Month: December 2012

FFWD – Go-With-Everything Celery Root Purée and Beef Cheek Daube With Carrots & Elbow Macaroni

~ Teresa ~ 14 Comments

Christmas Eve Dinner

Since the beginning of our time together, my partner and I have had a special dinner on Christmas Eve. We usually watch It’s a Wonderful Life, too. This week’s assigned recipe (along with a catch up from late November) was perfect for our Christmas Eve meal.

The celery root purée was almost as simple as mashed potatoes, just cubed celery root and potato boiled in a mixture of water and milk along with onion (and in my case, garlic), then puréed in the food processor with lashings of butter. I skimped a little on the milk, because I had other plans for it, but I don’t think that harmed the flavour of the purée at all.

The purée seemed like a great accompaniment for stew, so I also made the beef daube that I’d missed at the end of November. I didn’t bother tracking down beef cheek – the week before Christmas is hectic enough and I’d gotten a great deal on stewing meat at the grocer’s. I also skipped the elbow macaroni and replaced the regular flour called for in the recipe with a gluten-free all purpose blend. Beef, red wine, carrots, and a little chocolate at the end make a beautifully rich braise. Along with the buttery, slightly sharp taste of the purée, it made for an elegant supper.

This time of year, I think about how important societal rituals can be for making life meaningful, while at the same time, how hard they can be for some folks. Creating personal traditions helps to mark our passage through the year, while removing some of the hurt that many people carry through the standard holidays. At the darkest time of the year, we need all the light we can get.

This is my last post of 2012 (and it also happens to be the 200th post on this blog). I hope you ring in the New Year safely and joyously. See you in 2013.

You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Go-With-Everything Celery Root Purée

Here’s everyone else’s take on the Beef Cheek Daube With Carrots & Elbow Macaroni

Christmas, Canadian-style

~ Teresa ~ 3 Comments

Merry Christmas, to those of you that celebrate it. I love the music of the season; I can’t help it. Here are a few Canadian songs for the holidays, starting with Joni Mitchell’s River:

An instrumental version of In the Bleak Midwinter, from Loreena McKennitt:

My mother’s favourite Christmas carol, from the McGarrigles, et al.:

A wistful one from The Mountains and The Trees:

Said the Whale’s Christmas Under the Clouds gives us a typical Vancouver Christmas (no idea why the accompanying image shows snow, though):

Finally, a new tune from Dan Mangan, with lyrics crowdsourced from listeners of CBC’s On The Coast:

What are your favourite seasonal songs? Let me know in the comments, if you’d like.

I hope you’re having a happy, warm, and peaceful day. See you Friday.

FFWD – Cheez-it-ish Crackers

~ Teresa ~ 10 Comments

Cheez-it-ish Crackers

I’ll admit from the outset that I’ve never seen a Cheez-it, but if they’re anything like this week’s cracker recipe, I’m in. These Cheez-it-ish crackers have the texture of a very dry sablé, without its sweetness. Instead, they’ve got the richness of Gruyère, with the bite of pepper and cayenne.

The Entrance at Campbell's Gold

This cracker is just begging to be served with a nice wine, so much so that I wish I’d had some on hand yesterday when I visited Campbell’s Gold Honey Farm and Meadery. We arrived just in time for a wine tasting, starting with some dry mead and working our way through apple, currant, and cherry honey wines. I’m tempted to go back for a bottle of the apple honey wine to go with the rest of my crackers.

Honey wines and meads

Campbell’s Gold is on the Circle Farm Tour and it’s almost as nice to visit these farms at Christmastime as it is in the height of summer. It’s easy to forget, living in Vancouver, how much the rest of our region has to offer.

Honey, Flavoured Honey, and More

But let’s get back to the offerings of my kitchen. I opted to shape the cracker dough into logs and slice the crackers, rather than roll and cut them out. I only baked a few crackers and am saving the other logs to bake for some of the holiday gatherings we’ve got coming up. It’s not quite as elegant as the rolled-out cracker, but it’s awfully convenient. I’ve been favouring slice and bake cookies, too, this holiday season. I guess I’m embracing my last-minute nature…

Speaking of last-minute, I’d better get this post up while it’s still Friday. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it and a very happy New Year to all. I’m looking forward to cooking and baking with the rest of the Doristas through 2013.

Crackers in a tiny crock

You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Cheez-it-ish Crackers

FFWD – Chicken, Apples, and Cream à la Normande

~ Teresa ~ 14 Comments

Chickens, Apples, and Cream à la Normande

I write about community and cooking here, sometimes trying to combine the two, whether it’s cookie swaps or sharing food with family and friends. There’s another aspect of community that plays into the food writing I do here and that’s the online community built by French Fridays participants. A number of us are participating in a holiday card exchange organized by Alice of A Mama, Baby and Shar-Pei in the Kitchen. It’s been just over two years and 100 recipes since French Fridays began and this card exchange seems like the perfect way to express appreciation to at least some of the people that make our community so worthwhile. It’s been a privilege to get to know these folks a little and to communicate through our blogs and the comments we exchange. Thanks, Alice for organizing the card exchange – I’ve received a few already and they’re lovely.

It’s also good for me to cook something new every week (well, mostly every week) and to compare my results and variations with the rest of the group. I think I’ve become a better and more inventive cook over the course of this project. Speaking of inventive, I played a little bit with this week’s recipe. I added ground herbs to the (gluten-free) dredging mixture, I substituted two-percent milk for the cream, chicken thighs for the breasts and I skipped the alcohol altogether. (I didn’t read the recipe until this afternoon, I’m out of my all-purpose Cognac, and I wasn’t about to brave the lines at the liquor store on a December Friday evening.) Oh, and I added garlic, because I couldn’t help it.

Gluten-free flour with seasonings, for dredging.

It turned out really well, though I can see that adding Calvados, brandy, or Cognac would make it even more flavourful. We had some tonight on its own and we’ll finish it tomorrow, perhaps with spinach or broccoli as Dorie suggests.

Tonight, I’d also like to let our American Doristas know that I’m thinking of them.

You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Chicken, Apples, and Cream à la Normande

FFWD – Creamy Cauliflower Soup Sans Cream

~ Teresa ~ 5 Comments

Cauliflower soup, on a dark afternoon, with candles

It took me a while to post this week’s recipe, but not because it was a difficult one. This soup is ready from chop to purée in less than an hour and requires only a few vegetables, herbs, and some stock. Cauliflower is a wonderful vegetable for puréed soups, because it gives the consistency and velvet feel of a cream soup without reliance on cream. I usually roast cauliflower before adding it to soup, since I prefer the richer flavour that brings. It is nice to know that you can get good results without roasting it, though, on nights when you need to get supper on the table a little faster.

Dorie’s soup is seasoned with salt, pepper, and thyme, but I added some nutmeg after tasting it, for more complexity. Others in the group added bacon, truffle oil, or gremolata to theirs.

My current favourite cauliflower soup recipe is found at the end of this article on olive oil. It’s similar to Dorie’s, but relies on curry for flavour, which is perfect for cauliflower. I don’t think Dorie’s soup will supplant it in my heart, but I’ll try it this way again and I’ll roast the cauliflower first next time.

I’ll also be trying the mussel version of this recipe some time – it sounds wonderfully flavourful.

You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Creamy Cauliflower Soup Sans Cream