Depleted

I’m sick. I’m sick, and two very strange things happened to me today. After having consumed only soup for something ridiculous like 4 consecutive meals, I thought, I’ll bake a savoury tart. Wait. Those weren’t the strange things. I thought I’d bake a tart because I had some lovely eggs, and some mean blue cheese. So forward I marched, to start on some pastry, chill it, then begin thinking up ideas for filling, and what did I find? You might want to sit down for this. I was out of all-purpose flour! And butter! I know! Impossible right? Today was the end of the world. I am writing to you now from the afterlife. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking clearly I went to hell if it’s 40 degrees out and I had to make a crust out of twelve-grain flour and olive oil… but it wasn’t bad at all! I swear. I know I’m sick and my taste buds (or judgement) can’t be trusted but I’m telling you it was kinda… good. Do you think it’s the 40degree heat and flu medication? Who knows...

Emergency Tarte Aux Oignons

Crust
1C 9-grain flour
Just under 1/4c good Olive oil
¼ C ice water
½ tsp salt
1tsp dry rosemary

Filling
1 Large Spanish/Red Onion
2 Large Portobello Mushrooms
3 good eggs
½ C Milk (if you use skim we can’t be friends)
½ C Yogurt
1C Ricotta
¼ C Crumbled Blue Cheese (or more if you like more)
Salt and Pepper to Taste

In a mixing bowl mix together the crust ingredients to make a pliable dough. Wrap in plastic and chill for 10 minutes.

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Cut Mushrooms in strips and Sauté with olive oil, salt and pepper. Caramelize the onion to your liking. Drain any liquid from the sautéed mushrooms and mix with the onion. Set aside.

With an electric beater (or whisk) beat the eggs until they increase a little in volume. Add milk, yogurt, and ricotta beating on medium speed. Taste and season. Remember no one likes an under-seasoned savory tart.

Take out the dough and roll it out to fit your baking vessel. If it’s cracking leave it out to warm up a bit. That should help. There’s no butter in there anyway so no point in keeping it so cold. Once your baking tin is lined with your dough, arrange the onion/mushroom mixture in there evenly, then scatter some crumbled blue cheese all over. Finally, pour the egg mixture over everything and give yourself a round of applause.

Pop your tart in the oven and bake 45-55minutes. When the tart is ready, it shouldn’t jiggle in the middle. You’ll know. How is it? Am I losing my mind or is the cracker-like crust kinda cool?

Salted Watermelon, Monday, Magic.

I can explain. Remember how I put salt on the Pear tarts that my bog title alludes to? Remember how it was delicious? This watermelon is no different. It' s sweet, it's lovely, and it wants salt. My friend Dale put this idea in my head. Dale knows his food so we're gonna trust him on this one. Another thing about Dale, is that he is not fond of circular things. In an ideal world, Dale would use square or rectangular plates only. So naturally, if you give Dale a round thing such as a watermelon, he will cut it into... you guessed it: cubes. Well, here is the lovely thing about cubing a watermelon: you get to eat all the scraps! My grilled cheese sandwich at lunch went pretty darn well with these salty cubes of crunch. Try it!


I won't try to write out a recipe for my Grilled Cheese and Salted Watermelon (with greens), because I'm sure you can guess how I made it. What I will do though, is share some tips: if you don't have a sandwich press, cast iron is great for grilling bread. Put some pressure on your sandwich, though. My brilliant system today involved a plate and a full kettle. You could use a plate and a nineteenth century novel. Whatever works...


P.S. I tried to be really discreet about my use of Challah in making the grilled cheese of this post. I though you're so sick of this loaf of bread by now. But then I got a comment on the last post from Amuse- bouche that sent me back to the kitchen. I came back with this tiny grilled chocolate sandwich to have with my espresso. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sweet sweet conclusion to my lovely loaf of Challah.

Look ma, no fork.

Nothing says Spring like eating with your hands. After the eight month freeze, people in Canada start acting a little funny: Oh, it's four degrees above freezing, you say? Hold on, let me get my shorts and sandals. Ten degrees with and overcast on a Tuesday? Let's hit the patio and get a bucket of Coronas at lunch. I'll admit it, I'm guilty of a little of the crazy. We woke up yesterday morning and Mina looked outside at the gray skies, birds chirping on the barren branches draped with torn plastic bags, preening their feathers of the spitting rain, the damp gray sidewalk littered with a crust of dirt and cigarette butts in the wake of melted snow banks, and commuters heading to work in their rain coats, umbrellas in hand, and she said, "It's beautiful outside." And I thought, "Yeah, it is, isn't it."

So, in that spirit. Why not kick off Spring (there are, literally, snow flakes outside the window, today, on April 5th) with fajitas?



Chipotle Ground Beef Fajitas with Guacamole

1lb lean ground beef (chuck works, but you could use ground sirloin if you're feelin classy)
1 red pepper, sliced
1 green pepper, sliced
2 onions, halved and sliced
1 to 5 dried chipotle peppers, ground (pick your poison: the more pepper the higher the flame)
3 tbsp cooking oil
1/2 C sour cream, for topping
1/2 C cheddar, grated for topping
3 diced jalapenos, for topping
1 diced tomato, for topping
6 to 10 corn fajitas, lightly toasted (use an open gas burner and tongs if you have them)

For the guacamole

2 ripe avocados, halved, pitted and crosshatched in their skins
1/2 a bunch of fresh cilantro, roughly chopped, stems and all
3 green onions, finely sliced horizontally
2 limes, juiced
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp chili powder (or mexicali spice mix)

Start by making your guac. Gently turn the cut avocado out of its skin with a tablespoon directly into a bowl and fold in (just as if you were taking care to preserve whipped egg whites, because you don't want your diced avocado to turn into mush) cilantro, lime juice, green onions, and salt to taste. Then top with the chili powder. My favourite is to use a micro grater to dust the top of the guac with a dried nacho chili - and yes, those are a real variety of pepper.

Put half the oil in a small cast iron (or non-stick) pan and turn the heat to high. In a second medium-sized pan, add the remaining oil and half of your onion and cook for three to four minutes, until onions are soft, then add ground beef and stir through.

By now, your small cast iron pan should be smoking hot. Toss in the red and green pepper and remaining onion. Shake the pan hard once or twice, then listen to the sizzle. Toss every half-minute for five minutes, while keeping an eye on the beef mixture. When your peppers have blackened at the edge, remove from heat (if they stick at all, flick or spray some water into the pan and shake loose). Continue to stir your beef until the moisture has cooked off, then salt, pepper and add the chipotle. Cook for another minute, then remove from heat. The rest is simple: spread all your separate ingredients on a platter and start the free-for-all. Also, if you've got some, serve this dish with hot sauce and cold beer.

Cheers!

Variations on a Theme

Once again though not much time has passed, it seems the whole order of the universe has shifted since my last post. It's officially spring now, which the Persian new year has kindly reminded me, though for the most part the whether refuses to acknowledge that. On the table these days are a bunch of hard, honest, and essential questions, pending decisions, possible travel, and of course as it always is with these things, so many possible variations. You can get yourself pretty tangled in thinking sometimes as your comfortable grip on things fades farther and farther away and out of reach. This is where food comes to the rescue. It fills your stomach, your mind, and your kitchen. Something about the smell of cooking in the house, a cutting board covered in scraps and a sink full of dishes forces you to stop asking questions even just for a few hours. So here are recipes for chorizo (two ways) to keep you busy. Take a break, you don't have to do everything at once.

Glazed Chorizo Tappas Style

150 g chorizo sausage
1/2 small clove garlic, crushed
1 tbsp honey
1tbsp balsamic vinegar/red wine
olive oil

Slice the chorizo and fry in olive oil until crisp and slightly darkened in colour (photo above). Drain all but about a tablespoon of the oil, add the garlic and cook for a minute. Turn the heat down and add the honey and vinegar/wine and cook on medium until reduced and glaze-like.

Chorizo Pizza

1/3 recipe pizza dough
sliced chorizo
sliced red pepper
hot peppers
sliced red onions
spinach
buffalo mozzarella

Prehead oven to the highest possible temperature.Oil a baking sheet, sprinkle with cornmeal (very important step), and place your thinly rolled out dough over it, pricking the surface with a fork several times. Brush olive oil over the dough and a bit of tomato paste if you like. Arrange the sliced toppings and slip in the oven. Pour yourself a glass of wine as your pie bakes, but careful, it takes minutes, so don't walk away.

Parkas and Pasta

How many times have we endured the Canadian winter, and it's still the hottest topic of conversation between November and April. Whether we're surprised that the cold has taken longer to set in, or how long it's lasted this year, or just talking about the bone-chilling, teeth-chattering, skin-cracking cold, we persist. So naturally the first thing I want to tell you about (and the next handful of posts are likely going to start similarly) is that it's freezing here! Now since carbohydrates and fat keep our bodies (and hearts) happy, I propose we eat pasta until April. Think about the variations of pasta and sauce that are available to amuse ourselves with while we wait for the blossoms to grace our snow covered trees...


Casarecco with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce

(If you have a really good jar of roasted peppers, feel free to substitute)

250g dry Casarecco (or pasta of your choice)
2 Sweet Red Bell Peppers
1 clove Garlic
1 shallot
small bunch of fresh basil
olive oil
good pinch of salt
cracked black pepper
Parmigiano Regiano

Roast the red peppers, garlic, and Shallots (skin on) in the oven and peal when cool enough to handle. Blend/food process peppers, shallot, garlic, and basil with a pinch of good course salt and a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Taste the sauce and tweak seasoning to taste, then transfer the sauce to a medium pan on medium-low heat.

In the mean time, boil the pasta in plenty of well-salted water (salt the water after it comes to a boil, as salty water takes longer to boil) until al dente and drain, keeping about 1/4c of the starchy pasta liquid.

Toss the pasta and 1/4c liquid in the pepper purée and mix gently until it all comes together and the pasta is well coated with sauce. Grate some Parmigiano right into the pan and move around gently to enrich the sauce.

Serve with additional grated cheese and a glass of hearty red wine and count down the days until picnic season with us!

Fungi Pizza

Pizza is a staple food in Toronto. There are pizza joints in this town that have line-ups out the door from before noon til after last call when the pub crawls come spilling out along Bloor and College street. But even though there’s a lot of great places to get a slice around the city, truth be told, the best pizza I’ve ever had has always been at home. This is probably a bit of a deception, my first summer job was tossing dough at a pizza stand at Ontario place, and I spent a summer working at a chain of family run trattorias that a lot of people think is the best spot for a pie in town, so maybe I’ve got a jump on the dish, either way as long as you can get your oven over five-fifty you should be able to make some thin-crusted magic in 7 minutes. The trick is to make a good homemade dough and throw it to the cieling, the rest is all just icing on the cake.




Pizza al la fungi


dough
1 tblsp dry yeast, dissolved until frothy in
1 1/2C of warm water with a tsp squirt of honey
3 1/2 flour
1 tbsp olive oil

pesto
1 cup basil, pasted
1 tbsp olive oil
¼ cup pecorino, micrograted
2 tbsp walnuts, ground

toppings
1/2C sun dried tomato, thinly sliced
1C oyster or other mushrooms, roughly chopped
2C baby spinach, chopped
1/3C chevre

Preheat oven to 550. Start by making your dough in a large mixing bowl. Blend the ingredients until it forms a ball, then kneed dough on a floured surface for ten minutes or until you work up a sweat. Cover and let rise for an hour. Beat it down, then let it rise again for a half hour or until doubled. Now, with floured hands stretch out the dough by spinning it between your pinched fingers, give it a few good tosses and flips (you can youtube this kind of thing if my description leaves you totally clueless, I apologize). Next, roll it out and put it on a baking sheet lightly dusted with cornmeal. Sporadically poke it’s surface with a fork to avoid getting big unsightly, untasty bulbs in your pie.

In a mortar (or food processor), paste all the ingredients of your pesto. Apply the pesto liberally to your dough (Note: If you don’t have enough oil in your pesto it will make you dough soggy and no good for eatin). Your pie is now ready for toppings. Add everything you’ve got prepped to approximately equal sizes, so that they’ll have similar cooking times. Top with healthy scoops of the goat’s cheese, or grate anything else you’d like.

We devour these things before they even get a chance to cool with our favorite dirty little secret, Saroli Fine Food’s hot peppers in oil, which is pretty much like foodie crack.

Brunch for Dinner?

I worked at a French restaurant where we made hundreds of savory tarts and quiches for breakfast, brunch and lunch, so when I made one at home last night it was so refreshing to crack 3 eggs instead of 50 and not to worry about whether we'd have the tarts ready in time for the brunch rush. We had ours for dinner because we wanted to, so feel free, tart-lovers, to make one of these whenever the mood strikes. Tart time is any time. There's quite a bit of creative freedom with this tart, as the filling is really up to you, or the contents of your fridge. The only rule is to sauté whatever vegetable you want to use, to get some of the juices out and avoid getting a soggy crust.
Recipe: Goat cheese and pepper tart

Pastry:
1 c all purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1/4 c vegetable/extra virgin olive oil
1/4 c cold cold water

Filling:
3 eggs
1/2 c yogurt
1/2 c milk
3/4 c chevre (goat's cheese)

Sauteed veggies:
1/2 a red pepper, cored and sliced vertically
1/2 a green pepper, cored and sliced verticaly
1/2 a spanish onion, thinly sliced
1 a roma tomato diced or a handful of cherry tomatoes halved
fresh basil roughly chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil, for the skillet

This recipe is for a simple savory shell, but if you have pie pastry in the freezer, or a store-bought pastry shell, feel free to use that. First, mix the flour and salt with a fork. Beat in the liquids to thicken until it clumps in to a dough. Then grab dough with your hand and form a disc. Refrigerate for 10-15 minutes while you prepare your filling.

To prepare the filling, whisk together the eggs, yogurt, milk, and 1/4 c of chèvre in a medium bowl. Mix in the chopped basil and season with salt and pepper to taste.

Sauté all of your prepped veggies over medium high heat in a cast iron or non-stick skillet for 3-5 minutes, or until the edges brown. Remove from heat and set aside.

Roll out your pastry on a floured surface to match the shape of whatever tart shell you are using. It should be about 1/4" thick. Press the pastry into your shell, poke holes in the bottom with a fork and trim excess from the edges. Then, evenly distribute the vegetables into the tart shell, and pour filling on top. The vegetables should be submerged but still visible. You don't want to drown them. Next, put spoonfuls of the remaining chèvre evenly throughout. Bake for 30-40 minutes or until the crust is golden at the edges and the egg mixture has raised all over. And don't you worry if the surface deflates and flattens when the tart cools, it's supposed to.