Cedar Plank Salmon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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!