Non-Vegetarian Tofu

How To Get A Tofu-Hater To Like Tofu

First, you need to cut it into fairly skinny cube-type shapes. (It = the extra-firm kind.) Season with some salt and pepper and toss into a pan over medium-high heat with some kind of oil (preferably a kind that won't burn at higher temperatures).

Secondly, it is essential that you get a good sear. This means it's going to be frying in the pan for a while, and don't turn the cubes too often! When they start to brown, then the sugars that are naturally present are caramelizing (read: turning delicious). The browner the better, so long as it doesn't burn.


Now: Smother it in a meat-flavoured sauce! Like President's Choice Butter Chicken. Sure, some chickens died to make this meal. But not nearly as many as if you were making the authentic dish.


Now it's time to WOW your tofu-hating friend! And get ready to hear them say, I can't belieive it's not chicken! (Nope: it's just chicken-flavoured non-chicken.) Oh yeah: Serve on a bed of field greens with a side of veggies for extra healthiness bonus points.

No-Name Rolled Oatmeal Cookies

HI COOKIE.


Oh, there's more of you. Hey guys. These dudes came from a recipe on the back of a no-name bag of old-fashioned rolled oats.


I followed it pretty closely, except for the part where I didn't have any granulated sugar, so I replaced it with (almost the same amount of) chopped dates. Between this and a heavy hand with the coconut ribbons, the dough turned out on the dry side.

Tip: If your cookie dough seems too dry, the resulting cookies will most likely be dry.

After the first batch, I added a little water to the remaining dough to make it, well, wetter.


* Best consumed in the company of coworkers, past and present.

Vegetable Lasagne

Sorry about the hiatus. I promise I've been eating. I made sure of that by turning a catching-up-with-friends night into a making-vegetable-lasagne-together night. I'm pretty sure this is the best way to hang out with friends. Everyone should do it, all the time.


Before we get down to work, a moment should be taken to watch the Vegetable Lasagne Seinfeld clip. There you go.


Our recipe comes courtesy of Jackie, complete with important notes -- eg. "Simmer 30 mins., but whatever." It's important to know when you can say whatever to a recipe and still have it turn out.


Delicious cheese sauce preparation: 2 eggs, 1/4 tsp nutmeg, 475 g ricotta, 2 cups shredded mozzarella and 1 cup grated parmesan.


Fresh chopped veggies! The extent of my work this evening was chopping the eggplant and red pepper that I brought, and then consuming a bunch of wine.


Which by the way was one of the wines we picked up on our Okanagan wine tour last summer, a truly exceptional 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon from Burrowing Owl Estate Winery.


Our taster told us the bottle had been aerating for about an hour in a fancy expensive aerating machine, and this helped to soften the tannins and unlock the complex flavours. We didn't have an aerator on hand this time around, so we used a meauring cup and a whisk.


This really seemed to do the trick. Yes those are martini glasses.


Ok, the noodles are GOING IN. Spinach noodles for extra tastiness.


Everything gets layered together.


Here is plateful number one. It's not the most intact-looking lasagne, but it only existed for less than a minute before disappearing into my belly.

Pizza Times Are Now

There are some giant changes ahead for Michelle Meals. As such, I have created a Facebook fan page ( ← there's a link over there to the left) to keep you guys in the loop when those changes happen, so that NO MICHELLE MEALS FAN SHALL BE LEFT BEHIND.

In the meantime however, I've deactivated my personal Facebook account to devote the next while to wrapping my head around computer programming, rather than clicking through photos of strangers on vacation in my spare time. In these busy times, I turn to pizza. (Some things do not change.) A few recent pizzas I have made friends with:


Fantastic fabulous Panagopolis pizza, when I am feeling indulgent and rich -- a Friday night pizza. Recent favourites: Butter Chicken and Veggie Korma pizzas. (That's the latter pictured.) Both amazing.


Not-so-fresh-but-everyone-else-seems-to-love-it Uncle Fatih's pizza. For when I am ON THE GO.


A pizza alternative: Toast, with tomato sauce, two kinds of cheese and basil. For when I am feeling poor yet just happen to have all these ingredients in the fridge. Pizza sauce made by Jay, using tomato paste and a secret blend of spices.


So many frozen pizzas because they were on sale at No Frills, and then I just ate them all at once -- these are a mid-week pizza, and sometimes I'll buy one with pepperoni which sadly means Jay can't have any and I have to eat it all; pizza all night and then more for breakfast. Sigh.

Breadventures

Hello, best bread I have ever made. Just look at your charming crumb! I like you, especially slathered in spinach dip.

Way way back in March last year I went through a brief bread-baking phase, at which time I discovered this YouTube video. Watch it, and I guarantee you will want to bake bread too:


I bought the Tartine Bread book and then was frightened by the chapter-long Basic Country Bread recipe (28 pages!), and that was that.


Ten months later, I finally succeeded in wrapping my brain around this recipe, and my dutch oven gave birth to a beautiful round crusty loaf.


I used the starter that Grace gave me back in the day. Happily, you can ignore the starter at the back of your fridge for months at a time, and it will still refresh if you feed it a few times, and especially if you actually follow the directions that the book tells you (which is: discard all but a tablespoon of starter, and add 200 g warm water and 200 g flour. [You absolutely need a metric scale for this.]).

How do you know if your starter is ready? Drop a spoonful into a bowl of water. If it floats, it's good to go.


Here's one more picture of my bread. He looks like he's wearing a crown. He MAY AS WELL BE, that's how good he is.


I also made some Quick and Buttery Dinner Rolls this week, because of Twitter. I followed a tweet about easy bread recipes and the result was buns for dinner. Amazing how Twitter can change your fate like that. Internet!

I don't necessarily recommend this recipe. I'm not a bread expert, actually I know very little about bread, but I'm going to guess that adding baking powder to bread dough is not the coolest thing to do. But the recipe promised to take ONLY 30 MINUTES so I went with it. (P.S. It lied. Factoring in rising time and extra oven time, it took closer to an hour.) Anyway I wasn't a huge fan of these, but I suppose they were redeemed by the step in the recipe where you pour an entire stick of melted butter on them. Also I have lived off of them for the last two days. That is the problem with baking bread; you end up eating a lot of bread.

The 2012 Menu

I've set a bunch of food goals for myself this year. One is to make macarons! One is to put a dent in the manuscript for my family cookbook (which is proving to take a million years longer than originally planned). And one is to develop a menu for my home, a collection of dishes that are easy to make, that use fairly simple ingredients, and taste really really delicious.

I often find myself throwing together random leftover ingredients (mmm tofu and beans and . . . canned tomatoes and whatever else!) just in order to fuel my way through another weekday night; the results are often edible and just FINE, but. Why not put in a little more effort, memorize a few really good recipes and keep their ingredients on hand to increase overall deliciousness in my life?

I spent a good chunk of last month caramelizing onions for multiple French Onion Soups and Alsatian Onion Tarts; I believe both of these will be making it onto the menu. Another will be this vegetarian curry, and this dish also just made the cut:


Macaroni & Cheese.

Based on a recipe from my cooking class, this starts with:

• butter (about 1 1/2 Tbsp)
• 2 Tbsp chopped onion
• 1/2 rib celery, chopped
• 1/4 cup chopped red pepper
• 1 clove garlic, thinly sliced

Sweat the above ingredients. If you don't have them all, you can substitute other veggies. (This time, I used onion, zucchini and jalapeño pepper.) Oh and start boiling some macaroni. (1 cup? 1 1/2 cups? Somewhere around there.)

Add the seasoning!
• salt
• pepper
• smoked paprika
• cayenne pepper

And then: make the roux.
• 2 Tbsp flour

Make sure the flour is completely mixed in and that the flour flavours get cooked out of it before proceeding with the liquid. Which is:

• 1/4 cup of some kind of alcohol
• 1 1/4 cups milk

Note: the alcohol can be any kind of beer, red or white wine, or vermouth. I used vermouth, since I just keep a bottle of it in the fridge for cooking. (If you have vermouth it keeps better in the fridge; the alcohol content isn't high enough to let it sit around on the counter for months and months)

Note #2: I like to add just a bit of the alcohol at first and mix well as I add more and more, to watch the roux gradually develop. It's because I recently read an essay about sauce in Michael Ruhlman's The Elements of Cooking and it got me really excited about the sauce process. Sauce! Also, let the alcohol cook off a bit before tempering in the milk.

(P.S. Another new year's food resolution: to start paying double the price for creamy organic Avalon Dairy milk, and never look back.)

Also add this:
• pinch of thyme

So, let it simmer a bit, and then temper in the CHEEEEEEEESSSSEEEEE! Cheese.
• 3/4 cups shredded cheese

This can be a mix of any number of flavourful cheeses, depending on how rich you are at the moment. I just used 2 different brands of extra old cheddar this time.


So, once you're happy with the consistency of the sauce and its seasoning (you likely needed to add more salt at some point), pour the macaroni, which by now has been cooked and drained, into a casserole dish, pour in the cheese sauce, mix it around, and sprinkle overtop with panko crumbs and more shredded cheese.


You can now turn on the light in the oven and watch with glee as the panko crust broils to a golden brown.

Food time! Pair with a glass of the beer or wine you used to make it. You should probably eat a salad along with it too. But you probably won't. Wine is made of fruit. And remember those veggies you put in at the beginning. Everything is FINE.

See You Next Year, Delicious Christmas Cookies

Well, it's a New Year, but we're not leaving this holiday behind before we meditate on the Pracinky, a faintly chocolatey, faintly clovey Czech Christmas cookie that looks like a rolling brown mountaintop dusted with snow.

They are a Furbacher classic, and after a series of family emails and recipes tossed back and forth in December (and because my mom gave me her molds), I decided to give them a go this year.

My dad translated his aunt's recipe for this -- ingredients including flour, butter, icing sugar, ground nuts, cocoa, cinnamon and ground cloves.

I thought it was weird to use only icing sugar in the recipe instead of granulated sugar... Some notes from my dad on that subject:

Icing sugar by virtue of its name is over there [in North America] thought about mainly for icings or sprinkling on top of things -- however here [here being the Czech Republic], it is the sugar used for the baking of all fine cookies and pastry. All mothers and grandmothers used it and all recipes call for it. Some bakers even sift it to get the finest powder sugar. I think it blends with flour better. Since there is no liquid, the dough for these cookies is quite tough and it would probably take major effort in kneading to dissolve the rough-textured sugar.

Finally I got a classic family recipe right -- well, almost right. While the cookies tasted great, the raw dough was quite crumbly and hard to work with. It may be a simple matter of using pastry flour instead of all-purpose, or adding a Tbsp more butter to the mix. Once I've perfected it, I'll post it in time for Christmas next year.


Ok, one more special treat: Candy Cane Bark! Bark featuring white chocolate seems to be an easy favourite among my test subjects. My plan this year is to make white chocolate bark for every holiday and special occasion. (Remember this?)


Here is the recipe I used. It consists of: 12 oz white chocolate, 12 oz dark chocolate and 48 mini candy canes. I was concerned about hurting my food processor with the candy canes, so I tried breaking them up with a rolling pin in a plastic bag.


But that soon proved to be taking forever. Plus bits of plastic were starting to break off and candy cane dust was getting everywhere. So I poured it all in the food processor and pulsed it to pieces. No food processors were harmed in the making of this candy cane dust.


So once you have your candy cane dust ready, you melt the dark chocolate in a metal bowl on top of a simmering pot of water.


Pour it onto a wax paper-lined baking sheet and spread it out. Let it solidify in the fridge. Then melt the white chocolate like you did the dark, and mix in 3/4 of the candy cane dust.


Spread the white chocolate mixture over the dark chocolate, and then sprinkle the rest of the candy canes on top. Back in the fridge with the whole lot, and once hardened, break it into small pieces of deliciousness.

Christmas Cookies, Past and Present

Now that you are exploding from holiday baked goods overload, let me tell you all about the Christmas goodies I cooked up this year. It was the first year I actually found time to plan out my Christmas baking.


Sure I've managed to pull something out of the oven every December, but the past few years have been baking failures in one way or another, from the gingerbread man orgy to butchered family classics to bland, tater-tot-like marzipans, to one of my more depressing Christmases, where I over-baked chocolavas alone on Christmas eve while watching a David Lynch movie marathon.

But this year every ingredient magically fell into place in a delicious way. Now I will tell you about some of them.


First of all we have the aptly named Seriously Delicious Chocolate Orange Gingersnaps, from Lisa Slater's The Brownie Lover's Bible. They didn't turn out quite like the picture in the book -- they are extremely thin -- but they are without a doubt the most delicious cookie I have ever made. It's really unfortunate that when you Google what a ginger snap is supposed to look like, you get this. >:[ But Wikipedia tells us the classic ginger snap can be under 3 mm in thickness, so all is well in cookie world.

What is in these babies? SO MANY THINGS: three kinds of ginger (ground, fresh and candied), cocoa, cinnamon, nutmeg, brown sugar, molasses, bitter Seville orange marmalade, vanilla, cacao nibs and bittersweet chocolate chips. Plus all the usual suspects.


It took me so long to assemble these ingredients, that when it came time to chill the dough, I let it sit in the fridge until the next day.


But now here they sit, all rolled up in turbinado sugar and looking like Timbits, ready to be rendered "Seriously Delicious."


Next up: these aren't cookies. They are candy. ALL NATURAL! Except for the sugar. Which is most of the ingredients. Yes, the ingredient list was a lot shorter on this one:

Candied Grapefruit Peel

2 grapefruits, washed
2 1/4 cups granulated sugar (plus extra to coat candy)
Juice of 1/2 lemon


Peel the skin off the grapefruit, then cut into candy-sized strips.


Bring a medium pot of water to a boil and add the peels. Boil for 5 minutes and strain. Rinse and refill the pot with fresh water and bring it to a boil again. Add the peels and boil for another five minutes, then strain. Repeat this process two more times for a total of four pots of boiling fresh water. This blanching process removes the grapefruit's bitter flavour.

Place blanched peels in the pot. Add the sugar, lemon juice and 1 1/2 cups of water. Simmer on medium-low heat until the peels are translucent (about 1 to 1 1/2 hours).

[Actually I took a nap during this time and overslept, making the simmering time about 2 hours. That's why some of the candies in the first photo look a little scorched -- a few stuck to the bottom of the unwatched pot and started to caramelize. Luckily, a caramelized candy does not taste so bad.]


Strain and place peels on a wire rack. Let air-dry for several hours, or overnight.

Fill a shallow bowl with sugar. Roll and press each peel in the sugar until evenly coated. The candy will last at room temperature for a couple weeks.

I made these a while ago and I remember it being much more of an ordeal back then. But, everything was more of an ordeal back then because I was so new to cooking. Now I am totally a seasoned pro.

And, now this post is getting pretty long so I will stop here and post the rest in a couple days.

Alsatian Onion Tart

Making French Onion Soup a couple weeks ago reminded me how fun it is to make an entire meal out of a bag of onions. While cleaning out my fridge and wondering what to do with some ancient vegetable shortening, I remembered the onion tart I learned to make in my French Bistro Classics cooking class.


I made the pastry dough in my food processor using a 3 : 2 : 1 (flour : fat : water) ratio: 2 cups (whole wheat) flour (note: whole wheat: not the tastiest pastry maker in town), 1 cup fat (1/2 cup butter and 1/2 cup vegetable shortening) and 1/2 cup water. Throw in the chunks of cold butter/shortening, fill with the flour, and pulse, while pouring a stream of the water through the hole on top. Do this until it just comes together to form a dough; knead once or twice; wrap in plastic and freeze until you need it.

When you line the tart pan (with removable bottom) with the dough (and no need to butter it; there's enough butter in the dough), it's best to then refrigerate it for a half hour before blind baking (which will be for 15–25 minutes at 400°F).


I docked the dough with fork holes prior to blind baking.


But I didn't do it well enough, evidently.


Fresh sliced onions!


30–45 minutes later: caramelized onions. Once they got going, I had to add drops of water every minute or so to deglaze the bottom of the pot and keep the onions from burning. I used 3 onions for this recipe; next time I'll use 4 or 5. It's amazing how much they shrink.

Once I felt they were sufficiently browned, I sprinkled in 2 Tbsp flour and tempered in 1/3 cup milk (it's possible I should have done this earlier). This was then to be brought to a simmer, then cooled. Though there wasn't quite enough liquid for a visible simmer.


Fill your freshly blind-baked tart shell with the onion mixture, and bake at 350°F for another 10 minutes or so.


BY THE WAY. When you eat a whole bunch of caramelized onions, you need something acidic to cut through the soft sweetness so that it doesn't overwhelm you. I made a tomato onion salad with a simple dressing: olive oil, lime juice, raspberry wine vinegar, dijon mustard and thyme.

I am always forgetting the measurements for making homemade salad dressing. So I will write it here for later reference: 3 Tbsp oil; 1 Tbsp acid (balsamic/red wine vinegar, cider, juice of 1/2 lemon, etc.); 1/2 tsp dijon mustard; honey to taste if needed; herbs, salt & pepper, etc. to taste. The basic equation I learned in cooking class was: 3 parts oil + 1 part acid + Yum (mustard, herbs & spices, frozen fruits, etc.)


There you have it. This meal was brought to you by random ingredients that you probably already have. Just sitting around, waiting to be whipped into onion tart-shape.