More cheese, please!

A while back, my husband and I went out for dinner at one of our favourite restaurants.  The food is always inventive and delicious, and although the service usually leaves something to be desired, we go back often.  We hadn’t been in some time, however, and I was very surprised and somewhat stumped by the fact that they no longer serve diet soda. None.  The waitress offered some weird concoction of sparkling water with  juice and fruit slices, but I just went with plain water.  When she left the table, I turned to my husband to voice what I thought would also be his reaction about the diet sodas, but he just shrugged and didn’t really think anything of it.  In fact, he just assumed it was a sign of the times…that diet drinks were luxuries that even restaurants were not able to afford.  He figured they didn’t sell that many and so they cut costs and dropped them from their menu.

We were also slightly disappointed in a cheese plate that came out with a few hunks of rather mundane looking cheeses, all milky white sitting along side a lump of softer cheese and a few pieces of toast.  Again, cost cutting?  Possibly.  But today, I was reading an article in Maclean’s April 13th issue about cheese and it seems to completely cancel out that idea.

In this bad economy, artisnal cheese appears to be one area that usually does quite well, along with wine because many are made locally with fresh ingredients, which allows people to splurge a little without going over their budgets, an affordable luxury.   At the same time, artisnal cheese also give the consumer a bit of a story to go along with the product.  Many cheeses are sold in cheese shops where the sellers can regale purchasers with tales of where the cheese was made, what types of fresh ingredients have gone into it and a sense that they are buying quality.  And according to the article, the average Canadian eats 5.5kg per capita of “variety” cheeses per year (those other than cheddar or processed cheese), up from 2.3kg in 1980, so we are serious about our cheese.

If you are interested in trying new cheeses, pop into a local cheese shop and often they will provide free samples so that you can find something you like.  They will also be able to advise you of which cheeses to put together on a cheese plate so that you don’t end up with a plate that is quite boring, or one in which the flavours work against each other.  If you would like to have some new ideas about cheese before shopping, you can try The Cheese Primer by Steve Jenkins which is available in our library.

And if you’d still like to know more, Cheese.com has some great information so that you can shop and get it right the first time.  Maybe our favourite restaurant could use a little help in this area.

Bake-off and write a book!

We often copy recipes and pass them around to all the staff in the library. Someone will no doubt find a new winner and want to share it with the rest of us.  It is difficult to pass up a great recipe and so we are thrilled when new cookbooks arrive at the library for us to peruse.  We are all avid cooks and bakers and so it was no different last week when Shirley found us a new great recipe for Warm Chicken Taco Salad that uses lime yogurt of all things in the dressing. And where did this great recipe come from?  Of course, the Pillsbury Bake-Off Winners Cookbook.Pillsbury has a bake-off contest on a regular basis which allows the great bakers and cooks of America to try their hand at creating the winning recipe to win $1 Million! (Sadly, it is only open to US residents, but we can all reap the rewards of the great recipes!)  The recipes must be original, include at least 2 of the products that are eligible and fit into one of the four categories.  Each year, thousands of people enter the contest with family favourites or newly inspired recipes hoping to win.

One such entrant is a woman named Ellie Mathews.  She was a Seattle-based software developing manager and write who loved to enter cooking contests for both the love of cooking and the thrill of the contest.  She soon found herself fascinated by the idea of cooking contests and the people that enter them, from foodies to PhD candidates, all with the love of fod and the desire to compete.

Upon entering her Salsa Couscous Chicken in the Pillsbury Bake-Off contest, she was thrilled to win and even more than the million dollar prize, she walked away with a fascinating idea for a book about the cooking contest itself.  The Ungarnished Truth: A Cooking Contest Memoir (A Woman, A chicken Dinner, A Million Dollars) is Mathews’ finished product, which includes her winning million dollar recipe in the back of the book.

The book is a great look into the world of cooking contests (Mathews has since won several different prizes for her recipes) and the people that enter them.  Even if you aren’t a big fan of cooking, this is a fun book with lots of insight into the world that not many of us ever get to experience.   It might inspire you to get out there and try your hand at some creative recipes. Who knows, maybe you’ll be the next million dollar winner!

Let’s all write a cookbook!

A short editorial article in a magazine I read recently was written by a self-professed foodie.  She considered herself a foodie way back in the 80’s when foodies weren’t even really foodies as we know them now.  She was amazed that back then, you could host a dinner party and make “duck a l’orange” and you’d impress your guests with your unbelievable cooking knowledge.  These days, as she noted, you have to be MUCH more skilled in the kitchen and use many exotically paired foods in order to impress because everyone seems to have a bit of culinary knowledge. (As she puts it, even the kid working at the hardware store knows something about goji berries.)

She went on to describe the fact that these days, not only must you have some great culinary skills and be knowledgeable about many types of food in order to truly consider yourself a foodie, but you must also now be environmentally skilled, growing your own herbs, raising your own fowl and buying only free-range, grass-fed, organically produced meat.  Essentially, you must now be a farmer as well as a chef.

This article was funny, if only because I have been thinking this more and more lately as well.  Anyone who knows me understands my love for the Food Network and all things food related.  But I have also been noticing this strange fact that just merely purchasing food these days is not enough, even if you use all the ingredients and make something from scratch.  (Okay, so I didn’t quite make it to the local farmer’s market this summer at all and one of the organizer’s pointed that fact out to me a week ago at the grocery store!)

One of my favourite TV chefs is Gordon Ramsay.  I know that he isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but my husband will watch him with me and that makes him great in my books!  He has three different types of food-based shows on tv and they are all a little different and may appeal to various types of people. Hell’s Kitchen is your typical reality show, with a group of chefs who compete to see who will earn a job in one of Ramsay’s restaurants.  This is by far the most brash of the shows, and he uses a lot of profanity, but you get the sense of how difficult it must be to work in a restaurant.

His 2nd show is called “Kitchen Nightmares“ and this one finds Ramsay traveling to various parts of the world to rescue restaurant owners who are floundering.  He can still be quite harsh here, but the sheer spectacle of some of these restaurant owners and workers is worth it.

And last but not least, The F Word, takes us into the workings of a restaurant, but you also learn a lot about his life, family and food itself.  It is creative and light and usually quite fun.  This is where it gets me thinking though.  In the first season, he raised turkeys into the fall in order to use them in his restaurant for Christmas dinner.  Now, he is raising pigs.  Pigs?!  Really, who could do this?  Not your average person, and it makes you feel a little inferior that you aren’t trying when it seems so “easy” and makes for the best food.

Of course, Gordon Ramsay has many cookbooks, and the latest one to arrive in our library is called Cooking For Friends.

I must say that I tried a few recipes out of this cookbook and while they were good, they weren’t anything spectacular.  If you eat peanut butter sandwiches every day for every meal, then the recipes in here will blow you away.  But if you like to cook and go to restaurants with good chefs, this cookbook will probably only just please you.

And now his wife Tana has her own cookbook!  I don’t think my husband would want me writing a book about fiber optics, no matter how much research I did on the subject because it would only make me look like I was trying to ride his coattails.  So why has she written this cookbook?  It is her third actually, and she uses recipes that she cooks in her home.  This book is for the home cook with easily found ingredients and easy instructions. Her motto is that you shouldn’t cook separate food for children, but rather, make the same food you would for adults, only on  a smaller scale and on a simple level.

So, even though she is not a trained chef, she does most of the cooking in her household and wanted to share her skills with the rest of the world.  What makes her special?  Why couldn’t anyone write their own cookbook?  Time and cost, more than likely.  It takes a lot of time to develop new recipes and it costs to purchase the ingredients each time you run a trial.  Of course, you could always publish your own cookbook of favourite family recipes through a site like Shutterfly and give copies to everyone at Christmas, but it just isn’t the same, is it?

What do you think of all these cookbooks flooding the market?  Which ones do you like best?

A little science with your meal

I’m a foodie and so is my husband.  We enjoy going out to great restaurants and trying new and exotic foods. Around our little town, there aren’t very many restaurants that serve things other than burgers and fajitas, but occasionally, we come across something a bit out of the ordinary.

There is a new trend in food called “molecular gastronomy” which is the use of science to create food that is quite different, although edible and there are three new cookbooks out there that celebrate this trend. Recipes like  nitro-scrambled egg ice cream with candied bacon and pain perdu and snail porridge are typical of the foods you’ll find in  The Big Fat Duck Cookbook by Heston Blumenthal. Although they are made with some unconventional techniques, like super cold nitro to make the ice cream, the food is still quite beautiful to look at (and hopefully), tasty.  Blumenthal swears that there are techniques in his book that the home cook can use.  If you are interesting in seeing a bit more from his restaurant, you can visit this link.

Another interesting new book is A Day at ElBulli by Ferran Adria.  Adria boasts some 30-course tasting menus at his restaurant in Spain, and aims to show the public some of the great ideas they use there in this new cookbook.  (Preserved Tuna-oil Air?)  I’m not sure the descriptions are quite to my liking (yogurt globules don’t sound very appetizing), but  you can be the judge.  You might want to visit this site which also has video of the author showing some of his techniques.

And last but not least, Alinea by Grant Achatz boast more of the weird and wonderful food ideas, such as the anti-griddle (a griddle that is super cold, not hot).  You can see from his Tomato picture below that the food is more like art.  You might also want to visit the website which is slick and beautiful.

So what do you think about all this high-tech food?  Fad or future?

Make a batch of soup!

Fall has always been a good time to get into the kitchen to try out some comfort food recipes.  Casseroles, pot roasts and soups are wonderful additions to your regular cooking schedules, and there are so many great recipe books to help inspire you.

I have been on a soup kick lately, and I just came across this great cookbook in our library that should help me expand my repertoire.

The New Soup Bible has over 200 recipes just about soup!  There are wonderful Asian inspired, fall-themed and summery cold soups with page after page of beautiful, glossy photos.  I tried the Autumn Roasted Vegetable Soup this weekend, using only veggies that are right in season, and it was fantastic!

Another great soup book (as well as having many other wonderful recipes) is the Moosewood Restaurant Celebrates cookbook.  If you’ve never heard of the Moosewood Restaurant, it makes only vegetarian meals, but food that is out of this world delicious!  The holiday cookbook has all kinds of alternative meals, especially if you might have a guest who doesn’t eat meat, or if you’d just like to try something new.  I guess when I think of vegetarian meals, I think fall vegetables, so this cookbook is a great place to start looking.

We have so many wonderful cookbook ideas for this time of year.  You might try One Potato, Two Potato, a cookbook with 300 potato recipes or how about Steve Jenkin’s Cheese Primer for great cheese suggestions.  Whatever you feel like, I’m sure we have a unique cookbook full of delicious recipes that’ll help guide you to gourmet heaven!

Halloween broccoli?

I was reading over one of my favourite food blogs recently, and because Halloween is almost here, I thought I’d share this somewhat creepy little item (although probably not intended to be creepy).  You wouldn’t think of frozen broccoli as being particularly strange, and especially not the packaging because who really looks at the package?  It is not a cereal box that children would be looking at while sitting at the table eating breakfast.  It is frozen broccoli. You essentially open the package, throw the broccoli into the pot of water, and throw the plastic bag away.  So what are the people of Cascadian Farms trying to do?  They seem like a serious little company, producing organic foods that are better for us.  I just don’t get it.

Take a close look at the picture up above.  Do you see it?  Here are some close ups of the bag which I’m sure will make it all obvious.

Creepy little faces! I guess if you’d like to incorporate some spookiness into your Halloween meal, serve this broccoli and leave the package on the table. Ooohhhhh….

To go along with the broccoli theme, we have several books in the library that might inspire you:

SuperFoods, HealthStyle by Steven Pratt

When in Doubt, Eat Broccoli by Liz Pearson

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest —  and other timeless delicacies by Mollie Katzen

Thanks to the ladies at Bread & Honey for this funny moment!

So the next time you pick up a bag of frozen veggies, don’t be surprised if someone is staring back at you from the package.