The Chef's improvised laksa

Call me shameless, but I totally played the sick card today for homemade curry soup. Do you know Tom Ka Gai soup? It’s my favourite soup ever — this Thai dish is my go-to meal when I’ve got a cold. It’s spicy enough to break through the congestion barrier, opens up the sinuses, cuts through to your taste buds, and it packs a lot of protein (chicken and mushrooms) and vegetables. It tastes fan-bloody-tastic and yes, it can bring you back from the dead.

In other words, I was willing to play the sick card and hit up The Chef for this soup. I haven’t been out of the house since Friday, and this cold had worked its way up into my eyes, which were swollen and tearing up so badly I was debating whether I was presentable enough to go out in public and get takeout Tom Ka Gai. I also wondered if the local Thai restaurants would make their Tom Ka Gai spicy enough. As for cooking, it was also a question of ingredients — a good Tom Ka Gai has lots of kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, and galangal. Sheesh, a rather tall order for even a cosmopolitan Toronto neighbourhood in February. On a Sunday. In Vancouver this is easy — the best Thai takeaways were near my house, but here?

The Chef made a shopping list, started the chicken stock on the stove, and headed out to Roncy to see what he could find from the Chinese-run produce stands. He returned a short time later, unable to round up any kaffir, lemongrass, or galangal, but he managed to gather enough supplies in the neighbourhood to make an improvised laksa that totally hit the spot.

Man, did it ever. The curried chicken, mushrooms, and chilis with limes in noodles was exactly what I needed. Three cheers for guys who can cook!

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dumplings, goulash, et al

Continuing my streak of food-centric posts, I present to you an impromptu dinner at a well-established Polish restaurant in my neighbourhood, Café Polonez. I’ve eaten here once before but I think I just had a bowl of goulash and a side order of dumplings, not mains like this. The plate in front of me is in the ‘hot sandwich’ section of the menu, but it might as well have been a main. Whoa. My fellow diner could only eat a quarter of her plate and took the rest home for lunch tomorrow, with enough to share.

Those beer mugs are something, aren’t they? I got Alison to put her hand in for reference. I’d be tempted to sneak one home except I live around here. I’ll only consider it if I’m abroad! (Have you seen my cupboard? That’s how I got my Kölsch and Banks’s Bitter glasses.)

now THAT'S a glass

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my annual shipment of marzipan from Germany

I got a real surprise today… chocolate! Thank you, Iris! My annual shipment of marzipan from Germany arrived via post, along with a genius card with tea. Iris puts me to shame with her consistency — she’s been my main source for delicious marzipan from Lübeck (her home city and famous for marzipan), keeping me stocked up year after year since we first met in 2002.

I can’t believe it’s been nearly 10 years since Iris first stayed at my place on Beach Avenue. She was studying English in Vancouver for three months, and her arrival coincided with me departing for Europe in late April for a break after my semester exams were over. Our mutual friend Berit in Hamburg put Iris in touch with me, and we met very briefly after she got off the plane. Iris was so jetlagged she could barely speak. I handed her my keys, gave her a quick tour, and returned three weeks later, hoping she managed to find everything while I was away. Little did I know how many times in how many places we’d meet up over the years since, including camping in the lakes district of Italy in 2003, Hamburg in 2006, Paris after Iceland in 2007, and her wedding at a farm outside of Hamburg in 2008. (That’s when I stayed in the Hay Hotel.)

And all these years later, Iris still sends me marzipan because I love it so much… lucky, lucky me!

with love from Germany

tea for two

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My website has been pretty food-centric lately, hasn’t it? It goes hand-in-hand with travel and culture, so it should come as no surprise that I’d like to plug a food and travel adventure series that just wrapped up its first season last night. It’s on Travel & Escape in Canada, and it’s in the process of being distributed to other countries, which means the shows on the web can only stream to a Canadian audience for now.

What’s it about? Three young chefs from Winnipeg make a journey through Southeast Asia and bring along a videocamera and microphone, learning how to cook regional dishes from the locals while teaching themselves the ins-and-outs of shooting and editing footage. (It’s not a reality show, it only became a show once the chefs completed their journey and pitched their ideas and edited footage to producers.) They toured from Indonesia to China, and the final show in the videoclip above wraps up their Chinese experience and thoughts about the whole trip.

This show is not for the squeamish: they’re eating everything the locals are eating, including duck necks, beating cobra hearts, and watching fish getting filleted while still alive. But it’s authentic and the guys learn to communicate in a variety of ways to get past the language barriers and cultural differences.

In the final minute of the video (9:00) when they’re interviewed at Pho Hung here in Toronto, they mentioned a couple of things I consider very important while travelling: keep an open mind and maintain the attitude that they are there to learn. Those two qualities beat any advice you’ll find in a guidebook, and I’m sure will serve them well in Season 2.

Check them out online, on Facebook, and Twitter:

http://www.withoutborderschefs.com/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chefs-Run-Wild/181185462032
http://twitter.com/chefsrunwild/

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a kaleidoscope of flavours

This unholy mess is what happens when you can’t fit a round sushi pizza into a rectangular container. In case you can’t make it out, a sushi pizza is a thick round pancake of rice fried to a crisp then topped with salmon, avocado, spicy sauce, Japanese mayo, sesame seeds, roe, cucumber, and probably other stuff I can’t see.

It’s terrible for you (Japanese mayo is thicker and richer than regular mayonnaise), but it tastes amazing!

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extra-terrestrials are friendly

marshmallow structure

Photos of Day 2 of #ArtSciCamp with marshmallows and people from outer space may mystify instead of clarify what on earth was going on during the unconference hosted by Subtle Technologies, but this article in Toronto Social Review should clear things up. [Update: Subtle Technologies has their blog post up now, too.] I’m still working on editing and uploading the batch, but I’ll slideshow the Day 2 photos by tag of what’s been added thus far:

I joined the post-unconference dinner at Sambuca Grill on Baldwin Street, then had to dash to make a birthday party. I picked up some red velvet cupcakes along the way:

red velvet cupcakes for the Birthday Girl

Today I had dim sum with some wedding clients and I was so chuffed when they presented me with freshly-baked cookies that I completely overlooked photographing our dim sum dishes. It’s been absolutely ages since I had dim sum and I had every intention of documenting what appeared on our table with my phone camera, but this is all I got — the end of the dim sum parade:

lucky tea

Sad, considering how much food we consumed! But see the cup of tea? I was told that when a stick from a tea leaf is floating vertically near the surface like that, it means good luck. If I were remotely superstitious, I’d be out buying a lottery ticket.

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I actually made the cookie dough on Saturday, but I’ve only been baking it in batches because I like cookies fresh out of the oven. Also, this was the first time I tried this recipe and it didn’t turn out well…

I made a double batch, and WHOA! THE GARLIC! Can you see the amount down below? A tablespoon of fresh garlic in a single batch? I followed that part a bit dubiously, doubling it for the double batch, and the garlic ended up being overpowering. I love garlic, but man, the fresh garlic was beyond pungent.

The other problem was that I skimmed the lines too quickly and read a tablespoon instead of a teaspoon of rosemary. WHOA ROSEMARY! I chopped up two tablespoons — again, rather dubiously — but didn’t check it over and the cookies had a second overwhelming flavour.

It’s not a complete loss, however. I didn’t throw the dough away because the goat cheese was expensive and I wondered if letting the dough sit for a couple of days would make a difference. It sort of did — tonight’s third and final batch wasn’t nearly the garlic-and-rosemary-fest that batch one and two were, but still, I would probably either tweak this recipe or try another before I take these cookies anywhere.

Source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/foodwine/2013380803_xmascheesecookies10.html

Makes about 40 cookies

1/2 cup (about 4 ounces) fresh goat cheese (chèvre)
1 tablespoon minced fresh garlic
1 tablespoon minced lemon zest
1 teaspoon very finely minced fresh rosemary
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon coarse-ground black pepper
1/4 cup salted butter, softened
1 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup (about 2 1/2 ounces) chopped walnuts
Garnish: 2 tablespoons additional goat cheese

1. With an electric mixer, cream 1/2 cup cheese, garlic, lemon zest, rosemary, salt and pepper together in a mixing bowl. Add the butter and mix in well. Add the flour and mix the dough for about 30 seconds. Add the nuts and mix until ingredients are just evenly combined.
2. Divide the dough in half and shape into logs, about 6 inches long and 1 1/2 inches in diameter. Wrap tightly in plastic wrap, twisting the ends, to help firm the dough. Chill in the refrigerator for 2 hours or in the freezer for about 30 minutes to further firm the dough. (The dough can be kept frozen for up to one month; remove from the freezer to temper overnight in the refrigerator before slicing.)
3. Preheat oven to 350 degrees at least 20 minutes before baking.
4. Line baking sheets with parchment paper or lightly spray pans with cooking spray.
5. Cut the dough into 1/4-inch-thick rounds and place about 2 inches apart on the baking sheets. Divide additional goat cheese, crumbled among cookie tops. Bake until lightly golden at the edges, about 14 to 16 minutes. Cool on the pan.

Copyright 2010 by Kathy Casey Food Studios® Liquid Kitchen™ (www.kathycasey.com)

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fortune cookie: now is the time to try something new

We ushered in the Year of the Dragon with homemade bao and other Chinese food, mini-dragons, and setting money on fire. A typical Saturday night at Marin’s

More on Chinese New Year:
http://www.herongyang.com/chinese/festivals/chinese_new_year_spring_festival.html

Food gets the limelight as per usual at Gail At Large:

tea eggs

go bao or go home

another yummy veggie dish

rice and noodles featured prominently

yeah yeah, we know okonomiyaki isn't Chinese (it's Japanese) -- we'll still eat it!

Burning money:

the burn

one way to warm up in the winter

And the aforementioned mini-dragons:

enter the mini-dragon

fierce mini-dragon

this dragon even plays the tambourine!

The photo album is best viewed as a full-screen Flickr slideshow, or you can view all in the smaller slideshow below:

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bacalhau à brás - take 1

Paulo introduced me to bacalhau à brás back in June when I stayed with him in Portugal, and I’m only just NOW getting around to making it like I said I would. I asked him about the ingredients and he gave me an instructional refresher over the phone while I grocery shopped near the end of my walk home. The main ingredients are below… (I skipped shooting the onions and the egg)

salted cod was easier to find than I thought

salted cod bits sounds a bit dirty, doesn't it?

Italian parsley

I know what you’re thinking: that’s it? So what’s the Canadian part? It looks pretty straightforward.

However, the second main ingredient in this Portuguese dish (home cooking; their version of our mac and cheese) is something we don’t quite have: potato sticks. The closest thing we have to their potato sticks is hickory sticks, which Paulo had to look up because I couldn’t describe hickory (can anyone?).

hickory smoked bacalhau?

I thought I’d try it, anyway. Hopefully the hickory won’t overpower the dish.

The bulk of the labour and time in preparing bacalhau à brás is preparing the cod: shredding it, de-salting it, and picking out the bones. That’s most of the work right there. I could’ve let it soak longer, but I was impatient and more than a little hungry. While the cod was boiling I had to guess how much of the salt I’d gotten rid of in the process and guess how much saltier the hickory sticks would make of it. The other difference is the version I made in Portugal had olives in it, but I couldn’t find any where I went to get the rest of the ingredients so I left those out.

Once the bacalhau à brás was finished, I could taste the hickory. But the flavour blended in soon after that and now it’s barely noticeable, but I’ll have to get an independent opinion. For now, I am happily surprised it turned out so well!

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Dragons + Fairies Dinner

This is my fourth theme dinner hosted by my friends Clint and Lisa. They’d been hosting dinners for years, but formally created the monthly One-Of-A-Kind-Dinner events a couple of years ago, which was borne out of a love for food and people. The themes are based on specific movies or genres, and people get dressed up to follow the theme, paying a cover charge for the cost of the food (the work is volunteered).

I can tell you, since I’ve been attending these theme dinners for a couple of years now, that the labour involved is incredible. The menu takes a great deal of planning, some components of the dinner are prepared days in advance, ingredients are sourced, the shopping list is long, they’re in the kitchen literally all day, and everything is prepared from scratch. These dinners are a labour of love!

http://www.oneofakinddinner.com

Dragons + Fairies Dinner

Menu:

Purple Fairy Potion
Dragon Eggs
The Dragon’s Hoarded Treasure
Fairy Ring Soup
Dragon Torched Venison
Fairy Tower

Fairy Potion

Fairy Potion: Raspberry Infused Vodka, Blue Curacao, Fresh Peach Nectar

Dragon Eggs

Dragon Egg: Fresh Goat Cheese, Lavender Spice Mix, Red Pepper Crisp

The Dragon's Hoarded Treasure

The Dragon’s Hoarded Treasure: Trio of Gnocchi (Turmeric, Spinach and Wasabi, Beet and Garlic), Gorgonzola Cream Sauce, Roasted Cherry Tomatoes, Chive Oil

Fairy Ring Soup

Fairy Ring Soup: Mushroom Puree, Heavy Cream, Sauteed Baby Mushrooms, Basil Oil

Dragon Torched Venison

Dragon Torched Venison: Roasted Rack of Venison Flambeed in Cognac, Demi-Glace, Horseradish Cream, Pomme Berny, Beet and Carrot in Vinaigrette

Fairy Tower

Fairy Tower: Salted Dark Chocolate and Caramel Mousse, Orange Sugar Tuile, Blueberry and Port Compote, Dragon Fruit Jellies, Fresh Berries and Cream

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