Weather Talk Stops Now - I'm Declaring Spring HERE

OMG, can you believe the weather?

It is so cold/windy/awful out! When is this going to end?

I can't remember a season that has affected so many of us in such an icky and never-ending way. Even this morning, as the kids and I left for the cafe, my usually upbeat and winter loving 8 year old son took a look at the dusting of snow we got overnight and looked at the sky and muttered, "Really?"

So... that's it. I'm done now. The end of March is long enough. We're done. I'm planning my spring menu. I'm looking at seed catalogues. I'm perusing photos I took at farmers' markets and our garden last summer.

Remember Tomatoes on the Vine?

My teeny tiny silver lining in all this was my "spring cleaning" of my freezer. I discovered some of the strawberries I froze at the end of our strawberry season last year. I know they're not as good as fresh strawberries - but it snowed like a zillion feet here and the temperature was as cold as I imagine it is on the moon - so... they tasted pretty fantastic.

Last year's strawberries from the freezer

We decided to do something simple. I made tea biscuits and some maple whipped cream and that was it! (Sadly... we ate them all and... I forgot to take a pic - sorry. I temporarily thought of taking a photo of the empty plate - but decided that might be a bit mean.)

You may or may not know that while I have certain things I'm pretty good at baking, cooking is really more my deal. However, it just so happens that tea biscuits ARE one of my things! Mom taught me how to make these a ridiculously long time ago before I found out that baking was a science. When I thought it was easy I did a lot more of it. Later on, after the advent of the Food Network and hearing countless celebrity chefs go on about not touching dough, making sure cold water was COLD and a thousand other things, I sort of found my niche in cooking and left most of the baking to other people.

Tea Biscuits

2 cups all purpose flour

4 tsp baking powder

1/3 cup sugar

½ tsp salt

1/3 cup butter

½ - ¾ c milk/ginger ale**

Preheat oven to 350. Combine all ingredients mixing as little as possible. Lightly flour a flat surface and roll out the dough until it is about an inch thick. Take a cookie cutter (or, in a pinch, a drinking glass) and flour it. Cut the biscuits and place on baking sheet. (I always use parchment paper.) Bake 12 to 15 minutes and remove from oven.

**The original recipe for tea biscuits calls for milk - but one of Mom's friends always uses ginger ale when she makes hers. I usually do now too - they are definitely less dense this way!

I've Been Here All Along!

People have been asking about where the Lunch Tramp has disappeared to lately. Fear not, I have not left town. (Well, sometimes I leave town - I mean, a girl's gotta travel, you know?) 

The awesome business card I made when I "lunch trampin'"

Most of you know that I'm making lunch now more than I'm dining out with friends - but that doesn't mean I'm giving up my moniker. In fact, I'd say the opposite is more often true. Now, instead of a few lunch dates a week, I'm hanging out with all the cool kids every day!

We social creatures like to, you know, be social. We like to talk about things: local politics, new businesses opening nearby, what ridiculous drama we saw on the weekly installments of Come Dine With Me Canada - you know, important stuff. (I'm not sure if you can tell but I was using my sarcasm font there.)

One of the advantages of having a cafe is the conversation. It is a really rare day when I'm not fascinated by the things people talk about here. There are those who suggest we should install a hidden camera and then have some sort of closed circuit feed to entertain the masses but I suspect that privacy violations aside, we might not be as entertaining to the masses as some would have us think. (In related news, if the masses were tens of people, MAYBE we would be a hit - but I still doubt it.)

In any case, I thought today I would talk about how the Lunch Tramp came to be in the first place - and why I'm such an advocate for social media . I joke that social media is part of my job as a business owner - but I'm only half joking. MANY of my devoted peeps come to the cafe because they found out about me via social media. More often than not, people who are newcomers tell me about seeing a funny coffee pic on a friend's Facebook page or they liked my pics on Instagram. But (I know you're not supposed to start a sentence with but - but I felt like I could be colloquial) the even cooler part about social media for me is the actual friendships I now have as a direct result of... Twitter!

The Lunch Tramp came about because I tweeted one fine day in 2011, I had three lunch dates. To be fair, my social media maven friend invited me and two other people to lunch but one of them ditched us. Several people commented that they felt excluded and then joined in - and the Lunch Tramp (and Cornwall Tweetup) was born. I designed business cards, got teased a bit on Facebook and went on with my life. The next week there were over a dozen people at our lunch table - and several of them were people I had never met before. (Truth be told, I wasn't even married to Twitter at the time. When one person commented on my business card pic about a weekly tweet-up, I didn't even know what that was!)

Now, a couple of years later, my family and I have gone on vacation with friends we didn't know before tweet-ups and the Lunch Tramp. We have entertained at our home and been invited to spend time with others. Social media is what you make it - and I'm thrilled to say we have made it a great place to hang out. If you're on the fence, I say, give it a try. Pick one form of social media and try it on for size. You can learn stuff about a hobby, interact with fellow foodies, find business contacts and more. Or... follow a celebrity. It isn't my bag but I'm not here to judge. I am here to say I have friends today I didn't even know a couple of years ago. I have laughed until I've cried (today in fact) with someone I may never have come across otherwise. Social media is not the tool of the devil. (Except for the games. Those are terrible.)

March (Break) Madness

My daughter was bummed that she didn't get to attend the cooking class I gave at the Boys And Girls Club on one of their recent PD Days. She told me she wanted "at least two cooking classes" over the March Break to make up for it.

When she found out I had to cook for a client yesterday, she wanted to come to the shop to cook with me. I was hoping to finish in under 45 hours so I suggested I would instead go early to the cafe, make food there - and then come back and we could do the same things at home.

She decided on Chicken Pot Pie, Chocolate Chip Cookies and Rice Krispy Treats. Full disclosure: She asked for Salad instead of the Chicken Pot Pie but is snowed over a foot yesterday. I was not in a salad frame of mind.

Here she is reading a cookbook while wearing her shirt to show her support for a Bully-Free environment. She pointed out that it was important she wear this shirt on other days too as a reminder that she supports it "not just on the day."

When I make Chicken Pot Pie, I like to use pie crust. I know some people are fans of puff pastry - but my mom always used crust (as did my Nanny) so... pie crust it is. I'll have to give you the recipe for it another day since we had some already made (Thanks Mom!). If you don't have a crust recipe of your own and/or you REALLY like puff pastry, you could definitely use it here.

This recipe is definitely more "quick cooking" than the traditional way I made it in the past where I poached a whole chicken and shredded it first. I still make it that way sometimes - but now when there's an 8yr old involved.

As for the "insides" of the pie, it is a pretty classic mix of:

Abt 1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup flour**
1 Onion, chopped (If you're really not an onion fan you could use leeks or pearl onions if you want to peel them!)
1 cup Carrots
1 cup Celery
1 cup Potatoes
few handfuls of Peas
Chicken* (Normally, I use the whole chicken but I had chicken breasts and used 4)
about 8 cups Chicken Stock
1 teaspoon dried sage (or 4 or 5 leaves if you have fresh)
1 teaspoon dried thyme (or 2 or 3 sprigs if you have fresh)
Salt and Pepper to taste (I find you need less if you're using store-bought stock than house-made)

Sometimes, I use mushrooms and I have used cream in a few recipes too - but not today.

I don't usually measure my ingredients (I know... I know...) this is pretty close to what I would say the amounts were.

In the interest of not boring my 8yr old kid, I started with melting the butter and adding the vegetables to saute before adding the flour. I knew she wouldn't be cool with me making the roux on my own and I was pretty sure she wasn't up to whisking on her first try.

 I added the flour next and then the broth. It was perhaps not the way they taught me in culinary school but it worked out pretty well! I cubed the chicken since raw chicken and added it in along with the herbs and let the whole thing simmer about 25 minutes.

Once the filling is done, I spoon it into the container we're using (usually a glass casserole but in the interest of no dishes I totally took some containers from the shop - don't judge me) and top it with the pie crust.

Bake in a 350 oven for about 20 minutes or until the crust is brown. (This would probably be a few minutes less for the puff pastry.)

If you were making this ahead of time you could either make it to completion OR wait to cook it - totally your call.

**If you are eating this it is assumed you're using the pie crust and are therefore not gluten-free. However, for my gluten-free peeps, you COULD omit the flour and make this as a stew. (For my non-potato eating peeps, switch out the potato for sweet potato but be aware that there is not as much of a thickening that will occur this way. It will still taste awesome but won't be as thick.)

National Soup Month?

As my Dishtastic Peeps know, I make a lot of soup. I take pictures of my soup and I sometimes (although infrequently) blog about it.

While looking for inspiration to blog more regularly, I thought about the "Days of the Month" food options. It seems there's not a lot of science behind said "national (insert food) day" selections. If you google chocolate cake, it could be tomorrow and also four other times in the year. That said, it's chocolate cake people! I'm almost positive there could be a justified movement for making that an every day of the year sort of thing - but maybe that's just me. In any case, I've discovered a few different sites that list a special food day for every day of the year. Some of them are a bit far-reaching (like Groundhog Day on, well, on Groundhog Day) - BUT a few of them said that January is National Soup Month.

Now, I know that January is coming to a close but it is starting to look like the cold weather never will. Cold weather screams, "Make Soup!" to me. Even though I typically make two different soups a day at the cafe, I find that lately, I've been feeling like I could run a Soup Only business.

The Original Soup Only Guy

At the cafe, I make almost everything from scratch - and with the advent of the Polar Vortex and all of the other (less SFW) names people are giving the weather phenomenons, there has been a bit of an influx in people braving the cold because they know there are hot pots of soup waiting for them.


With that in mind, today's blog isn't so much a recipe but rather some of my non-recipe comments about making soup. For the sake of photos, we'll go with the Tomato Soup I made yesterday.

Tomato Soup!

• Caramelize onions! Almost everything in the universe tastes better when you add caramelized onions to it (except maybe, chocolate cake). I get that we're busy and that we are looking to save steps but I'm telling you that taking a little bit longer to bring out the flavour in simple and inexpensive ingredients will make you glad you took the time. 

The beginning of caramelzation magic

• It does not have to be complicated! Use ingredients you already have on hand. Don't stress out about finding a rare kind of saffron or panicking because your paprika is not Hungarian.
• Having the right tools makes your life easy. See the onions and garlic in the pic above? They're HUGE! They will cook down and get brown and delicious and when I add the other ingredients and they simmer I will use my immersion blender to puree them and make everything smooth and ready for dipping that grilled cheese sandwich you ordered to go alongside it.

Imersion blender - blending

Tomato Soup is the most popular soup at the cafe - and I make it several different ways. The tomatoes can be roasted; they can be green ones that didn't ripen in the fall. Perhaps you have some grape tomatoes you think have seen fresher days in the fridge - add them in with a couple of your favourite cans. You can use fresh from your garden, crushed, diced, whole, even tomato juice - but make sure they taste good because there aren't a lot of other ingredients being added to hide potentially un-delicious flavours. Like cream in your soup? Okay. Watching your dairy intake? Don't use it. See? Uncomplicated! The photo below shows what went into the Tomato Soup offering I gave to peeps yesterday. I also added some salt, pepper, thyme and water.

There you have it. Tomato Soup for a Polar Vortex Cold kind of day. Serve it with Grilled Cheese and people from all around will think you're fantastic.

Maple Curried Pasta

Although my husband and I are not necessarily on the Gluten-Free bandwagon, we have taken a lot of bread and pasta out of our diet. However, eastern Ontario has just gone through what I can only describe as the coldest cold snap in the history of my existence. (I tend to embrace hyperbole with alarming frequency but this is just true.) The cold weather screamed for comfort food. I was in a pasta mood.

Those of you who follow my blog and/or have come to my cooking classes know that I'm more of a "use what you have" type of person more than a recipe follower. We've made various versions of this dish over the years but this is how we did it the other night.

Maple-Curried Chicken, Mushrooms, Pears and Asparagus with Fettucini

1/2 lb fettucini, cooked to al dente in a large pot of salted water

1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon butter

2 shallots, diced

handful assorted mushrooms, sliced (we had cremini and button)

yellow pepper, chopped

1 pear, peeled and diced

2 chicken breasts*

1/2 cup white wine or chicken stock

bunch asparagus, snapped in half

2 tablespoons maple syrup

1-2 teaspoons curry powder

1 cup cream

salt and pepper to taste

Add extra virgin olive oil and butter to pan. Add shallots, peppers and mushrooms and saute about 5 minutes. (*If you are using raw chicken, add it here. However, we were using leftover cooked chicken breasts so I didn't add it until later so it would heat through without getting dried out.) Add the pear and saute a few minutes more. Deglaze the pan with wine and/or stock. Add the asparagus, syrup and curry.

 Add the cream to the pan and let simmer until cream begins to thicken and reduce. Taste and season.

Meanwhile, drain your pasta and add it to to the pan. Toss and serve immediately.

 

Variations: As I mentioned above, this is a really versatile recipe. You could easily omit the chicken for a vegetarian meal. I've used apples instead of pears, thrown in fresh herbs like parsley when I had them, used red peppers (or no peppers)... 

We had no maple syrup once (I blame my children) and I used honey. It was still delicious.

For those of you who don't eat wheat, you could use the gluten-free pasta of your choice. This is also pretty darn yummy on rice - or if you are averse to all things starchy, omit the mushrooms from the mixture, roast or grill some portobellos and then top the mushrooms with the yumminess in the pan.