better late than never!

New spring layout, ladies! (Thanks to Sam for the flowers! The bread is Everyday Oat Bread from SouleMama's book, Rhythm of the Family.)

In other news: I made cat pizzas with gluten-free squash pancakes. I thought they were really yummy. My boys disagreed. Oh well! More for me!

Greek = Better, Baby

         Today is Greek Independence Day!

         Απ’ τα κόκκαλα βγαλμένη

των Ελλήνων τα ιερά,

και σαν πρώτα ανδρειωμένη,

χαίρε, ω χαίρε, Ελευθεριά

We sing special songs in Church, light candles and pray in memory of those who fought for the right to call themselves free (I was struck, writing this, at how we are united across the world by this fight). And then there is a big parade downtown. Lots of flags, traditional music, and people dancing in the streets, its a joy to see!

my (second) cousins, dressed in traditional regalia

And one of the best things about being greek? Loukoumades. Greek honey balls, or doughnuts. Just saying the word makes me drool. Little balls of fried sweet dough drenched in honey, cinnamon, and sesame seeds = best dessert in the world. And from what I understand, they eat it every day as part of their breakfast over in the motherland. How awesome is that??? And because I love you guys so much, I will share this most secret recipe (that Im sure you can find hundreds of variation to online lol) and hope it puts you in the mood to shout OPA!

Ingredients
180 g all purpose flour
100 gr whole wheat flour
1 cup milk

2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon of dry yeast
Vegetable oil for frying
Honey
Cinnamon

Sesame Seeds


Directions

Heat the milk slightly, just to get it warm and dissolve sugar and salt in it. Add yeast and stir with a spoon. Slowly add the flour and continue stirring.

Preheat the oven just for a minute and turn it off. Cover the bowl with a towel and let it rise inside the oven for an hour.The dough will rise and draw bubbles on the surface.

Use a pan and heat the oil over medium heat. There must be plenty of oil because we are going to deep fry the donuts. When the oil is heated, we use a wet spoon to get some dough and we use another wet spoon to slide the dough into the oil. The secret for this recipe is that you have to turn around the donuts frequently and you must not fill the pot with too many donuts. Just few at a time. 

When they golden brown, remove them and let them drain on a paper towel. Transfer the donuts to a plate, shake some cinnamon, and drizzle with warm honey. Add some sesame seeds and serve (or eat the whole thing yourself)!



lately in the kitchen

soup served in bread bowls (it looks good in pictures but really, each bowl was way too much for us to eat!)


making blueberry-coconut chutney - dried blueberries, soaked 24h (I bought them at the Bulk Barn as a snack for Ambrose, but about 30% tasted strongly of curry - ew! not nice for a snack - delicious in chutney), a handful unsweetened coconut, an onion, some garlic, crushed chilli peppers, salt, and kefir whey to ferment.



hot Italian sausage-stuffed stromboli (with carrot, leek, mushrooms and rosemary, sprinkled with salt and pepper over an egg yolk glaze)... so good...



St. Joseph's day was yesterday! We had minestrone with garlic bread (pictured above) with cream puffs for dessert - basically eclair puffs, but with a filling of ricotta, yogurt, sugar, hazlenuts, grated chocolate, and vanilla instead of vanilla custard folded with whipped cream like normal eclairs have. They were yummy but I prefer the custard, oh well!


My God-son's cracker, celery and garlic bread creation...


canning leftover minestrone in 500 mL portions.


making ginger bug for ginger ale - you can see that the bug (center) is bubbly and frothy, this was taken around day 3. Weirdly, it died after that :( Not sure why this happens sometimes. I will start again tonight and let the water sit overnight - hopefully allowing the chlorine to evaporate will give it an extra healthy edge? The failure really puzzled me, though... it's the same brands and quantities I always use... weird!


Cream cheese and butter with whole wheat pastry flour was the winner! Pictured here in galette-ish form with a vanilla drizzle, stuffed with sour cherry jam, cottage cheese, and fresh green apples. They were da bomb! Recipe forthcoming.

Sharing

I just wanted to share this blog post I found, the pictures are absolutely superb in that grainy old-school quality, and the spirit of sharing and working together just seems to smack of The Leek Geeks. I almost got teary when I read through that post because of all it seemed to encompass with a few words and images. LOVE!

I also have to ask for help, I received a huge bag of honey roasted soya beans a few weeks ago and have been eating them in a million ways. Do you guys have any recipes or ways to incorporate them? Im at a loss of what to do with them, I still have a liter and 250 ml jars left! If nothing else, I can give some to whoever wants them, because I just ate enough to last me a gooood long while!

Pain Dore aux Bananes

When I was younger, french toast (pain dore rather) was a treat we only got maybe once every month or two, and always on Sundays. My mother didn't mess around with all the fancy versions and did a straight-up, old-school white bread dipped in egg drenched in syrup type of french toast, and that was the way we loved it. Now, as an adult, I've been experimenting and tasting a ton of different styles of french toast: peanut butter and jelly, whole wheat honey, stuffed cream cheese and strawberries, maple glazed, you name it, its been made. And probably tastes delicious. But this, to me, is my all time favorite winner of the french toast category. Et ca adonne, because I always have either frozen banana bread, or 20 frozen bananas in my freezer, waiting to be made into bread.

This is the banana bread recipe that I found worked best with french toast. The result is a much lighter and fluffier bread than usual, a bit more like a cake than the typically dense bread. This recipe is something that I reserve exclusively for french toast, because it is far from my usual recipe (think brown sugar, whole wheat flour, roasted bananas and roasted pecans).

Ingredients
1/4 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 cup mashed bananas (that's about 3 medium, for me)
1 egg
2.5 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup buttermilk

Preparation
1.	In a large bowl, beat the butter into a creamy texture.
2.	Add sugar and mashed bananas. Mix well.
3.	Add the egg and continue mixing. Mix dry ingredients separately.
4.	Slowly incorporate the dry ingredients with small amounts of buttermilk until all ingredients are combined.
5.	Pour into a greased and floured 9 x 5 loaf pan
6.	Bake at 350ºF (180ºC) for approximately 60 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean in the middle. Now that you have made your banana bread, its time to make it into french toast. Half a loaf is more than enough for two people, so when I freeze this, I cut it into two. Make sure it is completely defrosted before making it. Egg Mixture (for 5 slices/2 people) 2 eggs 1 tsp of honey (warm it up for 10 seconds) 1.5 tsp of cinnamon splash of milk Mix that all together in a bowl. Next melt some butter in a pan. When that is done, dip the bread into the egg mixture, giving it a couple seconds on each side to make sure it is really soaking, and fry in the pan until golden on each side. When I'm feeling whimsical or when I'm serving this to guests, I sprinkle with cinnamon sugar or powdered sugar, and slice strawberries and fresh bananas in a pattern on the top. Serve with maple syrup. And ladies, please, do yourselves and your taste buds a favor and go with real 100% pure maple syrup. None of that Aunt Jemima crap. It really is worth it. Felt too lazy to do the pattern thing.

flour tortillas

This is my normal tortilla recipe - from the Joy of Cooking. But I wanted to poke around online a bit for something else... while it's worked fine in the past, it calls for lard, and I never have lard, so I always go through this confused "butter or oil?? butter or oil??" conundrum when I want to make them (yes, my life is hard).

So I found this recipe - I love this blogger: "I am so in love with these tortillas that I found myself just staring at them with a silly grin plastered on my face, amazed at what I had made. My friends think I’m a little nuts for my obsession, and maybe I am, but who cares? It may have taken me many years, but at last I have cooked homemade flour tortillas I am pleased and proud to not only eat myself but to share with the world." LOL hahahhha. Don't you love her? She sounds like a Leek Geek at heart.

Will be making them shortly to go with these lentil tacos - I'm pleased at the prospect because as long as I've been buying lentils (about 10 years now!) I've stuck to red, because they cook so fast, but I decided to branch out and get green. They are slower, but hold their shape better when cooked, and have a bit of a different flavour. I'm also eager to see how they compare to TVP tacos and tofu tacos. The goodness is simmering on the stove right at this moment (I'll be out most of the afternoon so I want to have supper ready to slap together when we get home!).

What is your tortilla recipe?

Canning apple pie filling

Me and apples go way back. My mother has made croustade aux pommes (apple crisp) since I can remember, and apple picking was a yearly field trip for us, where we came back with so many bags, we just knew we were going to eat delicious apple-themed meals for the next couple of weeks. The first thing that I made for Jeff (my husband) was an apple pie, and he later proposed to me in an empty apple tree field. The smell of apples filled the church when we were married. In short, I love apples.

And I especially love apple pie. I feel like an old-school 1950's wife, baking a pie for her husband, and for me that is an awesome feeling. But sometimes its hard to take the time to make a pie from scratch, and I am the first to admit that canned pie filling is quite convenient. But I would never ever eat a pie made with a filling bought in the stores because a) they taste so gross and b) theyre ingredient list is quite frightening. So here I am, trying to make the perfect apple pie filling that I can can (I love doing that). Here is what I have come to so far.

Here are some basic explanation for canning, if you don't know how to do so.

First, you need about 6.5 lbs of apples. Don't go by the number of apples, because size is subjective. Peel them apples (and don't worry about it if there is a little peel left, its no biggie. I have a friend who actually makes her entire pies with un-peeled apples, and although texturally different, it was still pretty tasty. And arguably, higher in vitamins) Core them and slice them into desired thickness, for me an eight sliced apple is perfect.

Pack the apples as tight as they fit within a 1ltr jar (or quart jars if you've got American stuff). After you add each apple, shake the jar a little to settle the apples within the space. Leave a whole inch and half of space.

Next comes the syrup making fun. On the stove, wisk 2 cups of white sugar and 2 cups of brown sugar, 3 tsp ground cinnamon, 1/2 tsp nutmeg, 1/4 tsp of cloves, and 1/4 tsp of allspice together. I know the sugar level is scary, but that is why pie is, in my house at least, a special treat. The spices are also high because we like it spicey, but feel free to fine tune both the sugar level and the spices to your own liking. Next, add about 8 cups of hot water and stir until sugar is disolved on low heat. Bring to ebulition, then add 1.5 more cups of water with 3 TBSP of lemon juice, and 1 cup of cornstarch. Stir or whisk quickly. When the cornstarch has been completely incorporated (i.e. no more white) ladle the syrup slowly over the packed apple, and don't forget to leave an inch of headspace!

Warning, this will be a messy step. If your anything like me, you will need to wipe not only the inside rim, but the outside rim and indeed the whole darn jar as well as the counter.

Use a plastic knife (or other non metal instrument) to pop all those silly air bubbles, and this unfortunately makes tons of them so watch out. Process for 20 minutes. And bam, 6 liters of apple pie filling. One jar equals one 8 inch pie. Using this recipe, I personally found that there was a bit too much syrup so I just spooned out a few tablespoons when I upended a jar the next day over a pie plate. I also use this over ice cream, in pancakes, over my yogurt, etc. The possibilities are endless. Enjoy!

I swear I look like this when I cook.

Pastry experiments... Shhh...

It's all very hush-hush right now, but soon I will be sharing the results of my present experiments in whole wheat pastry. As you may recall from my intro post, this is a top culinary fascination of mine right now, but when I first switched from white flour to whole wheat pastry flour I was very, very sad with the results. I used my usual recipe and the resulting dough had no malleability at all; it just tore defiantly and had to be forced into a pitiful semi crumb crust. No roll, no stretch, and certainly no flake.
Breakthrough number one came last week when my friend Katie mentioned on the phone that Good Day For A Picnic, one of her favourite cookbooks, which she also got me a copy of, has a great whole grain recipe that uses yogurt and no water. Amazing! I tried it and it worked!
Breakthrough number two came last weekend at my mom's, when, so well-cared for I didn't have to lift a finger, I started getting itchy fingers and just had to make something- and breakfast was my aim. I remembered a guest bringing a rich dessert bread with a chocolate filling that was intriguingly light and flaky- he'd used yeast, water, sugar, white flour, butter, and cream cheese. So I made us pastries with white flour (the only kind my mom has in the house), butter, and cream cheese, and they were truly the flakiest, loveliest pastries I've ever made.
So to get to the point of my whole grain experiment- you'll soon hear from me the merits of yogurt vs cottage cheese vs cream cheese possibly vs some other cheesey product vis-a-vis workability, taste and texture. Get excited!