12 September 2010 by pat.

Last weekend I bought peaches to make the peach tart described earlier in the blog. I had two peaches left over, which I left in the paper bag. They continued to ripen, and were flavourfully fragrant and quite soft when I remembered to check on them today!

Trying to figure out what to do with them, I decided I wanted them to be part of a main dish, not a dessert (mostly because I seldom eat desserts). Alas, I couldn’t do a proper Beyond-the-Fringe Frog a la peche, so I had to come up with something else.

I decided to make a curry: curries work well with fruit (think: dried apricot, or raisins, or currants) so I thought that fresh peach would work well.

I went over to Meating on Queen (local organic butcher), and bought three magnificent bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs.

I brought them home, and browned them in a little bit of olive oil in my cast iron skillet. Then removed them to a bowl while I sautéed some chopped onions, and then added two chopped (freestone, peeled) peaches to them. Sautéed for a while longer, then added a few tablespoons of curry powder, mixed well, and added some white wine to make a sauce. Cooked it for a bit, then put the chicken back in the skillet, put a lid on it all, and transferred to the oven at 350F.

After a half hour, I added some roasted cashews to the mix, and put some brown basmati rice on to cook.

45 minutes later, dinner’s ready to eat. Here’s the skillet as it came out of the oven.

Had a piece of chicken with curried peaches and cashews  on some basmati rice. The sauce thickened up very nicely. For additional heat, I had a bottle of Himalaya Gourmet Hot Carrot Pickle in the fridge that I bought at the Cabbagetown festival.

That, and a green salad, made for a very enjoyable dinner.

And I have leftover chicken for other meals.

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10 September 2010 by pat.

Working at home means, frequently, making lunch at home (unless escaping for a spot to meet with others due to cabin fever!).

Today, while rummaging through the fridge, I found a few ingredients that should be eaten up before going bad. They included:

• Oven-roasted side bacon from Witteveen’s at the St. Lawrence Market
• Polenta
• One white mushroom
• Frozen spinach

First into the pan went the bacon, followed shortly by the polenta, and then the chopped mushroom. I microwaved the spinach on the plate.

What was missing? I could have used a clove of garlic and a cipolinni onion in the frying pan, added just after the bacon and before the polenta. Maybe a few (rinsed) salt-cured capers, some chopped sun-dried tomato that had been preserved in oil, to bump up the color quotient, and add a little bit of bite.

I should have noted the name of the mushrooms when I purchased them at Phil’s Place at the St. Lawrence Market. They’re delicious: I’ve bought them there before. Big meaty mushrooms that do well in a frying pan, absorb the flavours of things they’re cooked with, but don’t have a very strong flavour of their own. Here’s a picture of two of them. The plate they’re sitting on is 6″x6″, so you can see that they’re a good size. If I recall, they were $9.99/lb.

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8 September 2010 by pat.

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8 September 2010 by pat.

One of the people I follow on twitter is someone who posts 140-character fragments from the diaries of Samuel Pepys. One that was posted this morning gave me pause:

samuelpepys Saw the King and Queen at dinner; and the formality of putting bread wiped upon each dish into the mouth of every man that brings a dish.

Interesting. This tells me that potluck dinners have been around for a long time — one person didn’t cater the whole dinner, a number contributed. This makes sense — I remember from one of my English courses that hosting a masque at one’s estate for the royalty could be bankrupting.

Also realized, from that sentence, that the King and Queen didn’t rely upon one person to be a taster to prevent the monarch from poisoning: you bring a dish, you taste some of it on a piece of bread to prove that you haven’t poisoned it.

I can picture a procession of people entering the dinner room (I’m making this up)… all lined up, their ceramic pots of food swaddled in cloth to both keep the food warm and the participant’s hands cooler. They approach, one by one, a member of the King’s party, where they unveil the dish, remove the lid (hmm. Lids at that time were frequently made of pastry), and show it to the gatekeeper-of-sorts, who breaks a piece of bread from a loaf, swipes it through the dish, and pops it into the mouth of the food’s maker.

Visually, almost pantomimes communion.

Can you picture this happening at a modern dinner party for a head of state?

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6 September 2010 by pat.

 I documented the process

There was prep work that had to be done before flinging the ingredients together.

First, I toasted the sliced almonds in a frying pan. It didn’t take long to toast them over a medium heat.

I tossed them constantly.

Next, I had to prepare the fresh peaches. First, a pot of boiling water, and I blanched them by boiling them for almost a minute.

Next step was to peel them. They peeled really easily, thanks to the blanching. Peel came off in big strips.

Then came the challenge! These were supposed to be freestone peaches, so they should release easily from their pits. Would they?

I cut around a peach, grasped the two halves, and rotated. Yes! They easily separated, and the pit came out without any fuss. Then I chopped the peaches all up

.

Now it was time to make the pastry dough. I did some prep work by chopping the butter and putting it back in the fridge to cool, and by cooling some water in the freezer so it wouldn’t melt the butter when I added it.

Following the instructions on the pate brisée page, I pulsed the dry ingredients together, then added the butter.

A few more pulses, and then a few tablespoons of water, followed by a few more pulses, gives the following result.Next, pat it together into a ball on a floured surface. Handle as little as possible.Mix all the filling ingredients together.Roll out the dough, put the ingredients in the middle, and pull the edges of the dough up over the ingredients.Bake in the oven at 350F for 45 minutes to an hour. I regret to say that mine hadn’t browned after an hour, so I quickly put it under the broiler, but didn’t remove it fast enough: hence, it’s a little… umm… dark on top.

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4 September 2010 by pat.

It’s time to test out my hypothesis that the apple & blue cheese tart recipe can be made, with appropriate substitutions, with almost any fruit.

Today I went to the St. Lawrence Market, and found these beauties at the farmers’ market.

SO:I’m substituting:

• peaches for apples
• fresh goat sheep cheese for gorgonzola
• lemon thyme for thyme
• toasted sliced almonds for walnuts

I’ll be making it tomorrow. The woman who sold me the peaches told me to keep them in a paper bag in a warm place until tomorrow to ripen them up a bit more for the tart.

Posted in Food - farmers' market, Food, recipes, Food | 3 Comments »

3 September 2010 by pat.

I was contacted by a marketing manager at Lassonde, a Canadian conglomerate that sells a number of well-known brands of juices, asking if he could send me a new product. I told him sure, but was clear that there was no onus on me to blog about it, or to give it a good review.Well, I’ve now had all six bottles: three teas, three fruit-flavoured beverages.

Honestly? I can’t think of a single reason to buy these beverages. The tea flavour (black, white, and green teas) was very muted. They need to be steeping their teas more. The most strongly flavoured tea was the pomegranate green tea, which did taste of pomegranate (moreso than of tea).

For all three of them, sweetness overwhelmed the flavours.  The teas are flavoured with organic cane sugar (about 40 grams per 473ml bottle, which is supposed to be almost two servings). To my mind, that’s a lot of sugar, organic or not.

The organic designation comes from an American company, Quality Assurance International, which has approval from the US FDA to certify products as organic. I emailed Lassonde to ask why the products don’t have Canadian certification; to this date, I haven’t received an answer.The three fruit “beverages”:

• “Take it easy” Red Orange Guava Hibiscus
• “Live calm” Lemon Honey Aloe
• “Peak [sic] Your Senses” Strawberry Dragon Fruit Ginseng”

Suffered similarly from being overly sweet. The beverages were sweetened with beet or chicory syrup instead of cane sugar. As with the teas, sugar was ingredient #2, right after water. The fruit flavours were muted — strawberry came through most strongly — and I think one thing that really appalled me is that the predominant fruit juice seems to be apple juice, which is probably considered mostly neutral in fruit flavours, but adds more sweetness.

For the Red Orange Guava Hibiscus beverage, the fruit juice list is: concentrated (lemon, apple, blood orange) juices, natural hibiscus, guava, and other fruit flavours, citrus pectin

For Lemon Honey Aloe, it’s: concentrated (lemon, apple) juices, natural fruit flavours and honey, aloe vera gel, citrus pectin

For Strawberry Dragon Fruit Ginseng, it’s: concentrated (lemon, apple, elderberry, strawberry) juices, natural dragon fruit and other fruit flavours, ginseng extract).

Why bother?

Just buy some fruit juice and dilute it if you want a weak beverage. I don’t recommend buying these beverages, which don’t seem to be offering much over kool-aid.

Posted in Food, processed, Food | 1 Comment »