As of yesterday, my new favourite thing - foodwise - is rice paper. Made into summer rolls. I'd had them once before when my sister made them, but she is a massively multiple ingredient fan who uses no less than 5 cloves of garlic in any dish, so I wasn't crazy about them. The professionally-made ones I had yesterday, however, were fantastic. They were so fresh and were just the right thing for a snack on a hot humid sunny day. They contained cooked rice noodles, crunchy lettuce, julienned carrots, and a few mint leaves and came with peanut dipping sauce. I was sceptical of the mint before I tried it, but it was the perfect addition.
So motivated, I picked up the basic ingredients, some rice paper ($1.50 for 40 9-inch rounds) and rice vermicelli (99 cents for a package of 8 serving-sized noodle bricks), at an Asian grocery store today (yay for living in the Chinatown-Little Italy borderlands)... they are both available in the Asian food sections of most bigger grocery stores, but will be a bit more expensive. One brick of noodles is enough for 3 large summer rolls, and 3 summer rolls is a good amount for a medium-sized person as a large snack or small meal. The rest of the ingredients are mainly veggies - lettuce is pretty standard, and julienned carrots and cucumber are common, as well as chives or garlic greens - and for you meat eaters, a neat little row of 3 shrimp, or shredded beef or chicken bits. I'm a fish-only eater, so maybe one day I'll brave-up and try it with tuna or something, but for now the veg version is perfect.
Rice paper is kind of threatening when you look at it in the package, the sheets are thin and brittle and always made me wonder if you need a giant pot to boil them in. Turns out all you need is a container big enough fit the paper inside (I use a 9 inch cake pan) and some water, the most difficult part is getting them home from the store without breaking them. You just dip them in the water for a couple seconds and then lay them on a clean cloth or cutting board and start putting in all the fillings you want. By the time you are ready to roll them up (burrito-style) they have softened. I'm not gonna lie, the rice paper is kind of like skin. It makes me think of a research paper I did in grade 6 about Aztecs. They had one god in their pantheon who wore a cape made of human skin and I'm pretty sure it would have looked like he was wearing a cape made of softened rice paper. Anyway, all gross associations aside, rice paper is great and I will be making many summer rolls in the near future. Tomorrow they will include avocado.
Oh, and make yourself some peanut dipping sauce for your summer rolls. There are many variations on the recipe out there, usually including peanut butter (of course), soy sauce, maybe a bit of sesame oil, some form of garlic and something spicy like chillis or chilli powder. I improvised mine based on what I had in the house (i.e. no hoisin sauce) and it was good.
11.8.10
23.7.10
The only reason I missed peanut butter in Europe...
I had major sweet cravings today, but, y'know, the classy kind. I didn't want candy, I wanted the good stuff. So I got to work. First I made David Lebovitz's strawberry frozen yogurt, which I won't bother writing out again since you can go to his wonderful blog and get your info from the source. Seriously, it is the best frozen yogurt recipe I have yet encountered since I got my proper ice cream maker earlier this summer (I also have an old hand-cranked one I bought at the fabulous Great Glebe Garage Sale, but it leaks mysterious blue fluid that I fear is some kind of toxic coolant).
Then, I made peanut butter cookies. Generally, I'm not the rabid pb fan that many North Americans are, but I did miss it a bit last year during my 5+ months in Norway... only because it meant that I couldn't make these cookies. The recipe is from the Kids Cooking book from Jean Pare's Company's Coming series. The books are icons of Canadian kitchen lit, and in my opinion, are a much better read than Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle.
Peanut Butter Gems
(makes between 36 and 40 when I make them though the recipe says 24 to 30)
1/2 c margarine (at room temperature)
2/3 c brown sugar, packed
1/3 c white sugar
1 large egg
1/2 c smooth peanut butter
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 c flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp salt
Mix all the wet ingredients and the sugars (i.e the first 6 ingredients in the list) in a mixing bowl. Add the salt and baking soda and stir them in. Add the flour and stir until it is all mixed in. Take chunks of the dough about a heaping teaspoon in size and roll them into balls. Place the balls at least 3 in/7 cm apart on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
As an aside, if you are not yet familiar with the virtues of parchment paper, let me be the first to inform you that it is, in fact, the be all and end all of pan-food interface solutions. You will never grease a cookie sheet again, nor will you want to. Cookies slide off parchment paper and you can even line cake pans with it if you are handy.
Okay, back to the matter at hand. Once you've got the little balls on the baking sheet, squish them down with a fork so that they have the classic peanut butter cookie cross-hatching. Then bake them at 350F/177C for about 10 minutes (until they look puffy all the way to the centre, but aren't necessarily browned at all). For second and third batches in the oven, I would recommend decreasing the time to 8 minutes.
My thoughts on this recipe:
Yum.
This is a classic peanut butter cookie. No bells or whistles. It is mild, not overwhelmingly peanutty, and on the medium-high side of sweetness. I guess this is why it's in the kids' cooking book. I'd rather have these cookies than kids any day, haha.
Then, I made peanut butter cookies. Generally, I'm not the rabid pb fan that many North Americans are, but I did miss it a bit last year during my 5+ months in Norway... only because it meant that I couldn't make these cookies. The recipe is from the Kids Cooking book from Jean Pare's Company's Coming series. The books are icons of Canadian kitchen lit, and in my opinion, are a much better read than Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle.
Peanut Butter Gems
(makes between 36 and 40 when I make them though the recipe says 24 to 30)
1/2 c margarine (at room temperature)
2/3 c brown sugar, packed
1/3 c white sugar
1 large egg
1/2 c smooth peanut butter
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 c flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/8 tsp salt
Mix all the wet ingredients and the sugars (i.e the first 6 ingredients in the list) in a mixing bowl. Add the salt and baking soda and stir them in. Add the flour and stir until it is all mixed in. Take chunks of the dough about a heaping teaspoon in size and roll them into balls. Place the balls at least 3 in/7 cm apart on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
As an aside, if you are not yet familiar with the virtues of parchment paper, let me be the first to inform you that it is, in fact, the be all and end all of pan-food interface solutions. You will never grease a cookie sheet again, nor will you want to. Cookies slide off parchment paper and you can even line cake pans with it if you are handy.
Okay, back to the matter at hand. Once you've got the little balls on the baking sheet, squish them down with a fork so that they have the classic peanut butter cookie cross-hatching. Then bake them at 350F/177C for about 10 minutes (until they look puffy all the way to the centre, but aren't necessarily browned at all). For second and third batches in the oven, I would recommend decreasing the time to 8 minutes.
My thoughts on this recipe:
Yum.
This is a classic peanut butter cookie. No bells or whistles. It is mild, not overwhelmingly peanutty, and on the medium-high side of sweetness. I guess this is why it's in the kids' cooking book. I'd rather have these cookies than kids any day, haha.
13.7.10
A post to follow the heat wave
So, Ottawa's heat wave has "broken", by which I mean that the humidity makes it feel like mid-30s instead of mid-40s.
I decided a couple months ago that it might be worth my while to get an air conditioner since I live on the 12th floor of a pretty large apartment complex and heat rises, and all of the weather models were predicting a hot summer. Am I ever glad I did. I mean, on some of the days last week it was still 30 or 31 degrees in my apartment with the air conditioner on and the bedroom shut off to concentrate the cool in the living room, but I think I might have died without it. I still feel a little guilty about having an air conditioner, being that the only thing that sustains me through our Arctic winters is the knowledge that summer will eventually come (usually... last year being an exception); and being a country kid at heart - where no one has an air conditioner - I see it as kind of a cop out. But I currently work at home and I need to be able to concentrate. That is my excuse.
Anyway, the weather prompted me to come up with a suitable beverage, so if you can take the heat from the espresso maker for a couple of minutes, try it out.
Iced cappucino
(makes 1 large serving or 2 small)
100 ml espresso or double strength coffee
about 100 ml milk
1/2 tsp sugar (or to taste)
ice cubes
Pour the espresso and sugar into the blender. Add 3-4 regular sized ice cubes (maybe more if your espresso is still smokin' hot). Add enough milk to make about 250 ml. Blend on a high setting. Serve in wine glasses, if you are fancy, or in regular glasses if you are not.
Yum.
I decided a couple months ago that it might be worth my while to get an air conditioner since I live on the 12th floor of a pretty large apartment complex and heat rises, and all of the weather models were predicting a hot summer. Am I ever glad I did. I mean, on some of the days last week it was still 30 or 31 degrees in my apartment with the air conditioner on and the bedroom shut off to concentrate the cool in the living room, but I think I might have died without it. I still feel a little guilty about having an air conditioner, being that the only thing that sustains me through our Arctic winters is the knowledge that summer will eventually come (usually... last year being an exception); and being a country kid at heart - where no one has an air conditioner - I see it as kind of a cop out. But I currently work at home and I need to be able to concentrate. That is my excuse.
Anyway, the weather prompted me to come up with a suitable beverage, so if you can take the heat from the espresso maker for a couple of minutes, try it out.
Iced cappucino
(makes 1 large serving or 2 small)
100 ml espresso or double strength coffee
about 100 ml milk
1/2 tsp sugar (or to taste)
ice cubes
Pour the espresso and sugar into the blender. Add 3-4 regular sized ice cubes (maybe more if your espresso is still smokin' hot). Add enough milk to make about 250 ml. Blend on a high setting. Serve in wine glasses, if you are fancy, or in regular glasses if you are not.
Yum.
5.7.10
I shall try again.
I tried to have a travel blog once, but the problem with that was that when I was travelling I was way too busy to write anything or even feel guilty about it not doing it. And I had lost interest by the time I got home.
So I'm taking a different approach this time. This blog will be more general in its subject matter but may lean toward food and other stuff that I like and get kind of excited about. Mostly things I do at home.
So on that note, here is my first tale of the easy, the cheesy, and the Glam:
I like cheese. I like it a lot. I'm also into DIY - food-wise and otherwise - and have long pondered the intricacies of cheese-making. I have dreamed about having a little farm with some cows whose milk I use to make delicious things, so when I stumbled upon A Chow Life's intro to cheese-making with a recipe containing only four ingredients, none of which were bacterial, I was intrigued. I knew that fresh, unripened cheese was doable at home, but this actually looked like it might be good. Thus inspired, I did some calculating and substituting, and came up with the recipe below.
DIY Dill Cheese
1 litre of 2% milk
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice (about half of 1 large lemon)
1/8 tsp salt
2 tbsp fresh chopped dill
First, put the milk in a pot and heat it on medium-high heat until it just starts boiling. Stir it often while heating or else it will burn to the bottom of the pot. Once it has boiled, take it off the heat.
Second, pour in your lemon juice and stir until the milk has separated into curds (will look kind of like ricotta cheese) and whey (not gonna lie, looks like spinal fluid). It should take less than a minute. Apparently if your milk doesn't totally separate, you can put it back on the heat until it does... I didn't need to.
Third, pour your curds and whey through a strainer lined with cheesecloth or some similar fabric in your sink; I just used some cotton crinkle gauze that I had in my fabric stash. Gather up the top of the fabric so your cheese doesn't fall out and either put a weight (jar of beans, bottle of wine, etc) on top of the cheese and let it drain for a while (30-45 min) or, do like me, and just squeeze the liquid out.
Finally, peel your now-fairly-cheesy curds out of the cloth and add the salt and dill. You can do this with a food processor or with your hands - in either case treat it how you would treat bread dough. Basically you just need to break up the individual curds to make it more homogeneous and mix in your spices. You can now roll your cheese into a log, make little cubes, cookie-cutter it into alligator shapes... whatever you want. Then refrigerate it.
My thoughts on this recipe:
This cheese turned out pretty hard... like a mild cheddar. I think using a milk with a higher fat content like homo (whole milk, for you Americans) or adding some cream would make it a bit more spreadable. This could be seen as a benefit since I found my cheese kind of rubbery in texture.
It doesn't taste like much, though it is perfectly edible. If I were making this as plain cheese with no herbs, I'd use significantly more salt. Dill isn't a terribly strong spice, but I don't think I could add any more than I did since it kind of reduces the structural integrity of the cheese. I found the flavour to be stronger after a day or two, so maybe it intensifies with time. I can't vouch for that, the cheese didn't last that long.
You need a lot of milk to make a little cheese. For me, volume reduction was more than 3/4. 1 litre of milk made less than 125 ml of cheese.
All the negatives aside, it is wicked cool that I could make my own cheese, with ingredients that are easy to come by and without having to wait for it to age for anywhere from one month to seven years. I might not become a regular cheese maker, but maybe on special occasions.
So I'm taking a different approach this time. This blog will be more general in its subject matter but may lean toward food and other stuff that I like and get kind of excited about. Mostly things I do at home.
So on that note, here is my first tale of the easy, the cheesy, and the Glam:
I like cheese. I like it a lot. I'm also into DIY - food-wise and otherwise - and have long pondered the intricacies of cheese-making. I have dreamed about having a little farm with some cows whose milk I use to make delicious things, so when I stumbled upon A Chow Life's intro to cheese-making with a recipe containing only four ingredients, none of which were bacterial, I was intrigued. I knew that fresh, unripened cheese was doable at home, but this actually looked like it might be good. Thus inspired, I did some calculating and substituting, and came up with the recipe below.
DIY Dill Cheese
1 litre of 2% milk
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice (about half of 1 large lemon)
1/8 tsp salt
2 tbsp fresh chopped dill
First, put the milk in a pot and heat it on medium-high heat until it just starts boiling. Stir it often while heating or else it will burn to the bottom of the pot. Once it has boiled, take it off the heat.
Second, pour in your lemon juice and stir until the milk has separated into curds (will look kind of like ricotta cheese) and whey (not gonna lie, looks like spinal fluid). It should take less than a minute. Apparently if your milk doesn't totally separate, you can put it back on the heat until it does... I didn't need to.
Third, pour your curds and whey through a strainer lined with cheesecloth or some similar fabric in your sink; I just used some cotton crinkle gauze that I had in my fabric stash. Gather up the top of the fabric so your cheese doesn't fall out and either put a weight (jar of beans, bottle of wine, etc) on top of the cheese and let it drain for a while (30-45 min) or, do like me, and just squeeze the liquid out.
Finally, peel your now-fairly-cheesy curds out of the cloth and add the salt and dill. You can do this with a food processor or with your hands - in either case treat it how you would treat bread dough. Basically you just need to break up the individual curds to make it more homogeneous and mix in your spices. You can now roll your cheese into a log, make little cubes, cookie-cutter it into alligator shapes... whatever you want. Then refrigerate it.
My thoughts on this recipe:
This cheese turned out pretty hard... like a mild cheddar. I think using a milk with a higher fat content like homo (whole milk, for you Americans) or adding some cream would make it a bit more spreadable. This could be seen as a benefit since I found my cheese kind of rubbery in texture.
It doesn't taste like much, though it is perfectly edible. If I were making this as plain cheese with no herbs, I'd use significantly more salt. Dill isn't a terribly strong spice, but I don't think I could add any more than I did since it kind of reduces the structural integrity of the cheese. I found the flavour to be stronger after a day or two, so maybe it intensifies with time. I can't vouch for that, the cheese didn't last that long.
You need a lot of milk to make a little cheese. For me, volume reduction was more than 3/4. 1 litre of milk made less than 125 ml of cheese.
All the negatives aside, it is wicked cool that I could make my own cheese, with ingredients that are easy to come by and without having to wait for it to age for anywhere from one month to seven years. I might not become a regular cheese maker, but maybe on special occasions.
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