Teri Everitt
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Posts posted by Teri Everitt
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Orange Crush. For me it was Orange Crush...
A little self-promotion, and a walk down Daily Gullet memory lane
LIME Crush! In glass bottles........I miss those glass bottles. As for your article, I don't quite get it. If feeding any of my 3 kids had depended on me stumbling down to the kitchen to mix formula or heat bottles, they'd all have starved! Bottle feeding is much, much more work. I can't believe you were brave enough to taste test baby formula!
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As for what I make that I don't like to eat... hmmm.... most of my vegan desserts! LOL! I'm veg (but I eat dairy) so I'll take butter and cream over margarine and soymilk any day!
LCS..............I agree with you about butter and cream, but do you have any really good vegan dessert recipes? I don't want to eat that stuff, but I happen to have a mad crush on a guy who is vegan, and it wouldn't hurt to have a couple of recipes that might get me some, umm, appreciation
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I wonder if I merely enjoy hearing myself talk?
Can someone recommend a latin restaurant in Ottawa for me to try? Failing that please suggest authentic mexican that is NOT feleena's, mexicali rosa's or that place on Elgin St.
Not a restaurant exactly........but if you go to the Mercado Latino on Montreal road there is a small kitchen in the back. Weekend mornings they have tacos and tamales I think. GO EARLY. Last time I stopped in at about 10:30 am and they had stopped serving food in the back already. I'm not sure who is doing the cooking now, they used to have an older lady who kicked ass!
The few times I've eaten the food there, it was homestyle cooking, not restaurant food.
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I used to read cookbooks as a child also. My mom wasn't very interested in baking so I made all the cookies, muffins etc in our house. I also had to cook dinner from about the age of 10 but I didn't usually have a choice in what to make, mom always left a note with very detailed instructions.
My favorite childhood treat....I would bring home puffballs for my mom to fry in butter for me. Mushrooms of any kind are still my favorite food. I also really loved freshly caught fish panfried in butter (even though I'm the only one in my WHOLE family that doesn't like to fish).
Summers in Peterborough, my sisters preferred to stay with my Grandpa, but I always went to Grandma's place. She was the worst cook ever, she was always on some weird diet that she had read about in the National Enquirer so her kitchen was full of strange stuff like Brewer's Yeast and horrible skim milk, but she would let me drink as much coffee or tea as I wanted, would take me shopping for proper food when I stayed with her, and would let me order whatever I wanted when she took me out for dinner, regardless of the price. This woman.........who lived on dark rum, cigarettes and coffee despite her "diet of the week" and who showed no signs of enjoying preparing OR eating food, bought me my first cappucino at the tender age of eleven.
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Anything rose flavored tastes like I'm eating my grandma's hand lotion. We do two things with rose (and we use rose oil, not water), and the stuff is so strong, especially when it's first mixed, that the smell gets on my hands even if the oil doesn't, and lasts well past several hand-washings. (To give you an idea of how strong this stuff is, just 18 drops will flavor a 27 pound batch of frangipane filling.)
And, if I'm not mistaken (I might be), I think this is my 1,000th post!
You must smell like the Avon lady after! Ewwwwwwwwwww.
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Pumpkin pie. I love the smell, but the texture is just horrific.
Ditto that! Baby food in a crust.........strangely, I like the taste of pumpkin okay, and will eat it in cheesecake, pound cake etc. , but never EVER in pie form!
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So I have to confess.........I don't really like chocolate except as an accent flavour. I will eat it with nuts, coconut, peanut butter but I'll never eat one of those stupidly named "Chocolate Insanity" this or "Death by Chocolate" that. I don't strongly dislike the flavour of chocolate so much, I just find that I'm pretty much done after 2 bites. I also loathe meringues and marshmallows and although I have made creme caramel from several recipes at several restaurants, I've never tasted one that I didn't find disgustingly eggy. I love creme brulee though.
How about you.....what do you make that you don't even want to taste?
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I've probably got everybody beat.
On Tuesday, while sitting around waiting for some chocolate cream cakes to set up before cutting for a party of 200 ( a total of 13 cakes - party starts at 3:00 in one of our banquet rooms that you need to drive to), the Banquet chef comes running into my office ( at 11:00 AM ) yelling, " There's something wrong with your cakes, they taste really salty!" What? So I go to taste the cream on the cakes and you guess it, salty.
Someone had put salt in my sugar bin! So now I have these chocolate cakes that need to be redone, and did I mention, a party that required 4 of the same cakes that were cut and ready to go already, also need to be redone ( Party starts at 12:15!)
Luckily I had 4 chocolate cakes baked and I quickly filled and decorated them
( and then put in the freezer to set up as quickly as possible ), but now needed to make 13 more chocolate cakes, bake ( which takes 45 minutes ) cool in the freezer, cut, assemble ,and set up enough to cut by 2:30 ( banquet chef needs to have food at functions 1/2 hour before party starts at the latest. ) Well, I "rigged it" as a chef I used to work for would say, and got them cut and ready at 2:30 on the dot.
Did I also mention that the ganache I use to make my chocolate cream had salt in it? Also had to remake 6- 10" white chocolate raspberry cheesecakes that my pastry cook had made, salt in them as well.
This happened on Tuesday and I still do not know how this happened. Needless to say I now taste the sugar in the bin EVERY SINGLE TIME I need some.
Jason
P.S. My staff of 3 was already gone for the day so I had to redo everything by myself.
I am completely at a loss for words............what a horrible experience for you. Makes me feel a little guilty for having all of next week off. Hope that NEVER happens to you again.
We had a co-op student named Bruno who did the same thing with the jaconde cake and some orange curd. I came in and the jaconde was really thin and firm and just looked "wrong" so I tasted it, then I had to go and taste everything made that day, just in case. The orange curd was grainy (large quantities of salt don't dissolve the way sugar does) but I had to taste it anyway just to be sure........one of the most disgusting things I have ever had in my mouth
So you had a very BRUNO experience .......
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for the square mac, i have seen templates used and freehand piping of the square shape. with the italian meringue you will find that the batter is a little bit on the stiff side and it is easy to pipe into shapes. we have made the macarangle as well as the mactagon. just always keep in mind there is a bit of spreading and flattening out before baking.
as for the sweetness of the syrup, that is up to you and what you use. for example for the chocolate macs we use a simple syrup infused with cocoa nibs so it adds a chocolatey flavor and not much extra sweetness. if you used a rose syrup you would probably not make it a 1:1 ratio.
as for fillings the sky is the limit, any kind of ganache, jam, caramel, buttercream, ice cream for macaron glace............
I piped heart shaped ones for last Valentine's Day......what a pain.
Thanks for the demo Nicole.
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DO NOT look at this thread when you're hungry!!!!
It's my ex-husband's week with the kids so I am away from home and I will not attempt serious cooking in the tiny kitchen where I am staying. I have been living on bread and cheese all week
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The Recipe
2 kilo teint per teint (1/2 and 1/2 almond flour ground with 10x)
1K sugar (for syrup)
750 g whites
you can substitute partial other nut flours, add some cocoa by eye, food coloring etc
Nicole,
how much water do you use to make the sugar syrup? We make our macarons at work with beaten egg whites rather than meringue and they are REALLY unreliable, so I'd like to give these ones a try.
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The eggnog cheesecake bars were boring. And I couldn't figure out why the filling wouldn't smooth out when I was mixing it - it looked like watery cottage cheese. Any ideas what I did wrong?
Was the cream cheese mixture warm and the eggs cold when you added them in? Cold eggs or dumping them in all at once could cause the mixture to be lumpy. Sometimes a food processor works better than a mixer for making a small amount of cheesecake batter.
If it's any consolation, after making buche de noel for paying customers all week I had promised my 10 year old daughter we could make one at home....I then realized I had left my notebook with my own personal tried-and-true recipes at work, so I tried to do my chocolate sheet cake recipe from memory in a smaller amount than I would ever make at work. While mixing it I noticed that the cocoa powder I have at home sucks (instead of being nice and dark it was reddish brown and vaguely chocolate coloured. The cake baked, was turned out onto a clean towel sprinkled with sugar and rolled up to cool in a rolled shape. I can't even describe the look on my daughters face when I unrolled our cake to fill it and it had a half dozen large tears in it..........we made apple pie instead
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Bread is not scary...and once you get used to mixing and handling dough you can make almost any kind......go for it. If bread scares you, here's a pizza dough recipe even a child could make.
Pizza dough
500 g flour (bread flour or all purpose)
20 g instant dry yeast
20 g salt
40 g oil (olive is nice, but corn or veg works fine too)
325 g water (cool but not cold)
Weigh out dry ingredients and put in your mixer bowl, pour in oil and water.
Start mixing with dough hook on first speed until ingredients start to come together, once dough begins to mass boot mixer up to second speed and mix until dough begins to look smooth and leaves the sides of the bowl clean.
Put a little bit of oil in the bowl and turn the dough around to coat with oil....this will prevent the dough from crusting. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap ( I use an bread/milk bag cut up one side and tie it tightly over the bowl).
At this point you can:
Let rise 40 to 45 minutes and use immediately OR
put it immediately into the fridge and let it proof cold all day when you are at work (I do this ALL the time)
Divide your dough in half, round it into a ball.........let it rest about 10 minutes, shape and top, bake at 400F for about 10 minutes or so. Makes 2 medium pizzas. You can add herbs/garlic whatever to the dough as well.
I bake mine on pizza pans sprinkled with a small handful of cormeal or semolina.
Really easy, and when I mix a batch of dough in the morning I can come home from work and have dinner ready for the kids in 30 minutes or so.
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Is Christmas the most difficult season for folks in the pastry and baking service? I'm kinda guessing that it is but I would think that Easter and Valentines day would have their fair share of stress, too.
I think for cooks, Mother's Day has to be the most hellish shift of the year. For retail bakeries, the week preceding Christmas seems to be worst, but Valentine's Day is also not much fun if it happens to coincide with Winterlude here.
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Thanks for the laugh about the nut allergy people. I work in a private golf club, the members are all extremely rich. The one day of the year that we are closed is Christmas Day. They are now complaining that they pay over $280,000 dollars to join and why isn't the club open on Christmas. Don't they think we would like to be with our families. We work so hard to accomodate all their weird requests every other day. I don't understand why they are grateful for all they have and have a little heart towards others.
I work for a small business and we are closed for Christmas AND Boxing Day and my boss is very family friendly. I also don't get too many weird requests most of the time, but this is only my second year there, before that I worked the previous Christmas at a hotel (crippling volume to deal with but NO contact with customers) and in wholesale supplying restaurants for the 3 years before that (NO contact with the public at all).
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the concept of paying $280,000 for anything.........or even HAVING $280,000! Hope you had a good Christmas Pastrymama! I knew there had to be other people around here with frazzed nerves and sore feet!
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Wow......I wasn't actually hoping anyone had a worse day than me, really. Feel free to share even if you don't work in a restaurant/hotel/bakery etc. Lots of businesses are crazy this time of year.
It was really more absurd than bad, and we were all laughing about it........even the bomb scare thing (although it was nervous laughter).
Best part of yesterday: One of my co-workers got tired of the radio station on in the front which was playing the Gypsy Kings seemingly forever....so he changed the station and the radio was just randomly playing Christmas in New York by the Pogues.
Worst part of yesterday: Having the front staff ask me if there are brazil nuts in the fruit cakes (there are) and hearing the customer say "Oh, well they look lovely...I'll just buy one and see if I have a reaction."
I didn't realize these nut allergy people liked to live on the edge like that!
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It's a tiring time of year to be pastry bitch! It's crazy busy at work, cranky co-workers, rude customers......phone ringing off the hook, people calling up and not getting the concept that Christmas ordering was cut off Monday at closing time and that they will have to come in and choose from what's in the front case since they didn't bother to order their buche de noel earlier and NO we won't put one aside for them.............
Oh, and the day started off with the building next door being evacuated because of a "suspicious" package. We just kept on working with the street closed off by the police and all the workers from the evacuated building in the bakery and bistro for lunch, coffee, croissants etc.
Enough about me..........how was YOUR day?
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My stepdad always made tourtiere for Christmas. He always cooked it himself and spent half the day making the filling (Mom made the pastry for him). He grew up in a family of 7 kids with a single parent so their version was very bluecollar (not like the ones at my work which have venison etc)......his version was equal parts ground pork and ground beef, a very large yellow onion, some savory, salt and pepper and a tiny bit of sage and thyme. Sounds uncomplicated but because there are so few seasonings it is quite difficult to get them exactly right. He died at age 41 unexpectedly of an aneurism and never gave out the recipe, so I had to figure it out myself. This year I get to go "back to the drawing board" now that my oldest daughter is a vegetarian.
Our other family Christmas tradition: my mom's ceramic moose gravy boat ---apparently the best part of holiday dinners during my childhood was having the "gravy moose" barf on your mashed potatoes!
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Have you ever tried warheads? Man, those things were sour. When I was a kid, the bus driver used to drop us off at a candy store on the way home from school and I always got 1 dozen warheads to suck on the ride back. I used to shit like a firehose when I got back because it was a mild laxative but it was so worth it.
I have tried Warheads, but as much as I like sour candy, I've never cared for hard candy (I always end up biting and chewing them...very hard on the teeth) I definitely haven't eaten enough of them in one sitting to enjoy the "aftereffect". I'll just have to take your word on that one!
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Usually drinking saps my appetite so I try to eat BEFORE, but I used to make myself something to eat at 3am when I still lived at home with my parents....the most unusual thing had to be the lasagne sandwich which was just a big slab of my mom's lasagne in between slices of white supermarket bread.
A couple of years ago I had the pizza with gravy at House of Georgie here in Ottawa.......it wasn't as bad as it sounds but I definitely wouldn't eat it sober!
If you haven't experienced pizza with gravy it is just a slice of pepperoni pizza with a ladle of gravy poured over (beef? pork? chicken? I have no idea)
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SOUR CANDY!
I anticipate someday needing reconstructive surgery to my teeth and jaws.........but I just love them.
Sour Patch Kids (these are nicely sour, but they will make your gums ache)
Sour Skittles (when you've eaten enough of these at once you can actually get a welt on the inside of your cheek...eat a few more after this point and you will get a slight "shock" along the welt with each one ....similar to the effect you get if you bite down on a foil gum wrapper with a tooth that has a filling)
Hands down my favorite!
Jelly Belly Sassy Sours (good, some flavours are better than others)
Sour Starburst (barely sour.....don't go there)
I also love Almond Joy, so much so that I buy one whenever I see them for sale (they don't seem to be around much in Canada)
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Roasted Banana, Hazelnut and Cinnamon
Espresso and Caramel (especially for ice cream)
Earl Grey Tea and Dark Chocolate
White Chocolate and Cranberry with either pistachio or almonds
Toffee Chocolate and Almond
Coconut & just about anything sweet!
On the savoury side....duck foie mousse with carmelised apples and onions.
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Yes, I bake cheesecakes in regular cake pans with-out removable bottoms and I highly suggest it to everyone. You can bake using a water bath and never have a leak. In addition to having more size options when using a standard cake pan.
Wendy....do you ever bake cheescakes in square or rectangular pans? I wanted to make a large cheesecake to cut into diamond shapes for banquets but I was unsure about getting them out of the pans. I have done cheesecakes in round silpat molds to make a "deconstructed" cheesecake with the cheesecake circle placed onto a cinnamon almond sable and topped with carmelised apples. I got them out of the molds but it was a pain and 3 of them broke. Any advice you could give me on making non-round cheesecake shapes?
Thanks, Teri
Deal Breakers
in Food Traditions & Culture
Posted
I think you might have gone on a date with Elmer Fudd........you should have asked him to say "Be vewwy quiet....I'm hunting wabbit."
I almost needed the Heimlich while reading about your hellish date...maybe I shoudn't have been reading it so soon after dinner..........