Dinner in the Yellow House

Crave - Omnivorous ramblings from the rusty coast of Vancouver Island

Oh SWOON!  I just discovered another Vancouver Island food blog.  I have been hoping to find one for a while, so if anyone knows of any others, please let me know.  My new discovery is Crave by the queen of rust who lives in Nanaimo and also does the produce box thing.  In fact, she has a recipe for pickled garlic shoots, which are sitting in my fridge, neglected, because I had no ideas for how to use them.  Thanks, queen of rust! 

Crave has been around since 2005 and why I've never found it before is a mystery to me, since it is a great read.  What a fabulous new addition to my food blog reading list.  Go read her now, but please come back here once in a while too!

PS I now have a working computer.

Adios, Mark Anthony

In more bad news for Victoria shoppers, the Mark Anthony wine shop in Cadboro Bay is closing this week, and moving to Bear Mountain.  Curse you, Bear Mountain!   Mark Anthony's has been the main supplier for the Yellow House's wine needs, including education and recipes from Micheline, Nick, Peter, and others. 

I hear an Artisan wine shop will be opening in the new, horrendously-named Tuscany Village on McKenzie.  This is cold comfort for me, since what made MA so great was firstly, that I could walk there, and secondly, the staff. 

Pictured above is our last big haul from MA, including Perrin & Fils Vacqueyras 2005 (France, Grenache/Syrah), Casas del Bosque Cabernet Sauvignon 2004 (Chile), Pierre Sparr Reserve Pinot Gris 2004 (France), Sannio Falanghina 2004 (Italy), Burgans Albariño 2005 (Spain), Torcicado Primitivo Salento 2003 (Italy).  The Peller Estates Shiraz was a gift from my mother-in-law. 

The Picky Seven-year-old is no longer!

Now she is a picky eight-year-old! 

In a frenzy of monkey-themed gifts, activities, piñatas, and food, my big girl turned eight a couple of weeks ago.  Happy birthday, little monkey.

Suggested menu for a monkey-crazed eight-year-old's birthday party:  monkey cupcakes and banana ice cream.  I got the idea for decorating the cupcakes from My Little Mochi (who got it from Kelly at Buzzville), with some adjustments to compensate for my laziness.  The ears and mouth are mad with vanilla wafers, with chocolate icing covering half of the wafers to make the semi-circles required for the ears.  The nostrils are mini-chocolate chips.  The eyes are white choclate chips, upside down, with mini chocolate chips ontop.  The smile was the only part I actually had to pipe on with icing and as you can see, the results were a little messy.  The kids didn't mind though.

The banana ice cream recipe I used is from Alton Brown, but I can't say I really recommend it.  First of all, one of the whole points of making homemade ice cream, for me, is that I can leave out things like corn syrup.  Second of all, the result tastes a little too strongly of bananas for most palates, I think.  The one great thing about the recipe is how very easy it was to make.  Just toss some stuff in a food processor, process, and then toss the result in the ice cream maker.  The kids were reasonably pleased, though several only had a couple of spoonfuls before pronouncing it "too banana-ey". 

Sobeys buys Thrifty Foods: Food Blogger in Despair

All I really have to say about this, aside from the fact that I wish our island-owned chain hadn't sold to a Nova Scotia company, is that Sobeys grocery stores are crap and I really hope that we don't see a Sobeyfication of Thrifty Foods, which is a pretty great grocery store, actually.

Victoria shoppers note: Pepper's is still independent and locally-owned.   

Also,  I still am computerless, so blogging will continue to be light.  Wish it weren't so. 

Technical Difficulties

We are experiencing technical difficulties here at the Yellow House, which translates to "The baby pushed the power button on the computer all the way in and we can't get it out again."

So, blogging will be erratic until this issue is resolved. Thanks for your patience!

One sauce, two dinners

Last week I made papardelle with prosciutto and peas, using this cooks.com recipe. We were celebrating a new part-time job for me so we cracked open the Castello de Banfi Poggio Alle Mura 2001 Brunello we'd been saving for a special occasion. This lusty but smooth Sangiovese really should be paired with something heartier, but I didn't want to wait anymore for it, so we opened the bottle and crossed our fingers.

We lucked out, because the wine complimented, rather than clobbered the cream sauce. A lovely match that we won't be enjoying again anytime soon, since the Brunello was a gift that is way out of our normal price range for wine.

The next night, I had nothing planned for dinner, but I did have a fresh bunch of spinach, courtesy of my SPUD harvest box. Now had I been cooking for just myself, I may have just sauteed the whole bunch with garlic and butter, tossed some nutmeg over, and called that dinner, but that's not going to cut it with my spouse and kids, so instead, I scoured the fridge for more LOs (Yellow House shorthand for leftovers) and came up with the remaining prosciutto and pea sauce and some polenta. These all seemed like likely companions and so I conceived...

Polenta with spinach, peas, prosciutto, garlic, and cream

1 bunch fresh spinach washed, dried, and chopped
3 big cloves garlic, chopped
1 T butter
enough cooked polenta to cover a 9'X9' Pyrex dish (I prefer the kind you cook yourself, but some of the stuff that comes precooked in a plastic tube would be okay. Just slice it up and arrange in the dish.)
1 cup prosciutto, peas, and cream sauce (see link above)
3T freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1. If the polenta is cold, put your Pyrex dish into the oven and turn on the oven to 300 degrees. My oven takes just under ten minutes to get to temperature, and by that time, the polenta was warmed through.
2. Melt the butter in a pan and add the garlic. Saute the garlic till golden, then add the spinach.
3. Cook the spinach, stirring occasionally, until it is nicely wilted.
4. Take the pan off the heat and stir in the cream sauce.
5. Pour the spinach mixture over the polenta, sprinkling the Parmesan over it.
6. Broil on low for 3-4 minutes, just enough to turn the Parmesan brown.

Serves 4 as an accompaniment to grilled steak or 2-3 as a standalone dinner.

Strawberry Week(s)

When he saw that I had picked up a whole flat of strawberries from Dan's Farm, my spouse said, "Oh, I guess it's strawberry week then."  Apparently, this was a tradition in the family of his old girlfriend.  Once a year, at the beginning of strawberry season, they would celebrate strawberry week by eating strawberries for dinner every night.  I thought that sounded wonderful, but Tobias explained that the strawberries were always in desserts and it felt like a bit of a sugar overload and he would feel sick by the middle of the week.  I said, "Well, we're going to have strawberry week, but I promise you won't feel sick."

I had some great plans for that flat of strawberries.  I was going to make strawberry and avocado ceviche, Alain Passard's strawberries in hibiscus and vanilla syrup, and strawberry shortcake.  But by Tuesday morning, the ten pints that still remained in the flat were already starting to look like spoiling.  So I changed the plan, and made some jam. 

I used the recipe from the box of pectin that I found in the pantry (don't know why I ever bought that, since I've never made jam with pectin before), adding balsamic vinegar because Nigella does it.  I haven't actually tasted the jam (edit: since I first started writing this entry, weeks ago, we have eaten nearly a quarter of all the jam I made. It is amazingly good.), but the jam-making process went well, and all the jars sealed up nicely and everything.  They also looks very pretty:

Anyway, after the family nibbling and the jam-making, I was completely out of strawberries.  I had to buy a couple more pints at the grocery store to make the ceviche and also to make the strawberries with hibiscus (pictured below), the purchasing of which (from Plenty: the Epicurean Pantry) was the initial motivation for getting all those strawberries in the first place.

Incidentally, I had hoped to have a strawberry harvest in my own backyard this year, but it was not to be. So far, I've only had one beautiful red strawberry come out of my patch. Maybe next year. Until then, I will enjoy the delicious Vancouver Island strawberry harvest. Unlike with the cherries, I can easily resist California strawberries. They simply don't come close to tasting as good as the local ones.

Report on the Yellow House Canada Day Feast

I recently started working very part time at the university and today I read my first report. It made me get in the report-writing mood, but since I don't (yet) have to justify my work activities to anyone, I will report on my Canada Day party instead.

Last night we had 15 people at the Yellow House, celebrating Canada Day. To plan the menu, I had the following factors to consider:

I am getting a bit tired of the usual burgers/hot dogs/steaks/sausages sort of festivities that happen all summer long. I love burgers and steaks as much as a next red-blooded Canadian gal, but wanted to do something a bit different for my Canada Day feast.

Of the 15 people, 8 were kids. Of these 3 were infants that brought along their own milk bars, but the palates and prejudices of the other five were anything but straightforward. I'm not of the mind to bend over backwards catering to children's sometimes-bizarre and ever-changing preferences, but when it's a party, there should be something that everyone really likes to eat.

The group included carnivores that eat pork, carnivores that don't eat pork, and aquariumtarians (Ayun Halliday's term for pescetarians).

So, here is what we came up with!

For appetizers I kept it real simple with blue-corn tortilla chips and cheater's guacamole, an old Mexican trick I learned at my mother's knee: just buy some cheapo salsa rojo and mush a couple avocados into it. Tada! Cheater's guacamole. This is especially good if you have some Mexican blood in you, as everyone will assume that it's an old family recipe handed down through the generations. I even had a request to bring "that great guacamole" to a potluck next week. Hee!

Tobias made beer-can chicken with a Memphis rub. He used this recipe from Epicurious, with the addition of a few herbs from the garden stuffed in the chicken's cavity prior to sticking in the beer can.

The beer used was Keeper's stout. I don't know whether it makes much of a difference, but this is a great beer, really rich and dark and flavourful.

The balancing act was tricky, but Tobias managed it. You make a little tripod with the can and the chicken's two legs.

As promised, the chicken was moist and delicious.

Next Sunday we are going to try the same method but with lemon juice in the can instead.

I made Nigella's pomegranate and honey marinated salmon kebabs. I skinned and cubed 2.5 pounds of wild sockeye and put them in a mixture of 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, 2/3 cup of concentrated pomegranate juice and 2/3 cup of honey for about five hours. My friend Chris stuck them on the skewers, then they went on the barbecue for about 4 minutes each side. They were "like candy" according to one satisfied guest, who eschewed dessert in favour of more salmon.

For sides, I did dill potato salad and Anna del Conte's grilled red peppers. I'm looking forward to having the leftovers of these tonight. Our friends the Haqs always make amazing green salads with nuts and cheese and fruit and whatnot, so I left that to them, and they didn't disappoint. Other friends brought veggie dogs for the kids, which was lucky, since none of them liked anything else.

On Saturday morning, at a neighbour's garage sale, I became the ecstatic owner of my first ice cream maker. Of course, there was no way I could not make ice cream for Canada Day, despite the fact that someone else had been assigned to take care of the dessert. So I made Nigella's peach ice cream from Forever Summer. It was ...okay. I had very high expectations, thinking that my homemade ice cream was going to knock the socks off any store-bought one, but it didn't really. The ingredients are roasted peaches, custard and whipping cream. To me, the end result tasted too much like whipping cream and too little like custard and roasted peaches. I am going to try an egg-custard ice cream next, and see if I get the ambrosial quality I was hoping for. Despite my slight disappointment, however, the children were thrilled with their cones, so all was well.

The kids (and a couple teetotallers) were also pretty thrilled with the Lisa Simpsons I mixed up for them. This is a Jurgen Gothe recipe that is supposed to be a modern take on a Shirley Temple.

Into a tall glass put

a couple ice cubes
1/2 shot of grapefruit juice
1 shot of pineapple juice
1 shot of orange juice
2 shots of cranberry juice

Then fill the rest of the glass with Canada Dry ginger ale. Mix (or not) and drink.

Not only are these tasty (even for adults!) but the juices make a gorgeous little sunset at the bottom of the glass, which is why mixing is optional. I prefer not to mix and enjoy the colours longer.

All parties went home satisfied and have signed off on many future get-togethers. More funding is needed for purchase of wines, both white and red. The author would like to thank the Yellow House Culinary Achievement Fund for support and advice.