From the garden

Every Saturday, I get together with my Dad and we go to Phil’s Organic Market or the St. Lawrence Market or some food-related place where we get a few things to cook up during the week.

In the summer, he greets me with a little bag of goodies from his garden – tomatoes, purple basil, green onions, lettuce and various herbs that get all blended together on his way to meet me.

At the beginning of summer, my fab friend Diana took me to her allotment garden (pictured above) and shared her bounty. I took home this bulging bag of lettuce, chard, herbs and other wonders that I would have ordinarily cooked up, but instead made into a salad due to the intense heat and humidity.

Last week, I got to see Diana after way too long and she had just gone through her garden to tidy it up and had saved me some beautiful ingredients for supper.

I had a friend over for dinner that night, but it was still too muggy to cook much.  So I took Diana’s fresh, fragrant basil, crisp green and purple beans and various tomatoes and created:

Chicken pasta salad with fresh basil and tomatoes

10 Bean salad

Green Salad (with Diana’s tomatoes)

It was perfect.

I am grateful to these amateur farmers as well as the professional folks who work so hard to put good food on my plate.

Watch for Poetry of Food’s next issue launching next week for my story about one very special farmer.

Magazines to the rescue

I knew I wanted to cook last night, but I didn’t know what.

I checked the freezer for meats and took a huge bag o’ chicken wings and a tray of stewing beef out to thaw.

Now what?

I headed out to the library and thought I might see some inspirational ingredients on the way.  Lucky for me, I got Food & Wine‘s February issue and Fine Cooking‘s Feb/Mar issue that filled in the blanks.

From Food & Wine, I made Classic Hot Wings (recipe below) which Grace Parisi recommends you flour first, bake on high (500 degrees) and then finish with melted butter and hot sauce.

My fella came home from the office starving, so I don’t know whether it was his crazy hunger or whether they were that good, but he kept saying how much he liked them.

While the wings were baking, I made Food & Wine‘s Celery-and-Celery-Root Salad (which would’ve been much easier if I’d used my mandoline instead of my Chinese cleaver – what was I thinking?).  What a beautiful looking salad and really, just the simplest of ingredients.

My guy does not like the look of celery root before it’s peeled, so while he’ll eat it, he’s not too crazy about it.  This of course, I didn’t know the extent of until he came home and said, “Yeah, not for me.” After spending about 20 minutes whacking the beast and all the other ingredients (my celery root came out not like matchsticks, but like wide watercolour brushes – hey, you do what you can with what you have), I was disheartened, especially because now I had to eat a honkin’ bowl of root veg on my own.

Luckily, one of my closest pals dropped by in between meetings  today and I made her an ad hoc lunch of sliced chicken breast and a side of the celery salad.  She loved it so much, I gave her the recipe!  Phew.  Now there’s only a tub the size of a beer cooler left …

The main course I made was thanks to Fine Cooking. 

Spicy Red Lentil Dal with Winter Vegetables & Lamb might sound heavy for June, but it’s been cold and rainy on and off, so it felt like a good night for something hearty.

I replaced the red lentils with green and substituted beef for the lamb.  Otherwise, I followed the recipe as written.

Spicy comfort food with a modern edge.  It was absolutely perfect and exactly what we needed on a chilly night.

I am so grateful to these magazines.  They made what started out to be a panicked cry of “What will we have for dinner?”, into  a wonderful, memorable, nourishing night.

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 500°. Line a large baking sheet with foil and spray with vegetable oil. In a bowl, mix the flour with the salt. Add the chicken and toss to coat. Spread the chicken on the baking sheet in a single layer and spray with vegetable oil. Roast the chicken for 45 minutes, turning once or twice, until browned and crispy. In a bowl, toss the chicken wings with the hot sauce and butter; serve.

Balls!

So excited to be cooking again last night, I went for a walk to think through what I’d make.

Do you ever get so wrapped up in something that you can’t see your way out?  I was all over the place – minestrone soup, empanadas, homemade pizza, baked trout, keftas over quinoa salad.  I had looked through some cookbooks before heading out to get some ideas, but went to some fine food stores for further inspiration.

Thinking about how much fresh food I had in the fridge, I bought only an apple to eat on my way back, some sesame flatbreads to snack on throughout the week, some muffins for my fella and some pasta for either pasta salad (in case I just made a bunch of cold salads – it was almost too hot to cook) or to keep on hand for a baked pasta dish I had yet to try.

Since I had many of the ingredients on hand, I came back and decided to make Southern Sausage Stew from Jamie’s America, Jamie Oliver’s latest cookbook.

I loved Jamie when he was first starting out – his take on everything was so invigorating and refreshing.  But these last few cookbooks, I’ve found little to get excited about.  This stew sounded good though.

But after looking at it closely, I decided that some of my own additions would make it even better.

Instead of green and red peppers, I used yellow and purple carrots and I added in a Chinese eggplant, portobello mushrooms, black beans, leftover kale from the night before, along with the ingredients and spices he listed.

I have to say it turned out beautifully.

My dessert however, did not.

Having worked on this dessert for two night and many stages, I can’t believe that the part I couldn’t do was melting the chocolate.

As you know, I do not bake, so anytime anything calls for chocolate, I get nervous.  I mean, I barely eat it to begin with, so handling it doesn’t inspire confidence in me like working with any savory ingredient.

I was making surprise Cake Balls for my fella.  I had made an orange cake and left it in the fridge overnight so that it would be cold enough to form into big meatball size balls.

Done.  B-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l.

I simmered water in a pan and melted really good chocolate over it.

Good.

Now all I had to do was dip the balls into the chocolate and cover them, put them on wax paper and set back into the fridge to chill.

My sexy beau would be having delicious orange delights in just about an hour or two.

Except that the chocolate was so thick it didn’t really cover the ball, but swathed thickly around it, pulling it down into the chocolate.

F————————————–!

Then, I did the worst thing I could possible do – I added a little water to try and thin it out.

I don’t know these things.  I’ve baked about 10 times out of my life, so I didn’t realize this would create an immovable fudge!

I tried adding a little milk to further thin it.  Now I had a Dairy Queen Blizzard on my hands.

So I tried to save it by putting it in the microwave to melt it at least enough that I could hand form it around the balls.

Three fingers on my right hand have chocolate second degree burns and my wonderful little Cake Balls that I wanted to surprise the love of my life with now look like Tim Bits with sad melted fudge chunks on the top.

I was feeling really cocky earlier in the evening, because I thought my version of the stew was more Southern and creative than Jamie’s.

He must have heard me.

I think it will be awhile before I get the confidence to bake again (and I didn’t have any to begin with, so now I’m starting at like negative 10 or something).

Great.  And I just ordered 10 new baking books from the library…

Surprises abound

What I love about cooking is that you don’t always get it right.

But sometimes you absolutely do.

That beef curry was fanfreakintastic.  Best beef dish I’ve made in years.  YEARS.

I learned two vital things that night:

1.  My method of cooking stewing beef for only an hour and a half is why my stews are never memorable.

2.  Cooking Light Magazine has a piece a couple of months ago about The 25 Most Common Cooking Mistakes that offered a lot of advice I already knew but one that really stuck out – You don’t know your oven’s quirks and idiosyncrasies.

See, a couple of months ago, my sexy fella and I were making dinner together (something that doesn’t happen very often because we both cook very differently and because there’s not a heckuva lot of room to move around one another).  We were making Korean pancakes – MMM! – and I was pouring them into the pan while he flipped them (you’ve got to be quick with those l’il ones) and we noticed that they would slowly cook on 7 but once we upped the element to 8, they started to burn.

We had noticed inconsistencies separately before but not thought much of them – ’til now.

Which I confirmed when I made Beef Vindaloo Curry this past Friday night.

Wanting to brown the beef before adding the other ingredients (did you know that Jamie Oliver no longer believes/does this?  Gasp), I started it on 8 to get a nice seared side, but before I knew it they were blackening.  Oh no, I’ve got like 8 veggies and 5 other ingredients yet to add!  It can’t be ruined already!

I managed to save them by quickly turning the range down, and then up.  Down and then up again, until all the beef was done.

I thought that ordeal was over as I set everything to a low simmer.

Hmmm.  When I turned the dial down to 3 – nothing.  It wasn’t until I brought it back up to 6 that it started bubbling.  So back down to 3 it went.  I left it to stew, literally, while I went back to my desk to do work.

I heard this weird popping noise.  Now, sometimes Cosmo likes to clean between his toes and makes this awesome crunching sound, but he was sound asleep just a few feet away at the end of the bed.

I went out to the kitchen and the stew was bubbling away like it was on 6 or 7.  So I turned it down to 2.  15 minutes later, nothing.

It went on like this for the 2 1/2 hours that it was on the stove.

Our stove is not just quirky.  It’s possessed.

At first, I was miffed.  Great, here I am trying to learn to be a great chef and I’m working with an old jalopy!  But now I realize that if I can cook great meals on this puppy despite its massive weirdness, then I will be a great chef after all.

The roast chicken dinner I made tonight was okay.  The sides were what made it – summer crisp corn, wild and long grain rice and Swiss chard with petit haricots.

That chicken could have been better.

That’s why I’m going to work on figuring out the oven’s quirks next.

On the lamb

After many, many, many nights of eating out for book clubs, events and restaurant reviews, I am back at home cooking tonight.

And I’m making lamb.

I know I should be making something Mexican to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, but I’m going to delay our celebrations until the weekend when I can really savour the process of slow cooking things and make some more time-consuming dishes.

So tonight I’m making lamb and I’m excited!  I am heading out after finishing work to pick up some ingredients.

Tell me what your favourite way of preparing lamb is?  Do you often buy the same cut?

I’ll let you know how it turns out.  In the meantime, I’m just going to enjoy thinking about it…

Fishin’ for dinner

Today I took my Mom to some of my favourite food stores.

We loaded up on fresh produce and intriguing ingredients and came back here, where I made fish tacos for dinner.

Here in Canada, fish tacos aren’t a thing like they are in the States.  It’s because we’re not close enough to the water, I suppose.  But I do love and crave them and so I thought it was time to give into that feeling.

I patted fresh sole with panko (Japanese bread crumbs) and a medley of creole spices.  I made fresh guacamole and put out bowls of diced yellow tomatoes, sliced scallions, crisp red leaf lettuce, organic pea shoots, spicy salsa and rice and beans I made quickly, finishing with cilantro and lime juice.

It was so much fun and despite being very filling, it was  not at all heavy, which was nice after having a paella-bellowed tummy the night before.

I love that you can make anything that you’re craving.

Though it didn’t quite quell my desire to open a fish taco stand… stay tuned.

Clubbing

Tonight I’m doing up my notes for our book club meeting tomorrow night (I’ve yet to start the ones for my other book club…) and I’m grinning like a crazy person.

Because not only do I get to eat and write about food for a living, but I get to read books about it and then meet with a bunch of folks to talk about it – over a meal.

Ahhh.

And in rereading sections of books about food, I assess and reassess my opinions, my patterns and sometimes even the dishes I make.  All based on things I’ve read.

I wrote awhile ago about making a cabbage dish around the frenzy that is St. Patrick’s Day and just a few nights ago, I went out and got celeriac, after skimming a recent article about how it doesn’t get enough love, and made a beautiful, velvety soup, daubed with fresh herbs and fresh ground pepper.  Now thanks to our most recent book, The Tenth Muse by Judith Jones, I’m craving James Beard cookbooks and simple American food like liver and onions and the hearty dishes of Miss Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock.

I learn something new out of each book and it turns out, I put it to the test in the kitchen, long after the book has been read and put aside.

I fully intend to make some of the recipes from the book – Frozen Maple Mousse, Sorrel and Leek Pancakes and Martha’s Paprikash with Little Dumplings.

But just you watch. I’ll go to the meeting tomorrow and we will be spouting a flurry of ideas, with exchanges of ingredients, books and recipes flying across the table.

And in a few days, weeks and months, somehow it will all end up as dishes being simmered on my stove.

Nudging inspiration along

I met with my good friend and co-editor Chris this weekend for breakfast, where we, of course, talked food for much of the meal.

Chris has food ennui and well, it happens to all of us.  I get it from time to time, especially in winter where I tend to make a lot of roast chicken, beef stew, chili and meatloaf.

I have found that it helps me tremendously to constantly be looking through cookbooks, cooking blogs and sites and magazines for new recipes to try.  I also try to change up where I shop so that I’m not tempted to buy the same things over and over (this takes a little more effort, but oh-so worth it!).  Just this week, I took my Mom to an area she doesn’t get to often and we food shopped like crazy.  We bought a ton of healthy ingredients that were somehow affordable, and have been inspired ever since.

I was trying to suggest similar things to Chris.  I thought that we could each make something new once a week and then write about it to one another.  I’m going to write about my new dishes here.  Oh, this oughtta be good!

When you cook often, it is hard to keep the inspiration going, but it’s there.  You just have to look around a little bit and you’ll find it.

I’ve already found something I’m going to make this week.  That wasn’t so hard.

Actually, I can’t wait!

Do you go through these kinds of things?  What tough spots have you hit?

Salad days are here again

Last night my best friend and I went to a restaurant with a salad bar.

For $13.99 we could eat as much as we wanted.

And we did.

Can you ever have too much salad?

I think not.

p.s. you can have too many pickles though…

So I finally caved…

… and started a food site because not only am I reviewing restaurants and writing about food for a living, but I’m spending much of my “free” time cooking, shopping for ingredients and basically thinking about what I’m going to make next.

So I hope you’ll follow me and my little adventure here.  I will not be posting pictures of everything I make step-by-step (one photo will suffice), or what I eat at every meal or anything like that. But I will be sharing TMI – what I bought, what I made, what I read.

I figure if I’m thinking about this stuff, someone out there must be too.  I can’t be the only one questioning whether next time I make lime chicken I should finish it with grains of paradise or pepitas.

You’ll find out soon enough…

Thanks for joining me on this ride.  I am excited.

And hungry.