Bet you can't eat just one...

July 27, 2016

Remember that commercial? It was a long-used marketing slogan for Lay’s Potato Chips – the most memorable (airing in Canada in the late 1990s and early 2000s) being the one with hockey player Mark Messier.

*Covered Bridge Red & White (Canada) Chips*

Potato chips. They are an Achilles Heel for me. I cannot eat just one. I can eat any sized bag all by myself. Eating them is fun, a treat, an indulgence, but I have regrets after, and from the perspective of calories alone I rarely buy them. It’s the only way.

Mind you, for those who celebrate National Junk Food Day, I will take a moment to mention my favourites. Though the internet says that kettle cooked chips have existed since the early 1800s (!!) I don’t think potato chips entered my life until the 60s. I have no idea when I crunched my first potato chip, but I do recall once having a neighbour who was a Humpty Dumpty delivery man. He sold us chips right from his truck - they seemed to be so fresh! I had a Lay's stage, then Miss Vickie’s. (Have you noticed Miss Vickie's promoting the wine and chips combo?) For a while my local grocery store sold fresh kettle cooked chips made right in the store! These days my vote goes to Covered Bridge chips - made by the Albright Family in New Brunswick – and not to be found just anywhere yet... (Oddly, it was easier to find them in Victoria than locally.)

Am not a fan of ripples, thick cut or Pringles. (Are they really potato chips?)

The hankering for potato chips resides in the same part of my brain reserved for cravings for French fries. Similar story – some fries are good – some, not so much. Hands down best fries IMHO are from Jamie Kennedy. It was the first thing we'd order in his restaurants – nibbling while we pondered the rest of the menu.

In interviews, he often refers to his French fry inspiration in Paris – tasting them perfectly cut and fried and seasoned with salt and thyme. (Here's his recipe.) We had a similar love affair with fries in Belgium – first time we had mayo dip – but I’m not Jamie Kennedy, and returned only with a food memory and not inspiration for a cooking enterprise that survives to this day. His sons run J.K. Fries and sell them at the Evergreen Brickworks Market on weekends. (A fabulous market BTW.)

Are potatoes good for us? We have been trained to think “potatoes” = “carbs” = “bad”. More likely, it’s how we cook them or what we bury the potatoes under that can be the problem.

In fact, potatoes boast an impressive nutrient value and lately their status as “gluten-free” has been part of marketing campaigns. They contain vitamin C, potassium, fibre, niacin, folate, thiamin, zinc; they are fat-free and sodium-free. (Read more about all these nutritional benefits here.) Many ingredients I write about here have ancient origins somewhere across the Atlantic. One could be forgiven for associating potatoes with Ireland, or Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters. In fact, potatoes originated in Bolivia and Peru and were transported to Europe in Spanish ships once their value in the prevention of scurvy was noted. [Source and Source]

I have a few potato pet peeves. I have noticed that British Food magazines always tend to show a wide variety of potatoes – in fact, they claim 18 varieties. In my grocery stores, here are my choices - white flesh, yellow flesh, and baking aka russet; little/baby potatoes, fingerlings, heirloom purples. Often, “yellow flesh” refers to Yukon Gold – a potato variety developed right here in Ontario at the University of Guelph. In fact, May 2016 was its 50th anniversary!

Now here’s a shock. While prepping this blog, I discovered that Canada also boasts a wide variety of potatoes! Why are they not sold under any of these names?? Speaking of how they are sold - at the fantastic Jean Talon Market in Montreal – the potatoes are sorted into many different sizes. Love that!

Despite the wonders of the internet, I still often return to my trusty ‘Visual Food Encyclopedia” for reading and research. It reminds me that potatoes should be stored in paper bags, in a dark cool dry place. They need to breathe, so storage in plastic bags is not advised. Also better to purchase dirty potatoes vs. cleaned – the cleaning “removes their protective coating, making them more susceptible to bacteria”. “Green” on potatoes indicates they have been exposed to light. @kitchn explains that at the minimum such potatoes need to be aggressively peeled and worse case, because of the potential toxicity – discarded. Early / new potatoes do not even have to be peeled. Am running out of space to share other storage ideas I read about - namely root cellars. I have in fact eaten (melt in your mouth) potatoes in the dead of winter, that had been stored in an outdoor sand-filled root cellar. Every house I have lived in has had a "cold cellar" - which for some reason we call a fruit cellar - yet they were never used to store fresh produce - will have to look into that.

There are elegant ways of preparing potatoes, but they seem to have also been a staple peasant food. In my kitchen - which often features Hungarian cuisine – there are many meals that use potatoes. Krumplis teszta translates as potato pasta - a double dose of carbs!! - but it’s a staple in every Hungarian kitchen. Onions are caramelized - the more the better - and yesterday’s leftover mashed potatoes are added. Stirred into that mixture is cooked broad noodles. (Hungarians have a lot of these rustic pasta dishes – pasta mixed with one of these - cabbage, ricotta (with bacon and bacon fat), poppy seeds, or plum butter - aka lekvar).

Most people have heard of Chicken Paprikas – but Hungarians can be just as satisfied with Paprikas Krumpli – potato chunks cooked with onions and paprika – often with pieces of dried smoked kolbasz added. That’s considered to be a great meal – sometimes eaten with hunks of hearty bread - wow… carb city.

*Roasted Salt and Vinegar Smashed Potatoes*

Hungarians do not seem to have a tradition of making potato "gnocchi" – though I often have some in my freezer using a recipe from Emily Richards (click here for that recipe). Hungarians do make a potato dough – but it shows up in dessert as Szilvás Gombóc (Plum Dumplings). Italian or German prune plums, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon, are wrapped in the potato dough, cooked in boiling water and covered in toasted / sugared bread crumbs. (I’m sharing a photo here, but regret that I have not yet posted that recipe either…)

I could list several more ways that potatoes make an appearance in the KB kitchen, but until the recipes are posted that may seem mean. So far I have posted - Leftover Mashed Potatoes, Mini Potato Gratin, Olive Oil Potato Gratin, and Potato Leek Soup.

I’m ending this blog entry with a recent addition – Roasted Salt and Vinegar Smashed Potatoes. What with small new potatoes arriving at local markets, these have appeared on the KB table almost weekly! Bet you can't eat just one!!

Use Comments, below, to share or ask questions. Would love to hear about your potato chip, French fries or potato memories and tips. If you enjoyed this read, please take a second to click on "Like"!

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Contemplating the Big Apple

June 14, 2016

That girl on the docks – it’s me! In the last century, of course. We were newly married, and my in-laws, with an empty nest, made the adventurous decision to return to Europe. That meant traveling by boat with trunks full of their belongings – and the ship left from New York’s Harbour (most likely from a dock on the Hudson, probably close to Chelsea). I am flabbergasted and even embarrassed that I recall so little about that trip. I remember the plane circling for almost an hour waiting to land, a teeny tiny hotel room, and a city that was noisy – all through the night. Where did we eat? What did we see? Apart from the docks – whoosh – those memories are buried somewhere deep and inaccessible.

Maybe my short term memories never made it to long term in the first place. At the time, I was not a big NYC fan and in the decades that followed never pined after trips to shop or see Broadway shows. I wonder why I recall no “NYC thrill” – then a review of history provides a context.

NYC was a troubled city in the 1960s. “Like many major U.S. cities, New York suffered race riots, gang wars… By the 1970s the city had gained a reputation as a crime-ridden relic of history.” [Source]

So in 1971, the girl on the docks might well have been hoping – please let me get out of this place in one piece.

Apart from a few momentous events, such as the opening of the World Trade center in 1972, the Seventies, it seems were not much improved. “The financial crisis, high crime rates, and damage from the blackouts led to a widespread belief that New York City was in irreversible decline. By the end of the 1970s, nearly a million people had left, a population loss that would not be recouped for another twenty years.” [Source}

This was the context for the 1977 launch of the now iconic, and immeasurably successful, "l Love New York" campaign. It marked an apparent turning point in the city’s status and appeal – echoing earlier chapters, decades before.

Post-WWII NYC was robust and exciting. The BBC’s Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds documentary focuses on all of the amazing things that happened in NYC in a pivotal year. “It quickly became the most influential and exciting place on the planet, a place with more energy and originality than everywhere else put together… a towering testament to human resilience, ingenuity and above all hope. This city did more than any other to create our culture – the culture we live in today - and it all began in 1951."

The premise of that documentary may in part explain why, the year before, my parents went to New York City for their honeymoon. My mother, annoyed at my questions and the expectation that she should remember details from well over a half century ago, says she recalls they travelled by train, went to a Broadway show, and ate at a Hungarian restaurant. She tells a sweet story - that they joined the dance floor for a csárdás - dancing so impressively that they cleared the floor, admired and applauded by all. They never returned, and in many respects that kind of trip was out of character from how they spent the rest of their lives. Sitting there, little did they know they would one day have a grandson who’d live in NYC for almost a decade.

And that dear reader, is why the girl on the docks has visited NYC so often in recent years, and as a food enthusiast that became the focus of each trip. I still know little about shopping in NYC for anything other than food stuffs. All I know about Broadway is that our favourite DEAN & DELUCA is at Broadway and Prince. We feel comfortable using transit and have rented bikes more than once. And we walk. This year, peak steps in one day was 24,709 – and the older I get the more that translates into “Let’s sit down for a spell.”

Though I am confident we will return to NYC, that chapter is drawing to a close and I have been pondering memories and moments. We arrived so unprepared the first time and stayed in Chelsea – which has since changed tremendously. In fact, all of New York seems to be in constant flux. Clearly there is enough money to fuel the changes, which seem to be positive and creative. Undoubtedly there is a back story to every initiative – but somehow that city moves forward with rapid innovation.

And yet… “progress” is not praised by all. This recent NYT article laments the closing of shops on Bleecker Street / Greenwich Village. After periods as long as 28 years, facing rents of $25,000 per month for 500 sq. ft., shops that contributed to the neighborhood’s history and character are being replaced with high-end international chains. As in all major cities, gentrification creates a wave. It pushed people to Brooklyn’s more affordable neighborhoods such as Williamsburg, which in turn is quickly becoming un-affordable. The wave moves out – and up! If you have no time to read this, at least check out the photos in the NYT Magazine's High Rise edition - an astonishing number of people determined to live in Manhattan are living above 800 feet!.

The wave also moves beyond borders. I am ambivalent about the homogenization that comes with globalization. Was it better when the one and only Shake Shack was in Madison Square Park? And now that they have expanded globally – even to Russia! – should I be hoping to see a local one soon? There was “the summer of Pinkberry” – we ate it at every opportunity. Now there’s a Pinkberry in Mississauga’s Sherway Gardens Mall. I took a photo – but can’t bring myself to eat there. We ate at Nathan’s on Coney Island – and now my local grocer stocks Nathan’s Mustard and Pickles. I admit, I bought some, but can they be as good as the original? Where did Nathan’s suddenly get so many pickles that they could export them all over the world? So, fine, sometimes I am happy when “NYC” appears close by – Daniel Boulud, Momofuku and Milk Bar. There are even plans for a Toronto Eataly soon!

On the flip side, I have a little shiver of pride when I see Canadian products on the shelves of DEAN & DELUCA – Kozlik’s Mustard, Lesley Stowe’s Raincoast Crisps. But overall, year after year, I wander the aisles of D&D saying – we have that at home, have that, have that… A core travel question is do you want to see something different, or exactly the same? It’s fun to hunt down something you can’t get at home – like Liddabit Sweets. Ok… I can order these online, but where’s the adventure?

Chop, chop - editing decision...

I’ve decided to edit out my summary of restaurant memories and travel tips and will shortly add them elsewhere on this site. You can read last year’s NYC blog post, and check out my NYC / Eat page (which will be updated asap).

There's so much I could share from this year alone. A highlight was Café Sabarsky, in the Neue Galerie, home to Gustav Klimt's iconic Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Those who are not students of Fine Arts may know it from the movie Woman in Gold. The portrait was painted in Vienna, and the café has captured the essence of coffee houses we visited in Vienna (and Budapest – keep in mind that both cities were once part of the Austro-Hungarian empire). They even had Sacher Torte mit schlag (aka whipped cream).

Red Hook Lobster Roll: Southern Seaport Smorgasburg

Most years, we stay in the Historic Southern Seaport area where the day can end relaxing on beautiful outdoor seating, gazing at the Brooklyn Bridge and the East River. This brings to mind: 1) Brooklyn is worth a visit. More and more restaurants pop up every year – and there’s the interesting Flea Market and Smorgasburg - which has now expanded to other locations, including the Seaport area! 2) The sitting / gazing has at times been accompanied by eating a burger – not every meal in NYC can be “fine dining”. This year’s burger feast was at Spotted Pig, April Bloomfield’s NYC launch pad in the wonderful West Village. 3) The outdoor seating in the Seaport area follows the same design as that on the High Line - not to be missed - but may be less crowded early or late in the day.

What will take us back to New York? For starters, a graduation and a moving van; the 2019 opening of Anthony Bourdain's Pier 57 Food Hall / Market, and perhaps next year the opening of the Pier 17 Project in the Southern Seaport – can’t wait to see the changes to our quiet (and previously affordable?) little corner of Manhattan.

NYC trips are always a kitchen muse. I have figured out how to make Ramen Burgers, but have not tried this yet. In the "summer of macarons" I arrived home with all I needed to make them - but never did. (Sadly) this trend caught on like wild fire, and they are now available at my grocery store! bookstore! I am kind of thinking I am over them... Some NYC inspirations did make it to the blog - check out Black & White Cookies, and Flourless Chocolate Walnut Cookies.

You can also view more photos at my Instagram feed.

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The Cooking Badge

May 12, 2016

We have an automatic garage door opener. (More on that later.) Living in suburbia, I typically leave the house through the garage, open the door, back out and press a button in the car to close the door. This action, by the way, I must do with intense focus, concentration and mindfulness, otherwise - a half block away, filled with doubt – I turn back to check. Ok, the door is closed - and I drive away.

But this was early Monday morning – garbage day – and the blue bins had already been emptied, so leaving the car in the driveway, I returned the blue bins to the garage. Stepping back into the car I hear a bird call – “too wit, too wit, too woo”. I am not a birder, but I was a Brownie and a Girl Guide. No idea why we used to chant “too wit, too wit, too woo”, but we did – over and over and over.

What bird was this? Consult Google. Answer: the Tawny Owl – in fact two Tawny Owls! “Tawny owls make the familiar 'too-wit too-woo' call during the night and early hours but this is actually a male and female owl calling to each other - the female makes the 'too-wit' sound and the male answers with 'too-woo'.” [Source]

Several of my recent blog posts have been reminiscences – and this little bird call triggered another journey down memory lane - hope you don't mind.

For those who did not participate in “Guiding”, the leader of the Brownie pack was called Brown Owl, and second in command was Tawny Owl – there was even a Snowy Owl. The little girls were split into groups named for elves and fairies and we sat in a circle around a papier-mâché toadstool. I continued into Girl Guides – a transition that involved (for me) memorable pageantry. Walking from one group to the other along a silk carpet wearing fairy wings. “Hark who goes there? A Brownie. By what right do you come? By the right of my golden wings.” These days, I can’t remember why I walked into the next room, but I can remember that – good grief.

In Brownies and Guides, there were many areas in which one was encouraged to learn and demonstrate new skills for the reward of a badge. I had several badges, one of them being the cooking badge – not sure if that was at the Brownie or Girl Guide level – though I was quite young.

Here’s all I remember – I was told to go to a specified house of a family I did not know. In hindsight, it was probably a leader of a neighbouring pack who (bravely) volunteered for this trial. Arriving at the house, the lady told me what I had to make and then she closed the kitchen door and left me alone. I was told to make mashed potatoes and beef patties, and I think the vegetable was canned corn. There was no recipe that I recall. Corn and potatoes – easy-peasy. I have no idea what I mixed into the meat – then I fried the patties up in a fry pan. When ready, I served them and waited in the kitchen until they were done eating, and then had to tidy up. I honestly do not know how that family ate what I made. Maybe they didn’t.

If you are thinking that they stashed away my food and ate a pizza instead, I must note that at the time there were few (if any) pizza take-out joints. If you grew up in Hamilton, you may have had your first pizza at P-Wee’s Pizzeria on Crockett St – opened from 1963-1994. If you could not afford that regularly, then you perhaps began to buy Kraft or Chef Boyardee Pizza Kits. I just Googled this and they still sell them! How can these still be a thing!!??

But I digress…

Shockingly, I got my Cooking Badge – though did not afterwards embrace cooking, and in the ensuing years had grumpy debates with my mother re whether one could ever catch a man without being able to cook – most notably, cabbage rolls. Once married, one of my “go to” cookbooks was “101 Ways to Use Hamburger” – and pan fried meat patties, served with yams from a can, were often on the menu. Bizarre!

It is only fitting that the recipe linked to this blog post be a meatball – but times have changed and I have changed with them. These little delicacies combine lean turkey and healthy lentils! With a choice of sauces you have a hit on your hands!

Permit me a few postscripts.

What about the garage door opener? These were not common when our house was built. For our 25th wedding anniversary, my parents and in-laws split the cost of automatic garage door openers. All my dad’s idea. I was a daddy’s girl through and through, but was so disappointed in that gift – what a crazy way to celebrate a marriage! I forced him to return the thing and used the money instead to frame prints of the passage of time in a relationship – a better memento. A few years later we caved in and bought the door openers. I still sometimes think of my dad as I enjoy that convenience. He meant well and I must have seemed so unappreciative.

Brownie badges. I cannot recall others I earned, but I just loved learning to do knots! I had a cute little booklet with all the basic knots which disappeared at some point. These days I get a kick out of the fact that there is a très cool app for learning knots called 3D Knots.

I never became involved in Guiding as a leader, but I do have a leader’s pin (pictured above along with my Guide pin - who knows what happened to the Brownie pin - a leaping elf!). In my past life, I was a post-secondary educator – mostly of mature students. The horrible part of that job was the grading. The best parts were the kind remarks and gestures from students. They sometimes claimed that I “changed their life”. I made sure the last truth they learned was that they changed their own lives through their dedicated study. Nonetheless, one memorable student was determined to offer me a tribute to my role in the tapestry of her life – she gifted me her Brown Owl pin - so sweet!

Here’s the recipe for Swedish Lentil Meatballs.

Use Comments, below, to share or ask questions - and if you enjoyed this read, please take a second to click on "Like"!

P.S. Were you a Brownie or Girl Guide? Any memories? badges? Love to hear your stories!

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Time is on my side...

April 29, 2016

So said the Rolling Stones in their 1964 recording.

For a friend, grieving the loss of a loved one, time was not on their side.

So, here I am pondering time and dearly departed.

I am now too old to “die young” – though boomers do keep moving the bar on the definition of "young". The unexpected passing of someone the same age invokes the “live each day to the fullest” mantra – and yet…

Time – it is the gift of retirement. As a thoroughly modern working woman, juggling home, family, full-time work and graduate studies, I never achieved any work/life balance that included clever meal planning and Zen cooking. Now, especially since I began blogging, I have time to plan a project each week – recording an old family recipe or experimenting with things that have long been on my "to do" list.

“Recording an old family recipe” can be tough when the “family” is long gone. This May will mark 42 years since the death of my paternal grandmother. (I had to look that up.) I have very fond memories of her even though we did not spend massive amounts of time together. Perhaps because of some quirks of my grandfather, they became the grandparents that were visited less often than my maternal grandparents. Though I was a (young) grown-up when she died, it was stupendously stupid of me that I did not make time to learn from her / at her side. But I was not, then, who I am now, and “we don’t know what we’ve got ‘til it’s gone”. Her eyes lit up when I visited, and she would almost conspiratorially pull me to the back room to show me all the glorious handiwork she had embroidered for me. She was only a bit older than I am now when she died, after which my grandfather went a bit berserk and gave away the contents of those drawers to neighbours. Technically (and otherwise) he was kind to me, and on his dairy farm there was always a new calf named after me. By the time of his own death he had few assets or possessions. The only thing I “inherited” from him was a (made in Germany) colander that I use to this day.

I think of this grandmother as a brave woman.

It is conceivable that my grandfather was responding to these Canadian posters inviting emigration to The West. Leaving my grandmother in Hungary with two preschoolers, he arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax, was given $25 and property in Spiritwood, Saskatchewan (close to North Battleford). It remains hard for me to fathom that, with two wee kiddies, she travelled from a tiny village, across Europe, took a ship across the ocean, landed in Halifax and then travelled across Canada to join him several years later. The story, as I know it, is that the day she stepped off the train in North Battleford, he was in town mailing a letter advising her not to come. It must have been a brutal existence. She had three more children – two of which died out west, in winter. They had to tend a fire for several days to thaw the ground enough for a burial. Having moved to Ontario, they left their dairy farm in Wellandport after the third Canadian-born son was killed driving over a railway crossing. In Hamilton, she replaced farm work with factory work - walking to a corner close to her house where she’d be picked up by a company bus transporting workers to/from the E.D. Smith factory. She died from heart disease - but surely must have also had a broken heart.

From her kitchen, I remember she always had cinnamon spread, and/but never "real" ketchup. Instead she bought Catsup. The internet says ketchup / catsup – same thing – but in my experience it wasn’t. In hindsight it probably had no, or less, sugar!

My grandmother was the Kalács Queen (kuh-lawtch). This is a Hungarian sweet bread probably not unlike similar breads all over Europe and Eastern Europe. I can still conjure up that taste memory! My lifelong yeast phobia translates into the fact that I have not yet tried an official Hungarian kalács recipe. However, the second I laid eyes on this recipe for Lemon Ricotta Buns I felt sure it might replicate a ricotta kalács she used to make – and it did!

I now have “time” to make things that involve proofing time. Is that a good use of my time? Am I living each day to the fullest? Hard to say, but as Michael Pollan says in his book / documentary series “Cooked” – “time is the missing ingredient in our cooking” – and I am content that this ingredient is now a staple in my kitchen.

For as Bill Watterson / Calvin and Hobbes says - “There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”

For the sake of brevity, I am shelving so many more thoughts on "time". Want a good read? Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slow. Good movie? About Time. Daily meditation? Read any one of these quotations.

Here’s the recipe for Lemon Ricotta Buns. Use Comments, below, to share or ask questions - and if you enjoyed this read, please take a second to click on "Like"!