plum tart

I agree absolutely with every word you have written. I cook what I like and generally I enjoy it unless I screw up. I love to eat and will generally cook what I crave on a seasonal basis. I am very critical of restaurants, and I eat in some excellent ones in Toronto and elsewhere because as you say, they are the professionals and as well, I am usually paying a lot of money to eat what they have prepared. I am more tolerant of friends because I know I am intimidating in the food department. I don't want to be that way but people think "She knows so much, she must be an incredible cook". It is mostly perception and really what I want is for everyone to enjoy cooking and food the way I do. What I am, is a good home cook and I am willing to try anything and I love learning new techniques and trying new recipes and ingredients.

A Chinese student from Fujian cooked little oysters in an omelet mixture with a little green onion. The omelet was a little bit crispy. They were delicious and I have since found a recipe for them in a Chinese cookbook. I have never seen them on a Chinese restaurant menu however. Is anyone familiar with this dish?

I agree with you completely - that has always been my idea of food hell too. I know people who make a pot of soup and EAT IT EVERY DAY!!! Noooooooooo! I commute a long distance to work every day so that I can't prepare a delicious meal every day but I do prepare enough different meals on the weekend so that I won't have any repeats. Mostly the meals that suit this habit are braises, daubes, ragus, curries, and stews. Fish is fast so I will cook that fresh, as well as steak, chops and sausages. And if I have duck confit on hand, that is fast too. I am completely incapable of repeating a meal over the period of a week no matter how much I love it. I don't regard the meals prepared in advance as left overs either, they are all dishes whose flavor improves over time.

Quatrfoil in Dundas is a delight. So nice to have an excellent restaurant in this region.

Perhaps the difference is terroir. You're not using the same water, the same soil, the same feed grain, etc, as what was used originally so, of course, the end result would not be the same (e.g., Vidalia onions). Well Toliver, I write down the recipe the first time I cook it which is very close in time to when I have eaten it in the restaurant. And then I tweak it after the first eating and then I save the recipe with all its tweaks and notes for the next time I want to cook it. Heaven forbid that I should have to remember it years hence and hope and tweak. Now that would be a challenge. You are absolutely right about the terroir. I should have thought of that. Thank you.

I grew up in a remote mountain town in British Columbia. Food choices were limited unless you fished or hunted or grew it yourself. We had an endless supply of freshly caught rainbow trout which I did not appreciate until as an adult I ate what was available in stores, which wasn't the same fish at all. Nevertheless, my mother cooked up a storm every day and I had many favourites. She made delicious southern fried chicken and biscuits which were an odd specialty for a woman brought up in New Denmark, New Brunswick. She must have learned how to make it from the southern wife of a grad student at Princeton where my father was studying for his PhD. I loved her tuna fish casserole, a very fifties dish, which I make myself on the odd occasion when I am homesick for my childhood. She also cooked game very well - wild partridge and venision were my favourites. They were always served with delicious sauces. But she would "out do herself" at Christmas with her Danish roast goose with apples and prunes and red cabbage. The Christmas dessert was not the usual Danish ris a l'amande but a tart lemon ice cream which she made to please my father. It was refreshing and light after the rich goose and went very well with the many different Christmas cookies she had taught me to make. When meyer lemons are in season, I make the Chez Panisse recipe for lemon ice cream and remember. I loved the Christmas Eve dinner most of all the meals my mother cooked. As I said, my father fished as often as he could. Sometimes her fried white fish for breakfast or fish roe. I thought they were delicious and much preferred them to the rainbow trout we had for dinner. I read a lot and my culinary fantasies were influenced by books like Little House on the Prairie. I wasn't satisfied with canned baked beans and with the help of recipes, I figured out how to make them myself with navy beans, salt pork and molasses. I also learned how to make steamed Boston brown bread to serve with the beans. I loved making them and eating them. Naturally there were the weekly roasts - beef with Yorkshire pudding, pork with applesauce, lamb with mint sauce and roast chicken.And of course there was wonderful gravy with each roast. I still love gravy an sauces to an obsessive degree but none were as good as my mothers'. My parents bought their meat and poultry from a farm in the Windermere Valley and the its quality was exceptional. It is only recently with the advent of organic butchers that I have tasted meat that tastes like the meat we ate then. The poultry still can't compete with what we ate then. There were no fine restaurants in Kimberley nor were there any fast food places. When my father was away, my mother would take my brother and I to a diner uptown, where we had hamburgers, fries and chocolate milkshakes. I loved those hamburgers - they surpassed my father's barbecued burgers and for some reason they surpass anything I have eaten as an adult, even my own. It must have been the grease or the bun. Nor have I tasted a better chocolate milkshake or fries. I imagine that it was the specialness of the occasion that made the food taste so good. W When we went on holidays we always went to a city (Spokane, Seattle, Calgary, or Vancouver) and stayed in a grand hotel. We always ate in the posh hotel restaurants and I looked forward to the food. Especially in the coastal cities we could indulge in seafood - crab, oysters, shrimp and these were always a treat. To this day, I am a restaurant groupie.

James Beard wrote a lot about "taste memory" especially in his memoir "Delights and Prejudices" and when I read what he had to say, I connected with it. Madhur Jaffrey writes about her experiences with "taste memory" as well and once again, I resonate with what she says. I will quote from them; The ability to recall a taste sensation, which I think of as "taste memory," is a God-given talent, akin to perfect pitch, which makes your life richer if you possess it. If you aren't born with it, you can never seem to acquire it....And naturally good chefs and cooks must depend upon memory when they season or when they are combining subtle flavors to create a new sauce or dish. -- James Beard, Delights and Prejudices (1964) Madhur Jaffrey Years later, in New York, I helped my ailing neighbor James Beard teach some of his last classes. One of them was about taste. The students were instructed to sample nine types of caviar and a variety of olive oils, and do a blind identification of meats that had had their fat removed. Toward the end of the class, this big, frail man, who was confined to a high director’s chair, said to the students, “Do you think there is such a thing as taste memory?” This set me thinking. A few years earlier, my husband, a violinist, had been studying the score of Bach’s “Chaconne” when a friend asked him, “Can you hear the music as you read it?” It was the same question in a different form. When I left India to study in England, I did not know how to cook, but my palate had recorded hundreds of flavors. From cumin to tamarind, they were all in my head, waiting to be called into service. Rather like my husband, I could hear the honey on my tongue. ♦ I like Madhur Jaffrey's musical analogy. Taste memory for me is like "perfect pitch" for a musician. It is a gift albeit contingent on having a large repertoire of flavours in the memory bank. Like Madhur Jaffrey, I didn't know how to cook when I left home and I had no recipes or cookbooks. I recreated my mother's meals from memory and was usually successful. Later on when I had the money to eat in restaurants and ate a particularly delicious meal in a restaurant, I would analyze the flavours in the dish I was interested in and return home and recreate it as soon as possible. I was often successful. I became a cookbook collector and lost my dependency on my "taste memory" and mostly hunt down recipes instead. Recently, friends asked me if I could recreate the Hovis bread that we all ate as children. Hovis sent the dough to various Canadian bakeries (even those in very small towns). I ordered Hovis flour from Great Britain and found a Hovis recipe on the Hovis website and used it. We all agreed that it wasn't as we had remembered it. I have since experimented (Elizabeth David reports in her bread book that the wheat germ was toasted) so I tried that and still my tasters and I agreed that that bread wasn't quite "it" either. Next I will grind my own wheat (because it is the wheatiness that I am after) to see if that works. I also wonder if my friends and I are "in synch" vis a vis our taste memories. We grew up in different parts of Canada, me in a remote mountain town in BC, another in Hamilton, Ontario and another, north of Toronto. Also with regard to childhood taste memories, I find I am frequently disappointed. Chicken even free range doesn't have the same deliciousness of those we used to get from the farm in the Windermere Valley. Carrots do not taste the same at all, even those grown from organic European seeds by me. So a taste memory can be a source of great frustration as well.

I agree. I have read this in many excellent Chinese cookbooks and most of the Chinese cooks I know agree. I had a wonderfully seasoned Chinese wok - daily use (2 or 3 times a day) by three Chinese grad students who lived with me between 2000 and 2009). I loved to use it and was so proud of its patina and the smokey taste I achieved in my food. Then I rented briefly to a very young Chinese student who was grease phobic. She scoured my wonderful wok down to the bare metal (which then rusted) and told me that my previous students were not very clean in their cooking habits. I was heartbroken. Then I found out that she didn't know how to cook at all! Fortunately she didn't stay long and I am once again trying to season my wok to its previous glory, however, I do not use it frequently enough so it is taking a long time.

I meant to mention Judith Jones' cookbook, "The Pleasures of Cooking for One". Judith Jones, for those that don't know, is the Knopf editor of Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, James Beard, Lydia Bastianich and many many more famous cookbook authors. The recipes are actually written in quantities for one person - for example, Hollandaise for One, Lobster Bisque for One, A Small Roast Pork Tenderloin, Linguine with Smoked Salmon (for one) etc. When she does provide a recipe for something that will have leftovers she provides recipes for those as well. The recipes draw from her years of experience as a cookbook editor and so there is a range from Moroccan Cous Cous, to Indian Curry, and Ratatouille for One.

Whenever my husband was away, my daughter and I would bread some slices of brie or camembert and deep fry them. We would eat them with a chutney and a salad of bitter greens dressed with a vinaigrette. The oozy crunchy cheese, the spicy chutney and the tart bitter salad made for a delicious meal, all the more delicious because it was a secret pleasure. When my husband came home, he could always tell what we had eaten. He said the house smelled like a barnyard. So much for our gentle rebellion.

You guessed! I infuse it with flaked coconut. I leave it in and it is lovely. My daughter wondered if we could whip coconut milk, but even if we could, which I doubt it would be too rich. Try it!

Pineapple upside down cake with rum butterscotch sauce and coconut whipped cream. No picture but it is gold and burnished and beautiful and delicious. I had it for breakfast; I couldn't wait.

I just bought some freekeh. Do you cook it like rice or like cracked wheat? Do you cook it in water or soak it or steam it?

I absolutely agree. I love the combination of food writing and recipes. It makes the whole experience of cooking a dish much richer; and it allow you as a cook to participate in the evolution of a dish. You definitely feel like your part of a lineage, in my case a Danish Canadian Nonna following in the steps of the many Italian Nonna's that Elizabeth David evokes. I love Julia Child but I don't feel as free to depart from the precision of the recipe.

I made Elizabeth David's Paparadella con Lepre from her Italian Food this weekend. It is a wonderful autumnal dish. I cut up two rabbits and marinated the pieces in red wine, juniper berries, pepper, bay leaf and a little onion overnight.(This part is not from Italian Food, but I do it to make the rabbit taste more like hare - gamier). I cut the flesh from the bones to make the pasta sauce and I used the bones to make stock. I lightly sauteed the pancetta, followed by the rabbit pieces, onion and celery. Then I added the chopped boletus (previously dried and then soaked) and some fresh marjoram, sprinkled flour lightly over the mixture and then added dry marsala wine and reduced it. Then I added the stock and simmered to mixture for an hour. Delicious on fresh paparadella. Since this is such a fiddle, I make enough to freeze for later. It freezes very well. All other recipes cook the rabbit meat on the bone and then shred it,which is easier,but the result is a drier less integrated meat. While Elizabeth David does give quantities, I find this recipe very forgiving in that regard as many of her recipes are.

Yes it is a beautiful coffee table book but the ingredients are so rarified and the techniques are so beyond my home chef abilities not to mention my batterie de cuisine that I can only look at the pictures and dream. I have examined most of the recipes hoping to find one or two that are possible. The Aebleskever recipe is somewhat accessible but still not completely doable unfortunately.

Several times a year, I make Waldorf Salad for my friend Lyndsay. She doesn't cook herself but she loves waldorf salad - the way she remembers having it in the fifties when she was a child. She wants crisp apples, celery, walnuts a hint of tartness, and a hint of sweetness. She doesn't want it messed up with marshmallows, grapes or raisons or other variations that are out there. So I use two kinds of crisp apples so it is visually attractive- Honey Crisp for red, Granny Smith for green, home made mayonnaise made with grapeseed oil and extra lemon juice, a touch of dijon mustard and a little cream. I add some honey for the sweetness and a little walnut oil. Of course, I include chopped celery and lightly toasted and chopped walnuts. Lyndsay likes it that way and so do I. We eat it with homemake Wiener Schnitzel. Somehow, they taste good together with a glass of German riesling.

I have cooked from Elizabeth David's Italian Food for years. I will go to my grave with that cookbook. In fact I taught myself to make pasta from that book and I have many favourite recipes that I return to again and again. The hare (or rabbit) paparadella is the best recipe there is for that dish and I have tried many. Her spinach gnocchi are delicious as is the raw muchroom salad. She doesn't spell everything out, which leaves room for your imagination and she assumes a certain level of technical competence but the recipes all work and are delicious, and, the writing and descriptions are to die for.

When I was a child, our family always had Sunday dinners and it was always a roast (meat of chicken) and there would be a homey dessert like a pie or a warm lemon pudding. We would eat the roast cold with leftover gravy etc for at least two days and then my mother would cook other weekday meals like casseroles, or fish. I loved Sunday dinners. They felt so special! So, when I had a family, I had Sunday dinners too! Sometimes, we invited friends but mostly it was just family. I mostly cooked roasts - meat or chicken, a bottle of wine and a homey dessert and we would linger at the table saying good bye to the weekend and "hello" to the week. I loved the closeness and intimacy of that meal. The house seemed to have a warm glow at that time. Later, when my daughter went to university, my husband and I continued with Sunday dinner. However, five years later, we were divorced. I continued to cook for myself but Sunday dinner was one meal I couldn't bear unless my daughter was home and even then it was hard. I grieved a long time for Sunday dinner. Instead, I went to a nearby restaurant to eat and came home late to avoid to cold contrast of my reality with my rich, happy memories. A year or two later, I decided to try Sunday dinner again. I invited a friend who was on her own and we would have Sunday dinner - a roast, or a special meal - lamb shanks, a risotto etc. We would have wine, and she would provide dessert. Sometimes, I would invite others and sometimes we would eat at her place. We still do this, but not all the time. I can however, do Sunday dinner on my own (NOT a roast!)now and it feels special again. Evening closes in, the lights glow, the house is replete with wonderful aromas and I feel blessed.

I have thawed them overnight and then warmed them and I have put them directly into a 325 degree oven for 20 minutes. Both work. I wouldn't freeze them for an longer than 3 months but if you are like me, they won't last that long! I will be interested to hear about your clay pot experiment. Cheers Plum Tart

I too, take meds that prohibit grapefruit and I LOVE grapefruit. It is so sad and I become very desperate in grapefruit season. I tasted a grapefruit gelato not long ago and the tiniest spoonful seem to satisfy my craving. Surely that can't do too much harm. The other foods I crave are white Italian truffles and bottarga. Unfortunately, I can't afford them. There was a time, when I could buy the tiniest piece of a white truffle and make a wonderful pasta dish but no one seems to sell tiny pieces anymore. About once a year I break down and buy bottarga and make a wonderful pasta dish from Sara Jenkins cookbook, Oranges and Olives. Essence of the sea!

I have been baking many different kind of muffins for years, and I love them but I find they deteriorate very rapidly if they are stored anywhere but in the freezer. It doesn't matter what method of storage - tupperware, ziplock bags, foil, and it doesn't matter if they have sugar on them or not, room temperature storage doesn't do anything to enhance the texture and flavour of muffins. They are best right out of the oven and for maybe a couple of hours after that. If you want to retain the freshness etc. then you have to freeze them and reheat them.

I make a lot of muffins but I freeze them as soon as they are cool and then thaw as needed in the oven. That way they always taste fresh.

Just checked. A Pair of Trindles was in the Old Red Store and the restaurant was in the Privateer's Wharf (not stone on the outside anyway, I see) and yes the restaurant was where the Lower Deck is not but I don't think it was called that.

Yes, a Pair of Trindles was next to the old Chandler's shop in the red building. The restaurant with the big tables wasn't called the Lower Deck then, I will try to remember what they called it. Do they still serve sausage and sauerkraut? It was in a stone building across from the book shop. The bookstore was there from day one of the Historic Properties and it really was fun being there from the beginning. Thanks for the update. Barbara