When I was a kid I hated mushrooms, they were slimy and I wouldn’t eat them.  There were two exceptions: morels and puffballs.  Both of these are hunting mushrooms.  They didn’t come from the grocery store, they came from my backyard and surrounding areas.  Every year, when it was time, my parents and I would go out in search of morels.  Morels always come up in the same places, so if you know where those places are, you’ll be set for years to come.  But just because you know where the morels should be, doesn’t mean they’re easy to find.  You need a morel finding stick, it will pull you in the direction of the good morels.  There’s no set size or shape for a morel finding stick, you’ll know when you find a good one, it’ll just feel right.  In my morel hunting experience, the only place the morel stick couldn’t help was in the sand dunes under the tamarack trees.  Here you needed to get on your hands and knees and crawl under the soft tamarack branches.  This is all part of the hunt, it’s ok to get dirty, you’re hunting!  There’s also a certain amount of pride in being the one to find the first morel.  When I found the first one, I wouldn’t just pluck it from the ground, I would call Dad over to gloat and to let him find it too, (you’d be surprised how long you can stare at one spot without seeing the morels that are there), after he saw it he would take out his little silver pocket knife and hand it to me so that I could gently cut off the morel at its base.  Then I would cup it in my hand, bring it up to my nose and inhale deeply.  Fresh morels have a wonderful earthy smell.  It’s a throwback to my childhood every time I smell one.  Some days a morel hunt would only yield half a dozen mushrooms, other days we would come home with a plastic bag full of them.  When this happened we’d lay them on racks on the deck for the sun to dry them so that they could be stored in a big glass jar for use all year round until next season arrived.

Mom needed another cake to bring to school for someone’s birthday, I was happy to take care of that for her.  Searching for a recipe on epicurious.com I came across an orange-almond cake with chocolate icing, giddyup.  The recipe seemed straightforward enough, a little time consuming maybe, but that’s clearly not a concern of mine.  It was a triple layer cake so I needed 3 round baking pans.  I know we have 3 of these pans because I’ve used them before, (recently, for the checkerboard cake) but after a good 10 minutes of tearing the cupboards apart I was starting to be convinced that someone had stolen the third pan.  I had found the first two no problem, but the third one was missing.  As far as I could recall the three of them used to be buddies, they were always together, like musketeers or something.  In the good old days they’d get all battered up, hang out in the oven, then hit the cupboard for an after party…  (Some things seem funnier the first time you write them, but I’m still not deleting that.)   After going through all the places I thought the third pan could be, and in the process opening all of the cupboard doors, and leaving them open, I sat on the floor in the middle of the kitchen and hoped the pan would come to me.  It did not.  Instead, the open doors attracted my cat who likes to explore.  I got up, shut them and started to get ingredients out to make the cake anyways.  I figured if I had to, I would bake the third layer in one of the first two pans after they were done, it would just be an extra and unnecessary step, and I don’t like that.  While putting away some dishes to clear space on the counter I found the third pan, I absolutely hate when things aren’t in their place. 

After a slow start, I was sailing through making the cake batter; crushing almonds, peeling and juicing oranges, beating eggs, things were going fairly well.  I got through making the batter and putting the layers into the oven, but in the process I ran out of sugar and I still had to make an orange glaze and the chocolate icing.  I was also out of butter and eggs.  Being out of eggs wasn’t a big deal because I didn’t need any more for this project, but it was something to think about so far as breakfast was concerned.  After waiting for the layers to come out of the oven I got in the car and headed to the store.  Let me elaborate on this- I live in the country, the grocery store is not right around the corner and I didn’t feel like going all the way into town, so I only went as far as the closest country convenience store.  I picked up sugar, eggs and a scratch ticket for Dad, (we didn’t win).  I got back into the kitchen, looked at my recipe and decided to make the icing first because it needed to cool.  The icing required butter.  As I said already, there was no more butter and you will note that on my trip to the store I didn’t get any butter, (I had gotten distracted by the scratch ticket).  Annoyed, I got back in the car.  As you can imagine, the convenience store I was going to was no Whole Foods.  When I got there I found out that they had 1 type of butter, it was overpriced and it was salted.  My recipe called for unsalted butter.  Does it really matter?  Did I really care at this point?  The girl at the counter was laughing at me for being back so soon, I took my salted butter and left.

Back at home I was finally able to get on with the cake construction.  I made the icing with the salted butter and stuck it in the fridge to set.  I thought that because it had lots of tasty things in it like whipping cream and premium chocolate, that it would be fine, you probably wouldn’t even notice the salt.  I dipped my finger in to give it a try, it seemed a little off, but I told myself that it just needed to set, it would be ok.  While I waited for that to cool I had to make an orange syrup to spread over each layer.  The orange syrup was made from fresh squeezed orange juice, reduced with sugar.  I ended up with way more than was necessary, but I saved the leftovers because I was also going to be making candied orange peel to decorate the top of the cake and this would add extra flavour.  The recipe said to use store bought candied peel, but I didn’t have any of that and there was no way I was going back to the store (not that they’d have it, and we already know how I feel about having to go into town) so I thought I’d just make my own.  Well I ended up making enough candied orange peel to feed an army, or if not an army, at least to make 2 other desserts, more on that later.  Once the chocolate icing had set a little it still tasted funny, and by funny I mean salty.  I added orange syrup and sugar until it worked itself out.  In the end the orange-almond chocolate cake dressed up quite nicely once I had all the pieces together and the candied orange peel really was a nice touch. 

The leftover orange peel then became the inspiration to make walnut-orange biscotti dipped in chocolate.  Biscotti is not something I’ve made before, but Dad likes it so I thought I’d give it a go.  It’s actually pretty easy to make and the whole baking it twice thing wasn’t a big deal, (for those of you who don’t know, biscotti is Italian and literally means ‘twice baked’).  The only problem I had with it was the chocolate dipping, my chocolate was being weird, (what else is new?) I don’t know why, but at least this stuff wasn’t salty.  I ended up leaving some undipped.  If anyone asks, I meant to do it that way. 

Even after the biscotti there was still more candied orange peel.  What to do?  There were some strawberries on the counter that needed to be used up, and there’s an endless supply of rhubarb running rampant in the garden.  By now you should know where I’m going with this- Pie time.  For my own entertainment the rhubarb pies are always a little bit different, this one has the candied orange peel, strawberries and cookie cutter decoration on top, I like personalizing pies.  Later today I’ll be delivering this pie to a friend of mine who’s leaving to New Zealand for the year.  Maybe I should go with her, the kiwis need pie too, and who am I to deny them?  They’ve given us great wine and lamb, it’s about time we started giving back.  Think of it as improving international relations.  Anyone who would like to finance this trip for me, for the sake of world peace, is welcome to do so.

Father’s Day is a special day and as such a special dinner was required.  My Dad’s side of the family is from the East coast so we’ve always got an underlying lobster craving,  and special occasions are the perfect time to satisfy this craving.  Lobster eating is a spectacle, hands on and interactive, different from any other edible undertaking.  At what other time is it acceptable to dismember your food at the table?  If you’ve never experienced this before, my heart breaks for you.  Allow me to explain.  Begin by pulling some lobster from the ocean.  What?  You don’t live on the ocean with lobster crawling into your traps?  Yeah, me neither, but it’s nice to dream.  Begin with a giant pot of boiling water, salt it liberally, don’t be afraid of salt, there should be enough to float an egg.  Into the pot you drop the live lobster, they must be alive and kicking (or pinching) right up until the time they hit the water.  Supermarket lobster will do, so long as they’re fresh.  While waiting for the water to boil you can amuse the children by letting the lobster crawl on the kitchen floor, let them name their favourite one, (Pinchy is always popular).  When it’s time, remove the rubber bands from their claws, pick them up by the tail so you don’t get pinched and drop ‘em in the pot.  Don’t even think of putting them in with the rubber bands still holding their claws shut, nobody likes the taste of rubber, this is a surefire way to ruin your feast.  Just before the lobster’s done, set the table with bowls of melted butter for dipping and empty bowls to hold the shells, lobster bibs are optional.  A lobster feast in its purest form should be done straight up with butter, nothing else is needed.  Usually someone is put in charge of cracking the claws open with a big cleaver, everything else can be done by hand or with the aid of a good pair of kitchen shears.  Once the heaping plate of whole lobsters is set on the table conversation ceases and the serious part begins.  Lobster deconstruction is an art form.  It takes years to master and you’ve got to be worked in properly.  When I was little, my parents and grandparents would give me all of their legs as they devoured claws, tails and bodies, moving on to their second and third lobsters.  I would spend the entire meal sucking and chewing on the lobster legs, determined to get all of the meat out.  Hours of work probably didn’t even equal the amount of meat in one tail, but it kept me busy.  It was an excellent tactic on the part of my parents because the legs were something I could work at on my own- they didn’t require any cutting or breaking of the shell, something my small hands couldn’t do.  And as long as I was working on the legs I couldn’t pester them to break shells for me, thus interrupting their lobster eating.  As I got older and hungrier I began to learn to guard my claws and tail and not to be distracted for a second lest they be swiped from my plate and replaced with legs.  With time, practice and imitation I learned first how to push the tail out of the shell with a fork and then later how to excavate the meat without any tools by squeezing the shell with one hand, cracking it, making it easy to pop out the treasure inside.  Of course I still took the time to get the meat out of the legs, but I also realized that the tail and the claws were so much less work and resulted in far greater rewards.  Once you’ve got the meat out of the claws and tail, it’s butter time baby, (as an aside, should you ever find yourself at The Keg, having ordered the Surf ‘n Turf, it’s good to know that the lobster butter can be used for everything, everything).  Dunk the lobster in the warm butter, don’t be shy, no one is watching, it’s ok if it drips, it’ll do that.  Take time to savour the flavour.  Mmmmm lobster…  The intricacies of dissecting the body eluded me until well into my lobster eating career.  You have to know the one part of the lobster that you can’t eat and how to avoid it.  I usually skipped this task, my Dad took care of it for me, he then usually took care of eating all the good parts too, but at the time I thought it was for my own safety.  Now that I know better I like to save the body of my lobster for a sandwich the next day. 

In the rare event of leftovers, a lobster sandwich on crusty Italian bread is heavenly.  Leftovers generally only occur when someone is exercising some restraint (rare) or when they’re on their 3^rd lobster and are too lazy to get the meat out of the body.  Some people neglect the bodies, don’t even bother with them.  These people make me sick.  The best sandwiches are made from the meat cleaned out of the bodies and mixed with the “red stuff”, (female lobster) or “green stuff”, (male lobster), or ideally a combination of all three along with a little mayo, some tomato slices and lettuce.  There’s no need to get fancy, you want that lobster flavour to shine through.

But back to Father’s Day, once you’ve had a meal as rich as lobster, why stop there?  For dessert I made my first pecan pie.  My Dad made a comment about wanting one the other day so I decided to indulge him.  The pie was actually pretty straight forward.  Pecan pies are sort of like giant butter tarts, I imagine whoever invented the pecan pie had tried to make tarts and realized that small things weren’t worth doing, they might even have though to themselves “go big or go home!”.  I tweaked the recipe a bit by adding maple syrup.  I also wasted my time neatly arranging the pecans into a design before adding the filling, they floated randomly to the surface with no evidence that a design ever existed.  I told myself it was abstract. 

2 c.      sugar                      1 c.      butter, softened

3          eggs                      2 ¼ c.  flour

1 c.      yogurt                     ½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp    salt                        1 c.      thinly sliced fruit

1 tsp     vanilla

Cream sugar with butter.  Beat in eggs.  Add yogurt and beat well.  Gradually add the dry ingredients and beat well.  Stir in vanilla and fruit.  Bake at 375 degrees in greased tube or bundt pan for 50-60min.

***When I made this cake I used strawberry yogurt and rhubarb.  My aunt makes it with peach yogurt and peaches and it’s always been great.  You can pretty much mix and match any complementary yogurt and fruit combinations.

Another day, another culinary adventure!  I’m not lazy and unemployed, I’m adventuring!  Adventuring today included mowing the lawn.  Seeing as though I’m living here for free with no plans of leaving in the immediate future, the least I can do is clean up and make dinner.  Mowing the lawn took over an hour and a half, on a ride on mower…  I didn’t tackle the portion that I have to do with the push mower, I’ve got to save some fun for tomorrow.  I’d like to think of this as an educational blog so here’s a special tip for the kids: on a sunny day, it is not advisable to wear a sleeveless shirt, listening to your iPod with your armband, unless your goal is to make your upper arm look like a cheap Canadian flag tattoo.  Lesson learned.

Anyways, onto the cooking.  I decided to make fresh pasta today.  I thought it would be a nice treat for my parents because other than someone who’s unemployed, who really has the time to make fresh pasta?  Since I have never made fresh pasta before I thought I’d skip the usual beginner step of making plain pasta and go right on ahead to the flavoured stuff.  Why not?  Being limited by what was in the fridge, spinach pasta was my flavour of choice.  The recipe I found had a food processor option, I chose to forgo it and make the pasta by hand.  It looked like more fun, you got to play with dough and make a mess.  Due to the fact that I made the dough my hand, I thought I could cheat a little with the shaping of the pasta.  Actually, I don’t consider it cheating, I was testing out a new kitchen tool, experimenting, learning alternatives.  My dad had received a pasta roller-outer (I’m sure it has a real name, but I’m not overly concerned with what it is) for his birthday last year and it wasn’t something I had used before.  I don’t know how much easier it made my job anyways.  The pasta roller-outer is a great tool, but it requires two sets of hands.  They make it look like an easy individual process on the box.   This is not so, unless you have go-go-gadget arms, and at least three of them.  I needed one hand to turn the crank, one hand to feed the dough through the presser and then the cutter and another hand to catch the pasta so that it didn’t end up on the floor.  This required some acrobatics on my part, and I wouldn’t say that gymnastics are exactly my forte.  Some of it ended up on the floor.  3 second rule.  Eventually I found a system that worked and I was becoming quite proficient by the end of it, (ok, maybe dad came home and provided an extra set of hands, but let’s not argue over the exact details).

Following my first couple blogs, there has been some question as to whether or not I’m actually making this stuff or if I just have an active imagination.  Pictures were requested as proof, and rightly so.  Sticky hands, dead camera batteries and forgetfulness will sometimes get in the way of picture taking, but I’ll see what I can do.  I was so proud of myself today that I took a few pictures of my pasta making process, but then I forgot to take a picture of the final plated product, which was actually quite pretty with the green pasta covered in a red sauce.  Speaking of which, the sauce was what I like to call a rummage recipe.  I rummaged around the kitchen to see what I could find to make a decent sauce.  This led to the writing of a grocery list, but also a surprisingly pleasant sauce which consisted of garlic, onion, pancetta, green pepper, sundried tomato (the garden was overrun with tomatoes last year and we’re still eating them), crushed tomatoes, white wine, (a splash for you, a splash for me) oregano, rosemary and thyme.  Super.

This past Saturday I catered a 13 person event.  This seems less impressive when it’s revealed that it was for a group of principles, one of whom was my mom, and the dinner was at my house.  Nevertheless, I did do almost all of the cooking for it.  I say almost because my Dad is somewhat of a gourmet chef himself and he was keen on doing something on the BBQ.  We started planning about a week in advance, trying to figure out a menu.  For a while we were set on ribs.  Big racks of ribs.  Racks of wonderfully sticky, tender, fall off the bone ribs.  Then my Mom questioned our menu choice, commenting on how messy ribs were.  That was enough to banish them from the menu and result in my Dad making daily remarks about how good ribs were, how much he wanted ribs and how everyone was doing ribs but us, (and by everyone he was referring to Rob Rainford and Bobby Flay… you can’t beat the FoodNetwork), but fine, if Mom didn’t want ribs, there would be NO ribs.  Instead, pork loin was decided upon as a suitable alternative, with chicken for those who didn’t want pork, (3 pork loins and 6 pounds of chicken to be precise, go big or go home).  The final menu was as follows:
Appetizers: Sausage, cheese and almond puffs, shrimp cold rolls.

Main: BBQ’d pork loin and chicken.  Honey mustard potato salad and a romaine salad with veggies to accompany.

Dessert: Peach rhubarb pie and rhubarb pie with brown sugar, sour cream and oatmeal crumble toppings.

But of course, the pork and chicken couldn’t all be done the same, and plain old bbq sauce was not going to cut it.  My Dad bbqs all year round.  You want a steak in January when it’s minus 20 degrees out?  We do it up right, on the bbq.  This meant I had to come up with a few different marinades.  I’ve been wanting to try making jerk chicken for a while, so now was the time.  16 ingredients and a food processor later, I had my jerk sauce.  I am sorry to say however, that I had to wuss out on the heat factor, including the scotch bonnet peppers because apparently not everyone can handle spicey.  Seeing as though this was not my party, I figured I had better try to please the masses, (this also led to deciding on the title of a future blog- It’s my party and I’ll spice if I want to).  The end result was a sauce that was quite good in all respects, very flavourful, but I couldn’t really call it jerk sauce.  It went over well with the principles though, and I guess that’s all that matters.  I also whipped up some “magic dust” for a dry rub on one of the pork loins, courtesy of Bon Appetit magazine, (along with Gourmet magazine, my literary equivalent of the FoodNetwork).  The magic dust also had a fairly lengthy ingredient list, including paprika, dry mustard, and sugar among others.  Finally, for those fearing intense flavour, a marinade of roasted tomatoes was doused on some chicken.  All of this was put on the night before, to give plenty of time for the marinades and meat to become good friends.  Same deal for the potato salad, it always tastes better the next day.  Saturday I made pies in the morning, with rhubarb from our garden, (because like Chef at Home always says, using ingredients that are in season is the secret to great food).  No matter how many times I make pie crust, it always seems to turn out differently.  The odds of it turning out just the way I want it to are slightly better than winning the lottery.  Luck was on my side Saturday and I was fairly happy with the result, (no dice on the lottery ticket, I accept donations…).  Finishing the pies early gave me enough time to go into town and buy a new bike.  My previous one was 13 years old and made from leftover parts of my brother’s bikes, I deserved a new bike…  But I digress.  The afternoon was devoted to appetizers.  I’ve made sausage, cheese and almonds puffs quite a few times, they’re always a hit and they’re easy to make, done.  What took hours, literally, were the shrimp cold rolls which consisted of shrimp, mango, red pepper, bean sprouts, vermicelli noodles, green onions and carrots rolled up in a rice paper wrapper.  I started by chopping everything up and setting it out like an assembly line.  Then the rice papers needed to be soaked in water to soften them, but before being able to roll them I had to dry them off enough that everything didn’t just slide out.  This was an exercise to test my patience.  I would have probably quit much earlier, but the principles started to arrive and this gave me an excuse to stay in the kitchen instead of having to socialize.  I’m happy to cook for them but that’s where my part of the hospitality ends. 

The evening on the whole was a success and of course there were leftovers, because like I said, go big or go home and we went big.  This meant Sunday night was a repeat of Saturday, minus the principles and with the addition of my parents’ friends the Quiggies.  It’s Mr. Quiggies birthday later this week and as he’s quite fond of chocolate I made a chocolate layer cake with strawberries and maple whipped cream.  I got the recipe out of a cocoa cookbook and the method was just weird.  There was no butter/margarine/shortening, only a tablespoon of oil and the eggs were supposed to be beat in 1 by 1 after the flour and dry ingredients had been added.  Well by the time I had added all of the flour I had a big clump of batter, thicker than any cookie dough.  For those of you who aren’t in the habit of making cakes, this is not the way your batter should be, ever.  My electric beaters were not prepared to handle this and the process of beating in the eggs, individually was a difficult one to say the least, peppered with curses and lots of spatula work, (or was it spatula work and lots of curses?).  Eventually I ended up with a batter that resembled a fudgey brownie consistency (and tasted much the same, as my repeated sampling confirmed) which I poured into the cake pans, popped in the oven and hoped for the best.  I then sat down to “clean” out the bowl…  Much to my amazement, the cakes rose and the process of putting it together with strawberries and maple syrup whipped cream went along just swimmingly.  Another success!

My dad is still complaining about the lack of ribs.

I’m not going to lie, I used to think that people who wrote blogs were a little weird, maybe a lot weird. And since I don’t like being wrong, I will continue to think that, with one addition- “people who write blogs are weird*”. The asterisk is the important part, it lets me add important information like: *Except for people who have interesting things to say, like me. Do I actually have interesting things to say? Lunch with Len convinced me that I do, and even if I don’t, I can fake it and my blog will still be more interesting than most peoples.

4 years ago, at the outset of my University education, I realized that it probably wouldn’t get me anywhere. Today, I can confirm that. Therefore, it was with no job and no prospects that I was complaining about how I needed something to do, something that would make me money, something that I didn’t hate. I like to cook, I like to eat. I like to read about other people who like to cook and eat. I had just read about a woman who also liked to cook and eat who had undertaken a yearlong project to recreate every recipe in Julia Childs’ cookbook The Art of Mastering French Cooking. Along the way she wrote a blog about it which led to a book deal. The book deal led to the end of her working as a secretary. Len deemed this to be my ticket to success as well. Cook, eat, write about it. Clearly, it’s just that easy. And so my blog begins…