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| Diary of a Feeder |
| Recipes and reminiscences. Facts and fibs. Cooking and enjoying what AJ Liebling referred to as the fine art of feeding. A smorgasbord of food-related entries. |
| Language: English |
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Statistics |
| Unique Visitors: 35 |
| Total Unique Visitors: 74497 |
| Visitors Out: 808 |
| Total Visitors Out: 1368 |
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| Tripolina Lunga with Smoked Turkey Sausage, Beans & Mascarpone |
| 2007-10-08 17:11:00 |
Let’s talk about starch, baby. Let’s talk about you and me. Let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things that beans can be. Let’s talk about starch. Well, something like that. One of my favourite things growing up was a simple bowl of beans and wieners, and if there was heavily buttered toast on the side so much the better. Beans and wieners, back then I couldn’t think of anything more perfectly balanced. The starchy beans, sweet tomato gravy and salty diced hot dogs, man, add buttery toast and you have another level of balance with crunchy and soft. Eve had the chance back in the day to take this to Adam, she chose the apple because it was easier to carry. To this day this is still a comfort meal “go-to”, definitely up there with process cheese open-face sandwiche...
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| Mixed Mushroom & Goat Cheese Phyllo Triangles |
| 2007-09-25 18:43:00 |
MIXED MUSHROOM & GOAT CHEESE Ingredients8 oz mushrooms (I used an equal mix of Shiitake, Cremini, and Chanterelle)2 tbsp unsalted butter1 small onion, finely chopped2 cloves garlic, minced1 tbsp finely chopped fresh sage2 tbsp finely chopped fresh rosemary2 tbsp finely chopped chives1 tsp finely ground long pepper¼ tsp fleur de sel6 oz goat cheeseMethod1. Cut the mushroom caps in half and then into ¼ inch slices (throw the stems in the green bin). 2. Heat the butter in a skillet over medium heat. Just as it begins to brown add the onions and garlic. When they get soft (around 4 minutes) add the fresh sage, rosemary, and long pepper. Stir and give these aromatics time to meet and mingle, just a couple of minutes. Stir in the mushrooms and let them get...
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| Zwiebelrostbraten (Steak & Fried Onions) |
| 2007-08-06 16:20:00 |
Dinner for me in the late sixties and early seventies tended to be pretty straight forward Scottish fare. Both my parents being from Glasgow meant meals were usually mince with curry, shepherd's pie, steak & kidney pie, bubble & squeak, gammon & eggs, etc. We lived in Canada but the food remained from my parent’s homeland. So, it was with complete surprise and wonder, when some time around 1972, I was presented with crisp corn tortilla shells, seasoned ground beef, vegetables, and some spicy tomato sauce called salsa. The flavours were so different, so clean, spicy and tart. I loved it, I begged for it weekly until my parents got sick of making it. That dinner was so memorable, though, that they continued to try new dishes. When my mother first prepar...
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| Pan Haggerty |
| 2007-07-15 14:17:00 |
It’s Sunday morning and L has gone out with some of her friends. I’m left on my own for a chunk of the day. Last night we went out to a Roller Derby bout, Toronto Roller Derby’s Gold Digger Grudge Match between the Bay Street Bruisers and the Chicks Ahoy!. We had an absolute blast but I think I might have overdid it a bit with the alcohol (come to think of it this whole week was a bit of a boozy-binge) my body was crying out for something big and starchy. A usual “my body is a lard temple” meal is a fry-up—fried bacon, fried eggs, fried bread, fried tomatoes, you know, a good Brit breakfast guaranteed to cure the brain-fuzzies. But today I decided on something slightly different. I did a bit of an inventory of the fridge and pantry and decided on pan haggerty.I always like a di...
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| Paul’s Potato Salad |
| 2007-07-02 13:18:00 |
Our friend Dave invited us to his house for a barbeque last Saturday. I thought it would only be polite to bring a some sort of side dish other than a case of beer (the perfect side-dish to any bbq). When breaking bread old-stylie, around a fire, with friends, two dishes immediately come to mind—cole slaw and potato salad. The Adam and Eve of summer time dishes. Macaroni salad could, I guess be added, but then my analogy wouldn’t stand up. I love them with a passion and for versions I always prefer the creamy style dressing. They possess that Proustian ability to evoke all kinds of childhood picnics, bbqs, and cottage bonfires. All of the summer eating experiences I remember have been accompanied with a creamy dressed salad—a vinaigrette version would...
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| Chicken Adobo Variation #2 |
| 2007-06-23 23:39:00 |
L and I were planning a quiet night in to watch TV. I decided for dinner to return to that wonderful Filipino dish, Chicken Adobo. Back in March I tried the recipe for the first time based on its ease of preparation and it turned out so well I thought I’d look around and find another recipe for it. I found Chef Romy Dorotan’s (of Cendrillon Asian Grill and Merienda Bar) recipe and decided to give it a go. One thing that made me think twice while reading over this recipe was the use of coconut milk, I’m not a fan of coconut, but never having tried the milk I’m willing to give anything a go once.What a great version of adobo. I was so pleased with this dish. The house is still filled with an amazing aroma, and the flavour! This meal was more success...
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| Pan-Roasted Bison with Sea Salt and Parmesan Sweet Potato Oven Fries |
| 2007-06-09 22:50:00 |
| While shopping at the St Lawrence Market I visited White House Meats and picked up a couple of Bison Rib-Eye steaks at my wife, L’s, request. She heard that Bison was lower in fat and calories as well as having more nutrients than a lot of other meats. White House was clearly the place to go, it’s been around since 1953 and is quickly becoming one of my favourite and more challenging places to shop at the Market. I can easily walk away with a product that I have no idea how to cook; ostrich, rabbit, venison...etc.So, along with my usual free-range capon for my Sunday chicken roast (from Mano’s), a pack of free-range chicken legs and a couple of skinless chicken breasts from Clement Poultry, I had the two 10 oz Bison Rib-Eyes weighing me down along with eggs, kefir, morels,
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| Four Cheese & Cremini Free-Form Ravioli with Asparagus, Ramp, Morel & Cremini Ragoût |
| 2007-06-08 17:27:00 |
Currently, we are just leaving ramp, fiddlehead, and morel season. Let it be known through-out the land. Actually I’ve just been told we are officially out of ramps season now. See, that’s how quick seasons pass. If you don’t grab foods when they’re fresh, you are out of luck—flavour-wise, and what other “-wise” is there? I tend to stumble into each season, wandering through a market I’ll spot, say, ramps, and immediately know I have to rush about trying to find out where they hid the morels and other vegetables that arrive at the same time. When I was young I was blissfully unaware that all foods had a season. Being city-raised as far as I knew, we had sweet corn simply because we were at the cottage. It was Fenelon Falls food, Hickory Beach food, like the green beans eat...
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| Coq au Vin |
| 2007-05-14 21:48:00 |
“I love a recipe that really works, where you feel there is something unequivocally right about it. Where the cook has remained true to the dish, to its provenance, its history, its soul. I feel that way about coq au vin. The story is there for all to read.” - Nigel Slater“I wondered when you’d get around to making this.” - L We’re well into spring and because of this I’ve been looking around trying to find those hearty recipes that I want to make before the lighter, fresh meals of summer come along. Maybe a Spaghetti Bolognese with oxtail and pork shoulder, or a stew of some kind. I remember reading Jeffrey Steingarten’s article entitled “Red Wine & Old Roosters” in which he wrote that he had eaten coq au vin maybe 200 times in his life. My mind was blown. It wasn’t ...
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| Roasted Chicken |
| 2007-04-15 17:30:00 |
If you asked me, say, three weeks ago if I would make you a roast chicken you would have been laughed at. Nothing personal. It just had no place in my cooking vocabulary. To me, based on absolutely no facts what-so-ever, there was some sort of arcane knowledge and advanced skill needed to even buy a full wingy and leggy chicken. What a difference those twenty-one or so days make. What brought on this life-altering transformation in my thinking? Tom Colicchio. Sometime last week I was reading his Think Like a Chef in bed and just as L, who does a lot of martial arts, was just finally slipping off into some much needed sleep after a couple of days of very hard training, I nudged her awake.“bwuh?” she queried.“Oh L, are you still awake?” I turned...
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| RED WINE-POACHED BEEF WITH STAR ANISE, LONG PEPPER & CARDAMOM INFUSION |
| 2007-04-07 15:23:00 |
When I first laid eyes on Ludo Levebvre’s cookbook Crave: The Feast of the Five Senses I didn’t know what to make of it. I would go into detail about the hilarious photographs (which I’m sure were not the intention and thus making it all the more sad because of it) but I have seen enough entries online treading that path, and a joke told too many times ceases to be funny (The Aristocrats aside). I think it best to present this link to SoCalorie’s An Open Letter to Ludo Lefebvre, from the May, 2005 entry from la.foodblogging.com, and leave it there. Aside from the pretty pictures, what kept me looking through this cookbook were the recipes, flavours different from what I was used to, but recognizable all the same. They looked really good, I mean, look at the guy’s creds, Lefebvr...
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| Chicken Adobo Variation #1 |
| 2007-03-24 19:26:00 |
Spanish for seasoning or marinade, adobo is also a term used for the name of a well-known Filipino dish typically made from pork or chicken (or a combination of both). I first read the recipe in Greg Atkinson’s great Seattle Times article Food for the Crew which made it into Best Food Writing 2001. It looked so good and easy, which is a big selling point for me, I decided to give it a go. After a quick search of the net for alternate recipes I decided on a mix of things I saw. The result was really good. Salty and tangy balanced but maybe leaning a little heavily to the salt side. As we were eating I mentioned to L that adding something sweet to balance the savory would really make it for me, maybe honey. One recipe called for fresh grated ginger, one c...
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| Baked Sweet Potato & Roasted Cherry Tomato Soup |
| 2007-03-24 12:10:00 |
One of the easiest recipes I’ve done lately was from Tamasin Day-Lewis’s Good Tempered Food. Roast some onion, sweet potato and cherry tomatoes with olive oil, sprigs of rosemary and thyme and when all weepy and carmelly good, you peel the sweet potatoes and bung the lot into a food processor with some hot chicken stock (that has been mixed with some brown sugar). Throw it back on the stove and boil, then taste and season. Really delicious. Very simple, but bold, flavours all coming together. I served it with a slice of roasted garlic-scraped sour dough toast.Now a word about the cookbook. I haven’t tried many things out of Day-Lewis’s book (Good Tempered Food) but I agree with Renz over at Little Bouffe that...
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| Beer & Cheddar Cheese Soup with Bacon |
| 2007-03-18 14:09:00 |
“He was a wise man who invented beer,” Plato correctly noted, but it was an even wiser person that coupled it with aged cheddar to make soup. Come to think of it, it was probably a couple of people, the same ones that first mixed chocolate with peanut butter. I rooted around the lumber room of the internet looking for the history and found nothing. The origin of cheese predates recorded history and beer is one of the oldest human-produced beverages, so I’m assuming the recipe is likely as old. Beer (due to the brewing process) was safer to drink than the water and milk (which was usually preserved as cheese) so I’m sure the nomadic Turkic peoples sat around the yurt campfire eating thi...
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| Sautéed Spinach with Onions & Garlic Confit |
| 2007-03-14 22:46:00 |
OK, first off, I love sautéed greens—let’s just get that out of the way. I look like a meat and potatos guy but when left to my own devices, I admit it, I’ve got a couple cloves of roasted garlic and some diced shallots or onions in the pan, a little unsalted butter and garlicky olive oil and I’m rinsing the spinach. So, my wife L is coming home late, I’m hungry and reading the Cooking Journey food blog and Shayla has made some sautéed greens with shallots and it looks so good—and green, so very, very green. I think, yeah, I’ll have some of that. I had the garlic cloves minced and in the pan with the onions and the bunch of organic spinach glistening emerald before I remembered I had the Fine Cooking issue that she used (December 2006, on ...
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| Beef Barley Soup with Cheesy Garlic Bread |
| 2007-03-11 16:32:00 |
Once, sometimes twice, a week I make a batch of soup. My wife and I takes turns deciding what type I will make and then on my way home from work I’ll stop in at the organic market and pick the ingredients up fresh. This week was L’s choice and reaching back into her comfort food memories she picked Beef Barley soup. I did a quick search and found a great recipe from February 2000 issue of Bon Appétit. I hadn’t fully read the recipe until I got home and found that before the meat gets added the soup has to sit over night. Postponing the soup night seemed a sad thing at first but over the next 24 hours the flavours had married beautifully and made it all worth while. I only bought about one pound of the filet mignon (the ...
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| Soup and a Box of Tissues |
| 2007-03-11 16:22:00 |
When I was growing up, my father was the soup maker in our family. His soups were hearty, starchy, but above all, spicy concoctions. He said on a number of occasions that a soups quality can be judged by the need for a box of Kleenex tissues. The kitchen table would have a our bowls of soup, heaps of buttered white bread, curry powder, the ever present box of tissues and we would be tucking in, all sniffles and rosy cheeks. With my parents and my brothers the table was always full of laughter. In those days my idea of heaven was dunking thick wodges of bread into hot soup, buttery slicks forming on the surface and the way all those flavours came together in my mouth.Perhaps the reason we all laughed so much during those meals can be explained by the research...
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