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December 26, 2023 11:04 +0000 | Food Recipes 0

It's Christmastime, and I'm absolutely stuffed from the parade of food last night (three pieces of pumpkin pie!) but in preparation for the event, I was surprised by my favourite recipe for these potatoes disappearing from the URL I'd bookmarked. Thankfully, Archive.org's Wayback Machine was on-point and had a copy, so Christmas brelinner (we only had the one meal yesterday) was saved.

Regardless, the recipe is fantastic and leaning on archive.org for recipes feels like abuse, so I'm going to reproduce the recipe here.

Ingredients

1kg potatoes
2-3 garlic cloves (I generally use at least half a head though)
2 tablespoons yellow mustard (yes, I'm talking about that French's stuff)
4 tablespoons (of fresh lemon juice) (about 1 lemon's worth)
1 tablespoon dry oregano (I'm rather liberal here)
125ml of extra virgin olive oil
salt & pepper to taste

Method

Preheat the oven to 200°C
Chop up your potatoes. The original recipe suggested that you should peel them and cut them into long wedges, but in my experience, the skins are tasty and more surface area makes for a nice crunchy texture, so I recommend roughly 2cm³ chunks is best.
Put them all into a Great Big Bowl and dump in all of the above ingredients, tossing until everything is nicely covered.
Pour the result into a big roasting pan, using a spatula to make sure you're not leaving any of the yummy goo behind. The pan should be sufficiently long & wide such as to ensure that the potatoes are all visible from above. Anything buried will just turn into mush.
Cover your pan with foil (be thorough) and chuck it in the oven for 1 hour.
Remove the foil and put it in for _another_ hour or until the tips of the potatoes look a little blackened.

That's it. Roughly 2½ hours of work and you've got yummy potatoes for about 4-6 people depending on how hungry you all are.

December 20, 2023 19:40 +0000 | Recipes 0

It's my favourite time of year: pumpkin pie season. Screw the turkey, forget the presents, between October and January it's Pumpkin Pie Time in this house.

Now, if you're reading this hoping to get the recipe of a traditional, "done the hard way" pie, I'm going to disappoint you. Below is a recipe for a delicious pie that starts with a can of puréed pumpkin. Despite its origins however, this recipe always draws compliments. When in doubt, make two.

Shell

Ingredients

350ml (ish) graham cracker crumbs
80ml (~⅓ cup) white sugar
90ml (~6 tablespoons) unsalted melted butter
3ml (~½ teaspoon) ground cinnamon

Method

This part is really easy. Just combine it all in a bowl and when it's mixed well, press it into a pie dish. Just make sure that the result has everything evenly distributed with no holes, and that you've included a crust along the edge.

Bake for 7 minutes at 190°C, let it cool, and move onto the filling step...

Filling

Ingredients

2 large eggs, lightly beaten
425g (1 can) puréed pumpkin
170g granulated sugar
3ml (~½ teaspoon) salt
5ml (~1 teaspoon) cinnamon
3ml (~½ teaspoon) ground ginger
1.25ml (~¼ teaspoon) ground cloves
285g condensed milk

Method

Preheat oven to 180°C
Combine ingredients (stir, don't blend) into a big bowl and pour the result into your cooked pie shell.
Bake for 40-50min, or until a knife inserted comes out clean.

Topping

Some people like ice cream, others Cool Whip, or even home made whipped cream with a splash of chocolate and Grand Mariner. Personally, I have a deep love of the cheap spray cream you buy from Tesco in a compressed air can. Whatever you like, you do you ;-)

January 28, 2020 07:47 +0000 | Food Recipes 0

We've been developing a decent chili recipe over the years, initially derived from this one, but as it's been so heavily modified from the original, consulting it when making dinner no longer makes sense. So, in an effort to simplify cooking it for ourselves, and perhaps so that others may enjoy it, I'm sharing it here.

Ingredients

500g ground beef
2 zucchini, peeled and chopped into bite-sized pieces
6 carrots, as the zucchini
2 onions, diced into cubes no larger than 1cm²
1 head of garlic, peeled and chopped into tiny slices
a splash of olive oil
2 heaped tsp mild chili powder
2 tsp paprika
2 tbsp cumin seeds (you can never have too much cumin)
2 beef stock cubes
500ml passata (if you like your chili a little runny, 750ml might be better)
1 tsp dried marjoram
1 can red kidney beans, rinsed & drained (or some pre-boiled raw ones)
salt & pepper
long grain rice (we tend to favour Basmati), to serve
sour cream, to serve

The important thing to note here is that variation is encouraged. They say that while baking is a science, cooking is an art, so feel free to take some artistic license if you want to experiment.

Method

The preparation of this meal is the hardest part. For the actual cooking, you just dump stuff into the pot in the right order and wait the right amount of time between additions.

Put a reasonably-big pot on the stove. For something like this, you probably want your Big Soup Pot. Put the heat up to medium, and when it's reasonably warm, add that splash of oil.

Once the oil is warm, add the onions, chili powders, paprika, and about half the cumin. Stir until the onion is translucent and the spices are nicely distributed. Now add the garlic and stir a little to make sure it's covered too.

Next up is the cow. Crank the heat up a little and toss it all in. Break it up and stir it regularly until it's properly brown. This part is important: before you move onto the next step, make sure the meat is cooked all the way through, otherwise it won't have the right texture in the final product.

Now add the zucchini and carrots, stirring both around again for the sake of distribution.

Things are looking a little dry at this stage, so here we add some fluids. Make some beef stock from those 2 stock cubes (in my case it was 600ml of water, but do whatever the stock box says). Mix the stock into your primordial chili along with your passata, the marjoram, and the rest of cumin. This is also a good time to add some salt & pepper to taste.

Drop the heat back down to medium and add the beans. Stir everything around, cover it, and let it simmer for about 20-30min, stirring occasionally. Toward the end of this time, take the lid off so some of the excess water has a chance to evaporate. You'll know it's ready when it has the consistency you want.

Serve over a bed of rice, topped with a dollop of sour cream.

April 26, 2019 18:21 +0000 | Family Food Grandma Lidia Recipes 2

I've written about my grandmother's soup before, here and here, but those are both attempts to capture a special Romanian soup called "chorba". That soup is quite complicated and can be a hassle to throw together when all you want is something warm & nutritious to help fight off a coming cold so I wanted to share her typical chicken soup for my dear friend Noreen who's in need of such a thing right now.

Ingredients

Required

1 whole chicken Generally for this sort of thing, bigger is better, but as it forms the base of your soup, you want a proper oily one too. I tend to opt for a free-range one over a larger battery-cage type one as these tend to be a little less... I don't know, sterilised.
Some carrots I usually opt for a minimum of 3, but will happily add as many as 8. Honestly, there's no downside to adding more veggies as it only makes your soup tastier and healthier.
Some parsnips See the above rules for carrots
1 bunch of celery: Again, volume is good here, so don't be stingy as this stuff is pretty cheap and adds a lot of flavour.
1 large white onion
Lots of salt: Don't be stingy.
Pepper
A fist full of fresh parsley: You really can't overdo this, but generally I take a pack from Tesco and dump the whole thing in.

Optional

Garlic (chopped up and tossed in with the veggies)
Olive oil (in case your chicken doesn't have enough oil in it already)

Instructions

Over the years, I've adapted my grandmother's recipe to suit Christina's and my tastes. Where the two methods have diverged, I've noted them below, but honestly, you can mix and match and the results will still be yummy.

1. Stock

It's pretty simple: get a big pot and put your chicken in it. Then, fill that pot with enough water that it totally covers the chicken by about 3cm (~1" for the American savages that haven't yet figured out metric 😜). Put that pot on the stove and crank it up to medium heat.

A note about the heat at this stage: this step has two purposes: cooking the chicken (salmonella is a bitch) and creating your stock. If you crank the heat to maximum, you'll cook the chicken alright, but you won't have enough time to leach the goodness out of the skin and bones. If you're in a hurry, you can crank it up to 75% at most, but a tastier soup comes from a slow, even hours-long boil at a low heat.

Add some salt while it's cooking. How much? Lots. Take what you think a soup should have in it and triple it. I have one of those boxes of idodised salt in the cupboard and I open the mouth wide to pour about 5 turns of salt into the pot myself.

Cover it, and let it slowly come to a boil. Depending on how impatient you are, this can be about 30 minutes or 3 hours. If you've got the time, I highly recommend the patient route. Besides, you have other things to do while you wait.

Note that while it's cooking, some white fluffy goo might float to the surface (it varies by chicken). Just scoop it off with a slotted spoon every once in a while.

2. Vegetables

Now that the stock is doing its thing, lets get to the other tasty bits. But first, a note about divergence.

My grandmother's recipe calls for all of the ingredients above, but notably, she doesn't put the onion & celery in the soup. They're added for flavour, but removed before serving. Christina likes these bits though, so we chop them up with the rest of the veggies and leave everything in.

Given the above, if you're going Grandma's route, you'll wanna chop the onion in half and chop the celery stalks into halves as well. She also tends to cut the other veggies unusually large... that's your call I guess.

If you're going with my adaptation, then you'll want to cut all of the veggies down into bite-sized chunks (and the onion even smaller: diced). Dump them all into a big bowl or two and wait for the chicken to finish.

3. Chicken Out, Veggies In

You've just spent a bunch of time sucking the tastiness out of your chicken and into that salt water. You can tell we're ready because there should be little bubbles of oil floating on the surface of your water and the chicken skin should be showing signs of peeling back from the flesh.

A note about oil bubbles: This is the sign of some good broth: a good oily chicken tends to produce lots of yummy bubbles, so if you feel like your broth doesn't look sufficiently bubbly, even after an hour of cooking, feel free to add a tablespoon of olive oil at this stage.

Remove the whole chicken from the pot and put it aside. As it'll have a lot of water in it, I don't recommend just plopping into a cutting board, but rather I tend to favour putting it in a casserole dish to cool down. Be very careful as (a) the chicken is very hot, and (b) it's likely hiding pockets of boiling water. Use big long metal tongs or something. Be creative, but safe.

Once it's out and cooling down in the open air, take all of those veggies you chopped up and toss them in the water. Regardless of whether you opted for the veggies-all-in option or the flavour-only-subset, everything goes in right now.

Put the lid back on, reduce the heat, and let it simmer on low. The timing after this point isn't all that important. So long as your veggies simmer for at least 20 minutes, you'll be fine. If they simmer for an additional 4 hours, that's cool too.

Chicken Back In

Once your chicken has cooled down, you'll want to cut the meat off and into bite-sized pieces. Go through the whole bird and take as much as you can, making sure that you don't accidentally include any bones or inedibles. Put all of your edible bits right back into the soup.

Garnish

That's basically it. We've combined the two age-old food groups: salt and fat, with some vegetables & domesticated bird meat. It's yummy, but it can still be a little better.

Chop up your parsley as finely as you can and dump it all into the pot. Then, grind some black pepper into the pot for taste. I usually do about 12 turns of my grinder and then add more to individual bowls, but I love me some pepper.

Noodles!

I always forget this part, but it's critical: the noodles are cooked separately. Pick a noodle type (we tend to favour fusilli, but my grandmother prefers angel hair pasta.) toss it into a pot of boiling salted water and cook whatever you want for this sitting.

Put a handful of cooked pasta into each bowl and then ladle your soup from the big pot into each bowl. Do not put the noodles in the soup pot unless you intend to eat all of it today (unlikely, you cooked a whole bird). Generally you cook the noodles you need for each sitting

That's it! Enjoy your foodz, and let me know how it goes! If you like it, I'll let my grandmother know you appreciate it :-)

December 06, 2014 13:30 +0000 | Family Food Grandma Lidia Recipes 2

This is my second attempt at documenting my Grandmother's so-called "sour-soup" or "chorba" as is apparently the appropriate word for it. I've been trying to replicate it for years, but recently, she and I sat down and worked everything out (while i video recorded everything) and I've finally managed to reproduce this amazing dish. I present it now for you in the hopes that it will brighten your day too:

Note: my grandmother isn't big on measuring, so I'm afraid I don't have much to offer in the standardised quantities department. Instead, I'll be listing the ingredients in the very same way she provided them to me: in practical use cases.

Ingredients

Some meat.
- Turkey is good for this, but you can get away with chicken or even beef (big chunks, not ground). Ask yourself how much you want in your soup, and that's how much you'll need.
4 Parsnips
4 Carrots
1 Bunch of celery
1 White onion
1 Red pepper
Olive Oil
A handful or two of some kind of pasta or rice.
- I typically go for orzo or white rice, but you can also use angel hair pasta.
A handful of Lovage
A handful of parsley
Some sour cream
Salt
Pepper (fresh ground black pepper, none of that powdered stuff)
A big spoonful of vinegar (for the garnish step, below)

Directions

This is a two-part system, and it's probably best if you do things one at a time. Pros like my grandmother who have been doing this for 50 years can do things in parallel, but if this is your first or second time trying this out, pace yourself and do one pot at a time.

Preparation

In this two-part system we have vegetables we're going to eat, and vegetables we're using for flavour only, so we're going to break up our veggies into two groups:

A Warning

Throughout this whole process, it's important to note that the pot should always be covered, or you'll lose too much water and you'll end up with a more stew-like soup than you probably want.

Group 1: Flavour Only

In this group you have:

2 Parsnips
2 Carrots
2 or 3 stalks of celery
1 White onion

You chop these into big pieces, no less than 7cm long. For the onion, you just cut it in half. Leave these bits on the cutter board 'cause you'll need them soon.

Group 2: For Eating

In this group you have:

2 Parsnips
2 Carrots
2 stalks of celery (if you're into eating celery in your soup)
½ Red pepper
- I usually just throw out the other half, but you can use the whole thing if you really like red peppers.

These are all chopped into bit-sized chunks. Put the chopped bits into a great big bowl for now.

Cook That Meat

You need to quickly cook the meat to seal in the good stuff, and you also want to clean the ugly bits out of your soup before you actually start making broth so...

Put your big chunks of meat into a proper soup pot. You probably want something capable of about 6L or more of water. Don't worry about the size of the meat pieces yet, we'll make them mouth-friendly later.
Fill up said pot with water until the water just covers the meat.
Add some salt and pepper.
- Don't be stingy with the salt. If you skimp out on salt early, you'll have very exciting-looking water masquerading as soup.
Cover the pot and crank the heat up to 10, stirring occasionally so the meat doesn't cook all on one side. When the water boils, drop the heat down to 5. If any gunk floats to the surface (this is excess fat and other undesirable bits) scoop it off with a strainer or slotted spoon.

Completing the Stock

Now that you've got the beginnings of your stock, add your "flavour only" vegetables. Let them hang out in the water there with the meat for a bit. Drop the heat down to 3 or 4 and let things slow-boil.

Vegetables for Eating

Now with the stock pot simmering on the side, we're going to work on the veggies we intend to eat.

Dump all of your for-eating veggies into a deep pan or pot. Make sure that there's room to stir stuff around because you're going to be doing a lot of that.
Add some olive oil. How much? Enough to sauté the veggies. Typically I start out with a little bit and add until I feel that all of the veggies are getting enough love.
Run the heat up to 5 or 6 and stir frequently to make sure that all of your veggies get cooked properly.

Bite-Sized Meat

Going back to your stock pot, it should have been simmering there for a good 10-20 minutes. It's time to remove everything that doesn't belong.

Open the pot and remove all of the vegetables. You might want to keep them around to eat separately, but they don't belong in your soup anymore.
Now remove the meat and place it on a cutting board.
Put the lid back on if you haven't already.
Chop up that meat (careful, it's hot) into edible bits. Go ahead and sample some if you like, but my experience has been that the meat by itself at this point isn't very tasty. All the good stuff is back in the soup. At this stage, the meat is mostly for texture.
Dump your chopped meat back into the stock pot
Dump all of your newly sautéed vegetables (along with any remaining olive oil) into the stock pot

You're almost done.

Starch

At this point, you've got a pretty functional soup, but it needs something starchy, like pasta or rice, so let's do that.

If you're going the route of orzo or rice, I highly recommend that you rinse it first to get off all the excess starch. Otherwise you risk clouding your soup. It won't taste bad, but it'll be less pretty.

If you're going the noodle route, you'll want to break it into tiny pieces so it's easier to eat.

Either way, dump your chosen carb into your soup, cover it, and let it boil at a low temperature until the pasta/rice is ready.

Garnish

At this point, the soup is edible, but not yet exciting. You need to add all of the lovage and parsley at this stage:

Finely chop or rip the lovage and parsley into the soup
Stir it a bit and let it settle for another 5-10 minutes on a very low heat.
Stir in the vinegar as well

Serving

Finally we're ready to eat. Portion out the soup into bowls, and just before you serve, stir in a spoonful of sour cream. I can't tell you how much better this makes things.

That's it! The portions listed above should serve about 4 bowls, but I usually double things so we have enough soup for a few days.

Posterity

This entire recipe came from a recorded interview with my Grandma after multiple written attempts resulted in failure. I needed to interrogate her, to tease out the information she left out as a given, so I recorded the whole thing with my phone. Below is that interview.

November 04, 2010 03:05 +0000 | Family Food Grandma Lidia Recipes 5

So now that I'm unemployed, I suppose I have time to catch up on stuff here. There are a lot of posts I've been meaning to save here, and there's no time like the present to post them all. I'll start with the recipe for my grandmother's chicken soup.

My grandmother (on my mother's side) is the Chef-as-Matriarch of the family. Since I was a kid, she's had the family over for these massive European-style feasts. 4-7 courses, turkey, pork roast, cabbage rolls, roasted vegetables, soup, green salad, egg salad, pie, cake, and sometimes crème caramel if it was my grandfather's birthday.

All of these are amazing, but what she's known for, practically worshipped for in this family is her soup. Below is the recipe for her sour soup. For the most part, the mechanics are the same. You can swap out the stewed tomatoes for any kind of meat you like. The key is the first line, those vegetables make up the base that's used in all good soup. This incarnation is my favourite though. The sour cream step make everything fabulous:

carrot, parsnip, celery, onion (one of each, she calls this "miroquois")
Sauté in pot with oil until the onions are translucent
Add ½ a can of stewed tomatoes
Add 2 tomato cans worth of water
Add salt and pepper
Simmer until veggies are done (about 15minutes)
Take 1 big tbsp of sour cream and combine with a small amount of broth and mix until smooth and return to pot.
Add parsley for taste
Add some noodles

Now that's the recipe, but I've yet to actually make it work. I suppose now I have some more time to experiment.

December 04, 2008 00:38 +0000 | Friends Recipes 4

My friend Cat and I were talking over email today and the following transpired. I thought it fitting to post here given the weight of my previous posts:

Me

I am sick. Have been for days, and my company insists that I come in anyway so I'm not really getting better. I should be ok by the weekend though at which point I'll be heading out to Langley (ew) to practise with my old choir so we can go caroling later in the month (it's a thing we do).

Her response

Ew. That really sucks. Drink some Horrible Tea.

Horrible Tea

1 clove garlic

1 thumb-sized piece gingerroot

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

juice of 1/2 lemon

2 large spoons honey

Roughly chop the garlic and gingerroot. Steep all ingredients in boiling water under a cover for about 2 minutes, then drink. You can strain if you like, although I think it works best if you don't. STIR WELL. The honey keeps it from tasting too bad. Drink this twice a day until you feel better, and then for another day or so afterward.

You will need a new toothbrush after you get better, though.

September 22, 2008 17:47 +0000 | Food Recipes 0

Long forgotten by most of the planet, Green Goddess is probably the best salad dressing ever made. I used to have the recipe in my computer somewhere, but I've done too many hardware upgrades -- I appear to have lost my only copy.

Thankfully, Melanie helped me dig it up online last night. I've posted it below for posterity and for my own records. Please feel free to try this at home: