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Recipes from a Peaceful Heart

13 Apr

This white-haired woman on the Kake territory of Alaska bends to rinse the fresh salmon eggs in a bucket of Alaskan sea, under the gaze of mountains. “It won’t turn out if you don’t have peace in your heart,” she said. I wasn’t fortunate enough to witness this act –we watched it unfold on Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods America. And at first, I rejected the whole statement. After all, there have been many nights I have turned out a unique and lively meal with anger, sadness and heaviness in my heart. Nothing burned, nothing separated, nothing seized. Except for me. My relaxed and meditative cooking became a multi-tasked, clock watching, batter splattered, grumbly little CF. And yet I kept doing it because it made me feel normal during a time of transition and uncertainty and all around stress. My time in the kitchen became what I never wanted it to be – a chore – and eating became a fast, silent and often depleted affair. In short, my cooking has been without passion and my consumption is often mindless.

We started this blog to document and appreciate our travels in food and drink and the people and places we share those experiences with. On a spiritual and philosophical level, I also want to share my appreciation for the diversity of nourishing, living things on this earth, and to practice being grateful and amazed by the many forms they can take and gifts they can bring to us. So I am working on finding satisfaction by cultivating wonder in my kitchen again – and I am re-learning what peace in the heart does to my food, my eating, and my outlook. And I have managed to make quite a few things with a peaceful and present heart.

coconut bread

Coconut Cardamom Banana Bread

With no added sugar or oil, based on The Sweet Beet recipe, with a few minor substitutions.

Ingredients

2 large eggs
1 1/2 cups mashed banana (about 2 large very ripe – mine were totally black)
1/2 cup apple sauce
1/4 cup milk
1/4 cup of almond coconut milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup white flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 cup of unsweetened shredded coconut
About 1 teaspoon or a teaspoon and a half of cardamom pods, smashed with mortar and pestle

Preheat oven to 350. Grease loaf pan or use parchment paper.  In large bowl, beat the eggs with a beater until fluffy. Mash the ripe bananas and add to the eggs – I don’t bother to measure out the banana. I just added a bit more apple sauce one time when I sensed it wasn’t quite thin enough. Both times I have made it, it turned out fine without measuring! Add milk and vanilla and mix well.  In another bowl mix all dry ingredients and add dry to wet.  Pour into loaf pan. The recipe says to bake for 45 minutes but I am often closer to an hour, even on convection setting. Just watch closely and make use of that good ole raw spaghetti trick!

Coconut Glaze:

3 tablespoons almond coconut milk
1/2 teaspoon of pure vanilla
1 cup icing sugar
1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

Whisk all the glaze ingredients together and pour overtop of the loaf while it is still a bit warm. This is a thin glaze that the loaf will absorb, so I would recommend trying to loosen the loaf from the pan when you take it out to cool, but to leave it in the loaf pan to cool and then pour the glaze overtop so it soaks it all up. As you can see from the picture, I poured mine overtop after the fact and lost a lot of goodness on the bottom!

Buffalo chicken chilli

Buffalo Chicken Chilli

Ingredients

3 tablespoons of vegetable oil
1 lb of ground chicken, 1 lb of ground turkey
3 large carrot, thickly sliced
1 large onion, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
5 cloves garlic, minced
5 tablespoons chili powder
2 tablespoons ground cumin
1 tablespoon ground paprika
1/2 cup buffalo wing sauce
1 – 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar (I add, to taste, near the end)
1 19 oz can of tomatoes
1 19 0z can of tomato sauce
1 can of white beans
1 can of black beans

Brown the chicken and turkey in the vegetable oil. Add the spices and the garlic and cook until fragrant and toasty, about 1 to 2 minutes.

Stir in the veggies and brown until the onions are soft and transluscent. Add salt and pepper just to season.

Stir in all the remaining ingredients, bring to a simmer, then turn down to low. Put a lid on it and go about the rest of your day. Add the apple cider vinegar, and more salt and pepper to taste when you are almost ready to serve.

We had ours with sliced fresh avocado, cilantro, and some good squeezes of lime juice!

 quinoa granola

Quinoa Granola

Inspired by this recipe from Savoury Simple, last week’s variation was goji berry and apricot, this week it’s blueberry almond vanilla.

Ingredients

  • 2 1/4 cups regular or gluten-free rolled oats
  • 1 cup quinoa, uncooked
  • 1 cup whole raw almonds (or other nuts of your choosing)
  • 1/2 cup sunflower seeds
  • 1/2 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
  • 1 cup of honey (or 1/2 cup honey and half cup applesauce)
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 2 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 2/3 cup dried fruits of your choice

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees F.
In a large bowl, combine all the dry ingredients, except the dried fruit and mix well.
In a smaller bowl combine the vanilla and binder/sweetners together. Add the liquids into the dry ingredients and stir well to make sure everything is evenly coated.
Spread the mix in an even, thin layer on the baking sheet. Sprinkle the cinnamon evenly on top.
Bake for approximately one hour, turning the granola every 10-25 minutes. For the first half of the cooking time, I don’t check it as often, but as it gets closer to done you will want to check it to make sure it isn’t burning. I have burned granola in the past and it is very depressing.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool before storing in an airtight container.

NOTE: if you use the full cup of honey, I would recommend cooking at a lower temp (the original recipe I followed baked it at 225 and I ended up turning it up to 275 after an hour because it just wasn’t toasting darkly enough for me. But I imagine the lower cooking time is probably better for not burning your honey!). If you use the honey and apple sauce combination, you will get some sweetness but you won’t get those shattery little clusters – that only comes if you substitute with some shiny syrupy goodness like maple syrup or brown rice syrup.

May your own kitchen adventures bring you peace too.

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Some ABCs and flourless cookies

3 Apr

Hello Blog Friends! Spring has sprung all over the food blog world it seems, and here on Vancouver Island that means lots of sunny breaks and drizzle. Sunday morning at the Merville 15K race, just north of Courtenay, I had a beautiful run through the farmland up there. The snow was practically glowing off the mountains and it felt positively tropical at times. It was almost entirely flat so it was a great race for getting some fresh air and appreciating this island of ours.

And you have to at least appreciate the freshness of rain if you’re going to live here. The dampness combined with the wind off the water can still leave a chill in your bones this time of year, so dishes like Soup Addict’s Chicken Coconut Curry Soup and Karista’s Winter Vegetable Cobbler are still making appearances in our meal plans over the next few weeks.

Speaking of Karista, we are honoured to be one of her nominees for an ABC Award (Awesome Blog Content). Every time Karista posts a recipe, not only is it completely her own creation but it is usually colourful, nutrient dense and made with classic comfort food techniques. So naturally, I’m having a bit of a Wayne’s World meets Alice Cooper kind of feeling about the whole thing. This blog is a personal passion, a record of the simple pleasures of our lives, but I hope it might also inspire someone out there on the interwebs to experiment in the kitchen, treat themselves, and taste just about anything once. That would in fact be a spiritual bonus, the icing on our cupcake, the marshmallow in our hot chocolate, the funfetti in our funfetti cake. Plus, anyone who gives us an accolade along with a pork recipe is a good friend to have.

The rules are we are supposed to reveal some things about ourselves using the ABCs and then pass the nomination on to five blogs we think are ABC-worthy. So, if you’re interested in that sort of thing, scroll down to the bottom of this post! If not, there’s a reason I brought up dessert – read on!

I first became obsessed with flourless cookies after trying the flourless peanut butter cookie with coarse sea salt at habit a few months ago. It’s chewy, dense, and soft, without any of the dreadful powdery texture in soooome people’s floured peanut butter cookies. Then my sister sent me the link to these flourless fudge chocolate chip cookies from Savoury Simple and I knew we’d have to test them out during my trip to Kelowna back in February. There is an important lesson here: anything a floured cookie can do well, a flourless one might be able to do better.

This double chocolate cookie gets its incredible texture from the egg whites – they form a meringue-like crackled top that dissolves as you bite into the brownie-soft middle. We added a small amount of chocolate chips to ours, and Lake Country Harvest dried cherries to a few of them. They were addictive and very sweet and I’d like to try them again with some more adventurous variations. I had been contemplating walnuts, a touch of cayenne and a few cracks of sea salt on top and then we happened to split a Bubby Rose Beezlebubby cookie last week and it is confirmed: don’t argue with sea salt, cayenne and dark chocolate because they are never wrong. Unless you are a milk chocolate loyalist, which is a serious freaking tragedy but I will try and get over it.

When I got back from my trip, habit’s baker had broke her arm and I had to take matters into my own hands. As usual, a suitable addiction could be found on Epicurious, though I nixed the chocolate chips and added extra chopped peanuts to ours. I’ve varied the baking time on these cookies a fair bit and I tend to hover around the 10 minute mark with a two minute on-the-pan cooling time once I take them out of the oven. My oven is a little hotter and older than most though, and I’d always prefer an undercooked cookie.

So take your hand out of that 10 kilogram Robin Hood bag of flour and back away slowly – if you like simple, salty-sweet desserts, you might never go back.

The ABCs and some blog nominees:

A – Apples. Mr. ST hates the texture of raw apple. I love them and eat one every day. He does, however, enjoy the texture of cooked apple. So I can’t get him to eat cabbage, blue cheese, walnut salad but I CAN get him to eat spinach salad with bacon, roasted apple, pumpkin seeds and maple vinaigrette. Fair trade, I say.

B – Blackforest Cake. On top of our wedding cupcake tower, we had a 5-inch blackforest cake from Cakes etc. (which tasted heavenly but we only got one bite because we forgot to cut it until the open bar had taken a toll on the crowd and soooome people were already digging in. With scoop spoons from our candy bar. It was a good party).

C – Cats. We have two. Sweetpea and Ziggy.

D – Duck fat. I have a big ‘ole jar of it in the back of my pantry from when my Mum and I made duck confit together about a year ago. If you’ve never roasted new potatoes in duck fat, you absolutely MUST.

E – Eastbound and Down. Horrifyingly offensive HBO comedy produced by Will Ferrell. Currently a guilty pleasure.

F – Fall. Easily our favourite season; When we met; When we were both born.

G – Germany. Mr. ST’s family is German. And mine is French. Proceed with any European military history-based jokes you like.

H – Halifax. Our favourite Canadian city.

I – Iberico ham. Way way way better than prosciutto. We ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner while honeymooning in Spain.

J – Jason Mraz. My favourite male singer songwriter and basically the soundtrack to my teenage coming-of-age. Until he sold out and started doing commercials for the state of California, over-selling his “hot geek”-ness and making appearances in every single wedding’s playlist somewhere. Sigh. The only constant is change.

K – Killers. One of my favourite bands of all time. Still bonking myself on the head that I was too financially disciplined to put concert tickets on my Visa when they came to town.

L – La Coruna. Possibly our favourite stop in Spain, this little town was unkind to tourists but served us the biggest, baddest seafood platter of our lives. Also where we learned how to eat barnacles (with sewing pins!). Arrrr, maytee!

M – Maui Where my clan took a family holiday for Sister and Brother-in-Law ST’s wedding. First and last time I ever need to go to Hawaii. Shocking, I know.

N – Nineteen. The age I was when I met Mr. ST.

O – Oregon. We left part of our heart here.You should go.

P – Patience. One of our major opposing features. He has lots. I’ll be working on this forever.

Q – Quinoa. The main grain of choice in our household. Anything rice can do, quinoa can do better. Except maybe sushi. Just don’t.

R – Rootcellar. Our favourite place to spend a Saturday morning. Has the most variety of produce that is B.C. grown, organic or both.

S – Steamers. The pub where my girlfriends and I spent many a night splitting pitchers of beer, listening to local bands, and crushing on the wide variety of men this now defunked place used to attract. Including Mr. ST ;-)

T – La Taquisa. Stroll down Cook Street. Hold hands. Breathe deeply. Turn your faces to the sun. And then get a million of their tacos. They’re only two dollars each.

U -Ulla. To us, this is one of the best new restaurants to join the Victoria dining scene in recent years. Refreshing, decadent, French-West Coast style.

V – Vietnam. If we could drop everything and hop a plane tomorrow, this is where we would go.

W – The Whole Beast Salumeria. We have already waxed philosophical about our love of charcuterie. Here’s where they make it happen in Victoria.

charcuterieX – We have no answer for this one. And it took us hours to come up with this list so we are not ashamed.

Y – Yogurt. Superfood I cannot live without. Specifically Liberte’s Krema Coconut Greek Yogurt.

Z - Zest. Lemon, lime, orange….I love adding zest to dressings, noodle salads, desserts, breading, just about anything. Especially if you’re a salt addict, I highly recommend.

And now, since I am the blog-addict in this household, the responsibility falls to me to bestow the Awesome Blog Content on some of my favs:

The Healthy Everythingtarian: Holly is frank and nerdy and sophisticated and honest and makes amazing food you can feel good about eating. Often times, she’ll show you how to eat well with minimal effort. Also, she’s a runner who puts more emphasis on the feeling of running than the performance of running, so I love her.

How Sweet It Is: If you haven’t visited Jessica’s site yet – why not? She is insanely creative and prolific, churning out foods for any time of day faster than I can bookmark them. She is responsible for the red velvet white chocolate brownies I made at Christmas time. They are now a recurring food dream.

The Guilty Kitchen: Liz and Adrian live in Victoria, they love food and they blog about beer and sharing meals with friends and growing up and having dreams. What’s not to love?

Savoury Simple: Lives up to the name, although I have found plenty of sweet inspiration here too! Nearly every post is something I wish I had heard of sooner, and most of the time I have all the ingredients handy.

SoupAddict: Do I really need to explain this one? What I love most about SoupAddict is technique. There are lots of lazy shortcuts when it comes to soup that don’t impact the final taste. What I love about SoupAddict is that all her recipes come with a distinctive flavour and story, and she takes the time to try out different techniques and really let her freak flag fly. Also, she helps us get our veggies. So she’s good for you.

The Kelowna Farmers’ Market

1 Mar

As you might already know, we usually spend every other Saturday wandering the Downtown Winter Market in Victoria so naturally I was totally on board with my sister’s suggestion that we visit the Kelowna Farmers’ Market at Parkinson Recreation Centre during my Okanagan getaway.

Maybe I’ve been spoiled by all the open air shopping in Spain and France – and now the Downtown Winter Market in Victoria – but a little variety and a few eccentric or passionate vendors go a long way to keeping me shopping. I could not be happier to report that the Kelowna Farmers’ Market had all of the above.

Fresh baked breads and meat pies greeted in the parking lot. And inside there were just as many original, clever, and inviting arts and crafts as there were delectable local food businesses.

Check out this variety of flavoured honey from Brainy Bee Honey!

You know how little kids stop in front of the glass at aquariums, entranced by the swirling sea life? Yeah, that was me standing in front of this massive case of flavoured honeys trying to pick one. I already regret not buying more. When exactly am I going to find strawberry flavoured honey? Or chocolate orange!

I was trying to be practical since we don’t eat a lot of honey in general, but naturally I can think of a million different uses now that I’ve left: with brie on crackers, warmed and drizzled over oatmeal, stirred into my tea or coffee, in a pan sauce for chicken breasts or pork tenderloin. Sigh. Learn from my mistake, people. I finally settled on a mini jar of chilli and jalapeno honey – I plan to toss it with some steamed green beans and toasted cashews for dinner this week!

Lake Country Harvest is an example of the best in small business ingenuity.

Like the Fruit Tree Project here in Victoria, Lake Country Harvest’s owner is taking advantage of the short but abundant and varied fruit season of the Okanagan, combating food waste and creating dried fruit products, preserves and jams, muesli, and nutrition-packed energy snacks like these pear ginger chocolate hemp bites.

Mixing their muesli with greek yogurt and some sliced banana is my current favourite breakfast – if only I didn’t polish the last of the bag off this week!

I also took home some cherry wine vinegar, which has now become the base for one of my current favourite homemade dressing as an alternative to balsamic.

If you are looking for a snack at the market, you might consider a made-this-morning Jamaican patty from Mark’s Carribbean Foods.

In addition to all these hot sauces, Mark also sells a savoury, mild jerk type marinade called Calyso sauce (the dark sauce with the orange label). It has heavy notes of clove and ginger and I am still taking little tastes all the time trying to figure out all the different flavours in it.

So far I’ve used it for dinner twice: in the dressing and as a marinade for a BBQ chicken salad and brushed on some salmon served with mango salsa and edamame. I do believe it is destined to meet the Pioneer Woman’s pulled meat technique at some point in the future. Mark tells me it’s available in Victoria at Niagara Grocery.

Beyond the food, the craft product vendors at this market exceeded my expectations too, which is saying a lot for someone who lives in a city like Victoria that thrives on the arts.

Where do you stand on the feathered accessories trend?

I’ve never wanted to pay upwards of $30 for them, but this woman decided to cut out the Michael’s mark up and supplies feathers locally from her farm to a number of local crafters, and makes her own as well. All the earrings on this board were just $12!

Being the good auntie and uncle that we are, we couldn’t help ourselves and picked up a few things for Nephew ST. Since he’s at the baby stage of being mesmerized by fingers and hands, we had to snag a few of the mini alpaca finger puppets from this vendors.

We also picked up some adorable monkey face mittens — the kind strung together with a long piece of yarn. I can still remember the feel and fit of some of the hand-knit sweaters, toques and other lasting hand-me-down fashions from our childhood. Buying these made me smile, thinking Nephew ST bopping around in the snow for winters to come.

Everyone at the Kelowna Farmers’ Market that I spoke to was proud of their business, engaging with their customers, offering samples, making cooking or preparation suggestions, and just generally at ease and having fun. The best part of a market like this is that you get a clear snapshot of the region’s small business community, its natural gifts, and the awesome niche food businesses that keep it exciting.

What is your favourite part of public markets?

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More Market Discoveries

5 Feb

Every time I got to the Downtown Winter Market, I find something new and exciting.

The spot prawn ravioli from Cowichan Pasta.

The mesmerizing chorizo sandwich from El Guapo.

And just a few weeks ago, the Bacon Apple Fritter from B-Red Bakery.

Seriously, go! But wait until February 18th because you missed Saturday already, ok? Not only was it a gorgeously sunny day, the kind that makes people in Victoria all smug and delighted to live here, but it took about 2.5 seconds to find something still-warm, handmade and amazing.

Organic, freshly baked goodies in the French boulangerie style; I have instant nostalgia for my semester abroad in France when I look at this stuff. I am officially smitten.

These pretzels were chewy and eggy, punctuated with those intense bits of coarse salt.

I’ve only made pretzels once myself, but if anyone has inspired me to try again, it’s these guys. They were also the makers of the pear almond brioche from my ladies’ brunch.

As if the pretzels weren’t good enough, serendipitously the other mind-blowing discovery this week was this mustard from Fat Chili Farm in Cobble Hill.

Mr. ST comes from solid German stock and we have been known to have 3-4 different mustards actively in the rotation. Given what a versatile staple mustards are for cooking from scratch, I love having the variety too. We’ve had mustard with dill before but never combined with saffron and chillies. This stuff has an extended tang, almost like citrus, that would be incredible on pretty much any kind of sausage. Or, say, one of Fry’s pretzels! Even if traditional varieties of hot mustard aren’t your thing, you’ve got to give this one a chance.

The other ways I can’t wait to try this stuff? Folded into scrambled eggs, slathered on a crocque monsieur sandwich, in a salad dressing, as part of a marinade for roasted chicken legs….

Kudos to this guy – he encouraged me to sample pretty much EVERYTHING, which is a key technique to gauging your customers’ spice-o-metre and making appropriate suggestions. As a vendor, being attentive and passionate about your goods is so critical to drawing people in. If my habits are any indication, offering samples/snacks is highly effective as well ;-)

I also took home some of their creamy, spicy hummus and I can’t wait for Mr. ST to come next time and try their habanero and hot chocolate (mole) sauce. He’s a sucker for anything spicy and has been a sad man ever since we ran out of the habanero mustard sauce we bought from Garrison’s Brewery in Halifax.

Do you have a favourite chili or chili product? If you really can’t wait until the next market day to give them a try, you can also order from them online!

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I Scream, You Scream

29 Jan

When I first came across Cold Comfort Ice Cream on Becoming Something, I was immediately intrigued. Most commercial ice creams are so wretchedly sweet, I can feel my molars eroding just reading the flavours. And while that has made me more partial to gelato, most are one-note flavours. Reading the Cold Comfort flavour archive, I couldn’t help but be curious. Strawberry Balsamic? Pear Amaretto? Malbec, Sour Cherry, Almond?? THIS I had to try.

Ok, so $12 is a lot to pay for a small tub of ice cream, but you’re paying for hand-made, small-batch creativity and organic ingredients so to my mind it’s a fair price. You can find the Cold Comfort truck at the Moss Street Market or the Downtown Winter Market, but we bought ours at Ingredients, a fabulous whole/health/hipster store down on Store Street kiddie corner to Sports Traders. Have you been to this place?! As we wandered the aisles, my eyes danced across all the product labels. They’re stocked full of neat stuff big, urban bloggers are always tempting me with. Lentil chips? Coconut oil? Don’t mind if I do! You can also buy Cold Comfort at Aubergine in Fernwood, Niagra Grocery in James Bay – check the web site for a complete list, or just follow the Cold Comfort Facebook page and you’ll know when they last made a drop to the store nearest you!

The flavours available at Ingredients were Rosemary Sour Cherry, Coconut and Matcha Green Tea, and Blueberry Earl Grey. As daily black tea drinkers, we couldn’t resist the Blueberry Earl Grey.

It had a strong bergamot flavour right up front, with a lingering sweetness from the blueberries and a prominent black tea aftertaste with each bite. The texture, however, needs work. At first it had a buttery mouthfeel, but after a few minutes, I noticed a film on my spoon and coating my mouth. I don’t know what’s up with that, but it ain’t right. Handmade ice cream is all about the meticulous churn, mixing and breaking up ice crystals as they form. With organic, high-quality ingredients, and impressive originality of flavours, I’m hoping this is just a matter of perfecting technique and determining how to substitute the stabilizers and fillers commercial ice cream producers use (word is, the flavours with booze in them don’t have the same consistency). And so, I’ll just have to keep trying the other flavours to know whether it’s characteristic of all of them or not. For scientific accuracy and such ;-)

I’m hoping to snag one of their ice cream sandwiches at the Downtown Winter Market on Saturday. According to the blog, the current flavour is chewy chocolate walnut ice cream sandwiches with caramel coconut ice cream! Have you tried Cold Comfort yet?

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