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.

O Canada!!!

And the mens hockey team wins again!  The gold medal game was excellent but I have to comment on the press and their flip-flopping.  A few days ago, before the Canada US game, the commentators were saying:  the US is the team to beat, Canada can't score, didn't bring the right players, etc.  Today they are saying that the Canadian team is the best team ever assembled.  Geesh (but in a good way).

Do it again

I can't resist the Tulip sweater.  I have made 3 for baby, one for a slightly older girl and the boy version, Rocketry.  I don't often want to knit the same thing twice, let alone several times.  But it is such a fun knit and I have tons of Dream in Color Classy to finish up in the stash so it was a perfect time to make another.

This is technically an olympic project by I'm not really finding myself compelled to get involved too much.  I am enjoying the olympics, particularly moguls, curling and hockey, and knitting while watching.  That's good enough for me.

I'll be up early tomorrow cheering for the Canadians in mens hockey.  Go Canada Go!!!

Reading in bed

Am getting caught up on old RSS feeds from my favourite blogs.  Squawkfox comes through again with a great tip and has introduced me to free magazines through a combination of my local library and Zinio.  She gives detailed instructions on what to do to get free access to a big selection of magazines here.  I downloaded about 1/2 a dozen just now and am getting to read as I take a nap after an intense weekend of curling (which we won - regions here we come!!!!).

The great exhale

Some weeks are challenging to get through.  This week, it is for no good reason other than it is f*(&ing cold outside.  Don't get me wrong.  I actually like winter.  To qualify, I like southern Ontario winter which generally is not too cold (my first winter here I wore a raincoat with a liner the entire season quite comfortably).  But this month-long cold snap is really getting to me.  Leaving the house involves about 17 extra clothing items and 15 minutes of prep time.

Anyway, I had to take my car in to the garage this morning (my car has been in the shop more in 2014 than I've been driving it but that is another very annoying story) and needed to get home from the train without the benefit of my in-house taxi service so, took the bus to, admittedly, not that far from my house, but was never-the-less very glad for my parka, hood, knitted hat, cowl and mitts.  When I got home, I was strongly motivated to order pizza.  Then I remembered that I don't have any cash, don't like using a credit card when ordering food, the aforementioned in house taxi service wasn't home yet and we still have good food in the fridge so … I decided to make some pizza.

The pizza dough comes from Fine Cooking magazine, a very quick, limited rise time dough and a bunch of yummy ingredients from the fridge (mushrooms, red peppers, pancetta, mozzarella, beet greens and goat cheese).  Combined with a nice bottle of Peller Estates Merlot and I'm feeling the relaxing effects of the great exhale.

Rise up

It is rather cruel that when you spend a couple of days and a few hours making bread that you aren't supposed to taste it until it cools for an hour.  Fortunately, I have a braise in the oven and the bread will go very well with it so I'm not too upset.  And the little bit of crust that stuck to the pan when I popped the bread out onto the rack was enough to tide me over for a little bit longer.  We'll have to see if I can hold out all the way to dinner.

About the bread itself … I have two of Peter Reinhart's bread cookbooks and I can't decide whether I like them or not.  I regularly and successfully make a really nice loaf from a fairly simple recipe.  Then I crack open one of Reinhart's books and the bread takes at least two days to produce.  The recipes require pre-mixing of certain parts of the dough the day before the double rising process.  And instead of the standard two loaf recipe, his recipes make one.  And I can't say that I have thought Reinhart's breads were so awesome that they were worth the extra time.  But I have had very good success with bread lately, and I'm giving the proofing feature on my new oven credit for that, so thought I would try again.  More to come after the official tasting later today.

And speaking of braising, I'm back into Molly Stevens' All About Braising book.  Yesterday I made a delicious braised tuna with chickpeas and radicchio.  It is a fairly quick recipe; a maximum of an hour from start to plate.

Today a little more involved braised oxtails is in the oven.  I have no idea if I like oxtails or not but I see them every time I go to my local butcher and decided to take the plunge.  If I don't like them, I can always have another slice of bread!