Irish food

I don’t get St. Patrick’s Day. At least, not the way we get on about it. I understand saints’ days, if you’re Catholic. I understand holidays, if St. Patrick’s Day still were one here. I understand that some of our province’s stock came from Ireland, long, long ago.

I just don’t get how that translates to “drink your face off, woooooo!”

Now, I have no problem with drinking one’s face off. I don’t even mind everyone in town drinking their faces off at once. But why bring Ireland into it? Or St. Patrick? St. Patrick, as a child, was captured from his home in Britain and brought to Ireland by slave traders. He eventually escaped, and legend has it that he returned to drive the snakes out of Ireland. Except there never were any snakes in Ireland. By “snakes,” they mean “pagans.” So St. Patrick converted the pagan Irish, who were, no doubt, happily going about their business like most colonized people were before they got colonized, and that’s why everybody wears big green foam hats and puts on fake Irish accents and gets shitfaced every March 17.

Never mind St. Patrick himself for a moment. Let’s look at this big green hat, sparkly shamrock earrings, “Kiss Me, I’m Irish”, ti-tiddly-tee-tum, pot o’gold, they’re-after-me-lucky-charms business for a second. Now, I haven’t been to Ireland, and I’m no expert, but I have met enough Irish people who are, you know, normal, to suggest that Ireland is not actually inhabited primarily by leprechauns. Or by drunks. Or by drunken leprechauns. “Celebrating” Irishness by painting some shamrocks on your cheeks and upending a series of barstools while listening to frantic tin whistle music before vomiting greenly onto your date’s “My Goodness, My Guinness” T-shirt is not terribly respectful of Ireland as a nation, or of Irish people, is it?

Here’s the thing: every time we Newfoundlanders see an image of a toothless, Cape-Ann-wearing, illiterate, rum-swilling, accordion-playing, seal-clubbing, Newfie-joke-inspiring fisherman as a “celebration” of our culture, we get righteously angry about it. We write letters and boycott products. We go on national programs to speak articulately about our industrial edge, our cultural and artistic achievements, our boutique hotels, our ecological attractions, our ever-changing urban demographic.

And yet, we’re not ashamed to portray Ireland and its people in an equally ignorant fashion for 24 hours (plus hangover lag time) every March. We’ll go so far as to say it’s okay because “we’re Irish.” Well, actually, most of us aren’t Irish, and many of those of us who are (in an ancestral sense) haven’t been Irish (in a practical sense) in a long time.

“I’m sorry,” you may be saying, “your mad rant is very interesting, but what does this have to do with food?” Well, food is an expression of culture, isn’t it? Ireland’s history of food culture is complicated and political; it was the great famine (which was, let’s remember, starvation at the hands of colonial landlords) that resulted in much of the migration of Irish people to North America. The potato isn’t indigenous to Ireland; it is a South American plant, which was introduced to Ireland as a supplementary crop, but which was manipulated into becoming a staple. When the potato blight hit in the 1840s, the Irish people had no other food to turn to (most other crops having been claimed for export to England), and so a great many Irish people came to the Americas to give it a go here. Those immigrants formed communities, integrated into the cities and towns, and that’s why we began to recognize St. Patrick’s Day in the first place.

Surely I’m not the only person who finds this interesting. Surely! Come on, people!

What I’m getting at here, if you’ll indulge me, is this: if you wish to celebrate Irish history—and why wouldn’t you?—how about instead of turning it into a stereotype-fuelled piss-up, why not take some time to honour the Irish experience by thinking about what happens when communities lose the means to grow food for themselves? And while you’re at it, why not raise a glass to the indomitable spirit of Ireland, and of people everywhere who have survived devastating cultural losses. As for St. Patrick and his story, well, I myself side with the snakes.

Irish food

Irish food tastes and Newfoundland ones run along similar lines – our ancestry and climate have much to do with that. Contemporary Irish cuisine (as hip and cool as contemporary cuisine anywhere) combines traditional ingredients like root vegetables, cabbage, potatoes, game, salt meat, and lamb with newer techniques to create dishes that are at once simple and elegant. Kinda like we do here, hey?

Of course, you would always defer to James Joyce on this one, and dine on organ meats in the style of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Joyce’s Ulysses:

Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

If you’re into that sort of thing.

Food Nerd highlights

I never really set out to become the Food Nerd. I was just kind of minding my business, making tasty dinners in my damp and drafty apartment, and occasionally blogging about it. I’ve always known a lot about food and cooking, but it had never really occurred to me that anyone wanted to hear about it.

Then, way back in the mid-aughts, my old friend Elling sent me an e-mail saying, “We’re moving to St. John’s to start a free alternative paper. You want to be in it?” Well, of course I agreed. Who doesn’t want to write for a free paper? I mean, imagine the glamour! The fame! The fat free-alternative-paper-columnist paycheques!

After some talk, it was determined that I was to be the official voice of food lovers at The Scope. We didn’t want to do restaurant reviews, since a) Karl Wells had that pretty much sewed up at the time, and b) we had no budget for fine dining (or for any dining). For a while there was some talk of my interviewing local non-culinary personages while preparing foodstuffs, but the short-lived free version of The Express started up an interview-over-lunch column about a week after we thought it up (they were monitoring my brain, I swear it). So we figured, let’s cut out the restaurants and the celebs and just talk food.

Well, actually, Elling’s assignment was “a column that’s like a sex column, only with food instead of sex.”

“Um… sure, I can do that,” said I, not at all sure I could do it, or even what he was talking about, but willing to give it a go.

I’m not certain I’ve ever approached that directive, although I’ll admit that my chocolate beet cake column (www.tinyurl.com/yboeam3) was a smidge lusty, and I may have gotten a little blue in my descriptions of quinoa grains (www.tinyurl.com/ychde8k), but, seriously, they look like sperm. Was I supposed to not go there? I’m a newspaper writer, damnit! I have journalistic integrity!

Actually, I have no journalistic integrity whatsoever. But I do have the encyclopedic knowledge that comes from a lifetime of reading cookbooks as though they were novels. My college years were spent defending Martha Stewart to my Women’s Studies colleagues (you would have paid money to see it, I promise you). I started cooking when I was about seven, and I’ve even earned a few bucks catering over the years.

I’m no chef. I have no desire to run a restaurant or even a muffin stand. I occasionally toy with the idea of having a soup stall somewhere, or delivering lunches to downtown offices, but I keep having babies and they’re not really keen on helping me advance my foodular career. I get asked with some frequency when I’ll have a cookbook out, and I always kind of laugh at that. Me? A cookbook? But I am sitting on 99 Scopefuls of food writing (I missed one issue due to a family emergency, but that’s it, people, that’s it), and I suppose that’s adequate grounds for a cookbook, no? Some of you would buy it, wouldn’t you?

Not to go all sloppy and sentimental on you now, but here’s the thing: the best part of writing this column is you, my readerly friends. I know I act like a dork when I run into you somewhere and you say, “Hey, you’re the Food Nerd, right?” I don’t mean to be so dorky. I just can’t believe that people are still interested in my rants against the grocery super-empires and in my many, many ways to combine chocolate with vegetables. To say that I’m flattered doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Since The Scope ran its first skinny, floppy issues, I’ve moved house four times, gone through several day jobs, weaned a kid off gluten, had a baby, gotten married, and cooked a lot of meals. I’ve sent in my columns from Paris, London, Quebec, Halifax, and Gander. For the first year, I didn’t even have a computer of my own, and I would cobble together my columns at friends’ and relatives’ houses and various people’s offices. And you guys have been there the whole time, sending e-mails and leaving comments and occasionally hugging me in noisy bars. You know how to make a nerd feel loved.

So… here’s to 100 more?

•••

Food Nerd highlights

I’ve said and eaten some crazy things over the last few years. Here are some of my favourite Food Nerd memories:

Surreptitiously documenting the early days of courtship between myself and my husband, using pastry as a metaphor for love (www.tinyurl.com/ya6753l). Nerdiness. I know.

Old reliable chocolate cake

It’s been over a year now since I switched this column over to the all gluten-free network of foodnerdery, and look, you hardly even noticed. Same tasty treats, same snarky remarks… nothing’s changed, right?

Well, maybe not at your house, but it has at mine. Just to recap, in case you’ve forgotten, about 14 months ago I put my daughter, who was in kindergarten at the time, on a no-gluten diet to deal with some health issues she was having. Which meant that we had to re-think, in a pretty serious way, everything we eat. Gluten (just to refresh you) is a protein found in many grains, primarily wheat, spelt, kamut, rye, barley, and (through processing), oats. It’s not, you know, evil, but for people with sensitivities to it, the effects can be anywhere from mildly irritating (congestion, bloating) to debilitating (malnutrition, depression, reproductive disorders, you name it).

Some people with gluten issues can pick the cheese off the top of a piece of pizza and eat it without any ill effects; others, especially people whose systems have been damaged by Celiac disease, can have their symptoms triggered if their food is so much as prepared with a wooden spoon that had been used to stir a pot of beef and barley soup last week. Those little gluten molecules are sneaky shaggers.

Changing your diet, and especially changing your child’s diet, is difficult. As is always the case in my life, when faced with difficulties, I deal in one way: I bake. I bake cookies, I bake cakes, I bake squares and cinnamon buns and scones. It’s my coping mechanism. I drown my troubles in butter. I am lucky to have very few troubles to drown, else my butter intake would far exceed the recommended amount for any human. Who am I kidding? I’m sure it already does.

When you have to put your kid on a special diet, you worry about them being labeled “weird.” Suddenly, you desperately want them to be able to eat all the cookies at the school Valentine’s party. Which is funny, because under normal circumstances, you would be begging them not to eat all the cookies at the school Valentine’s party. But there you have it. Parenting makes you do irrational things. So, when there’s a party, I send cupcakes to share with the class, so my youngster isn’t the only one with a non-matching cupcake. When she gets together with friends, I usually send along cookies to share, partly because that’s just nice, and partly because I don’t want her friends’ parents to be standing there, looking through their cupboards, reading every ingredient and getting all stressed out about it. If I can whip up some cookies in half an hour and save someone else an afternoon of freaking out about what’s going to happen if my kid gets into the multigrain tortilla chips, it seems like a batch of cookies is the way to go.

Cupcakes decorated by someone I know.

I won’t go into the crazy science of gluten-free baking right now, because, frankly, it’s a book-length discussion of wacky flours (quinoa? sorghum? millet?) and starches and xanthan gum. Not to scare you if you’re considering going gluten-free: it’s a little complicated, but once you get the hang of what does what, you’re fine. Better than fine, sometimes, like in the case of the chocolate cake recipe below.

I know that this is the third chocolate cake recipe I’ve run during the life of this column – the fourth, if you’ve ever baked the Fudgy, Sludgy Brownies in a cake pan and called it a cake – but all those other ones had vegetables in them, so they hardly count. Besides, it’s February, the Season of the Cake. If you pick this up early enough, you can make one for Valentine’s Day. If you don’t, well, what odds? I’ve never felt that chocolate cake was something that required excuses.

•••

Old Reliable Chocolate Cake

You can bake this in two 8” round pans and make a layer cake, or you can pour it into a Bundt pan for a ring cake, or you can always go with cupcakes. Most recently, I used this recipe to make a dozen mini-cupcakes for my daughter and her friend, and there was enough batter left over to make a small loaf cake for the grown-ups.

A note on flour: if gluten is not a concern for you, just use all-purpose flour, preferably unbleached. I developed the recipe using El Peto brand gluten-free flour mix, so that’s what I’ve listed, but I’ve also used Glutino brand, and it’s fine. If you don’t want to use a flour mix, I would suggest ¾ cup sorghum flour, ¼ cup sweet rice flour, ¼ cup tapioca starch, and ½ teaspoon xanthan gum, whisked together.

1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1/2 cup butter, room temperature
1/3 applesauce
2 eggs
1/2 cup cocoa
1/2 cup boiling water
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 1/4 cups El Peto gluten-free all-purpose flour (or other flour: see note above)
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Butter pan(s) and dust with flour or with cocoa powder, or, if you are making cupcakes, line a 12-cup muffin tin with papers.

Melt together in a double boiler. Stir until smooth. Cool slightly before spreading. Will harden to a truffle-like consistency overnight. Be warned: if you use this right away, they will be messy. Deliciously messy.

Eat it, punk!

So, you’re gonna do the RPM Challenge? Well, good for you. You’ve got 28 music-filled, magical, intense days ahead of you. I imagine that three weeks from now you will be completely out of your mind.

I was hoping I could come up with some kind of appropriate fuel for you during this mad journey, but who am I to tell you what to do? If you’ve been writing songs for more than two weeks, you probably have some kind of formula for fueling your work already. Perhaps it’s beer and smokes, perhaps it’s drugs about which I would surely know nothing in the least. Perhaps it’s rock-climbing and whole-wheat pasta. I’m not a musician, and despite my track record of having dated almost exclusively musicians from the years 1992 to 2006, I don’t know a damned thing about what makes you people tick. You’ll note that I ended up marrying a poet. Him, I get.

The only experiences in my own life that I can imagine would be anything like completing the RPM Challenge would be 1) pulling all-nighters writing university papers, and 2) um, childbirth.

In the case of the paper-writing, I had a pretty decent system worked out. I discovered early on that simply drinking coffee all night would yield nothing but all-over shakes and peripheral-vision hallucinations. So I would have a couple good-sized mugs of the ol’ caffeine juice, then I would switch to a giant pitcher of water and a bag of jelly beans. The jelly beans provided the essential refined sugar and artificial colours to keep my brain buzzing along (until that painful mid-morning crash, oh the crashiness of it), and the glasses of water made sure that if I were to doze off, I would quickly be awakened by the need to pee. Not bad, hey? Yeah, I’m a genius. As for childbirth, quarts of homemade electrolyte drink (lemon juice, water, honey, and a pinch of salt) saw me through the wee hours of that particular trial, with popsicles in between.

Useful information? Probably not, but it’s all I’ve got.

I would suggest that you stock up on some easily-prepared, high protein foods to have around the house, something that’s going to fill you up without making you feel too gross. And something that’s not going to make your fingers all greasy, because whether you’re holed up with a guitar and a four-track or making beepy noises on your laptop, clean fingers are a good thing. Save the Big Mary for the first of March. Keeping some good, wholesome fixin’s around is a decent plan, for no other reason than this: say, just say, that you’ve just stumbled upon what might be the greatest song ever written, and it’s being written by you. But you’re also approaching hunger-induced delirium because you skipped lunch and you’re about to pass out. Do you want to reach for a snack to tide you over while you seamlessly finish composing the greatest piece of music to grace the ears of the RPM listening party attendees, nay, the world? Or would you rather faint in a heap on the floor, only to awaken and find your great opus a mere fragment, a memory, a collection of bits and pieces like Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn, destined to remain unfinished for all time?

I think we know the answer here: Feed yourself, my friend, and feed yourself something half decent, for heaven’s sake, or who knows what state you’ll be in when you emerge from your musical cave at the end of the month.

One warning, though. Gather healthful snacks, yes, but I don’t suggest you take this time to turn into a real health food nut. Because you know who’s a health food nut? Randy Bachman. Yeah. Do you want to end up like that, swiveling around in a leather chair in a radio studio, riffin’ your heart out while you relay anecdotes about the glory days and your famous pals? No, my friend, you do not. Nor do I want that to happen to you. So, you know, rock the multigrain, but go easy on the wheatgrass, for all of us.

—

• What’s round like a cd and full of goodness? A waffle sandwich, that’s what. Take two tasty , grainy waffles (from a package, or you can use the recipe here—www.tinyurl.com/yh6g799—or the gluten free ones here—www.tinyurl.com/ykrkqzh – to make your own and keep them in the freezer), toast ‘em up, and spread them with peanut butter (or almond butter, cashew butter, whatever), add some slices of apple or banana, a drizzle of honey or maple syrup, and yum, that’s a meal. Cream cheese and raisins also make a delicious, if unlikely, waffle-stuffer.

• As much as I would have once scoffed at the breakfast burrito, there’s much to commend the omelet-wrapped-in-a-tortilla for portable, fast protein. Just make sure to warm your tortilla (or wrap of choice) first, because the clamminess of a cold tortilla is enough to suck the soul out of anyone. Other than that, it’s just a matter of beating a couple eggs, winging them in a hot pan, throwing on a little cheese, and letting them cook through, which should take no more than 90 seconds. Turn the omelet out on to the tortilla, spread on a little ketchup or add a slice of ham or something, roll the thing up (artfully tucking in the ends to prevent drippage), and eat.

• I know, grilled cheese is a no-brainer, but if you’re looking for inspiration that takes less than 5 minutes, there are some good ideas embedded here www.tinyurl.com/yjqtfmh. And if a non-grilled, not-necessarily-cheese sandwich is more your style, there are some ideas here (check the comments, too) www.tinyurl.com/ylfcj4p.

• Hummus. Great tubs of hummus. With rice crackers. Only takes one hand. Dig it.

Eat well, and good luck, Challengers!

Mo’ Rockin’ Chicken & Chickpeas

So, remember a couple years ago, when I was all, like, “hey Scope friends, I’m totally pregnant and I hate food now, sorry for any inconvenience”? I mean, I got over the food-hating eventually, but man, was I ever not into cooking for a while there.

Well, I’ve done it again. Gotten pregnant, I mean. I had help, obviously, but the point is that I am once again in the family way. I’m halfway through the process, and I’ve managed to spare you the details of this particular food-hating phase (although I’m not sure chicken stir-fry and I will ever be friends again). I’m happy to report that my appetite is back in a big way. It returned, conveniently, just in time for me to consume several batches of cookies, innumerable chocolates, and the better part of a 22-pound turkey.

I may not be queasy right now, but you know what I am? Freakin’ exhausted. It turns out that having a six-year-old and a 15-month-old and being pregnant all at the same time is awfully tiring. Go figure. I wake up tired, I fumble through the day tired, I take a nap and I’m still tired. I usually fall asleep on the couch or putting my elder kiddo to bed at around 8:30, then I stumble to my room where I sleep in three-hour intervals punctuated by rounds of toddler-screams (he’s perpetually teething, poor darling boy), and then I wake up tired again. Next verse, same as the first.

And so it is with great enthusiasm that I have accepted a gift from my mother: a slow cooker. Yes. The “I’m really not a gadget person” Food Nerd now owns a machine that cooks dinner for her. My mother, you see, needed a slow-cooker for her Christmas party (there were meatballs, and they wanted to be warm), and the gadgets were so impressively marked down that she bought two. Now one of them lives at my house, on the condition that it be returned for parties.

You may be asking, “What the heck is a slow-cooker?” Well, you might know it as a Crock-Pot. Crock-Pot is actually a brand name, and belongs to the appliance company Rival. Just about every other appliance company has an equivalent product. The unit has three parts: a ceramic crock that you put your ingredients in, a metal or enamel base that has electrical elements running through it, and a glass lid. The elements heat the crock, which in turn cooks the ingredients you’ve put inside it. Only, rather than cooking everything at an oven-like heat, the slow cooker cooks at a low temperature (between 170F and 200F), and instead of things being done in an hour, it takes between six and ten hours to have dinner on the table.

“Why, oh why,” you ask, “would you want cooking to take longer than it already does?” A very good question, indeed. The beauty of the slow cooker is that you can toss your ingredients in the crock in the morning, or even the night before (in which case you stick the crock in the fridge overnight), and then you turn it all on, walk away, and by supper time you have a hot meal on the table with minimum effort. There may be a little preparation involved, like frying your onions or browning your meat, but it’s pretty reasonable. If you’re someone like me, who has just slightly more energy in the morning than in the evening, a slow cooker is an awesome help. At 9 am I can wrap my head around a decent meal, and I have the brains and coordination to assemble the ingredients, prep them, and pop them in the slow cooker. By 5:00 pm most days, I’d just as soon have a giant bag of potato chips for supper as even think about cooking. I’d do it, too, if it weren’t for the children.

Slow cookers are especially good for stew-type dishes that benefit from longer cooking times. Hearty stuff, not delicate fare. Pot roasts, chicken thighs, that sort of thing. If you’re a vegetarian, slow-simmered bean dishes do very well, but apparently some dried beans can be toxic if they aren’t cooked at a high enough heat, and so you have to bring them to a boil in a pot on the stove for an hour or so first (or just used tinned ones). Other than that little warning, though, let me suggest that, if you have a slow cooker you’ve never used, you dust it off, assemble yourself a nice dinner, walk away for a while, and enjoy.

•••

Mo’ Rockin’ Chicken & Chickpeas

This recipe grew out of a similar one I read in a Moroccan cookbook years ago. I always just called it “Moroccan chicken,” until the joke emerged that it was “Mo’ rockin’ than any other chicken!” It’s my family’s favourite dish, and is perfectly suited to the slow cooker. Serves 4.

1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup slivered almonds
1 small onion, finely diced
3 1/2 pounds chicken thighs, skin removed
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
5-6 tinned Roma tomatoes (or 3 regular summer tomatoes) seeds and juice squeezed out
1 1/2 cup cooked (or canned and drained) chickpeas
1 tablespoon honey
Salt to taste

Stovetop method
Follow steps one and two. Add chicken to pot and sprinkle with turmeric and paprika. Cover and let chicken cook on medium low in its own juices for 10 minutes. Remove cover, turn chicken pieces, and add tomatoes and chickpeas. Cover again and bring to a gentle simmer. Cook on low heat about 40 minutes or until chicken is cooked through, stirring occasionally to make sure chicken isn’t sticking to the bottom. Remove lid: if dish is too soupy, cook an extra 5-10 minutes uncovered. Add honey and salt and serve as above.

Florentines

Photo by Andreae Callanan

Andreae Callanan keeps cookies in Christmas.

By the time you read this, it will be December. As I write, though, the St. John’s Christmas Parade hasn’t yet happened. It’s an unseasonably warm November day. Still, according to Facebook, four people I know have already put up Christmas trees. In their houses. On purpose.

When I was a kid, I’m pretty sure we never had the tree up more than a week before Christmas. The needles would have fallen off, for one thing. I don’t even think you could buy Christmas trees earlier than the middle of December back then. I know that loads of people have the pretend ones now (although unless you have a deadly spruce allergy, I really can’t understand why), but really, settle down. The ornaments will be all dusty, and the cat will have eaten your tinsel by the time Christmas actually comes. Besides which, we’re Newfoundlanders, and are obliged to keep our trees up until Old Christmas Day.
Even if you wait until the first of December, that’s five long, needle-shedding weeks. Think about it.

This is coming from someone who goes completely insane about Christmas. I love it. I love everything about it: the decorations, the presents, the shopping (to a point, mind you), the wired children bouncing around the house, the family gatherings, the parties, the television specials, the music, the food, oh the glorious, glorious food! I love hanging stockings by the chimney with care, I love ding-dong-merrily-on-high and fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la.

I also really, really love cookies.

I started baking Christmas cookies on my own when I was in high school and living with my father, who “doesn’t do Christmas.” Well bah and humbug to you, sir. Armed with cookbooks and a great deal of butter and flour, I made some of my family’s classics, like shortbreads, and invented some recipes of my own, like my half-moon-shaped chocolate-dipped orange-zest sugar cookies.

When I hit university and had my very own kitchen, I started churning out batch upon batch of Christmas cookies, and would do up little gift bags for my friends. Since I was studying literature, I never had much in the way of final exams, so I would finish school while my friends were still cramming away. I would bake busily, and they would snack hungrily. Cultural exchanges were made, and I got to go to some rockin’ Hanukkah parties, and a few swingin’ Solstice celebrations, further strengthening my theory that all people, when they find themselves in the dark and cold, are compelled to eat stupidly rich treats and light candles. We may come up with different reasons for it, but really: dark and cold. Need I say more?

When it comes to selecting cookies to bake, I go about it systematically. The way I see it, there are six categories of Christmas flavours: buttery, chocolatey, fruity, nutty, spicy, and citrusy. The six flavours can be combined—as in the recipe for Florentine cookies here—but they must all be equally well-represented. And Christmas cookies for me have to be “shaped” cookies, which means that they’re either roll-out cookies that I then go at with the cookie-cutters, or they’re the sort of cookies made by rolling balls of dough in your hands. This is probably because Christmas is the only time I could be bothered with the tedium of rolling a triple batch of cookie dough into ¾-inch balls.

Last year, I slacked on the cookie baking. I had just put my daughter on a gluten-free diet and really didn’t have what it would take to convert all my favourite recipes to weird and unusual flours. I also had a three-month-old baby glued to me, so that didn’t help. Now, though, I’m excited to get back at it. I was cracking out the old Christmas cookie magazines this year on Labour Day weekend. Does that make me worse than the November tree-putter-uppers? Perhaps. Except the cat won’t be eating my tinsel.

•••

Florentines

There are many variations on this recipe; mine is based on ones I used to eat in a Greek café where I worked in Montreal. Flourless nut wafers studded with dried fruit, suspended in caramel, and coated in chocolate. Yum. Makes about 36 cookies

1/2 cup slivered almonds
1/4 cup dried cherries
1 tablespoon candied citrus peel
1 tablespoon raisins
1/4 cup salted butter
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon whipping cream
4 ounces good chocolate

7. When cookies have cooled completely, melt chocolate in a double boiler, and use a spoon to cover smooth sides of cookies in chocolate. Use a fork to make the traditional “wave” pattern in the chocolate. Let cool completely and enjoy. Keep cookies in a tightly sealed container in the fridge, but try to let them come to room temperature before eating.

Peanut sauce

Can’t we all just get along?

You know what’s good? Peanut butter. Well, anything with peanuts, really. Most of us know this, but it hadn’t occurred to me just how good peanuts are until I received, honest to goodness, an e-mail from a national peanut marketing group with some good-time holiday peanut recipes, suited to these tough economic times. Now, I’m not in the employ of said group, but I do like peanuts, and their buttery, buttery sandwich-spread incarnation, and I’m going to declare it to you all.

When I was in elementary school, I ate a peanut butter and jam sandwich on whole wheat bread for my school lunch every day. Every day. My daughter’s school is peanut-free, so I can’t send the same predictably delicious lunch with her, and as a result we really don’t have peanut butter around all that often. Or bread, for that matter (I’m still working on finding a gluten-free bread recipe that the child will eat). If my dedication to peanut butter has waned in the age of the school lunchroom peanut ban, I wonder how many other peanut butter lovers are passing through the sandwich-spread aisle and foregoing that most luscious and mouth-stick-togethery of toast accoutrements?

Of course there’s the allergy issue. The latest stats suggest that about 4 per cent of us have food allergies of some sort. That may not seem like a lot, but it means that you probably know at least a couple people who have to steer clear of the Cracker Jack. And that every school has its allergic contingent. If you’re a parent of non-allergic kids, you’ve probably had your moments of being overly hard on the parents of kids with food allergies, who are perceived as being the force behind the lowly peanut’s troubles (and your lunchtime dilemmas). But you’ve got to cut the parents some slack. I like to think I’m a pretty level-headed person, but still and all if I were convinced by my doctor that my child might stop breathing if the youngster across the table ate a handful of Reese’s Pieces, I might behave in a, shall we say, hyperprotective fashion. Breathing is pretty important, even for children.

The truly annoying thing about the media exuberance over deathly peanut allergies is that the hoopla undermines the difficulties that the small but significant number of food-allergic folks experience. If people pipe up about their allergies these days, they’re as likely to get a response of, “Oh, you’re one of those, are you?” as anything else. But people with food allergies, believe it or not, aren’t actually out to make your life complicated. They just want to be sure that the sandwich they ordered isn’t going to land them in Emergency. Is that entirely unreasonable?

So it is with this qualification that I call upon the peanut lovers of the world: express your peanutly passion, yes, and express it exuberantly. But don’t send peanut-containing lunches to your kids’ school (you’re not being revolutionary, you’re putting other people’s kids in danger—stop it), don’t bring peanuts to a potluck unless you know it’s okay, and if you’re having people over for dinner, ask them whether they have any food sensitivities. They’ll be happy you asked, and you’ll be happy to make a dinner that everyone can enjoy.

And if you’re among the 96 per cent of people who can eat anything you like, including peanuts, with abandon, then you might want to put this peanut sauce recipe into regular rotation at your house. It’s awfully delicious, full of protein, easy to make, pretty cheap, and is just as good hot as it is cold. I usually throw it on noodles, but it’s just as good over rice, with chunks of grilled chicken or tempeh (if you can get your hands on it), and the odd vegetable wouldn’t go astray in there, either. This recipe got me through my college years, and I’m happy to rediscover it now. Thanks for the note, peanut-marketing people! I’ll buy extra peanut butter now, for those who can’t.

—

Peanut sauce

There are a bazillion different recipes for peanut sauce out there, but this is the one I survived on for about three years. Now that I have youngsters, I cut the chili paste way down, but you can bump it up as much as you like.

(makes about 1 1/4 cups)

This is great over a stir-fry, but don’t pour it directly into the hot pan—the honey will caramelize and give it a weird taste. If you want to use the sauce as a dip for salad rolls, add a little more water. Or you can toss it with cooked noodles and serve it with some more chopped peanuts or toasted sesame seeds on top. If you have sauce left over, it will last in the fridge for up to a week.

Panna cotta

Panna cotta da vida, baby.

So, you may have noticed that I’m going by a different surname these days. Yes, the ol’ girl done got herself hitched. And she’s traded in a big pile of consonants for a lot of extra As.

And so, hearing this news, you may ask yourself, as many of my acquaintances have, what does a Food Nerd serve at her wedding?

Well, if you have visions of a multi-course, sit-down dinner, with me calmly juggling bridal bouquet and tray of chanterelle-stuffed vol-au-vents, then you must be thinking of some other food writer. I’ll admit that when this whole wedding idea got cooked up way back when (it’s been a lengthy engagement… so lengthy that I’ve been referring to my husband as my husband for about a year and a half), I was a little control-freakish about the menu.

But then reality caught up with me and I had to admit that a woman with two youngsters and various jobs just shouldn’t try to handle a wedding’s worth of food on her own.

I am damned lucky, let me tell you, to have family and friends who are as happy in the kitchen as I am. People who, from the moment the wedding was announced, asked, “What can I make?”

I come from a line of food lovers, and whenever there’s an event of any sort, we’re driven to cook something. It’s just how we are. If you should ever find yourself throwing a wedding, and someone asks if they can help with the food (and you’re not tied to a caterer, naturally), say a great big “yes.” As long as they know what they’re doing, of course. Which, more often than not, they actually do, or they probably wouldn’t be offering.

As a recently-wed person, I can tell you that no matter how capable you think you may be, the week before your wedding is no time to be roasting all manner of roast beasts and wrapping pastries and making hors d’oeuvres. You will have other things to do. Best leave the cooking to someone who isn’t about to, you know, get married.

So here’s how the whole thing went down. We opted for a nice, cozy afternoon wedding at a family home, and after a short-ish ceremony we all tucked into a great array of finger foods—wonderful bread, cheeses and olives and pickles and grapes and figs (yes, I braved Costco), thinly-sliced turkey and ham and roast beef from various family ovens, ridiculously delicious spanikopita, wonderful spicy meaty nibbly things.

And the cake? My life-long friend and soul sister Meghan O’Dea (of Pi fame) made what might have been the most deliciously dense, chocolate-full, fudgefully-frosted wedding cake in the history of the sport.

Throw some wine on top of all that, and I ask you: is there a better feast? No having to worry about seating plans or which bits of cutlery to use, and we got to mingle with our guests while hanging on to our little plates and wondering where we left our wine.

It was a proper party, no stress, no pressure, no wedding-day freak-outs.

Did I really leave all the food up to my friends and loved ones? Well, I figured I should pitch in a little—it is, after all, what I do.

So, on the night before my wedding, while other women might be flitting in hennish flocks through the streets of downtown, or drinking fluorescent shooters in some sticky bar, I was at home, making six dozen servings of panna cotta.

To be fair, my husband was up half the night making Ultimate Wedding Mix Volumes One and Two and printing programs, so it all came out even.

Panna cotta, if you’ve never had it, is a lovely dessert of Tuscan provenance—basically sweetened cream set with gelatin. I know, that sounds kind of weird, but trust me, it’s awesome. It’s as rich as ice cream, as smooth as custard, and miraculously light for something that’s made of, you know, cream.

It’s always a favourite of mine when I happen to be in a restaurant, but since that happens less and less these days, I decided to take matters into my own hand and learn how to make the stuff myself.

Well, it didn’t take much to figure it out. The recipe isn’t even a recipe really, just instructions. Honestly, if I could make 72 individual cups of panna cotta in an evening and still manage to get a decent night’s sleep, it can’t be all that hard.

For serving cups, I used 125-ml jam jars (apologies if you were trying to buy tiny jars last month—I may be the jerk who bought them all). They looked mightily cute, and the lids and boxes made transporting them from my house to the wedding site super easy.

And I can reuse the jars for everybody’s Christmas present preserves for the next three years, so it’s an investment.

Normally panna cotta would be unmolded onto a plate, but we kept it simple, eating panna cotta out of jars with a spoonful of berry sauce on top (Pouch Cove blueberries, Cape Spear blackberries, and Pleasant Street raspberries cooked with some apple jelly I’d made earlier in the fall). People loved it, and, at risk of sounding ridiculous, love is what the day was all about. Every 12-serving batch took a whopping five minutes.

I need to throw more big parties just as an excuse to do it again.

Hey, just eleven months until our anniversary…

—

Panna Cotta

1 litre coffee cream (18%)
½ cup sugar
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2 packets unflavoured gelatin
6 tablespoons cold water
¾ cup fruit preserves of your choice
12 125-mL jam jars, or equivalent dessert cups

1. In a large bowl, sprinkle gelatin over the cold water and let sit while you heat the cream. Make sure that you sprinkle it evenly, without any big lumps, so that it will soften throughout.
2. In a large pot, stir together sugar and cream until sugar is dissolved. Heat until just below the boiling point – don’t actually let it boil. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla.
3. Pour hot cream mixture over softener gelatin, and stir until gelatin has been completely dissolved. Distribute the panna cotta evenly between the twelve jars or cups. Refrigerate at least four hours or overnight.
4. Before serving, top each serving with a tablespoon of preserves.

Food Nerd answers your science-y questions

Why doesn’t my whole wheat bread ever rise properly?

One of the things people ask me about this Food Nerd gig is, “Don’t you ever run out of things to talk about?”

Well… yes. And so I ask for help. Sometimes in person, sometimes over the phone, and, now, online. I was going to put out a call for reader questions, but I was afraid that nobody would ask me anything and I would look like a total knob. Hey, apparently it happens to everyone.

My pals came through, and now I have a whole pile of questions to answer. I’ve decided to group them thematically, under headings like, “Folks who can’t Eat Anything, and the People who Love them,” “Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?” and “Now, What am I Supposed to do With This?” But to start things rolling, here’s a bit of science because, really, it’s all about science, isn’t it?

•••

Why do recipes ask you to separate flour/dry ingredients from wet ones? Is it for the sake of the texture of muffins/cookies and the like, or for some other reason?
– Laura

It’s for a very good reason, I assure you. You’ll find this instruction mostly applies to muffins and “quick breads” like banana bread and zucchini loaf. The reason they’re called “quick” is this: their leavening (rising) action comes from baking soda or baking powder, and it’s pretty much instant. Baking soda starts to work when it comes in contact with some nice acidic liquid, like buttermilk or lemon juice. Baking powder has built-in acid (more on this later), which kicks in when you mix it with any wet ingredient. The reaction is the same as when you did the volcano experiment back in school: acid plus base makes gas. The flour and eggs and everything else in your batter trap the gas, and the muffins puff up nicely.

The whole thing happens fast. Double-acting baking powder draws the process out by kicking in as soon as it gets wet and then oomphing up again once it is exposed to heat, but even with the double oomphing, if you let your batter get a little bit wet, and then add in some more dry ingredients, and fiddle back and forth, most of your leavening action will have burned itself out by the time you get your muffins into the oven, and you’ll end up with hockey pucks.

There’s a second reason, too. Muffins are fairly delicate goodies, and will turn out tough if you stir them too much. I’m sure most of us have done this at some point. Stirring encourages the development of gluten, which is awesome when you want a big fluffy loaf of bread, but bad if you want a nice, crumbly muffin. If you have all your dry ingredients together, and then add all your liquid at once, you can stir your batter with just a few quick strokes and you’ll have delightful, airy muffins instead of dense, doughy ones.

•••

Why doesn’t my whole wheat bread ever rise properly?
– Susan

Um… that depends on what you mean by “properly.” Whole wheat bread never rises the way white bread does, because white flour is lighter, finer, less oily, and, let’s be honest, full of nothingness. The bran, oils, and general wheat-ness of whole wheat flour weigh everything down and prevent gluten strands from forming with wild abandon; in white flour, gluten strands grow uninhibited, and that’s what allows the bread to fluff up so much. Floofy breads that claim to be 100% whole wheat generally have piles of junk in them to help them rise up in this most unnatural fashion (just check out the ingredients list).

If you’re using a recipe meant for white flour, you might have to increase the amount of liquid you use; whole grains are thirstier than refined ones, and bread without enough liquid will end up suitable only for construction or hand-to-hand combat. Whole grain flours go rancid very easily if they’re not refrigerated, so make sure your flour is fresh, and keep it that way in an airtight container in the fridge or freezer. If neither of these things seems to be the trouble, try substituting warm soda water for the liquid in your recipe: the carbonation might give your bread that extra lift it needs.

•••

What the heck is cream of tartar and can I just use baking powder instead?
– Gay

Don’t do it, Gay! They’re not remotely the same! Put the baking powder down!

Actually, they’re not completely unrelated: in baking powder, cream of tartar (that’s potassium bitartrate, if you’re wondering) is combined with baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) so that there are both acidic and basic components: add any liquid at all and they’ll react with one another. But on its own, cream of tartar has no leavening power whatsoever.

What does it do, then? The main use is in making meringues and meringue-based cookies like snickerdoodles; the cream of tartar stabilizes the egg whites and keeps them from deflating too easily. It is also an important ingredient in some icings, like the relatively inedible sort you use on a gingerbread house. Baking powder would definitely not do in either of these recipes.

In case you’re put off by the cryptic name “cream of tartar” or by the laboratory-sounding “potassium bitartrate,” rest assured that the stuff is completely natural; it’s a byproduct of the winemaking industry. When grape juice ferments, white crystals precipitate out of it, and those white crystals, when refined, are what we know as cream of tartar. Nothing to be afraid of, and definitely useful to have around the house.

Gadgets, schmadgets

Show me the button and I probably won’t push it, says Andreae Prozesky.

I’m not a gadget person in the kitchen. Kitchen stuff always ends up as clutter, and I’ve moved enough, starting my kitchen from scratch each time, that I’ve learned how to get by with a frying pan, a bowl, and a couple forks. Even with the kitchen gear I’ve amassed, I end up using those three things more than anything else. The fork is the universal stirrer, whipper, smoosher, flipper, fisher-outer. I admire it.

Part of my reason for shunning kitchen gear is that I hate buttons.

Buttons on a kitchen appliance just call out, “I’m going to break. Probably within a year. Keep your receipt, and set aside bus fare to Canadian Tire.”

This is the reason I haven’t had a toaster for two years. Every one I see has too many buttons. What happened to those slidy things that indicated “light” and “burnt,” and the up-and-down things to get your toast in and out? Was this technology imperfect? No, it was fine, and the appliance companies ruined it. I make toast in the oven now, and it works, so long as I don’t get distracted. It’s not the most energy-efficient way to do the job, I know, but it’s what I’ve got.

In terms of things that plug in, I have few. I have a waffle iron, and I love it. I really do.

I have put a price on the head of the mouse who has been nibbling my waffle iron cord, because if my waffle iron goes, I might never be the same.

I have a blender, and I love it perhaps more than I love my waffle iron, if only for its versatility. My blender is an Oster Beehive that I bought on eBay six or seven years ago. I wanted an old blender, precisely because all the ones in the shops had too many buttons. And little computers in them. There’s no reason for a blender to have a little computer in it. For sixteen US dollars and about the same in shipping, I got some wonderful lady’s old blender and the instructions and cookbook that came with it. The date on the cookbook is 1949, yet it has recipes for soy milk and soy loaf. Who knew?

Anyway, here’s the awesome thing about my blender: the threads of the blender jar are made to be the same as a standard-mouth canning jar. That is post-war American ingenuity at its best. Should you wish to, say, grind some coriander, you put your coriander seeds in a half-pint jar, screw the blender blade on to the jar top, flip it over, pop it on the blender, and flick the switch (there are no buttons, just an on/off switch).

If I want to be the most on-the-ball person on Earth, I can take a bunch of smoothie ingredients and put them in a pint jar in the fridge at night, and then, in the morning, I can pop the jar onto the blender and have my daughter’s breakfast made in 20 seconds. Stick a straw in the jar and I’m done. It’s kind of like that Magic Bullet thing they have on the infomercials, only sixty years earlier and made of metal and glass instead of plastic. And without the zombie infomercial people.

I know I can’t tell you to run out to the shop and pick up a blender from the 1940s, but if you’re someone who trawls eBay, keep your eye out. They come up fairly often, as do replacement parts (which I’ve never needed), and they never, ever die.

Now, I do have one exorbitant, indulgent appliance, but it was a birthday gift and I do use it all the time. The classic, the beautiful, the weighty KitchenAid stand mixer. There are other stand mixers out there, and they may be as good. I don’t know. But this one is iconic. And it was on sale. Score. There really was a need for it: I burnt out the motor of my little hand mixer a while back making gluten-free bread. If you’ve ever had the pleasure, you’ll know that gluten-free bread dough can be remarkably cement-like in texture, and you’re usually instructed to beat it for about 15 minutes in an attempt to incorporate some air into the stuff. Anyway, a couple rounds of that and my trusty hand mixer was reduced to a smouldering handful of warm petrochemicals, grinding and shuddering when I tried to coax it back into action. I did without for four or five months before the stand mixer appeared, all shiny and alien-head-looking. It is so oomphy. It cannot be killed by the most cement-like of dough. If it has one flaw, it is that the dimensions of the bowl prevent you from making small amounts of anything, like, say, one dollop of whipped cream. For that, I go low-tech and use my hand-crank egg beater (another eBay find, but I see them in stores a lot). Or I just dump the whole carton into the stand mixer and suffer the consequences of eating too much whipped cream. There are worse fates.

And you know what? I think that’s it. We have an electric kettle and a coffee grinder, and a clock radio. What a bunch of boring people! But we get dinner made, and that’s what matters.

Gadgets, Schmadgets

Here are the most important non-plugging-in kitchen things, according to me:
• Cast-iron frying pan (about $24 at Canadian Tire)
• Half-decent stainless steel pots (one big and one small)
• Good knives, although you really only need one good chef’s knife and one good paring knife. Those two can take care of everything if you don’t have a big kitchen budget.
• An enameled casserole dish or two. The LeCreuset ones sure are pretty, but there are lots of excellent cheaper brands out there.
• Thermometer for meat, deep-frying, yogurt-making, candy-making. I used to think I was too cool for one of these, but after wasting enough ingredients I’ve become convinced that I am not that cool after all.
• Wooden spoons, a whisk, a really nice thin-edged spatula, some slotted spoons, miscellaneous pans for baking and roasting.

Things I would really like, even though I don’t need them:
• A panini press, not one of the electric ones, but the stovetop kind with the ridged pan and the ridged, weighted lid. They are so cool.
• A cappuccino maker, because there’s only one place I can bear to drink the coffee around here and I’m usually home anyway.
• A marble slab for rolling out pastry, even though it’s not something I do all that often.
• A pressure canner. So I wouldn’t have to put two cups of sugar into every jar of jam I put away.

What’s in your kitchen? And what’s on your kitchen wish-list? Leave a comment below.

Spuds in a barrel

Photos by Andreae Prozesky.

A few weeks back, I waxed on about the magical world I inhabit in my mind, where our agricultural staples are grown right here in Newfoundland, and taste of the salty, capelin-enriched soil of backyard gardens and community veggie plots and small, diverse farms. I’m not saying we have to live without olive oil and chocolate and coffee and peanut butter. I’m not completely insane. But because I love food, and because I love Newfoundland, I really want to find a way to get as much of my food as possible from somewhere I could get to without having to board a plane or a ferry.

While I was writing that column, having just returned from my interview with the exuberant Andrea Maunder, I received an e-mail from my editor about the Eat Atlantic Challenge. Then, while I was still feverishly typing, I got a phone call from CBC Radio, asking if I would like to talk about local food on Crosstalk the next week.

I could hardly say no, could I?

I listen to Radio Noon a lot, usually while making lunch myself. I love that it’s open to callers from all over the province. Sure, it may be a fairly narrow demographic—people who are near both a radio and a telephone in the middle of the day—but it’s an interesting demographic. Some real characters come out whenever you want to talk about food.

There was the townie contingent, the individuals who work hard on committees and boards to help put community gardening back into the consciousness of the average city dweller. Sadly, but truly, many of us on this side of the overpass are complete novices when it comes to tossing a few seeds in the ground and eating what comes up. We don’t know what’s edible and what’s not along the paths and in the vacant lots, and we’ve shagged our soil up to such a degree with our lead paint and whatnot that it’s not fit to play in, let alone to grow a row of peas. We are, in many ways, stunned.

But the same cannot be said for the rest of the island.

One call I got on Crosstalk was from a man in a community of 180 people, who had a pantry the likes of which I dream about: bottled and frozen vegetables and fruit of all description, potatoes, turnips, beets, bottled moose and rabbit, fresh and salt fish. Another was eating homemade seafood chowder and a shrimp sandwich on his own homemade bread, all from fish he had caught or bought in his own community.

“All you have to do is just go down to the wharf and see what they’ve got down there,” he offered by way of advice.

Sadly, for those of us in town, there’s not much wharf action going on. So if you’re reading this around the bay, eat some mackerel for me, would you?

Here in St. John’s, we’re pretty much limited to what we can grow in bins and greenhouses. Last weekend, I took a little tour of a few gardens on the map published on the FEASt (that’s Food Education Action St. John’s) website. Open garden day? Yessir, even in the chilly drizzle.

My mom, my daughter and I set out on foot to take in five gardens in our neighbourhood, and was it ever-inspiring.

None of these five little gardens were being tended by award-winning veggie growers, and none of them were going to feed a family of four over a long St. John’s winter, but they were chugging along, providing greens and herbs and a few roots for the gardens’ devoted stewards. There was one raised bed in a front yard, and there were two in a back yard that was all but hidden by killer raspberry canes. One garden was in shared space behind a school, and another was a borrowed tangle of roses and gooseberries and tomatoes behind a house owned by a chef.

And one was perched on a deck, in handmade cedar and glass cold frames flanking a square-foot garden made from shipping palettes. What a lovely space that was. The recycled window panes shimmering with mist and the seedlings of the year’s last lettuce crop covering the black, wet soil. The cold frames were newly built over the summer, and the smell of the cedar was so lovely, I would have stayed all afternoon if my daughter hadn’t been threatening to eat all of our host’s otherworldly cookies.

I know this is meant to be a food column and not a gardening one, but when you think locally, you can’t really separate the two. Fall is in full swing, and this is harvest time, but for those of us who didn’t get a garden in this year, it’s time to take inspiration where we find it, and start planning for next time around. There’s a lot of garden downtime ahead, perfect for building window boxes and wooden bins, and dreaming of what you’ll have for dinner this time next year.

As for right now, I’m cramming as many local veggies as I can into my freezer and my pantry, and eating the last of the turnip greens before they’re only a memory.

—

Spuds in a barrel

I’ve been reading a lot about maximizing your growing space, and one technique that’s come up is growing potatoes in barrels. Apparently, people do this in Britain a fair bit, where the space you have for growing your veggies is fairly limited. I also found a paper online exploring the suitability of this technique for growing potatoes in certain parts of Africa.

What you do is plant your seed potatoes in compost-rich soil at the bottom of a barrel (or large plastic garbage bin, or wooden structure you’ve constructed for this purpose). When they start to grow, you cover them with more soil, and on and on until your plant bursts out the top, and there is no more room for dirt. The theory is that, at every level where you’ve added more soil, the plant will have sent out more tubers. What you end up with, then, is a potato plant on top and about four feet of potatoes below.

Now, I haven’t tried this, but I’m planning to do it next year. Have any of you readers done it, or even heard of it, before? Anyone else want to grow potatoes in a barrel next summer and compare notes? Drop me a line at dreae@thescope.ca

Crunchy granola bars

Photo by Andreae Prozesky

Years after my own school days wrapped themselves up in a tidy, red-tape-and-useless-diploma-wrapped academic package, I still catching myself sniffing the air on cool September mornings, hoping to catch a whiff of the intoxicating back-to-school olfactory cocktail of pencil shavings, new socks and shoes, and crisp McIntosh apples.

I always loved the rituals of back-to-school shopping, arranging my newly acquired supplies (standard-issue tartan pencil case, multi-subject binder, weapon-concealing geometry kit) in my canvas backpack. This was back in the stone age when downtown St. John’s had department stores; some years my mother and sister and I, after pillaging Piper’s and Target, would stop for lunch at the Woolworth’s cafeteria for a nourishing meal of red-heat-lamp-warm fries and a fine dessert of Jell-O cubes topped with “whipped topping” and a quarter of a maraschino cherry. I love Jell-O in a cube to this very day.

Now that I have my own school-age daughter, I get to relive it. It’s not quite as much fun paying for school supplies as it once was picking them out, and, due to our twenty-first-century horror of any child being bullied off a cliff for having the wrong kind of glue stick, you’re not really allowed to buy anything fun any more, but, still, it’s back-to-school. The fresh start of untouched scribblers, the erasers showing no evidence of your ever having made a mistake. It’s a time full of hope.

And lunches.

School lunches aren’t what they used to be. Peanut butter might as well be napalm, the way people go on about it. And tuna sandwiches are a stinky, fishy lunch food of the past. I’m not about to weigh in on whether the allergy business in schools is motivated by a genuine desire to keep kids safe or by a wide-reaching allergy hysteria fueled by the big-business pharmaceutical companies or by the school system’s fear of lawsuits. It’s probably a bit of each. Deadly food allergies are incredibly rare, far rarer than you would probably think, but they do happen, and if I were the mom of the kid who the doctors said might stop breathing if the kid next to her ate a peanut butter sandwich, I might react in a way that other parents might not understand. Who knows? I’m already the parent who sends her kid to birthday parties with her own gluten-free cupcakes, and it’s a slippery slope from there.

It’s not only schools that ban certain lunch foods, of course. Plenty of office buildings have a no-peanuts policy, and, well, there are some people who would say that bringing a room-temperature tuna sandwich into a shared kitchen space with recycled air and no windows should be a punishable offence anyway. Tuna’s out, peanut butter’s out, and frustration is in.

One of the recipes I’ve fiddled with and tested with over the last year is for crunchy granola bars. They were a staple lunch food for us children of the children of the sixties. Then Quaker Chewy Dipps appeared, with their prominent Degrassi placement and their chocolate chips and marshmallows and chocolatey coating. How did anyone expect us to learn anything? No wonder our teachers chain-smoked in the lounge every second that they could.

Then, maybe ten or fifteen years ago, the crunchy granola bar started to make a comeback. They’re almost as tooth-rottingly sweet as the chocolate-dipped chewy marshmallow granola confections of the 1990s, but they’ve got the odd whole grain in them, so they’re all right. They’re not all that cheap, though, for something composed primarily of horse feed, and one plastic-foil wrapper for every two skinny bars adds up to a lot of waste.

In all my fiddling with my granola bar recipe, there was one thing I got wrong for a long time. In my attempts to make the bars not too junky, I kept trying to reduce the sugar. It just didn’t work. The crunchiness has to come from some kind of sugary syrup. It can be corn syrup, which is what it would be in most commercial granola bars, or it can be honey, which is delicious and relatively good for you but which has a strong flavour that some kids (well, mine at least) don’t like. I usually use brown rice syrup, which you can buy in health food stores and in the health food section at Dominion. It’s not very sweet-tasting, and it’s almost buttery. I don’t worry too much about a bit of sugar syrup if the stuff the sugar syrup is holding together is all wholesome grains and nuts. I just send a crisp, tooth-scouring fall apple along with it and hope for the best.

—

Crunchy granola bars

Makes 8

1 ½ cups old-fashioned rolled oats
¾ cups various seeds (I use a combination of pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds, but sunflower seeds, toasted soybeans, coconut – which is usually allowed, as it’s not related to true nuts – and other seeds are also tasty)
3 tablespoons butter
½ cup lightly packed dark brown sugar
½ teaspoon cinnamon, if desired
4 tablespoons corn syrup, brown rice syrup, or honey (or a combination)
½ teaspoon coarse salt (kosher salt or pickling salt are fine)

1. Line a 4 ½ x 9” bread pan with parchment paper so that the paper hangs over the two longs sides a little – you will use the overlap to remove the bars from the pan.

2. In a pan over medium-low heat, stirring often, toast oats just until they become fragrant and slightly golden, 5 to 6 minutes. Remove oats to a bowl and add the seeds, stirring well.

3. In the pan, combine butter, sugar, cinnamon, syrup or honey, and salt. Cook over medium heat, stirring, until butter melts and mixture begins to bubble, about 3 minutes.

4. Pour sugar mixture over oats and seeds and stir to combine. Quickly turn mixture into prepared bread pan and press down with a rubber spatula (or your fingers if it’s not too hot). It should be even across the surface. Refrigerate until set, at least 30 minutes. Using parchment paper overhang, lift slab of granola to a cutting board and cut into eight slices. Keep granola bars in an airtight container, preferably in a cool place so they don’t soften up (I keep mine in the fridge).

PS Oats can sometimes be contaminated with gluten, so people with Celiac disease and some acute gluten sensitivities can’t tolerate them. I make these with slightly crushed cornflakes instead of oats and they’re marvelous (I skip the toasting step). Check the box to make sure they’re gluten-free if this is a concern for you.

Become a Locavore

Every year, about this time, I get carried away with a marvelously optimistic conviction that our little island, left to its own agricultural devices, just might be okay.

The hills and paths are resplendent with wild fruit, the backyard gardens are tumbling over with zucchini, the woods are teeming with game, the farmers’ market tables are groaning under the weight of beets and broccoli, the fields at Lester’s are waving with tall, beautiful corn.

At each meal I tally how many of my ingredients have come from somewhere on the island, and from the beginning of August until after Thanksgiving, I don’t do too badly. Veggies from local farms and city plots, foraged mushrooms, vacant-lot berries, eggs and milk from local producers, a bit of fish, and some Spyglass butter get thrown together and we eat like kings. And every year I become more convinced that, with a little more planning and forethought, and a slightly bigger freezer, I could eat this way all year ‘round.

It’s not quite the 100-mile diet, but close.

Chances are you’ve heard of the 100-mile diet by now, but if not, here’s the gist: rather than buying just any old groceries from any old place, 100-mile-dieters dedicate their food dollars and their time to the acquisition of local produce. The phrase was coined by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, who spent a year eating nothing but food produced within a 100-mile radius of their home in Vancouver. No Mexican mangoes, no Costa Rican pineapples, no olives, no chocolate, and nothing packaged up with shrink-wrap.

“Why on earth would anybody want to do that?” you may well ask.

Well, I can think of a bunch of reasons, but the quality of produce shipped from halfway around the world is reason enough, as far as I’m concerned. Limp greens, mealy tomatoes, and polystyrene-flavoured strawberries have become the norm. We don’t know who grew them, or what sort of environments they came from, we just pick them up at the grocery store, pop them out of their plastic clamshells, give them a rinse and feed them to our families, pleased that we’ve managed to get our kids to choke down their five servings of fruit and veg a day, no matter what the ultimate cost.

What else? Well, how about the fossil fuel required to move produce from one side of the planet to the other, the chemical additives needed to keep fruit looking good for days and weeks on end, the conditions of the workers in the far-off countries that the fruit comes from, the lack of connection to the seasons when you buy the same produce all year round, the uneasy position of relying on imports when we live on an island… need I go on?

“100-mile diet” is just one term for this kind of thinking. The Slow Food movement is a similar phenomenon, encouraging people to celebrate local food traditions, to connect with farmers in their area, and to savour the production and the consumption of food rather than just stuffing something into their mouths and hurrying about their days. “Locavore” is another new term, describing someone who eats only food grown or produces within a certain radius of their community, usually 100 or 150 miles.

Catering to locavores is career ambition for Andrea Maunder, co-owner of Bacalao restaurant, where the “Nouvelle Newfoundland Cuisine” focuses on fresh local ingredients. The foodstuffs aren’t 100% local, but as close as possible given the volume required to keep the kitchen running. Maunder finds it ridiculous “that we need phrases like ‘100-mile diet’ and ‘slow foods movement,’ all this new terminology for stuff we should be doing anyway.”

She has a good point: up until about fifty years ago, the bulk of what Newfoundlanders ate was grown in backyard fields and on small farms. The idea of eating a potato from anything other than Newfoundland soil would have been laughable, and fruit like oranges would have been exotic Christmas treats rather than flavourless commodities, picked while green, shot through with food colouring, and shipped here in unimaginable numbers.

Local traditions carry a great deal of weight for Maunder.

“In the olden days, we canned,” she says. And that’s just what they do at the restaurant. During our interview, in fact, a slew of local veggies were being made into mustard pickles in the kitchen behind me.

To ensure a supply of local berries through the winter, Maunder and her staff freeze some and can the rest. The restaurant has four “dirty big freezers” full of local meat and produce, and, says Maunder, if they ever get a line on moose meat, they’ll “sooner go out and buy another freezer than turn it down.”

Sounds wonderfully Nan-and-Pop-ish to me (aside from the buying-a-new-freezer part) but then Maunder has a very successful restaurant, so she can get away with it.

For those of us working on a smaller scale, a closet-sized deep-freeze and a home-canning kit are probably enough.

If you want to feast on local foods through the year, “you have to start in the summertime,” says Maunder. “It takes planning and preparation.” And I know that not everybody is a freelance food writer on a flexible schedule, or a restaurant owner. But what about heading out to the farmer’s market or your favourite farm stand, buying as much broccoli as you can, and spending a weekend afternoon cutting it into spears, blanching it, packing it into bags, and stuffing it in the freezer? Or picking rosehips on Signal Hill after the first frost, taking them home, and making jelly? How about calling up your great-aunt for advice on making piccalilli with the too-late-to-ripen tomatoes from your balcony tomato pots, or letting your “got-to-get-me-moose, b’y” uncle know that you’ll happily take some stew meat off his hands?

It doesn’t have to be all pickles and moose meat either, of course. Beautiful scald cream (like clotted cream) is being made here, by Glenview’s Finest. There are delicate salad greens being produced seasonally by The Organic Farm and Seed To Spoon, and year-round by The Lettuce Farm (or you can grow your own in a plastic bin in a sunny window). There are juniper berries along the Signal Hill trail, and there is wild mint growing just about everywhere it’s wet.

The biggest difficulty with eating local around St. John’s is that the farmers and producers haven’t had much help in terms of networking and marketing. It takes a lot if legwork to find local farmers and, when you do, it’s not always clear what sort of farming they’re doing.

Maunder recalls looking for her locally-sourced produce: ”I’d find a listing for ‘Jonathan’s Farm,’ but I don’t know whether Jonathan raised carrots or emus.” The St. John’s Farmer’s Market has done a lot to connect area farmers with customers, but if you want to get some rabbit or bakeapples or wild mussels or a duck, you have to put your feelers out and ask around.

Often, though, asking around is all it takes. St. John’s, for all the availability of avocadoes in February, is still a small town, and if you ask a few people to spread the word that you like a bit of flipper pie in the spring, chances are there will be someone, or ten someones, hauling you to a flipper dinner at a church hall the first chance they get.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last few years, it’s that foodies like other foodies. If you want to build a network of locavores, even part-time locavores, the first step is announcing your intentions. That done, be prepared to swap some of your frozen blackberries for a chicken, or to paint someone’s fence for a feed of cod tongues. Blow your birthday money on dinner at a local-foods restaurant or market stand to show them that what they’re doing is important.

It’s how things have always worked, and how they should.

—

Note: these menus have not yet been tried, just dreamed up. If they inspire you, please leave a comment, send a photo, or share your recipe by commenting below.

1. Lamb sausages, dandelion or turnip greens sautéed in local butter, steamed and buttered potatoes, baked rhubarb with honey and scald cream

5. Big ol’ boiled dinner, massive bowl of blueberries with full-fat milk (Okay, this particular menu has been tested and approved.)

Summer vegetable risotto

Photo by Andreae Prozesky

This summer, for the first time in many years, I’ve been getting weekly organic vegetable bags from a local farm. Community-Supported Agriculture is probably old news to many of you, but for anyone else, here’s how it goes: in the spring, you buy a share of your CSA crop, paying up-front for your season’s worth of whatever the farm produces. Your payment goes toward all of the seeds, supplies, labour and whatnot that the farm requires. Then you get tasty, fresh vegetables (and some fruits, and berries and herbs and such) through the summer and into the fall.

The wonderful thing about this system is that you’re getting excellent local organic produce for a fairly reasonable price, while at the same supporting good environmental stewardship and labour practices.

The challenging thing about it is you have no control over which particular vegetables you get, and you may have no idea what to do with them.

But this is not at all a bad thing. I would never have tried Swiss chard if I hadn’t ended up with CSA baskets full of it about ten years ago. It’s now one of my favourite vegetables. Normally, I never buy snow peas, because they’re always lashed to a black Styrofoam boat with two layers of cling-wrap, wilting in their own misery. Now, for weeks, I’ve had more snow peas than I’ve eaten since I was a kid (in a friend’s back yard, with gluttonous abandon), and I’ve been compelled to make delicious, black-bean-sauce-laced stir-fries as a result. Garlic scapes are so obscure a vegetable I’ve never even seen them in a grocery store, but earlier in the season I binged on them and lament the fact that their days are gone and I won’t have any more until next year.

Despite my best intentions when opening up my basil-scented, leafy green veggie bag each Tuesday evening, I often don’t manage to use up my veggie share over the course of the week.

Sunday and Monday nights are usually mad scrambles to find the best way to eat up any languishing vegetables. The lettuces and other salad greens, herbs, and edible flowers are easy to work with: toss with oil and vinegar and devour—checking first for any little buggy or sluggy friends who may have made their way out of Portugal Cove hiding along the ribs of my Romaine.
Braising greens like kale, chard, and beet tops, that haven’t made their way onto a plate are blanched and frozen for winter. I’m sure I’ve talked about blanching greens a million times, but just in case: clean and chop your greens, removing tough ribs and stems. Dunk them into boiling water for about a minute (two minutes for really big, tough ones like kale), strain them out into a big bowl of ice water, pat them dry with a tea towel, and put them into freezer bags with the air squeezed out. Nothing to it. Extra green beans, fava beans, cauliflower, broccoli, and the like get the same treatment.

But if I want it all to end up in my bowl instead of in my freezer, I either make some kind of veggie-packed pasta, or turn to my new standby: risotto. For years I scoffed at risotto as having some kind of early-1990s restaurant-chic tackiness to it, but I know now I was wrong. Risotto is so deliciously silky and comforting, so easy and so versatile, it’s the perfect veggie-user-upper. Even children like it, although, if you have children who are old enough to be suspicious of anything too foreign-sounding, you might want to call it “cheesy rice with vegetables.” If you’ve never made it before, and have been under the impression that risotto requires hours of endless stirring, let me assure you that it’s only twenty minutes, half an hour, max, and it’s well worth it. The reason for all that stirring is this: when the grains of rice rub up against each other, their starchy outer layer sloughs off, and that turns into the smooth, glistening sauce that holds the whole thing together.

It’s a beautiful thing. The stirring is quite meditative, really, and watching the grains of rice change from tiny, hard little things, through oil-glistening translucency, to their final, pearlescent state is pure magic.

And, even if it’s not magic, it’s delicious.

—

Summer vegetable risotto
(serves 6)

1 to 1 ½ litres stock (vegetable or chicken)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, chopped finely
3 garlic cloves
2 cups risotto rice (Arborio and Calrose are easiest to find)
½ cup white wine, Vermouth, or additional stock
3 tablespoons butter

In a large pot on the back burner, bring stock to a simmer. Reduce heat to low.

Serve with an additional sprinkling of herbs and Parmesan, if you like.

Vegan option
It occurs to me—and I have no experience to support this—that you could probably replace the Parmesan with some light miso thinned out with wine or stock and a generous sprinkling of good-tasting nutritional yeast, and swap the butter for some more good, fruity olive oil, and have a delicious dairy-free dinner. I don’t think you would get away with calling it risotto, but that’s no matter. If you try this, leave a comment and drop me a line and let me know how it turned out, okay? Leave a comment here or email me at dreae@thescope.ca.

Simple syrup

Photo by Elling Lien.

By Andreae Prozesky

A few days ago, I made what is probably my fourth (or maybe my fifth) rhubarb crisp of the summer, and my third (or is it fourth?) since moving into the new house. And for the third (or, you know, possibly the fourth) time, I realized, after having chopped my rhubarb and preheated the oven (in as much as I can do, my oven being satanically possessed), that I was out of brown sugar. Not a difficult thing to find, brown sugar, but I have forgotten to buy it now for what must be two months.

So for the somethingth time, I’ve had to “make” brown sugar. Stop rolling your eyes, I haven’t set up a rudimentary refinery in my basement or anything (yet). I just took some white sugar, drizzled some molasses over it, and smooshed it together with a rubber spatula until, miraculously, brown sugar appeared.

Because, you know, that’s all brown sugar is. They take all the molasses out, then they put it in again. Golden sugar has just a little, dark brown sugar has a little more, but it’s all just refined white sugar underneath. Weird, huh? And why do they do it? Well, there is that slightly molasses-y taste, but brown sugar also serves to keep baked goods nice and moist. If you want to make chewy oatmeal or chocolate chip cookies, brown sugar is what you turn to. White sugar would make them kind of crispy. Which might still be nice, but it’s probably not what you would have had in mind.

White sugar, though, is what you want when you’re making jam. The crystals are small and they don’t have any molasses to clump them together, so they distribute evenly without making big chunks to be broken up. The molasses would also darken the jam a fair bit and interfere with the taste of the fruit. Sometimes the molasses-y taste of brown sugar can compliment fruit quite beautifully—I use brown sugar in my pineapple preserves, for example – but often the brown sugar will kind of weigh down different fruits’ light and summery flavours.

Did you know that you can make your own icing sugar, too? Just take your regular white sugar, throw it in the blender and whizz it around to a powder. Once that’s done, add a couple spoonfuls of cornstarch and whizz it again. The sugar manufacturers put the cornstarch in for a couple reasons. Starch keeps the sugar from clumping, and it also works as a binding agent in some baking. That’s why some recipes, like shortbread cookies and certain sweet pastries call for icing sugar; without the starch component, they wouldn’t hold together quite as well.

This make-your-own-kinds-of-sugar business is good to know if you’re trying to bake with organic ingredients. Organic cane sugar is fairly easy to find, as are organic molasses and cornstarch, but organic brown sugar and organic icing sugar are fairly uncommon.
It’s also good to know if you, like me, forget to buy things for weeks at a time.

There are other varieties of sugar that are less refined than your standard crystal-white by-the-kilo stuff. Demerara and turbinado sugar are the same thing, less refined than regular white and brown sugar. If you put those little packets of “sugar in the raw” in your coffee, this be they. It’s not really what you would call “raw sugar,” strictly speaking, but it’s been through the ringer with less intensity than table sugar has. The crystals are big and kind of amber-coloured, and they’re really tasty sprinkled on top of blueberry muffins before the tray is popped in the oven. Because they’re bigger than regular sugar, the crystals take longer to dissolve, and leave sugary gritty bits at the bottom of your latte, which is either awesome or gross, depending on your perspective. You can’t swap demerara sugar for brown sugar in your baking. Even though it’s brown in colour, it’s not the same as brown sugar. The texture of your cookies (or whatever) will be completely different than it would be with regular brown sugar.

Muscovado sugar, on the other hand, is like brown sugar to the power of brown sugar. It’s much closer to being “raw sugar” than “sugar in the raw” is… sorry if that’s terribly confusing, but it’s the truth. It has a strong molasses taste and big-ish grains, and it is very moist and sticky. You can use it where you would usually use brown sugar, but it’s going to make your baking darker, muskier, more oomphy. I use it all the time in baked goods that can support that kind of intense flavour, like gingerbread, spice cake, chocolate cake, and brownies. Oh my goodness, how I love it. I put it in my tea, too, but I also like to steep my tea in the mug for about twenty minutes until it’s on the barky side. A gentle, dignified cup of tea might not be able to keep up.

Okay, one last thing about sugar, and then I’ll leave you alone. If you wish that you could make homemade lemonade or iced tea without a layer of sugar sludge at the bottom, what you need is to make what’s called a “simple syrup.” If you’ve worked in a bar or as a pastry chef you’ll already know about simple syrup. You use it for mojitos. Need I say more?

—

Simple syrup

This isn’t exactly a recipe, more just instructions. Make as much or as little as you like; it will keep forever in a jar in the fridge.

1 part water
2 parts white sugar

For flavoured simple syrup, just add your favourite herb, spice, or what have you to the water before you boil it. Syrups flavoured with fresh mint leaves, vanilla pods, gingerroot, and cinnamon are all delicious for making mixed drinks, for drizzling over ice cream, or for serving with soda water. Quantities depend on your taste, but I would use, say, two vanilla pods or a big handful of mint leaves per cup of water. Once your syrup has cooled, strain out your flavourings and store the syrup in the fridge as usual, but try to use it up within about two weeks. That’s a lot of mojitos!

Fruit-topped ricotta tart

Andreae Prozesky isn’t normal, but she’s virtuous.

Every year, it’s the same. It all starts with the rhubarb. Then it’s the strawberries, then the raspberries, the gooseberries and blackcurrants, and then comes the glut of autumn blueberries and partridgeberries and rosehips.

Local foraging. I spend my winters and springs dreaming about, nay, obsessing over local foraging. I dream of someday challenging myself to survive the year on local fruit alone. I’m sure it can be done. Already I’ve been out scouting for tangled raspberry patches and pincherry trees and crabapples and chuckley pear bushes in my neighbourhood’s vacant lots. I’m sure there are neighbours who wonder at my frequent emergence from treed-in urban wilderness, the spots which are inhabited by semi-feral cats and the occasional underhoused human. I’ll admit, it looks a little dodgy. But I really am up to something totally normal. Well, perhaps not normal, but virtuous.

Already in the season, I’ve taken a spin around the bay to pick wild strawberries in a friend’s overgrown field, and I’ve eaten as much rhubarb as friends and relatives can throw at me. Almost.

Some of the spoils of my summer foraging, like the tiny and almost unnaturally sweet strawberries, will be mostly eaten out of hand, thrown over cereal or yogurt at breakfast, or smooshed between my thumb and forefinger to feed to my happy nine-month-old kiddo, who scarfs them down with inspiring abandon.

Other fruits will be cooked down and made into preserves. Crabapples aren’t really fit to eat, at least not in any serious amount (unless you have guts of steel), but they make delicious jelly. Same for rosehips, which grow wild and abundant all over St. John’s. So long as they’re wild roses, and not somebody’s cultivated and possibly pesticide-drenched ornamentals, the fruit is pretty much free for the taking after the first frost. Blueberries and partridgeberries are the best to freeze.

And last year was the first time I ever picked chuckley pears. They grow all over town, in green spaces and along walking trails, and nobody under the age of 65 ever seems to notice them. If you’re not familiar with the name “chuckley pear,” you might know them as Saskatoon berries. People all over the rest of Canada go cracked for them, and they’re so full of antioxidants that I’ve read a number of references to them as a new “superfood” (like chocolate and coffee and pomegranates… good company).

I do, of course, bake with lots of the berries and fruits that I forage over the summer. Usually it’s muffins, but over the last couple days I’ve come up with what I think may be my go-to fruit tart. The base is made with ground almonds and buckwheat flour, and it’s a press-in crust, so you don’t have to worry about messing around with delicate rolled pastry in the summer heat (it’s also gluten-free, if you’re among the gluten-averse). The filling is sweetened ricotta cheese, which you can buy in a shop or make at home (the instructions are in this article here), and the topping is whichever fresh, local fruit I’ve hauled home. So far I’ve tried it with rhubarb (result: yum) and with a rhubarb-strawberry combo (result: double plus yum). I’m fantasizing now about making the same thing with raspberries and blackberries on top, knowing that the raspberries will be gone before the blackberries ripen—remind me to set some raspberries in the freezer for this experiment, will you? And chuckley pears will be great on this, perhaps with some lemon zest stirred into the ricotta filling.

The fruit-jelly glaze is what makes the tart so pretty. You know when you go to a bakery and their fruit tarts are all shiny and gorgeous, and then you go home and make what seems like the same thing, but it just looks kind of amateurish? It’s the glaze factor. It just takes it over the top. I’m not saying you should make a batch of apple or rosehip or gooseberry jelly just to have on hand when the mood strikes you to make a fruit tart, but, you know, it wouldn’t hurt. Failing that, store-bought apricot preserves, with the big chunks strained out, are a pretty standard substitute.

Either way, it’s delicious.

—

Fruit-topped ricotta tart

Crust:
¼ cup brown rice flour
¼ cup buckwheat flour
½ cup ground almonds
¼ cup icing sugar
½ cup chilled butter, cut onto small pieces

Filling:
1 ½ cups ricotta cheese
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup sugar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
½ teaspoon salt

Topping:
1 ½ cups fresh summer fruit, pitted/chopped/stemmed as necessary, combined with up to ½ cup sugar, depending on type of fruit (rhubarb will need lots, blueberries won’t need any… judge accordingly)
½ cup light-coloured fruit jelly (rosehip, crabapple, white grape, gooseberry) or heated, strained apricot preserves, optional

INSTRUCTIONS:
Preheat oven to 350F.

In a large bowl, combine flours, ground almonds, and sugar. Work butter into flour mixture with your fingers until it forms a coarse meal. There will still be small lumps of butter, but that’s okay. Press the mixture into the bottom and up the sides of a 9-inch tart pan. If the dough is too sticky, sprinkle with some additional rice flour.

In another bowl, using an electric mixer, mix ricotta, eggs, and vanilla. In a small bowl or cup, stir together sugar, cornstarch, and salt. Add to ricotta mixture and mix well.

Pour ricotta mixture into crust. Carefully place in oven – the filling will be quite liquid, so you might want to place the tart pan on a cookie sheet first, for less sloshing about. Bake tart about 25 minutes, until the filling has begun to set. Remove tart from sheet and distribute fruit evenly across the top. Return to oven and bake another 30 minutes.

In a small saucepan, heat jelly to boiling, stirring with a whisk to break up any lumps. Set aside. Remove tart from oven and spoon warm jelly over top to cover fruit. Set tart aside to cool, then refrigerate to chill thoroughly.

Send your questions, comments, and sweet and sour suggestions to dreae@thescope.ca

Cooking with gas

Ilustration by Peggy Pope.

Andreae Prozesky blames the electric oven.

Last week, a wonderful thing happened here at the Food Nerd Laboratory. We—the people and the kitchen—moved. No longer content with our adorably diminutive and exceedingly cramped gingerbread cottage, the Food Nerd family up and relocated to a big house with lots of room, a garden for growing veggies, and a lovely big kitchen with windows on three sides and a cherry tree just outside. It’s a magical place, and I love it, except for one small hitch.

No longer am I cooking with gas.

The last Laboratory location was blessed with a workhorse of a propane stove. The thing was probably thirty years old, and seasoned with grime from who knows how many tenants. The oven door didn’t shut right, and the oven flame was dangerously slow to start, but, dammit, we were cooking with gas. Real professional-like. It was wonderful.

Do you ever look through home décor magazines? The ones that tell you all about renovations and maximizing your house’s potential and all that stuff? Well, all those kitchens in all those magazines have gas stoves. Likewise for restaurant kitchens. It’s not just because blue flame looks badass and sexy, no no no. A gas stove makes cooking way easier. Most electric stoves, especially the common coil-element ones, take ages to heat up and ages to cool down again. They are slow to adjust. They reject any attempt at precision.

The oven parts are okay, unless you put a nice, butter-laden, fatty chicken in there at 425F like you normally would, and the grease spits and gets all over the element and your smoke alarm goes off and wakes up the baby, and then your husband comes home and you can barely see him through the haze of chicken-smoke. Not that I would know. Actually, I would, and I’m not ashamed to admit it: since we moved into the new place, I have ruined every single bit of food I’ve tried to make. The only reason I haven’t ruined the tea is because we had to buy an electric kettle, so slow to boil was a pot of water on the stove (no, I wasn’t watching it).

I super-crisped the outside of the chicken, but the inside remained dangerously pink. I burned the turnip greens, which are among my chief delights come spring time. I made rubbery eggs and crunchy rice. I overbaked the rhubarb crisp, and I undercooked the strange mélange of tinned goods I threw in a casserole dish and called “dinner” on our first day here.

It’s been a very sad state of affairs.

I know there’s bound to be an adjustment period when something changes in the kitchen. An upgrade, a reno, a new appliance, a loved one putting all your dishes back in the wrong places after having insisted (despite your objections) on washing them. Anything that interferes with the way you’re used to doing things, with your—as the office-people say—workflow, is going to cause a little culinary pain. But you get used to it. You adjust your reach, you remember that the counter is shorter or longer than it once was, you read the owners’ manual, you find your hand mixer after all.

You return to your ninja-like state of effortless dinner-makery, at least when it comes to your regular go-to recipes. You don’t burn the hell out of the roast chicken, for heaven’s sake.

It did, after all, take me some time to get used to the immediacy of the old gas stove, the insistence, the fiddliness of getting the flame just right. The fact that the lower right flame crapped out if you tried to set it on low, releasing a stream of suffocating and combustible propane into the air.

But once I figured it out, I remembered why I had loved the gas stove at my father’s house, and the one in my first Montreal apartment. You want it to cook? It’ll cook. Right now. No questions asked. No standing around. You’re done cooking? Turn the flame off, and, whaddaya know, no more heat. The gas does what you want it to, and it doesn’t kick its toes in the sand and reply to your attempts at heat-regulation with a five-year-old’s drawn-out, “alriiiiiiight, I’m coming… in a minute…” As though you were asking your stove to wash the windows or clean the cat litter or something.

I mean, come on. You’re a household appliance: do your job.

I suppose that, with time, I could likewise get used to an electric stove again. I could adapt my cooking style to suit the slow-to-heat, slow-to-cool, quick-to-smoke nature of the stove I’ve got now.

Or I could forgo stoves altogether, get myself a toaster oven and a hot plate and relive the culinary scene of my Yellowknife shack-dwelling days. I could buy a microwave oven and figure out what they do (I’ve only ever used them to heat up coffee; can you actually cook in them?). I could get a rice cooker and a deep-fryer and a slow-cooker and a Panini press and a popcorn maker and a George Foreman grill, and be perfectly well-equipped for any and all alimentary eventualities.

But in a little while we’ll have saved up enough to have a gas line put in, and we’ll buy ourselves a proper stove and I’ll be the foodster I was a week ago.

Until then, I foresee a stretch of cold snacks and leftovers.

Saving For a Better Stove Survival Plan

• Salads. Lots of salads.
• Hummus. Lots of hummus.
• Crackers with cheese and chutney, with sliced apple and a handful of walnut halves on the side (best lunch ever).
• Barbecued everything, including pizza, vegetables, and fruit (grilled pineapple and peaches are both exceptional).
• Chocolate.
• Cereal.
• Granola with yogurt and diced pears.
• Waffle iron as daily-use appliance.
• Snacks from the farmers’ market, doled out slowly over the week. Believe it or not, cold leftover curry is remarkably restorative as a breakfast food.
• Um… more chocolate?

Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for cold snacks and leftovers to dreae@thescope.ca

Illustration by Peggy Pope.

Pasta with Kale, Bacon, and Feta

Has Andreae Prozesky‘s inner vegetarian left the building?

If you ever want to really irritate a table full of friends out enjoying a weekend brunch, just tell them that you don’t like bacon. Perfectly sensible people will be beside themselves. “What do you mean, you don’t like bacon?” It’s one thing if you’re a vegetarian and don’t eat any meat at all, so long as you admit that you would eat bacon by the plate if your dietary restrictions would allow it. If you don’t eat it for religious reasons, people will let you off the hook, although they’ll probably look at you with a mix of pity and incomprehension. Anyone who has had to give up bacon for health reasons will likewise be pitied, but it’s a pity mixed with fear, as each person glances at his brunch plate and speaks a silent prayer that he and bacon never be torn apart.

But to simply not like bacon, that’s downright deviant. People refer to it as “the gateway meat” because of its remarkable power to turn the most principled of raw-food vegans into full-English-breakfast-devouring porkivores. One hit of smoky, salty bacon and next thing they’re twitching for a bit of blood pudding. I’ve seen it happen.
On Saturday mornings, my husband and daughter go through a little song and dance we like to call the “Bacon Saturday” routine. Bacon is fried up, and I am offered some. I politely decline, and the game begins.

“I just can’t believe you don’t like bacon.” “Seriously, mom, what’s wrong with you?” “I mean, what kind of a person actually doesn’t like bacon?”

A person like me, I suppose. I just couldn’t be bothered with it. I like the way it smells, especially when there’s coffee brewing at the same time. I’m not grossed out by great pools of bacon fat, and in fact I think I’ve cooked with bacon fat more often than I’ve cooked with bacon itself (fish cakes fried in bacon grease over a Coleman stove while camping is just about the greatest thing ever).

I think part of it is that I can’t quite get around the idea of breakfast meat. For me, breakfast is a festival of carbs: French toast, pancakes, waffles, oatmeal, that kind of thing. Meat in the morning just seems weird. And while I know that there are people out there who think of bacon and waffles as being the best of friends, well, I guess I’m just not one of them.

I have put bacon in waffles, though, and it was pretty good. I put the bacon on the waffle iron grill, poured the cornmeal waffle batter over it, and let ‘er sizzle.

Because I dig bacon as an ingredient.

This is a fairly recent development. I remember my first bacon-appreciation moment perfectly. It was a gorgeous spring day in Yellowknife, a balmy -15C (yes, that’s a minus). I’d been out for a walk and stopped in at the lovely Mary’s Tea Room for lunch. I ordered a pot of Persian Cardamom tea and a bacon, avocado and lettuce sandwich. Just like that. My only explanation is I was pregnant at the time, and my carnivore of a daughter was already making her tastes known.

Since then I have become able to eat an entire club sandwich, picking out only a few little bacon strips once I’ve hit my “bacon wall.” I quite enjoy bacon in a Cesar salad now, so long as it’s actual bacon and not mysterious bacon-flavoured morsels (that’s not even cat food, people). I found a recipe in one of Nigella Lawson’s books for roast chicken where you fry some bacon, stick the cooked bacon into the cavity of the chicken, pour some brandy in with the bacon fat, stick the chicken on top of that and pop it into the oven, basting with the bacon-brandy juices. That’s just awesomely good.

And now I’ve had my own bacon-as-ingredient triumph: pasta with greens, bacon and feta.

How did this magical dish come about? Well, I had a whole lot of fresh Portugal Cove kale looking up at me, and I decided to make one of my standard what-to-have-for-dinner pastas, wherein I cook some pasta, douse it in olive oil and lemon juice, throw in some garlic, some kind of cheese, and whatever else is around, and call it supper. It has never yet failed.

While the pasta sat on the stove, I cleared the table of brunch’s detritus, and found that there were three strips of cooked bacon sitting there, untouched. Why the hell not, I figured, thinking of recipes I’d seen for pasta carbonara and the like, and I chopped the bacon up and threw it into the pot.

Angels sang, my friends, and fireworks went off, and a brilliant new pasta recipe was born. What started as a use-this-stuff-up dinner is now my favourite pasta dish. Bacon.

Who knew? Oh, right… everybody but me.

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Pasta with Kale, Bacon, and Feta

(serves 4)

3. Add pasta to the pot with the vegetables, along with chickpeas and bacon. Stir everything together, add salt and pepper to taste. Serve, crumbling a big pile of feta into each bowl.

Send your questions, comments, and baconlicious suggestions to dreae@thescope.ca

Make your own mayonnaise

A few things to do with eggs

When I was a wee young nerdlet, my father was a part-time farmer. That is, he was a suit-wearing St. John’s executive by day, and the muck-slinging mastermind behind a Pouch Cove hobby farm by evening and weekend. Turkeys, ducks, geese, pheasants, and, for one season, rabbits, lived short but comfortable lives under my dad’s watchful eye. Come fall they were sent off to be butchered and dressed. He’d sell a few, keep the rest, and we’d be well fed through to next season.

And there were chickens. Some for eating—broilers and fryers, they’re called—and always a good number of laying hens. So there were plenty of eggs at Dad’s house. Brown, white, bright-yolked, sometimes double-yolked, dependable eggs, fresh as anything. Which is why, I suppose, when I sit and dream about the coastal subsistence farm to which I will one day retire, hens are the first animals I picture populating the landscape, scratching for bugs and roosting peacefully in the spacious coop I will have built for them entirely from reclaimed materials.

Yes, this is what I think about, almost all the time.

Hens are the ultimate value-added product on a small farm. Their feed is fairly cheap, they peck and pick and eat the slugs out of your veggie patch, and, if conditions are right, they lay at least one egg a day. Get yourself a half-dozen hens and you’ve got three and a half cartons of eggs a week, which means enough quiches and meringues and crème caramel for you to start your own catering business on the side. Add a rooster to the flock, and your hens make more chicks. Some of those grow up to lay eggs, some of them end up in the soup pot. The cycle of life goes on, and you get to observe it while dining on soufflés and breakfasting on omelets. A wise investment, since, unlike milking cows or shearing sheep, collecting eggs requires practically no effort. Every day is like Easter morning. Only without the chocolate. And with more chicken poop.

My nutritionist (who some of you dear readers might recognize as my mom), calls eggs “perfect food.” They’re inexpensive, full of protein, easy to prepare, and versatile. They’ve got folate, vitamin B12, and the antioxidant lutein. They’re also one of the few protein sources that St. John’s-dwellers can find locally. While there might not be much small-scale meat production on the Avalon, there are a good few family farms producing enough eggs to sell here and there. Ask around at the Farmers’ Market (opening up for the season on June 6 at the Lion’s Club Chalet, and hot damn am I excited), or at any roadside stand and you should be able to hone in on someone willing to part with fresh, happy eggs. But even if you’re strictly a supermarket shopper, you can find local eggs without too much trouble.

If you do buy your eggs at the grocery store, don’t be seduced by promises made about eggs high in Omega-3 fatty acids—I don’t care what the Omega-3 people say, chickens weren’t meant to be force-fed flax seeds and fish oil. That’s some kind of monstrous agricultural hazard in waiting, that is. And while I’m all for the idea of free-range and free-run chickens, some of the large egg producers have taken “free-range” and “free-run” to mean “locked out in the cold all day and all night,” or “free to walk around in a concrete pen under fluorescent lights” which isn’t really all that much better, if you ask me. Organic eggs are lovely, but if they come shipped from Ontario in plastic or polystyrene cartons, doesn’t that kind of run counter to the whole ethos of organic growing? Best to actually find yourself a farmer, get to know him or her, and ask about the sort of conditions his or her chickens live under. If they’re free to eat the odd grub and get out and stretch their wings now and again, you’ll notice it in the flavour of the eggs.

And lest you get all twitterpated about the cholesterol issue, let me just tell you this: freaking out about eggs and cholesterol is so 1980s. And not in a hip cool retro way. Recent studies all say that, for the average healthy person, there is no reason at all to limit egg consumption, and even people with high cholesterol levels can happily indulge in two eggs a week, which is a nice Sunday morning omelet, or two days’ worth of fried egg sandwiches, or a third of a flourless chocolate cake (well, maybe not that).

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A few things to do with eggs

1. You’ve probably eaten soft-boiled eggs with toast soldiers, but try swapping out the toast for steamed asparagus – which will be in season here real soon.

4. If you’ve never made your own mayonnaise, and if you don’t get weirded out by the thought of eating raw eggs, stay tuned for an upcoming Food Nerd Tutorial on mayonnaise makery. Trust me, it’ll be fun. And tasty. I promise.

Send your questions, comments, and suggestions for how to justify eating as much chocolate cake as possible to dreae@thescope.ca

Chicken pakoras

Andreae Prozesky didn’t burn her house down.

Fridays, to celebrate another week of making it through the madness of kindergarten without incident (or to provide some solace after a particularly difficult few days, depending), we hand the joy of dinner selection over to the delightful Miss B. More often than not, this means chicken fingers. Like her mother before her, Miss B. goes cracked for a plate of fried chicken. So strong is this love that the menu pronouncement is often accompanied by a little chant dating back to Miss B’s toddler years, and that goes, “Chicken and fries! Chicken and fries! My little girl loves chicken and fries!” You’ve got to say it kind of sassy-like. Dancing is an optional, but enjoyable, addition.

Since we’ve had to kick gluten to the curb, however, chicken fingers have taken a hit. No longer can we scurry up to our favourite takeout and walk home with dinner steaming its greasy way through layers of cardboard plates and paper bags. I’ve tried making chicken fingers with coatings of corn flakes and rice cereal, of tapioca and potato starches, I’ve tried broiling, baking, and pan-frying, and the results have been pretty uninspiring. I have made a few good batches, only to be unable to replicate them. For the most part, the chicken fingers have been pretty gross. Soggy, oily, strangely sweet or else awfully bland. A shameful thing to do to otherwise perfectly tasty chicken.

It only struck me a couple weeks ago where I was going wrong. The hubby and I were out for a big ol’ Indian dinner (a very rare occurrence these days), and, in an unusual manoeuvre, ordered chicken pakoras as an appetizer. I’m generally a veggie pakora kind of gal, but we were awfully hungry and chicken seemed like the way to go. If you’ve never had pakoras, they’re just an Indian take on fritters. In the vegetable version, pieces of cauliflower, onion, potato, mushroom, and whatever other veggie is on hand are dipped into a spiced chickpea-flour batter, deep-fried, and served with chutney or herbed yogurt for dipping. Chicken pakoras have the same crispy chickpea flour coating, but instead of vegetables they’re made with delicately-flavoured marinated chicken pieces. Keep this in mind if ever you’re at an Indian restaurant with a child who has decided that curry is the enemy. When our order of pakoras came to the table, I knew that this was what I would have to replicate if I were going to make chicken fingers worth eating.

I bake with chickpea flour a fair bit at home, and I use it in sauces and gravies all the time, but I had forgotten what a great batter it makes. Texturally you get a bit of heft, which is what I like for chicken (though not for fish; fish requires an airy, tempura-like lightness). The flavour is a little earthy, but not overly assertive like some other bean flours. It’s available in bulk shops, and also in specialty shops where it may be labeled gram (not to be confused with graham) or besan.

Pakoras, like many of the tastier things in life, are deep fried. Do not be alarmed at the amount of oil called for in the recipe; you want at least two and a half inches of oil in the bottom of the pot. So long as you don’t scorch it, you can strain it and use it over and over again. Keep an eye on the pot and don’t let the temperature get too high; the oil should bubble insistently, but not furiously. If you’re using a thermometer, it should read between 350F and 375F. Chances are you’ve had a parent or insurance agent try to scare the wits out of you with tales of people burning down entire city blocks through inept use of chip fat; I’ve been deep-frying for ages and I’ve never burnt anything, but I approach the process with reverence and awe. Never turn your back on boiling oil, and make sure no children come near the stove. Do not answer the phone, run a bath, or go outside to weed the garden while you’ve got pakoras cooking. Don’t wear long flowing sleeves, and tie your hair back, for heaven’s sake. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. If you’re nervous, check out this website: tinyurl.com/howtodeepfryanything

Obviously, in an Indian restaurant these wouldn’t be served with fries and ketchup, but don’t let that stop you. If you want to keep it authentic, chop some cilantro or mint finely and stir it into some yogurt to make a nice, simple dipping sauce, then follow the pakoras with any of your favourite homemade or store-bought curries.

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Chicken pakoras

(serves 4 as an appetizer)

To make vegetable pakoras instead, you can a) dip bite-sized pieces of your veggies of choice (cauliflower, potato, pepper, and onion are all common) into batter and fry, or b) shred up a whole pile of veggies, stir them into the batter, and drop by the spoonful into the oil; either way the vegetable fritters should cook about 5 minutes.

Send your questions, comments, and inauthentic suggestions to dreae@thescope.ca

Salted caramels

Andreae Prozesky is worth her weight in salt for sure.

I hope I’ve never come off as a salt snob. Really, I’m not. I do use sea salt in most of my cooking and baking, and I specify it in my recipes because I want to record them as accurately as possible. The reason I use it is this: the last time I looked at a box of free-flowing table salt, it had a list of ingredients that read “salt, invert sugar.” Ingredients? Sugar in the salt? What the hell? I mean, I like sugar and salt together, in, say, a bag of salted caramels, or in the form of a DQ Peanut Buster Parfait, but what are those two doing in the same box? No, sir, I don’t like it.

I was living out of St. John’s when I made the sea salt switch, and I selected my salt based mainly on the packaging. The neighbourhood I lived in had a wonderful Greek supermarket, and there was a brand of “award-winning sea salt” on display there. On the side of the container there were artists’ renderings of the various awards that the salt had won, and one of them looked just like an Emmy. Hilarious. How could I not buy Emmy-winning salt? It didn’t hurt that it was cheap as chips. I took my salt home and began to imagine the sorts of acceptance speeches a container of award-winning Greek sea salt would make. Sophisticated form of diversion, I know.

So, as a sea salt user, it doesn’t bother me a mite that there are people out there dusting their chocolate truffles in fleur du sel, or flinging pink and grey mineral salts over their plates like wedding confetti over a set of church steps. And I figure that if you want to pay a fortune for glorious pyramid-shaped salt crystals made of angels’ tears, evaporated by the flapping wings of doves, fine. But here’s the thing: it doesn’t make you better than other people. It might be dead tasty, but it won’t cure what ails you, and if you go around pouring it all over everything you’ll end up with hypertension just like everybody else.

Honestly, the way people are going on about sea salt, you would think it was the new penicillin. I mean, it’s salt. You need a bit of it to stay alive, and you need a lot of it if you’re making popcorn, but it’s still just salt.
This is not to say that the idea that sea salt might be a better nutritional choice than regular table salt is completely unfounded. For one thing, sea salt tends to be sold in coarse form, which means that you’re more likely to be satisfied with a small sprinkling of it atop your food than you would with the same small sprinkling of fine table salt. The nuances of flavour in your meal will be more pronounced, you’ll be more pleased with what you’re eating, a flood of happy emotions will surge through you, and you’ll go for a jaunt in the warm spring evening air instead of having another giant bowl of pasta and passing out on the couch. It’s a roundabout kind of health benefit, but the real ones usually are.

Another potential benefit is that sea salt, coming from sea water, is full of minerals. This is why sea salt is often grey, sometimes pink or red or brownish. You can taste the difference, which is kind of neat. Whether these minerals have any real dietary impact, though, is difficult to judge. You would probably have to eat an awful lot of chunky grey salt for it to count as a magnesium or potassium or iron supplement. And while sea water is mineral-rich, it’s also full of, well, filthy man-made toxins and pollutants, which can just as easily show up as residue on the salt. If your sea salt has been cleaned and refined, the toxins will have been removed, but so will have been the fancy minerals. If the sea salt is unrefined, you’d best be sure it’s from a reputable source (or that it’s won an Emmy).

I suppose there’s an economic factor to consider; if you’re someone who tends to use too much salt, and you replace all the Sifto in your house with snappy gourmet salts at 10$ for a half-cup package, you’re likely to be a tad more judicious in how you season your food. But since the most damaging salt is not the salt you cook with but the nefarious salts that the food giants sneak into your frozen dinners and take-out meals, simply replacing your salt shaker at home with a grinder full of salt chunks probably isn’t going to do anything for your health.
If there is one major advantage that sea salt has over table salt, it’s a karmic one; most table salt is mined, and the conditions for the workers are often cited as atrocious. Mining salt has a host of negative environmental effects, too. Sea salt, on the other hand, is usually produced by small companies, and is available with fair trade and organic certifications. Your body might not be able to tell the difference, but supporting ethical business practices is definitely good for you. Even if that means eating extra salted caramels.

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SALTED CARAMELS

There’s nothing difficult about making candy, so long as you have a candy thermometer, which you can pick up for a few bucks in the gadgetry aisle of your grocery store. Have all your ingredients and your pan ready to go so that you can keep an eye on the temperature: too low, and you have caramel syrup, too high and you have brittle, filling-removing toffee (neither of which is a terrible thing, mind you).

Pour your caramel syrup into the prepared pan and set aside for two hours to firm up. Cut into bite-sized pieces and wrap in waxed paper. If you want to dip each square in tempered chocolate, then go mad. If you have fancy, pretty sea salt, you might want to sprinkle a bit more over for decoration.

Send your questions, comments, and salty suggestions to dreae@thescope.ca