Archive | February, 2011

Pulled Pork Sandwiches

27 Feb

Real Southern barbeque isn’t something that you get a lot of in Canada, but ever since Pig BBQ Joint opened up in town, I have developed a love for pulled pork sandwiches. I’ve made them a few times at home, and this time I sort of made it up as I went along. The results were really good, so I’m going to share it.

I use a slow cooker for this recipe, but you could just as easily cook the pork in a Dutch oven (see the recipe for details). The barbeque sauce is made from the braising liquid and juices from the pork, and relies on smoked salt and chipotle powder in the Brown Sugar Rub to get a slightly smoky flavour. If you don’t have smoked salt, regular salt is fine. The sauce as I originally made it was kind of ketchup-y, so I’ve modified the recipe here to show what I would do next time.

The buns and coleslaw play just as important a role as does the pork and sauce. The buns should be soft and slightly chewy, and not too grainy. The coleslaw should be creamy, crisp, and a little bit tangy. If you have a favorite coleslaw recipe, feel free to substitute it!

Click for the recipe!

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Leek and Potato Soup

25 Feb

This recipe originally comes from a friend of my Mum. It’s one of my favorite comfort foods: simple, delicious, satisfying. It is good enough plain, but what makes it extra good is stirring toppings into your bowl of soup. I really like adding shredded cheese and hand-peeled shrimp. Crumbled bacon is also really good.

I don’t worry about exact measurements with this soup – it is very forgiving, and also versatile for substitutions and personal preference. Try adding a sweet potato and a spoonful of chipotle puree and top it with bacon and cheese for a Southwestern-ish version.

Use whatever type of potato you happen to have on hand. My favorite is Yukon Gold, but any kind will work. Look for leeks with as much white as possible, and clean them really well to remove any dirt that gets between the layers. To clean, remove the tough dark green parts, reserving the white and light green parts. Slice in half lengthwise first, the slice into semi circles. Place them in a large bowl of cold water and swish them around with your hands. Let it settle for a minute – the dirt will fall to the bottom of the bowl and the leeks will float on top. Scoop out the leeks, drain in a colander, and proceed with the recipe :) Continue reading →

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Snow and a Quiche

24 Feb

Yesterday we unexpectedly received rather a large amount of snow (we measured 21 centimeters at one point!), and in usual snowy Victoria fashion, the roads were terrible, life slowed to a halt, and neither Nate nor myself went to work. Instead, we spent the day on the couch watching season one of Mad Men, and I did some baking. Seeing as I had all day, I made a quiche, which I find inevitably ends up taking about three times as long as I think it will. I also tried to modify my usual fantastic, go-to banana bread recipe to be sugar-free, but it turned out to be not-so-fantastic sans sugar :( Someday I’ll perfect the recipe and share it, but in the meantime, here’s my quiche recipe.

Continue reading →

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Breakfast Pizza

20 Feb

Quite a while ago I stumbled across a recipe for a breakfast pizza topped with bacon, eggs, and cheese. Of course I can’t remember where I originally saw it, but I filed it away in my brain for later. I’ve been craving pizza lately, and as Nate and I went out for breakfast yesterday, I figured I would make something at home this morning, and breakfast pizza fit the bill.

The pizza dough recipe comes from my trusted friend Martha’s Everyday Food magazine. I mixed it up the night before and let it rise overnight in the fridge, rather than delaying breakfast by waiting for it to rise in the morning. Originally it was for grilled barbequed pizza, but I’ve figured out how to bake it very successfully in the oven. The trick is high heat (500˚ F) and baking the pizza on parchment paper rather than on a baking sheet (I’m sure a pizza stone would also work, but I don’t have one). As this makes a thin crust pizza, it’s best not to overload it with toppings – I adhere to the same principle of less is more for pizza as I do for burritos ;)

This recipe makes two 10-inch oval pizzas topped with two eggs each, enough for two pretty generous servings. If you are not so hungry, you could shape the dough into a slightly smaller circle (8 or 9 inches in diameter) and use only one egg in the centre of each pizza. The variations are pretty infinite: you could divide the dough into 3 or 4 pieces and make small little pizzas (5-6 inches in diameter, 1 egg each) to serve alongside fruit or hashbrowns or something, or you could make one giant pizza and top it with 4 or more eggs to feed a crowd (if you are going to double the recipe, I would still recommend making two pizzas, as it might start getting out of control size-wise). If you are in the habit of having guests for breakfast or feeding a large number of family members, this would be a good recipe to try because it’s ready all at once (unlike pancakes or waffles or omelettes which cook one or two at a time) and can be eaten with your hands. Click for pictures and the recipe :)

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Pizza Dough

20 Feb

This recipe was posted to go along with the Breakfast Pizza, but obviously it can be used as a base for any kind of pizza!

Pizza Dough

Originally this dough was for grilled barbequed pizza, but I’ve modified it to bake in the oven. This version is half of the original recipe, so feel free to double it (FYI, 1 cup + 2 tbsp doubled is 2 1/4 cups). Makes 1/2 lb of dough, enough for tw0 8 to 10-inch pizzas. Adapted from Everyday Food magazine, July/August 2010, Issue 74, page 96. Original recipe available here.

1/2 cup warm tap water

1/2 tsp honey

1 1/8 tsp instant dry yeast

1 tsp olive oil

1/2 tsp coarse salt

1 cup + 2 tbsp bread flour or all purpose flour (I usually sub in 1/2 cup whole wheat flour)

Pour warm tap water into a medium bowl (water should be quite warm – almost bath water warm). Stir in the honey and sprinkle with yeast. Let sit for 5 minutes, until foamy (my yeast usually ends up looking more sludgey than foamy, but it still works fine!).

Whisk olive oil and salt into the yeast mixture. Add flour and mix with a wooden spoon until it comes together in a ball. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead a few times until it comes together in an elastic ball. Transfer to an oiled medium bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise in a warm place for 45 minutes, or until doubled in size. Punch down, cover, and let rise another 30 minutes while you prepare the pizza toppings. (Alternatively, let rise overnight in the refrigerator, remove from the fridge, punch down, then allow to sit at room temperature for about 30 minutes before proceeding.)

Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured surface and divide into 2 equal pieces. Let rest for a few minutes before using.

Stretch and roll dough to desired shape, add toppings, and bake on parchment paper in a preheated 500˚ F oven for about 10 minutes, until bottom of dough is golden brown.

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Sunday Roast Chicken & Gravy

20 Feb

Last weekend, Nate bought me a car stereo as an early Valentine’s present, and he and Sam installed in on Sunday. I made a roast chicken dinner for them to show my appreciation – nothing like comfort food to say “thank you”!

There are a bazillion different methods for roasting a chicken, and this one is a pretty standard variation: start with a high heat, turn it down slightly when the bird goes is, rub the skin with oil to make it crispy, season the outside and stuff the cavity with aromatics. I have found that best roasting vessel is a large cast iron frying pan with the chicken on a circular rack, because that way you can simply remove the chicken and rack from the pan and use it to make gravy, without losing any of the drippings or pan juices.

What makes a roast chicken special is the gravy, and I can confidently say that I make a mean gravy. Mostly I owe this to my Dad, whose secret ingredient in chicken and turkey gravy used to be finely chopped dried, salted, Chinese blackbeans. I know that sounds totally weird and gross, but the salty, umami flavour that they imparted to the gravy was SO GOOD. I’ve taken that idea and run with it, only now my secret ingredients are soy sauce, Marmite, Worchestershire sauce, and balsamic vinegar instead of black beans. The soy sauce adds saltiness and umami and more flavour than just salt would. It also adds colour, which I think is just as important as flavour – a nice, rich, brown gravy is way more appetizing to me than a pale, thin-looking one. The Marmite also adds a bit of salt and a meaty, almost yeasty flavour. Even if you don’t like Marmite, you will like what it does for gravy. Worchestershire is a pretty standard ingredient and adds good flavour, but be careful not to add too much, as it can be overpowering. My uncle Mike gave me the idea of adding a small amount of balsamic vinegar to the gravy at the end, to brighten the flavours and cut through the richness with a touch of acidity.

The most important thing to remember when making gravy is to keep tasting it and to add liquid and seasonings in small amounts, as it is always easier to add more than it is to subtract! Read on for pictures and the recipes!

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Second Saturday: Cider Tasting at Sea Cider Farm & Ciderhouse

15 Feb

Please excuse the bad quality of the photos - they were taken with my cell phone!

Second Saturday is a “club” consisting of my friends Lynette, Katheryn, Tangle, and I, where we go out somewhere for drinks and food every second Saturday of the month (hence the name).

This weekend I went on a Second Saturday outing to a cider tasting at Sea Cider Farm & Ciderhouse, a local cidery in Sidney. Tangle was unable to join us – she was busy doing a show with her puppetry troupe, Entangled Puppetry – so it was just Katheryn, Lynette, and myself.
Lynette managed to score a sweet deal on the cider tasting from Groupon.com, which included nine samples of cider, a platter of local cheese, meats, preserves, and bread to compliment the cider samples, hot buttered Rumrunner cider (yum!), and a bottle of your choice of cider. It was awesome, and would still be totally worth going even without the deal – the full flight of nine cider samples is only $16 regularly, and it was enough for all three of us to get a good taste of all nine. And it was delicious, of course!

Honey cured smoked salmon from Sointula, local cheddar and Natural Pastures Comox Camembert, Galloping Goose Co. sausage, blueberry cider preserve, black olive tapenade, bread from The Roost, and dark chocolate

The ciders we tasted can be found here, in order from driest to sweetest. The first two, Flagship and Wild English, were both “ultra dry” and champagne-like, and none of us were big fans – they didn’t have a lot of apple-y flavour (at least not to our uneducated palates!). Kings & Spies and Pippins were slightly sweeter, less dry, and had more cider taste. Katheryn liked Kings & Spies, and I liked Pippins, but again, not our favorites.

Cider is exciting!

Then we had the Bramble Bubbly, a seasonal cider made with apples and blackberries. This was Katheryn’s favorite, although she swore it tasted like cranberries rather than blackberries. I could taste (and smell) blackberry, but not so much the berries themselves as the blackberry canes – you know the smell of blackberry brambles in the hot summer sun? That was what the cider tasted like. Incredible!

Katheryn and the Bramble Bubbly

Next was the Rumrunner, which is aged in rum barrels. It was seriously delicious – it had sort of caramely toffee notes and just enough sweetness. It was the cider used to make the hot buttered cider – Rumrunner, mulling spices, and butter (recipe here). Awesome!! We all had this one down as a favorite, and Lynette ended up taking it home as her free bottle.

Hot buttered Rumrunner - cheers!

The sweetest ciders started with Cyser, fermented with honey. It had almost a buttery, nutty taste that was amazing. Another favorite all round! The last two were more apératif or liqueur-style ciders. Pommeau was 18% alcohol and tasted like apple scotch or whiskey – it had the smoky taste as well as the alcohol taste. I managed to sip it without making a (really bad) face, whereas Lynette and Katheryn both threw this one back, tequila style. Not one of our favorites. The final cider was Pomona, which was like a desert or ice wine. It was delicious and syrupy, and would have been fantastic over ice cream. Again, a favorite for all of us.

Cast iron chandeliers and vaulted ceiling in the tasting room

As I said above, this tasting would be a great way to spend an afternoon, even without the deal. The cider was delicious (and even when it wasn’t to our liking, it was interesting and fun), the food was yummy (and locally sourced), and the tasting room was beautiful: vaulted ceilings, big cast iron chandeliers, long rustic trestle tables, and windows looking out over the fields and water. I will definitely put this on my list of “things to do again”!

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Macarons from Paris

13 Feb

 

My aunt recently spent a month in Paris (lucky!), and she sent me a box of culinary goodies, the contents of which included some crystallized sugar, sea salt “pearls” (which apparently form naturally into these large, pea-sized balls – I’m not too sure what to do with them, but they’re cool!), green tea “dust” for sprinkling on baked goods, and – drumroll! – French macarons.

For those of you unfamiliar with the macaron, it is essentially an almond meringue petit four sandwich cookie, made of ground almonds, icing sugar, egg whites, and a delicious filling. The outside is crunchy, the inside is slightly soft and moist, and it all melts deliciously on the tongue. Macarons come in as many flavour and filling combinations as you could possibly think of, from ketchup (yes, ketchup!) to pistachio to chocolate. They are an essential French pastry, and I don’t think I have had one since I was in Paris myself 9 years ago. They were pretty much my favorite part of the trip, and as I mentioned, they come in almost every flavour imaginable, so there is no way you can get tired of them. Or, at least, I can’t.

Anyway. The macarons sent by my aunt were from Ladurée, a French tea salon that also has stores in London, Switzerland, Monaco, and Tokyo (just in case you are ever in those areas of the world and are craving a French macaron). The flavours in the box were Chocolate, Caramel with Salted Butter, Rose, and either Raspberry or Blackcurrant Violet – I’m not sure which. Despite the fact that they were a tiny bit stale and a tiny bit crumbly from being mailed, they were delicious. The Caramel was devine – the salted butter was just the right note against the sweet and toasty caramel flavour – and I also really liked the Raspberry/Blackcurrant Violet one – it was the most amazing purple colour. The Rose was interesting – I bit into it thinking it would be strawberry, and then got this floral aroma on my tongue that took me a minute to place, as rose isn’t usually something you taste. And the Chocolate… well, I love chocolate. That’s about all that needs to be said.

Oh, and did I mention that I’m still doing this 30 days of no refined sugar thing? Yeah, that went out the window for the macarons. They wouldn’t keep for another week (when the 30 day challenge ends), and there was no way I wasn’t going to eat them!

There are tons of websites and blog posts dedicated to perfecting the art of the macaron, which apparently can be quite tricky. David Lebovitz has an extensive resource list for macaron making on his blog, along with a delicious-sounding recipe for chocolate macarons. My trusted friend Martha also has a basic recipe with several flavour variations (such as saffron with chocolate ganache, black tea with sweet mango filling, pistachio with orange floswer cream, and chocolate with lavendar ganache) in the 2010 Martha Stewart Holiday Cookies magazine. So there is lots of inspiration floating around…

I’m planning on making them myself some day. Stay tuned.

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Christmas Baking 2010 – Part II

10 Feb

Hazelnut Shortbread - triangular cookie on the left

As promised is Part I, here is the recipe for Hazelnut Shortbread. As I said previously, this cookie has a beautiful crumbly texture, great hazelnut flavour, and is not overly sweet at all. It may have been my favorite cookie this year.

Again, when baking shortbread, using real unsalted butter is a must. Because there are so few ingredients, butter really plays a starring role, and the flavour will be worth it.

The original recipe directs you to press the dough into two 8-inch cake pans and then score into wedges. I wanted to yield more, smaller cookies, so I shaped the dough into a triangular log, stuck it in the fridge until firm, cut it into slices, and sprinkled each one with raw sugar. The baking time was shorter as well, but I can’t remember exactly how long I baked them for. I would start checking for doneness after about 10 minutes.

Hazelnut Shortbread

(adapted from Hazelnut Shortbread Wedges, Canadian Living Special Cookbook Issue, Fall 2010, pg 52)

1/2 cup hazelnuts

1/3 cup packed brown sugar

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour

1/2 tsp salt

raw sugar (or granulated sugar), for sprinkling

On a baking sheet, toast hazelnuts in a 350˚ F oven until browned and fragrant, 8 to 10 minutes. Rub in a clean tea towel to remove most of the skins, and set aside nuts to cool. Once cool grind the nuts in a food processor with the brown sugar.

Beat together butter and hazelnuts/sugar mixture until light and fluffy. Stir in the flour and salt. Divide dough in half and shape each half into a log (triangular if you’re feeling fancy). Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm, about 30 minutes.

When you are ready to bake, cut the chilled dough into slices about 1/2 cm thick. Place on parchment paper-lined cookie sheet and sprinkle with raw sugar. Bake at 300˚ F until golden and firm, checking for doneness after 10 minutes. Remove to rack to cool.

Makes quite a few!

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Wing Wednesday at Christie’s Carriage House Pub

10 Feb

This evening Sam, Nate, and I went to Christie’s Carriage House Pub for wings and beer. We were worried that it would be super busy because not only was it Wing Wednesday, there was also a Canucks game on, but we got there around 6 and there was plenty of room.

Christie’s has good wings. I already knew that, but this visit cemented it. We had several flavours going on: sweet Thai chili (deliciously sticky and sweet with a chili kick), Saharan dry (crisp and spicy with a peppery dry rub), Blue Boy (hot sauce and blue cheese together in mouth-watering harmony) and teriyaki, which I didn’t taste but I’m sure was just as good as the others. So 10/10 on the wings.

So as to be slightly healthy along with my chicken wing binge, I ordered a small green salad. Often a salad in a pub is a sad thing, but this one was pretty good. The salad greens were crisp and fresh (romaine plus some spring-mix-ish leaves), the cucumber slice was not too unwieldy (I hate it when they hide a 3-inch long slice of cuke in the middle of a perfectly good salad), the carrot was freshly grated, and the pickled beet slivers on top were a nice touch, as were the dried cranberries and pumpkin seeds. I have a feeling that the sundried tomato dressing was not made in-house, but it was still tasty. I didn’t peruse the menu past the wings and salads, but the burgers at the next table looked awesome – stacked high on a hand-made-looking bun (?) and skewered with a steak knife.

Christie’s has an extensive collection of beers on tap – 34! – including lots of local island (Phillips, Vancouver Island, Driftwood) and mainland microbreweries. Every time I am there I mean to try the Back Hand of God stout, but I usually chicken out. Next time! This time I had the Driftwood ale, which was pretty good – bitter, but I’m starting to like bitter beer more and more.

The price was also quite reasonable: I had a dozen wings (29 cents each), a small salad, and the special beer on tap, which came to under $13 after tax. Pretty decent for a meal that included a beer.

I think the trick to Christie’s is figuring out when it’s not too busy, because we have tried to get in a few times before and they have had no space – and judging by the lineup at the door when we left at 7, it fills up when there is a hockey game on. But it’s safe to say we will be back to sample some more things off the menu, now that Nate’s wing craving has been satisfied.

Christie's Carriage House Pub on Urbanspoon

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