Panaderia Canadiense

I have a glass tamper that was originally intended for chemical laboratory use (for what exactly I'm not sure - probably for packing chems), and I absolutely love it. The extra bonus is that I can freeze it before I start making tarts, which is extra-good because my dough recipe works best when it's maintained cool until baking.

I am going to make your "popular cake", exactly when I don't know, but I am not familiar with quinua flour Is there a substitute? Thanks You can substitute your regular wheat flour or use amaranth flour if you can find it. Quinua flour is dirt common down here, where quinua is a staple grain and has been used in breadmaking and baking for millenia. I keep forgetting it's a rare commodity up North.

With the drill you get a finer texture in the taffy than you do with a wall-mount hook.

You take a dough hook attachment for a hand-mixer (like these), snug that into the chuck, and then set the drill for the lowest torque possible. Have a friend hold the drill while you hold the taffy, and depress the trigger just a little (for slow rotation). Then you have both hands to manipulate the taffy while it spins. For fine pasta, the concept is the same but you can use slightly higher speeds while pulling out.

Ojisan, Myoga is very easy to grow in pots if you can get ahold of a viable chunk of rhizome.

I use a power drill to help me make fine pasta and to spin taffy. I've also used it as a mixer for very large batches of cakes and cookies, with the attachment that's normally used for mixing paint. I use all manner of drywall and tiling tools (particularly the spatulas) in cake decoration - I can never find nice stainless ones in the kitchen stores, but the hardware always has them, and they're only a couple of bucks. I use small-diameter PVC tubing designed for cold-water pipes in place of hidden cake pillars. The list goes on... The hardware store is a great place for kitchen stuff!

I only grudgingly use the white death in recipes where Piloncillo or Panela would cause an undue colouration. Other than that, unprocessed sugars all the way! The flavour is just better.

I'm with Blether. In Canada, you get the barest minimum of food education, even if you do take Home Ec, and you're left with your parents to help you along with good food choices. I was lucky in that since my folks are old hippies and insisted that each meal be more than 50% veggies, but most kids don't have that. Down here in Ecuador, there's an entire compulsory class called "Healthy Eating" that kids take from about grade 3 to grade 8 which explains various dietary choices, nutrition, and healthy cooking and meal planning. The result? Less than 10% of Ecuadorians are overweight. And this is a culture which absolutely adores fried piggie parts! (Chugchucara, anyone?) We have Micky D's here (albeit, we have two McDonalds restaurants - one in Quito and one in Guayaquil) and they're almost exclusively the haunt of tourists. Locals know they can have much tastier stuff and more of it, much more inexpensively, and at the same speed, in the little nameless fixed-menu restaurants that are all over the place. Because they've been educated about the traditional diets and how to choose healthy things, Ecuadorians crave the fresh soup, rice-veg-meat plate, and fresh fruit juice when the hunger hits them. Sure, the local burger joints do a booming business, but it's occasional eaters.

Here's my Aunt Roslind's recipe - it's a bit more involved than the one Peter has posted. It makes two standard loaf pans (9x5x3"). 4 oz candied citron, coarsely chopped 2 oz candied lemon peel, coarsely chopped 2 oz candied orange peel, coarsely chopped 8 oz candied cherries, halved 1 lb candied pineapple, shredded 1 lb golden raisins 8 oz sultana raisins 4 oz currants (I substitute dried blueberries) 1/2 C black rum 4 oz almonds, blanched and shredded 4 oz walnuts or pecans, coarsely chopped 2 C sifted all-purpose flour 1/2 TSP mace 1/2 TSP cinnamon 1/2 TSP baking powder 1 TBSP milk 1 TSP almond extract 2 TBSP blackstrap molasses 1/2 C butter (1/8 lb) 1 C granulated sugar 1 C brown sugar, packed 5 eggs. 1. Mix the fruits, add the rum, and allow to stand overnight. 2. Preheat the oven to slow (275 F). Grease your pans, line with wax paper, and then grease the paper (don't skip the greasing the paper step!) 3. Combine the fruit mixture, the nuts, and 1/2 C of flour. 4. Sift together the remaining flour with the spices and baking powder, and add the almond extract and molasses to the milk. 5. Cream the butter until smooth, adding the sugars gradually, and continue to mix until even. Add the eggs, mix well, and then add the milk mixture. Add the flour mixture and mix well. 6. Pour the batter down over the fruits and nuts, and mix thoroughly. Fill the pans and press the batter down firmly. 7. Bake the loaves for about 3 hours. Remove from the oven when the toothpick comes out clean, and let stand 30 minutes, then turn out of the pans onto wire racks and peel off the paper. 8. Once the cakes are fully cool, wrap them in cheesecloth soaked in the liquor of your choice (I use more black rum), and place in a tightly sealed container. Allow to age 1 month (minimum), adding about 1/2 oz of liquor every week. I have a stone crock for aging my own cakes, and (since I offer this fruitcake seasonally in my bakery) I've found that cakes can be aged very well at the back of the fridge, simply wrapped in cheesecloth, then tinfoil, and sealed in ziplock baggies.

I'll post mine tomorrow morning. Be aware that it takes about 5 lbs of candied whatnots....

I use Piloncillo or Panela in all applications calling for sugar. It's just better.

I can't believe this thread has made it to 8 pages without a single mention of Nova Scotia Black Fruitcake! The recipe I use was passed from a great-aunt from Halifax, and it has apparently been in my family for centuries. When I was in Halifax last I asked around, and apparently it's not just a tradition in my family, either. It definitely bears inclusion in the traditional NS foods, as it's the best fruitcake running (especially after 6 months in black rum... )

I'd like to nominate the banana saver. If I'm taking bananas somewhere, I'll never take just one, even if it's for lunch. Besides which, I kind of like the kind of bananas I eat (usually a pink-fleshed type called Limes) when they're a little bruised and smooshed - it makes them sweeter.

Last meal would absolutely be langostino encocado (crayfish cooked in coconut-peanut curry in the coconut shell itself) from a little shack on the beach in Canoa, sopa de bolones de verde (catfish soup with nice big green plantain dumplings stuffed with shrimp) from my friend Anna's kitchen, ceviche de pulpa from Claudia's kitchen, and for dessert I think the maracuya mousse as made by Chef Portillo of Taberna Gitana in Quito. Hey, if the world doesn't end, I want a giant fruit salad from my own fridge on the morning of the 22nd, with a heaping mound of my own granola and yogurt.

Well, BMDaniel, I still make my ice cream in a copper bowl, spinning over a bed of ice (dry or otherwise) and water - they make an ice-cream attachment for stand mixters?

Dexter is bang-on about needing a liquid if you're using dry ice in your ice-cream maker, but if you're adding it directly the alcohol would do funny things to the recipe.... Liquid nitrogen is also food-safe, but I can't imagine any recipe that would work with it, beyond cryogenically preserving interesting edibles.

Well, me and mine are used to it (my father is a professional chef and he's the one who taught me the how and why of visiting the kitchen when something goes wrong with the meal) so there's no mortification there, but I have embarassed friends.

I'm fine with being yelled at (and on one memorable occasion a knife was thrown), and if I feel the need to go into the kitchen I won't be going back to the restaurant anyhow. I find that there's no better way to make myself clearly and completely understood. I also do write restaurant reviews for local media; most restaurants in Quito at least recognize me, and understand that if I end up in their kitchens there's something grievously wrong.

Alternately, you can use it as a nest for a large copper bowl, and experiement with making Helado de Paila (traditional Ecuadorian sherbet).

I still wouldn't worry about that - the very nature of dry ice renders any contamination by other chemicals/outside detritus moot. It's so cold that it will kill most microbial contaminants, and if you're worried about dirt simply allow the surface to transpire before using it. I do a lot with dry ice in the theatre, and have used it with no problems at all in cooking (particularly icecream and cocktails). I get mine from a chemical supply house that receives it in turn with shipments of volatile chems.

I'm another in-its-own-foil-in-the-fridge-door kind of gal - but then again I normally use butter in 1/4 lb to 1/2 lb increments and it doesn't get the chance to go skanky on me. I buy from a local creamery, which means it's always fresh anyhow. Am I the only one who's alarmed by the colour of andiesenji's butter, though? I've always thought of this stuff as being a sort of pale, creamy colour....

Wear gloves to handle them. I grow Ghosts, and I can tell you from personal experience that even just touching the outside of these peppers will coat your fingertips with a phantom layer of capsaicin, which you only notice when you lick your finger to turn a page in the cookbook, or rub your eyes (god forbid). I use them for curries, aji sauce for my Lojano friends, and to cauterize bleeding wounds in the forest (I carry powdered ghost chili on hikes - hurts like heck but you don't draw a jaguar.)

Bragg's as a company is all about super-health, so I can't see them changing their name or marketing any. The originators of the company were bodybuilders, and since the stuff is often available in GNC-type stores, it's not all that off-target.

I'll guiltily admit to using jars of precrushed ginger rather than grating fresh (because I invariably include some of my knuckles along with the ginger every single time), and I am a huge proponent of using dried Luteus mushrooms in everything, then fishing them out and keeping them for mushroom sauces (I don't powder mine.) I thicken gravies and stews with quinua flour and tell nobody. I regularly throw nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon into savoury dishes. I use chervil, even though I could get the same results with parsley. I use yogurt in place of heavy cream in many sauces. No guilt at all there, though.

It's a seasoning, similar to soy sauce in flavour but a bit more complex and a lot thinner (well, a lot thinner than the soy I use). It's fabulous on salads, and quite salty. The whole thing with Bragg's is that it's processed at a much lower temperature than most commercial soy-type products, which leaves all of the amino acids of the soy intact - hence the name of the product. Think of it as thin, sous-vide soy sauce.