It was a dark and nutty night....

Another big storm is headed our way today. Already a tens of thousands of people are without power on the Rusty Island and mainland. Yesterday, power flickered on and off all day here, threatening us with a blackout but I called it’s bluff and we remained juiced up. I don’t think I ought to push it. It’s a bit odd that we haven’t lost our power in this old house during these past wind storms when everyone we know has been dining by candlelight. Especially since we often lose electricity if a bird flies too close to our power lines.

Yesterday we had a glimmer of sun and even a 7-lane highway rainbow fill the sky. And you know what they say, ‘Make candy when the sun shines.’

I’ve been wanting to make peanut brittle. It’s a tradition for this time of year for me. Unfortunately, it’s been way too humid to be making it. Usually you want humidity to be under 60% to make a good hard candy. We’ve been hovering around 100% for the last several weeks. The extra moisture in the air can be reabsorbed by the cooling candy and leave you with a soggy brittle.

Yesterday, the humidity reading reached the low 70s and I figured that that’s probably as low as it’s going to get. I pulled out my candy thermometer and made a batch of spicy peanut brittle. The power sputtered a few times but it didn’t seem to affect the final product.

The spice came from a ¼ teaspoon of red chili pepper flakes I added. It’s got a nice afterglow to it. I think I’m going to have to make a feistier version and a molasses brittle with local hazelnuts. I’ll keep you posted.

I was also going to do some baking but with the power hiccupping back and forth I decided against it. Instead, DH and I headed over to Westwood Lake to take advantage of the relatively dry weather. The 6km trail around the lake has a nice mix of hills and few wooden bridges and boardwalks and as is picturesque as it gets.

We often use the trail for running. Well, DH goes for a run. I go for a run/brisk walk/skip/puddle jump. I figure as long as I clock in an average of 50 or so minutes for each 6km lap, I’m doing ok.

The wind was bellowing across the forest. The lake was huge with whitecaps and the trails were strewn with windfall. The rain came and twirled about. It certainly made for a dramatic jaunt. I love being in the forest when it rains. At least, when I’m not carrying a heavy backpack and I have a hot shower and cup of tea waiting for me at home.

We had invited our friends, Karin and Dave, over for dinner. In exchange for dinner, Dave fixed our dining room light and was DH’s PS2 date for the evening while Karin and I had a knitting session. We also had our usual last minute drop-in guest. With 5 mouths to feed and a questionable power supply, I opted for another quick and easy stir-fry noodles dish. This time I did noodles in a Thai peanut sauce. I had some leftover Chinese BBQ pork, a ton of local veggies and Japanese buckwheat noodles. I spent 10 minutes of playing human food processor to turn the veggies into a pile of slaw. My veggies consisted of chayote, cabbage, carrots, onions, mushrooms, bean sprouts and red pepper. Simply stir fry those and the BBQ pork, as in the Singapore chow mai recipe. While that was going, I boiled up some water for the buckwheat noodles. The noodles took only a few minutes to cook up. As soon as they were done, I dumped in with the stir-fried veggies. The sauce was my Thai It Up sauce with a dollop of organic peanut butter. A sprinkle of peanuts and it was done.

The sauce was a balanced melding of the rich peanut butter, countered with the sour, savory, spicy kick of the Thai It Up sauce. The buckwheat noodles have a nutty taste that echoes the nutty sauce. It was simple bowl of comfort food with a twist.

Along with the noodles, I put out a jar of homemade spicy pickled carrots that I had canned in the summer. The carrots were locally grown baby Dutch carrots. I can’t remember which farm I got them from but they’re super sweet and don’t get very big. They’re great for canning because you don’t need to peel or cut them. Simply wash them really well and they’re good to go.

We finished off our meal with tea, homemade fruit crisp made with locally grown Jonagold, Northern Spy and Belle du Boskoop apples, Anjou pears and cranberries and some of that spicy peanut brittle. A sweet and nutty ending to a sweet and nutty day!

Happy Eating!

Jen

Cat paparazzi

From this last weekend:

Kev got bored watching the Liberal leadership election and decided to play cat paparazzi. Poor Spike just went down for a cat nap and next thing you know, a large monkey-being corners him with a bright, flashing light.

Yesterday was one another cold, rusty weather day. Here’s what we had for lunch to combat the cold and damp.

A good-old fashion noodle soup with the leftover moose sausage and cabbage. I used Chinese shrimp noodles (haw jee mein). I was raise on these noodles. In fact, when the coroner cuts into me, he’ll find that my right leg is composed of shrimp noodles in the place of muscle and bone. They cook up super-fast and aren’t deep-fried like ramen. It was a basic dump everything into a pot of water and season with some of my Thai It Up seasoning. Don’t bother cutting the noodles. Half the fun is slurping the never ending tail of noodles. You have to eat this piping hot. I have a feeling we’re going to be having many more bowls of noodle soup in the coming months.

Last night, we were invited over to Karin & Dave's, for dinner. Karin made a wonderful Thai dinner with coconut-lemongrass soup with chicken and mushrooms and a star anise spiced pork and rice noodles. They picked up the pork from Shady Mile's freezer. They get much of their meats from farmers in that area. With a local white wine and an local apple and sour cherry version of the same pastry I made of the weekend, it was a fine feed. Thanks guys!

Most of yesterday was spent dreaming and scheming a design for my mum-in-law’s sweater. Over the weekend, she handed over a bouquet of Noro Silk Garden yarn for me to work with. Sigh. I’m in heaven.

The photo doesn’t do the yarn justice. With Noro yarns the colours flow nicely from one to the next. The colours also don’t change with as much frequency as other multi-coloured yarns. This allows for some very interesting design potentials and colourways. I used Noro for the kimono-shrug-wrap.

One could knit a basic sweater in stockinette with this yarn and it’ll look fine. IMHO, if I wanted a sweater like everyone else’s, I’d buy one at the mall & I do have a stack of generic mall sweaters. But if I’m going to create something, then it warrants intention and mindful energy. To make it not just to get it over and done with but to produce something with awareness of the yarn, as well as awareness of who is going to be wearing it. This is especially so when you get to play with lovely Noro yarn and have the opportunity to make something for someone that you love.

This is not to say that I never do things in stockinette. Some yarns look best as in stockinette and take on the appearance of a rich fabric. Some yarns are so blinged out with eyelashes and intrusions and bobbles that stockinette and garter are probably all you want to do with it.

Making a simple stockinette sweater would also have me bored to tears. I don’t know how other knitters do it. Some even do it on circular needles so it’s like a gzillion knit stitches over and over and over and over again. I’d be in a comatose state before I’d finish. I haven’t quite embraced the throne of simplicity to that extent.

The thing with a yarn like Noro is that you don’t want a pattern that is too overwhelming. I’ve been playing around with ideas on how to bring out the uniqueness of this yarn. I even picked up a couple of pattern and motif books by Kathleen Kinder and Barbara G. Walker from the library. I spent a couple of hours simply browsing through the books daydreaming of all the historical knitwear examples (including the knitted vest that Charles I supposedly was executed in) and different patterns before hunkering down and doodling through some ideas.

I know, the obvious thing would be to pick up a Noro pattern book. That would be way to logical for me ;)

I swatched a couple of aran designs and even did a stockinette swatch to get an idea of my gauge. I’m evening considering doing some fair isle work. So far, the yarn hasn’t been too warm to any of my ideas. Maybe today, it’ll be a more responsive.

Enjoy!

Jen

Thai one on

I finally got around to freezing the 15 pounds of tomatoes I got from Gary Argyle’s farm this past weekend. Of course, now I had to find room for 15 pounds of tomatoes in our tiny chest freezer. In order to make more real estate, I pulled out a few odds and ends to be made into dinner including some corn (from McNab’s farm) and a few meatballs leftover from a Frikadeller dinner a few weeks back, a couple cups of beef stock and a block of Pete’s organic extra firm tofu. Tofu freezes beautifully and can be thawed either at room temperature or immersed in boiling water. Just make sure to press out the excess water. The tofu takes on a meatier texture after being frozen.

The possibilities are endless, especially with a vat of ready-to-go roasted veggies at my disposal. I could have done a stew or a tomato based chowder. I could have done a funky Ma Po Tofu or a miso-marinated stirfry. I could have done a savoury risotto with corn & tomato salsa. Or just toss the stock back into the freezer and used the rest of the ingredients as the base for a super-simple pasta.

I was still savoring last night’s noodle dish and wanted something warm and comforting. So I decided on my Thai One On noodle soup. Here’s the Fast & Dirty directions for soup:

3-4 oz rice sticks

5 meatballs – quartered

1 heaping teaspoon minced ginger

1 garlic clove- minced

1 green onion/scallion chopped

3 cup cilantro chopped

2-3 oz of extra firm tofu – pressed and cubed

2 cups roasted veggies

½ cup frozen corn

2-3 tomatoes chopped into chunks

2-3 cups diluted beef broth. Basically 2 part broth to 1 part water. Veggie or chicken broth would be fine. Use low-sodium if you’re using pre-fab.

2 tablespoon fish sauce

½ teaspoon sambel oelek

2 kaffir lime leaves minced fine – use fresh or frozen

juice of ½ lime

couple shots of sesame seed oil

peanut or veg. oil

Topping options – chopped cilantro/parsley/scallions, shredded carrots, fresh thai basil, lime wedges, shredded egg omelet/scramble egg, bean sprouts, dry roasted peanuts or any other nuts or seeds

Soak rice sticks in boiling water. Cover and set aside. Once soft, drain and rinse in cold water. Set aside.

In a wok, heat up the oil over high heat. Dump in meatballs, ginger, garlic, cilantro, scallions. Stir fry for a few minutes. Take a moment and inhale the wonderful aromatics.

Dump in tofu and let that brown a bit. Dump in roasted veggies, tomatoes, corn, beef broth, fish sauce, sambel oelek and lime leaves. Bring to a boil and lower to a simmer for 10 mins.

Finish off with the lime juice and the sesame seed oil.

Arrange noodles in bowls and top with the piping hot soup. Garnish as desired. I just had some lime slices on the side just in case folks wanted a larger slap of citrus.

So good on a cold fall night. This is one of my favorite soups. I love the beautiful, robust flavours of Thai cooking. I often keep a small jar of 'Thai It Up' sauce in my fridge. Here's the fast & dirty recipe for that:
1/3 cup fish sauce
1/3 cup lime juice
1/3 cup rice vinegar
1 teaspoon organic cane sugar or honey
1 thumb of ginger grated
1-2 garlic cloves crushed
2-3 kaffir lime leaves minced fine
1/8 teaspoon sambel oelek (you can use more if you want)
a couple shots of sesame seed oil

Dump everything into a jar and store in the fridge for up to a month. Shake before using.

You can use in absolutely everythng ;)
You can add it a simple brothy soup, drizzle it over scrambled eggs, use it as seasoning for a stirfry, add a spoonful to fish congee with lots and lots of cilantro, use it as a dipping sauce for gyozas/potstickers or dimsum (so good with har gow and sui mai), dump it over cellophane noodles and let marinate overnight for the best noodle salad or use it as a slaw dressing.


Speaking of slaw, (look Kev, a segue) for our first course I made a quick asian slaw with gomashio dressing. As mentioned before, gomashio is one of those items that is usually grossly overpriced when bought already made. Along with the fact that it will start going rancid as soon as it’s made, it’s just absurd to be paying $6 for something that really only costs 25 cents and 3 minutes to make. Just toast up a couple spoonfuls of black sesame seeds in a dry pan over medium heat until you smell the toasted sesame seed goodness. Then with a good pinch of sea salt and pound in a mortar & pestle for a few seconds or toss into spice/coffee grinder and pulse a couple times.

Here’s my Fast & Dirty Asian Slaw & Gomashio Dressing recipe:

In the bowl that you’re going to serve the salad in dump in (because you don't really need more dishes to do):

2 tablespoons rice vinegar – just eyeball it

½ teaspoon honey – I used a wonderful local wildflower honey

1 tablespoons gomashio

Mix until the honey has dissolved.

Then add in (again eyeball it because it would be stupid to actually measure this out):

1 cup finely shredded cabbage – pretty much any type of cabbage will do. I’m still working my way through a red cabbage.

½ cup carrots- sliced fine

½ cup English cucumber sliced fine

Toss and let sit while you prepare the rest of dinner. You could let the veggies marinated overnight too.

We had our usual last minute, drop-in dinner guest show up and the above recipe was enough to feed me and two grown men.

Of course, all the veggies and the meat from the meatballs are from local farms. Dinner itself took less than 30 minutes to make. You can play around with the vegetable and meat options for the noodle soup. Use whatever leftover meats or seafood you have on hand. It's a great way to use up leftover baked salmon. Just add right it to the soup at the very end so it does get too fishy. Or use tofu, tempeh & /or beans like chickpeas . Instead of rice sticks, you could use udon or egg noodles but I like rice sticks best with this soup. The veggie alternatives are pretty much whatever you can find. Again, leftover veggies do well in this soup. If you really want to go super-deluxe, you could even toss in dumplings.

Enjoy!
Jen

Nanaimo's 100 Mile Diet Challenge

Please pardon the mess...

What do you expect from someone who decided to start a new blog just days before Elf Hunting season begins?? So the house is a minor catastrophe. How the heck did my knitting crap get all over the freaking place and how come last week I couldn't find a single yarn needle and today there's a colony of them that have taken the coasters as hostages??

I can explain. I've been making 'Happy Birthday Jesus!' gifts all weekend. This year it's brittle. Partly because I love brittle and so if I love it then everybody else loves its. Dems the rules. Also because I had pretty much all the ingredients and my bank account is a bit barren.

I made pumpkin & sesame seed molasses brittle, plain ole peanut brittle, spicy pecan brittle and an almond toffee. Miracles of miracles, there's actually some left for gifts.

So the kitchen got a bit messy and then I had to bake bread yesterday. It was supposed to only be a bread morning but it ended up being a bread day. All day and into the night. I made 3 loaves of walnut-kamut, 3 loaves of seed & multigrain, 2 loaves of fruit-anise seed bread and a patridge in a pear tree. But it was neccessary. We were completely out of bread. Nada, not a crumb. I didn't know what to sop my soup up with. I mean, I make soup just so I can sop it up with bread. We cannot soup without sopping!

Somehow a relaxed morning of making a few loaves of bread ended up turning the house into a Atkin's Dieter's nightmare. Not that I'm complaining. It's just that by the time I pulled the last of the bread out of the oven, my DH called and said he was on his way home and I realized that a whole day had already risen and baked! I hadn't even had a shower yet!

I pampered myself with half a loaf of walnut-kamut bread accompanied with a good couple knobs of butter and a thick slice of real Derbyshire cheese.

Dinner was a spicy pork & eggplant Thai-sort-of soup and walnut bread. I just browned a pound of lean ground pork, then threw in the last of a batch of roasted eggplant, a few sliced mushrooms, carrots, onions, a smacked loonie of ginger, a couple of cloves of garlic . A couple glugs of chinese cooking wine, a couple healthy jizzes of fish sauce, a spoonful of sambal oelek, a few szechuan peppercorns were added once everything was cooked up. I added enough boiling water into the pot to cover the ingredients plus and inch and let it simmer for 10 mins. If I had them, I would've added some scallions and some lemongrass. Cilantro wouldn've been nice too.

I also had a bag of brussel sprouts and a few stalks of gai lan than were close to their due date. Those I cut up and sauteed with some chopped garlic. Upon serving, I just added the greens ontop of the soup.

This morning I breakfasted on the seed and multigrain bread and a couple slices of parmigiano reggiano. There's something so satisfying about bread and cheese. Especially if the bread is homemade and the cheese is good, honest cheese. I buy my parmigiano in chunks no bigger than my fist. If you only enjoy parmigiano in the grated form then do yourself a favor and cut yourself a slice. It's the only way you can get the full-mouth experience of parmigiano reggiano. A good chunk will have these amazing naturally formed salt crystals that crackle as you bite into them. The taste is earthy and sexy. Like the unadulterated sweat of a Roman slave boy...oh, sorry, got carried away. Anyways, it's really good.

I supposed this makes me a parmigiano snob. If you want to use that dessicated cat puke in those green containers that is being sold as 'Grated Parmesan Cheese' on your jarred pasta sauce, go right ahead. I mean that chunky ketchup backwash could probably be improved by the horse musk aroma of that processed lactose atrocity. But if you're going to go through the trouble of making a homemade sauce then why do you want to slap it across the face and spit into it's mouth? I know, it's expensive but think of it this way: You've gone through the expense and time of making a homemade sauce, a good couple shavings of parmigiano regianno will help your sauce bloom into a savoury blessing. Well at least it won't make it taste like cat puke!

So today I'll clean up. I'll even put up a couple of curtains and sequester my knitting crap to only one corner of the living room. Maybe I'll even have time to take a shower before the DH comes home. A girl can dream can't she?