La Gourmandesse

Fresh baked peach buckle.

This recipe is my first foray into the world of Smitten Kitchen. I’m sure that many food bloggers already know about this bible of a food blog, but for those who haven’t seen it, I highly recommend the site. It is one of the only food blogs I read on a regular basis; the photography is great and the recipes are always fresh, in season and creative.

A few weeks ago, a Nectarine Brown Butter Buckle was posted, and I decided to actually try one of Deb’s recipes, rather than just ogle them online. Luck would have it that I ended up with some extremely ripe Ontario peaches just as I was invited to a dinner party. This smelled so divine baking today that I’m surprised Kevin was able to leave it alone long enough to get it to the dinner party!

I decided to leave out the brown butter part and change the nectarines to peaches. The comments online were that the taste wasn’t much different, and  I am supremely lazy when it come to baking. And cooking, really. I hate it when any recipe has many steps…..make this…set aside to cool…etc, etc. Usually I just skip the whole thing entirely.

Also, all I had was an 8 inch round cake pan, and the recipe called for 10 inch. I attempted to cut the ingredients down by about 1/3. So, here is my version of a buckle (also known as a tasty cake with fruit in the middle and streusel on top).

If you have a 10″ pan or prefer brown butter, I would suggest using the original recipe.

Peach Buckle

Peach pinwheel.

This version fits an 8″ cake pan.

Cake

1 stick butter (1/2 cup), melted
1 cup all purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp  salt
Pinch of cinnamon
1/2 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
4 medium peaches, sliced
1 tbsp lemon juice

Streusel

2 tbsp butter
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup all purpose flour
Pinch of cinnamon
Pinch of salt

On goes the streusel.

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Start with the cake batter: Melt the butter, mix in the rest of the wet ingredients. Add in dry ingredients and stir well. I used the same bowl for all of it. Less dishes, less steps = happy me.

2. Grease baking pan. Spread batter in the pan and top with sliced peaches. Make a pretty pattern in you like.

3. Mix together the streusel until it is crumbly, you can do it in the cake batter bowl to save dishes. Pour over the cake batter and peaches to cover. Some peaches and batter will still be visible.

4. Bake at 350F for 40 minutes. It will be done when the cake springs back when you poke it, and the cake isn’t jiggly when you shake it.

It was a hit at dinner, we served it with some vanilla ice cream and the tartness of the peaches, the mildness of the cake and the sweet of the ice cream were a great match.

I reduced the sugar a bit in my version, which was great when paired with ice cream. You might want a bit more sugar if you plan to serve alone. Also, I found the cake the tiniest bit dry, so perhaps a bit more milk in the recipe, or baking 35 minutes. However, I may just be being picky, because Kevin said the moistness of the peaches went well with the texture of the cake.

Sweet roasted root veggie perfection.

A few weeks ago, our CSA veggie box contained some particularly fat & sassy beets, and the first carrots of the year. I love roasted beets, and the carrots were crying out to join their purple cousins in tinfoil on the barbeque.

Peeled and ready for chopping.

Seasoned with S&P and garden herbs.

Simply chop the beets and carrots roughly, toss them in olive oil and chopped garlic, sprinkle with salt, pepper, fresh rosemary, oregano and thyme, and pop this all into a tinfoil package. It can go on the BBQ for 45 minutes over indirect heat (one burner on high, the other off, package over the off burner) or in the oven for 1 hr at 375F.

And there you have it- simple, healthy, tasty and local.  And this cooks up just beautifully while steaks occupy the other side of the grill!

2009 Sandbanks Baco Noir, $15.05, LCBO#110049 & 2008 Dunes, $13.05, LCBO#110031.

This weekend I went into the LCBO with one thing on my mind and one thing only- to pick up some great wine. Although I continue to have fun trying out new $10 wines, the gems seem few and far between lately. Rather than purchase yet another bottle of affordable disappointment, I thought it was time to splurge on some summer favourites.

For this Wine Wednesday I am sharing my two best Ontario wines- which coincidentally come from the same winery and are 100% Ontario grown. When it comes to home grown wines, I really only feel right buying VQA. There’s just something so silly to me about labels that say “cellared in Ontario,” as if you won’t notice the conspicuous absense of the VQA seal.  If you didn’t grow the grape here, where it got cellared does not mean much to me. Hence my beef with most of the wine WalMart and the Wine Rack carries. By these standards, retirees can start putting “cellared in Ontario” on the crappy home made wine they make in their basements. Maybe WalMart will start carrying that?

I discovered Sandbanks Estate Winery on a Prince Edward County wine tour in May 2009. Our tour had the good fortune to bump into the winery’s lovely winemaker, Catherine Langlois, and I can see how her sunny disposition leads to great wine.  In my opinion, her wine is the best that Prince Edward County has to offer, and I’ve sampled most of the region’s vineyards. I love that I get to buy local and get great wine, and I can only imagine how much better things will get as the vines mature.

Their Baco Noir is one of my go to red wines. It’s exactly what I want in a wine; bold and fruit-forward with a touch of oak. I guess it’s just my luck that baco noir is often grown in more difficult climates like Ontario because it is definitely my kind of grape. That said, I have tried some other Ontario baco noirs and they are nowhere near as good as this one. So I must give some credit to the winery for growing a lovely grape and making a fabulous bottle.

Their other great bottle is Dunes, which is a Vidal Riesling blend. Again, it is a fruity and fresh wine. Not too sweet, with some crisp citrus notes that make it very refreshing. This has been one of Kevin’s favourite whites ever since I introduced it to him last year.

We’re having a small dinner party this week, and I think the Dunes will be a good opener with olives and cheese, while the Baco should partner well with some juicy steaks off the BBQ.  Cheers to great summer sippers!

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

I’m not typically one to browse the German section of the LCBO, especially because smaller stores seem to mainly feature such atrocities as Blue Nun, wine that Germans themselves would never touch.  So I am not terribly familiar with German varietals and wineries.

2008 Pelee Island Gewurztraminer, $9.95. LCBO#135970.

By some strange coincidence, however, two Ontario wines based on German grape varietals have crossed my path this week. Last night, our friends Mac and Stacy dropped by for dessert and brought a bottle of Gewurztraminer that was a great partner for my Fudgy Layer Cake.

Pelee Island Winery’s 2008 Gewurztraminer is floral, fresh and fruity.    Most of Pelee Island’s wines are VQA, but this one is a 30% domestic/70% foreign blend, cellared in Canada. We’ll have to forgive them as a little research has informed me that Gewurztraminer is a very temperamental grape to grow. A crisp pale straw colour, with a typical bouquet of roses and flavours of peaches and pears; it is very balanced with a smooth finish. Definitely on the sweet end of the spectrum, it’s a great dessert choice, but is quite sippable and could pair well with spicy asian food.

Overall, I give this Gewurztraminer 8.5/10 for taste and 4/5 for value.

2007 Trumpour's Mill Riesling, $11.95. LCBO#28258.

Tonight, our spring salad with baked salmon needed a white wine partner, so it was the perfect time to break out a VQA Riesling we got this fall.  It’s from the Grange of Prince Edward County, an incredibly charming little winery on a farm property near Picton, ON. Their Trumpour’s Mill 2007 Riesling is an interesting bottle. We got it as part of a food and wine festival door prize, and I’m not sure I would ever have picked it up on my own.  We had 2 bottles of it, and looking back at my November 2009 notes, this second try has me drawing the same conclusions.

The wine has a strange chemical quality to both the nose and the taste. Kevin and I agree that it is reminiscent of cheap dollar store erasers. I have to admit it ruins the wine for me, I can’t get past it. If the chemical aspect was absent, it would be a nice, crisp, off-dry wine with a taste of apples and citrus. It has a bit of a tart finish that leaves you puckering in a good way.  Maybe future years of this wine will not have the same chemical issues. Until then, I will pass.

Overall, I give this Riesling 7.5/10 for taste and 3/5 for value.

Image from Root Radicals CSA- July 2009 weekly share

For years now, I have wanted to belong to a community agriculture program. Last year, Kevin and I tried our hands at growing some tomatoes and herbs on the patio, but were dissatisfied with our limited space to grow food. We have since moved into a house with even less space to grow veggies (unless we planted some lettuce between our parking spots), and decided this year to take the plunge with a farm program.

After searching the web for local programs, we settled on Root Radicals Community Shared Agriculture, based from a Gananoque farm. For $400, you get a weekly share for the 22-week growing season, delivered to several pick up locations in the Kingston area. There will be several work bees throughout the summer that we hope to volunteer at and get our gardening fix for the year. I think a full share may be a lot of produce for Kevin and I, but hopefully it will force us to get all of our recommended servings of vegetables and give us the opportunity to share with friends.

The first delivery is slated for mid-June, and I don’t know how I will contain my excitement for the next 3 months.  I’m already thinking of future posts about the virtues of kohlrabi, kale and garlic scapes (all of which I have no idea how to prepare).  I look forward to expanding my vegetable bubble, and on this grey March day I am already thinking about all the crunchy green salads to come.

2008 Pelee Island Monarch Red, $9.95. LCBO#107763.

Wine Wednesdays have made me especially fond of the middle of the week. I thought I’d be patriotic and sample a Canadian $10 bottle, which is no mean feat if you want something VQA, and not mass-produced in the Niagara (Romanian juice) tradition.

Pelee Island Winery delivers an exceptionally fun and sippable bottle for a reasonable price. It is a red blend, which they list as Zweigelt: 33%, Baco Noir 40%, Chambourcin 10%…..and 17% mystery if you are able to do simple math.  No matter, as the wine is well worth drinking, even if the vintners were drunk when they calculated the technical data. I really like Baco Noir, and this delivers a lighter version of that extreme fruitiness.

The wine is a ruby colour, with an earthy nose and a fruit forward, jammy taste. Kevn detects raspberries while I say grapefruit. It has a sweet-tart quality but still a balanced finish. Somewhere between light and medium bodied, it would be excellent as a summer wine, and paired well with our BBQ dinner. I feel a picnic related daydream coming on…..

It is a very fun and friendly wine, and I think I may keep some on hand for our inevitable housewarming party.

Overall, I give this wine 8/10 for taste and 4/5 for value.