Friday, July 16, 2010

List

I would like to post more. I certainly don't post every thing I cook, or every thing I intend to post, or every thing I think about posting.

For those who don't know, V and I were in a car accident in April. It's been a long road to recovery, and I still feel weak and not-fully-recovered sometimes. But I'm getting there. And while unable to move much in those first few weeks I read a lot. Ok, the reading part doesn't have much to do with where I'm going - but I do read a lot of food blogs and I love it. Anyway, I'm finally starting to feel more whole, and I don't want to waste the rest of the summer, so this is something quick and easy for me to post. This is a list of things I want to cook or eat in the next few months. Hopefully it will inspire me to post more.

- Pizza at pizza libretto
- corn chowder (I have jaw problems and the dental appliance I have post-accident doesn't let my front teeth meet - so I can't have corn on the cob. I will, instead, learn to make corn chowder)
- chick peas from dried
- a cobbler or a slump
- my first ever lobster roll (V and I leave for Cape Breton on Tuesday!)
- vegetable stock (my vegetarian brother is moving back to Canada this fall/winter!)
- oatmeal pancakes (though V might protest - he loves my beer pancakes and resists change)
- heirloom tomato salad
- sweet potato gnocchi with sage butter
- something new with the pears from our backyard (we ate a lot of peach-pear crisps last summer. I'm not complaining but I'd like to mix it up. If you have a favourite recipe, let me know!)
- something new to be canned (in the past few years V and I have done strawberry jam, peach-pear chili sauce and canned pears in syrup and I did fantastic meyer lemon marmalade with the lemons from my brother's backyard in California.)

I'm glad to have this to keep me on target. Since starting this blog, I have already tried cooking two new things that I'd always wanted to try. Beet greens and salsa verde. Last weekend when V was out, I made creamy beet greens pasta. I managed to keep from eating it long enough to take pictures and I will post those and the recipe eventually. I made salsa verde for my birthday, and of course I didn't take pictures... I was too busy eating! But by popular request (at least two people at dinner wanted it) I will post the recipe/general guidelines here. This is not a mexican salsa. I think it's Italian, and the only things every one seems to have is capers, parsley and garlic. Some add anchovies (I'm not a fan), some lemon juice, many have dill or mint or basil or some other herbs. If you want my advice, start with the basics, then add the herbs or other flavours you like and the ones that will go best with what you're eating (we had ours with boiled potatoes). That's basically what I did, and I think it turned out pretty well. I loosely based it off this recipe in case you want something firmer.

Salsa Verda
2 cups loosely packed fresh parsley
most of a bunch of dill - probably 1/2 to 3/4 cups - I added some, wanted the dill to be more prevalent, then added more so I lost track of exactly how much went in.
around 1/2 cup fresh mint
4-5 sprigs fresh rosemary, off stems
handful of fresh basil
2 tbsp capers
2-3 cloves garlic
juice of half a lemon
3-4 tsp dijon mustard
1/3 cup olive oil (while I was basically doubling the recipe, I found the single quantity of olive oil to be sufficient)

Roughly chop garlic, then put in food processor and blend until finely minced. Add herbs, capers, lemon juice and dijon mustard. Pulse several times to blend. With blender running, pour in olive oil and blend just to combine.

I guess I'm on a roll here, cause I think I'll go ahead and tell you about the rest of my delicious birthday dinner:

Shrimp and chorizo skewers, same ones as for the SS&C party. We also experimented with grilling halloumi cheese (inspired by the fantastic meal we had for V's mom's birthday in Cobourg at the Northside Grill). The cheese was incredible, salty and just a tiny bit charred... perfect with the grilled tomatoes and of course the spiciness of the smoked paprika glaze. I made a mistake though, in cubing it and putting it on skewers - the first few melted too much and fell into the grill. Next time I will do separate skewers of tomatoes to go with the cheese and then grill the cheese in larger slabs so it can hopefully get a better char without falling into the grill.
Greek salad. My family has always made a horiatiki style Greek salad without the lettuce (though not presented with the feta on top like in restaurants). It's so simple and so delicious: big chunks of cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes, mixed together with feta, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, lots of oregano and black olives. My moms get their feta and olives from Ararat (1800 Avenue Rd.) and the feta is by far the best we've found in the city. When I get lesser-quality feta, I let it soak in the garlic, lemon juice, olive oil and oregano while I chop the rest of the vegetables and it imparts a great flavour. With the Ararat feta this is entirely unnecessary.
And then of course we had grilled asparagus and the potatoes with salsa verde. I'm hungry now just thinking back on it, but what really made the meal/evening fantastic was the company (as I think is true with most great meals.)

For my birthday dessert, V always makes me strawberry shortcake. We spent the morning on a strawberry hunt guided by a Blackberry (anyone else find that amusing?). After a bit of a wild goose chase through my new favourite market here (is it still a wild goose chase when you come out with a bag of beautiful produce - beets, cherries, green garlic, rhubarb...), and an even more fruitless (heh) trip to a place in Whitby, we found Watson Farms and got two flats! They smelled incredible and I'm not sure how I resisted going through a few baskets in the car on the way to the cottage. Oh right, V put them in the trunk away from my greedy little fingers. They were perfect - bright red, juicy, flavourful. Ontario strawberries in June and July are the way strawberries are meant to taste. And I confess that I love strawberries so much I will buy the crappy California ones in the winter, but they really don't compare. He mashed half of them with some sugar, I whipped cream, and made homemade biscuits. I like a light and fluffy biscuit, so I made the Amateur Gourmet's buttermilk biscuit recipe found here. They were fantastic! And easy enough that I will not hesitate to make them again. I did all the steps up to adding the butter and blending, then transferred that mixture to the bowl and let it sit in the fridge until dinner was done. At the last moment I added the buttermilk, formed and baked, so we got our dessert on perfectly warm, just-out-of-the-oven biscuits. Amazing. Though I suppose you could also do it all in advance then reheat, this also gave us a nice break to clean and digest between dinner and dessert.

And I really do recommend the Amateur Gourmet blog... it's the only one that makes me laugh out loud and drool. Sometimes at the same time, but maybe that's because of my dental appliance...

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Steak, Scotch and Cigar Party Part 2: Appetizers and Dinner

I've intended to post this for a while, but apparently I'm a little slow in getting the ball rolling with this whole blog thing. I blame my distaste for taking, downloading, formatting and then uploading pictures. Seriously, it takes way longer than it should. Anyway, here is the rest of the deliciousness we ate that night! Thanks again to Anna for the pictures!!

For the first appetizer, I went with shrimp and chorizo skewers on the bbq. I had intended to do this for the party last year, but V bought the wrong (not-dried) kind of chorizo, so we ended up pan-frying it. It was delicious, but not exactly what I had intended. As I was in the planning stages, I ended up at physio reading my Bon Appetit and came upon this recipe. I was amazed! Not only was it shrimp & sausage skewers, but with a smoked paprika glaze. Smoked paprika is a fairly recently discovery of mine, and I LOVE it! These lived up to my highest expectations, except that I don't think it's worth saving half the glaze for sauce... it's not smooth enough (maybe my emulsifying technique is lacking) and they really do have enough flavour on their own. I made a few very minor changes to this - I didn't have enough fresh thyme, so I used some dried. I didn't have sherry vinegar, so I used balsamic and added about a teaspoon of maple syrup for some sweetness. I used 3 tsp of regular smoked paprika and 2 of hot smoked paprika. I made them again for my birthday dinner using all hot, and found them a bit spicy for my taste, but still delicious.


Our other appetizer was bacon-wrapped scallops - a repeat from last year. These are delicious. They go wonderfully with scotch. If you are hosting a scotch dinner I cannot recommend highly enough that you make them. I suggest pre-cooking the bacon in the microwave slightly, then broiling. Unfortunately we did no precook and my oven decided it wanted to overheat and shut down. V finished cooking them on the bbq while I panicked that my oven was broken. The bacon was definitely soft, but they were still absolutely delicious!



Dinner was steak, roasted garlic mashed potatoes, barbecued asparagus and orange-spinach salad with whiskey dressing. For the meat, we went to Costco and bought a whole tenderloin, which V cut into nice thick steaks:


And then cooked to perfection:


For roasted asparagus, I toss one bunch of asparagus (obviously more here) with 1-2 tbsp of olive oil and some coarse sea-salt and fresh ground pepper in a loaf pan. For larger amounts like we did here, it's definitely easier to roll it in oil on a cookie sheet. V barbecues it till soft and slightly charred and it is absolutely delicious - our favourite side dish when we are barbecuing pretty much anything!


The roasted garlic mashed potatoes didn't turn out perfectly texture-wise - they were slightly lumpy (wrong kind of potato I think - what's your favourite to use for mashed?) The flavour on the other hand was excellent. I got the instructions from my brother's friend Nick who is a fantastic chef. Garlic mashed potatoes are my brother David's favourite thing, so Nick gave me the recipe to make for his birthday and here I share it with you with his presumed permission. He suggests peeling a whole head of garlic, putting it in a small pot and covering it with olive oil. Simmer at low heat until garlic is really soft. Reduce some 35% cream until it is thickened, then mash the garlic in the cream and add it to the potatoes. Here you can see the potatoes (served in the pot - we're classy like that) as part of the buffet we set up on the counter.


The salad recipe can be found here along with some other recipes I haven't tried yet. I followed it pretty closely, though I didn't bother with the butter lettuce. I highly recommend taking the time to roll the goat cheese rounds in ground almonds - it added such a nice textural and visual component to the salad! I confess that due to time constraints I used canned beets here, but I think they worked just fine for the salad.





All in all an absolutely delicious evening - both food and scotch-wise! The company certainly didn't hurt either - it was overall a fantastic night and I think everyone enjoyed themselves almost as much as I did (some maybe more, but as a favour to them I will refrain from posting pictures of the kitchen dance party!)