If you were trying to get a hold of me today I had my phone off because I was shopping at the One of Kind Show.
I don’t take very many days off, especially this time of year but…..this show is only in town for 2 short weeks and I hate to miss it. I worked early from 8 to 11 a.m. and I’m working tonight from 8 to 11 p.m. to make up for it.
I’ll be back in the kitchen slavin’ tomorrow.
Archive for November, 2007
I baked and baked today. Whipped shortbread and chocolate drizzled hazelnut spritz. Can you get fat from cookie aroma? If so, I’ve gained at least 10 lbs.
The cookies are for a variety of catering events this December. We are going to make Florentine cookies this week! They are fairly difficult to make but oh so rewarding. Check back in a couple of days, in the meanwhile here are some cookie photos: Cookie exchange anyone?
Tuesday we were in the kitchen making:
Beef and cheese enchilada casserole, broiled lemon and onion salmon, Toblerone cookies, roasted vegetable salad, beet salad and Chicken Korma.
When I make Chicken Korma dish at home I use chicken thighs and cook the chicken in the korma sauce. When I am preparing this dish for client who prefer chicken breast meat, I make the sauce first and then saute the chicken and simmer slightly in the sauce. This way the chicken doesn’t get overdone.
Here is the recipe:
Chicken Korma for 6
1 kilograms boned and skinned chicken breast halves
37 1/2 grams blanched almonds
3 cloves garlic — minced
1 1/2 inch ginger root — minced
3 tablespoons oil
4 1/2 cardamom — pods
1 1/2 onion — finely chopped
1 tablespoons cumin
3/8 teaspoon salt
225 milliliters yogurt
262 1/2 milliliters cream
Instructions
Cut chicken in 1 inch cubes. Put the almonds, garlic and ginger into a food processor and blend to a paste adding 2 tbsp. water. Heat the oil in a large frying pan and saute the chicken until browned, set aside.
Add the cardamom pods and fry for 2 minutes, add the onion and saute. Stir in the almond and garlic paste, cumin and salt. Add the yogurt a little at a time and cook over low heat until it has been absorbed. Return the chicken to the pan . Add the cream and simmer until chicken is fully cooked.
But we are baking, baking, baking this week! Stay tuned for baking updates.
Since our family tries to eat Ontario produce only I’ve never had too many pineapples in my shopping cart but this price is ridiculous.
The pineapples in Hawaii were $1.97 and they were grown locally. How is it that a pineapple flown thousands of miles (expensive jet fuel) can be cheaper than a local pineapple in Hawaii. This dilemna is multi faceted but this chef refuses to buy into the scam. Capitalist forces are changing the face of our food, somewhere in Cost Rica (where the pineapple came from) someone is paying the price of my cheap pineapple and some giant corporate pockets are being lined with the surge of pineapple purchases. Keep produce money in Ontario! Make pear soup. Here’s a recipe:
Parsnip and Roasted Pear Soup
Ingredients
4 tbsp Butter
3 Pears — peeled and cored
2 Onions — finely chopped
2 pounds Parsnips — peeled and chopped
6 cups Stock, Chicken
2 cups Cream, Heavy, Whipping
2 tsp Lemon Juice, Bottled
Instructions
Melt butter. Heat oven to 375. Line baking sheet with parchment, drizzle butter over pears and roast until brown on the edges (about 40 minutes). In saute pan add a little oil and saute onions until just translucent, add parsnips and stock. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer until vegetables are tender, about 15 minutes. Cool slightly. Puree soup in 3 batches in blender until smooth. Return soup to pot. Stir in cream and lemon juice. Season with salt and pepper.
Every year our street hosts a neighbourhood Beaujolais Nouveau party.
‘…Every year the first taste of the new wine harvest is eagerly anticipated in France and around the world. Parties are held, bottles are uncorked and the first sips of Beaujolais Nouveau are savoured. But since this is a young wine, it would be out of character to get too serious at this party. A relaxed attitude in both presentation and attire should be the order of the day. After all, until the first bottle is uncorked, no one quite knows what toexpect from it - so be prepared for surprises!”
We sipped, we ate, we met many of our ‘old’ and new neighbours. Thanks to Lisi and Alex for graciously hosting this year’s affaire.
My dear husband says that they were all great! Blech! The party was great and the food was great but I prefer my beaujolais aged at least 1 year. The nice gentleman at the LCBO had a great suggestion on what to do with the Nouveaus left over from the party. He uses wine when he bakes biscotti. He makes the biscotti dough, bakes it, then cuts it and dips each cut edge into the wine before returning them to the oven for their second baking. Yum!
This Friday was supposed to be my day off after my email was caught up and my client menus were sent out. I was supposed to have a glorious afternoon shopping at the One of a Kind Show but somehow life gets in the way and by the time that I had my ‘work’ done I only had 2 hours til I had to pick up my son from school so……I baked off some gingerbread. It’s snowy here in Toronto and I wanted the house to have a holiday feel to it so what better way then to make gingerbread cookies.
I baked cookie ornaments.
I will decorate these and then package them up for sale to make your tree beautiful and edible at the same time.
I use the Wilton Gingerbread recipe. I truly have been using it for about 20 years. It is reliable, extremely tasty and very sturdy. It’s the perfect dough for gingerbread houses which I will make a little later on in the month. I make the dough in my 5 quart mixer. The dough is pliable and easy to work with while it’s still warm but as it sits it becomes tougher so don’t be tempted to make this dough in advance (I learned the hard way with a full 23 litre pail of g/bread dough).
Keep tuned to watch the decorating in progress. If you looking for a good client gift a dozen of these gingerbread cookie ornaments sells for $15.
See you next time.
I have been living the low carb lifestyle for about 3 years. Every now and then I gain a little weight, mostly while I’m on holidays but sometimes work exhaustion can do it too! Now that I’m back from Hawaii and I know for sure that I will either have to lose some weight or buy a bathng suit in another (read larger) size.
No way! So back to cutting out excess sugars and carbs.
My favourite lunch is this Korean Beef Soup from Karen Barnaby’s Low Carb Gourmet . I have made a huge number of the recipes and they are truly fantastic. I double the batch for the freezer.
If you are considering a low carb diet I have cooked for many many clients and have just a ton of suggestions.
We were busy in the kitchen today. We started off the morning getting ready for a weekend catering job. Hummus & Garlic Feta Dip , coffee cake, cookies, jalapeno cheesecake and then moved on to making the crepes, filling and sauce for the blintzes.
Blintzes are made by every culture, they’re just known by different names. My polish mother in law calls them naleshniki.
I have been using the same recipe for crepes since I made my first ones when I was 12 years old.
Crepes (30)
Ingredients
2 1/4 cups milk
1 3/4 cups flour
3 eggs
1/4 cup butter — melted
1 pinch salt
Instructions
Add milk, eggs to blender and process. In 2 or 3 additions add flour, add melted butter. Let mixture stand for at least 1 hour.
Heat crepe pan, lightly oil, swirl batter, cook until crepes are done then flip and lightly cook second side.
The filling for my blintzes has changed over the years from cottage cheese to ricotta cheese. It’s easy and straight forward.
1 454 gr tub of ricotta
1 large egg
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp cinnamon
sugar to taste.
Mix up the filling and place a tablespoon or so in the centre of your crepe. Fold up from the bottom then fold in the sides and finally fold down the dop. Fry on both sides in hot butter and serve with your favourite sauce.
So you want to know how to debone a turkey. It’s not difficult, it does however help if you know a little turkey physiology (where the joints are).
Before I deboned my turkey, I brined it in an 8 to 1 water to salt solution for 24 hours. I rinsed it well and patted it dry.
I made a stuffing for it. In our family, my dad, (Shimmy) is the stuffing king and so I use his recipe.
Stuffing for one 12 to 15 pound turkey
1 loaf bread (pre-seasoned & herbed bread is great)
4 stalks of celery, chopped
2 onions, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
4 cups mushrooms, sliced
2 to 4 cups of chicken stock to moisten the mixture.
Always season with salt and pepper to taste.
I start with my mix of onions, celery, garlic and mushrooms. I heat up my pan, add a little oil and saute until wilted but not browned. Season with salt and pepper. It should look like this:
Mix together your sauteed vegetables with the cubed stuffing bread and moisten with chicken stock until it holds together.
Then I cool the stuffing in the fridge so that it is as cold as the turkey.
You need a sharp knife to debone. If in doubt take your knife to your favourite cooking supplies store and arrange to have your knife professionally sharpened.
Make sure that your hands and your knife are dry. Lay your turkey breast side down and make a cut from top to bottom along the backbone.
Your next task is to begin to remove the turkey skin and meat while leaving the central carcass behind. You carefully cut through the wing joint and the thigh joint and scrape away the breast meat from the carcass. We’re half way done.
Turn the turkey around and repeat the process. The goal is to leave the carcass without any meat attached. You should remove the thigh bone too.
In the following photo the carcass has been removed and is on the right.
I have to be honest with you….I have done this about a hundred times, I have deboned every kind of poultry right down to quails. It takes only practice to get the hang of it. It took me 25 minutes to debone my first turkey, now it takes about 5. I teach courses on how to do this.
Next we need to fill the cavity with stuffing.
Then I sew the turkey back up using wooden skewers.
then you need to truss and massage your turkey back into a ‘turkey shape’.
I like to roast my turkeys at about 375 F until the internal temperature of the stuffing is 140 F.
I have a convection oven and this 12 pound turkey took about 1 hour and 20 minutes. It’s worth it to own a digital probe thermometer. They are very inexpensive ($10 at Ikea or Loblaws) and the alarm goes off when the correct temperature is reached. I set the alarm at 130 and after it rests on the counter it goes up to 140 in about 15 minutes.
The beauty of this turkey is the presentation. Once it’s cooked you simply cut it in half, tip it cut side down and slice it like a solid roast.
There are a ton of boneless/spineless poultry jokes in my family about these turkeys but I’ll leave you to send me yours.
If this seems too time consuming just email me and I’d be happy to prepare one for you and deliver your dinner ready for cooking.
Our client is a vegetarian, her husband likes meat so we have been working on some seitan dishes that appeal to both of them. So far we have met with great success on the creativity side but the price of seitan was ridiculous.
It was costing over $12 in seitan at my favourite grocery store and I thought that this was an exorbitant price for gluten flour. Undaunted by the undeserved reputation that making seitan is difficult, I set out to make my own.
I did some research, mostly on the internet and would like to give credit to Ken for doing an amazing job at describing the process.
Here is the photo of our Ginger Seitan Sweet Potato Stir Fry and the recipe follows:
Ginger Seitan-Sweet Potato Stir Fry - Serves 4
Ingredients
2 tablespoons Sugar, Brown
1 tablespoon Cornstarch
3 tablespoons Soy Sauce
2 tablespoons Dry sherry
1 teaspoon Ginger Root, minced
2 cloves Garlic, minced
1/2 cup Pineapple Juice, Unsweetened, canned
1 pound Seitan, — julienne
Pepper — to taste
3 tablespoons Oil
2 Sweet Potato
1 Red pepper — julienne
1/4 pound Pea Pods — washed & trimmed
4 Scallions — sliced
Instructions
Sauce: Combine brown sugar, cornstarch, soy sauce, sherry, ginger, and pineapple juice. Stir well. Set aside.
Saute sweet potato and bell pepper for 2 to 3 minutes.
Add snow peas and garlic and cook one minute, and then pour in reserved sauce.
Add seitan, stir and cook until mixture thickens and ingredients are glazed. Add green onions and stir just to combine.
We will definitely be making many more seitan dishes as it has that ‘meat mouth feel’ that make the dish feel complete.
I should mention that being in Toronto with the city’s huge selection of ingredients it was not difficult to find gluten flour. I didn’t buy the brand name vital gluten flour I just picked some up at our local bulk barn, they even had organic gluten flour.
We also made Black Bean Chilaquile, Spinach Stuffed Lasagna Ruffles, Vegetable and Chickpea Stew and Ginger Peanut Tofu Stir Fry.
Tomorrow we’ll be deboning and stuffing a turkey in preparation for American Thanksgiving. We’ll also be making a Sweet Potato Bake, Green Beans Almondine, Stuffing, gravy and mmmmmm Caramel Sauce for the Bavarian Apple Torte.
See you back in the kitchen tomorrow.