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White Pepper

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?

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Every year, about this time

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.

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Did you expect something different?

I’m not sure I can identify any of those greens. They were tasty, even if they were a mystery.

So typical. I’m not even sure why I was surprised, as this is a regular situation at my mother-in-law’s place. We were up over the weekend closing up the cabin. *sigh* When we left, it was decided that facing yet another awful fast-food meal on the drive home was more than we could handle. My wife made some quick egg salad and my mother-in-law cracked open her collection of lettuce from her garden to put on the sandwiches. I think she used one of each leaf she had. I bet there are half a dozen different greens on that sandwich.

Tasted great, I’ll admit. But I’ll also admit that I nearly burst out laughing when I saw the collection. My mother-in-law does nothing in half-measures.

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Ripe yet? It’s tough to know.

I have 150lbs on the back porch right now

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.

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Never seen something quite like this.

Now I’m all hungry.

All of a sudden, on Saturday evening, the kids were gone and my wife and I were at loose ends for dinner. Usually we have something on the go but this weekend was not like that. My wife suggested we go to Oca Pastificio, a local restaurant where they make fresh pasta, and only fresh pasta. Well, they have a few other bits, but it’s mostly a pasta place.

We had the tasting menu and a bottle of nice Italian wine. I do love throwing myself on the mercy of a chef and asking for some great food. It’s a lot easier than having to decide. And goodness knows there may well be something in the back that will absolutely blow me away, and who better to get that to me than the chef?

The above is one of the dishes we had. It’s a strip of fresh pasta with a line of ricotta and oregano down the middle. Then it’s folded in half and twisted up into a crown like this. I’m assuming it’s cooked in a shallow pan of water and then drained. It’s then finished with butter and lemon.

It was amazing. I bet, in total, there aren’t more than 10 ingredients in this dish, one of which is salt. And one of which is water. This dish is the epitome of what I love about Italian food. Simple. But at the same time, rather creative and really tasty.

My wife and I took a moment to be obnoxious and picked apart the dish (figuratively as well as literally) and sort of figured out how it was done.

I gotta try this one at home. My pizza kick might be coming to a close, to be replaced by a pasta kick. Not a bad nutritional segue, if I do say so, myself.

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A Lament, of sorts.

Her father was in France, and he was supposed to be home for May.

I’m not particularly nostalgic. Wait, never mind, I can’t possibly defend that. I’m not excessively nostalgic. Much better.

I had an opportunity to do some work in a city in the centre of the province – Kamloops. Nice place, amazing scenery – it’s actually a desert – gets about 2 inches of rain per year. Three hours north of the border. Strange place, Canada.

Kamloops is about an hour’s drive from Salmon Arm, where my father grew up. He emigrated with his family after WWII. They came from Birmingham, or what little was left of it after the War.

My brother commented once that our grandfather wasn’t much of a traveler. However, he did pick up and move his family to Western Canada from the middle of England, which as far as my brother was concerned (and I agree with him) probably used up all of my grandfather’s wanderlust – what little there might have been of it.

I knew both grandparents rather well. My mother (for which I will be eternally grateful to her for) insisted that we get to know them. As a consequence spent a lot of time with them, and with my aunt Hylda, my grandmother’s sister, who was the one who actually found Salmon Arm and got them to move West.

To the title of this post – my lament is that I didn’t pay near enough attention when my grandmother was cooking. Well, baking. She could do a decent meal, even though she was British (ha) but my God, could she bake a pie.

I lament I didn’t pay more attention. It wasn’t up to her to show me her secrets – which she would have done, no question. It was up to me. I lament that the dominant paradigm was that men (and boys) just didn’t spend much time in the kitchen and were never really asked to help or given much instruction. I close my eyes and I really want to picture her making her pastry. I think I can remember her rolling it out, and I certainly remember this great floral apron she had. I remember the tiny kitchen of their split-level house; I remember the fact that there was no dishwasher and we all had to take turns washing dishes – thankfully my gender didn’t preclude me from that task. But picturing her deft touch with the pastry eludes me.

I really want to ask her about her cherry pie. And her apple pie… And the pumpkin pies she used to make…

I want to know how she did it. How she survived the unrelenting bombing; survived having measles when she was 3 and losing an eye ; surviving tuberculosis and living for decades with only one lung… And, of course, how her pastry was just so much better than anyone else’s. The British Reserve was in play, of course. Not for the pastry, but for the rest of it, definitely. And she didn’t want to talk about such things. She was always much more interested in politics and current events.

I can find the perfect pie recipe in a book, but of course it’s not quite the same thing.

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Perfection. No, really. Perfect

Perfect fruit.

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.

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Green Thumb. Of a Sort.

See? The cucumbers did actually grow. We have had several from my plants so far…

Every time I look at a vegetable garden, my first impression is that I just can’t see why anyone would bother. Strange, I know, given the fact that I have a garden myself.

Stranger still, given that I know what can come out of a garden. Somehow, I just can’t shake the notion that there isn’t much there.

  • Even if I can conjure up a cutting board like this in a matter of a couple of minutes out in the garden. And then a couple of days later I can do it again.
  • Even if my mother–in-law (who, admittedly, has quite the garden) can come in with endless armloads of produce

It’s almost as if I have some sort of an inherent inability to accept that you can actually get a lot of produce out of a small garden. I’m actually at the point now where I just ignore my first impressions and I start picking. There always seems to be more than enough out there, even if I have to sample all kinds of things along the way.

And, my God, it tastes great.

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My childhood, contained in a single cookie.

Happiness in oatmeal.

Actually there were other cookies. My mother made Lunch Box cookies that were pretty darn tasty, too.

…but these! These chocolate chip cookies rule. They are just the right amount of chewy and substantive, with enough oatmeal to make you *think* you’re eating something that isn’t terrible for you. The 4 cups of sugar (but only 2 cups of white sugar. Brown for the other 2 cups) in the recipe and the 4 cups of chocolate chips don’t do anything to help the healthy street-cred of these treats.

I think it was my grandmother’s recipe, on my mother’s side. Which is noteworthy, because my mom never really talks about her mother and her mother’s cooking. I get the impression that things in mom’s childhood home weren’t really that great kitchen-wise (and, quite possibly in other ways) which is why my mom had to cook from an early age and (possibly) why she never really cared for it. Being forced to cook is a different beast than choosing to cook.

At any rate, my maternal grandmother’s recipe. If it’s not the case then it really doesn’t matter. Honestly, I don’t have it in front of me but I’ll try to post it when I track it down.

Regardless, they are a challenge to make, as the recipe makes enough batter for like 5 dozen cookies. Thankfully, having that many tidbits means the sugar and chocolate chips are spread out among a great number of final cookies.

My mom made these continuiously when I was growing up. My brother and I ate them faster than she could make them. We lived on them. Before school, after school. In later years it was with a cup of coffee (heck, it was my pre-breakfast snack this morning, but I limited myself to just one rather than the half-dozen I would have when I was 12)

it wasn’t long before I was making them, myself. I would churn out a batch on a regular basis. Once I made them a few times it got to the point where they were always the same. Same process, same ingredients (which were always stockpiled – thanks mom!) and 9 minutes in the oven at 375. My wife made the most recent batch – she was achieving superstar status yesterday with both a batch of cookies and a huge pot of hamburger soup. (another post will be forthcoming regarding that recipe)

The cookie I had this morning – It brought me directly back to my parents’ kitchen 4 decades ago. Tasted exactly the same way, and I had exactly the same response.

“Damn, I love these things.”

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You want me to what? Ok, if you insist.

Step one: Lots of heat

When my family and I visited London last year, a friend insisted that we go to Nopi. He told me that we could sit anywhere – even the basement was fine. And so we made reservations and went. We did end up downstairs, sitting at a massive marble table, surrounded by racks of storage for the kitchen.

Dinner was amazing. I remember being totally blown away and even the kids thought it was great.

We came back to Vancouver and at some point in the following months I ordered the restaurant cookbook.

I might have been in a bit of a funk, post-London. It might have been the grey fall weather. Maybe I needed some new eyeglasses. Possibly all three, but in any case I found the cookbook really unimpressive. I looked through the recipes and nothing jumped out at me at all. It felt like the entire volume was not to my palate.

But I decided I had better try something, so I settled on the ‘Burnt Green Onion Dip with Curly Kale’.

Holy cow. I was absolutely amazed. Other recipes have followed and they have been roundly incredible. The only drawback is that if you want to cook any of the meals you had best read the recipe really carefully several days in advance because some things take several days to create. The ‘Strained Ricotta with Blackcurrant Compote and Rhubarb’ takes a week to make, I swear. It’s worth it, but man, days pass.

But I’m writing about the burnt onions. The intro to the recipe states:

“One important point to remember: there’s no such thing as overcharring your onions, so hold your nerve at the grill… The more burnt they are, the better and more smoky they will taste.”

After charring my pizza, this was music to my ears. I love recipe instructions like that.

Getting there – need a bit more time

I love the idea of not being able to go too far when cooking something. I guess it’s like roasting eggplant. More is better.

Of course, I do wonder if maybe I should have kept them on the grill for longer? There always seems to be something to improve upon.

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