Mean Slaw

Happy belated birthdays to Thidz and Stef!

I have never made coleslaw before in my life.  In fact, I don’t even really like coleslaw.  For this, though, I will make an exception.  And I made all this without even consulting a recipe!  I guess a lifetime of watching my mother cobble together a slaw left a lasting impression.  This particular combination offers a bit of a snappy uptake on the traditional Southern slaw, and I hope you like it. If I do say so myself, I make a mean slaw.  Remember that a slaw is always best the next day, after the flavours have had a chance to intermix.  Also, if you say slaw a lot it starts to sound weird in your head.  Slaw.  Slaw.  Slaw, slaw slaw.  Slaw.  What a weird-looking word.

Before we begin, I would like to introduce you to my cabbage.  This was the smallest one I could find in the produce section, and, to give you a size comparison, that is a two-litre kettle sitting next to it.

Cabbage is the basis of every slaw.  I am not too fond of the bitterness of red cabbage, though I know it adds a bit of colour to the salad.  Nevertheless, I’m sticking with the green one.  If you have a food processor, then this salad is a snap to prepare.  I like to do certain things by hand, however, and me and my stupid sharp knife get along real well.  You’ll want to hack off a hunk of your cabbage and then start slicing off bits real nice and thin.

If they are too long and dangly for your liking, feel free to cut the little cabbage strips in half before tossing them in a large bowl.

I also have some fennel here, which makes for a nice aniseed-y aftertaste in the salad.

Don’t worry too much about the green bits — focus on cutting up the white parts really thin and chuck those in with the cabbage.  Don’t add too much, or your slaw will just taste like liquorice.

Next, I’m going to grate a large carrot and add that in for sweetness and colour.

Some sweet red peppers.

Feel free to add ones that are a little spicy, but not too spicy.

And some red onion.  Give that a toss.

Now you make up your dressing.  I think coleslaw dressings are kind of like curries — they need a lot of ingredients in order to encapsulate all the important flavours a slaw needs.  In this one I have olive oil, rice vinegar, dijon mustard, minced garlic, brown sugar, celery seed, and mustard seed.  You can replace the rice vinegar with white vinegar if you want something a little stronger.  The Pie is not a huge fan of heavy vinegar usage which is why I take the milder rice vinegar more often than not.

I poured all that into a plastic container with a lid and gave it a good shake.

Now your salad is all ready to be dressed.  Pour on the dressing in stages and toss to coat.  You want enough dressing so you get some pooling at the bottom.  It will be absorbed into the salad while it sits.

Seal your tossed and dressed salad in a container and refrigerate overnight.

Serve with burgers and fries, or any other summery food you can think of.

Chicken Fried Rice … for Danger K

I got a tweet on Friday from Danger K over at Project: Priceless, looking for a good fried rice recipe.  We happen to have one.  Actually, the Pie has one, which he modified himself from one of our many stir-fry books.  We make this one with chicken, but you can leave that out for a vegetarian option.  If you want to go vegan, you can leave out the egg as well.

So this is what you need:

Half an onion, diced.

A boneless, skinless chicken breast, cubed.  Add a splash of soy sauce to that.

An egg, beaten.

Two carrots, peeled and diced.

About one cup peas.  These are defrosted frozen ones.

A pinch or two of sliced green onion.

About two cups cooked rice, cold.  Preferably a day or two old.  The rice needs to be dry and no longer sticky.

In a large frying pan or wok, heat a tablespoon oil with a tablespoon minced garlic on medium heat.  Chuck in the onions and cook until they’re translucent.

Toss in the chicken and stir until the chicken is cooked through.

Make a well in the middle and pour in the beaten egg in a thin layer. Allow it to cook through and then break it up with your spatula and mix it in.

Add in all the vegetables and heat through, then add the rice and stir to mix.  Splash in some more soy sauce to taste.  When everything is heated up to your satisfaction, you can serve it.  And it’s as simple as that!

O Canada: Poutine

This dish comes to you from the Ottawa-Gatineau region, where most street corners in the downtown area are dotted with “chip trucks”, mobile vendors of French fries and hot dogs.  And poutine.  A melty mix of hot fries, squeaky cheese curds, and oozing thick gravy.

Like most foods we hold dear to the Canadian heart (though if you hold this one too close you are apt to have a heart attack), the origins are contested.  The version I like best I heard on CBC a few years back.  This particular chip truck also sold cheese curds, a Québec specialty.  A customer wanted the vendor to simply chuck his order of cheese curds on top of his fries.  The vendor protested, saying “ça va faire une maudite poutine” (it’ll make a damned mess), but the customer insisted.

A new delicacy was created out of “a damned mess”, though the gravy drizzled over the fries and curds to keep them warm came a little later.

My mother grew up in the Ottawa-Gatineau region, so I trusted her judgment as a child when she told me that poutine was absolutely the most disgusting thing in the entire world.  Then, when I was a teenager, and we moved to Ottawa, I discovered that my mother had never in fact eaten poutine in her life.   I promptly went out and discovered what I had been missing.

My mother did, at the age of 60, eventually eat her first poutine.  The dish has a new fan.  If you’re in the Ottawa area, the best place in the city for poutine is JP’s Crispy Chips, a high-end chip truck on the corner of Merivale and Baseline Roads.  Trust me, you won’t regret it.

That’s not to say you can’t get good poutine at other places in the city.  The chip truck near my high school had a decent recipe.  If you wanted to get fancy you could head down to the Elgin Street Diner and try their Philly Cheese Steak Poutine, among other variations.

But poutine outside of the Ottawa-Gatineau area tends to fall a little short of my expectations.  The Pie and I once ordered a poutine in Parry Sound, Ontario.  What arrived was a plate of Tex-Mex seasoned frozen fries, grated marble cheddar, and a gravy that obviously came from a powder packet.  Most disappointing.  The only decent poutine I’ve had outside of Ottawa-Gatineau has actually been here in St. John’s.  Newfoundlanders are good at eating potatoes, so they picked up on poutine right away.  Venice Pizzeria has a version served with “dressing,” what I call stuffing — the kind that goes in a bird.  And Aqua has a ridiculously rich version with chorizo and LOBSTER.

We’re going to do it the simple way here.  I don’t think my arteries could take it any other way.

A note before we begin, however.  You can buy your fries pre-cut and frozen from the store.  You can use powdered or canned gravy rather than make it from scratch.  You can use chicken gravy, turkey gravy, beef gravy, moose gravy, or mushroom gravy.  Whatever gravy you want.

But you absolutely MUST use cheese curds.  Must.  Otherwise it’s just fries with cheese on them.  And if you can get the cheese curds from St-Albert, Québec, by all means do so.  You can definitely taste the difference.  We used these ones from Montréal, Québec, and although they were good, they just weren’t the same.

Because we were serving the poutine as a sort of pseudo-Thanksgiving dinner, we decided to roast a chicken to serve on the side (because everything takes a backseat to poutine).  This also gave us a base from which to make our gravy.

First I fried up some onions with butter and herbes de provence, then I stuffed them into the chicken, which I roasted at 400°F until the thickest part of the thigh registered at 180° and the juices ran clear.

I used the juices that came out as the foundation for my gravy. I have more info on making gravy here.

I poured the juices into a saucepan and added a ton of organic chicken broth.  Here’s your gravy base, if you’re going for chicken gravy from scratch.

Make a slurry of flour and water and add that as well.  Bring the gravy to a boil and then reduce the heat and let it simmer to thicken.

The Pie was also engaged in making a pumpkin pie while this was going on. Gren got to lick the pumpkin spoon. Cooking dogs are so very helpful.

While that is going on, chop up 6 medium potatoes into shapes resembling French fries.

Rinse off the starch and let the potatoes soak for half an hour.

Drain them and dry them with a paper towel when you are ready to cook.

In a large saucepan, bring about 4 cups vegetable oil to a temperature of 350°F. Use a candy or deep-fry thermometer to be accurate.

Ease about half your potatoes into the hot oil.  A wire spoon is handy in this situation.  A fry basket would be even better.

Leave them in there, sputtering away, for about 2-3 minutes, depending on the thickness of your fries. The sputtering will calm down after a while.

Pull them out and let them sit on a paper towel for about 5 minutes, while you cook the rest of the fries.

After you have cooked each batch once, allow the heat of the oil to rise to 365°F.  Now you put the first batch back into the pot and cook for a further 2-3 minutes, until light brown.

Drain on paper towels again, season with sea salt, and get ready to serve immediately.

Pour half the fries into the bottom of a large serving bowl.  Sprinkle half a package of cheese curds on top.  Add a bit of gravy to get everything melty.

Repeat with the remaining fries, curds, and some more gravy.  Serve immediately.

We had ours with our roasted chicken, stuffing onions, and some carrots.  And all that extra gravy, of course.

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.

Pork-Stuffed Belgian Sandwiches

I originally had the title written as “pork-stuffed Belgians” but that didn’t seem right somehow.  I had a vision of a bunch of people walking around in Bruges with sausages coming out of all their pockets.

For the record, the Belgian is the name of the loaf I picked up from the Georgestown Bakery the other day.  Not to be confused with the sweetened tea bread served in Belgium, this is more of a sourdough French bread baked in a shape not unlike a gridiron football.  The thing is, I picked up two, because they were hot from the oven and the guy at the counter was very persuasive.  The other thing is, they’re not so good the next day — a little stale.  We consumed one for lunch that day, and then I had to think up what to do with the second one for dinner.  That’s a lotta bread.  So I kind of made this up on the fly.  I’m sure there are other variations out there, and if there’s one with a nifty name, please let me know.  Also it could use some tweaking so I welcome suggestions.

Preheat your oven to 450°F and spray a baking dish.  Peel the membrane off one small tenderloin (enough meat for three people), just like we learned.

I lightly basted the tenderloin with a few drops of Lee & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce, malt vinegar, and hoisin sauce.  Pop that sucker in the oven for about 25 minutes, or until the meat reaches an internal temperature of at least 135°F (for rare).

Meanwhile, use a mandolin to thinly slice about four small new potatoes.  I sliced them into a bowl of water, to rinse the starch off.

Drain the water and pat the potatoes dry.

Thinly slice as well three small carrots.  We’re working with small today.

Chop a few broccoli florets up and steam them.

Toss the potatoes and carrots into a large frying pan with a bit of olive oil and sauté on medium-high heat for a few minutes.  Add in some sea salt to taste.

Add in about three tablespoons malt vinegar and three tablespoons water and reduce the heat to medium-low until the vegetables are tender.

Plop in your steamed broccoli bits.

Plop in a few spoonfuls of plum sauce and teriyaki sauce.  Don’t forget another splash of the wooster sauce as well.

Now cut your loaf (I used a Belgian, but you might want to try something with a little less bread in it) in half vertically. Slice a hole in each half, being careful not to puncture the sides of the loaf.  We want a little pocket.

Butter that pocket.

I thought we needed a bit more sweet in this salty meal so I spread the inside of the pocket with some lovely mango chutney as well.

At this point your tenderloin should be cooked.  Plop it on a board and cut it up without allowing the meat to rest.  We want the juices to run so they run straight into the bread.

Stuff pieces of the tenderloin into the pocket.

Stuff your warm vegetables in as well.

I had plenty of vegetables left over, and some meat, and that made a good lunch the next day.  I never want to see bread again.

Deep-Fried Dinner

For the Pie’s birthday dinner, we decided to try deep-frying for the first time.  We’d been putting it off because, well, it’s incredibly unhealthy, it’s a dangerous fire risk, and our kitchen has no fume hood so we’d be dealing with the aromas of cooking oil for several days.

But we needed to learn (in the same way that we need to learn everything else we do here).  So we decided to try two different methods and make Buffalo chicken strips (with blue cheese dip) and some beer-battered onion rings.  Both recipes come from Martha Stewart’s Every Day Food magazine.  Both recipes involve buttermilk.

Now, though I’m presenting two different recipes here, I’m going to give the instructions to you in the order I did them, because that makes the most sense to me.  In order for you to differentiate the two recipes, I’ll preface instructions for the chicken with BCS and use OR for the onions.

BCS/OR: Turn your oven to 250°F.  Put some cooling racks on top of rimmed baking sheets and put those in the oven.  Those will be your warming and draining trays for your chicken and onions.

OR: Slice 2lb onions into thick rounds and submerge them in 2 cups buttermilk for about an hour before cooking.  The buttermilk takes the acidic bite out of the onions, making them sweet and tender.  Just a warning: following this recipe results in a heckuva lotta onion rinks, so if you don’t want to fry up a million, I suggest halving it, or even quartering it.

BCS: Crumble up 1 cup blue cheese (I used 400g here and it crumbled to about a cup) and 1/2 cup buttermilk.

Stir that around and set it aside.

Cut up some vegetables while you’re at it, why don’t you?  You’re about to consume pure fat — you should probably add in some vitamins.

BCS/OR: Plop about 1 1/2 cups flour in a shallow dish and put that near your stove.  That’s for the batterin’.

OR: Crack two eggs into a bowl.  Whisk ‘em.

Whisk in 1 bottle lager or pale ale.

Whisk in 1 1/2 cups flour and 2 teaspoons coarse salt.  Set that near the stove as well.

BCS: In yet another bowl, combine 1/3 cup hot sauce with 3 tablespoons butter.  Stir well and set that aside for now.

Slice up 3 boneless, skinless chicken breasts into finger-sized pieces.

Dip them in 1 cup buttermilk.

Then into that flour you have ready.

Lay them out on a baking sheet.

I think we’re about ready to start cooking.  While I’m sure you could do these two dishes at the same time, I am far from experienced with hot-oil cooking, rather prone to accidents, and I only have one large-sized element on my stove.  So I am going to cook the chicken first, as it doesn’t need to be crispy and can therefore sit in the oven for longer.

As a safety note, we had a box of baking soda handy at all times during this, in case of flareups.  Never leave hot oil unattended, and never, NEVER add additional oil of any kind or any temperature to oil that is already hot.

BCS: Heat 1/2 cup to 1 cup vegetable oil in a heavy skillet.  You can tell if the oil is hot enough for frying when a pinch of flour dropped into it fizzes rapidly.

Slide a few chicken pieces in, working in batches.

Cook for about 6-8 minutes, rotating halfway through, until the chicken is golden brown.  Remove the cooked chicken to the rack in the oven.

This was a very spatter-y process, so I wore long sleeves and kept my face averted from the pan.  My hands kept getting burned from little splashes of oil.  In the end I pulled on a pair of work gloves to protect them and worked happily after that.

Make sure to let that oil cool before you move it anywhere.

OR: In a large, wide saucepan, heat up 5 cups vegetable oil.  I know, that’s a lot of oil.

Use a candy or deep-fry thermometer and continuously adjust the temperature of your element to keep the oil at 375°F.  If it gets too cold, it won’t cook the onions all the way through, and if it gets too hot, well … let’s not think about that.

What was interesting was the cool pattern the oil made while it heated.

Take a ring of onion out of the buttermilk and dip it in the flour, then into the beer batter.  Shake off the excess.

Slide the ring carefully into the hot oil.  Cook in small batches, rotating halfway through, for about 5 minutes.  Remove to the other rack in the oven to drain and keep warm.  This method of frying was wayyyyy less spatter-y, if you were interested to know.

We had a lot more onions left to cook after we had cooked as many as we thought we could eat.  We figured they would keep until tomorrow and we would try again.

BCS: When everything is cooked and you are ready to go, take the chicken strips out of the oven and toss them in the hot sauce.  These will be served with the blue cheese dip we made earlier.

OR: For the onions we had a nice tzatziki dip as well as a chipotle mayo.

All told, it was pretty epic.

Peanut Butter Spaghetti

This recipe is actually called something like “Whole Wheat Spaghetti with Snow Peas and Carrots”, but the Pie and I have made it so many times that our version is better.  It came out of an Every Day Food from eons ago, and it’s kind of like a lazy man’s pad thai.

We made it for Kª one night when Kº was off gallivanting in Russia, leaving her alone with Il Principe and the Incredibly Little Hulk.  Served with our crispy won ton crackers, it was a great and easy meal.  Even Il Principe approved.

Start some water a-boilin’.  Like enough to cook about 8-10oz of whole wheat spaghetti (to serve 4).  Then you can, you know, cook that there spaghetti for about ten minutes, or according to your package instructions.

While you are waiting for the water to boil and for your pasta to cook, prepare the following mis en place:

3 medium carrots, shaved with peeler

8oz snow peas, tough strings removed

1 (300g) package of firm tofu, cut into small cubes (if you’re not a fan of tofu it’s conceivable that you could replace this with thin strips of cooked chicken or steak)

Prepare as well this wee bowl of sauce:

5 tablespoons organic peanut butter (smooth or crunchy, it’s your choice)

2 tablespoons brown sugar

2 teaspoons rice vinegar

2 teaspoons soy sauce

2 teaspoons lemon juice

2 teaspoons sweet chili sauce

Stir that all together.  If you can’t get the peanut butter to go, don’t worry, the heat from the pasta will melt it.

When your pasta is cooked, scoop out about a cup of the pasta water.  You may or may not need it later.  I like to keep you guessing.

Drop all the vegetables and tofu into the pot with the pasta and let sit in the boiling water for 2 minutes before draining the whole thing.

Toss the pasta to make sure everything is mixed around.

Pour in your peanut butter sauce and toss to coat.  If the sauce is too thick and won’t coat properly, pour in some of the reserved pasta water to thin it out a bit.

Garnish with crushed peanuts and serve.  Fantastic cold the next day.

Related articles

• thai anyone? (realfoodjoy.wordpress.com)
• Healthy Recipe: Thai Edamame Pasta (fitsugar.com)
• Peanut Butter Attack (patspapers.com)
• Woman Sends Peanut Butter-Coated Letter To Ex’s Allergic Wife [In Brief] (jezebel.com)

Sloppy Joes

My husband has permanently etched this song in my head.  Once you listen to it, all you’ll hear from now on is “SLOPPY JOES, SLOP-SLOPPY JOES …”  every time you see the words “sloppy joes”.  FOREVER.

We had a lazy night last week and neither of us wanted to put much effort into either cooking or going to the grocery store.  The result was these modified sloppy joes, and they were pretty good.  This recipe makes two large sloppy joe sandwiches, but you can easily multiply the recipe to suit your appetite.

In a wide-bottomed saucepan, brown up 1/2lb lean ground beef with about 1 teaspoon minced garlic and 1/4 of an onion, chopped (we didn’t have any onions, but you can do what you want).

In a small bowl, mix together the following:

1/2 cup ketchup or barbecue sauce

1 teaspoon white vinegar

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1 teaspoon Worcestershire (wooster) sauce

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

1 teaspoon paprika (we used Hungarian paprika, but I don’t really know what the difference is)

1 tablespoon brown sugar.

Add the sauce to the browned meat and simmer for a few minutes until thickened.

Serve on hamburger buns or toasted bread.  We topped ours with sautéed mushrooms and had carrots on the side. Total cooking time: about ten minutes.

MishMash Curry

The Pie wanted a curry for dinner on Sunday night, so, because I like him and stuff, I made him one.  Didn’t have all the ingredients I wanted (like fresh herbs, for one), but it turned out all right.  It’s a good curry for cleaning out your fridge.  But most curries are, of course.

I chopped up a bunch of vegetables, all nice and thin so they would cook quickly: carrots, broccoli, mushrooms, and tiny potatoes.

Cube up as well some chicken breasts.  Remember that you can cut meat with more accuracy (like thinner slices or smaller cubes) if the meat is still slightly frozen at the time.  Not totally frozen (because that will ruin your knives), but still firm and icy.

Heat a tablespoon or so of oil in a pan on high and drop in the chicken to brown.

Add in some spices, to taste.  I added in here some garlic, ginger, and yellow curry, then added in extra cumin, corriander, and turmeric.  I would have added cardamom as well but I didn’t have any.

When the chicken has browned but not completely cooked through, reduce the heat and add a can of coconut milk. 

Bring the milk to a simmer and add in your vegetables, and cook until the veggies are as tender as you like them.

Serve over na’an with a dollop of plain yogurt or raita for cooling purposes.

Plenty left for me for lunch tomorrow!

Bar Night: Buffalo Chicken Strips

The Pie and I went to Buffalo, NY, for a shopping trip once.  We drove past the Anchor Bar, undisputed home of the Buffalo chicken wing, and it was closed.  We never went back.  I regret it to this day.  And when you order wings in St. John’s, you can get them with barbecue sauce or honey garlic, but none of that tangy, vinegary spiciness that comes with the bright orange Buffalo wing sauce.  It’s truly sad.

Out of necessity, therefore, I have had to come up with my own version of that sauce.  It’s not quite right, but it will do in a pinch.

Start with a base of hot sauce, like Tabasco.  Add in a bit of butter, as well as some light barbecue sauce (not the dark smoky stuff).  The sauce I used is the one I made the Pie for Christmas.  Pour in some rice vinegar and some white vinegar to taste.  Adjust your amounts until it’s the way you like it.

Simmer that down for a while.

While that’s cooking down, peel and thinly cut some carrots into sticks.

Cut up some celery as well, and plop your veggies in a bowl of water to await your pleasure.

Get yourself some blue cheese and some sour cream.

Crumble the blue cheese into a bowl and smush it together with some sour cream to make a blue cheese sauce.

Process some bread crumbs until they are superfine.

Slice up some chicken breasts into thin strips.

Dip the strips into buttermilk, then into your bread crumbs.

Repeat until you’re out of strips and thoroughly covered with gooey bread crumbs.

Fry up those strips until they are brown and crispy.

Toss the strips in a bowl with your simmered down sauce until the strips are all coated.

Serve with your vegetables, blue cheese dressing, and, hey, why not some French fries?