, ,

Mystery Coffee

I think I got it right – not really sure.

A few years ago a friend of mine sent me a stock photo request for a cortado coffee. I had no idea what one was. As it turns out, it’s a Spanish coffee, where the milk ‘cuts’ the espresso. So a 50-50 mix of coffee and espresso. I had never heard of one before. Apparently they’re consumed in glasses, rather than cups, and apparently they have steamed milk but not froth or foam.

I didn’t make the sale on the stock request, even though I shot what I thought were some rather nice photos. I even used some film.

But I ended up making and consuming a fair number of these drinks. I have never really seen one except in photos in a search engine. Still don’t know if what I’m doing is right. I’m sure there are a bunch of baristas out there who roll their eyes at such abominations as this.

But it’s my narrative now, and this is my cortado. It’s more like a 2:1 mix of milk and espresso, and I do a bit of latte art on the top, such as it is. The Rorschach test on the top of this drink is either a puppy or a tornado. It’s hard to tell.

I’m rather partial to them now. My afternoon go-to coffee drink, especially in the summer.

Not as strong as a macchiato and with more substance so you can enjoy it longer. That’s the only problem with straight espresso. It’s over before it starts.

/0 Comments/by
, ,

Ugh, Oysters.

Direct from some seabed, somewhere nearby.

I love fresh oysters and I have no idea why. The thought of them really isn’t particularly exciting, really. And yet, somehow, they are amazing.

My oyster journey started more than 20 years ago, when I was having a bite to eat with a friend of mine. He is older than I, and I trust his food suggestions without question.

A tray of fresh oysters went by and I grimaced. He looked at me and asked, “You don’t like oysters?”. I replied I had never had one, but the idea was somewhat challenging. He responded by ordering a dozen malpeques. I figured that if John said they were good, I wasn’t going to die.

And here’s what happened. I had one – with a touch of a vinegar mignonette. I was totally unprepared for how much I enjoyed it. I remember thinking quite a few things, most notably, “huh, I have been missing out.”

This order of Kusshi Oysters that I had with my dinner last week was delightful, but my wife still won’t try one, no matter how much I try to encourage her to give it a shot.

The oyster lesson has stuck with me – my mom always wanted us to at least try dishes that were presented to us as children. She made some pretty strange (to a kid) dishes. Some were great, others less so. This is something I do with my children. I always ask them to at least try it. Sometimes they’re right and they hate it. Sometimes the plate is clean before I can get another word in. Things haven’t changed much since I was a kid.

So far, no one in my family has taken me up on my conviction about how great oysters are. Even my brother and sister aren’t interested. Time will tell, but I expect that at some time in the near future someone in the family will admit that I was right, and they are really good.

While I’m at it, I would also like a pony, now that we’re wishing for crazy things.

/0 Comments/by
, ,

That was a while ago.

It was a while ago. And even then it really wasn’t that good.

I was asked by one of the utilities here in British Columbia to take a few photos of some of their properties. I made a fairly large loop (about 600km) and ended up driving down the Fraser Canyon on my homeward leg.

My grandparents lived in Salmon Arm, BC and we would regularly drive the 7 hours and visit them. Before 1986 when they built a new highway, the only reasonable way up was the road beside the Fraser River. Several times a year we would all pile into our car (1977 Chevrolet Impala – quite the machine) and we would make the trek. Once, and only once as I recall, we stopped here for breakfast, as my dad always wanted to get on the road early. It was a Smitty’s Pancake House in Yale, BC.

In the first decade of my life I probably traveled this road 30 times. In the following three decades I have been up it three times, as I recall. Wait. Maybe four times. Regardless, it has been a while.

Things have changed, obviously. This location has, sadly, closed and the town which always felt somewhat bustling is now very quiet. The food here was really not very good, and I expect that there were a number of factors that involved the closing, but ‘great food, I’ll miss it’ was probably not something that people said much of.

That said, though, I remember being here once, probably when I was about 8 years old. And I remember it like it was yesterday, almost 40 years later. Even bad meals can do that to you.

/0 Comments/by
,

Special still water

ooooo. Frosty…

I’ll bite: How is it that water tastes better in a restaurant?

I went for lunch with an old friend today. We went to Chambar, a downtown restaurant. It was a little strange, with everyone in masks but the food was pretty darn good (more on that later).

To start the meal, our server asked if I wanted some water – still or sparkling. I asked for still and a bottle of this showed up. Check out that label! I’m assuming that in the cooler they have a multitude of bottles – some still, some sparkling and the labels are to tell the two apart when servers are grabbing them in a hurry.

Regardless, I think they’re snazzy.

And I think the water tastes better out of a bottle like this. Strange, but true. I had several glasses. They just kept on bringing more bottles of this wondrous stuff.

/0 Comments/by
, ,

Garlic Scape Pesto

Fresh from the garden

A neighbour of ours, before he started a micro-brewery, farmed a piece of land near Vancouver. His sister, as I recall, was in charge of the garlic, and one day he dropped a bag of scapes off for me. It was rather kind – he also dropped off a piece of horseradish root a while later – that was tasty, too, but the subject of another post. The scape is the flower of the garlic plant and it comes up all of a sudden in late June. Apparently the idea is that you cut the scapes off so as to give more energy to the garlic bulb. cut off the scapes and you get bigger garlic.

Some people just compost theirs, but Steve even gave me a recipe: Ready for it? Chop up the scapes, put them in a food processor with a handful of walnuts, big pinch of salt… run the processor and drizzle in oil until it turns into a paste. Toss with freshly-cooked pasta.

Brilliant. I remember being totally blown away. Three (well, four and five if you count the Parmesan cheese on top) ingredients, plus some pasta.

So supremely easy and so tasty. Every time I see scapes I get hungry – even photos of them from a year ago.

….and mix
Just add pasta.
/0 Comments/by
,

Mid-Year

Mid-year. Thankfully it’s looking more summer-like

June is always rainy in Vancouver. Well, not always but often enough so I can say it always rains in June. It isn’t currently raining, but it will, soon.

The weather for the rest of the week is looking pretty good, thankfully.

It’s about this time of year (and again in Mid-December) when things kinda fall off the rails, food-wise. We were going to go to Italy this summer, but that is off the table, obviously. So we’ll go to the lake, instead. We leave early July and in the next two weeks it’s going to be a major challenge to get through the days, as everyone is looking for a few days off.

I’m not sure how it is that everyone can just go and go and go and then barely deal, but that’s how it works in our household.

Of course, it is an excellent opportunity to eat up all the frozen things we have, as well as revisit some family favourites. Meals for the next two weeks aren’t about ‘interesting’, they’re about ‘easy’ and ‘surviving’.

Come mid-July we’ll be (hopefully) energized again.

Man, I need a vacation, somehow more this year than most.

/0 Comments/by
, ,

Did it again

Crowded the pan. Again.

Here is how this worked – I pulled out a pan to fry up some spuds that I had cooked the night before. I figured I could give them a bit of heat in some butter, crisp them up. You know, like dinner hashbrowns or something like that.

Dinnertime was looming and I had leftovers to heat up.

Right, the pan was hot, and full of butter or oil or both… And when I dropped in the potatoes, they totally filled the pan. Crowded it, I daresay.

As a consequence the potatoes heated up but I didn’t get nearly the browning on them that I wanted. It was an epic failure of not very much at all, because no one sent the dish back, and there were no complaints among the distinguished diners that evening.

As my mother would say, “you won’t be poisoned”

/0 Comments/by
,

Meh

Not going to dignify my pizza dough failure with a photo. Actually, it isn’t a failure… yet. But still no photo.

I thought it had this figured out. Appropriate amounts of water, flour yeast, sugar, oil, elbow grease…

Still flummoxed about yeast, though. This time I used instant yeast as opposed to traditional yeast, and I used about twice as much as was called for in the recipe.

I put it into the fridge overnight… And I took a look just before lunch. The dough has risen. A bit, but it still resembles a large mass of wet flour. I put it on the counter for a few hours to see if we can get some levity. Uh, rise…

Same thing, really.

I have made this dough at least a dozen times. Probably 20, really. And I think I have been really happy with the results once. Maybe twice. The other times haven’t been terrible (with the notable exception of that one time when it tasted like rock-hard pita bread. Yeah, that wasn’t good) The other times haven’t been terrible but damn, it’s hard to get right.

Shouldn’t say that. Throwing together some ingredients and having them rise isn’t too hard. It’s the rise-in-the-fridge-overnight trick that I seem to be struggling with.

But the problem is that the dough tastes WAY better if it has had a few hours to think.

Speaking of which, I better get cracking on my tomato sauce.

**edit** Couple of hours later and the dough is still not resembling what I was hoping but a couple of things have come up:

  • My daughter, who has a birthday today, told me that my worst pizza is miles better than everyone else’s (Her words. Her birthday. Who am I to argue)
  • I’m not entirely sure what pizza dough is supposed to look like. I know, like dough. But all light and fluffy? Sort of wet? Lots of bubbles in there? Not very many? Thankfully, there are as many people to make pizza and pontificate on it as there are pizzas, so I’m pretty sure I can find someone who will agree that this is the proper way to make dough.
  • So the dough stays. I expect it’ll be a challenge to roll out, but who knows? I did give it a good knead, so hopefully that helped. How it might help, I’m not exactly sure, but I expect it’ll help.

Talk about the blind leading the blind.

But I have buffalo mozzarella, regular mozza, and some killer tomato sauce that I make myself, I do. So all is not lost.

/0 Comments/by
,

Tea Biscuits

Just add some milk and hey-presto, just like mom used to make.

My wife has a blue recipe book. In it are all her family recipes – well, not all of them, but a bunch of them, including several of her mom’s family recipes.

Many are written out by hand. Some in my wife’s hand; some in my sister-in-law’s hand; some in my mother-in-law’s lovely writing. The binding is shot. There is a large oil stain that starts at Whiskey Chicken and goes clear through to Pumpkin Chiffon Pie. Just in case you’re wondering, the recipes aren’t in alphabetical order.

I see a sticker from an Australian Navel orange; a little illustration on the Ginger Cake recipe… Some of my mom’s recipes… Heck, my Cranberry Sauce is in there. Hadn’t seen that before.

And then there is the Tea Biscuits recipe. Right above Plain or Fruit Muffins and right across the page from a piece of paper with a fresh pasta recipe on it a note about Cornmeal Muffins and 9 Grain Bread.

The tea biscuits are epic. Super easy to make – without question the most used recipe in this book.

There is more to the book, though. The recipes in here represent a big part of my wife’s childhood… And now that I think about it, a bunch of me growing up, too – with her and enjoying a bunch of these meals together.

Funny how meals can imprint themselves like that on us. I remember some fantastic meals I have had like they were yesterday. But I also remember meals that were as pedestrian as they come. Usually the memory is because of something other than the meal, but that cornmeal muffin recipe I referenced above is from my mom. I haven’t thought about it for probably 30 or more years. But I remember how they taste like it was yesterday. Sometimes the mind is a strange place.

  • 2 cups flour
  • 3 tsp. baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 1/3 cup shortening or butter
  • 2/3 cup grated cheese.
  • 1 cup milk

Oven to 450 degrees. Mix everything together. Add the milk until it makes a sticky dough – don’t over-mix. Dump on to a floured countertop, roll to about 3/4 inch thick. Cut out rounds with a drinking glass. Assemble on a greased baking sheet. 12-15 minutes.

/0 Comments/by
, , ,

Eggs on Toast I

Breakfast favourite at our house

I’ll be brief. Eggs. Toast. Salt. Pepper. Breakfast.

And a little background… Empires have been torn apart over the appropriate way to boil an egg. Do you put the egg in cold water and bring it to the boil? Or drop it into boiling water? 3 minutes? 7 minutes? Both techniques have pros and cons (cold water won’t break open a cold egg and have it spill everywhere; water that is already boiling doesn’t have to be watched so carefully to see when it’s actually boiling before you start the clock.

Wait. Maybe I’m not making sense.

Two egg cooking techniques exist:

  • One is where you put an egg into a pot of cold or lukewarm water. You turn on the heat and once the water starts boiling, you set your timer for 3 minutes. This is how my father and my sister boil an egg.
  • The other is where you boil the water and then drop in the egg for 7 minutes, while the pot simmers away. This is my wife’s technique.

I use my wife’s technique, because I see her in the morning more often than I see my dad or my sister.

But the rest of the recipe is easy. Good piece of toast – hot out of the toaster (unless you’re my dad who likes his toast cold) bit of butter… Peel the egg, chop it roughly, sea salt and pepper. Enjoy.

Breakfast of champions because it’s almost as quick as a bowl of cereal and it’s different than cereal. Variety being the spice of life and all that…

/0 Comments/by