French omelette

When it comes to breakfast I usually don't get too fancy. I pretty much just eat toast when it is hot and oatmeal when it is cold, but this morning I felt like an omelette. Fine Cooking magazine had an article on cooking the perfect omelette this month so I was inspired.

I've always thought that eggs are one of the easiest things in the world to mess in up even though they are so simple to make. Most people cook them at high heat which ruins them, in my humble opinion. I like to cook them low and slow, which produces a fabulous texture. My omelette was pretty simple: two eggs, salt and pepper. In the picture you can see a package of applewood smoked ham lurking; it will make an appearance later.

Like all great French inspired endeavours in the kitchen start, I began with a small pat of butter. Please, if you use margarine for cooking, I implore you to see the light and toss it out and go buy some butter (no, I am not being paid off by a bunch of dairy farmers). Seriously though, nothing will produce the taste and flavour that butter does in in food. Anyways, you can see my mostly cooked omelette above. The technique recommended by Fine Cooking requires that you sort of swirl the eggs while shaking the pan to make sure that everything is cooked properly while retaining its shape.

Here is my omelette filled with the aforemention applewood smoked ham and some aged cheddar. The edges broke up a bit so it doesn't have that perfect magazine look, unfortunately.

And here in my breakfast, all nice and prettied up for the camera. As you can see, my meal is accompanied by yet more tomatoes; I have no concerns about getting enough lycopene in my diet. It had been a while since I had made eggs for breakfast. Unfortunately, most mornings just getting out of the house in one piece on my way to work in an accomplishment so cooking is out of the question but for leisurely weekday mornings an omelette is a great way to start your weekend.

Tourtiere a.k.a. Quebec Meat Pie

Ok, gather around boys and girls because today we're making tourtiere. What is tourtiere you ask? Well, the wikipedia answer is here, but it is basically a savoury meat pie. Traditionally you throw whatever meat you had in there but I chose to go with veal, pork and beef. Yes, I love veal, please don't send hate mail as I cannot resist its tastiness. Anyways, back to the pie. As you can see above the crust is butter, flour, salt and cheese. Seriously, how can anything that starts with these ingredients not be good?

Behold the filling. The meat is browned with an onion, some garlic, salt and pepper, parsley and allspice. Broth is then added along with some breadcrumbs so the mixture gets thick and binds together. Like all traditional Quebecois recipes it is very light on the spices, not many of those available back in the day I suppose.

Check out my pie crust with all of the bits of cheese. I let the dough chill for half an hour in the freezer and then rolled it out. After letting the filling cool for a bit I filled the pie.


Isn't my pie pretty? Yes, I am rather fond of this recipe, as I think you can tell.

Alas, the kitchen deities do not like culinary hubris. As you can see below the baked pie looks a wee bit different from the unbaked pie. You see, I had to perform emergency surgery on my pie, as bizarre as that sounds. The filling is supposed to have yet more cheese added in it and I had forgotten to do so. So with much cursing in French and English I attempted to remove the top lid of the pie without disfiguring it too much. Alas, this was not possible after the pie had been crimped and brushed with milk so I had to rip the top lid off, mix in the cheese with the filling and then re-roll the top lid out again. Unfortunately my pie was no longer as pretty as in the first shot and I remembered why I needed to re-read recipes when cooking. If you're wondering this comes from Ricardo. I've linked the recipe, in case you don't read French you could run it through babelfish.


Et Voila, the finished product. I could seriously sit down and eat half the pie in one go because it is just that good. Cheddar cheese was made to go in pie crust. Everytime I make this recipe my only regret is that I didn't make a second one.

Brandied Shrimp

In order to balance the butter and cream in my diet, I do attempt sometimes to make lighter dishes. I decided to make brandied shrimp loosely based on a recipe by Ingrid Hoffman. I say loosely because her recipe involved ketchup. Blech. Unless your shrimp are breaded and fried, ketchup should not be anywhere near them. See that measly little pile of shrimp in the colander? 17 bucks worth of shrimp. Oi! Seafood is expensive in my neck of the woods. Anyways, here are the ingredients:

-Butter
-Olive Oil
-Roasted Garlic (I buy the roasted garlic paste that comes in a little jar. Awesome stuff.)
-Worcestershire Sauce
-Pureed Tomatoes
-Brandy
-Habanero Hot Sauce
-Salt and Pepper
-Tomato Paste

I browned the shrimp in butter, garlic and olive oil along with salt and pepper and added all the other ingredients and let it reduce a bit.


Oops, that picture is a little blurry. Here's a better one:

Overall, a pretty good recipe. It's pretty straightforward but tasty and very fast to put together. One thing I love about shrimp is that they thaw so quickly and you can "creatively" thaw them in water and the texture does not really suffer. If you're the type who often needs to come up with last minute dinner ideas I would really recommend keeping a bag of frozen shrimp in the freezer. Strangely enough, even though I will spend hours cooking I get rather lazy with certain things, i.e. peeling and deveining shrimp. I bless the kind soul who decided to start selling frozen, uncooked, deveined, shelled shrimp and wish many culinary blessings upon them since they've saved me from this aggravating task many times.

Bastardized Empanadas

Being a guy my husband is a big fan of meat, and meat wrapped in puff pastry is even better. One of the things he really likes is my bastardized version of empanadas. Why bastardized you ask? Because they're wrapped in puff pastry instead of actual empanada dough. I like to think of them as my France meets Central America fusion spin on the classic, or at least that's what I like to tell myself.

As you can see above the filling is very simple and man friendly. It's basically

- Four browned italian sausages
- Two hard-boiled eggs
- Half a caramelized onion
- Minced garlic
- Chopped green olives
- Salt, pepper and paprika

The filling is mixed together and then deposited onto the puff pastry to make little parcels. I have to admit, as much as I love baking I loathe, detest and abhor cleaning the mess that it makes. I always manage to get flour all over the floor and since I have a small counter I am always running out of room. If I ever win the lottery, I am running out and buying a house with a bigger kitchen.


The pastries are then brushed with an egg wash and put in the over for half an hour at 350 Fahrenheit. Oooh ahhh, delicious bundles of flaky goodness. I wish I were industrious enough to make them into pretty little round pastries but I just can't be bothered and I hate to waste the scraps of dough that are left over when you cut out circles.


And here are the final results awaiting my hungry husband on his plate. I instructed him to cut his empanada in a neat manner because I wanted to photograph it. This of course got me the "my wife is weird sometimes" look but he held off taking a bite long enough so that I could get photographic evidence of his meal.

Cupcakes

One thing I always try to do is to use up food before it goes bad. Since I had 5 eggs whites left over from the batch of ice cream I made last week I just "had" to make cupcakes. Purely for frugal purposes you understand.

My very nice mother bought me Martha Stewart's cupcake book a month ago. I of course, opened it up and immediately wanted to bake and inhale all of the recipes. Not being blessed with Michael Phelp's metabolism (apparently he has to eat the equivalent of 20 Big Mac combos to keep from losing weight), I decided to bide my time. Since the recipe requires egg whites and I had some on hand I thought it was the perfect opportunity.


I am lucky in that I have central air conditioning so I get to bake the whole summer long. This always elicits weird looks from my co-workers when they find out I made lasagna when it is 35 degrees Celsius outside.

I used Martha Stewart's recipe for chocolate chip cupcakes, minus the chocolate chips. There is not a lot of butter and the batter has whipped egg whites folded in so the cupcakes are extremely light and fluffy.
I did have a problem however, when it came to the icing. I was out of cocoa powder and baking chocolate, oops. Not to be deterred (and I was going to be extremely cranky if I did not get chocolate icing), I decided to invent an icing recipe. I beat together a small amount of butter, some icing sugar, chocolate chips that I melted in the microwave and when all of that was mixed, a few tablespoons of boiling water. The delicious results can be seen above. For the good of my waistline I have had to freeze most of the batch. I should freeze the icing as well because if I have a bad day at work I might be tempted to go to town and eat it all with a spoon.

Birthday cinnamon buns

The husband must be one of the few people on this planet who is indifferent to cake. Shocking, but true, people like this do exist. So instead of making him birthday cake I made him birthday cinnamon buns. Don't worry, they still contain all the prerequisite butter and sugar of a birthday cake. The recipe comes from Ricardo magazine, which sadly, is not published in English anymore but still is in French.

The dough is pretty much like a brioche dough, meaning full of eggs and butter. I love, working with this dough as it rolls out so smoothly and easily. The middle is filled with brown sugar, cinnamon, ground ginger, nutmeg and ground cloves.

I'm always so happy when I cut the log and see the nice swirls.


After they had time to rise nice and big and puffy they were ready to go in the oven.

Et voila, the finished result. They are as good as they look and made my kitchen smell amazing.


Another picture of my creations. This one is a little blurry though, I'm still getting the hang of taking food pictures. The cinnamon buns are soft, sweet and buttery; filled with spices and topped with a straightforward milk glaze. Nothing makes me feel like a good wife like baking from scratch. The husband was very happy with with birthday cinnamon buns and has informed me that they will be his breakfast for the upcoming week.

Home made BBQ sauce chicken and French potato salad

So the weather was finally nice here in Montreal yesterday, so I decided that it was barbeque time. As much as I love fancy food barbequed chicken has got to be one of my favourite foods, especially since we use charcoal, not gas, so it gets all nice and smoky with little charred bits. Yum.

All good barbequed chicken must start with a good sauce. Personally, I like to make my own if I have the time. I have a big problem with grocery store sauces, if you read the label the first ingredient invariably tends to be sugar or corn syrup; as a result most of them taste like pure sugar with a bit of tomato added in. I have a few sauce recipes but yesterday I made the recipe from Jamie at Home by Jamie Oliver. As a lot of home made sauce recipes do, this one called for ketchup as the base. While he is my culinary idol I ignored him and used chili sauce.

Please do try chili sauce. It will change your life. Ok, maybe not quite change your life but you might smack yourself on the forehead and wonder why it took you so long to try it. It's tangier and less sweet than ketchup, I haven't even bought any since I started using chili sauce. (No, I am not being bought off by the Heinz ketchup. I just really, really love this stuff!)


Behold the makings of the sauce. I tried to artfully arrange the different herbs and spices to get a nice picture. There is chili sauce, balsamic vinegar, orange juice, orange zest, fennel, minced garlic, paprika, cayenne pepper, thyme, rosemary and probably a few other things I can't remember. I mixed everything up and marinated the chicken thighs for a few hours.


Mmm. Delicious barbequed chicken. But since the chicken was getting lonely and needed a side dish I made French potato salad from on of Ina Garten's cookbooks. If you hate mayo this is a good choice; I like mayo but am a great fan of potatoes prepared in all manner of ways. It's dead easy to make. Boil your potatoes, cut them in chunks first though. While that's going on, make vinaigrette; I like to use dijon mustard, chicken broth, white wine, white wine vinagar, salt, pepper and whatever herbs I have in hand. When the potatoes are ready drain them, then toss them in the vinaigrette and cover the bowl with plastic wrap so the potatoes have time to soak up all the lovely flavours.

I decided to top my salad off with green onions (they had been lurking at the bottom of my vegetable crisper for a little while) and parsley that I cut from a pot that I have in the back yard.


This was my final lunch plate all put together. Please excuse the sauce on the place mat, I had a slight mishap while serving myself. Lunch was delicious, if I do say so myself. While I always grumble about how long it takes to set up the charcoal barbeque (while looking enviously at my neighbours who just flick a switch on their gas barbeques to turn them on), I am more than happy to eat the tasty results.