Artichoke and Asiago Dip

This quick dip is easy and has only a few ingredients.  All you need is a food processor and a cheese grater and you’re ready to go.

Start with some artichoke hearts.  These usually come in a jar or a can, preserved in brine or oil.  Grab yourself 12 ounces of these.

Plop them in the food processor with 1 package (250g) plain cream cheese that has been brought to room temperature.

If your artichokes were in brine, add in a dollop of olive oil.  If they were packed in oil you probably won’t find this necessary.  Sprinkle in some dry mustard and a few spoonfuls of sour cream. Pulse that sucker silly.

Grate up some asiago cheese and stir that in afterwards.

Top with some fresh basil if you’ve got it and serve (or wrap up and store in the fridge for a few days). We had ours alongside some baba ghanouj and the five minute flat bread I showed you on Monday.  Tasty!

Five-Minute Gluten-Free Flat Bread

One of the benefits of having a friend who has a gluten intolerance is that I get to learn all sorts of new recipes.  This one I served up as an appetizer at Easter dinner.  At first, it seemed questionable and I doubted it would work, but when I did it, I was pleasantly surprised.

First, preheat your broiler (the top grill in your oven) to its highest setting and move the top rack as close to it as possible.

Then, using a scale, measure out 150g gluten-free flour.  For the purposes of this recipe I used half white rice flour and half soy flour.

So you have your flour.  Now you also need olive oil, sea salt, and some warm water.  The amount of water you will need will vary but on this particular occasion I needed about 1 cup.

Slowly add the water to your flour mixture, stirring the whole time.  When you come up with a mixture closely resembling cake batter then you’re all ready to go.

Pour some olive oil onto your baking sheet and spread it around with your fingers.  In retrospect I would have used an older sheet where the oil would have stuck better to the surface.

Roughly spoon your bread batter onto the oiled sheet and drizzle some more oil over top.  Make your hands nice and oily too — it helps.

Use your fingers to spread the batter to the edges of the pan.  You will get some areas where the batter is translucent — this is a good thing — and this is where your big bubbles will happen when the bread cooks.

Sprinkle it with sea salt and whatever spices you want.

Place the bread under the broiler and keep an eye on it.  When it starts to char in places, after a few minutes, take it out.

So this is the top:

Use a spatula and your fingers to flip it over.  You can see how, because the oil moved away from the surface of the pan, I had some sticking issues.  This wouldn’t happen in an older pan.

Pop that under the element again until it’s nice and charred as well.

Use a pair of scissors to cut it into pieces and serve warm.

On this night, when I was experimenting, I had it with home-made artichoke and asiago dip (recipe to come soon) and some goat cheese we got on sale.

Surprisingly tasty and not too filling!

Orange Coconut Scones

I had a bad experience making (read: burning) scones when I was a kid and haven’t tried them since.  But our receptionist at work made these for the Sweet Treats club (seriously, the best idea I have EVER had) two weeks ago and I thought I would share with you the awesomeness.  If you think something is awesome in Newfoundland, you say that it’s “best kind.”  Not THE best kind.  Just best kind.  And these are best kind.

Preheat your oven to 400°F and line two baking sheets (or three, depending on the size of your scones) with parchment paper.

Stir together 4 cups all-purpose flour, 2 tablespoons baking powder, and the zest of 2 oranges in the bowl of a stand mixer.

Dice up 3/4 cup cold butter and add that in, mixing on the lowest speed until the butter pieces are all pea-sized.

Lightly beat 4 eggs and pour in 1 cup cold heavy cream.  Give that a stir then add it to the mixing bowl and mix until just blended.

Combine 1 cup shredded coconut with 1/4 cup flour and add that in as well.  I found I had to stop the mixer at this point and manipulate it in with my cold hands, as it slowed the machine down quite a bit.

Dump the dough onto a floured surface and knead it into a ball.

Flour a rolling pin and flatten the stuff out until it’s about 3/4″ thick. Use a cutter or a knife to cut your scones from the dough.  When you run out of room, squish up the scraps and roll them out again.

The scones will expand upwards while they cook, not sideways, so you can crowd them pretty close on the baking sheet.

Bake the scones for 15-20 minutes, until the tops are browned and the insides are baked all the way through.  They will be firm to the touch, not sticky.

Let them cool for about fifteen minutes, and while they’re doing that, mix together 1/2 cup confectioner’s sugar (icing sugar), 4 teaspoons freshly squeezed orange juice, and the zest of 1 orange.

Drizzle the glaze over the still-warm scones.

Serve right away, with honey and butter.  Or secretly leave half the batch on your neighbour’s doorstep.

Blue Egg Group

Happy Friday the 13th!

I do not suffer from triscadecaphobia, the fear of Friday the 13th.  Normally it’s an extremely lucky day for me.

And true to form, what do I get but some fresh St. Phillips BLUE eggs, a gift from Miss Awesome?  It’s always my lucky day.

Aren’t these beautiful?

I don’t want to waste them on something banal, so stay tuned for the amazingness I plan to create with them.

I have a number of project ideas lined up for the next few weeks, but they all take a bit of time, so please be patient with me if the posts you’ve been seeing are a little simpler than you are used to.  As Blackadder would say, it’s all part of my cunning plan …

Baba Ghanouj

*drool*

I have a thing for baba ghanouj. The Pie only lets me buy it when it’s on sale (though that might have something to do with the fact that we consume large quantities of na’an when we eat it), so imagine my pleasant surprise when I discovered two things. The first is that making the stuff is ridiculously easy, even easier than making hummus. The second, is that eggplants were on sale!

I bought this honker of an eggplant, which weighs in at about 2lb.

Turn your broiler on to high (or prep your barbecue, because you can grill these babies, too), and roast the eggplant for 30-40 minutes, until the skin is crisp and blackened and the insides are squishy. If you have a big eggplant, poke it with holes and cut it in half. Let that cool completely.

When it’s room temperature, scoop the innards out.

I got to bust out my little-used food processor, which I got for free from a friend who was moving away to England. Every time I use this baby I’m always amazed at the marvel that is the food processor. But because I use it so rarely, it’s always a struggle to remember how to put the damned thing together.

Plop the eggplant innards into your food processor and pulse until smooth.

Add in, making adjustments for your own taste, a pinch of salt, 2 tablespoons olive oil, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, 3 tablespoons tahini, and 1 tablespoon minced garlic. Pulse that around as well and give it a taste.

After the initial taste, I added in some paprika, a pinch of cumin, and some more lemon juice, but of course that depends on your own preferences.

To serve, drizzle with olive oil and garnish with fresh parsley, pomegranate seeds, red pepper flakes, or whatever suits your fancy, and eat with flat bread. OM NOM NOM.

O Canada: Fried Pastry Dough “Tails”

It seems like Canadian cuisine is all about the different ways you can fry bread.  I’ll take it easy on you for the rest of the week but we’ll go with one more to end the month.

If you’ve ever done any touristy stuff in Canada you probably have tried Beaver Tails.  They’re especially good after a day of skating along the Rideau Canal, the longest outdoor skating rink in the world.  With a nice hot chocolate.  You can get them at fairs, too, and in the States (though they call them “elephant ears” there, what a silly name).

You can’t get them around here.  The franchise hasn’t moved this far east yet.  So I got the recipe from here, from a genius lady who has come up with her own form.  It makes about 20 pastries, so feel free to halve it.

Start with your yeast.  Mix a pinch of sugar with 1/2 cup warm water in a large bowl and sprinkle 5 teaspoons active dry yeast.  Let that sit for a few minutes until the yeast is all dissolved.

Add in 1 cup warm milk, 2 eggs, 1/3 cup vegetable oil and 1 teaspoon vanilla.

Then add 1/3 cup granulated sugar, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, and between 4 1/4 and 5 cups flour.  You may need more or less, depending on the vagaries of the weather and whatever else is going on in your life.

Stir that baby up real good until you have a dense but pretty elastic dough.

Knead the dough on a floured surface until it’s not tacky anymore.  This will take about 5-8 minutes or so.

Drop it in a greased bowl and cover it with a tea towel.  Leave it in a warm place to rise for about 30-40 minutes.

Look it at.  All nice and risen.

Punch that sucker down.

Pinch off a golf ball-sized hunk.

Flatten it out into an oval.

Plop those suckers on a tray and cover them with a tea towel while you heat your OYLE.

When your oil is hot enough to fizzle a pinch of flour, you can start yer fryin’.

Before you fry your ovals, stretch ‘em out a little so they look a little bit more like beaver tails.

Slide them in one end at a time.  You can fry probably two at once, maybe two minutes per side.

Let them drain on paper towels and cool enough so they don’t burn your face off when you eat them.

Now you have a range of toppings to choose from of course.

How about chocolate hazelnut spread with bananas?

Bananas and honey?

Jam?

The Pie had himself some jam and peanut butter.  And banana.  He’s a fan of all three.

And of course my favourite: cinnamon sugar with lemon.

O Canada: Moose Pizza

Gren killed a moose and was kind enough to share it with us.

Just kidding.  Gren is about the size of a moose’s hoof.  If anyone were to be killed and eaten in that situation it would surely be the tender tasty corgi.  Hell, sometimes *I* want to eat him.  He does look pretty delicious.

Fusselette’s dad likes to hunt and fish and as a result we have a pile of fresh-frozen cod and moose roast and moose sausages in our freezer.  This can only mean good things for you, my readers.

In any case, I couldn’t continue my Canadian feature month without including a dish made from Newfoundland’s biggest (and I mean that in more ways than one) pest.  On an island where “Nature comes in extra large,” moose are certainly vermin to be reckoned with.  I had some more to say about moose back when Rusty and Mags were in town.

So.  Yes.  We have moose.  We are going to eat it.  When we were in Gros Morne this summer, I had the opportunity to try moose pizza for the first time.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that it’s a Canadian dish, most likely invented right here on the Rock.  Of course, Hawaiian pizza was invented on the Canadian prairies, so who’s to say?

First we start with the dough.  For the sake of variety, I’m going to use a different dough recipe than normal.  This one I pulled out of The Joy of Cooking and cut it in half.

Sprinkle 1 1/8 teaspoons active dry yeast on the surface of a small bowl filled with 2/3 cup warm water.  Let it stand for about 5 minutes, or until the yeast is all dissolved; then you can stir it up.

In a larger bowl, mix together 1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour, 1 tablespoon olive oil, 2 teaspoons salt and 2 teaspoons sugar.

Pour in the yeast and water and stir until all ingredients are completely combined.  Then keep stirring for another minute or so.

Turn out onto a floured surface and knead by hand for about 10 minutes.  You will find you have to add quite a bit more flour in to keep the dough from sticking to the surface.  When the dough is smooth and elastic, transfer it to a lightly oiled bowl.  Roll the ball of dough around in the bowl to make sure all the sides are coated.  Cover it with a clean cloth and leave it somewhere warm for about an hour.

Preheat your oven to 475°F and start prepping your toppings.  If you are going to use a pizza stone (like we did) then put your stone onto the rack in the oven when you turn it on, so it can preheat too.

I decided that mushrooms and red onion were a good complement to the moose sausage that was sizzling in a pan.

I sliced up the sausage as well, and grated some mozzarella cheese while I was at it.

When your dough is ready, flatten it into a pan sprinkled with cornmeal, or, if you’re using a stone, onto a peel or surface covered with parchment paper.  I made a circle out of ours, to match the stone.  Make a slight lip at the edges of the dough to keep stuff from spilling off and press your fingers into the dough to make dimples.  This prevents crust from bubbling up.

Brush the surface of the dough with olive oil to prevent it from becoming soggy, and sprinkle with some herbs.  We like herbes de provence in our pizza.

Crack open a can of pizza sauce.  We generally use half a can for each pizza.  Smooth that sauce on the dough.

Add your ingredients.

Don’t forget your mounds and mounds of sausage. There might be a bit too much sausage on this pizza, but what’s done is done.

And lots of cheese.

Bake for about 20-25 minutes, until the crust is golden-brown and the cheese is melted and bubbly.  Slice and serve!

O Canada: Baked Beans with Toutons

My house currently smells like awesome.  All the windows are steamed up.  It’s great.

Baked beans, I think you’d agree, are a traditional staple all down the eastern seaboard of North America.  Add a splash of Québec maple syrup to the sweet, dark sauce and serve it with a side of Newfoundland toutons (“TAOW-tuns”), however, and you’ve got yourself a Canadian dish.  It all takes quite a bit of time (you have to start by soaking your beans overnight), but it’s worth it to have your house smell this good.

For the Baked Beans:

I cobbled together this bean recipe from three others, which I’ve listed at the bottom of this post.  I think baked beans are conceptually pretty fluid, so feel free to experiment on your own.

This recipe also involves some interesting food items that are not usual additions to my refrigerator contents: fatback pork and salt pork.  If you can’t find fatback pork or pre-cut scruncheons, you can also deep-fry the toutons in vegetable oil.  Here in St. John’s, salt meat, which you can buy in 4L buckets, has its own section in the grocery store, right next to the bologna section.  That’s right, bologna section.  As in, there are several different kinds and cuts of bologna available to the residents of this lovely city.  Luckily I found smaller amounts of fatback pork and salt pork riblets, and was able to get away with just a scant pound of each, rather than having to find a use for a whole bucket of meat.  You could probably use a salty ham (Virginia-style) in place of the salt pork if you can’t find it.  And of course if you want a vegetarian version of the baked beans, leave out the pork altogether.

Start with about 4 cups dried white navy beans.  Rinse them and plop them in a bowl.  Cover them with several inches of water and leave them overnight to soak.  You may need to add more water as it gets absorbed.

The next day, drain and rinse the beans and plop them in a very large pot with three times their volume of water to cover (so take the bowl the beans were in and fill that sucker three times with water and you should be good).

Plop in 1lb salt pork.  Usually this comes on the bone.

Bring the water to a boil, then reduce the heat and let the beans and pork simmer for 40-50 minutes, until they’re all tender and stuff.  Scoop out 1 1/2 cups bean cooking water and then drain the rest.

While the beans are simmering, finely chop up 1 large onion.

Plop the onion in a saucepan with 2 tablespoons vegetable oil, 2 minced garlic cloves, 1 tablespoon dry mustard (Keen’s or Colman’s are the traditional versions around here), 2 teaspoons chili powder, and 1/2 teaspoon sea salt.  Cook on medium heat for about 10 minutes, until the onions are soft and fragrant.

Pour into that 4-156mL cans of tomato paste (that’s about 2 1/3 cups), 3 tablespoons apple cider vinegar, 1/4 cup packed brown sugar, 3/4 cup fancy molasses, and 1/2 cup pure maple syrup.  Give that a good stir and bring it to a boil.  Reduce the heat and allow it to simmer for about 10 minutes.  It will bubble like the Thing from the Black Lagoon and get absolutely everywhere, so make sure to cover it.

Pour in the reserved bean cooking water and mix well.  You can purée it in a food processor at this point if you wish, but I didn’t bother.

Preheat your oven to 300°F.  You could do this earlier but it really doesn’t take long, so there’s no point in having your oven on for such an extended period of time.

Strip the salt pork from its bones and tear it into small pieces before tossing it back in with your drained beans.

Mix the beans and the sauce together.

Pour the mixture into a large casserole dish.  Cover and bake for 2-3 hours, then uncover and bake until sauce is thick and the beans are coated, about another hour.  Serve hot with toutons, or allow to cool and freeze for later.

For the Toutons:

I pulled the recipe for these weird little Newfoundland doughnuts/dumplings/biscuits from this site.  Most of the other recipes I found ended up being exact copies of this one, so I figured it was legit.  Toutons are essentially fried white bread dumplings.  Most of the time they are served doused with butter and maple syrup.  This sounds like a good idea to me.  You can buy pre-made touton dough at the gas station down the block from our house.  During the summer festival here they have touton-throwing contests.  These bready balls are evidently important to Newfoundland culture.

Start by dissolving 1 tablespoon sugar in 1/2 cup warm water.  Add in 1 tablespoon traditional yeast.  Allow that to stand for 10 minutes, then stir it in until it’s all dissolved.

In a saucepan, scald 1 cup low-fat milk (the recipe called for 2% but we use 1% so I figured that would only save us from an earlier death).  Add in 2 tablespoons vegetable shortening and stir until it’s all melted.

To the hot milk, add 1/2 cup cold water, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1 teaspoon sugar.

Make sure the milk mixture is lukewarm and then add the yeast mixture and stir until well-blended.

Add in 2 cups all-purpose flour and stir until it’s all smooth.

Gradually add 3-4 more cups of flour until you have a moist dough that no longer sticks to the bowl.

Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured surface and knead for 10 minutes.

Shape the dough into a ball and plop it in a greased bowl, turning the ball to grease the top.  Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and put it somewhere warm and draft-free for the dough to double in size, about an hour.

While you’re waiting, you can make your scruncheons (or scrunchins), which are fried pork back fat.

Mmmm.  Like bacon only without the actual pork.  So you take your backfat, about 1/4lb, and you cube it up as finely as you can.

This is harder than it looks.  Pig backs are tough.  Also see the surface of this particular chunk?  I’m convinced it was actual skin, because it was a pain to get through, and it fried up almost rock hard.  I suggest trimming that off if you can.

Set your raw scruncheons aside for a spell, until your dough is ready.

Punch down the dough and squeeze off pieces about 1/3 cup in size.

Flatten them to about 1/2″ thick, in a circular or triangular shape.

Fry your scruncheons until the solid pieces are golden brown and crisp.

Take them out and lay them on a paper towel.

Fry the toutons in the liquid pork fat until they are golden on both sides, a minute or so per side.

Add a dab of butter to the hot touton, sprinkle with crispy scruncheons, and douse with maple syrup.  Serve hot!

Now if you’ll excuse me I am going to go and have a heart attack somewhere.

More Baked Beans:

http://canadianwinter.ca/index.php?page=canadian_winter_molasses_baked_beans

http://www.canadianliving.com/food/maple_baked_beans.php

http://suppertonight.wordpress.com/2008/09/09/canadian-baked-beans/

O Canada: French Toast

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Wait a second. Are you telling me that French toast is Canadian?

No, not really.  In fact the first reference to a dish resembling French toast is written in Latin and dates back to the 4th or 5th century.  French toast, or pain doré (“golden bread”), can be found in a lot of recipe books from all over the world.

But it does form part of what the Pie and I refer to as a “lumberjack breakfast,” and that makes it part of our Canadian cuisine.

Picture this: most of Canada is unpopulated by people, and in many places still there are huge tracts of old-growth forest stretching off past the horizon.  One thing we do got is trees.  A steady supply of timber is one of the reasons Canada was colonized in the first place.  Our capital city was founded in the 1850s as a lumber town, and mills operated there even as late as the 1960s, clogging the Ottawa river with rafts and rafts of logs.

From our old $1 bill, image from Steve Briggs

The timber that flowed downriver to the mills came from logging camps far upstream, and these camps were occupied by big, rough men, mostly immigrants from Poland, Ireland, or the wilds of Québec, working in miserable conditions to earn enough money to send to their families, who often lived hundreds of miles away.

Logging was (and still is) a rather dangerous occupation, and it took a lot of energy just to stay alive and get the job done.  That is why every logging camp worth its salt (and many weren’t) had a reputable camp cook, and this cook was responsible for providing all the loggers with the caloric intake they needed to last out the day.  This meant a breakfast crammed with carbohydrates, proteins, and fats: bacon, biscuits, eggs, pancakes, bread, sausages, steaks — and French toast.

The traditional lumberjack French toast would have originally started out as a loaf of stale bread, sliced and left to soak overnight in a mixture of milk and eggs.  It was fried up and served hot, slathered with sugary maple syrup and dusted with more sugar.  Our version is only slightly more refined.  Oh, and if you’d like to read a bit more about logging camps, John Irving produced a great novel recently on the subject called Last Night in Twisted River.  It’s a good read, one of Irving’s best, in my opinion.

Anyway, French toast.  Here we go.  This recipe will give you six to eight slices of eggy toast, depending on the size and absorbency of your bread.

In a shallow bowl, whisk together 2/3 cup milk (or half milk and half cream) and 4 eggs.

Add in as well 2 tablespoons sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla.  If you want to go very traditional, try a teaspoon of rum instead and replace the sugar with maple syrup.

One at a time, soak your pieces of bread in the egg mixture.  Here we used raisin bread because we love it.

Traditionally you would use a thick hearth loaf, but if you want to get fancy, it’s also good with brioche, or pannetone, or even biscuits.  Experiment. Make sure to get both sides good and eggy.

Slip the bread into a hot buttered skillet.

Brown both sides (this takes about three minutes a side if you use medium heat).

Serve hot, sprinkled with icing sugar and fresh fruit, if available.

You can add a sprinkle of cinnamon, too, if the mood strikes you.

Canadian-style means, of course, lots and lots of maple syrup. Lumberjacks need their caffeine, too, so have it with a hot cup of coffee.

Makes a great start (or end) to any day.

O Canada: Nova Scotia HodgePodge with Beer Bread

In light of the Multilinguist’s excursions in Vega, we are making October Canadian Cuisine feature month (the Pie is thrilled because none of it involves tofu).

What better way to start us off than to take advantage of what the autumn harvest in Newfoundland has to offer us?  This creamy vegetable stew is easy and comforting (vegetarian, too, though certainly not vegan).  The recipe for the stew comes from All Recipes (with my modifications), and the idea itself comes from Delilah, one of the Pie’s classmates.  The beer bread comes from my mother’s own cookbook on Nova Scotian eatery.

For the Beer Bread:

Didn't have any Nova Scotia beer on hand, sorry.

In a bowl, mix 3 cups self-raising flour with 3 tablespoons granulated sugar.  If you don’t have self-raising flour, mix 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon salt into every cup of all-purpose flour.

Add in 1 12oz bottle of beer and mix well.  Use a commercially produced beer for a lighter loaf, or a home made beer for a denser loaf.

This is supposed to turn out more like a batter, and you can see here that one bottle of beer has just produced a really dry dough.

I poured in almost a whole ‘nother beer before I got the consistency I was looking for, but this will depend on your flour, your beer, the temperature/pressure/humidity of your environment, whether or not you got out of bed on the right side or the left side, whether a butterfly really did flap its wings in Brazil … you get the idea.

Pour into a greased loaf pan and chuck it into a cold oven.  Turn the oven on to 350°F and bake for 40 to 45 minutes.

The loaf will sound solid when you tap it and be a pale golden when it’s done.

Serve hot.  Also good the next day if you have any left over.

For the HodgePodge:

Peel and dice 1 medium-sized turnip.  Chuck that in a large saucepan.

Dice 3-4 carrots and chuck those in as well.

Trim the ends off a couple handfuls of fresh wax beans (those are the yellow ones) and cut them into 1-2″ pieces.  Do the same with several handfuls fresh green beans.

Add enough water to the saucepan to cover the vegetables.  Bring the water to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for 30 minutes.

Cube up 5-6 small potatoes and add that to the pot.  Let that simmer another 30 minutes.

Add in 6 tablespoons butter and 1-2 cups heavy cream (we used a blended table cream here) and stir that in for a few minutes.  Soy milk would also work well here.  I have used soy milk in chowders and it provides a rich, nutty flavour that complements the vegetables nicely.

Add 2-3 tablespoons flour to 1 cup water and stir that around.

Pour the flour water into the saucepan.  Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring occasionally, and cook for a few more minutes to thicken the broth.

Season generously with salt and pepper and serve hot with beer bread.

Frankly, both the Pie and I found the hodgepodge a little on the bland side.  It tasted kind of like invalid soup.  But it was good.  And totally freeze-able.  Next time, though, I think I’d add an onion, some garlic, and some spices.  The beer bread was excellent and we plan to have what’s leftover with some chili tomorrow night.