Wild Blueberry Sauce, Or Jam, Or Pie Filling

I bought “jam” blueberries from Jean-Talon market. They were the cheapest wild blueberries I’ve seen in the city - $7 for about as many cups. None of this crazy $35 a basket business. I come from Newfoundland where you go out and pick your own gosh-darn blueberries. You maybe buy blueberries from the man who comes door to door selling them. Or maybe you buy the local ones at the grocery store to top up your own jam or frozen berry supply, but you don't go spending a fortunate on them.

So these were the only blueberries I bought this year. I will not bankrupt myself for the sake of over-priced fruit.

I’ve also grown up on blueberry pie. It’s nothing special. Homemade crust-making is in my blood. So that’s the last thing I wanted to do with my blueberries. Oh, “jam” berries just meant the berries were a little over-ripe, or should be used right away, so they were cheaper. They were just fine, though. Not even squished. So I washed them, froze about half, stuck some of the firm, less-ripe ones in my fridge to eat fresh on salads or yogurt or cereal, and put the rest in a saucepan on the stove with about 2 tablespoons of sugar, a few tablespoons of water, and a cinnamon stick.

I brought the pot to a simmer over medium heat, and then reduced the heat to medium-low for about 25 minutes, stirring occasionally to make sure they didn’t burn. Next time I think I’d do this in the slow-cooker with way more berries so I could cook them longer at a lower temperature and get more of the cinnamon flavour into the berries.

After the 25 minutes I added a few tablespoons of lemon juice (succo di limone – bottled, not fresh, but still good. I’d been disappointed in my organic lemons lately. They seemed too sweet. I’d had to use way too much fresh lemon juice to make things lemon-y). Just add it to taste. I like it a bit more sour because it brings out the flavour of the berries. Wild berries are usually naturally more sour, but these were both sweet and flavourful – a rarity.

This “sauce” is perfect on its own – eat with a spoon…or you can serve it over ice cream, yogurt or on sponge cake, angel food cake, any white cake, or cheesecake. I also think it’d be great on a rich fillet (lamb, beef, venison, bison, or even pork). It’d even be okay with chicken and very good with fish – trout, char, salmon or even white fish such as swordfish or halibut. Ooh! Scallops! But don't expect to taste much of the fish if you're heavy-handed with the sauce.

Pancakes or crepes! Crème caramel…panna cotta, chocolate cake…zabaglione. Toast, bagels, croissants, French toast. It basically is jam, after all, just without the fridge life. There’s a world of possibilities.

So go to Jean-Talon, and find the vendor on the south side of the fresh market stalls selling jamming blueberries (the small berries in the plastic containers), I think across from Au Pain Doré or Frites Alors. Take them carefully home without getting them more squished. They’re good for making jam because you would squish them anyway as the first step in the jam process, but they’re just fine for pies, or anything cooked, and I like them fresh too. The saucepan mixture also makes a great pie filling, so you can put it into a pre-baked pie shell, or add a little flour or cornstarch and let the filling cook in the oven in an un-baked pie shell instead of on the stove. I suppose most people love blueberry pie. I'll just have the filling, thanks.

The Other Way I Hurt My Back: Japanese Food!

After the Matsuri Japanese Festival in the Old Port of Montreal where I played big drums and made takoyaki squid balls with other like-minded people, all the volunteers were invited to the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre for an appreciation BBQ. There were hotdogs, yes, but there were lots of leftovers from the festival – mix for takoyaki, okonomiyaki and the accessories for Japanese hotdogs.

Someone asked me on a post I wrote where they could find good okonomiyaki. In Montreal, it’s hard, but L’Entoilage was determined to be the best bet, and it’s good quality.  Haven’t been there yet, but their food philosophy is very respectable. A small menu of home-made Japanese food – not just sushi – at an appropriate price. This is not a fastfood joint. I’m convinced it’s better quality than what we made at the Japanese Cultural Centre, but that had to be made en masse for the festival. The pickled ginger probably had some MSG in it, and the sauce that goes on top of the pancake was bottled and probably had some intense forms of sugar. These are things I cross my fingers that L’Entoilage wouldn’t use.

Still, it was fun to learn to make these Japanese street foods. Okonomiyaki is made with a pancake-like batter with tons of cabbage and some other bland but crunchy vegetables. Then you can add thinly sliced meat, a lot of traditional Japanese kewpie mayonnaise sauce and sticky sweet teriyaki-style sauce. The tricky part is flipping the messy thing over on the grill.

The takoyaki are a little more nit-picky. These are squid balls. You pour a pancake-like batter over an oiled, special 12-hole (half-spheres) grill pictured above. Then you stick a diced piece of squid in each, and then scatter some pickled ginger, green onions and tempura bits over the whole grill, not just the holes. Then pour over enough batter to cover the entire grill surface without spilling the batter on the counter.

Then the hard part. Take two chopsticks and drag the batter into each of the holes. It looks like a giant, soupy mess, but slowly, as the batter solidifies it’ll shape itself into the holes. Just keep scraping. Of course this is all done by peering over the oiled grill in poor light. It takes a good few minutes of careful scraping, piling and smoothing to get these into rough balls. Then you use the chopsticks to turn the balls around to squish all the dangling ends of the batter underneath the weight of the ball and to brown the other side. Then you just keep turning until you can pick the balls up with the chopsticks, they're not too mushy, and they're not burned. 

That's the tricky part. If you didn't work fast enough in the scraping step then the bottom of the balls may have burned a little. Then when you turn it it may not cook evenly on the opposite side because some of that batter cooked before you scraped it off the grill. It certainly won't brown evenly, anyway. Sometimes it takes an age for the ball to cook through, and if you scraped slowly, you're just extending the amount of time it's going to take to cook. The trick is to get the (probably) frozen squid piece to cook through. It should have thawed before you put it in there, but if it's still slightly frozen you're pretty screwed, since water will seep out of it and make the takoyaki cook much more slowly...and squishily. That's a word.

So I was straining my neck over the grill for a few hours...long enough to know I never want to work a grill. Or at least to know that it's a luxury to have big fat cooking utensils. None of this small chopstick business. Big chopsticks only...and good lighting...and counters at the proper height...and thawed squid...These are things that are are essential in life. I think that makes it an educational day.

Yellow Watermelon Bliss Massage

Don’t:

1.     Cart a watermelon home in a bag over your shoulder

2.     Cart a cantaloupe home in another bag over your other shoulder

3.     Cart lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers home in another bag in a sack over both shoulders...

…And think that your back is going to be okay. It won’t be okay.

In effect, this was the most expensive watermelon I ever caved and bought. the watermelon itself cost $5, a relative steal for organic fruit, but my back was shot for a week. I think I burst some blood vessels judging by the red splotches on my shoulders, and the cantaloupe wasn’t even very good. 

But the watermelon was incredible. There were even black seeds like all watermelon used to have! It as basically an heirloom watermelon. That’s what I dreamed about (the sweet flavour, not the seeds) while I was getting my first massage in a year.

Bliss Studio is a massage and yoga studio on St-Laurent south of Mont-Royal. I’ve had maybe four massages there. Really, the best thing about it the studio offers standard therapeutic massages, but they also offer shiatsu, reflexology, reiki, Thai yoga massage, hot stone massage, four-hand therapeutic massage, etc. They have a legion of practitioners that come in on different days and even if you call last minute you usually have a choice of massage type or massage therapist. I’ve had some hits and some misses here, but this time I knew I just wanted someone to beat the heck out of my back. So shiatsu it was.

Really it’s nice just walking into Bliss Studio. There’s a wonderful feeling of calm. Way too much money later you should feel relaxed and bruised. Next time I will not buy a watermelon without bringing my granny grocery cart. The massage was long enough to allow me to come to this conclusion. As wonderful as it was, this will not be a regular event.Yellow watermelon will, however, hopefully be a regular part of my life.

Anniversary Honeywine

It was exactly one year ago today that I posted my first recipe story. That was 187 posts ago, not including my posts at Interculturiosity and Midnight Poutine. I made my own birthday cake from Alice Medrich's Chocolate and the Art of the Low-Fat Dessert. Made = messed up but it was still delicious. This is the story of my life. This year I asked my aunt for rice pudding instead of birthday cake because it's gluten-free (for her sake) and dairy-free (for both our sakes). We didn't stick any candles in it and I didn't make a wish, but it was completely delicious. She, of course, made it perfectly.

After 1 year, these are the cakes rules I've learned but obviously still don't put into practice:

1) Room temperature butter
2) Real sugar unless it gets melted
3) Soft peaks happen before you think, get stiff quickly, and then go limp long before you would have hoped or expected. Thus egg whites, like life, can be very disappointing

Also exactly one year ago I went to the 18th Century marketplace in Montreal's Old Port and bought my first honeywine. I took it and soaked and glazed a sweet loaf in it. So in honour of a year of blogging I decided to go back to the marketplace and find the same wine.

I know I can actually buy this blueberry honeywine at the Marche des Saveurs at Jean-Talon market year-round, but that wouldn't be honouring the anniversary. I went and found the same vendor, tried the raspberry honeywine, the blueberry honeywine, and the cassis (blackcurrant) honeywine, and decided I didn't want to make the same recipe after all. That's not as fun. So I went with the gold medal winning cassis. The blueberry was better, but ah well.

My granola-making genius recipe-giver gave me the recipe for a lemon coffee cake she made as a bundt cake for a dinner party once. The cake was absolutely to die for. I figured I'd skip the lemon and use the cassis honeywine instead. I'd kind of put the two recipes together. Yeah, that was a disaster. Seems that one year has not made me a better baker.

I used a gluten-free flour mix, which would have been fine, except I used a sugar replacer (xylitol) that doesn't cream. I bought fresh Quebec butter for the occasion, trying oh so hard to not mess this up.

I creamed the butter until it was pale and then added the fake sugar. It seemed fine. Then I separated the eggs and added the yolks, patiently, one at a time as instructed. Then you're supposed to add the lemon juice, so I added the honeywine instead. The batter just didn't come together. It was lumpy. the butter hadn't been at room temperature. That was problem one. Then sugar didn't dissolve in it. That was problem two. I know better. I'm just stubborn.

In a separate bowl I combined the flour, baking powder and baking soda, and then I cleaned the beaters and whipped the egg whites to stiff peaks with the salt. I couldn't find the stiff peaks stage. They kind of got soft and then seemed like they were hardening and then just softened up again. So many women deal with this, I know, but I'm unforgiving. There was really no way to beat them again. So I gave up and just tried my best to follow the rest of the instructions.

Unfortunately once you mess up the creaming and the beating there's really no hope. I added the flour to the butter mixture and it became kind of tough and chunky. Then I had to fold in the sad egg whites. Hopeless. Completely hopeless. There ended up being little pockets of egg whites in the batter. I tried to salvage it by squishing the egg whites a little. This sucks all the air out of them (if there was anything left to suck out of them after the over-beating). I used my hands to massage the egg white pockets into the batter. Maybe that was better than stirring the air out.

I couldn't put enough love into those egg whites to keep them from giving up on life. I will never be a paramedic or a lifeguard.

I preheated the oven, stuck the pitiful dough into a loaf pan and resigned myself to bad loaf. Fortunately I could drink the open cassis honeywine to soothe my spirits. Then I remembered it wasn't great honeywine and I didn't really want to drink it by itself...not my day, apparently.

45 minutes later I had loaf...sort of. I got it out of its pan and a bunch of the topping crumbled off. It was kind of the consistency of properly kneaded uncooked, unextruded pasta...very much not a cake. I made a liquor soak of honeywine and sugar (the fake kind of sugar again that melts just fine, at least) and poured it over the loaf on a cooling rack over a plate. The plate catches the excess liquor and then you pour it back over the loaf again until it's all gone. That was fine.

Then I made the glaze, a simple mixture of honeywine and icing sugar. I brushed it all over the crumbling loaf. Again, fine.

You know what? It actually looked okay. It tasted weird because the egg didn't incorporate well, but it was just fine. I'd serve it with tea (or sweetened honeywine), or smother it in jam (blackcurrant). I destroyed the texture but there was nothing really wrong with it.

The moral of this story is that it's good to know that I started this blog with the intent of telling all my recipe stories - both the successes and the disasters - and I stuck with it. If I'd actually gotten better would I be as interested in continuing? Sometimes the mistakes are more entertaining than the successes. I'm no genius cook or baker, but I'll always have something to write about (and eat) as long as I keep trying different recipes...and maybe, just maybe someone who reads this won't make my mistakes.

Zucchini and Tomatillos Cooked In Chilies

I'm a big believer in using what you have. What I had was a pot in which I'd just made the most delicious chile sauce. The pot still held the remnants of the sauce and I hate wasting a delicious thing. I wanted every last bit of heat. So I quickly chopped some zucchini and diced some tomatillos. I figured the zucchini might be weird but the tangy sweetness of the tomatillos would be amazing. In general I think spicy fruit is highly underrated. Think Thai mango and papaya salads. They are heavenly. Sweet and spicy go together. If you can add sour and salty to that then all the better, and there was a little salt in the chili sauce and a little natural sourness in the tomatillos. Perfect.

So I deglazed the pot with a half cup of water and lightly boiled the tomatillos and zucchini. Then they became both a hamburger condiment and a salad ingredient. The salad needed a little more sour from some vinegar, as well as some oil to mute the heat, but it worked. It worked better on the hamburger though, because it was pretty pungent...

What's wrong with Toronto? Do they not believe in good tomatoes? I went to St. Lawrence market, my mecca of beautiful food, and bought a very inexpensive container of tomatillos. I figured they'd be just as good as the ones I'd been having in Quebec. Nope. They were junk. They were sour and either too soft or too hard, picked too early from the branches. I roasted them and they never got sweeter. The complexity of taste I'd come to expect was lacking. I wasted $2.00 that I'll never get back, but more importantly my respect for this little shop in St. Lawrence market that carries my favourite Pinehedge yogurt and kefirs, Niagara Foods, is much less.

Anyway, if you don't want to make the chile sauce recipe you can still recreate this effect for the purposes of creating a great hamburger condiment (much better than ketchup and pickles) by boiling a little water with a sprinkle of salt, sugar, a dash of vinegar and some crushed chilies or cayenne or other chile powder to taste. If it doesn't work out, though, don't blame me. Blame the chile powder. Then add some sliced zucchini and diced tomatillos (they can even be a little under-ripe since they're getting cooked). Cook about 5 minutes at a simmer and then drain the pot or remove them with a slotted spoon. Done.

Another great hamburger seasoning is grilled or broiled or baked tomatillo. Stick the whole tomatillo (or 3) in the oven or toaster oven at 400 Fahrenheit and let it cook until it's a little soft of the skin breaks. This generally gets rid of some of the tang and you'll end up with a very sweet hamburger topping. That is, unless you buy your tomatillos in Toronto. I challenge you to find a good tomatillo there. Maybe from an organic market? The roasted tomatillos (when ripe) are also great with rice, kind of like Middle Eastern traditions squeeze a regular grilled tomato over their cooked basmati for flavour.

Ode To Vietnamese Chili Garlic Sauce

Just giving you a heads-up that this is not going to rhyme. I'm not that poetic.

There are two condiments I cannot live without: Dijon mustard and chili paste/sauce (you start to think of it in terms of being a sauce when you use it as liberally as I do).

I'm more than a little obsessed. I can go through a jam-jar sized amount of chili paste in a few weeks. Partly out of practicality because I sometimes don't know how long it'll take to go bad since the recycled jars weren't sterilized first, and partly out of addiction. Don't get me wrong, I hate the overwhelming "I want to die" kind of heat that happens when you eat too much, but I absolutely love the flavour of the chilies. So it's not so much the burn I'm going for, but the way the burn combines with the flavour and the way the paste combines with my meal.

I have a new favourite Vietnamese website - VietWorldKitchen. This woman is a good resource for all food things Vietnamese. She does a bit of fusion, but the classics are there. She's my go-to gal for pho info and I would trust her word blindly on dumplings and bun. Everything is authentic. So when I saw a few recipes for chili sauces I got a little giddy. I had just finished my last bottle of pickled chilies and had been turned off tomato-based sauces since a disappointing experience with the Wasselton chili paste from McGill's Organic Campus. Not that it was bad, but it just wasnt pure chili. I was craving some sweet heat and this was going to be it!

Basically, I'd been considering hot sauces for a few weeks and then when I went to the Mile End market last week I bought a huge bag of fresh chilies. The conversation went something like this:

"Do you have any hot peppers?" ("les piments forts" in French = "strong" peppers)
"Yes." The man turns around to get a bag. He starts taking some out.
"I'll take them all."
The man stops. He looks at me. He looks at the bag. I smile encouragingly.

$6 later I had at least three batches worth of peppers. This was a good idea I picked up from VietWorldKitchen. Buy a whole bunch so if one recipe isn't stupendous, you can try another. It's hard to find organic red chilies in Montreal. Really this is supposed to be made with red chilies that look like jalapenos, so shorter, rounder-edged ones, but I have absolutely no idea what these ones were. That's very dangerous when making a chili sauce because each pepper's heat can be completely different. Fortunately I like to live dangerously with pepper heat, and I can always adjust flavours later. You can also just use less of the stuff if it's hotter, or add a little more sugar or vinegar.

So I stuck my bag of chilies into my backpack, slung my purchased whole watermelon in a bag over my left shoulder and my canteloupe over my right and marched the 10 minutes to the metro, made the 25 minute trip to my stop and then marched the 7 minutes home. I had deep red marks in my shoulders but I had chilies and fruit. All in all I was a happy girl. What I do for fresh organic produce...

So VietWorldKitchen has a lot of chili sauce options and I plan to make it through all of them. I decided to start with the cooked homemade garlic chili paste. 

Ingredients:

6 ounces of my long, red, hot chilies, stemmed and chopped (you can also use cayennes, fresnos, habaneros, jalapeno, long, serrano, Thai, or a combination, but good luck figuring out which is which. Often the vendors don't even know. They're all just "chilies")
4 cloves garlic, chopped

1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tbsp sugar (I used a sugar substitute, xylitol, because the sugar here doesn't really need to act like a preservative like it does in jams or other canned goods, I think.
1 1/2 tbsp brown rice vinegar (the recipe actually calls for distilled white vinegar but I figured I didn't want to go buy that and this would just add a little sweetness and flavour. I think it did)

All you do is stick everything in the blender and don't over-blend it. You want it to be kind of rough and a little chunky. The recipe says to take a whiff, but make sure you follow the American fish wafting instructions and use your hand to move the smell of the chilies toward your face. Don't stick your face right over the contents of the blender or you may be crying for awhile. Or sneezing, or coughing, or swearing at me. The wafted smell should be enough to make you tear up a little or sweat.

Taste and adjust the flavor by adding extra salt or sugar. (You can stop here and you've made the raw version of this, but I like the cooked version because it reduces the heat a little and emphasizes the flavour of the chilies). 

Transfer the blender contents to a small saucepan, bring it to a boil over medium heat, then reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer for about 5 minutes, or until it no longer smells raw (again, fish wafting technique). Remove from the heat and set aside to cool. Transfer to a jar, let cool, and store in the refrigerator. Makes about 2/3 cup and lasts a few months. Unless you're me.

It makes the best ketchup...

Be careful, though, because it's really not ketchup.

 

"Heartsmart Cooking": Multigrain Yogurt Bread

I'm currently obsessed with the sourdough bread from the Plateau Sunday Market. This is not it. This is the bread I turned into quasi-hamburger buns for my last post. It's still pretty great.

It's at the point where I want to ask "Son Boulanger" from "La Perle et Son Boulanger" at the market for some of his sourdough starter to make my own version of his magnificent bread. Making starter is a three-day process I will soon embark on, but the other day I wanted bread and it was Friday, and that's two whole days before Sunday. What's a girl to do?

Yes, I could go to Première Moisson where the bread is also amazing (but not quite as amazing) and buy a loaf, but that felt like cheating on my "boulanger", even if he does belong to the Pearl. So I made my own. There's something really nice about making your own bread. The kneading, the patience to let it rise, the baking...I was mostly convinced when I found a recipe that called for yogurt since I need to use up my kilogram of yogurt by the time I leave for Toronto this Friday.

So practicality and desire came together in the form of multigrain bread.

1 cup buckwheat flakes (or rolled oats. I just happen to have buckwheat because I'm like that)
1/2 cup cornmeal
1 1/2 cups boiling water
2 tbsp honey
1 1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp olive oil
1/2 tsp ground fennel seeds (or anise. Is there a difference? There must be, but I don't know it. If you don't like the black licorice flavour, skip it)
2 tsp cane sugar
1/2 cup warm water
2 packages dry yeast
2 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups all-purpose flour (I used 4 cups of whole wheat, which is bad, but probably better than trying to use my latest gluten-free flour blend)
1/2 cup wheat bran or oat bran (or a mix of both)
Water and salt to glaze (or egg)

Plus honey and jam and things to serve (above: blueberry honey and apple butter), or toast the bread for hamburger buns.

This was just plain fun. It took forever, but I had the time.

I combined the buckwheat oats and cornmeal in a large bowl and stirred in the water, salt, oil, honey and ground fennel (I even ground my whole fennel seeds in my mortar and pestle. Yes, that was a little self pat on the back...but I so wish I had a coffee grinder. I live down the road from Canadian Tire but I'm stubbornly waiting to find one at a yard sale for even less. Apparently when Quebecers move they take their coffee grinders with them. They'll leave a brand new DVD player, expensive appliances, pots, pans, and juicers, but a grinder goes with them.

Then I set the mixture aside to let it cool for 20 minutes while I worked with the yeast.

I had one package of dry yeast and one package of dry instant yeast. These are not the same things. You add the instant yeast to dry ingredients, not to warm water, but the non-instant yeast needs to froth and bubble in warmth for 10 minutes. I also messed this step up. You're supposed to dissolve the sugar in the water first, then sprinkle the yeast over top. I added the sugar last and stirred it in. I didn't know if it was okay to stir the yeast but then I saw a TV show later that instructed you to do just that anyway. I breathed easier. What I don't know about bread could fill a book. Unfortunately, no one would buy it.

My yeast bubbled up, though, merrily. It got frothy and kept popping up like gnocchi out of the water, except the result looked like the top of a cappuccino, not pasta. Both are Italian, so both are good.

In the 10 minutes this whole bubbling thing took I mixed the whole wheat flour with the wheat bran and the instant yeast. It really didn't take 10 minutes, though, so I did some thumb-twiddling while I was at it.

Then I stirred the frothy yeast and added it to the buckwheat-cornmeal mixture. I plopped in the cup of yogurt and the whole wheat flour mixture and stirred it gently together. It was supposed to get to the point where it didn't stick to my hands, but that didn't happen. So I added a bit more flour...and it almost happened...I kind of sort of tried to knead for 10 minutes, but that didn't really happen either since it was all sticking to my hands.

Well...

I put the dough in my big oiled bowl and covered it with plastic wrap. Into the oven on the lowest possible heat with the door slightly open for 1 1/2 hours. It doubled! Miracle of miracles it actually doubled in size like it was supposed to! Usually bread only needs one package of yeast so the two packages must have been working well.

So to thank it for doubling I punched it down. I divided it in half and put one in a loaf pan and one onto a baking sheet to make a country loaf like I'd recently seen someone much better at bread than me do. The pans were lightly oiled too, just like they were supposed to be. Now that my bread had risen I didn't want to mess anything else up and ruin my good luck.

I covered it again with plastic wrap (loosely) and it let it rise for an hour.

It actually rose again! It was going to be voluminous bread! But then when I took the plastic wrap off and brushed with the glaze it started deflating. Oh no! The oven was preheating since the bread had been in there only at low to rise. What do I do? What COULD I do? Cry a little inside was about all.

When the oven preheated to 400 I put in the loaves and baked for about 45 minutes, until the centre of the bread registered 190 Fahrenheit on a meat thermometre. It was funny...my thinner baking sheet  loaf didn't cook as fast as my loaf pan loaf for some reason. The loaf pan temperature shot up on my meat thermometre but the country-style loaf took its time and even needed an extra 5 minutes. I have no idea how this is possible. Well, I took the breads out, let them cool, and enjoyed the wonderful whole wheat chew of Première Moisson flour in my under-risen but still delicious, homemade bread.

No one is going to complain about this bread.