Sammy's Dot

I’ve come to a turning point in my cooking.

As a mostly vegetarian cook (cooking chicken or fish perhaps once or twice in a month), I don’t have to deal with squicky ingredients as a general rule. Although looking back many of the recipes I’ve featured here have involved chicken, my go-to non-Daring cooking is much, much more likely to be a variation of masur dal or chana masala. I usually work two or three rice and bean meals into my grocery lists – and I could go on for months without repeating myself. I like this style of cooking not just because it’s delicious, filling, and cheap, but because I’m a wimp. Dried chickpeas have no fat or bones or gristle or scales or shells to be trimmed away. So when the Daring Cooks came up with pâté for the June challenge, the gauntlet was really thrown down. I wasn’t inspired by the vegetarian tri-colour pâté (combining white beans, roasted red peppers, and pesto), and I was not at all sure that I could handle a liver pâté (nor was I sure that I could convince the fellow to eat it!), but the shrimp and trout pâté seemed challenging yet edible. And then someone mentioned that bánh mì are often made with pâté, and I knew how I was going to meet the challenge requirements.

Our hostesses this month, Evelyne of Cheap Ethnic Eatz, and Valerie of a The Chocolate Bunny, chose delicious pate with freshly baked bread as their June Daring Cook’s challenge! They’ve provided us with 4 different pate recipes to choose from and are allowing us to go wild with our homemade bread choice.

I decided it was time to roll up my sleeves and prove that, grossed out or not, I could peel a shrimp just as easily as I could make bread – in this case, Vietnamese-style mini-baguettes, following a recipe from HomeBaking.

And if this month’s Daring Cooks challenge taught me anything at all, it’s that shrimp have way too many legs. And removing those legs is an icky process. But hey, I can do it. (I’m not going to go this far just yet though. Somebody else deal with the heads!) In the end, I didn’t love the trout and shrimp pâté, finding it simply too rich to want to eat more than a few bites even when worked into a sandwich, but I did a) learn how to peel a shrimp, b) flambé for the first time, and c) try a recipe for a broccoli and nut terrine and make crackers as well. So thanks are due to Valerie and Evelyne!

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Continuing my newfound obsession with Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, and more specifically their book HomeBaking, I’ve been playing around with coarse semolina: an ingredient that I previously associated only with the porridge an old roommate of mine used to make. And while there’s nothing wrong with porridge, it’s hard to get as excited over a bowl of porridge as one might over a slice of a moist cake bursting with lemon.

My roommate, as I recall, didn’t bake, but I think if she’d tried this, she would have loved it. I love it so much that I’ve made it three times over the past month, though for different groups of people, and I’m looking forward to the next occasion I have to make it. I do bake the occasional multi-layered celebration cake – I’m working my way through Sky High! – but this simple cake is the kind of cake I like best.

That is, the kind of cake that you can eat with your hands as easily as you can eat it with a fork, and the kind of cake that needs nothing at all to make it more delicious.

Next time, I might add a cinnamon stick or a few crushed cardamom pods to the syrup that the cake is soaked with, or switch out the lemon for orange, or try mixing in some pistachios or walnuts or replace some of the semolina with ground almonds – there are so many possibilities, and every one of them delicious. But these changes would only be for the joy of experimenting with new flavours and textures.

That’s what I find most enjoyable about HomeBaking, and that’s one reason why I can’t wait to add it to my cookbook collection: I have always tried to be adventurous with the flavours and ingredients that I cook with, but I think my baking may have fallen into a rut. I can whip up a batch of biscuits or a pie crust from memory because I do it so often, but I don’t think that I ever made a syrup-soaked cake before this, though it’s a common thing to do in some parts of the world, just as I’d never thought to use coconut to add texture to banana bread.

It’s good to be reminded of the incredibly wide world of flavours and techniques, and Alford and Duguid do it so well.

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I am a big, big fan of enchiladas as a concept – spicy sauce, tasty filling, cheese, tortillas, what’s not to love? However, I can’t swear to the authenticity of any of the enchiladas I’ve ever made. One of my favourite recipes involves a mess of corn and roasted red peppers and spinach tossed together with cottage cheese, and a cheater’s sauce made of bottled salsa and cream. (In my defense, this combination is really delicious and really quick to put together. And I do make enchiladas with many other fillings, too.)

This month’s Daring Cooks challenge – stacked green chile and chicken enchiladas (though I’ve always called this a tortilla strata and saved the term “enchiladas” for tortillas rolled around the filling and baked) was an excellent opportunity to revisit the dish and strive for authenticity.

Our hosts this month, Barbara of Barbara Bakes and Bunnee of Anna+Food have chosen a delicious Stacked Green Chile & Grilled Chicken Enchilada recipe in celebration of Cinco de Mayo! The recipe, featuring a homemade enchilada sauce was found on www.finecooking.com and written by Robb Walsh.

I decided to finally take my grandmother up on her offer to let me borrow her tortilla press (I think it may be a permanent loan!) and make my own corn tortillas. My first attempt at this, a few years ago, was a miserable failure, but I was ready to try again. I visited the Perola Supermarket in Kensington for masa harina, fresh tomatillos, and poblano chilies. If anyone found Anaheim chilies in Toronto, I’d love to know where!

I also made a second batch for the fellow’s family, using chicken chorizo, potatoes, and mushrooms for the filling, with a spicy tomato-based sauce. I have no pictures, but I’ll have to sit down and figure out exactly what I put into it, because it was really good too.

I served both versions of the enchiladas with the Mexican red rice from Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s Seductions of Rice – at some point soon I’ll write that up as a post in itself, because it’s a book that deserves some dedicated attention.

Barbara and Bunnee, thanks for another wonderful challenge!

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My experience of traditional English puddings – which are not anything like the foods that I think of as puddings, starting with the fact that they’re traditionally steamed or boiled – is limited to the sticky toffee pudding my aunt made for Christmas Eve dinner this year, and the demonstration of Christmas pudding-making that I saw at Spadina House when I was a kid. Appropriately, that demonstration was in July.

The April 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Esther of The Lilac Kitchen. She challenged everyone to make a traditional British pudding using, if possible, a very traditional British ingredient: suet.

This is only my third Daring Baker’s challenge, but there’s no doubt that so far, this is the one that’s required me to step the most beyond what’s familiar to me. Fortunately, although Esther recommended using suet to make the puddings more authentic, it wasn’t a requirement (my semi-vegetarian, health conscious family thanks her), and as it turns out, steaming a pudding isn’t hard. It merely takes some improvisation. Thanks to Audax, my mother’s crockpot immediately suggested itself as an excellent steaming apparatus, combined with a couple of pyrex bowls and a wadded up dishtowel. Getting the bowls out of the crockpot after the puddings were cooked was a scary process, but there were, happily, no disasters.

Since I had not had any idea that one could steam a pie – and certainly I had no idea that it would turn out deliciously – I knew I was going to do at least one version in a pastry crust. I opted for savoury, because we love lentil and vegetable pie with mushroom gravy in this house. Just to be different, though, since I wasn’t going to use suet, I used coconut oil instead of butter – with excellent results. And I had to do a sponge version too, because who doesn’t love cake? The only requirement I had for the sponge version was that it incorporate dulce de leche, which I’ve fallen in love with in a big way ever since a classmate brought some amazing coconut-crusted macaron-type cookies filled with it to our end-of-year potluck. After the coconut-banana bread I’d made the week before, combining the two was as natural as breathing.

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It’s hard to believe that, until a week or two ago, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid were flying completely beneath my radar, despite the fact that they live in Toronto and that Mangoes and Curry Leaves has been on my Indigo wishlist since forever. Apparently the book caught my eye, but the names of the authors never registered. I can be kind of oblivious sometimes.

Then I got the book out of the library, because I’m on a bit of a self-imposed book-buying diet, for reasons of cost and space. (This means that expensive and space-occupying cookbooks are right out, and I’m limiting myself to three or four used paperbacks per month. Which is about two to three days worth of reading material. Given the limitations of the local library’s science fiction section, I have a small problem.)

Then I went back to the library and borrowed as many of their other books as I could get my hands on.

Now I’m going to have to acquire all of the couple’s books, even if it takes me some time. And while I’m really enjoying Mangoes and Curry Leaves, as well as Seductions of Rice, and I’ve tried several recipes from each, HomeBaking is the one that’s moved to the top of my list. It’s the banana bread that did it, although I plan to share one more recipe from the book before I (sadly) let the library have it back. (I’m getting anxious for my next opportunity to splurge on cookbooks now, I must say.)

I’ve made quite a few banana bread recipes over the years (that being my favourite way to eat bananas), and Alford and Duguid’s recipe is, hands down, the best one I’ve ever eaten. It’s not the healthiest version, but one must face up to the fact, as I have, that while it’s called banana bread it is in fact a banana cake. “Healthy” is not a requirement. A perfect tight moist crumb packed with banana flavour is. This one delivers in a big way.

And seriously, how is it that I’ve never before encountered a banana bread recipe with shredded coconut? Because that addition is sheer genius. It adds texture and flavour without overpowering the banana-ness the way chocolate chips do, and without making the bread dry the way whole wheat flour or oatmeal might. The sprinkling of demerera sugar before baking is – rather literally – icing on the cake.

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Having teased a bit with my posts about Bryant Terry’s fabulous smothered cabbage and my cornmeal dumplings, we now come to the meat (literally) of this series: the April Daring Cooks challenge, Brunswick Stew.

The 2010 April Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Wolf of Wolf’s Den. She chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make Brunswick Stew. Wolf chose recipes for her challenge from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook by Matt Lee and Ted Lee, and from the Callaway, Virginia Ruritan Club. It was great fun, too; thanks, Wolf!

Now, being Canadian, the first thing that sprang to my mind when I read the name “Brunswick Stew” was, naturally, New Brunswick, which called to mind visions of seafood, which scares me a little. Because I’m a snobby Torontonian, the second was the Brunny, more properly known as The Brunswick House, a notoriously icky pub. Now, I’ve never actually been there, because the fellow in my life is a wee bit older than me and he has, and we started dating a few months before I was legally old enough to drink, so I sort of skipped the phase in my life where I might have found a grungy, filthy bar the perfect place to be. (And I miss the Queen’s Head/Pimblett’s, the pub we did frequent, and its awesomely bizarre British decorating scheme, comfy couches, board games, and aging drag queens, whenever I go out anywhere else.) So, anyway, seafood or grungy bar stew – my first thoughts weren’t so promising.

However, as it turns out, the “Brunswick” in Brunswick stew actually is a reference to either Brunswick, Georgia or Brunswick, Virginia (which one appears to be a matter of controversy) and it’s a slow-cooked mess of various meats, beans, and corn (and perhaps other vegetables, depending on whose rules you’re following). This is a meal that I can totally get behind, even if my version probably offends the standards of authenticity. Salty-sweet-smoky-spicy is perhaps my favourite flavour combination in the world and oh, does this ever deliver.

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True story: My brother hates dumplings. It doesn’t matter if they’re the kind of dumplings that you might eat with chicken and dumplings, or the delicious steamed dumplings of dim sum fame, or gyoza, or even strawberries and dumplings. And that last is just weird; my brother is sort of like a strawberry vaccuum. If he’s in the same room with strawberries, they’re just naturally drawn to him in order to fill the inner strawberry void. But it doesn’t matter; if you call it a dumpling, he won’t eat it.

This is funny because this aversion goes back to daycare, where apparently they fed him dumplings that were so awful, the automatic aversion has persisted into his twenties. Personally, I don’t remember anything about daycare that well. It’s pretty amazing.

And I, unlike him, love dumplings. My mom used to make them when I was a kid – I think she called them “pound dogs”, or at least that’s how I remember things – and ever since I re-discovered them a few years ago, I’ve had an urge to make them every time I make soup or stew. (Okay, it’s always a toss-up between dumplings and biscuits and bread. But I always at least think about making dumplings.) I haven’t made Deb’s strawberries and dumplings yet, but I’m totally going to this summer, and I’m not sure I can wait.

In the meantime, it’s all about the cornmeal dumplings. These were the first ones I made – to go with an awesome (though insanely hot, if you use the full three quarters of a cup of chopped jalapenos) squash and tomato stew from Anna Thomas’ The Vegetarian Epicure Book Two. They’re still my favourites; they may look ugly here, but hey, it’s the flavour that counts.

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The idea of “soul food” has always had an appealing ring to it. Sort of like soul music: I’m not religious in the least, but when I sang in high school choir, we did a lot of soul and gospel songs that were just plain fun to sing with a bunch of friends. I don’t think one has to be a believer to enjoy being a part of that complex, upbeat harmony.

Some of this fascination might just be the allure of the unknown, too: after all, what does a girl of French-German-English-Irish extraction growing up in Toronto learn about Southern soul food? My mom’s cooking, happily, has always leaned away from the meat and potatoes and boiled-to-death peas, but we were  more likely to stir fry bok choy than to braise some collards – and everything I heard about collard greens seemed to involve ham bones. Soul food sounded like it should be simple and filling and delicious, but at the same time it seemed so out of reach. When it comes to actually eating, I’m not a vegan, or even a particularly devout vegetarian, unless chicken and fish and an occasional slice of bacon count as vegetables, but most of my cooking is vegetarian. I’ve certainly never cooked with a hambone in my life.

Then I got Bryant Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen for Christmas, and it’s quickly becoming one of my favourite cookbooks. Yes, one favourite among many, but it’s definitely one of the more distinctive books, with recipes that are simple and yet creative and fun and delicious. Terry isn’t preachy about the veganism; he’s simply written a book full of songs and stories and recipes for food that’s as good for your body as it is for your soul.

And of all the recipes I’ve tried so far, my favourite has been the smothered cabbage. Maybe this is just the natural result of the intersection of soul food and my Western European ancestry; I’m sure there’s no genetic basis for the love of cabbage, but there’s certainly a cultural one. And cabbage that’s been sort of braised and sort of sautéed and sort of steamed until it’s tender, caramelized, and deeply flavoured with mustard and a touch of hot pepper is just about as good as cabbage gets, in my opinion.

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According to Wikipedia, a “tian” is defined thus:

A tian is a tall, conical earthenware cooking vessel used in the Alpes-Maritimes area of France. Today, most of these vessels are produced in the town of Mougins. It is traditionally made from red clay and can be either glazed or unglazed. A modern tian can come lidded or not and sometimes has a looped handle on one side.

Apparently, the word has undergone a significant shift, though: the cranberry orange tian I made for the March Daring Bakers challenge is certainly very far removed from clay pots.

The 2010 March Daring Baker’s challenge was hosted by Jennifer of Chocolate Shavings. She chose Orange Tian as the challenge for this month, a dessert based on a recipe from Alain Ducasse’s Cooking School in Paris.

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I could never, ever do a low carb diet. (In fact, the very idea horrifies me.) When I go out for Korean barbeque, my friends all go straight for the meat and say that they don’t want to fill up on the rice; mixed with the kimchi and other vegetables, that’s my favourite part!  A spicy vegetarian riff on gallo pinto just became my go-to for breakfast. My brother and I have to fight over the nasi goreng when my family gets Malaysian take-out – and oh, how I envy my parents’ proximity to that restaurant!

Yeah, this month’s Daring Cooks challenge was straight up my alley. Risotto. Mmm.

I make risotto a lot, but I took the opportunity to play around and try a few new things: a roasted vegetable stock, a different play of flavours in the risotto itself, arancini, and an Indian-inspired “sweet risotto” (yes, it’s rice pudding in my lexicon – but made using the general risotto method).

The 2010 March Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Eleanor of MelbournefoodGeek and Jess of Jessthebaker. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make risotto. The various components of their challenge recipe are based on input from the Australian Masterchef cookbook and the cookbook Moorish by Greg Malouf.

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