Planet Borscht

Planet Haddock? Planet Lobster? Planet Fiddlehead?

2011-07-26T19:33:00.003-05:00

The planet borscht took a bit of a slowdown and has found itself in a new setting. It's time for the planet to start turning again...

This time, there's some scallops next to the farmer sausage. Double the goodness.

Andalucian Eats

2010-03-06T14:47:00.011-06:00

Spain has been a foodie destination for years. Some of the most exciting chefs in the world have been coming out of Madrid and Barcelona, exploring the outer reaches of molecular gastronomy with flavour infused foams and gases on their ironic food. Here's a quote by Ferran Adria about his food from his iconic restaurant, El Bulli just outside Barcelona:

"Decontextualisation, irony, spectacle and performance are completely legitimate, as long as they are not superficial but respond to, or are closely bound up with, a process of gastronomic reflection."

This concept, while interesting, has nothing to do with the food from Southern Spain, which is where we spent a week last spring. Food in Andalucia is very simple, very straightforward ,very traditional. And very lovely.

Our first meal in Spain was at a cafe across from the bus station in Alicante.

We had just arrived on a cheap flight from Germany (about 75 Euros for the two of us!) and had about two and a half hours to get from the airport located outside the city to the bus station downtown, where we would then hopefully be able to buy tickets to go to Granada, a four hour drive away. We took a transit bus from the airport which dropped us in downtown Alicante where we had a stressful time with our luggage on the steep cobblestone streets. We finally found the station, bought our tickets and still had an hour or so to find lunch.

This plate of tiny little fried sardines made everything better. We were now definitely back on holiday. I'm still a little unclear as to whether or not the heads were supposed to be eaten - Jeff ate his, but I left mine on my plate. The guys at the restaurant found us entertaining and gave us some complimentary cafe con leche at the end of the meal. All the stress melted away and everything seemed fun again. We caught our bus, had a lovely drive through the Sierra Mountains, and arrived in Granada without a hitch.

In Granada, we ate some more fried fish, or Pesca Frita, although we decided not to eat the head of this particular fishy monster.

A comment about eating in Spain - the food rhythm is very different from North America. They tend to have small breakfasts, huge lunches, and then EVERYTHING closes between 3:30 and 7:30. The streets are deserted, the windows of the restaurants are usually shuttered and there are few signs of life on the streets, apart from the other confused tourists. This particular meal was consumed in a completely empty restaurant - one of the few that we found open at 6:00. After we ordered our food our waiter went to the kitchen and soon we heard a woman yelling at him in an exasperated manner - I have a feeling she thought it would be another hour or two before she'd have to go back to work. Oops! I promise that the next time we'll train our stomachs to eat when the rest of the country eats.

Our favourite pesca frita experience was served in Tarifa a few days later. There were so many things on this plate - clams, shrimp, sardines, squid, chunks of cod and a few things we couldn't quite identify which were extremely tasty nonetheless. There were some roundish things (in the middle of the photo underneath the calimari) that were particularly tasty and particularly bewildering - they tasted like some kind of crab, or seafood pate of some kind in some kind of casing, mild and lemony. Underneath the breading there were tiny little veins running over the surface which made them look kind of like kidneys. We asked the waitress what they were in our broken Spanglish and she said something that sounded like huevos, which means eggs.

I thought I had misheard her but later we saw the same things in a tapas bar (pictured on the left) and confirmed that they were, in fact, marinated fish egg sacs. Cooked caviar! We also ate a lot of boquerones, tiny little anchovy fillets marinated in lemon, garlic and olive oil served with bread, (pictured on the right).

When we weren't in the mood for fish, jamon was definitely the way to go. These giant legs of air-cured, pressed ham were hanging in almost every bar we entered. In the picture above, we were in a bar in Granada where tapas are complimentary with a drink, and we got a few thick slices with some almonds and olives. One thing about this salty food - it gets you to drink more!

At breakfast, we'd try to find a churro stand where we got these amazing hot, unglazed spiral doughnuts that you'd dip in thick hot chocolate.

Piping hot!

Our best and worst meals in Spain were in the same city, about 8 hours apart on the second last day of our trip. We arrived in Cadiz quite hungry, and found a nearby restaurant in the square near our pension. The 'menu del dia' which included an appetizer, main, and dessert was really cheap, so we went for it. This soup pictured above was supposed to be chickpea stew. Sure, there were chickpeas, but there was a lot of gelatinous tripe and thick rinds of fat as well in a bland, greasy broth. Gross. I couldn't finish it. Jeff had a seafood soup that was just as bland and had almost no fish in it at all. How disappointing. Our second last day, and the food was awful!

We made up for it the same evening. Cadiz was kind of creepy during the dead hours of the afternoon, but everything came alive at night and was so beautiful. We found this little cafe down a little alley and shared this plate of pulpo. Lying on a bed of thinly sliced boiled potatoes, the octopus was tenderly cooked and topped with grainy mustard and olive oil. It was the most unexpected, rustic treatment of seafood I think I've ever had, and definitely was one of the best due to the freshness of the octopus.

After thinking about our culinary experiences in Southern Spain it's even more interesting that Spanish chefs are at the vanguard of the cutting-edge food world. The molecular gastronomists treat food as performance art and their four hour long tasting menus of 25 mouthful-size courses are meant to meant to confuse and inspire. This is so different than the food we experienced - everything was so connected to place, so connected to simple flavours rooted in the food's texture. Perhaps this simple food was the inspiration to explore the essence of pure flavour on a higher level. Whatever the connection, I dearly hope I'll get to experience it again.

Victuals of the Lowlands

2010-02-20T20:50:00.000-06:00

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

2010-02-20T12:03:00.006-06:00

... 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.

Manitoba Quinoa

2010-02-13T10:11:00.014-06:00

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

Happy New Year!

2010-01-07T20:02:00.003-06:00

It's not really New Year's without portzelky.

After getting burnt out by a very Christmas season this year, I knew I had to take it easy on New Year's Eve. No parties, no fireworks, just staying at home and watching DVDs. (Run, Lola, Run and SCTV Christmas specials, for those who are interested) My plan was to do a lot of NOTHING.
However, my plans of decadent laziness were thwarted when a friend mentioned on Facebook that very afternoon that her mom had just brought her some Portzelky. I was immediately motivated to get going on a nice big batch, since MY mother was recovering in bed from back surgery and needed ME to bring HER some portzelky! Or perhaps I just wanted to eat some yummy dough deep fried in lard and then covered in sugar. (...And then could gather brownie points by bringing the leftovers to mom's the next morning!)

Portzelky are basically raisin fritters that are topped with copious amounts of icing sugar. The Dutch call them Oliebollen, my sister-in-law from Montreal said they were like tiny little Dutchies. Whatever you want to call them, they're YUMMY, and the Mennonites of Manitoba like to eat them on New Year's Day.

I used a yeast dough that was very hard to scoop up and even harder to place in the hot fat without splattering. I used lard for frying, which I don't think I've used before for these, but I think it worked out really well. I've never had such an easy time maintaining temperature on my crappy stove. These things can be a little tricky because if you have it too hot, the outside will get burnt while the inside will still be gooey. This time, all was golden.

I think the sticky dough is part of the magic of the misshapen ball - I think if these looked pretty, they'd somehow lose most of their charm. They're SUPPOSED to look irregular and misshapen.

Top warm portzelky with icing sugar with more on the side for dipping, and you've got yourself a fine way to start the new year.

Sometimes writing blogs feels like homework...

2009-12-05T09:02:00.013-06:00

...And that has been the reason for my absence this year.

2009 has been a fantastic food year. Many photographs of delicious things have been tucked away on my hard drive, awaiting the dissipation of my laziness and antipathy, awaiting their chance to be shared with the world. And now that life is getting hectic with pre-Christmas nonsense, I finally have the get-up-and-go to start up again with exploring my adoration of food.

So I'll start with something random from 2009. How about...

European Potato Chips!

This spring, we made a little trip out to Europe to celebrate Jeff finishing university. We had a fantastic time visiting family in the Netherlands and in Germany, and a great time exploring southern Spain on our own.

The chips definitely weren't the culinary highlight of the trip or anything, but they kind of signify the best thing about travel for me. You expect to see beautiful old buildings and lovely canals and attractive people on bicycles and bakeries on every street corner and cobblestone. The things that you don't expect are the things you usually take for granted so completely you stop noticing them anymore, and then when they're different,it's kind of a fun surprise. For example, I didn't see one door with a door knob. Bathrooms are also an adventure every time you walk in, considering the wide range of toilets out there. Traffic lights in Spain aren't on the other side of the intersection - they're right next to you. And you'd expect Netherlands TV to have a mix of local programming and dubbed North American shows, but somehow coming across Spongebob Squarepants in Dutch can be very, very surprising.

Obviously, the food of another culture is a big perk of travelling - for the two us it's sometimes the main reason for going somewhere. There'll be more posts on the highlights of our European food experiences, but here are a collection of chips that I found kind of surprising.

German Donair flavoured chips. 'Doner mit alles' - loaded donair.

Donair shops are pretty ubiquitous in the Netherlands and Germany - it's usually the best bet for a cheap but tasty lunch. I expected the shops, but not necessarily the chips. Did they taste like a donair - not at all, but it was an interesting bag.

Spanish 'Jamon' flavoured chips. Ham is BIG in Andalucia - in most bars and restaurants you'll see a whole cured leg (complete with hoof) hanging on a post behind the bar, ready to have a few paper-thin slices cut from the haunch for a tapas. I expected the ham, not necessarily the chips. Interesting note - these kind of tasted like Old Dutch BBQ chips. Kind of bacony. The real jamon was INFINITELY more worthy of snacking.

The surprise favourite of the trip? These Cream of Mushroom flavoured chips purchased in Spain. I've never been a huge fan of cream of mushroom soup, but these chips were really shockingly mushroom flavoured. And creamy. Very subtle, and I think these were a kettle-type chip as well, which is always a bonus for me. The bag was written in Spanish and in Portuguese.

Writing this post now, I find it a little depressing that I spent time eating chips when I could have been snacking on more exciting things, but I must acknowledge that they still have an important place in vacation eating.

(Plus I really love eating chips.)

Pure Lard Part Two: Soap

2008-12-20T20:27:00.011-06:00

So what's a gal supposed to do with 15 lbs of lard, anyway? How much pie crust can you eat? A few weeks after rendering all my pig fat I was still trying to figure this out when I thought of making homemade soap. I remembered watching my Oma make soap when I was a little girl. It was really harsh, nasty stuff that was great for cleaning laundry - all that lye burned the stains right out of the clothes! I found the idea of using my nice organic, porky lard to wash my tender body quite delightful, so I started doing a little bit of research online. How hard could it be?

The internet is a wonderful thing. I found so much info - recipes, lye calculators, tips on what to do if your batch fails, and pictures of what each step is supposed to look like. I even found a local source of lye at http://www.dierbe.com/ . (Di Erbe actually just opened up shop at 1853 Main Street next to Don's Photo this last weekend! Funny that I had to find them by googling 'Winnipeg Lye' and they ended up being neighbours...) Anyway, I was glad to find them because lye is a little hard to find in retail stores these days - apparently it's also an ingredient in Crystal Meth.

There was also a ton of info on which oils and fats made the nicest soaps. Most recipes use a combination of tropical oils and almost every recipe included coconut oil, which is desirable due to its abundant lathering capabilities. It was pretty difficult to find information on lard as the main ingredient but I eventually discovered that soap made of pure lard is known to be slightly soft, quite moisturizing, but with meagre suds action. It was pretty universally recommended that you add beef tallow (or even better, coconut oil for hardness and bigger bubbles!) to lard soap to make sure you get nice soap.

I wasn't terribly interested in besmirching my 100-mile lard with mangrove-destroying, plantation-grown palm or coconut oils, so I started to look for tallow. However, it turned out that NO ONE in Winnipeg even knows what tallow is, let alone sells it. Only a handful of the dozen butchers I called even knew what suet was, let alone tallow. I finally found suet (from veal - yikes!) at DeLuca's. They gave me four pounds of it for free! Time for more rendering!

The online soap calculators are really neat - you input exactly how much and what kind of oil or fat you have, and it will calculate exactly the amount of lye and water is required to saponify the amount of fat you have. I think this is why the old fashioned stuff was so harsh - people used to use a lot more lye than necessary.

My first batch of soap did turn out slightly harsh, due to my inexact and bouncy kitchen scale. Maybe I'll get a better one for Christmas, hey Santa? I made a bigger batch the second time around so I would be able to measure larger amounts at a time and therefore get slightly more accurate measurements.

Anyway, this is how you make soap.
1. Weigh your fat, and melt it.
2. Weigh your lye and your water, and then add the lye to the water in a WELL VENTILATED AREA. Lye fumes are pretty nasty - My Aunt Mary told me scary stories of damaging her respiratory system when making soap in her basement many years ago. It can also burn your skin, so you have to be careful with that, too. Wear your gloves and your gas mask!
3. Make sure your lye mixture (which gets really hot when you mix it together) and your fat are both around 100 degrees Fahrenheit, then mix them together.

4. And then mix together and mix together and mix together until the whole mess starts getting thicker, kinda like thin pudding. This is called 'trace'. It probably took about 15 or 20 minutes for my soap to trace. When your soap starts to trace, add your scented oil and colours (I used a vanilla pomegranate scent and a bit of paprika to add a bit of colour) and mix it up.

5. Pour the thickening soap into your primary mold and let it sit.

There was a lot of info online about how to primary molds, but I used the good old fashioned milk carton like Oma used to, which worked out well. The soap continues to heat up as it hardens - you want to keep it warm so it can finish going through the magical chemical process of saponification.

After a day or two, you can take it out of the mold and cut it into blocks and lay it out to cure a little longer. Apparently soap made from animal fat solidifies a little quicker than soap made from pure vegetable oil, which can take a little longer to harden properly. I let my soap dry out for a couple of weeks before I tried using it.

In the next few weeks while I was waiting for the soap to harden I read up on milling processes. Milled soap is basically regular soap that's shaved and then melted down and poured into molds. It's the FANCY stuff! I ended up melting down most of the first batch and about a third of the second batch to make some new exciting molded soaps. I made some lemon scrub soap with turmeric, lemon zest and cornmeal and a couple batches of cinnamon oatmeal soap.

EVERYBODY will get soap for Christmas this year. Make sure you look surprised when you open it up!

Pig's Head Soup (warning - graphic photos)

2008-12-07T21:00:00.001-06:00

Like I mentioned in the previous post, when I purchased a butchered pig last month, I asked for the extra fat, the liver, the heart and the head to be delivered with my meat. When you buy meat directly from a farmer, you pay for the whole animal, even though you only get the nice bits of meat that the butcher wants you to have. I figured since I already paid for the weird parts, I should get them home and figure out what to do with them. I had a few plans - I had long wanted to try making liverwurst, and as for the head - I was interested in getting the jowls so I could smoke them or make Guanciale. When smoked, it's similar to bacon and guanciale is apparently kind of similar to pancetta.

Well, the idea of using up all the spare parts was a noble one. I didn't take any pictures of the liverwurst making process for some reason - I guess it was so intense and engrossing that I didn't pick up the camera. I ended up making two large liverwursts and about 10 small loaves of liver pate with bourbon. Pretty yummy stuff. I ended up giving the heart to my brother Carl, who always called dibs on the chicken hearts and gizzards any time Mom would roast a chicken when we were kids.

But the head.... Oh my God, the head nearly did me in. I don't think I was quite prepared to handle the huge hog's head that came wrapped in butcher paper. First of all, it was skinned. Do you know how gross a skinned pig's head is?

I'll show you how gross it is:

Not only was it gross, but the way that it was cut left very little meat in the jowl area, so I couldn't even make my hog jowls. Now what was I supposed to do? Make head cheese? Even I have my limits.
I found my way over to El Izalco that particular weekend, and the lovely Salvadorean woman who runs the place (and who I constantly forget the name of) suggested that I roast the head, make stock, and cook up some pozole. Pozole is a Mexican/Central American soup made with pork and hominy corn. Apparently it is served on special occasions because of the time it takes to prepare and it is a pretty big treat. I picked up a few pounds of dried hominy and lots of dried guajillo and chipotle chiles and went home with renewed excitement for my pig's head.

I have some pretty large stockpots, but nothing really worked with this damn head. I had hoped to skip the roasting part of the stock making, but the skull just wouldn't fit in the pot in one piece. After it had roasted for an hour or so, it was easier to break up into parts.

Long story short -

I was victorious in my goal of not wasting the pig's head. It made a delicious, rich soup that tasted extra yummy with all the hominy corn and chiles. And triple yummy with a garnish of chopped up avocados, cilantro and lime juice.

Pure Lard

2008-12-01T20:00:00.000-06:00

Let me preface this post by saying that I don't particularly care for pork. It's not really my favourite meat in and of itself - if I'd have my pick on a buffet table I would probably go for chicken or fish sooner than a big piece of pork. However, I seem to be drawn to the transformative nature of pork. You can do so many interesting things with pork - you can cure it, salt it, smoke it, age it, stuff it into sausage casings, and render it. I love what I can do with pork.

This year we purchased a whole pig from some organic farmers in La Broquerie, Manitoba. (Butchered, of course). I like buying meat directly from the farmer for a few reasons -

I like buying straight from the producer. The farmer gets all the profit - no money needs to go to a middle-man or shiny grocery store. They get to pocket all the money from the sale and thus actually afford to have a small-scale organic farm and be able to make a living doing so.
I like that organic meat is cheaper than in the grocery store. Not cheaper than the regular meat, but cheaper than the organic stuff. I really like the idea of eating organic, humanely raised meat, but I also cringe at the inflated prices on the freezer-burnt organic roasts I see in the supermarket freezer. I paid $1.95 per pound of live weight - around $300 for this batch of meat.
I like that I can decide how I get my meat cut up. Now this point is actually hypothetical, because I haven't ever received meat cut the way I requested it from the butcher. It seems that butchers are an obstinate bunch that like to do things the way they want to do them instead of how they were asked to do them. This time, I asked for large roasts, to have half the belly fresh so I could make pancetta, and half of it smoked into bacon, for lots of ground pork so I could make my own sausages and very few pork chops. I also wanted the head, the liver, and as much of the fat as possible. What I actually received was 3 measly pounds of ground pork, no fresh belly,12 rings of farmer sausage, 56 pork chops, a couple of large roasts.... and the head, the liver and 3 giant bags of fat. (At least they got that part right.) Apparently my ham and bacon is on its way this weekend - when it comes, I'm going to see if I can trade some of those pork chops for ground pork.

Anyway, the first weekend of the pig I was BUSY. The meat went straight into the freezer, and I started working on the weird stuff. The first job was rendering the lard.

Why do I need to render lard? I really have no idea.

I think the main problem with me is that I read Chowhound.com way too much and I pay too much attention to the crazy Mexican food aficionados that say that you gotta render your own lard to get the real, authentic good flavour you need for good Mexican food. I've been on a bit of a tortillas, beans and pork kick for the past year or so and so it made sense that I should ask for the fat from my pig so I could render my lard and have lots of exceptional flavour in my tortillas.

Rendering lard takes a long time. You have to chop up the hard fat into small pieces like the picture above, and then cook it for hours and hours until all the fat turns to liquid.

There will still be some solid pieces in all the liquid fat at this point. Strain the fat through a small-grain sieve to get all the chunks out of there and set the lard in a pan to cool and harden. I figure that I rendered about15 pounds of lard, when it was all said and done. When it solidified, I cut it into chunks, wrapped it in parchment paper and stuck them in the freezer.

The chunks that are left are crackles, or Jreewe, in Low German - the preferred way to die from cholesterol poisoning for every Mennonite girl worth her weight in grease.

You can still buy Crackles in Steinbach in big plastic tubs, smothered in lard. I was really grossed out by crackles when I was a kid - Mom would scoop up a big spoonful of what looked like dirty lard into the frying pan, and then it would melt to reveal these brown glossy lumps of... whatever the hell they are. I'm thinking it must be leftover collagen from within the fat structure of the fatback. Like... Grody to the Max.

But who am I to deny my heritage? They're still not my favourite, but once the extra fat is strained out of them, they tasted pretty fine with some fried potatoes.

Home Canning Season 2008

2008-11-09T14:22:00.009-06:00

The frenzy of food preservation hit us just as hard this summer as last year. In 2007 we had attempted to put away as much food for the winter as we could, partly due to our desire to avoid India-grown pickles and California-grown tomatoes throughout the winter as much as we could, and partly just to learn how to do it.

Some things disappeared really quickly - I think we had eaten most of our 20 jars of tomatoes by January. The chow, relish and pickles were gone by mid-winter too. When spring finally arrived, all we had left was some pickled cauliflower, ikra and salsa.
This year I tried to focus a little more on the stuff that went early last year, and a couple of new things like the sauerkraut mentioned in an early post.

I decided not to can tomatoes or tomato sauce this year. Because tomatoes aren't that acidic, you have to process them forever in a boiling water canner to safely can them. All that extra cooking didn't do too much for the flavour, either. This summer, whenever I had a few ripe tomatoes from our garden, I tossed them into the freezer whole. I also froze a big batch of tomato sauce in plastic yogurt containers and I also processed about 25 pounds of farmer's market tomatoes by roasting them in the oven until their skins blackened. I saved the run-off tomato juice to drink, and froze the roasted tomatoes in big blocks.
I also froze most of the swiss chard, kale and spinach that we got from the CSA so I could use them in soups and stews all winter long.

I went a little crazy with the pickles this year. I pickled everything - carrots, garlic scapes, green beans, zucchini and the odd cucumber. Between my garden, our CSA deliveries, and the farmer's market, there were a lot of vegetables to process as soon as they came in the house.

One day stands out in my memory in particular. I woke up early to cut up cucumbers and zucchini so they could sit in salt during the day when I was at work (the salt draws out the moisture from the cut vegetables and keeps them crunchier once they're pickled). My plan was to spend the evening canning the pickles and then making venison meatloaf for a friend at work and then doing laundry for my trip to Quebec.
At work that day, I received some free Bomber tickets for a game that very evening. I'm not the biggest football fan, but Jeff loves going to the games, (especially when they're free) so I accepted them, thinking that Jeff could find a buddy to take to the game and I could continue my evening pickling plans. So when I got home, I started boiling the water in the canner, and Jeff started calling his friends. By the time I was into mixing up the venison meatloaf however, he conceded defeat at finding anybody to go with him to the game. The onus was on me to accompany him to the damn football game. At this point, kickoff was about an hour and 15 minutes away. No problem, right?

At about this time I checked my e-mail. There was a new message from the Landless Farmers (our CSA) saying that there were FREE EXTRA CUCUMBERS available for pick-up a couple of blocks away on a first come, first serve basis. My mind raced... If I could get Jeff to run over and pick up a couple more pounds of cukes, I could get the meatloaf in the oven in the meantime, and then when I got the cucumbers from Jeff, I'd cut them into slices and get them soaking in salt by the time the meatloaf was ready to come out of the oven in time to go to the football game, and then I could can them when we came home from the game! I could make it all work! We might miss the beginning of the game, but it would all work out!

For some reason Jeff agreed to this plan and he ran off to fetch the free cukes. He must really love me. Or maybe he just loves pickles. I don't know.

To make everything more stupid, I decided that I didn't want to make sweet bread and butter pickles from this new batch of cucumbers - I wanted sour dill pickle rounds even though I had no dill. Wasn't it convenient that there was a Safeway directly on our way to the football stadium? It was a strange feeling to walk into the game with huge fronds of dill erupting from my purse - I got my share of heckling for my dill from the drunken football fans, but I felt quite vindicated when the Bombers actually won the game, the first win of the season.

I totally chalk that up to the dill. Anyway, the Bombers won, the second batch of pickles were successfully processed and EVERYTHING WORKED OUT.

I didn't do a proper count of everything we canned this year, but this picture shows what my pantry looks like right now. Lots of relish, chow, sauerkraut and salsa and LOTS of pickles.

Sauerkraut

2008-11-09T14:15:00.001-06:00

- Sorry for the lack of Planet Borscht posts this fall - since I got a new modem I've been having problems uploading images to Blogger - hopefully it'll all get solved soon!

Remember when you were a little kid - your mom always let you pick your favourite food to eat on your birthday? I always picked sauerkraut. Sauerkraut with farmer sausage and potatoes. Mmmmm. Still one of my all-time favourites. It was one of the first meals I cooked for Jeff when we were first dating - I don't know how the relationship would have worked out if he hadn't liked it too... Thank goodness I never had to find out.

Since sauerkraut has always been one of my favourite foods, it's surprising that I never thought of making it before this summer, when it was one of the most plentiful veggies in our weekly CSA box. During the first few weeks of cabbage deliveries we tried to eat a lot of cabbage borscht and coleslaw, but every week we'd get another one and they'd start piling up. I went searching for cabbage recipes... what would use up a maximum amount of cabbage with a minimal amount of effort?

I found my obvious answer quite quickly - my two favourite Menno cookbooks, More with Less and Simply in Season - both had a really simple Sauerkraut recipe designed for small batches like mine. I kind of combined the two recipes - the MWL version has a bit more detail but I think it assumes that you're going to start out with really fresh cabbage that will make its own brine, and the SIS version tells you to add water.

So here's how I made my sauerkraut:

1. Chop cabbage. It would be sensible to have a food processor for this purpose, but yet again I did all the chopping by hand. My shoulder got quite sore and so my darling husband got to chop his share of cabbage as well. Darling husband.

2. Add a bit of salt to the shredded cabbage and pack it really tightly into clean jars. (I ended up taking the cabbage from these five jars and cramming it into three). Liquid should cover the cabbage once it's in the jar - if you're using super fresh cabbage, I think the salt would pull enough water out of the cabbage to not require any more water. However, my cabbages had been sitting in my fridge for a week or two already so I topped up the levels with boiling water.

3. Put really loose lids on the jars and let it sit at room temperature for a couple of weeks. During the first week the liquid will ooze out of the jar as it's fermenting. Once the water levels drop down again, your kraut is done. Then you can move it into sterilized jars and can it for longer storage.

That's it, that's all. Easy Peasy.

It worked so well and so easily that I decided to make a second batch. Although this time I was in a hurry or something and I neglected to top up the water levels when I first put the cabbage in the jars. I remembered to do it about a week later but it didn't work out so well.

These jars of kraut didn't do their oozing thing and when I took off the lids after two weeks, this is what it looked like.

Some of the really old crock-cured recipes I found when I was first doing my research said that mold was possible and could simply be removed along with the top inch or two of cabbage. (Assuming you were using a gallon size stone crock filled with massive amounts of cabbage). This was NOT the case for my small jars of kraut - the whole thing smelled yucky and therefore it was discarded.

Ah, you live, you learn. The first batch still gave me some damn fine kraut and I'll definitely be doing this again.

Community Gardening

2008-09-21T13:30:00.009-05:00

This year I became a gardener!

Apart from the bits of lawn that I dug up this year to plant a few tomato plants, our yard doesn't have a lot of productive dirt. I had been thinking about digging up our whole back yard to plant veggies, but it's so shady back there that the only thing worth planting back there are hostas.

Thank goodness for community gardens! My dear friend Kreesta had planted almost the whole space in this community garden on Maryland Street last year and this year wanted to share the burden/joy with some others. I got a 5 by 20 foot plot to use for my own growing pleasure.

It was a lot of fun to watch everything explode into delicious green yumminess throughout the summer. Certain things produced very well - I had a good month and a half of sugar snap peas and green beans. I probably didn't take very good care of the tomato plants though... They kind of got huge and unruly mid-summer and then a little diseasy by the time they were supposed to be pumping out the fruit. We also got a few small green peppers but strangely enough the plants at home did a lot better.

The cucumbers also started off really strong but eventually got some kind of musty nastiness half way through August that kept them from producing more cukes. I did manage to get enough from these plants for a couple of jars of baby dills, so I can't complain.

I also planted some cantaloupe plants near the back that didn't do too well, apart from the one lovely little melon I picked mid-August.

Tiny but tasty!

This picture kind of shows the risks of community gardening in a poor neighbourhood. I was so proud of my potatoes (you can kind of see them at the back). I had planted fingerlings because I thought it might be nice to have baby size potatoes throughout the growing season.

Unfortunately a few days after I took the picture on the right, I came to the garden to see that all the potato plants in the entire garden had been uprooted. Kreesta had warned me about planting potatoes - along with carrots and corn they're the most popular veggies in the neighbourhood, and you shouldn't expect to harvest everything you grew. I was pretty upset when I first saw them gone - I REALLY love potatoes and I had gotten quite attached to my plants - but them's the breaks. It's easy for me to go and buy baby potatoes at the Farmer's Market if I really want to - but it's probably not much of an option for whoever pulled up my plants.

My Brussels Sprouts on the other hand, have been left entirely for me! I've already picked a few of the biggest ones near the bottom of the stalks, but if this mild autumn continues the way it's been going, I'll be swimming in sprouts for the next few weeks! Yum.

Crampton's Market Part 2 - Smoked Garlic!

2008-09-21T13:23:00.002-05:00

This is a short story about a good thing I found at a nice store called Crampton's Market. This good thing is Local Smoked Garlic.

Local Smoked Garlic are big heads of juicy garlic roasted over smoke until they're almost soft, but not quite.
Local Smoked Garlic tastes really good in things like three bean salad.

Go and buy some Local Smoked Garlic.

A tale of two pizzas

2008-09-21T13:18:00.002-05:00

The pizza pictured above was consumed on a warm sunny patio in Quebec City. It consisted of brie, artichokes, prosciutto, and sundried tomatoes. It was very tasty. It was very French.

When I came home I had a lot of vegetables to eat. But I wanted to make it exciting like the food I had on holidays so I made a pizza like the one in Quebec City but not like the one in Quebec city. Mine had roasted green and yellow zucchini, fresh tomatoes, black olives, feta and Parmesan, drizzled in balsamic vinegar. It made the zucchini taste special and not like a burden. This was my goal.

Lovely Treats from La Belle Province

2008-09-21T13:11:00.021-05:00

I can't quite make the transition to talking about autumn food until I have the summer food posts out of the way. This summer, the funnest food I had was definitely in Montreal and Quebec City.
Jeff and I usually manage to get away for a roadtrip every summer, but this summer he couldn't get time off work so I had to make other plans. My lovely friend Deb obliged me with a 5 day girls' getaway to Montreal and Quebec City for a shopping - eating - drinking extravaganza. It was fantastic on all points, but we're here to talk about food. Each meal could probably be its own post, but here are the highlights:

1. Breakfasts.

Every morning started with a cafe breakfast with a huge mug of cafe au lait. This particular breakfast also had a toasted bagel with cretons. Pork pate for breakfast. I love it.

2. Jean-Talon Market.
We were blessed with a hotel room with a full kitchen so I wanted to make sure I got to cook at least one tasty meal in it. We spent a lovely morning at the market perusing the veggies (spherical eggplant!) and the wonderful cheese shops and bakeries and meatshops.
Duck fat in a jar! Horse meat! Duck sausages! Purple peppers! Yup - this market has it all.

Alas, cooking options were limited in the hotel kitchen (no oil, no spices) so the spherical eggplants and purple peppers and horse meat were left behind at the market. We still managed to bring home a feast of sausages, wine, cheeses, garden fresh berries and some lovely bread.

3. Schwartz's Deli.

Restaurants with ritualized ordering procedures have a fond place in my heart. This place has exactly the same spirit as the best BBQ places I've been in the southern States. The ritual is equal to the pleasure of actually eating the food.

There are two lineups here - one for take-out and one for eating in. We were in the take-out line and still waited 25 minutes for a smoked meat sandwich. Would I stand in line here if I lived here? I don't know for sure, but all that waiting, staring at the meat through the window did make me yearn to learn how to smoke beef.

I had read somewhere that you should order your sandwiches medium-fat because then they're more juicy. And so I did because I always do what I'm told.

Mmmm, medium fat. They perhaps were a trifle too juicy for Deb's delicate hands.

4. Au Pied de Cochon.

This restaurant has gotten a lot of press for two things - for really pushing the whole 'snout to tail' philosophy of enjoying and preparing meat (a philosophy to which I try to subscribe) and also for putting foie gras on practially everything on their menu. This was my first time with foie gras, and I've got to say that it's damn tasty. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about the ethical aspects of eating the fattened livers of force-fed ducks but it seemed like something I should try at least once. Next time I come here, I'll go for the 'pied de cochon', which is what the guy beside me was eating. A roasted pig's foot, stuffed with sausage and triumphantly topped with a thick slice of foie gras.

This time we decided to eat light and shared an order of fried clams and a foie gras pizza with prosciutto, arugula, figs and goat cheese. Thumbs up, indeed.

Finally it was off to Quebec city for...

5. Classic French dining

Quebec City was a little more fancy pants than Montreal and it was definitely harder to get a seat in a restaurant due to the massive tourism that the 400th Anniversary Celebrations brought to the town. On our first night, our concierge suggested that we make a reservation if we wanted to eat out. At his suggestion we ended up at this little bistro at the end of a very long day. It was a little pricey, but duck confit with frisee salad and cretons on toast seemed like a perfect French meal, with the added Quebecois touch of having everything served on a slab of slate.

There was plenty of other great food on this trip, but there's simply too much to post here. You'll just have to go and eat for yourself.

Crampton's Market

2008-08-15T19:51:00.002-05:00

Crampton's has been around for a couple of years but only recently have I discovered the amazing goodness of this place.

I had seen this place at the corner of Waverley and Kenaston before - I always thought it was something affiliated with the driving range that's right behind it. I had seen the signs on the road advertising fresh fruit and the like but I assumed it was another one of those road-side price-gouging markets. One day this summer on the way to St. Norbert Farmer's Market I decided to take a closer look. As soon as you make it to the driveway, the character of the place starts to come through. There's lots of cute hand painted signs, lots of nice potted plants and a gelati window on the deck. And the most amazing fresh bread smell!

I don't have any shots inside the shop, but it's packed full of local produce, dairy, meat, fruit and baked goods. It's the closest thing I've seen in an actual store that can compare to the Farmer's Market in quality and variety of produce. They're serious about sourcing local grub but doesn't shy away from offering other non-local stuff that still tastes yummy. Thus you can still buy avocados and limes and peaches at the same time you buy your New Bothwell and Oak Island cheese, Halbstadt corn, Ste. Anne chips, green tomatoes, and Manitoba Berkshire pork. The prices are a little on the high side for certain things - similar to the farmer's markets but it's worth it when you know there are farmers in our own backyard that get to make a living by growing our food.

Erin is SERIOUS about her produce. She sends out a weekly newsletter to those who subscribe and it makes for really good reading. Her last newsletter was a 2000 word explanation of the corn industry - the variety of species, the marketing, the merits of hand-picked vs. machine picked corn, and lots of cooking ideas.

So yeah, the produce is good, the ambiance is nice, but what really keeps me stopping here on the way to St. Norbert every weekend are these cinnamon buns!

Every time I've visited the shop on a Saturday morning they're still warm and glistening with melted butter and sugar. They're not gooey or syrupy - they're more like a super buttery soft cinnamon bread with lots of sugar. And at 75 cents each I usually get two.

And so should you.

Cedar Plank Salmon

2008-07-25T02:06:00.002-05:00

But Man and Woman cannot live by greens alone. Sometimes tasty fish is good too.

Tasty fish cooked on a cedar plank basted with maple syrup and dill over charcoal is even better.

And tasty fish with the smoky maple dill glaze carmelized on top is the best.

Early Summer Greens

2008-07-24T18:50:00.003-05:00

Oh Dear.

Yes, it's late summer now and I haven't posted for two months. If I have any excuse it's because I've been too busy enjoying my food and planning meals around the fresh produce to blog about it. But pictures have been taken all along, and the pictures and experiences must be shared.

So this post is about my life in early July of this summer.

This is the list of our veggie delivery on July 15. Notice the abundance of greens and herbs?

This was the story pretty much all of July. It didn't get boring though... Check out the gorgeous salads below...

My favourite way to eat our greens ended up being pictured below - stirfried scallions and chinese cabbage and chard and chard stems and kohlrabi and baby carrots mixed up with red thai curry paste and served with coconut rice. So decadent!

Homemade Halifax Donairs

2008-06-22T17:45:00.005-05:00

I have posted about Halifax donairs before.
From what I've been able to gather over the past ten years, the Halifax donair is a strange Lebanese sub-genre of middle-eastern flatbread with sliced meat, descended from gyros. The meat tends to be a little spicier, the pita is a lot greasier, and a sweet milky sauce is used instead of a tangy tzatziki sauce.
My husband pines for donairs more than he pines for the fresh seafood from back home, so when we came across some fresh ground lamb at the St. Norbert Farmer's Market last weekend the wheels started turning. (Not that Halifax donair shops actually still use lamb. But it was our inspiration, nonetheless.)

We mixed the lamb equally with ground (grass fed) beef, also purchased at the market. The recipe I found on the internet gave specific instructions on mixing the spices with the meat:

Place the ground beef in a large bowl, and use your hands to blend in the spice mixture. If you want the smooth texture of meat that you see in a real donair shop, you must do this in a steel mixing bowl and on a sturdy surface. Pick up the meat, and throw it down with force about 20 times, kneading it after each throw.

Jeff took these instructions a step further and increased the meat force by throwing the meat up in the air and then slamming it down into the bowl. A very impressive performance.

The meat was truly exciting to mix, but the sauce really is the magic part of the meal - it's really what sets apart the Halifax donair apart from the rest of the crowd. And here's how to make it, again courtesy of Dash's Donair recipe. Add some sugar and garlic powder to a can of evaporated milk. Slowly mix in vinegar, a table spoon at a time. The vinegar will curdle the milk and thicken the sauce. Sweet goopy goodness.

Now fry your pita until it's soft, pile on the sliced meat, tomatoes and onions, and load on the sauce... and you've got yourself a reasonable facsimile of a Halifax donair.

Vietnamese Hot and Sour Soup

2008-06-17T21:10:00.004-05:00

A recipe for Vietnamese Hot and Sour Soup (Canh Chua):

1. Steam three lobsters in a large pot partially filled with water, salt, peppercorns, and bay leaves. You may choose to do this on an occasion like... say, Mother's Day. Your mother will think it is all about treats for her, and you can let her think that the lobster was planned for her delight alone. This will increase the likelihood of pleasant thoughts by your mother toward you. There is nothing wrong with this. Reserve the steaming water.

2. You may choose to serve the lobster with a baked potato and some freshly steamed asparagus. You may choose to garnish your baked potato with chives freshly cut from your garden and drizzle your lobster in melted butter. If you are my husband, you will put lots of garlic in your melted butter.

3. Upon completion of your meal, remove all shells and place them back into the reserved lobster-steaming water. Simmer, and then simmer some more. You will now have some lobster stock, that although somewhat weak, will enhance the flavour of your hot and sour soup immeasurably.

4. Now, the soup!

Use some of the hot broth to soften a large chunk of tamarind paste. Strain the liquid into the soup and discard the pits. Add a can of pineapple chunks with the juices. Add some mushrooms, fresh bean sprouts, diced tomatoes, leeks and what ever else you would like to include. Add fish sauce and hot chili paste to taste.

Garnish with fresh cilantro, mint or basil, and you have supper.

A slip of the tongue.... Buffalo Tongue

2008-05-03T20:58:00.007-05:00

What would YOU say if someone wanted to offer you free buffalo tongues? How could you say no? You wouldn't! You'd say YES YES YES YES gimme those tongues!

Or perhaps on viewing the fetus-like appendage, you might come to your senses and say, Sorry, no thanks, perhaps some other day I might accept a tongue, but not today.

Then you would not be me, apparently. I'm generally not much into organ meats, but I thought the tongue would be a good foray into the world of spare meat parts. I figured it's just a muscle, so it must taste like ordinary meat, right? Plus it was free, an important bonus. You can't go around wasting perfectly good food.

The first step for preparing the tongues was to cook them with herbs and spices in a slow-cooker for a few hours. This is important because the tongue has to be cooked in order for you to peel off the taste-bud laden skin which is not so tasty. Once the taste buds are gone, the tongue is ready to eat!

Here we have Tongue in Piquant Sauce over brown rice risotto. The texture of the meat in this dish was very, very tender. The flavour, beefy. (Recipe courtesy of Jodi Hildebrand)

The other tongue was reserved for sandwiches. Even though the flavour was pretty much like roast beef, eating it cold really emphasized the texture, which was not so good for me. It is a little denser than standard meat, and a little gnerply (or cartilaginous, for the non-Menno folk). Jeff was a big fan, but it kind of grossed me out.

Next time, I may just say no to the tongue.

Key Lime Pie

2008-05-03T20:46:00.003-05:00

Key limes actually exist.

They are very small. It is hard to extract the juice from these small limes.

But we must juice these limes because key lime pie tastes so good.

A Frenzy of Baby Spinach

2008-04-07T20:19:00.006-05:00

My darling husband came home last week with four pounds of organic baby spinach. (That's FOUR of the large bins pictured above.) It's a bit of a long story as to how we came into all this spinach - but it feels like freekin' Christmas. We've kind of stayed away from the fresh salad greens this winter - salads have been mostly cabbage and carrot based rather than composed of delicate tender leaves imported from far away lands.

Using the spinach as an excuse to take a break from the 'locavore' ideal was clandestinely thrilling!
We ate Greek salad with lovely hothouse tomatoes and cucumbers and Kalamata olives. Strawberry salad with California berries and almonds from who knows where. And the lovely wilted salad with (homemade) pancetta and hard boiled eggs.

I also finally made a recipe of Spinach Brownies that I first discovered from my cousin Lorna. The main ingredients in this were a pound of cheese, a cup of flour, two eggs, and a bunch of spinach. So cheesy. (So much better than chocolate brownies!)

And of course, it is a lot of spinach to eat fresh, so these lovely spanikopita went straight into the freezer for some future party appetizer.

I can't wait for June, when we get nothing but greens in our CSA veggie boxes! Bring it on!

My Second Kick at the can - Ham Edition

2008-04-05T10:12:00.004-05:00

As mentioned in the Bacon Edition earlier, things were a little easier this year.
The ham was brined for 3-4 weeks in our cold, cold basement, and then the ham was smoked for about 10 hours without catching fire! Everything went nicely and according to plan.

I found myself wondering how I should store the ham until Easter - about three weeks later. Iwas trying to figure out how I could vacuum wrap or somehow seal it before freezing it until I realized that I had CURED A HAM. No refrigeration necessary. So up in the basement it went again until it was time to eat it.

I boiled it in several changes of boiling water to reduce the saltiness. Then I removed the rind, stuck some cloves in the fat, smothered it in honey and baked it up.

Ham to be proud of. Easter dinner will never be the same again.

My Second Kick at the Can - Curing Bacon

2008-04-05T09:27:00.008-05:00

They say that the third time's the charm - but my second try at bacon was so vastly improved over the first batch that I feel plenty charmed already. (For those of you interested in the miserable results of my first attempt at bacon, click here.)

The first and most important thing I learned from last year was not to brine the belly for so damn long! Last year I kept the bacon and pancetta in the salt mixture for about 5 days, which is what you'll need if you want to truly cure the meat to avoid refrigeration. However, these being modern times, I have a freezer and need not fear spoilage. So the bacon soaked up the salt for just under 24 hours this year.

The second thing I learned from last year was that I needed a better smoker with an off-set firebox so my meat can't start on fire! My little charcoal BBQ unit still provides a pretty amateur smoking situation, but it's easier to use than my old kettle smoker.

And the third thingI learned from last year - don't use yucky wood! Apparently Manitoba Maple is not a premium smoking wood. (Who knew?) A less acrid choice was a bag of little Hickory and Applewood chips that I bought in a bag at S.I.R. It wasn't 100-Mile smoke, but it actually resulted in enhancement of flavour rather than the detriment of flavour.

The bacon sat in the smoke (away from the heat this time!) for about two hours.

My result - lovely pink bacon. hampered only by the nasty hack-job that I performed on the skin removal.

Just enough sugar to have a slightly carmelized effect when cooked, without the overwhelming saltiness from last time.

Yay for modern packaging. Say no to oversalting.

PS - I made pancetta too. It was also good!

Mmmm, Mmmm! Sausage Cake!

2008-02-04T21:30:00.000-06:00

I'm not quite sure why this recipe grabbed my attention the way it did. I'm even more unsure as to why I felt the need to make it.

I was curious, sure. Wouldn't you be curious? What would the texture of meat baking within a cake be like, exactly? Would it be chunky? Would it be savoury? Would it be soggy?

I found it quite fun that the first step was to cream the sugars with the raw sausage meat. A pretty standard recipe step, creaming the sugars with the fat source, but it seemed so icky this time. But cream I did.
I used Maple flavoured breakfast sausages from the grocery store - (I didn't really feel like breaking out the Berkshire chorizo for this one, know what I mean?)

With the addition of the flour, coffee, nuts and raisins, the cake batter was looking a lot more palatable. Still, it was a little disconcerting to not be able to thoughtlessly scoop up a spoon of the batter to taste - something about raw pork consumption made me shy away from the taste test.

The end result was astonishingly tasty.

Served with a burnt sugar caramel sauce, this actually became a nice, moist, dense spice cake. No discernable meat texture, although a co-worker of mine swore that it had an after-taste reminiscent of Hot-Rods.

Rice Pudding

2008-01-27T20:31:00.000-06:00

I'm a lazy person on the weekends at the best of times - and the end of January in Winnipeg is generally not well known to be the best of times. In my ideal world, winter weekends are for reading and watching movies and cooking and being slovenly and not leaving the house.

Today I managed to fulfil my goal quite nicely - I didn't get out of my pajamas all day and I still managed to have a nap. And I made the perfect food to eat on a day that you're not going to get out of your pajamas - rice pudding.

Just to make it fun, I used arborio rice for extra creaminess and threw a few cardamom pods into the mix. If I had raisins, I probably would have thrown them in as well, but I didn't so I added some dried cranberries and toasted almonds to the finished dish. And delightful it was, eating in my pajamas in my sunny dining room, gazing at the cold snow outside.

Merry Christmas Part One - The Christmas Tomato

2007-12-26T11:22:00.001-06:00

I'd love to make this a yearly tradition, but the timing might be tricky to duplicate next year. Tomatoe plants just go so nicely with Christmas ornaments!

Our potted tomatoes actually did quite poorly this summer - I think we might have gotten 2 or 3 tomatoes from them all year. We brought in the plants when it got cold this fall - there were still a few tiny little tomatoes on the plants that we thought might eventually grow and ripen if we brought the plants inside.

They started turning red the week before Christmas and are now perfectly ready to eat in our leftover turkey sandwiches. Brilliant!

Merry Christmas Part Two - Tourtière

2007-12-26T10:49:00.000-06:00

Apparently, it is a French Canadian tradition to serve Tourtière on Christmas eve. I am not French Canadian, but I love tourtière, and I happened to have a lot of ground pork in my freezer. And anyway...what goes better with a turkey dinner than MEAT pie?

So...this is the method. You get your ground pork (Berkshire pork from Clearwater, MB in my case), you cook it up with some water, onions, garlic and lots of ground cloves, sage and savoury. Mix it up with mashed potatoes and stick it in some lardy pastry. Bake until lovely and enjoy with friends and family.

Fried Potatoes

2007-11-25T20:40:00.000-06:00

Today is Gray Cup Sunday, the pinnacle of the Canadian Football League season, and I'm not at a party celebrating. This is by choice. I am not interested in football. I find football dull and difficult to pay attention to. There's something about the day that deserves a party, though.

Several years ago, after fostering an anti-Gray Cup party tradition, some friends sadly informed us they would no longer be available to celebrate the day with us in our particular fashion because the desire to actually watch the game had stolen upon them. This was not particularly sad, just somewhat puzzling. These days we celebrate the day by grocery shopping in an empty store.

I don't know what it is about Gray Cup Sunday, but I had this wicked craving today for hot wings and potato chips today. Sitting around the living room watching-the-game-food. Even though I held strong through all the grocery aisles, my passion for salty crispiness did not abate when we got home.

So I made me some potato chips. And ate them as I watched The Simpsons, avoiding the big game one channel over.

Planet Pumpkin

2007-11-05T19:16:00.000-06:00

I've been living in pumpkin land for the past couple of weeks.

We got several pumpkins this year from our CSA, like every year. This year however, we actually wanted to eat them before they rotted away. A noble goal, yes?
We got through the first little pumpkin quickly with Creamy Pumpkin pasta and Liberian Pumpkin Stew from the Simply in Season book. Pretty tasty.

Even our giant Jack-O-Lantern pumpkin was saved for food this Hallowe'en - we used an LED light inside the lantern instead of candles so it wouldn't get charred and nasty on the inside. After its life as a Jack-O-Lantern was complete, we roasted it whole until it was nice and soft. It ultimately gave us four litres of cooked pumpkin to deal with.

So this weekend - I dealt with it.

Pumpkin and kidney bean enchiladas...

Pumpkin Crumble....

And pumpkin bread.

And there is more pumpkin pie filling and pumpkin enchilada sauce in the freezer for later squash adventures.

So as a celebration, and as reward for our hard work using up our pumpkin in such ingenious ways, we celebrated with some fantastic Sargent Sundae soft serve pumpkin pie ice cream.

BEST SOFT SERVE IN TOWN!

Home Canning Season, 2007

2007-09-26T21:27:00.000-05:00

As I posted earlier in July, we made the commitment this year to eat locally all summer while the produce was fresh and in season. At some point we also made the decision to stock up on all the beautiful, fresh, local stuff and try to save some of it for the winter. (This decision came shortly after we noticed that the pickles we were buying were grown in India, and the tomatoes we depended on all winter were from California...) Our Wiens Farm CSA share gave us our veggies for the week, but we also made it out to the St. Norbert Farmer's Market almost every Saturday morning this summer to supplement the frenzy to 'put food by'.

And yes, it became a frenzy. Lots of food made its way into the freezer, which is currently full of kale, swiss chard, beet greens, corn, strawberries, freezer jam, gooseberries, raspberries, apples, and sorrel, but the most time intensive effort was devoted to canning preserves.

The diced zucchini, peppers and onions pictured above were diced by hand. As was everything else processed in my house. I don't know why I keep resisting a food processor - I'm paranoid that everything is going to be sliced down to mush, I think. If you're going to make everything from scratch, let it have some character! Yay for chunks!

My kitchen was continuously filthy. Simmering pots on the stove for hours and hours at a time... boiling pots of water going for hours and hours at a time...
All I can say is, thank God August wasn't as hot as July was this year. This project would definitely not have come to fruition if it that 30+ heatwave would have continued.

Slowly but surely, the little batches of tasty things collected up...

In the end, this was the approximate final tally:

2 pints zucchini and pepper relish
4 pints curry pickles
3 pints bread and butter pickles
4 pints pickled baby carrots with oregano
4 pints pickled cauliflower
8 pints baby dills
3 quarts big dills
12 pints tomato salsa
10 quarts diced tomatoes
10 quarts tomato sauce
9 pints carrot ikra
10.5 pints green tomato chow (all from Stiles Street tomatoes!)
1 quart apple cider

I'll keep ya'll posted to see how long all this stuff lasts us!

Pembina Valley Manitou Honey Garlic & Maple Syrup Festival

2007-09-23T18:53:00.000-05:00

Please welcome our second ever guest writer to Planet Borscht - Ms. K - an individual who truly knows the Manitoba food scene in and out.

I am delighted to be a guest blogger here at Planet Borscht....
home of down home Manitoba food culture!

September 7th found us flocking to Manitou for the Pembina Valley Manitou Honey Garlic & Maple Syrup Festival.

The festival featured a Pancake Breakfast, Craft Show and Sale, Farmer’s Market, Display Booths, Honey, Garlic & Maple Syrup Vendors, Free Stage Entertainment, Cooking Demos, Historic Town Tours, Soap Box Derby, Gourmet Alley, Beverage Gardens, all topped off with a delicious Buffet Supper. The highlight of the day was the soapbox derby. Below is a video to give you a taste of the action!

There was even transportation to tour one throughout the town! An enterprising Manitouarian was holding a garage sale and we missed out on purchasing a nearly new 1950's accordian for $50!

The evening was lovely with a Deadwood Saloon in the arena and an excellent dinner.

In the realm of fall suppers the dinner was something of a gourmet meal and well worth the $17. Here is the visuals on the dinner..our eyes were much much bigger than our stomachs and I regret to inform you we wasted some of this lovely food

Veggie option

Meat Option

The buffet featured

Plain or garlic roast beef

Honey lemon crusted chicken

Dry roasted garlic pork ribs with wild cranberry jelly

Honey mustard glazed farmer sausage

Garlic mashed potatoes

Herb sauteed mushrooms

Orange honey glazed carrots with fresh dill

Manitoba maple syrup baked beans

Tomato salad with basil garlic dressing

Honey coleslaw

Cucumber onion salad

Dinner rolls

Roasted garlic in olive oil and herbs (my favorite)

Pembina valley apple crisp with manitoba maple syrup

In closing here is a clip from the Deadwood Saloon compete with saloon piano player

We give the Pembina Valley Honey Garlic and Maple Syrup Festival 4.85 stars out of 5!

MCC Relief Sale, Morris MB

2007-09-09T20:56:00.000-05:00

The MCC Relief Sale in Morris, MB is the ultimate kick-off to Autumn each year.
MCC puts on this combination of farmer's market, craft sale, bake sale, flea market, auction and fall supper every September as a fundraiser for food, water, and other missions projects for the Mennonite Central Committee.

You can find hand-knit winter mittens, cottage cheese vareneki, damson plum jam, giant homegrown watermelons and Manitoba apple cider and quilts and antiques... and so many other exciting things.

Then you can eat yourself into a stupor! What more can you ask for?

The jam table and the mittens table. The jam went pretty fast this year, but the mittens were plentiful. The fresh produce and food tent.
It's a little different from a farmer's market in that you don't actually get to talk to the people that grow or produce the food - it's completely run by volunteers. Some of the food is produced by large companies - farmer sausage is donated from Winkler Sausage and the noodles are donated by a local pasta company. But most of the produce comes from regular folks' gardens.

Noodles and apples.

The food is cheap as borscht....

And so tasty at 10:30 in the morning!

This is the booty from this year's trip. 4 liters apple cider, 4 dozen frozen cottage cheese vereneki, a link of Winkler's liver sausage, a bag of windmill ground rye flour, four jars of jam, two pairs of mittens, 9 pounds of tomatoes, 5 pounds of apples, a head of romaine lettuce, a giant watermelon, 3 green peppers, 2 big onions and two dozen eggs.

Everything is cheap, locally produced, and all proceeds went to the MCC.

For more info on MCC Relief Sales, check out this link: http://mcc.org/manitoba/morrisreliefsale/

The Camping Gourmet

2007-08-19T20:10:00.000-05:00

Yes, that's right. Canned lobster. The Camping Gourmet's best new friend.

Jeff brought a frozen can of lobster home from his last trip to Nova Scotia (mostly to keep the fresh scallops cold). Normally I'd kind of question frozen lobster, but when you're camping with no refrigeration, frozen canned lobster is brilliant! We packed it in the cooler Friday morning, and was thawed out but still cold for Saturday night supper.

There were about three tails and four big claws in the can - altogether about two and a half small lobsters worth of meat. It's pre-cooked and soaked in brine. Surprising not rubbery.

We fried it up with some butter and pesto, added some tomatoes, and finished it off with white wine and cream.
Yum. Couscous with zucchini and green peppers rounded out the meal. This meal topped the time we had grilled octopus in Pacific Rim on the camp stove. Best anniversary meal yet!

This was the site of our elegant repast. We were camped next to some yahoos in the campground, so we thought this abandoned park trailhead called Forester's Footsteps would at least be quiet.

Those Foresters sure were rough on their playground equipment.

Romantic Dinner, here we come!

Beet Salad

2007-08-09T21:25:00.000-05:00

The Bounty of the Harvest

2007-07-07T20:43:00.001-05:00

Food from the St. Norbert Farmer's Market

I've just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver's book, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year in Food Life" and found it very inspiring. In her book, Kingsolver and her family have committed to eating locally for a year. This involves raising their own turkeys and chickens for meat and eggs, growing huge vegetable gardens, and even making her own cheese. It helps that she's living in a rural, agricultural area in a moderately temperate climate that makes this type of living feasible, but there are a lot of ideas in it that are pretty viable, even for an urban dweller living in a part of the world where winter lasts for 6 months.

The idea of primarily eating food grown in our own community is an goal that we've been moving closer towards for a few years. We've been members of the Wiens Shared Farm, a CSA based out of St. Adolphe for about four years or so and have really enjoyed eating food in season. We've also been buying a majority of our meat in the last year direct from local sources - organic pork from La Broquerie, chickens from New Bothwell, and the odd package of grass fed beef from those who bought a quarter and didn't have the storage space to keep it all.

This year, the Hundred-Mile-Diet is getting a lot of buzz in the media. There are groups being formed here in Manitoba that are promising to stick to a rigid 'locavore' diet for 100 days this autumn. I like the idea of food challenges, and this one sounds interesting, but the idea of forgoing coffee or the odd citrus fruit for 3 1/2 months will make me say no thanks to the 100 day promise. Instead, I'm doing what I can now to buy my food from farmers markets to supplement our CSA share (very wet fields this year - lots of kale, green onions and lettuce so far) and I've decided to plant peas, beans, tomatoes and herbs in my front yard this year instead of begonias and petunias.

My front steps garden - tomatoes, green beans and peas.

My herb garden - thyme, oregano, basil, sage, chives, sorrel, and some more green beans.

Check out http://100milemanitoba.org/ for links to lots of local Manitoba food producers.

Warning! Lewd Content!

2007-07-07T20:38:00.000-05:00

We've been making our own sausages for about four years now. I'd always liked Italian grocer's fresh lean sausage and it seemed like it would be easy to make. Simple as that.

This is how you make sausage:
Take meat, grind it if it needs to be ground, add spices and then stuff into casings. Then you're done. This time around we started with pre-ground organic pork from La Broquerie. We made two flavours - a spicy Italian with lots of red pepper flakes, fennel and sambuca, and a chipotle pepper fresh chorizo style sausage. Once the meat and spices have been mixed and taste-testing is successful, it's ready to stuff into casings.

Making sausage enriches our marriage. (Tee Hee!)

Stuffed and ready to make into links.

Linked, vacuum packed, and ready for the freezer.

Sour food from my garden

2007-06-17T14:52:00.000-05:00

I like sour food. When I was little, all I can remember wanting to eat is sauerkraut and dill pickles. (And process cheese and potatoes...) As an adult, sour is still one of my favourite tastes.

Although my garden is quite pitiful, I have ensured I have a supply of my sour favourites.

Gooseberries.

Nasty little sour berries that eventually ripen on some other alternate universe, but never in any garden I've ever seen. Add a little sugar to these babies, though and they're magical. I'm not sure what I'll make with these - maybe some gooseberry pereshki or milch moos if my mom will teach me how.

(What is a gooseberry pereshki, you ask? My mother's rendition is a handheld pastry filled with the tart berries and a bit of sugar. Here is one of my mom's goosberry pereshki, baked fresh:)

Rhubarb. This is the saddest little rhubarb plant in the world, but its presence is comforting. Thank goodness I have friends that have more rhubarb than they can handle.

Sorrel.

The secret ingredient for somma borscht and a tart addition to salads. Every year I buy another sorrel plant, and every year it kind of disappears for different reasons. This year the plant is looking pretty robust.

Non-BBQ Southern Treats

2007-06-09T18:46:00.000-05:00

I'm still catching up with the food pictures from our trip, even though we got home over a month ago. I've already posted a bit about the BBQ we experienced down south and my poor attempts to duplicate it.

This trip was not all about BBQ, however... Not by a long shot.

Favourite food surprise of the trip: Hot Boiled Peanuts just outside of Mobile, Alabama

I wouldn't have necessarily thought that hot peanuts would be tasty, but this bag of spicy goobers that we picked up at a gas station in Alabama were FANTASTIC. You still had to sort of crack the shell open, and the soggy, salty, spicy peanuts inside were really tasty. We devoured this bag by the side of the road at 10 in the morning.

Favourite greasy breakfast: Fried Country Ham in Hoxie, Arkansas

This definitely was not a slice from some plastic-wrapped Toupie ham product - this was the real deal. This ham reminded me of my Oma Froese's fried ham- it was swimming in its own grease and it seemed appropriate. Why shouldn't it be swimming in grease? It's HAM!

Favouite Cajun food: Chicken on the Bayou, Henderson, Louisiana

We ate a lot of great Cajun food on this trip, and most of it was fancier than this place, but nothing could match Chicken on the Bayou for freshness or local flavour. It was basically a convenience store with a fry kitchen on the side with about 5 tables where you grab your own beer from the fridge. We started off with these spicy boiled crawfish and some yummy boudin (the spicy pork liver and rice sausage in the foreground) and ended up also ordering a fried seafood plate that included oysters, alligator, catfish, crawfish, shrimp and frog legs.

(And before you get alarmed at our unending gluttony here, remember that you only eat the tail from crawfish! Most of them were smaller than the average size cocktail shrimp.)

Favourite Seafood of the trip: Oysters!

It's hard to decide how I liked them best...it's a toss-up between simple raw oysters on the half shell and the fried oyster po-boy we had in Larose, Louisiana. Those po-boys were absolutely delicious, though...

Most interesting edible seafood: Fried soft-shell crab

I don't know about you, but I found it interesting to eat a crab - shell and all. Yummy. And not too crunchy, either. Jeff also had a softshell crab po-boy in New Orleans. Imagine half of one of these guys in a baguette with lettuce, mayo and pickles. Super yummy!

Favourite 'It's Getting Late and We're Hungry and We Need To Find a Hotel' supper: Spring Hill Seafood, Mobile AL.
We saw this place as we were on our way through Mobile, looking for a cheap hotel on the edge of the city. After we finally found a Super-8, we backtracked into the city to check this place out. It was a run-down fish market that also boiled crawfish and shrimp to order. We got a couple pounds of crawfish and a pound of huge Gulf Coast shrimp boiled fresh for about $12. We then rounded out the meal with some fried dill pickles and some fried catfish from a fast-food fish place across the street. So good! Why don't people sell fried dill pickles in Manitoba? We love dill pickles!

I've left out a lot of great food from this trip. We fine-dined at NOLA and munched on beignets at Cafe Du Monde in New Orleans, listened to Cajun music at Prejean's in Lafayette, and ate crawfish pie in Breaux Bridge, not to mention the very fine tin-foil dinners we enjoyed while camping. There just simply isn't the space to list it all. This list was mostly about the delectable surprises that were unexpected high points of the trip.

For those of you who'd like to see the non-food highlights of the trip, check out our album:

http://www.froddard.photosite.com/

Barbecue Ribs

2007-05-26T20:15:00.000-05:00

We recently returned from a trip to the US. We had many, many culinary adventures on this trip through the American South- but this post will focus one particular discovery of the trip - BBQ ribs.

I've never been a huge fan of ribs; they always seemed like more bone, fat, and gristle than meat. I've had great oven cooked ribs, but the ones off the grill never enticed me. On this trip we decided to investigate the world of BBQ ribs. We had our first rack at L.C.s in Kansas City and they were so good, I knew we were on to something.

Some other notable racks from our journey:

On the left - Memphis dry ribs at The Rendezvous. (The picture at the top of this post is an example of Memphis wet ribs, at B.B. King's.) The folks in Memphis are pretty proud of their ribs - these two places were suggested by the security guard at Graceland.
On the right - beef and pork rib combo at Leatha's, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I am still astounded at the huge hunk of meat attached to this rack. Where can you even buy ribs like this? These were absolutely delicious, but the sauce was really sweet. These rib leftovers made really good tin-foil dinner supper 6 hours later.

When we returned home, I thought I'd try making these for myself on our new smoker with an off-set wood box. I tried out the ribs two ways - one rack was kind of steamed in tinfoil in the oven at 250 degrees, and the other rack went into the smoker, maintained between 225 and 250 degrees. We used dry Manitoba Maple for the smoke.

This is what my smoked ribs looked like after about 4 hours. I took these ribs off the grill at about 4 1/2 hours. The ribs in the oven were falling off the bone after 3 1/2 hours.
The verdict?

The ribs from the smoker were too smoky and too tough, and the ribs from the oven were so soft they were almost mushy! The smoked ribs just needed more time and less smoke and the ribs in the oven definitely didn't need the tin-foil.

Food for thought for next time around. (And besides, Kansas City is only a 12 hour drive away if I want the real deal!)

Happy Marshmellowy Mother's Day!

2007-05-13T22:15:00.000-05:00

My Mother Can Do Anything.
My Mother Can Make Marshmellows and make 5 dozen zwiebach at the same time.

To make marshmellows - boil sugar and water and gelatin together until it gets to soft-ball stage. (Add maraschino cherry juice to make it pink, just for fun.) Let it cool down, then beat until it triples in volume.
Once tripled in volume, spread it in a small pan coated in icing sugar and let set for a few hours.
Roll in coconut, and you got yourself the treats pictured at the top of the post. After finishing these, Mom said it was too much work.

To me, It seemed a lot easier than the zwiebach going on at the same time. My mother has a gift for the most amazing breads and buns. I love to cook, but I leave the baking to my mom!

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

Eggs and Salmon

2007-03-31T09:43:00.000-05:00

I was somewhat remiss in my duties last week.
I forgot to take pictures of the potluck brunch after a weekend morning at the spa with the girls. There were beautiful foods at this brunch, and they must only be brought to mind with memory and no photos. Like the old days. (Sigh). My contribution was warm gingerbread (which really deserves its own post someday) and some devilled eggs filled with smoked salmon. The devilled eggs were quite delightful - I hadn't really thought too much of eggs and salmon before, but they were a tasty delight.

And subsequently, the inspiration for the following quiche a few days later:

I like making quiche. I pride myself on my pastry. Rarely attractive, but usually quite flaky.

This particular pie wasn't too flaky - the pastry ball was approaching freezer burn after living in the freezer for several months - but I thought this photo demonstrated the unattractive quality of my pastry, at the very least. This quiche was loaded up with Swiss cheese, red peppers, dill and chopped up smoked salmon.
Add some green salad, and you got yourself a nice early-spring supper.

Sushi

2007-03-08T19:59:00.000-06:00

Enough about pork! Time for Sushi!

Lest you all believe that all I eat is salt pork, I would like to affirm that my pleasure of the palate are wide and varied.

That being said, these sushi rolls may not have been authentic, but they sure were tasty! And remarkably easy to make, too.

The Agony and the Ecstasy - Curing Pork (Part Three)

2007-02-25T17:47:00.000-06:00

Part Three: Smoking.

The pancetta in the basement was joined by even more hanging meat. Smoke permeates the meat better if the surface is totally dry.

Jeff got to work preparing the wood. While it is true that you can buy wood chips all over the place, it seemed more fun to do that from scratch too. (Although not as much fun after an hour of sawing..)

This huge branch of Manitoba Maple fell down during one of last summer's windstorms.

Next morning, bright and early.

A few pieces of lit charcoal and a couple of chunks of maple got the smoke puffing nicely. Nice and cool.

Look at the happy smoker on the deck!

Look at the happy ham and happy hock and happy sausages!

Now look at the burnt, sad and unhappy ham!

This catastrophe occurred around hour 3 of smoking.

Everything had been going really well until that point. The wood was smoking consistently and was nice and cool for the first hour and a half, but then it started fizzling out. It took a while to get the next batch of charcoal and wood smoking nicely, so I figured I'd have to time it a little tighter on the next batch. Which led me, an hour later, to add half a dozen burning briquettes to the wood when the last half dozen were still going.

About fifteen minutes later, Jeff saw flames spitting out of the smoker. No more smooth, cool smoke. We had fire.

Now, the whole thing about smoking is that you want to flavour and somewhat dry out the meat without cooking it. This is why the low temperature is so important - you don't want to render any fat or cook the meat. Which is what happened.

I wept bitterly.

But all was not lost. The burnt parts of the ham were cut off, and then we roasted it. The smoke had permeated about 3/4 of an inch into the ham, leaving a nice pink ring on the outer layer. It tasted...kind of hammy.

Some of the bacon had started cooking in the fire and had gotten pretty leathery. I cut those pieces off to use later as salt pork, some of which flavoured a huge pot of spicy baked beans beautifully the next day.

There was about a 6-inch square of usable bacon from each slab that I had prepared. Hey, for my first try, that's not so bad, is it?

Mmmmm. Homemade maple bacon.

The Agony and the Ecstasy - Curing Pork (Part Two)

2007-02-25T16:07:00.000-06:00

Part two: Bacon and Pancetta.

The dry cure sucked out a lot of the moisture from the meat as it sat in the fridge, creating its own brine, as seen below. After about 5 days, it was time to get the meat out of the salty brine. The remaining salt was scrubbed off the meat and thoroughly washed.

The two slabs designated to be bacon were dried off, and placed into new bags into the fridge. I added some maple syrup to one of them, and garlic and pepper to the other so the flavour could permeate a bit before smoking. (The scallops pictured on the Valentine's Day post were wrapped with the maple bacon from this stage.)

The slab designated to be pancetta was also scrubbed and dried off, then covered with a thick layer of cracked black pepper.

Then came the fun part - rolling up and trussing the tightly rolled meat.

Rolling - easy, trussing - tricky.

And then the easiest part - Hang it up, and let it cure.

Thank god the cats can't jump higher than two feet - the basement is usually their domain, but the cool, dry environment down there was very nice for the pancetta.

The finished product, after curing for almost four weeks:

For more info on making pancetta, check out http://www.chowhound.com/recipes/10699.

The Agony and the Ecstasy: Curing Pork (part one)

2007-02-20T18:47:00.000-06:00

2007 - The Year of the Pig.

Pork intrigues me more than beef, somehow. Beef is too simple. You don't have to work with it to get results. It justs sits there, tasting good, being beef. But pork! Working with pork is like a culinary costume party. Different preps of pork leaves you with totally different tasting meat. Pork for the sake of pork - I could take it or leave it. But seasoned, smoked or cured pork becomes a seasoning of its own.

Yes, I could find simpler hobbies. Hobbies with less sleepless nights, with less heartache and tears, with less crushing disappointments. But then I'd never have homemade bacon!

O.k. So this all started about two and a half weeks ago, when I purchased half a pig. Half an organic, raised under the oak trees in La Broquerie pig. After trying out the flavour of the fresh pork by roasting the bone-in loin roast (juicy and succulent - organic pork for the sake of pork is pretty damn good!), the work of curing began.

Three projects were started: ham, bacon and pancetta. I received several small ham roasts cut from the leg, and I chose the largest roast (about 6 pounds) as well as the hocks to brine and eventually smoke. The belly came in a 8-pound slab that I cut into three equal pieces. One piece would become pancetta, and the other two were destined for becoming bacon.

Darling husband made the brining possible by procuring some lovely plastic buckets from the cafeteria at U of W.The brine for the ham and the hocks was salt, brown sugar, some juniper berries, and water. Next came the pancetta. This was a dry cure, pictured above: salt, brown sugar, bay leaves, juniper berries, fresh thyme, chopped garlic and cracked black pepper.

This spice mixture was rubbed liberally all over the slab of pork belly. This was repeated with the other two slabs of belly, but with a simpler cure of salt and sugar.

The slabs of bacon were placed into air-tight plastic bags, and then weighted down in the fridge. I used a sophisticated method of placing canned goods on top of them. Clever, yes?

The brine with the ham and the hocks were placed in a cold corner of the pantry. There happened to be a cold snap during this time and this room was probably around 5 degrees. Although it probably slowed down the process of salt absorption, I didn't have to panic that it was going to go bad on me!

Then, I waited.

Happy Valentine's Day!

2007-02-14T20:37:00.000-06:00

My Valentine's gift to Jeff: A kielbassa heart.

Jeff's Valentine's gift to me: fresh Digby scallops, brought home on the plane. (wrapped in our very own homemade bacon - as yet unsmoked - updates on bacon shall come soon...)

...and pretty flowers too.

Tourtière!

2007-02-05T19:42:00.000-06:00

Here on Planet Borscht, I present to you our very first guest Blogger.
Please warmly welcome Miss Harms and her tales of fine food from afar!

Hello fine foody folks.

I recently returned from La belle province, and while there, David and I dined at 'Aux Anciens Canadiens'. This most charming restaurant in Old Québec specializes in old school cuisine served by delightful wait staff wearing period costumes. . .the period being French colony Québec.

The lunchtime meal--Table à Haute: your choice of main dish, including soup du jour (a delightful creamy tomato while we were there), dessert (maple sugar pie or apple cranberry pie served with fresh cream, not whipped cream or ice cream. . . cream!) and a glass of wine or beer! And the beer was not hum-drum beer. It was all tasty beers like Boréal Russe, ooh or Blonde. . . mmmm) (Coffee was extra) for a mere 14.95$!

And now, the meat of my entry-- the main dishes! David had "Tourtiére Lac-St-Jean avec des viandes sauvages" (right). The wild meats included caribou, boeuf, cerf (deer) and wapiti (elk). It was a most succulent tourtiére. So juicy, and seasoned excellently. It was the best tourtiére ever to touch my tastebuds (sorry St. Jo).

Also, the tourtière was not in pie form. It was more of a loaf. The breaddy crust wrapped around the meaty filling. Note the lovingly cubed potatos, and the bits of extra-burned. Oh, Heaven!

And I had the daily main dish special "Pâté en croûte de Wapiti avec le Romarin" (super-flaky crusted wapiti pie with rosemary). Oh my, yum yum yum! the wapiti was definitely much drier (and therefore leaner?) than the tourtiére. The crust was most dilectible, and melt-in-your mouth. I am guessing it was definitely lard. And the rosemary crept up on you and enveloped your olfactory and savory senses in a big blanket of joy!

And, to top it all off, the sides that accompanied the main dish (viewed here and above) were divine! The orange-red-yellow mixture is a tomato, onion and yam pickle. It is sweet, tart and delightful, and I will never enjoy ketchup again. There was a smattering of lightly--perfectly--steamed sugar snap peas, and the most amazing yams I have ever tasted. They must have been approximately 2/3 boiled yams mashed with 1/3 butter, and liberallty mixed with salt. And piping hot! Everything arrived at just the right time, and steaming to perfection!

Vive Le Québec!

Three Fondues

2007-01-29T21:31:00.000-06:00

I'm always up for over-the-top food. And if an idea is a good one, why not triple it?

Having received a chocolate fondue set for Christmas, we were eager to try it out. It seemed appropriate to plan a multiple fondue feast - Cheese, Broth, and the Chocolate for dessert. It also seemed like a good opportunity to return the hospitality of Chris and Coral for their mid-December feast. (Thanks go to Coral for the pictures of the broth fondue and the chocolate fondue treats!)The cheese fondue was composed of McEwan's Scotch Ale, two cheddars (one smoked), some mustard and some cayenne.
The McEwans was a great choice for these cheeses - the strong and sweet ale paired really nicely with the slightly smoky cheddar. I probably should have paid more attention when warming it all up - it curdled quite quickly but a bit of lime juice smoothed it out a bit. We eventually enjoyed it with roasted potatoes, broccoli and cauliflower, kielbassa rounds, bread cubes, and cherry tomatoes.Considering the heaviness of the cheese fondue, I opted for a broth fondue rather than oil for cooking meat. I had planned on getting some wonderful scallops from Mariner Neptune and thought a nice gingery broth would work really well. Unfortunately, the scallops were way too huge to cook properly in the over-crowded fondue pot! The beef, chicken and prawns worked really nicely though (and left me with some tasty broth at the end of the night!)
We had a couple of very nasty fire flare-ups as a result of the old lamp oil that we used for fuel. Both pots got charred black and the metal pot had a 1/2 centimetre of ash covering its base. (Note for future reference: buy Sterno for next fondue).

And to end off the evening, we had strawberries, bananas, marzipan cubes, marshmellows, and peanut butter balls for dipping in chocolate.
The chocolate that came with the fondue set didn't last long though, and I had about as much success with melting more chocolate that I had with the cheese earlier. I brilliantly thought it would be clever to mix in some plain yogurt to melted chocolate, forgetting how easily this stuff seizes up... But thank goodness that you only need a bit of chocolate to make the sweetness of a strawberry sing!

January Eating

2007-01-20T16:59:00.000-06:00

The More With Less cookbood is my bible for simple, cheap eating. Rich food has its place, but after days and days of non-stop seafood and donairs last December, I started craving simpler food. And this soup recipe is one of the simplest.These are the basic ingredients: lentils, onions, garlic and lemon juice. Here's what you do: Boil lentils with cumin. Fry onions and garlic in olive oil. Add a tablespoon of flour to coat onions. When lentils are cooked, add the fried onions and lemon juice.

Garnish with yogurt, and you got yourself some damn fine soup. Lentils rule!

Xmas in Halifax - Seafood Heaven

2007-01-08T20:55:00.000-06:00

These lovely clams and chips come courtesy of Cousin's Snack Bar on Agricola Street in Halifax. Most Haligonians swear by John's Lunch in Dartmouth for fried clams, and don't get me wrong - they are amazing! But Cousin's has always been Jeff's favourite.Cousin's Snack Bar used to be a convenience store with a couple of stools in back, but the racks of potato chips are gone and now tables fill the place. On their sign outside they proudly advertise their Homestyle Cooking and then in smaller letters it says: Breakfast and Seafood. Gotta love a place that specializes in fried fish and fried bacon.

By the way, their clams are soft, succulent and sweet. YUMMMMMMM.

Onward to Clam Harbour. Not pictured here are the mounds of Willie Krauch's hot-smoked salmon that we had for lunch. Alas. But we did manage to get this shot of the amazing fish chowder that Jeff's dad made us for supper.

Check out the huge, twonie-sized scallops. Check out the chunks of lobster claw meat. And check out the glistening, shining layer of melted butter floating on the top. (The soup was actually a creamy colour underneath the butter). When I sipped my first spoonful, my tastebuds quivered with joy. The second spoonful of soup was gently savoured, and the flavours were quietly contemplated. On the third spoonful of soup my body started to rebel. I tried to will my body to submit to the pleasure, but the fourth spoonful of soup brought on nausea. I was defeated. (But Fluffy the cat won out BIG TIME.)

This soup did me in. This was the 2nd last day of the trip. I had already been dreaming of cleansing kale and lentils for awhile at this point due to the overload of amazing food being offered up from every direction. Two turkey dinners, three donair meals, corned beef and cabbage, clams and chips - all in the same week! It was too much!!! NO MORE EATING!

But then I slept on it, and woke up feeling great and ready to eat again. We brought home the rest of the chowder, and we ate it New Year's eve for lunch. At this point I only had to last one more meal. One more glorious meal before heading back home to the land of potatoes and sauerkraut. I'll let the rest of the photos speak for themselves.

The remains.

Xmas in Halifax - Donairs

2007-01-02T20:03:00.000-06:00

The seafood in Halifax is wonderful, and there will soom be a post detailing our feasts upon the crustaceans and molluscs of Nova Scotia... but let's start with Donairs, shall we?

Halifax Donairs are the stuff of legends. There is something about that spicy meat and creamy sweet sauce that can't be duplicated outside of Metro Halifax. The night we flew into town, Jeff insisted on stopping for donairs on the way home from the airport. His loving mother dutifully drove in circles in Dartmouth and Cole Harbour until we found a suburban shop still open at 1:30 am. Dino's two for one, I believe.

So what constitutes a Halifax Donair? This is what Wikipedia says:

The meat in this version of the döner kebab (Halifax donair, as it is sometimes referred to) is sliced from a loaf cooked on a vertical spit, made from a combination of ground beef, flour or bread crumbs, and various spices, while
the sauce is made from evaporated milk, sugar, vinegar, and sometimes garlic.
The meat and sauce are served rolled in pita bread with diced tomato and onion. This version is generally so packed with ingredients, that the pita is almost there for ceremonial purposes; the pita of any true Haligonian donair will be so soaked in sauce that attempts to pick it up will be fruitless.

They're not kidding about the 'don' t pick it up' part. This particular donair comes to us courtesy of Robert's Pizza and Donairs on Windmill Road in Dartmouth. They're kind of known for their over-the-top huge donairs. (Put it this way - Jeff could only eat about 1/2 of the large donair).

An offshoot of the donair is the donair pizza. You get your donair meat, your onions and tomatoes, your cheese - and then you smother donair sauce all over it. Kinda gross, but kinda yummy, especially after a few beers at the Seahorse Tavern...

(This pie comes courtesy of Alexandria's Pizza on Queen.)

Next post: Seafood heaven.

Regrettable Foods Christmas Potluck 2006

2006-12-17T20:24:00.000-06:00

...Or shall we call it the Family Circle Christmas potluck?

The origins of this potluck go back to a lovely day at the beach this past summer when Jodi presented various cookbooks from The Family Circle Illustrated Library of Cooking to those present. This past weekend, we were all called upon to utilise these books to conjure up the magic of cooking in 1972. The consensus at the party was that it was painfully difficult for us to follow these recipes to the letter; the abundance of pre-processed ingredients, the lack of spices or seasoning, the insistence on hard-boiled egg garnishes, and the enthusiasm for molding perfectly good food with gelatin made this potluck prep an almost arduous task . However, we persevered and these are the results.

Ladies, if I get any of the details wrong, please say so in the comments below!

The Feast!

My own contribution to the feast was Scotch Eggs. Pretty simple - hard boiled eggs encased in spiced hamburger, rolled in crushed Corn Flakes, then deep fried. Not too much technique there - although I'd love to make these sometime with really little eggs covered in homemade turkey sausage. These beasts were a little overwhelming and kind of difficult to cook because of their hugeness. But oh, so tasty. (Next time, I'll spice 'em up! The Scotch won't know what hit 'em!)

Next, we have a casserole with pineapple, yams and ham with Marshmellow topping courtesy of Sharon (one of my favourites of the evening, actually...) and an eggplant salad. The ham was cooked in a sauce of canned pineapple juice and brown sugar. I think this is kind of a take-off on the whole candied yams American Thanksgiving thing. Yummy.

The eggplant salad was from the 'Foods from Afar' heading - this was a supposedly Israeli salad of cooked eggplant, cucumber, celery and green olives covered in sour cream. No spices apart from salt, sugar and garlic. The method for making the radishes into rosettes was also in the cookbook. Those 70s housewives sure loved their garnishes.

These two treats above were courtesy of Kreesta and John. The sandwiches were a corrupted Reuben sandwich with spam instead of corned beef - and the lovely tuna ramekins were concocted completely of preprocessed and canned foods. Even the biscuit topping was Pillsbury. A lovely little Tuna Pot Pie, if you will.

My vote goes to Jenny, however for the most ornate food of the night.

These little candied oranges were astonishingly beautiful. I want to decorate my Christmas tree with them. Jenny, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is how they were created. First, the orange was sliced at the top and all the insides were gently scooped out. Then the hollow peels were candied. I'm not sure of the process, but I think it involved cooking them in a sugar syrup over a long period of time. Then the candied orange peels were filled with Christmas cake and steamed.

In a way, these oranges reminded me of the beautiful molded Marzipan treats that I first saw in the Netherlands when I was a kid. Breathtakingly lovely, but you were a little afraid to eat them.

It was almost surprising that there was only one molded salad at the potluck - I would venture a guess and say that almost a quarter of all the recipes in these Family Circle books involved mixing gelatin with otherwise acceptable food and conforming it to a imposing, quivering tower of food.

Melanie took on the molded salad challenge with this little number composed of rice, cream, melted candy hearts, and canned pears. Garishly festive!

Alas, there were many other dishes that were enjoyed but not photographed - the quiche, the ambrosia salad, the cheesecake, the salmon spread, the molasses roll-ups... All truly wonderful, and all enjoyed.

Huzzah for Regrettable Food!

Sometimes the best food is the food someone cooks for you!

2006-12-10T00:08:00.000-06:00

There hasn't been much interesting going on in my kitchen lately. It's busy at work and busy at home and its the time of year when I revert simple, easy, boring food. But thank God for ambitious friends!
Everyone needs a friend like Coral. Coral has found some interesting recipes lately. Coral wants to try them out. Coral calls me up like I would be doing her a favour by coming over and letting her try out some new recipes. Like the martyr I am, I say yes, Yes, YES! Green Coconut Curry soup with scallops and shrimp makes up the first course.
I go a little cuckoo for scallops - the succulent little pillowy morsels of rich sweet flesh make me groan with pleasure.

I remember once, long ago, coaching Coral for her first trip to the east coast of Canada. Like lots of people growing up on the prairie, she was a little nervous about eating seafood because the only thing we ever had growing up was frozen fish sticks and nasty canned or frozen shrimp. I had only discovered the joys of fresh seafood the year before on my first trip out east, so I passed along my newly found passion for Digby scallops and made her promise to at least try them when she was down there. As far as I can tell, she's never looked back since!

Oh, yeah - and the soup was damn tasty too. Not too spicy, with a hint of lemongrass. Veggies still crunchy. Yum.

Main course - Chicken breast stuffed with prosciutto and cheese, scalloped potatoes, and green salad with walnuts and blue cheese.
The chicken was coated in a tortilla chip breading, which made a lovely crunchy crust which contrasted nicely with the molten cheese and tender prosciutto within.

On an aside - I'm finding corn flour makes mighty tasty breading. My personal favourite lately has been corn flour with crushed pepitas with Mexican oregano as a breading for pan-fried fish. But I digress....

Dessert - Molten Chocolate and Espresso Fondants

These little lava cakes were OUT OF CONTROL. I don't know if any of you have ever had this experience, but this dessert reached out and punched me right in the face with the crazy flavour and texture! Then, just as I was trying to recover - another sucker punch to my taste buds! This dessert made me YELP right at the table!

Seriously. I'm not the hugest chocolate freak out there, but this was incredibly decadent. The almost-bitterness of the dark chocolate and espresso were offset so nicely by the cappucino ice cream. I couldn't finish the whole thing because it was so deliciously rich.

MMMMmmm. Molten.

This meal will give me the strength to make it through the craziness of December. And any spare moments will probably be consumed with thinking about how I can repay this meal!

Thanks, Chris and Coral, for a fantastic feast and good times!

I hate baking!

2006-12-03T12:11:00.000-06:00

Now... in my younger years, I loved baking.
I loved finding new recipes that required precision and attention to detail. Complicated torte recipes, cheesecakes, florentines drizzled with chocolate - I even made fruitcake one year when I was 19. Even though I never had much of a sweet tooth, I would visit friends and bring them treats and generally just bake for the sheer joy of baking.

I don't know exactly when it happened, but the thrill is now gone. Or maybe yesterday night I just lacked inspiration or patience. Or maybe I just need a bigger kitchen for baking. Or maybe I just needed to know that my new oven really means 430 degrees when it says 400. Regardless of my new ennui towards the sugar and spice arts - I persevered. And I managed to get three batches of treats of the (too hot) oven.
Batch one: Vital Geback.
These came from a recipe that my mom got from a German friend. They kind of taste like sesame snaps, but with sunflower seeds and almonds too. However, I burnt many of the almonds when I was attempting to toast them, so I threw in some pepitas to make up for the lack of almonds. Then I overbaked the whole batch.
The recipe said to bake them for about 15 minutes. I checked them at 13 and they were starting to overbrown. Then I waited too long to cut them into slices (you have to cut them while they're still quite warm) so some of the pieces shattered. But they are still edible, especially if you suscribe to the notion that burnt sugar is an exotic and delicious flavour.

Batch two: Lime and Pepita Sugar Cookies.

This recipe came to me from the Rebar cookbook, by way of lovely Kreesta Doucette. They are kind of like a sugar cookie with lime zest and pumpkin seeds. Thankfully, they are hard to screw up, and so they actually turned out quite well. I should have taken them out of the oven sooner to keep them a little softer, but the hot oven foiled me again.

Batch Three: Chocolate Chip cookies

This was the batch that nearly killed me. This recipe was nominated the best chewy chocolate chip recipe ever by the folks at Chowhound ( I think it's originally from Cooks Illustrated) but by this time I had lost all patience for careful measuring and delicate mixing. I should also mention a large part of the frustration of the day was due to the fact that my sugar was mostly comprised of huge, hard lumps that I had to crush down to be able to use for these recipes. I keep big bags of sugar and flour in the pantry in the basement and I guess it's too damp for the sugar.

Those lumps of sugar broke my spirit. At one point I was literally yelling out my frustration and was throwing stuff around the kitchen until Jeff came downstairs to see what the hell was going on... Even though I had read that you really needed to follow all instructions down to the letter for them to turn out just right, I just wanted to be done with the horrible things!
So I don't know if it was the hasty mixing/measuring or the hot oven, but they turned out very average and not-chewy.

Sigh... I think I will just have to leave baking to others more dedicated to the craft. Or at least stick to one recipe at a time - mixing up a new batch of dough when you have to pay close attention to the batch currently in the oven is probably not a great idea.

I shall endeavour to learn from these mistakes. I promise.

Spaghetti and Meatballs

2006-11-14T19:43:00.000-06:00

Ah... the classic dish.

I think today was the first time I've actually ever made spaghetti and meatballs. I was inspired by the Sundried Tomato and Fennel Turkey Sausage that I made this weekend. I didn't have any casings handy to make them into sausages, so I froze it in bulk.

Three Cheers for Turkey Meatballs!

Fish and Chips - HFX Style

2006-11-04T09:34:00.000-06:00

My husband and I have always had a slight difference of opinion on the perfect fish and chips.
I've always been fond of light, crispy coating and am ambivalent to the type of fish being used. Jeff is a fan of the thick, heavy stuff that his favourite Halifax greasy spoons would use to coat their fish, which has to be Haddock. Cousin's Snack Bar on Agricola Street served his version of piscatorial bliss. The secret to Jeffery's favourite fish batter?

We have started getting phone calls from Mariner's Neptune here in Winnipeg every time they get fresh haddock in their shop. (It's pretty hard to find in Winnipeg, but I'm getting sold on it for the best fish-and-chips fish there is.) It's a firm white fish, with a tangier, saltier flavour than cod. When we got the call this weekend, Jeff laid down the law. After 6 years of marriage we were finally going to make Aunt Jemima Haddock Fish And Chips!

And I think I'm sold on it. The last light, frothy beer batter I made tasted fantastic- but it took forever to get ready because it had yeast in it. This was definitely simpler and still tasted really good. Yes, it's heavy....which meant I was stuffed after two pieces. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Happy Halloween!

2006-11-01T22:09:00.000-06:00

Would you accept candy from this man?

St. Joseph Fall Supper - October 15, 2006

2006-10-24T20:37:00.000-05:00

The fall supper so good, you'll do anything to get there - even hitchhike!
Yes, Jeff managed to fit in a bus-tour school field trip in the Pembina Valley and a fall supper 120 kilometres away. I think it was the sign that made that wonderful couple from Altona pick him up... (Whoever you are, thank you for taking pity upon my husband!) The food.

For me, this supper is all about the pies. Well, the pies and the roast beef. The entire menu listed above also mentions salads, hominy corn (a little bland and kind of cold) and a pork ragout (kind of a bland gravy with a few pieces of meat).

My favourite St. Joe treat will always be the tourtiere, delicately flavoured with cloves and garlic, topped with the flakiest crust ever. Not to mention the meltingly tender slices of medium-rare roast beef, rubbed lovingly with lots of pepper and spices.This beef was perfect! And this is how they did it - Rotisserie style on a trailer beside the community hall. (Please note the look of gleeful concentration on the gentleman with the roast.)
Last but certainly not least, are the (dessert) pies of St. Joe.

Most suppers have a set banquet menu with donated homemade desserts, but at this supper the pies are part of the set menu. Every year the pies are the same, and they're heavenly. Pumpkin pie, saskatoon pie, cherry pie, lemon meringue pie, chocolate cream pie and French Canadian sugar pie.

Pictured above is my favourite - Bean Pie. Pinto beans are grown locally in the area, and this pie is here every year. The flavour is similar to a sugar pie, but the texture is dense and almost a little chewy. Not too sweet. And the pecan is a nice touch.

Carnitas!

2006-10-14T23:38:00.000-05:00

I was gifted with 8 pounds of Manitoba Berkshire pork a few weeks ago, and I was looking to find a recipe that would show off this pork to its fullest potential. I slow roasted the first roast, but I thought I'd try somthing more interesting and complicated for the second roast. I got the inspiration to make carnitas from Chowhound.com. I found pages and pages of endless debates on the Chowhound boards over the best way to make this dish, so it seemed like a fun challenge!

It's a strange feeling to try to make an authentic version of a food you've never eaten. The most 'authentic' recipes involved slowly simmering an entire roast in freshly rendered lard. Most of the other recipes involved slowly boiling the meat in water with spices and then browning it later. I always like to try for authentic preparation, but unfortunately I don't have large vats of freshly rendered lard on hand. So I did a little experiment - I'd render the lard from the roast, and try the 'authentic' method for as much meat as the lard would cover. The rest of the meat, I'd try out the other way.

Step one: Rendering lard.
This took a few hours on its own. I had about 3/4 pound backfat with skin that I cut into 1-inch cubes and boiled it down until the skin were crispy bits of crackly goodness. Funny, I always hated crackles when I was a kid, and now I went out of my way to produce them. I salted them and ate them hot - the first two were delicious, but the next one became lard overload. Jeff ate the rest.

Step 2 - The next day: Time to start boiling hog!
The roast got cut up into large chunks - about 1.5 x2.5 inches. I had about a 1 1/4 cup of lard from the night before, which got placed in a small saucepan. I was able to cover about 5 large pieces of pork with the melted lard. This I simmered slowly for an hour, then added the juice and rind from 1/2 an orange, and about 1/2 a can of Coke. I don't know how authentic the Coke was, but since I saw it in a few places, I thought I'd run with it. It simmered for about 2 hours longer, until the meat broke apart easily.
The other meat went into the stock pot with a cut up orange, a chili pepper, mexican oregano, cumin, lots of garlic and water. This simmered down for about three 1/2 hours until it looked like the picture above. Most recipes said to boil it down until there was no liquid left, but since I cut up the meat instead of leaving it as an intact roast, it was breaking apart at this point. I strained the meat and went shopping for corn tortillas.

Step three: Time to eat!
The water-boiled carnitas still needed to be crisped up. They were a little mushy and fatty, but 10 minutes in the oven at 425 degrees got them nice and carmelized. The lard-boiled carnitas were pretty perfect and just needed to be warmed up.
A little bit of avocado, fresh salsa and sour cream on a warm tortilla, and we got the final product pictured at the beginning of this post.

Final verdict? The flavour of both preparations was really similar. The taste of the oranges really came through in both of them, and the extra spices and garlic in the water boiled version weren't too noticable. I like the consistency of the lard-boiled ones better though. Strangely enough, they seemed leaner to me - less mushy fat still attached. Maybe next time I will boil them a little longer for that fat to render out, and maybe add a few dried chipotles to the boiling pot.

I called my pork farmers today to order some more of this stuff. I think I may be hooked!

Happy Thanksgiving!

2006-10-09T22:59:00.000-05:00

Yeah, we had Roast Chicken for lunch, and the pumpkin pie and stuffing, etc... But isn't this picture of our supper more interesting? Let's all give three cheers for vareneki and schmon faht.

Distinguishing between the Ukrainian perogy and the Mennonite vareneki is a little tricky. Ultimately, they come from the same tradition with the main difference that Mennonites fill their dumplings with cottage cheese and Ukrainians fill them with potato. (Although my Oma used to sometimes make fruit vareneki filled with cherries or apricots...)
Here in Winnipeg, the typical perogy is a pan-fried potato and cheese filled dumpling served with sour cream on the side. They are strangely ubiquitous in this part of the country - you can find them in diners, in mom n' pop family places, chain restaurants as a regional add-on, fried chicken places... They've become the ultimate starchy side dish for Winnipeg.

However, the perogies I've had at all the Ukrainian fall suppers are never pan-fried - always boiled, served with a cream gravy, sometimes on the side. I grew up thinking that only the Mennonites put cream gravy on their vareneki but I'm starting to realize that it is more of a restaurant vs. home-cooking thing instead. There are only a handful of actual restaurants that I know of that make good Mennonite-style vareneki, and they are all in Steinbach. Seek them out, and you shall be satisfied.

Ste. Agathe Fall Supper - October 1, 2006

2006-10-02T22:47:00.000-05:00

24 degrees Celcius at the beginning of October! A good day to spend an hour waiting in line for a fall supper!
Apparently, the good weather brings out the crowds, because the community hall in Ste. Agathe (just south of Winnipeg) had a line-up about two blocks long by the time we got there. As the line moved ever-so-slowly towards the lovely aromas inside, we had a chance to do some chatting with some charming Franco-Manitobain Hommes. We asked these men about the local specialties at the supper, who responded with the opinion that Fall Suppers were not about the food - they were about community and getting together with your friends. (Not about the food?!) We did get some hot tips on Suppers to watch for in the future, though. La Broquerie is their traditional kick-off supper every year. Something to remember for next year, I guess.
.
This was the first 'fowl' supper that I had been to. Roast Turkey, meatballs, ham, mashed potatoes, corn, stuffing, coleslaw was the fare. The supper itself was a bit lackluster, but the pie table more than made up for it. There was a huge selection of homemade pies and dainties, including creamy Sugar pie, strawberry, apple crumble pie, and a very intriguing coconut custard pie. Not too sweet, really eggy with lots of real coconut. Very yummy.

The spiky apple? Simply the most creative toothpick holder I've ever seen.

Pansy Fall Supper - September 24, 2006

2006-10-02T18:40:00.000-05:00

After much debate, the decision to start the 2006 season was settled on Pansy, in South-Eastern Manitoba. Now, the great thing about Pansy it that it's not really a town at all. It's this community center, a church, and a mailbox. (Plus it's called Pansy! How great is that?) Oh, and they have an awesome Pet Cemetary. I have no idea what the story is behind the pet cemetary, but it's a few miles out of 'town', has a well-maintained parking lot, brand new sign, and picturesque paths winding around the bush. No markers as far as we could see, but fascinating nonetheless.
But I digress. The Pansy fall supper was noteworthy for its four-line system (no line-ups despite a packed house) and its fantastic variety of food, not surprising since it was advertised as a Ukrainian Smorg. Here, off the top of my head are some of the treats offered: Fried chicken, two kinds of meatballs, two kinds of cabbage rolls, perogies with a creamy dill sauce (great flavour, but a little gummy), yummy peppery mashed potatoes, amazing sauerkraut with big pieces of ham (so mild, tender and hammy), pickled beets (heavy on the cloves, which is a good thing), sweet Ukrainian crepes stuffed with cottage cheese (Nalysnyky) and piles of other preserves, salads, and jello. There was actually enough non-meat options here for the vegetarian among us to eat her fill too (not always that common on this circuit...)
The dessert table was also impressive - lots of homemade pies, dainties and squares to choose from. A big pitcher of thick cream straight from the dairy accompanied the coffee.
Sounds like heaven, right? The best in the East?

No, sir. Not the best. Although the results are unofficial, the moniker of best in the East may still have to go to Gardenton.

You see, part of the dilemma whilst choosing the supper this weekend was to decide if we wanted to branch away from Gardenton this year. As you have read in the 2005 recap, G. is the traditional kick-off to the supper season for this gang. But we thought we should try to branch out, to experience what else the world of suppers had to offer us. So we went to Pansy.

The gravitational force of Gardenton's perogies sucked us in, though. Yes, friends, we did TWO suppers in ONE afternoon. Disgusting. Over the top. Gluttonous. But we all can categorically now state that we can assert with confidence that Gardenton does have the best perogies ever consumed by any of us, plus it has pumpkin pie that will make you weep. Well, it made Jenny weep, anyway - (seen here in a 2004 photo...)

Even though it was the tail end of the supper and half the food had been taken off the tables already, the perogies maintained their amazing, light texture. No gumminess! Beautiful, thin cream sauce with tiny bits of fried onion. Intense cheddar flavour with the potato filling.

They. Are. Perfect.

Fall Suppers 2005 Recap!

2006-09-28T19:52:00.000-05:00

The Ukrainian Village is the site of the Gardenton Fall Supper in South-Eastern Manitoba. It has kind of become tradition to kick off the fall supper season with this supper - the leaves on all the oak trees have just begun to change, the day is always sunny and warm, and you just know that you're going to have the best Ukrainian food in the province. The hall is small - seats about 100 - and a sweet guy named Mike is always there to greet you as you come in. The food is typical Ukrainian buffet - perogies, holubchi, potatoes, meatballs, fried chicken - but everything is prepared so delicately it's hard to think of this as a mass-produced meal. Highlights of this supper are the beautiful boiled cheese and potato perogies, the potatoes in cream and fresh dill, and the light pumpkin pie with real whipped cream. Sometimes you can buy some shredded Horseradish beets - Yum!

Silver, Manitoba is a Ukrainian town in the interlake area of Manitoba. Their fall supper is more of a dinner and dance than a come-and-go supper. The food was a little lackluster compared to the glory of Gardenton (Praise Gardenton!) but from what I can remember, it was a perfectly fine Ukrainian buffet with two kinds of holubchi, perogies, meatballs and homemade headcheese. The best part about this supper, though, was chatting with the locals about the best places to hunt for wild mushrooms - not that anybody gave up any real secrets - and dancing The Butterfly to a live band.

http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k2/froddard/thepiesofst.jpg (click on the link for a collage of St. Joseph... for some reason I can't upload these pictures properly...)

St. Joseph is a little French town south of Winnipeg. The feel of this supper is a little more razzle-dazzle than the down-home flavour of some of the other suppers. Don't get me wrong, there is still some damn fine home cooking here, it's just that St. Joe is so....organized! When you complete the buffet line (filled with crazy jello salads, hominy corn, beautifully tender roast beef and melt-in-your-mouth Tourtiere), there is a volunteer waiting to find your party a place to seat. There are at least another dozen volunteers scattered throughout the large hall that gesture with hand signals the availability of seating arrangements in the crowd. They run this place like clockwork! http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k2/froddard/Stjoseph004BW.jpg It can be a little tricky getting your pie after supper because those volunteers fill up any empty spaces so quickly. The pies are probably the highlight of this exemplary supper. Every year there is the same selection: Bean pie (kind of like a pumpkin pie consistency that tastes like caramel - Yum!), Sugar pie (much creamier than you might think), raisin, chocolate cream, apple, saskatoon, turtle, lemon and Cherry pie. St Joseph is pie heaven.

So there we have it - the highlights of the 2005 season.

This next weekend might be a little crazy - there are at least 8 suppers that I know of happening this Sunday alone. Please wish me and my cholesterol levels luck.

my first post...

2006-09-25T19:42:00.000-05:00

What can I say - I'm a fan of good food.
Lord knows, I'd hate to work in the food industry, but food just seems to be more interesting than anything else.
So here's to food as celebration, food as sacrament, food as politics and food for sustenance!