Thanksgiving is the only truly and completely North American feast that my family celebrates: all others have their roots deep in European ground, and are either specific national dinners like St. Patrick’s Day, or broader Christian celebrations like Easter and Christmas.
Thanksgiving dinner is the most rigidly traditional meal that most North American families share. For Easter and Christmas, families choose between ham and turkey, or possibly roast beef. They may serve scallop potatoes, or mash. Dessert could be any number of pies or cakes. The specifics depend on the family, where they are on the continent, and where their ancestors came from. Thanksgiving, on the other hand, is more uniform, and centres on a few distinctly New World ingredients … Continue reading.
When it comes to pies and crumbles, I’m usually a purist: I prefer to use only one type of fruit. Saskatoon pie and crumble, however, pose two problems. First, the berries are relatively low-moisture, with pronounced pips and skins. When you cook them down with sugar they don’t ooze moisture like most other fruits, so they don’t produce cohesive pastry fillings without the addition of water, which simply dilutes the flavour of the berries. Second, they are low-acid when ripe, and on their own don’t make well-balanced fillings.
Rhubarb solves both of these problems. When cooked down, most rhubarb varieties are fluid, and help make saskatoons into a cohesive pastry filling. Rhubarb is also crazy tart, balancing the sweetness of … Continue reading.
Once apples have been crushed, they need to be pressed to extract the juice from the mash. As with the apple crusher, I’ve been using Kevin’s apple press for the last couple years, but decided to build my own this fall. I am indebted to him, and to Whizbang Cider for his post on rack-and-cloth pressing.
The essential components of the apple press:
The Press: some kind of geared, ratcheted jack that actually exerts the force that presses the apples. We started out using a scissor jack (pictured below) but have since found that a hydraulic pump jack is more balanced and easier to operate.
The Frame, which sustains the force of the press. The top and … Continue reading.
As I mentioned in the Cutting Poultry post, one of the chief pleasures of buying whole birds from the market is that you get a bunch of bones with which to make stock.
You can make a small amount of light stock with one chicken carcass, or you can freeze the bones and collect a few carcasses so that you can make a whole pot. You can cut up your chicken, raw, into largely boneless pieces, and save the raw bones for stock. Or, if you roast the whole bird and pull the meat off at the table, you can save the cooked carcass for stock.
All the bones of the bird can go in the stock. The neck and … Continue reading.
This post is about “converting” a garburator into an apple crusher. I use sarcastic quotation marks because there’s really very little you have to do to change a garburator into a crusher.
For the record, I stole all of this from Kevin, who built his first apple crusher years ago, posted about it here, and has generously lent it to friends many times since then. I just got around to making my own, so I thought I’d write about it for the sake of completeness, but there really isn’t anything in this post that isn’t already in his.
The first step is to obtain a kitchen garburator that has never been used. I have seen them on Kijiji, … Continue reading.
I have to admit that this summer came with many, many gardening disasters. “Gardening lessons” maybe is a better way to think of it. There were, for instance, some hard lessons in soil fertility.
Last summer we got some trees cut down and we were left with a staggering amount of mulch, mulch that I slowly and laboriously transferred to our many garden beds. At the time I thought that since I was adding organic matter to the beds I was improving the soil. I planted chard, onion, kale, spinach, and potatoes in those beds, but only the potatoes became proper plants, and even then they produced small, scant tubers.
Pork tenderloin quickly roasted, sliced into blushing medallions, and served as a meal for two: this may be as intimate and elegant as fresh pork gets.
Every pig has two tenderloins that run under either side of the lower backbone. Each tenderloin has a blunt end tucked into the pelvis, a roughly cylindrical cross-section through most of its length, and then a tapered end at the forward end of the pig. (See this post on pork-cutting for more details and photos.)
As the name tells us, this cut is very tender. It is also very lean – almost perfectly lean – so it doesn’t have much distinct pork flavour.
There is a band of silverskin on the tenderloin which … Continue reading.
I’ve known for years that Evans cherries thrive in Edmonton, but I only recently learned that they are actually “from” here.
In 1976 a cherry orchard near Fort Saskatchewan owned by one Mrs. Borward was about to be torn out to make room for a new federal penitentiary, the Edmonton Institution. Borward invited local horticulturalist Ieuan Evans to take suckers from her plants.[1]
I haven’t been able to find any info on where exactly the Borward cherries came from, but they were a variety of the species Prunus cerasus, commonly known as sour cherry and native to areas around the Black and Caspian seas. Morello is another example of a variety of that species. The Borward trees were … Continue reading.
Recently I was shocked to discover that many people have bad childhood memories of “creamy” coleslaw. I was raised on chopped cabbage in mayonnaise, a creamy slaw that we called cabbage salad. Many detest this side dish so much that they have given up slaw all together.
I’d like to vouch for a different style of coleslaw, one that has more in common with the German Krautsalat than the classic mayo-bound North American slaw.
The main difference is that it’s dressed in a vinaigrette, instead of mayonnaise or buttermilk. But before we discuss dressing, there’s a very important technique to consider.
Lightly Curing Cabbage for Slaw
There are very few vegetables that I truly enjoy raw. Good carrots, radishes, and … Continue reading.
I think that no cut of pork is as mistreated as ribs. In kitchens across the country, in homes and restaurants alike, folks are boiling, stewing, steaming, and baking pork ribs into mushy oblivion.
A shame, as there is nothing quite like a properly smoke-roasted pork rib glazed with zingy barbecue sauce.
There was a time when this was considered a poorman’s dish. Perhaps it still is, but smoked pork ribs are a delicacy in my home. We buy our pork by the side, and currently one side of pork lasts us about one year. This means that we get at most one full slab of side ribs and one full slab of back ribs for every 365 days. As … Continue reading.
The personal website of Edmonton chef Allan Suddaby
Thanksgiving is the only truly and completely North American feast that my family celebrates: all others have their roots deep in European ground, and are either specific national dinners like St. Patrick’s Day, or broader Christian celebrations like Easter and Christmas.
Recently I was shocked to discover that many people have bad childhood memories of “creamy” coleslaw. I was raised on chopped cabbage in mayonnaise, a creamy slaw that we called cabbage salad. Many detest this side dish so much that they have given up slaw all together.