My brother, sister in law and nephew have been visiting for the week so I’ve been fairly busy, but still cooking.  Or maybe lazy, but still cooking would be more accurate, I’m not really ever that busy, am I?  Potato, pot-ah-to.  We decided to have an Asian inspired dinner one night, the Quiggies were invited too.  Everyone got in on the cooking for this meal.  Appetizers were pork and shrimp dumplings from the Quiggies and cold rolls courtesy of me because Dad likes those.  I had debated making sushi because I hadn’t done that in a while, but you can’t get good ingredients for that here.  There’s definitely no sashimi grade fish in my grocery store, so cold rolls it was they never disappoint.  Main dishes included spicy shrimp stir fry, chicken chow mein, ginger beans, bbq ribs and honey and soy glazed chicken wings.  My mom, sister in law and I started chopping up all the veggies and organizing each dish so that it would be ready to go when we wanted to cook it.  We were going to the beach before dinner so we wanted to have everything ready for when we came back.  Dad and my brother were in charge of the bbq, all they had to do before dinner was grill some chicken for the chicken chow mein.  Well, they got as far as putting the chicken on the bbq and then we left for the beach.  Without removing the chicken from the bbq.  Blackened chicken was not on the menu.  That chicken was tossed when we finally returned home a couple hours later and they started over with a fresh piece.  The second time around garnered much better results.  The spicy shrimp stir fry was originally supposed to be chicken but considering the fate of the first chicken, shrimp was definitely the way to go.  The chicken chow mein ended up being good despite the slow start, we added in shiitake mushrooms from the mushroom man, (we also picked up some Lion’s Mane mushies and pink oysters while we were there, we’re frying those up with some bbq’d steak tonight).  Ginger beans weren’t part of the original plan, but we had a whole lot of them, so there you go.  The honey and soy glazed chicken wings were popular, but I’m losing my love of chicken wings, ribs are more substantial.  And these ribs were high quality.  I added a habanero pepper to the marinade so they had some nice heat to them.  Dad and I are already planning a strictly ribs night in the near future.  For some reason Dad was fretting about not having enough food, maybe we should make a fried rice dish he said.  Clearly that was not even a possibility as we will be eating leftovers for days and an extra dish would have been overkill.  Dad relented and accepted that we wouldn’t be making anything else only because 1- Mom said he would have to make it, (thus relinquishing his roll as bbq master) and 2- The bbq, oven, and all 4 stove burners were already in use.  For dessert I made coconut ice cream which my sister in law diligently churned for me every ten minutes after I put it in the freezer.  I always forget to churn the ice cream and it ends up with the paddle frozen in place and I have to hack away at it to free the paddle which is a largely frustrating ordeal and I don’t like it.  With her help it turned out very well.  The coconut ice cream turned out rich, very rich, but there were no complaints, (except from my sister in law, who complained my brother was stealing all of her ice cream).  I would have liked to add ginger and lime to my ice cream, but decided plain was more of a surefire success when feeding a crowd.  All in all, the whole meal was well received and I’ve decided I need to figure out how to get on the new TLC show Dinner Takes All, best dinner party each week wins a thousand bucks, who doesn’t love that?

Besides the Asian inspired dinner, here’s a random rundown of some other dishes I’ve been up to in the past week:

Corn chowder- because Dad bought a dozen corn and then bought another dozen before finishing the first one.  I searched epicurious.com for a recipe and ended up combining 3 of theirs to create one of my own because I didn’t have all of the ingredients for any single recipe and I didn’t particular like any one of their methods used.  Luckily the chowder was especially good (bacon and sweet potato contributed their best assets) and I’ve made it twice now.

Pizza grilled on the bbq- because if it can’t be done on the bbq, why do it at all?  I made the dough, (remembering to put in the yeast this time, pure genius), and then grilled one side of the dough, flipped it over, put all of the sauce, toppings and cheese on the grilled side, and then put it back on the bbq to finish it off.  I highly recommend it.  I suspect I’ll try smoking a pizza sooner or later.

Quiche- because I had a leftover pie shell after making a peach, blueberry and gooseberry pie, and I didn’t feel like making another one so I made quiche for lunch one day.  The original recipe was for a straight cheese quiche, but I decided I would add veggies.  Of course, I didn’t account for all the extra space that onions, zucchini (the garden is exploding with them) and peppers would take up.  This meant that I had extra egg, cream, cheese and milk mixture that wouldn’t fit in the pie shell.  The whole point of making the quiche was to use up leftovers, not create more of them.  I decided to make a second, smaller, quiche to avoid another leftover situation.  I tore up some stale bread (getting rid of more excess) and covered the bottom of a small pie plate with it to make a crust of sorts and then filled it up with the dairy mixture.  It worked out fairly well as a lighter and faster version of quiche.  It was also a decent way to use up the ends of bread loaves that accumulate on the counter because Dad always buys and starts a new loaf before finishing the old one.

Gelato- because… well no reason really, I just like gelato.  This one was peach, apricot, lime and ginger, (if I couldn’t put it in the coconut ice cream, it was going somewhere!).  The peaches were fresh from Niagara.  You can’t really go wrong with gelato… of course I forgot to churn it, but these things happen to the best of us.

In other news my new favourite drink is Jamaican ginger beer.  I love it.  It’s especially good with fresh squeezed lime and dark rum.  There’s that lime and ginger combination again, lately I want to put it in everything.  Eventually I’ll run this flavour into the ground and get hooked on something else… Until that time it will be lime and ginger for everyone!

Today's pictures are cold rolls, the quiches, a chocolate cheesecake with raspberry and mango topping (made for Dad on the day the sailboat went in the water), and a black forest cake with chocolate ganache and cherry ice cream for Mom's birthday.

 I've been playing around with ice cream making lately.  I was motivated to do this on a  particularly hot day when I remembered making homemade ice cream many moons ago, (around 4380 moons if you want a number, our ice cream machine hasn’t been used in at least a decade and I’m gauging even more than that).  I remember it tasting completely different from anything I'd ever had from the store.  It was creamier, richer and it had depth.  We used to keep fresh made ice cream (while it lasted) in an old margarine container and I would sneak spoonfuls of it from the freezer when no one else was around.  Unfortunately, the ice cream maker seemed to be a novelty item that quickly fell into disuse in my house.  The freezing tub took up too much space in the freezer and the whole thing was eventually packed into its box, not to be opened again until years later.  It was never thrown out though and survived the move to a new house.  Up until a couple weeks ago it remained in its first landing spot- the basement, gathering dust on a shelf with a variety of other items, (extra kitchen tiles, pieces of a water bed that never got reassembled after the move, a foot spa, a coleman lantern, some old ski boots...).  After having picked a flat of strawberries and being unsure of what to turn them into, I resurrected the ice cream maker for some good old fashioned strawberry ice cream.  I was delighted to find that all of the pieces were in the box and even more delighted that the machine could still turn out a damn good spot of ice cream, just like when I was a kid.  It was good, but not perfect.  I didn’t churn the ice cream enough so it wasn’t as smooth as I would have liked it to be, but the flavour of the fresh strawberries more than made up for any inconsistencies in texture.  After getting off to such a great start, I was eager to make more ice cream.  I decided to stick to the basics and make chocolate.  I had bought some Mexican chocolate, but it turned out not to be the kind that I had been looking for (with cinnamon in it) and I made the ill-fated decision to use it in my ice cream.  Not only was this chocolate not what I was looking for, but it was grainy, not really chocolately at all, and basically tasted like granulated sugar mixed with a little cocoa powder for colour.  I don’t know why I thought this sub-par chocolate could be improved by turning it into ice cream.  It could not.  The ice cream turned out just like the chocolate from whence it came, grainy and decidedly lacking in chocolate flavour.  This didn’t mean the end of my ice cream making though, I was learning valuable lessons: churn more often, don’t use inferior ingredients.  My third and most recent foray into ice cream making has been the most successful.  At the Farmer’s Market last week Dad and I bought some white peaches.  They seem to be a trend lately as we’d been hearing about them on quite a few cooking shows.  August’s issue of Bon Appetit is also full of peach recipes so I had no shortage of ideas on what to do with them.  I ended up not using any of the recipes I had already seen and instead invented some gelato.  We were all out of cream and I had no intentions of going anywhere to buy some, (in my battle against making superfluous trips to town, I think I’m finally starting to win) so gelato was an easy choice as we had plenty of milk in the fridge.  The peaches became quite ripe before I had gotten around to doing anything with them and I realized that if I didn’t use them almost immediately I would lose my chance.  Into the blender went the peaches (pitted and peeled), with some milk, sugar, fresh picked raspberries, (I had gone berry picking with Mom) and grated ginger for a nice kick.  From the blender the mixture went into the ice cream machine and then the freezer.  I remembered to churn this one often and the results were great.  The gelato is a rich raspberry colour and each of the flavours are easily distinguishable while at the same time complementary.  Forget the normal flavours, experimenting with new flavours is where it’s at.  I’m coming up with all sorts of ideas for future flavours, (and am open to suggestions) but my next ice cream will have to be cherry because it will be for Mom’s birthday.  After that, all bets are off.

I decided to make foccacia tonight.  I had been thinking about it for a while and when I was at the Farmer’s market on Tuesday I got some feta and roasted red pepper spread that I thought would be a suitable topping.  The recipe I found was for the bread machine.  It was a garlic foccacia, and that sounded good to me except I decided to substitute one cup of whole wheat flour for one of the cups of white flour.  This usually isn’t that big of a deal.  However, I have a reoccurring problem with our bread machine- All of the recipes I find for bread machines generally conclude with “add ingredients as per manufacturer’s instructions”.  That’s all well and good for someone who still has the manufacturer’s instructions or for someone who read them at some point, but neither of those describe my current situation.  This means that every time I use the bread machine I wonder if things are going to turn out the way I want them to.  In general, they haven’t and I’m beginning to suspect that I should do some searching for the bread machine manual or just resume making bread the old fashioned way, without a machine.  Some mistakes however, are not due to a faulty recipe or a lack of manufacturer’s instructions but just straight up human error.  I threw all of the ingredients in the bread machine on the dough cycle and hoped for the best.  When the machine beeped at the end of the dough cycle, I took it out, put it on a floured surface, as I had been instructed to do and attempted to shape it into two rectangles.  I was supposed to then let the dough rise and bake it on a stone in the oven.  When I turned it out my dough seemed a little dense, there didn’t appear to be enough of it to form two rectangles.  This was a little odd, but stranger things have happened, I decided shapes didn’t matter and formed one big circle then put it on a pizza tray to rise.  I returned to my dough some time later, expecting it to have risen and to be ready to pop into the oven.  It was sitting on the tray, just as flat as I’d left it.  Hmm.  Not impressed.  Maybe it was the substitution of whole wheat flour that was the problem, sometimes whole wheat flour takes longer to rise.  I decided to leave it a little while longer.  When I came back to check on my dough, this time determined to put it in the long ago pre-heated oven, it was still flat as a pancake.  Maybe it would rise in the oven?  I put it in.  When the buzzer went off I looked in at my slightly inflated, (though by no means risen) “foccacia,” it was still pale and didn’t seem to have any colour to it.  I decided it wasn’t done and left it in.  I did this two more times before deciding that I was just going to garnish it the way it was, hopefully the addition of feta spread and olives would save it.  I was so annoyed with the thing at this point that I didn’t even want to try it.  Mom eventually took care of that for me and sliced into the flat bread.  It was dense and chewy, the opposite of foccacia.  I still couldn’t figure out what exactly the problem had been but was beginning to think that it couldn’t possibly be me, it must be the lack of manufacturer’s instructions.  I thought that I must be missing one key piece of information.  Dad walked into the kitchen and provided me with that missing piece of information.  He took one look at my flattened foccacia and announced “There’s no yeast in that.”  Sure enough, Dad was right.  I’m an idiot and forgot to add the yeast.  Sometimes you just can’t win. 

Summer means the arrival of lots of readily available, fresh local fruit, the best of which could very well be cherries.  I may be slightly biased in this regard as I have spent every cherry season of my entire life in my Grandparents cherry orchard, picking, sorting and selling cherries.  This is where I have been for the past week, sorting through basket after basket of cherries, removing the bad ones, eating the best ones and putting the good ones into baskets for customers.  The orchard is small and family run.  There are 34 trees which produce a variety of Bing cherries (the big, sweet, dark ones) as well as 3 trees of Oxhearts and Victors (a semi-sweet white cherry with a touch of pink, some people think they’re sour, those people are not cherry connoisseurs).  The pickers begin as early as sun rise to avoid the heat and are usually finished by lunch time.  Since I wasn’t picking I got to sleep into about 6:30am, when I would get up, have breakfast (I enjoyed fresh raspberries on my cereal because they’re in season too) and then start sorting.  Sorting cherries requires both an eye and a feel for bad cherries.  There are a number of clues that give away a bad cherry in a bunch.  Juice on your hands is a clear sign that something’s wrong.  If a cherry feels soft, there’s reason to suspect foul play.  Missing stems are simply a reason to pop it in your mouth because without the stem the life span of a cherry decreases dramatically.  These are some of the reasons for a cherry not to make it into a customer’s basket, but a split should not be one of them.  A cherry split that has dried is perfectly edible.  In fact, the splits are some of the sweetest cherries there are.  A split has occurred for one of 2 reasons, both of which have to do with rain.  A very heavy rain can cause cherries to split from sheer impact, cherries are delicate after all, (which reminds me- DON’T squeeze cherries and then tell me they’re soft, they weren’t soft until you squeezed them, don’t do it).  The second reason is that the cherries have soaked up the rain from the roots and have become so swollen and juicy that they’ve split their skin.  After the rain clears and the cherries are dried up, some of them will have splits and although they may not be as pretty as their peers, the garbage is definitely not where they should end up.  Many people are not aware of this and complain when they see a split in a basket, now that you’re enlightened on the issue embrace the split cherry and quit complaining about it.  So, back to my day of sorting and selling… If there were cherries leftover from the day before I would sort them first and then move onto the incoming baskets.  We never sold cherries that were more than a day old.  Being the cherry snob that I am, I rarely eat cherries that have been off the tree for more than 24 hours, and certainly never eat cherries that come from the grocery store and have been sitting on a truck for God only knows how long...  The only exception to the 24 hour rule are the frozen cherries that I snack on in the winter, but I put them into the freezer within 24 hours of being off the tree.  The reason for my cherry snobbery is simple: I’ve tasted the best and I won’t lower my standards to eat sub-par cherries.  Plucked straight off the branch, cherries are firmer, crunchier and have better flavour than anything else.  They taste great in both desserts and main courses, but I must confess that although I have good intentions they rarely last long enough for me to turn them into anything.  This year I froze a bunch of the white cherries to make into jam one day when I’m bored, you don’t see cherry jam around enough.  I’m also tempted to make a cherry yogurt cake like the rhubarb one I made a while ago and I’ve already made a pie.  Cherries are amazing in pies all on their own or with other fruit.  The one I whipped up was cherry-raspberry-strawberry, all fresh picked.  It was summer in a pie.  Dessert wasn’t the only thing I was making, but not everything involved cherries.  I volunteered to cook dinner for the family every night as this let me escape the tediousness of sorting for a few hours.  I was cooking dinners for a bigger group than I usually do.  The number of people ranged from 8 to 15 depending on the night.  The ‘go big or go home’ mentality was quite useful in this situation.  I made lasagna, (ginger and spinach are nice additions) pork tenderloin, (dry rubbed and then done on the bbq) green salads every night (with lettuce, raspberries and parsley fresh from the garden) tabbouleh, (my Grandma never quite got the name right) ribs, (clearly my dad had a hand in this one, we used a recipe from the latest Food & Drink magazine from the LCBO) Asian chicken stirfry (with soba noodles), a bbq’d roast, (more experimenting with dry rubs) salmon (marinated in soy and maple syrup) and a heap of other side dishes and appetizers.  Cherry season however, did not allow for time to write about any of this.  After my break to cook dinner I would return to the stand, sorting and selling cherries until 9pm when I was exhausted and ready for bed.  But it’s tradition, and summer wouldn’t be the same without cherry season.  The first night that I was back home I was missing the cherries already and sautéed turkey breast with a cherry and balsamic vinegar sauce.  Fruit and meat are an excellent combination and summer’s the ideal time to test out new pairings.  Eat fresh, eat local, eat well.