chromedome

"Crazy" is perhaps not the best way to put it. "Impractical" would fit, perhaps, or something along those lines. It's not a pragmatic choice for most people, that's for sure. Having gone into cooking at 40, I can certainly tell you you're not too old! Practical questions...can you budget around the ramifications of losing something like 40% of your income? Can your existing relationships work around the loss of about 90% of your free time? How many 16-18 hour days of shit and abuse will you tolerate before you say "To hell with this" (what's the UK version..."sod this for a lark"?)? Because many chefs will deliberately serve you an extra-large portion of Shit and Abuse with all the trimmings, just to determine how serious you are. Having said that, I'm still enjoying myself, and you may too. But it's really, really hard work.

so what do you call us that work both lunch/ dinner? ← Tired.

Ooooh...a redheaded slave who can cook...shame you live so far away...

Wow, a blog from my hometown! What a treat! At least I'm in the area, now (New Brunswick) so I'm not as homesick as I might otherwise be. Two of the vendors in your Brewery Market shots are among my very favourites: "That Dutchman" (used to be "That Damn Dutchman," but he toned it down) makes raw-milk Gouda and Edam cheeses...the real thing. Not to be missed, but I'd maybe hold off a couple of years before I fed it to the kids. Just in case. The bakery, Boulangerie la Vendeenne (sp?) is absolutely amazing. The owner is a classically-trained boulanger from France, and the breads there are some of the best I've ever had. I wouldn't panic if Pete isn't around the store for a little while. He's a pretty hands-on guy, right enough, but he also travels a lot. And yes, Prasantrin, he's a real person...exactly the person you see on TV, in fact. Not one of those guys who puts on a face for the camera. You could walk into his store any day, pick an item, and say to Pete "Tell me about this one" and get the full-tilt rave, just like on TV. I took my kids in there one day, when they were small (8 and 4, maybe?) and he cheerfully took them on the big tour all around the store. Very personable guy, with twice the energy of most people twenty years younger.

Crispness is a factor of sugar content, for the most part. Cutting back the sugar would have an impact. Creaming the fat for longer will help the cookies spread, as it introduces extra air into the cookie dough. For an entirely different approach to oatmeal cookies, "whizz" your oatmeal to flour in a food processor or coffee grinder. Use all or mostly oat flour in your favourite shortbread recipe. Goooood cookies...

...and perhaps Qualifirst, also out of Toronto. Too tired to plough through their catalogue right now, but I'm pretty sure I saw purees there.

As with so many other things, I like it and don't give a rat's ass if it's healthy or not. Having said that (again, like so many other things) I don't eat it often enough to be an issue.

In Canada, they're "beaver tails:" oblong pieces of thin bready dough, deep-fried and dusted with sugar. Some places offer maple syrup or applesauce, but more usually it's sugar or cinnamon sugar.

Wow, hydrogenated coconut oil...I can feel my arteries hardening, just typing the words! I'll check around, anyway, and see what I can find. Chances are, if it's available in Canada we can find a way to get you some...even in Newfoundland (haven't been back since '82, so I'm long overdue...).

Wow! Sounds exciting but exhausting. What kind of food are you thinking of doing? Hope everything goes smoothly. ← Evenings will be aimed at the casual end of the fine-dining spectrum. I have fresh fish coming from the waters outside my dining room window (one fishing wharf about 2km down the road, another about 8km); local producers for duck & foie gras/boar/organic beef/organic pork/heirloom veggies/sturgeon & caviar, etc etc. As I build momentum and get established, my plan is to feature a higher percentage of local product; for now the cool stuff gets to be the focus of the plate while I keep my costs in line with staples from Sysco and their ilk. Gotta make a buck or I don't get to keep doing it, right? Sunday brunches will be "nice," but not as upscale. Quiches, omelets made to order, that sort of thing. I'm going to do an Eggs Benny variation with duck prosciutto and Maltaise sauce, maybe another with house-made gravlax and some of the local caviar. Intended to be accessible to the blue-collar crowd as well as my target evening market...a way to get people in the door without the same $ commitment. During tourist season I'll also be doing cheap lunch (soup, salad, sandwich) for drive-up business as well as packed picnic lunches for the Inn's guests.

Gee...now that I'm only an hour from Maine, I'm going to have to start paying attention to these threads. What a novel concept!

You're lucky. I'd get about a day and a half out of a gallon of milk (sometimes less), and that's with two kids. Oh, and a week's worth of cheese would sometimes be fifteen minutes of snacking, if Dad wasn't around to wield the Wooden Spoon of Doom.

Don't you love it when the trainer stops dead in mid-stride, squints over your shoulder, and squeaks, "How did you do that?"

Once upon a time, I came across a site that was a testimonial to similar potluck items, as preserved for posterity in companies' in-house cookbooks (you know the ones..."This lovely Jell-o and smoked oyster salad comes from Debbie in Accounting..."). Unfortunately when I moved I did not think to export my bookmarks, or I'd offer a link. It was pretty, um...interesting. Some of the old Pillsbury Bake-Off cookbooks are amusing, too, in a gut-wrenching sort of way.

A bit late, but apparently Gio's been recently renovated as a showcase for executive chef Ray Bear. I hear very good things... Also worth visiting, by all accounts, is Tempest in Wolfville.

FWIW, speaking as a non-snob who's spent the last few years laying a foundation for understanding wine... When I started drinking my way through the major 6-10 varietals in both white and red, I found many references to Chardonnay as arguably the white-wine world's heaviest hitter, a chameleon grape that could be vinted in numerous styles while retaining a full and robust character. Impressed, I tried several different styles of Chard over a period of a couple of years. Initially, I have to say, I was unimpressed. I found the majority of the chardonnays I tasted to be cloying and unpleasant, to the point that I was reluctant even to use them in a sauce. Yet, others were clean and crisp and lacked the characteristics that I found repellent. Eventually I came to recognize the key adjectives on the label...anything "malic," "toasty," "buttery," or - God forbid - "butterscotchy notes" - meant a Chardonnay that would be destined for the kitchen sink. French Chardonnays, or "French-style" on a label, meant something that I would find drinkable. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the chards I disliked were invariably oaked, while the ones I disliked were invariably unoaked. Now, bear in mind that my budget has been sharply limited, with $20-$25CDN marking the upper reaches of my spending. I am open, therefore, to the notion that oaked chardonnays become more drinkable when you get into the higher quality/higher price ranges. I've found a number of good wines from other varietals in my price range though, so I don't think I'm likely to make the effort very often. Just my two cents, offered up by a novice who doesn't give a flying f**k what's trendy at a given time...

This is always a difficult thing (especially for those of us in North America, because of our silly habit of anthropomorphizing). When I was a kid, my first acquaintance with rabbit came by way of my father's rabbit stew. We usually lived out in the boonies when I was young, and my father typically had snares set just a few hundred yards from the house. Kids being kids, I was always keen to help him skin out his catch (my dad was at sea a lot, and we didn't have a lot of bonding opportunities...); by the time I was seven or eight I could skin and portion a rabbit on my own (supervised but unassisted). We did eventually get rabbits of our own to raise for meat. My sister and I immediately set about the task of naming them, as kids will. We settled on a name for the doe immediately (I don't remember it) and were pondering a name for the buck. My father, overhearing us, couldn't stop himself from suggesting "Stew." Since my best friend's name was Stu, I didn't think anything of it until about a week later, when the shoe finally dropped. We did eventually eat both rabbits, and I don't recall feeling especially squeamish about it. Of course by then real life had intervened, and I'd seen "Stew" kill and chow down on a couple of his own children (Dad hadn't realized that the doe and infants needed to be sequestered), so I didn't have quite the same warm, fuzzy feelings for him that I might otherwise have had. Later on, in my mid-teens, we lived on a small property in northern Newfoundland which my father was attempting to work as a subsistence farm. We grew our own root vegetables and potatoes and cabbages, and some beans and peas, and raised ducks and chickens and pigs. The only one we got a little bit sentimental about was a specific duck that had an odd and distinctive tuft of feathers at the back of his head. I'll confess to a twinge every time we ate duck that winter, but it wasn't enough to put me off eating...duck is one of my favourite things (it'll be on my menu year-round, if I have my way). I guess I'm saying that I'm pretty pragmatic about food. When I asked my father how squirrels tasted, he took me out to shoot a few and we cooked them together (tasted like rabbit, actually, but it takes too damn many to make a decent stew). The natural life cycle for most animals ends abruptly by way of disease, predation, starvation, or accident; a quick and relatively painless death at the hands of a human is a better alternative than most (I'd rather face the axe than be chewed to death, if it came to that). Please understand that I'm not being callous; I think it's a lot harder to properly value food if you've only ever bought it in plastic and styrofoam. I felt a real moment of recognition when reading Ruhlman's Soul of a Chef...remember the chapter where Thomas Keller talks about slaughtering his own rabbits? I don't know if he cooks any better for having done that, but it certainly reinforced his reverence for his ingredients.

Mornings were important for me (I wasn't a chef when my kids were younger, but I worked long hours in retail and that's just as bad). I was usually not there in the afternoons and evenings, but I was there in the morning to preside over breakfast and get them off to school (when they were pre-schoolers, of course, that was even better). I'd usually nap a bit before work, while my ex took over on the kid supervision. That compensated for getting up early after a late night, in my case. I know not everybody can nap effectively, but it worked (works) for me. Weekend mornings were best. Then we'd have a lot of time together and I'd make pancakes or waffles and we'd just linger at the table and enjoy each other's company for as long as we could reasonably sit. My kids are both very intelligent and very funny, so mealtimes were generally uproarious. Even during the last few months, as my ex and I prepared to go our separate ways, any time the four of us were gathered at the table we laughed our heads off. There are a lot of good memories around that table.

Divide it. In similar circumstances I've used it as a pre-ferment in my bread, understanding from the start that its leavening power is about nil. However, the flour in your starter is nicely aged, and the level of bacterial activity will be high, so there's flavour to be had, there. Use up to 3/4 of it in your next batch of bread, and refresh the remaining 1/4 with new water and flour. Leave the renewed starter at room temperature for several hours, until you begin to see signs of yeast activity, then refrigerate it and maintain it as usual.

You can do it either way, Shalmanese. You can precook your roux, or you can add it "raw" to your food and then let it simmer. I find that an hour is not usually required unless you're working with large quantities; at home a bit of quick roux or flour-and-water "whitewash" will be cooked out in a matter of 10 minutes or so...twenty at most. Like you, I was struck by the contradiction that roux "must" be cooked for an hour, but beurre manie was fine to add at the last minute (relatively speaking). I would love to tell you that cooking out the flour is entirely a myth, but I'd be lying. I've tasted (and made...I have to cop to this one) sauces in which the flour was not adequately cooked out, and it was unpleasant. Pre-gelatinized flours are handy for those last-minute scenarios, or cornstarch can be used if appropriate to the dish.

My breakfast is pretty much based on whim, and what's on hand. I don't have a whole lot of hard-and-fast rules about it. In fact, I can veer anywhere from no breakfast at all to "fully ballasted" and it doesn't really faze me either way. One thing I very definitely don't have in the morning is breakfast cereal. It was on hand for the kids, but on the very rare occasions I had a bowl it would be at night, when I felt the need for something light. That's because on the one hand I find most breakfast cereals (even the "virtuous" ones, like Cheerios) to be disgustingly sweet; while on the other hand eating cereal at 7 leaves me ravenous at 8...hungrier than I'd be if I had eaten no breakfast at all. I like fruit at breafast time, though it has to be part of a larger plate. Fruit alone also has the effect of making me hungrier. I try to scale my breakfast to the demands of the day. If I know I'm looking at 16 hours of kitchen mayhem, I'll try to load up with eggs and fried potatoes and toast and bacon or sausage or ham. Most mornings, though, tea and toast (my homemade bread, so it's not as Spartan as it sounds) is more than adequate. Coffee addict though I've been for many years, I find I can't drink it in the morning any more (gives me the gut rot). Coffee is lunch time onwards. Tea is up until dinnertime, as coffee will not keep me awake but tea will. Go figure. Pie for breakfast is an honourable tradition at my house. I figured that it was healthier (and probably had less sugar) than commercial cereals, so I never had a problem giving it to my kids if it was there. I like porridge when the weather is cold, but it could be jook and chili sauce instead of oatmeal or Red River. Depends on my mood. Leftovers rock. Over the last year, I've come more and more to appreciate rice for breakfast, especially cooked up with lots of good leftovers (to my ex and kids, the fridge was a black hole...if I didn't use the leftovers, they'd stay there until they could leave under their own power). Cold pizza? You bet. Steak and eggs, or chops and eggs? Absolutely. Eggs Benny? Special occasions. Pancakes or waffles? Every weekend without fail...a family tradition (I taught my daughter to make them before I moved away). We'd occasionally have waffles and ice cream for a light dinner during the heat of the summer. My kids loved that. On the subject of workingman's breakfast, I have to tell you that the biggest breakfasts I've ever eaten were when I was gillnetting with my father and uncle in Newfoundland, back in the late 70's. Unlike the farmers, fishermen were obliged to load up as soon as they were dressed (no bringing the boat in after a few hours to eat...). A solid fisherman's breakfast in northern Newfoundland would consist of one or two plates of baked beans, six to ten fishcakes, three or four slices of bread with jam and/or molasses, and a half-pot of hot, sweet, milky tea. If there was any leftover cold fish, meat, or potatoes from a prior meal, that would find its way to the plate as well. Considering that there'd be a gruelling 16-20 hour day to follow, and only a packed cold lunch (sandwiches, etc) along the way, it was important to fuel up properly. I do have to concede that it was a lot to take on first thing in the morning, but I was so ravenous all the time that I didn't really feel bloated.

Almond paste is available in varying degrees of quality, like so many other ingredients. The better versions contain only almonds and sugar, typically 50/50 or (better), 66% almonds to 34% sugar. The sugar prevents the almonds becoming almond butter (y'know, like peanut butter). Cheaper brands use lesser percentages of almonds and may include preservatives, artificial flavouring, or other adulterants. Marzipan is made by adding additional powdered sugar to the almond paste, and some glucose (sometimes corn syrup, in North America) as well. Marzipan is more malleable, and can be rolled and shaped in any number of ways. It can also be dried to a beautifully smooth surface which may be painted on with edible pigments for interesting effects.

I like Lapsang Souchong, but I'm thinking that the milder smokiness of a Keemun would work well. I've got some Mao Feng Keemun that I think would go well with an earthier (as opposed to fruity) dark chocolate...must try that once I get my chocolate supplies laid in. I haven't tried the combination, but I would also think that a nice malty Assam tea would complement a lighter and fruitier chocolate. I feel a special tasting night coming on...

I was following a similar train of thought, looking for somthing to use with white chocolate. I'm thinking that I may try one of two things: either a jasmine tea-infused ganache, or reduced icewine. I'm leaning toward the tea, 'cause it's a lot cheaper than icewine. I'll likely try both before the year's over, though.

I'm going to be opening my own restaurant soon (a month or so), just outside Saint John, New Brunswick. Like most chefs of my generation I have an ideological attachment to using local product whenever possible, so I've been trying to track down suppliers for interesting ingredients. It hasn't been easy, and was not made any easier by being on the other side of the country. In the Vancouver and Western Canada forum, there is a popular thread addressing this very subject. Over here, though, I have only found threads focused on specific items in specific places. So I says to myself, "Self...we need one of those for my end of the country." So here it is, folks: your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a knowledge base for Quebec and points east. Want to find something? Post a question. Found something you want to share? Post it here. To start the ball rolling, I'm going to offer up a producer of duck and related products in Cormier Village, up Moncton way. They are called La Ferme du Diamant, and they were hard to track down...no website, and the telephone isn't listed under that name. You can reach them at 506-532-5579, or find them at the Dieppe farmer's market. They sell duck (whole and in parts), foie gras, confit and rillettes, and a variety of French-style charcuterie. You're welcome.