Sailing and Chowder - Wordless Wednesday

Fiffer Feffer Feff

Dessert first.

It's just been one of those days - full of 2 year olds being 2, 35 year olds being pissy, and everyone trying their best to just get along. And stay together.

I indeed started and ended my day with a slice of apple pie. The first of the season. Talk about comfort eating. Just the way the apple peel releases from the flesh under the cut of my paring knife is enough to inspire relief in the heart. Apple pie is comfort cooking. Hmm, maybe I should be making another pie right now?

Why so much stress in my retirement and new career? Well, I've been sick (sniff) and Hubby has been pretty much gone for a week. The first few days actually felt pretty good. I thought I was handling things so well. It certainly makes a huge difference to not be gone for 10 hours a day at a job that crushed me. By now, however, I'm cranky and fuelling myself with tea all day, and a chocolate and scotch once the girls go to bed.

This weekend I thought I better buckle down and be a good mom. I tried. Hey, I only lost Death Wish once at the market today. And I did my best to take responsibility for that one, although we all know that she took off while I dealt with her spazzing sister. But today is Sunday and so rather than heat up leftovers I thought we all deserved a proper dinner.

Enter the roast chicken. Take one chicken, a giant clove of garlic, and a lemon. Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Pat the chicken dry, smash the garlic clove, and stuff the lemon and garlic in the cavity of the chicken. Salt, pepper, and a little bit of olive oil. Place in oven. Cook for an hour or hour and a half (depending on the size of chicken). Eat.

The Monster asked for potatoes and tomatoes to eat with the chicken, so I roasted some potato coins and made a salad. At least I roasted a chicken. And we sat down together, us girls, and ate our Sunday dinner while singing songs about a Fiffer Feffer Feff. And then we ate pie.

Peel Me a Grape

There are times in the kitchen where experimentation fails in a colossal way (note to self: stay away from the curry) and other times where a little 'why not?' turns into 'why have I never?' With a pile of Coronation grapes being snubbed by The Monster I needed that why not.

Why not put grapes in muffins? We put raspberries, peaches, apples, and even pineapple in muffins, so why not grapes? You really don't see it much though. And I'm not sure why.

Hopefully, after you see these muffins you will change your mind. There was some Twitter chatter about this a day after I made the muffins, with Jennie going all out to seed her Concord grapes.  I am far too lazy for that, so thank goodness the Coronation grapes are seedless. 

The base for this recipe is my basic muffin recipe (find it here) with some grapes and roasted, skinned, and chopped hazelnuts added in. With the the girls I have much better luck with muffins when I bake the mini kind. Mama doesn't like that because I eat a lot more that way! This recipe will make 12 regular sized muffins or 24 mini muffins.

Grape and Hazelnut Muffins

1 cup hazelnuts

1 3/4 cups flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 tbsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1/2 cup sugar

1 cup small grapes (I used Coronation)

1 egg

1 cup milk

1/4 cup olive oil

1 tsp vanilla

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Spray a muffin tin with non-stick spray or grease with butter.

2. Roast the hazelnuts (unless already roasted) in the oven on a cookie sheet.  Roast for 10-15 minutes, giving the pan a shake every now and then. Be careful not to burn them. Pour them into a clean kitchen towel. Wrap it up loosely and rub the nuts with the towel. The skins should come off easily. Don't worry if not every bit of skin comes off. Aim for most of it. Le the hazelnuts cool while you assemble the rest of the ingredients.

3. Combine the flour, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and sugar in a medium mixing bowl. Combine the egg, milk, oil, and vanilla in another bowl.

4. Chop the hazelnuts coarsely, on the smaller side, but don't worry about any larger chunks.

5. Toss the chopped hazelnuts and grapes with the dry ingredients. Add the wet ingredients and stir until just combined.

6. Scoop into prepared muffin tin and bake for 15-20 minutes, until tops are rounded and golden.

Dirt in my Freezer

It might be the Ukrainian in me, but I am incapable of throwing away good food. And I feel inordinate guilt if I forget about leftovers or a head of lettuce in the fridge. That would also be the Ukrainian in me.

With a really good haul from our CSA this year I've been forced to face these issues head on. It's one thing to throw away grocery store produce that you paid pennies for and was grown and picked by a random stranger in Mexico. It's another thing entirely when you get the lettuce in your hands was placed there by a man with permanent dirt under his fingernails.  The same dirt that still graces your carrots, your onions, your greens.

* Aside - As I read that last paragraph it occurs to me that is just as bad to throw away the grocery store lettuce because there is still a person there with dirt under his fingernails. *

Our farmers, Jon and Andrea are such committed people. We light up when we see them at the market, where we pick up our weekly haul. The girls go running and asking after the horses and roosters, all while ripping greens with their teeth. We shoot the shit about the weather and yuppies and our egg man. And food passes hands.

Then we come home and I am forced to deal all that food. On a day when I'm just so damn tired I really don't feel like finding room in the fridge, grating zucchini, or freezing chard I sometimes leave the bag on the counter for hours, even a day. Then I remember the dirt. The dirt I'm invested in.  The dirt our farmers are invested in.  The dirt this food was grown in. So I sharpen my knives and set too. Far better to have trimmings in the compost pile than real food.

We clean, we store, we cook, we freeze, we eat. And so we will eat for another week, thanks to the phenomenally hard work of Jon, Andrea, their family, and their WOOFers. And in January, I will make another loaf of this zucchini bread, some swiss chard fricos, or a bowl of gingered carrot soup and be thankful for that dirt.

But now? Now I need to head back in the kitchen and make some beet leaf cabbage rolls.

Backseat Adventure - Columbia Icefields

It was a day trip turned into overnight. It was a long weekend turned into a very, very long weekend. But the girls are in bed and I can pore over my photos of our trip to the Columbia Icefield.

Can you believe that as a lifelong Alberta girl I've never actually been to the Icefields? Only one drive by as an adult, in the middle of winter, where we were mostly concerned with merely safely arriving at our destination. So when Hubby suggested a road trip I couldn't really say no, could I?

Poor planning on our part led to a frantic search for mittens and boots, a stop at the mall, and not enough snacks. But we grabbed the last Ice Explorer monster bus and got our canned tourist experience. And it was so worth it! The mechanical geek in Hubby was quite enthralled with the monster bus, as was the Monster. (Guess what her new career aspirations are?) And all of us were blown away by the expanse of the glacier. 

All I could think was, "Holy Crap! I'm standing on a glacier!" And it makes me want to reread Icefields by Thomas Wharton. We had the pre-packaged experience, I know, but it was still awesome. And despite my, I'm struggling to describe it any other way.

While I don't think the girls could grasp the immensity of what was in front of us, they could grab the ice, lick it, and ask why the mountains were so big. Soon enough we'll have them hiking and maybe even backcountry skiing to grow up as good mountain girls.

Sunday dinner was at 9:00 pm. After a day of road tripping and exploring we landed in Banff. it was late, we should have grabbed something easy and put the girls to bed.  We should have done that.

Instead, we ventured out to Maple Leaf Grille and Lounge. After a day of nothing but mediocre snacks Hubby and I decided we wanted a good meal. While I'm not sure the late night with the girls was worth it (it was close to midnight when they finally fell asleep), the food was pretty damn good.

But the best thing we ingested all day was the water, running in a stream, over a thousand feet of ice.

In My Dreams

When I started blogging I had only in mind a medium in which to practice writing, something I hadn't done regularly since I was a teenager. My on-line presence was a chance to share my creativity, getting it out there in the hopes that someone else was inspired. 

About a year ago, however, things changed for me. Writing, creating, and thinking about those things became a compulsion. I attended the Okanagan Food and Wine Writers Workshop last September. And while I was blown away by the food and highly entertained by the company, the experience gave me a clarity and focus to my future. I was driven to find a way to change my life to make this my work, not designing energy efficiency programs. 

Today marks the first day of that life full-time. Over the past 8 months I've been building up a freelance writing base. Have you seen me at What's Up Family yet? Or at Simple Bites?  What about Babble? But it is time to do more, to be more. I've quit my job and my networking chops are already being tested. I will now call myself a freelance writer.

But not only this, I also be home with my girls. You could call me a work at home mom. (In all honesty, I hate that term.) In between bed time and morning, and during the naps that still occur you will find me writing, creating. When my girls are awake you will find us in the kitchen together, or around the table creating, reading, chatting, living.

To celebrate this momentous morning I turned to another of my dreams. Quite literally, this was a dream.  The more I've been on line the more I've found myself dreaming of people I've never met. It seems I'm some sort of unconscious stalker. The last dream I had involved Kim, her in-my-dreams-only rooftop garden in NYC, and these peach basil pancakes.

It seemed only fitting that I pull out everything from my dreams on a day when my dreams are becoming a living reality.

Peach Basil Pancakes

Makes 12 small/medium pancakes

3/4 cup flour

1/4 cup corn flour or light corn meal

2 tbsp brown sugar

1 tbsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

2 tbsp chopped basil

1 peach, peeled and chopped

2 tbsp butter, melted

1 cup butter

1 egg

1. Combine all the dry ingredients in a medium bowl. Toss the basil and peaches in with the dry ingredients.

2. Stir together the wet ingredients. Mix the wet into the dry. Stir until just combined.  Let rest while your griddle or frying pan heats up on medium/low heat.

3. Pour the batter into the griddle 1/3 cup at a time. Cook until the bubbles on the surface form and start popping.  Flip and cook on the other side for another minute or so.

4. Serve with cherries or syrup of choice.

Stew

It all started with a few turnips. After a number of attempts last summer to like the turnips we got in our CSA delivery I was looking for another way to try them. Gail gave me the motivation after she shared what she did with our CSA delivery. And the weather has made a decided turn towards fall, being chilly and rainy today. A perfect day to have the oven on all day, with meat slowly cooking inside.

In short, a perfect day to make stew. And this is how I did it.

Get some meat. My entire family purchased a cow this summer. Well, my parents bought it and shared it with all of us. (Thanks!) So the beef stew meat came from that cow. And somehow I thought to defrost Italian sausage with it. Not sure why, but it paid off. And I was lucky, our butcher cut the meat into chunks for us.

Spoon a couple of tablespoons of flour in a bowl.  Season it with salt and pepper. Today I also added some ground Ethiopian Berbere spices I have. Go with what you've got. Sometimes it is thyme and oregano, sometimes paprika, sometimes it is nothing. Stir it all together.

Toss your meat in the flour and spices to get well coated. Do it a handful at a time. About as much will fit in your pot without crowding. Make sure all sides are coated. Not only does this help the meat brown, but as the stew cooks, the flour helps thicken the sauce.

Heat up some olive oil or vegetable oil in the pot you will use to cook the stew. For this, I always turn to my trusty dutch oven. In small batches, so the meat isn't crowded, brown the pieces of meat. Most recipes will say to brown on all sides, but some of my pieces were more rhomboid than rectangular. Quite frankly, I can't be bothered to turn my meat 6 or 7 times. So as long as the big sides had colour I was happy.

As your meat browns, put it in a bowl. That way, if any juices run out you capture them.

While your meat is browning, chop up an onion or two. How much depends on the size of onion and how much onion you actually want in the stew. I also chopped up some garlic, roughly.

Because I'd defrosted them, I decided to add the sausage. And because I was lazy, I cooked them whole in the stew. (When I added the veggies later I took the sausages out, sliced them, then tossed them back in with everything else. It beat taking them apart raw.) At this point I browned the sausages and softened the onions and garlic. This is all still in the same pot I where I browned the beef.

By now you can see that stew is about layering flavour. The next step is to deglaze the pan. More than anything I use beer, but sometimes wine. This beer was leftover from a party we had the other night. So I took a sip from the beer, then poured the rest in the pot. When you add alcohol to a hot pan it bubbles wildly and with a few scrapes of the wooden spoon, all those brown bits that look like burnt stuff came off the pot and to flavour the liquid. To this I added two cans of tomatoes. Not the juice, just the tomatoes. And I squished them in my hands as I added them.

After that, the meat goes back in the pan, with any accumulated juices. Then the whole thing goes in the oven at 200 or 250 degrees F for a few hours. Yes, hours. You could also cook it on the stove, but I find the oven requires less attention. And frankly, stew is supposed to be about hands off cooking. Well, once you do all the stuff before this step.

After a few hours it was time to add the veg. You could add it all at the same time, when you first put it in the oven. Perhaps, though, you need to go to the farmers' market and pick up the carrots and potatoes because all you have are turnips in the house.

Cut all the veg into about the same size - 1/2 to 1 inch pieces. Throw them in the pot and let it all cook for a few hours more. At some point you should taste and season it. To mine I added some dried thyme as well as salt and pepper.

When Hubby and I first started dating we actually argued over the best way to eat stew. I was firmly in the with bread camp, and he preferred his over rice. Well, the day he makes the stew he can have it over rice. Today we had it with a loaf of wild rice and green onion bread from The Bakery at the Market. It was a fantastic compliment.

The stew was gently flavoured, with perfectly cooked meat that even my 2 year old could cut with her spoon. The sausage lent a sweetness and another texture. And the turnips? They softened slightly sweet, with just a touch of peppery bite. Just different enough from the potatoes, and about the best way I've ever had a turnip.