Morocco

In an effort to reenergize my cooking, get together with friends more regularly and reenergize my interest in blogging, I've copied an idea I first heard about on a podcast which referenced Global Table Adventure.  The idea is to cook food from every country in the world over a certain period of time.  On Global Table Adventure, Sasha cooked a different country every week.  Since I'm not that ambitious, and we're getting into the time of year where curling takes over most of our spare minutes, I'm going to aim for once a month.  Twice if I'm really lucky.  This means it will take me about 20 years to complete this project.  We'll see if I can stick with it!

The other thing Sasha did was cook the countries in order.  This was my original plan.  I went to the US State Department website and picked up the list of countries and started to comb my cookbooks for ideas.  I was all set to start with Afghanistan until I thumbed through The Slanted Door cookbook I had in the house from the library and decided that I don't really want to wait 19 years for the Vietnamese dinner!  So I've decided to wing it, crossing off countries as I randomly journey the globe.

The other thing I want to do is use recipes I already have stockpiled.  This may mean some issues with complete authenticity but I'm not sure randomly selected web recipes (which I will also use as a source) offer a complete guarantee either.  So here goes.

First up, Morocco.  Why Morocco?  We were in the car when we set up a dinner date via text message with my in-laws.  So my first thought was, why not take advantage of this opportunity to kick off my project.  And Morocco is quite straight-forward.  I have a tagine, I've made Moroccan food before and it doesn't require a full day in the kitchen.  Since I had less than a full afternoon, this seemed to make sense.  So, I searched Eat Your Books, Pinterest and Paprkia and came up with a decent menu.  

As an aside, I'm going to try for two common themes as I cook around the world.  Bread and cookies.  I am guessing all countries make some sort of bread (I'm counting rice paper wrappers in the case of Vietnam).  And I'm hoping most also make cookies.  This is a selfish hope because I really think the cookie is the perfect dessert.

The cookies for this meal, called Moroccan Sugar Cookies by food.com were simple to make.  I did run out of vegetable oil so combined it with another oil that made the cookies taste a little grassy.  Lesson learned but they did taste really good with the North African Mint tea we enjoyed with them after dinner.

The bread, ksra, or Moroccan Anise Bread is from Flatbreads & Flavours, a cookbook I've had since 1995 and rarely cooked from.  It was delicious.  The book has really interesting essays and stories about the food too.  One item I found interesting is that people often take their homemade breads to the bakery for baking, covered in a distinctive cloth so that they can tell which bread is theirs when they go back to pick it up.

In terms of the rest of the meal, I made Moroccan Carrot and Red Lentil Soup from A Cedar Spoon, which had a very nice blend of flavours.  The last minute addition of lemon juice and a fresh coriander garnish gave the soup a hint of freshness.

The tagine was from a go-to winter book, All About Braising and was quite similar to a few other recipes I found.  Chicken, olives, moroccan spices and preserved lemons combined to make a warming, flavourful dish.  Along with couscous (with some sautéed onions and pistachios), this was really satisfying and the chicken was fall-off-the-bone delicious.

So, off to a good start.  Next stop might be Vietnam.  Or maybe something from the Southern Africa cookbook we got when we were in Botswana and Namibia a few years ago.  Decisions, decisions.  All I know is that the plan will include bread and cookies!

Free to decide

I was half-heartedly thinking about riding in a Mountain Equipment Coop ride this morning but the Knitter's Fair is on.  What to do?  What to do?

The first would have been good exercise and a nice bike ride.  The second, a reward for the big bike ride last weekend and a morning surrounded by yarn.

In the end, it was not hard to choose.  The sudden cold weather and rainy skies, combined with the lure of all things knitting, made the decision even easier.  And now my yarn-buying diet is over.  Although, given that I had to travel an hour to get to Kitchener, could I lump the purchase under the category of travel yarn buying?  A bit of a stretch.

I didn't go too crazy.  Just a few skeins, one sweater quantity, a couple of sets of needles and two really nice bags from Alison Ruth Designs.  And I prevented myself from buying more than four balls of Silk Garden.

I was able to show Rae from Stix & Stones my Foolproof from her knit-a-long.  And hi to Gail and Susan who I saw in line at opening and then never again.  Hopefully they had as much fun as I did.  What am I saying, of course they had as much fun as I did.  Who wouldn't?

Escarpment Blues ...

… and greens and grey, grey, grey roads.  And lots and lots of hills.  Yesterday I participated in the Halton Epic Tour.  It is a bike ride through parts of the escarpment in Southern Ontario.  I rode 80km, at times wondering why I signed up for this.  It is not something I normally do … sign up for these things.  I prefer to hop on my bike and go for a ride from my house.  For as long or as short as the mood governs.  On nice flat roads.

I should also say that I've never been the sporty sort.  I realize the benefits of exercise for the heart so, like taking a medicine, I exercise most days.  But this summer, after really enjoying the Ride for Heart on the Don Valley Parkway in June, my usual summer enjoyment of cycling took on a more obsessive flavour.  I have been riding at least once and usually twice every weekend.  I rode before work until the recent shorter days put an end to that.  I rode a bunch on our vacation.  I have even ridden in the rain!  And I signed up for the Epic Tour.

So off I went yesterday morning and made it through my chosen distance.  I won't say it was easy.  It wasn't impossible, because I have been riding a lot but it was difficult because I live by the lake and there aren't hills readily available to ride.  You have to seek them out.  Which I have done to a certain extent.  But not to an 80km hilly ride extent.

I really only felt like packing it in once.  It was at the top of one of the lesser inclines and I stopped to get a breather and a drink of water.  One of the girls doing the same thing mentioned the upcoming big decline.  If I had the choice between a steep uphill and a steep downhill, I would choose the uphill.  I associate this with a childhood arm break during a flying downhill attempt.  Given I was 9 at the time, I really should have overcome this but, not being the sporty sort and a big chicken, this still hasn't happened.  So after I confirmed that the downhill was worse than the switchback one at the beginning of the ride, I felt like crying and quitting.  I think the only thing that saved me was the check of the GPS that said that there were only 13km to go.  I had to finish.  So off I went, riding both brakes all the way down the big hill.

I automatically assume people that go in these things are the athletes, fitter than fit.  But I realized that there were more people like me than the others.  This became really clear on the: dreaded-the-entire-ride-by-everyone second last hill.  When approximately 75% of the riders were walking it, I knew I wasn't alone.  And it felt good.  And I could cheer the people who were riding it without feeling like I was a failure for not being able to do it myself.

Once at the top, a drink of water taken, I hopped on my bike again and continued, up some more hills, to the finish line.  Happy to be done.  Happy that my husband was waiting at the finish line cheering me on.

I told myself a couple of times on the ride that if I finished, I could go to the Kitchener Waterloo Knitters Fair next Saturday.  It conflicts with a Mountain Equipment Coop Ride in Burlington.  Which one should I choose?  At this point, it will be the knitting but we'll see what next Saturday brings.

Whiskey in the Jar

It never fails that my biggest harvests are ready on the hottest day of the year.  So yesterday, I contributed to the unnecessary burning of fossil fuels by:

1. Decreasing my pile of tomatoes to make my most favourite savoury relish … tomato jam from Food in Jars.  After 5 pounds of tomatoes, I still have a good number for munching. And this jam in January is like a ray of sunshine on your tongue. 
2. Justifying the extra peaches I picked up at the Farmers' Market on Saturday, I whipped up Peach Barbecue Sauce from Williams-Sonoma.  Any recipe that includes a half cup of bourbon can't be wrong.  And peaches and whiskey just seem to make sense.  I was a bit hesitant about the called-for cupful of Worcestershire sauce.  It sounded like it would be overwhelming but it blended in really well with the peaches and bourbon.  We had the sauce on barbecued chicken and it doesn't have an overpowering flavour but instead enhanced the flavour of the chicken.  Yummy.  And four jars on the shelf for another winter pick-me-up.
3. Using some sour cherry rhubarb jam from last summer that I boiled too far, making it relatively unspreadable on top of my peanut butter toast, I used Eat Your Books to locate the recipe for Rye Crumble Bars from Molly Wizenberg's blog Orangette. These are fantastic.  The jam provides a perfect contrast to the shortbread crust and oatmeal topping.  I can't remember how many jars of this jam I made but I'll be watching out for them in the jam cupboard to make this again soon.
4. Further decreasing the pile of tomatoes, since the oven was on anyway, for lunch I made the Sweet Cherry Tomato and Sausage bake from Jamie Oliver's Jamie at Home book.  This recipe was also found through Eat Your Books, my favourite cooking website.  I am exploring so many recipes that I just wouldn't have found the old fashioned way.  This was a tasty wrap to a very satisfying morning of cooking.

Chicago

My New Year's resolution was not to buy any more yarn unless I was travelling. And here I am in Chicago, not too far from Loopy Yarns. Since the store was (sort of) directly on my way to see the bean, I thought, how could I not go?  What a lovely store. There were so many yarns I could have purchased but I decided I could only buy if I found something I hadn't seen before or that was truly different. This yarn which might be cascade cascadia(??) was it. The name on the ball band is covered by the price tag and I don't remember the name for sure. I will sort it out when I get back to the land of wireless intermet. The hotel has it in the lobby. Otherwise you have to pay some ridiculous amount in the rooms so I have had to be creative with my internet usage. I bought a roaming plan but am going to NJ next month so need to be careful not to use it all in the 2 days I'm in Chicago. 

I'm here for a conference so haven't done heaps of sightseeing but did get a bit done this afternoon.  The bean, the fountain, a river cruise. It was all good but I brought the wrong shoes despite the little voice in my head telling me to be smarter and I came back to the hotel with a couple of blisters. Oh well, they will heal. 

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.