My mother in law is the queen of the newspaper recipe.
Because they often have 3 of the 4 local papers in the house, it’s not unusual to find her kitchen at home or at the cottage littered with clippings of recipes she is longing to try. She’s pretty open minded, but definitely has a soft spot for Lucy Waverman’s weekly column. Generally speaking, I don’t usually find recipes for my kind of food in the paper (with the exception of Bittman, that is) so you can imagine my surprise when we all (myself included) immediately fell in love with a dip she’d cribbed from the paper over Christmas.
If I’m not mistaken, the original recipe was also a Waverman, but I can’t confirm because I’ve been unable to find it online. The recipe in question was for a rather festive roasted red pepper and artichoke tapenade, made unique by the fact that it didn’t actually contain any olives. I know, it’s technically not a tapenade without them, but I kind of think of it along the same lines as the universe basterdizing hummus. At any rate, this tapenade was SO good that all of us spending Christmas at the cottage were hooked and slurping it up like crack. Since then, I’ve regularly made it twice a month in 3 cup batches and find it as a welcome addition to a lunch basket.
However, while recently peeling and turning a 5 pound bag of carrots into sticks, I started to wonder what would happen if I started messing around with the proportions of veg in the recipe. Before I knew it, I was steaming a handful of carrot sticks and collecting the rest of the ingredients I wanted to play with on the counter. By the time I was done, the recipe bore little resemblance to the original, but still had the same raw, sweetly pungent bite that the roasted pepper variety had. The lovely thing about the dip is that it gets better and better the longer it sits, as the flavours have time to meld.
Foodie’s Roasted Carrot Dip
(more…)
Tags: artichokes, carrots, Cooking, dip, Lucy Waverman, Mark Bittman, Recipes
Posted in Cooking, Recipes | No Comments »
At this time last year, I was up to my eyeballs in lusciously imperfect tomatoes.
But, like almost everyone else this year, my garden’s been slow to blossom. About 2 or 3 weeks ago I was finally able to start harvesting close to a handful of mixed cherry tomatoes per day. Even though we’re now a couple of days into September, I still haven’t tasted the first full size fruit yet.
As with the red ones above, I’m not sure what varietals these (and the one below) are. I don’t recall planting any white varieties, but these tomatoes seem awfully pale to me. Perhaps they might be garden peaches…
(more…)
Tags: artichokes, beets, celery, figs, Gardening, jalapenos, lemons, poblanos, potatoes, shallots, sunchokes, tomatoes
Posted in Gardening | No Comments »
Every day that passes brings the gardening season that much closer (fingers crossed that we’re done with snow). To while away the time I’ve become hooked on something I read about over at You Grow Girl several months ago… Gardening Mama! It’s a game from the people who making Cooking Mama, which I also obsessively love, but more than that, it keeps my hands busy while I’m waiting for the universe to hurry up and warm up outside already…
Though I may have let the past few months pass in relative silence on the garden front, you can be assured that I’ve not been dormant. From taking my seed catalogs with me on Christmas vacation so I could pick out my new projects (yes, I am a garden dork and I was mocked mercilessly about it the entire vacation), to harassing the people at West Coast Seeds when an order didn’t arrive, to finally breaking out the potting soil and mucking about in my basement laundry room, the last 3 months contained their fair share of preparatory activities.
-
-
What Baby Artichokes Look Like
-
-
Advanced Growth
Project Sustainability 2009 is well underway, with approximately 60 seedlings chilling out on the grow tower. Considering that last year was my first attempt at growing anything more involved than a cactus, I was pretty impressed with the end results. There were definitely lessons learned, and notes made about plants I wouldn’t bother to grow again (read: corn and those weeds I thought were beans). But this year, along with bringing back favorites and successes from 2008, I also picked a bunch of new plants to try. As our diet becomes increasingly varied, the memories of how explosively flavorful my completely organic, fresh picked produce was last year inspired me to try my hand at even more. I can never replace Bob (our organic delivery guy) or our CSA farmshare from Zephyr Organics, but being able to combine two of my all-consuming passions is just too good to pass up. Plus, creating your own tiny microcosm means being able to experiment with more unique and just plain bizarre produce that larger growers might not bother with.
So far on the rooftop roster this year we have:
(more…)
Tags: artichokes, beets, carrots, celeriac, Cooking Mama, figs, Gardening, Gardening Mama, Homeland Garden Centre, hot peppers, Lee Valley, lemons, lettuce, limes, New Projects, potatoes, Project Sustainability, raspberries, shallots, strawberries, sunchokes, tomatoes, Urban Harvest, West Coast Seeds, You Grow Girl, Zephyr Organics
Posted in Gardening, New Projects | 1 Comment »
Since I think it’s about to get nutty around here, what with the holidays and all, I thought I’d pre-preemptively post a year end wrap up before I go away to the cold, cold world that is Winnipeg.
So, without further adieu, let’s jump right into my favorite new foods of the year;
1- Beef Shortribs – As the Everyman succinctly reminded me the other day, until I tried them at Cowbell I never did much like the shortrib. It’s true, but what a convert I am. Now I must have them at least every 2 to 3 weeks or else I feel like I’ll go batty. I even convinced the Everyman to prepare his version of something I saw on Brad Long’s Veritas menu; a grilled cheese and shortrib sandwich. Heaven is a shortrib bounty. It tastes almost exactly not like a hamburger, in grilled form. Delicious.
2- Carpaccio – I always have loved raw fish, but this year was really when I finally turned on to raw meat. I still can’t stomach tartare; it must be the egg that’s the problem. And again, this transformation is primarily due to Cowbell and Brad Lamb. I first had an amazing beef carpaccio at The PT Club which started my intrigue with the dish, and then fell completely in love once I tried a few variations at Cowbell over the summer. I think we can safely say that my mantra for 2008 has become Eat. More. Meat.
3- Pork Belly – I’ll be honest. I used to hate pork belly. Really, really strongly hate it. Then one night I had it at Globe Bistro with a couple of sea scallops and thought, hmmm, this is pretty darn good! Then there was a low period where I hated it again after I had it at Treadwell (which I’d like to reiterate from my post on it is completely overrated). But I persevered, and now I actually like it. It’s rich for sure, but in small doses you just can’t beat it. I even had some fun this year cooking with it at home; though I will say if you’re inclined to try that, good luck, it’s really hard to find in Toronto even at high quality butcher shops.
4- The Hamburger – OK, before anyone gets bent out of shape, let me clarify this. I know hamburgers are not new and I have always enjoyed a good one (or cheeseburger for that matter). What I am trying to say is this is the year that I became fully obsessed with all things relating to them. I believe this can mostly be attributed to a little website I’ve mentioned before called A Hamburger Today. My discovery of this internet treasure is directly proportional to how frequently I now consume and dream about the humble hamburger. Mmmm, I could sure go for one of those right now.
(more…)
Tags: A Hamburger Today, artichokes, Brad Long, burgers, carpaccio, cheese, Cowbell, Ed Ho, Eigensinn Farm, Globe Bistro, Grace, kohlrabi, Lists, Mark Cutrara, pork belly, PT Club, Purveyors, saskatoonberries, shortribs, Stephen Treadwell, sunchokes, The Cheese Boutique, tomatoes, Treadwell, Veritas, year end review
Posted in Lists, Purveyors | No Comments »
