International Bento (Japan): Tonkatsu Bento

As promised, a bento which ventures into Japanese content. In this case, the bento is an exact redux of the dinner from the night before (see below): tonkatsu, Japanese rice, miso-glazed carrots, and gingered daikon salad. The vegetable content was a little light, as I intended to combine the carrots with lotus root slices (very pretty together!) but failed to acquire the lotus root on my way home. Next time, I mean to do a combination of carrot, lotus, and burdock (gobo). The preparation is much like a kinpira, but with a little red miso mixed with water and sesame oil added in and reduced until it glazes the vegetable pieces. An extra vegetable, maybe something green to balance out the meal, too - perhaps a little finely chopped snow-pea "coleslaw", made in a vaguely sunomono-like fashion, would be a good addition here.

I'm very fond of tonkatsu, a breaded, shallow-fried pork cutlet, in this case made from a slightly pounded pork sirloin chop. The conventional flour/ dip in egg / dredge in crumbs is employed, using panko, the airy, coarse style of breadcrumb that gives Japanese breaded foods a delightfully fuzzy appearance. For the recipe, I refer you to Maki's excellent site Just Hungry, the sister site to Just Bento, which is a favourite resource for my forays into Japanese cuisine.

The little fish-shaped sauce bottle in the bento is filled with a Tonkatsu sauce which Palle assembled after perusing various recipes online and taking the best of them to form a hybrid (his favourite way to cook). I don't think he noted it down, though, so the next iteration might be quite different, depending on how well he remembers what he did. The little fish-bottle is one of a veritable school of fish bottles I got in a little box from a Japanese dollar-type store here in Vancouver. They are generally used for soy sauce, or other smooth and not-too-thick sauces that can be loaded by suction through the fish's "mouth". A bargain at two dollars for a box of them (if one doesn't make it home, I'm not too broken up by it).

If you recall my Fear of Frying post, you will know that this involves more oil and temperature control issues than I am strictly comfortable with, so making the Tonkatsu also helped me push my boundaries and further develop my frying skills. To be fair, I made a crash decision to shallow-fry the cutlets instead, using about an inch of oil in a large skillet, based on a different recipe that I found in a cookbook. The first two of the four cutlets I cooked were beautiful, but I had my predictable troubles controlling the heat for the second batch. The cutlets were all delicious, but the second batch were considerably less attractive.

More practice is clearly in order, but I was really happy with how well this turned out.

Jamaican Buffalo Pie

I don't get nearly enough pie in my life. One of the problems is that I am rather picky about the crust, and the leathery, greasy offerings of many of the pre-fab pies available are discouraging. Also, as is fairly well documented, I am quite lazy, so it is difficult to rouse myself up to make a double-crust pie on the spur of the moment. It can be done, however. It just takes a little craving.

My world is run by food cravings. It always has been, even at some fairly inopportune times. I am lucky to be able to indulge most of them. So, when an enormous craving for a savory pie hit pretty much juxtaposed with a wish for a Jamaican patty, I decided to combine the two: voilà, one double-crust pie, filled with a spicy, Jamaican patty-inspired filling, and less actual work than making a bunch of smaller patties.

I used ground buffalo meat, since that is what I had on hand, but a good quality beef would work as well, of course. I browned the buffalo with rather a lot of sliced green onions (white and green parts), seasoned it heavily with black pepper and allspice and lightly with hot curry powder and salt, added some chopped hot chiles and a generous slug of Matouk's Calypso sauce (I didn't have habaneros on hand, but the pie still had a big ol' kick). I thickened it with a flour-based slurry, but was careful to keep the amount of liquid really low, so it would act as a binder without sogging things out too badly. The seasoning was essentially just taste-and-tweak, so I'm afraid I can't impart the precise amounts.

Finally, since pies look more lovely with a shiny golden crust, I gave it a quick swipe of egg-wash, and loaded it into the oven on the middle rack at 375℉ for about 45 minutes.

Because this was done on a weeknight (and, see above re: lazy), there's a big flaw in the surface of the top crust (upper right quadrant) that I didn't bother to fix, but we successfully managed to ignore that and devoured the pie anyway, with coleslaw on the side.


I took a well-wrapped quarter pie to work the next day, to give to a co-worker friend whom I generally torture with descriptions of what I am cooking. It was received with great appreciation, and apparently re-heated splendidly.

International Bento (North America) Roast Chicken & Potatoes

I'm not heading back to school this week, nor am I sending a young person off to school. I will be going to work as usual, though, and at this time of year I find myself eagerly, even voraciously, reading up on all the latest ideas for packed lunches.

As those of you who follow this site know, I'm pretty enamored of bentos right now, along with most of the world, as evinced by the rampant proliferation of websites and cookbooks (many of which are very impressive indeed) dedicated to the art of the bento.

Since many, if not most, of my packed lunches are derived from dinner leftovers, working them into a bento format takes no great leaps of imagination. This bento was ridiculously simple - leftover cold roast chicken, which had been removed from the bone when it was still warm, and the attendant leftover roasted potato halves. I intended to either heat them up on a plate (my work has a microwave) or eat them cold, as is, but when lunchtime rolled around I realized that, with judicious application of the mayonnaise I keep in the fridge at work (for sandwich-related emergencies), I could make myself a tasty chicken and potato salad. So, that's what I did. I chopped up the potatoes a bit more, and the biggest pieces of chicken, and mixed them together with just enough mayonnaise to moisten them, and garnished heavily with black pepper. Very tasty!

The rest of the bento is self-explanatory: sliced cucumbers, and an assortment of fresh berries (get them while it's still technically summer).

My next bento will probably venture into Japanese territory, just for kicks, but stay tuned also for French bento, and more North American bento fun!

Chocolate Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chip Muffins

I was really very happy with my recent foray into the world of chocolate, oatmeal, and peanut butter. So much so, in fact, that I started thinking about other, non-cookie applications.

In a related note, I found myself picking gooey chocolate crumbs out of a muffin wrapper last week, having succumbed to the "chocolate muffin" at Tim Horton's. Yeah. Well. It wasn't so much a muffin, as a damp, massively sweet cupcake with an unstable texture. Looking at the online nutritional information, the only entry close to what I had is the "chocolate chip muffin", which is a whopping 430 calories, of which 16 grams of fat and 40 grams of sugar make up much of the payload. If it had been more pleasant an eating experience, and less of a crumby, sticky-fingered disaster, I wouldn't have minded so much, but...you call that a muffin? Really? We must be speaking different languages. I'd have rather had a doughnut. Or, er, "donut."

It got me thinking - why can't there be a chocolate muffin that is, in fact, a muffin and not an also-ran in the sweets department? Now, maybe if they'd backed down on the sugar overload, or added a hearty, muffin-friendly texturizer to give the creation a little backbone...and, before I knew it, I was drafting up a recipe.

The results were very pleasing indeed. A perfect lunchbox treat, in fact, or a quick breakfast snack on the go. Dare I say, perfect for back to school lunches (for those schools which don't have a peanut butter prohibition)?

Chocolate Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chip Muffins

3 tablespoons soft butter
½ cup brown sugar, lightly packed
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Pinch of cinnamon
1 cup all purpose flour
¾ cup rolled oats
1 teaspoon baking soda
1½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
½ cup dutch process cocoa powder
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk
1 cup peanut butter chips

My own cryptic notes for assembly read as follows:
Muffin Method; 400℉ 20 minutes; 12 regular. Those of you who enjoy a little more specificity may want to follow these directions:

Preheat your oven to 400℉ with the rack set in the middle of the oven. Lightly grease (or spritz with canola oil) a 12 cup muffin pan.

In a medium mixing bowl, beat together butter, sugar, egg, and vanilla extract until smooth.

In a separate bowl, combine the oats, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cocoa powder, and cinnamon,

Measure out the buttermilk for quick access.

Add about a third of the dry flour mixture to the beaten butter/egg mixture and combine until just blended. Then, pour in half the buttermilk, and stir it gently through. Repeat with the next third of dry mixture and the last of the buttermilk. Finally, fold in the last bit of dry mixture and add the peanut butter chips, carefully stirring it through just until all the flour is incorporated, handling gently to prevent toughness.

Distribute the batter between the greased muffin cups. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, depending on your oven (check after 20, and if the muffin tops are dry and show a little resilience when gently pressed, remove from oven. Allow muffins to cool in pan on a rack for a couple of minutes, then lift muffins out of cups to finish cooling on the racks.

Store in a sealed container in the fridge, once completely cool, and re-warm in the microwave for 20 seconds.

The muffins are just sweet enough - the peanut butter chips are actually little sweet bursts of peanuty tastiness, and the oatmeal gives the muffin a sturdy, satisfying texture without being heavy or dense.


For those interested in how the nutritional info stacks up, I used an online calculator to come up with a count of about 220 calories per muffin based on this recipe, including 20 grams of sugar and 8.3 grams of fat. Plus, over three grams of fibre, if that's your thing. It should be noted that I couldn't find an ingredient listing for the Reese's peanut butter chips that I used in the recipe, so my calculations are based on using Reese's pieces instead, which will skew the results at least somewhat. Plus, I'm never entirely sure how reliable online calculators are. Your mileage may vary. Still, all in all, a considerable nutritional improvement on the commercial muffin I was lamenting above.

International Bento (North America): Macaroni & Cheese

Moving right along in the world of bento, I decided to do one that was close to home. My home, that is. That means that the macaroni and cheese is home made.

I have two different mac and cheese recipes that I use. One is deluxe and decadent, involving eggs and multiple cheeses, and the other is somewhat leaner and absolutely quick as the boxed kind. The second one is a little more suitable for everyday (but maybe not every day) consumption. You can make it with whatever cheese you like, but I prefer sharp cheddar. This one was made with white sharp cheddar, which is not as picturesque, hence the smoked paprika decorative topping.

The rest of the bento is simple: some sliced zucchini and red bell peppers, and a few Rainier cherries for dessert. I removed the pasta to a ceramic plate to re-heat, since my bento is not microwave friendly.

Skillet Macaroni & Cheese
aka "Evapomac"

Serves 2
Total Time Prep & Cook: 20 minutes

1½ cups uncooked macaroni
¾ cup* canned evaporated milk**
2 cups water
1 tablespoon butter
½ teaspoon kosher salt (or ¼ teaspoon table salt)
½ teaspoon cornstarch
1 – 2 shakes of Tabasco sauce
1 ½ cups grated sharp Cheddar cheese
¾ cup grated Colby cheese (or Monterey Jack...or more Cheddar)

Bring the water and ½ cup of the milk to a boil in a large skillet or medium saucepan. Add the salt, butter, and the macaroni, and cook (stirring frequently) until the macaroni is tender and the liquid is reduced to a thin “sauce”.

Put the remaining ¼ cup of milk in a small bowl with the Tabasco and the cornstarch. Stir until smooth. Add to the cooked macaroni and stir until the sauce begins to thicken – no more than a minute or two over high heat. Turn off the heat and add the cheese, one handful at a time, stirring it in each time, and adding a little room-temperature water if necessary to adjust the consistency of the sauce as you go.

You can top it with some buttered, toasted breadcrumbs or parsley or something like that if you feel the need to be fancy, but really this is designed to be dumped into bowls and eaten in front of the television. Have a salad tomorrow.

Serves 2 people generously, or 4 people as a side dish.


*This is about ½ a 370 ml can. You can also use an entire 160 ml can, but add 2 tablespoons of milk or half-and-half with the cornstarch, to make up the difference

** don’t use sweetened condensed milk by mistake. Ew!

Spanish Pork Burgers

This was really, really good.

I'd made the Spanish Pork Burger recipe from Eating Well Magazine once before - well, once as burgers, and once as meatloaf, and I liked it. Finally having made it with pimentón de la vera (smoked paprika), and having vastly improved my burger seasoning skills, I absolutely love it.

What else did I do differently? Quite a few things, actually.

This time, I also used a smaller bun, a potato bun from my local supermarket's in-house bakery. It had a very, very slight sweetness to it that complemented the earthy lemon saffron mayonnaise (which sadly, is not visible in the picture, but is a delightful, vivid yellow), and the smokiness of the paprika. The lower bun-to burger patty ratio is generally more satisfying, I think. I didn't use Manchego cheese, this time, I simply used a nutty mozzarella that needed using up, and it was fine, if ever so slightly less Spanish. I didn't grate it, but simply laid it onto the pork patties in the grill pan.

That brings up another thing - the grill pan. This is definitely the right pan for the job - you get the slight char on the striped bits, without blackening the entire surface of the burger. It is infinitely more attractive, but also has a positive effect on the texture and flavour of the meat.


I also used the Piquillo peppers recommended in the recipe as opposed to regular roasted red peppers. I liked the firm texture and the flavour. I used them as a bottom layer between the mayonnaise and the pork patty, topped the pork with the cheese and then the sauteed onions, and then the toasted top bun. No other toppings were needed or wanted - they could be safely relegated to a salad on the side, and consumed leisurely after the burgers were devoured.

And devoured they were. I can hardly wait to have them again.

Fear of Frying #1: Southern Fried Chicken

I've always had something of a fear of frying. Not searing, or stir-frying, or tossing the perogies into a skillet with butter pan-frying kind of frying. You know. Frying. Deep frying, or at the very least, shallow-frying. I don't know whether it comes from a childhood immersed in 70's style health food obsessions, or simply the fact that my mother almost never fried anything. Maybe it's the waste of oil, the mess, and the general aura of guilt that seems to be evoked even by the word frying.

But, I do like fried foods. I like tempura, tonkatsu, southern-fried chicken, pakoras, fish and chips, doughnuts, and all kinds of delicious fried delights. So, I've set myself on a remedial course to learn how to fry without fear. First up: chicken.

I turn to the experts for advice, and in this case, I consulted Alton Brown's Fry Hard II episode of Good Eats, and the related cookbook. I learned that what makes southern-fried chicken "southern" is that it is shallow-fried in a couple of inches of oil which allow the skin to contact the bottom of the skillet during cooking, and is never fully immersed, which allows moisture to escape during cooking and prevents the crust from becoming a separate layer that simply peels off the chicken when you bite into it.

I dutifully soaked my chicken in buttermilk overnight, and seasoned up the pieces (all drumsticks, in this case) with the exact seasoning mixture he prescribes, right down to using smoked pimenton for the paprika, which is a variant mentioned in the Good Eats: The Early Years tome.

I tossed the pieces in flour, and allowed them the full recommended 15 minute resting time to allow the combination of flour and buttermilk to gelatinize and form the crust. This little nugget of wisdom appears in the book, but not the online recipe.

The frying itself was actually pretty easy: I laid the pieces gently into the preheated vegetable shortening (I used a frying thermometer to get the right temperature of 325 F), four legs per batch, set the timer, and watched in fascination as they cooked. Tongs to turn them over, and another short wait, then onto a rack placed over a tray to rest while the rest cooked up.

I confess that I was relieved that Alton had cautioned that the step he employs of seasoning the chicken with paprika prior to the flouring stage makes the cooked chicken quite dark, or I would have been afraid that I had burned it. As it was, I may have left the second batch in a little longer than strictly necessary - it was quite mahogany coloured - but every piece was juicy and delicious, and made me want to eat far far more than I ought.

As you can see above, we had our southern-fried chicken legs with mashed potatoes, chicken gravy (made from the de-fatted chicken drippings of chickens, aka "chicken gold", a little broth, and a flour/chickenfat roux) and, of course, coleslaw.

It turns out, the hardest thing about frying chicken at home is refraining from overindulgence.

Chocolate Buttermilk Pancakes

I once had a lovely brunch that featured a bitter orange chocolate waffle with bourbon cream. It was chocolatey with out being overly sweet, and the bitter orange was a delightful counterpoint.

Since that day, I've been slightly haunted by thoughts of chocolate pancakes. Since my attempts at chocolatifying oatmeal cookies turned out so well, why not use the same adaptation for pancakes? I didn't have any orange, bitter or otherwise, but I figured that it should be pretty good anyway, especially with a little whiskey syrup poured over.

You can make these in a food processor! The metal blade continually slices through any forming gluten strands, preventing it from getting tough.

Chocolate Buttermilk Pancakes
Makes 8 or 9 medium pancakes, or 6 bigger ones

1 large egg
1 cup buttermilk
3/4 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup dark cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons melted butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
pinch of cinnamon (optional)

Combine egg and buttermilk in a food processor fitted with a metal blade (not a mixing hook) and blitz for about a half-minute to make sure everything is thoroughly integrated. Add the rest of the ingredients and process on high for one whole minute.

Pre-heat a large non-stick skillet over medium-high flame. Spritz with a little canola oil. Ladle out pancake batter, making two or three pancakes at a time, depending on the size of your pan (I get three modestly sized pancakes in a 12" skillet). Cook, keeping an eye on the temperature, until bubbles start to form throughout the surface and the edges start to look dry. Then turn each pancake over, and cook for a couple of more minutes on the other side. Keep warm on a rack in a warmed oven until all the pancakes are ready.

Since I make three at a time, I like to sort of rotate where I put the batter to make sure I'm using most of the surface of the pan. This is mostly just to keep the pan from overheating where nothing is being cooked.

It is entirely reasonable to fry up some bacon in another pan, while all this is going on.


Why didn't I do this before? Next time, perhaps a little orange zest into the mix, or maybe just serve with a good bitter orange marmalade.

Mexican Bento

My worldwide bento lunch theme continues with Mexico.

The crumbly meat mixture is in fact picadillo, a ground meat filling used to stuff into things - peppers, tortillas, empanadas, etc. I made this one using the recipe from Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz's slim volume The Mexican Kitchen. It consists of fried up ground beef, onions and garlic, finely chopped green apple, tomatoes, pickled serrano peppers, raisins, cinnamon, ground cumin and black pepper. You can pretty much add as much of each ingredient as you want - I used one apple per one pound of meat, and just a small handful of raisins. It's very customizable. There is often a garnish of sliced almonds fried in butter, but I didn't have any, so I left mine plain, and stirred in a little cilantro instead.

The vegetably dish is the unimaginatively titled Green Lima Beans in Sauce (from the same book). I'm thinking of calling it ¡Hola Frijoles! It is delicious, and this coming from someone who was none-too-certain about the whole Lima Bean thing until very recently. I used frozen baby limas, and chucked them into a shallow sauce pan with a little water, a chopped onion, some garlic, and some tinned diced tomatoes. I added some chopped fresh jalapeños and stirred in a whole lot of cilantro. I cooked them, stirring frequently, until the water had evaporated and the tomatoes smudged down into a chunky sauce, which took about twenty minutes.

I was expecting a dish that was palatable but unremarkable (I restrained myself from adding cumin), but I had woefully underestimated the recipe. The flavour of the finished dish was surprisingly complex, and very, very Mexican tasting. It was an outstanding vegetable dish that stood up well to the rest of the meal, was good hot and cold, and re-heated beautifully for my bento the next day. (FYI, I do not heat food directly in my bento container, I use proper dishes. It's not safe to microwave the brand of bento boxes that I use.) I would recommend it to anyone, and especially to vegetarians wanting an interesting taco or tostada filling.

Finally, up at the top, you can see the edges of some homemade corn tortillas (recipe nominally also from the same book, except that I added a little lard, and a pinch of salt). I don't have a tortilla press, so I use my heavy, cast-iron frying pan to flatten them out, and that seems to work pretty well. I keep a small rolling pin on had to give them a quick go-over if they seem to need it, but usually they're fine.

More bentos to come...French, North American, (of course) Japanese, and many more! I'm in a zone.

Chocolate Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chip Cookies

Oatmeal Spice Anything Cookies - are so very adaptable that they've become a go-to staple whenever I need to whip up a quick batch of cookie goodness. I've made them with dried blueberries and white chocolate chunks, with cranberries and Christmas spices, pumpkin seeds and golden raisins, and an almost infinite variety of fruit, nuts, spices, and other goodies. So...why not chocolate?

Of course, I have already made them with chocolate chips - I'm not daft! But, it occurred to me that I don't often see recipes for cookies that are themselves both oat- and chocolate-based. Why not? Is there something mutually exclusive about the decadence of a chocolate cookie and the healthy image of the oatmeal cookie? Couldn't they be combined into a single, satisfying treat?

I had been toying with the notion for a little while, when I stumbled onto an ingredient that upped the ante considerably: peanut butter chips.

That did it. I bought some. I took them home. I squinted at my master recipe for a while, and finally, I made the adjustments that I hoped would satisfy everything that I knew these cookies could be.

Here they are:

Chocolate Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chip Cookies
Makes about 3 dozen (depending on size)
Total prep and cooking time: 45 minutes

1/2 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated white sugar
1/2 cup lightly packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup rolled oats
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup dutch-process cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1 cup peanut butter chips
Preheat your oven to 350℉.

Lightly spray two large cookie sheets with canola oil.

In a medium mixing bowl, cream together the butter and sugars until thoroughly combined. Add the egg and vanilla extract, and mix again. You can do this by hand or with an electric mixer. Pour the oats over the wet mixture. Without stirring, sift the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and baking soda directly over the oats. Sprinkle the salt and the allspice over the flour mixture. With a wooden spoon, or on the lowest setting of your mixer, carefully begin to blend everything together. When it is starting to come together, add the peanut butter chips. Finish combining the ingredients until the peanut butter chips are all even distributed through the cookie dough.

Drop by tablespoon onto the prepared cookie sheets, leaving room for each cookie to expand a little. Use your fingers to gently flatten the cookies slightly. Bake at 350 F for 12-15 minutes, depending on size. Remove to racks to cool - they will be soft and flexible - downright bendy! - at first, but will firm up as they cool.

And, of course, they count as health food, thanks to the oatmeal, right?

Summer Fruit Salad

I adore fruit salad.

That is, I love fresh fruit. Fruit salad, as found in restaurants (often under the name "fruit cup" or simply arriving unannounced on the side of your brunch) is often lacking. The most heinous of the many crimes against fruit salad are as follows: too much filler (melon, canned pineapple, citrus sections from a tub), cut too long in advance (I'm pretty sure I've had some that were cut days before they got to me), fruits that don't complement each other (apples mixed in with soft stone fruits), the poorly cut (giant hunks of one fruit, tiny slivers of another) and, finally, what I think of as "interference" - some sort of nasty syrup poured over all as a "dressing".

Fruit salad is not difficult, and in the summer it need not be expensive. I eat fresh fruit year-round, when I can, and I therefore end up eating fairly seasonally, although I confess to occasionally succumbing to raspberries grown in Mexico in the dead of winter. In summer in Vancouver, there are explosions of local berries to choose from, and gorgeous stone fruits from the Okanagan. An embarrassment of riches, really.

While I'm not a hardened locavore (we don't grow papaya or mango around here), I do like to purchase the local version of those fruits that do well in our climate. The salad above contains local organic strawberries and blueberries, as well as papaya (not so local). I thought the combination of colours was pretty, and I find that generally three well-chosen fruits together make a very nice balance. I dressed it the way I dress most fruit salads (the non-dessert-y ones, anyway), which was simply with freshly squeezed lime juice. That's all you need, really, for most fruits.

This salad was made for a friend's bbq afternoon, and I was tickled pink when our host told me that it was the first time anyone had ever brought a fruit salad that wasn't full of things he hated. Perhaps that was luck, but I suspect it's because I didn't go the cheap filler route.

Now, before you think that I'm some crazed melon-hater, I should tell you that I rather like melon. We don't have it in the house due to allergy issues, but I have nothing against fresh melon, in season. I tend to prefer it on its own, but I've had melon-ball salads that were all different kinds of melon, and were absolutely delicious - but that's because it was someone using melon specifically to execute a particular effect, and not simply as coarsely-cut filler to reduce expenses. I also like fresh pineapple - one of my go-to fruit salads is the trio of fresh pineapple (diced small), kiwi, and blueberries - all drizzled with lime juice, naturally. Such a pretty combination of colours, with the green, yellow and blue. So delicious!

Getting back to restaurants, though, I know that one of the problems is that of suppliers. If you want the favourable, stable pricing from your supplier, you need to arrange a full-year gig, not just getting fruit in when it's not in season in your own backyard. This is why you can get limp, colourless tomato slices on your burger at the height of rioting tomato season. It's a tragic pay off, really.

So, in the summer, I eat a lot of fruit. I take fruit salads to work for my lunch as often as I can, and I take great delight in trying different flavours and combinations. It's pretty low effort for most fruit - maybe a bit of peeling and chopping, but for five or ten minutes' work, you get a splendid salad that cheers you right up at lunch time.

Using Up the Bits: Zucchini Balls

I do like zucchini, and I admire its versatility. My mother had an astonishing number of places to hide it when it overran the garden (and the neighbourhood), including a magnificent chocolate zucchini bundt cake and, more surprisingly, a sort of lemon curd whose bulk came from the skin-free pulp of the zucchini (not that you could tell).

As for me, I use zucchini in pasta sauces, in salads, as crudites, and of course the much-beloved Zucchini Fritters. Occasionally I stuff them, and that was what I was doing here...using a melon baller to remove scoops of zucchini flesh from the outer shell that would eventually house some meat-y rice-y affair. No photos of that dish, sorry; I got distracted by the fun possibilities of finding a way to use up the little zucchini balls that I had carved out. Half-balls, actually, as you can clearly see, since my goal was really just to empty out the shell of the zucchini, and I wasn't exactly heeding the form of the squash divots while carving.

I thought about tossing them into the freezer to be thrown in the next batch of curry or an upcoming pasta dish, but they were just so cute, and I couldn't resist doing something more immediate with them. So, I got out a wide skillet, heated a little olive oil until quite hot, and then threw in some cumin seeds. Once the seeds started to pop, I tossed in the little balls, and sauteed them briskly until they just picked up a little colour. A pinch of kosher salt, and voila! Tasty little side dish (or snack) that handily used up all the leftover bits, leaving me feeling virtuously waste-free and rather content at having a little extra something in the fridge.

Turns out, they were good both hot and cold, although a little slippery once chilled. This is definitely going to be the fate of the innards of the next summer squash that I feel the need to eviscerate. I'm betting that a few cherry tomatoes, and maybe some oil-cured black olives and some garlic would round this out into a perfectly wonderful dish all on its own.

Chicken Canzanese

I had some sage that needed using. A friend had uprooted a monstrous sage bush from his yard, and I became the beneficiary of a whole lot o' sage leaves that needed using (or drying) post haste.

Happily, my June 2010 issue of Cook's Illustrated had a recipe for Chicken Canzanese, an appealing-looking braised chicken and wine dish that is fairly different from anything I'd tried before. The dominant seasoning notes of the dish are fresh sage and garlic, but it also contains whole clove buds, which is an intriguing departure from the usual suspects.

The recipe suggested serving the dish over polenta, boiled potatoes, or noodles, and I decided that the generous amount of liquid in the dish could be converted into a nice sauce for linguine. In fact, it was a little on the too-thin side, but was delicious anyway. In the future, I think I would probably reduce the amount of cooking liquid by about 1/2 cup, which shouldn't be detrimental to the main braise, but would result in a slightly thicker sauce at the end.

There was, in fact, so very much sauce that I used it as the basis of a pot pie for the remaining pieces of chicken (stripped from their bones), the next day. Even so, there was more sauce than strictly necessary, and reducing the overall liquid by a half cup is definitely in this dish's future. It also could have taken even more sage, had I only known. I did add a little more to the pot pie, just because I could.

The flavour of this dish is fantastic - familiar, comforting, and somewhat sophisticated, all at the same time. It takes a little while to make, but is definitely worth the wait.

Chicken Canzanese
Adapted from Cook's Illustrated, June 2010

1 tablespoon olive oil
2 ounces of diced prosciutto cubes (very small)
4 garlic cloves (sliced lengthwise)
8 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (back attached), trimmed of excess fat and skin)
2 teaspoons flour
2 cups dry white wine (or 1 1/2 cups...)
1 cup chicken stock or broth
4 clove buds
1 sprig of fresh rosemary, minced
12 whole fresh sage leaves (15 would be better)
2 bay leaves
pinch of red pepper flakes
juice from 1/2 lemon
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
kosher salt

Pre-heat oven to 325℉, with the rack at middle-lower position. Season the chicken lightly with kosher salt, and a little ground white pepper if you wish.

In a large skillet (minimum 12"), heat half the olive oil and saute the prosciutto cubes until fragrant, and add the garlic slices, cooking for just a minute or so until lightly golden (be careful not to burn). Remove to a small bowl and set aside.

Without cleaning the pan, add the rest of the olive oil and heat until very hot. Add the chicken pieces, skin side down, and cook without disturbing for about 8 minutes or until golden brown. Flip pieces over and cook a further 5 minutes. You may need to do this in two batches. Remove the chicken to a plate.

Remove some of the rendered fat from the pan, leaving about 2 tablespoons. Make a blond roux by adding the flour to the pan, and stirring and scraping with a wooden spoon or spatula until fragrant, about one minute. Add the wine and broth, slowly, stirring to make a smooth, if thin, sauce, continuing to scrape the bottom until all the browned bits have been scraped up off the bottom of the pan. If the sauce is lumping up on you, whisk vigorously until it smoothes out. Add in the clove buds, red pepper flakes, sage leaves, bay leaves, and reserved prosciutto and garlic.

Carefully return the chicken to the pan in a single layer, skin-side up so it sticks out of the liquid. Bake uncovered until tender, about 1 hour 15 minutes. You should check on the chicken after about 15 minutes into the cook time, and the liquid should be barely bubbling. If it is doing something else (or nothing) raise or lower your temperature slightly, accordingly. While the chicken cooks, you can prepare your side dish(es). A big green salad nicely complements the richness of the dish.

Remove chicken from pan to a clean plate, and tent loosely with tinfoil. Place pan over high heat on the stovetop, and boil vigorously until sauce is reduced and thickened. Turn off the heat and add the lemon juice, butter, and minced rosemary. Pour sauce around chicken, and serve.

This chicken was so incredibly tender, moist, and delicious, even when re-heated the next day in pot-pie format, that I will absolutely be making this dish again. Next time: less liquid, more sage. Next time, also, I will make a full recipe (even for the two of us) and plan to make another stunning pot pie out of the extra.

Not Quite Trifle, Almost Parfait

What do you do with a little leftover plain chocolate cake? Well, if you have some strawberries around, you cube up that cake and toss it with sliced strawberries and a big dollop of freshly whipped cream. If I had had the foresight to layer these carefully into parfait glasses, it would surely make an even prettier picture (although I would have had to cut the cubes of cake a little smaller).

When I made this, it was still a little early for strawberries, and they didn't have the most robust flavour. To give them a boost, I sliced them up and macerated them in a little cherry brandy and a pinch of sugar. This is a common treatment for strawberries in our house, especially if there isn't additional fruit available to make a fruit salad. After a couple of hours in the fridge, they were thrown into this ad hoc dessert for a late-night treat in front of the television.

It's not fancy, and it's not something I would ever plan to feed to company, for example, but it was a pretty nice way to say goodbye to the last of the cake that needed using up.

A few final words on whipped cream. If you are in the habit of buying self-whipping cream in a can, do give the old fashioned method a try: it doesn't take much time or effort, and the result is so luxuriously preferable to the sweet, fluffy canned version. You can control the sugar, too, or flavour it in other ways - the aforementioned brandy, for example, or a hint of vanilla extract.

Santa Fe Corn Pie (or, it took me long enough)

I found this recipe whilst surfing around the internet, as one does. I had bookmarked it, and then copy-pasted it into a document of Things I Want to Make, where it languished for about a year until I finally, randomly decided that it was about time. As I set about marshalling my shopping list to make sure I had all necessary components, I noticed that the credited author, Diane Clement, is local to me - a fellow Vancouverite, whose Tomato Fresh Food Cafe I have visited in the past, and whose cookbook "At The Tomato" is on my bookshelf, where it has been for a number of years.

When I got home, I cracked open the cookbook and discovered that the very same recipe had been waiting for me, at home, all this time.

It was delicious. And easy! It's a sort of quiche-y affair, and sort of a cornbread-y thing, and not quite a spoonbread. I will be making this again and again - for brunch, for lunch, for dinner, and maybe even for some kind of snack. It was easy, too - no fussing with pastry (which I enjoy, but don't always have the patience for at blink-o'clock in the morning. I suspect it is a useful make-ahead, where you leave it unbaked in the fridge the night before, and then simply pop it into the oven in the morning. In fact, I think I'll try that next.

The only significant addition that I made to this recipe was to sprinkle some smoked paprika over the top as a finisher. It gave a lovely smokey highlight to the dish without taking over the lovely corn-forward flavour. I also omitted the melted butter from the original recipe.

Santa Fe Corn Pie
(adapted from Diane Clement's At The Tomato)

3 large eggs, beaten
1 cup creamed corn
1 1/4 cups frozen corn – thawed by running it under hot water (in a strainer)
1/2 cup yellow cornmeal
3/4 cup sour cream
1 cup Monterey jack cheese grated
5 canned mild green chiles, chopped
1/4 teaspoon worchestershire sauce
few shots Tabasco sauce
3 tablespoons green onions, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon pimenton (smoked paprika)

Spritz a 10" pie plate with canola spray.

In a large bowl, combine all ingredients and stir with a big mixing spoon until thoroughly combined.  Pour into the pie plate and bake, uncovered, at 350 F for about 45 – 50 minutes or until golden and firm in the middle. 

She notes that the pie may be baked ahead and refrigerated for up to 3 days. I did take my leftovers to work for lunch the following day, and it warmed up beautifully in the microwave. Alongside a big green salad, it was a light, yet filling work lunch.

Yo ho ho, French Toast for breakfast

A while ago, I made some rum syrup, for some recipe or other. And I liked it so much, it stayed on in the kitchen to be incorporated into anything where a traditional maple syrup might have once gone, or really anything that could use some pirate flavours. Such as pancakes ( a frequent flyer, of late) and this time, by special request, French Toast.

I don't make French Toast all that often. It's easy enough, of course, but it seems rather a lot of work for something ultimately fairly ordinary. This time, however, I used a mild sourdough bread, and with the added bananas and rum syrup, well, I can see myself doing this again, and soon. I am always ridiculously thrilled to have fresh fruit at breakfast, a condition which has only worsened since our trip to Mexico last year, and French Toast provides a terrific vehicle - more so even than pancakes, I think.

Since I am almost constitutionally incapable of having an all-sweet breakfast, we added bacon, which is a fine additional to almost any meal.

If you don't have a favourite recipe for French Toast, you might enjoy this one, which is adapted from the Big Book of Breakfast by Maryana Vollstedt.

Basic French Toast

2 large eggs
1/2 cup 1% milk
dash salt
4 large slices of mild bakery sourdough
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
a little butter, for frying.

Mix the eggs, milk, salt and vanilla and pour into a shallow bowl. Dip the slices of bread briefly into the egg mixture, turning to coat, and put aside on a holding plate until they are all done.

Heat a large skillet over medium, and add a little butter (or canola oil). When the butter has melted (or oil heated) lay in two of the slices (or as many as will fit in a single, uncrowded layer), and cook for about three minutes per side. Remove to a rack in the oven to keep warm until they are all cooked.

Delicious with any sort of syrup, I'm sure, but extra pirate-y with rum syrup.

Feel Good Noodle Bowl

I've been sitting on this pic for a while, as it trickily sneaked under my radar when I was processing a large number of photos.

This is wonderfully comfort-foodish, even if your childhood didn't include Chinese steamed noodles, miso gravy, or tolerable vegetables. If you like any of these things now, this will be a go-to staple of those nights when you really feel like something that is simple, healthy, and tasty.

I can't even call it a recipe. It takes about three minutes to cook up some fresh Chinese steamed (or "steam") noodles (around here, they are sold in the produce dept. of most major grocery stoes), or other fresh noodles, dole them into bowls and top with freshly steamed vegetables of your choice. Drizzle with sauce, and devour.

I like snow peas (mangetouts) here, too, and chunks of steamed or roasted yam. You could try fennel bulb, red bell peppers, cubes of smoked tofu, baby corn, or sake-steamed shiitake mushrooms.

You can also switch things up to suit yourself - this is an eminently customizable dish. You could swap the miso gravy for a nice peanuty sate sauce, or perhaps even a little leftover curry sauce that you might happen to have in your freezer. You could change the noodles to your favourite type of rice, for a potentially (depending on the sauce, of course) gluten-free version. Even the sesame seeds are optional.

Best of all, once you are deliciously full, you can feel confident that you've gotten most of your vegetable needs down the hatch, while feeling like you're getting away with something. A little fresh fruit for dessert, should you be so lucky, and you're done.

Bento Greco

Bento, again, or as they might say on Iron Chef, "Bento, Greek Flavour."

The meatballs in the little silicone baking cup are spiced lamb, and the salad is the always fantastic and staple summer potluck salad, Chickpea and Orzo with Dill. I've changed the technique a little over the years, and now I combine everything but the orzo and cold water in a big bowl while the pasta cooks, and then, after running it under cold water to stop the cooking, giving it a half-hearted shake and add it to the rest. Quick toss, and you're done.

The olives tucked in with the meatballs are kalamatas. The cucumber is self-explanatory, but I confess it was going to be a Greek salad, originally - cukes, tomato, red onion, more feta, and green bell pepper. I discovered that the other vegetables were inexplicably not in my crisper, so I just went with sliced cucumbers, which I'm always happy to have with my lunch.

Between the chickpeas and the lamb, it was plenty of food. I removed the meatballs and heated them up in the microwave, but I was using fairly lean lamb, so they could have been eaten cold. They were leftovers from dinner the night before, and as you may know by now, I love taking leftover dinner for lunch.

A Brief Journey in Short Ribs

Spring is coming on fast, but there are still a few chilly days left that lend themselves to beefy braises and slow stews; just time to get in one more short rib dinner. Or three.


I kept it simple, to start. Rubbed the meat with a little kosher salt and olive oil, browned it well in a Dutch oven, deglazed with a cheap and cheerful Chilean carménère (Éstacion, $12, surprisingly drinkable), added a 400 ml tin of plain diced tomatoes with their juices and a half-cup of chicken stock. For seasoning, a sprig each of rosemary and thyme from the garden, 3 bay leaves, a few cloves of garlic (quartered lengthwise), and a dash of allspice. Once the dish was at a simmer, I put it in the oven, covered, at 300℉ for three hours. The last half-hour of waiting was pure agony, but the wait was worth it. Rich, meltingly tender, and with a deep, wonderful beefy flavour. Baked potato (since the oven was on anyway) and coleslaw rounded out the meal.I made extra, not that we'd have had the room for larger servings. No, the extra was for conversion purposes. I figure that any time I am waiting three hours for something to come out of the oven, I'm making it count. So, I cooked double the amount that we needed, and stored the leftovers in the braising liquid in the fridge.

The added bonus of advance preparation and chilling is that all of the lovely suet comes up to the surface, and an be quite easily lifted off (to feed the birds, or save for some other purpose), leaving a lean gel of braising liquid surrounding the still-on-the-bone meat.

So, what to do with the leftovers? Sandwiches, of course! I warmed up the meat and shredded it with a couple of forks (pulled pork style), and put it on toasted buns with a few pieces of the tomatoes from the braising liquid, topped the whole thing with a layer of edam cheese, and served with a spinach salad for super-fast dinner.


Since there was still a little shredded meat leftover that I couldn't cram onto the buns, and the rest of the braising liquid, I used the liquid as a base for a soup, adding a little extra broth, some carrot coins, corn, lima beans(!), and barley. At the end, the shredded meat went back into the pot to warm up. Embarassingly easy, and very delicious with a big hunk of bread to mop up the last bits.

Bring on spring. I'm feeling fortified.

Salad Tweaking (Pasta Salad Primavera)

If you have check out my Reviews blog, Much Ado About Diet, you'll see the test recipe for Dilled Pasta Salad with Spring Vegetables from the newly released Mayo Clinic Diet & Journal. As noted, we like all of the ingredients, and so we enjoyed the salad, but we also identified some issues for this recipe in terms of its end result on the plate, as well as the overall health scorecard. So I decided to give it a little salad makeover.


Right away, we were surprised by the amount of oil in the original dressing recipe. 1/4 cup seemed rather high for the amount of salad to be dressed and, in fact, it delivered an uncomfortably oily result. In the revised recipe below, we cut the amount of fat in half, using only two tablespoons of olive oil. That took care of the excessive greasiness, and still easily provided enough dressing to adequately season the salad.

The second thing we noted was that the use of both asparagus and green bell pepper gave an overall bitter quality to the entire salad, not to mention contributing to a rather monotone appearance. The few cherry tomatoes did break up the green and white pasta-scape, but left me thinking that the whole dish could benefit from more colour, and more natural vegetable sweetness. I switched out the green pepper for orange and red bell peppers, which are much sweeter and do not have that unripe bitter quality of the green.


I also felt that the amount of pasta could really support a much greater quantity of vegetable matter, allowing for larger portions that really only increased the fresh vegetable intake of any serving. More vegetables is generally considered an improvement, health-wise, so I increased all of the feature vegetables: 2 more asparagus stalks, an extra half bell pepper, extra tomatoes (the exact number is going to depend on the size of tomato you choose).

Finally, I thought the amount of fresh herb could use a boost, so I roughly doubled the chopped herbs. In the second iteration, I used tarragon instead of dill, but that was simply because I had it handy, and it plays well with the same vegetables.

I think the final salad was more visually appealing (the change of noodle was strictly due to availability at the time) with lots of colours and a nice balance between the astringent asparagus, the sweet peppers, and the acidity of the tomatoes. The flavours were bright, the pasta tasted seasoned, but not greasy, and this recipe has earned a place in my spring and summer repertoire. It's versatile, vegan, stores well in the fridge for a day or two, and is about perfect for potlucks or picnics.

Pasta Salad Primavera
adapted from The Mayo Clinic Diet & Journal
Serves 4

3 cups uncooked short pasta, such as rotini
10 asparagus stalks
1 orange bell pepper
1/2 red bell pepper
2 green onions
10 - 12 cocktail tomatoes

Dressing
2 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 Tablespoons rice vinegar (or white balsamic vinegar)
2 Tablespoons olive oil
large pinch kosher salt
black pepper to taste
1/2 cup fresh green herbs of your choice (e.g. tarragon, dill, basil, or parsley)

Trim the asparagus and slice into approximately two-centimeter chunks. Dice the peppers into medium-small dice. FInely slice the green onions. Cut the tomatoes as needed - quarters for strawberry tomatoes, halves for cherry tomatoes, and whole for grape.

Stir the dressing together while the pasta boils.

Drop the pasta into boiling, lightly salted water and cook until just tender. For the last two minutes of cooking time, add the asparagus to the pot of boiling pasta. When finished, drain and plunge the pasta and asparagus into ice water to stop the cooking process and cool it down. Rinse with fresh, cold water until all the pasta is cool to the touch. Drain well, shaking to get rid of any excess water.

In a large serving bowl, combine the chopped raw vegetables and dressing. Add the well-drained pasta and asparagus and toss so that the dressing gets evenly distributed. Serve right away, or chill until needed.