La Gourmandesse

As I mentioned in the Peach Buckle post, I am a big follower of the blog Smitten Kitchen. I’m going to take the risk of looking like a blog stalker, and re-post another one of Deb’s masterpieces. And then I’ll give it a rest for a while, I swear. It’s just that there’s so much great local fruit around lately, and Deb just keeps giving me delicious ways to use it up!

I love blueberry muffins. My mom used to make huge batches when I was little and our family would devour them in a few days. Her recipe was called “Helen’s Blueberry Muffins,” I can still see them written out in her recipe notebook. I don’t know who Helen was, but she made a good muffin.

However, the muffins I made today have blown Helen’s out of the kitchen. They are a masterpiece of a muffin. I think they’d be great with peaches or raspberries too.  I followed the recipe pretty much to the letter, so I’m going to be lazy and just give the link to Perfect Blueberry Muffins.

I am usually rushed when baking, but today since I am procrastinating from all the things I should be doing, I decided to go all out with the hand mixer and the sifter.  Actually following the recipe produced the fluffiest muffin to ever come out of my oven.

The only changes I made were to add a drop of vanilla to the wet ingredients, a squirt of lemon juice because I didn’t have a lemon for zest, I used 3% plain yogurt and I baked them in a 6 cup muffin tin. Deb’s recipe made 9-10 medium muffins, so I went for 6 monster muffins. They were perfectly done at 25 minutes.

Moist muffin perfection!

Best lunch of the trip was devoured here.

This week, Kevin and I took a trip to Quebec City. We stayed within the walls of the Old Town, and thoroughly enjoyed being transported a few hundred years back in time. Our days consisted mostly of walking and eating, with a small amount of shopping thrown in! Our hotel started every day for us with a lovely picnic basket of breakfast at our door. What could be more French than a breakfast of croissant et confiture?

My delicious meat pie.

A breakfast of pure carbs leaves you pretty hungry by 11am, so our first lunch at Aux Anciens Canadiens was highly anticipated. They open at noon and we were pretty much banging down the door. It is located in the old upper town in a sweet little heritage house, not far from the Chateau Frontenac. This gem of a restaurant only serves traditional Quebecoise fair, by young ladies in traditional garb, and what a treat it is. I went for the meat pie, which turned out to be a plate of heaven. The pastry was perfectly crusty and flaky, the meat wonderfully spiced (we could smell them baking from the street below) and the accompanying potato, red cabbage, relish and pickled beet were an expert match.

Sugar pie made with maple syrup.

Kevin had the daily special, which was fillet of sole au gratin, and was very pleased with the delicate and cheesy dish.  The best part of the meal by far, however, was dessert.  Maple syrup pie, a version of Quebec’s famous sugar pie, was perfection on a plate. Sort of like a butter tart without the nuts; it was buttery and sweet and accompanied by delicious real whipped cream.  My only regret is that we didn’t buy a pie to bring home!

Steak with a massive amount of frites.

Another noteworthy meal was dinner at Le Cochon Dingue, which a french speaking friend tells me means the “crazy pig.” This cozy little place is down in the old lower town, not far from the funicular, which comes in handy when you are too stuffed after dinner to climb the many, many stairs back to your hotel. Le Cochon is crazy in a fun and happy way, of course. This cheerful restaurant featured equally cute and cheerful female staff, with checkered tables and a bright, happy atmosphere. Several glasses of sangria made us feel even more cheerful, of course. We ate the “Dingue Formula.”

Strawberry cheese pie.

This is a version of the plat du jour, and for $30, we had soup, salad, steak frites, dessert and coffee. Let’s just say the funicular came in handy after that adventure. My favourite part was the dessert. I chose strawberry cheese pie, which was a pastry crust filled with a cream cheesy centre and topped with fresh strawberries and berry sauce. The sweet-tart creamy combo was heaven- and I hope to attempt a re-creation in my kitchen some day soon.

Frothy cappuccino.

On our last day in QC, our train left at 1pm. We saved our croissant for an afternoon snack, and went for breakfast at the place to be: Casse-Crepe Breton, just down the street from our hotel on Rue St-Jean. The Old Quebec theme repeated here- cozy, cheerful and staffed by cute young ladies. Kevin thinks that all the boys must be out driving delivery trucks for the summer, because they are certainly not working as waiters. Kevin and I both had savoury crepes to start, mine a ham-swiss-asparagus combo, and Kevin’s an egg-bacon-cheese creation. I think mine was better, but we’ll have to agree to disagree. I’m excited to try some savoury crepes of my own some day soon.

Fresh blueberry crepe.

We finished with sweet crepes, and I have to say my cherry one fell short of my expectations, it was cherry pie filling and cool whip. A total let down. Kevin’s had fresh blueberries and appeared to be significantly more tasty. I left half my cherry crepe behind, a bad sign as I am a compulsive plate cleaner! I think the key is to enjoy the savoury crepes and to skip the “whipped cream,” as it is really just a poor imitation.

Other notable eats included some really creamy brie and crusty baguette, greedily consumed as an afternoon picnic, as well as several pints of local brew- I really love their take on a blond beer.

Overall, our trip was filled with lovely sites punctuated by delicious food. I wouldn’t choose to go in summer again, the sidewalks were bursting with tourists by mid-week, but a fall trip several years from now is definitely on my list of places to go and things to eat.

Le Cochon Dingue, on a crowded street in the old lower town.

Make-shift berry container full of the "fruits" of our labours.

Few things are more fun and tasty to me than growing something myself and devouring it. Case in point, my recent penchant for tomato and cheddar sandwiches, with tomatoes courtesy of my patio garden. Living in a city for most of my life, I’d almost forgotten that sometimes tasty things grow wild, waiting to be discovered by birds and bears.

The berries soak up the Sangria.

Imagine my enormous pleasure at discovering mother nature’s gift to us on a recent cottage weekend in eastern Manitoba. I’ve never seen so many wild blueberries and raspberries. It was a reminder of what these fruits used to look like before we engineered them. The blueberries were so tiny, they were hard to spot, and the raspberries were perfect and so delicate you needed your softest touch to capture them.

Wildberry pancakes on the vintage cottage stove.

Braving hungry mosquitos and nasty black flies, we collected many cupfuls over the weekend. I think the cottage road was picked clean before our departure. These tiny treats made for several Sangria adventures and a stack of berry pancakes that rapidly evaporated from the breakfast table.

When was the last time a walk in the woods produced a bounty for your table? I very much enjoyed my reminder that there’s nothing more “local” than sneaking berries straight from the forest floor.

Week 3 CSA Share

Kevin & I joined a community shared agriculture (CSA) program this year and were very happily surprised to get our first share at the beginning of June. My post about our lack of a garden and which farm we chose can be found here.

It is week 3 of the 22 week season, and I must say our fridge is overflowing with greens!  We have bok choy, leaf lettuce, spinach and mixed mustard greens vying for attention in the crisper as I write.  It’s hard to decide who to devote your attention to, especially as not all the greens have a terribly long fridge life.

Gigantic salads seem to be the order of the week. I think we’ll see how far we can take this before we can’t stand to look at another leaf. Luckily the greens were accompanied by radishes, small turnips, kohlrabi and green onions to make a salad a bit more interesting. I never would have thought a turnip would be tasty in a salad, but these are crisp and sweet, nothing like the bitter mash that is inevitably served at holiday dinners.

It sounds like the share will evolve over time, and not always be so “green.”  I’m looking forward to the appearance of carrots, beets, and peas.  We’re also growing some treats on our back patio: tomatoes, red peppers, spinach and every herb you can imagine.  So far the basil and mint have gone wild.  My next post should be about pizza and mojitos! Going local on those will be no problem.

Cheers to many tasty summertime salads to come!

Fresh from the oven

I love roast chicken. Chicken most other ways bores me, but there is nothing better than a roasted chicken (especially when you can be proud that the crispy skin and juicy meat is the result of your labours in the kitchen).

I bought this chicken from Old Farm Fine Foods. I don’t know if it’s local origin made it more tasty, but it certainly made it much more expensive. I was lured in by their “fresh local chicken” sign and was a bit stunned by the $18 price tag at the till….but too embarrassed to walk away! Being a “locavore” is a constant budget dilemma.

Kevin and I experimented with BBQ’d beer can chicken last summer and even bought a little stand that helps the cooking go smoothly. It’s a bit easier to do in the oven because the chicken is quite tall on the stand and the BBQ lid does not always want to close properly.

We don’t drink beer in cans, so we went to the odds and ends section of the LCBO and found a cheap random can of beer to use. You just pour half the beer out, sit the chicken on top of the can, and pop it in your oven (or onto your BBQ grill).

This time we rubbed the chicken with a mixture of equal parts of smoked paprika, ground cumin, chili powder, salt, and a double dose of brown sugar.

Roast the chicken at 375F for about 1.5 hours, or as long as it takes for the thigh meat to read around 180F on a meat thermometer. Let it rest 5-10 minutes before you carve it.

The upright cooking method makes sure the skin is crispy all the way around, and the beer can inside keeps the meat incredibly moist and juicy. Who wants a drumstick?

The chicken awaits its delicious fate