Thursday, September 21, 2006

Diana's desserts


What a wonderful discovery! I was looking for some dessert ideas and found Diana's delightful site, rightfully named Diana's Desserts. Her full name is Diana Baker Woodall. Baker...? you say. What a coincidence (or is it?). :)

Whether it is a coincidence or otherwise, her site is overflowing with wonderful recipes for goodies that make your mouth water just by reading their descriptions. But the site is a feast for the eyes, too. Most of the recipes are accompanied by their beautifully artful photos.

She also has a Tips&Tools section, conversion calculators, a long list of recommended cookbooks. You can also sign up for her newsletter, and she has an online discussion forum. Worth having it in your Favourites folder.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Stroopwafel


Stroopwafels or siroopwafels are favourites in our house. They make a wonderful kind here in Canada that matches the back home variety to the T. Of course, it is wonderful to just have them with your coffee, gently warming them over your steaming cuppa.

Now, at 101 Cookbooks I found a new way of serving them: with mascarpone and fresh fruit. Yum!

For those of you, who happen to own a pizzelle iron, I recommend this Answers.com page where you have a couple of make-it-yourself recipes.

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

No verjuice :(


With heavy heart I have to report that my experiment with the windfall grapes turned sour (pun intended). As per a discussion on the cooking forum I decided to try my hand at making verjuice (French: verjus).

According to literature found on it on the internet, verjuice is squeezed from unripe grapes that are picked when people are thinning the crop in the middle of summer. The obtained juice was widely used for cooking in the more distant past, when lemons were not readily available, and it is becoming favoured again for its milder, grapey taste.

Mine started to ferment almost immediately, and then it went way too sour. The truth is that the grapes were not really totally green any more, it was September already. Which probably caused the sugar in the juice to ferment and turn into alcohol and/or acetic acid. In any case I ended up with bottles of yucky, smelly stuff that I finally decided to dump. But now that I gained some experience, maybe next year...

Friday, September 08, 2006

What did we eat last week?

A nice new internet friend of mine from India :) asked me what do we usually eat here in Canada, and that I should make a list of the dishes that we had the last week. Hmmm... I am not exactly a typical Canadian cook. We immigrated to Canada when I was young and I really took to the multicultural aspect of Toronto. I love to peruse small ethnic grocery stores, as I described to another online friend, touching, smelling everything, asking when there are no English labels at all. My husband took to my eclectic cooking a bit more slowly, he used to call himself my lab gerbil. Our boys on the other hand grew up with it. Nowadays my younger one actually annoys me with such remarks: "We already had this dish last month! Can't you cook something new? Go find something on the internet, Mom..." They, by the way, prefer South East Asian dishes, very spicy! For the last 10 years they had a favourite pho restaurant, where they dropped the fresh, thinly sliced meat into the boiling soup right there at their table. Then for a while we favoured a - hidden in the corner, mom and pop type - Chinese restaurant, after that an also very home style Indian restaurant, smack in the middle of the Indian district. Lately we started to frequent a Mongolian barbeque, again with freshly sliced lean meats (we like lamb) prepared in front of you, and then you custom spice your stuff yourself. We went there twice already.

OK, so let's just see what did we have for dinner this last week. Here at home I still have to cook at least half the time in a more European style because of my 85 year old mother-in-law who lives with us.
- Hungarian lecsó (pronounced: le-choh), made of chopped red and green peppers, onions and fresh tomatoes, and which I usually enrich with ground meats, this time canned turkey - served with mashed potatoes.
- fish filets (sole) in lemon sauce, with Italian risibisi (parsleyed rice and green peas)
- Moroccan style vegetarian couscous
- chicken curry, spiced spinach on the side, with Basmati rice mixed with chopped roasted almonds
- birthday dinner of Wiener schnitzel, steamed sauerkraut and parsleyed potatoes. Cake, the recipe of which to follow below.
- minestrone soup, lightly panfried rice cakes (with eggs&cheese) and corn mixed with chopped roasted red peppers
- today we will have Thai style stir fried turkey breast with baby bok choy an rice, and I prepared dessert also, kheer - not from scratch, I had a box that I picked up last week at an Indian grocery.

We don't eat desserts regularly. The boys are "dieting" (well, just counting their calories, as it is the vogue today), and I am, ahem, "phat". The only person who likes to have sweets every day is my husband, because he is a tennis champ in the older guys' category and plays several times a week. But I can usually satisfy him with simple dry tea cookies topped with a dollop of fancy home made jam. (Hence those plums...)

Now here is the birthday cake











Daquoise
6 egg whites
1-1/2 cups sugar
1/4 tsp. cream of tartar
pinch of salt
1-1/2 cups toasted ground walnuts

Filling
1 pint whipping cream
icing sugar (to taste)
1/2 cups toasted ground walnuts
1 pouch vanilla sugar

Beat egg whites until stiff peaks are formed. Add salt and cream of tartar. Beat in 4 tbsp. of sugar, one at a time. The mixture should be stiff and glossy. Mix the remaining sugar with the ground walnuts an fold into the mixture. Preheat oven to not more than 200F. Grease and flour 2 baking sheets. Or use parchment paper, if you have some available, because you can draw perfect circles on it. Spread the mixture on the sheets in four circles and bake them until they feel hardened (1 to 2 hours). Leave them in the warm oven for another 2 hours.

After the layers cool (next day?), beat the whipping cream, sweeten it and mix in the walnuts and the vanilla sugar. Sandwich the cake layers together with the filling. I made a little booboo but it turned out really nice after all: it occurred to me (after I baked the layers) that my mom-in-law may have a hard time with the crunchiness of the daquoise, so I brushed them with some diluted Kahlua liqueur. It turned out that the whipping cream itself would have softened the daquoise adequately, the liqueur was a bit too much, so the cake collapsed a little and became somewhat soggy, closer to a pudding consistency. But sooo delicious!!!

Sunday, September 03, 2006

BlogDay 2006

I will interrupt my plum Odyssey for a moment, in honour of a day I did not know about until now: Blog Day 2006. Unfortunately I am a bit late in recognizing it, the official date was August 31. But better late than never! Being the resident godess of this blog here, I declare (just for here and just for now) September 3rd as BlogDay!

According to the rules of the celebrations, one has to choose five blogs from five different geographical points, as far apart as possible, and introduce them to the visitors of our own blog.

So here are my five choices for this year's BlogDay offering:

1. If you want to read about exotic (Korean...) food experiences, visit Zen Kimchi.

2. A wonderful food blog, Kitchen at No. Nineteen, by a young lady (originally from Malaysia?) in a small Hungarian town.

3. Great Canadian food blog: Domestic Goddess

4. Simply Recipes: extremely well organized blog, full of great ideas, pictures, recipes.

5. And finally here is a truly avid cook/baker from Singapore. She has not one, but THREE blogs on food!
a) She bakes and she cooks
b) The baker's index
c) Crumbs...

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Unexpected windfall... of unripe grapes and plums

My husband called yesterday from a friend he was visiting. The friend asked me whether I would like to have some home grown table grapes and plums. He is a bachelor, this is his first house, he has no use for them. I said, sure! Well, my husband arrived home with over 30 lbs of half ripe grapes and plums, not quite good yet for direct consumption. I was nonplussed. I even posted at the Discuss Cooking forum for advice.

In the end I decided to start with the plums because they seemed to be more fragile. I sorted them in two piles, riper and less ripe. The less ripe pile is left to ripen until tomorrow.

Tonight I worked with the smaller, riper pile. I washed them,



ground them in the blender, put the mush on the stove with the appropriate amount of sugar,



and cooked it.

When it reached the right consistency, I divided the batch in three, I mixed in the first batch 1 cup of ground almonds and a few drops of almond essence, in the second I added 1/2 cup of Jamaican rum, and into the third batch I mixed a jar of peach jam that I made last week, together with 1/2 cup of roasted, chopped walnuts. I reboiled each batch, ladled them into jars, capped them, turned them upside down and they are waiting on the counter to be cleaned and labeled. I will make some photos of them tomorrow.