Archive for the 'sweet stuff' Category
I realize this is neither wintry nor particularly healthy.. but when I went to buy some eggs for my Seven-Minute Frosting yesterday, carrying nothing but a box of eggs home with me I couldn’t stop thinking about egg salad sandwiches. And so this morning I boiled some eggs – you know, just in case – and at dinnertime I couldn’t summon up the gumption to make anything but.
However. I didn’t have any celery or green onion, and my chives are currently lying dormant under snow and frozen-solid Lou poo. Rooting through my fridge I did come up with some fresh (sort of – revived in a glass of water like a teeny bouquet) basil, and… drumroll please… bacon.
Bacon and egg salad sandwiches! How have I never thought of this before?
So I chopped a few strips, cooked them and crumbled the chunky bits into my chopped hard-boiled eggs along with some low fat mayo, torn basil and lots of pepper. I’m pretty sure I don’t have to tell you how good it tasted. See where fridge cleaning can get you? Combinations like bacon and basil in egg salad that you might never have otherwise considered. On the downside: I may have ruined any other sort of egg salad for myself forever.
And I just ate the last of the chocolate cupcakes leftover from Book Club – which went well, I hope, despite an excited 3 year old boy who had to pee a lot and was not satisfied to sit and watch Wall-E after all – thanks to all who came, for making the drive and for being patient with W as he took your shoes off and bowled with apples. He won’t be there next time! It was so fantastic to meet you all face to face. I think next time there should be wine.
One Year Ago: Chocolate-Covered Hazelnuts
March 05 2009 | leftovers and sweet stuff | 24 Comments »
Dinner tonight: pita pizzas again I’m afraid, made this time with a Spolumbos Italian sausage (from the freezer) cooked up with a thinly sliced onion, some mushrooms I found in the back of the fridge (frozen on the inside, wrinkly on the outside) and some frozen spinach. These babies were load-ed. I’m sorry it isn’t very inspiring, but I am sticking to my no-shop agenda. I even managed to bake chocolate cupcakes for book club tomorrow using what I have in the cupboard. (I may, however, need to duck into the corner store for some eggs to make Seven Minute Frosting to go on top.)
But before I go – I want to introduce you to someone.
His name is Dr. Walter Willett. He’s a world-renowned Harvard-based researcher and chairman of the Harvard School of Public Health’s department of nutrition, and he has been working since the 70′s on the optimum diet. (By diet I mean way of eating in general, not a weight loss diet.)
When people ask me – how do I eat? Do I follow Canada’s Food Guide? (Short answer: No.) Do I follow any other sort of nutritional plan? Not really. It would be most accurate to say I follow food like Wimpy follows a hamburger, but if I had to give you one basic nutritional guideline to follow, this would be it.
Dr. Willett, along with the faculty in the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, came up with this Healthy Eating Pyramid. Why another pyramid? Using a pyramid is just a way to make it easy for us to visualize what the structure of our diet should look like – rather than try to remember how many servings we need and what size those servings should be (which might then vary depending on our age, size and physical activity) we can remember that in general, our diet should be based on whole grains, fruits and vegetables, plant oils, nuts, legumes and seeds, then lesser amounts of lean protein from fish, poultry and eggs, modest dairy consumption and butter, red meat and simple carbs only occasionally. And it’s all science-based.
I won’t get into comparing Canada’s Food Guide, except to say that I ran a typical day’s worth of food through my nutritional analysis program and came up with well over 3000 calories. (And oh: 25% of the members of the Food Guide Advisory Committee are from Big Food.)
Dr. W was the first to make the distinction between healthy fats and unhealthy fats, and the fact that people on a low-fat diet often missed out on important nutrients. (Canada’s Food Guide doesn’t pay much attention to fats: “include a small amount – 2-3 Tbsp. – of unsaturated fat each day. This includes oil used for cooking, dressings, margarine and mayonnaise” – kind of hard to calculate tablespoons of fat when it’s in something. And while there is a mention of trans fat, the directive provided is “Limit trans fat”, this despite the fact that Health Canada’s own trans fat task force calls for the elimination of trans fat from our food supply. So shouldn’t it be “Avoid trans-fat”? And you might notice that pudding (!), chocolate milk and sweetened yogurt are all lumped in with 1% and even skim milk in the dairy group, as if they were equal choices.)
Dr. Willett is my kinda guy. If you’re interested in this nutrition stuff, poke around the Harvard School of Public Health website – The Nutrition Source – it really simplifies things, and nothing is skewed by companies who have a vested interest in selling their products. There’s even a page on weight control.
(And if you’re looking for extra reading credits, there’s an excellent story on Dr. W in the April 2007 issue of Cooking Light.)
Pyramid Illustration Copyright © 2008 Harvard University. For more information about The Healthy Eating Pyramid, please see The Nutrition Source, Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, http://www.thenutritionsource.org, and Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy, by Walter C. Willett, M.D. and Patrick J. Skerrett (2005), Free Press/Simon & Schuster Inc.
March 03 2009 | leftovers and sweet stuff | 16 Comments »
This photo was taken at five to 4 am.
That’s how late we managed to stay at the New Year’s eve party we went to. I can’t recall the last time I was out until 4 am, (if you don’t count the night we shot to episodes of It’s Just Food between 10pm and noon the next day). It would have been at least a decade BW (before Willem), and tonight he was actually out with us – he had a 3 hour nap in preparation for the party, but I still can’t believe he stayed (more or less) upright all night, driven by the thrill of playing with bigger boys (aged 7-10) and their big-boy Christmas toys – Rock Band wii and such.
4:42 am – that’s what time it is now. It’s fitting, actually, that rather than spend the day composing my final (but not really) blog post of the year, I’m propping myself up in bed to hammer it out when in fact I can hardly keep my eyes open. Mmac’s idea to linger over this all day tomorrow is bloody brilliant.
My New Year’s eve, instead of being relaxing and low-key as we assured ourselves repeatedly it would be, was instead an act in three parts:
OK, I fell asleep at that point, but it was almost 5 (!!) am, so really it was today anyway. That must have been my delirious logic.
8 am: W wakes up and comes in my room, eventually falls asleep again.
9 am: parents call to say they’ll be here in 20 minutes for their ride to the airport.
9:15 am: dressed, guts churning, standing outside (it’s around minus 100), in waiting with a vanilla-scented poo bag for Lou to do his steamy thing.
10:10 am: present – back from the airport and reheating yesterday’s Tims in the pot I cooked my sticky toffee fondue in last night. Oh yes.
So where was I? A New Year’s Eve in three parts:
Since it’s my last official DwJ day, I needed to make something suitably scrumptious. Jamie Oliver’s Steak & Guinness Pie. I don’t want to down the whole thing between the three of us, so I invite my sister over to share it. She obliges. We sit around the kitchen nook and crack a big spoon into the crackly puff pastry crust and scoop steaming (in a much better context this time, don’t you think?) beef in gravy into our bowls, then top them with peas. We ate the whole thing, but at least it was divided between 4. The crispy bits around the edges were superb.
Jamie’s recipe calls for puff pastry on the bottom of the baking dish too, but I don’t think it needs it. It would end up soggy(ish) anyway, and I’d rather spend those calories elsewhere. Like baking the extra sheet of puff pastry on its own, on a cookie sheet, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar. (Frozen President’s Choice puff pastry comes in a package with two individually wrapped rectangles of pastry, and one fit perfectly over my rectangular baking dish – no need for rolling.)
Also, the cheese was fab, but it would have been equally fab without. I browned the meat first (separately from the veg, just so they’d get a bit of browning) and tossed with the flour before adding the Guinness (this way you ensure no lumps), baked the lot in a casserole dish with a lid, then tipped it into the baking dish I wanted to use; I’d love to do this again in individual baking dishes (those little French onion soup crocks from the 70s would be great), each draped with a square of puff p.
Jamie Oliver’s Steak & Guinness Pie
adapted from Cook Your Way to the Good Life
canola or olive oil, for cooking
3 medium red onions, chopped
3 garlic cloves, crushed
1 Tbsp. butter
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
2 cups sliced mushrooms (optional, and any kind – button work well, but Portobello are nice and meaty)
2.2 lbs. beef brisket or stewing beef, cut into 3/4″ cubes
salt and pepper
a few springs of rosemary, leaves pulled off and chopped
2 Tbsp. flour
1 can or bottle of Guinness
1-2 cups grated old cheddar (white cheddar looks and tastes great)
1 pkg. frozen puff pastry, thawed
1 egg, lightly beaten with a fork, for brushing on top (optional)
Frozen peas
Preheat the oven to 375F. In a large skillet or oven-proof pot, heat a drizzle of oil and sauté the onions over medium-low heat for about 10 minutes, sweating them more than browning them. Add the garlic, butter, carrots, celery and mushrooms and cook for a few more minutes. Transfer to a baking dish (if the one you’re using won’t work) or a bowl. Add a bit more oil to the pan and brown the meat in batches, sprinkling with salt and pepper and rosemary. Return all the meat and vegetables to the pan and sprinkle with the flour; toss to coat. Pour over the Guinness and bring to a simmer, stirring. If the pan you’re using won’t go into the oven, dump it into a baking dish. Either way, add water (or beef stock) to just barely cover the meat.
Cover with a lid or foil and bake for 2 1/2 hours, stirring about halfway through. After 2 1/2 hours the meat should be very tender and the sauce thick, dark and robust; if it’s not, uncover and bake for awhile longer, or cook it on the stovetop to reduce the sauce a bit. Remove from heat and stir in half the cheese.
If your puff pastry is in a block, cut it in half and roll out on a lightly floured surface until it’s about as thick as a loonie (or as Jamie describes, a silver dollar). Place over the beef filling and tuck the pastry around the edges (it doesn’t have to look neat – go for rustic). Lightly score the surface in a crisscross pattern, not cutting through to the filling. Brush the top with beaten egg.
Return to the oven for about 45 minutes. Towards the end of the cook time for the pie, cook some frozen peas. Serve the pie steaming hot, with a scoop of peas beside or overtop. Serves 4-6.
Damn, are we still only on part 1? Good thing everyone is off work today.
After our pie, my sister and I baked a load of potatoes to bring down to Olympic Plaza to my Mom, who was manning the skate shack during their New Year’s Eve bash. We pictured her freezing (she was to be there from 6-midnight, but actually left the plaza at 1:30 am) and possibly needing a potty break. so we trucked down with a little basket of potatoes wrapped in a towel (it’s all we could think of) and a chocolate bun from Manuel Latruwe. When we arrived the line-up to borrow skates was massive (they had a DJ and light show on the skating rink, and live bands, and fireworks at 9 for the kids as well as midnight) and she was short two volunteers, so we jumped in and doled out skates for a couple hours.
We managed to get out before the wave of skate returns, and M, W and I headed over to M and A’s for a 70s-themed party, at which we had jelly balls (meatballs with grape jelly and chili sauce - have I made these this year? if not, there’s reason enough to go on) and smoked salmon devilled eggs, and A made French onion soup topped with toast and Gruyere, baked in these stripy brown tureens she borrowed from her Mom.
I had decided on fondue for the final day of the year, so that was my contribution. Chocolate is the obvious choice – too obvious, I think. Plus I may actually be chocolated out. (Come to think of it, it would have made use of our stash of stocking chocolate – Lindt balls, Toblerone, icy squares, chocolate Santas – all could have been melted down and consumed with fruit.) But since this has been a sticky-sweet year, and also the year I became slightly infatuated with caramel, I decided to do a caramel fondue, which is delicious with white cheddar popcorn for dipping.
But I had been toying with the idea of a sticky toffee pudding, which morphed into sticky toffee fondue. Fortuitously I caught a snippet of Nigella on Food Network, in which she was making a sort of ice cream sauce that she described as liquid pourable fudge and was made with brown sugar, cream and Lyle’s Golden Syrup. (Remember when I said that toast and jam was my favourite food? I lied. It’s buttered toast with Lyle’s Golden Syrup. No question. I can’t even buy the stuff – I kind of pretend it doesn’t exist – because I eat it all.) I searched for the recipe to no avail, and so sort of tried to make something up – really all toffee and caramel are just amalgamations of sugar, syrup, butter and cream. I didn’t have dark Muscovado sugar and didn’t want to make a run to the store, so added a drizzle of molasses to the golden sugar and it turned out fantastic. (At the end of the night we were all sitting around the table eating the stuff straight up out of the Chinese soup spoons W brought to serve his arctic char tartare in. I think I’m still sticky.)
A made me promise to fess up that I jammed on the hot tub last night. True. But no one wants to see post-holiday Julie in a swim suit, no matter how much Prosecco was consumed. Plus we couldn’t exactly leave the 5 zombie boys in the house to their own devices.
Sticky Toffee Fondue
Serve with chunked fruit, small, thin biscotti, and cubes of dense pound cake or fruitcake.
3/4 cup packed dark brown sugar (or golden sugar and a drizzle of molasses)
1/3 cup butter
2 Tbsp. Lyle’s Golden syrup
2/3 cup cream
In a small pot, combine the brown sugar, butter and syrup over medium heat and bring to a boil, stirring often to dissolve the sugar. Boil for a few minutes, swirling the pot occasionally.
Remove from the heat and whisk in the cream. Return to the heat and bring to a simmer again, whisking often. Boil for another few minutes, then remove from heat and cool to warm (you don’t want to serve molten toffee), or cool completely and refrigerate until you need it. Makes about 1 1/2 cups.
Nigella suggests you serve this molten, over ice cream – some solidifies slightly, giving you nuggets of chewy toffee, depending on how long you cook it.
And since this is our finale, my (other) sister made gingerbread letters for the kids to decorate the other night, and she made enough to spell Dinner with Julie. W and all his cousins decorated them, and I thought it would be a fitting final photo for the year, don’t you? (She used the Martha Stewart gingerbread recipe, I believe.)
HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
Thanks for making this such a wonderful, memorable year.
(P.S. It looks like Whitecap Books might be interested in publishing a book version of Dinner with Julie! Stay tuned!)
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January 01 2009 | beef and dessert and sweet stuff | 47 Comments »
You know it’s Christmas when you have leftover dip, hambone pickings and Clodhoppers for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
We had an amazing afternoon with Tagyn and Diego at A Christmas Carol – Diego, whom I drove crazy asking to say “dulce de leche” and “Feliz Navidad” about 50 times (he’s 7 and speaks Spanish) brought me a batch of homemade shoe soles – like small, oval, sweet pancakes native to Mexico, with a ketchup-shaped bottle of – something I’ve forgotten the name of and just realized the bottle is on the back seat of the car, and I’m in my PJs and it’s a hundred below outside – it’s like dulce de leche, only darker and better, with a cooler name. We dipped into the stash when the lights went down and squirted caramel on our shoe soles and tried to eat them without getting busted.
Up to that point, you understand I had eaten exactly this: leftover biscuits toasted with butter and mandarin jam, nut balls, ham pickings, Clodhoppers and coffee. We dragged our feet on the way back to pick W up from Mike’s Mom’s (his first time staying there with both his Mom & sister – he requires a team effort) and so stopped at Beano to get a cafe mocha, just because we could.
Which was delicious, but didn’t make us feel much better. After some chaotic Christmas gift returns (that’s what you get for being on the ball and buying stuff early – it ends up being broken) and a stop at the grocery store for my segments (4!) on BT tomorrow morning, we got home at close to 8 more wanting something that didn’t resemble chocolate than actually being hungry. We had leftover edamame walnut dip and mini lamb burgers with tzatziki while I made stuff for tomorrow.
Mini Lamb Burgers in Mini Pitas with Tzatziki
These would make great full-sized burgers too, but the rich lamb and feta is perfect for nibbling.
1 lb. ground lamb
1/2 cup bread crumbs
1/2 cup crumbled feta
1/4 cup currants
1 egg
1-2 Tbsp. chopped fresh mint
1 tsp. dried oregano
salt & pepper
mini pitas, cut in half crosswise
spring greens
Tzatziki (below)
Roll them into meatball-sized balls, and flatten them a little into tiny patties. (If you are doing a lot, put them all on a rimmed baking sheet and then squish them down by pressing another sheet on top of them.) If you like, you could freeze them at this point and bake them from frozen. Otherwise they could be frozen after they are baked.
Bake at 425°F for about 10 minutes, until they are cooked through.
To serve, stuff into half a mini pita with a few leaves from a box of spring greens and a glop of tzatziki.
Tzatziki
Regular yogurt, preferably thick Greek yogurt, is far superior to the runny low fat or fat free varieties that are most commonly found at the grocery store. Even ‘full fat’ yogurts generally only contain about 3 grams per half cup, and it’s much more delicious and satisfying. If you like, strain the yogurt through some cheesecloth for several hours to thicken it. (Save the drained-off liquid to use in pancake or muffin batter.)
1 small cucumber, peeled if necessary
1 – 2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 cups good quality plain yogurt, preferably Balkan-style
Salt & pepper to taste
Grate the cucumber with a box grater onto a double thickness of paper towel. Gather up the cucumber in the towel and squeeze out as much excess water as you can.
Combine cucumber, garlic, yogurt, salt and pepper in a bowl and stir until well blended. If you like, add a squeeze or lemon. The garlic flavor will intensify the longer it sits. Makes 2 1/2 – 3 cups.
Per 1/3 cup: 45 calories, 1 g total fat (0.6 g saturated fat, 0.3 g monounsaturated fat, 0.1 g polyunsaturated fat), 3.5 g protein, 5.6 g carbohydrate, 3.7 mg cholesterol, 0.3 g fiber. 20% calories from fat
Instead of cookies today I’m offering up another small sweet (and only because you got two cookies yesterday) – Mike is a huge fan of maple fudge. And fortunately my friend Marty Curtis, who owns Marty’s Cafe in Muskoka, has a maple fudge recipe in his new(ish) book, Marty’s World Famous Cookbook. (In it, his World Famous Butter Tart recipe, which is not allowed to be reprinted. Sorry. But trust me, people come from all over for these – they even won the Toronto Star’s best butter tart competition.) Digging up a link to that mandarin jam recipe, I just stumbled upon a muscovado fudge recipe that looks pretty damn heavenly too. Mike just may find both in his stocking. He has been pretty good this year, don’t you think?
Muskoka Maple Fudge
From Marty’s World Famous Cookbook. This is also good with nuts – add about 1/4 cup chopped walnuts while creaming the fudge.
2 cups (pure!) maple syrup
3/4 cup 10% cream (that’s half & half)
2 Tbsp. butter
Grease an 8″x8″ pan.
In a saucepan over high heat, combine all the ingredients and bring them to a boil. (Do not cover.) Bring the temperature to between 235F and 240F on a candy thermometer, and then drop a little in cold water – it should form a soft ball. Remove the heat and monitor the temperature until it drops to 110F. Beat with a wooden spoon or heat proof spatula until creamy. Pour into the pan and cool, then cut into squares.
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December 21 2008 | appetizers and lamb and sweet stuff | 8 Comments »
This blog has begun to trigger a Pavlovian response in me; every time I sit down to type my eyes nearly go crossed with drowsiness, probably because it has become the last thing I do every night before bed, and because I never, ever seem to make it to bed before midnight. (If this thing has a time stamp, it’s about an hour off, and I can’t figure out how to fix it.)Lately the process has become even more time consuming as my computers start to slowly deconstruct… I’m sure they are choked with photos and files and things W has clicked on while playing Art Machine or Peep - my laptop is sticky with candy cane fingers and peanut butter; my screen about 4 times the size it was (as if I was ultra hard of seeing) and I am sporadically unable to highlight text and add links and really do anything but type. The H and L are so sticky I have to hammer them to get them to work. My desktop is melting down in tandem, not allowing me to upload photos (or use Google maps or Facebook) which means, since that’s where the photos are, I’m emailing them to myself on the laptop, to then upload here.
Santa better bring me a Mac for Christmas, if he knows what’s good for him.
We worked on season 3 of It’s Just Food (coming up with topics, recipes and other details) until 6pm, and then M & W picked me up and we went straight over to my Mom’s, where she had some things she picked up (lasagna, mac & cheese, lentil & quinoa salad, roasted vegetables, mashed sweet potatoes, grainy bread) from a new shop called Fresh, in the same strip mall as My Favourite Ice Cream Shop in Marda Loop. It was a timely little break from coming up with dinner – I’m sure we would have defaulted to frozen spinach pizza or pancakes.
Which is OK, I wanted an excuse to tell you about my Sunny Boy soup anyway, which we ate for lunch. On GO! I was challenged to make soup out of a bunch of Albertan ingredients they pulled from a donation box – beans, Sunny Boy Cereal and Cattle Boyz barbecue sauce. Wanna hear how to make soup out of Sunny Boy?
It actually makes more sense than it sounds – in Scotland and Ireland it’s common to make oatmeal soup out of leeks, cream and chicken stock, the oats thickening the soup. And of course grains like rice and barley and even couscous (yes I know, bitty pasta) are not foreign to a bowl of soup. So why not grainy Sunny Boy, which is a blend of wheat, rye and flax? And the barbecue sauce… really just sugar and spices. I spread a peeled, wedged onion, peeled and diced sweet potato and the peeled cloves of a head of garlic onto a rimmed baking sheet and tossed them with oil, then roasted at about 400F until they started to caramelize. Then I drizzled them with a bit of barbecue sauce, tossed them about and put them back in until they were dark and sticky, sweet and slightly smoky.
In a large pot I cooked up a chorizo sausage and few chopped stalks of celery, then scraped in the roasted veg along with the crispy dark bits on the pan, and added a 1L tetra pack of chicken stock, a drained can of beans and half a jar of tomato paste, because that’s what was in the fridge. I could have tossed in a handful of Sunny Boy but didn’t want it to starch up the soup – instead I toasted it in a dry pan just like you’d toast nuts, until it turned golden and toasty-smelling. Then I cooked it as usual, and put a spoonful into the bottom of a soup bowl and ladled soup overtop. After the show I put the rest of the Sunny Boy into the pot, so the leftovers we had today had soft grains in it, like smaller barley almost, but not at all mushy. Something I never would have dreamed up, but will likely do again, especially with bean soups – and what a great use of leftover Sunny Boy from breakfast – added to hot soup at lunch or dinner?
We came home tonight to leftover truffles - truffles are so easy to make it’s almost silly. The fun part is flavouring them by infusing the cream; bring it to a simmer with a few slices of ginger, or strips of orange rind, or some instant espresso, or loose tea leaves, or just extract - a few drops of good vanilla, or mint. If you’re using something with bits, like tea or ginger, strain it or pick it out before you add the chocolate.
Simple Chocolate Truffles
Add flavourings other than extract as you bring cream to a simmer, then let it steep for a bit off the heat (you don’t want to cook the cream down too much) and strain it out, then rewarm it enough to melt the chocolate.
1 part cream
3 parts semi-sweet or dark chocolate (chopped or chips or nibs)
cocoa or finely chopped toasted nuts, for rolling
In a smallish saucepan, bring your cream to a simmer and then turn off the heat. If you’re using extract, add it now, then dump in the chocolate and let it sit for several minutes. Give it a stir until it’s smooth and chill until firm. Roll into balls and roll the balls in cocoa to coat. Store in the fridge, but serve at room temperature (chocolate should never be served cold).
By the way, I stumbled upon another caramel recipe I may have to try – espresso caramels with walnuts and honey. Muumuus, I understand them now.
And a chocolate cookie that claims to bring about world peace seems like a good choice for the holidays. This is Pierre Hermé’s recipe for to-die-for chocolate cookies that Dorie Greenspan included in a cookbook in which she names them World Peace cookies because they triggered so much peace and happiness. Worth a try, I think.
December 14 2008 | leftovers and sweet stuff | 10 Comments »
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