I think I’ve pretty handily established how much I’ve come to enjoy cooking and eating rabbit during the last 6 months.
Coincidentally, rabbit’s profile and status has been elevated in the media lately, with some even going so far as to dub it the “gateway” animal to raising their own food. I wouldn’t necessarily go to that extreme, seeing as I have enough small, stinky animals coexisting with me as is, but I do love to suck the meat off the bones of the occasional, delicious hare. No longer just a popular protein for immigrant fare, rabbit it seems is beginning to come into its own, whether the mainstream is ready or not.
So, it was without hesitation that I purchased a few whole rabbits on my last 2 trips to The Healthy Butcher, even though I had no particular plans for their meaty little carcasses at the time.
Since then we’ve had rabbit braised in red wine over polenta, a ginger mustard stewed rabbit, and most recently a succulent rabbit ragu (pictured above). We generally don’t eat a whole lot of red meat or pork on a regular basis (it’s typically one or the other about once every 2 weeks), so rabbit has been a refreshing way to break up the monotony of a diet riddled with vegetarian meals, pastas and poultry. It’s gamey, yet mild and faintly sweet, lending itself to numerous preparations; small enough to be cooked relatively quickly, while also capable of being braised for many hours. In our house, one might even go so far as to say that rabbit is the new pork belly, or even the new chicken!?!
While sautéing the base for said ragu on a Sunday not too long ago, I stopped to reflect on a time when I used to think ragu was merely a brand that came in a jar, and how unlikely it would’ve been for that younger me to consume a bunny rabbit (nigh on 25 years ago, I’d reckon). Oh, how things (and opinions) have changed. After a 6 hour simmer, the ragu I craftily prepared with a jar of my own preserved bruschetta (subbing in for canned tomatoes) melted down into the perfect, wintry sauce for blanketing a bed of hand cut egg yolk noodles. It wasn’t the first, but it’s sure to be but one of many delicious rabbits I’ll sit down to over the course of the rest of my life.
One of the main reasons I made a stop at Sankothis weekend was to pick up ingredients for a simmered soybean side dish that I’d read about over at Serious Eats and had been wanting to make for nearly a week and a half. The Everyman is no fan of soybeans, but the dish sounded just perfect for me to bring to work as a relatively healthy afternoon snack, so I’d been mentally drooling over the umami-ish combination ever since.
Of course, while I was there I couldn’t help but grab a few other odds and ends that I had no specific intentions for, other than random experimentation. Shopping in Asian stores is always fun for me, because oftentimes packages contain minimal English, so you don’t always know exactly what you’re going to get. It’s like playing culinary roulette, just not deadly.
Once I got home with my mysterious bounty, I began prepping the dried soybeans so that the following day I could complete the recipe, while visions of deliciousness danced in my head.
Coincidentally a few days prior I had made another Serious Eats recipe, this time for something called velvet chicken, which sounded similar to san bei gi, otherwise known as 3 cup chicken.
I went to the Japanese importer Sanko down the street from my house today.
Aside from the fact that the staff kept looking at me like I was horribly out of place, I came away with a good haul of stuff for some experimentation later this week.
Here’s a small sampling of the bounty to pique your interest; it includes udon, kombu, mirin, bonito and a seaweed/sesame sprinkling concoction.
During the last few weeks it seemed like you couldn’t swing a cat without being subjected to the Vancouver Olympics in some way, shape or form.
As someone who is generally not a huge fan of sports in any respect, I’m sure you can imagine how exasperating I found the 24/7 coverage, especially when you stop and consider how much time, effort and money goes into what amounts to a glorified international pissing contest. However, the Everyman is a huge lover of sports, so there was a fair amount being viewed in our household during those 16 days.
One food-related topic that received quite a bit of press during and after the games was the validity of having McDonald’s as a prominent corporate sponsor. Many have chimed in and been rather vocal about this, including those who wished that we’d showcased uniquely Canadian cuisine, instead of pandering to the lowest common denominator. GFReven had some random 12 year old write a (rather unedited) rant about the whole affair, the gist of which boiled down to shame on us.
Far be it from me to be a shit disturber, but with the exception of the whole First Nations/Burgergate saga I’d have to say I respectfully disagree and might even (sort of) be on the same side as McD’s(!) for once.
I know. You’re all shocked and dismayed about how that could ever be possible. Well, it goes a little something like this…
I’ve been categorically ignoring the whole no knead bread trend since I first heard about it back in 2006.
It became quite the internet sensation at the time, died down and now seems to be making the rounds again, due at least partially to Cathy Erway’snew book about not eating out for 2 years, I assume (which includes her riff on the recipe).
As someone who loves cooking and food as much as I do, I can say with alacrity that I’ve often thought of no knead bread as the lazy person’s shortcut, aka baking for dummies. If you asked my mother, she’d probably cluck her teeth and mutter something under her breath about it being the cowboy way. Beyond that, even though I start by mixing 90% of my breads in a stand mixer for at least part of the process, I can’t imagine giving up the interaction with the elementalness that is bread just to make life “simpler”.
But, when I saw Erway’srecipe for parmagiano, peppercorn and potato no knead bread, I made an exception and decided to try it. At the time I had no knowledge of what made her recipe differ from the standard no knead bread, so I followed everything to the letter except for 2 things. I subbed in a cup of whole wheat flour to surreptitiously improve its healthiness and instead of cracked black peppercorns, I mixed up a blend of 5 different ones that I’ve had lurking in the kitchen, including Muntok, Sarawak, Malabar, Tellicherry and Moula peppercorns crushed in a tea towel with a mallet.
A few weeks ago when the Everyman made un-Valentine’s Day dinner for me, the accompanying sauce for the pork chops was so slurpable that I could not bring myself to rinse the leftovers down the drain. Instead I kept the pear, thyme and shallot infused jus in a small container in the fridge, with no clear idea for what I meant to do with the rest.
Flash forward to nearly 2 weeks later when a dinner of broiled lamb loin chops and cumin glazed carrots was looking rather forlorn on the plate. Digging the jellified jus out of the fridge, I opted to warm it in a saucepan with a frozen cube of vegetarian stock. Once it had thinned out a touch, a knob of membrillo jam melted and sweetened it a bit, while a splash of barley malt vinegar brought everything into balance.
Served with the crispy broiled lamb, the resulting sauce was quite nearly the perfect pairing for lamb. It was so well matched that I think I’d even go to the trouble of making it from the start just for lamb chops next time. Score 1 for culinary ingenuity!
Not for me are the random masses shuffling along through their workaday lives, never fully immersing themselves or finding anything worthwhile to commit to. Instead I respect the creative, overly exuberant doers, the ones who push the envelopes and expand the boundaries of their respective fields through constant trial and experimentation.
When I familiarized myself with Paul A Young’s2009 work Adventures With Chocolate recently, I knew I’d found a rare culinary maverick worthy of further examination, whose book I just had to lay hands on. Once I managed to track down a copy through Alibris UK I only had to exercise a modicum of patience until it arrived on my doorstep a week and a half later.
Adventures With Chocolate is a rollicking stroll through the mind of a (not so evil) genius, whose book jacket photo reveals a dapper young man reminiscent of a modern day Willy Wonka. This is by no means your mother’s cookbook, resplendent as it is with the rich tones and lush textures of pure chocolate juxtaposed against rustic, homespun preparations. It’s part concept journal and part chocolate as high art, but on all accounts they add up deliciously. I’ve yet to test drive a single recipe, but after my recent experimentations with chocolate and ‘nduja I’ve been inexplicably drawn to some of his more whimsical combinations, including chocolate water crackers (for cheese), fig and date tarts with cumin chocolate syrup and cedar cassia truffles (to name a few). I’ve no doubt that once I start I will work my way through the book in its entirety.
Especially helpful for the novice chocolatier is the glossary near the beginning that identifies certain flavours that marry well with distinct varieties of single origin chocolate. I may be somewhere between amateur and professional (having only dabbled in truffle making during my late teens and early twenties under the moniker Princess P) but even I found the table to be an invaluable tool. I’ve also found it curiously prevalent for British recipes to specify the variety of sugar; whether it’s turbinado, muscovado, caster or any other, nothing is left to chance in the precise flavour compilations Young is after (definitely a trend I would like to catch on universally).
When I was younger, comfort food took on many forms.
Being half Trinidadian, if my mom was cooking it often meant some sort of roti and curry preparation to warm our hearts and bellies. After my parents split and my dad took over the cooking for our household, it was a Sunday roast chicken redolent with paprika, garlic, onion and pepper with a side of fluffy stuffing. Once I was considered old enough to cook on my own, my foods of choice were often plain, bland and white, including tall glasses of cold milk, hot buttered rice and large piles of creamy mashed potatoes – clearly my love of starchy white carbs was cultivated at a young age.
These days comfort food in our household usually means homemade macaroni and cheese (prepared with creme fraiche, parmagiano, manchego and chevre instead of nuclear cheese food), baked panko crusted sriracha nuggets or my aunt’s Christmas morning poached chicken salad that the Everyman fell in love with while we were there for the holidays. While the spirit of the dishes remains the same, the ingredients and methods have certainly gone more upmarket to account for our more refined tastes and preferences than what we would have settled for as kids.
The one comfort food genre that I’ve never really dabbled much in was Southern food. I like cornbread, fried chicken, BBQ and all the other stereotypical fare as much as the next person, but I generally don’t make much of it at home. But between this article about Hank’s new Southern dinner menu and the return of more wintry weather recently, I was suddenly craving something heartier and more rib-sticking than normal. Over the years I’ve enjoyed all of the components of the dish I made last night separately, but I never bothered to put them all together as one before. It’s far from authentic Southern or Caribbean fare but dang, it does taste good.
To begin I soaked half a pound of red beans overnight, then simmered them in several inches of water until they were mostly tender. In the meantime, I sautéed several links of a homemade spicy poblano sausage I had in the freezer with some chopped celery, onion, thyme, cumin and cayenne until the whole upper level of our house was nose-tinglingly fragrant. Once the sausage and veggies were well browned, I added a handful of frozen stock cubes and scraped the bottom of the pan with a spoon. At this point I put on water to boil for a pot of brown rice. Draining the beans in a colander, I added them back to their pan with the remaining sausage/veggie/broth mixture as well as a few fresh bay leaves, then covered and simmered again. In the interim I mixed up a cornbread batter and slid it into a preheated blackened frying pan. Once the cornbread was mostly cooked through I grated a large dusting of peppered pecorino on top of it and returned it to the oven to brown. When everything was ready I served the sausage and bean mixture atop a mountain of brown rice with a wedge of crispy cornbread on the side.
Today I am leaving you with a picture of a recent vegetarian supper I concocted out of couscous, lentils and roasted root vegetables in a tarragon cream.
The reason for this is that I am currently coming down from a meat hangover after having been to Cowbelltwice in the last 36 hours, and needed something lighter and plant-based to inspire me.
We visited for dinner on Saturday night and enjoyed a meal of all of the usual delicious suspects, including the charcuterie platter, a consomme, some red deer and variety pork dishes, and a pot of chocolate rillettes. Chef was kind enough to serve our dinner himself, and at the end of the night he even brought out some wonderful ice wine and wished me a happy birthday. It turns out his birthday is also this week, so I wished him many happy returns.
On Sunday morning we came back nearly 12 hours later to enjoy the mother of all brunches. I ingested what they call the Rusty and Jerome, which is a TV tray laden with just about every item on their brunch menu, including a melange of bacon, toast, waffles with fruit, meatloaf and gravy, eggs and baked beans and sausages. It was quite the impressive feast, and I enjoyed it all the more when they brought it to our table and assumed the Everyman had ordered it. Instead he had a Belgian waffle with the aforementioned fruit, a side of home fries and a few links of chorizo. After behaving like a pair of gluttonous beasts, we left Cowbell once again and continued on with my birthday, albeit in a food-addled stupor.
The third instance of the equation is actually part of my present. The Everyman and I will be participating in one of their private butchery classes (I just have to pick which one) which basically means that I received the gift of 3 Cowbells for my birthday.
So, it seems only fitting that as I prepare to spend another year in this skin, I should reflect on what it is I’m planning to do in the coming months, particularly in relation to gardening.
With the exception of the various forms of root stock I ordered (potatoes, sunchokes and asparagus) all of my seeds have arrived. I spread them out on the kitchen table last night and simultaneously felt surges of fear and excitement. There’s something rather exhilarating about the potential of this year’s garden with the many unknowns I’m introducing into the equation, but at the same time I can also see the immense amount of work all of the seed packs represent.
Of course, the few months between receiving the seeds and actually planting them into the ground is excruciatingly painful for someone as impatient as I am. There is the distraction of starting the seeds in the basement, but that is just a temporary solution, which is why I invariably end up going back to the seed catalogues that keep showing up at my door and ordering more. In fact, immediately after I placed the orders for all of the seed packets that you see above, another Richter’smagazine (ironically) showed up, attempting to entice me into purchasing again. To date I haven’t caved, but only because I’m not sure whether I realistically have room for all of the things I’ve already bought. Regardless of that concern, I’m sure before May rolls around there will be a few more seed orders arriving at my door.
As an added bonus, the company that sent me the seeds on the very left (Heritage Harvest) included a free package of tomato seeds with my order, and I’m very intrigued by them. They’re called Henderson’s Wins All and apparently this heritage variety grows grotesquely massive 2-3 pound specimens. While some of you may be aware of my fascination with all things tiny and squee, I’m also (surprisingly) amazed by those biggest vegetable ever contests that people hold every harvest season. Between the Sicilian Saucer (another 3 pound beast) and this new Henderson’s I think I’m going to have giantesse all wrapped up this year. I’m expecting it’ll be a very Alice In Wonderland-esque garden with all of the tiny cherry tomatoes being dwarfed by these 2 oversized plants.
First off, I don’t have kids, nor do I ever want them.
In fact, if I’m to be brutally honest, I’d have to say that I generally despise the smarmy little buggers (with the exception of the kith and kin of a few friends or relatives of mine, that is). For comfort’s sake I usually prefer to keep a fair amount of distance between me and the lot of them with their bad manners, foul mouthes, entitled attitudes, short attention spans and constant orbit of gadgets and technology (/rant).
That being said, there’s been a lot of talk about children in the media lately. There’s plenty of discussion surrounding the obesity epidemic that’s facing their generation and how as a society we need to focus our energies to improve and shift their current fate. Mrs. Obama has her Let’s Move initiative, Alice Waters has the Edible Schoolyard program, and Jamie Oliver’s recent TED Prize wish was to teach every child about food. Of course, that’s merely a sprinkling of the many projects attempting to tackle this multi-faceted problem, but these 3 just happen to be some of the most highly visible.
On the surface they all sound like rather noble causes, and certainly there is a degree of credibility behind the idea of educating children about food and exercise in order to stem the tides of an obesity related epidemic.
And anyone who has seen the promo clip of Oliver’s upcoming show (specifically the kids that don’t know the difference between potatoes and tomatoes at around 1:16 in the video) should be able to grasp the positive ramifications when kids get switched on about food.
However, the point where I often find myself flummoxed is when people start talking about banning, outlawing, taxing or restricting certain foods deemed to be “unhealthy” from school premises in order to achieve that goal.
Aside from my timtana experiment last week, I haven’t really done a whole lot of bread baking yet this year. I’ve been more than a little preoccupied with work, planning our vacation and things of a more pastry-ish nature, so when I decided to make bread again this week there was a fair amount of anticipation on my part.
I once read that the word ciabatta loosely translates to mean “carpet slipper” in Italian. Given their delicate dough and diminutive stature I can’t really say I’m surprised, though I’m not sure what about carpet slippers is supposed to make them sound appetizing or appealing, despite the fact that they are.
Coincidentally those small, squat rolls are some that I enjoy preparing (and eating) quite a bit. Of course because I am merely an honorary Italian, I make no bones about putting my own little twists into the bread that I’m baking, and on Family Day yesterday I decided to enhance the ciabatta with a healthy dose of homemade tomato conserva.
I began the night before by mixing up a biga (sourdough starter) by combining flour, water and a small amount of yeast and then letting it ferment on the counter.
That clichéd Simpsons line has been popping up in stories all over town this week but I really do love the Simpsons and specifically enjoy that episode.
We’re not really fans of the big “V-day” here at Foodie and the Everyman (which I tend to refer to in my head as venereal disease or victimized delusions day, for no particular reason). In fact, when the Everyman and I first started seeing each other, it was only a few weeks before V-day (and my birthday which is one week after) and we both agreed about how ridiculously stupid it is. So generally speaking, we don’t tend to celebrate it. I prefer to think that the person I’m with is going to do nice things for me all year round instead of being bludgeoned into submission by some industry’s made up excuse for a spending spree.
And for the most part the Everyman does and so do I. Though he doesn’t often bring me the “traditional” gifts of chocolate or flowers, he does regularly indulge me in other ways, such as expanding my love of restaurants and travel. In fact, just last week he told me I could start planning our next vacation to wherever I wanted to go, and to me that’s more romantic than a February 14th drugstore chocolate sampler any day.
But because we both love to eat, we did go out for dinner on V-day one year (to Mistura) but like that article in the Globe earlier this week, I wouldn’t necessarily consider it a worthwhile experience (though it was one of the last times I ate lobster before I got sick). The whole time we were there the service was so rushed and you could tell the meal had been hastily prepared. At the end of the night it was apparent that their main objective was maximizing bums at tables and gross consumerism is just so sexy, you know? So, we just don’t bother anymore. If the Hoof wasn’t constantly overrun with hipsters, I’d probably have gotten on board with going there for an anti-V-day meal, but it’s packed every night of the week anyway, so that was pretty much out of the question. I don’t enjoy busy restaurants on a good day, so amplifying that by adding a “holiday” to the mix makes it even less appealing to the both of us.
