When it comes to cooking I’m more a technician than a planner. I think of myself as a ‘Man of Action’ rather than a ‘Man of Ideas’ although I have enough of the latter to make myself appear in equal parts annoying and dangerous.
Regardless, I do a lot of the cooking – and my lovely bride does most of the planning. It’s a process that works out rather well, actually.
Things do fall through the cracks, from time to time, though. Generally we read through the recipe ingredients and make sure we have it all, but recently we missed the listing of chia seeds as part of a salad we had planned to do.
Of course I was 90% of the way through the salad before I noticed the listing of chia seeds. After humming the jingle from the Chia Pet ads, I figured before I give up looking I had best at least take a look. I did build the (too small, filled up too quickly) spice cabinet, after all.
So I looked under ‘c’ and sure enough, there they were.
Of course.
Filled to overflowing before a single day of owning it. Next time I’m making it twice as big.
https://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.png00Alastairhttps://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.pngAlastair2021-03-22 15:17:292021-03-22 15:17:31Do we have…?
Not a fan of the name – ‘micro greens’. I keep thinking that they’ll be tiny little plants and the only way you can eat them would be on a massive white plate with a small pile of them in the centre. Kinda 1990s era nouveau cuisine.
Aside from the name, though, they’re rather cool. We planted some pea shoots which, well, shot up and grew so fast we couldn’t keep up. Next time I’ll plant them a few every day.
We also have some baby kale, and something else that I didn’t recognize but tastes rather good.
If you like salad and live in Canada, like I do, then these grow light contraptions for micro greens are rather cool. As long as you stay on top of them, the greens keep on coming. The grow-op that we have also has a nifty contraption for keeping the plants watered. Once every two weeks you can fill a bin and the water wicks up. It’s brilliant.
And if you really hate the name ‘micro greens’ just don’t harvest them for a few days. They turn macro rather quickly. But then they get unwieldy and the flavour suffers somewhat.
This is what happens when you let your mind wander
Ok, the caption on the photo isn’t quite right. The above is what happens when you let your mind wander and you don’t set a timer.
Once, many years ago, I forgot a pot on the stove at my mother-in-law’s house. I was reducing some sauce and headed out the door in a clueless moment without a thought to what I was doing only a few minutes before.
Then I remembered I had left it on the stove and I tried to call someone at the house to see if they could take it off the heat. By that point it had already been found by another family member, all dried out and in a rather bad way, sauce-wise.
Incredibly, I actually managed to resurrect it. I felt rather fortunate about dodging that bullet.
And my luck went downhill after that. I remember my mother reminding me to crack the oven door a little bit when I was broiling things as it gets rather hot in there rather quickly, and before you know it your broiling will turn to charring.
But the oven door let out too much heat, I argued. When I had the opportunity, I broiled with the door closed. Things certainly moved more quickly, that’s for sure. So much so that after clearing all the smoke out of the main floor of the house, I promised myself that I would set a timer every time I broiled anything. Same for anything I was cooking, especially if it was over high heat. I kept nattering on to my kids about not turning their back on a pot on the stove, set a timer, pay attention… You don’t want to burn anything.
And I took my own advice right up until I didn’t. Mercifully, I had more pine nuts in the pantry and no one else happened to be in the kitchen and had to know about my hot pan oversight. But you see? This is what happens when you get cocky. Your perfectly browned pine nuts end up biting you in the ass. It was the stove version of a marshmallow over a bonfire. I spent a ton of time and effort getting a perfect brown char all over and then in a moment of inattention I set it aflame.
Secretly, I’m always a little relieved when I make a mistake like this. It was relatively harmless (although pine nuts are horribly expensive) and it reminded me to be careful and pay attention. When a lesson like that comes along I always try to heed the message. At least a little bit.
Right there, between Turmeric and Zaatar, of course
I don’t understand white pepper.
I also don’t really know that much about it. Being not particularly familiar to me, I’ll do what I do with all strange (to me) things, and deem it a ‘Tool of the Devil’. You know, like how Grandpa Simpson describes the Metric System.
Apparently it’s black pepper with the outside skin removed. White pepper is only the inside little bit. The wikipedia entry also goes into details about pink and green peppercorns, but I’m sticking with white pepper for this entry.
My first response when I learned that was to ask which poor fool has the job of stripping off the outer husk? Then it was explained that there are processes to take care of that.
Regardless, it’s pepper, but not really very good pepper. The outer skin adds a lot to the flavour. So, apparently you only use white pepper for appearance sake. Mashed potatoes are a perfect spot for white pepper. Ditto the sauce for macaroni and cheese. Little black flecks in either of those dishes would be rather off-putting.
So, imagine my surprise when I was reading an older cookbook by one of Vancouver (and Winnipeg’s) greatest chefs, Rob Feenie. He called for ‘freshly ground white pepper’ on some short ribs that were to be braised. I’m certain that looks aren’t going to play a role in that dish, at least for the first bit.
I wonder why – is there something magical about white pepper that I’m missing?
40 jars out of 5 boxes of tomatoes. I was going for more pulp, but there is a little water in there… Live and learn
Every year, about this time (Late August, September) I do a couple of things: I read, The Closing Down of Summer by Alistair MacLeod. It’s a melancholy reminiscence of a hard-rock miner, touching on all kinds of themes, but the one that I hear is the simple notion of leaving a comfortable existence behind and having to get back to work. Or ‘Back to porridge’ as my wife would say.
The other end-of-summer thing I do is I can some tomatoes. Yes, they’re actually in jars but somehow ‘jarring’ tomatoes makes me think that the tomatoes are going to do something to surprise me.
I’ll detail the process in a later post, but for now I have 40 new jars of tomatoes to go downstairs. Throughout the year, whenever we need tomatoes, up a jar comes. That’s pizza sauce, chili, any soup or sauce that requires tomatoes – here they are.
Ripe (actually, they sort of got away from me and I had about 10% of them spoil – never happened to me before), organic, perfect.
If I ran the numbers on the tomatoes, I would probably find that buying them by the case in actual cans would be more cost-effective.
But that’s not really the point. For me, the jars are a year’s worth of potential, waiting to be tapped. Like a pre-paid account at a resort or summer camp, I never have to worry about whether or not we have enough. There always seems to be another jar. Having a basement full of preserves is comforting. We’re ready as we can be for the coming winter. Well, we’re more ready now that the tomato cupboard is full.
https://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.png00Alastairhttps://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.pngAlastair2020-09-25 13:06:012020-09-25 13:06:02Every year, about this time
Just like every year for the past several years, some of the families in the neighbourhood got together and ordered tomatoes.
Let me be a little more specific: Some of the Italian families who know the value of a basement full of tomato sauce took pity on me and allowed me to ride on their produce-ordering coattails. Apparently about 30 cases of Roma tomatoes showed up on Friday. Five were mine.
One of the neighbours has a food mill. She and her sister turn their tomatoes into passata (crushed tomatoes) with the mill, and they always allow us to borrow it, as who wants to store a food mill for 364 days of the year when you can rent one for a day with a decent bottle of red wine?
Here’s the issue: She gets to deal with her tomatoes first. We work around her schedule and every year it isn’t a problem.
Doesn’t mean I don’t worry, though. The tomatoes last year were perfectly ripe right off the truck. This year, not so sure. Not only were they about a week later than last year being delivered, they also needed at least a week to ripen up. It’s Tuesday. We have had them for 5 days. They’re looking pretty good.
Here’s the question: Do I trust the neighbour who thinks they need a few more days? Or do I trust my gut and do them early? I’m heading out of town this weekend so I either do them on Thursday (2 days’ hence) or wait until Monday.
Will they be too far gone on Monday? Will they be ripe enough on Thursday?
This is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night, you know.
I think I will wait until Monday. I just had one and although it was incredibly tasty, it still had a fair amount of crunch. I think there is still time.
My wife prefers nectarines to peaches. As in, nectarines are amazing; peaches are, well… OK…
I didn’t realize I had a position on such things, but then I was reminded of an afternoon in Paris many, many years ago – probably 1991. I was sitting in a plaza and I bought a couple of peaches from a greengrocer.
They. Were. Perfect. Perfectly ripe, juicy, peachy (duh) and absolutely sublime. As a consequence, I have always been more of a ‘peach’ guy. My wife tolerates this transgression the same way she tolerates most of my foibles – with undiminished grace and dignity.
I hadn’t thought about that anecdote until a whole case of nectarines showed up at our house a few days ago.
Every year, yours truly along with several families in the neighbourhood, buy tomatoes from a farm in Oliver, BC. It’s an organic farm and the roma tomatoes they grow are pretty amazing. Every year we take about 150lbs of tomatoes and turn them into a few dozen jars of sauce for use throughout the year. Now that I’m on a pizza kick, I’m using a lot more of said tomatoes, but it looks like we’ll only have a few jars left from last year before the next lot gets added to the cellar.
In addition to our tomato order, we also get a few pounds of garlic and a box of nectarines. Apparently the nectarines were so ripe that the farmer drove down that part of the order last week. Tomatoes show up tomorrow.
And the nectarines are perfect. Perfect as in perfect. I think I ate 4 of them yesterday. I eat fruit like this with no guilt at all. It’s fresh, organic, incredibly sweet, chock full of who knows how much nutritional goodness…
It doesn’t get any better than this. I’m speaking here in a specific way – there is no way that a nectarine, grown by anyone, anywhere, could be superior to the fruit that was sitting in front of me up until about 10 seconds ago. More about the objective value of the fruit itself, rather than the experience of eating it.
This is one of the cool things about ingredients – they have their flavour and they have their ‘best before’ but the taste is pretty linear. There isn’t any way to prepare or to create a better result. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, everything aligns and you can eat these things when they are absolutely at the peak of their goodness. No amount of creativity can change that.
Ok, fine. I’ll allow that it might well taste better being eaten in the plaza next to the Centre Georges Pompidou. It’s a nectarine from BC, not a miracle.
Apparently only Millennials eat it. (and I’m no Millennial. Gen-X, baby. Just like Douglas Coupland.)
It has an appalling amount of discussion and furor surrounding it, given that it’s avocado smeared on a piece of toast. From Nigella Lawson being pilloried for offering the recipe in her TV show to a hapless Australian millionaire suggesting that Millennials could afford a house if only they could stop buying so much avocado toast. (see item #2) There have been more headlines about avocado toast than probably any single other breakfast item in the last decade. Even a condominium complex was giving away free avocado toast for a year with the successful purchase of a condo. That made headlines. How, I’m not sure, but feel free to Google away.
There is a secret to good avocado toast. Well, I’m sure there are several secrets, but the one that stands out for me comes from Trader Joes in the form of a jar of ‘Everything but the Bagel’ seasoning.
I live in the Trader Joe’s wasteland known as ‘Canada’ and you can buy the seasoning online from Amazon. I guess that some guy goes and clears the shelves at Trader Joes and then puts the jars up on Amazon. Price for a single jar, shipped to me in Canada? $30.
Yeah, all of a sudden it looks like you could buy a house in lieu of daily avocado toast.
But if you have a pal in St. Louis who regularly visits Trader Joes, and who knows you can cram 5 jars of ‘Everything but the Bagel’ seasoning in a fixed-price USPS box, well, then, all of a sudden you can have avocado toast AND make your downpayment.
Super simple to make. The only caveat is making sure you have a decent, ripe, avocado. The joke about ripe avocados:
Cook: Are you ripe?
Avocado: Not yet.
Avocado: Wait.
Avocado: Wait.
Avocado: Wait.
Avocado: Wait.
Avocado: Ok, now I’m ripe.
Cook: Great!! *reaches for a knife*
Avocado: Oh, too late!
Hey, I think it’s funny, mainly because for me it’s totally true.
Regardless, this morning I had perfect avocados.
See? Perfect!
I had some really nice bread, and it was a perfect warm summer morning.
My coffee was made (saved $5 there, just in case anyone is counting, and not considering the capital cost of the espresso machine and grinder)
Toast. Bit of butter. Avocado and a generous sprinkling of the seasoning. Step back and enjoy the fact that you made, for about $2, what would cost you several times that in a restaurant or cafe.
Amazing toast (my goodness it was good) Good coffee. On a shoestring budget. Best part of making food at home – how cheap it is and how, with a bit of practice, you can make stuff that is as good or better than what you might get eating out.
Just bring the Everything sprinkles.
Didn’t last long. Even from a household where everyone eats like the proverbial condemned man, it disappeared in a hurry.
https://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.png00Alastairhttps://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.pngAlastair2020-07-30 17:17:112020-07-30 17:17:13Breakfast with baggage
This was designed with future expansion in mind. The expansion was spoken for in about 4 minutes.
I took this photo to illustrate to a friend the place of honour that his gift of “Everything but the Bagel Sesame Seasoning Blend” has in our household. If you’re wondering where it is – top shelf. Wait, top of the cabinet, in the middle.
We don’t have Trader Joes in Canada. For a while we had a store called “Pirate Joes” where the owner would go to the USA, purchase product at full retail from Trader Joes, mule it back across the border, and then sell it at a markup in a store in Vancouver. He stayed in business for years before Trader Joes finally shut him down. I don’t think they really cared that he was selling their products; they just cared that they had no opportunity to have any control over said sales.
Canada is Trader Joes-Free. We lament this on a regular basis.
But I’m here to write about spice racks. But like any good food conversation, it’s hard to really comprehend how many themes there are here. I know, it’s a spice rack and only a spice rack. But I built it after much consultation with my wife. We agreed on the size and how many jars we needed.
We agreed on 35 different spices, all in similar jars. 7 shelves, 5 jars per shelf, no problem. We filled it completely in about 10 minutes once it was installed. I’m not sure who was in charge of counting, but obviously we left a few essentials out. I had no idea that Ras-el-Hanout even existed, let alone THREE types of paprika (Sweet, spicy, smoked)
What is more, we don’t have anything older than me in the shelf. See below for an explanation.
Exhibit ‘A’. From my late grandmother-in-law’s spice rack:
Older than one might think. Or not.
My grandmother-in-law was lovely, and the turmeric was… Terrible. It was like 50 years old. The packaging was epic, but the spices not so much. There is something to be said for keeping things fresh.
Back to the spice rack – it’s a work in progress. We have swapped the ground nutmeg for fresh nutmeg (nuts about the size of olives that you grate on a microplane), and we only have one type of dried oregano right now. The fresh stuff is taking over the herb garden as I write this.
Still, we have harissa, and now rose harissa. And we have Zatar, and something called ‘Dukkah’ which showed up recently. No idea what it is, but I expect it’s tasty.
https://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.png00Alastairhttps://dontcrowdthepan.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Dont_Crowd_Logo_new-1.pngAlastair2020-07-23 19:52:272020-07-27 12:52:53They were all supposed to fit.
When I make pizza, or, for that matter, make anything that requires tomatoes, I reach for a jar of our passata – which is an Italian word for sauce, except that it isn’t really sauce.
Let me explain, if I can. Passata is a product you make by passing cooked roma tomatoes through a mill. The only ingredient is tomato. It isn’t sauce, per se. It’s crushed tomatoes. With a basil leaf or two and a touch of citric acid to make absolutely sure I don’t kill any of my family members, even though the acidity of tomatoes makes it pretty hard to grow anything in there. I wouldn’t dream of canning garlic or mushrooms but tomatoes are pretty safe – a low bar to clear.
In tandem with a bunch of other crazy neighbours, every year I get about 120 pounds of organic Roma tomatoes from a farm not too far from Vancouver. The tomatoes show up in boxes, all ripe and perfect, and we (myself and any other family members I can dragoon into helping) spend an afternoon boiling them up and running them through a food mill, making several dozen jars of passata. Or sauce. Or whatever the English word is for sieved tomatoes.
To take the sauce from passata to pizza sauce, I make it the way Joe Beddia tells me to do it in Pizza Camp. Fresh tomatoes, no cooking. Bit of garlic, oil and salt. Let stand for a few hours, or overnight.
I used to just use it straight from the jar, but there is a lot of moisture in with the tomato pulp and things were getting a bit gooey, so now I have taken to concentrating the pulp by running yet again through a sieve. I used to use a coffee filter as well but that was just too much trouble – messy and super time-consuming. The fine sieve works, uh, fine.
It tastes great. Takes a couple of hours to do, but only about 30 seconds of work – the rest is waiting for things to drain.
Simple, tasty. I do love having the jars of tomato in the basement. We use them for all kinds of things. Now if only I could convince a certain wife of mine to let me build a wood-fired pizza oven in the backyard. So far my attempts to articulate my rock-solid case for a new piece of backyard furniture have fallen on deaf ears.
