I think everyone has treats from their childhood that evoke special memories. Maybe it’s your mother’s chocolate chip cookie recipe bringing back memories of winter mornings or blueberry pancakes making you think of camping trips in the woods. One of mine has always been Frangipane. My grandmother would often buy a delicious frangipane tart made by the since closed Belgian bakery on Corydon here in Winnipeg. Something about that buttery crust, thin layer of raspberry jam and thick layer of almond filling just rocked my world as a kid. It didn’t hurt that I often got it when I was either off or home sick from school and had to stay with my granny while Mom was at work. Just the thought of those tastes takes me back to being curled up under a blanket in the recliner watching pbs or cartoons.
It’s one of the first sweet things from my childhood that I remember distinctly. The first thing I remember loving that wasn’t your standard overfrosted birthday cake. I think at this point I’d only ever had basic roasted almonds and this was my introduction to just how delicate and delicious they can be. It would eventually blossom into a full-blown love of almonds to the point where one of the best gifts anyone can give me is a tin of the smokehouse almonds.
My grandmother passed away a several years ago now, but this has been a year of honouring her memory for me. I finally visited England properly, toured some of the locations where she or her family lived and met some friends who missed her dearly. As Christmas rolled around and I tried to think of something to make for dessert the Granny theme came back again and inspired me to finally make my own version of that delicious cake.
Apologies for absence, last school term was hellish. So many blog entries half finished as a major crisis erupted with a project. For those who might still check this site
on occasion, my sincere thanks. Here’s a super awesome recipe or two to get back into the habit.
Some people are of the opinion that soups other than the chilled variety should be saved for winter. Hogwash I say. (or should I go with poppycock as an outmoded but fun to say contrary exclamation?) A good, reasonably light soup can be the perfect addition to a summer meal or can, served with fresh baguette and the beverage of your choice, make an excellent light summer meal out on your deck/balcony.
Note, the names of the recipes are links to the actual recipe.
The flavour of this soup is very mellow at first with the after taste of the blue portion of the cheese making a really nice counterpoint. In my opinion this soup works best when accompanied by something else with a nice low key flavour.
Serving Suggestions:
Pair with a light sandwich, roasted chicken and provolone is a personal favorite. Also works nicely along with a large salad and a hunk of baguette as a light but satisfying meal on a sweltering day. Add in a peppy white wine or beer to round out the meal.
This spicy summer soup I came up with for an iron chef competition a few years back just screams summer to me. The smoky spice of the chipotle is balanced by the lime and basil to make a refreshing hot weather meal. Finish the soup with a dollop of creme fraiche or sour cream for a bit of extra contrast.
Serving Suggestions:
Extremely tasty suggestion include pairing with a grilled chicken or veggie quesadilla, Fish Tacos, or simply served with Tortillas or Nachos on the side. Practically begs for an accompanying margarita.
One of a few thai soups I could easily add to this list. The variety of flavours in this soup really make it sing on your palette and it’s filling enough that one bowl is usually enough. Handily enough, it’s also incredibly easy to make. If the recipe linked above doesn’t match your favorite restaurants version search around, here are thousands of recipes available.
Serving Suggestions:
If you’re having it as the main portion of your meal I personally feel it’s brilliant on its own, but a nice hunk of crusty french bread also works. This is another soup that is just dying for nice peppy light beer. The usual Thai accompaniment is a Singha.
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So… there’s 3 suggestions. Anyone have any others? Post
This is a really tasty sweet jam recipe that I adapted from a crazily overdone one I found elsewhere on the net. The cherry juice turns the peaches a beautiful ruby colour and the aroma while it’s cooking is to die for.
Ingredients
8 Normal Sized Peaches (Washed and pitted/chopped, I leave skins on but you can remove if you prefer)
2 Cups Cherries (chopped)
4 cups sugar
2 boxes pectin (peach jam takes extra pectin as there isn’t a ton of natural
1/4 cup lime juice
Butter (optional, to remove scum)
Method
Sterilize your jars and keep them nice and warm so the temperature shock of the hot jam doesn’t shatter them.
Chop your fruit, then combine in blender or food processor. (You can also mash with a potato masher, but it takes a while)
Process until you hit the desired consistency, I like my jam a little chunky but you can get it as smooth as you want.
Move the fruit to a pot, add your pectin and lime juice.
Bring to a boil
Add the sugar, then bring to a rolling boil
Once it’s boiling, cook while stirring vigourously for 5 minutes or so
The scum that forms at the top is harmless, but doesn’t look very nice in your jam, stir in about a tbsp of butter and much of it will dissipate. If some remains you can add more butter, or remove it with a spoon.
Ladle hot jam into jars, ideally with a canning funnel, but you can do without.
Seal jars and process for 10 Minutes in a boiling water bath.
Super super tasty and really quick for a jam. Made excellent farewell gifts at the office as I finish my second last week. More content to come soon.
The warm summer months are here for most of us (apologies to my 2.5 million southern hemisphere readers) and I feel inspired to share a fantastic looking recipe from our sister site GoonsWithSpoons.com
This was an entry from Sirrobin for the 5th Iron Chef Something Awful competition (Battle: Cookies)
I’m a huge fan of The Onion’s AVClub site. One might even call me a die-hard fan. Yet sometimes I hate their living, breathing guts.
Once a year the writers take a break from practicing blood rites to whatever dark god has given them their dream jobs. This much needed break from the drudgery of watching movies, listening to new albums and playing rock band gives them a chance to visit the All Candy Expo, held annually in Chicago. Yes, the All Candy Expo is exactly what it sounds like: Willy Wonka meets convention center. Candy Manufacturers from all over converge and hawk their products. The big boys like M&M/Mars and Hershey push new products and new flavours of old products, while small time folks try to become the “next big thing” for buyers from all over the world. Luckily they let journalists in too, as the loot attests:
Sandra Lee… In my American foodie brethren her very name evokes the kind of disgust usually reserved for Rachel Ray’s spouting EVOO (followed by an explanation) or by College_Student_04029812 asking for CHEEP FOOD IDEAZ 4 DORM PLZ for the millionth time! Those of us lucky enough to live north of the 49th have thankfully avoided her frankensteinian cooking methods and trailer park arts and crafts aesthetic thus far so I will explain.
When I asked one of my friends if she’d seen the cake referenced later in this post her response was “those box cakes you used to get at KFC after they stopped using McCain?” As a result, I’ll start out by pointing out that I am not referring to Sara Lee, though I will admit that in my youth I somehow ate a few of those stale angel food and crusted mortal icing bricks that they forced upon us. CANCON rules (I’m guessing anyway) have thus far saved us from Sandra Lee, a “chef” who presents a show called “SEMI-HOMEMADE” where she takes premade products and combines them into meals that, at least in her words, look homemade.
I try not to be a food snob, I certainly have low grade junky foods that I love and won’t give up, but Sandra Lee takes it to a level that is just revolting. While some of her shows feature the occasional recipe that uses some pre-packaged ingredient in a novel and valuable way, most of them involve combining highly processed, very unhealthy foods together into one giant mess. The supposed time savings are often incredibly minimal or simply non-existent. The excessive use of easy store-bought “ingredients” means the end result often has a sodium or sugar level double or even triple what a proper dish would.
A few examples include:
A chicken and dumplings recipe that calls for a store-bought roast chicken (pulled apart), Pillsbury biscuit dough, canned gravy and the addition of 6 cups of broth. It also includes Bags of carrot and celery sticks that are then chopped up for addition to the chicken (yes you read that right… pre sliced carrot sticks, that you then chop… essentially saving yourself one or two knife slices per carrot at a 150% cost markup). I’m sure you can figure out the unnecessary repetition in this recipe from the chicken etc. Really basic dough like a dumpling is one of the easiest things in the world to make using ingredients most people have anyway, hell even using Bisquick is tons healthier than the Pillsbury kind and tons tastier
Mini Chicken Pot Pies using canned chicken…
Six Cheese Tortellini using Cheese Whiz and shredded bag cheese and cheese tortellini. Seriously… why are you not just buying a high quality jarred sauce, it’ll taste better.
For more horrors, simply visit the food network site (US version)…
I’d always thought Sandra was horrible from the odd time I flipped past her show while in the states or from the occasional unbelievable Youtube videos. I’d always meant to write a little rant about Lee, and when Amelie Gilette over at the AVClub posted the following this week, I had the perfect excuse: Sandra Lee’s Kwanzaa cake.
Tony Bourdain (who I love dearly but who often tries a bit too hard to be ornery) had this to say about this concoction:
“The most terrifying thing I’ve seen is her making a Kwanzaa cake. Watch that clip and tell me your eyeballs don’t burst into flames. It’s a war crime on television. You’ll scream”
This cake starts out as a grocery store stale angelfood ring sliced into two layers. She then adds canned icing by the quart.
At this point you’re probably thinking “man he’s overreacting… my mom used to do that…” There’s a reason that Amelie refers to the cake as: “clearly a pile of ridiculousness slathered in despair and sprinkled with nonsense nuggets.”
The next step is to open a can of apple pie filling… and drop it with a plop into the middle of the hole in the middle of the cake. Not content to stop there, she then covers the cake with comically oversized candles and sprinkles it with pumpkin seeds and corn nuts. The nauseating result looks like something you’d find on the table at an elementary school craft fair and is yet more proof that pretty much everyone who watches her show will die of adult onset diabetes.
There are varying degrees of culture shock that one gets upon moving away from one’s birthplace for the first time. Maybe you moved to Europe for school and you’re learning a new language (or multiple new languages). Perhaps you went to Australia for a year to find yourself (more likely to find beer and people of loose morals of the gender of your choice.) Or perhaps you only moved to Ontario…
As most of you who read this blog know, I recently (temporarily) moved to Waterloo Ontario to take an internship at Research in Motion inc. proud manufacturers of BlackBerry and BlackBerry related products. Is it whiny and lame of me to complain of culture shock moving to southern Ontario from Manitoba? Yeah, probably… but it’s more a combo of wistful homesickness and culture shock anyway.
Waterloo is an incredibly white town, somewhere around 90% of the city is very white, mostly of Germanic descent. The universities thankfully break this up a bit, bringing a more diverse student base, especially of asian backgrounds. As someone from Manitoba however, the absence of any significant aboriginal population is somewhat jarring. I was actually specifically told that I might want to consider not broadcasting the fact that I’m Metis as this area doesn’t have the greatest reputation of friendliness towards first nations people. I’m not entirely surprised as the city is fairly affluent and definitely seems to cultivate a wholesome whitebread image.
The weirdest things have been making me home sick… I’m the first to claim that Winnipeg drivers suck, but at least we’re relatively friendly. People in southern Ontario like to come very close to running down a pedestrian in a parking lot at least once daily, and will NOT come to a stop at crosswalks even if you’re already halfway across. When people pass you on the highway, they will cut back in front of you within 2 feet of your bumper, even if the lane is clear ahead and there is no one on their tale. One of the weirdest things that I still find jarring after two months is the sheer length of light patterns. Pressure plates seem to be non-existent here and many of the intersections near my place have light patterns in excess of 90 seconds.
Culinarily I’ve been having issues too, needless to say I can’t get anything George’s like here (though I’ve been pleased by being reunited with Popeye’s Chicken) and overall ethnic food wise the place doesn’t hold a candle to Winnipeg. The single greatest tragedy is the lack (at least that I’ve been able to find) of any true thai restaurants. Most of the Vietnamese restaurants in town bill themselves as Vietnamese and Thai food, but invariably their Thai dishes consist of a shitty tomato based Pad Thai and various Vietnamese style noodly bowls with “thai chicken” which near as I can tell just means they put extra lime juice or lime leaves in. If you’re especially lucky you might find a lackluster Tom Kha Gai soup. This wouldn’t be a crushing disappointment if it weren’t also very difficult to find Thai ingredients in the limited local asian markets. Proper thai curry pastes are nowhere to be found, much less something like Matsuman, but at least I can make some semi-proper pad thai. What I wouldn’t give to be able to head down to Vientiane tonight though…
You might think I should be thankful for the weather, but to be honest, other than the week of death back in January (Winnipeg: coldest place on the continent… beating out the ARCTIC CIRCLE) temperatures have not been far apart and we’ve gotten an absolute ton of snow that has made the wussy people around here hibernate even more. Even getting someone to go for a drink after work is like pulling teeth. I’m told things will get better here with the coming of summer and the festival season, but all I can say is thank god for movies and the internet. Regardless, summer brings Fringe back home and unless I can swing a trip back it’ll be the first festival that I’ve missed all of in well over a decade.
Matters are not helped by the fact that the famous southern Ontario attitude is alive and well here… Not long after arriving here I was shopping at best buy for a movie and happened to mention that I was new to the city and trying to keep myself occupied until I met some people. His response when he found out I was from Winnipeg. “So I guess things are a little more fast paced here hey? – – – Yeah that’s right buddy…Kitchener (population ~200k) is too fast paced for me, your towering downtown skyline of 3 or 4 buildings over 10 stories tall just blows my little prairie mind. Wake up, even Regina has a bigger downtown core than this dinky little town. I guess merely by being within 2 hours of downtown Toronto I should feel overwhelmed by the I AM CANADA aura that is the GTA.
Doc Marten’s is having a contest whereby they’ll actually make one of these. I just want to see how far I can get up with stupid ideas. The goons from SomethingAwful.com are thoroughly ruining the contest already for the enjoyment of all. Go vote “Love it!” for my boot!
It’s summertime, we’re featuring our new chili page on the front of the wiki and barbecue season is in full swing. Given the recent anniversary and the fact that I haven’t done it in a while I figured it was time for a giveaway.
Burger King in London has apparently introduced what they call the world’s most expensive hamburger (which it isn’t, but that’s another story.
The burger is made of Wagyu beef and sits atop an Iranian saffron bun with organic mayonnaise, white truffles and pink Himalayan rock salt. It’s garnished with onion straws fried in Cristal champagne and Pata Negra ham drizzled in aged Modena balsamic vinegar.
For those who don’t know Wagyu Beef is a breed that has a premium flavour, texture and marbling and is raised on a diet that includes premium grains as well as Beer and Sake. The Pata Negra ham is Jamon Iberico and is another incredibly expensive meat made from free range hogs that eat mostly oak acorns. It was actually illegal in the states until last year. One would assume they mean the onions are battered in a champagne batter.
Price for one burger?
$190 U.S.
What on earth do you eat as a side dish with this thing? The standard BK fries would feel awfully lowbrow sitting next to it… or do they make special premium fries with this “pink Himalayan rock salt” as a coating?
My other question (and a question brought up by many on the SA forums) is who do they get to cook these things? Is it just the usual minimum wage slaves who generally make my whopper or do they actually bring in a chef to do it? I somehow can’t imagine the regular staff being any part of the process of creating a burger where the beef alone costs more per pound than they make a day.
All the proceeds from this fancy-pants burger actually go to a London based charity.
