If any food can be described as ephemeral, it’s squash blossoms. They’re only around for a short while, and once picked they deteriorate rapidly, which is why you usually can’t get them at grocery stores, only farmers’ markets and neighbourhood gardens.
Squash plants actually produce two different types of flowers: male and female. The male flowers grow on the end of long, slender stems. The female flowers grow on thicker stems that buldge where they meet the flower. This bulge is what will eventually become a squash.
Generally there are more male flowers than female. The male flowers can be picked without affecting the production of fruit, so long as a few are left behind … Continue reading.
This summer I had a little burger freak-out. I thought about hamburgers more in the last few months than my entire life previous, and I came to realize that, despite eating them for about twenty five years, I knew very little about them.
The following burger info will be obvious to many of you, but circumstances conspired to stunt my burger knowledge from a very young age. For instance, the burgers I ate growing up were a bit like squished meatballs: they contained bread crumbs and eggs and were mixed to bind the ingredients together. They were tasty and comforting, but they hampered my understanding of proper hamburger flavour and texture for years. To aggravate … Continue reading.
I work in a kitchen that is built into a sort of warehouse. It has terrible ventilation and gets stiflingly hot in the summer. We’ve found that if we raise the large bay door in the receiving area behind the kitchen, then prop open the door in front of the kitchen, we can sometimes wrangle a decent cross-breeze to cool us down.
One hot afternoon we were running this system, and riding a beautiful cross-breeze. So much so that the catering menus and prep lists pinned to the walls were flapping and waving at us. I was cutting chickens at a work bench opposite another cook who was slicing fennel. I was downwind, so to speak, and during one warm … Continue reading.
This is the tedious origin story of a cocktail, or rather my version of a cocktail.
I’ll start apologetically and admit that I don’t know very much about cocktails. I read one book about them last year (Imbibe!), and then started mixing them at home. Probably no book has had such a deleterious effect on my liver and general health. Anyways, I think the drink described in this post is delicious, but I acknowledge that it’s a bit over the top. I have absolutely no idea how it would play in the real world with real bartenders and patrons.
Blood and Sand is a classic cocktail, typically composed of equal parts blended scotch, orange juice (often blood orange … Continue reading.
The River City Kir: sparkling hard apple cider with a splash of cherry liqueur. Something so simple shouldn’t need a complicated origin story.
[Pauses awkwardly, before rapidly relating a complicated origin story]
A Kir is a French cocktail, a glass of white wine with a bit of crème de cassis (blackcurrant liqueur). There are a number of common variations. The Kir Royal, for instance, uses Champagne instead of still white wine. The Kir Breton uses hard cider. So this most recent invention was inspired by the Kir Breton.
I’ve tentatively titled this drink the River City Kir. I’m open to other suggestions. This is the first cocktail I tried with my homemade cherry liqueur. It’s a knockout. … Continue reading.
In retrospect this is a pretty straight-forward homemade cherry liqueur, but it was actually inspired by a drink from Normandy called pommeau. To make pommeau, Normans combine two parts fresh apple juice with one part Calvados (apple brandy), then age the resulting mixture in barrels for several months before bottling. You can purchase this traditional, aged pommeau at fine liquor stores, but fresh pommeau made with just-pressed cider and consumed without barrel-aging has become one of my favourite parts of the cider season.
This formula (two parts fresh juice, one part spirit made from that juice) occurs in a number of other places. Pineau de Charentes is another famous example, made with grape must and Cognac.
Take a midsummer drive away from Edmonton in any direction and soon you will find fields of yellow flowers in radiant bloom. This is canola, and the oil pressed from its seeds is as common in Albertan pantries as the plants are to Albertan landscapes.
Canola is a Canadian invention. In fact, its name is an amalgam of the words “Canada oil low acid”. Canola is a type of rapeseed that has been bred to have a low erucic acid content.
What’s rapeseed, you ask? It’s a plant with an unfortunate name, ultimately derived from the Latin word for turnip, rapum, to which it is a close relative.
Allow me to expedite this explanation by quoting from the … Continue reading.
A few weeks ago I led a Chardonnay tasting for a private event at Little Brick Café and General Store. I thought I would post some notes from that session. If this type of info interests you at all, I’m going to be hosting a tasting of Belgian beers on Thursday, April 21, as part of Little Brick’s Home School series.
For this event we did a style of tasting that we do a lot with our wine group at work. We call it a semi-blind varietal tasting. This isn’t a technical term, or even a commonly used term… it’s just a name we made up. Three or four wines of the same grape varietal are selected, but … Continue reading.
Some shameless self-promotion: if the type of information contained in this post interests you at all, I’m going to be hosting a tasting of sparkling wines on Thursday, February 11, as part of Little Brick’s Home School series.
I’ve been meaning to write about Austrian wine for some time. Years, actually: ever since I wrote this post on Heurigen, which are rural taverns that serve young wine and cider.
Last week the Elm wine group did a tasting of Grüner Veltliner, the national grape of Austria, so I thought I would finally put down some info on Austrian wine.
If you haven’t had Austrian wine before, you’re not a freak or a philistine: there isn’t a whole … Continue reading.
Tonight is Pancake Tuesday, which is how Catholic Canadians celebrate Mardi Gras or Shrovetide. If you’re unfamiliar with the tradition, I wrote a bit about it here.
So yes, I’m eating pancakes for dinner tonight, which means I get to use one of my very favourite appliances, my West Bend counter-top griddle.
My parents received this griddle as a wedding present in 1981. It takes 120 V electrical and runs at 1500 W. It is a simple, flat, metal cooking surface, roughly 10″ by 16″, with a shallow trough along three sides, and a deeper, broader trough on the fourth to collect rendered fat. It is supported by hard plastic brackets that hold it above the counter on which … Continue reading.
The personal website of Edmonton chef Allan Suddaby
If any food can be described as ephemeral, it’s squash blossoms. They’re only around for a short while, and once picked they deteriorate rapidly, which is why you usually can’t get them at grocery stores, only farmers’ markets and neighbourhood gardens.
