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  • Tonight’s dinner was a trial run of #ChefsPlate, a meal kit service that I’m doing a trial run of.

    Full write up on the blog blog.bmannconsulting.com/2022/12/17/trial-run-of.html

    → 12:03 AM, Dec 18   •  cooking
  • Trial run of Chefs Plate

    My first delivery of Chefs Plate meals arrived today.1

    My company sent everyone SnackMagic boxes with treats for the holidays, and the box also came with a discount code for Chefs Plate, a meal delivery service.2

    I decided to try it even though I’m not really the target market for it. We live close by to grocery stores and I enjoy cooking things from raw ingredients.

    But, it was steeply discounted, and I’ve always been curious about these services. I don’t know how long this one has been available or what others there are in Canada / are live in Vancouver.

    I picked the meals ahead of time with Rachael. This order included:

    • Herby Panko-Crusted Chicken
    • Creamy Butternut Squash Orzo
    • Loaded Beef Burrito Bowls

    Usual price $60CAD, discounted price $27CAD. For 2 people for 3 meals that’s pretty good.

    Unboxing

    You can pick different days of the week for delivery and they leave it at your door.

    There is a glossy double sided print out of meal prep and cooking instructions. My first reaction was that this is a lot of packaging and paper and inks and it’s definitely wrecking the planet.

    The kits are in a big cardboard box, each meal’s ingredients in a bag. The bags are compostable so you can use them for your bucket liner (as it says in the explainer).

    There’s a compartment in the bottom with an ice pack and things that need to be kept cold. This week, chicken breasts and some ground beef. There was also a loose whole bulb of garlic.

    The kit bags aren’t full to the brim, so the tops could be folded down. But I still had to find room in my apartment sized fridge to stick them.

    Making Herby Panko-Crusted Chicken

    We decided to make the chicken for dinner.

    Here’s everything from the kit laid out on the counter. The sticker on the bag has a full ingredient list for everything like the spice blend and then mayo, plus the nutrition info for the whole meal.

    The double sided instructions are good. Tells you the equipment and other stuff you need (basics like salt, pepper, oil, honey). And the instructions are laid out in time it takes to cook. So preheat the oven right away and get the potato wedges started.

    And now we’ll teleport all the way to the plated meal. Chicken breast covered in mayo and panko-crusted, potato wedges baked in the oven with Montreal Steak Spice, and honey glazed carrots.

    It was good! We added our own salt and pepper to everything as instructed and it was nice and flavourful.

    It called for parchment paper for both the potato wedges and the final bake of the chicken. That was a nice tip for me to save on clean up and keep things crisp.

    It definitely reminded me that potato wedges are something we can make any time!

    The carrots are pretty much how I make them anyway - finished with a little butter and honey. Dill if you like, or I’ll add cumin seeds sometimes.

    The mayo-instead-of-egg was another nice tip that I’ll be using.

    All in all, a good, tasty first experience.

    On Meal Kits Generally

    The discounts to get me on a subscription is very much an investment driven business.

    The packaging feels like a lot. But: no plastic other than on the meat.

    There is an app, so maybe I can opt out of the printed meal instructions.

    Are the ingredients local? Could one check a box and have 80% local ingredients?

    Could one apply this to community supported agriculture?

    This meal was ~$9CAD with discount, ~$20CAD without. For 2 people, that’s reasonable. The chicken breasts alone would cost me $5-6. Everything else low cost: 2 carrots, 3 potatoes, mayo, steak spice. Maybe another $1.

    We used to do zero take out. And then the pandemic. Now we’re at 1-2 take out meals per week. This would be cheaper.

    I’m interested in perhaps doing some food sharing with people, where everyone cooks a larger quantity and then shares with the group. Don’t know if I’ll get to it as a habit this year, but it’s the sort of thing I’d like to see more of.

    And bulk buying!

    I have done zero research on this in Vancouver. If you have thoughts on meal kits or on fun community food locally, let me know!


    1. Yes, I’m going to use a referral code when linking to Chefs Plate. You get $80 in discounts, I get $40 in credit. [return]
    2. I assume that Chefs Plate pays SnackMagic to get it into the hands of people who are already getting food delivered to their homes. [return]
    → 11:29 PM, Dec 17   •  cooking, Blog
  • Nudelauflauf: made with ricciarelle noodles (a bit like skinny lasagna).

    Remembered the trick of using a box grater to grate fresh tomatoes, made a very garlicky sauce, then put in cooked noodles and broiled with raclette on top.

    → 10:38 PM, May 22   •  cooking
  • It’s #pickling season! Trying out my new Kraut Source fermentation lid. Cabbage, radishes, and carrots.

    → 8:24 PM, May 8   •  cooking, pickling
  • I had sourdough bread success today. I’ll take it.

    → 10:56 PM, Jan 6   •  AllTheBestRecipes, cooking
  • And so it begins. Bought the sous vide machine that Jae told me I should get.

    First time recipe: Pork Steak.

    → 2:53 PM, Dec 20   •  cooking
  • I should log my epic sandwich from yesterday’s lunch. Sourdough from Tall Shadow breads, polish mayo, pickle slice, Roma tomato, havarti, and salami.

    → 2:03 PM, Oct 20   •  cooking, mastodon
  • Spicy udon bowl for lunch today. Onions, ginger, garlic, some diced red peppers & carrots I had laying around. Diced Roma tomatoes. Miso. Soy Sauce. Samba Oelek. Rice vinegar.

    → 1:56 PM, Oct 20   •  cooking, mastodon
  • The Sifter in Atlas Obscura

    The Sifter thesifter.org

    a multilingual database, currently 130,000-items strong, of the ingredients, techniques, authors, and section titles included in more than 5,000 European and U.S. cookbooks.

    – A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks Is Now Online, and You Can Help Improve It, Atlas Obscura

    The data on this site is super interesting. Whatever is running the site is not great. It’s some sort of out of the box Microsoft thing including default loading animations.

    But! It aims to be a sort of Wikipedia. I’ve signed up to be a contributor and I hope that this can be built on and be licensed for re-use.

    I did a search for “Vancouver” and found only one entry, so my used cookbook collection may be able to add a handful more. It does say it only wants pre-1940 cookbooks, but it’s unclear why.

    It provides a bird’s-eye view of long-term trends in European and American cuisines, from shifting trade routes and dining habits to culinary fads. Search “cupcakes,” for example, and you’ll find the term may have first popped up in Mrs. Putnam’s Receipt Book And Young Housekeeper’s Assistant, a guide for ladies running middle-class households in the 1850s.

    Yes! Super interesting to me. Looking forward to see how this evolves.

    (From the Gastro Obscura section of A.O.)

    → 7:30 PM, Oct 13   •  AllTheBestRecipes, cooking, Blog
  • The funky liquid leftover from lemony pickled cabbage with some dried chilies added 🌶 I don’t have room to keep it around. Slices of lemon zest made it more magical over time.

    → 8:58 PM, Oct 3   •  cooking, pickling
  • DaveO has just posted two kitchen posts. One on salt fermented pickles, the other on preparing two food gifts, tai snapper fish and wagyu beef.

    Yum! Clearly I need to go visit DaveO in Japan so we can cook epic feasts together.

    → 12:25 AM, Jul 23   •  cooking, DaveO, Japan
  • Tickets to a restaurant /via @eastgate

    Next is a fascinating Chicago restaurant that serves a single, fixed menu that changes every three months. You don’t make reservations; you buy tickets. The current menu is titled “Tour of Thailand.” It’s full of fascinating ideas.

    …

    By selling tickets instead of taking reservations, for example, Next builds service into the charge and gets rid of tipping. Everyone is on salary, and servers and cooks both receive the service charge dividends.

    via markbernstein.org

    If you click through to Mark Bernstein's full post, you can read his description and reaction to the current Tour of Thailand menu at Next Restaurant (I'm linking to the FAQ, since the "home page" is literally just an invitation to create an account and buy tickets; and they're currently sold out).

    The food is fascinating, but I'm even more fascinated by the model of selling tickets.

    In Vancouver, you might check out the Irish Heather Long Table Series. I really should talk to Sean about switching to using Eventbrite directly, so people can self serve, and he can spend less time wrangling tickets.

    What happens when you start having more ticket buyers than space? That is, people who go to every event you put on? Do you get to be wilder, even more creative? Or do you just cater to the audience that you have? Sounds kind of like the concerns of a music artist.

    I've only done mass food delivery once. I got Mark Busse, Ben Garfinkel and the Industrial Brand gang (pre-Foodists) plus Robert Scales and myself to prepare / cook / serve 150 people for the Northern Voice 2007 pre-dinner / party. With live slide presentation of Lee & Sachi's world travel. Anyway, that was a crazy / fun experience, from which I learned many things, including that delivering food to 150 people without professional prep facilities is HARD.

    I've thought a lot about getting involved with a restaurant/cafe/food enterprise. But I've done it before (dishpig / prep cook a long time ago), and it's a LOT OF WORK. Which is mainly filled with uncertainty, since you have to lose a lot of money waiting for people to show up, then hope they like what you make, and rinse and repeat.

    A ticket / event based food experience is a different ball game. KickStarter for restaurants?

    → 2:03 PM, Aug 23   •  Personal, cooking, Food, restaurant, KickStarter, Industrial Brand, Irish Heather, Long Table Series, Next Restaurant, Northern Voice, nv07, Blog
  • Myth of the Marvelous Ingredient

    [I] remind everyone not to be too hung up upon the Myth of the Marvelous Ingredient. Sure, the fresher the better, and yes, starting out with marvelous ingredients helps, but...you still have to cook. It´s annoying and patronizing and plain stupid to convince people that unless the produce was harvested within a mile of them by vestal virgins they needen´t even bother to start.
    via lobstersquad.blogspot.com

    The hardest part of cooking good food (after you've done all you can to buy good ingredients) is … cooking.

    And there are two parts to that cooking. There is the "I've got extra time on the weekend, let's make something special cooking", and there is "I need to cook tasty meals every day of the week".

    I'm home sick for the second day. I made myself soup yesterday, and it didn't taste very good. A cooking screw up hurts even more when you don't have the energy for a do over.

    → 8:08 AM, Aug 23   •  Personal, cooking, Food, quote, Blog
  • Weekends are cooking time

    P2580 P2586
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    Weekends are time for me to do more elaborate / longer cooking. I'm the primary cook-er in the household, so I do cook most every day, but cooking is also relaxing downtime for me, especially when I get to try new things, or things that I don't cook very often.

    Yesterday was an errand day in general. We bought 10lbs of peaches and apricots coming back from the Okanagan (at the Mariposa fruit stand in Keremeos, to be exact -- recommended by Chris Rich amongst the sea of fruit stands there). By now, it was time to process them in bulk in some way. So I made peach jam and apricot jam.

    I've never made peach jam before. I used this Farmstand Peach Jam recipe, although as always, not exactly. I don't like using pectin, and I don't like to put in too much sugar. I ended up taking out a cup of cut up peaches at the last minute since I wanted to stick them in the freezer, and I think that was the error. Or, just that peaches are quite sweet to start with, and without pectin you can't skimp on the sugar. I had originally intended to also make some spicy peach chutney of some kind - I still have those peaches in the freezer, or I could even just use some of the jam and mix it with savoury ingredients to make it.

    Next I made apricot jam. My mom makes this all the time, so I was reasonably sure the no-pectin method would work, and it certainly did. It turned out nice and tart. It was a pleasant surprise to find and use Jens Alfke's apricot recipe - a long time blogger whose feed fell from my reader at some point. So, score 1 for a great recipe (since it uses a formula for fruit-to-sugar) and for re-finding a great writer.

    This morning I poached a couple of eggs for breakfast. Rachael is a fan of poached eggs, but I usually just find them too fiddly. I took it upon myself to actually look up some egg poaching instructions and they turned out nicely. In short: the water shouldn't be boiling, turn it off as soon as you put the eggs in, put a lid on it, and 3 minutes is about the right time length.

    Wandering up Commercial Drive, I decided today would be a seafood day. So, I've got some Qualicum Beach scallop and side stripe shrimp ceviche marinating in the fridge. Recipe in short:

    • 10 prawns, remove the shell and chop
    • 4 large scallops, chopped
    • 1/2 avocado, chopped
    • 1/3 cup red onion, minced
    • 1/3 cup fresh basil, chopped
    • 3 tomatillos, chopped
    • juice of 3 limes
    • fresh cracked pepper
    • small red chile, minced
    • 1/3 cup cucumber, chopped

    It's marinating now, it may end up gaining some other bits and pieces as I adjust seasonings when it comes out of the fridge.

    → 1:26 PM, Aug 7   •  Personal, cooking, recipe, apricot, ceviche, jam, peach, poached eggs, Blog
  • I made a vegan German potato salad

    The key part of German potato salad for me is the lack of mayonnaise and eggs. I make this up from scratch whenever I make it, but my version always includes two essential ingredients: Dijon mustard as part of the vinaigrette (I like the flavour and tang that it adds) and finely chopped dill pickles (a satisfying crunch and burst of vinegary / salty goodness).

    I also usually put in bacon / guanciale / schinken speck, but this time around, knew that there were going to be a number of vegetarians present and skipped the meat products. Hence, I (*gasp*!) accidentally made a vegan potato salad - which I didn't even realize until someone asked what was in it, and it dawned on me that yes, it was indeed a vegan potato salad :P

    The full recipe is on Foodista:

    Vegan German Potato Salad

    → 4:06 PM, Jun 27   •  Personal, cooking, Foodista, recipe, German, potato salad, vegan, Blog
  • Who wants to dinner swap? /via @trevoro

    A cooking co-op, or dinner swap, is simply an agreement by two or more individuals or households to provide prepared meals for each other, according to a schedule. The goal is to reduce the time spent in the kitchen while increasing the quality and variety of the food eaten.

    It’s not a new idea — dinner co-ops have been around for years — but it was new to me. Mine is based in my apartment building in Jackson Heights, Queens, which adds to the convenience. Members of our co-op, made up of four households, including two editors at the James Beard Foundation and Tony Liu, the executive chef of the Manhattan restaurant Morandi, exchange meals weekly.

    It works like this: Once a week, you cook a dish (chicken enchiladas, for instance), making enough to provide at least one serving for each adult member of the co-op. (Children can be assigned half or full portions, depending on ages and appetites.) Around the same time, your fellow co-op members are cooking large batches of their chosen dishes.

    via nytimes.com

    Saw Trevor post this earlier in the day. This well describes what I'd like to try – I find it easier to cook large portions in any case. Leave a comment if you're interested in participating.

    → 12:59 PM, Jun 24   •  Personal, cooking, co-op, cooking co-op, dinner swap, Blog
  • Making pork stock

    062120101586 062120101587 062120101588
    See the full gallery on Posterous

    I followed a combination of #2 and #3 from this site on Chinese soups. Specifically, I used a bunch of pork bones plus a pork hock. The hock had lots of skin and fat as well as bones, so I trimmed the the skin off and then broiled it in a cast iron pan with a couple of cloves of garlic until the skin was crisp and the garlic was nutty brown.

    → 9:00 PM, Jun 22   •  Personal, cooking, pork, Chinese, stock, Blog
  • Mover Dinner Menu

    OK, it's down to the wire, and I think I've figured out the menu for the Mover Dinner I'm putting on tomorrow. Mover Dinner? A thank you to all the folks that helped us move. When I'm short on cash, I pay in food!

    First Course: Laksa a la Boris

    I spent Monday making pork stock. This is going to be the basis for a Laksa-inspired soup - I'll add coconut milk, bean sprouts, noodles and likely some chicken. Fresh green onions and coriander will round it out.

    Second Course: Spinach salad with Guanciale

    I've talked about the beauty of guanciale before - I'll crisp up some cubes of it with garlic and make a honey / mustard dressing to go over spinach leaves and some tomatoes.

    Third Course: Pita Wraps with Chicken

    I'll marinate / grill the chicken in pieces, as well as have some roasted peppers, sautéed onions, a tomatillo-based salsa (maybe sort of like this one?), some fresh tzatsiki, and other fixings for people to make their own wraps.

    Dessert Course

    Some sort of white vanilla cake served with the strawberries & rhubarb that we got last weekend.

     

    → 8:48 PM, Jun 22   •  Personal, cooking, guanciale, laksa, tomatillo, Blog
  • About to broil an octopus

    Media_httpkalofagasca_poqad
    via kalofagas.ca

    I'm about to braise & broil an octopus - bought about a pound of tentacle down at Granville Island. Wish me luck, will have photos of the finished product.

    (Especially ironic because of the "cute" octopus video? Perhaps - they're still damn tasty)

    Update: OK, worked out pretty well. A little chewy, but delicious. Bought it at The Salmon Shoppe on Granville Island - had them hack off one big tentacle for Rachael and I (Rachael had fun taking some close up shots before I cooked it).

    Here's the picture of the finished product:

    Making Broiled Octopus - 6

    And the rest of the "making of" is on Flickr.

    → 3:28 PM, Apr 18   •  Personal, cooking, octopus, Blog
  • Roast Lamb Leg Dinner

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    See the full gallery on Posterous

    Last of the Cutter Ranch lamb. Marinated with preserved lemons with bay leaves from my parents' garden, plus turmeric, coriander, garlic, etc. Served with cous cous with grilled peppers.

    → 1:56 PM, Mar 8   •  Personal, cooking, photo, lamb, Blog
  • Spicy Coconut Tumeric Beef

    022020101165

    I was going for the Banana Leaf's Rendang Beef curry - which is a completely different dish, but I think I got the coconut right, as well as the sweet + tang + spice.

    Spicy Coconut Tumeric Beef on FoodistaSpicy Coconut Tumeric Beef

    → 9:41 PM, Feb 20   •  Personal, cooking, Foodista, recipe, beef, coconut, tumeric, Blog
  • No Knead Bread first result

    No Knead Bread (inside)

    No Knead Bread

    01/17/2010

    01/17/2010

    via flickr.com

    This is my first attempt at No Knead Bread (wrote about it previously with links to recipes).

    This was a bit of a mashup with something from Cooks Illustrated that recommends a *little* bit of kneading, and the addition of beer and vinegar.

    I didn't have any beer, but I did add the vinegar, and I did knead for about 10 minutes. I let it sit yesterday at 5pm, and started working with it at around 9am this morning, so it sat for 16 hours. The modified Cooks Illustrated plans on anywhere between 8 and 18 hours.

    1/3 whole wheat and 2/3 white (both unbleached organic all purpose from Spud). The crust is nice and substantial, the crumb is bit too light for me: will have to experiment with heavier grains, maybe some rye flour. Will have to see how it tastes when it's cold: fresh out of the oven all bread is fantastic.

    → 3:20 PM, Jan 17   •  Personal, cooking, baking, no knead bread, Blog
  • Make your own Sauerkraut, Kimchi, Beets, etc. /via @sarahfelicity

    Live Fermented Food & Organic Raw Dairy Making Workshops at The Urban Ashram - 2290 Saint George Street, Vancouver, BC V5T 3R2  604 708 9058 farmertomas@gmail.com

    Food is the new black. Everybody wants to connect to food again, whether in festivals like Fork in the Road, Taste of Health, Vancouver Health Show...or shopping at local farmers markets, growing their own food at home or in community gardens. Food is once again taking its primacy as what truly nourishes us and our Earth. Food also roots us and gives us a truly spiritual connection to our place here and now on Earth.

    Fermenting one’s own food at home is truly a wondrous and if alchemical experience produced by lactic acid bacteria, that exist all around us and within us. The process gives us a greater appreciation for all those beings we never see yet are reliant on: a lesson illustrated so beautifully by Dr. Seuss in Horton Hears a Who and Well(es) versions of War of the Worlds. Simply put, our sense of self is broadened and we appreciate and experience the interconnection that David Suzuki so frequently speaks of.

    Learn to make your own Sauerkraut, Kimchi, Beets and Fermented Fruits and go home with them! $40. Wednesday January 13 at 7 pm, at The Urban Ashram, 2290 Saint George Street.

    In this workshop you will learn how to work in harmony with some of these invisible friends while making Sauerkraut, Kimchi and fermented Fruits, along with the delicious fermented tea Kombucha. You will go home with your own vegetable and fruit ferments to continue at home, along with your own SCOBIE to make Kombucha.

    Lactic Acid Fermentation requires no energy other than ones own, for the production, fermentation and storage of the food: no heating, cooling in fridge, canning etc. LAF also adds many nutrients to our food, pre-digests it thus making the nutrients more absorbable and keeps the food alive, raw as it has not been cooked at all. In our era of rising consciousness of our energy usuage, LAF fits beautifully into the Kyoto Accord Ethic, sorely lacking at many governmental levels, so we can set the example in our own homes, bellies and lives!

    Wednesday January 20, 7 pm - Learn to make your own Yogurt, Butter, Buttermilk, Buttermilk Scones, Ghee, and Hard Cheese Curds using Vegetable Rennet, Whey Based Soup and enjoy chocolate ghee!
    This is a very hands on workshop and you will both have a meal around the foods and go home with many samples and yogurt starter. $40. At The Urban Ashram  2290 Saint George Street Organic RAW Whole Certified Organic Milk Used

    Get five people together for either a fruit/veg fermentation workshop or a dairy workshop and we can arrange a time and date that suites you. Please watch the YouTube video from a Dairy Making Workshop ~ [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTqdb8HlDmA?wmode=transparent]

    via urbanashram.ca

    This looks like something we could organize a group around. Anyone interested?

    → 4:55 PM, Jan 11   •  Personal, cooking, event, Urban Ashram, Blog
  • Parsnip and apple coleslaw

    Parsnip and apple coleslaw
    Serves 2 as a main meal, 4 as a small side dish

    2 tbsp cider vinegar
    1 tbsp good olive oil
    1 tsp clear honey
    1 tsp wholegrain mustard
    175g parsnips
    100g carrots
    100g red cabbage
    1 Cox’s apple, or your preferred eating apple, weighing approximately 150g
    Handful of fresh parsley leaves, roughly chopped
    25g walnuts, roughly chopped

    1 Place the vinegar, oil, honey and mustard in a small jar and season with a small pinch of salt and a good grinding of black pepper. Screw on the lid and give it a shake until it’s pale and combined. Taste, adjust the seasoning if necessary, and set aside.

    2 Peel the parsnip(s) and slice out the woody core – you’ll end up with about 100g parsnip. Coarsely grate and place in a large bowl. Peel and coarsely grate the carrot(s) and add to the parsnip. Very finely slice the red cabbage and add to the bowl.

    3 Quarter the apple and slice out the core. Coarsely grate the apple, discarding any large pieces of skin. Add to the vegetables with the parsley leaves and half the walnuts.

    4 If the dressing has started to separate, give it a shake again, then pour over the coleslaw. Toss the salad to coat in the dressing and then divide between two plates. Scatter over the remaining walnuts and serve. For a more filling meal, serve it with a chunk of blue cheese and warm crusty bread (it’s also good with a greasy pork chop and apple sauce if you’re not vegetarian).

    via ginandcrumpets.wordpress.com

    Used 2 parsnips and 4 small carrots. 1/4 of a small / medium head of green cabbage. 1 Tbsp honey, 1 Tbsp dijon, only a splash of cider vinegar. Zest from one lemon, plus used the fresh lemon juice from the whole lemon. No parsley, no walnuts (so it's very plain and orange / green looking).

    My version is definitely more of a side dish version.

    → 3:05 PM, Jan 9   •  Personal, apple, cabbage, carrot, coleslaw, cooking, mustard, parsnip, recipes, Blog
  • Me sawing off a pig's head /via @ecstaticist

    http://s.ytimg.com/yt/swf/watch-vfl139942.swf
    via youtube.com

    Also features James in the background.

    → 12:45 PM, Jan 7   •  Personal, cooking, Foodists, me, video, Blog
  • Proscuitto Egg Cups a la @ecstaticist

    Yield: 24

    Ingredients

    12

    slices proscuitto

    1

    cup cooked crab or lobster

    6

    eggs

    ¼

    cup cream

     

    salt

     

    pepper

    Preparation

    Step 1

    Preheat the oven to 400 degrees

    Step 2

    Get out a mini-cupcake pan with 24 cups

    Step 3

    Trim the top bit of fat from each slice of prosciutto

    Step 4

    Cut each slice in half, and fold it into the cupcake pan

    Step 5

    Place a bit of crab / lobster in each cup

    Step 6

    Beat the eggs with the cream and add salt & pepper to taste

    Step 7

    Pour the egg into each cup until it reaches the rim of each cup. It doesn't matter if the crab / lobster pokes out a bit

    Step 8

    Bake for 10 - 15 minutes or until the eggs are set

    via foodista.com

    This is Evan's recipe - he'll need to edit to correct. Ben asked about it today, and I hadn't uploaded my picture yet, so I thought I'd add it.

    On Foodista, anyone can edit / improve the recipe, so go ahead and change it if you have improvements.

    → 12:51 AM, Jan 3   •  cooking, recipes, Foodista, appetizer, crab, decadent dinner, egg, Food, lobster, proscuitto, Blog
  • Buttermilk Scones

    • 1 1/2 cups All purpose flour
    • 1 teaspoon Salt
    • 1 teaspoon Baking powder
    • 1/2 teaspoon Baking soda
    • 6 fluid oz Buttermilk
    • 3 tablespoon Butter room temp

    Preparation

    Oven temp: 425F / 220C / Gas Mark 7

    1. Preheat the oven to 425. Grease a baking sheet.

    2. Sift the dry ingredients into a bowl. Rub in the butter or margarine with your fingertips until the mixture resembles bread crumbs.

    3. Gradually pour in the buttermilk, stirring with a fork to form a soft dough.

    4. Roll out the dough until 1/2 inch thick. (I often make mine thicker and roll it into one large circle). Cut into wedges with a sharp knife.

    5. Place on the baking sheet and bake until golden, 12-15 minutes.

    via bigoven.com

    One of the things I've been on a roll with over the holidays is baking. I do lots of cooking, but generally little baking. Oh-ten will contain more baking.

    UPDATE: this is very much a savoury recipe -- mine ended up being a bit salty / soda-y because I wasn't very careful at measuring. The texture was very nice and flaky, not sure what adding sugar would do.

    Buttermilk Scones

    → 6:19 PM, Jan 1   •  cooking, recipes, baking, Food, bigoven.com, buttermilk, scones, Blog
  • Foodists: Much Ado About Recipes

    Posted on Foodists: Much Ado About Recipes - http://foodists.ca/2009/12/29/much-ado-about-recipes.html

    Chicken Marsala Recipe on Rouxbe Screenshot

    Chicken Marsala Recipe from Rouxbe.com

    I’m facing a dilemma I’ve faced several times before. What to do about recipes?

    I'm facing a dilemma I've faced several times before. What to do about recipes? We don't focus on churning out lots of start-to-finish recipes here on Foodists, mainly because it's more about sharing food experiences rather than "just" recipes. But we do share our recipes, and try and tag the blog entries with ingredient hints to help find them. Still, it's not ideal for sharing lots of recipes.

    Most of my cooking using recipes falls into the "inspired by", "adapted from", or "I'm sure it'll be fine if I substitute half the ingredients" categories. But I'd like to keep track of those sources, whether it be from just the right Google search or from a physical cookbook.

    And yes, I've got lots of cookbooks. At the one end I've got basics like Joy of Cooking and Fannie Farmer, and at the other end I've got various cookbooks from second hand or thrift stores, plus a smattering of regional cuisines purchased while traveling. While I like nothing better to sit down with piles of cookbooks all around me, engrossed in reading and dreaming of food, it's not very practical to a) easily find a recipe amongst dozens of cookbooks or b) to share that recipe. Where's my digital index for my physical cookbooks?!

    I tried to solve my dilemma a while back by building my own recipe website. It does a passable of sharing links to recipes I've found elsewhere, and a pretty terrible job at inputting recipes with full ingredients and instructions. And, I really don't need to be maintaining yet-another-website.

    So over the holidays, I again began looking for a great place to make my "digital recipe home".

    My first stop was at Foodista. It's a startup out of Seattle that's just barely a year old, run by a friend of a friend. Foodista is unique in being a kind of Wikipedia of cooking. You can set recipes to be public, which means that anyone can edit and evolve them, whether that means fixing mistakes, clarifying the directions, or adding a note that Brand X flour needs to be used differently. I love this feature, and I love the concept of seeing the history or changes of recipes over time.

    They also have a widget that links blogs to recipes and vice versa (similar to Urbanspoon). Here's an example of a Foodista widget for my favourite Czechoslovakian Cabbage Soup recipe: Czechoslovakian Cabbage Soup (Nutbread & Nostalgia) on Foodista

    Foodista is still relatively new and will be evolving more features (check out my taste profile). I've already left a comment about making it easy to link in my own photos from Flickr.

    Next stop was our own local recipe / learning website, Rouxbe. I've got an account from ages ago, and couldn't recall if they actually let you enter in your own recipes. They do, so I started work on entering in Shredded Short Ribs with BBQ sauce that I made over the holidays. At first, I was excited by the interface, which lets you upload a photo for each step. Ultimately, I gave up before completing and publishing the recipe, because there were too many fields and too much to fill out.

    I think Rouxbe has a great interface for longer recipes, especially those with unfamiliar or complicated techniques (many of which they have video tutorials for that you can link in), and I would definitely use it for that kind of recipe. They even have a "Save as Draft" feature to make it easier to finish inputting those long recipes. Here's the embed for the Chicken Marsala that I used a screenshot of at the beginning of this post - the embed is gorgeous, but at the same time doesn't show the ingredients (which is what *I* would want out of a widget) and busts out of this blog layout: http://rouxbe.com/embedded_player.swf

    Rouxbe Online Cooking School & Video Recipes

     

    So, Foodists, help me with my recipe dilemma: What recipe sites do you frequent? How do you share / keep track of recipes that you find online? What features do you want out of an ultimate recipe website? And yes, I'm still contemplating building my own -- recipes.foodists.ca anyone? :P

    → 9:10 PM, Dec 31   •  cooking, recipes, Foodista, Foodists, Food, Rouxbe, Blog
  • Sunday Cooking: From corn bread to yogurt cake, with some beef in between

     

    So, I did a whole bunch of "experimental" baking today. Experimental mainly because a) I don't bake a lot and b) I tried tweaking a bunch of baking recipes. And by "tweaking" and "bunch", I mean not quite having all the ingredients for one recipe, so vaguely scavenging a few other recipes trying to see if I could come up with a Franken-recipe.

    First up was corn bread for breakfast. Corn bread is, as far as baking goes, NOT HARD. However, I was faced with no flour, and the need for no dairy. The soy milk worked just fine. But spelt flour...

    ...OK, so spelt flour and me are done. I didn't really like it before, and yeah, stuff made with it is usually denser / coarser, which you have to watch for. But the main thing is, spelt flour makes stuff taste bad! Yes, it's true: I was relatively happy with how the slightly coarser, slightly crumblier corn bread turned out. Except it was infected with yucky spelt taste. *sigh*

    At dinner (or rather, in the midst of cooking 2 things at the same time), I found out that all those yogurt containers in my fridge needed to have the yogurt used up so that I could use the empty containers (that, and so that fur wouldn't grow on the yogurt). The thought "yogurt cake" popped into my head, and so I looked at Lemon Yogurt Cake, Wonderful Yogurt Cake, and Simple Yogurt Cake. I also looked into my pantry after seeing that last entry about cake mixes and found chocolate pudding mix / pie filling. So that got combined with the yogurt...but a double-plus amount of yogurt...and off I went, creating a Franken-recipe for Chocolate Yogurt Cake.

    I may post it for posterity as a full recipe later, as I did note it down. But, after baking, it's clear that I made a medium-rare cake. Medium rare is great for steak. It is not good for cake. Flavour is pretty good, but gooey...

    Ah well, it was still fun. And I made two meat dishes to stock my freezer with, as well. Prime rib bones roasted on a mirepoix, and then simmered to make a nice and rich beef stock. 3 large empty yogurt containers for the freezer, plus a small bowl of soup for "first dinner".

    Aside: how do you cool things before they go in the freezer? My apartment is small, and usually quite warm after I've been cooking and baking and such. I have a window in the kitchen, so I usually stick things to cool on the window sill. I haven't had a pigeon steal anything yet...

    The other meaty item was beef stew, simmered for hours in the slow cooker. Another 5 or 6 meals worth, and all good hearty winter time stuff.

    Source of all this good stuff? Famous Foods on Kingsway. An excellent, excellent store, heartily recommended for meats, bulk staples, and everything in between.

     

     

    → 8:15 AM, Dec 9   •  cooking, Food, Famous Foods, foodlikethat, spelt flour, Blog
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