Saint Sustenance

A Very Good Idea

2008-04-02T20:44:00.006-04:00

My friend, artist David Horvitz, has an amazing website.

"thing for sale i will mail you"

You can buy all sorts of amazing things from him, but he just added a new one I thought I should mention here.

"If you give me $30 I will buy $30 worth of cookies and give them away to people I find in the street. I will send you an email with the details of where I bought the cookies, and the exact minute and date I started giving them away and the exact minute I gave away the last one."

So far one person has purchased this.

I think this is what I want for my birthday.

Prized Condiment

2008-04-02T18:44:00.008-04:00

With my chutney quickly gaining fame within about a ten block radius, I realized that I should finally get around to cementing my recipe, especially being that I was down to my last jar. So on Wednesday, I dug up my notes and cooked up a batch. Too bad it takes about three months to mature...
My chutney is cobbled together from a few different recipes and is good on almost everything. This is a condiment that elevates a grilled cheese sandwich to a very special occasion. Also recommended on roast chicken, veggie burgers, and stuffed into prunes to be wrapped in bacon and called devils on horseback.

My Apple Chutney

2 lbs. apples (I use Cortlands)
1 lb. onions
3 small red chiles (I actually used 6 Thai bird's eye chiles-- we shall see if it's too hot)
1 c. raisins (jumbo Thomson!)
2 1/2 c. brown sugar (I prefer dark)
2 TBSP. grated fresh ginger
1/2 tsp. powdered mustard
1 1/2 TBSP. salt
2 tsp. ground allspice
2 tsp. ground cloves
2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper
2 tsp. turmeric
1 1/2 c. cider vinegar
1 1/2 c. malt vinegar

Chop the apples, onions and chiles finely (I use a food processor). Transfer to a large, heavy bottomed pot along with all remaining ingredients. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat and simmer, stirring occasionally and gradually diminishing heat, until thick, about one hour. Ladle into sterilized jars and seal. Makes about 6 - 250mL jars.

Greasy Goose Salon

2008-02-27T16:16:00.007-05:00

Friday, February 29th, 2008
7pm @ Cagibi, 5940 St-Laurent

The Greasy Goose Salon Series #1

Featuring talks by Bartek Komorowski,
Camilla Wynne, Katie Mathieu,
and Jenny Lee Craig.

Greasy Goose website

This Just In (Victorious)

2008-01-23T18:54:00.000-05:00

"Your application has been accepted.

Pork Club meetings, officially called 'Meat Happenings', will be held once a month. The next one, Meat Happenning 3, will probably be held sometime at the end of February. I will keep you posted.

I too have tried this applewood-smoked bacon chocolate bar and I would echo your assertion that bacon and chocolate are best enjoyed separately.

I await receipt of your membership dues."

Hurrah!

On Pork

2008-01-23T15:12:00.000-05:00

I have been required to write an essay on the subject of pork in order to gain entry to the mysterious and exclusive Pork Club presided over by the eminent Bartek. Should my essay be deemed acceptable, I will be charged the very reasonable membership fee of one key lime pie.

I am a relative newcomer to the altar of pork. This isn’t to say I haven’t always liked pork—bacon was the last meat I enjoyed before commiting to eight years of vegetarianism, during which I often tried to emulate my enjoyment with dishes like vegetarian sweet and sour “pork,” and since my return to the world of meats I have oft enjoyed various parts of the pig. However, I hadn’t become a worshipper until the past few years, perhaps just because I hadn’t been exposed to any truly transcendental pork.

I can’t say what is was in particular that first caused my conversion, but in all likelihood it was applewood smoked bacon. Supermarket bacon has absolutely nothing on this stuff. It is thicker, far more flavourful, sweet and smoky, and leaves your house smelling deliciously of applewood all day long. Unfortunately, this delicacy is not (yet) available in Canada, but it is of such a quality that I would gladly drive the two and a half hours to Burlington, VT, to procure a pound or two. At first I liked the idea of making a BLT out of it, but have found that, since my supply tends to be so limited, I prefer to enjoy it unadulterated, perhaps with a side of pancakes, but alone will do just fine, too. Im fact, I have become such a champion of one Vermont brand in particular that recently a friend brought me his last three slices, raw and wrapped in tinfoil, to a book reading we were both attending.

My conversion to ham-lover occured much more recently. I had always been averse to the insipid pink slabs offered on Easter Sunday and tried to avoid it at all costs. Now, though, I can’t tell you what lengths I wouldn’t go to for Col. Bill Newsom’s Aged Kentucky Country Ham. It is salty-sweet-smoky-tender and absolutely perfect. Unfortunately, the only place I know to get it is at egg, the fantastic Williamsburg breakfast joint, where one is always faced with the dilemma of whether to order the ham or the candied Dines’ Farm bacon. Fortunately, both can be had as sides.

But how often can I make trips to Vermont or New York City? Not often enough, to be sure. And though I love to cook, I am much more a baker, and my years of vegetarianism left me rather clueless when it comes to cooking meat. I have never roasted a chicken or broiled a steak. But as of this summer, I do make a killer rack of barbeque ribs. It took an experiment or two and the melding of a few recipes to perfect, but success was eventually mine. There was most notably one blunder, that being my purchase of six lbs. of smoked pork ribs resulting from a combination of my meat-purchasing ignorance and the inability of me and my Hungarian butcher to properly communicate. Thankfully, my father conceded to take the smoked ribs off my hands and taught me to transform them into a delicious baked bean dish, and in the meantime I elsewhere bought my proper fresh ribs in time for my dinner party. But ribs are not to be confined to special occasions or even the summertime—a barbeque is not even a strict requirement and these could (and likely should) be enjoyed even in the depths of winter. (And if one had happened to can some peach pie filling earlier in the year, a real feast might be had—if one had happened to do so.)

Since my rib-induced confidence boost, I have made a few more forays into pork cookery, poking around Porc Meilleur looking for chunks that appear manageable. They provide me with the lardons necessary for the transcedental penne with lardons and crème fraîche I was introduced to in Paris.

My weakness for novelty tends to work very well with my love of pork. I recently purchased Mo’s Bacon Bar from Vosges Haut-Chocolat in Manhattan. The bar, composed of bits of applewood-smoked bacon and Alder-smoked salt in milk chocolate, was better than my attempt at bacon-peanut butter truffles a few years ago, but I ultimately believe chocolate and pork are best enjoyed, if not seperately, at least alongside one another.

And so I stand, a worshipper but still a neophyte, doubtless in need of initiation into the deeper depths of pork that only membership to an exclusive club could possibly afford me. Besides which, I miss when I lived with Bartek and he would occasionally make grilled pork chops covered in melted cheese.

As final criteria for my candidacy, I would like to mention that I have also been up to my elbows in ground pork shoulder learning to make homemade sausages, but that is a story for another day…

Go Ahead and Mock Me

2008-01-15T13:46:00.000-05:00

I would advise you to chew carefully, to consider utterly the taste and texture of what I am about to offer. You may be about to get an idea of how the king felt when he had that dainty dish set before him of four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. It certainly wasn't what he was expecting, nor will you be without surprise. For if I have put before you a slice of mock apple pie, you will shortly be tucking into a flaky crust encasing a filling so redolent of apple pie that you may choke when I reveal to you that it is in fact totally devoid of apples, and actually made of Ritz crackers, sugar, lemon and cinnamon.

That the modern world adores fakery is certainly no secret. Fake meat, fake breasts, and fake Louis Vuitton handbags are just a few examples of North America’s romance with artifice. So why don’t we love the mock pie? It mostly resides nowadays in the realm of novelty-lovers and April Fools’ Day tricksters, hardly the position for a pastry with such a rich history. How can you mince around wearing your Calvyn Klyne perfume without a single thought about the perilous downslide into the tomes of History that the mock pie is taking?

Trouble is, even a fake can be faked. A good portion of the recipes using the word “mock” in their title are nothing but reduced-calorie concoctions, which for the most part would fool no one if you tried to fob them off as the real thing. Another misuse of the term is for pastries that don’t actually require rolling a crust, as in a recipe for Peach Mock Pie that is merely a peach crumble baked in a pie dish, as if baking a proper pie was really such a difficult thing to do. That said, whipping up an apple pie wasn’t always such an easy task.

Consider a life without apples, for they were not always so readily available. In fact, sweet apples are not native to North America but were brought over by the first English settlers, who packed with them both seeds and cuttings on their voyage across the Atlantic. The fruit subsequently began to flourish in what remain the country’s greatest apple-producing states of the East Coast, but by the mid-nineteenth century had yet to be cultivated in the West, which was still in the throes of its ‘wild’ period. Apples were, for the most part, off-limits to all but the wealthiest. I do not believe it to be mere coincidence that the very same year that mock pie was invented, a shipment of four bushels of Washington apples sold in California for $500, which would have been a fortune at the time. It was thus in 1852 that a group of pioneer women so yearning to provide their children with the apple pie they missed from back east somehow summoned the inventive genius to mix soda crackers with brown sugar, water, citric acid and cinnamon in the hopes of replacing the apples in a pie. In the first known publication of the recipe, it was christened California Pioneer Apple Pie.

At just about the same time as the invention of the mock apple pie, two gentlemen from Iowa were on their separate ways to make their fortunes growing apples in the Pacific Northwest. Their wagons were loaded with seedlings, and they apparently made the journey subsisting mostly on dried apple pies. These two were not, however, about to make the pioneer women’s invention obsolete. This was still a time before cold storage and radiation. Contrary to what the modern supermarket shopper might believe, apples do have a season. To keep apples the whole year round they needed to be stored in a single layer on a bed of hay with no fruit touching the other. For this reason apples were mostly dried. Crackers remained cheaper and easier to store in barrels. The mock pie endured.

The soda crackers in the pie became Ritz crackers in the early 1930s when a recipe for Mock Apple Pie began to appear on the box. It was the Great Depression, and apples were once again a luxury for those not lucky enough to live on an orchard, which is not to say that people living on orchards were particularly lucky, since fruit crops were not especially profitable at the time, but at the very least they could eat what they grew.

These days it is still slightly cheaper to buy thirty-six Ritz crackers than the eight apples or so required for a nice pie. Cheaper still is McDonald’s apple pie, which currently runs at two for a dollar. At this price you could even get one for each of your dinner guests. I heard a rumour that they use turnips instead of apples, which is most certainly true of most commercial fruitcakes. But after all the processing the filling of such a thing doubtless undergoes, could you really tell the difference?

A number of eminent food writers cite this as the exact problem that the believability of the mock pie denotes. Apples in the supermarket have become so tasteless, so distant from the adored fruit that was brought to North America long ago, that they are nearly indistinguishable from crackers soaked in a sugary, lemony, cinnamon-flavoured syrup. We do not taste the apple in apple pies anymore. The apples available to us commercially are available based on which are the most profitable. Tasteless apples sell better because their taste cannot offend anyone. You can’t sell a blemished one, but you can sell a shiny, uniformly round tasteless one. Most of the varieties that I can find at my local fruiterie fit this bill. As A.J. Liebling wrote, if pessimistically, “People who don’t like food have made a triumph of the Delicious apple because it doesn’t taste like an apple, and of the Golden Delicious because it doesn’t taste like anything.”

Fortunately, in Quebec at least, one can still find a few tasty varieties of apple, the Cortland being my top pick. Thus, one evening I set myself to the task of baking both an apple pie and a mock apple pie in the hopes of resolving the matter at a semi-official tasting the next day. By semi-official I mean that I had advertised “One day only! Buy one slice of apple pie ($2) and receive a FREE slice of mock apple pie! (Under the condition that you fill out a short survey)” at my sort of sketchy Backroom Bakeshoppe. I do regret that the morning of the Official Taste Test I did not come up with particularly in-depth questions for my survey. This may have had something to do with the fact that I was up until two o’clock in the morning making two kinds of pie (and testing a revolutionary new dough recipe). The survey answers, in kind, were not particularly in-depth.

I did, however, manage to lure about nine people to my taste test, and each one dutifully filled out the four questions on their survey card. When asked whether the mock pie resembled apple pie, they generally agreed that it resembled a storebought pie “to a shocking degree.” They may have been more willing to say it resembled any apple pie, storebought or otherwise, if I hadn’t provided such a stellar example of good homemade apple pie alongside. When faced with the second question of whether the mock was good, one respondent noted that “it seemed good before I ate the real one,” while someone else chose to skirt the question by replying only, “It is a remarkable experiment in the psychomatology of taste.” Next, I asked whether it was more likely to find apples or Ritz crackers in one’s home. The most popular response was neither, but at least one person admitted to having at least seen apples in their apartment. One sly duck replied, “What’s apples? Ritz.” The last section was reserved for any other comments, but respondents tended to embellish their answers to the first question, referring to mock pie as “black magic alchemy” and asserting, “It’s scary that Ritz crackers can taste like that.”

A success? I think so, though the two professional cooks at the tasting complained that the mock pie lacked acidity and texture. Subsequently, however, I brought a slice of the mock pie to one of Montreal’s most distinguished restaurants, where the cooks were quite dumbfounded.I first presented it to the pastry chef, who called the chef, who was inevitably followed by the entirety of the kitchen staff, and finally a few straggling waiters. The small pastry kitchen was crammed to the gills, and everyone there was fooled. An intern even requested the recipe so she could make it for her fellow students at the pastry school.

That it is a good bet for stymieing professional cooks or any average Joe is just one reason to continue making mock apple pie in this age of the ubiquitous apple. There are ample others. Or perhaps you have an overwhelming craving for apple pie but are trapped in the apartment due to, say, a raging blizzard, or secret police keeping guard at your door, and you don’t have any apples but do have a lifetime supply of Ritz crackers. Or maybe you’re very unfortunately allergic to apples, which sounds like a dubious sort of allergy to me, but apparently 40 to 90% of birch pollen allergic people in Northern Europe and North America are sensitized to apples. (And as a person allergic to broccoli, I’m not really one to talk.) However, I think the best reason to make mock pie is just a plain and simple hatred of Malus domestica. To quote the introduction to one mock apple pie recipe I unearthed, “Love apple pie, but hate apples? Your prayers have been answered!” I believe this is somewhat akin to “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”

But the Ritz apple pie is not the only mock pie. After all, what if you love apple pie, but hate both apples and crackers? Fret not. I have found another recipe for mock apple pie that replaces apples with zucchini. In mock cherry pie, cranberries and raisins take the place of the classic stone fruit. A number of recipes for mock pecan pie exist, likely born of the logic that pecan pie is extremely delicious, but pecans are also prohibitively expensive and rather high in fat if you happen to be worried about that sort of thing. Most recipes are much like the original, containing a base of eggs, vanilla, brown sugar and dark corn syrup, but substituting the nuts with cornflakes, waterlogged Grapenuts, or a mixture of dry oatmeal and coconut. The most interesting mock pecan pie recipe, however, is made by mashing cooked pinto beans with sugar, spices, and eggs. I sincerely regret not having had the time to make that one.

The greatest atrocity I encountered was the mock coconut cream pie that consisted of powdered milk, low-cal sweetener, and cooked spaghetti squash, unaccountably seasoned with nutmeg. Should one really be so enamoured of coconut cream pie, I would suggest either saving up dollars or calories until one can afford to indulge in the real thing, lest this foul concoction forever put a person off food in general. This is simply not a valid use of spaghetti squash.

With the exception of that obvious error, though, what really belongs in a pie? Who decides? After all, many of the things we’re used to finding in our beloved traditional pies are actually kind of odd. Rhubarb, for instance, is a very sour vegetable, nothing like a peach. A pumpkin is just a great big squash. The Martha Stewart Cookbook includes recipes for such unexpected pastries as Beet Pie, Carrot-Parsnip Pie, Green Tomato Pie, and Sweet Spinach Pie. None of those sound particularly appealing to me, mired in preconceived pastry notions as I am, but, then, a pie full of soggy crackers didn’t sound very appetizing either, and it turned out to be so palatable that a group of revelers polished it off during the night when I left it on the counter in the bakery. This explains why I didn’t get more survey respondents—no one would own up to having taken part in the illicit intoxicated feast.

Tag, I'm It!

2008-01-07T11:09:00.000-05:00

This morning I awoke to find I'd been tagged by Anthony at ...an endless banquet. I thank him for choosing me and thereby forcing me to post--clearly a task I've been much neglecting. Here are the rules:

Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.

Share 7 random and/or weird things about yourself.

Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.

Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

This is really random.

1. In 2007 I had the honour of having my first recipe in print in a real live book. In addition to I don't actually have a copy myself yet, but the book is called Lost in the Supermarket: The Indie Rock Cookbook. The recipe is for millionaire's shortbread.

2. For my birthday last year I received a really beautiful gift from a junkshop in Portland, OR. It was an old panorama egg made in Czechoslovakia. A panorama egg is a hollow eggs made from sugar and decorated with royal icing, featuring a little scene inside. They were generally made as Easter gifts for children but are rarely seen these days. This December I decided to revive the art and made my own.

3. My late grandfather swore that we hailed from Ingria. I assume this is true.

4. I was a german hairdye model.*

5. Once, working for one of France's foremost pastry chefs, I accidentally weighed salt instead of sugar for his ice cream recipe. Needless to say, he didn't ask me to come work for him in Paris.

6. In December, I had the longtime dream fulfilled of visiting Tubby Dog in Calgary, Alberta. I regret to inform you I did not possess the courage to try the hot dog with peanut butter, jam, and Captain Crunch, but I did have a really good one featuring mustard, relish, sauerkraut, banana peppers and nacho cheese.

7. I made the worst Lady Baltimore Cake in the world this summer, and I didn't have the heart to post about it. The post remains half-finished.

Okay. On to the next suckers. Except I don't know seven blogs at all. Four will have to suffice.

Diamonds

Sic Transit

Steph in Paris...

Ghost Pine Fanzine

*For a tv show prop.

For the Love of Porridge

2007-11-29T17:30:00.000-05:00

Do orphans love porridge? Doubtless any orphan worth his salt would kill for a bowl of such steaming goodness. As Dickens taught us, orphans are traditionally fed gruel, which is not at all the same thing as porridge, though they may be related. Gruel is essentially a very, very thin porridge. This thinning tends to devalue the dish. If you watered down another of your favorite foods, the result would be equally unpalatable. Imagine soaking a piece of delicious cake in a pot of water, or stirring three cups of water into your poutine. No, it simply wouldn’t do. And yet, I had to be certain. I had to try it for myself.

I found a recipe for gruel on my favorite new website, Mr. Breakfast.com. When I relayed the recipe to a friend, she told me it is also a good formula for glue or paste. I was obviously taken aback—only second graders eat paste! But her story checked out. The recipe I found for flour paste was almost indentical to that for gruel. Of course, the glue recipe contains no salt, as you’re not expected to attempt to eat it, though one wonders how much a meagre teaspoon of salt can elevate glue to a meal. Somehow, pondering this question rather turned me off the idea of whipping up a steaming vat of gruel, and I procrastinated on the task for as long as I possibly could. The idea actually made me feel a little nauseous. But the time for me to perform finally came—and I botched it.

It’s hard to say what went wrong. I suppose it was foul vanity which led me to believe that a dish perfected by evil orphan-starving nuns or foul-smelling charwomen would be a breeze for yours truly to make. I learned my lesson, though, for I concocted no gruel. I boiled my cup of water. I mixed my two teaspoons of flour with my teaspoon of salt in a little bowl. I dripped water upon it, forming a paste, and I added that back into the pot. But no semi-fluid consistency was reached. Instead, I made the most vile little flour dumplings in a tasteless water-broth saltier than the very sea. So dejected was I that the pot was left carelessly on the stove to fester. I tried with all my might to muster the courage and the thirst for knowledge to make another bold attempt, to make gruel and make it right so that I might truly know the orphans plight. But I simply could not find it within myself. After all, I had much juicier topics than gruel to pursue on the subject of porridge.
I was sitting at the local coffeeshop discussing the merits of porridge and also of some South African malt cereal, when a friend happened upon the scene claiming some pretty scandalous porridge facts. “Truly,” he began, “porridge was nearly banned by the clergy on account of the belief that hot food in the morning was too stimulating and caused morning erections. Thus, cold cereal was born.” Well, you can imagine I did all I could to try and substantiate this story with thorough internet research. As badly as I wanted to believe this amazing tale, its teller was also the man who told me about the woman in India with the x-ray vision and the Russian toddler who could lift a car with one hand.

As it turns out, his story wasn’t quite true, but it did contain some verifiable elements. After all, people’s diets are often influenced more by fad, religion, suspicion and prejedice than actual nutritional value or savor. This is no less true for porridge. In the Middle Ages, some foods—oats among them—were classified as coarse, the eating of which was thereby believed to coarsen the character. Similarly, that horses enjoy oats has long prejudiced people against their consumption by humans. Pliny, for instance, much maligned the Germans for their devotion to oaten delights, which he considered only fit for the animal population. In fact, oats were at one time considered a weed not even fit for beasts, simply because they are heartier than most grains. At one time farmers would pull them up from their wheat fields and burn them in great piles. All this considered, it isn’t implausible that some religious sorts might invent a disinclination towards hot breakfast foods.
The health food faddist movement of nineteenth century America that spawned cold breakfast cereal didn’t have a particular vendetta against porridge, but they certainly did believe that certain foods led not only to bad health but also bad conscience. Sylvester Graham (of the eponymous crackers), was a revivalist clergyman bent on eliminating immorality through wholesome diet. He explained, "All kinds of stimulating and heating substances; high-seasoned food; rich dishes; the free use of flesh; and even the excess of aliment; all, more or less—and some to a very great degree—increase the concupiscent excitability and sensibility of the genital organs…” Graham’s contemporary, John Kellogg, was possessed of similar beliefs, and prescribed a bland, abstemious diet to men in order to cure terrible and debilitating ailments like wet dreams and morning erections.

Kellogg was the author of Plain facts for old and young : embracing the natural history and hygiene of organic life, which he evidently wrote on the night of his honeymoon for a marriage that, though lifelong, apparently remained unconsummated. While his text primarily addresses the perils of masturbation, he also dispenses a good deal of what he called “general health advice.” It seems he felt that his fellow Americans were in dire need of direction: “We have met people whose tastes had become so utterly perverted that they had acquired a decided fondness for cheese alive with ‘skippers.’” He clearly agreed with me on the point that people’s diets are far too often designed according to fashion, but he advocated an extreme alternative. At his sanitarium, the diet was light, vegetarian, coffee- and alcohol-free, and very rich in enemas of both the water and yogurt variety. For his constipated patients he invented a cold breakfast cereal which he christened Granula—odd, because James Caleb Jackson, another staunch vegetarian and the operator of the Jackson Sanitorium in Dansville, NY, had already invented the first cold breakfast cereal, which he had dubbed…. Granula. Kellogg changed the name to Granola after being sued.

All that said, and as much as I consider him a truly unsavory character, I like to think Kellogg would have approved of porridge, at least perhaps if it was served cold and congealed. After all, everyone has a different way of enjoying the dish. The Scots, possibly the greatest porridge-lovers in the world, eat theirs plain and unadorned, with only a bowl of cold cream or milk served alongside in which to dunk each spoonful. They consider their English neighbours rather effeminate for sweetening their porridge—something they only tolerate in children. The Scottish even have a utensil designated solely for the purpose of stirring porridge. It is called a “spurtle” and looks rather like a magic wand carved out of wood. In fact, they go so far as to hold an annual porridge-making competition called The Golden Spurtle. Which isn’t to say that Americans don’t like porridge almost as much, even though they are responsible for the creation of cold breakfast cereal. After all, there is an Oatmeal, Texas. And January is nothing if not National Oatmeal Month (so proclaimed by the Quaker Oat Company). Oh, many an American nightly dreams of porridge!

According to Mr. Breakfast (whom I persist in trusting despite the faulty gruel recipe), dreaming that you are eating porridge means that you are well-grounded, whereas dreaming that you are cooking or serving it means that you have control over the fate of someone close to you. Both positive things by me. So keep some oats in your cupboard, even if you don’t indulge that often—scientists have shown that 75% of people consider rolled oats that have been stored 28 years in sealed containers "acceptable in an emergency,” taste- and quality-wise. But please, don’t buy that instant oatmeal. You may consider me a snob, but it is truly foul, most especially in its peaches-and-cream incarnation, and simply not fit to be called porridge, though I suppose it’s really up to each man to decide for himself. My Welsh ancestors would have been enjoying their brewis, an unappetizing-sounding oatmeal broth, while my Scottish relations ate their salty, spurtle-stirred oatmeal. I admit I am thankful that times have changed and the following is the porridge that I learned to make from my dear old dad and that I intend to teach to any children I may chance to meet.

Porridge for Two: My Best Recipe

In a medium saucepan, combine 3/4 c. of water and 3/4 c. of homogenized milk (or use all milk if you’ve only got the weak stuff). Add about a tablespoon of maple syrup and a dash of pumpkin pie spice, along with a modest handful of dried fruit (golden raisins or dried cranberries are my favorite), and heat on high, stirring once or twice to prevent the milk solids from burning, until you begin to see steam rising off the liquid. Add 3/4 c. old-fashioned rolled oats, stir, reduce the heat to medium-low, and put a lid on it. Continue to stir and reduce the heat as the oatmeal thickens. It should take about ten minutes in all. In the meantime, heat a knob of butter in a small frying pan over medium heat. Fry a scant handful of nuts (I recommend pecan pieces or sliced almonds) until toasty. Throw them into the pot, being vigilant to get any traces of butter in there, as well. It will also improve your oatmeal to add some fruit. Apples, cut into smallish chunks, are good, as are rhubarb and cranberries (though they might require some additional maple syrup)—either of these should be added with the oats. Softer fruits like blueberries are better added near to the end of the cooking time, unless, of course, they are frozen. Finally, when the oatmeal has reached a nice, thick consistency, remove from the heat and let it sit, covered, for a minute of two to consider itself. Serve in deep bowls with maple syrup and pouring cream on the table, along with cups of strong, hot coffee.

(Originally published in $2 Comes with Mixtape #10, revised January 2008.)

On Publishing One's Failures

2007-09-12T16:58:00.000-04:00

I had a bad feeling about it. Granted, the recipe for Sally Lunn bread came from what is currently my very favorite cookbook, The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook. I have executed quite a few of their recipes now, to great success. Indeed, many of their recipes, particularly the Creamed Corn, have garnered major accolades. But the one recipe that went terribly wrong for me was their Sweet Pie Crust. It was dry, difficult to handle, and stuck to the pie dish in a way I've rarely seen a dough do. The recipe for Sally Lunn was my second foray into the "Bread Basket" section of the book, and I wasn't without misgivings. Besides my unsuccess with the pie dough, the bread recipe seemed too miraculously simple. Sally Lunn is a rich white bread, referred to by the Lee Bros. as the challah of the South. One loaf contains 7 TBSP. of butter and three eggs, as well as 1/3 c. of syrup, be it sorghum, cane or molasses (or golden syrup, as I used). Now, in no way do I purport to be anything close to an authority on bread-baking, but I've done it enough times that a few things seemed odd to me. First off, the dough is not kneaded at all before the first rise, which is supposed to only take 35 minutes. This seemed an awfully short time to me, which I found it truly was when the dough had scarcely risen after resting for the allotted time. It remained the sticky, unkempt mass it was when I covered it with the dishtowel. After it had rested about an hour, not yet having risen to double, I turned it out onto the worktable and had a hell of a time punching it 30 times, when with each slap of my fist I would come away with more dough stuck to me. I scooped it all up into the pan (which certainly doesn't require an entire tablespoon of butter to grease it), let that rise double the allotted 12 minutes, then baked it.

Well, it wasn't a total disaster. I mean, it's edible, though it would be an exaggeration to call it sliceable. I used it to make the Grilled Pimento Cheese Sandwiches from the Lee Bros. book, and I had to discard about 3 slices that just fell apart. It struck me as rather an odd choice for grilled cheese, being so sweet and dense, but perhaps that's just a matter of taste. And perhaps really Sally Lunn isn't quite like this. I wonder what went wrong between the Lee Bros. and me...

The pimento cheese, I must mention, was really delicious and made a superlative grilled cheese filling, despite whatever unsavory memories the word conjures up for me of the foul pimento-studded baloney I was served as a child at school. This was something entirely different and delicious. And I couldn't resist sprinkling a little smoked hot paprika on each sandwich. I don't know if Southerners would approve, but it was certainly good. I would recommend something pickled on the side, as well.

You may ask why on earth I chose to follow as recipe I was fairly certain wouldn't work. Fact is, I like to always give the recipe the benefit of the doubt the first time around, lest it disclose to me some secret shortcut or alternate route I never would have discovered otherwise. Alas, this is not often the case. Next time, lacking an adventurous side and undesirous of danger, I think I will stick to Greg Patent's Buttermilk Loaf, which I made last year (revealing, perhaps, with what shameful infrequence I address the task of making bread).

More on Greg Patent, one of my favorite American bakers, later on...

Backroom Bakeshoppe

2007-09-07T14:22:00.000-04:00

It's not entirely easy to give directions to my "bakery," which is essentially a bakesale in a backporch in Montreal's Mile-End neighbourhood. There is a minor maze of alleys to navigate, but hopefully people notice the sign.

We opened last summer and stayed stubbornly open almost until December, shivering by the space heater in the uninsulated shed. After a many-month stint in Asia, my partner, the record vendor, has returned, and we reopened last week.

The menu:
Popcorn Balls
Peach Pie Bars
Caramel-Filled Brownies
Lemon Tartlets

Today is our second day opened this week. Yesterday I made Lemon-Cranberry Bars. Today I awoke at the rather offensive hour of 8:30am to concoct a recipe I'd been meaning to try clipped long ago from the back page of Food & Wine.

Double Dark Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Filling

ACTIVE TIME: 45 MIN
TOTAL TIME: 3 HRS

MAKES 24 CUPCAKES

3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons cocoa powder (not Dutch process)
1/2 cup boiling water
1 cup buttermilk
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 sticks plus 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
2 large eggs, at room temperature
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 cup creamy peanut butter
2/3 cup confectioners' sugar
1 cup heavy cream
8 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped

Preheat the oven to 350° and position 2 racks in the lower and middle third of the oven. Line 24 muffin cups with paper or foil liners.
Put the cocoa powder in a medium heatproof bowl. Add the boiling water and whisk until a smooth paste forms. Whisk in the buttermilk until combined. In a medium bowl, sift the flour with the baking soda, baking powder and salt. In a large bowl, using an electric mixer, beat 1 1/2 sticks of the butter with the granulated sugar until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Beat in the eggs and vanilla, then beat in the dry ingredients in 2 batches, alternating with the cocoa mixture. Carefully spoon the cupcake batter into the lined muffin cups, filling them about two-thirds full. Bake for 20 to 22 minutes, or until the cupcakes are springy. Let the cupcakes cool in the pans for 5 minutes, then transfer them to wire racks to cool completely.
In a medium bowl, beat the peanut butter with the remaining 3 tablespoons of butter until creamy. Sift the confectioners' sugar into the bowl and beat until light and fluffy, about 2 minutes. Spoon all but 3 tablespoons of the peanut butter filling into a pastry bag fitted with a 1/4-inch star tip. Holding a cupcake in your hand, plunge the tip into the top of the cake, pushing it about 3/4 inch deep. Gently squeeze the pastry bag to fill the cupcake, withdrawing it slowly as you squeeze; you will feel the cupcake expand slightly as you fill it. Scrape any filling from the top of the cupcake and repeat until all of the cupcakes are filled.

In a small saucepan, bring the heavy cream to a simmer. Off the heat, add the semisweet chocolate to the cream and let stand for 5 minutes, then whisk the melted chocolate into the cream until smooth. Let the chocolate icing stand until slightly cooled and thickened, about 15 minutes. Dip the tops of the cupcakes into the icing, letting the excess drip back into the pan. Transfer the cupcakes to racks and let stand for 5 minutes. Dip the tops of the cupcakes again and transfer them to racks. Spoon the remaining 3 tablespoons of peanut butter filling into the pastry bag and pipe tiny rosettes on the tops of the cupcakes.

MAKE AHEAD The cupcakes are best served the same day they are made, but they can be refrigerated overnight in an airtight container.

Recipe by Peggy Cullen
This recipe originally appeared in April, 2004.

These turned out really well, though I do wish I'd used a chocolate with a lower percentage of cocoa. The 72% I had was too bitter. 60% or 65% would be better. I also sprinkled on some fleur de sel to finish them because the peanut butter-chocolate combination is really held together by saltiness. And, last of all, as warning: when transporting 18 ganache-iced cupcakes, refrain from doing so on your bicycle, especially when the trajectory includes a set of railroad tracks to cross. Highly stressful.

Backroom Records and Pastries
5912 St-Urbain
*Back alley entrance only*
Thursday-Sunday noon-6pm