plum tart

Thanks for the review of Fortune Cookie Chronicles. I have been eyeing it for a while. Now I have a reason to buy it!

Pasta with fresh pasta clams - pancetta browned in olive oil, lots of garlic, parsley, and a couple of Turkish dried peppers added, then the clams. Poured in some white wine and the juice of a lemon. Steamed the clams until they opened (they ALL opened!) tossed it all over the pasta and added some more fresh parsley. I toasted bread crumbs to sprinkle on top. An excellent quick meal. Good with an arugula salad lightly dressed.

Oh I agree. I looove Laksa and was planning to make myself some this weekend, paste and all if I can get some fresh turmeric. I have a fabulous recipe with all sorts of garnishes. It is my favourite soup of all! Even better than my borscht. Yummm

My favourite kind of food story! Please keep on with your ritual - it might evolve, it might not. We will be kept guessing.

I am very envious of your lunches So much fun and so delicious!

I had a Christmas lunch with colleagues at Le Select Bistro yesterday. I hadn't been to their new location and it is lovely and jam packed with eaters celebrating the Christmas season. I had a kir to start, followed by braised cokscombs and mushrooms in a wine sauce. They were delicious and interesting at the same time, mild in flavour and gently chewy. This was followed by skate in brown butter with a lovely Alsatain reisling. The skate was impeccably fresh with the flesh removed from the wings and annointed in brown butter. I enjoyed it. My colleagues had French onion soup which Andy, a serious francophile says is the best in Toronto. Andy followed with choucroute garni, the chef's specialty and Maggie had the duck confit in a gorgeous jus. For dessert we shared rum baba and iles flottant. We lingered over dessert and coffee until about 3 pm. The restaurant emptied and became peaceful with only a few hangers on at the bar. The food was very good at Le Select and I am surprised that Toronto Life doesn't list them in their guide. I know there are many bistros in Toronto now, but Le Select prepares the bistro classics well, it is not expensive and the service is better than in many trending spots. It was a good beginning to Christmas dining.

Started yesterday to make a large pot of borscht. Combined methods and ingredients from 2 recipes - Ukranian borscht from Time Life Russia and the same from The Good Cook Soups edited by Richard Olney. Used a ham bone, brisket, beef shank, salt pork and beef short ribs for the meats; grated beets, carrots, parsnips, celery root and some fresh horseradish in addition to onions, garlic, cabbage. i didn't ferment the beets so used vinegar from my pickled beets, a squirt of lemon juice, some liquid from some kosher pickles, and some sauerkraut wine juice. Yesterday, the soup was a beautiful clear ruby; today somewhat muted but still beautiful. Took hours to braise the meat, make the stock and then cook the vegetables very briefly. I debated as whether to eat the meat as a separate course but instead cut some of it up in very small dice and added it back to the soup. Ate it with sour cream of course, with a beer and my Danish rye bread. Great for a day that is 14 below zero. And I have 6 quarts so can freeze it for the deep winter days in January and February. The house smells beefy and beety with whiffs of vinegar. Lovely. I can rest now.

Love your kitchen - so compact and cozy. And I love the green - my favourite colour.

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.