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!!!