Okanagancook

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.

Picked a couple of nice baby pak choi. Steamed and tossed with a little oyster sauce and soy sauce.

Really, I don't think I've ever done that. I shall try that tonight with my Porterhouse. Is that a special finishing/flavoured salt or just Kosher salt?

I always salt my steaks and roasts in the morning of the day I cook them in the evening. It's the Judy Rodgers' school of salting early. It allows enough time for the meat juices to be drawn out, the salt to dissolve in them and get reabsorbed back into the meat. This deeply seasons the meat without a 'salty' taste. Check out page 35 onwards from her Zuni Cafe Cookbook.

When I make my oven baked fries I cut them; rinse well until the water is clear; recover with fresh cold water; store in fridge overnight; then bake. I have even left them in the fridge for two days. Nutritionally, you will be loosing some of the potassium as it leaches out into the water. Dietitians often recommend soaking potatoes to patients with kidney failure...reduces the burden on the kidney. No big deal for healthy people.

May 7th and the garden looks like June 7th. My garlic in the shade on the left, I swear will be putting out scapes soon and I reckon we may even be digging it up in another four weeks. The farmers are watching the grape vines grow three to four inches a day. Here is my garden this morning. The green cloth is my shade cloth beds where I grow spinach, lettuce and radish. It really works to prevent bolting with our hot weather. (You can see the farmer spraying the apple trees in the back ground....I ran back inside before he got any closer.) The basil plants need pinching off....I'm growing them for a friend who is in Edmonton until end of May. They will be 3 feet tall by then. The potatoes have been covered with the first layer of soil and the tomato plants are just getting established after transplant so should start to grow next week with the forecasted hot and sunny weather. The last picture is my revamped herb garden. It had been taken over by the mint (managed to contain it for 9 years but it escaped out of it's plastic container) and oregano. I planted some lettuce and basil as an experiment this year. There's tarragon, sage, lovage, chive, sorel and thyme growing in there.

The recipe in the book Aromas of Aleppo calls them 'kibbeh nabelsieh' The ingredients are 3 parts fine bulgur; 1 part all purpose flour and 1 part matzah meal which I understand is crushed matzah crackers. I could not get matzah crackers so I substituted panko bread crumbs. Some cumin, paprika, pepper, salt is added to the dough and the dry ingredients mixed together. 2 3/4 to 3 cups of lukewarm water and some oil is stired into the dry ingredients until a 'moist but firm dough' is achieved. That's it. Then you form the casings and stuff with the spiced ground beef filling. It was really difficult to form the shells and I ended up adding more water as I went along because the dough dried out seeing I took so long to form the Kibbeh. I put the formed ones on a sheet pan and they were put in the fridge for a few hours to dry out and consolidate before I deep fried them. The frying part was easy. Not one fell apart and they were very delicious with the crunchy crust and soft bulgur/beef interior. I made a tahini dipping sauce for them which was perfect. I hope that is what you were wanting. cheers

Oh, I have a sore throat too!

The mushrooms grow so fast. They just appeared in the mulch like little rockets from middle earth, four or five inches over night.

Ouch, poor family and what a waste. The first year after we spread mulch (wood was from some of the burned wood from the Okanagan Park Fire back in about 2007) morels started coming up all over the place. Each morning we did a 'walk about' with our tea in hand looking for new mushrooms. We had a lot in fact, so many I had to dry them. Drying them worked the best. You could go back to the store for some to dry if you have a dryer. So good. cheers

"WOWSERS"!!!!! A plate of shear beauty. I think I can even taste it.

I wonder if you substituted some semolina flour for wheat flour to make them more toothsome? This is the same idea as adding semolina when making pasta that you want more firm.

A few refried beans Anna N and that would be a perfect breakfast!

Oh, yes, the greens, grilled, thanks for the reminder.

Yeah, the one split. I really didn't think they would be nearly ready but when I checked, yikes, they were enormous.

Harvest time. Picked some arugula yesterday along with herbs. Butter lettuce should yield a few leaves soon. Many hummingbirds this am. :