Dinner in the Yellow House

Cajeta in the Great White North

As a child growing up in Puebla, my grandmother loved to eat cajeta.  When she moved to Winnipeg in her thirties, of course, she couldn't buy cajeta at the store.  I'm not sure why she didn't make it herself but it could have been many things: caring for her five children in a freezing foreign country took all of her time, she had no source for goat's milk or vanilla beans, or she simply didn't know how.  Instead, she resorted to spreading condensed milk on graham crackers, which is what she gave me for a treat when I visited her house in Winnipeg when I was a child.  I thought it was absolutely delicious. 

A couple of weeks ago I was shopping alone (heaven!) at the Market on Millstream and noticed that their Mexican foods section was much better than any other grocery store -- and I do believe I've examined the Mexican food section at every grocery store in town very closely!  Not only did they have Herdez salsa verde in the big bottle, and Mole, but they had cajeta!  I've never even seen the real thing, but I knew that I would love it.  "I might even share a little with the kids", I thought as I put the jar in my shopping basket. 

Since then, it has become a popular breakfast treat in our house, for both the kids and me.  Tobias has yet to take the plunge, but I suspect he will become more interested once I try my hand at a homemade version, which I plan to do soon, with the aid of this recipe from vanilla.com 

As for Abuelita, she died in 2004, and didn't get a chance to see prepared cajeta on the shelves of a grocery store here in the great white north. 

Orale Mexican Food

Just an FYI for Victoria people.  The name of the company that makes the wonderful tamales that are sold at the Moss Street Market is ¡Orale!.  Looks like they do catering, and may open a restaurant as well.  In the meantime, you can stock up on their frozen tamales and steam them at home yourself (or get lazy and use the microwave). 

Spice Depot spice blends

As is evident by the sorry state of this blog, I am very busy these days.  I am working on a temporary, and it's taking much of my time.  It's the kind of work that I really enjoy, but also the type that is constantly on my mind.  So whenever I sit down at the computer, I always feel guilty if I work on my blog, which is a labour of love, instead of the project, which is a labour of cold hard cash. 

But while blogging is optional, cooking diiner seven nights a week is not and so I have moved toward simpler meals and more convenience items in my cooking.  One such convenience item, sent to me by the company's PR team, is Spice Depot spice blends.  The cool thing about the spices is that they are whole in the jar, and then the jar has a little built-in grinder, so you can grind them fresh, right onto your meat or veggies.  I keep an old coffee grinder for grinding spices, but these days it feels like a pain to get it out and use it, so I appreciate the handiness of the built-in grinder. 

I have used the New York Steak Spice blend to flavour a nice piece of filet mignon, a cut that always seems to have a beautiful texture, but falls short in the flavour department, and a bison sirloin steak (pictured below).  The mix contains cumin seed, dill seed, mustard seed, as well as peppercorns and big hunks of salt, and dehydrated onion and garlic.  A very nice blend, that tastes best if you use more than you think you need.  Think of it as a dry rub, and keep grinding.  Another good reason to use a lot of it is that although the spices stay fresher because they aren't preground, they'll still start to lose their flavour if the jar is in your cupboard for too long (Not that I follow my own advice:  I have ground spices that I think I bought in Ontario, when I lived there five years ago!  Terrible.) 

(Click on the photo to see a legible version.)

I also put the New York Steak blend on eggplant and zucchini, before grilling it with plenty of olive oil.  This gave the veggies a nice kick.  I tried the spicy chicken blend on eggplant as well, but it was a bit too spicy.  I did like that blend on grilled onions and corn on the cob, however.  I think it's because they are a bit juicier, and soak up the spiciness.  I have yet to actually apply the spicy chicken blend to any chicken, but I am looking forward to using it as a dry rub for a beer can chicken,  before it gets too cold to go outside to cook. 

My Moss Street Market Haul

Hello!  I am still alive!

Very sorry to have taken two weeks off blogging unannounced.  Every day I thought I would find some time to blog and I just didn't.  You see, since August 17, my spouse has been travelling, making me a temporary single mom.  Somehow, that, combined with a big work project, has resulted in my having very little time for myself :)

But I'm back now and with lots of foody things to report on.  The first is my haul at the Moss Street Market yesterday.  Moss Street Market is sort of a miniature urban farmer's market (not that the farmers are urban, I mean, the market is in an urban location) with a bunch of crafts and stuff thrown in.  I don't go there much, but when I do go, I always love it.  My two favourite things about it are the International Women's catering co-op tent (always a huge line for their delectable samosas, empanadas, curries, and more) and the playground.  Whoever came up with the idea to have the market in the parking lot of Sir James Douglas school, with a playground right there, was a genius.  Even fiesty little anti-shoppers like 20-month-old M'hijo can be cajoled into visiting a market like this.  Here's my little monkey right after he took the pint of baby squash I bought and poured them all over himself.  He's also holding a bear-shaped bottle of B's honey.

Apart from squash and honey, I was thrilled to find, for the first time ever, rapini.  I have read about this dark leafy green, also known as broccoli rabe, and wanted to try it for a long time.  But I've never seen it for sale.  The closest I've found is something called broccolini, which is less leafy, more broccoliesque.  I'm hoping to cook it up with some Galloping Goose Italian sausage tomorrow.

I also bought a spider wort plant, having fallen in love with the electric purple blooms the day before when I saw them for the first time in a garden.  But the pièce de résistance was this:

TAMALES!

Real good Mexican tamales!  Hot to eat right away or frozen to take home!  3.50 a piece!

Mole, salsa verde, and poblano!  For sale in Victoria, which is located, don't forget, in the Great White North.  A real miracle find, to be sure.  I was so excited that I forgot I hardly had any cash left.  Luckily, the owner of the tamale stand, called, appropriately, Mexican Tamales, took pity on me and gave me a two for one deal.  He also had agua de fresa (strawberry water), a glass of which he gave to the very thirsty and grateful M'hijo.

So, quite a good little shopping trip, if I may say so.  There were plenty of other tempting veggies (bitter melon and Japanese eggplant among them) and plants (fig tree), and I didn't even get around to visiting the International Women's Catering Co-op, so I'll be returning to the Moss Street Market soon.

I dream of Vij's

There are a lot of reasons I won't be going to Vij's anytime soon:

• cost of travel to Vancouver
• time required to travel to  Vancouver
• once I get to Vancouver, lack of babysitter
• impossibility of taking M'hijo (my 18-month-old)  anywhere NEAR a restaurant which is known for making people wait for up to an hour for a table (because they don't take reservations)

The New York Times said that Vij's was "easily one of the best Indian restaurants in the world".  And it's just right there, over the water!  Right there

It might as well be in Mumbai (sniff!). 

Lucky for us Vancouver Islanders, however, Vij's now sells some of their entrees frozen in little metallic bags, suitable for boiling in the bag, or you can heat them up in the oven or microwave if you prefer.  Here is the list of available dishes. (Click for a version you may actually be able to read).

And where can you purchase some of these goodies?  The wonderful Charelli's, of course.  Call ahead to see when they're getting a shipment in (598-4794).

I took four shiny bags of Vij's goodness up camping this weekend and they were great.  We were a little skeptical that boil-in-the-bag dinner could be good, but we were happily surprised with the result.  We tried the Punjabi daal, Punjabi lamb curry, saag paneer, and garnet yam and green chili dumplings.  Thank goodness I had the forethought to toss the bowl of my rice cooker (half full with leftover rice) into the back of our van before we went off into the wilderness, because the sauce on the lamb in particular was really delicious, and without the rice to sop it up, it would have been wasted. 

Tobias claims this was the best Indian meal he'd ever had, but this was after two bottles of IPA, and really, doesn't everything taste better when it's eaten beside a river, in front of a roaring campfire?  I'd say it was certainly the best Indian meal I'd had outside of a restaurant. 

Best Butter Chicken Ever

Lest you think we in the Yellow House are all about growing our own food and making things from scratch, I will admit to using one particular convenience food quite a lot: butter chicken flavouring mixes.  For years, we've been searching for a way to make butter chicken easily at home that approximates the taste of our favourite butter chickens: Da Tandoor (Tobias' favourite) and Trimurti (my favourite). 

The findings:

• the worst way to make butter chicken is to simply add a sauce from a jar.  Patak's = yuck.  I've tried four types of jarred pastes/sauces and none were good. 
• having to add a lot of ingredients (butter, milk, tomatoes, tomato sauce) yourself seems like it would result in a better butter chicken, but this isn't necessarily the case.  A long-reigning winner was a little metallic packet that I found at the wonderful Seven Valleys (2506 Douglas Street) that required only the addition of milk.  Unfortunately I can't remember the brand name of this mix, and the Seven Valleys owner told me she had trouble restocking it after she ran out. 
• there does seem to be a correlation between the time taken to prepare the dish and the flavour.  The longer the cooking time, usually, the better the result.

Our unscientific survey has now ended with the discovery of Daksha's Gourmet Spices Butter Chicken mix.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, this mix leaves the cook with the most work to do of any of those we've tried, and takes a while to make (about an hour).  Still, it's much quicker than the recipe given to me by my daughter's best friend's former nanny, which started "Take a chicken, and the following spices...." and continued, "let it marinate for 24 hours at the least, 72 hours ideally" and finished "let it simmer for about half an hour" with some oven time somewhere in between. 

Daksha's spices are available by mail order from SpicesGourmet.com and also at Slater's First Class Meats (2577 Cadboro Bay Road), which is where I got mine.  I will now start experimenting with every Daksha's product I can find.  I love the fact that my favourite butter chicken mix comes from teeny little Williams Lake, BC! 

For the record, I have made butter chicken from scratch, once, when I was a young, silly bride.  The results were ho-hum.  If I remember correctly, I didn't handle the spices well.  I think I may have even burned them but put them in anyway.  If I do try again, I'll probably use one of the three recipes posted in MuslimVillage.