scared of stuff, but we spent half the movie covering their 3D glasses with our hands. I may have nightmares. About the $45 popcorn tab and over $100 admission between the 8 of us, at least.
And today, after the dog park and W’s gymnastics and before I drove to Red Deer, I retrieved some sausages from the freezer, grilled them and topped them with spiced figs from last week. It was a tapas menu item I stumbled upon that struck me as particularly tasty, and it was.
Grilled Pork Sausages with Spiced Figs
adapted from Bon Appétit, September 2007
1 cup red wine vinegar
3/4-1 cup sugar
1 pkg. dried black Mission figs (about 1 1/2 cups)
1 cinnamon stick or 1 sprig of rosemary
1 tsp. cornstarch (optional)
5 sweet Italian link pork sausages (about 1 pound)
In a small saucepan, combine the vinegar, sugar, figs and cinnamon stick or rosemary and bring to a simmer. Cook over low heat for about half an hour, until the figs are plump and the liquid is syrupy. If you like, dissolve the cornstarch in about 2 tsp. water and add it to the mixture to thicken it a little; bring back to a boil for at least 2 minutes to allow it to thicken and get rid of any starchy texture.
Meanwhile, grill the sausages until almost cooked through; holding them with tongs, cut them in half lengthwise, then throw them back on the grill for a few minutes, cut-side down, until char-marked on the bottom.
Serve each sausage half topped with a few figs and some sauce. Serves 10.
One Year Ago: Crab, Spinach and Artichoke Omelets
November 26 2009 | appetizers and on the grill | 19 Comments »
Bit of a week. My head hurts. It’s after midnight. I can’t seem to spell without the aid of spell-check. Still on Thursday and Friday’s to-do list: find a Julia Child wig (and build a costume around it, then practice my higher-octave voice) for Breakfast TV Friday morning (I’m hoping they’ll let me bloodily cut my finger on the air à la Dan Ackroyd on Saturday Night Live), shop and prep for two different cooking segments (cupcakes, shaggy monster cookies, spun-sugar cobweb croquembouche, stuff with pumpkin in it), make green food for a photo shoot for ParentsCanada magazine tomorrow afternoon (at which I’ll also be taking the pictures), finish two articles and take photos for one of them, and cook for a Napa Valley wine event at Willow Park on Friday night, which 250 hungry people will be attending. That’s not including the little stuff, and the outline and sample chapter of a book manuscript I was supposed to have done this week, which obviously won’t. And oh yeah-
I have a 4 year old.
Luckily (for so many reasons) I have a next door neighbour who happens to be a chef. He comes in handy because 1) we’re tag teaming on this Napa Valley event, which is a very good thing because he’s far more cheffy than I, making things like seared scallops over radicchio slaw in soup spoons, and there’s no way I could pull it off myself. Also, he sometimes brings us food. Some days he leans over the fence to give me a taste of a duck confit or some little cornucopia filled with something interesting. Earlier this week he brought over cold rigatoni stuffed with goat cheese and tossed in pesto, which we’ve been dipping into for the past few days.
Tonight at around dinnertime they came in handy-we set the last of them out in a bowl at the table and nervously scarfed them down with our fingers, dunked in chipotle aioli, as my sister filled out paperwork to make an offer on a house. Her very first house. Directly across the street.
Rigatoni Stuffed with Goat Cheese
from Chef Wade Paterson-thanks Wade!
1 package (500 grams) good quality dried rigatoni
1 lb soft goat cheese
¼ cup sun dried tomatoes packed in oil (well drained)
1 14 oz can artichoke hearts (well drained)
¼ cup chopped fresh basil
¼ cup ground Parmesan
½ cup pesto
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
salt & pepper
Cook rigatoni in a large pot of well salted boiling water until just al dente. Drain well and immerse in cold water to stop cooking. In a food processor add cheeses, tomatoes and artichokes. Process until smooth. Add in basil and pulse until just mixed. Season with salt and pepper.
Fit a piping bag with a small straight tip small enough to fit in the rigatoni. Fill bag with cheese mixture. (Alternatively, fill a large ziploc bag, seal and snip a corner off to pipe from.) Drain rigatoni well and pipe cheese mixture into rigatoni. Be careful not to overfill or the rigatoni might break.
In a large bowl combine pesto and olive oil and mix well. Add stuffed pasta and toss to coat. Serve at room temperature. Store in the fridge up to 3 days. Does not freeze well.
One Year Ago: Green Hair with Bloody Eyeballs and Toenail Clippings, and Crème Caramel
October 29 2009 | appetizers and pasta | 17 Comments »
I think if one is going to discuss tomatoes, the issue of classification (fruit or vegetable) should be cleared out of the way at the outset.
Botanically, tomatoes are indeed fruit. This is a fact of common knowledge, yet although people are quick to point it out, they hardly consider treating them as such. One would no more make a sweet and cinnamon-scented crisp out of tomatoes than they would stuff an apple with crumbs and top it with cheese. (Although come to think of it, either one might be quite tasty. I have, after all, discovered this year that tomato paste makes a more than suitable addition to a spicy Jewish apple cake, and I’ve for a long time added a spoonful to carrot cakes.)
And that’s because tomatoes are – ready for this? – 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, from the arena in which it matters (the kitchen), a tomato is a vegetable. But whatever you call it – I’m just happy that my plants are producing some.
(And 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 the court to decide; furthermore, tomatoes are the state vegetable of New Jersey – 8,682,661 New Jerseyers can’t be wrong.)
So yes, it’s Tomato Week, the final installment of Summer Fest 2009, and I’m late to the party again – last week seemed to completely blow by without much more than roasted beans, let alone greens.
This week though, my tomato plants are bursting. Bursting! I no longer have tomato envy. I am the proud mama of two flourishing plants, picked up around May/June from Home Depot with high hopes and replanted (at about a foot tall) in the old double sink propped up against the fence and filled with dirt. They are now over-the-fence-high; over the summer as they grew I propped them up with bamboo sticks and chunks of hockey sticks, secured with twist ties, and maybe it’s all that Canadian karma, but it worked. One is heavy with cherry tomatoes, not all ripe at once but promising a tomato-heavy month; the other produced small “patio” tomatoes, sort of like a cross between a Roma and a regular beefsteak. They are still green, but they’re there. And there are lots of them. And I grew them. Or at least, didn’t kill them.
One of my favourite things to do to a cherry tomato is roast it; drizzle with oil, scatter with garlic and sprinkle with salt, then roast at 400F or so until they release their juices and shrivel, then start to get sticky, dark bits. There are so many things you can do with roasted tomatoes: scrape out of the pan onto hot pasta with crumbled feta or goat cheese and tear some fresh herbs over top; add chicken or veg stock and puree for roasted tomato soup (add a splash of cream at the end); scatter over pizza; or make a savoury clafoutis.
Roasted Cherry Tomato and Goat Cheese Clafoutis
A clafoutis is a baked French custard usually studded with cherries and sweetened with sugar; this one is savoury, but resembles the original with cherry tomatoes. Serve it warm or cold, in wedges. It’s probably great as a sandwich, tucked between buttered toast.
1 pint cherry or grape tomatoes
2-3 garlic cloves, left whole
canola or olive oil, for cooking
salt and pepper
4 oz. soft goat cheese
2 Tbsp. snipped fresh chives, parsley or basil
3 large eggs
1 cup half & half
3 Tbsp. flour
Preheat the oven to 400F. Spread the tomatoes and garlic in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet; drizzle with oil, salt and pepper, roll around to coat and roast for 20-30 minutes, or until the tomatoes start to shrivel and turn golden.
Scrape into a pie plate or other shallow baking dish that has been sprayed with nonstick spray. Turn the oven down to 350F. Crumble over the goat cheese and sprinkle with chives.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs, cream and flour; pour over the tomatoes and cheese. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until puffed and pale golden. Serve immediately, wait until it cools to room temperature, or chill and serve cold.
A lot of tomatoes are finding their way into kitchens this week:
Margaret of A Way to Garden made some quick tomato sauce, ever so slowly; Matt of Matt Bites shows off his Tomato Top Ten. Shauna of Gluten Free Girl slices them up and makes a smoked salsa. Marilyn of Simmer Till Done made us an upside-down tomato-basil bread. Paige of The Sister Project simmered tomato soup. Jaden of Steamy Kitchen (thankfully!) made a Caprese salad with basil vinaigrette. And Diane and Todd of White on Rice Couple simmered some tomato jam – yum.
Check them out – Summer Fest 2009 – like summer itself – is coming to an end.
One Year Ago: Grilled Cheese with Elk Pepper Salami, Pickled Beet and Apple Salad
August 18 2009 | appetizers and eggs and vegetarian | 21 Comments »
A long day. Up at 4, out the door by 5am, back home just in time for the 9 o’clock news. But a few new experiences in between:
At around 6:30 am, as I was hurtling down the highway toward Edmonton listening to Panic in Detroit, I saw a moose standing by the edge of the highway; a big guy with a massive felted rack, tapping a hoof onto the pavement like he was testing the water before getting in. I honked. He got spooked and backed off, then ran alongside the traffic for a bit. (How Canadian, eh?)
Later in the morning I was carrying 3 watermelons down Jasper Avenue in Edmonton and my pants fell down. Yes, I was, and they did. (A hidden camera moment if I’ve ever heard of one.) This is the problem with Spanx – their smooth shininess coupled with their ability to smooth out those rolls your pants normally hang on to, just enough for them to work their way down without you feeling them go. You really learn something about yourself and what interesting new muscles you’re capable of pulling when you’re responsible for the safekeeping of multiple melons. I might have been more mortified if I wasn’t so ecstatic that my pants actually fell down. I must be wasting away to nothing, right?
I had lunch (beef short ribs and phyllo-wrapped cheese with saskatoon compote) with someone I had never met, someone also guilty of photographing her food. Then I drove to Legal (pronounce it as if you were French) and met some fantastic people with a brilliant food product that I’ll tell you about tomorrow – tonight I’m just too bagged to even know where to begin.
Dinner was leftovers from this morning’s cooking segments on BT – grapes from the bag, chunks of melon, strawberries and watermelon salsa nestled in the cup holder scooped out with corn chips. Turns out finely chopped watermelon is a great addition to salsa – juicy, crunchy, slightly sweet; a refreshing contrast to the chilies, black beans, corn and spice. I ate in the car, driving in and out of rainstorms from Legal through Edmonton and back to Calgary. My favourite part – besides the fields full of hay bales we always refer to as whole-wheat marshmallows – is the sky.
For those of you who have not experienced an Alberta sky; well. How do I describe it and do it justice? A friend of mine moved here from Halifax to become a doctor, and she said that for 2 whole years she felt like she was being crushed by the sky. It’s just that big. This afternoon it was straight out of the Simpsons opening sequence – on my way home it looked like puddles of blue-gray watercolour paint dabbed with a wadded-up Kleenex. I couldn’t stop looking at it.
Watermelon Salsa
adapted from www.watermelon.org
1 19 oz. (540 mL) can black beans, rinsed and drained
1 can kernel corn, drained
1/2 small purple onion, finely diced
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and finely minced
1-2 garlic cloves, minced
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1 tsp. ground cumin
1 tsp. mild chili powder
juice of 1 lime
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
Salt to taste
2 cups finely chopped seedless watermelon
In a large bowl, stir together everything except the watermelon. Add watermelon and gently fold to combine. Chill for a few hours to allow the flavours to meld before serving.
Serves about 10.
August 13 2009 | appetizers and beans | 28 Comments »
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