Dinner With Julie

Plantain Fritters and a 35 lb. Poutine

Yes, I shared. Honestly, I have no idea why my pants are getting so tight.

But first: Plantain fritters! I wish I would have figured this out on Monday. Then again, best that I didn’t – the house smelled like mini donuts and the Stampede all day. They were fantastic. And easy to make. They brought out the banananess of the plantains – as fritters, they tasted more of bananas than I think bananas would have. And they held up to the heat – when you bit into one, it wasn’t mush.

I love that this week I was forced to make my acquaintance with something that has been available to me for most of my life, and yet I never bothered getting to know. I still have enough left to take a stab at a curry next week.

Which, ahem, brings me to a small confession. I assumed that since we started on Monday, Sunday night we’d be wrapping up the Week in Their Kitchen project. It makes sense, right? En route to CharCut, where I had booked a seat at their communal table for Meat Sundays, at which this particular Sunday they promised to make a 15 kg poutine, I got an email titled: three more meals and you’re home free!

Um. Whoops? We’re supposed to keep going from the hamper until Monday noon? Maybe I didn’t read the instructions thoroughly. (Try to hide your shock.)

At any rate. I didn’t bail out on going for poutine, since I had already signed up. It was stupendous.

John and Carrie brought it out steaming – all 35 pounds of it (they weighed the ingredients) including 3 kg of cheese curds and I imagine a bucket of gravy. The fries themselves were cooked in duck fat. It was poutine perfection, served at the communal table, family-style. Awesome.

And yes, I enjoyed it. A little too mightily. It was good food with good friends around a table of happy (verging on ecstatic) people. It was nice to see cheese again, but I had been eating my share of potatoes this week anyway.

Which brings us back to the Week in Their Kitchen project. Yes, it wraps up today. But I can’t say I’m excitedly looking forward to the end of the day (to sum, that was the gist of the aforementioned email: I imagine many of you are looking forward to dinner tomorrow when you can eat whatever you want! That’s right after your lunch tomorrow you are all free of the Hampers!) because really, all the participants in this were always free of the hampers. We’re not homeless, or struggling. We didn’t worry all week that we can only access the food bank once per month, and what we might do when this stash runs out. This has been a learning experience, but I still can’t say I know how a food bank client feels, or that I’ve truly walked a mile in their shoes. Some participants have said this week was fun – I doubt anyone actually utilizing the food bank would share that sentiment.

So. I won’t be going out for a celebratory dinner tonight. I’ll use up the rest of my hamper, along with the (comparably vast quantities of) ingredients already in my kitchen. I’ve already gone and bought a couple bags of food to give back to the food bank (remember-Husky covered the cost of the extra food for all our hampers). I’m going to continue on in some way, cutting my food spending drastically – for the next month at least only buying fresh produce and milk. (And toilet paper. Hard to make that from scratch.) I’m going to shop from my cupboards instead of from the store, and make do with what I have, which is clearly not that difficult.

I’ll try to pursue new sources of fresh produce for the food bank wherever I can (a portion of the new Ramsay community garden?), and contribute easy recipes (hopefully even compile a cookbook) because that’s what I can do to help. And I’ll focus more energy on being happy for what I have, and less thinking about what I’m in the mood for.

And I’ll eat more plantain fritters.

Plantain Fritters

Thanks to Gourmet for walking me through this.

1 cup all-purpose flour
2 Tbsp. sugar (white or brown)
1 tsp. baking powder
pinch salt
1/2-3/4 cup water
1 large egg, lightly beaten
3 ripe plantains

1/2 cup sugar
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
canola oil, for cooking

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. Add the water and egg and whisk until the batter is smooth.

Peel plantains and cut on a slight diagonal into 1/2-inch pieces. Heat a half inch of oil in a heavy skillet or pot until hot, but not smoking. Dip the plantains in the batter to coat them and fry in batches (don’t crowd them) until bottoms are golden, about 45 seconds, then turn over and fry until other side of each is golden, 30 to 45 seconds more. Transfer to paper towels to drain. Stir together the sugar and cinnamon in a shallow bowl.

While still warm, toss each batch in sugar mixture until coated. Serve warm.

June 07 2010 | sweet stuff | 26 Comments »

Crunchy Salted Chocolate Peanut Butter Blocks

I subscribe to the Nike school of thought when it comes to entertaining:Just Do It. Or Just Send Out An Email, and by hitting send you’ve instantaneously committed yourself to having people show up at your door, and you’ll figure it out, and everyone will have a great time even though you haven’t managed to tidy up the dust and dog hair rhinos that have collected in every corner and on the sides of each hardwood stair. Because really, no one cares about that stuff. And I’m convinced that everyone else will feel a little bit better about themselves if they see what a disaster my house is.

The point is, if you wait until you have time, or worry about schedules and menu planning and all the things that might stress you out about having people over, it might never happen. So although I should have been working on my manuscript today, I knew much of the neighbourhood would be out chipping in for the community clean-up, and would be hungry afterward. And isn’t life all about the people in it? Isn’t this the important stuff? Says the girl who is neglecting all her friends equally.

And so a few days ago I sent an email telling everyone to come over this afternoon for a bit of a barbecue. As it turned out, the temperature hovered around ZERO all day. We woke up to wet snow, and it came down until around dinnertime. By mid-afternoon we were all wet, cold and tired, having spent hours pitching in to give the community its spring cleaning. My sister suggested that instead of the barbecue, I throw a big pot of chili on the stove, and fill the oven with baked potatoes. I did. To bake a potato: wash it, poke it with a fork and bake right on the oven rack -you don’t need to wrap it in foil- at 350F for about an hour, depending on its size. It’s easy to tuck a few potatoes in the oven along with whatever else is baking, regardless of whether or not you’ll be eating them right away. Leftover baked potatoes make great, fast skillet fries or hash. Today they would have come in handy tucked into our pockets, to keep our hands warm. Sheesh.

Mike made me promise not to spend much time cooking, and I didn’t. I knew we’d need something sweet, and although a big batch of cookies or brownies would have been easy enough, I wanted to streamline it even further. I had a bag of letter-shaped pretzels I had bought for the occasion, and so smashed some up and stirred them into melted chocolate chips and peanut butter, then chilled the lot and cut it into blocks. A little too addictive, but dead easy. Especially when you need something to fill that chocolate void.

Crunchy Salted Chocolate Peanut Butter Blocks

They’re a little like homemade chocolate bars – you could add chopped toasted nuts and/or dried fruit in place of the pretzels if you like, but I love their crunchiness and salt.

3 cups chocolate chips (or chopped chocolate)
1 cup peanut butter
1-2 cups small pretzels, coarsely crushed in a ziploc bag

In a medium bowl, melt the chocolate chips and peanut butter in the microwave or over a pot of simmering water, stirring until melted and smooth. Stir in the pretzels and pour into an 8″ or 9″ square pan. Chill in the fridge until set. Let sit at room temperature for a bit to make them easier to cut into bars or blocks. Makes lots.

I picked up an orange pound cake from Rustic Sourdough Bakery on 17th Ave. Love the domed oval shape. W loves the little candy orange wedge on top.

Cathy made tiny potato, bacon and cheese frittatas that we ate like popcorn, and Jenn baked bread. And taught me how to take the top off a cupcake, then flip it upside down to sandwich the icing inside.

Altogether too much carb loading, and only one of us is running a marathon tomorrow. (Not me.) But we had lots of laughs around the kitchen table, and no one even mentioned the dust and dog hair rhinos.

May 29 2010 | snacks and sweet stuff | 18 Comments »