Posts Tagged ‘food’
August 3rd, 2010
Please excuse the over-exposure of this photo. It’s the inevitable consequence of low lighting and late eating. For a recent family birthday dinner, we visited Ferro, and this drink, the Negroni, convinced me to blog the location.
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July 31st, 2010
A while ago, my friend Sara gave me a free sample of Starbucks’ new VIA instant coffee. She’s not much of a coffee drinker, but I am. I take a double-walled thermos with me most everywhere, and I am deeply in love with the Cuisinart Grind and Brew we purchased last year as an anniversary gift to each other, and most often we use it to brew Kicking Horse’s Hoodoo Joe blend. But sometimes, instant coffee is all you have, so one day when we were running low I decided to try the VIA.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t awful. I wouldn’t drink it every day, but if it were between VIA and a raging migraine, I’d probably go with VIA. I tweeted this, and my friend Tamara Sheehan revealed to me that no, VIA is really just freeze-dried cat piss, and that if I had any self-respect I’d be drinking some of her coffee. You see, in addition to being a writer of GLBTQ fiction for the YA crowd, Tamara works for Discovery Coffee Roasters in Victoria. When I jokingly requested samples, Tamara very generously sent me three blends from Discovery’s lineup.
This, my friends, is what Twitter is for.
What follows are my impressions from the samples that Tamara sent me. I think each is already successful in the Victoria, but I think they would do well in Toronto, too. Although Toronto has plenty of good coffee places, they’re not spread around very well. They’re concentrated in the downtown area, which means that there are inroads to be made further north, east, and west as those areas gentrify. I’ve never visited Discovery’s locations, but they seem like the kind of places I’d enjoy, and if I’m ever in Victoria I’ll definitely drop by. Discovery has the kind of operation that I remember from Seattle’s Caffé Vita: roasting, distribution, and training coupled with a few storefronts. It’s a smart business model, because it means increasing the reach of the brand without investing in a huge number of brick-and-mortars. And offering a training course for baristas means that third parties like hotels, etc. can ensure the quality of their espresso drinks without training every single person on staff in a business with high turnover. But at the heart, there has to be good coffee. Luckily, they have that part nailed.
El Salvador Finca Alaska
Most “medium” blends are a little too light, but this one evolves from its malty whole bean into a strong wash with a sharp, bright aftertaste. That sharpness softens with the addition of milk and sugar, resulting in a surprising chocolate flavour. This coffee feels like a people pleaser, and might make a good brunch offering or Christmas morning brew. Lighter roasts also contain more caffeine, so if you’re looking for more bang for your buck, this is a good choice.
Costa Rica Bioli
This triple blend of Central American beans bills itself as a big, solid cup of drip, and I couldn’t agree more. This is the coffee you want when you enter a diner. Any diner, anywhere, anytime, for any reason. This is the coffee Dean Winchester orders when Dean Winchester orders coffee. The flavour is bold enough to stand up to any combination of milk, sugar, Bailey’s, Jameson, or whatever other flavouring agent you deploy. You could probably also use the dregs to make red-eye gravy, if that’s your thing, or pair it with sweeter recipes where a strong coffee flavour is needed to complement a dark chocolate (as in a flourless torte) or offset a white chocolate (as in a biscotti).
House Espresso Blend:
We brewed this up as drip because our espresso maker has a cracked O-ring. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it straight. Milk and sugar served only to throw it way off-base, and I think it’s best enjoyed without any accoutrements. I think it would also make a fine iced coffee for this very reason. (Iced coffee is almost impossible to sweeten appropriately without ready access to simple syrup or superfine caster sugar. But with really excellent coffee, this isn’t an issue.) However, my husband found it a little thin and generic. I suspect this was a function of brewing this blend as drip rather than espresso. Concentrated, this blend would definitely have more character and would not falter under pressure from milk, foam, or sweetener.
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At this point, I should add that I’m obviously open to reviewing any other samples that are sent my way. I’m the kind of person who reads product reviews fairly regularly, and who thinks in granular detail about things like headphones, soap, and knives — the things I deal with on a daily basis. I have a small group of “favourite things” that I love interacting with and will promote to anyone who listens (including my Sony headphones, my Pacifica soap, and my Henckel knives), and I like adding to that list.
May 28th, 2010
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| From Food |
This week, my father-in-law phoned me just to ask if our air conditioning unit was installed, yet. When I told him it wasn’t, he sounded a little panicked. Today, Karl asked me the same question. We’ve received heat warnings for the past few days, and I’ve heard reports of elderly people having trouble breathing and so on. Thankfully that hasn’t been a problem, here: my husband and I managed to wrestle in our A/C unit a couple of days ago, and both we and the cat are glad of it. But there’s no A/C in the kitchen, and that means salad. I dressed this one with olive oil, lime juice, salt and pepper. When you have a whole avocado in among the spinach, you don’t need much else. Well, aside from a chipotle tenderloin sandwich with guacamole on top.
My affection for avocados should never be underestimated. If I could plant one tree and be guaranteed that it would grow no matter what, I’d plant an avocado. I would be very fat, but my hair and skin and nails would gleam.
I also like mango:
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| From Food |
That’s a bowl of sweet and sour pork with mango (mostly mango) over the brown rice I showed you earlier. The sauce is very simple: gochujang, raw apple cider vinegar, and honey. The proportions change each time I make it, so I won’t even bother trying to share the proper measurements. You’ll have to decide if you want something more spicy, acidic, or sweet, and blend accordingly. It’s a good idea to taste the gochujang on the tip of your finger or the edge of a spoon, first, so that you know how hot it is and what you’re working with. When I tried it, I was impressed with the mellow sweetness backing up the spice. Your mileage may vary.
I also made green tea concentrate. I have no photos of that, yet, since I’ve been so busy drinking it and dreaming up sake cocktails involving it that the glass is always empty before I think to bring out the camera. The 1 : 1 concentrate + water mix is the closest I’ve come to approximating Oi Ocha, my favourite drink from Japan. Japan has one of the widest selections of beverages on the planet, but once I made my way through some ume soda and canned whiskey, I found that the drinks I liked best there were the cold, unsweetened varieties of my favourites from home: coffee and green tea. I returned with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for these things. But now I can make the tea at home, and not buy those absurdly expensive bottles of the imported stuff. (The coffee is still a problem; some shops know what you mean when you say iced coffee, but others give you a sort of brownish liquid that tastes like thin birch syrup.)
Anyway, the point of all this is that I am in fact eating vegetables and drinking moderately healthy liquids in all this heat. You’d think this would result in pounds lost, but no. Just the other day, the woman who runs my favourite coffee shop asked if I was pregnant. She always asks this, every time I come in. “No, it’s just fat,” I say, pointing at my middle.
Those avocados. They’re lethal. And delicious.
May 22nd, 2010
I watch a lot of tutorials online. I find they really calm me down before I try to sleep. I had a feeling that this one would be an instant favourite the moment it appeared in the related content navbar, but wow. David Lynch teaching me how to cook? I’m so there.
This is only the first part of the tutorial. The second part is here. Apparently, Lynch released them as part of a promotional campaign for Inland Empire. What I really enjoy about the twenty-minute tutorial in total is that it not only teaches you how to make quinoa, but Lynch tells a story while he’s waiting for it to plump up. He tells it just like you imagine he would, only better, and the whole scene reminds me a little bit of David Carradine preparing a sandwich at the end of Kill Bill, only real and therefore scarier.
Also, I find it completely adorable that Lynch compensates for his cigarette smoking with whole foods. Whatever he’s doing, it works — he’s probably around 63 in this clip, but you’d never know.
May 20th, 2010
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| From Food |
I’ve been on break from school for a while. I wish I could say that I did something truly amazing with my time, but I mostly focused on watching Twin Peaks, doing yoga, and finally figuring out how to make brown rice properly on a stovetop. There are a lot of ways to do this, but I seem to finally have discovered the method that works for me. The secret is washing the rice. Over and over. Three times, at least. You drop the rice in a bowl, run cold water over it, then polish it between your fingers like Ebenezer Scrooge counting the last of the day’s shillings on a cold December afternoon. When the water becomes cloudy, use your hand like a sieve and tip the bowl over, draining out the water between your fingers without losing too many grains. Lather, rinse, repeat. You are finished when the water runs clear. It’s slow, but it works. For one cup of rice, I use 1 1/4 cup water. I bring it to a boil, then lower the heat to the lowest possible setting, and do my best to wait patiently. It’s hard not to open up the pot and meddle with the process. But nothing destroys rice faster than over-attention; too much stirring and you have risotto instead of sushi.
This break I’ve also finally learned how to sear a perfectly moist chicken breast, and how to make the right macaroni and cheese. (I love macaroni and cheese. Without those crucial bits of butter and milk during my growing years, I’d have wound up even shorter. But now I make mine with broccoli, Worcestershire sauce, and my all-important Calphalon saucepan.) Nothing fancy, just techniques that make things easier later. It feels good, getting these small things right.
I also received Peter and Caitlin’s notes on the novel. I suspect that they had several “spare the rod, spoil the child” discussions before giving me those notes. For two people who approach their craft from such different points, they wound up agreeing on a number of issues. And for the first time in a long time, I feel like I have a plan. I’m thinking of the story as a story again, and not a checklist, and remembering what made me want to write it in the first place. All the decisions I was loath to make earlier on are much easier and clearer, now, and it feels good to have it under my hands, polishing it, clarifying it.
It’s there when I go to sleep and it’s still there when I wake up. I missed it.
April 12th, 2010
I had a houseguest all week — an old friend from university who needed some down time before starting a cross-country move and a dissertation. We presented together at a conference, applying Aristotle’s notion of phronesis from the Nicomachean Ethics to science fiction futurism, but most of the week was spent sleeping in, visiting art galleries, and eating. There’s a lot of really great food in Toronto, and we barely scratched the surface. But what really surprised me about this week was how much comfort food I made, and how happy it made all of us. Things like:
I wish I could claim that I made fancier fare, or that I had photographed it, but this was not the case. I cheated. I opened jars. (I made my own guacamole, with organic avocados that did in fact taste better than the inorganic variety. But this was the foodiest of my foodstuffs, that week.) I felt a little guilty about this, thinking that I should have prepared something more work-intensive, but in retrospect this would have interrupted the flow of the week, which was all about staring quietly into the rain, inhaling the smell of it mingled with the steam rising from our coffee. You don’t spend the morning that way and then turn around and make a multi-course meal. You do your homework instead, or you read a novel, and then you come home and take out your knife and see what needs slicing.
You might wind up with something like this:
Soondubu jjigae from Maangchi on Vimeo.
This is soondubu jjigae, which I have yet to make but which I enjoy on a regular basis. My friend’s first night in town, we ushered him into a Korean restaurant where the rice is purple and this soup is served with a raw egg. It’s simple. It’s delicious. It’s also one of the first foods I discovered in Toronto, on the advice of a new friend. I’m still so glad that she shared it with me, because it inaugurated my appreciation of Korean food in general, and opened my cultural palate as well as my culinary one. Soon is comfort food for me, now. It always makes me feel better. I like how messy it is, and how I always leave feeling full.
Relationships are like this, too. Messy, but nourishing. Things may boil over. You can cut yourself if you don’t watch out. You may stand there for hours, waiting for it all to come together. But eventually, it does. Eventually, there’s just the full silence, when you know you did it right, it’s enough, you’re done, no further preparation is necessary.
Then, dessert.
March 14th, 2010
No, this is not one of those locovore posts where I tell you to eat only within a hundred miles and go visit a slaughterhouse and then go look at your meat in a different way. There’s already a lot of that sentiment out there, and with good reason, so I doubt you need to hear that message from me. If you really want to know more about the local and organic stances on food, I suggest you visit the WorldChanging articles on food, which will inform you far more than I can.
Instead, this post (which I realize is not on a Friday, again, so yeah) is about where I read about food. You should I know that I read about food all the time. All day, even. In fact, as you read these words, I am staring lustfully at pictures of scones swathed in spiced fig butter. Or beans braised in beer. Or chocolate and coconut pots de creme. Or steak in pink peppercorn sauce. Or curls of pale cheese over steaming soup. Or sushi, jewel-like and glistening. I’m always looking at food. More than that, I’m always imagining food. I read menus for restaurants I know I’ll never visit. I read recipes I know I’ll never make. I sometimes start thinking about the meal I’m going to eat that night from the moment I wake up in the morning. (I frequently delay eating on days like those, just to avoid the inevitable disappointment that happens when the thing on my plate and the thing in my mind don’t match up.)
Usually, when I’m thinking about food, I’m looking at these sites:
There, now you’ve had a glimpse into yet another of my neuroses. Eat up.
March 7th, 2010
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| From Food |
Please excuse the blurry, stalker-esque photo. And yes, I know, today is not Friday. But I’ve been in love with chana dal since attending a Hindu wedding last summer. I first tried the dish during the mendhi celebration, when the groom’s mother prepared it for the women in his family. Instantly, I realized I would have to learn how to make it for myself. Although I had come to enjoy Indian cuisine since moving to Toronto (where the influence of our significant South Asian population has trickled into the grocery store freezer aisle, home of the tandoori chicken fingers), I had never until this moment wanted to try it for myself. I had looked at the recipes. I knew how complicated they were. I knew there was no way I would buy a separate spice grinder, or start pan-frying whole cumin seeds in the final five minutes of cooking, or culturing my own paneer. But this dish, with its soft bursts of mellow flavour punctuating a sweet, silky, spicy stew — I had to have that, over and over. (With naan. I’m a sucker for naan.)
This dish makes no claim to authenticity. I did not learn it from the woman who first served it to me. It has no ghee, the clarified butter that helps the dish achieve that Oh God more please now sensation that it should have. It also has no chickpeas, because I had no desire to a) soak chickpeas, or b) render canned ones into mush with my slow-cooker. I chose real chana dal instead: the dried yellow split peas that gave the dish its name. In place of clarified butter, I used light coconut milk. Ordinarily, I would have gone with the full-fat variety, but this week I endured the Cronenbergian body horror that is trying on new jeans, so low-calorie it is.
February 26th, 2010
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| From Food |
This dish came about with wish to bulk up my blood’s iron supply. Thus the lentils and kale, both of which are chock full of iron. I added pork because I had to use up a chop in my fridge, but you could easily go meat-free to make the dish entirely vegan, or deploy some tiny, sweet bay scallops in the final moments of cooking. I also wanted to use up the rest of the tamarind sauce in my fridge. Since the sauce came from a small local producer, I’ve suggested a substitution of tamarind juice and Worcestershire sauce. You might also try jerk sauce, if you have some around, but result will be spicier. The measurements for spice are approximate; I don’t recall exactly how much I used, and your tastes might be different. But I think you’ll find that you won’t need much, because the flavours of the other ingredients are strong enough on their own. If you do this right, you won’t be able to taste a single specific ingredient. My final result was silky, tangy, and filling. Enjoy.
You will need:
Heat oil in a large stock pot. Add onions, sweat for five minutes, then add garlic. Sweat for another moment, then add tomatoes, water, coconut milk, and lentils. Bring to a boil. (Be patient with those lentils. They need time to soften and cook properly. As in: at least an hour, more like ninety minutes.) Lower the heat. Add banana chips, carrots, and pork. Then season with the tamarind juice, Worcestershire, curry, and cumin. Cover and simmer on medium-low heat. When the curry has cooked for an hour, test the lentils. If they are soft, add the kale (if using scallops, add them now). The kale will need at most five minutes to wilt and brighten appropriately, at which point you can pull the stockpot off the heat, and give it a good stir before salting and peppering. If you need more heat at this point, some red pepper flakes will do.
October 18th, 2009
I am blogging this dish because I want to remember it. And also because you should make it. Tomorrow.
Inspiration for this dish came from the pears and cranberries which colour it and lend it sweetness. They showed up in my (university-organized!) CSA box, and I had no idea what to do with them. Mike and his partner Lorna suggested a chutney. Dave said I should stuff a chicken with them. In the end, I wussed out and reached for something easy: my slow cooker.
You can thank me later.
Autumnal Pork Tenderloin
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