Michelle Meals

Just think of your taxes as a big juicy hot dog.

2012-02-27T21:15:00.000-08:00

Two days left to get your RRSPs, guys! Thanks, BMO, for making banking more delicious.

Non-Vegetarian Tofu

2012-02-15T20:56:00.000-08:00

How To Get A Tofu-Hater To Like Tofu

First, you need to cut it into fairly skinny cube-type shapes. (It = the extra-firm kind.) Season with some salt and pepper and toss into a pan over medium-high heat with some kind of oil (preferably a kind that won't burn at higher temperatures).

Secondly, it is essential that you get a good sear. This means it's going to be frying in the pan for a while, and don't turn the cubes too often! When they start to brown, then the sugars that are naturally present are caramelizing (read: turning delicious). The browner the better, so long as it doesn't burn.

Now: Smother it in a meat-flavoured sauce! Like President's Choice Butter Chicken. Sure, some chickens died to make this meal. But not nearly as many as if you were making the authentic dish.

Now it's time to WOW your tofu-hating friend! And get ready to hear them say, I can't belieive it's not chicken! (Nope: it's just chicken-flavoured non-chicken.) Oh yeah: Serve on a bed of field greens with a side of veggies for extra healthiness bonus points.

No-Name Rolled Oatmeal Cookies

2012-02-09T00:51:00.000-08:00

HI COOKIE.

Oh, there's more of you. Hey guys. These dudes came from a recipe on the back of a no-name bag of old-fashioned rolled oats.

I followed it pretty closely, except for the part where I didn't have any granulated sugar, so I replaced it with (almost the same amount of) chopped dates. Between this and a heavy hand with the coconut ribbons, the dough turned out on the dry side.

Tip: If your cookie dough seems too dry, the resulting cookies will most likely be dry.

After the first batch, I added a little water to the remaining dough to make it, well, wetter.

* Best consumed in the company of coworkers, past and present.

Vegetable Lasagne

2012-02-01T22:32:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the hiatus. I promise I've been eating. I made sure of that by turning a catching-up-with-friends night into a making-vegetable-lasagne-together night. I'm pretty sure this is the best way to hang out with friends. Everyone should do it, all the time.

Before we get down to work, a moment should be taken to watch the Vegetable Lasagne Seinfeld clip. There you go.

Our recipe comes courtesy of Jackie, complete with important notes -- eg. "Simmer 30 mins., but whatever." It's important to know when you can say whatever to a recipe and still have it turn out.

Delicious cheese sauce preparation: 2 eggs, 1/4 tsp nutmeg, 475 g ricotta, 2 cups shredded mozzarella and 1 cup grated parmesan.

Fresh chopped veggies! The extent of my work this evening was chopping the eggplant and red pepper that I brought, and then consuming a bunch of wine.

Which by the way was one of the wines we picked up on our Okanagan wine tour last summer, a truly exceptional 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon from Burrowing Owl Estate Winery.

Our taster told us the bottle had been aerating for about an hour in a fancy expensive aerating machine, and this helped to soften the tannins and unlock the complex flavours. We didn't have an aerator on hand this time around, so we used a meauring cup and a whisk.

This really seemed to do the trick. Yes those are martini glasses.

Ok, the noodles are GOING IN. Spinach noodles for extra tastiness.

Everything gets layered together.

Here is plateful number one. It's not the most intact-looking lasagne, but it only existed for less than a minute before disappearing into my belly.

Pizza Times Are Now

2012-01-19T10:33:00.000-08:00

There are some giant changes ahead for Michelle Meals. As such, I have created a Facebook fan page ( ← there's a link over there to the left) to keep you guys in the loop when those changes happen, so that NO MICHELLE MEALS FAN SHALL BE LEFT BEHIND.

In the meantime however, I've deactivated my personal Facebook account to devote the next while to wrapping my head around computer programming, rather than clicking through photos of strangers on vacation in my spare time. In these busy times, I turn to pizza. (Some things do not change.) A few recent pizzas I have made friends with:

Fantastic fabulous Panagopolis pizza, when I am feeling indulgent and rich -- a Friday night pizza. Recent favourites: Butter Chicken and Veggie Korma pizzas. (That's the latter pictured.) Both amazing.

Not-so-fresh-but-everyone-else-seems-to-love-it Uncle Fatih's pizza. For when I am ON THE GO.

A pizza alternative: Toast, with tomato sauce, two kinds of cheese and basil. For when I am feeling poor yet just happen to have all these ingredients in the fridge. Pizza sauce made by Jay, using tomato paste and a secret blend of spices.

So many frozen pizzas because they were on sale at No Frills, and then I just ate them all at once -- these are a mid-week pizza, and sometimes I'll buy one with pepperoni which sadly means Jay can't have any and I have to eat it all; pizza all night and then more for breakfast. Sigh.

Breadventures

2012-01-11T02:32:00.000-08:00

Hello, best bread I have ever made. Just look at your charming crumb! I like you, especially slathered in spinach dip.

Way way back in March last year I went through a brief bread-baking phase, at which time I discovered this YouTube video. Watch it, and I guarantee you will want to bake bread too:

I bought the Tartine Bread book and then was frightened by the chapter-long Basic Country Bread recipe (28 pages!), and that was that.

Ten months later, I finally succeeded in wrapping my brain around this recipe, and my dutch oven gave birth to a beautiful round crusty loaf.

I used the starter that Grace gave me back in the day. Happily, you can ignore the starter at the back of your fridge for months at a time, and it will still refresh if you feed it a few times, and especially if you actually follow the directions that the book tells you (which is: discard all but a tablespoon of starter, and add 200 g warm water and 200 g flour. [You absolutely need a metric scale for this.]).

How do you know if your starter is ready? Drop a spoonful into a bowl of water. If it floats, it's good to go.

Here's one more picture of my bread. He looks like he's wearing a crown. He MAY AS WELL BE, that's how good he is.

I also made some Quick and Buttery Dinner Rolls this week, because of Twitter. I followed a tweet about easy bread recipes and the result was buns for dinner. Amazing how Twitter can change your fate like that. Internet!

I don't necessarily recommend this recipe. I'm not a bread expert, actually I know very little about bread, but I'm going to guess that adding baking powder to bread dough is not the coolest thing to do. But the recipe promised to take ONLY 30 MINUTES so I went with it. (P.S. It lied. Factoring in rising time and extra oven time, it took closer to an hour.) Anyway I wasn't a huge fan of these, but I suppose they were redeemed by the step in the recipe where you pour an entire stick of melted butter on them. Also I have lived off of them for the last two days. That is the problem with baking bread; you end up eating a lot of bread.

The 2012 Menu

2012-01-04T23:26:00.000-08:00

I've set a bunch of food goals for myself this year. One is to make macarons! One is to put a dent in the manuscript for my family cookbook (which is proving to take a million years longer than originally planned). And one is to develop a menu for my home, a collection of dishes that are easy to make, that use fairly simple ingredients, and taste really really delicious.

I often find myself throwing together random leftover ingredients (mmm tofu and beans and . . . canned tomatoes and whatever else!) just in order to fuel my way through another weekday night; the results are often edible and just FINE, but. Why not put in a little more effort, memorize a few really good recipes and keep their ingredients on hand to increase overall deliciousness in my life?

I spent a good chunk of last month caramelizing onions for multiple French Onion Soups and Alsatian Onion Tarts; I believe both of these will be making it onto the menu. Another will be this vegetarian curry, and this dish also just made the cut:

Macaroni & Cheese.

Based on a recipe from my cooking class, this starts with:

• butter (about 1 1/2 Tbsp)
• 2 Tbsp chopped onion
• 1/2 rib celery, chopped
• 1/4 cup chopped red pepper
• 1 clove garlic, thinly sliced

Sweat the above ingredients. If you don't have them all, you can substitute other veggies. (This time, I used onion, zucchini and jalapeño pepper.) Oh and start boiling some macaroni. (1 cup? 1 1/2 cups? Somewhere around there.)

Add the seasoning!
• salt
• pepper
• smoked paprika
• cayenne pepper

And then: make the roux.
• 2 Tbsp flour

Make sure the flour is completely mixed in and that the flour flavours get cooked out of it before proceeding with the liquid. Which is:

• 1/4 cup of some kind of alcohol
• 1 1/4 cups milk

Note: the alcohol can be any kind of beer, red or white wine, or vermouth. I used vermouth, since I just keep a bottle of it in the fridge for cooking. (If you have vermouth it keeps better in the fridge; the alcohol content isn't high enough to let it sit around on the counter for months and months)

Note #2: I like to add just a bit of the alcohol at first and mix well as I add more and more, to watch the roux gradually develop. It's because I recently read an essay about sauce in Michael Ruhlman's The Elements of Cooking and it got me really excited about the sauce process. Sauce! Also, let the alcohol cook off a bit before tempering in the milk.

(P.S. Another new year's food resolution: to start paying double the price for creamy organic Avalon Dairy milk, and never look back.)

Also add this:
• pinch of thyme

So, let it simmer a bit, and then temper in the CHEEEEEEEESSSSEEEEE! Cheese.
• 3/4 cups shredded cheese

This can be a mix of any number of flavourful cheeses, depending on how rich you are at the moment. I just used 2 different brands of extra old cheddar this time.

So, once you're happy with the consistency of the sauce and its seasoning (you likely needed to add more salt at some point), pour the macaroni, which by now has been cooked and drained, into a casserole dish, pour in the cheese sauce, mix it around, and sprinkle overtop with panko crumbs and more shredded cheese.

You can now turn on the light in the oven and watch with glee as the panko crust broils to a golden brown.

Food time! Pair with a glass of the beer or wine you used to make it. You should probably eat a salad along with it too. But you probably won't. Wine is made of fruit. And remember those veggies you put in at the beginning. Everything is FINE.

See You Next Year, Delicious Christmas Cookies

2012-01-01T21:02:00.000-08:00

Well, it's a New Year, but we're not leaving this holiday behind before we meditate on the Pracinky, a faintly chocolatey, faintly clovey Czech Christmas cookie that looks like a rolling brown mountaintop dusted with snow.

They are a Furbacher classic, and after a series of family emails and recipes tossed back and forth in December (and because my mom gave me her molds), I decided to give them a go this year.

My dad translated his aunt's recipe for this -- ingredients including flour, butter, icing sugar, ground nuts, cocoa, cinnamon and ground cloves.

I thought it was weird to use only icing sugar in the recipe instead of granulated sugar... Some notes from my dad on that subject:

Icing sugar by virtue of its name is over there [in North America] thought about mainly for icings or sprinkling on top of things -- however here [here being the Czech Republic], it is the sugar used for the baking of all fine cookies and pastry. All mothers and grandmothers used it and all recipes call for it. Some bakers even sift it to get the finest powder sugar. I think it blends with flour better. Since there is no liquid, the dough for these cookies is quite tough and it would probably take major effort in kneading to dissolve the rough-textured sugar.

Finally I got a classic family recipe right -- well, almost right. While the cookies tasted great, the raw dough was quite crumbly and hard to work with. It may be a simple matter of using pastry flour instead of all-purpose, or adding a Tbsp more butter to the mix. Once I've perfected it, I'll post it in time for Christmas next year.

Ok, one more special treat: Candy Cane Bark! Bark featuring white chocolate seems to be an easy favourite among my test subjects. My plan this year is to make white chocolate bark for every holiday and special occasion. (Remember this?)

Here is the recipe I used. It consists of: 12 oz white chocolate, 12 oz dark chocolate and 48 mini candy canes. I was concerned about hurting my food processor with the candy canes, so I tried breaking them up with a rolling pin in a plastic bag.

But that soon proved to be taking forever. Plus bits of plastic were starting to break off and candy cane dust was getting everywhere. So I poured it all in the food processor and pulsed it to pieces. No food processors were harmed in the making of this candy cane dust.

So once you have your candy cane dust ready, you melt the dark chocolate in a metal bowl on top of a simmering pot of water.

Pour it onto a wax paper-lined baking sheet and spread it out. Let it solidify in the fridge. Then melt the white chocolate like you did the dark, and mix in 3/4 of the candy cane dust.

Spread the white chocolate mixture over the dark chocolate, and then sprinkle the rest of the candy canes on top. Back in the fridge with the whole lot, and once hardened, break it into small pieces of deliciousness.

Christmas Cookies, Past and Present

2011-12-29T09:54:00.000-08:00

Now that you are exploding from holiday baked goods overload, let me tell you all about the Christmas goodies I cooked up this year. It was the first year I actually found time to plan out my Christmas baking.

Sure I've managed to pull something out of the oven every December, but the past few years have been baking failures in one way or another, from the gingerbread man orgy to butchered family classics to bland, tater-tot-like marzipans, to one of my more depressing Christmases, where I over-baked chocolavas alone on Christmas eve while watching a David Lynch movie marathon.

But this year every ingredient magically fell into place in a delicious way. Now I will tell you about some of them.

First of all we have the aptly named Seriously Delicious Chocolate Orange Gingersnaps, from Lisa Slater's The Brownie Lover's Bible. They didn't turn out quite like the picture in the book -- they are extremely thin -- but they are without a doubt the most delicious cookie I have ever made. It's really unfortunate that when you Google what a ginger snap is supposed to look like, you get this. >:[ But Wikipedia tells us the classic ginger snap can be under 3 mm in thickness, so all is well in cookie world.

What is in these babies? SO MANY THINGS: three kinds of ginger (ground, fresh and candied), cocoa, cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar, molasses, bitter Seville orange marmalade, vanilla, cacao nibs and bittersweet chocolate chips. Plus all the usual suspects.

It took me so long to assemble these ingredients, that when it came time to chill the dough, I let it sit in the fridge until the next day.

But now here they sit, all rolled up in turbinado sugar and looking like Timbits, ready to be rendered "Seriously Delicious."

Next up: these aren't cookies. They are candy. ALL NATURAL! Except for the sugar. Which is most of the ingredients. Yes, the ingredient list was a lot shorter on this one:

Candied Grapefruit Peel

2 grapefruits, washed
2 1/4 cups granulated sugar (plus extra to coat candy)
Juice of 1/2 lemon

Peel the skin off the grapefruit, then cut into candy-sized strips.

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil and add the peels. Boil for 5 minutes and strain. Rinse and refill the pot with fresh water and bring it to a boil again. Add the peels and boil for another five minutes, then strain. Repeat this process two more times for a total of four pots of boiling fresh water. This blanching process removes the grapefruit's bitter flavour.

Place blanched peels in the pot. Add the sugar, lemon juice and 1 1/2 cups of water. Simmer on medium-low heat until the peels are translucent (about 1 to 1 1/2 hours).

[Actually I took a nap during this time and overslept, making the simmering time about 2 hours. That's why some of the candies in the first photo look a little scorched -- a few stuck to the bottom of the unwatched pot and started to caramelize. Luckily, a caramelized candy does not taste so bad.]

Strain and place peels on a wire rack. Let air-dry for several hours, or overnight.

Fill a shallow bowl with sugar. Roll and press each peel in the sugar until evenly coated. The candy will last at room temperature for a couple weeks.

I made these a while ago and I remember it being much more of an ordeal back then. But, everything was more of an ordeal back then because I was so new to cooking. Now I am totally a seasoned pro.

And, now this post is getting pretty long so I will stop here and post the rest in a couple days.

Alsatian Onion Tart

2011-12-21T12:10:00.000-08:00

Making French Onion Soup a couple weeks ago reminded me how fun it is to make an entire meal out of a bag of onions. While cleaning out my fridge and wondering what to do with some ancient vegetable shortening, I remembered the onion tart I learned to make in my French Bistro Classics cooking class.

I made the pastry dough in my food processor using a 3 : 2 : 1 (flour : fat : water) ratio: 2 cups (whole wheat) flour (note: whole wheat: not the tastiest pastry maker in town), 1 cup fat (1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup vegetable shortening) and 1/2 cup water. Throw in the chunks of cold butter/shortening, fill with the flour, and pulse, while pouring a stream of the water through the hole on top. Do this until it just comes together to form a dough; knead once or twice; wrap in plastic and freeze until you need it.

When you line the tart pan (with removable bottom) with the dough (and no need to butter it; there's enough butter in the dough), it's best to then refrigerate it for a half hour before blind baking (which will be for 15–25 minutes at 400°F).

I docked the dough with fork holes prior to blind baking.

But I didn't do it well enough, evidently.

Fresh sliced onions!

30–45 minutes later: caramelized onions. Once they got going, I had to add drops of water every minute or so to deglaze the bottom of the pot and keep the onions from burning. I used 3 onions for this recipe; next time I'll use 4 or 5. It's amazing how much they shrink.

Once I felt they were sufficiently browned, I sprinkled in 2 Tbsp flour and tempered in 1/3 cup milk (it's possible I should have done this earlier). This was then to be brought to a simmer, then cooled. Though there wasn't quite enough liquid for a visible simmer.

Fill your freshly blind-baked tart shell with the onion mixture, and bake at 350°F for another 10 minutes or so.

BY THE WAY. When you eat a whole bunch of caramelized onions, you need something acidic to cut through the soft sweetness so that it doesn't overwhelm you. I made a tomato onion salad with a simple dressing: olive oil, lime juice, raspberry wine vinegar, dijon mustard and thyme.

I am always forgetting the measurements for making homemade salad dressing. So I will write it here for later reference: 3 Tbsp oil; 1 Tbsp acid (balsamic/red wine vinegar, cider, juice of 1/2 lemon, etc.); 1/2 tsp dijon mustard; honey to taste if needed; herbs, salt & pepper, etc. to taste. The basic equation I learned in cooking class was: 3 parts oil + 1 part acid + Yum (mustard, herbs & spices, frozen fruits, etc.)

There you have it. This meal was brought to you by random ingredients that you probably already have. Just sitting around, waiting to be whipped into onion tart-shape.

Kängurupfeffer (Kangaroo à la Hasenpfeffer)

2011-12-16T15:44:00.000-08:00

I went to 3P Natural & Exotic Meats in North Van last week. Kangaroo mango sausage was the most "exotic" meat I could find there, so I bought three links. I went home, pan-fried one up, and ate it along with some green beans, corn and mashed potatoes. And it was sad and terrible. I guess I was worried about what would happen if I undercooked kangaroo, and therefore ended up with a dry, dry log of gamey meat. The mango added no flavour at all; in fact I suspect it was added to tone down the overall gaminess.

BUT. I still had two sausages left, and a little hope. And so I decided to go another route and make stew. Stew couldn't possibly be dry. Following some bus-ride kangaroo discussion, I took Jesse's suggestion and consulted other recipes that use gamey meat. Well, just one. The only recipe I could think of, thanks to Bugs Bunny: Hasenpfeffer.

I chose my spices based on a mix of the ingredients found in Google Result Number Two, and those on the Hasenpfeffer Wikipedia page (Google Result Number One).

So. I sautéed an onion, then added 1/8 tsp allspice, 1/8 tsp thyme, 1/4 tsp rosemary, 4 cloves, 2 bay leaves, 1 Tbsp veggie stock, 2 cloves of garlic and ten peppercorns' worth of pepper. (Cooking this up brought back the memory of some kitchen smells from my childhood.) Next I added the two sausages, chopped up in small pieces. At some point I also added the juice of about 1/3 of a lime.

Once the sausage was browned, I added a whole cup of dry vermouth, let the alcohol cook off, threw in 1/2 can of chickpeas, and then a large can of whole tomatoes (not in the hasenpfeffer recipe, but you generally can't go wrong with tomatoes in stews). Once it became clear the stew was going to be too thin, I poured in about 1/4 cup dry red lentils, let them cook and then gave the stew a few whirs with my immersion blender. Success! I guess. I have hereby eaten kangaroo and it was o-k. Thanks, Warner Bros.

Highspeed Thai Chickpea Curry

2011-12-12T12:05:00.000-08:00

Last night I made Thai green curry in about ten minutes! I guess this should traditionally be made with chicken, but I have vegetarianized it with chickpeas instead. The peas of chickens. As it turns out: the perfect substitution! Much better than tofu. (I am getting tired of tofu.) I sautéed some onions with the curry paste, added thick zucchini noodle curls, spinach and the chickpeas (half a can), then coconut milk (a whole can), cilantro, grated ginger, black pepper and the juice of one lime. This probably has one of the highest deliciousness return factors for the amount of time you put into making it.

Meat & Potatoes, feat. Onion Soup Mix

2011-12-07T20:59:00.000-08:00

It's been a meat & potatoes kind of week. In the interests of saving money, I bought a bag of about-to-rot bell peppers for 99 cents at an independent grocer on Davie Street, about the same size bag of peppers I'd buy every week at the farmer's market for $4 in the summer. (That said, the farmer's market peppers were still better quality, no matter the degree of ripeness. These peppers had a faint chemical smell.)

I pan-roasted all the peppers on the stovetop while I boiled some baby potatoes, mashed them up with some butter, milk and grated cheddar, and threw them in the broiler. In the meantime, I was trying out this thing with some chuck steak.

I cut it into cubes, coated the steak in onion soup mix (an idea I got [via Jesse] from a chili recipe in In a Pinch), wrapped it en papillote in parchment paper and let it cook in the oven for over an hour at 325°F. Of course the recipe calls for leaving the meat in the oven for 3 hours to give it that slow-cooked tenderness… FYI one hour doesn't quite cut it; the meat was pretty tough. But the onion soup mix part was still a good idea! Finally a use for this stuff I've had sitting in my cupboard FOREVER.

Budget Tofu

2011-12-06T11:46:00.000-08:00

So, I have just discovered the wonderful world of budgeting. In fact, I made myself a budget using Gail Vaz-Oxlade's Interactive Budget Worksheet Excel spreadsheet, which you can find over here. As a result, I'm back to trying to cut back in the kitchen again, which means inventing weird meals out of stuff that I already have that I didn't even think constituted a meal.

However, I've also not been sleeping well, and I was awake until 3 am on Sunday, so when Jay came over last night I was just waking from a 1.5-hour nap and unable to do anything useful. Luckily he takes direction well, so I instructed him on what to put together. In one pot: a can of lentils and a leftover half can of diced tomatoes. Plus hot sauce and pepper, Jay's idea. In a pan: firm tofu, seared ("make sure it's really seared") with an old bottle of Diana's steak sauce that I have had forever. Then I remembered I had frozen green beans and corn, so we threw some of that into the mix.

Once again, this is one of those meals that is "actually not bad!". We ate it while watching Drive, which was actually really bad. This is better.

Also: dessert --->

Hello Pizza My Old Friend

2011-12-03T13:59:00.000-08:00

I've come to munch on you again.

Uh, Veggie Hash?

2011-12-02T18:43:00.000-08:00

Yeah, I don't know what this is. But it's not as bad as it looks. Just trying to use up all my produce before it dies, so I food-processed broccoli, carrots, onions and tomatoes, sautéed them in a pot and added some frozen corn and peas, lentils, salt, pepper and oregano and chopped up tofurky sausage. The spiciness of the sausage made everything else taste not so bad.

Vegetarian French Onion Soup

2011-11-28T09:54:00.000-08:00

I wasn't sure if I'd be able to do enough cooking this week to justify last weekend's purchase of a whole bag of onions. So to take care of the majority of the onions, we made French Onion Soup. Or rather, South African Onion Soup, since it was made with Obikwa Shiraz from South Africa. Or was it Swiss Onion Soup, since we topped it with Swiss cheese? We also melted some brie into it. So, whatever the case, it was Delicious Onion Soup.

It was also vegetarian: we replaced the traditional beef broth with a mushroom stock (cubes from Capers). I didn't miss the beefiness at all. The rich flavour really comes from the slow caramelizing of the onions over low heat. This took a looooong time... over an hour. But you have to take your time with the browning (but not burning!) of the onions, because other than the red wine, a dash of thyme and Dijon mustard and a couple cubes of bread, that's really all there is to this soup. (Oh yeah, and cheese, glorious cheese.) We used this recipe as our guide, and pulsed the onions to pieces in the food processor. The raw onions hung like a stinging cloud in the air, and made Peanut cry. It was pretty cute.

Speaking of things that make Peanut cry: Peanut received his very own seduction video last week from Kyles McKay, of the upcoming superfilm Steel Viper Force: Fiero's Redemption. HOT STUFF. Like onion soup fresh from the broiler.

Adding veggies and BPA to my diet

2011-11-25T09:16:00.000-08:00

I've been seeking out easy ways to make really easy dinners that will add more vegetables to my life. One thing I've started doing since my return from Ontario (where I ate non-vegetables with abandon) is eating salad before making dinner. Using the easiest prepackaged things: a bag of pre-washed baby spinach, a bag of broccoli-carrot slaw, roasted sunflower seeds and store-bought dressing. It may not be the most environmentally friendly salad in town, but it indeed does result in more vegetables inside my body.

I also make an easy dinner which is called Canned Soup Plus Frozen Vegetables. YUM. This particular one consists of Habitant pea soup, with frozen corn and peas and a chopped up red pepper. This dinner contains a satisfactory amount of veggies, and includes a wealth of BPA as well. Hrmmm. So the question is, does the good outweigh the bad? Or vice versa?

Oops, Cucumber Noodles.

2011-11-21T19:47:00.000-08:00

I was surprised by the exceptional girth of my zucchini when I bought it, especially given the fact that zucchinis have been shrinking consistently since the end of summer. But I didn't think much about it until I sliced it in half tonight, and discovered -- oh. It's not a zucchini. It's a cucumber.

In the past I have relied on signs and gut feelings to tell the difference between zucchinis and cucumbers. Of course a little internet image searching reveals one particular difference I failed to take note of before: zucchinis have a stalk at one end. Cucumbers are rounded at both ends. Cucumbers also tend to have a filmy coating, according to this handy site (which I did notice while buying the cucumber, but only thought, hmmmm what's this new pesticide they're using; I'll have to wash this one extra well).

But anyway. The delicious pasta sauce was ready to go (made from Classico Tuscan-Style Olive & Garlic sauce that was on sale, plus onions, green pepper, black beans and veggie ground round). And so I just tried to make noodles out of the cucumber.

It didn't not work. And it didn't taste TERRIBLE. But, the texture and flavour of cucumber is a little too cold, wet and bitter (is bitter the word? Well, the flavour is the kind of flavour that needs things like feta cheese, tomatoes, red onions and black olives to offset it) to want to try that again. BUT maybe I will try making cucumber noodles again when I feel like making a fancy Greek salad.

I boiled some macaroni to eat the rest of the sauce with.

Ontario Whirlwind Family Tour, Part V: Happy Birthday Mom!

2011-11-20T17:40:00.000-08:00

My last night in Ontario, we celebrated my mom's birthday with a gigantic home-BBQed steak dinner.

Mmmm steak.

I held an impromptu Spirooli demo to teach my family members how to use their new presents. So we had zucchini noodles as a side, and topped them with onions, tomatoes, mushrooms, roasted red peppers, pesto and Parmesan cheese.

Mmmm steak. Enormous steak.

Pretty excited to be recruiting my whole family onto the zucchini noodle bandwagon.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with the leftover zucchini nubs. They look kind of like really tall mushrooms. Any suggestions?

Ontario Whirlwind Family Tour, Part IV: Furbacher Christmas

2011-11-18T09:20:00.000-08:00

Christmas came early this year for my family. Let's face it: Christmas is not even that far away, you guys! Well, we went and got it over with this weekend. I highly recommend the pre-Christmas Christmas.

Before the parents showed up, we got to work on the stuffing. It's Trinidadian (like my mom). Key ingredients include rum, pork and green olives. I made this stuffing two years ago for Thanksgiving... check it out.

I chopped the olives, then took a hundred photos of them.

Here is a page from the as yet still unedited manuscript of the family cookbook I started working on 2+ years ago. It's a WORK IN PROGRESS. Judging by the writing all over it, Nadine has made a little more progress than I have.

Here is a bird, pre-oven.

Post-oven.

I ate a whole turkey leg.

My mom made all-new Christmas treats that we had never heard of. All of them, amazingly, are cracker-based.

Those flat ones are chocolate and butterscotch variations of Skor Bark. They taste like fudge. Pure sugary fudge. Made with one sleeve of saltines, one cup butter, 3/4 cup brown sugar and 2 cups chocolate (or butterscotch) chips:

Cover a baking sheet with foil, spray with cooking spray, and layer the saltines on top. Heat butter and sugar until melted; whip with a fork until caramelly, and pour the mixture over the crackers. Bake at 400°F for 6 minutes. Sprinkle with the chips; let sit 5 minutes until they've softened, and then use a spatula to smooth them out. Let cool in the fridge then feed to people to induce heart attacks.

The squares are made from Ritz crackers! Once you know this, you can totally taste the Ritz, but if no one told you, you'd never figure it out. The recipe is dangerously easy: one box Ritz crackers, one can condensed milk, and one package Skor bits.

Crush crackers in a bowl; stir in the condensed milk and then (most of) the Skor bits. Press into a greased 8-inch square pan, and sprinkle some extra Skor bits on top. Bake at 350°F for 20 minutes.

Try these at home at your own risk: there's no telling how many calories we ingested eating these things.

. . . especially given the fact that dessert was washed down with Ponché Crema (ie. Trinidadian eggnog). Another dose of condensed milk, along with evaporated milk, mixed with a tonne of dark rum, eggs, lime peel and Angostura Bitters. Whew.

Ontario Whirlwind Family Tour, Part III: St. Thomas

2011-11-16T06:28:00.000-08:00

What's cooking in St. Thomas?

'Twas the night before Furbacher-Christmas, but Nadine already got her Spirooli present. (Spiroolis for everyone this year!) We made zucchini spaghetti, and ate it with some of her chicken paprikash, a bastardized (in a good way) version of a family classic, including a can each of mushroom and celery soup.

Meanwhile, Rhyder tried to steal my shoes.

Ontario drinking! Feat. Great Lakes Brewery and Dan Akroyd. The latter was actually not so bad.

Ontario Whirlwind Family Tour, Part II: St. Catharines

2011-11-15T13:55:00.000-08:00

Only one night to eat dinner at my mom's place? Then, fricassee chicken it is. Fricassee chicken is my favourite Trinidadian meal. It's basically caramelized, stewed chicken with potatoes and carrots. We made it together last time I visited (a shocking two and a half years ago) -- here's the link to the recipe.

Plantain is a traditional Trini side dish, and it is perfect with fricassee chicken. It looks like a big, wild banana. Here are some plantain tips courtesy of my mom: When you buy plantain, buy it ripe: dark, with yellow and black patches (the blacker the better). It should be soft to the touch (don't buy the green and hard ones).

To prepare: Sprinkle some white sugar onto a large plate. Peel and slice the plantain into chips -- about 1/4-inch thick.

Heat up a frying pan and add butter. Once butter melts, add plantain chips. When they start to brown, turn them over. Keep turning until you have a nice sear on both sides. Remove from pan and place slices on sugar plate; turn over to make sure they are coated on both sides. Aaand, that's it! A TASTE OF TRINIDAD.

Ontario Whirlwind Family Tour, Part I: Pickering

2011-11-14T12:18:00.000-08:00

Of interest: this sushi burger at iBurger in Montréal. I didn't go there; just a photo from the magazine on the flight. But it makes me want to stop over in Quebec... Instead I went to Pickering, Ontario.

Here, I learned the proper way to drink both red and white (sweet) vermouth (without spending an extra $60 worth of booze to construct Negronis or Boulevardiers). On the rocks: one slice each orange, lemon and lime; vermouth; splashes of orange juice, lemon juice and soda water; topped with Angostura bitters. A mighty fine apéritif.

Time to eat! But first we must photograph it. Ivan made us weiner schnitzel with Czech potato salad and Czech beer (Kozel). He measured the oil for deep-frying by shooting it with the beam of an infrared sensor gun. Cooking with engineers! The schnitzel was perfect.

My new favourite cognac. I learned what XO (à la the fancy expensive Clément XO rum) means: delicious. (It also means 'extra old'.)

Some sleep, so that we can eat again!

Those eggs are 'double-yolk'. Delicious unborn twin chicken babies. Wikipedia says there are hybrid breeds of hens that lay double-yolk eggs by default. You can detect the two yolks by shining a light through the egg.

This is the 'proper way to serve toast': leaning together like a four-sided tee-pee. This way the other pieces that are awaiting being eaten don't get soggy.

Meeeeeatt! I ate speck for the first time (a lean, cold-smoked bacon with juniper flavouring, pictured here laying across the middle of the plate) and I LOVE IT. Also on the menu: spicy ham, mortadella (thinly sliced and spiced with nutmeg), and prosciutto (Ivan's favourite, so it must be eaten last).

The aerial view.

A bunch of cilantro walked into a bar...

2011-11-13T10:14:00.000-08:00

I walked into the Dover Arms beer & wine store with this bunch of cilantro in my hand...

And walked out with this $10 bottle of wine. When you need suggestions for wine pairings, it's always helpful to carry a prop.

Other Mexican pairing suggestions included some of the lighter-bodied reds, an Italian red whose name I can't remember (but it's on the bottom right shelf of the west wall) which goes really well with tomatoes, some Chianti and some sweeter reds, to balance out the spiciness. I was in a cheap mood, so this La Casona was the winner. And indeed, it goes great with Jay-burritos.