Saturday, February 20, 2010

Victuals of the Lowlands

I'm a lazy blogger. I have a full year's worth of food stories and photos that I just haven't gotten the kick in the pants to get them posted.

Ach, du lieber.

Without further ado, here are my tales of ...
Food of the Netherlands!

Last spring we went to Europe to celebrate Jeff's graduation and to visit some relatives. We landed in Amsterdam where we spent a week with my cousin Freek and the rest of the family acting as hosts and tour guides.

The most typically Dutch food I can think of has got to be fresh herring. When I was a teenager my uncle Peter tried to get me to eat herring and I absolutely refused since I was a pathetic wuss with a fearful palate.
This trip - I couldn't get enough of this stuff. So lovely. For a euro or two you could get a few chunks of raw herring covered in raw onions at little vendors on the street. Tasty, even though it did leave you with pretty skanky breath.

FYI, Eating it on the street with a toothpick is a good idea. Taking it on the train and eating it in a closed compartment is a BAD idea. Live and learn, people.



Another typical Dutch eating experience - Indonesian Rijstaffel.
Dutch food is very simple, but they've held on to yummy things from their colonial history like the Rijstaffel, which is a huge selection of little dishes of curries and stirfies and crazy spiced hard boiled eggs and other delicious things.
This is celebration food - the occasion here was my cousin Christa's 30th birthday. It was so great to get to share this day with the family!

One of the funnest discoveries was on a chilly day in Rotterdam. We were walking down the street and saw a guy outside a little restaurant with this giant cast-iron grill with little indentations. About 40 seconds after pouring the batter, he flipped them over with a fork to cook the other side. Another 40 seconds, and he would whip them out of the grill onto a waiting plate which would then be covered in slices of butter and mounds of icing sugar. They were like hot little puffy, eggy pancakes. Poffertjes! So good!

Not too much explanation required here - this is a piece of bread covered in butter and chocolate sprinkles. For some reason, chocolate sprinkles or hagelslag is a standard bread topping often eaten at breakfast. I remember being VERY impressed with this as a 10 year old visiting the Netherlands for the first time... It was like having Easter paska every day. Jeff liked it too.

And the best is saved for last....

Vla.

Pudding in a carton. Lots of flavours. Good for breakfast, good for dessert. Enough said.

Treats from the Teutons

... Otherwise known as food from Germany.

After leaving the Netherlands, we headed over to my lovely cousin Lina's place near Stuttgart in Germany where we spent a few days visiting her family and exploring the old Schwabische towns and castles. Lina fed us incredibly well at her place, but apparently I actually showed some restraint in keeping my camera in its bag instead of introducing it to her family's dinner table.

This post reflects our eating on one particular day visiting the town of Bietigheim-Bissingen close to Lina's place.


Breakfasts were amazing in Germany. There were always mounds of meats, cured sausage, cheese, breads... I would normally consider these dinner food but they were a yummy way to start the day.
The top photo was Jeff's brekky - four different cheeses and four different meats. I think he also got some eggs - hardboiled, maybe. My breakfast consisted of mounds of prosciutto with sliced tomatoes smothered in pesto topped off with mini bocconcini balls. There was also a basket of assorted breads on the table with a half dozen different types of breads. This was also the kind of thing that Lina served us at home -this wasn't just a restaurant experience.



After several hours of walking around and exploring the town on very full stomachs, it started pouring rain. Although we still weren't too hungry after the enormous breakfast, we popped into this place called Brauerei zum Rossknecht.
(wanna see the menu? http://www.rossknecht.net/upload/226588_rk_speisekarte_web.pdf)

Jeff had schnitzel, I had the kasespaetzel and the micro-bier. We shared the salad.


This kasespaetzel was basically a high-end version of mac and cheese - lots of green onions and ham, topped with loads of carmelized onions and sooooo cheesy. Just thinking about it is making me drool. Even though I wasn't too hungry after the breakfast we had eaten, I still ate every single bite of this stuff.
This food is RICH food. I think I may have felt like dying later in the evening... a glutton's life is not always a comfortable one.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Manitoba Quinoa


As I was perusing the offerings of my favourite plant and seed store last spring, I discovered some seed packages for Cherry Vanilla Quinoa. http://www.herbs.mb.ca/en/on-line-shopping/seeds/all-seeds/quinoa_cherry_vanilla_seeds.html

Quinoa seeds! How preposterous! I want some!

Somehow I assumed that quinoa would be an exotic warm weather plant like everything else that's tasty in the world, but it was first domesticated up in the alpine plains of the Andes. It doesn't like weather much above 30 degrees and it prefers cooler nights. It's actually currently being grown commercially in Saskatchewan, so I figured it should do just fine in downtown Winnipeg.


I had planted a bunch of new things in this part of the garden so I wasn't sure which plants were weeds and which were my seedlings. The arugula was spindly, the frisee was non-existent for the first week or so and all I could see where I planted my quinoa was pigweed. On the other hand the spinach was gorgeous due to the colder weather.

After a little investigation online I found out that quinoa does, in fact, look exactly like pigweed which made it a little difficult to separate the good stuff from the bad stuff at first - but it kept getting taller and taller and taller...



This clump of greenness shows the garden at the end of August. At this point the tallest quinoa plant was about 5 foot 7 or so - definitely taller than me. Officially this stuff isn't supposed to grow this tall, but it seemed as though our weird weather last summer made it shoot straight up instead of staying shorter and producing big seed heads.


The plants started drying up mid-September, so I cut off the seed heads and left them to dry in a big vase on my kitchen table for the next few weeks.

Once they were dry, I had to figure out some way of removing the seeds from the chaff.

I thought of using screens, or of using a fan to blow away the undesirable stuff, but the seeds are just so small that I had to think of something else to try.


I started out by rubbing the seed clusters into a big bowl, and then painstakingly hand-picked all the green stuff out of the bowl. Because the flowers hadn't developed that well, there was a lot of fluffy stuff that kind of looked like it should have contained a seed but hadn't matured properly. After a bit of experimenting I found out that this fluffy stuff FLOATED.

So a routine developed... Add water to bowl, swish around vigourously, whisk away the stuff that floats to the top. Inspect the removed portion for errant seeds. Repeat.
I must have rinsed out that damn blue bowl a dozen times....
The good thing about this technique was that home-grown quinoa requires vigourous rinsing since it grows with a bitter coating which is usually already removed in commercially available stuff.


After all the rinsing, the quinoa was left to dry on a cookie sheet in my dining room. After about a week it was totally dry and it went into the jar pictured at the top of this post.
All this work created one cup of quinoa. ONE CUP!
How do you honour ONE MEASLY CUP of home-grown quinoa?

By making quinoa salad with oranges, mint and sun-dried black olives for all your friends at a potluck, that's how. I hope they enjoyed it.

More on growing quinoa in Canada:
http://www.saltspringseeds.com/scoop/powerfood.htm