Category Archives: Baking & Other Food

Healthy Lunch Pizzas

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It’s a pretty simple recipe. Basically, put anything you would put on a personal pizza on a portabello mushroom (remove the stem first). Then bake until cheese is melty!

The best part about this recipe is the website it introduced me to: Once a Month Mom. Now while I am nobody’s mum/mom, I do like to eat. I like to eat immediately once I’m home from work. That is, during the weeks that I don’t eat dinner at work. This usually means that the fridge could be stocked with all sorts of good things, but I want FOOD and I WANT it NOW so I’ll fry an egg. Or have cereal if getting the frying pan out will take too long (this is assuming P hasn’t been at home that day to cook, because when he is, he does, and I love him for it). I could see us using a lot of the OMM recipes, especially their whole food, veggie, and dairy-free menus. (I’m just not a ‘open a can of mushroom soup’ type of person).

The things that need to be thrown in the oven before eating will be great for rehearsal days, when I work 9am-6pm, and the things that just need to be put in the microwave or toaster oven will be great for tech days, when I work 12pm-12am! And, I’m always up for a great muffin recipe. :)

I love having a stocked freezer – stocked with meals, not just frozen meat and ice cubes! It’s great to help tighten your literal and financial belts too. We aren’t running to pay $$ for greasy things that we probably shouldn’t eat. Just grab something from the freezer! We do need to invest in some more food containers though, they’re all ending up in the freezer now.

That’s the way the crumble crumbles

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I love me a crumble. I love fruity desserts, but I also love butter and flour in any combination on top of my fruit. Crumble is almost instantly prepared, and reminds me so much of my childhood, where dessert was whatever fruit we’d picked that day, with oats, flour, and butter on top.
Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble

My mum flew out to visit last weekend, and brought me some of the first flush of rhubarb from her garden. I chopped up some of that, along with some strawberries from our fridge, and filled this casserole dish about 3/4 full. I sprinkled 1/4 cup of sugar over it all (because rhubarb is tart!) and gave it a quick mix.

Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble

Then I mixed a cup of whole wheat flour with a cup of oats and a cup of sugar in another bowl. I normally use brown sugar, but we were out for once! Then I pulled 1/2 a cup of butter out of the fridge and mixed it into the flour mixture with my hands.

Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble

Pat that mixture on top of the fruit, then bake it somewhere around 400 until the juices bubble up around the edges (almost an hour this time).

Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble

Try to let it cool (my tongue still feels burnt 4 days later), then dig in!

Strawberry Rhubarb Crumble

Blood Orange Marmalade

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I made marmalade the other week using one of my favourite new canning books, Canning for a New Generation. I used the navel orange and lemon marmalade recipe, substituting most of the regular oranges with blood oranges. You can see the difference in the colours of the flesh above.

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A sharp vegetable peeler made short work of the zest from a few of the oranges, but sectioning them and reserving the membranes in my jelly bag took a lot of time. An hour or two of cutting, I’d guess. My fingers were prune-y by the end of it!

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But, I managed to save as much juice as possible, and had a been glass full of membranes and seeds afterwards.

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And a lot of compost, if we had a compost bin. Our garbage can smelled sweetly citrus-y for a few days though!

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This is my canning set-up, and my favourite pans to use. I bought the big silver one specifically for canning, and store extra canning things in it (magnet wand, jar lifter, extra lids & rings) in it to save room in our storage room. I also use a layer of spare rings at the bottom of that pot so the jars don’t touch the metal bottom.

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Our kitchen has a few of these moustachey sun-face dudes scattered throughout the terracotta tile. They amuse me.

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And the terracotta colour is pretty close to the colour of (mainly) blood orange marmalade!

Roasted Blood Orange Chocolate Tart

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I made this tart for a work potluck, and it was a huge hit. The oranges are roasted for so long that they are most of the way to marmalade by the time you’re eating it, which makes it a hit with me. There’s something about January/February that makes me crave marmalade. Probably because my mum cans 30+ jars of Seville orange marmalade every year to keep my dad in sandwiches for another 365 days. I’ll post about making my own marmalade later, today is about the tart.

I saw a basket of blood oranges at Safeway, and had to buy some most of them. I couldn’t remember seeing them there before, so they were a novelty. Then that night, I was reading my February issue of Martha Stewart Living (on the iPad… Canada Post seems to have taken my Feb issue hostage) and found this tart recipe. I figured it was a sign, and arranged a potluck at work for the next weekend so I’d have an excuse to make it.

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Roasting the oranges was fun, and made the kitchen smell delicious. I started with those, as they roast for 2+ hours, and made the tart shell in between basting the oranges with orange juice. I feel like that shortened some of the kitchen time, as you have to be in and out of the oven every 30 minutes anyway.

Roasted Blood Orange Chocolate Tart – Adapted from (my hero) Martha Stewart’s Feb 2012 Living magazine.

I’ve laid out this recipe in the order I did things – give it a read through before starting to make sure it makes sense to you.

Makes 8 slices of tart.

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Oranges, pre- and post- roasting. Inset is a regular orange for comparison.

Ingredients – for the roasted blood oranges:

4 blood oranges

1 1/4 cups fresh orange juice (4-5 regular oranges, squeezed)

1/3 granulated sugar

2 tablespoons water

Preheat oven to 325F. Leaving the peel on, cut oranges into 1/4″ rounds (I discarded the tops and bottoms that were all peel) and arrange them in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet or large metal baking pan. Pour 1/4 cup of juice over the oranges. Lay a piece of parchment paper on top, then cover tightly with tinfoil. Cook until peel is tender, about 2 hours, pouring 1/4 cup of juice over them every 30 minutes.

Ingredients – for the tart shell:

1 cup all purpose flour

1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

3/4 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

1 large egg yolk

3/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

3 tablespoons heavy cream

Once the tray of oranges is in the oven, mix together the flour, cocoa powder, and salt in a medium bowl. Beat the butter and granulated sugar on medium speed in a mixer fitted with the paddle attachment  until pale and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Beat in egg yolk and vanilla to combine. Reduce the speed to low, and add flour mixture in 3 additions, alternating with the cream in 2 additions (I did 2 tablespoons for the first cream installment, and 1 for the second). Shape the dough into a disk and refrigerate until oranges are at 1.5 hours in the oven.

Ingredients – for the filling:

1 cup/250mL  mascarpone cheese (at room temperature or close to it, so it is easily mixable)

2 teaspoons powdered sugar

1 orange

Once the dough is in the fridge, zest the orange, then mix the zest and powdered sugar into the mascarpone. Refrigerate if you are assembling the tart on another day, leave out to stay soft if you are doing it today.

At the 1.5-hour mark for the oranges, take your tart dough out of the fridge. Roll it out to a little less than 1/4″ thickness on a lightly floured surface. Fit the dough into a 9″ fluted tart pan with removable bottom. (I found mine at Crate & Barrel) If it tears a little, just patch it with scraps, pressing and smoothing the edges down so everything is level. Trim the edge flush with the top of the pan. Chill in the freezer for 15 minutes.

At the 2-hour mark for the oranges, increase the oven temperature to 375F. Remove and discard the tinfoil and parchment paper, then sprinkle oranges with the granulated sugar. Add the last 1/4 cup of orange juice, then return oranges to the oven for 15 minutes. Add the water and roast until slightly golden, 2 – 3 minutes more. Cool completely. I pulled my oranges out of the pan and let them cool on wax paper, because I was pretty sure that when they (and all the sugar/juice in the pan) had cooled, they’d be cemented to the cookie sheet.

Reduce oven temperature to 350F. Take tart shell out of the freezer and prick the bottom all over with a fork. Bake until firm, about 20 minutes. Let cool completely in the pan on a wire rack.

Assemble the tart by spreading the mascarpone in the shell, then layering roasted oranges on top.
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Storage:

Completed tart can be stored at room temperature for up to one day (I used a cookie tin that probably doesn’t seal completely).

Un-baked tart dough can stay in the fridge for up to 2 days.

I stored my roasted blood oranges overnight on the counter at room temperature in plastic containers with the lids not quite fully closed, so they didn’t get too soggy. The tart shell I left out, uncovered. Mascarpone should go in the fridge overnight, but remember to let it warm up before trying to spread it.

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$18 for mushrooms?

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My mum sent P and I a cookbook for Christmas:

River Cottage Everyday Veg

It’s a really fun book by a UK author/TV chef, and it only has veggie recipes in it. The author is not a vegetarian, but wanted to get people excited about eating vegetables, something I can totally get behind.

Mum bought us the UK edition, so there’s a lot of converting involved in the recipes. That’s a little odd, considering that Canada and the UK are both using the metric system, but he calls for cans of kidney beans measured in grams, and all the cans I buy at Safeway are labelled in mL and oz. But it’s nothing a scale and/or the conversion app on my iPhone can’t handle.

We’ve made a few recipes from it so far, but I wanted to talk today about the Mushroom Stoup. Called ‘stoup’ because he couldn’t decide whether it was a stew or a soup, it is a super-thick, mushroom-y meal in a bowl.

I’ve never been a fan of mushroom soup, but then my mushroom soup experience so far has really only been the gloppy, gooey canned stuff, or worse: stuff cooked in the gloppy, gooey, canned stuff like it’s sauce. ew. Salt overload! The photo looked so enticing, and it used some of the veggie stock we’d made (also from the book) a double batch of and frozen, so we decided to give it a go. I also wanted to try out the optional dumplings included in the recipe – just self-raising flour, butter, and cold water rolled into balls and tucked into the stew to cook for the last 15 or so minutes of simmering.

One of the ingredients was 50-60g of dried porcini mushrooms. I got to Safeway and found that while they carried dried porcini mushrooms, they were sold in packets of 14grams each. Ok, so I’ll need 4 packets, which will cost…. $18?!

I did debate about buying them for a few minutes, and in the end decided to give it a go. It was our first time making the recipe, so I figured we should follow the directions fairly closely. You soak the mushrooms in hot water for a while, then strain and reserve the water, and put the mushrooms into the pot, along with fresh mushrooms too. As we’d splurged on the dried mushrooms, I just used button mushrooms for the fresh.

OMG this meal was so good! It was amazingly flavourful, and the dumplings were delicious. Why haven’t I been making soups and stews with dumplings before now? I ended up using dumpling directions from a Jamie Oliver book I have and love, just because of the measurement weirdness. Same basic idea though.

When I told people at work I was eating mushroom soup, someone looked in my bowl and said ‘no way is that soup, there’s no liquid. And you have a fork in your hand!’ so the ‘stoup’ label is appropriate. I think this is what mushroom soup is meant to taste like, and it is nothing like the canned stuff!

When does a soup cross the line in to stew for you? When is it not even stew, and just a pile of mushrooms?

The Sauerkraut Experiment

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Way back when, in my last CSA post of the year on October 15th, I mentioned I was going to try making sauerkraut with all the cabbages I had. Today, after renewing our share in Sundance Fields, I decided I should probably post about how that went.

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I chopped up a lot of cabbage. LOTS of cabbage, but the right amount by weight, according to Martha. All that cabbage filled my 3 biggest mixing bowls. Then I added a little salt and some caraway to each bowl and got squishing. I was very concerned that it wasn’t all going to fit in the 3 jars I had, but after a lot of massaging, I dumped one mixing bowl into the other. Then a bit later, all the cabbage fit in one mixing bowl. Then, it only half-filled that mixing bowl! There is so much water in cabbage! It all packed very nicely into my thrifted mushroom jars. Apparently I have a thing for mushroom kitchen accessories, my favourite vintage pyrex pattern to find is this one. You can see them in a bunch of my other food posts on the blog too.
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I followed Martha’s schedule for letting sit and opening the jars every now and then to release the gas. One jar made a satisfying ‘psssst’ sound every time I opened it, which was reassuring. Then, I kinda forgot about them. I remembered about a week or two after you were supposed to put them in the fridge, then I put off checking on them because I was scared of what I would find. When I did get around to it, one jar had gone disgustingly, stink-up-the-whole-kitchen fuzzy. The other two though, were fine! I tried a little forkful, and then spent the rest of the day saying to myself  ‘Do I feel sick? How is my belly?’ but everything was ok.

Then I realized that while I had fun making sauerkraut, I didn’t know what to eat it with. I’m not a big sandwich person, so I found a recipe for sauerkraut fritters. They weren’t bad, with some goat cheese on top, but not amazing. I think I’m just not a huge sauerkraut fan (except when friends K&E put it in their stuffing at Christmas. YUM!).

Have you ever made something more to see if you could, than because you’d eat it/wear it/use it when you’re done?

Rehearsal Snacks

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I have a reoccurring problem. It happens to me every day, between 3pm and 4pm. I’ll be sitting at the table at work, trying to work, and I seem to lose control of both my neck and my eyelids. My eyelids droop, my chin heads toward my chest… it’s a terrible case of what I call ‘the 3 o’clock sleepies’. Between my love carbs at lunch, the buzz of the fluorescent lights, and the fact that we’re in a windowless room, I just can’t help myself. If I worked in an office, I could get up and go for a walk around the cubicles or something. But I’m meant to be recording the blocking the actors are doing, or reading along with what they’re saying (which really doesn’t help the sleepies) in case they need me to yell their next word. It isn’t a situation that I can just leave. What pains me is worrying that people will notice, and think I’m bored or disrespectful. Really, I just can’t control it. Eating protein helps. Endless glasses of water also help, but then I have to pee – see above re: being tied to the desk.

I pinned this recipe on Pinterest the other day, and made a batch of energy balls for rehearsals this week. I made this first batch almost exactly as the recipe says, only substituting cocoa nibs for chocolate chips. I even had the ground flaxseed! Hm, I left out the vanilla just because I forgot it, no other reason.

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Here are the balls in action, sitting on my (heavily annotated) costume plot:

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As soon as I feel the first drooping of the eyelid, the first little bit of dizziness that resisting that pull creates, I snack on one (or all 3 – they’re tasty as well as useful). It’s helped! I’ve staved off the sleepies for 4 days in a row so far. We’ll see if it still works on Sunday, which is usually the day of me wanting to take a nap all through work, not just at 3pm.

What I love about this recipe is that, even though it’s delicious as written, it is endlessly adaptable. I would love to try putting some cinnamon into a batch. I’d love to try some dried fruit, like cranberries, although I think the balls would hold together best if you chopped the fruit fine. Dried wild blueberries would be delicious, and small enough to begin with. Various different nut butters of course (I used natural peanut butter, but I bet it’d be delicious with hazelnut butter!), different varieties of honey…. As I said, endless. And delicious. And good for you! I think… nuts are good for you, right? Protein?

Christmas Open House

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This year being the first year that I’ve had more than 3 days off for Christmas in a while, we decided to try doing an open house again. We chose an open house format for our party because many of our friends would be working no matter what date and time we chose, and this way they could stop by before or after work. I had great fun baking up a storm, and because way less people came than we expected, we’ve been having great fun eating all the leftovers and not cooking at all.

After everything was set up, I realized that my camera battery was dead, so all photos in this post were taken with Hipstamatic on my iPhone.

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We bought all these tiny teal Christmas balls last Boxing day for something silly like 90% off. We were going to use them as wedding decor, but decided it was too much effort in the end. I really wanted to turn them in to some sort of chandelier-y thing, and it worked! We knotted them on to fishing line at random intervals, and knotted a blue jingle bell to the end of each string for weight. I thought it was very whimsical and festive.

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I baked. A lot. We had Lime Linzer Cookies, Brown Butter Shortbread, Lemony Slice & Bakes, Peppermint Meringues, Chocolate Spice Drops, Eggnog Coffee Cake, mince pies made with mum’s homemade mincemeat…

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And that was just the baking! For savoury, we did our favourite caramelized onion dip, spinach-avocado dip, pizza monkey bread (with chicken chorizo and goat cheese), Caesar salad devilled eggs, and curry chicken wonton cups. Plus veggies, naan, and chips for dipping.

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I used these printables from Hostess With the Mostess for the food labels.

It was great to see the people that did come, and I know those that didn’t are probably having a busy holiday time. Hey, it meant we didn’t have to cook for a few days afterwards!

Festive Food

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I need only the slightest excuse to bake up a storm, and when I found out about the 4-theatre potluck dinner / evening of games and entertainment (and booze) that was happening, I just had to bake. I decided to go with a literal red & green theme. I’d had these cookies pinned on Pinterest for a while, so they were my red component:

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The tiered baking racks are one of my favourite items we got off our wedding registry. We ended up with two sets, which has come in really handy with all the Christmas baking I’ve been doing recently.

For my second item, I looked to one of my favourite baking books, Baked. Once I’d leafed through, the answer was obvious – Grasshopper cake to compliment the red cookies! So I went out and bought a bottle of creme de menthe, which came with a lovely layer of dust on the bottle. Now that I’ve used my 3 tablespoons, I’m sure it will gather more dust until I make that cake again.

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Here’s the evolution of a layer cake:

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And the final product:

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At said party, our group also contributed the ‘Joyeux Noel Coward’ tree,

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and a ‘spirited’ manger scene, complete with knitting shepherds (shepherds shown before & after heads) :

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I’m the Grand Marnier bottle with the glasses.

Cinnamon Fun – PIE

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I’ve spoken a lot about the homemade wedding pie in previous posts, and as I don’t want you to think I’m totally obsessed with pie (although it’s kinda true) I’m going to let the pictures speak for themselves in this post.

Previous pie posts:

The first wedding decision we made.

The secret ingredient for perfect pastry.

Post-wedding logistics tips for making your own pies.

Recipes & baking tips.

Our baking and set-up day.

Wedding Pie

Wedding Pie

Wedding Pie

Wedding Pie

Wedding Pie

(guest photo above)

My creation

(guest photos above)

Top to bottom, left to right: Blueberry, Strawberry-Rhubarb, Saskatoonberry, Apple, Cherry, Apple-Blackberry

Wedding Pie

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Mum’s chocolate tart.

Wedding Pie

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Suggested serving. :)

Pie vs. cake, which is your favourite?

Unless otherwise noted, all photos in this post are by Fotograffika.

The Cinnamon Bun Recaps:

Pinterest Recipe – Pizza Monkey Bread

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I found this recipe for Pizza Monkey Bread on Pinterest, and just had to try it. Apparently Monkey Bread is a ‘thing’? I’d never heard of it before, but I love the concept! I decided to make this as a treat dinner for us one day when I had the full day off, and P was coming home at dinner time (these days are rare in our industry). I bought a turkey sausage and goat cheese to put in the balls, and a red pepper so there’d be at least some veggies in our dinner that night.

I found it easiest to cut 48 of everything, so I wouldn’t have to go back and cut more sausage in the middle of everything. I rolled 48 little goat cheese balls, and cut 48 little pieces of a red pepper.

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I also divided up the dough before starting to roll, to make things easier.

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I found it easiest to flatten the dough into circles (like making tiny pizzas), put a piece each of sausage, goat cheese, and pepper in the middle, and pinch the dough closed around everything. Dough is stretchy, so it’ll fit around the most awkward pepper slices. Just mold it like playdough until all the edges meet and you can pinch them.

I found it easiest to dip the finished ball into the frying pan of garlic butter (drool) rather than faff about with the pastry brush.

It was at that point my camera died, so you’ll just have to take my word for it that this was one of the most delicious and fun meals I’d made in a while. I did serve it with pizza sauce for dipping, which made it a little messy. If you included a dab of sauce in the ball though, it’d be a very neat meal. We want to try it again as an appetizer if we have people over, with different fillings. I also want to try a dessert version! Cream cheese and jam maybe?

And, as there are only 2 of us, and this was equivalent to about 2 pizzas, it reheats well in the microwave. Just put however many balls you want (heh) on a plate and nuke!

Halloween Baking

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I’ve been a total lame-o the past few years on Halloween and haven’t dressed up. I’m generally working, and costumes are a part of the job. This year I had a special treat and had Halloween off, as it fell on a Monday this year. I didn’t dress up, I honestly didn’t even plan on leaving the house, until I discovered that I had no yellow food colouring. Because while I may be a costume-Scrooge, Halloween is the holiday of sugary, tasty things. Don’t worry, I’m not a total Hallow-scrooge – we don’t get trick-or-treaters because we’re in a childfree condo building, so no one cared that I wasn’t in costume and I didn’t have mini candy bars.

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I had a baking afternoon and made two recipes I found on Pinterest! Candy corn sugar cookies, and Day of the Dead skull cookies.

The technique to make the candy corns was awesome, and has me thinking about what other holidays I could apply it to, because I love a sugar cookie!

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You make lots of dough, press 1/3 of it (still white) into a loaf pan, then dye 1/3 orange, press than on top of the white, dye the last 1/3 yellow, and press that on top. Let it harden up in the fridge for a bit, then cut into slices.

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Then cut each slice into 6-7 triangles! I shaved the wrinkly bits off either end, but otherwise not much dough was wasted at all. Certainly much less than rolling it out and using cookie cutters. I love the touch of lemon in this recipe. The triangles are just the right size to eat (REDACTED – embarassed) right out of the cookie tin.

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The skull cookies were a bit more involved, even though they look much less polished. I had troubles with the white dough, I ended up having to add some water to get it all to stick together, and then I had a big problem trying to roll the two dough logs to the same diameter. The recipe says to poke the ‘face holes’ through the log, then cut. My problem was that when you do that, the pressure from cutting will distort the faces, so I decided to poke the holes after cutting the disks of dough. I used a big carving fork for the eyes, so I could do both at once, and a butter knife for the mouths.

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Above is a pan of cookies before baking. Below, the same pan after baking:

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At that point I stopped calling them ‘skull cookies’ and decided they were zombie cookies, because they all look like they’re saying BRAINSSSSSS. When I brought the tin into work, one of the first comments was ‘Oooh, Frankenstein cookies!’ So really, just call them ‘scary face’ cookies and you’re good. I added a little mint extract to the white dough, so they’re choco-mint scary face cookies.

I really want to organize a Christmas cookie swap this year, and the fun afternoon I had baking these has just made me more excited. I’m trying to figure out exactly how I want to do it – I could go the few friends at our house route, or a giant 3-theatre swap if I can figure out the logistics of that.

Pinterest Recipe – Caramel Apple Cheesecake Bars

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While I do find Pinterest to be a giant timesuck (but what an amazing + inspiring time suck!) I think I have been cooking more after joining. It certainly makes it easier to bookmark recipes – it’s so great to see pictures of everything, rather than titles in my bookmarks folder. Especially when the title that it ends up being bookmarked under doesn’t have much to do with the recipe, or is so long that it gets cut off.

On Thanksgiving we went to games night at our friends E&K’s house. I decided to take some time off from our weekly D&D sessions this season, but went on that day because it was Thanksgiving, and that gave me an excuse to make dessert. I waffled for a bit about making these bars because E can’t have dairy products, but P gave me the puppy eyes when I said I might not make them, so we got a pie from the grocery store that was safe for E to eat.

The recipe has 4 layers:

Shortbread-y crust. I added some whole wheat flour, and found that the mixture matched my mixing bowls! I love my vintage mushroom Pyrex.

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Then came the important part – the cheesecake. (Happy as a pig in… cream cheese.)

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Then the good-for-you part (apart from the whole wheat) – the apples. I just about never bother to peel my apples when recipes say to. Give them a scrub and you’re good. It’s extra fibre!

Caramel Apple Cheesecake Bars, before baking

Then yummy yummy struesel topping. The only way to properly mix this topping is with your hands.

Caramel Apple Cheesecake Bars, before baking

For a dessert with 4 layers it came together very fast. I put the shortbread-y part in the oven and had the cheesecake mixed and half the apples chopped before the timer beeped. Then P took over the apple chopping and I squished some flour, butter, and oats together and all the layers were done. P was mixing the apples up with the sugar & cinnamon I’d put in the bowl I was chopping the apples into and he said ‘I don’t think there’s enough sugar in this bowl, it isn’t going very far to cover these.’ I told him to read the recipe to see how much sugar I’d added to all the other layers, and he agreed that the apples really didn’t need any more sugar. I was a lazy baker and bought a jar of butterscotch topping at the grocery store, instead of making my own caramel. In my defense, I think I bought one that doesn’t have any HFCS in it!

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Dessert that night was a hit! I will absolutely make these again, and the great thing is that I think you could do it with any fruit you wanted, it doesn’t just have to be apples. It’s like crumble and cheesecake all rolled into one glorious bar.

I was a bad baker that day and didn’t clean up my mess, just moved it to the sink to soak instead of actually washing everything. The next morning P was off to work before I was awake, and when I finally got out of bed and stumbled into the kitchen I found this scene:

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I love it when he leaves me silly notes. He didn’t even need to set up the scene, that was how I’d left things.

Poptart Heaven

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The last show I worked on was a contemporary drama that involved a lot of food. Generally, I find theatres try to find ways to write out or ignore the food in scripts. It’s just too awkward, and a big old drag. My recent show had a lot of food in it. So much so that it couldn’t really be written out. So I as the assistant stage manager got the glamorous job of cleaning this up after every show:

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Yup, that’s 6 full bus trays of dishes and assorted bottles. The food was mostly real (with rubber pork chops and cunningly painted styrofoam bacon) and the drinks were mostly various shades of food colouring in water. The white wine was white cranberry juice though. This show also had some other things I didn’t have to clean up – like the box of Cap’n Crunch ceral, and the boxes of pop tarts we went through.* The redeeming part of this job was that although the pop tarts didn’t get eaten, you could tell when they were broken because the little foil packages looked all lumpy and weird, so those ones had to be ‘disposed of’ and new ones set for the next night. I don’t know that I’d ever eaten a pop tart in my life before that show – I had a very homegrown, homemade diet as a kid, which I am very thankful for.

Time came for the potluck for this show – we try to do one on every show, and sometimes there’s a theme. This time the theme was ‘food inspired by the show’, so naturally I knew I had to use Smitten Kitchen’s recipe for homemade poptarts.

homemade pop tarts

I made a double batch – one with regular pastry and my own spiced wine peach jam, the other with SK’s suggestion of wholewheat pastry, and a brown sugar & cinnamon filling.

homemade pop tarts

They were a hit! Luckily there were enough to go around, so both P and I got to try one of each flavour, plus the ones that broke that the potluck peeps never saw. The brown sugar ones were a cinch to get off the pan, the jammy ones were a little messier – a couple of them burst and stuck to the tinfoil, but it all worked out in the end.

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The credit for actually baking these goes to P – I made the pastry one morning, then though I could assemble and bake them the next morning. I didn’t leave myself quite enough time to bake them all and get to work, so I put P in charge of taking them out of the oven at the right time. I’d say he did an excellent job.

homemade pop tarts

As much as I enjoyed munching on the odd commercial pop tart during the run of this show, it was so much fun to make these, and proves to me yet again that homemade will always be tastier than preservative-filled, HFCS-filled storebought things. Which has more calories? No idea. But I know exactly what went into each of my tarts (really. I made the jam, remember?) and I know that I can pronounce every single ingredient, which is what scares me about a lot of pre-made grocery store things.

*Amusing side note: one Friday the props department delivered items we were getting low on. I got a shopping bag full of pop tarts, condoms, and joints.** Party on!

**Actually the filling from herbal cigarettes rolled up to look like joints.

CSA Wrap-Up

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Time to wrap up the CSA party that was going all summer. The photo above was our final delivery from Sundance Fields. We’ll be thinking of them for a long time though, due to the sheer amount of potatoes we were given this week! Lots of different types and colours. We haven’t cut into the purple ones yet, but I’m excited to do so.

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We also got some dried herbs, and an onion braid!

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They said to let the onion braid dry out until it looked like onion skin, then we could hang it up and cut the onions off as we needed them. I thought it was dry enough yesterday and tried to pick it up by the braid…. onions and flaky onion skin everywhere!

We’ve made some great meals since receiving this bounty a few weeks ago. We actually made a shepherd’s pie where everything in it was from the farm, minus the ground beef. We had peas, carrots, onions, savory, and thyme in with the meat, then a layer of steamed spinach, then a layer of (boring, white) potatoes. Ok, the goat cheese we put on top of that wasn’t from the farm either, but that was literally ALL that wasn’t organic, pesticide free, or from within 100 miles. Thinking about it, the beef probably was, this being Alberta and all. We made one big one for eating for a few days, plus two smaller 2-serving shepherds pies for the freezer. I’m serious about stocking our freezer this year! No more Safeway lasagnes when we’re too tired to cook!

Tonight’s dinner (and yesterday’s, and tomorrow’s) was a nice hearty chili with farm-kinda-fresh (it’s been a week or two) zucchini, carrots, celery, and tomatoes. I didn’t use any canned tomatoes in this one, just fresh! Oh, and our one tiny green pepper is in there somewhere too. The tomatoes were actually given to us green, and we just let them ripen in our storage room in a brown paper bag. Things in the chili not from the farm: ground pork, garlic, other spices. To go with our chili, I made this coleslaw with a cabbage and some cilantro we had hanging around in the fridge. It is actually a great match for chili, it’s nice and cooling.

We still have about 5 cabbages left, but I was recently successful in thrifting some wide-mouth wire-bale glass jars, so I’m going to try making sauerkraut this week! The fridge is also still full of carrots, turnips, some beets, and some leeks. Oh, and the ever-present zucchini. The leeks may make it into the sauerkraut, but the rest is still up for cooking with. We need to get on it, because even turnips don’t last forever!

Any tips for using up turnips? Do you think I can can them? How about carrots?

CSA Adventures

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I’ve slid behind on my CSA posts, and now we’ve had our last drop-off! The last few weeks have been so busy we’ve barely managed to get photos. The photo below is from September 14th:

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The veggies are threatening to take over our very large island!

On one of my days off last week, I went through the fridge and pulled out all the veggies. Since joining our CSA, the fridge has become a scary sight. I like having order in there, with veggies in the veggie drawer, fruit in the fruit drawer, leftovers together… with these giant loads of veggies arriving each week, it was every veg for itself and we stuffed stuff where it fit. Because all the produce is so fresh, it also lasts a long time (unlike Safeway veg which has already been sitting in a truck or warehouse for a week or two before you get it) so we had accumulated a lot:

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Some, sadly, got thrown away because it had been pushed to the back, never to be seen again. Everything else got put back neatly, just in time to make room for September 21st’s veggies. Oh, we no longer have a fruit drawer… we have a cabbage drawer:

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I want to try sauerkraut, but P isn’t a big fan of it. I may do it anyway, if I can just find some wire-bail glass jars. That’s what Martha says to use in October’s MS Living, and I don’t know if regular 2-part canning lids would work too.

One of my favourite things we got this summer that I’d never heard of before was this:

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It looks like regular corn, but they called it ‘cold corn’ and you just eat it without boiling or anything. Shuck the husks off and dive in! It was delicious and sweet and yummy straight from the fridge.

I’m going to do a round-up post soon of all the recipes I used this summer while trying to use up these veggies, and with the photos of our impressive last shipment. It won’t be an exhaustive recipe list (yet) because we’ll have some stragglers in the fridge for a few more weeks.

CSA Tales August 24th

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The first thing I did with last week’s veggies was to fill up the void in our freezer where we usually keep a couple frozen lasagnes for ‘emergency’ dinners. ‘Emergency’ may consist of: forgot to plan for dinner, didn’t realize it was 5:30pm all of a sudden, don’t feel like cooking dinner, among other situations.

I used the Stuffed Shells recipe from Martha Stewart – I’d made it before, and stuck to the recipe, but this time I just used what I had on hand. What I had on hand was a lot of Swiss chard, ground chicken, goat cheese and ricotta cheese. And a couple of the little onions. The  sauce was a jar of Classico sauce augmented with a big can of diced tomatoes, and a couple frozen muffin-cup-pucks of homemade tomato sauce base from a Mario Batali recipe. I wasn’t really measuring per se, but I’d guess I doubled the recipe.

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So I don’t tie up all my casserole dishes when I do this, I buy foil pans at the grocery store. I’ve already cooked and eaten one of the small ones (got to make sure it tastes good!) but the rest are frozen into nice hard blocks now.

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Blurry photo of some coleslaw that the Mr made. Cabbage and cilantro from our veggie CSA, sausages from the duck farm CSA we’re part of. The duck one isn’t a weekly delivery, we basically got a share of their farm for a wedding present, and can go to their booth at the farmer’s market and pick up what we want. They keep track of what we take, and take it off our balance. Duck sausages are so delicious!

I was so busy sampling food trucks last week that the rest of the veggies are still in the fridge, and some have gone to good homes tummies with some friends of ours.

Here is today’s haul:

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Herbs (including basil!), 2 larger zucchinis, lettuces, baby carrots, bag o’ potatoes, giant turnip, little onions, beets, tons of peas, a leek, very tiny celery. I think this is the most variety yet. And only one type of salad greens!

Here’s a link to all my 2011 CSA posts!

The Food Truck Revolution

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Calgary has been hit by the food truck bug! I’ve loved the whole idea of food trucks since I first saw more-than-just-street-meat trucks in Portland in 2009. Gourmet trucks? Dessert trucks? Vegan trucks? AWESOME. And now the first few trucks have arrived in town, and they’re working with City Hall on a pilot project to see if food trucks will work in our city. I’m interested to see what will happen come winter – it’s one thing to stand in line when it’s summer and +25C outside, but will people wait around for a (very good) burger when it is -25C? I don’t know what the winter plan is, if there even is one yet.

I’ve managed to eat at a few of the trucks over the past few weeks. What I’ve found interesting is that most of them seem to be doing more dinner service than lunch service. That makes me a little sad, because this is just the type of lunch I’d want to buy on my break from work. And, most of Portland’s carts are clustered in the downtown core, why can’t it be the same for us? I think part of that might be due to the fact that they aren’t allowed to park within 25m (or something) of a restaurant – and I’m having a hard time thinking of somewhere in downtown Calgary that isn’t within 25m of a restaurant. So, for the sake of this report, I bought myself dinner a few times this week. The things I do.

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This is actually 3 trucks serving lunch! It’s in the East Village, which is still in mostly the planning stages of development, at least where these trucks parked. Luckily, it wasn’t too far to walk for lunch. Here we had the Mexican truck, the fry truck, and the gelato truck.

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I had a ‘Daisy Duke’ hotdog (chipotle mayo, yum!) and I think these were ‘Sophia’ fries – parmesan and truffle oil. Mmmm, tasty. And, because it was boiling, I had a gelato on my way back to work.

Now this next point is either a problem or a boon: these trucks like to park near my house. Here is Fries and Dolls just a few blocks away from here:

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I didn’t actually stop for fries this time, I just took a picture.

When I found out that the perogy truck was going to be in my neighbourhood at 7pm one night, all plans of making dinner just flew out the window. I hopped on my bike (got to burn those calories somehow!) and rode on over. As it was so close, I brought my goodies home with me to eat:

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This is a double order of perogies – one order sauerkraut & potato, and one order duck & saskatoonberry. OMG, they were both amazing. You get a little blob of sour cream in the box, some sauteed onions, and the little thing of sauce on the side. I’m not really sure what the sauce was, I just gobbled the perogies up with the onions and sour cream.

I also finally tracked down the Alley Burger truck the other night, and had a late dinner at 9pm. The fries were as delicious as people say they are, but I don’t feel like the duck fat they fried them in made them taste any different. Maybe I need to do a side-by-side test with regular-fat fries?

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The burger got a little squished from me holding on to it as I walked home to eat. The Alley burger is a pork patty with a slightly spicy aioli on it, and Quebec cheese curds! Yum.

I love this movement, I hope more trucks get going soon, I hope they survive the winter, and I hope hope hope they find some way and some place to do corporate lunch time.

CSA Tales August 17th

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I really enjoyed the beet green pasta dish I made last week, so this week I sauteed the two green onions, added some spinach to the saucepan to wilt, then mixed that in to cooked pasta with a mozzarella cheese sauce. All that went into a casserole dish, had some Panko sprinkled on top, and baked until the sauce bubbled.

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Do you want to know the secret of the sauce? Mum used to make macaroni & cheese for me this way when I was little and wanted food NOW. So, you take some heavy cream (whipping cream), and pour it into a pot. When it is warm, toss in as much grated cheese as you want. Stir until cheese melts. The end. No faffing about with butter and flour and milk here!

Then I decided I really needed to do something with the lettuce other than salad. I browsed Tastespotting until I found this chilled summer soup. It’s summer, it’s hot, I have a lot of lettuce, perfect! I had to buy leeks for this, and some frozen peas. I love the colours in the little green chopped leek rounds. I used two types of lettuce in this, the onion tops, and most of the herbs. I didn’t have all the ones called for, so I just used what I had: mint, cilantro, and dill.

Chilled summer soup

I served a little bowl of it with a hunk of homemade bread and some tasty Irish cheddar cheese. The soup is delicious chilled, and great for hot summer evenings. But it just wasn’t appealing on the freakishly cold evening we had one night this week – I wanted something warm, so that leftovers plan got abandoned. I froze 3 portions of this for work lunches in early September when it is still warm. No way I’m eating chilled soup in the winter!

Every now and then our fridge will decide to freeze everything in it. It usually happens when it is over-full. I didn’t feel like the fridge got super-full this week, but I didn’t get to the cabbage before it froze. The freezing made it go all dark, and then very limp when it got back to regular fridge temperature.

Here are the veggies I picked up today:

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Lettuces, giant bag of Swiss chard behind them, another cabbage, a turnip, herbs, radishes, 2 zukes, and potatoes!

Here’s a link to all my 2011 CSA posts!

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