What we ate

I like writing about food, as it happens, and so to this end, here’s another unedited post on a variety of food-related things.

It’s asparagus season, I think, south of us at least, where it’s warmer and doesn’t feel like the spring has a windchill. To commemorate the appearance of these green stalks, I made Melissa Clark’s recipe for white beans on toast topped with asparagus. I went to a local bakery for fresh bread… a country-style loaf for the adults and something plainer for the kids. And that’s precisely the beauty of this meal: the adults can have their virtuous meal of beans made from scratch - soaked the night before and lovingly simmered - while the kids can top their bread with deli ham and sliced pickles, or slathered in peanut butter and dotted with bananas. Everyone finishes their meal happy with very little extra work on the cook’s part.

Our second asparagus-themed meal was a riff on (again) Melissa Clark’s Cacio e Pepe with Asparagus and Peas. I used a single cheese and had fresh linguine from the store. It was a satisfying meal mostly because the children can’t seem to get enough of pasta.

Now, I have something I have to correct… Our family has had the lazy habit, as one does with inherited recipes, of referring to a particular cabbage slaw as “Chinese Salad”. I even posted about it here. A week ago, Deb Perelman posted a Poolside Sesame Slaw that I am looking forward to trying… I mean, if it ever gets warm enough to consider going poolside. She made a note of the usual name for these kinds of salads and linked to two articles on the subject. Perry Santanachote’s “Stop Calling It Asian Salad” clearly expresses the problem and is concluded by seven actually-Asian salad recipes. As she writes, the article is “about words and how they matter”.

I’ve enjoyed diving into two cookbooks: One has been online-only and the other I picked up at the library after learning that the author was Canadian. The Stained-Page News is a fun newsletter about cookbooks and its recent edition included lots of photographs of the unique page design from a cookbook titled “Leon’s: Ingredients and Recipes”. I relish good design and this cookbook was highlighted for its whimsy and smart layout. This can be glimpsed here.

The second cookbook is Tessa Kiros’ Falling Cloudberries. I paged through this tome, with chapters dedicated to geographic locations and could almost feel a nostalgic ache for travel and wholesomeness. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, except to say that thoughtful writing and cozy pictures of imperfect scenes and telling details can open a gate for the mind to go and wander about where it has never been. Kiros’ Instagram evokes a similar feeling and it makes me want to post anew. I thought “cloudberries” was an invented idea, like “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs”, but no! They are an actual fruit.

Earlier this week, a fellow tutor and I had a whole conversation about food. There’s this place in Scotland, she was saying, where she ate this fantastic dessert and had thought to snap a picture of the menu. Home again, the flavour lingered in her mind and so she retrieved the picture to recall the name and since adopted this simple-yet-impressive treat as a go-to dessert. I served it to our guests today, with a blackberry coulis and a mint leaf and it is indeed wonderful. It is called a Lemon Posset.

There! That’s a quick tour of the food-related things that have been on my mind! Cheers!

January recipes

There are a variety of ways I could introduce the topic of “food we ate in January” here. There were Christmas leftovers, like lingonberry sauce from IKEA that pairs so well with breaded chicken cutlets, my mouth waters thinking about it. The kids like breaded meat… panko crumbs or bread-crumbs, simply flavoured with salt and pepper, maybe parmesan too. Thus, chicken cutlets and schnitzel made with pork are reliably liked.

But there was also comfort food (chicken noodle soup and salmon en papillote), the meals you can transport to someone else’s house, to warm and serve and bring a feeling of home.

But also, there floats about the month of January that siren song of New Year’s Resolutions. Some people favour vague ideas (more of this, less of that). Others argue specificity is the key to success. I waver between the two… This year, I’ll draw every day-ish. This year, we’ll expand our vegetarian repertoire. Both come from a feeling of dissatisfaction: I want to draw better, I’m tired of a routine formula for a meal.

Thus, I made tofu wonton soup, from Hetty McKinnon’s cookbook To Asia, With Love. I mixed the wonton-filling with a mortar-and-pestle and Christian said it was his favourite tofu-based recipe to date. Even the kids ate all their wontons. While tofu-filling tends to make for a crumbly texture, chicken suddenly seemed rubbery in comparison, with a back-to-back serving of both wonton-filling variations. I learned a new way to fold wontons, thanks to Youtube. Hetty writes that her mom keeps pre-assembled wontons in the freezer and adds them to a meal as she sees fit, which sounds delightful.

I also made cabbage-mushroom hand-pies from Six Seasons, which was a meal with a chicken and apple-filled version for the kids. Chicken and apple is fine and all, the kids opined, but really, the effort would be better spent on a dessert version. And so, last weekend for a family visit, I made apple turnovers from a simple recipe in Dorie Greenspan’s cookbook Around my French Table. It exceeded our expectations… Six or seven McKintosh apples cooked slowly with a bit of water, a bit of sugar, a pat or two of butter, a generous sprinkling of cinnamon, cooled and spooned onto puff pastry cut in a circle and “painted” with an egg-wash, as Dorie puts it… Mwah! Chef’s kiss! And in spite of the fact that assembly takes time, the supermarkets are determined to help home cooks because they offer puff pastry that is pre-rolled! Pre-rolled! All I had to do was defrost the package, unfold the sheets and cut the circles! Amazing!

So there… those were the new things we tried in January.

A week in five recipes

Of all the ways one might write of hectic days, listing the things you made to eat, or ate made by others, might be the most sympathetic.

On Monday I made blueberry popsicles and discovered what a mess pureed blueberries make.

On Tuesday I hosted lunch for a friend while our puppies played together. Chickpea Pan Bagnat is the visitor-friendly kind of lunch you can prepare ahead and pick up and put down for the inevitable child and puppy interruptions.

On Wednesday, Christian found enough string beans in the garden for Salade Niçoise. The garden centre had new potatoes for sale.

On Thursday, we made our son’s birthday party lunch: grilled cheese and a strawberry-banana smoothie.

On Friday we made salmon en papillote, paired it with simple fried rice and a glass of white wine to celebrate the end of an unusually busy week.

Cookies

I used to come home from an office job, and consider the week productive only if I managed to bake a dessert. Dessert signified a form of self-care and indulgence and generosity too towards my husband. Now, I bake cookies for the kids and these Apple-Spice Cookies from The Pollan Family Table are a favourite. I like the almost ginger-bread-like spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves), the simple icing on top, but I especially like their cake-like texture.

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School lunches

Schools went online here in Manitoba on the Wednesday after Mother’s Day. Unlike March of last year, the day’s routine is structured around the children’s classroom appointments rather than a schedule I improvised. (I write about it here.) This means the kids are more independent and I have time to make lunch the day-of, rather than doing it the night before. Here is what the kids have for lunch during the week:

Monday: Sandwhiches

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Tuesday: Quesadillas

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Wednesday: Pasta salad (here with tuna)

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Thursday: Fruit smoothie, a muffin (here banana-chocolate, although other favourites include banana chocolate-chip, zucchini, and pumpkin) and nuts and bolts

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Friday: Pizza (from frozen)

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In celebration of a random Friday-night meal

Could we pause here just a minute to appreciate a meal well pulled together? I mean it’s delightful that the internet abounds in recipes, that cookbook authors put forth books by the series, that categories of cuisine fill shelves, but really, the home-cook does not jubilate over a single successful dish. No, the home-cook celebrates the satisfactory table. The table upon which each of her children finds something they enjoy, upon which there is something that does not demean the sensibilities of the adult, upon which tastes mingle and are sated.

On Friday, the fridge offered half a bunch of asparagus, sliced deli ham, 5 eggs, and some leftover cream too. The freezer was stocked with frozen berries, but no bananas. In a cupboard, dried dates had become this inconvenient pinecone-shaped leftover (from date-nut pinwheels) that shuffled between the sugar cubes and the chocolate. We’d already had pasta. I was loathe to go to the store (I always am).

This was Friday night’s menu:
Date Milkshake (from Jamie Oliver)
Blueberry pancakes (from Mark Bittman)
Asparagus and ham omelet (inspired by Mark Bittman)
Tasty Taters (from the freezer, by McCain)

On the surface, it might not seem all that much of a triumph, but what should be considered are the following factors: that the home-cook had no idea what to make for supper Friday morning, nor even Friday afternoon, and at Friday 1:00 considered texting her husband some words on the theme of mealtime despair. Fortunately, I resisted.

Sure, maybe home-cooking is an under-appreciated talent, or maybe home-cooking is undervalued, but when those grimy gremlin thoughts leave their swamp and start marching towards you, they can only be dispelled by a level of confidence wielded by professionals facing outside-the-home kind of problems, like the high-school principle who had, on her doorframe a magnet that read: “put on your big girl panties and deal with it.” (She was of a certain age, but no matter.)

Dealing with the problem created dishes, but also the tastiest omelet, one son’s favourite milkshake, satisfyingly crisp potato bites, and a pile of perfectly turned out pancakes that not only quelled my daughter’s hunger, but had that addictive quality where hands keep reaching to the plate for just one more, blueberry-studded and syrup-doused.

Five stars

Brussel sprouts, boiled or roasted are inedible in my opinion. But buy them when they look good, take off their dusty outer leaves, chop the core off, cut them in half and slice them, thin, thin. When your pile of Brussel sprouts looks like a mass of green-yellow paper confetti, put them in a mixing bowl, drizzle olive oil over them, squeeze a fresh lemon over them too, for brightness and add salt and pepper and shave parmesan and mix everything with your hand, till the leaf-shreds glisten. Top with toasted walnuts and enjoy!

(This Brussel Sprout salad originally comes from the cookbook Six Seasons.)

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Design and the Loblaws applesauce jar

If interest in design could be measured in podcasts, mine would rate just a little above average, with shows like 99% Invisible, or Design Matters in my Stitcher app feed. A recent episode by TED Radio Hour, for example, featured an interview with computer engineer Tony Fadell, who offered satisfying anecdotes about Apple’s iPod design solutions. Design stories tend to give you a shiver of pleasure as they unroll a problem and offer a delicious solution. But design can also make you uncomfortable, because once you start to notice it, you start to categorize it. Living with bad design is what the TED Radio Hour podcast host Guy Roz calls “accepting design flaws”. His guest however, was hardly so passive. Mr. Faddell said, “we lose control to these things that are thrust upon us as opposed to wrenching control back [and saying] ‘I’m not going to do that anymore, we need to get this fixed.’” But I wonder who he’s addressing. Is it me, the lowly consumer? Or is it other designers? Or is it an elite I don’t belong to?

Take the No Name unsweetened applesauce sold by Loblaws. We buy a jar or two every week. It will be out on the counter during our weekend lunch, still cold from the fridge, and while I wait for my slice of bread to toast as the kids are eating at the table, I’ll take a spoon from the drawer, pick up the jar and reach in for a few heaping spoonfulls. The consistency is always just right, and the flavour is dependable. Years ago I tried making applesauce but my efforts would not compare, with exception to one luxurious variant.

About three years ago, Loblaw’s decided to change the design of the applesauce jar. It had previously been made of glass and held a larger amount of applesauce. The new design is made of plastic, and contains less. The issue is the design of the jar. Underneath the yellow “No Name” label, the plastic is ribbed, and the bottom is full of indents. It has since become impossible to clean out the jar with a spoon so that jars go to the recycling with applesauce still clinging to the sides.

I called the phone number provided on the jar twice. The first time was to make a complaint about the design. The representative on the other end of the line was sympathetic. I felt consoled to know that others had made similar complaints. I held on to a hope that an imaginary pile of complaints might cause a change in the design. A year later I called a second time to ask whether or not it was possible to know who made the jars. The representative checked and came back to me and said that there was no way of knowing because it was proprietary information. In the Loblaw Code of Conduct, it is written “disclosure of confidential Company information can seriously harm Loblaw.” I get that. I don’t want to hurt the makers of the applesauce that I like.

So then, what? My frustration with an applesauce jar is this trivial thing… You assume that the more you pay, the better a thing should work. A jar that costs two dollars is more about content than packaging, more about affordability than brand. The irony is that the applesauce jar causes food waste for the customers who least want to afford it.