200 Blog Post and Giveaway!!

Oh hello there.

Guess what?

I love you. I do. If you are looking at this little bit of the internet right now, I love you.

This little bit of internet is my blog, and it’s one of my favourite places in the whole world. It’s taken a huge amount of time and energy and love to put the last 199 posts up, and I feel so very grateful that you are reading it. So grateful in fact, that I want to give you a present.

Yup. That’s how much I love you.

I don’t talk much about the shops and restaurants in Vancouver, because I know that a lot of you don’t live here. BUT I have fallen so head over heels with Much and Little that I needed to share it with you. And I need you to have some of the things that I have from there. It’s my favourite shop to find things for my kitchen, it’s my favourite place to look at trinkets for my walls, and it’s quickly becoming one of my favourite clothing stores.

But mostly, it’s my kitchen shop, because kitchens are mostly my favourite things.

So here are a couple of goodies,

• an incredible ceramic pie dish that is so pretty you certainly don’t have to limit it’s use to pies, it is a gorgeous casserole dish, and it’s so much nicer to put on the table than a basic glass Pyrex (no offence Pyrex, I have several of yours at home too)

• the sweetest baking tea towel, full of words like “whisk” and “sift” to motivate you through your next undertaking.

• And my favourite- the enamelware perforated ladle, which I have now bought 4 of. (One for my mom for Christmas, than one as a Christmas present for myself because it was too cute, and then one for my bestie because she liked it too much!) This is the perfect utensil for pulling small pasta out of a pot, poaching eggs and a slew of other things, on top of being the cutest kitchen accessory you will ever need.

All you need to do, is comment down below with your favourite recipe! And “like” me on facebook or follow me on twitter. Then a randomizer will decide who get’s this awesome hand picked gift! (sorry, only available to those living in North America!)

Sunday Salads- Fennel, Avocado, and Citrus Salad with Meyer Lemon Vinaigrette

This is the sort of salad you can only make in the winter months, and I relish fresh simple salads that can be made from things available this time of the year because frankly, in Vancouver, it’s slim pickings. But what we lack in veg right now we make up for in proxy to California, and thus California citrus. You can use any citrus in this salad, but the blood oranges and the grapefruits just make it so pretty, and if you can find a meyer lemon for the dressing, well, you’re pretty well in business.

This is one of those recipes that almost seems silly to put up here. I’ve made it so many times, and there are so few ingredients, it just seems too simple.

But when I made it for a friend of mine a while back she immediately begged me for the recipe, and wouldn’t take a “Oh, you know just chop up some fennel and add in some citrus” for a recipe.

I do that a lot. She gets mad at me.

It is though, the easiest salad to make. I grew up on this salad, sometimes it was just fennel dressed with lemon and olive oil, sometimes my mom threw in some citrus segments if she was feeling fancy. But it was a standard salad in our house for years, and it is always one of my favourites. The only thing I’ve changed is the addition of an avocado, which was totally a fluke, I just had one that was on it’s last legs so I chopped it up and tossed it in, but it turns this salad from a bright side dish, into a perfect light lunch. And when you eat as much sugar as I do, a perfect light lunch salad is just about the best thing.

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Cinnamon Roll Biscuits

People always ask me what my favourite thing is to bake. I tell them I’m a baker and it’s the first question. And here’s the thing of it; I never know what to say.

There are things that I don’t love baking- macarons for instance, which are delicious and wonderful, are also the bane of my existance. Puff pastry, with it’s tedious rolling and folding would fall into that category, but favourites? They’re harder to come by.

But recently I’ve decided. They’re something friends always ask me to make, and then continue to talk about long after the last one has been scarfed up, and they’re something I genuinely really enjoy making.

Biscuits.

Guys, I’m willing to put it down into the internet, a place where things are never deleted. I make great biscuits, and I love making them.

The simple act of cutting in the butter, folding in the buttermilk, pressing out the dough with my finger tips. They are my favourite. I love them.

Which is a good thing, because man oh man, have I made a lot of biscuits lately. I’d say about 300 last week alone.

Oy.

See I work for a Southern restaurant which opened up last week as a pop up fried chicken shack. And what is fried chicken without biscuits? Not much apparently, because those things were flying out of the kitchen. It was all biscuits all the time.

So with the scrappy bits that were left over and a bit to tough to serve, I rolled them out , sprinkled them with cinnamon and brown sugar and rolled them up. They’re like the cookies my mom used to make with left over pie dough, except much, much, bigger and fluffier.

And seriously, those things were delicious. Like, proper, all kinds of wonderful, I will sell these one day when I open a bakery, delicious.

They were one part biscuit, one part cinnamon bun, and all parts fantastic. So there you go.

Biscuits, they are my favourite, whether for dinner, or for breakfast, or for shoving in your face when they’re covered in cinnamon and sugar and still hot from the oven.

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Tuesday Tutorials- Danishes!

When I was little my parents had it all figured out. They decided when we were very young, that we could make our own breakfast. And on Saturdays, starting when perhaps parents would decide was too young today, we walked the block and a half to Second Cup and bought breakfast. It was a tiny cafe, part of a larger franchise in Canada, but one where they did all the baking in house. And every Saturday in the summer we would get a cinnamon danish with peach drink, and every Saturday in the winter we would get a peach danish and a hot chocolate. We were creatures of habit.

The couple that owned it were endlessly sweet to us, and we adored this little tradition. Then they hired an extremely rude girl who would serve the adults instead of us and be mean to us kids, so we wrote a very stern letter and we wrote each line in a different colour marker, so you know we meant business. And we never went back. For a few months we tried different cafes that were close to us, but it was never the same. Not long after we started making our own elaborate breakfasts which was, in fact, the beginning of a whole other exciting era. BUT there was a very sweet couple of years in which my sister, my next door neighbour and I ate danishes every Saturday. And it was a wonderful time.

Which is all a long way of saying that I love danishes. An awful lot.

Danish dough is what’s called a laminated dough, because you roll out the dough with a big block of butter in the middle. And then you fold the dough, and roll and fold and roll and fold, and as you do this the butter laminates the layers of dough. This is the same premise behind puff pastry, but here the dough is also yeasted so it rises even more, and has more flavour. The dough is similar to a croissant dough, which I might do a tutorial for soon -let me know if you’d like that in the comments!

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Sunday Salads- Thai Style Coleslaw with Lime and Peanuts

Here’s the thing of it: I work almost all the time, and always at weird hours. It’s just the way my life is these days. Somedays I start at 5am and some days I finish work at midnight, which has lead me to some very strange eating patterns. Most of them involve a whole lot more sugar than I will ever admit to on this very public forum because, if we’re being real here, I’m totally unwilling to admit it to myself.

But I struggle, as I know a lot of people do, with working long hours and trying to eat vegetables at the same time. Some people, like my sister, buy their veggies pre-cut because it saves time. But you get totally subpar vegetables if they were cut 5 days ago, so I’ve resisted this, and instead, I’m getting into salads and things that aren’t full of delicate greens, but instead are full of hearty veg that stay crisp even when you dress them. The sort of salads that you can make in a big bowl and continue eating for a couple days. The kind of salad that eat with dinner on Sunday night and eat left overs for Tuesday lunch in between your baking shift and your serving shift when your too exhausted to much of anything but eat and sleep.

And if you’re that tired, as I seem to be an awful lot lately, I figure it’s better to eat coleslaw than it is to eat left over meringues. Especially if said coleslaw isn’t the Southern mayo kind, but the Asian sort, dressed in nothing but lime, soy, and peanut oil.

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Spring Coloured Meringues

When I first moved into this little apartment it was all sorts of crazy colours, there was purple, and lots of yellow and the living room was a bright Tiffany’s blue. And I hated all of them, I painted it all white, but the blue. For some reason I just needed the blue. After living here for 5 years, I think I’ve finally figured it out- it reminds me of the sky that we only get a couple months here.

See, Vancouver does this thing, this dreadful thing where it rains all the bloody time. It starts in late September, early October if we’re lucky and it keeps raining until May, or June, or sometimes, even July. I’m not joking, we sometimes only get 3 months of sunshine. Last year was one of those years, and maybe that’s why I feel like I’m struggling so much with it right now.

My saving grace in all this rain is the flower shop I live on top of. It regularly wins best florist in the city and with good reason, it has the most gorgeous blooms in every imaginable colour, all the time. And even when everything is grey and gloomy and damp when I walk out my door I see heaps and heap of fresh flowers. They even take the old roses and sprinkle their petals half way down the block, to bring a bit of colour even further. They really are the best.

So lately I’ve become obsessed with their colours, the soft peachy ranoculous, the bright red of the tulips, and these soft yellow roses, oh those roses. They give me hope that it is sunny somewhere in the world. And so I made these meringues to bring some more of that colour in, because in this dreary grey city, sometimes you just need colour.

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Tuesday Tutorials- Gnocchi

I wish that I had a cuter story about gnocchi. I wish my Nona had taught me to rice the potatoes, that she had shown me just how much flour you need to bring the dough together. I wish, to be honest, I could even remember her gnocchi, but I don’t. Although I’ve heard my mom and cousin talking about how incredible they were, the only time I remember her serving us gnocchi I also remember her apologizing for not making them from scratch.

But such is memory I guess, flawed.

So instead I learnt how to make gnocchi from reading the French Laundry Cookbook, where Thomas Keller goes to great length to explain how to make them. There are many ways to make gnocchi, and many debates on how to do it best, should you use starchy russets potatoes, or waxier Yukon golds? Should there be cheese added, or just on the top? If you use another starch, a squash, or a sweet potato, is it still gnocchi?

Over the years since I first forayed into the world of homemade pastas I have tried just about every possible method and every possible ingredient, and this is the recipe I always come back to. I use Yukon golds- waxier, so that you get more control over the starch content, no cheese in the gnocchi, it’s an unnescessary flavour, and it detracts from what is darn close to perfection to begin with. And you can call it a squash gnocchi, or a sweet potatoe gnocchi, but again- if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Gnocchi are surprisingly simple to make, you roast the potatoes, push them through a potato ricer or through a seive, to get very fluffy potatoes, and then you add in a few eggs and a touch of flour and knead it together until it barely forms, and then roll it, cut it, and boil it. It’s also wonderful because it freezes brilliantly, so if you make a bigger batch you can keep some for later.

While it is simple, and just about anyone can do it, I should note that it takes a quick hand, and the first time you do it you should stick to a small batch and just practise the technique. Gluten, the protein in wheat, forms at 55C and you want the dough to come together before it cools down past that temperature, so you must work quickly and keep a cloth over your dough as you go. And always have a pot of water boiling so you can test the little pastas, and make sure the consistently is just right.

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Sunday Salads- Semolina Crusted Cauliflower with Arugula and Capers

Phew.

The last month has just about taken it out of me. Valentines was very near the death of me. For serious.

The thing about doing the pastries for 4 different restaurants is that, when one is busy usually all of them are busy. And then it gets crazy.

Post Valentines there will be lots of deep breathing, lots of yoga, and lots of writing. I know I’ve been bad to you you all lately. I just haven’t had a chance to breath lately.

But now is the prime time to start again, to write again, and to eat salads again.

This one is one of my all time favourites, one I make pretty regularly and one that gets lots of praise every time I do. It’s full of super crispy cauliflower, peppery arugula and the sharp acid of capers. It’s admittedly, not one of the healthiest salads I make, I know it, and you could bake the cauliflower if you wanted to, I have and it’s still good, but there is just something about it when it’s pan fried in bubbling olive oil that just makes it better. It might make everything better.

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Valentines Breakfast for Dinner- Pancakes with Raspberry Rose Syrup

Here’s the thing of it, guys just don’t like Valentines Day. I have never heard a man sound excited about buying flowers that are suddenly double the price two weeks into February. I have never been told that a male friend is really excited to take their girl out for dinner, or to a show, and I think that’s mostly because men really don’t like being told what to do. So they don’t like being told they have to be romantic. They’re stubborn like that.

Here’s the other thing, all girls like Valentines. Even the tomboy-est of ladies wants a day of the year where the door is opened for her, and roses are sitting out on the table when she gets home. It’s a silly day, but it’s also wonderful. It’s a day of romance, and it’s a day for pink. And I will make no claims pretending to be above it.

It’s just fun.

But what isn’t fun is how expensive it is to go out on Valentines, how much more restaurants charge for things, and how busy it is. Which is why, when I’m not working, Jordan and I make dinner in on Valentines. And this year, I’m proposing pancakes.

I love breakfast for dinner. It is my absolute favourite. It is simple, and not fussy, but it feels special. It feels indulgent, and it feels a little bad for you, and if you have pancakes for dinner, you’ve already had your sweets and you don’t need dessert!

It’s extra festive if you cut out some hearts from pretty paper and sew them onto string, and tie that string onto a couple of skewers so that you have heart bundting on your pancakes. But you don’t have to.

These pancakes are incredibly good, they are the lightest fluffiest pancakes I have ever encountered, and they are best when they are smothered with this raspberry-rose sauce. Just please don’t go and buy the raspberries that are imported from Argentina (unless you live in Argentina, in which I’m super jealous) I used some lovely frozen local ones and they are all kinds of delicious.

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Sunday Salad- Raw Winter Veg Salad with Horseradish

Oh man, I just love the winters farmers market. I’m completely surprised every time I go by how much is still available, despite the weather. Now, that’s not to say that I live in a place that gets a proper Canadian winter, it rarely, if ever, snows here, but it gets cold enough that I certainly have no burning desire to go outside. But things are still growing, and the cold is preserving the apples and pears, and and I can still buy slews of kinds of root veggies. 

And there is a certain energy at the farmers market too, and it doesn’t fade away with the sun, there are still kids everywhere, and people laughing, and having samples of the greatest Asian pears, or the new kind of smoked cheddar.  There’s a sense of adventure when you go to the farmers market, but maybe that’s just because it’s nearly always pouring rain. It makes you feel a little hard core. 

This is a salad made with only very pretty winter veg, and served very simply. The sort of salad that takes 5 minutes to put together, but gives you that crispness that I crave from raw vegetables. The kind I always think I have to forfeight during the cold months, before I remember that with the help from a mandolin to slice them very thin, the texture can take me right back to the days of warmth and sunshine. 

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