chromedome

The NSLC in Nova Scotia also has a "shop the world" option. As long as you are willing to commit to a case (or can organize enough friends to do so) they'll bring in just about anything, from anywhere.

I've had cans of Eagle Brand that were thoroughly caramelized, here in Canada. It may have been an assembly-line error, but the cans were left in my bakery by a previous manager and had logged a lot of time on a high shelf near the ovens, so I'm leaning to the slow-caramelization theory.

Plant gender is not folklore, at least not entirely. It's not simple, either, or universal; but it is well-recognized and documented. A few links for your perusal: Plant Facts Gender comparison in cannabis sativa (Gender is all-important in pot growing, apparently...) And for further study, if you're truly obsessive... Gender and Sexual Dimorphism in Flowering Plants

I read up on saffron rather extensively a year or so ago, after being gifted with a quantity of it from two different individuals (on whose heads be blessings...). I can recall the Pennsylvanian saffron being mentioned in a few of those books, and I suspect that there are more growers than just the one. If memory serves, one book referenced a few Amish growers. I have found the Iranian saffron, in general, to be more pungent and quicker to infuse than the Spanish. I tend to use the Spanish for long-cooking items, and the Iranian for hot beverages and quick-cooking dishes. I know many people who are saffron enthusiasts, some few who really don't get excited about it either way, and a number who just don't like it at all. I think it may be one of those genetic-trigger things, like cilantro or truffles. If they don't do it for you, they just don't <shrug>. More for the rest of us.

If it is indeed a problem of your oven cycling incorrectly, you may want to invest in some thermal mass...unglazed tiles, brick, or even two or three cheap pizza "stones" stacked up together will retain enough heat to keep your oven temperature stable. Load up the bottom rack, allow your oven lots of time to heat up (like, say, an hour ahead of time...), and have at it. If that's what your problem is, this should fix it.

I've seen collards in all the major supermarkets, at one time or another. They seem to only be around for a month or so, so you've got to keep your eyes peeled (am I the only one who finds that colloquialism creepy?). As for grits, the ubiquitous Bob's Red Mill produces them, and you can find their product pretty widely too. You may have to phone around a bit, but somebody in your area should have them.

This is an interesting discussion, for me. I've run an in-store bakery for a year, but I have not been in a position of needing to generate a large volume of sheet cake for my clientele (that was done for us at our sister store, and transferred over), so I've only baked cake at home. For family use, I have a handful of cakes that I can crank out just as fast as a mix, so it's not been an issue. However, there are a whole bunch of things tied up in the "scratch vs. manufactured" debate. Obviously, on the whole we'd all prefer to wow our customers with gloriously perfect product we'd made from all-natural ingredients. There's just that little detail about making enough profit to stay in business... For me, coming to cooking/baking at the age of 40, after a lot of years in sales, I found a lot of congruence. People complain a lot about salesmens' bulls--t, but really it's just like the kitchen; everything has its "presentation side." You don't serve your fish skin side up, and you explain your product in a way that presents it to good advantage. It's not dishonest, it's pragmatic. Was this cake made from mix? "Well, I use a commercially available base to ensure consistency, and I complement that with lots of fresh eggs and cream and other quality ingredients." Is this pie made from scratch? "We buy good-quality pie shells from a reputable supplier, because of the consistency and labour-cost issues. The fillings we make from scratch, from the best fruit available to us at this time of year." Now, the best fruit available to us may be (and often is) Individually Quick Frozen, here in the Great White North. That changes nothing. I could respond by saying, "I use frozen fruit and frozen crust." Both statements are 100% accurate, but which would leave you with a better impression? I can tell you that I've had scores of customers ask me the latter question, and the answer you see is the one I've given. If a customer shows any interest, I'll get into the reasons for using IQF vs. out-of-season crap, and I can tell you that they almost invariably respond well. For any of you who are in entrepreneurial situations, you surely have a handful of questions you answer *all the time*. It is well worth your while to sit down and prepare answers for those half-dozen or so questions, and have them ready to hand when you are asked. They are part of your mise en place, just as surely as the flour and eggs.

I've never read anything of Reichl's until now (as the odds of my dining in New York anytime in the next decade are slim-to-none). On the evidence of this excerpt, I think I need to adjust my "next things to read" list.

I tried a few brews from BC a couple of weekends ago, at the Rocky Mountain Wine and Food festival here in Edmonton. My favourite discovery of the show was the Cannery Brewery from Penticton, BC. I tried their Blackberry Porter, Naramata Nut Brown Ale, and Anarchist Amber Ale; and found them all to be solid offerings. The Blackberry Porter is especially interesting, combining a classic porter style with local Okanagan blackberries. It's not quite raspberries and chocolate, but there's a definite affinity. They'll be hard to find outside of BC, but if any Edmontonians want to give them a shot just PM me and I'll tell you where to find them. The Anarchist Amber and Naramata Nut Brown are full-bodied brews, and have fared well in international competition. I also had a few Hophead IPA's from the Tree Brewing company, which I rather liked. These are very hoppy - as befits an IPA - with definite fruity notes. Not bad at all.

There is a traditional Acadian dessert containing salt pork (Acadians were/are big salt-pork eaters). Slice your salt pork thinly, and fry over moderate heat until the strips have rendered out and are thinly, crisply, delicious. Roll pastry dough, cut into squares (3, 4, 5" as you wish). Place a piece of salt pork in the middle of each, and cover with apples. Fold up the corners to make a square packet, pinching the corners together so that the juices do not foul your oven. While the pockets are baking, reduce some maple syrup by 1/3 on your stovetop. When pockets are beginning to be nicely browned, drizzle reduced maple syrup into the opening at the top of each pastry. Return to the oven for a few minutes. Serve when cooled to room temperature.

Semantics are always fun, aren't they? When I only cooked at home, I jokingly referred to myself as "chef" quite often. Then I went to cooking school, and began working in a restaurant, and began to see what really went into being a chef, and I changed my tune. Now, with the majority of the industry, I consider the person running the kitchen to be "chef," and noone else (unless it be a "chef emeritus," so to speak). This has nothing to do with formal training. I work for a woman with no formal training who's run one of the city's leading fine dining restaurants for 25 years (a mathematician and industrial engineer, in fact, by trade). Is she a chef? Durn tootin'. Am I a chef? Not yet. Not nearly. Interestingly enough, to my boss, "chef" denotes a cook who's had sufficient training or experience to be functional in a busy commercial kitchen. To her, my colleagues and I are chefs. To each his/her own, I guess.

I guess there would be two, for me. I stayed home from university in the fall of 1980 to fish with my father and my uncle. My plan was to save my earnings and tour Europe on a Eurail youthpass. I had collected all of the necessary applications and such, but...that year the fish didnt' come, for the first (but by no means the last) time, in that part of the Newfoundland coast. We spent a lot of time and hard work on earning very little money. When all was said and done, I'd have had about enough money to get me to Heathrow and back, and that was about it. Although my focus at the time was not gastronomic, I know beyond a doubt that a trip like this would have spurred my interest in "good" food (as opposed to "just" food) years earlier than it did happen. This, in turn, leads me to a second regret: the twenty years I drifted from sales job to sales job before becoming a cook. I'd like to have at least a few of those back. There are lots of others, of course, but they're not culinary...

That's outright genius! I'm on it right frikkin' now... (To Do List: 1) Learn to read music 2) Learn to write music 3) Learn to orchestrate 4) Pirate a copy of movie script 5) Translate same 6) Write libretto 7) Write score 8) Translate back, 'cuz opera doesn't sound right in English) Actually, writing an opera is my personal "dream big" project, the accuracy of the above To Do list notwithstanding.

Unscrupulous fishmongers have been known to punch rounds out of skate wings and sell them as scallops. October 28th was my wedding anniversary, but we didn't do anything much. I made steak with panfried potatoes and bearnaise sauce, and later we sipped on some port. That was it.

Tsing Tao is pretty widely available, so I guess an inquiring mind could experiment. It's also pretty much identical to Beck's, so if you can't get Tsing Tao that's the alternative.

In one or another Indian cookbook, I found a variation on parathas that uses a fairly similar technique. Except, of course, they used ghee for the oil. They were easy and quick to make, and even more so to eat.

You may also want to visit the Beyond Vegetarianism website. The proprietor is a long-term vegetarian and sometime vegan who started the site because he felt that the various dogmas (and pseudoscientific substantiations thereof) did vegetarianism a disservice. While he supports the choice of a vegetarian lifestyle, much of the site is given over to debunking the various forms of silliness that are promoted by earnest and well-meaning vegetarians, as well as some of the more self-serving health gurus. More to the point, in this specific instance, the site has a great deal of information about the anti-nutrient properties of various raw foods, and which ones should not be combined and/or should be eaten in isolation at a separate sitting. Raw spinach, for example, binds several nutrients and enables them to pass through your body without benefit. This is not an issue for most of us, since as opportunistic omnivores we have lots of nutrients passing through our systems on a given day. For a raw foodist, especially a vegan, it can be a real concern.

I like vegetarian food well enough, if it's prepared well. I could probably even eat vegetarian for an extended period in a place like India where it's done well. Here, though, I don't trust the food in explicitly vegetarian places to be well made, because frankly it usually isn't. In order to sample a significant number of vegetarian places, and sort out which ones do it well, would require pretty much my entire eating-out budget (roughly, two-three times a year) for some time to come. Frankly, I don't see the point when I can do better myself at home. I have no problem with legumes in general, I eat them more than most North Americans. Tofu I can do without, as it is a waste of mouthspace as used in most vegetarian establishments I've visited. As for Yves and the rest of the mock-meat crowd, well...some of them are modestly palatable, but I still don't see the point. I will give Yves this, though...their Lack of Ram is one of my all-time favourite product names.

Yes. I don't often do a traditional roasted turkey, unless I'm hosting a get-together with family (I'm not, this year). I don't have anything much against turkey, but it's not one of my favourite meats...especially a whole roasted bird. Even when done perfectly (a rare occurence), roasted turkey gives me a wicked case of drymouth for about three days afterwards. Sometimes, if I can get a nice fresh turkey, I'll break it down to make multiple meals out of, and roast one or both breasts for the Day Itself. One stuffed with fruit and nuts, one stuffed with a traditional savoury stuffing; this way the stuffing cooks to a food-safe temperature before the turkey turns to sawdust. When I'm doing this I roast the carcass and wingtips for drippings and then make stock, so running out of gravy is never an issue. If you make stock with your current turkey, then you'll always have enough gravy for the next one; avoiding the heartbreak of running out. I kicked off this weekend by cooking a piece of pork sirloin, stuffed with coarsely-chopped prunes. I served it with orange-saffron rice, glazed baby carrots from my garden (I deliberately overseed, so they stay small right up 'til fall), and some escarole sauteed in butter with toasted walnuts, then deglazed with fresh-squeezed orange juice...sort of a warm "vinaigrette" effect. I deglazed the pork pan with a splash of LBV port, finished the sauce with butter, and that was dinner. For tomorrow I've got a piece of ham. Normally I'd roast that and make gravy with the drippings, but I'm thinking just this once maybe I'll do the ham "en croute," like a German friend of mine in Nova Scotia used to do. Wrapped in bread dough and then baked, and the bread soaks up all the lovely juices. If I do that, then I'll have to come up with something else in the line of a sauce. Buttermilk "gravy," perhaps, with a bit of the ham's fatcap diced and rendered and sprinkled into it for some extra umph. I've got a "Sweet Dumpling" squash and a "Delicata" that I want to use up, so I'll probably use the Sweet Dumpling to bookend my Thanksgiving meal. I'm leaning towards little ramekins of soup for a starter, and then with the remaining squash individual souffles for dessert. Maybe with a ginger creme anglaise. Or perhaps squash creme brulees, I haven't decided yet. I have new potatoes, baby carrots, and pretty little beetroots from my garden, and at present I'm still deciding how I'm going to put it all together. That's the fun part.

Hi, there! After a year in the bakery at my work, I'm back to being a cook again (woooooohooo!). On a day-to-day basis, I'm now the saucier, responsible for soups, stocks, sauces, etc. However, for a cooking class later on this month, I've been asked to put together a meal (four or five courses) on the theme of Oktoberfest. Now, I do have a reasonable grounding in German food, and coming up with individual dishes is not a problem as far as that goes. My question is whether there are dishes that are generally identified with Oktoberfest, or at least seasonal? As far as I know, most O-fest food is of the "eat-while-strolling-with-a-beer-in-hand" variety, which doesn't really lend itself to a cooking demo. I guess I could show them how to make bratwurst, if it came to that. Format is demonstration-style rather than hands-on, with me having roughly 90 minutes to prep the dishes before the wondering eyes of the (20-35) paying customers; after which we all sit down and eat the food (which would be prepared in quantity by other kitchen staff, while I'm setting up and doing the demo). Should ideally be the sort of dishes that people might legitimately want to try at home, which is why I'm not keen on the sausage-making. Whaddaya say? Any suggestions?

When I lived in Saskatchewan years ago, I knew a family of English ex-pats. They'd arrived from the southern end of England, where the climate is similar to Vancouver, on a January day in the late 1960's. Back then, there were no nice tunnels into the terminal; they rolled the steps up to the door and you got down and walked across the tarmac. They arrived in a terrible blizzard, in white-out conditions, and the pilot was lucky to find a small hole in the storm so he could set down. When the doors opened, the father was the first out, setting an example for the rest of his rather intimidated family. The kids, of course, swallowed their terror and followed. When the mom got to the doorway, though, she stopped dead, grabbed the doorframe, and announced to the entire area that she was NOT getting off, NOBODY could make her, and they could just turn the airplane around RIGHT NOW and take her home. They told this as an amusing anecdote, when I knew them in the early '80s, but the mom had only the thinnest of smiles...

I use this kind, and it works just fine for almost anything I could think of. Wheel cutter I thought that croissant cutters were a pretty neat idea, too, until I priced them out.

Score! Picked up a copy of Cooks Illustrated's "The Best Recipe"...from a remaindered bin at Safeway...for $6.99 CDN (list price $40 CDN).

<sigh> This Nova Scotian's been living inland for 2 1/2 years. Last time I did that (early 1980's) I made two trips to the East Coast and one to the West during that time. No such luck this go-round...I can't fit all I own in a duffle bag anymore, and hitchhiking with the wife & kids is O-U-T out! Your pix have been wonderful medicine for the homesickness. Maine looks almost as nice (cough, cough) as New Scotland.

When I lived in Newfoundland, no festive occasion (graduation, wedding, baby shower, etc) was complete without the mandatory three bowls of potato salad: one white, one green, one pink. The white was (at least where I lived) yer basic potato/egg/Miracle Whip agglomeration; the green had mushed-up canned peas mixed into it; while the pink had little bits of pickled beet and the attendant juice mixed in. Not being a fan of Miracle Whip, I wasn't that keen on any of them. Other than that, I'm open to pretty much any variation on the overall theme of potato salad. I like them with and without eggs; with mayo or vinaigrette (or German-style with bacon fat and vinegar); with or without mustard; with pretty much any kind of pickle or any kind of fresh herb...let's face it, potatoes whether warm or cold are pretty much a blank slate. They'll work with any combination of other ingredients that taste good in their own right.