Surprising Me

Several years ago, I worked at Bay and Bloor and they opened a Williams Sonoma store across the street.  A big Williams Sonoma store that I still love visiting.  I am pretty well stocked in the pots and pans department but, as mentioned time after time, I love cookbooks.  And I was enticed by the small Williams Sonoma cookbooks that are built around a theme.  My favourite Whole Wheat bread recipe comes from the Bread book.  There are others for Pasta, Salads, Steak and Chop and so on.  I have at least a dozen because they sold them in boxes of 4 which built the collection pretty quickly.  Add to that, Costco sold them later on too so I picked up some there too.

Anyway, I bought some (sustainable) sea bass from my local Longo's the other day and was looking for something to do with it from my cookbooks through my new favourite website, Eat Your Books, and stumbled across a recipe from the Seafood book that I don't think I realized I owned.  Obviously, I realized it long enough to enter the book into Eat Your Books as I was building my library but when I pulled all of that together, I was hardly paying close attention.  Anyway, the recipe was Sea Bass on a bed of Fennel and it was excellent.  Fennel is one of my favourite veggies and roasting is my favourite way of preparing it.  The recipe has you roast the fennel for 20 minutes (next time I would go longer) at 400 and then putting the fish in the pan for 10 minutes to finish.  While the fennel is cooking, the fish marinates in a lemon juice honey mixture to give it some extra flavour.

A very tasty result and another cookbook found.

Everyday is Like Sunday … or I wish it were

I decided to stop blogging.  And then Natalie said that reading this is the best way to keep up with what is going on with me since we rarely see each other.  So here goes.  We'll see how long it lasts.

I discovered a new, and totally meant for me website, thanks to Chocolate & Zucchini.  It is Eat Your Books and is exactly what I need.  Before I explain it, I should say that I have 181 cookbooks.  And I have saved hundreds of recipes from magazines on my Paprika app.

On Eat Your Books, you enter all of your cookbooks by name and when they have been indexed in the website, you have a searchable inventory of all of your recipes by ingredient.  It is awesome.  The only, rather large issue … they are pretty terrible at having indexes for Canadian cookbooks.  The good part, members can index books.  I am going to contribute to this but it will take time.  I started indexing a book a couple of weeks ago and am only about 1/4 of the way through.  So eventually.

Anyway, ever in search of a theme, I decided to write a blog about tonight's dinner, sourced from my cookbook collection, courtesy of the Eat Your Books index, partly.

Since it has been a fabulous weekend, barbecue was in the air.  We had Honey Whiskey Glazed Chicken from Lynn Crawford at Home (not a book indexed in the website), Freekeh Pilaf from Plenty by Ottolenghi and Roasted Cauliflower from the Gourmet cookbook.  I improvised a little in all.  Everything was great.  I pretty much improvised a bit on everything.  This is how I made the Freekeh Pilaf:

1 medium onion, chopped
1 tablespoon butter
1/2 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 cup freekeh
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground allspice
1 cup chicken stock
salt and black pepper
chopped beet greens
a handful of chopped mint, parsley, basil and chives

Saute the butter, olive oil and onions over medium heat for 10 minutes until onion is soft.

Soak freekeh in cold water for 5 minutes.  Drain in a sieve and rinse well under cold water.  Drain well.

Add the freekeh, cinnamon and allspice to the onions, add the stock and salt and pepper.  Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat to low and cook for 15-20 minutes.  Throw the beet greens into the pot and put the lid back on the pot.  Remove from heat and leave covered for 5 minutes.

Stir herbs into the warm pilaf.

Enjoy.

Ottolenghi adds some pine nuts and uses a lemon flavoured yogurt to serve.  Both would be good but I forgot the pine nuts and didn't have any yogurt.  It was all very tasty without.