Soup Therapy

While spending the holidays with family in Ottawa, I made a huge pot of nice soup. It wasn't really anything fancy but for a group of people who would only need a phone to order takeout in place of a kitchen, homemade soup is something of a treat. Plus I was getting sick of eating shitty food.

As one would expect, I started by caramelizing some onions after which I deglazed the pan with about half a glass of merlot. To this I added carrots, celery, garlic, a red pepper, a de-seeded jalapeno pepper, a can of organic chick peas, two boxes of organic chicken stock, a big can of tomato juice, cayenne pepper, celery seeds, bay leaves, salt and black pepper. Surprisingly the soup was really good. Maybe I was just hungry for good food though.

When we got back home, I replicated the recipe with the addition of salmon, halibut and mackeral. I also changed some of the ingredients such as vegetable stock in place of chicken stock and white wine instead of merlot. The results were different but both were pretty good.

Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA

When I worked at the Pump House brewery this summer, the brewer there was a great connoisseur of beers. He also loved things really hoppy. For those familiar with beer, it would come to no surprise that my brewer friend raved about Dogfish Head's 60 Minute IPA.

Now if you're used to mainstream beers, this would be like drinking liquified dandelion greens. But if you enjoy the taste of beer, as a wine drinker might, this beer is for you. I had to go to Ontario to find it but I was pleasantly surprised when I did find it (they also had the Japanese Asahi beer there).

Yes this beer is very hoppy and thus bitter. But the bitterness doesn't seem to linger. It washes away to leave you with a pleasantly light malty finish. Just remember, our tongues have four different zones: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. So go ahead, excite your palate.

Breakfast Crepe Panini

Chain restaurants are so easily imitated and surpassed it's ridiculous. I know that it's part of the whole marketing brainwash that people run to chain restaurants but I still think it's ridiculous. We were paid a meal at Boston Pizza over the holidays and I'd rather have gone without eating for a week.

At Cora's Breakfast, a breakfast chain that specialises in nice fruit presentations, they've come up with what you see above: ham, eggs and cheese rolled into a crepe and grilled in a panini press. This is ridiculously easy to make. I don't even need to write it out for you.

All I do need to mention though is that you shouldn't make your crepes too sweet. A nice contrast of sweet and salty is good but not too much. Unless you want to pour maple syrup over the whole thing in the tradition of sugar shacks...but don't say I didn't warn you.

The Difference Real Quality Makes

Here in Canada, Maple Leaf have commercials which say "You can taste the difference quality makes." This is the same company who had outbreaks of listeria in their products sometime in 08. So yes I can taste the difference quality makes, but quality is very rarely something I find in brand, mass-produced, space age food products.

I find that good food is making me difficult. You get used to something good, it's hard to go back to the same old crap you used to ingest so thoughtlessly. Take, for example, the pasta dish you see above. Homemade italian sausages which I rolled into meatballs along with homemade pasta both from the market. Now the tomatoes came from a can. That's not the bad part. It's the brand that really messed an otherwise good dish up. The culprit is Hunt's Tomato Sauce. It tasted like overly vinegrated (not sure if that's a word but...) ketchup. Disgusting. Completely ruined everything.

For canned tomatoes, I usually buy Eden Organic from my local natural food stores (http://www.edenfoods.com/). They have quality products that aren't only environmentally sound but also delicious.

So there is a difference between real quality and marketed quality. As far as food goes, always judge it by its cover. Because if it's all flash, beautiful packaging but the ingredients read like something out of a chemistry set, you will certainly taste the difference fake food makes.

Here's to real food!

Goat Sausage

I love breakfast. You might have noticed. I also love these lovely people from Au Fond des Bois who make some really lovely homemade goat cheeses. Recently, their son went to train to butcher goats and is now selling the meat every Saturday at the Dieppe Farmers Market. This week he had sausage!

The taste of goat is unique since it's slightly dry, does resemble lamb somewhat but is milder. Regardless of taste though, it's unique and made by some really nice people. People who will travel over 100 kms through a snowstorm to make sure that market regulars will have their weekly cheese fix. My hats off to them and to all of the dedicated merchants who let me fill my fridge with delicious and natural food every week.

Proper Roast Beef

Growing up, roast beef was some dry crusty grey meat that wasn't even edible even when drenched in gravy. But beef is beef. A roast is no different than a steak. And I don't remember my father eating his beef well well done so I don't know why he treated his roasts that way. Oh well, I know better now.

The inspiration for this traditional meal came from two places: 1) my discovery of an organic beef farmer at the Dieppe Farmer's market who raises his cattle in pastures where they are free to graze and live a chemical free life, and 2) yet another recipe in Jamie Oliver's infinitely useful cookbook, Cook with Jamie. I also took out a meat thermometre, something I don't even think my father knows exists.

Mr. Oliver's recipe calls for roasted beets alongside the beef but seeing as we're past the season of variety at my local farmers markets I made due with root vegetables. I chopped up some ruttabegga, small potatoes, organic carrots (that actually taste like carrots) and the sweetest little onions you've ever tasted. I pressed some of the onions and garlic into the beef, topped these with a handful of thyme sprigs, wrapped the whole thing in bacon, and then slathered it with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Propping my beef contraption on some carrots - for a roast mustn't boil - I cooked the whole thing, excluding vegetables, for an hour in a 400 degree oven. I then added the vegetables and cooked the whole thing for another hour, making sure to baste the whole thing from time to time. I also stuck the meat thermometre in at this point. I wanted my meat medium well. Not dry.

Once the meat was cooked, I put it in a bowl, covered it in aluminum foil and let it rest for 20 minutes. In the meantime, I drained the juice from the pan, reduced it and kept roasting the vegetables.

Thin slices of beef with sweet roasted vegetables (the onions were the best since I only peeled them and left them whole) and all deliciously swimming in reduced jus. Very good, very well cooked and very different from what my childhood memories.

My girlfriend even said that this was one of the best things I've ever made. Now that's an accomplishment!

Sausage, Egg and Hollandaise Breakfast Pizza

There's this local chain that we went to recently that really surprised me. I'm not used to being pleasantly surprised by chains. They tend to be bland, umimaginative, poor service, overpriced money pits of consumerism. Now Mikes Restaurants is not an exception. We waited far too long in line before the understaffed staff finally sat us down at a table that had been empty since we'd walked in. But that was the end of our troubles. Our server was great.

All my friends encouraged me to take a breakfast pizza. And, like I said, I was really surprised. The idea of putting everything you would find in a breakfast on a pizza, douse it with hollandaise sauce and melted cheese and place it alongside a bit of fruit and some homefries is simply genius. So being the person who I am, I decided that I would make my own. I'd even make it better. Truth be told, chains aren't very difficult to beat.

First I prepared my pizza dough from scratch...more on that in a later post. I then prepared hollandaise sauce which, it turns out, is egg yolks, butter and lemon juice. Really fattening but oh so delicious. As far as toppings go, I sautéed some mushrooms, onions and sausage after which I scrambled some eggs. Everything went on the semi-baked pizza crust, topped with the sauce, sprinkled with cheese and enjoyed with a tall cup of coffee.

Was it better than what they had at the chain restaurant? Of course. And the victory was as easy as I'd predicted.