Yes, I know, I am an extraordinarily boring person this week. Sorry about that. Sorry too for the hideously blue bowl I decided in haste to dish my boring chili up in, not even thinking (after 170 days) that I would be required to take a photo of it. I’m particularly proud of my buttered sliced bread garnish - it reminds me of dinnertime images of the 50s when they’d put out a section of Wonder Bread slices in a serving bowl on the kitchen table. (This is not Wonder Bread. It is grocery store sliced bread, but at least it’s whole wheat. Honest. When I see Wonder Bread I can’t not think about Clarissa Dickson Wright’s reference to “slimy white slice”.) Tomorrow promises to get more interesting, as I’m cooking for my Dad’s birthday on Saturday and Ramsay Rocks on Sunday, an event I’m emceeing (and cooking for the volunteers - there will be plenty of food for everyone else though). You should come.
I do have a confession to make: I love anything tomato-saucy with buttered bread. I have been known to make a spaghetti sandwich, just to create a vehicle for the tomato sauce. Sometimes I just scoop up chunky tomato sauce leftovers with bread. W tried to mimic me tonight and made quite a mess of the patio. Lou was happy though. (I mean John Cusack.)
Again, chili isn’t even particularly summery. But it is cowboyish, and Stampede is coming up faster than I care to acknowledge. When I was 12, I won the Calgary Stampede Chili Cook-off. (The adult one, not a special cook-off for kids; let me tell you, there were some mighty unhappy contestants who took their chili very seriously and were not at all pleased to be whupped by a 12 year old girl who sort of threw a bit of this and that in the pot and then didn’t even particularly remember her recipe.) This year, I’m hosting the second annual kids’ chili cook-off at the Stampede on Kids’ Day. We don’t have enough contestants yet, so if you have kids under 14 who are interested in entering their chili - the winner then gets to make their recipe on the ATCO cooking stage and be on TV, if they want to - email me!
I have never used a recipe for chili. There is no reason to. I cook up some lean ground beef or bison with a chopped onion, maybe a red pepper, in a drizzle of canola oil, then add a couple cans of beans, drained to get rid of the salty bean sludge (I like things beany - red kidney beans for sure, sometimes baked beans in tomato sauce, sometimes white kidney or black beans) a big can or two of diced tomatoes (whole is fine too), and about a cup of salsa if I have some. A good heaping tablespoon or so of chili powder - which is really high in fiber, being simply ground up dried chiles - and sometimes a small spoonful of cocoa and/or instant coffee or espresso, just to give it some depth and colour. Coffee is the cowboy way, after all. Decaf works just as well. Simmer it all for about an hour to break down the tomatoes. That’s pretty much it. If you want to add a can of tomato paste, that’s always a good idea - tomato paste is such a great source of lypocene - much higher than fresh tomatoes, as they have been cooked down and condensed. Tomato paste is also great as pizza sauce. It’s nice and thick, and quite sweet tasting, being just pure tomatoes. Kids love it.
The biggest flavour factor when it comes to chili is time - I always let it sit in the fridge for a day or two before we eat it. It’s edible of course the day you make it, but always better after a day or so. It also freezes very well.
For some reason, yesterday’s spaghetti and today’s chili tasted fantastic. No thanks to any particularly stellar culinary skills, but more likely due to the fact that I spent a good 4 hours completely secluded from anything edible in the CBC newsroom beforehand. They are really onto something with this concept of bon appetit.
If this wet, grey, hail-y weather continues, we are in for a whole year’s worth of cold weather comfort food. The smell of this shepherd’s pie bubbling made me crave crunchy leaves and Halloween.
To be honest shepherd’s pie isn’t normally in my repertoire, but as I was pondering what to do with this leftover roast lamb (hash was my first thought… my mom used to make the crispiest hash with leftover roast beef, potatoes and onions - like a wedge of burger and fries all crisped up and smothered in ketchup) I was simultaneously working on an article on meals you can freeze ahead. Shepherd’s pie is traditionally made with lamb, and I saw it as another opportunity to chip away at my stash of sweet potatoes while making it healthier in the process. Typically SP is made with raw ground meat, but it can just as easily be done with finely chopped leftover roast. Honestly, you could make a shepherd’s pie out of anything - a panful of veggies, even, or robust mushrooms with onions and garlic - then sprinkle a spoonful of flour overtop and add a cup of stock; bring it to a simmer to thicken and scrape up the browned bits from the pan, and pour into a baking dish and top with mashed potatoes. You really don’t need a recipe here, just a basic formula.
Come to think of it - a vegetarian version made with meaty portobello mushrooms, onions and garlic, and Guinness in place of the stock, would be just fab. More appropriate in October though, I think. Under normal circumstances, anyway.
Shepherd’s Pie with Sweet Potatoes
2 largeish sweet potatoes or 3 largeish russet potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
a drizzle of canola or olive oil
1 large onion, peeled and chopped
1 large carrot, peeled and chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 lb. ground lamb, lean beef or bison (or 2-3 cups chopped leftover roast)
1 cup sliced mushrooms (optional)
1 Tbsp. flour
1 tsp. chopped fresh or dry rosemary (optional)
1 cup beef, veggie, onion or chicken broth
2 Tbsp. tomato paste or ketchup
1 cup frozen peas
2 Tbsp. butter
1/4 cup(ish) milk
salt and pepper
Preheat oven to 375°F. To cook the potatoes you can either roast them in their skins in the oven for about an hour, microwave them whole in their skins (poke them with a fork first) or peel, chop and boil them until soft.
In a large pan, heat a drizzle of oil and sauté the onion and carrot over medium-high heat for about 5 minutes or until soft; add the garlic and meat and cook for another 5 minutes, until the meat is cooked through and the veg are starting to brown a little.
If you want to add mushrooms, set the meat mixture aside (transfer it to a bowl or something), heat a little more oil and sauté the mushrooms until they release their moisture and then the moisture cooks off and they start to brown. Return the meat mixture to the pan. Sprinkle the flour overtop and stir it around until it coats the meat a little, then add the rosemary, stock and tomato paste and stir until the mixture bubbles and thickens, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Stir in the peas.
Pour into a baking dish, making sure it only fills it half full, so there is room for the potatoes.
Peel (if necessary) and mash the potatoes with the butter, milk and salt and pepper. Spread over the meat mixture and bake for about 45 minutes, until bubbly.
Serves 6.
Per serving: 270 calories, 9.6 g total fat (2.8 g saturated fat, 4.4 g monounsaturated fat, 1 g polyunsaturated fat), 27.8 g protein, 17.9 g carbohydrate, 74.8 mg cholesterol, 2.5 g fiber. 32% calories from fat.
I take back yesterday’s comment about Lou being deserving of homemade peanut butter and cheese treats - this morning, his first order of business was to completely chew up Mike’s glasses. Silly me, here I was worried about our shoes.
The fantastic thing about soup is that it can start from anything. I never would have thought to combine these ingredients in soup, but I looked in my fridge tonight, still full from a late lunch at Aida’s with A (please feel free to hate me for eating so well this week. I would) and found the better half of a can of black beans (leftover from the quesadillas) and two mild Italian Spolumbos sausages that needed cooking. And the storage compartment in the seat of the bench at the kitchen table is beginning to get difficult to close - every time I go to the market I pick up sweet potatoes and add them to the stash, which hasn’t been depleted lately, so I figured sausage, black beans and sweet potatoes might make a fine soup.
Because my other favorite black bean soup is made so much better with a fresh jalapeno pepper (and I say this as someone who is not a particular fan of jalapenos), I minced one (they cost about 3 cents each and last forever in the fridge, so I happen to have a couple) and cooked it along with the sausage. Unlike onions and garlic, a hot pepper’s heat will not be tamed by cooking; if you’re a wuss like me, get rid of the seeds and membranes, which contain the majority of a pepper’s capsaicin. Then I threw in a diced sweet potato, the black beans, a 1L tetra pack of chicken stock, a shake of cumin and about a third of a can of leftover tomato sauce that was also in the fridge. I thought this soup would benefit from a hit of tomato - a bit of tomato sauce or spoonful of tomato paste gives it a far richer and deeper flavour, and the starch in the potato thickens the broth slightly.
Some of you in warmer climates may think such a soup is the exact opposite of what one might want to eat on a June evening. Honestly, Calgary does have its share of 30 degree days, but today it’s damp and chilly; we all huddled into kangaroo jackets in order to go outside and see how the garden is recovering from the hailstorm A and I watched out the window at Aida’s while we finished our ricotta-rosewater cheesecake and baklava. When the forecast calls for a week of rain, I’ll be glad to have a pot of leftover soup in the fridge. Besides, Mike is suffering from a hangover, and I can’t think of much more reviving than a warm bowl of spicy black beans, sweet potatoes and sausage.
Sausage, Black Bean and Sweet Potato Soup
a drizzle of canola or olive oil
1-2 mild or hot Italian sausages
1 jalapeno pepper, seeded and minced
1 medium sweet potato, peeled and diced
1 19 oz. (540 mL) can black beans, drained
1 tsp. cumin
1 L chicken or vegetable stock
about a cup of tomato sauce or a big spoonful of tomato paste
In your soup pot, heat a drizzle of oil over medium heat. Squeeze the sausage out of its casing into the pot and cook it, breaking it up as you stir it around, until it’s no longer pink. Add the jalapeno pepper, then the sweet potato, beans, cumin, stock and tomato sauce. Bring to a simmer, reduce the heat and simmer for about half an hour, until the potatoes are tender and the broth has thickened a bit.
Serves 4-6. Per serving, based on 4 servings: 416 calories, 7.7 g total fat (1.5 g saturated fat, 3.8 g monounsaturated fat, 1.8 g polyunsaturated fat), 27.8 g protein, 60.5 g carbohydrate, 30 mg cholesterol, 14 g fiber. 16% calories from fat.
The final resting place for any chicken that has been roasted in my house is a pot on the stove. When it would appear that most of the meat has been used up in salads, quesadillas and fried rice, there is always more to be coaxed off by a stint in the hot tub. Yesterday I covered the last of two chickens with water and added a handful of chives from the garden, a few peppercorns, and that was it. (And always add any chicken gel that might be left in the bottom of the roasting pan or container you stored it in in the fridge.) You could add any kind of vegetable trimmings you like - onion skins to make it darker and richer - or roast the carcass in the oven first, which is akin to browning meat; it caramelizes any natural sugars in there, adding flavour to the resulting stock.
Contrary to popular belief, stock does not have to simmer for hours on end, nor must you boil an entire chicken to rubber in order to make stock. A half-hour simmer is fine, then turn the heat off and let it all cool down - sort of like steeping a big pot of chicken tea. When it’s cool enough, pull out the bones and help the bits of meat fall off into the stock - a perfect base for soup.
I’ve had a jar of alphabet noodles on my shelf for at least a year - something I thought I should have when I became a mum, but not the sort of thing I often think of cooking with. W likes to play with them, but I have yet to actually add them to anything. Today I thought I’d reheat my chickeny stock, along with some chopped carrots and alphabet noodles. It seemed boring.
Then I remembered a soup Mike used to be addicted to when he worked in a deli decades ago - it was called Italian wedding soup; a basic chicken soup made with teeny meatballs, greens and tiny pasta stars. (I’m pretty sure Campbell’s makes a version of it in one of their hoity toity varieties.) I had greens. I had meatballs, even if they weren’t teeny. I cut them in half. I did a quick internet search to see if I was missing anything, and noticed Giada makes a version (with endive or escarole) in which she whisks together egg and Parmesan cheese and dribbles it into the hot broth, creating a cloudy soup with ribbons of egg, reminiscent of egg drop soup.
Alphabet Wedding Soup
I’d love to try this with sausage meatballs; squeeze lean Italian sausage out of their casings at about 1/2″ intervals to make small meatball-sized pieces that will hold together as they simmer in the soup.
3-4 cups chicken stock, preferrably with pieces of chicken in it
1 carrot, peeled and diced
1/3 cup alphabet or other small pasta
about a dozen marble-sized meatballs, or small bits of sausage (uncooked)
1-2 eggs
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
a couple handfuls of fresh baby spinach, chard or escarole
Bring the stock to a simmer in a pot on the stove. Add the carrot, pasta and meatballs and simmer for about 10 minutes, until the meatballs are cooked through and the pasta is tender.
In a small bowl, whisk together the egg and Parmesan cheese; drizzle into the hot soup, stirring gently so that it doesn’t completely blend in, but cooks in strands. Throw in the spinach and cook for another minute or two, until it wilts.
Season with salt and pepper, and serve with extra Parmesan cheese on top.
Normally I would stir up some biscuits to accompany soup, but today it was the other way around. I made a batch of pesto-filled cheese slab scones for CBC this morning, thinking they might be appropriate for our chat about kids and picnicking, but later on, when there was a slab scone to spare, I really couldn’t imagine anything better to accompany a bowl of soup. Since it has been about to rain all day long (like the pause before a sneeze), soup is fitting. Since the scones are filled with pesto, roasted tomato soup made sense. All the stars fell into alignment when I noticed a bunch of tomatoes going wrinkly on top of the breadbox.
But, the scones. Inspired by the mega scones on Heidi’s blog, these are great slabs of cheesy biscuit dough, folded over pesto to enclose it like a letter. Heidi’s version was lemony, slathered with raspberry jam and drizzled with a glaze. I turned mine into cheese biscuits, divided the dough in half and filled one package with sundried tomato pesto (this one was the best - it came to the studio with me this morning) and one with plain basil pesto, as per W’s love for the stuff.
There is so much potential for these scones. I love that you can fill them, easily, with anything; jam, preserves, cinnamon-sugar, ham and cheese, pie filling, even. Most scones take on additions well, but these you can flavor and then fill. The best part is you can slice off pieces as thin or thick as you like; it even made a great base for eggs on toast at lunch.
Pesto & Cheese Slab Scones
If you want a sweet version, omit the cheese and use jam or preserves in place of the pesto. If you like, add grated orange or lemon zest to the dough, brush the tops with milk and sprinkle with coarse sugar before baking.
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups whole wheat flour
1/4 cup sugar (or more if you make a sweet version)
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1/2 cup butter, cut into pieces
1 cup grated old cheddar cheese
1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 1/2 cups buttermilk, half & half or 2% milk
1/2-2/3 cup sun dried tomato pesto or basil pesto (from a jar)
Preheat oven to 375°F.
In a large bowl or the bowl of a food processor, combine the flours, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Blend using a pastry cutter or fork, or pulse the food processor until the mixture is combined but there are still bits of butter no bigger than a pea.
If you’re using a food processor, dump the mixture out into a bowl. Add the cheeses and toss to combine. Add the buttermilk, cream or milk, and stir just until the dough comes together. Divide it in half, and on a floured surface roll each piece into a 10″-12″ square. Spread the pesto in a strip down the middle third, and fold each half over it, overlapping like a letter. If you like, brush the tops with a little extra milk.
Transfer to a baking sheet and bake for about 30 minutes, until golden. Cut into whatever sized pieces you like.
Makes two slab scones.
And the tomato soup. Another easy thing to make, and a great use of tomatoes that have passed their prime. I don’t really bother measuring, although I’ve provided some measurements below for those who crave them; I’ll use about 4 big tomatoes, 6 or so Romas, or a pint of cherry or grape tomatoes. Spread them on a cookie sheet and roast them with as many cloves of garlic as you like, then add stock and a bit of milk or cream, until you have soup with the consistency you like. Puree it until it’s chunky or smooth.
Roasted Tomato Soup
It’s important to use ripe, flavorful tomatoes for this soup, since their flavor is paramount. If you have overripe, wrinkled, or squishy tomatoes around, use them up, so long as they don’t have any bad spots. Roasting them transforms their flavor, making them sweet and smoky. It’s a great way to make tomato sauce for pasta, too - just blend it without adding the stock.
about 3 lb. ripe tomatoes
a good drizzle of canola or olive oil
Salt and pepper
1 head garlic, cloves peeled (or 2 cloves, if you don’t want it too garlicky)
2 cups (500 mL) chicken or vegetable stock
2 tsp. sugar
1/2 cup milk, half and half or whipping cream (optional)
Chopped fresh basil or pesto (optional)
Preheat the oven to 450°F.
Cut the tomatoes in chunks (or in half, widthwise, if you’re using Roma tomatoes) and place them on a large rimmed baking sheet or in a roasting pan with the cloves of garlic. Drizzle them with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast for about an hour, until the tomatoes are juicy with dark edges and the garlic is very soft. Set it aside to cool for a bit.
If you have a hand-held immersion blender (I highly recommend one), transfer the tomatoes, garlic and all the juices that have collected in the pan into a
medium saucepan and set it over medium heat. If not, transfer it to a blender or food processor, puree it (add a little stock if you need to get it moving) and then transfer it to a pot. Add the chicken stock and sugar. Bring to a simmer and cook for about 10 minutes. If you are going to add cream, turn the heat down to low and add it at the last minute, stirring just until the soup is heated through. If you like, stir in a small handful of chopped fresh basil or a spoonful of pesto just before serving.
Let me clarify: chocolate-dipped cheesecake pops are not something I would typically make for dessert on a plain old Monday night. I made them for the Eyeopener because tomorrow I’m going to chat about food blogs. Thinking I’d choose a recipe from one of my favorite sites, I hopped around a few and found that Cream Puffs in Venice, Tartelette, and another blog I stumbled through were all posting cheesecake pops. As I was perusing them my friend S emailed from Whistler, where she is apparently hooked on something from the local chocolate shop called cheesecake bombs. I took this as an unmistakable sign that I should make some. What a hero I’m going to be in the studio tomorrow morning!
The pie was to make use of leftover spaghetti; I did a few segments debunking common cooking myths on BT this morning, and as a result had plenty of leftover cooked pasta that was used to demonstrate the myth that adding oil to the cooking water prevents it from sticking together. (It’s a large volume of water, kept at a rolling boil with space for the spaghetti to move around, that keeps it from sticking. In fact, adding oil to your water will result in an oil slick on your pasta once you drain it, and your sauce won’t stick very well.)
Spaghetti Pie.
I’ve seen many versions of spaghetti pie, some in which the pasta is tossed with the sauce and cheese, then baked, others that have the crust par-baked first to crisp it up, and others with layers of cottage cheese between the noodles and sauce.
So I improvised: tossed the leftover spaghetti with some eggwhite (I had some whose yolks had been used to make lemon curd), a bit of grated Parmesan, a grinding of pepper and a big spoonful of pesto, just because there was some open in the fridge and W is such a fan, then spread the spaghetti into an oiled pie plate, pushing it up the sides a bit.
I had requests for spinach sauce, but had hastily crumbled and cooked a couple lean Italian sausages, a red pepper, a few fresh tomatoes that had gone too wrinkly for anything but cooking with and a can of tomatoes before remembering this, and pureed sausage, I imagine, is not a Good Thing. So I decided to proceed as if it were a lasagna - I crumbled some ricotta and thawed, squeezed-out spinach over the crust,
topped it with the sauce…
and some grated part-skim mozzarella, and baked it at 350F for about half an hour, until all was golden, crsipy-edged and bubbly. Yum.
The cheesecake pops were simple, really, mostly because I didn’t make the cheesecake from scratch like the others did. Some advised making a cheesecake and then scooping up balls of it with your hands, freezing them and then dipping the frozen wads in chocolate. Because I couldn’t envision blaspheming a cheesecake that way, nor attempting to cut one into teeny fancy shapes using a cookie cutter (too thick for any in my collection) I decided to buy one of those small plain frozen Safeway cheeesecakes and cut it into wedges. It worked perfectly.
After inserting the sticks (bamboo skewers, although popsicle sticks or the 4″ lollipop sticks you can buy at Michael’s would work brilliantly), I put them back in the freezer to solidify while I melted some chocolate chips in the microwave, then half dipped, half spread the melted chocolate onto the frozen wedges. Some sprinkles or other decoration would have worked out well, but I didn’t really have anything. That’s the beauty of radio; you don’t really need to accessorize.
After three nights and four days of events, I got home from Banff mid-afternoon and didn’t much feel like cooking dinner. But it occurred to me that W hasn’t had anything green for a long time, and I didn’t feel like take-out or cereal, either. So I sucked it up and made a quick batch of spinach spaghetti sauce while the pasta boiled.
You do this by sautéing a bunch of spinach (or half a bag of the prewashed stuff) in a little canola oil, until it wilts; pour your tomato sauce overtop (or go the other way; heat up the sauce and stir in the spinach until it wilts), pour it into the food processor and whiz until it’s smooth. Voilá - spinach that is undetectable to a two year old.
I have never been so happy to see the arrival of daylight savings time. Sunlight at dinnertime! This is going to make documenting these dinners much easier.
Last week I lugged home the bone from the roast ham we made on It’s Just Food (in case you haven’t figured this out already, I can be cheap) and yesterday threw it in a pot of water to coax the remaining meat off and make a stock.
Having opened up a can of black beans to make quesadillas for lunch (still one of my favorite things ever) I decided that the ham stock was destined to be black bean soup. I’m sorry if I’ve black bean souped you to death already; turns out we eat a lot of it.
This one was a bit of a soup yukaflux: half a leftover can of diced tomatoes, carrots, celery, onion, red pepper, jalapeno (this is something I never would have had in the fridge even a year ago, but I have discovered that even one chopped into my soup makes all the flavor difference), the half can of black beans, a shake from the bag of frozen corn, and the meaty ham stock. Scooped hot over a pile of leftover brown rice that was in the fridge. Done like dinner.
I suppose at least my current crazy schedule is making this project more interesting. Or more dull?
Today I taught a homemade pasta class at the Cookbook Company with Lina deGaeta, master pasta-maker and the wife of the owner of the Italian Supermarket on the corner of Edmonton Trail and 20th Ave NE. (Who makes, by the way, the best pizza in Calgary - Saturday afternoons only they fire up the wood-burning oven and you can order pizza any way you like it, with real Italian ingredients and chewy, bulbous crusts.)
Tonight though, my call time to the set of It’s Just Food is 10:30pm, and we’re going to shoot all night. So I had a bit of a nap, and then, technically, it was dinnertime. Because I was assembling a sort of “lasagna” made out of fresh ravioli as a beauty shot for the show, I assembled another small one for Mike and W. (I got the idea from a cookbook put out by Real Simple magazine.)
I ate a wedge of frozen chocolate zucchini cake. That counts as dinner, right? After all, it does contain a vegetable, and was made with canola oil - a healthy fat.
Ravioli Lasagna
This is as fast and easy as it gets. The ravioli is already filled, so you don’t need to layer your noodles with filling. Also great when cooking for one – you can make individual sized lasagnas, which isn’t possible when using pasta sheets or lasagna noodles.
If you like, use any kind of cooked veg as well as or in place of the spinach – a container of roasted tomatoes, peppers, zucchini and eggplant from the Italian market works especially well.
1 large jar good-quality tomato sauce
2 16-18 oz. bags fresh or frozen large ravioli - any kind
1 pkg. frozen chopped spinach, thawed
1 cup grated part-skim mozzarella (or as much as you like)
½ cup grated Parmesan
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Spray a 9”x13” baking dish with nonstick spray, and spread about a third of the tomato sauce over the bottom. Lay half the ravioli in a single layer overtop. Sprinkle with the spinach and half the cheese, another third of the sauce and then the remaining ravioli, sauce and cheese. Cover with foil and bake for 20 minutes, then uncover and bake another 10 minutes, until golden and bubbly.
Serves 6.
(Low Fat) Chocolate Zucchini Cake
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1 cup cocoa
1 ½ tsp. baking powder
1 ½ tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
1 ¼ cups buttermilk
1 cup packed brown sugar
2 large eggs
1/4 cup canola oil
2 tsp. vanilla
1 cup strong coffee
1 zucchini, unpeeled & grated
1/2 cup chocolate chips (optional)
Preheat oven to 350°F.
In a large bowl, combine flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
Add buttermilk, brown sugar, eggs, oil and vanilla and beat for 1-2 minutes, until well blended and smooth. Stir in coffee and zucchini. The batter will be thin.
Pour into a bundt pan that has been sprayed with non-stick spray. Bake for 45 minutes, until springy to the touch.
I hope no one was expecting a romantic Valentine’s Day dinner of, say, beef Wellington and strawberries dipped into chocolate fondue, which would of course end up seductively licked off our fingers. A friend emailed me today, concerned with these public dinnertime duties and consequent pressure to cook an amazing romantic meal, and suggested I cook nachos, paired with a fine Kokanee and a Safeway apple pie. But the best part was her suggested narrative (obviously she watches Nigella):
My heaving bosom was barely concealed by the lace doily covering them. The heat of the oven door caused a fragrant drop of perspiration to roll playfully down my neck. I was immediately taken by the spicy hardness of the roasting chips. The succulent velvety texture of the avocado wrapped itself tightly against the awaiting firm black olives……
Seriously, I’m thinking this website should have guest authors.
So since the teacher’s convention is on and my sister is a teacher, my 9 year old niece, Emily, and 5 year old nephew, Ben, are here for two days, including a sleepover. Plus Mike has band practice tonight, so I’m cleared of any V-Day pressure that might have otherwise been. Beyond that, the extra bodies pose a slight obstacle at dinnertime because, among all the other mealtime prejudices (only orange cheese, no weird bread) Emily is lactose intolerant. When I asked them what they wanted for dinner, both (and this doesn’t often happen) answered the same: pancakes!
No, you can’t have pancakes for dinner.
Yes we can! We want pancakes!! Please can we have pancakes?
Well, it would be easy. And there’s the matter of maintaining my Cool Aunt status. But when I stopped to think on it, I realized that pancakes made the proper way, notwith a box of soapy-tasting ultra-refined mix, aren’t really a bad thing. Grains (I use mostly whole wheat flour, ground oats, some flax seed, and they have no idea), eggs, soy milk or yogurt, a drizzle of canola and flax oils, batter scattered with sliced banana and/or berries, actually does deliver complex carbs, healthy fats and protein. Phew. So they’re happy and I’m not guilty of baking animal-shaped chicken nuggets or ordering pizza. And with the miracle of modern freezers, breakfast is taken care of too.
Good pancakes don’t require a recipe, if you can remember that to make them you need two of everything: 2 cups flours and grains (this can be all one kind; I use a combo of whole wheat flour, sometimes some oat flour, sometimes some quick oats or oats that have been whizzed in the food processor, sometimes some oat bran, always a sprinkle of ground flax seed), 2 Tbsp. sugar, 2 tsp. baking powder, 2 cups milk (or soy milk or thinned yogurt), 2 eggs and 2 Tbsp. (although you could use more) oil - canola and flax are my pancake oils of choice. Mix the dry ingredients (adding a pinch of salt if you think of it) and the wet ingredients separately, then whisk them together.
The secret to good pancakes is keeping the heat fairly low, and if you want to simulate that first pancake that never turns out quite right and gets thrown away, drizzle the pan with oil and then wipe it out with a paper towel. Cook until bubbles are starting to break on top, not until they have all already broken through the surface. You don’t want to exhaust all leavening potential. Scatter berries or sliced bananas on the surface before you flip it; the fruit is more evenly distributed that way, and won’t risk turning your pancakes green with berry juice. Another way to get them in is to simmer a handful of fresh or frozen berries in some maple syrup until they burst, turning the syrup a brilliant heliotrope (love that word).
Mike and I had yesterday’s leftover couscous, and yes, a few pancake pickings.
(P.S. If I was so inclined to make a special dinner for Mike, I might have chosen braised lamb shanks with mashed potatoes and Pavlova with cream and partially smushed fresh berries for dessert.)
