Category: Food

Over the last couple of weeks, I have started to bake bread. It started with a resolution to pack a lunch, which I have not done consistently since University. It brings back memories of Men into Space (see also the Wikipedia entry) and the lunch box I carried to grade school. I was not consistently eating the bread I bought at the supermarkets. The slices are light, suited for toast, not necessarily for hearty sandwiches.
Jean Paré’s “Company’s Coming” cookbooks are becoming like Louis L’Amour’s gunslinger romances. They are sold in grocery stores, kitchen ware stores and hardware stores like Canadian Tire more than in regular bookstores. Most of the books are bound in with plastic combs or coils, which means the books lay flat on a counter – a huge convenience in my opinion. I had a couple already and found them handy, and simple. More on that another time. Her books are being released in a new printing and I leafed through a copy of the 38th printing Muffins and More, the third book in the original series, which was first released in July 1983. The emphasis in the title should be the “and More” because it has recipes for bread, fruit and flavoured bread, buns and rolls, as well as muffins.
Her recipes all use baking powder and baking soda, rather than yeast. This means mixing dry ingredients and wet ingredients, pouring it into a baking pan and baking. This avoids the kneading and rising involved in baking a yeasted bread. The results are good in my experience. The wheat bread is good, the raisin bread is very good. My first impression is that the chemical leaveners have sodium, and bread most recipes for yeast bread suggest using salt.
The Paré book is good enough, but there are other options. I found the new edition of the Tassajara Bread Book to be quite useful, with detailed instructions and good illustrations of a process that was unfamiliar to me (I swallowed my indifference to the Zen proselytizing to read the book). The results are good, but there is a lot of time and a fair amount of work involved in kneading and triple rising. It works well on a morning devoted to chores or reading, where I can work around the requirements of coming back to the loaf several times over several hours.
There is no clear financial advantage or disadvantage. A 2 kg bag of flour runs around $5.00 and can produce about 5-6 loaves, but the cost of other ingredients, energy and hardware has to be taken into account. If you buy larger bags of flour, there are savings. The bread, if one avoids the pitfalls of the process, is worthwhile.

This may not be a great discovery, but it worked for me. I haven’t had good results with making my own pizza on a pre-made pizza shell. The topping usually doesn’t taste right. I don’t like frozen pizza because they use a lot some synthetic flavourings including a garlic oil on the crust, but I keep a few in the freezer for those days when I am too tired to cook anything else.
Last week I tried to make a pizza from scratch using a frozen shell, plain canned tomato sauce, and tuna, black olives, capers and grated parmesan cheese. I spread the sauce on the pizza shell and then sprinkled marjoram, oregan, and dried powdered garlic on the sauce. Then I put the flaked tuna on. Then I took a fork and stirred the topping before adding the other ingredients. It turned out much better than my past efforts. I think in my past efforts, I just sprinkled the herbs onto the sauce, and they dried out. Stirring the herbs into the sauce makes a difference. I am not sure, but other times I have used Italian seasoning which is a blend including marjoram, basil, thyme, savory, sage, oregano and other spices. I think basil tends to be overdone in many factory sauces and it may be overdone, at least for my tastes, in Italian seasoning. This pizza came out very nicely.

Pasta and sauce is a good meal. There are many pre-mixed pasta sauces for sale, packaged in jars, cans and pouches – and the sauces aren’t often either bland or overseasoned. They tend to be sweet and heavy on basil and sweet-smelling herbs.

I found a recipe in the Winnipeg Folk Festival Cook book that pointed the way to making a good homemade sauce. It takes a few minutes chopping vegetables and cooking the raw ingredients – but it’s easy and worthwhile

I followed – and played with – Pierre Guerin’s recipe for clam sauce.
It calls for a can of baby clams. I used the 284 ml/10 oz size. It calls for a can of tomato sauce. I used a 398 ml (14 oz) can and a 213 ml (7.5 oz). I think a 14 oz can would be ok, but I was able to simmer this for a while to get a thick sauce. It calls for a medium onion and 2 cloves of garlic. A large onion doesn’t hurt, and 2 cloves of garlic is too bland. Use 4-6. The onions and garlic should be chopped fine, and sautéed in light oil in a large skillet. When the onions are soft, add the clams. Drain the clams first, rinsing them doesn’t hurt. Cook for a few more minutes. Add the tomato sauce. At this point I added a cup of red wine. The recipe called for unstated amounts of oregano, black pepper and parsley. One teaspoon of oregano is good. Parsley is not meant to be eaten, but it seems to be a standard ingredient. I skipped it. I thought a touch of basil wouldn’t hurt – a quarter teaspoon, and a quarter teaspoon of tarragon. I went heavy on the pepper. I use peppercorns in a grater, and I was liberal with both black and mixed peppercorns, perhaps half a teaspoon each – which may be a little intense. Also, a tablespoon or two of grated parmesan. Guerin also suggested a little sugar to cut the acidity of the tomatos. I thought the basil, tarragon and wine did fine. If I hadn’t used the wine, it would have been an idea.

Simmer on low heat, stirring occasionally. Relax. Have a beer. Heat the water for pasta slowly. Clam sauce is good on linguine noodles. Clam sauce is supposed to be eaten fresh, not refrigerated for too long.

Guerin’s notes suggested the recipe works as a Bolognese sauce with 300-500 grams of lean ground beef instead of clams. He suggested adding the beef to the onions as in the clam recipe above. A different idea – if you don’t mind an extra pan to wash – is to brown the beef in a separate skillet, and remove it with a slotted spoon and add it to the onions and garlic. That leaves some fat behind. However, it also makes for a less robust dish. Bolognese is a tomato and meat sauce, good on spaghetti. Choices, choices.

Claire had been making a similiar dish with spicy Italian sausage – a fresh sausage we get at our local supermarket. She starts with onions and garlic and adds sausage chunks. She uses a can of diced tomatos and a small can of tomato sauce. I think she uses some oregano, but she lets the sausage supply the other spices.

I haven’t tried to cost out the ingredients for these sauces against packaged sauces. It’s not expensive – onions, garlic, tomato sauce, and clams/ground beef/sausage/etc. If you have a good chef’s knife and washable cutting board, it’s pretty easy. It cooks in short stages, and there is time to to do other chores or read as it simmers. it’s hard to go wrong, and you can get something you really like instead of someone else’s idea of Italian.
The Folk Festival cookbook is fun. There are a few recipes from the cooks who prepare the meals for the volunteers just for information, like borscht for 1,500. There some interesting regional dishes and some delightful eccentricities. Queen Ida’s Poulet Gumbo (Queen Ida is a Zydeco musician from Louisiana). Stan Roger’s Hot mustard (start with 3 jars of Keens’ and add Tabasco, cayenne, garlic and Madras curry.) Spotted Dick with Hard Sauce? Visions of Russell Crowe as Jack Aubrey. The less of two weevils.

On Saturday I made a low calorie vegetarian lasagna, and it turned out very well – tasty and filling. I took the recipe from the Canadian Living 2005 Crockpot Cooking special issue, and I adapted it.

It has to be made in a larger oval crock. It uses 12 no-cook or oven-ready noodles; the noodles need to be snapped at the ends to fit in the pot. After making the sauces, it cooks in about 3 hours. Give yourself an hour and half to chop and process vegetables, grate cheeses, and to cook or mix the 2 sauces. It makes 8 servings. The recipe notes say it would be about 370 calories per serving. I added some cheese so lets say 400 grams per serving. It uses whole containers of ingredients which is convenient. No half cans of stuff sitting around, nothing wasted. There is a cold cheese sauce, a hot tomato mushroom sauce, and a topping.

The cold cheese sauce is made by mixing these ingredients in a bowl:

• 1 500 gram tub of low fat cottage cheese (The recipe suggested 2% but 1% should work. However 1% isn’t that much lighter than 2%).
• 1/4 cup (50-60 ml) grated parmesan cheese.
• 1/2 cup to 1 cup (125 t0 250 ml) grated mozzarella cheese.
• 1 egg, beaten.
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg (grated.
• 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper (or more to taste).
• (The recipe also says 1/4 teaspoon salt but I skipped the salt as I always do).
• 1 package (10 oz or 300 grams) frozen chopped spinach, thawed and drained.

The hot tomato mushroom sauce is made with a large onion or a couple of medium onions, 5 or 6 cloves of garlic, a carrot, 4 cups of sliced mushrooms, some dried spices, and one 700 ml jar of any basic off-the-shelf pasta sauce. The onion should be chopped. The carrot should be finely diced. The garlic should be minced. The mushrooms should be washed and sliced. The next step involves a saucepan big enough to hold the vegetables and the sauce. Heat some vegetable oil in the saucepan and sauté the onion, garlic, carrots and mushrooms with dried spices over medium heat until the onions mushrooms cook down. They give up their water at first, and the water steams off. This should take 8-10 minutes.

The main spice is 2 teaspoons of Italian seasoning. (Italian seasoning is a mixture of Marjoram, Thyme, Rosemary, Savory, Sage, Oregano, and Basil. I don’t know the proportions. If I didn’t have Italian seasoning on the shelf I would use 1/2 tsp Marjoram, 1/2 tsp Thyme, and 1/4 tsp each of Rosemary, Savory, Sage, Oregano, and Basil). The other spices are 1/4 teaspoon black pepper, ground, and a pinch of hot pepper flakes. The recipe said a pinch but I used a healthy pinch. more like a quarter teaspoon.

When the vegetables have cooked down, add the pasta sauce and 1 and 1/2 cups (375 ml) of water. Stir to mix, then heat until the mixture boils.
Fill the crockpot in layers, from the bottom up:

• One cup of tomato sauce – fill the bottom of the pot.
• Three noodles.
• A layer of spinach-cheese mix – half of the bowl.
• Three noodles.
• A layer of tomato sauce – half of what’s left in the pan.
• Three noodles.
• A layer of spinach-cheese – the rest of the bowl.
• One last layer of 3 noodles.
• The rest of the tomato sauce on top.

Then sprinkle a cup or a cup and a half of grated mozzarella (the printed recipe also suggests provolone) cheese on top, cover, and cook for three hours on low. The cheese will melt but it won’t bake. You can tell it’s done if you can poke a knife or fork down into the noodles and they are nicely soft.

A little positive news. My weight has been going up over the winter. I have been going through a reality check around diet and exercise over the last several weeks. I have made some changes, and I am starting to notice the results.

Continue reading “Weight Check”

After Steve’s comments on my last entry (Portion Advice) about Weightwatcher points, I looked at the labels on a few 355 ml (12 oz) beverage cans. The Safeway house brand root beer and regular cola have 162 and 161 calories per can, respectively. Diet Coke has 2 calories per can. Schweppe’s diet ginger ale, 0 calories. Schweppes Tonic Water – 130 calories. Canada Dry Tonic – not marked. Presidents Choice Brew (0.5 percent beer) is 65 calories per can. I have some regular beer in the house, but beer labels don’t have nutritional data. I dug up some information.

Continue reading “Canned Drinks”

Yesterday I wrote about portion sizes, complaining that good nutritional information tends to be published alongside luxuriously unhealthy recipes and other consumption-oriented material. On Wednesday the Free Press basically turns its Life and Entertaiment section into a Food section, with articles about cooking, recipes and a wine column. Today, I found an article out of the Canadian Press covering the start of Nutrition Month – March is Nutrition month for the Dieticians of Canada. This year they are emphasizing portion size.

Continue reading “Portions Advice”

This won’t be a stunning insight for many people. I knew it in an abstract way, but I haven’t made a serious effort to live with it. If I, as an adult, am gaining weight in spite of regular exercise, I am eating too much. I eat too much because I eat what I buy or cook, and I am buying and serving large portions.

Continue reading “Portions”

The first recipe I tried in the 2005 Canadian Living Slow Cooker cooking special was a success. I adapted it a bit, mainly in spicing and preparation. It makes about 6 good servings. It’s a simple beef vegetable stew.

Continue reading “February Beef Stew”

Canadian Living Magazine just had a special issue of slow cooker recipes. Canadian Living is a regular monthly publication with recipes, and articles on cooking, decorating and the domestic arts. I usually ignore the regular issues, although I guess it would be ok for a middle-aged metrosexual to browse. Canadian Living also publishes several cookbook specials every year. The cover on this one advertised that it had 135 slow cooker recipes, and tips and tricks, and when I flipped through it, there were several interesting recipes.

Continue reading “Magazine Recipes”