Bits ‘n Bites

In early June I was invited by Jasmine (Confessions of a Cardamon Addict) to blog about “which savory dishes or drinks tastes like Canada to you?” This invitation was in anticipation of July 1st, Canada’s official birthday. It certainly was an interesting question, one I had often thought about, but usually in the context of: Does Canada really have a distinctive culture? Food is definitely part of a culture, I think. But as difficult it is to answer the culture question, the food angle is no easier.

I was born and raised in Québec, predominantly in the french-canadian culture. I now live on the West Coast of Canada, in Vancouver, a city with distinct Asian and East-Asian culinary influences.  Though I absolutely love that cuisine, and consider it part of my heritage now, I have to admit the first thought and taste that came to me when I received the invitation was my mom’s meat pie (tourtière). I also “smelled” maple sap reducing in a cabane à sucre (sugar shack), and felt the soft, sweet texture of maple taffee on my tongue. All, really, childhood memories.

Christmas time is a big cooking and baking period pretty much around the world. It’s no exception in Québec. Though my mom now lives in Toronto, I was really happy last Christmas to finally help her prepare a traditional dish, usually served in the winter: Ragoût de pâte de cochon (Pigs feet stew). I blogged about this here. Another traditional fare at that time of year is a type of quick paté called cretons.  It’s a nice little appetizer. Here’s the recipe:

Cretons à l’ancienne

Source : Jehane Benoît

1 lb minced pork, lean
1 cup milk
1 cup bread crumbs (or dried bread, finely chopped)
1 onion, finely chopped
to taste, Salt
to taste, Pepper
to taste, cloves, grounded
to taste, cinnamon, grounded

Instructions :Mix all ingredients in a saucepan. Cover and cook for 1 hour on low heat. Stir once or twice during cooking time. Store in containers. Can be frozen.

Thanks again, Jasmine, for this thought-provoking subject. Now, I wonder, to which cuisine will I turn to celebrate this July 1st?…

Maria Liberati, former super-model, now celebrity chef, stopped by Athena Isle today, as guest speaker for the Writers Club weekly meeting. She has just launched her second book, The Basic Art of Italian Cooking, available in stores and online at Amazon.

The format of a roundtable made this particularly enjoyable. Before long, there were quite a few of us sitting around Cybergrrl Oh’s magical table (a new chair appears every time someone sits on one). Maria proved to be very comfortable fielding questions and moving around. Considering this was her first time in Second  Life, I was impressed. We touched on various topics, from the use of fresh ingredients as the key to Italian cooking, to the Slow Food movement, very common in Europe, and now gaining a foothold in North America. Maria explained that her book is not so much a collection of recipes, as a story, or a collection of stories related to various dishes and foods in Italy.

Maria has a few plans in store, including a podcast and a television series featuring celebrities talking about what they like to eat and favorite recipes. The full transcript of the chat will be available a little later this week on the Second Life Writers Club website. Maria is one of the latest author to make Second Life a stop on a book tour.

Sometime in early December, as I was perusing the Daring Bakers website, I noticed an ad on the site for a chocolate competition hosted by Hotel Chocolat, a UK-based purveyor of fine chocolates. The deal was simple: Submit your favorite chocolate-based recipe and their panel would pick a winner.

My all-time favorite and most acclaimed recipe is for Santa Fe Brownies, an unctuous concoction of 12 ounces of chocolate (bittersweet and semi-sweet) and cream cheese. I can’t quite recall how I got hold of this recipe. I believe my mom gave it to me, but she can’t remember where she got it from. It took me all of 2 minutes to copy my recipe onto the site’s registration and to submit it. Needless to say, I was dumbfounded when I received an email, from the marketing company behind the contest, telling me I had won! :0

Shortly after Christmas, I received my prizes: a box of Pink Champagne Truffles and a copy of the 101 Best Loved  Chocolate Recipes Book. The truffles are to die for, and the book is chock-full of scrumptious recipes (chocolate pasta anyone?…). Thank you Hotel Chocolat! It was a very nice after-Christmas present.

I baked Santa Fe Brownies while at my mother’s over the holidays. Our guests at Christmas all got to take a slab home. That recipe is definitely a winner in everyone’s book. Here’s the recipe. It’s a little-time consuming, but well worth the effort.

Santa Fe Brownies
1 cup plus 1 teaspoon butter
6 squares (6 ounces) unsweetened chocolate coarsely chopped
6 squares (6 ounces) semisweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
1 _ cups all-purpose flour
1 _ teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
5 large eggs
1 _ cups firmly packed brown sugar
1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 _ cups walnuts, broken into large pieces

Cream Cheese Mixture
12 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
6 tablespoons butter, softened (no substitutions)
1 _ teaspoons vanilla extract
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3 large eggs

Instructions :
1.Preheat oven to 350 F. Line a 13x 9 inch baking pan with foil.   Melt 1 teaspoon of the
butter and brush the bottom and sides of the pan with it.  Melt the unsweetened
chocolate, semisweet chocolate, and the remaining 1 cup of butter in top of a double
boiler over simmering water.  Set mixture aside and cool slightly.

2.  Stir together the flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.  Beat the eggs in a
large mixing bowl at medium speed until just blended.  Add the brown sugar, granulated
sugar, and vanilla: beat just until smooth.  Beat in the chocolate mixture, then flour
mixture, at low speed just until combined.  Reserve 2 1/4 cups batter.  Stir the walnuts
into remaining batter in the mixing bowl.  Spread the batter in the prepared pan.

3.  For Cream Cheese Mixture, beat the cream cheese and butter in a clean mixing bowl
at medium speed until smooth.  Gradually beat in the vanilla and sugar until light and
fluffy.  Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition and beat just until
smooth.  Spoon the mixture over the chocolate batter in prepared pan, spreading to
edges to the pan.

4.Stir reserved chocolate batter to soften.  Spoon the batter over the cream cheese
layer.  With a knife, cut through batters in a zigzag pattern to marbleize slightly.  Bake 1
hour 15 minutes , until toothpick inserted in center comes out barely clean.  (If the top
browns too quickly during baking, cover the pan loosely with foil.)  Cool completely in the
pan on a wire rack.  Invert onto a cookie sheet; gently lift off pan and remove foil.  Invert
again, cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

5.  With a long, sharp knife, cut brownies into squares, then cut each quarter into 8
squares.  (Can also be cut into slabs and frozen.) Makes 32.

Enjoy!

I’ve never been much of a computer-based gamer. I’ll play the odd game of solitaire or backgammon. I do wander the virtual landscape of Second Life, these days looking to solve the CSI:NY SL murder mystery. But I’ve never been into this whole Doom/DOD and other multiplayer computer-based games. The idea of destroying stuff to win never appealed to me. So when I came across the game of Chocolatier in an article on macnn, my curiosity was piqued.

The game is the brainchild of PlayFirst games. According to Macnn, Chocolatier…

“…maintained a Top 20 position on several casual game sites for approximately five months.”

PlayFrst was now releasing the sequel to that game, Chocolatier 2. I took a look at the first version of the game and liked what I saw:

“Oh the gloriously rich and delectable life of a chocolatier! Constantly surrounded by mounds of chocolate bars and boxes of mouth-watering truffles! Become a master chocolatier one ingredient at a time as you travel the world to find the best prices and maximize production…but don’t forget about those conniving competitors who wish you poorly! Do you have what it takes to conquer the world through chocolate?”

There was a 60-minute free trial you could download to test it. I did just that and became hooked. I’m not sure where those 60 minutes disappeared, but before I knew it I was frantically looking for my credit card and signing up for the registration key. Reasonably priced at $19.95, it has been my time sinkhole for the past couple of days. Despite its simple graphics, I have found myself totally submerged in the story and its environment. Dashing from city to city, buying ingredients, factories, retrofitting them for special recipes, discovering new recipes through a deep stable of characters around the globe, making new recipes, selling chocolates, the whirlwind never stops. You are sent on special assignments, delivering letters, special orders of chocolate bars or squares – I haven’t made it to the truffle level yet, all the while accumulating and spending money. You get special awards and titles as you move up the chocolatier ladder. You can then upload your high scores and awards to the FirstPlay website to see how you stack up against other players. I was ranked 167 last I looked. Still a ways to go for me….

Chocolatier 2 looks a little slicker than its predecessor, the UI a little cleaner. The PC format of both versions of the game also comes with the Together feature. Unfortunately, not so for the Mac version. There are also forums for players to interact on the FirstPlay website, with tips and tricks. I still have lots to do with Chocolatier before I will need to upgrade to Chocolatier 2. But, as I contemplate a 10-hour flight over the holidays, I may just give myself another small Christmas present before I board that plane…

Run out of gift ideas for that difficult-to-buy-for person on your list? Singapore-based Provocachic may just have the recipe you’re looking for: a custom-designed cocktail. Back in 2002 Damien Sim started designing cocktails for friends. Before long his flair for the art and science of mixology extended to companies looking to dazzle during special events and (well-to-do) couples looking for that special drink for their nuptials. Being based in Singapore, Sim often uses ingredients indigenous to that region. Custom glasses, best suited to impart the flavours of the drink. These concoctions don’t come cheap and will set you back $1,200 to $3,600, depending on the event. More details, and a recipe, can be found here. (Photo: REUTERS/PRNewsFoto/Pernod Ricard USA)

Checking up on the latest posts on the DB website, I found out that Monday November 26th is International Onion Day. What better way to celebrate this staple of cooking than with a cooking challenge. Onion lovers and enthusiasts are encouraged to cook a dish featuring onions on that day and blogging about it the next day. Details of the event can be found here. Thanks to Kochtopf for the heads-up!

(Image: Wikipedia Creative Commons. Courtesy of Fir0002)

(My recipe for International Onion Day - Tony Roma’s Onion Rings)

Came across an interesting article from NPR today on the discovery of the 5th taste profile. Looks like we can thank one of cooking’s demi-gods for its discovery. Auguste Escoffier first experienced this taste when he developed veal stock. This stock would ultimately redefine sauces as they knew them in the late 1800s and now. The basic four tastes were: sweet, salty, bitter and sour, as defined centuries earlier by the Greek philosopher, Democritus. When Escoffier tasted his first veal stock, he realized he had stumbled onto something new. It was not until the 19th century, when taste buds were “discovered”, analysed and classified by the scientific community, did the science of taste become established. However, because Escoffier’s new flavor profile did not fall into one of the four categories…

“…as far as the scientists were concerned, it wasn’t real. People may smack their lips, drool, savor and pay enormous amounts of money to M. Escoffier, but what they were tasting wasn’t really there. It was all in their heads.”

Meanwhile, in Japan, a chemist named Kikunae Ikeda, arrived at the similar taste profile while drinking/eating daichi, a classic Japanese soup made from seaweed. Being a chemist, he was able to decompose it to its essential component, namely glutamic acid. However, he decided to give it a sexier name, “umami”, which means “yummy” or “delicious” in Japanese. When glutamate breaks down during the cooking process, L-glutamate is the end result. And this is what became the fifth taste. In 2002, some 100 years later, the scientific community recognized the work done by Ikeda and officially established and named that fifth taste (which is neither sweet, salty, sour or bitter), umami.

I would have loved to see Escoffier’s and Ikeda’s face when they first realized they had stumbled onto such a world-altering discovery…

German meat producers Toennies has announced they have successfully developed a schnitzel that can be cooked in a toaster. The product wil be introduced in German supermarkets in 2008. Other countries will follow later on. Story from Taste.com.au. (Photography by Ben Dearnley)

Hallowe’en may conjure up thoughts of candies and cookies, but after doing three cooking challenges in a row involving sweets, I needed a break. Luckily the Weekend Cookbook Challenge #21, hosted by mlb of Je mange la ville blog this month, was pretty liberal in how we tie our recipe to Hallowe’en.

After flipping through countless pumpkin recipes, most involving breads or muffins, I finally found something interesting in The Whole Foods Market Cookbook: Toasted Pepita Dip. It had some of my favorite ingredients, namely, jalapeños, cilantro, cayenne, cumin and lime. A pleasant surprise with this recipe was how low in fat pepitas are compared to other seeds and nuts (eg: 1/3 cup: sunflower seeds: : 24 g. fat; almonds: 24 g. fat; cashews: 21 g. fat; pepitas: 4 g. fat. from Whole Foods Market website)

The results were a nice, spicy, crunchy and refreshing dip. A nice change from the usual cream cheese (though there is some sour cream here) and artichoke, crab or spinach dips. Another keeper. Thanks for the challenge MLB!

An acrid smell emanating in the famed Soho district in London brought out a chemical response team from the London Fire Brigade last week. Passers-by were reporting a burning throat sensation as a result of the smell.

Steve Bird of The Times of London reported:

“As the ambulance service sent in its Hazardous Area Response Team Unit, firefighters wearing specialist breathing apparatus entered the deserted streets to seek out the source.
Soon after 7pm on Monday they emerged from the smoke carrying a huge cooking pot containing about 9lb of smouldering dried chillies.”

Turns out the chilies are used in the preparation of nam prik pao, “a super-hot Thai dip to accompany prawn crackers.”

The Thai Cottage restaurant’s chef, Chalemchai Tangjariyapoon, explained:

“I was making a spicy dip with extra-hot chillies that are deliberately burnt. To us it smells like burnt chilli and it is slightly unusual. I can understand why people who weren’t Thai would not know what it was. But it doesn’t smell like chemicals. I’m a bit confused.”

The owner then further explained that due to the rainy weather, the smoke hadn’t dissipated as usual.

I wonder if Chef Heston Blumenthal was in the area?…

(Image courtesy of Daniel Risacher/Wikipedia)