Okanagancook

The dinner was a resounding success. Everyone was raving about the food and when the plates come back licked clean you know they were sincere. Someone asked if this could be a monthly affair! Financially it was very successful and we have enough money now to bring the family's relatives here from Regina in a couple of weeks. That will make an enormous difference to their mental state of mind. The local wineries/distilleries and businesses were very generous in their donations with one winery donating a whole case of wine. Here is what we made:

Deryn: sorry for the late reply...was busy cooking. We ended up cooking whole chicken breasts and keeping them warm. We had 25 breasts and we ended up slicing them in half as we plated them. There is a picture coming up: topped with yogurt sauce. We cooked them in three batches and checked them frequently. We ended up doing all the prep at my house. I have a large kitchen. Monday I asked another volunteer to help me shop. Thank goodness. We had two large trollies full of groceries. Monday afternoon I made the dressings and spices; Tuesday three volunteers came over at 9 am and we worked until around 2:30 then drank wine :-); Wednesday we cooked the chicken, fried the onions for the Mojadara; fried the meatballs and cooked in the sauce; cooked the carrots most of the way through then we took it all down to the hall and set up. All in all I think 50 or so man-hours was spent on shopping and food prep. Then another 10 or 15 man-hours selling tickets, making posters; setting up, etc., etc.

Possibilities here are getting endless. Enjoy and would love to hear your feedback.

Well, we have a sold out fund raising dinner on Wednesday! Filled two shopping carts full of groceries today. Asked another volunteer to help me, thank goodness. It is a lot of work. Applied for a community grant at the local Superstore and were turned down. Very disappointed. We bought all the food there and we bring the families to shop there every week. Pooh. did four hours of mis en place today. Tomorrow I have three additional helpers including the wife from the family. Loads of chopping, etc to do. The local wineries have generously donated wine for raffling off and other donations from local businesses have been acquired. i will try and take some pictures at the dinner. all very exciting.

Oh , Lordie, Lordie!!!! You are killing me, oh just a minute, need to wipe the droole off my chin. They look so moist. How many hours did you smoke them? Great job.

Your wish is my command! we have been to the Rock Oven last year when they reopened. It had only been open a week or two. It was good. I would not rave about. The steak is apparently a rip off according to a friend who had it. $45. It is a beautiful spot. go to Lake Breeze and try to get there around or a little before noon so you get in. We were there last week and it was outstanding. in Naramata there are new owners of the cafe and they have breakfast stuff and lunch fare. Cannot say what it is like. They have been open a week. I got a regular coffee to go and it was way better than the coffee made by the previous owner. the Grapeleaf beside the cafe is excellent. Home cooking. Their hours are a little difficult to understand. Breakfast and lunch only. It is usually packed. went to Hillside Bistro at the winery twice in the past three weeks. It is very pricey. I had one good meal and one sinker. So you decide. many wineries have food now. Joie has a pizza oven, Red Rooster has a lunch service on the patio done by Bogners. Therapy have some kind of patio grill but I do not go there as I do not like their wine for some reason. I think it is because of the location of their vineyard.....in a frost pocket. Misconduct has a bistro which is apparently pricey with tiny portions. Bench 1775 which has the best view in the valley have picnic baskets and you can sit on the patio, drink wine and eat. Good wine also. the vanilla pod at poplar grove is worth going to just for the view and the great wine. It gets mixed reviews and I have had mixed experiences but it is really worth a visit for a snack and a glass of wine. in penticton Brodo is wonderful for lunch and if you want East Indian food Lashi is excellent. The Cellar Door is supposed to be good. I do not like Theos but it is consistent. The Bad Tattoo has good beer and pizzas, worth a visit.The Cellar Door and The Cannery bewery on Ellis are also good. be sure to visit our good friend at Deep Roots for a great story, nice people and pretty good wine...they won a Platanium for their Gamay last year at the All Canadian wine Awards. The view rivals Bench 1775. have not been to Gausthouse but hear good things about the restaurant, not the pub. We do not go out to eat in Kelowna much but my brother has been to Raudx a few times and he loves it but it is a pain because there are no reservations. we have been to Bouchons and it was excellent. Waterfront has a fantastic chef but I have not been there.. hope that helps. cheers and enjoy your trip if you have any questions when you are out here or if you want to pop round for a glass of wine on our deck overlooking the lake give us a call. 778-514-1587. Heather

Lobster and Champagne! What a concept!

The cookbook Zahav introduced me to tahini sauce. In his instructions he says this "The important step here is to allow the garlic and lemon juice to hang out for 10 minutes after blending but before adding the tahini. This step helps stabilize the garlic and prevents it from fermenting and turning sour and aggressive, which is the problem with a lot of tahini sauces." He uses garlic, lemon juice, salt, tahini, ground cumin and ice water to thin to your preferred consistency. He then uses this sauce in many of his subsequent recipes. So quite different from shain's thinner sauce. I found Zahav's sauce to be quite strong so I think I would prefer shain's version...will have to try it. Here is a link to the recipe: http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2016/03/israeli-style-tahini-sauce-recipe.html In the June/July issue of Fine Cooking there is a recipe for preserved lemon tahini sauce, here: http://www.finecooking.com/recipes/preserved-lemon-tahini-sauce.aspx Says to thin the sauce with additional lemon juice and use as a dressing for green salads; serve as a dip for falafel or spread on lamb or veggie burgers. Great thread Thanksforthecrepes.

Thanks liuzhou. A heart warming read! Amongst the first things the family asked for were kitchen related: a meat grinder; a blender; and now she wants a mortar and pestle...a large one. The mother can cook quite well considering she is only 20 years old and already has two sons: a 3 1/2 year old and a 2 1/2 year.

That is totally awesome kayb. Every little bit helps. Here is the treasurer's address. Cheques can be made out to NCSRI which stands for Naramata Community Syrian Refugee Initiative. Cheques can be mailed to: Renee Matheson, Box #125, Naramata, British Columbia, Canada V0H 1N0

Tender little shoots from my New Zealand spinach plant.

Some thin cut steak with new potatoes, fiddle heads, mushrooms and corn. A little herb butter on the steak. The other dinner was dahl, rice, roast chicken, grilled radish and green onions both from the garden.

I have a fairly large stash of sesame seeds but they are not hulled (that's what happens when you send someone, not mentioning any names, to the Asian Store without clear instructions about what kind of sesame seeds to buy). Can I use them for tahini making? Or for the sauce I could just whiz them with the water? I have a dry grind jar for my Vitamix. Very interesting shain. Thanks for info.

thanks Lisa. I do have a thermapen so will do what you said. Sadly no RD near here.

Update: Fund raising dinner is set for June 1st which will be held in a little hall here in Naramata. Seats 44. We have the menu set: hummus and that spicy pepper dip from the dinner I did above accompanied by focaccia bread donated by a local bakery. Then some roasted chicken with middle eastern spices; tamarind meatballs; rice and lentils with the crispy onions; roasted dill carrots with goat cheese; and fattosh. A glass of wine made by locals who have a club called "Artisan Wine Makers of Naramata"....a bunch of 15 guys who grow their own grapes and make their own wine for their private consumption. Each one has donated two bottles so it should be a good 'wallet opener' for our raffle Fruit for dessert. Our little band of volunteers will make everything in my kitchen and take it down to the hall's kitchen for a buffet. We are now trying to get some donations from Superstore towards the cost of the groceries. I costed everything out (boy that was a chore...took me 5 hours) and we will make $25 per plate and then the raffle and any donations people can give. Should be fun and I shall try to take pics along the way. The Syrian mother is going to help us prep! The main focus of the fund raiser is to get enough funds to pay for the father's brother and his family to move here to Naramata from Regina in Saskatchewan. $1400 apparently. We have the house available. They are such lovely people. I was down at their house today and she said she and her husband spent 6 hours making these little dumplings made of flour and stuffed with ground beef, onions, garlic and parsley topped with yogurt. She even heated a few up in the microwave for me to try! I showed them how to make their own pitas to save money and apparently the father was in the kitchen this morning rolling out pitas...sweet. He is such good father. I was at the store today and they had small nice okra. Previously when she had been at the store the okra was too big and woodie. So I got her a bag of them and she had a big old smile on her face when I pulled them out of the bag. I asked her how she cooks them. Answer: onion, tomato sauce and meat. On the lamb front, they asked me again today about getting a whole lamb. The father's brother who is living in Regina got one and he killed it himself, with the throat slit. So they are asking can we do this too. I called my lamb farmer up the valley and asked if it was possible for them to come up and get their own lamb and kill it at the farm. To my amazement she said of course we can accommodate that BUT, and very firm on this, they have to be experienced at doing it. She has had a couple of bad experiences and doesn't want a repeat. Apparently, the father does have experience so I will have to explore that further but it looks promising. They would share the lamb with the three other Syrian families in the area. We would help them cut it up here seeing we have all the equipment. I've done loads of lamb butchers before and they probably have too. Such fun. I'll let you know how it goes. I'm just nervous cooking chicken...don't want to dry it out.

You folks are making me drool with all the fantastic meals and such diversity. Very inspirational. I scored some fiddleheads today. Will have them with the first new potatoes from the Fraser Valley. I find myself unable to decide what to make these days. Leafing through cookbooks; checking out my Eat Your Books Bookmarks. Just can't decide. Stupid. I should just pick a book and start cooking from it. This always happens when we get busy and setting aside time to do some real cooking is hard to find. It's the hockey playoffs and of course our NBA team. Don't want to miss any of the games which usually start at dinner time. I did make a whole rack of lamb for my birthday. Can'b believe we ate the whole rack! Then our 42 year anniversary was yesterday and we had a very simple grass fed organic rib eye steak each which were absolutely fabulous accompanied by fresh corn and steamed greens from our garden.

Great looking meals AnnaN and robirdstx. That sauce on the crab plate looks to go well with the crab cake. My two neighbours and I went to a local winery bistro last week for a ladies lunch. I had the marguez pasta dish as did one of the others but with corn pasta due to being Celiac. We both got about a 1/3 of a cup of oil in the bowl...perhaps from cooking the sausage. It made mine, to me, almost inedible. I didn't want to make a fuss so I just fished out what I could, drained off as much oil as I could before eating it. The other lady didn't seem to have an issue with the oil and happily ate about half of it and asked for a doggie bag. I did comment as the waitress took my 1/2 eaten plate away that I found it to be overly oily to the point of inedible. Nothing was done, no apology. This was probably because my table mate had no issue, oh well. $55 for that and a 6 oz glass of Pinot Noir. Won't be back for quite some time.

Crunchy, fatty, porkie bits nestled in little pillows! They are a thing of beauty.

Steam Whistle, my new favourite beer!

Don't worry about it. Thanks for your help. cheers

THANK YOU DERYN. Unfortunately it looks like they only ship in Ontario and we are in B.C. The price for a leg of lamb is cheaper than the $17/lb I was quoted. We'll get something worked out probably from the Vancouver end. There are loads of Halal butchers there but someone has to drive out there. And the family needs a freezer.

Deryn: He asked what the celery was so he was not familiar with it. Good idea about juicing lemons with a spoon, which they have. I am not sure if the family will be attending, probably not eating 'cause seating is quite limited. May be they will come after the meal for the fund raising part. We will not be getting Halal meat because it is so much more expensive and we are trying to keep the food costs down. I spend five hours yesterday getting the menu set up and costing it as best I could. The dinner isn't until June 1 or 2nd. It is difficult to get Halal meat. Just a few places in the Okanagan sell it. No lamb which is what they crave. There are more Halal meats available in Vancouver but that doesn't help us here. It doesn't appear as though the family have to have all halal products. They do buy canned fava beans, pasta, Oreo cookies, potato chips, regular milk and eggs. Liuzho and Shain thanks for those kind words. We have so much to be thankful for here in Canada. The family is very appreciative. Lisa Shock, that is quite a bit of protein for one slice of pizza but it comes with 17 grams of fat also. Meat brings other nutrients other than protein and they don't drink milk as a beverage. The male's protein needs are up around 90 grams a day. Good idea about the soy flour addition. Right now I'm just trying to keep it simple. My other idea for the home made pizza was the point you raised about being able to get more veggies on the pizza. We made three kinds and the toppings included grilled eggplant (which they loved), grilled zucchini slices, canned artichoke hearts, green pepper, mushrooms, grilled onions, cheese and the chicken. I suggested to her to use the no name canned tomato sauce for her pizzas. I took over some rehydrated garden tomatoes from my last year's stash which made a nice rich sauce. So I think they will be making more of those as the kids gobbled them up. And you are correct in that I need to check to see if she knows about lentils, rice and pitas providing complimentary protein sources. There is so much going on with the family at the moment. Government funds are delayed due to their move here and changing banking institutions, etc., etc. They have very little cash at the moment, hence the need for fund raising. I plan on approaching the mother about what else they eat now that we are getting proficient at using the itranslate app. Now they have a nice frying pan, fritattas are on the menu for sure. They don't have a freezer other than the small compartment in their fridge. I have already pointed out to her how much cheaper it is to buy dry beans and make them herself and we'll demonstrate that when I show her my hummus recipe. The sunflower seed idea is interesting. I shall have to try that here first. My recipe doesn't use a lot of tahini, just two tablespoons. They are choosing what meat they purchase and kosher meats are just as rare in these parts as Halal meats. Thanks for your time and effort to post your excellent suggestions. cheers. The good news from yesterday is that they have a garden plot to use for the summer! We shall get things planted very soon. They have been gifted with tomato plants and I think some cucumber plants. I have four zucchini plants growing in my compost bin so I will get a few of those to them too. I also plan on getting them into our food bank program. Not sure how to do that but I'm sure they will qualify and that will give them two or three days worth of food every two weeks. Slowly we go forward. They have only been here four weeks.

Update. No talk of a welcome tea but now moving on to the fund raising activities. Every Victoria Day the town of Naramata has a May dance around the pole and crown the Mayday queen. Usually there are lots of people around so we are going to try and do some kind of fund raising at that event. I'm thinking I'll make more pitas and hummus and that may draw people to our donation table. It's a little town so I'm not sure how much money we will get but the family is in need of so many things, every little bit will help. We will also plan perhaps a Syrian dinner. One of the volunteers has been to culinary school. We will be discussing the menu but probably something simple like chicken kebabs in pitas with some salads. Not sure what the facilities are like where they plan to have it but the volunteers will make everything. I have taken on the task of helping the family with their nutrition, shopping and cooking in North America seeing I am a retired Dietitian. So far I have shown this very young mother how to make her own pita breads. They are on a very tight budget and pita breads are quite expensive at $3 or so for just 6. They probably go through two packages a day. So if she makes her own, or most of her own, then that's a savings of $42 a week!!! The recipe is from Flatbreads and Flavours. She can make the dough and keep it in the fridge for up to five days and make them in a cast iron frying pan that I picked up for her. She was really keen to do this and yesterday she proudly showed me that big pile of pitas she had made the day before. The next item to teach her was pizza. I noticed she bought frozen cheese pizzas. Because they only eat Halal meat the pizzas were lacking in protein for their main meal of the day. So I thought I could buy some Halal chicken, bake it with some Middle Eastern spices and shred it for their pizzas. (At the moment getting Halal beef has been hard but this week the butcher at our Super Store said he will bring it in once a week on Fridays when we take them shopping. So they could use ground beef on their pizzas too.) Last night we made three large pizzas on some sheet pans and boy did they like that. We are using iGoogle translate which works a treat. You just speak into the iPad/phone and it speaks back in Arabic! Sweet. Now here is the fun part. At the meet and greet in the above post I took the Hummus and gave them what was left. Last night they asked me if I could show them how to make it! I replied 'no, it's a secret' to which we all roared with laughter. So, that will be my next kitchen project. Need to find out if they have something in the kitchen to juice the lemons; they have the blender; may need to get a jar of tahini and cumin. She makes her own labneh. There was a big bowl of it in the fridge. She gave me a spoon to try and they have me some to take home. Delicious. Another thing I learned last night was the love of Oreo Cookies that exists in the Middle East. The mother would always buy two packages of Oreo cookies each time she shopped. Apparently it is a real 'comfort' food. The other thing are potato chips that they like and buy at each shopping trip. I think she uses them to help calm her little boys who can be quite exuberant at times. Learning slowly. Trying to steer them in the direction of healthy foods. Low on the veggie intake, just like our society. Yesterday they had celery for the first time! Soon there will be bountiful fruit here. The cherry crop will be a bumper one this year, that is if the weather holds. People will have extra veggies from their gardens which will help. Cheers

They did chop up the meat. But perhaps their conclusion that the more fat, the more the dulling effect on taste. Maybe btbyrd can ship you his steak and you can do a side by side comparison I certainly can't purchase such a steak where I am.

From Cook's Illustrated: ' Throughout years of cooking in the test kitchen, we’ve noticed that we tend to season fatty meat more generously than lean meat. To bolster our anecdotal evidence with real data, we set up the following experiment. EXPERIMENT We rounded up five meats ranging in fat content: turkey breast, pork loin, strip steak, and both 80 percent and 90 percent lean ground beef. We cooked the meat and chopped it into pieces. We then tossed 10-gram portions of each meat with increasing amounts of salt (0.1 percent, 0.25 percent, 0.5 percent, 0.75 percent, 1 percent, and 1.5 percent by weight of each sample). We had tasters try the samples in order, starting with an unsalted control, and had them record at what percentage the meat tasted properly seasoned. We also sent cooked samples of each type of meat to a lab to determine fat content. RESULTS Sure enough, the fattier the meat the more salt it needed to taste properly seasoned. Tasters preferred the lean turkey breast (0.7 percent fat) and pork loin (2.6 percent fat) seasoned with 0.5 percent salt by weight. The strip steak (6 percent fat) and 90 percent lean ground beef (10 percent fat) required about 0.75 percent salt by weight to taste seasoned. And finally, the 80 percent lean ground beef (20 percent fat) tasted seasoned to a majority of tasters only when it reached 1 percent salt by weight. TAKEAWAY Our experiment adds credence to the conclusion of several recent published studies that fat has a dulling effect on taste. So when you season meat, remember to use a heavier hand on fatty burgers than you would on moderately fatty meats like strip steak and 90 percent ground beef. Use a lighter hand on lean meats like turkey breast and pork loin.