Baking from a foreign cookbook

During the summer, Melissa wrote about cookbooks she likes called Ladies, A Plate.  The title refers to the tactful code at the bottom of a community event notice in New Zealand for attending ladies to bring along some baked goods to share. 

We know where this is going, right?  I had to have these books.  Or at least one of them.  For a start pretty much everything Melissa does or gets interested in is awesome, and also, the custom of catering en masse is traditional to the neighbourhood where I grew up, too.  Bonus: did you click on the Melissa link and look at the covers?  Please. 

Right away when my copy of the original book arrived I spotted the cuteness of the recipe titles - 'bumble bees', 'butterfly cakes', 'coffee cloud cake' - and in particular the presence of 'Nainoma Bars'.  This recipe is immediately recognizable as what is known in my circle as 'Nanaimo Bars', after a town in British Columbia, but also 'You Name It Brownies,' and even 'Johnny No-Name Bars' because they are known under so many different titles.  (graham/coconut/butter/cocoa crust, vanilla pudding-enriched icing for filling, melted chocolate poured over top.)

I love this book and have been making recipes from it, none of them yet keepers but all - and collectively too - fascinating.  Like, who knew you could have so many ginger-based recipes in one book and have them all be different?

And another cool thing: dissolving the baking powder in milk or water so it's part of the liquids added to the dry ingredients.  Where I live, the baking powder gets sifted in with the dry stuff.

Those are 'Friendly Road' buns, named after the depression-era radio show where the recipe was first shared.  By my local standards, they are not a bun but rather a tall satisfying cookie, sweetened noticeably with a little addition of Golden Syrup (sweeter than pure corn syrup and generally one of the most delicious things imaginable: try it on pancakes.)

These are Ginger Kiss halves, served without being sandwiched over icing because who has time? They poured out onto the cookie sheet like cake batter, but puffed up prettily into a soft but firmer-than-cake morsel.  I balked at the amount of ginger the recipe called for and halved it, but of course it came out very delicately-flavoured so another time I would make it as directed.

There are recipes in the book I would never bake, but which serve to point out how incredibly dedicated those New Zealand moms were about treating their families with special tarts and mini eclairs and elaborate cakes.  Actually I could never make any other recipes in the book and it would still have been worth buying it - the pictures are soooooo wonderful! and the introductions to where the recipe came from or how it was adapted by dozens of different bakes!  it's everything I like about social history. 

Try a copy yourself and see what I mean - and if you make something I haven't but should, let me know.

A recipe

Okay, it's pretty much just fruit in a cup - and apparently I'm one of the last to know that drizzling honey over fruit is a delicious idea. But see that lemon wedge in the green goblet?  Yeah.  Lemon juice drizzled over honeyed  fruit = super yum.

Where maple sugar comes from

This weekend I decided that as a lifelong resident of Ontario, having lived under maple trees for pretty much the duration and being more than fond of pancakes, I needed to see for myself what maple syrup looks like when it's really new.

Any time this sort of urge descends upon me I hit up some friends to come along, and somehow even in the depths of summer Sio and I, alone of the group, freeze.  One time we had to talk each other out of buying silk shawls in some 19th century castle's gift shop because it was August for crying out loud.  Unseasonably cold and rainy, but August.

This time I was determined not to mess up.  The temperature was hovering just over the freezing point as I left the house and the sky threatened rain or worse, so I put wool/mohair socks inside my rubber boots, two layers on my legs plus a skirt, a giant wool sweater and scarf, and a wool hat with my raincoat. 

I was glad of the rubber boots.

(Sio begged off by the way, claiming to have too much laundry for gallivanting.  I bet she was warm.)

There are four kinds of maple trees.

I think the one in front of my current house is a sugar.  I grew up with two reds.  Mum didn't realize how big they'd grow when she planted them, and a subsequent owner of our house had to cut one down to save the other (and have natural light in the living room, and get any free time at all from raking leaves every autumn I expect.)

The idea is to tap the trees when the sap starts running in early spring, and catch said sap in something or other.  One of the more picturesque approaches is a pail.

The sap is quite clear and beautiful.

Also in evidence at the park I visited: the more modern method

which eliminates the risk of overflow and protects the sap from marauding raccoons. 

Either way, you have to boil it down.

This is the part that prevents sensible people from tapping the maple trees on their own lawns even if they aren't growing on the municipally-owned portion of same.  I mean, you've got to get the sap down to about a 40th of its original volume to get to syrup, which is a lot of steam, and I say this with confidence because the one guy I know who did once tap his own trees made his wife really, really mad when he boiled the sap in their kitchen.  She had to rehang all the wallpaper.  Hence the 'once'.

(the syrup was delicious though.)

You can get maple syrup in different grades depending on how much water has been boiled off the sap.  There's a brownish fluid that resembles syrup but pours like water, and there's something sweeter and  little denser that says With Real Maple Syrup on the label, meaning just a whiff probably, and there's high quality maple syrup from Quebec that is a rich lustrous brown and glugs out of the bottle or can, and there's my friend's syrup that took down the wallpaper, and then there is the sample they gave us on the trail. 

It only took about 113 seconds for this stuff to hit my bloodstream.  I'm amazed it was still liquid, there was so much sugar in that cup.

There was more of the same for sale in the Sugar Shack.

But my preference was for something with not much liquid left in it at all because

who can resist maple leaves made from maple sugar?

Saved by walnut cookies

Last week I got food poisoning and spent about 36 hours either asleep or wishing my stomach would be transplanted into a lake approximately 487 miles due west of my then-present position.  About 20 hours in, my friend Rosa happened to delivered cookies in lieu of the ones she wanted to make me at Christmas but was too sick for, herself.

 

Don't they look just like walnuts?

When I got past the soda cracker stage, I gave in to the illusion that they might be mostly protein without too much fat and tried one.

It wasn't sweet. It was actually pretty much like eating a walnut but with the texture of a soft biscuit.  I imagined being well and drinking coffee at Rosa's (Rosa makes wicked coffee too, and I say that without even liking coffee under normal circumstances) and eating these cookies; they would be perfect together.

Over the next few days I ate a few more, gingerly and then less so as things started to settle down.  They totally took the sting out of not being able to face chocolate even though I was miserable and wanted comfort food.  Treated as dessert, they made plain boiled eggs seem like a sumptuous lunch.

I guessed that Rosa has a walnut-shaped cookie mold and pressed in some walnutty dough to get each shell, then pasted them together with the walnutty filling (I asked her today: I was right.)  I thought about acquiring such a mold myself.  I wondered whether she'd give me the recipe.  I decided that I want to recuperate with walnut cookies next time I get food poisoning, which I hope will be never.

Finally I thought I'd better take a picture before they were all gone.  And now that they are I'm glad I did, aren't you?

Pasta, the gift that keeps on etc.

Lately I've been cooking pasta most nights. Not because it's easy - it's not, what with having the filter the tap water (lead pipes coming into the house from the city, yay) and all the extra pots you have to wash - but in part because I'm on some kind of weird sauce groove.

Like - onions sauteed in butter, then diluted with a can of tomato sauce plus a can of navy beans? Sounds awful, right? Yet it's awesome.

Or white sauce with red or yellow peppers and snap peas and carrots, or ye old tomato meat sauce, or onions/zuccini/fresh tomatoes sauteed in balsamic vinegar and a little olive oil, with grated cheese thrown on top at the end so it goes spready.

The other part of my pasta obsession is the leftovers. Yeah, if I can freeze any extra sauce I'll do that, but I'm talking about the pasta itself. I've been saving some out from the sauce and throwing it into an omelet the next day - wow.

You can go fussy with recipes such as this one from Epicurious, or you can be lazy like me - onions in butter again, then gradually add some celery and maybe some chopped tomatoes, then dump all that into a bowl to mix up with grated cheese and a couple of beaten eggs and the leftover pasta, be it bow ties or spaghetti, before pouring it all back into the pan. Looks a lot like that bean/tomato/onion sauce sounds, and tastes like heaven on a plate.

Roasted marshmallows

Almost done my busy tourism week, which has been sunny and not unbearably hot until today, which is wet and not unbearably hot, which means no forays to ice cream shops.

So here is yesterday's status:

Back to Greg's, for roasted marshmallow ice cream. And yes, it really did taste like the toffee-ish crust of a well-roasted marshmallow. And definitely, this alone is worth coming to Toronto on vacation.

Vindication for the ice cream

Yesterday I was horrified to prefer a fairly unexciting bean soup to a seriously expensive single scoop of ice cream purchased from a posh shop in a posh part of town.

Today, under duress (really!) (okay, not really) I went to a different ice cream shop. Not posh, but a serious favourite from my university days.

I couldn't decide what flavour to order so I went for the same as yesterday - chocolate orange - and tried not to gasp when the bill for same rang up at almost half what the posh shop was charging.

Also: I got two scoops of ice cream, not one.

Also: it was delicous.

Soooo much yummy orange flavour! The other ice cream, which shall remain nameless, was bland and had bits of tasteless rind in it. This was like smoothly frozen fudge infused with orangeness.

My friend had vanilla, also a replica of yesterday's choice, and found that it too was way better. Way better even than Baskin-Robbins, our usual benchmark for ice cream parlour deliciousness.

As we ate, people kept coming in, one at a time, for ice cream. As we left we found the ones had turned into a solid lineup out the door. Ha! Not only did we get great ice cream, we beat the rush.

So: if you're visiting Toronto, you want to check out Greg's Ice Cream at Bloor and Spadina. Bliss in a cone (or a cup.)

Lunch vs. Dessert

I did all sorts of interesting things on the weekend and I'm too tired from the less interesting things I did today to tell you about them. So I will tell you instead about today's tragedy:

Lunch: a bowl of Italian soup with noodles and beans, for $3.50

Dessert: 1 scoop of chocolate orange ice cream from the best ice cream shop in town, for $4.50

Tragedy: the soup was better.

Yes. In my world. I am still reeling.

Rhubarb

There's not much in the dessert line that I love more than my mum's rhubarb pie, so when I saw some stalks in the grocery store this week I had to buy a few. Mum isn't baking these days and I thought it would be nice to bring her some individually-sized pies when I see her on the weekend.

I love rhubarb's colours - the pinky red and the different shades of green. These stalks even had spots inside!


Mum's recipe calls for 1-inch hunks of rhubarb but I like them small, so they spread out into the custard filling.


Yes, that is a lot of rhubarb. I figured I'd freeze half for a future pie... and I doubled my recipe for sweet pastry, too. I'm evil with that stuff: as well as desserts, I use it for chicken pie. With maybe a little less sugar in it, ahem.

The tarts turned out to be high maintenance - they took most of the day to put together, on what I must say was a seriously hot day both inside the house and out.


But I knew I was doing something nice for my mum and when I got these little pastry stars on top I just felt so happy.


Actually tasting one was pure bliss. I only wish you could freeze custards. It would be nice just to enjoy random acts of pie, don't you think?

Porch picnic

Today has been the perfect sort of day to spend outside, especially while eating.

It's hot but there's a breeze, and I finally got organized about a proper wasp trap:


You fill it with apple juice and the wasps fly in to drink it, leaving you to enjoy your lunch in peace.

I didn't get around to eating the all the croissants I bought from the French bakery on Monday for a tea party, but stale croissants are awesome when toasted, so they automatically went on the picnic list. I like them best with butter and honey but that's a bit too evil for lunch so I stuck with cheese.


Sandwich planning bonus: the heirloom cherry tomatoes are ripe already.


I'm so glad I put furniture on the porch this year.


(caveat: the heirloom tomatoes? delicious in a buttery croissant, bitter and a bit ew on their own. I'll be cooking with these or throwing them into a pasta salad, if I ever remember to buy more pasta, which is debatable considering I forgot again today after going into the grocery store specifically to get some.)

Chocolate-covered bacon

I don't know how I missed the boat on the idea of coating bacon in chocolate, but that's been remedied now with a little taste of a Mo's Milk Chocolate Bacon Bar.

(yesterday after supper, not today after breakfast - I do have some standards! Breakfast chocolate must be in either steamed milk or bread. Honestly.)

My review: meh on the chocolate/bacon combo. I infinitely prefer the maple syrup/bacon combo that apparently inspired the bar I tasted. But the alderwood salt that was added to the bar... whoa. That's a different story. I didn't know salt could be so awesome!

Fortunately, I'm not nearly so addicted to salt as I am to chocolate, so I will be able to resist buying alderwood salt to sprinkle on apples, unbelievably amazing though that would be. Oh, it's good to be such a paragon of healthy eating.

How to make butterscotch brownies

This week is turning out to not be getting so very much done in it

but

I did make butterscotch brownies today.


The recipe I use is from this book, which may possibly be familiar to other Canadians of just old enough to be baking in the 1970s vintage. It's an old favourite of my family's and judging by the cut-up form in the back we ordered several more copies of it. To be truthful, it is a pretty great resource. Proof that you should never judge a book by its cover.

(I mean honestly, who would know from the pineapple thing and the creepy lobster and the mystery mess in that pot that there are great desserts to be had within?)


I hope it's not breaking any copyright to share the recipe here... since I can't find a copy of the book anywhere online and Cream of the West now appears to refer to a US-based cereal company, I think it is okay. I should know this sort of thing what with being a writer, shouldn't I.

Anyway my own version is modified very slightly for emergency people-are-coming-over use, such that it uses only the ingredients most likely to be in the house, with minimal cleanup because I am so very lazy:

Butterscotch Brownies

Preheat oven to 350 degrees
Line an 8" square cake pan with parchment paper
Blend together
1-1/4 cups Cream of the West Flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
Combine
1/2 cup soft butter
A little more than 1 cup lightly packed brown sugar
[*note: the original recipe calls for 1-1/2 cups, which is crazy sweet]
Stir in
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
Beat until light and fluffy, then blend in dry ingredients.
Pour into pan and bake for 25 - 30 minutes.

Then of course you can just lift the parchment paper out of the pan onto a cooling rack, and later store the remains (if any) still wrapped in the parchment in some other container.

I wonder what it would be like with chocolate chips in it?

Sour grapes, literally

I have a 'frig full of sour grapes and let me tell you, it was a surprise to me to be reminded by Wikipedia that the expression 'sour grapes' refers to disdain for something you can't have anyway. Sour grapes are not only something I can have, they seem to be the only grape I can have, courtesy of a conspiracy by my local grocery stores.

What I want to know is, what can you do with sour grapes? It's not like eating them straight is an option.

Can I add sugar and bake them into a pie? Float them in a bowl as a centerpiece? Pitch them at people who annoy me?

Maybe I should take advice from Epicurious, and roast them.

The upside of culinary cowardice

Aren't these beautiful?


I found them at the grocery store the other day: fiddleheads. You see them around briefly at this time of year - they're the springtime furls of an ostrich fern, and if you get them at just the right time, they're delicious (wait too long, with the fronds uncurling, and they're bitter.)

For years now I've wanted to try fiddleheads, and when I saw these I thought, Yup, this is the year. I'll saute them in a little butter and finally see what the fuss is about.

I figured I'd look around online for a good recipe first though, or at least see if there were tips about the brown stuff on the ends of some of the cuttings (there is; you wash it off.) Epicurious had suggestions about washing the fiddleheads in few different bowlfuls of water, presumably to get out any grit, and some very fussy recipes I didn't have the energy for, so I kept looking.

And guess what I found out? Fiddleheads will make you super sick if you don't cook 'em right!

The rinsing isn't just for grit, it's to wash off whatever toxin causes the problem, and that's why you have to keep changing the water. You can't do anything with the cooking water either, because it could have toxins in it.

Thank goodness I didn't just go ahead and throw them in a pan with butter.

(and no, I never did cook them... I think I'll wait for a year when somebody else who's done it a lot can show me how.)

No time like lunch

While stuck in bed with a fast-emptying box of tissues at my side I've been thumbing through my copy of How to Read a French Fry, a cookbook I got when I was wanting to know more about the science of cooking. (another more exhaustive one was Cookwise.)

This is both an entertaining and educational book, being as I say about the science , but it does have a lot of cheery recipes in it too like white peach and fig ice cream, and eggplant and goat cheese casserole, and roasted beet and orange salad.

I'm not actually a huge fan of eggplant, and I haven't been sufficiently motivated yet to buy an ice cream maker, but I do love reading the instructions.

That said, I know my limits. I have family coming for lunch today and I'm sick, I have a ton of knitting to get done and not enough time to do it in, and the house is still something of a mess. So we will be eating this:


I couldn't do any of that better myself anyway.

(but I am totally all over the beet and orange salad once I'm better. With goat cheese on top!)

Shave and a haircut

I lasted a whole day before heading back to Summerhill Market with friends, but when I got there I kinda panicked from the overwhelmingness and pretty much only bought cookies:


Florentine cookies are an excellent choice for evaluating a bakery - they're a bit fiddly to get right. The Belgian bakery near me makes them in a silver dollar size, with rich dark chocolate and a still-chewy lump of nuts and dried fruit and goo, all of which makes them hard to top, so why look elsewhere?

Because that shop isn't open on Mondays, and sometimes Monday is the day I need Florentines most, and if I buy them on Sunday just in case they will be gone ten minutes later. I have no self-control when it comes to Florentines.

Buying these was a lesson in the importance of reading labels though: if I'd known they had soy nuts in them I wouldn't have taste-tested them at all. Soy nuts have no place in a traditional Florentine cookie. I might add that really good chocolate does, because apparently that is also news.

Still, such a relief! This market isn't all that easy to get to and what if I got totally addicted to their baked goods? I'd find a way, and it wouldn't involve walking over to burn the calories I was about to consume, either.

Later today I'll be introducing the chocolate marshmallows and the pretty ginger cookies to friends who are experts on those and see what they think. And later still I'll be trying one of the market's chicken pies: everybody I know who goes there raves about them, and it would be awesome if I loved them too because they are a lot more accessible than my current source for same.

I think I mentioned that I have been by this store a zillion times on walks and runs but probably not why: it's near a pedestrian bridge that crosses a train track. We got there just a minute or two before a long freight came through.

I hoped the engineer would honk or something if we waved but whoa: Shave and a haircut, and the two bits? That's a pretty good evening right there.

(Up)market

I can't stop thinking about the grocery store I was in yesterday.

I mean, seriously. I think I was ruined for any other after three minutes, and that was just the produce and chutney sections - by the time I rounded the corner past prepared foods (Oh. My. Gosh.) and into the bakery, I was totally doomed.

(see: peanut-free cupcakes with bright frosting in their own shaped plastic containers for local moppets to take to school in their lunchboxes, tucked in beside sandwiches folded into reusable, washable cloth cases in cheery construction equipment or floral fabrics, available in the elegant stationery section alongside baked goods. Oh, and let's not forget the 'Skunk' duster in Housewares - white tail as business end.)

I've known about this place for a really long time - it's in the neighbourhood I aim for when planning a long walking, or medium running route. I've just never been inside. But now that I have to practise driving every day I am running out of places to go, and on the weekend I remembered this market and thought, huh, maybe I can head over there and brush up on parallel parking. It turned out to be far too busy on the roads for that, though, which maximized my browsing time.

Yep, I said browsing: I made it all the way through without buying anything, mainly because the lineups were about six miles long and I was already out of time. But I am totally going back. Those sandwich cases? Perfect gifts. And - okay, I don't actually like marshmallows, but they have some flavoured ones handmade in Vancouver... pistachio, maple, vanilla, and about six other options I forget.

I just need to figure out a better place to park, because I don't want to be carrying the spoils three whole blocks to the quiet street I found this time.

Versatility

This post is cruel of me because the product of which I will speak appears to be available only very locally. I'm guessing the principle applies anywhere though so I'm gonna go for it! It was that or more driving talk and I'm trying really hard not to bore people with that all the time.

Okay, so: I have discovered a new granola, and I've made Something Interesting with it.


Not strawberries and yogurt, because the instructions for that are right on the package if I hadn't thought of it already. Though I must say it's is pretty delicious, now that I've eaten it.

I like granola a lot, but I know myself: it's because of the sugar. Most granola has a ton of honey and stuff in it sticking the oatmeal together.

This granola is gluten free and minimally sugary. There's no oatmeal - it uses quinoa instead, plus a lot of nuts and seeds to go with the dried fruits. But what's especially interesting is that the quinoa is kind of flaked. You pour this stuff out and it's going to blend right into its new environment, sticking to everything.

Which is what gave me the idea. The other day I was craving one of those salads you make with chopped apple, grapes, nuts, and mayonnaise-like salad dressing, but I had no grapes. Or walnuts for that matter.

That's when I remembered the granola. Nuts, raisins... would it work if I blended the apple pieces with the mayo stuff and shook the granola over it?

Yes, yes it does. It is awesome, and I even served it at a lunch with guests this week and they are still speaking to me.

In fact I think I might have some for lunch again today... but first, I gotta see whether there are any more strawberries, because I want seconds on breakfast.

Garlic soup

I'm trying not to cry over having finished My Life in France. I enjoyed it so much, and now I have nothing to read over breakfast or lunch.

In the end, and even though French cooking is not exactly my thing, one food thing actually struck a chord with me. So much so that I picked up three heads of garlic at the fruit and veg shop yesterday.

Yep, garlic soup. Who ever heard of such a thing? Not me over here under my rock, that's for sure. I immediately envisioned roasted cloves, smashed and pureed and mixed in with chicken stock... all kinds of awesome.

Sadly I neglected to pick up a copy of any of Julia Child's cookbooks with the garlic, and could only find this recipe on Epicurious to try. It would require me to have made chicken stock first (you just know it's not going to be as good with store-bought broth) and to poach eggs.

While debating the merits of all that effort, I did a proper web search and found the Julia Child version here. This one would have me making my own mayonnaise with raw egg and olive oil. I'm sure that the egg would cook to a safe condition in the heat from the soup. Really. But... the poached egg option is looking a bit more appealing by comparison.

Now all I need is to get a wicked cold on the Friday of a weekend in which I'm going nowhere and seeing nobody (except people who really like garlic or, alternatively, vampires), preferably while all that garlic I bought is still a viable ingredient. Any chance, you think?

Flat as a pancake

In addition to about a metric tonne of chocolate, there was a complete pancake crisis at my place over Easter weekend.

I'm good at pancakes, so periodically I'm called upon to make rather a lot of them, which several years ago led me to purchase a nonstick two-burner griddle for my ceramic-topped stove. Since then I've used that griddle for so many things, the nonstick stuff wore out and I had to stop using it. So with Easter looming, the pressure was on to get myself a (better) replacement.


Voila! The griddle of my dreams, complete with delicious-looking cookbook. I was a happy girl when I took that picture. Then I took off the rest of the wrapping and looked at the bottom of the griddle and realized you can't use it on a ceramic-topped stove (it doesn't make 100% contact with the heating surface and was in fact designed for a gas or electric stove; put it on a ceramic top and it will warp, thereby voiding the warranty.)

So back it went. And home I came again with the next level up at 5x the price and 6x the storage size - an actual electric griddle. Thing of beauty except for two tiny nicks in the nonstick.

So back that went. And I spent Easter doing this:


The skillet in front? Totally burnt most of the pancakes I trusted it with. So I'm still hunting for a griddle and hoping to find it before the next big gorgefest.