Steak rolls

Can I just reiterate how much I love Pinterest?

Although I already knew about Steamy Kitchen, it was on Pinterest that I found this great recipe for steak rolls. It can sometimes be hard to find recipes that fit our no-grains, no-starch, no-bread diet and that keep us full, since it's so easy to use potatoes and rice as a filler. My pictures don't do the recipe justice because I'm a sloppy cook, but it tasted really good, which is probably more important than presentation anyway.

Breakfast salad

A couple of months ago, Davis decided to seriously cut down on carbs in his diet on the advice of Tim Ferriss, and I kind of went along for the ride. This made breakfast a little more difficult, since my breakfast traditionally involved a bagel, toast, or pancakes. For a couple of weeks I did fried eggs and sausages - hey, no carbs, right? - but feeling queasy for the rest of the morning cut that trend short. I also tried shakes with berries and protein powder, but it never really kept me full.

Thankfully, a few weeks ago through the miracle of Pinterest, I found this gorgeous recipe for a breakfast salad. It's so simple and relatively quick - the longest part is poaching the eggs, but I start them first and then chop up everything else and make my coffee while they're cooking.

The base of the salad is one chopped tomato, half to one avocado (depending on the size), and some shredded prosciutto.


I mix these up in a bowl, top with some grated cheese, ground pepper, and fresh herbs (basil, yum!) and two poached eggs.

Poached eggs? Scary!

The last time I tried to poach eggs for a yummy openfaced sandwich, I ended up with a pot full of egg foam and two poached yolks. Fortunately, the recipe for the breakfast salad also included a link with ridiculously simple instructions on how to poach eggs - and seriously, I've perfectly poached dozens of eggs with this method.

To reiterate: find a small pot and fill it about halfway with water. If you underfill it, I find the egg doesn't thoroughly cook. Boil the water, then bring down the heat until tiny bubbles are just rising off the bottom of the pot. Add one tablespoon of white vinegar.


Crack your egg into a small measuring up or teacup, and lower it into the water and slowly tip the egg out.


Set your timer for four minutes, and watch your egg poach!


When the time is up, remove the egg with a slotted spoon to a paper towel to remove the excess water.




YUMMY!

Umami eggs

I can't emphasize enough how awesome these umami eggs from TasteSpotting are. They changed a gloomy, first-day-back-at-school-after-break Monday into

super duper awesomeness

Okay, it may be a bit of an exaggeration, but let me tell you that I boiled seven eggs - so fourteen halves - and I couldn't get Davis to stop eating them fast enough to get a picture of more than two halves.




The ingredients are super simple, and these take a minute to make once the eggs are boiled. You will need:



Hard boil and peel your eggs in whatever way you like. The recipe I linked to has a good how-to blurb at the bottom which I tried and liked. Davis swears by this method, but I think it's because he's in love with Tim Ferriss.

Next:
Cut the peeled eggs in half.
Add a few drops of soy sauce over the yolk of each egg half. You don't want it to overflow - just soak into the yolk.
Next add a squirt of Sriracha.
And top with the furikake.

Donezo!




Update: deluxe umami eggs with smoked salmon!

Happy Valentine's Day!

Valentine's Day is not really a big deal to me and Davis. On our first Valentine's Day together, he made a trail of chocolates and gummy lips in our house that led to a giant teddy bear. That was pretty cute. The next year I think we went out to some overpriced restaurant in downtown Montreal. It was probably about -30C out, so I wore a turtleneck sweater. I felt like a nun compared to all the other girls there - strapless tops in February, really? - and although we had reservations we had to wait at the bar for an hour and rang up a huge, overpriced drink tab until we got to sit down. Since then, Valentine's Day has been more about scoring discount chocolates on the 15th than anything else.

But, since this is our first Valentine's not living with one of our families in six years, I thought I'd at least make an effort. I got up early and made breakfast.

This was the plan:


[from left: image by New York Examiner, heart pancakes from 24/7 moms, berry smoothie by Make & Takes]

This was what I got:

I would say I scored about 2/3 on this breakfast. The smoothies were wonderful and so easy to make with just berries and soy milk. I've been practicing the pancakes for a week or so and they turned out all right - I dropped chocolate chips and frozen raspberries in the batter as they were cooking and that tasted pretty awesome, but I couldn't stop the raspberries from burning on the surface. It was also really hard to make the heart shapes - I used a large cookie cutter that I put on the pan and poured the batter into that, but even though it was oiled the batter kept sticking to the cutter which ripped off huge chunks as I pulled it off - and that cutter was HOT!

The eggs were not a success - I tried doing them the same way as the pancakes, but the white seeped out from under the cutter. I then tried to just fry the egg normally and used the cutter afterward, which worked fairly well except I didn't know what to do with the excess whites - I felt guilty throwing them out, so I hid them underneath the egg heart and it just looked a little odd and lumpy. Oh well!

I took the morning off of school (I used to go to class religiously in undergrad, but now in vet school I'm finding that I'm much happier if I just study from home) and tonight we're going to make a nice Italian dinner - gnocchi and proscuitto wrapped around melon and bocconcini on tomato - and have some wine.

Update: dinner was a success!


What are your Valentine's plans? Fancy dinner or a cozy night of TV on the couch?

The spice of life

I've been buying spices in bulk for a couple of years now, because I can't bear to spend $5 on a little glass bottle of paprika at the grocery store. But this meant that I unfortunately had a basket full of little baggies twist-tied with spices in them - not the most attractive or organized presentation.

When we moved to Guelph, I decided to buy a spice rack to fill with bulk spices - we found a really cool magnetic system that stood on the counter, which seemed like a good idea because we didn't have much cupboard space (we don't have much counter space either, but it didn't seem like much of an issue at the time). We bought a few extra tins that we figured we'd cram onto the easel, and went home.

I'm not sure how it transpired that Davis figured out that - being magnetic - the tins would also stick to the fridge, but as far as I'm concerned this discovery is right up there with penicillin, flubber, and the theory of relativity. I still remember the dawning look of revelation on his face as he stood there, still holding the tin stuck to the fridge door. We returned the easel set, and bought a bunch more individual tins. And they've been multiplying ever since.


[note also Davis's hercules beetle magnet and the requisite bird on top of the wine rack - well, I assure you it's a bird, it looks more like a blob]

I've labeled the back of each of them and arranged them in alphabetical order - primarily because I'm a nerd, but it also makes things easier to find.



I love my spice rack. Realistically, I'll never run out of room, the tins are just over a dollar each, and if I decide for some unknown reason I never want to eat cardamom anymore, I can just wash the tin and stick a new label on. And most importantly, I can buy spices in bulk without sorting through a bunch of baggies every time I want to cook.

Christmas cooking recap

Every year I get drafted into making two things at Christmas: our now-traditional Christmas day breakfast crepes, and cookies.

This year, along with the usual gingerbread and sugar cookies, I decided to try something a little fancier, and found Martha Stewart's Linzer sandwich cookies. They looked complicated, but ended up being not much more difficult than gingerbread cookies.

Here's what you'll need:

• 1 cup raw hazelnuts (I ended up adding some almond to mine because the bag of hazelnuts I bought turned out to be slightly less than a cup)
• 1/2 pound unsalted butter (it's so much easier if you take this out a few hours before...!)
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp nutmeg
• 1/4 tsp salt
• confectioner's sugar
• jam (raspberry or cherry will do, but I was told that red currant is traditional so I hunted all over {okay in three grocery stores} for some. It was delicious, so I do recommend it if you can find it!)
• you will also need two cookie cutters - one that is large and round and one that is small (see pictures)

Start by preheating your oven to 375 degrees. When the oven is ready, spread the nuts on a baking sheet and toast them for about 10 minutes. Keep an eye on them though... mine could have used a couple more minutes, but you don't want them to burn! When the nuts have cooled, rub the skins off using your fingers or, for more stubborn ones, a clean towel.

Using a food processor, grind the nuts as finely as possible. I didn't have a food processor, so I destroyed the motor of my mother-in-law's coffee grinder instead. Fortunately she wasn't upset because it was only $10 and she ended up getting another one for Christmas, totally coincidentally. If there are some chunks left it's not a big deal because it'll be interesting in the finished cookie... but try to get most of the nuts to a salt-like consistency. Set aside for now.

In a large bowl, beat butter and sugar until light and fluffy. If you are so privileged, you can use an electric mixer. I used my good old muscles. Add egg, and beat until smooth. Mix in vanilla.

In a medium bowl, whisk together ground hazelnuts, flour, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt. In parts, add to butter mixture and stir until combined. I had to use my hands at the end. 

Get two large pieces of plastic wrap, and divide the dough onto each piece. Flatten to form a disk, then wrap each piece in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least an hour.

When the dough has chilled, preheat the oven to 350 degrees. On a floured surface, roll out the dough until it is about 1/4 inch thick. Cut out the cookies using the large circular cutter and place onto a baking tray. Using the small cutter, cut out the centres of half of the cookies. Bake for about 12-16 minutes, checking to make sure the edges don't get too brown. Cool on wire racks.

Separate the whole cookies from the cookies with the cut-out centre. First, sift some confectioner's sugar over the cookies with the cut-out centre. Then, spread some jam on the whole cookies. Then make a sandwich!

I thought these cookies were super tasty - a nice break from all the chocolate we had, and the nuttiness combined with the tartness of the currant jam was delish!

Mint and white chocolate brownies

Ingredients:
half a cup melted butter
half a cup unsweetened cocoa
one cup sugar
two eggs
two teaspoons vanilla extract
half a cup flour
one quarter teaspoon salt
half a cup mint chocolate chips and half a cup white chocolate chips

Instructions:
1. preheat oven to 350 degrees
2. mix together the melted butter and cocoa until smooth
3. add sugar and mix well
4. add eggs, one at a time, and stir until combined
5. add vanilla, flour, and salt and stir until just mixed
6. fold in chocolate chips (you can substitute anything you want... smarties, peanut butter, nuts, maraschino cherries, etc!)
7. spread batter in a greased eight-inch square pan and bake for 25 minutes
8. don't overbake! or your brownies will be dry. I discussed this with my mother and for brownies, unlike for cake, a toothpick inserted should not come out clean, it should have moist crumbs clinging to it.
9. eat like a pig and enjoy. I cleaned out half the pan before Davis got home...

When life gives you lemons...

... make s'mores!

Vegan Cranberry Pumpkin Bread

I'm not a vegan. I'm not opposed to veganism, or vegetarianism, but neither do I see anything morally wrong with eating an animal. I am opposed to the mistreatment of food animals - I always buy free-range eggs, meat from small, local farms, and support humane food labeling. But I do like my bbq ribs, my grilled Cajun chicken, my bison steaks, and devilled eggs.

But that is not the point of this post, and I digress. The reason why I ventured into vegan cooking is because I was asked to contribute a couple of items to an on-campus craft fair and bake sale held by Engineers Without Borders back in November. Because McGill's School of Environment is on our campus, there are a lot of vegans and vegetarians (which is ironic, because the farm is also on this campus...) To be vegan-friendly, I looked up a recipe without eggs, butter, or other animal products. I was very happily surprised by how this turned out! It was moist, and flavourful, and Davis has been harassing me to make more ever since.

Vegan Cranberry Pumpkin Bread

Ingredients:
2 cups whole raw cranberries (I used frozen, but if available I imagine fresh ones would be lovely!)
1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup cornmeal
3/4 cup sugar
3/8 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1 cup canned pumpkin puree
5 tbsp canola oil
2-3 tsp orange zest (I think I might have actually used way more than this... but I'm zesty)
3 tbsp water

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Using a food processor or a sharp knife and lots of patients, roughly chop the cranberries until they are about quartered and set aside.

In a medium-sized bowl, mix the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and spices.


In a larger bowl, mix the wet ingredients - pumpkin puree, oil, orange zest, and water. In small portions, start adding the dry ingredients to the wet, mixing as little as possible until just combined. Pour the batter into a cake pan - I know the recipe title says loaf, but the recipe calls for a 9-inch round or square cake pan. I used a springform cheesecake pan, and it seemed to work. Someone who reviewed the recipe used a muffin tray. I'm curious to see what would happen if you used a normal loaf pan... an experiment for the future. Oh, and because there's no butter, it might be a good idea to grease your pan. I might have unthinkingly used butter, something I only realized now, two months after the fact. I really hope I didn't.



This should be baked for 45-55 minutes. The recipe suggests removing the cake from the pan relatively soon after taking it out of the oven, or the bottom may get soggy.

Ta da! It was quite a dense loaf, but that could be due to my overstirring. But it was quite good - which I think others agreed with, as they sold out of it!


I also made traditional chocolate and vanilla icing cupcakes, for the non-vegan junk food addicts like myself:

Funky Chicken with Peanut Noodles

I've been craving Asian food lately - peanut butter dumplings, xiao long bao, Azuki bean soup... etc.

I wouldn't venture to say that this dish is authentically from any Asian country, but the flavour satisfied my craving. It's a blend of a few recipes I plucked from Recipezaar - Mirj's funky chicken, HollyGolightly's Thai noodles, and Walt's teriyaki sauce.

I marinated strips/chunks of boneless, skinless chicken breast (right, for the carnivores) and to-chicken (left, for the herbivores) for about an hour. Leaving it longer would not have hurt. The marinade consisted of:
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/3 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup honey
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp onion powder
1/2 cup water

The recipe originally called for fresh ginger, garlic, and onion but... I felt lazy.

If you feel lazy too, you can use frozen stir-fry veggies. I actually sliced up fresh baby carrots, broccoli and sugar snap peas... but I cooked the hell out of them (accidentally) so they probably have all the nutrient content of frozen ones anyway. I also put some fresh minced ginger and garlic in as well.

For the noodle part, I prefer using thin thin spaghettini or angel hair pasta. Cook them to your preferred softness, and in a small pot heat up the sauce ingredients:
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup creamy peanut butter
1/4 cup soy sauce
3 tablespoons rice vinegar
1/2 tablespoon chili-garlic sauce


(That is enough for two people, by the way).

Drain the pasta, mix in the sauce, sprinkle some sesame seeds overtop, and you're done!

Double Chocolate Orange Cookies

Right now, I am slacking off from studying immunology - there is only so much of B-cell gene rearrangement, MHC codominant expression, and dendritic cell antigen cross-presentation that I can take.

My exam is at 10:30 tomorrow morning; usually I work with the campus's kestrel colony from 7:30 to 9:30, but I begged off work tomorrow morning so I wouldn't be a walking zombie for my exam. A very kind coworker offered to fill in for me, so I baked a batch of cookies to thank her. Very tasty cookies.

The recipe is courtesy of Mirj over at Recipezaar.

These make good Christmas cookies.

You will need:
1 cup sugar
2/3 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 tablespoon grated orange rind (zest from a large navel orange)
1 egg
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup baking cocoa
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
sugar to coat

Preheat oven to 350C. In a large bowl, mix sugar, butter, egg, and orange zest. Stir in flour, cocoa, salt, baking powder, and baking soda.

It can take a while to incorporate all the flour in, but trust me, it will go. I recruited Davis to help mix because my biceps curled up and cried after about 30 seconds.

Form balls about 1 1/2 inch in diameter and roll them around in extra sugar. Press down slightly to flatten on baking tray. Bake for ~10-15 minutes until they form a dent when poked. Your cookies will be crunchy on the outside because of the sugar, but soft with orangey goodness on the inside.



I'm going to go eat one right now. And then - immunology.

"Somehow it reminded him simultaneously of...

...treacle tart, the woody smell of a broomstick handle, and something flowery he thought he might have smelled at the Burrow." This is what Harry Potter smells in the love potion Amortentia: treacle, Quidditch, and Ginny. And I don't know about my fellow North Americans, but I had no idea was treacle tart was before last week.

Last night, some friends and Davis and I got together for a Harry Potter themed party. We brought all sorts of dishes explicitly mentioned in the books as well traditional British dishes, and played Harry Potter Scene It. My contribution was treacle tart, mentioned throughout the series as Harry's favourite dessert, and pumpkin juice, which is frequently drunk at Hogwarts. I bought a cookbook from Amazon called A Wizard In The Kitchen which has all sorts of recipes inspired by Harry Potter. I was a bit turned off by the book at first because most of it is geared toward children (except the cocktail section at the back containing the Green Serpent - creme de menthe and creme de cacao) but in the end I was glad for the simplicity of the recipes.

Treacle tart actually turned out to be a pretty easy recipe. It required:
- a 9 inch pie crust
- 1 1/2 cups treacle
- 1 1/2 cups soft breadcrumbs
- 1 tbsp lemon juice
- 1 tsp ground ginger
- 1 egg lightly beaten

Treacle, I have discovered, is a by-product of sugar production in the UK. It's like molasses, but stickier and thicker and lighter in colour. It's so sugary that you can hear it crackle when you stir it. I think they sell some at our local British imports store (where they also have cool chocolate bars and tea) but it's quite pricey. A friend of mine recently travelled to the UK and brought back a tin of treacle for me!


Preparing the filling is really easy: you just plop all the ingredients in a bowl and stir them together. The soft breadcrumbs can be made by putting crustless, sliced white bread in a food processor. I think mine took 5-6 pieces to give about a cup and a half.


The filling gets dumped into the pie crust... which I apologize for. I have never made pie crust from scratch, and though I would have liked to for the treacle, please see my post below as to why my life is currently insane.




The pie gets baked at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. The filling should be firm and have darkened somewhat in the oven. I think I might have left mine in a skosh too long - there was a nice crust over top but it was a bit too thick and sticky to chew. If I make this again, I'll probably aim for 35-40 minutes. After taking it out of the oven, the pie should cool for about an hour.



I forgot to take a picture of the final presentation of the pie, but I served it with fresh whipped cream, raspberries, and mint leaves. It was pretty good - it kind of had the texture of a sugar pie or maybe like the filling of a butter tart, but a with a little more substance because of the bread crumbs. It was very, incredibly, decidedly sweet - I cut the pie into six pieces, but I think next time I'll cut it into 8 to make the pieces smaller, since I couldn't finish my piece. Overall though, I think it was a success.

Between dinner and dessert we had some pumpkin juice, which is made by spooning canned pumpkin into a container of apple juice, shaking it up, and straining the juice into a punch bowl or other type of server to remove any floaty pumpkin bits. Ours was shaken pretty well so we didn't have to strain it (well, also the cheesecloth I was holding over the mouth of the jug slipped and all the juice splashed into the bowl anyway) and the end result was actually pretty good! It wasn't extremely strongly pumpkin flavoured, but it did remind me of pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving.




Other courses of dinner included delicate little cucumber and cilantro sandwiches with a tasty yogurt pepper spread for appys, a beef roast with veggies and gravy and incredible Yorkshire pudding for the main course along with Pimm's and lemonade, and butter beer served with the treacle tart for dessert.

I came in second at Harry Potter Scene It. I blame the Pimm's... and the butterscotch schapps in the butter beer... and the glass and a half of red wine... and the prosecco... but mostly the treacle tart.