Drambuie Hot Toddy

So glad someone else thinks Drambuie makes a great hot toddy. It’s like those instant apple cider pouches you can get but not fake or alcohol-free! Yum.

Faux Crêpes with Fig Jelly and Cottage Cheese

A rework of  Barley ‘n’ Buttermilk Pancakes

(I hate the word ‘lite.’ Brr.)

I made only one change to the recipe: rather than 2 cups of buttermilk I made a 3:1 ratio of water to 10% cream, put two Ts of vinegar in the bottom of a measuring cup and topped it up with the cream/water to the 2 cup mark. Put another way, didn’t have milk, much less buttermilk.
Weird thing: they warn you that the batter will be thicker than what you might be used to. I found it considerably thinner. I whisked out the lumps, reasoning that even if the pancakes are flat they’ll still be good. Ish. After a couple of tests I realized were were nearing crêpe territory. Ok, then.
Crêpes made, I discovered that we were low on butter and maple syrup. So I brought out a jar of fig jelly and smeared one side. Very tasty. Then decided that as 1) fig jelly and brie taste good together and that 2) crêpes sometimes use cottage cheese perhaps crêpes with fig jelly and cottage cheese would work. They did. But they weren’t thin enough to be real crêpes and so I did faux crêpes that resembled faux antojitos and put cottage cheese on the side. (Picture above includes my lame attempt at presentation with icing sugar, not some curds making a break for it.)

Spelt Scones

Doesn’t that sound … healthy? Ech. We’re on a let’s-see-how-flours-other-than-wheat work kick right now but I was turned off when I tried Pizza Nova’s gluten-free crust — it’s just not good. Healthy in all the ways you’re not looking for pizza to be. But I’m at home and Linda agrees that any recipe for Spelt Scones*, as long as they are warm and covered in butter, will work out great. And they were! Two changes: I used brown sugar in place of Sucanat (which I had to look up) and I came up short on the spelt and so needed to top up with barley flour.

*They most certainly do not look like the image on the site itself: 1) There’s no way they can be that white, and 2) the recipe asks for them to be rolled into balls, not cut out. LAZY. Take your own picture!

Kale Restaurant

Wonder whether anyone’s tried out Kale yet? BlogTO seemed to think it was good but not great. How about you?

Was it anything like Commensal, or London UK’s Tibits?

Rasoee order craziness

I order takeout from Rasoee for lunch about once per week. It’s like the McDonald’s of Indian food restaurants. Not great quality but cheap, fast, filling, and addictive.

Today I placed my usual order: vegetarian combo with no naan, to go.

“Is that for here or to go?”

To go.

When my order is up, I see that it’s the vegetarian platter *with* naan, no rice, to eat in. Hm.

“Oh, not what you wanted?”

A few minutes later, I’m presented with a giant brown paper bag containing my order.

“With the extra rice you ordered.”

Ugh.

Gingerbread muffins

We’ve been toying with new ideas for snacks and breakfast. We’ve also been dabbling in alternatives to wheat flour. When you Google “wheat-free recipes” you’re almost guaranteed a few Celiac sites so it’s not surprising to find a recipe for ginger muffins courtesy of Celiac.com. I followed this to the letter as I’d never used soy flour and potato starch before and didn’t want hockey pucks.

Sift together and mix well:
3/4 cup soy flour
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 cup potato starch
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon baking soda

Beat in mixing bowl:
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup melted or soft margarine
1/2 cup molasses
1 well beaten egg

Add sifted dry ingredients. Stir and add 1/4 cup hot water. Then mix well. Pour into well-greased muffin tins. Bake 20 to 25 minutes at 350F.

*

I think they’re too sweet but that’s my complaint about a lot of ginger-based cookies and muffins. And I’m not a huge fan of molasses. That said, they taste really good with coffee.

New Year’s Day Mushroom Miso Soup

Those of you who are perhaps a bit depleted from NYE festivities might consider this recipe.

Miso is a known restorative: protein, vitamins, saltiness to rival fried eggs, liquid. I started out thinking I’d just whisk some miso into hot water, then it became hot veggie broth, then “I wonder if there’s tofu in the back of the fridge,” to searching for a recipe to follow to the letter. Found a recipe but, wow, used it for inspiration only!

Ingredients:

• 4 or so cups of water (see? improvising!)
• 1 package of dried portobello mushrooms
• 2 t dry vegetable stock
• 2 T vegetable oil
• half a carton of grape tomatoes, sliced in half
• half a block of tofu, cut into wee cubes
• about 1/3 cup of white miso

Directions:

1. Put water in a saucepan on high, add dried mushrooms and veggie stock and boil for at least 15 minutes. [The dried mushrooms, probably unlike fresh ones, add a lot of flavour to the water, well beyond what the stock alone would do.]
2. Remove the mushrooms from the stock; add the tofu and set to simmer.
3. Grab a frypan, add oil, set heat to medium-high.
4. Chop up the mushrooms, add them and the tomatoes to the oil and flash fry on high heat for at least 5 minutes. [Shake like crazy to keep things from sticking. The idea is to get the liquid out of the tomatoes before they're added to the soup. I think. I read that somewhere, in any case, and it worked.]
5. Add the tomato/mushroom mixture to the stock, stir it about, reduce heat to low.
6. You can either add the miso as-is or, as I did, get some warm water, about 1/3 of a cup, and mix it with the miso in a blender. It helps avoid lumps later on.

Note: Make sure you keep the heat fairly low as miso loses some of its goodness if you boil it.

Serve when ready! Sliced green onions might be a nice touch but I didn’t have any.

iPod Touch: cookbook in your pocket!

Linda and I have had iPod Touches for almost a year and like most other people with the Touch or an iPhone, we’re nuts about the applications available. We’ve found that 1) some apps are definitely better than others, 2) not all free apps are useless, particularly the ones that can be used offline, and 3) there are no useful recipe book apps available, or at least not ones I’m willing to take a chance on.

Like many people, we’ve tried to consolidate our recipes somewhere that works for us. We have some go-to cookbooks (I strongly recommend Clueless in the Kitchen and The Clueless Vegetarian) but for the most part we find our recipes online. The search function has become at once a really useful tool and one that sends me off in all directions.

Speaking of off in all directions … ok, iPod Touch and no app that works for us. In the end we decided to make use of the built-in Notes app, the 3.0 OS’s cut/copy/paste function and the new search function, which isn’t just for songs. Here’s what we do:

1. Find a recipe on our desktop computers (one you already have or something online)
2. Copy it to an email
3. Email it to ourselves
4. Open the email on our iPods
5. Copy the contents
6. Paste them into a new note
7. Edit at will
8. Save the note (the name of the recipe, if you’ve put it at the top, becomes the note’s name)

Best part? You can use the search function not just for the name of your recipe but any word in it. Have eggplant (god, why?) in more than one recipe? They’ll both show.

Given that we don’t have a printer — and my laptop has seen enough close calls with liquids — having a portable, customized, and fully searchable recipe book rocks.

Natalie Portman on “Eating Animals”

I must read this book. As someone who has asthma, I’m disturbed by “…the copious amounts of pig shit sprayed into the air that result in great spikes in human respiratory ailments, [and] the development of new bacterial strains due to overuse of antibiotics on farmed animals….”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/natalie-portman/jonathan-safran-foers-iea_b_334407.html

Organic chocolate chips

Just glanced at our tag cloud and noticed that “organic” and “chocolate” are the largest words.

Recently found Cocoa Camino organic chocolate chips at Fresh & Wild and also saw some at Essence of Life Organics in Kensington.

Hm, maybe I’ll go have some now…