Category Archives: Homemade

Pi(e) day: 5 days to go!

Dining Out for Life is this Thursday, March 12, 2009. More than 200 restaurants will donate 25% of their food proceeds to A Loving Spoonful and Friends For Life. I’ll be at the Cascade Room. Where will you dine?

It’s pi(e) day on Saturday. It’ll be March 14, or 3/14 – which, if you squint and turn your head sideways, is 3.14. And, as all geeks know, 3.14 = pi.

You don’t have to be a geek to appreciate it, either. Any day you get to eat pie is a good day.

Gettng flaky pie crust is simple science. The key ingredients in pie dough: flour, water, and fat. The flour and water interacts to create gluten, providing the pie’s structure. The fat is incorporated to interrupt this structure. As a pie bakes in the oven, the fat melts and leaves a void where it used to be. The result: layers of pastry with air between them. When you bite into the crust, you perceive the pastry-air mixture as flakiness.

Interlude: cabbage rolls

I’ll return to your regularly scheduled chocolate myth debunkery soon, I promise. But in the meantime, I wanted to post a brief interlude about the world’s most amazing cabbage rolls.

Last night, I lined up for an hour at a secret location, only to be told that supplies were running low. Rations were set at one dozen perogies and one dozen vegetarian cabbage rolls. Things were looking dire. There were, however, ample supplies of the world’s hugest Ukrainian sausage. We took what we could get and booked it home, we were so excited to eat.

Well, it was worth the wait. The perogies were soft pillows of filling that actually tasted like potato, nestled inside the thinnest possible pastry. They were unctuous and tasty, and it was remarkable how much flavour an actual perogy has. I’ve been wasting away in frozen perogy land for far too long.

But the cabbage rolls! My god, the cabbage rolls. My previous experiences with cabbage rolls have been with oversized cabbage wrapped around mushy rice, the whole thing doused in sauce in a poor attempt to hide the lack of flavour and texture. These cabbage rolls were the complete opposite. They were dainty and delicate: a thin cabbage leaf hugging a flavourful mixture of perfectly al dente rice cooked with spices.

The ultimate bite: one part cabbage roll, one part perogy, one part pan-fried sausage, one part caramelized onion, one part sour cream. I dare you to find anything more perfect on a cold Friday night.

Prawns and poo

Here’s a puzzle for you: you have a bucket of raw, unpeeled shrimp. You need to transform this bucket into cooked, peeled, deveined shrimp. What’s the order of operations?

The answer, my friends, is to first devein the shrimp, then cook them, then peel them.

I prefer cooking them in the shell because you get a more intense flavour than if you shell them first. It also affords a bit of protection from overcooking (but not much, so you still need to pay attention!).

Most importantly, if you plan on deveining them, then you need to do it before you cook them. Once you cook them, the opaque flesh makes it hard to see the vein, much less get it out.

And just so we’re clear: “vein” is a nice way of saying “poo.”

Random item of the week = tamarind

I bought tamarind paste this weekend. I’ve never needed it before (I don’t do much Thai cooking), but figured I’d take it home and figure out what to do with it.

I think I will make candy with it. Tamarind fruit jellies, perhaps?

Blast from the past

I’ve been re-reading entries from a dead blog, and found an entry on chocolate fondue. I wrote it in 2004, and I’m happy to report that I’ve come a long way. I hope you find it helpful.

How NOT to make chocolate fondue

Use milk chocolate. Do not look up a recipe in advance. Add coffee cream, not whipping cream. When it seizes into a giant ball of goo, try adding butter. Throw out butter because it smells like ass. Use margarine instead. Stir. Pour mixture into fondue pot and eat with fruit. Notice that mixture is separating into grainy gooey chocolate mess with oily sludge on top. Throw the mixture out and eat fruit by itself.