FFWD – Eggplant Caviar

August 19, 2011August 20, 2011 ~ Teresa ~ 23 Comments

Roasting eggplants puts me in mind of our mortality, or at least, aging. The skin of a good eggplant is so beautiful, shining with health. Once roasted, though, it’s all crags, wrinkles and uneven tones. Sort of like what happens to us. Roasting deepens the flavour of eggplant and I hope that aging does the same for character. I think I’ll end the metaphor there.

All this eggplant sacrifice was in service of this week’s French Fridays recipe, Eggplant Caviar. A high-falutin’ name for a very quick and easy dip (or spread, depending on how you use it). Roasted eggplant mashed with garlic, onion, lemon, herbs and spices. Dorie recommends Piment d’Espelette, but I substituted cayenne. You may add chopped, fresh tomatoes if you like, though I didn’t. It has a bite and works well as a sandwich spread or a dip for crudités. This evening, I spread it on rye bread and added thin slices of cucumber. Tomorrow, I think I’ll use it in a chicken sandwich, on Quejos, which are gluten-free, so Kevin can have some, too.

This is another recipe that would make great picnic food. It’s making me want to take a trip to the Westside beaches with a picnic basket and some sparkling lemonade.

You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Eggplant Caviar

FFWD – Salmon and Potatoes in a Jar

August 18, 2011 ~ Teresa ~ 5 Comments

I took the low road on last Friday’s recipe – I made the bonne idée version of the salmon, though I did follow through and put the potatoes into a jar. I don’t regret it, though. Cured and briefly roasted sockeye salmon is a lovely treat. Salty, but not enough to be off-putting, perfect for stirring into scrambled eggs or crumbling over salad greens. The potatoes make a great side for those eggs and if you spoon them over the greens before you add the salmon, no other dressing is needed.

I love the slight crunch that’s left in the thin slices of uncooked carrot and onion that are added to the marinade, along with boiled new potatoes. Herbs and spices infuse everything with their flavours, especially after a couple of days. The onion loses its sharpness, which allows me to enjoy it much more.

I intend to try the salmon in a jar someday, but I’ll save it for a time when we’re picnicking with others. It seems like a dish to share. The potatoes, though, I’d gladly keep for myself.

Tomorrow, I’ll be blogging on schedule for this week’s recipe, Eggplant Caviar.

You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Salmon and Potatoes in a Jar

Roasted Cherries

August 16, 2011May 10, 2014 ~ Teresa ~ 11 Comments

I never feel I’ve made the best use of summer fruits. No matter how many stone fruit or berries I eat, cook with or freeze, I feel that I could have done more. This year’s been no exception, especially since I was a little out of commission during the best weeks for berries. I did manage to roast cherries though. I’m going to be doing it again before they disappear for another year.

Roasting fruit brings out the sugars and deepens the flavour, without turning it into mush. It’s also a good way to use fruit that’s just past its peak. Mostly, though, it’s just good. I’ve used it in yogurt, over ice cream, and just right out of the jar. My next plan is to use it as a tart filling, perhaps with custard. If I were the sort of person to make cocktails, the syrup would make a great addition. I suppose you could also stir it into soda water. Something like this salad would be really lovely, too.

I sort of improvised these, based on two sources: the kitchn‘s roasted cherry recipe and 101 Cookbooks‘s roasted strawberry recipe.

I whisked together equal parts of maple syrup and olive oil, with a little bit of sea salt. I then added about a 1/8 tsp. nutmeg and four shredded basil leaves. I tossed the cherries in this and then roasted them at 450° for ten minutes, then added a couple of tablespoons of cognac and put them back in for another five minutes. After they’d cooled, I removed the pits. The cherries keep for a few days in the fridge and freeze well. Slow-roasting is another great method for these, too.

I’m sort of curious to see what would happen if instead of basil and nutmeg, I used a little bit of cocoa powder. Maybe I’d leave the nutmeg in. I’d love to hear your ideas for other flavours that would work well with these, or your experiments with roasting other kinds of fruit.

FFWD – Slow-Roasted Tomatoes

August 5, 2011May 4, 2014 ~ Teresa ~ 35 Comments

The lines between restaurant cooking and home cooking have been slowly blurring for a long time, now. Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that they converge and diverge over time. Right now, we’re in the midst of a gourmet revival, which seems to happen every generation or so. I direct you to almost any cooking blog for further research. At the same time, there’s also been a revival of interest in home-cooking from a professional perspective. In my town, restaurants like Grub, Burgoo, and The Wallflower have made names for themselves presenting and reinventing comfort food. My brother, a chef, cites not only professionals as mentors, but also my mother. Of course, a professional chef can’t surpass your mother’s famous [insert specialty here] and there are few home cooks who can match the expertise and equipment available to chefs.

One of the fundamental things that separates the two is preparation…though perhaps I mean preparations. At home, the success of a dish is often based on seasoning and the care put into assembling and cooking the dish. An apple pie is the result of a gentle hand with pastry, judicious spicing of the filling and a careful eye on the oven. In a professional kitchen, the Mother sauces provide the springboard upon which a menu is built, but the same care is put into other ingredients. Especially at restaurants that make use of seasonal produce, it’s the preparation of ingredients that can transform a dish. It’s a step beyond what we usually do at home.

This is the train of thought that I followed when reading this week’s French Friday recipe for slow-roasted tomatoes. It seems more like a preparation that would be found in a professional kitchen than a home cook’s staple. It should be a staple, though. Slow-roasting is a wonderful, hands-off process for a quiet day at home. It’s also an effective method for concentrating flavour. This summer, I’ve slow-roasted strawberries, rhubarb and now tomatoes. Tomorrow, I’m going to try cherries. I think they’ll be great as a tart filling. But, I digress.

Dorie’s slow-roasted tomatoes can be flavoured with garlic and herbs, or just a little salt and pepper. They can be used immediately or packed in olive oil to use over the course of a few weeks. They can be ground into a paste, added to a dish during cooking, or used as a garnish. It’s this versatility that reminds me of restaurants.

Save for a taste after they were finished, I haven’t used my tomatoes yet. I’ve packed them in olive oil and they’re waiting in the fridge, ready to bring my home cooking up a notch.

You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Slow-Roasted Tomatoes

I’ve just realized today that I’m nearly at my 100th post and am only a few weeks away from my one-year-blogoversary. So, I’m trying to think up a little something to celebrate. As they say in advertising: Watch This Space.

A Tale of Two Crusts – A French Fridays Catch-Up

July 29, 2011 ~ Teresa ~ 14 Comments

My post on this week’s recipe, Citrus-Berry Terrine, will have to wait until later this weekend. I’m still not fully up to standing for very long, but think I can manage it in the next day or two. After all, I don’t want to miss out on using local berries at the height of their goodness.

Instead, I’m going to do a catch up post on two of the recipes I missed out on when they were scheduled. Torteau de chèvre was one of the recipes I’d been looking forward to from the beginning of French Fridays, while Spinach and Bacon Quiche was a recipe that had escaped my notice at first.

What both of these recipes have in common is Dorie’s pâte brisée, or tart dough. This tart dough is not the cookie-like pâte sucrée, but one that has a similar structure and is suitable for both savoury and sweet fillings. I’ve managed to adapt it to gluten-free just by using my favourite gluten-free flour mix and reducing the quantity of flour by 1/4 cup. I wish g-f adaptation was always so easy.

As you can see from the photo at the top of this post, I don’t own a tart pan. So, I just press the dough into a springform pan to the height I need. It looks just fine when it’s filled and out of the oven, but I’m sure I’ll succumb to the temptation and purchase a tart pan at some point. What is a cooking club, after all, but a good excuse to buy more cooking equipment and exciting ingredients?

I’m not sure now why I didn’t get ’round to writing a post for torteau de chèvre, but I suspect it has something to do with how few of my photos turned out. I only ended up with two I liked. I’m slowly trying to break myself of the habit of photographing food after dark. At this time of year, that’s an easy task. In May, it was a little harder. No matter, the tourteau was beautiful under any light. Making the batter is a process of adding more and more air with every step. First, the egg whites are whipped to stiff peaks, then the rest of the ingredients are separately mixed into a light, smooth batter. Once the egg whites are folded into the goat cheese mixture, the batter is almost frothy. So, it’s a surprise that once it’s poured into the par-baked crust and baked, what emerges from the oven is more like a sponge cake than a cheesecake.

I just ate the slices out of hand, without any embellishment, but you could easily serve it with a fruit or a sauce. I love what Elaine did with hers, combining it with another French Fridays assignment.

My partner wasn’t a fan of the torteau de chèvre, but he loved the spinach and bacon quiche. In fact, this quiche sent me off into a quiche baking spree. Now that I know he likes it, it’s going to be something I make monthly. It’s great for light dinners and even better for packed lunches. This particular quiche is quite hearty, which is a departure from the dish’s 1980s reputation as a lightweight, fussy meal.

I didn’t add any salt to the filling, as I knew the bacon and Parmesan would make it quite salty enough for us. It’s not something that I’d serve too regularly, as the eggs, heavy cream, cheese and bacon militate against heart health, but it’s a nice treat. It’s also something that could easily be adapted with lower-fat milk. I haven’t done it yet, but I’m planning on making a vegetarian version of this that’s a little more Mediterranean, inspired by Betsy, whose beet green quiche will also be on the menu, once I harvest the beets in my garden.

I’ve been on a quest for a good, easy gluten-free pie crust for a while now, but I’ve begun to feel that all I really need to do is to use this tart dough instead. It has a different taste and texture than pie crust, but everyone who has had the g-f version has loved it. I think I’m going to adapt my thinking around pies and stick with the dough that works. I have plenty of opportunities to make conventional pies and the crust recipe that’s been handed down in my family serves me well for those. Best of both worlds, I’d say.

You can find many other blogged descriptions of these recipes here: Torteau de Chèvre and Spinach and Bacon Quiche

FFWD – Coconut-Lemongrass-Braised Pork

July 22, 2011May 4, 2014 ~ Teresa ~ 18 Comments

My parents live in a rural(ish) area of the Fraser Valley. There is a tiny downtown, a vestige of the village that was swallowed up by the municipality in which they live. They’re also twenty minutes away from suburbia in two directions, so they have access to everything they might want, including gourmet ingredients. What their area lacks, though, is reliable access to less usual ingredients at the last minute. It makes me realize that I’m spoiled. If I’m missing an ingredient, I can walk down the street, right up until around nine in the evening, and be almost guaranteed to find what I need. What I don’t have is the beautiful setting they live in. I also haven’t developed my mother’s instinct for planning ahead.

Knowing that I was making this week’s dish at my parents’ place should have caused me to take a look at the list of ingredients, then place a phone call to my mother to see what she had on hand. If I’d done that, I might have packed up the whole coriander and the cardamom pods in my pantry and run to the store for some fresh lemongrass. Instead, I blithely congratulated myself for remembering to pack the cookbook and headed out to the farm. When it finally came time to make a shopping list, my lack of forethought caused a scavenger hunt that amped up my (car-fueled) carbon footprint more than I’d like to say.

My mother has ground coriander and cardamom in her spice cupboard, but I thought I would be able to find whole versions when we went out for the rest of the ingredients.Two supermarkets and a specialty store later, I had managed to find everything but the cardamom and lemongrass. As I was being told there was no lemongrass by the third produce clerk of the day, another customer tapped my elbow. She told me she got frozen lemongrass from a little store downtown and that they might have cardamom pods, too.

Off we went. The store was packed full of all sorts of produce, spices and ingredients that you couldn’t find on the shelves of the local supermarkets – even mangosteen, which I rarely see around my neighbourhood. I enlisted the aid of the clerk, but she couldn’t find any cardamom at all. She thought she was completely out of lemongrass, too, until she remembered that there was some in a package of fresh ingredients for Tom Yum soup. More than enough lemongrass for my recipe, with enough left to try the soup mix another time. As I was paying, I mentioned how difficult it was to find what I needed to make a mildly Thai-influenced dish. “Not in this town,” was her response.

Well, my parents’ farm has its own attractions. They occasionally raise a few pigs, which keeps the whole family in pork for quite some time. They are coming to the end of their latest stock of pork, but we found some pork chops that substituted nicely for the pork butt suggested in the recipe. I took out the bones with a filleting knife and the thick chops cut easily into 1-2 inch chunks. Our late summer meant that there weren’t yet any root vegetables ready from the garden, but I got some nice carrots, potatoes and onions from the local co-op.

After browning the meat, toasting the spices and adding the coconut milk, the kitchen was aromatic. Which made it hard to wait the more than half-hour it took to braise the stew. I kept busy, cooking the vegetables and finishing last week’s Cold Melon-Berry Soup, which we had as an appetizer while we waited for the stew to finish. Though the suggestions for serving this pork dish include pasta or rice, we served it just as it was. The vegetables provided enough of an anchor for the pork and its thin sauce. The stew can be finished with a touch of honey, but I neglected to add it. It didn’t matter, the flavours of the stew worked very well without it.

I’m back home now, experiencing the best of both worlds, with some of my parents’ farm-raised meat in the freezer and all the ingredients I need just down the street.

You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Coconut-Lemongrass-Braised Pork

FFWD – Cold Melon-Berry Soup

July 15, 2011 ~ Teresa ~ 25 Comments

It took me half a cantaloupe to get the hang of making melon balls. They aren’t something that’s ever shown up on the menu chez moi, but I’ve only recently begun to appreciate melons. Melon wedges on a fruit tray, yes. Proscuitto wrapped around a slice of melon, certainly. But in my mind, melon balls are fare for a 1960’s country club buffet, piled in pyramids atop shaved ice in a silver dish. Or a cut glass dish on a silver salver. Something like that.

This probably influenced my thinking when I made this week’s melon-berry soup. I kept imagining it presented as though for a wedding supper or an awards banquet. I settled on some pretty etched glasses. A nod to the elegance I’d imagined, with the practicality required of a dish served in the living room. I was making next week’s Coconut Lemongrass-Braised Pork for dinner and thought that this soup would make a nice prelude to the curried sweetness of the stew.

The soup is simply pureed cantaloupe mixed with lime juice and grated ginger, then seasoned with a little salt. After the soup, melon balls and strawberries have chilled for a few hours, the dish is assembled and topped with a sprig of mint. You may add a tablespoon of sweet wine if you like, though I didn’t this time. I think the only thing I’d add to this is a good grinding of pepper. I think that would contrast well with the sweet-tartness of the rest of the dish.

I was at my parents’ house and gave my father his soup while I took photos of the other portions. My mother was playing food stylist/photographer’s assistant, bringing out many of her lovely, eclectic dishes for me to try and then holding up a white piece of card to make the most of the evening light. My Dad came into the kitchen to tell us that he liked the soup so much he’d gladly eat the rest. That’s an excellent endorsement, in my estimation.

I think there are lots of jumping off points for this recipe: ice pops, cocktails, granitas – just make sure you include the melon balls. They’re the best part.

You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Cold Melon-Berry Soup

FFWD – Salmon and Tomatoes en Papillote

July 8, 2011July 8, 2011 ~ Teresa ~ 30 Comments

I love using the en Papillote method of cooking. It’s our favourite way to cook fish and it also works really well for chicken (though for chicken I open up the package near the end of the cooking time so that it browns a little). Vary the liquid, the herbs and seasonings, add some fruit or vegetables – use whatever you have on hand that complements the protein you’re cooking. Or, go vegetarian and oven-steam summer squash or zucchini.

I have to admit that the flavour and tenderness that this method brings aren’t actually my favourite part of cooking en Papillote. It’s the clean up. I hate doing dishes and oven roasting can mean a lot more time in front of the sink than I wish to spend. There’s no scrubbing with en Papillote. And that always gets my vote.

That’s not to say that the result isn’t a big selling point in itself. The steam that builds up in the package infuses what you’re cooking with the flavours of the seasonings, while making it extremely tender. The liquid can even be used to make a nice pan sauce.

This week’s French Fridays recipe has all of these qualities, but it’s the way that the dish is constructed that makes it special. The ingredients are layered so that when it’s served, the dish looks elegant enough for a dinner party. The flavours of whole basil leaves, thick slabs of salmon, lemon slices and chopped scallions make it worthy of company, too. I used dried thyme, but sprigs of rosemary or thyme are called for in the recipe and would add nicely to the presentation.

This meal is good enough that I wouldn’t even mind cleaning up afterward.

You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Salmon and Tomatoes en Papillote

FFWD – Chunky Beets and Icy Red Onions

July 1, 2011July 8, 2011 ~ Teresa ~ 29 Comments

I’ve never understood why beets are on the no go list for so many people. They show up on the plate in so many different ways, they’re good through all four seasons, and they’re sweet and earthy without being too assertive. I hated pickles growing up, but my mother’s pickled beets were the exception. The only thing that can spoil borscht is too much vinegar. How many vegetables are good steamed, boiled, roasted or raw? You can even make cake with them.

Raw onions, however, give me pause. A little of those go a long way for me. I’ve even been known to discreetly slide thick rings of raw onion from sandwiches. I like them best when they’re chopped finely and used sparingly. The inclusion of raw onions in this week’s French Fridays recipe didn’t pose a problem for me, because they are thinly sliced and soaked in cold water to get the worst of the bite out. Then, they’re plunged into ice water until it’s time to sprinkle them on the salad.

The salad itself is made of cooked, diced beets in a herbed honey-mustard vinagrette. I roasted some heirloom beets, striped to match the red onion, and substituted Italian parsley for the fresh oregano. The tamed onions make a nice, crunchy contrast to the roasted beets. This salad can be dressed up (as in Trevor’s version) or dressed down – I served mine with Dubliner/thyme scrambled eggs.

For dessert, I roasted strawberries using Heidi Swanson’s method and served them over lemon sorbet. I substituted cognac for the port, but that didn’t seem to diminish the goodness.

You can find many other blogged descriptions of this week’s FFWD recipe here: Chunky Beets and Icy Red Onions

FFWD – Mozzarella, Tomato and Strawberry Salad

June 24, 2011 ~ Teresa ~ 35 Comments

Torrential rain and summer salad aren’t natural companions. This afternoon, while the rain was pounding on the rooftops as loudly as hail, my mind was on quiche, soup and stew. Luckily, I’d already gotten all the ingredients for this week’s recipe, or I might have been guilty of yet another late post. I would have bought entirely different ingredients had I gone shopping today. By early evening, though, the sun was shining and salad became a reasonable dinner option.

Purchasing the ingredients is the hardest part of this recipe. The salad is thrown together quickly, just before serving. Slice the mozzarella, then plate it. Slice and mix the strawberries with the tomatoes. Shred the fresh basil. The rest is just seasoning and drizzling some good olive oil. Add some balsamic to the fruit if you think it needs it and then garnish the mozzarella with crushed pink peppercorns.

Just as goat cheese and strawberries work together, tomatoes and strawberries are naturally compatible. I didn’t need to use balsamic, as the fruit had a good balance of sweet and acid without it. This worked well with the creaminess of the mozzarella and the tang of the basil. It’s been a cool, wet summer so far and we’ve been waiting a long time for strawberries. This salad was a perfect way to use the first local berries I’ve gotten this season.