plum tart

The picture says it all!LOL.

The first time I made coulibiac it was winter and we lived in an industrial loft over a taxicab meter repair business. All day long you could hear cars driving into the garage below. The exhaust of waiting taxis polluted the outside air. The kitchen in the loft was tiny - everything was tiny, stove, fridge, counter - there really wasn't a counter. I had to use my Quebec pine table to roll out dough. Also, I had a baby, about one year old. She was very busy. Anyway, for some reason the recipe for coulibiac in the Time/Life Classic French Cooking book interested me and I was young and fooishly brave. I broke the recipe up into sections and spread the work over three days. - the rice, egg and herb mixture one day, the veloute and crepes another and the salmon and the dough, and final assembly on the last day. Miracle of miracles, it worked out. It look like the picture in the book and it was sumptuously delicious. A foodie friend of my husband wept for joy. He had never eaten anything like it anywhere. If I hadn't already been married, he would have married me. About 12 years later, in my present home with a good kitchen. I decided to invite friends for dinner and make coulibiac. I had done it before, I could do it again! I remember my success fondly. A cherished memory. I was on vacation, and would have the requisite three days. This time however, it was summer. The first two days were fine - the rice, egg and herb mixture on day one; day two went well, the crepes and the veloute; but day three was hell - humid and hot, the salmon poached as it should have and was suitably pink and moist but the brioche dough was out of control, rising too quickly,overflowing the bowl, buttery slick, unmanageable. After considerable effort, I assembled the dish but this time, it did not look so gorgeous as the time life photograph did. Nor did it serve so neatly and beautifully. It sort of slithered all over the plates. Collapsed, it made for confused eating and messy plates. Really it was not the kind of dish for a hot summer's day. It tasted good and it made excellent picnic fare at Stratford the next day (in the rain) but somehow coulibiac lost its magic for me. I have never made it again.

I love Tender 1. I love the way Nigel Slater writes about food. He makes me ravenous every time. I guess I will have to get Tender 2. I can only imagine what he does with fruit!

I take great comfort in your drawers of ingredients and full refrigerator. I will save these photos and show my daughter who said I inflicted "refrigerator trauma" on her, meaning, there was never any room in the fridge because of all the condiments and food that Ihad prepared. How can anyone cook creatively without a lot of ingredient choice. Your meal looked delicious and your roulade has reminded me how much I love roulade and should make again myself sometime soon. maybe with lime or lemon curd or chocolate mousse as it is winter here.

I bought a bottle of Chambord several years ago to make a sauce to accompany duck breasts. It was a dish from Gourmet magazine that my husband always made and it was delicious. So when he retired as my very excellent chef I decided to make the dish myself. Well, the recipe didn't call for much and I still have the large round bottle in my liquor cabinet awkwardly taking up space. It also turns out that my husband used cassis because he didn't want to pay the extravagant price of Chambord. It is not so sweet and much better than chambord. The joke's on me. Someone mentioned Cherry Heering which is just too sweet for words but is supposed to be used in a sauce with cherries for Danish rice pudding which is full of cream and almonds and is eaten cold. I long ago replaced the traditional cherry sauce with fresh raspberry sauce. It tastes better and it looks gorgeous on the snow white pudding.

I always buy Fine Cooking. It is second only to Saveur in my estimation. I save all the issues and mark those with successful repeatable recipes. Recently I made a pumpkin spice cake which they had on the cover of the October issue I think. I have made it twice (I am eating in as I write) and it is a lovely moist light cake and the brown butter icing is just about the best bbi that I have every made. It is a layer cake in the photograph but I prefer to treat it as a coffee cake, so I make it in a bund pan and bake it longer. Then when it is cool I drizzle the brown butter icing over it and then add the pecan, candied ginger topping. The topping is supposed to include pepitas but being lazy and preferring more pecans and ginger I added more of them instead. I will be very sad when there are no pie pumpkins left. I have become rather addicted.

Thank you, Snadra you are much to modest in your oenophile remarks. Rather sophisticated imbibing I would say. If I ever am presented with kangaroo steaks, I will refer to your remarks. Oh yes, in good restaurants in Toronto, an American is a cup of coffee made with regular espresso with hot water added. It is my favourite way to drink coffee when I am out and about.

Gorgeous looking ham. Wish we could get ham that looked like that. I have a Polish friend who knows a country store near Milton, Ontario where the sausage is very good and they also sell cabbage rolls which I like but I don't recall seeing ham. Can't wait to see the kangaroo steaks after they are grilled. What kind of wine would you drink with them?

First the rye bread recipe. I had been searching for this recipe ever since I visited relatives in Denmark 18 years ago and finally found it last year in a newish Danish cookbook:" The Scandinavian Cookbook" by Trina Hahnemann. This is not "Noma", it is Scandinavian home cooking. Here is her recipe for rye bread: Sourdough starter: 1.5c rye flour, 1.25c. buttermilk, 1tsp coarse sea salt. Mix rye flour, salt and buttermilk in a bowl; cover with foil and let stand for 3 to 4 days at room temperature(77-86 degrees F) Dough 3c lukewarm water scant 2.75c rye flour scant 2.75c all purpose flour 1Tbsp sea salt In a bowl dissolve the starter in the lukewarm water. Add the rye flour, all purpose flour and salt and stir with a wooden spoon until you have a runny dough. Cover the bowl with a dish towel and set aside for 12 hours at room temperature. Loaf 1 pound cracked whole rye generous 1c lukewarm water 2 tsp salt Add the cracked whole rye, lukewarm water, and salt to the dough and stir again with a wooden spoon until the grains are evenly distributed. Take 3 Tbsp of dough, add 2 Tbsp coarse salt and save in a container in the fridge until you next make rye bread. It will last 6 to 8 weeks. Pour the rest of the dough into an 11.5 by 4 inch nonstick loaf pan that is 3.5 inches deep. (if you don't have a nonstick loaf pan oil your pan instead.) Cover the pan with a dish towel and let the bread rise 3-6 hours or until the dough has reached the rim of the pan. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F and bake the loaf for 1 hour and 45 minutes. Removed from pan and let cool. Note from plum tart: Being greedy I don't save any starter and use all the dough in a pullman loaf pan. That makes a nice large loaf which I cut into sections, some of which I freeze until I am ready to consume them. Of course I have to make the starter from scratch every time, but I love the ritual of this bread, so I don't mind. This is indeed a volkesbrod and you will love it. It is great with cheese, smoked fish, curried herring - all sorts of open face smorbrod combinations. It is wonderfully moist and chewy and of course, strongly flavoured of rye.

That dinner looks delicious and beautiful. Ditto the mango. I have an excellent Danish rye recipe that is easy to make once you have the sponge fermenting. It is moist and not crumbly and the kind of rye bread Danish people eat for breakfast. I am amazed what you cook from scratch after your long commute. I commute two hours each way every day between Hamilton and North Toronto. I determined long ago that I wanted to eat delicious food every day but would prepare some of it in advance. I mostly make braised dishes on the weekend, or stews, ragus for pasta, Chinese red cooked dishes, or curries. They mostly improved with age. Obviously accompanying vegetables are cooked fresh as are the salads. On Fridays if I don't go out for dinner I will buy wonderful fish or seafood at Pisces in Rosedale and cook that from scratch with salmoriglio sauce and some baby vegetables. I also cook sausages a lot. This weekend I made frikadiller (sp?)(Danish meatballs) in a sauce with boiled potatoes, danish pickled beets and cucumbers and Danish red cabbage which I alway have on hand in the winter to accompany the sausages. I am envious of the freshness of all your produce.

I always give myself cookbooks at Christmas. Nobody else knows which one to buy so I do it myself or send out a list. This year, I bought one Christmas cookbook early and that is "India Cookbook" written by Pushpesh Pant who is an Indian food authority. The book advertises itself as "the only book on Indian food you'll ever need" and has 1000 recipes from all of India's regions. It is therefore a huge book and its size is intimidating but nothing else about it is. There are many coloured photographs with the names of the dishes neatly labeled. The book is packed in a flour bag and weighs 1.5 kg. I just bought the book so I haven't cooked from it yet but having perused it over the weekend there are several recipes I would like to try such as a Goan shrimp curry, a pork vindaloo, several lamb curries and stir fries, quails stuffed with savory minced chicken and many enticing breads and sweets. A dessert called Rabri (thickened milk) looks delicious as do the kheers, gajar halvahs etc. The regions are very well represented in every section of the book. The recipes are not difficult - there are some new ingredients to be sourced but there are a few standard methods used throughout the book which are apparently the methods used by by cooks all over Indian - so there is a consistency which once mastered will be straightforward to use. Other books I would like to receive for Christmas are "At Elizabeth David's Table" which looks like a contemporary presentation of her work with lots of glossy photographs and which as a longtime fan of Elizabeth David, I hope will convince other cooks that her recipes have stood the test of time. There are many testimonials included by British chefs who were influenced by her. She was to Great Britain, what Julia Child was to America and she revolutionized eating there after the war. The third book I would like to receive for Christmas is Molly O'Neill's One Big Table - 600 recipes from the nation's best home cooks, farmers, fishermen, pitmasters and chefs. I have read high praise of this book and look forward to reading it over Christmas. One final book - a Canadian book "Eating Chinese: Culture on the menu in small town Canada" by Lily Cho which is a study of the lives and cuisine of those lonely Chinese families who ran the one Chinese restaurant in many of the small towns of Canada. We had such a restaurant in Kimberley, BC where I grew up. Wong's restaurant was where the Rotary Club met each week, where high school graduation banquets were held and where people went for a western breakfast or an exotic Chinese meal. You could even get a glass of wine there. There was no other place to eat in town except a diner which served burgers and fries and the usual diner fare. This book pays homage to these brave Chinese souls who gave small town Canada, a taste for food that was a little different from what they ate every day, even if it wasn't exactly authentic.

Your thread about huckleberries has returned me to my childhood in the Rockies and Selkirk Mountains. Now I am craving them. Since I have no chance of foraging for them, I have been looking on line for jams, jellies and syrups as well as dried huckleberries. I can find the preserves but not the dried. Can you recommend any good sources for any of the above?

Rabbit would be very good but you would need some kind of fat to keep it moist. Rabbit is dry.

I thought they were being pulled from the Gourmet archives which are huge.

i grew up in Kimberley, BC in the middle of the Selkirk mountains and every summer we would pick buckets of huckle berries and my mother would make them into delicious pies. (yes, we might have to fight of the bears but mostly we got our share). In comparing them with wild blueberries which we get here in Ontario, I think that huckleberries were more flavourful but it may just be nostalgia doing the talking and tasting. Some day I would like to go back out West and experience a few more huckleberry pie orgies.

I have collected Food and Wine, Gourmet, Saveur and Fine Cooking for years. The issues of all of them except Saveur are all stacked up in a downstairs office. My daughter says I have to get rid of them but I can't bring myself to do it. Saveur gets special treatment because it is by far my favourite. I store it in my cookbook room. I have cooked from many of Saveur's recipes over the years and I love their food articles. I like the fact that their recipes represent many different cuisines and I find them more focused on authentic cuisine rather than quick dinners and entertaining and that focus most closely dovetails with mine. Over the years, I have learned more about world cuisines and ingredients from Saveur than I have from any other food magazine. I have sourced ingredients from Saveur as well as cookware (eg.copper couscousiers)and have never been disappointed. I must say that I preferred Saveur when Coleman Andrews was at the helm but I continue to like it best of all.

I used to do it frequently with mixtures of butter and garlic and herbs - tarragon and garlic were especially good. I always wanted to try Poulet en Demi Deuil (sp?) but never had enough truffles.

I was craving Chicken Pot Pie a few months ago and scoured my cookbooks for a recipe that matched my craving (because I think we all have different taste memories of what makes the perfect CPP.) The one that matched my taste memory perfectly was in Jasper White's The Cooking of New England...and when I made it I was delighted with it. I made a lard crust from some very special pork lard that I had shipped from ChefShop. The pie included pearl onions, some diced carrots and peas. I think I added some mushrooms. I made a lovely veloute out of rich chicken broth. It was perfect. When I have another Chicken Pot Pie craving, I will make Jasper's recipe again.

I guess I'll be in Hell for a long time because I accumulate many kinds of ingredients "just in case" I might want to cook a dish with them some day. This is not a past habit that I am swearing off, it is an ongoing obsession. The ingredients, I need change with the latest cookbook I am reading and the shipping guys at Kalustyans and Chef Shop know me by name. I have bags and bags of various kinds of hot peppers from all over the world, a number of varieties of dried legumes, spices and flavourings for most of the major cuisines of the world, losts of Asian pastes and sauces, vinegars and oils (I once spent $40 to ship a small bottle of strawberry vinegar from Germany); varieties of grains, and many kinds of rice, flours and meals. And a number of cheeses that I am going to consume soon... I do use these ingredients as I journey from one cuisine to another and I store them sealed in cool dark places to reserve their flavour and freshness. I don't want to be sentenced for ingredient abuse during my stay in Hell. But as others have pointed out, I don't use all of a spice in one go, and I don't like to repeat dishes too often - I am too busy exploring and trying new cuisines and new recipes. I do like to look in my condiment fridge, my freezer (which contains a large tub of leaf lard) and my shelves in the basement filled with fascinating jars and cans and bags. My taste buds perk up and I think of how many dishes I have yet to try.

I had a 4 gram white truffle from Alba. I made pasta al burro with homemade pasta, artisanal butter and some freshly grated parmesan. Then I grated the truffle all over the pasta and chowed down while it was still hot. Red wine of course and after veal marsala followed by a fennel salad dressed with aged balsamic and extra virgin olive oil from Spain. Very sad that the meal is over. Certainly can't afford another white truffle from Alba this year. I am just so grateful the grocer would sell pieces of truffle.

I made fabada today - big huge dried limas from Spain and a dried Spanish chorizo which I got as a freebee for ordering over $60 of olive oil (and the beans) from latienda. I used wild boar porkbelly and a tamshire ham bone as well as morcilla. I mostly followed Penelope Casa' recipe which finishes the soup with garlic and paprika heated in olive oil. There's a name for that treatment but I forget what it is. I also added some caldo nero which is not authentic at all but I wanted some greens and it seemed meaty enough to accompany the heavy duty meats. The fabada tastes good, looks good (I wish I were a better photographer) and sticks to my ribs which is important in cold weather. The beans are incredible - very creamy and buttery. The recipe makes a large amount so will try freezing some.

I just bought the cookbook and have enjoyed reading the food writing very much. I like to read about the process she goes through coming up with a recipe. There are also a number of recipes that interest me (NOT the shrimp and broccoli recipe) which I will be trying very soon. I like the way she did combination tagines. I have always been frustrated by the simpleness of many tagine recipes, for example, prunes and lamb, or dried apricots and lamb, or preserved lemons and chicken etc etc. I'm sure you get the point. A couple of her tagine recipes combine ingredients that are complementary and should make for a more complex and interesting dish. Maybe this weekend I will cook a tagine from this book and christen my new tagine from tagines.com I miss photographs as well but the writing is compensation.

I have a lot of food art in my home. I will list it but do not have pictures of much of it. 2 egg pastels of eggs - brown eggs 1 still life of an apple 1 still life of a peach 3 still lifes of pears 1 still life of lemons 1 Indian print of a lady sieving rice i print from New Orleans of peaches in a basket 1 coloured print of my favourite grocery store in Dundas, Ontario - Picones 1 gorgeous print of a vinyard in Niagara 1 oil painting of cherries on either snow or q white table cloth 1 photograph by Beth Powning of 2 broad beans I have other works of art but my favourite is food art. i can't resist it.

Pumpkin, brown butter and pecan cake. I pretended it was a coffee cake and ate it for breakfast.

Fresh apple mueseli and pumpkin, brown butter and pecan coffee cake. No pictures but delicious.