Juice Feasting

It is winter. February is drizzling on and on and I am trapped between Christmases exuberant feasting and the cheap Valentines Day chocolate to be sold off in approximately 3 days. I am puffy. I am pale. I am a hairs breadth from going back to the gym.

I am going back on a juice fast.

I decided to try juice fasting last spring after watching Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead .  I went for a few months drinking juice all day and eating real food pretty much only ay night. I felt really good. I dropped a few pounds, but not as many as I was hoping. I glowed. And then I completely and totally lost interest.

The problem with liking food and trying any diet-type thing is that I feel a bit like a traitor. I thought, how incredibly boring it was turning every conversation into a blow by blow of what’s going into my mouth. This is something other girls do. I don’t want to sit around vegan raw food restaurants talking about the latest diet I’m on. Who wants to hear about that?

Hmmm. Who wants to hear about everything going into other peoples mouths.

Food writers. Oh god.

Because really, what is the difference between taking a picture of a pie or a veggie smoothie and whoring it all over Facebook. They are both going on and on about the mundane business of eating.

So I’m at my local market this evening buying a comical amount of produce and a pack of Du Maurier distinct regulars, and the sales girl looks at my tomatoes and goes “Doing a lot of baking? or…”

“oh, I’m starting a juice fast in the morning.” I reply, a bit embarrassed. Why did I have to but cigarettes with all this? I look like the biggest Yaletown oxymoron imaginable. I should have bought a box of wine and a round of Plan B, I would look like less of an asshole.

But she is now my new Bestest Mate. “OMG I do a juice feast once a month! I super love it!” etc etc, something something, glowing skin, etc. Did she just call it a juice FEAST? It’s noisy in here, but I’m pretty sure she said Feast. How little is the average woman eating when eating pureed kale for days is described as a Feast?

Look, I recognize that as someone who self-describes as a “food writer” (it’s less embarrassing than office administrator) I am supposed to be enjoying the fecundity of the culinary arts daily! Every minute should be a romp through tastes and textures, drowning in butter, damn to all the haters. But fuck, how people can eat all day, for a living even, and not look like their trying to shoplift a sack of potting soil under their top all day is beyond me.

Fat may be a feminist issue, but damn it, I feel like I’m made out of packing peanuts at the moment. So excuse me if I go miserably chug down ginger-apple-beet juice for a few weeks.

If anyone needs me, I’ll be on the toilet.

Getting Fabulous.

Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

I agree with Nigella Lawson on many, many things. I agree that food is integral to grief, second marriage need not wait forever, and that thinking about doing something is always worse that just doing it. I agree with her thoughts on pie too, lemon meringue in particular.

My chapter in her book Feast expectantly opens onto page 170, Lemon Meringue Cake.

“In all honesty, the origin of this cake is simply that I cannot make a go of a lemon meringue pie. I’ve tried, and I’ve tried, and it’s not that I’ve utterly failed, but I haven’t completely delighted myself. There’s enough of that kind of falling short in the rest of life, without having to usher in disappointment and self-loathing in the kitchen. This, then, is the easy option. “

My thoughts exactly. Now while the recipe on page 170 of Feast is a scratch lemon cake with meringue baked on top of the cake sandwiched with  scratch lemon curd, I had a birthday party to deal with. Mr. Spillycakes to be exact. Cupcakes would have to be made.

BTW good food sometimes comes from mixes, as nothing sours a good meal like over-expectation and panic.

Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

1 – box lemon cake mix, prepared as per box directions

1 – packet lemon meringue pie filling OR jar of lemon curd

1- batch Italian Meringue (recipe in link here) recipe followed EXCLUDING adding butter

Basically, put cake mix in 24 cupcake cups and dollop a big teaspoon of the lemon curd on before popping in oven.  After baking and cooling, make the Italian meringue and put in a piping bag with a large plain round tip. Swirl on your cute little cupcake tops. Take a brûlée’ torch (or a flame thrower, whatever, it’s your counter top) and toast the meringue golden brown.

Disappointing Bread in 5 Minutes a Day

Fresh bread, hot from the oven. No other smell makes a house feel more like a home. This time of year especially, I want bread with everything. Hunks of it with hot soup and chili, cinnamon buns with coffee, garlic bread and pasta. Cold weather and carbs make a happy partnership.
In an effort to warm up my home with the kind of lovin’ you can only get from the oven, I tried out the book Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg, M.D., and Zoe Francois. It promises the kind of crispy crusted, soft crumbed, artisan style breads once available in every-ones local bakery, just down the street. Now as those sort of “just around the corner” type places disappear, it is possible to recreate it in the comfort of your own home.
First thing, there is a rather long list of things that the book suggests one must purchase before starting. To get the basics, it required an afternoon spent in Winners and Cookworks trying to find things like an oven thermometer and pizza stone. I was probably a good $175.00 invested before water ever met flour. Not that all this stuff will be useless if I never make bread again, but I’m just saying, there is an equipment investment involved.
The books main premise is that you don’t have to knead the dough. Ever. This is a bit of a head scratcher as all previous bread making teachings and experience, not to mention a stint in a bakery, is adamant about kneading, window tests, and gluten production. In the book it tells you to just mix everything really roughly in a plastic container, that’s it. You don’t even need to mix it well. Just stir together and leave it.
This creates a very slack dough, as in quite on the wet side. In theory this is supposed to give it a sort of spongy constancy that will rise well. I just found I ended up with a very sticky, wet interior and slumped over, flat round loaves. There is a great section in the beginning of the book on suggestions to fix various problems, but I found that most of them were ways of sorting out problems caused by the actual “no knead” technique of the book in the first place.
There is also no way that this is bread in 5 Minutes a Day. Sure, you could mix dough in that 5 minutes, but all other stages still took hours. Before the dough could go in the fridge it had to proof on the counter for two hours. After it then came out of the fridge and was shaped it needed ages as it needed to come to room temperature first, and then actually rise.
Not that the motivation behind the book is bad, not at all. All the recipes are much lower in sugar and have none of the preservatives present in commercially baked breads. This is great. It gets people to try baking bread and hopefully they find that it is not nearly as hard as they thought. It’s also really nice to have a tub of dough waiting in the fridge for when creative impulses strike. I was able to make a pan of cinnamon buns in the time it took to get ready for work, and Friday night pizza took less time than it would normally take to wait for delivery.
This book was a great motivation to get back to making bread again, but I have a bad feeling that someone really not familiar with baking bread would get discouraged by the results pretty quickly. However, now that I have started baking my own bread fresh at home, I’m only more motivated to try to tweak it and get it right.

As a comparison, I will be doing another no knead recipe sent to me by my new mum in law. Is sounds very similar, but involves leaving the dough to ferment at room temperate for 18 hours, proofing on a piece of parchment, and then putting the dough, parchment and all, in a preheated pot in the oven. Sounds just about crazy enough to work. I will let you know!

The 12 Days of Valentine’s

I didn’t know it, but this is my boyfriends first Valentine’s Day. Just for some strange reason, he has always been single or just ended a relationship before the 14th of February. So I think he is, dare I say, excited about the whole prospect. Last night was kicked off with this little dessert suprise.

I mean, is that not the cutest thing? And the cookies are available at Butter Bakery in case you want a set of your very own.

Men have really gotten their shorts in a knot about Valentine’s Day for a lot of years now. They feel pressured to put on some big romantic gesture. There is the cost. If you’ve been together a long time there is that big looming “are you gonna buck up and propose this year” question. Nothing like a lot of unnecessary pressures on bullshit things that mean nothing anyway to really take the love and joy out of an occasion that essentially about love and joy.

But just like being smacked in the face with John Holmes junk, this should maybe surprise you.

IT’S A HOLIDAY SPECIFICALLY TO HAVE SEX ON, DUMMY.

Why the hell has that slipped everyone’s mind? I mean it seems to have. Why else would it’s squishy red and pink, balloons and hearts, bears and chocolate, delivered to the office with a singing telegram, addenda be so scoffed at, so bemoaned, dare I say, so LOATHED?

I agree, much of the whole shtick has gotten well out of control. For a little while there it was getting to the point that, well,  forget nice dinner out, you better book tickets to some quaint European city for the weekend. It’s an expensive holiday, and there are seemingly limitless ways to spend more on it. As DeBeer’s have been trying to convince us for years, nothing says I love you like spending a shit ton of money. The Beatles were wrong, money can buy you love.

I guess the point is that February is gray and cold, the Christmas credit card bill has arrived, Spring is awhile away. The one thing you can do is bundle up together and skronk like bunnies. And hey, it’s the year of the Rabbit, so how appropriate.

And what better to do on a cold, grey Saturday than stay in and make

Beignets

Just follow the link above, it is an awesome recipe. Beignets are a staple of Louisiana food and culture and make for a pretty goddamn good breakfast. Dylan had to try to make them him self and as you can see did an awesome job.

Do I have to say what we did after? What any red blooded woman would do after being made fresh homemade doughnuts for breakfast.

Spillycakes

This is a recipe given to me by a friend of my boyfriend, Jason “Spilly” Spilchak. He brought it over my place this last weekend for a day of complete Cupcakepalooza. He usually makes a big pile of cupcakes this time of year and brings them to wherever he happens to be working at the time. And a pile of cupcakes we made; I’m guessing about 80 or so. The trick seems to be to keep making them until you can’t make any more, and then make another batch because there will never be enough for wherever you bring them. The cake is really easy to make and uses normal baking ingredients. This is much more about being patient with the mixing than any fancy chocolate going into it or anything. It’s also really easy to double or triple the ingredients.

This is being produced mainly for my lovely work colleagues who gushed about them and demanded the recipe. And to them, I live to serve.

Chocolate “Spillycakes” Cupcakes

1 ¾ cup Cake and Pastry Flour

1 ½ cup Sugar

1 ¼ tsp Baking Soda

1/3 cup Cocoa

2 Eggs

Pinch Salt

1 cup Water

½ cup Butter (melted)

Mix first 6 ingredients together in an upright mixer then slowly mix in the water to create a runny batter. Mix on high speed until bubbles start appearing and bubbling to the surface (about 3-4 minutes). When you start to see bubbles, slow down the mixer and drizzle in the melted butter until incorporated. Then speed up the mixer again until you have a creamy batter. When you lift up the beater, you should see thick trails. This may take another 5 minutes or so.

Fill cupcake papers in muffin tins about ¾ full of batter and bake at 350 f for 15 minutes. A toothpick should come out clean. Cool and frost.

For those who like icing on a cupcake, (and if you don’t, I’m sure there are professionals who can help you through that sort of childhood trauma) read on for my favorite simple buttercream.

Buttercream

1 ¾ cup slightly softened but still cold Butter

1 bag Icing Sugar (although it’s good to have a little extra on hand just in case it needs more)

1 tsp Vanilla

2 tsp Cream, Heavy Cream, Milk, Booze, Espresso, use your imagination

Pinch the cold-ish butter into little bits in your mixing bowl and slowly incorporate about half the icing sugar until you have a smooth, very buttery mass. Add the flavorings and liquids and then slowly work in the rest of the icing sugar. When any plumes of icing sugar dust have subsided, whip on high speed for about 3-4 minutes until you have light, airy, dangerously sugary icing. Decorate to your heart’s desire.

The Unbearable Complication of Eating

Cannot get excited about eating.  For the first time in I think my whole life I am not craving anything, excited to try to cook anything…and know that it is because I am only feeding myself.  And who cares what I eat, frankly.  Upon returning home from work today, need to eat something.  Am so tired, down, crampy, sick still with a cold, I can hardly bear myself I am so miserable, and know that part of it is just that I need something good in my belly.

First off, a half hearted checking of the drawer of take-out menus.  It’s all crap, crap, and more crap.  Delivery Tacos?  When did this vile idea start, why would I ever order delivery burritos?  Sushi is too cold and uncaring on a night like this.  Thai seems too confrontational.  A quick check to the internet confirms my suspicions that ordering food will not be the solution to my hunger problem tonight.  I had better go to the grocery store.

I end up doing the equivalent of browsing in the grocery store.  I don’t know, is there anyone else who can go through all the aisles, decide what they actually want and then go back through all the aisles again?  On a night like this, this is exactly what I’m doing.  I am struck by the fact that in all this food, this beautiful, perfect food, I am having a hard time being seduced by any of it.  Motivation comes at rock bottom; the boil in the bag curry aisle.

I decide that the least taxing and most livable option is a lamb curry involving nothing but cooking some lamb and mixing in the packet and a cup or so of water.  This I can handle.  I better put some veg in it, I am eating so shamefully lately that if I don’t I may end up with scurvy soon.  Lamb curry and…mushrooms?  Lamb curry and…Eggplant?  Fuck it, who am I trying to impress, it’s just dinner.  I am putting in green peppers and zucchini.  As if authenticity is really going to materialize this evening, curry-in-a-packet-girl.

I get everything home, get myself an alcopop, and start chopping, searing, simmering…and everything seems a little bit happier already.  By the time the lamb in bubbling away in an erotically familiar sauce, I have decided to dry fry the veg and mix in at the end.  To preserve texture and flavor, I think to myself.  But perhaps also to prolong the act of cooking.  As long as I am here tending, browning, mixing, making it all work, everything is going to be alright, for a little while.

The curry was delicious.  And thank God, as I think that stupid bag of curry sauce saved me from topping myself this evening.  That, and the fact that I have cupcakes in the freezer.  No, will not do anything rash this evening…will maybe just have another cupcake…

A Victory Over Flour and Water

I baked by own bread on Saturday. Now from my many other postings I have done on my absolute screwing of the pooch on many, many simple food items that should not have been screwed up, I was taking a big step here with bread. No bread mix, no bread machine, just yeast, flour, water, a dough hook on a Kitchenaid, and my own brute frustration. And let me tell you, it turned out really well.

I really have no excuse to not be making my own bread, I did work at a proper bakery for 6 months. I know what I’m looking for, I know what it’s supposed to look like and feel like. The thing is you really need a day or at least the better part of a morning to bake bread. A good recipe is nice as well. A day that is cool enough that you don’t mind having the oven on is awfully nice as well. But there also seems to be some general rules and mysterious things that happen that makes good bread.

1. Start with bread flour and real yeast – You cannot make decent bread with all purpose flour, the protein content is not high enough to build the gluten required for bread. You need bread flour, preferably a decent one. There is also no point in fast rise or easy blend yeast. It tastes, for lack of a better word, yeasty, even after being baked. Use standard rise or fresh yeast (fresh you can buy from any bakery and sometimes the bakery counter of a grocery store, it looks like a pound of butter, but grey. Don’t make that face). Standard rise dried yeast you will have to dissolve in water with a bit of sugar for 10 minutes or so before you can get down to making dough. This is hardly a bother though as you get to then watch it bubble like a science experiment on your counter top for a few moments before you viciously mix it into your flour.

2. Bread makers are false hope – Don’t buy them. There are too many variables when you are trying to get the dough right; the weather, the ingredients, humidity in the air, etc. There is a certain amount of judgment that needs to be used to know whether it’s had enough flour, water, and kneading. A bread maker cannot see or feel the dough in order to gauge if it really ready, it just uses a timer. This leads to almost universally under mixed dough resulting in tough, dry bread. A better option is a dough hook on a mixer, but this will still only get the bulk of the ingredients mixed. You still have to get it all out of the mixer and give it a good thrashing on the counter top.

3. You will know it’s ready when it gives up – When you are kneading the dough by hand, at first it will seem very tough and will not want to behave. You will really have to fight with it for about 10 minutes (depending on how long it was mixing in the stand mixer). You will know that you can stop when the feel of it changes and it just seems to give up in your hands. There will be less resistance and it’s easier, almost suddenly, to knead. Another indicator will be that you are completely sick of kneading, but maybe that’s just my experience. You can also tell it’s ready when a small bit of of dough stretched very carefully makes something like a bubble of dough which is kinda see-through. This is called a window test, if you want to impress people.

4. Don’t try to make crusty loaves at home – It’s just an exercise in frustration and disappointment. You can’t make French bread by sticking a pan of water in the oven or any other nonsense. You will burn yourself and it will not be right anyway. Regular load bread, cinnamon buns, rolls, anything with a soft crust, these can be done beautifully at home. Leave the specialty breads to people with $30,000.00 invested in steam injection ovens.

4. Give it lots of time to rise – Rising develops flavor, so it’s really important to give it it’s full hour or so to proof and another hour or so after forming to proof again. Yes this is a lot of time, but if you don’t have at least 4 hours to kill, don’t bother baking bread.

5. The oven has to be pretty hot – Hotter that you may be comfortable with actually. You know whether or not your own oven runs too high and burns things (like mine), but you still need it to be pretty damn hot in there. It needs the initial burst of heat to get the remaining yeast to give a final push to rise everything to it’s full potential. You also don’t want to under bake, so give it a good amount of time in the oven but check the bottom to make sure it’s not burning. Tap it when you think it may be done, it will sound hollow.

6. Anything not eaten that day must do into the freezer – Commercially produced breads are full of chemicals to keep it from going bad, and even scented with fresh baked bread scent to convince you that it hasn’t gone bad even after it has. What you produce at home will be not the same tomorrow. Anything not eaten in 24 hours must go in the freezer.

I hope you give home bread making a stab. Even though it’s time consuming, it’s enormously satisfying when it all comes together. Just keep your first few attempts something simple like rolls or pizza. Don’t be surprised when you start casually throwing together a focaccia over the weekend and bringing it into work to impress people.

The Ketchup Cake Was Made…And Eaten

I have made the Ketchup cake mentioned in my previous post over the long weekend and must say that is was…Ok? It really does just taste like carrot cake without any carrot in it. The cream cheese icing included in the recipe is sensational, and I may go back to this the next time I need it. But I can’t seem to figure out what the point of the ketchup in the cake is. It’s a very small amount (1/2 cup), and all the other flavors in the cake seem to be there to mask any ketchup flavor. The acidity of the ketchup didn’t make it any lighter, in fact it rose very little. In all it was a little dryer than I would have liked, only rescued by the very nice icing. So, you know, give it a try if you want to shock your kids or dinner guests or whatever. I don’t think this one will be making it’s way into my little folder of secret recipes though.

Ketchup Cake and 2 Cheesecakes (nope, still not pregnant)

I just read on the Vancouver Sun site that to commemorate 100 years in Canadian kitchens, Heinz has introduced to us The Ketchup Cake. It looks much like a Red Velvet Cake, complete with Cream Cheese Frosting, but with a half a cup of good ol’ Heinz tomato ketchup in it. I have to try this recipe. And don’t worry, I will immediately and let you know honestly how it turns out. There is just this problem at the moment of there being two cheesecakes in my refrigerator. Last night we decided that we needed cheesecake, but couldn’t decide whether to just make the quick Nigella Express version that I normally make, or make a real baked one. Hubby really wanted the full monty, but was put off by the entire day waiting time. So I made one for right away and one for later. I really must plug the Nigella Express Cheesecake though, it is so wonderful for so little time and effort. You make a graham cracker crust (cracker crumbs and butter pressed into a pan, or buy one if you must) and chill while you mix the rest. You then mix two packs of cream cheese, half a cup of icing sugar, little vanilla, squeeze of lemon juice, in a food processor until smooth. Then whip a 500ml whipping cream until quite firm and fold into the cheese mixture. Pour over the crust and chill for as little as a hour, or however long you have. We ate ours after an hour, me with gobs of cherry pie filling as this is really just and excuse for me to eat cherry pie filling at all. The baked version I made was out of Gordon Ramsay’s Healthy Appetite, a low fat cheesecake with caramelized oranges. It contained ricotta and quark instead of cream cheese. I think it turned out ok, for this type of cheesecake, but the ricotta just does not give that smoothness that you are hoping for. I need to find a cheesecake recipe that compares to Transylvania Flavors heavenly version. In the meantime, Nigella wins.

So I will be eating cheese cake for a good 2 meals a day for a few days so I can get on with trying this ketchup cake. Stay tuned.

Who’s To Blame For the Home-Ec Slump?

An interesting article in the Georgia Straight today got me thinking about Home Economics. Kids, it would seem, are just not learning to cook. Home-ec teachers are having to teach the most basic of cooking skills that normally would be taught at home. And this is putting an entire generation at a financial disadvantage. When you cannot take care of your own food, clothing, and home you are going to rack up bills paying other people who do know how to do such things.

I’m reminded of a quote from a Kids in the Hall sketch. When a character who is crashing at another characters house has done nothing but make a mess and generally be a bad house guest is confronted, they reply “I came from a dysfunctional family, we had a maid!”. I’m sure that most families are under the best of idealisms when they order in food, get help in to clean, send out the washing, all to make sure that no one is bothered with the stress of domesticity, especially heaven forbid, the children. But while a professional two parent working household perhaps can afford domestic help of all forms, do you think your kids will be able to when they leave for University? Do you want to pay for it when they can’t?

And when did EVERY meal need to be bought away from home? Is pouring a bowl of Lucky Charms really that much more tedious than waiting in a drive through for a sausage n’ egg MCwhatsit with waxy coffee n’ baked tater slab? Seriously, how fing lazy are we folks. I can understand that convincing kids to put down the cheezies and slurpie and pack a complete and balanced lunch is a tall order, but expecting all three meals a day to come in cardboard? This is normal for most families now? Please tell me otherwise, please folks.

But can we really be surprised that we as a society are in this position, at this level of food preparation rejection. Do you remember home-ec? I went to what was considered to be, at the time, a very progressive Jr. High school. There were an equal number of computers per student in every classroom. There was gym class daily. And yes, mandatory home-ec, in which we learned to sew and cook. However the projects selected to prepare us for domestic life were vague at best, sometimes downright bizarre. I remember learning to sew decorative table runners and boxer shorts, which I think were selected as a project because you just had to sew on a machine in a straight line. I already knew how to sew quite well as I grew up in a home with a sewing machine and $0.00 clothing budget. But did the other kids take anything at all away from this exercise? Maybe not.

Selected foods projects were equally surreal. While a day in the food lab making crepes was a great tie in with our French class work, kitchen skills learned were making a batter and using a specialized crepe pan that no one had at home, at best. Our lessons seemed to be things like that. lofty in their aspirations, desperate to not be irrelevant or uninteresting, most of the time utterly lacking in practicality. Learning how to make crepes leaves a grave gap in skills if the culinary education gleaned at home is how to microwave a pizza pop while waiting for mom to come home with KFC.

I understand that Jr. High is a tough crowd, and something like learning to make boring but practical and cheap food a very hard sell. In any case, why should our school system be taking on this impossible task? This is the job of whoever is at home; mum, dad, grandparent (if that fails the domestic help maybe?). Watching mum and dad cook is extremely valuable, and setting a kid loose with cookie dough, cutters and a whole mess of flour is a good few hours of cheap fun. Hell, give them food coloring, cornstarch and water, they can play with that for an entire afternoon. If little guys know that mucking around in the kitchen produces things that taste good and are fun, frankly you can’t keep them out of the kitchen afterwards.

The truth is that it doesn’t matter how clever the curriculum or how enthused the teacher or how progressive the school, it will not be able to teach a kid how to clean a carpet, or keep a sweater from shrinking in the wash, or how to eat for a week on a food budget so small it can only be seen via electron microscope. This can only be learned from being nagged out of bed on a Saturday morning, or off the couch and away from the TV every night, to help with the chores. There will be whining and moaning and threats of complaints to the UN Human Rights Tribunal. But one day, they will be able to impress a girl with a meal that they have cooked themselves, or be able to clean an apartment to a level required to get their full damage deposit back. Who knew domestic proficiencies would bring returns of sex and money?

So perhaps the answer is just re branding the entire Home Economics thing. How about Neo-Classical Domestic Studies, Pâtisserie Class, Low Environmental Impact Living Class. The focus has simply got to be shifted firmly and finally away from the idea that Home Economics class is a class for girls to learn how to be mothers and homemakers. At this point in history it is more about avoiding paying a per hour wage to multiple individuals in the effort to maintain a good standard of living. So lure them in with something interesting like fashion and gourmet cooking. The final result of the knowledge will pan out later in economics.

Now while we all wait with round cartoonish eyes in the hope that public schools to come up with that type of funding for foods programs, lets remember that in the meantime it is really the responsibility of those at home to get skills like this into kids. I’m going to make an outlandish comment here and say that the ability to cook is a parenting skill, just like not shaking your baby is a parenting skill. The lack of either skill detrimental to a child’s good health.