Happy Birthday Peter

It is a beautiful sunny day, and it is my sweeties birthday. Which we both forgot until we were up a few hours and he looked at the date on the computer.
So, as tradition dictates, I am making an Angel Food cake. I don't much like Angel Food cake, and I used to think it was because it came out of a box, so one year I tried making it from scratch just to see if it was better. It was exactly the same, so now I just make it out of the box. It takes 5 minutes, and that is only because I always have to wash the dust out of the bundt pan and the mixer bowl.
You know how the directions say immediately invert the pan on the neck of a bottle to cool? My bundt pan has too narrow a neck to do this, there is no bottle narrow enough to fit. Every year I forget this until I take the cake out of the oven, and then I have to hunt around for various objects in my kitchen that might work. This year it was the knob on the butter dish that worked.

Peter got three tonnes of sand for his birthday. Not terribly romantic, but it will help to bury the power cable that runs to the garage when we get the power upgrade. Which, yet again was postponed until next Wednesday. That makes the fifth time it has been postponed by our electrician, if anyone is counting. If anyone ever wonders why it takes us so long to renovate the house, this would be one example of a delay that is not our fault.
The delay has not been all bad. The temperature has warmed up to freezing, which will make digging easier. Sometimes we are very lucky.

Like last weekend for example, we went and got a new snow blower. Notice I didn't say buy. We stole it out of my father's shed as he can't use it anymore so he decided this year to get the local plow operator to clear his drive instead. Our last snow blower died during the last snowstorm, and we were lucky enough to get the new one the day before the next snowfall. Lucky. Thanks Dad.

Holiday Cooking Failures

On the weekend, I actually mustered enough spirit to do some Christmas cooking. There are some standards that must be made every year, but the problem is of course that there are two of us, so the standards are different. (The nice thing about standards is there are so many of them.)
My favourite is frying pan cookies, his favourite is fruit balls. The good thing about Christmas cooking is that for everything the ingredients are pretty much the same but the method is different. Ingredients for dark fruit cake, (or war cake as we call it in this house) frying pan cookies and fruit balls are all the same, only in different amounts which make the trip to the bulk barn easier. Sugar, fat, eggs, dates, nuts, coconut, candied cherries and candied fruit are all you need to make anything at Christmas.
War cake is pretty easy, and I posted about it two years ago here. This year, I forgot to cover the outside of my breakaway bunt pan with tin foil, so the cake got mushy on the bottom inch as it sat cooking in water to keep it moist. Moist, yeah I'll say. The fix for that is I have a slightly shorter bunt cake than usual because I cut off the bottom and threw it in the compost.
Frying Pan cookies are also easy, because they don't get baked, just cooked in the pan and rolled in coconut. Yum.
Fruit balls are trickier apparently. This year was my first attempt. He usually makes them, as they are his mother's recipe. They have always turned out for him in the past so I was not forewarned. On Monday, while he went to Digby to pick up his parents from the Saint John Ferry, I got to work to make fruit balls as a surprise for them all. You mix all the stuff together in a bowl, add eggs and sugar, and drop them on a cookie sheet and into the oven. Easy right? The sugar and eggs are supposed to keep the chopped fruit and nuts together and they turn into sticky chewy blobs. It didn't work. They looked fine until I tried to remove them from the cookie sheet, and they fell apart into crumbled sticky fruit and nuts, they wouldn't stay as balls at all. It was at this time they all arrived home to witness my complete failure. That's when his mum told me she couldn't get them to work either most times. She blamed the egg being too runny, I blamed the dates being too hard.
I thought I could salvage the failure by taking the crumbs and using it as topping for a holiday pear crisp. Good idea, but bad execution. I had some already sliced pears in the freezer that we harvested from our tree out back this fall. I threw them in a pan, threw the topping on top and popped it all in the oven. I think, it would have worked better if the pears weren't frozen. What we got was a very watery, mushy pear soup on the bottom with sticky chewy nuts and fruit on top. It tasted Ok once it was drained with a slotted spoon, but there were a lot of leftovers that went into the compost bin.

Canning is the New Knitting

Last week, I heard on the radio that canning was the new knitting. The idea is that people can continue to eat locally during the winter if they preserve the harvest now. My mother would say everything old is new again.
Being a country girl, I've always been into canning because I was spoiled as a child with home made everything and the store bought versions were never as good. So years ago I started with jam and sweet fruit preserves. The other one loves pickles, so pickles were my next attempt. I used to spend weeks in the fall preserving everything I could get mt hands on that I could do in a hot water canner. My intentions were good but invariably we never ate all of it, and after a few years of dusting jars full of suspect stuff that eventually got thrown away, I gave up most of it and just stayed with the staples.
I'm not so fond of pickles and making them is a lot of work, so I don't do as many of those as he would like. The picture above is a small batch of green tomato chow, because we have a lot of green tomatoes and both the O.O and his father like them.
Salsa is one of those things that I can't stand if bought in a store. It just tastes like chemicals to me, but we eat a lot of Mexican food, and homemade salsa is a staple now. For a couple of years I've attempted to plant everything in the vegetable garden that one needs to make Salsa, but no matter how much I plan, the plants don't seem to co-operate. This year I got enough green peppers, about 2 weeks earlier than any tomatoes ripened. We got cold weather in early September which threatened frost, so I picked the bulk of my tomatoes while they were still green and packed them up in boxes to ripen later. None of my hot peppers grew at all. I couldn't find cilantro to plant at all this spring and my onions are just about ready to be picked now, although they are very small. So once again I went to the farm market and bought the ingredients I needed to make salsa and spent all day yesterday in the kitchen.
The other one, meanwhile finished off roofing the garden shed with the help of our neighbour Dan. This will keep the floor from rotting out again, and will also keep the new lawn mower dry in the winter.









Today he is working on replacing the sheathing on one end of the garage in a vain attempt to keep the critters out. Again, we are doing this a cheaply as possible because we want to tear the ugly garage down someday, so instead of using something proper, we are slapping up something call super roof, which seems to be half inch chip board, but not chip board.

We're Jammin'

This weekend I found myself with the unusual circumstance of not having anything to do. No social commitments, no house reno planned, no plans already made at all. And with the tail end of a tropical storm bearing down on us, I knew I wouldn't be gardening or going for a spin on the bike.
I may have mentioned that strawberry season is my favourite time of year. My love of strawberries is easily surpassed by how much the Other One adores blackberries.
With the O.O. locked in his room until his school work is done, I decided to reward his efforts by making him some blackberry jam. Off I went this morning to my not so secret spot down by the railroad tracks, just as the rain began to fall. It has been three years since I was last there. Last year and the year before, we were in Newfoundland. (AKA no berries to be found land.)
The berries were still there but they were smaller than I remembered, and pretty picked over already in most spots. Since I was last there, a proper walking trail has been put in beside the tracks, and I think more people walk there now. CN used to be pretty unhappy when people would use the train tracks as a trail, so they gave people a place to walk, just about a year before the last train stopped running. It took me nearly three hours to pick a scant five pints. It rained lightly, but I got soaked through, wading deep into the thickets looking for bigger berries. Finally I figured I had enough for a batch.
The bad thing about blackberries, aside from the thorns and the wasps, is that you have to sieve out the seeds and so you need to pick a lot more of them than say, strawberries. (Mmmmm, strawberries.) Happily, the O.O. likes jam more than jelly, (or at least so he tells me) and I don't have to get rid of all the seeds, which would be too tedious. When I was a teenager with braces, my Aunt Erica use to make me blackberry jelly. Now I know that there is just nothing I can do to make it up to her.
The jam making took most of the afternoon. Usually I double or quadruple a batch to save time. The directions on the pectin packaging warn against this, but I like to live on the edge. Except this year, none of my strawberry jams set up properly. I was blaming watery berries from all the early rain we got, but to be on the safe side I decided to follow directions this time. I forgot to put in the pectin in the first batch before I started to bottle it. Then I had to reboil the jam and re wash and sterilize the jars so I could add it. This slowed the process down a bit.
Then I had the brilliant idea to try and save the seeds I had sieved out so I could plant them and have my own berry patch. The O.O. was really excited by this idea and so we began. We washed and we washed and we washed and we washed. And lots of pulpy gunk came off the seeds, but at the end of 20 minutes, they were still pretty pulpy. I was concerned that they would go moldy before they germinated, so we tried a different tactic. We smooshed them out onto newspaper to dry them. My theory is that the pulp will brush off easier if it is dry. Once the seed is clean, we can stratify it in the fridge and sow it in a cold frame to germinate in spring. All in all, I had about 4 cups of pulp, which probably translates into thousands of seeds, so even if the germination rate is really low, I should get a few plants growing in the spring to plant out. It's a start.

Food Adventures

Food is a big part of the holidays for me. Being in a foreign country, I have experienced some unusual fare in the last month at parties.
First it was cod spread. Believe it or not this was pretty good. Salt cod, rinsed until it was only very salty, flaked up and then mixed with lots of garlic and some cream. Spread on crackers or a baguette as a snack. I was told this was a traditional thing except the garlic which is a modern addition.
Then it was moose sausages. These weren't all that moosey if you know what I mean. I expected them to be gamey like deer, but mostly they were like ground beef.
Tortierre was at the same party as the moose sausage, it was ground lamb and pork in a nice pastry, but a little dry for me.
Seal flipper pie. Yes, the LeXy TD insisted on this one. We found it at the apparently famous institution of Bidgoods Grocery in the Goulds. They have a licence to sell game and it is probably where the moose and the tortierre came from as they also have quite a specialty section. We went looking for mince meat for Christmas pie, but were unsuccessful. I think seal flipper must be an acquired taste. It was a traditional meat pie with chunks of veg and gravy and a thick bread crust on top, but instead of beef or chicken it was flipper. Just flipper the label said, we made a few jokes about dolphins and bought it for lunch. Studyboy described the taste as smoked liver. The texture was stringy like stew meat but the taste was a strong smoked liver with a soupcon of fish. LeXy and I finished ours off but didn't go back for seconds, Studyboy gave his to the dog. The dog LOVED it.
We bought partridge berries at Bidgoods too, in case we never found the mincemeat for pie. I have had fresh partridge berries before, because they grow in Nova Scotia, but we have so many nicer berries there that we don't bother with them like they do here. The partridge berry jam we bought at the farmers stall is nice on toast, but the frozen berries in a pie leave rather a tart taste on the back of the tongue. "Like cranberries trying to be blueberries' is how LeXy described them. Thinking that they were a relative of blueberries and cranberries I put lots of tapioca in the pie to sop up the extra juice. Partridge berries are not as juicy when cooked so we ended up with a really thick solid filling. A jam pie.
After several attempts to find real mincemeat, we found a jar imported from England at Auntie Crae's, another institution here in town. It essentially made raisin pie. Whenever I would ask for mincemeat at a butcher or deli counter, they would try to sell me ground beef. When I described what I was looking for, one woman pointed out that there are no deer in Newfoundland so I was not likely to find any. Good point.
We saw lots of bake apple preserves too, but they were pricey and one woman said they were difficult to pick so it was worth it to pay for them. I kept asking what exactly bake apples were but really didn't get a good explanation from anyone. A low growing berry was all the description I could elicit so I googled them. They are a ground cover version of a raspberry/blackberry cousin, but yellow when ripe. It must be the prickles that make them difficult to pick. Now that I know, I'll splurge out on a small jar.

Christmas Samosas

Christmas is a time of traditions. Cooking is one of those traditions I enjoy. The eating bit I mean, not so much the cooking bit. Usually I just eat what other people (read: my mother) make, but that is impossible this year so she kindly sent me the recipes for my favourites so I could make them myself.
Christmas cooking has always struck me as a BIG Production. I once stayed with a Portuguese lady in Kitimat just before Christmas. Her daughters were coming home for the holidays so she was making the traditional bean salad for them. This required having the beans sit under cold running water for a week. In Kitimat she did this in the laundry sink, but at home in Portugal she explained they would be placed in the local stream. This seemed like a lot of work to me, but the bean salad was delicious.
At my mother's house, cooking was a big deal there too. I mean, there are at least 4 or 5 standard cookies alone that must be made, plus the War Cake, the gumdrop cake, and three or more pies. This is usually all done by the time I breeze in, so it is terribly impressive to see. (and eat)
The War cake was always the most intimidating. I never understood the name. Why, when it has all kinds of fruit and stuff in it, when it was so rich and moist, was it called War cake? I had a vague idea that the name came from rationing, but it seems to me that it is full of stuff that would be rationed. Cherries, dates, candied citrus; these are not local products.

Theory number 1: Studyboy thought it was sent oversees to England (where there was stricter rationing) as a present to the soldiers during the war.
Theory number 2: I thought people saved up rations for months as a treat to be able to make this at Christmas.
Theory number 3: It is so heavy and dense, it could be used as a weapon in a slingshot or a trebuchet.

All good theories, but all wrong apparently. I looked it up. Butter, milk and eggs were rationed during war time, and true War Cake doesn't have any of these things. I'm still not certain how you were meant to get the exotic fruits during naval blockades but there you are. My mother's War Cake recipe does have eggs and a bit of sugar. The sugar, I suppose, could be honey.
Incidentally, War Cake came before the 2 World Wars, I found an internet recipe for Civil War cake that is exactly my mother's recipe. I'm not saying she's that old, just the recipe.
So I was a little intimidated to make it, what with all the ingredients, plus it is huge. I imagined it taking days and days to make. My mother always seemed to make it so early, I thought this was because it took that long to make. You have to chop up all the stuff, you have to measure it out. It's a BIG production.
Turns out it's not. You can buy all the stuff pre-choppped and measured at the bulk barn. Throw it in a pot, boil it 5 minutes, stick it in a snowbank to cool, toss in the flour, throw it in the oven and have a cup of tea. You don't even have to grease the pan.
I'll tell you what is a lot of work though. Samosas. Studyboy and I went to an end of term/holiday pot luck last week, and he had the bright idea that I could make samosas. Here is the irony: War Cake if full of exotic stuff and is dead easy to make, samosas are full of bog standard ingredients like potatoes and frozen peas, and they take hours and hours and hours.
It took an 90 minutes in the morning to cut up and boil the veg, mash the potatoes and let it cool to make the filling. I cleaned up the mess and made lunch. It took an 90 minutes in the afternoon to make and roll out and cut the pastry, and then fill the pastry and clean up the mess. Then I decided to take a tea break before I fried them, so the samosas wouldn't be cold when I took them to the party. This was a bad idea, because as I was about to heat the oil the power went off for an hour. Once it was back on, it took 25 minutes to heat the oil, and that's when I learned you can't pile raw samosas on top of each other because they stick together. Happily, Studyboy had just returned from passing in his last paper and he was drafted to gently peel them apart and repair holes while I took another 35 minutes to fry the stupid things.
Next party, I'm taking War Cake.

How to Cook Cod (or How NOT to Cook Cod)

This week seems to be about cooking adventures. Yesterday, our neighbours gave Peter some fresh cod. This is the last week of the food fishery and someones brother in law had been out to catch some fish. Food fishery is one of those odd terms that seems redundant to me. Like why else would anyone catch fish except for food? But what it means is that non commercial people like someones brother in law can go out and get some cod for personal use. Or to give to the crazy Nova Scotians next door.
According to our neighbours who are gay, but otherwise true Newfoundlanders through and through, there is only one way to cook fresh cod. In fact, they were so adamant about it, they gave me explicit instructions. Twice. You chop up some salt pork fat into little squares and fry them until the fat is all rendered ( this is called scruntcheons). Then you dredge the cod in flour and fry it in the pork fat. You buy the salt pork fat in the grocery store in the meat section, right next to the salt pork riblets and the blood pudding. This is not a joke.
But here is the thing, the day before I had made breaded pork cutlets for dinner and I didn't really want to eat something fried two days in a row. Plus, I don't really like cod that much, and I knew the only way I would enjoy it was to disguise it. So I opened the Joy of Cooking and found a recipe for Fresh Cod a la Portuguese. Now even a Newfoundlander has to admit the Portuguese must know something about cooking cod. Essentially it is cod poached in a tomato and white wine sauce, and it was pretty good. When I told my neighbours what I was doing they were utterly horrified. I think if they had been able to demand I return their cod they would have. (Waste of Cod!) But then again, they are getting used to hearing about the crazy stuff we eat: the other day I made Dave try some halva.

My $50 Bowl of Soup

Six weeks ago I signed up for a mushroom ID class offered through the City of St John's rec department. I wanted belly dancing but it was full. The mushroom class was every other Tuesday night for 3 sessions at the MUN botanical garden. We had our last session two days ago. I knew nothing about wild mushrooms before, and I still know very little but it was an interesting introduction none the less.
One thing I learned; people who like wild mushrooms really like wild mushrooms. I am only mildly interested myself, and I confess that even though I could now distinguish a King Bolite from a Morel I am no more likely to go foraging in the forest for them than I was before. However, it is nice to know that if I ever find myself wandering through the woods in the fall, post apocalypse, I won't starve like some people.
Another thing I learned was to properly ID a mushroom, you need to do a spore print. Each mushroom has a specific spore print based on its pattern and colour. This is important because there are a lot of mushrooms that look a like and some are good to eat but others will kill you. This means that if I am wandering around in the forest post apocalypse I better remember to bring a field guide. And a microscope. And some paper for the print.
Possibly, it might just be better to have a large supply of those military emergency rations on hand...
At our final class on Tuesday, the instructor brought enough Pine Mushrooms for everyone to be able to take one home. Pine mushrooms, also know as Tricholomata magnivelare, are a highly sought after delicacy. They call them Matsutake in Japan where good specimens will fetch $100 each. One of their distinct identifying features is their smell. We spent a lot of time smelling mushrooms in this class, it was a lot like wine tasting that way; people trying to come up with crazy adjectives that describe a particular mushroom. Some just smelled earthy and mushroomy, but some really have a surprising smell. One smelled like pears. The Matsutake smells just like Cinnamon Red Hots. I picked one that looked like it would make a good spore print, and also had a good strong smell. It wasn't a perfect shape though, so my instructor said it was probably only worth $50.
Behold, the $50 mushroom and its spore print. The instructor told us to make a soup using chicken broth and shave some thin slices of Matsutake into it. I did this today, and I can report that it was pretty good. It was so good in fact that I was going to save half for Peter when he came home from school today, but I ended up eating it all myself instead. His loss. I was surprised it tasted so good, because I used some home made chicken broth I had in the freezer, and I had put quite a lot of savory and parsley into it when I made it, so I really just expected it to taste like chicken broth. But the mushroom gave it a really unusual flavour which I can only describe as like miso, only earthier. The slivers of mushroom too had a texture similar to an oyster mushroom, like a firm tofu. It lost all its cinnamon qualities, but the soup itself had a hint of paprika.