The Noble Spud

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Like most international school teachers, I have the pleasure of a variety of nationalities and cultures in my class each year.  This year I have a mix of American, Indonesian, Korean, British, Filipino, Australian, Norwegian, and even one wee boy from the Emerald Isle.  Well, on the Friday before St. Patrick’s Day, my one Irish student arrived with his mother early this morning with buttons, ribbons, cards, and even washable green tattoos for everyone in the class.  My room mother, Sheila had just delivered some melt in your mouth shamrock cookies so we were set to celebrate St. Patrick and all the lore that goes with him and his big day.  The kids were delighted as we topped the afternoon off with a hunt for gold (chocolate) coins and a reading of my favorite leprechaun story, Jaime O’Rourke and the Big Potato by the wonderful American children’s author, Tomie de Paola.

This dramatic yarn honoring the noble spud and a clever leprechaun, got me thinking about how I grew up eating potatoes everyday of my life.  When I tell my students in Asia about my daily diet as a first grader, they often gasp and exclaim “’But your mom made rice everyday too?!” or “Why would you mother do that to you?”.  Indeed rice is the carb of the world’s population, but I could love a potato in any form.  My great-grandmother, Maggie Moore mashed them up everyday for her brood and this culinary habit follows through my family in Eastern Canada everyday to this day.

So this week, we thought we would share Andrew’s perfect scalloped potato recipe.  These creamy praties are heaven with any roast dinner but especially recommended with a ham and a mustard pickle in the Easter season.  Slice them up on a Sunday when you have time at home to let them cook a good while in the oven while you read, watch a little TV, or visit with a friend.

Roasted Garlic and Rosemary Scalloped Potatoes

The essence of scalloped potatoes is thinly sliced potatoes cooked in milk in a shallow pan placed in the oven.  Beyond this lie an infinite number of variations.  Many people like to make a béchamel sauce with the milk first, often adding cheese.  Bacon is a common addition, and cream can take the place of some or all of the milk.  My standard technique, which I assume I must have learned from my mother, is to layer my sliced potatoes in a casserole dish, adding thinly sliced onions, chunks of butter, a sprinkle of flour, and salt and pepper to each layer.  I then add hot milk, cover the casserole with foil, and cook the potatoes for an hour to an hour and a half, depending on how high I have stacked them.  As the potatoes cook they absorb some of the milk, and the butter and flour combine to form a sort of roux, thickening the milk that remains and turning it into a delicious, onion flavored sauce.  Simplicity itself, and delicious.

If you want potatoes with a little more panache this Easter, however, try the following recipe.  I have added a couple of steps that increase the preparation time a bit, (not to mention the calorie count) but the results, I think, are worth it.

For the potatoes:

¼ cup extra virgin olive oil

12 to 15 peeled garlic cloves

3 or 4 stalks of rosemary

1 cup heavy cream

3 T butter

1 large onion, thinly sliced

4 lbs. potatoes, peeled

3 cups milk

4 T flour

Pre-heat the oven to 375 °F

Put the olive oil and the garlic in a small, heavy bottomed pot, on very low heat.  Stir the garlic every now and then, and cook until it is golden brown and very soft.  This is not roasting, of course, but the flavor is essentially the same.  Add the rosemary and cook for a few minutes more.  Then add the cream and continue to cook on low heat for another ten minutes or so, to infuse the cream with the flavors of the garlic and the rosemary.  Add the milk and bring the mixture to a simmer, but do not let it boil.  Strain the mixture into a clean pot.

In another small pot melt the butter over low heat and add the onions and a little salt.  Cover the pot and cook the onions until they are very soft, and just starting to brown.  Remove from the heat.

Butter a casserole dish or lasagna pan.  Choose something fairly large; you want to be able to make three layers of potato, but if the layers are too thick it will take forever for the potatoes to cook through.  Slice the potatoes in half lengthways, then slice across.  Put a third of the potatoes in the casserole, add half of the onions, half the flour, and a good sprinkle of salt and pepper.  Repeat, and finish off with a layer of potato.  Add the milk and cream mixture, cover the casserole with foil, and place it in the oven.  Cook for an hour, or until the potatoes are soft when you poke them with a knife, then remove the foil and turn on the broiler for a minute or two to brown the top.  Let the potatoes rest for ten minutes or so before serving.  They will still be nice and hot, but the sauce will have thickened up a bit, making it easier to serve.

March: All about good things to come

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March has arrived and with it the promise for all parents and teachers of a spring or Easter break!  We have survived any February blues that may have clouded around us and now  face the new month with thoughts of green beer, better weather, and flight bookings.  Here in Manila, the weather remains beautiful but we thought we would wake up the new month by hosting some friends for a Sunday breakfast!   We served an old standby that Andrew used to cook when he was on breakfast duty at the Inn at Bay Fortune.  The inn only served breakfast to the guests who stayed the night and these early morning delights were the envy of the island.

So invite some friends and celebrate winter wherever you are with some hot biscuits and holiday planning!

One thing serious cooks do not like is when they carefully plan and prepare a five or six course meal and someone shows up at the door with food they were not asked to bring, expecting it to become part of the meal.  They do not like that at all.  Ok, I do not like that at all; there are probably lots of relaxed, devil may care cooks out there who just take it in stride.  But just to be safe, the next time you are invited for dinner and asked to bring wine, bring wine.  And leave the haggis at home.

That’s right; someone once brought me a surprise haggis.  It was a dinner for my parents and a few of their friends, a birthday present sort of thing for my mother, as I recall.   I can’t remember what I was cooking, but I do know that the theme of the meal was not hideous Scottish peasant food, and so I had to do a bit of improvising. Haggis is a sheep’s stomach stuffed with its heart, liver, and lungs, the latter three ingredients chopped up with oatmeal, onions, some spices, and a good bit of suet (rendered beef fat).  It sounds a lot better than it looks.  But it tastes pretty good.  Essentially, it is a big, fat, ugly sausage, and so that’s how I treated it, like a sausage.  I took the stuffing out of the casing, jammed it into a ring mold to make nice round patties, fried the patties in a little butter, sliced up some apples and fried them in butter too (when in doubt, fry it in butter—you’ll never go wrong) and then layered a couple of patties on each plate with some artfully arranged apples and a drizzle of pan juices and voila—I had a plate I could serve.  Everyone was very impressed.  Not because of the subtle marriage of flavors between the haggis and the fried apples.  They were impressed because I had taken a misshapen lump of oatmeal and sheep organs and made it round.

What does this have to do with serving brunch?  People like things that are round.  Or square.  Perhaps the simplest tool a professional chef has that most amateurs don’t is a set of molds.  With a mold you can take any semi-solid food—mashed potatoes, squash, pureed carrots, haggis, or fruit salad—and make it look better.  The other thing people like are drizzles.  The best way to drizzle is to use a squirt bottle (the second simplest tool a professional chef has) but a spoon works.  What I did on Sunday to serve the fruit salad was to chop the fruit a little smaller than I would if I were simply going to put it in a bowl, then put the chopped fruit in a strainer over a bowl for a minute or two to drain off excess juice.  Then, because I was using a square plate, I used a square mold, packing the salad in pretty firmly to get it to hold its shape when I pulled the mold away.  For drizzles, I used some strawberry puree we had in the freezer (jam diluted with a little water would work too), a little bit of yoghurt, and some maple syrup.  I didn’t want to go to the bother of filling three squirt bottles for four plates, so I used a spoon.

Chive Biscuits with Cheddar Sauce, Scrambled Eggs, and Bacon

For the cheese sauce:

2 T butter

4 T all purpose flour

4 cups milk

½ small onion, peeled

1 whole clove

1 small bay leaf

salt

nutmeg

white pepper

8 ounces cheddar cheese

½ teaspoon dry mustard

2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

Start by making a Béchamel sauce.  Melt the butter in a medium size saucepan and whisk in the flour.  Stir and cook over low heat for about a minute. Gradually add milk to the roux (flour and butter mixture) beating constantly with whisk.  Add very little milk at first, and then add successively larger amounts. Bring the sauce to a boil, stirring constantly.  Reduce the heat to a simmer.  Stick the bay leaf to the onion with the clove.  Place the onion in the sauce.  Simmer for ten to fifteen minutes, stirring occasionally.  Season very lightly with salt, nutmeg and white pepper.  Strain the sauce, and add the cheddar cheese, dry mustard (or a little bit of prepared mustard) and Worcestershire sauce.  Whisk over low heat until the cheese is melted and sauce is smooth.

For the biscuits:

Preheat the oven to 375 °F

2 cups all purpose flour

3 t baking powder

1 t salt

1/2 cup chopped chives, or the green part of a handful of green onions

6 T butter

2/3  to 3/4 cups milk

Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt together, or mix them together with a whisk.  Cut the butter up into small chunks and incorporate it quickly into the flour.  I like to use my fingers, but you can use two knives, two forks, or a pastry cutter.  Don’t make the butter chunks too small though, and don’t let the butter melt.  Add the chopped chives or onions and mix well, then add the milk and stir; you want the dough to stick together easily, but not be too wet.  Put the dough onto a floured surface, sprinkle a little more flour on top, and roll to dough out until it is about an inch and a half thick.  Use a small biscuit cutter, about two inches across, to cut out 12 biscuits.  If you don’t have a biscuit cutter, use a small drinking glass, or a tin can.  Push the scraps together and cut out extra biscuits, repeating until all the dough has been used.  These extra biscuits will not rise as evenly, but they will still taste delicious.  Bake the biscuits for 8 to 10 minutes, or until they are golden brown.

For the bacon:

12 slices bacon

Preheat the oven to 375 °F

Fold the bacon into thirds to make small squares.  Place the bacon squares on a baking sheet and place the sheet in the preheated oven.  Keep a close eye on the bacon; it won’t take long.  Flip it over when it starts to crisp up on the top, and cook it until it is just short of being completely cooked.  Remove it from the oven and let it cool on a rack.

For the eggs:

12 eggs

Break the eggs into a bowl.  Mix thoroughly with a fork.  You can add a little milk or a little cream, but I like to leave them plain.  Cook the eggs in a non-stick frying pan in a little butter over low heat, stirring every now and then with a wooden spoon or plastic spatula.  Cooking the eggs this way will give you nice soft eggs with large clumps of egg.  When the eggs are about half cooked, stick the pan in the oven to finish them off; if the handle of the pan isn’t oven proof you can wrap it in aluminum foil, or just leave the handle sticking out of the oven.   This will set up the eggs so that you can cut them into solid chunks, which will make assembling the egg and biscuit towers easier.

To assemble:

Just before the biscuits come out of the oven, start cooking your eggs.  Reheat the bacon and the cheese sauce.  Split the hot biscuits in half with a fork, place two biscuits on each plate, and put a spoonful of scrambled eggs on the bottom half of each biscuit.

 

 

Pour some cheese sauce over the eggs, add a bacon square, and finish with the biscuit top.  Garnish with chive oil.

Side dishes – Mix up your menu!

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February blahs.  I remember the feeling, when I lived in snowy climes, of waking on a chilly morning and knowing there was snow to shovel and windshields to scrape. In Japan, a country with lots of snow and cold and no central heat, the dread was all about getting up and lighting those heaters!

As February comes to a close, many of us are already a little fed up with the winter and our usual dinner menus.  While we are living in a tropical location this year, we still experience that after-the-holidays desire to spend less and eat a little better.  While we always eat well, we do make a comittment to healthier eating in the months following December to be sure to stay fit and (hopefully) fabulous as we get older.  We are big fans of the tried and true Weight Watchers program because it’s all about eating the things you love (in moderation) and developing positive life long habits.  We just can’t go in for those wacky diet plans that dictate pounds of cheese per day but no carbs or lashings of bacon but no cheese.  Or worst of all, food processed and delivered to your home!

So to spruce up our side dishes at a time when we are keeping track of our intake, Andrew came up with three super salads to go with any kind of meat or fish.  We paired this trio with pulled pork and grilled chicken last weekend (one of our guests opted for a veggie burger) and all were happy diners.  And when I say salad, yes, I mean a satisfying potato salad and a zesty, crunchy brown rice combo, all finished off with an almost zero-fat coleslaw.  We just can’t sacrifice taste for calorie counting, especially when it comes to entertaining friends around our table!

Cranberry Coleslaw

You can’t have pulled pork without coleslaw.  I also felt like making some potato salad too, though, and since one mayonnaise based salad would be tricky enough to fit into the Weight Watchers program it was clear that I would have to go with an oil and vinegar style dressing on the slaw.  I looked at a few recipes online and they all had very high amounts of oil, up to three quarters of a cup, far more than I was interested in using.  I decided to use sugar to balance the acidity of the vinegar and cut way back on the oil. My mother always put raisins and chunks of apple in her coleslaw; I wasn’t crazy about the apples we had picked up at the grocery store, and we didn’t have any raisins, but I did find a bag of dried cranberries lurking in the cupboard.  That led me to the bottle of maple syrup one of our guests had brought back from upstate New York at Christmas; I love the combination of cranberries and maple syrup.  The cranberries were pretty dry, so I plumped them up by gently warming them in about a quarter of a cup of cider vinegar with a good glug of maple syrup thrown in.  For the slaw itself I just sliced up a head of cabbage very finely, grated three medium carrots on the big holes of the box grater, and grated half a medium onion on the second smallest holes.  I drizzled a little extra virgin olive oil on the vegetables, added salt and pepper, poured on the cooled vinegar and cranberries, and tossed everything thoroughly.  It was delicious.  Next time, though, I probably would use sugar to sweeten the dressing rather than maple syrup; the maple flavor was good, but pretty subtle, and with something as valuable as maple syrup I want to save it for maximum impact.

Garlic Potato Salad

I love potato salad, but it takes a lot of mayonnaise, and even with light mayonnaise, one of the few fat reduced products I’ll allow in my kitchen, the points add up pretty quickly.  I had a 500 ml container of plain yoghurt in the fridge, though, and so I decided to use that to cut down on the fat grams.  The night before the party I dumped the yoghurt into a strainer lined with a dishtowel, put the strainer over a bowl, and put the whole contraption in the fridge.  The next day I had about 250 ml of yoghurt, with a consistency similar to ricotta cheese.  This is a great trick when you want to use yoghurt as the base of a dip, too, and if you don’t want the texture to be that dry simply strain it for an hour or two instead of overnight.  I decided I wanted some garlic flavor in my salad, and so I chucked eight or nine cloves of peeled garlic into a small, heavy bottomed pot and added a couple of tablespoons of olive oil.  I put this on my smallest burner, and turned the heat down as low as it would go; cooking garlic this way gives you pretty much the same flavor as roasted garlic, and is a handy technique when you don’t have the oven on.  When the garlic was completely softened and beginning to brown I took it off the heat, let it cool, and then strained the oil into my thickened yoghurt. (I saved the cloves to add to my barbeque sauce.) I then added about a quarter of a cup of reduced fat mayonnaise, salt and pepper, and stirred it together.  The potato salad itself was pretty simple; I just cut up a couple of pounds of potatoes I had cooked the night before, added a couple of stalks of finely chopped celery, and a dozen or so finely sliced green onions.  I mixed that together with my dressing and garnished the top with a sprinkle of paprika and some hard boiled eggs cut into quarters, just like my mother in law taught me.

Brown Rice Salad with Grilled Vegetables

Since we started following Weight Watchers Julie and I have been eating a lot of brown rice; we find it much more filling than white rice, and very flavorful.  Another benefit is that leftover rice makes a great salad.  I like to combine it with grilled vegetables, as they complement the nutty flavor of the rice.  Corn is in season right now in the Philippines, so I grilled a couple of ears on the barbeque before I put my pork on to smoke.  Some people grill corn with the husk still on, but with all the silk removed.  To me that defeats the purpose, which is to caramelize the corn and get it nice and charred, so I just husk my corn and throw it on naked.  I also put a couple of red peppers on the grill, and some slices of onion.  When the vegetables were done I sliced the kernels off the corncobs with the tip of my chef’s knife, peeled the charred skin off the peppers and chopped them up, and diced the onion.  I didn’t have any leftover rice in the fridge, so I had to cook some.  Normally we cook rice in our rice cooker, which is simplicity itself.  The rice, however, is a bit sticky for use in a salad fresh out of the cooker and so I used another method—free boiling.  This is when you cook rice like pasta, by throwing it in a big pot of boiling water and draining it when it is done.  It is not a common technique, but it is virtually foolproof, and it results in firm grains of rice that don’t stick together.  I used about two cups of raw rice, which made enough rice salad “to feed the Chinese army,” as my father used to say.  When it was cooked I drained it, and poured it into a lasagna pan to speed up the cooling, drizzled some olive oil over it, tossed it with a fork to separate the grains, and then added the chopped vegetables and tossed it again.  I seasoned it with salt, pepper, and a little white wine vinegar.   Done.  Delicious.

True Love Dining- Try at home this year!

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As believers in true love, we do like to celebrate our chance meeting in the Seahorse Tavern in 1987 and all that has come after, each February 14th.  This time last year, we were living in Shanghai and had an incredible array of food and restaurants available to us to step out and celebrate.  This year, we find ourselves in Manila, still finding our way around the food scene and restaurant community.  While we do love to try new food and experience new menus, we have to admit that we often end up at home on Valentine’s Day while many couples venture out to fill the restaurants to capacity on the biggest fine dining night of the year.

Being married to a chef who feels that Feb.14 could be one of the worst nights to book a table in a beautiful eatery, we usually opt for a dinner party or a romantic evening at home with just the two of us.

Two happily married Valentine guests toast true love at our dinner party, Shanghai, 2009

I could ramble on about all the February dinner parties we’ve had over the years with couples who arrived bleary-eyed from adjusting to a new baby, or couples who we admired for their longevity and fun, or those couples who rolled up our rugs and danced between courses. (And even one couple who over-imbibed and made the uncomfortable announcement of an affair that had recently been brought to light in their marriage. Not invited back, sorry to say).

While we did escape the compound to spend the pre-Valentine weekend at a lovely coastal hotel, which seemed to hang off the side of a cliff here in Anilao, Philippines, we limited our dining to sunset cocktails and rich pate and brie on a baguette in our room.

Sunset at Anilao, Batangas, Philippines

This Feb. 14th, we decided that instead of dining out, we will be at home enjoying the culinary bliss of a traditional romantic menu.  Yes, I think the French had a great idea with the combination of a superior cut of beef ($9.00 for two servings)and the old stand-by, Bearnaise.  You can transform a nice cut of beef into a sublime experience when topped with this decadent butter sauce!  Add a little heart-shaped side dish and some delicate asparagus or lightly dressed greens and you’ll have a meal that would cost you a lot in a restaurant.  Don’t forget that at-home dining with Bearnaise gives you the option to clean every drop of sauce off of your plate in what could be considered an unbecoming manner in a public dining room.  Don’t forget to have a little chocolate and some bubbly to round out the romance!

Roasted Beef Tenderloin with Béarnaise Sauce

There is no “could be” about it.  Valentine’s Day is amateur night.  Regular restaurants are full of people who usually use the drive through, and the better places are full of people used to flipping through giant plastic pages before ordering.  It’s not their fault, however; the people who make February 14 the worst possible night to eat out are the owners and managers who insist on trying to jam as many patrons into their restaurants as possible, overloading their kitchens, stressing out their wait staff, and stacking the deck against an enjoyable evening.

So here’s an easy recipe you can cook at home.  Living overseas, we have gotten into the habit of eating less beef than we would in Canada, largely because of the high cost of imported Australian or US beef and the unpredictability of local products.  When we do go for something in the steak line, I try to find locally raised beef tenderloin, which is generally less than half the price of imported tenderloin, but just as tender.  The thing about beef tenderloin is that it isn’t the most flavorful cut of beef, no matter what country it comes from, and it can pretty much always be counted on to be tender.

The two classic preparations for beef tenderloin are Chateaubriand and Filet Mignon.  The first refers to the roasted “head” of the tenderloin, the thickest part, which, in restaurants, is usually only available for two or more diners, and the second refers to slices of the thinner parts of the tenderloin pan fried as individual steaks.  I like both preparations, but roasting has the advantage of requiring less last minute attention, and it is much easier to achieve the desired degree of doneness.

There are five essential steps to roasting meat that will ensure the best possible flavor, and the least loss of moisture.  These principles also apply to cooking meat on a grill.

1. Start with meat that is at room temperature.  Simply take the meat out of the fridge well ahead of time, or, if it is well wrapped, place it in a large bowl of warm water.

You don’t necessarily have to buy the very thickest part of the tenderloin to successfully roast it, but don’t take the very thin piece at the end.  It will be the most expensive cut of meat available, but since there is no fat or bone, a little goes a long way.  (The piece of beef in the illustrations is roughly ten ounces, a healthy five per person.) You may have to trim off the silverskin though, a band of tough white tendon running parallel to the grain of the meat; just slide a knife into the tendon, poke it through, and gently slice it away from the meat.  Turn your knife around and slice the other way.  Repeat this several times to remove the whole tendon.

2. Season the meat with salt and pepper just before searing.

If you put the salt on any earlier it will draw moisture out of the meat, and make it difficult to achieve a good sear.

3. Sear the outside of the meat at as high a temperature as possible, as quickly as possible.

Many cookbooks tell you that the point of this step is to “seal in the juices,” but as food scientist Harold McGee demonstrates in his fascinating book on the science of cooking, Food and Cooking, this is nonsense.  You can’t seal in juices.  This is still a critical step, however; the point is to caramelize the sugars on the outside of the meat, and thereby to create flavor.  The reason you want to do it at a high heat, and as quickly as possible, is so that the outside of the piece of meat does not overcook and dry out before the inside is done.  Heat up a little oil in a small frying pan, and when it is good and hot add the tenderloin.  Let it sizzle for a minute or two, and then turn it and cook the opposite side.  You want a nice, dark crust on the outside, and you want to sear all sides, so when you have turned it over a few times lengthways, turn it sideways and sear the ends as well.  When it is done, take it out of the frying pan with a pair of tongs and place it on a wire rack set inside a shallow roasting pan. This part can be done ahead of time, and in fact it is a good idea to let the meat cool down a bit before putting it in the oven.

4. Roast the meat at a low temperature.  No more than 350° F.

Low temperatures equal less moisture loss.  About fifteen minutes before you want to eat, put the beef in a preheated oven, 325 to 350° F.  If you have a lot of experience cooking meat, you can test the doneness by poking it with your finger; an easier way is to use an instant read thermometer.  Cook to 130-35° F for rare, 135-40° F for medium rare, and 140-45° F for medium.  If you want to cook it any longer that that, you’ve wasted your money; get yourself some ground chuck instead and make a nice Salisbury steak.

5. When the meat is done, let it rest on a wire rack for five or ten minutes before slicing it.

Pretty much any decent cookbook will tell you to rest the meat.  The real secret, though, is the wire rack.  If you a piece of meat out of the oven, off the grill, or out of a frying pan and put it on a plate, its own weight will push a lot of the juices out before the resting has done its job. (Resting the meat provides time for the internal temperature to even out, so that juices that have been driven to the outer edges can return to the center.)  Placing it on wire rack, on the other hand, means that there are only a few pressure points, and thus only a few places for juice to leak out.  I learned this tip at the Inn at Bay Fortune, working for Chef Michael Smith, and it is incredible what a difference it makes.

                

While the meat is resting, prepare your side dishes (French fries go really well with Béarnaise, but mashed potatoes are much easier because you can cook them ahead of time and heat them up in the microwave. When the meat has rested, slice it into four pieces, arrange two pieces per plate, one from the outside and one from the inside, and drizzle the Béarnaise sauce around the edges of the meat.

For the Béarnaise Sauce

Most cookbook recipes for Béarnaise make about a cup and a half of sauce, enough for two people if each person weighs four hundred pounds.  Or would like to.  For a romantic dinner then, you want to reduce this to half a cup, tops.

1 t chopped shallots, or 1 t chopped onion with just a smidge of chopped garlic

2 t coarsely chopped fresh tarragon, stems included

1 T white wine vinegar

2 T water

1 egg yolk

4 oz butter, melted

1 t finely chopped fresh tarragon leaves, no stems

Shallots are hard to come by in Asia, so when I can’t find them I just substitute onion and garlic, but you could also just use onion.  Don’t worry too much about these amounts, as you are going to strain the shallots or onions out anyway.

Most recipes call for white wine along with the vinegar and water, but to make such a small amount it is much easier to skip the wine, and it won’t affect the flavor significantly.  Put the shallots, water, and vinegar in a small pot over medium heat and reduce the liquid to half the volume.  Strain the liquid into a small metal bowl, and add the egg yolk to the bowl.  Heat some water in a small pot; you need to be able to sit the metal bowl on top, to make a little double boiler.  Take a larger bowl and fill it half full with ice water.  When the water in the pot comes to a boil, turn the heat off and place the small bowl with the egg yolk on top.  Whisk the egg and vinegar mixture together; it should quickly start to thicken and foam, at which point whisk in the butter in a slow stream.  When the butter is incorporated and the sauce has thickened, remove the bowl from the pot and place it in the bowl of ice water to stop the egg from over cooking and curdling, whisking all the time.  Add the finely chopped tarragon leaves, taste, and adjust for salt.  If the sauce thickens too much, thin it by whisking in a tablespoon of warm water.

Welcome 2012: Cool dragons and hot soup…

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Well, it’s January. The tree has long since been taken down and the lovely lights along the street are no longer twinkling in the dusk as I ride my bicycle home from school.  December and all its parties and feasts has come and gone bringing us to the festivities of the lunar New Year.  This is the auspicious year of the dragon, a great year to have a baby ( as compared to say, the year of the sheep) or be a dragon.  As your average Canadian family, it may seem surprising that we just couldn’t resist getting out in our new city of Manila to experience the celebrations in China Town.  But after a total of nine years in China and many lunar New Year holidays, it would be plain strange to let the ringing in of the New Year arrive without some kind of celebration. So off we went to Ongpin St in Manila.  We found a lively Chinese community with all of the  traditions well entrenched in this otherwise devote Christian country.

 

As we enjoy hot and sweet pork-filed buns on the equally warm streets of Manila,  many of our friends back home in Canada and the U.S. are busy keeping warm and shoveling snow. Noting a friend’s warning/post on Facebook the other day about the parking ban in our home city, I thought about waking up to the everything being blanketed in snow. A dreamy time of year and a great time to cuddle up by the fire keeping warm with hot treats. January is a great month to comfort ourselves with steamy, delicious soup!  I love the pumpkin-squash soup that Andrew makes and thought this would be a great time to share it with you.  It’s a mouth watering comfort at the end of a cold day or a delightful dinner party course when served ‘cappuccino style’. As a bonus, it’s a healthy soup for all of us watching our calories in the post-holiday months.   I’ll let Andrew fill you in.

Roasted Carrot and Squash Soup

The great thing about this soup is its flexibility.  It takes a little longer to make than most, but the results are worth it; an intense, rich soup that tastes decadent but is actually extremely healthy.  There are two essential techniques involved in this recipe:  the first is roasting the vegetables, and the second is making a broth from these vegetables to use as the base of the soup.  As long as you use these two techniques, this recipe is going to work.  Don’t worry about precise amounts or measurements, and don’t worry about having all the right spices.  Use the ones in the recipe below, or come up with your own ideas. You can make the soup just with carrots, or just with squash.  The recipe below calls for turkey stock, which gives the fullest flavor, but chicken stock will obviously work too, and I originally came up with this recipe when our friends Hanna, Mark, and Ellen, vegetarians all, were regular dinner guests, and plain water works just fine.  You can serve it in a small cup with frothed, cardamom-infused milk on top and call it Pumpkin Carrot Cappuccino, or you can serve it just as it is, or with a swirl of cream or coconut milk added at the last second.

The recipe below is based on the amount of vegetables I can roast in my tiny oven here in Manila; if you are have a regular sized oven you can make a bigger batch.

For the soup:

1 kilo carrots, peeled (or just scrubbed, if they are organic)

1 kilo butternut or other squash, skin removed

2 heads garlic

1 piece of ginger, approximately the size of your thumb

2 litres turkey stock, chicken stock, or water

1 bay leaf

½ cinnamon stick

2 whole cloves

2 medium onions

Extra virgin olive oil, for roasting the vegetables

Vegetable oil, for caramelizing the onions

Pre-heat the oven to 350°F

The key to roasting the vegetables is to have pieces that are roughly the same size, so that they all take the same amount of time to cook.  The best way to deal with the carrots is to cut them in half crossways, and then to slice the smaller half into four wedges and the thicker half into six or eight wedges.  Try to cut the squash into chunks that are roughly the same size as the carrots, but don’t worry too much about it, as you are going to roast them in separate pans.  I usually cut the squash into crescent shaped wedges, and then chop each wedge into three or four pieces.

When the vegetables are cut, put them into two shallow roasting pans, one for each vegetable, pour a couple of tablespoons of olive oil into each pan, and mix them around until the vegetables are evenly coated with oil. The perfect sized pan will just accommodate the vegetables in one layer, but don’t worry if you have to pile them up a little bit, or if they seem a little lonely; just keep an eye on them while they roast and be prepared to adjust the cooking time.  Don’t try to jam much more than one layer of vegetables into a pan, however, or they will steam rather than roast, and you will lose the caramelization that provides the depth of flavor that is essential to the success of this soup.

Roast the vegetables for 45 minutes to an hour or longer, depending on the size of your pans and the size of the vegetables.  Turn the vegetables every 15 minutes or so to ensure even cooking.  The squash may stick a little at first, but just do your best to lift the chunks off with a spatula.  The carrots are done when they have shrunk to roughly half their original size and are starting to blacken around the edges.  The squash won’t shrink as much, but it should be golden brown and tender when you poke it with a fork.

 

 

 

Separate the garlic into cloves. Slice the ginger into eight or ten chunks.

Reserve approximately ¼ of the roasted vegetables and put the rest in a pot along with the stock or water, the garlic, the ginger, the bay leaf, the cinnamon, and the cloves.  Bring to the boil, skim off any foam that appears, and simmer for two or three hours.  If you want to make sure you have extracted the maximum flavor from the vegetables, taste a piece of carrot; if it is bland and flavorless, there is no point in cooking the broth any further.  Pour the broth through a fine mesh sieve and discard the solids.

While the broth is simmering, caramelize the cut the onions into a medium dice, heat a little vegetable oil in a medium frying pan, and add the onions to the hot pan.  Resist the urge to stir the onions for a minute or two; wait until you see them starting to brown around the edges, then give them a stir, turn down the heat, put on the lid, and let them sweat until they are softened, approximately 10 minutes.  Remove from the heat.

Put half of the reserved roasted vegetables, half of the caramelized onions, and half of the broth in a blender and blend on high speed until it is smooth.  Blend the other half of the soup, mix the two together, and adjust the seasoning.  If the soup is too thick, thin with a little more stock or water.  If it is too thin, put it on the heat and reduce it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Christmas Dinner Party

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Christmas in a new overseas location is always a little unpredictable.  By unpredictable, I mean that you’re never quite sure how many families will be here on the compound celebrating or how you might pass those festive days in the December twenties when you know everyone at home has a calendar full of the usual warm gatherings and parties that fill their happily frantic days leading up to the 25th.  This year, as the final half-day of school came to a close and I collected up all the teacher cards, cookies, and gifts, I realized there was no rush.  We had decided to stay in Manila this Christmas and welcome our daughter (away at university) to our new home.  So as we waved goodbye to many of our colleagues setting out excitedly for their homes or other beautiful destinations, we knew it would be a time to relax.  This year, we would wait for our daughter to finish her exams on the other side of the world, leave the snow behind and have turkey in the tropical heat and a much needed island holiday. So last Friday Andrew and I met in our living room for a celebratory drink to organize the menu list and table settings for our annual Christmas dinner party.  The following evening, we shared numerous courses by the tree with the air con reminding us that a white Christmas was definitely not in the cards.  Nine friends shared in our festive menu with some staying until almost midnight to talk over the school year and all that comes with adjusting to a new job and home, sight unseen.  Indeed, it was a time to reflect and feel fortunate as our guests hugged us and said goodbye leaving to pack for places like New Zealand, Boston, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore.

Silly Christmas place cards for the guests.

Have a look at the merry menu, hand delivered to our guests days earlier by Alasdair and our golden retriever, Tux:

A Christmas Dinner

 Blinis, Eggplant Caviar, Roasted Peppers

 Smoked Salmon Shortcake

 Pumpkin Carrot Cappuccino

 Mixed Greens, Crispy Pancetta, Smoked Mushroom Pâté

 Beef, Béarnaise, Pomme Frites, Green Beans

 White Chocolate Bread Pudding

 We loved this festive menu and wanted to share two of the courses with you.  The first is Andrew’s white chocolate bread pudding.  It’s a perfect holiday dessert made complete with a sauce for sopping up the chocolate-coated bread.  Just eating it made our guests feel like they were dining in luxury in an elegant restaurant (though some were dining at a  card table we added to accommodate all 11 diners).  The other recipe that needs to be featured is  the Smoked Salmon Shortcake. It’s one of those dishes that shines as combination bite course.  You’ll love the sublime flavors of cream, hot biscuit, salty salmon, and sweet lemon-onion marmalade all together in every bite.  The pudding recipe is below with the shortcake recipe and pics to follow as soon as Andrew finishes making a pie to replace the brownies that were heartily consumed by the dog this afternoon.  The brownies were promised to a late night Christmas Eve party just down the street so the pie has taken priority tonight.  Merry Christmas!

This week’s recipe(s):

White Chocolate Bread Pudding

My first real job as a professional chef (I cooked pizza at a chain restaurant in college) was at an inn outside Kyoto, Japan, where the room rate included a buffet breakfast and dinner, eight dishes each time. I didn’t have any formal training, and neither did TJ, the twenty something Vietnamese American macrobiotic chain smoking artist I shared the cooking duties with, and so we read a lot of cookbooks and back issues of Gourmet magazine.  One of our go-to books was The New Basics Cookbook by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins; six years later, several restaurants later and back in Canada, it was one of the most stained and battered of the dozens of cookbooks I had collected, a sure sign of quality cookbook writing.  Asked to create a special dessert for a small fundraising event, I found myself flipping through its pages for inspiration and came across the recipe for “Anne Rosenzweig’s Chocolate Bread Pudding with Brandy Custard Sauce”.  I had already decided I wanted cranberries in the dessert (it was a December event) so I switched the dark chocolate for white, used cubes of bread rather than slices so that I could cook it in ramekins, and added a cranberry-maple syrup sauce.

The dessert was a big hit, and has been a staple of our winter dinner parties ever since.  Obtaining fresh cranberries overseas, however, is impossible, and frozen nearly so, so I now make it with either raspberries (usually frozen, sometimes fresh), or dried cranberries plumped up with some kind of alcohol (usually rum).

For the bread pudding:

1 loaf of good quality white bread, unsliced

½ pound butter

8 oz. white chocolate

3 cups heavy cream

1 cup milk

1 cup sugar

12 egg yolks

1 t vanilla extract

pinch of salt

2 cups fresh or frozen raspberries

OR

1 cup dried cranberries and ½ cup rum (preferably dark or light, but white will do)

Pre-heat the oven to 400° F

Using a sharp chef’s knife, slice the crust off the bread.  Almost any kind of dense white bread will work, but don’t use sourdough, and don’t use a really authentic baguette.  The sourdough is not suited to a sweet dessert, for obvious reasons, and the crackling, crisp crust and airy interior of a true baguette will leave you with nothing much to work with once the crust has been removed.  The typical supermarket baguette, however, works fine; you just need to use two loaves instead of one to end up with the right amount of crust-less bread.

Once the crust has been removed, cut the bread into ½ inch cubes.  Put the butter, cut into 8 to 10 chunks, in an ovenproof pan large enough to hold all the bread cubes (a lasagna pan works well) and put the pan in the oven for a minute or two to melt the butter.  Remove the pan, add the bread cubes, and toss the cubes in the butter to coat them thoroughly.  Put the pan back in the oven and roast for ten to fifteen minutes, stirring every five minutes.  The bread cubes are done when they are golden and crispy and starting to brown around the edges.  Turn the oven off.

Cut the chocolate into six or eight chunks, put it into a medium sized microwave safe bowl, and microwave on high for one to two minutes to melt it.  Be careful not to microwave the chocolate too long; it will still hold its shape after it is completely melted, so stir it every thirty seconds to see how it is going.

Combine the cream and the milk in a heavy bottomed pot and heat until it is almost at the boil.

Combine the egg yolks and the sugar in a medium sized bowl and whisk together until well blended.   Slowly add the hot cream mixture, whisking constantly.  Strain the mixture into another medium sized bowl, skim off any foam, and then slowly add this to the melted chocolate, again whisking constantly. Add enough of the warm cream to dissolve all the chocolate, and then pour the chocolate mixture back into the larger bowl.  Add the vanilla and salt and stir.  Add the toasted bread cubes.  Cover the surface of the mixture with cling film and then put a plate on top to keep the bread submerged in the custard.  Let the mixture sit for one or two hours to let the bread absorb as much liquid as possible.

While the bread soaks, prepare the fruit.  If you are using fresh raspberries, simply wash the berries and drain them well.

If you are using frozen berries, don’t do anything; keep the berries in the freezer until the last minute.

If you are using dried cranberries, warm the rum in a small pot or in the microwave, and pour over the berries.  Let sit at room temperature while the bread soaks.  Drain the cranberries just before adding them to the bread mixture.

Pre-heat the oven to 350° and then add the fruit.  Use a rubber spatula to fold the fruit gently into the bread mixture.  Avoid over stirring, or else the juices from the fruit will bleed into the custard and ruin the contrast of white and red that makes this dessert so festive.

Spoon the pudding into ramekins.  Don’t be afraid to pile up the bread cubes, and pour the liquid right up to the edge; you should be able to fill a dozen  4 oz ramekins.  Place the ramekins in a pan large enough to hold them all comfortably (that lasagna pan might work again) and fill the pan with hot water until the water comes three-quarters of the way up the side of the ramekins.  You have just made a bain marie, which will prevent the custard part of the pudding from cooking too quickly. Place the bain marie in the oven.  (Alternatively, you can pull the oven rack out a bit, place the pan on the rack, and then use a pitcher to fill the pan; just work quickly so that use don’t lose all the heat in the oven.)  Bake the puddings for 40 to 50 minutes, or until a wooden skewer inserted into the middle of the pudding comes out clean.  Use tongs to remove the puddings from the pan and place them on a rack to cool.  If you don’t have ramekins, or if you want to serve the pudding family style, just use a single casserole dish in the bain marie instead of the ramekins and increase the cooking time; it will likely take an hour to an hour and a half, depending on the size of the casserole.

Fresh out of the oven--my small Manila oven, which can only hold six puddings at a time.

To Serve:

The pudding can be served as is, and eaten warm right out of the ramekin, but if presentation is your goal you will have to let the puddings cool to room temperature and then remove them from the ramekins.  To do this, simply run a small, sharp paring knife around the edge of the ramekin and then, grasping the ramekinin your right hand, shake the pudding into your left.  Carefully transfer the pudding from your left hand onto a plate that will fit into your microwave; a metal spatula can be handy. When it is time to serve, heat the puddings in the microwave for a minute or two, make a pool of Rum Crème Anglaise  in the middle of your plate, place a pudding in the center of the sauce, and drizzle some Butterscotch Sauce around the edge of the crème Anglaise—if you want to feel like a real chef, get yourself a squeeze bottle for your butterscotch sauce.  You could also use a simple raspberry coulis instead of the butterscotch; it will look more festive, but the flavors will be a little less complex.

Smoked Salmon Shortcake

This is a very simple recipe; in fact, it is really more of an “assembly job,” to use a phrase I heard on Jamie Oliver’s show the other day.  The smoked salmon and the crème fraîche come straight from the supermarket.  I use The Joy of Cooking recipe for biscuits, but any basic biscuit recipe will work, and I suppose you could even buy the biscuits at the supermarket as well.  The only thing you can’t buy is the lemon-onion marmalade.

For the marmalade:  

1 medium onion

1 large lemon

1-2 T sugar

Salt and pepper

Finely dice the onion.  Sweat it in a small saucepan in a little olive oil over low heat until it is soft and translucent.  Meanwhile, take your lemon and grate the rind on the finest holes on your grater; a micro plane grater works particularly well.  Be careful to grate only the yellow zest, and not the white pith underneath. Cut the lemon into quarters and squeeze the juice into a small bowl, using a strainer to catch the seeds.  When the onion is soft and just beginning to brown around the edges, add the grated zest and the juice.  Simmer the mixture until the liquid is almost completely evaporated.  Taste the mixture; it will be quite sour.  Add just enough sugar to take away the harsh edge of the lemon, but make sure you leave enough acidity to stand up to the richness of the smoked salmon and the crème fraîche.  Season with salt and pepper.

To assemble:

To facilitate quick assembly, portion your salmon ahead of time.  Cut the biscuits in half.  Place the bottom half of a biscuit on a plate and top with an ounce or so of smoked salmon, a tablespoon of crème fraîche, a teaspoon of lemon-onion marmalade, and the top half of the biscuit.  Serve immediately. 

 

 

 

Christmas Cookies – Easy giving in a busy season

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Like so many of us at this time of year, we are busy with holiday gatherings, shopping lists, play rehearsals, thanking people who help and support us all year round, and being sure that we have enough goodies in the house for family feasts.  As the final week of school draws near for both teachers and parents, there can sometimes be a flutter of panic as we look at the calendar and think of all that has to be done and attended to before we can settle into the holidays at home.  For us, we also look forward to our annual holiday dinner party, coming up as we close the classrooms for holiday and focus on festivities at home.  (Tune in next week!)

As an overseas family who often spend Christmas far from home, we have tried our best to drop some of the holiday stress in favor of doing some good for others.  Whether shopping for an annual donation to a food bank or taking time to volunteer in a soup kitchen, or helping out in local schools where we live, we find that the act of giving is so deeply satisfying that we heartily recommend to all that you find a way to give to others and make a difference in the lives of someone less fortunate in the spirit of the season.  Giving is always a great thing to do and for us, the gift of food seems to come easily.

Here in our new home, we have been happy to be able to help out through our school with some of the families from the local area. We love getting together with these 80-90 kids on the weekend whose families have very little and live in small squatters settlements in our local area.  This year, with logistical help from the mayor’s office, we were able to organize a Christmas lunch for many of these local folks who, come Christmas day may not have a dinner.   With a team of volunteers, and Andrew having permission to use the school kitchen, we were able to cook and distribute 480 meals of roast pork with sweet glaze, along with a sizeable portion of the much loved noodle dish, pancit. All topped off with a Christmas tree cookies decorated by the kids from the local area and our students.   It took some organizing, but on the day of the meal all went smoothly as students and teachers led games and activities while we cooked and boxed in the kitchen.  We expected an estimated 310 people but soon after we started cooking, heard that close to 500 had come to share in our meal.  Good thing chefs love a challenge!  In the end we managed to serve 480 meals.  A good time was had by all.

Pork roasts just out of the oven

Busy packing cookies!

 

 

 

Andrew cooking up large quantities in the school kitchen!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

480 meals were packed and ready to go!

Two of our guests awaiting Christmas lunch

Speaking of a busy time of year, why not thank those who do good things in your life with home baked treats?  We like to thank the teachers, coaches, counselors and principals who work hard everyday with our own children with a jar of Christmas cheer.  In the weeks leading up to mid December, we bake and freeze a multitude of my grandmother’s best Christmas shortbread cookies to combine with some chocolate in gift jars.  Our kids deliver the jars around the school and neighborhood and personally thank the recipients for all they do for them in the course of the school year or sports season.   The recipe is a no fail, basic, but melt in your mouth shortbread cookie that delights all, especially when combined with seedless raspberry jam.  A classic winner of a holiday sweet! ( If you have an IKEA in your area, you can find lovely gift jars at great prices.)

Classic shortbread cookies with raspberry jam. Always a winner!

Also, featured this week, is the recipe for our Christmas tree treats pictured below.  It makes for a sturdy batter for kids to play with, cut, and decorate and still tastes great!  If you are a first grade teacher like me or have kids at home who love to decorate, I highly recommend this cookie for fun and flavor!  Don’t forget to use an icing that whips up quickly dries easily (see recipe below).  My fabulous room parent, Sheila brought oodles of these cookies to my classroom for a holiday activity.  We made the icing with the kids and filled sandwich bags with red and green icing and cut one small corner off to make first grade piping bags.

Perfect cookies for kids to decorate!

For the recipe for the sugar cookies that can take take the rough handling of kids everywhere, you can find it on Betty Crocker’s website as Sugar Cookies at www. bettycrocker.com.  For the icing I use a King’s Glaze and my first graders had great fun mixing up this no fault, easy frosting.  Just sift a cup of icing sugar into a bowl and add a little vanilla and 2 teaspoons of some kind of syrup like corn syrup.  Here in Manila, I used something called Karo syrup (commonly used by Kiwis and Australians).  Then just add milk until you get your desired consistency.  Have the kids add the color and watch them squeal with delight!

Finally, here’s the recipe for the perfect Christmas shortbread made in the homes of my Irish great grandmother and grandmother every December.  I remember my mom telling me this was the only time of year her mother splurged and used butter for baking.  I know you’ll love them!

Maude’s Christmas Shortbreads

  •  1lb butter
  • 1 cup icing sugar
  • ½ cup cornstarch
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • 3 cups flour

Cream together soft butter, sifted icing sugar, and vanilla (you may want to use a mixer).  Then sift in the flour and cornstarch making a thick but soft dough.  Form into 2 inch balls. On a cookie sheet, flatten each dough ball to about half of its height and make a well in the center with your thumb.  Fill the well with homemade or high quality raspberry jam.  If you don’t have homemade jam on hand, I recommend the Bonne Maman seedless raspberry jam for this cookie.  Bake in a 300 degree oven for about 10 minutes.  We got about 65-70 cookies from this batch.

Note: We vary the size of the cookie depending on the size of the jar or container we happen to buy for gift giving each year.  This year we made cookies with 1 and 2 inch dough balls (just watch them carefully in the oven). A truly delicious homemade gift!  One of my son’s  teachers told me that her gift cookies never made it home because she could not stop eating them after tasting the first one.  Enjoy tasting and giving these classics!

 

Ever Thankful, Luscious Leftovers

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Thanksgiving is nothing short of heart warming as we gather with family, friends, and feelings of true gratitude for all we have in our lives.  International school teachers seldom have the opportunity to celebrate this important date with family members.  Many of us work through the national holidays of our home countries and get together with dear friends and colleagues to feast in the evenings or weekends and Skype with our loved ones and their turkey legs from afar.  This year, in our new location, we were thrilled to be part of an annual Thanksgiving feast that is held on the streets of our compound and involves about 150 people.

Turkey, a noble bird

We celebrated last month on the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend despite the fact that the majority of residents are Americans who celebrated this week.

Teenagers from Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and Korea share a table and some turkey.

It was a wonderful community event complete with a whole roast pig in true Filipino style.

The pig arrives, ready for carving!

This week our American friends gathered for more feasting and turkey.  On Wednesday night, our neighbor, Sheila, in the midst of preparing for dinner for 30, dropped by with her notebook in hand to ask Andrew just how he makes his incredible turkey pie from the leftover carcass.  Andrew filled her in and she reported back to us today that the stock has been duly simmered and reduced and she is ready to assemble the pies!  This prompted us to want to share our most wonderful of leftover recipes, the holiday turkey pie.  Eat it in the days after your feast or freeze it as treat and a treasure for a cold winter day.

As we worked through Thanksgiving Day here in Manila, our daughter back in Canada prepared for a long awaited trip to New York City to meet up with 60 of her friends from her graduating class of June 2011.  These international kids spread out around the globe once they graduate and Eilidh was so lucky to have the chance to have a Thanksgiving weekend reunion in one of our favorite cities.  There was an almost near tragedy as she considered not going after catching a nasty cold and flu virus but in the end, her Uncle Doug battled the snowy east coast highways for her to catch her flight to the Big Apple.  As predicted, the recent graduates are painting the town red and the stores black.  Eilidh sent us a text just this morning to say she and her friends were quoted in the media while standing outside the mecca of Black Friday locations, Macy’s.  We thought she was kidding but later sent us the link:

http://money.cnn.com/2011/11/23/news/companies/Macys_black_friday/index.htm

So that’s the Thanksgiving excitement for this week!  Have a look at Andrew’s recipes below and your turkey bones will never be something you discard absentmindedly again!  They’ll be transformed into precious conduits of rich and delicate flavor fit only for the best sauces, soups, and risottos.  For me, Thanksgiving is the pleasure of leftovers and that teary-eyed feeling that comes over me when thinking of all the wonderful people we have shared our fall feasts with and the family members back home who wait to share our table and memories in the summer months.  We truly are ever thankful.

Now for the recipes:

Recently, we bought a second fridge for our new home here in Manila.  It’s not a big fridge, but it provides insurance against the danger of running out of cold beer, and having an extra freezer means there is always something to throw on the barbeque.  An extra freezer is also handy for keeping bones and shells.  We generally have roast chicken every week, and so when the meal is over I throw all the bones in a plastic bag and put them in the freezer.  Fresh shrimp is another weekly menu item, and the shells go into the freezer as well.  Even the bone from a T-bone steak is worth saving.  When there is no more room for food, I take out the chicken bones, throw them in a pot, and make some chicken stock; if I don’t need it right away I reduce it down to a thick, delicious sauce.  Now it can go back in the freezer again, at a greatly reduced volume.   With shrimp shells I can make a stock in thirty minutes that will serve as the base of a delicious cream sauce for pasta, and while a proper beef stock takes the best part of a day to make, a beef bone fried up with onions and a bit of tomato paste and then simmered for an hour provides a lot more flavor than a bouillon cube.

My favorite stock to make, though, is probably turkey.  Whether it is Thanksgiving or Christmas, or just a Sunday dinner in July (Julie loves turkey dinner) I have the turkey carcass in the pot by the time the table is cleared.  Sometimes we end up with turkey soup, sometimes the stock goes in the freezer for later use (turkey stock makes great risotto) but my preference is for turkey pie.

Turkey Pie

For the stock:

1 turkey carcass

2 medium onions, quartered

2 medium carrots, roughly chopped

2 bay leaves

Carve all the meat off the carcass, including the drumsticks and wings.  Save the best slices for sandwiches, or to eat with your leftover potatoes and gravy; put any scraps in a bowl. Then use your fingers to scrape the carcass clean, adding all the meat to the bowl of scraps.  This will be the meat for your pie.  It is important to get in there with your fingers.  If you just use a knife, you will leave behind a lot of delicious meat, and using your fingers prevents any bone, gristle, or slimy undercooked skin from getting into the mix.  It is also important to get this meat off the carcass before you make your stock; if you pick the meat after the bones have simmered for four or five hours it will be easier to get the meat off, but it will have no flavor left in it.

Once all the bones have been cleaned of their meat, break up the carcass and put all the bones in a pot large enough to hold them easily and cover them with cold water.   Bring to the boil over high heat.  As the stock nears the boiling point a foamy scum will develop on the surface of the water; use a ladle or large spoon to skim these impurities off.   As soon as the water starts to boil, reduce the heat and bring it to a simmer.  It is important to keep an eye on the stock as it nears the boiling point, as if you let it boil vigorously these impurities will be mixed irretrievably into the stock.  (This is not a disaster, especially with a dish like turkey pie that is not particularly delicate, but it is best avoided if possible.)

When the stock has been simmering for ten minutes or so, or when the scum stops coming to the surface, add the onions, carrots, and bay leaves.  Do not add salt or pepper—because this stock is going to be greatly reduced in volume, it is impossible to predict how much seasoning will be necessary.  Put a lid on the pot, turn the heat down further, and leave the stock to simmer for four to six hours, or even longer if you have the time.  To see whether you have extracted the maximum amount of flavor possible, pull a piece of meat out of the stock and taste it.  If the flavor is gone, there is no point in cooking the stock any further.

If you want to make soup (or risotto), your stock is probably ready to go at this point.  For turkey pie, however, you need to reduce the stock to concentrate the flavor, as this stock is going to be the basis of the gravy that holds everything together, and it needs to be rich and flavorful.  Strain the stock into a clean, heavy bottomed pot and put it back on the stove on high heat.  Bring it back to the boil, and leave it to boil vigorously until it has reduced by half, or until you are happy with its flavor.  When it doubt, reduce it a little further; it is always better to sacrifice volume for flavor, even it means making a smaller pie.  When the stock has reduced, strain it again, through a fine mesh strainer this time, into a large bowl (you want to expose as much of the stock to the air as possible for quick cooling).  When the stock has cooled, place it in the fridge for several hours, or, preferably, overnight.  You want to refrigerate it long enough so that it gels into a solid mass, with the fat lying on the surface where you can scrape it off.  Save a few tablespoons of the fat, and discard the rest.  (You can skip this step, and go straight to the pie stage, but your pie will have a lot of fat in it that it really doesn’t need.)

 

For the pie:

The recipe that follows is for one nine-inch pie.  Depending on how big your turkey is (or on whether you can snag someone else’s turkey bones before they hit the compost bin) you may well be able to make more than one pie.

2 x basic pie recipe

2 medium carrots, peeled and diced into ¼ inch dice

2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced into ¼ inch dice

1 large onion, diced

3 cups turkey meat, chopped

2 to 3 cups reduced, defatted turkey stock

6 T flour

Pre-heat the oven to 375°

Roll out half the pastry until you have a circle roughly two inches bigger all around than your pie plate.  Line the bottom of your pie plate; you should have roughly an inch of pastry hanging over the edge, but don’t worry if it a bit uneven, as long as the plate itself if fully covered.  Roll out the other half until it is large enough to cover the top with a 1 inch overhang all the way around.  Fold this in half, and then in half again so that you have a triangle of dough, making sure that the pastry is well floured so that it doesn’t stick together.  Place the triangle inside the pie shell and put the plate in the fridge.

Bring two pots of salted water to the boil.  Cook the potatoes and carrots.  Drain.

Place three cups of turkey stock in a small pot and gently heat until it is liquid.

Melt three tablespoons of turkey fat in a medium frying pan.   Add the onions and cook on medium heat until they are softened and lightly browned.  Add the flour and mix thoroughly. Cook the roux for a minute or two, and then slowly add two cups of the turkey stock, whisking vigorously.   Let the mixture simmer for a minute or two to thicken, and then add the vegetables and turkey and stir well.  If the mixture seems a little dry, add some more turkey stock.  If it seems too wet you can let it simmer a little longer, but keep in mind that the mixture, as well as the pastry, will absorb liquid as the pie cooks.  Season with salt and pepper.

Fill the pie shell with the turkey mixture.  Cover with the top crust and fold the overhanging pastry underneath.  Use your fingers or a fork to crimp the pastry together all the way around, and make two or three slashes in the middle of the pie to release the steam.  Bake for forty-five minutes, or until the pastry is fully cooked and nicely browned.  Remove from the oven and let cool on a rack for ten or fifteen minutes before slicing, to give the pie a chance to firm up a bit.

To market, to market….

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This week’s post starts with a visit to our regular Sunday market where we find our weekly supply of organic veggies, fresh bread, and scrumptious prepared foods from kitchens around the globe. Many of us are loyal market patrons who worship weekly at the altar of the noble farmers who work so hard to provide us with exceptional seasonal produce and the cooks and artists who join them to add flavor, music, and art to the experience. Over the years, so many friends have shared their stories with us of hometown markets where their need for both groceries and a sense of community are met. When we visit my brother in the California, Andrew is up and over to the weekly market for the unbelievable local apricots, cherries, and wild salmon with the kind of excitement only a foodie can muster that early on a Saturday morning.  Back home in Nova Scotia, I often rise at 6:00am to roam the market with my parents and share some fabulous coffee and a hot cinnamon bun. It’s always fun running into old friends and catching up on news or buying that special Christmas gift while listening to the fiddlers play.

What I love about the Halifax Farmers Market is that there are many farmers there to provide us our staple foods as well as lots of artists and eye-catching crafts and goodies from local vendors. We had a chilly

Beautiful stained glass for sale right across from the homemade sausages at the Halifax Farmers' Market

Saturday morning visit there last December when we were home for Christmas. Where else can you buy mouth watering homemade sausages just a few feet away from beautiful stained glass ornaments? Or bags made from old sails that fit an iPad like a glove just a few steps from pecan pie tarts and organic potatoes?  Your local farmers market!

In our new city, we have found the Legaspi Market in the Makati area of Manila to be a frolic into the world of traditional Filipino cuisine and a myriad of other Asian and European influenced dishes that mingle happily with the food culture here.  On the weekends, we love our new habit of packing a cooler and shopping bags and heading there as a family.  Alasdair, being a fourteen-year-old boy of large appetite, loves the monster cheeseburgers as his morning appetizer.  He usually follows that up with a chicken shawarma, a reminder of his days as a second grader in the Middle East, when he would ask for these pita wrapped delights (with no sauce—he’s a picky eater) in his broken Arabic.  As we are leaving he is digging in his pocket for coins to afford  pain chocolat for the ride home. Andrew and I often start the morning with a mini Quiche Lorraine, (two bites of heaven) but the highlight of the trip for Andrew is his weekly treat of an Ilocos empanada.  A specialty of the northernmost islands of the Philippines, these crispy orange pockets are filled with vegetables, egg, and pork, and come with a vinegar dipping sauce.

We adore the many Asian dishes, the beautiful coffee, the live music, and, oddly enough, the traditional lasagna we happened to buy one morning to take home to split for an easy late lunch with a side salad.  It was perfect! This simple lasagna with its melt in your mouth béchamel got me daydreaming of the varied pleasures the simple noodle brings to our tables.

Speaking of noodles, we recently talked with friends over a pasta dinner about how we had celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary last summer and how cliché it was to feel that those two decades had gone by us so fast.  (Wasn’t it just a couple of years ago we were living rent free on someone’s sailboat and driving that old Volvo?)  Our friends asked what we did to mark the occasion and we said that we had a great few days in New York visiting our favorite beautiful restaurants, seeing our most loved museums, and shopping at the summer sales.  But, in terms of celebrating 20 years, it wasn’t much different than other summers because we usually have a stopover in our most favorite of world cities as we move westward with our annual home leave tickets.  New York to us is a haven of cultural wonders, gastronomic heaven, and a buffet of the arts.  There’s something for everyone to do and eat and the an assurance that hangs around the city telling everyone that they can fit it and be who they are here.

Anyway, we got to talking about the wonderful bistro in New York that we visit every year.  The ambience is noisy and casual and the food, a tour de force for cheeseheads.  For me, Artisanal is the home of the world’s best mac and cheese. If you go, be sure to take home a little cheese find from their cave.  Love the cave!  It’s a cool and swanky clientele that mingles with regular lunch folks at this Park Avenue address.  What I like is the price.   A lunch full of warm food memories for two with cocktails and a toast to twenty-some years together, only ran us about $69.USD.  (These days I think it’s hard to escape some of the casual, mediocre chain restaurants with a cheque less than this.)  Like us, Artisanal loves to add healthy greens with a light dressing to their full fat indulgences.  We recommend balancing dishes like mac and cheese with lots of lightly dressed, crisp, fresh, greens.

So dreaming of mac and cheese got me to thinking about Andrew’s version.  We love to cook it at home and serve it in dainty ramekins so we can savor every bite and think about how much we really do need to maintain a healthy diet.  I have to agree with the French folks (and Julia Child) when it comes to portions.  I don’t think we should be giving up the kinds of cheese and buttery breadcrumbs that make our gastronomic lives worthwhile.

Forget the low fat cheeses that resemble kitchen sponges in every way imaginable and go for smaller portions of high quality, full fat flavor! Good cheese does cost a little more but if you are eating reasonable portions, you won’t find it hard on your wallet.

Visit your local deli or cheese shop and bring some home to share. Try something new!

Gruyere, for example is so packed with flavor, Andrew needed less than 100g for this week’s recipe.  There’s also the added fun of finding a great cheese shop or deli in your area and exploring the kinds of cheese that suit your palate. Taste a few and find something new!

So one of these fall weekends, skip a trip to a restaurant and dine at home with mac and cheese, a little wine, lots of greens, and someone you love.

Macaroni and Cheese

During our university days, my good friend Martin had a repertoire of exactly two dishes: liverwurst on toast, and pasta mixed with butter and grated cheese.  Having been cooking and baking in my mother’s kitchen since the age of ten, I looked down my nose at the primitive nature of my friend’s “recipes,” but a quick look at my Larousse Gastronomique the other day turned up the information that the classic recipe for Macaroni and Cheese, or “Macaroni a l’ Italienne,” is essentially identical to Martin’s:  hot pasta and butter mixed with grated parmesan and gruyere cheeses.

American style Mac and Cheese, however, generally involves a cheese sauce made with a roux.  To add a little richness and complexity to the dish, I like to add a little beef stock to the sauce, generally one part beef stock to three parts milk.  My other deviation from most of the recipes I have read is to add finely chopped onions and garlic to the sauce for another layer of flavor.  When my mother in law has the opportunity to pick what I’m going to cook for her, she pretty much always goes for my macaroni, and she doesn’t like onions.  Or garlic.

The most significant contributor to the success of this dish, however, is obviously the cheese.   You need to use cheese with a lot of flavor, and while you can easily make it with one kind of cheese (a sharp Cheddar, for example) you will get better results following the advice of Larousse and combining a hard, aged cheese, (Parmesan) with something a little softer (Gruyere).  The hard cheese will give you maximum flavor, and the softer cheese will give you a rich, creamy texture.  Any aged cheese should give you the kick you need; I recently had great success combining a nice piece of aged Gouda with Gruyere and sharp Cheddar.

6 to 8 servings

1 lb macaroni noodles, cooked in plenty of salted water

4 T butter plus 2 T for the bread crumb topping

1 medium onion, diced

2 large cloves garlic, finely chopped or pressed through a garlic press

6 T flour

1 cup beef stock, preferably home made, but canned will do.  A beef bouillon cube dissolved in water will also work, as a last resort.  For a vegetarian dish, simply replace the beef stock with another cup of milk.

3 cups whole milk

4 cups grated cheese

½ cup breadcrumbs

For the sauce:

Melt the butter in a medium pot and add the diced onion.  Cook the onions on low heat until they are extremely soft, 10 to 12 minutes.  Add the garlic and cook for a minute or two more.  Add the flour and whisk into the butter to make a roux.  Cook the roux out for a minute or so, being careful not to brown it, and then add the milk a cup at a time, whisking thoroughly.  Add the beef stock and bring to a simmer.  Cook the sauce on low heat for 3 to 5 minutes, until it thickens up, and then add the cheese.  Stir the sauce until the cheese is completely melted, then remove from the heat.

For the bread crumb topping:

Melt the butter in a non-stick pan and add the breadcrumbs.  Cook on low heat, stirring constantly, until the bread crumbs are golden, but not brown.  Remove from the heat.

To assemble:

Pour the macaroni into an ovenproof casserole and add the cheese sauce.  Stir to thoroughly coat the pasta with sauce.  Sprinkle the breadcrumbs evenly over the top of the pasta.   If you are serving the casserole right away, you simply need to place it under the broiler for a minute or two to brown the topping.  If not, cover the casserole with foil and bake at 375 until the sauce starts to bubble, then remove the foil and broil the top.

Alternatively, mix the pasta and sauce in a large bowl and then spoon into individual ramekins before topping with the bread crumbs.

 

 

 

Fall Dinner Party

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October and early November are perfect times to have a dinner party. As international school teachers who start back to work in the first week of August, we are well settled into the academic year by mid-October and have usually just finished the first round of report cards and parent-teacher conferences. It seems like a great time to invite people over and feel a little festive.

We don’t usually ask our guests to dress up or wear costumes (though some have, in past years, and added some winning new personalities to the table). We usually just decorate a little and deliver a fall inspired menu to each diner a few days before so they can anticipate a special dining experience and be thinking about a wine they’d like to bring to match one of the courses. This year, our friend Jim even too the menu to a wine store and asked for recommendations to match our courses. We were impressed.

In any event, this year’s menu was a great success and we shared many stories and much laughter over the course of the evening. We were a little concerned earlier in the day about being short two guests when one couple found themselves at the hospital on Saturday morning with contractions for the baby due on Oct. 27th! In the end it was declared a false alarm and she lasted at the table for all six courses served over 5 hours. What a culinary trooper! Her husband even stayed on to fill the liqueur glasses as midnight drew close.
Here’s the menu I sent to my diners wrapped in orange paper and garnished with one of my cutest pumpkin stickers from my first grade collection:

October Dinner

Gougeres and Bubbles

Alsatian Onion Tart

Fresh Greens, Oven Roasted Tomatoes,
Grilled Sourdough Croutons,
and Bacon Vinaigrette

Handmade Fettuccine with Shrimp,
Smoked Salmon, and Cream

Beef Tenderloin, Red Wine Gravy,
Brown Butter Potatoes, Roasted Carrots

Deep Chocolate Torte, Wild Berry Coulis,
Single Malt Butterscotch, Vanilla Ice Cream

Many of our friends, family and visitors would recognize a couple of these dishes as regulars that we love to serve. The old standby we’d like to share with you this week is the elegant and enchanting onion tart. We love this one because it’s rich, beautiful to eat, and pretty inexpensive to make. Also, if you have full time jobs like us, the filling can be made days ahead of time and the pie pastry can be kept in the freezer until the day you need it.

 

 This recipe began back in 1996 when Andrew was cooking at a gorgeous fine dining restaurant in Vancouver, a city where a vibrant and competitive fine dining culture thrives alongside plentiful markets full of fresh produce. We only stayed a year in Vancouver, but I remember eating the original version of this tart with guests after they arrived at our dinner table with red cheeks from days of skiing at beautiful Whistler and Blackcombe. (I’m not one to overuse the term breathtaking but these mountains and their stolid beauty really can take your breath away, and offer the thrill of world class skiing at the same time. If you’re a skier, you really must go.) At that time, it was a leek and goat cheese tart, taken straight from the menu of the restaurant where Andrew was working. It was a dinner party staple for us for many years. One day when leeks were not available, however, Andrew substituted yellow onions, and liked the results so much that he never went back to leeks again. Because the recipe called for fresh, mild chevre, the tart was always a hit with diners who were under the impression that they didn’t like goat cheese. But sometimes, if there was a lot of cheese in other courses, he would make the tart with just onions, butter, eggs, and cream. We thought we were very clever, but it turns out that this particular combination has been a staple in Alsace-Lorraine for generations, the only difference being that bacon is often included. In the most recent version of the recipe, the onions are slowly cooked in a mixture of bacon fat and butter, imparting the delicious flavor of the bacon without disturbing the melting smoothness of the scrumptious onion custard. We adore the subtle bacon flavor with the onions but if you prefer a vegetarian dish, you don’t have to. Also, don’t forget that practiced pie crust is an essential part of any good tart.

We have served this tart over and over again in our homes in the Middle East and China where vegetables would only be available seasonally and cheese would sometimes be limited to process slices, Haloumi, or that silly laughing cow.  Last week, this tart proved as heartwarming in the hot temperatures as in the cold winter weather and satisfied our desire for a perfect dish for our first dinner party in our Manila home. We opted for the no cheese version because the gougeres were made with gruyere and the pasta was sprinkled with shaved parmesan. We had nine diners in total and we all fit perfectly around our dining room table for eight. (Lisa, a Canadian teacher overseas for the first time, kindly doubled up at the end on a patio chair.)

On the spur of the moment, Andrew decided that the perfect condiment for this dish was chutney. Red and yellow peppers have been available in Manila at reasonable prices since we arrived so he came up with a red pepper chutney recipe to compliment the tart. All plates were returned just about licked clean with the enjoyment of the taste combinations on the plate!

So here are the recipes for the tart and the chutney that you can wow your home diners with sometime in the crisp, fall weather (or like me, kid yourself in tropical heat by putting on the air con and lighting the jack-o-lanterns, before everyone sits down to the table). You don’t need to make the chutney to accompany the tart. It’s delicious on its own!

Alsatian Onion Tart

4 large yellow onions(about 2 lbs) 

2 T bacon fat

2 T butter

1 cup heavy cream

4 large eggs, beaten lightly

Pastry dough for one 9” pie shell (see recipe below)

Salt and pepper

Slice the onions as thinly as possible. Add two teaspoons of salt and toss to coat the onion slices evenly. (This will help the onions release their juices.) Add the bacon fat and butter to a heavy bottomed pot large enough to hold all the onions. Turn the heat to medium; as soon as the fats have melted, add the onions, salt, and pepper, and stir vigorously to break up the onion slices and coat them with the bacon fat and butter. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and let the onions sweat for thirty to forty minutes, stirring occasionally to keep the onions from browning or sticking. As the onions cook, they will release their liquid, and after twenty minutes or so they should be gently stewing in their own juices. To tell when the onions are done, simply pop a forkful in your mouth; they should quite literally melt in your mouth, with little or no chewing. If the onions are done, taste again for salt and pepper, keeping in mind that you will be adding eggs and cream. Take them off the heat and set them aside to cool for a few minutes. While the onions cook, prepare the pie shell.

Roll the pastry out until it is a circle two inches bigger than your pie plate. Place the pastry in the pie plate; there should be about an inch of pastry over hanging the edge of the plate, but don’t worry too much if there is more in some places than in others. Fold the extra pastry underneath so that you have a double layer resting on the edge of the pie plate, then use the thumb and forefinger of your left hand and the forefinger of your right hand to crimp the pastry together. The idea is to raise the level of the pastry above the edge of the pie plate by about half an inch so that you can have a nice deep tart. When you have crimped the pastry all the way around, prick the bottom of the pie shell with a fork about a dozen times (to prevent the pastry from puffing up when you blind bake it) and put it in the fridge to rest for half an hour or so. Pre-heat the oven to 375°.

When the oven is ready, place the empty pie shell in the bottom third of the oven and let it bake for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, add the eggs and the cream to the onions and mix well. Remove the pie shell from the oven, add the onion mix, and return to the oven. Bake the tart for 35 to 45 minutes, or until the custard is set in the center, and the onions are just starting brown on the top. Let the tart cool on a wire rack for ten minutes before cutting.

To serve, place a slice of the tart on a plate and heap a tablespoon of chutney on top. A drizzle of balsamic reduction makes a nice garnish.

Perfect Pastry

Any single crust pie recipe will work—you could even buy one frozen at the supermarket, I suppose—but I like to use a combination of vegetable shortening and butter. The butter gives the pastry flavor and flakiness, and the shortening adds the crumbly texture that makes for pastry perfection.

1 cup all purpose flour

½ t salt

2 T cold vegetable shortening

4 T cold butter, cut into 6 to 8 chunks

¼ cup ice water

Sift together the flour and the salt, or use a whisk to combine them well. Add the butter and, working quickly with just the tips of your fingers, work the butter into the flour until the pieces of butter are roughly the size of peas. Add the vegetable shortening and quickly work it into the flour as well. Alternatively, use two table knives or a pastry blender to cut the butter and shortening into the flour.

Sprinkle a tablespoon of ice water over the pastry mixture and stir with a fork to incorporate the water thoroughly into the flour. Add another tablespoon of water and stir again. Add enough ice water to make the pastry dough come together into one mass; be careful, however, not to make it too wet. Scoop the pastry out of the bowl with your hands and quickly knead it into a flat round disc, adding a little flour if it sticks to your hands. Wrap the disc of dough in plastic wrap and let it rest in the refrigerator for twenty minutes or so before rolling it out. The dough can be kept in the fridge for two to three days, or in the freezer for several weeks.

Red Pepper Chutney

2 red bell peppers

1 medium onion

2 T white vinegar

3 T water

1 T sugar

2 whole cloves

1 small bay leaf

½ cinnamon stick

 

Roast the peppers. The idea here is to a) remove the tough outer skin of the pepper and b) cook the peppers, to soften them and to intensify the flavor. The classic way to roast peppers is to put the whole pepper directly into a gas flame and blacken the skin all around. If you don’t have a gas stove you can use your gas barbeque; just lift up the grate and, using tongs, put the peppers directly into the flame. A simpler way, however, is to slice the peppers in half, remove the seeds, coat the outside of the peppers in vegetable oil, and place them under a hot broiler for ten minutes or so until the skins start to wrinkle and blacken. Whichever method you use, when the peppers are well blackened, transfer them to a small bowl and cover the bowl with a plate. Let the peppers sit for five or ten minutes to steam from their own heat. When the peppers are cool enough to handle, use your fingers to slide the blackened skin off, placing the roasted pepper flesh in a clean bowl. If the peppers are whole, cut (or tear) them in half and discard the seeds and any white flesh. The advantage of the broiler method is that the seeds have already been removed, making for easier cleaning. The disadvantage is that you lose the delicious juices that built up inside the whole pepper as it roasts. Chop the peppers into ¼ inch dice.

Chop the onion into ¼ inch dice. Heat a little vegetable oil in the bottom of a small, heavy bottomed saucepan and add the onion. Resist the temptation to stir; you want to caramelize the onions, so let them get good and brown (but not black). When the onions have developed some colour, add a pinch of salt and stir. Cook for a few more minutes, until the onions are cooked through, and then add the rest of the ingredients. Bring to a simmer, and let cook, covered, 3 to 5 minutes. Remove the lid and cook for another minute or two, until the liquid is almost gone. Taste the chutney, add salt, sugar or vinegar as needed, and let cool.