Julie & Julia, and very good food.

We went and saw Julie & Julia today.

I had no interest in seeing the movie when I first heard about it. I read the book a few years ago and didn't care for it. I wanted to be a fan of the book. I thought the premise was great. But ultimately I just found her so unlikeable that I didn't enjoy the book.

But then I heard that the story would also be about Julia Child and that Meryl Streep was playing her and I became much more interested. I figured that the movie would "Hollywood-ize" the Julie character to a more likable person, and then the reviews were good, so we figured why not.

I loved the movie, especially the storyline of Julia and Paul Child. What a wonderful life they had. Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci were amazing. The movie is funny and inspiring and touching and I lost count of how many times I cried.

After the movie ended we went to my parents house (they saw the movie with us) and my Mom had a Julia feast planned out for dinner -


Potage Parmentier to start (which I believe is the first recipe Julia Child tested for the cookbook, and the first recipe Julie cooked from the book), followed by



Rapee Morvandelle, which Scott and I have previously cooked, and then we managed to find the strength to eat a few mouthfuls of Cherry Clafouti.


Scott took one for the team and ended up with blue fingers after pitting the required 3 cups of cherries.

Eating like this once in a while - heavenly. Eating like this for 365 days - madness, darling.

Market Aug 15

This is probably the biggest haul we've bought at the market so far this year.


On the right are some pickling cucumbers, I'm hoping to make my favorite bread and butter pickles with at least some; Scott wants to try something new. Below are some carrots, nice and small and hopefully sweet. I'm looking forward to when the market carrots and bigger and cheaper; there's a carrot soup recipe in Super Natural Cooking that I want to try. Then 6 relish cucumbers we got for $1. I've never made relish before and am looking for a freezer relish recipe - does any such thing exist? Next are some beans - green, yellow and purple, and finally some Ronde De Nice squash. I've wanted to try these since last year.

garden! and juice.

The heat has not been kind to our flowers and garden (or the forests in BC, for that matter). The lettuce has died, our squash plants are fried. The broccoli bolted. What can you do?

We have a surprise in our garden this year - sunflowers. The birds have been dropping seeds in the garden from our feeders, and now we've got some lovely sunflowers growing. I hope they do it again next year.



This tangled mass is our tomato patch. So far we've harvested maybe a handful and a half of cherry tomatos, and there are tons of little green tomatos, and lots of blossoms to go. The Super Fantastic plant has produced lots of good sized green tomatos. Hoping they start to redden soon, but then again I do love Fried Green Tomato Sandwiches, so I'll be ok. There are also some small heirloom tomato plants hiding in there, Black something, or something Black.



My potato plants! After the sunflowers this makes me the happiest in the garden.


The herb and onion section.


The surprise of the garden this year - peas! Scott planted these on impulse and neither of us expected much. They are doing very well and 2 nights last week we stood over the plants, snacking on our delicious pea bounty.


The raspberry plants and hanging in there, but are still really small. We added another plant to pump up the volume.


Another experiment of Scott's - carrots. He planted these late, so we'll see what happens. But they are off to a good start.


________________________________________________

I love juice and smoothies and they are so easy to make at home. At least 3 or 4 days a week I try to make a smoothie to take to work with me. Here are 3 of my current favorites.


This one took me by surprise, how much I liked it. You need a juicer, which I have been using less lately cause it's a pain to clean, but it's always worth it.

Strawberry and Grapefruit
adapted from Thirst by Nigel Slater

1/2 large grapefruit, rind removed
1 orange, rind removed
10 strawberries

Juice the 3 fruits together, stir and drink.


The next one I don't have a photo of, but it's my favorite because you can change it up. All you need is one part fruit (my favorites are strawberry, raspberry or pineapple) to two parts apple juice. If the fruit is fresh, I'll add a couple of ice cubes. If the fruit is frozen then I omit the ice. Yum yum yum.

This is the best photo I have of this last one, because the minute it came out of the Magic Bullet we drank it all. This one is heavy on the sugar, so we don't have this often, but it's so refreshing.

Lemon Lime Slush
Rachael Ray

1/4 cup boiling water
1/3 cup sugar
1 teaspoon grated lemon peel, plus 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice and 1 lemon slice (I omitted the peel and the slice)
1/2 teaspoon grated lime peel, plus 1/4 cup fresh lime juice and 1 lime slice (I omitted the peel and the slice)
2 cups ice cubes

Using a blender, mix the boiling water, sugar, lemon peel and lime peel until the sugar is dissolved, about 15 seconds. Add the lemon juice, lime juice and ice cubes and blend on high speed until slushy, about 15 seconds. Serve with the lemon and lime slices.

Cool it

Oh Em Gee it's hot, hot, hot here! In the past month we've only had a couple of days that have dipped below 30, and we've hit 40+ twice in the past few days. Aieeeeee.

I'm not normally one to complain about the heat, but damn. It sort of sucks when it's this hot for this long, because there is no break. It doesn't cool down in the evenings. It's hot first thing in the morning. There is no escape.

We are trying to stay away from using the stove/oven to try to keep the house and us as cool as possible. Here's some cooking free stuff we've enjoyed lately:

Cucumber Salad

This is the quickest and healthiest of the recipes I'm sharing today. Ready in minutes and very very yummy. Also, cucumbers are low in calories and a good source of Vitamin C and Fiber.

2 TB rice vinegar
1 TB agave nectar
1 TB soy sauce
1 TB vegetable oil
1 cucumber, peeled, cut in half lengthwise and cut into thin half moons
salt and pepper

Whisk together the vinegar, agave, soy sauce and oil. Toss with the cucumber and season with salt and pepper if desired.

Gazpacho

Is there anything that screams SUMMER more than gazpacho? Fast, easy and super fresh. This recipe is from Ina Garten and it makes a ton. We made a half recipe and ate gazpacho for days and days. Not that I'm complaining.


from The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook

2 hothouse cucumber, halved and seeded, but not peeled
3 red bell peppers, cored and seeded
8 plum tomatoes
2 red onion
6 garlic cloves, minced
46 ounces tomato juice
1/2 cup white wine vinegar
1/2 cup good olive oil
1 tablespoon kosher salt
1 1/2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper

Roughly chop the cucumbers, bell peppers, tomatoes, and red onions into 1-inch cubes. Put each vegetable separately into a food processor fitted with a steel blade and pulse until it is coarsely chopped. Do not overprocess!

After each vegetable is processed, combine them in a large bowl and add the garlic, tomato juice, vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Mix well and chill before serving. The longer gazpacho sits, the more the flavors develop.

Triple C Milkshake

This is the most decadent of the recipes and my favorite. Yum, yum, YUM. Cocoa powder contains antioxidants and flavonoids, which are very good for you. Cinnamon is also high in antioxidants. And chocolate ice cream is just plain good.


I like milkshakes a little on the thin side. You might want to decrease the milk a little, or add an extra spoon of ice cream if you like thicker milkshakes.

2 cups chocolate ice cream
1 1/3 cups skim milk
1 tb cocoa powder
1 tsp cinnamon

Place all ingredients in a blender and blend until incorporated and smooth. Add more milk for a thinner milkshake or more ice cream for a thicker one if needed.

Two hits and a miss from Rachel Ray

Have I mentioned that I am struggling with food? Well not with food, exactly, but the cooking of food. I have little interest in spending time in the kitchen cooking, and even less interest in looking through cookbooks, magazines or online for interesting things to make. Looking at food and/or reading about food? Blah. That word describes many things in my life. If I'm not in my pajamas, eating fruit and watching What Not To Wear and/or re-reading a Harry Potter book, then it's Blah. Oh my, that looks sort of sad, what I just wrote.

Anyway! From time to time I have short spurts of food related energy, when I say to myself, stop making boring sandwiches and pasta and the same zucchini-onion-pepper stirfry! Grab a cookbook and find something new and exciting! One day I even got myself so worked up that I'd decided to do one of those cook thru the book things (like I failed at last year!), but once I discarded the recipes containing booze, uncooked eggs, peanuts, certain cheeses and everything else I shouldn't eat, plus the ones I wouldn't eat (salmon, veal), there were like 4 recipe left, and what's the point.

So I've been reading a lot of Rachel Ray magazines. My Dad and I have an arrangement - he buys the magazine, reads it and cooks whatever out of it, then he passes them to me. I do the same thing and then store them so should either of us want to revisit an old issue, there it is. I like the magazine quite a lot and almost everything we've tried in the past has been a success. I'm trying to strike a balance between finding recipes that appeal to me and recipes that I have some or all ingredients on had for, like today's first recipe,

Pretzel Crusted Chicken and Zucchini Strips.

We had company at the end of last month and in preparation I bought a jumbo container of pretzels for snacking. No one touched them but me and although pretzels have been my friend and constant companion the past few months I was more than willing to sacrifice some of them for the recipe. I also had some chicken in the freezer, so all I needed to buy was zucchini. I am a huge, huge zucchini fan, and I love me some zucchini sticks. This dinner was easy to put together and tasted very nice. The zuke sticks were my favorite part and I will make them (and most likely the chicken) again.


Up next is a BLT Salad, also something I love. The one in the magazine is made with arugula and nuts, but I had spinach and no nuts so I went with that. I also had bacon in the freezer and tomatos on the counter so I had to buy nothing to make this dinner. I love when that happens. In the magazine this was served in endive leaves, but we just used bowls and a sprinkle of parmesan. I loved the mustard in the dressing - this salad is a real winner - easy and good. I was about to type that you don't have to turn on any appliances to make it but that's not true. Unless you buy pre-cooked bacon. But you could always microwave the bacon, avoiding the stove on hot hot days.



The last one is a miss that was pretty spectacular - Plantain Hush Puppies. I've been wanting to try a plantain for a long time but never knew what to do with them. I figured this recipe would be an easy introduction, paired with corn, and the dipping sauces sounded pretty yummy. Well the mixture came together fast, we dolloped it into the oil and...yikes. They just disintegrated into mush. There was no saving the first batch. Checked the oil temperature....it was good....second batch, same as the first. I was getting ready to switch gears and pan fry the rest of them, but when Scott tasted a little of the batter and immediately spat it into the sink....we turned to sandwiches and salad for dinner. And tried our best to ignore the pan full of oily yellow goo on the stove.

I'm disappointed it didn't turn out. Did I do something wrong - was it my corn? My plantain? I don't know. Anyone out there tried this one? I hate kitchen failures.

Coming soon - juice!

Bread Baking Babes - Sukkar bi Tahin

This month's Bread Baking Babe recipe was chosen by fellow Canadian Babe Natashya from Living in the Kitchen with Puppies.

She's chosen a very unique bread for us to make this month - Sukkar bi Tahin, Beirut Tahini Swirls.

These breads are deceptively simple to make. After the dough has risen, the pieces are rolled into a rectangle and spread with a paste of tahini and sugar.

Roll the dough up like a snake, then coil the bread into a circle, then roll out again.

Bake until golden and flaky.

The flavor of these is interesting - the tahini and sugar taste similar to peanut butter. The dough was lovely and flaky, this would be fun to play around with different filling combinations as well as the tahini. I'm thinking something with jelly would be fun...but messy.

Check out Natashya's site for the recipe and instructions, and don't forget to visit all the other Babes, they are listed over on the right.

Misc

Thank you all very much for your comments and emails about our really big news. It was hard to keep quiet about the baby, the reason I wasn't posting much or visiting your websites hardly at all. I hope I replied to all of those who asked but in case I didn't, or if anyone else is wondering, my due date is December 5, and we are not finding out if it's a boy or a girl.

I have been supremely uninterested in food 90% of the time. Planning, cooking and eating meals have mostly been a struggle. Anything beyond toast, eggos, cheese slices and fruit is largely unappetizing, even now, at 5 months gone. We had some family come to town to visit and meal planning, which normally would have taken me an hour, took a solid week. I could not think of a single thing that I wanted to eat that would appeal to anyone else. Reading cookbooks or websites devoted to food is almost always out of the question.

But because it's just me and you here, I can tell you that there are the days when all I do is eat. EAT. On work days I'll have something for breakfast at home; toast or an eggo. Then I'll take my food to work - my "second breakfast" of cereal or yogurt or fruit, my lunch, and then some more fruit for the afternoon. Some days that's good enough. But then there are the days when I've eaten my second breakfast by 8:30 and by 10 I'm eating my lunch. And then someone walks in my office and I scramble to shove my bowl of stir fry in a drawer, and their all "Why does it smell like meat in here at 10 am?" and I'm all "It doesn't! Get out! What do you want!" and then by noon I'm in the grocery store forlornly wandering the aisles, looking for something that doesn't gross me out.

_____________________________________________


I'll wrap it up with a picture from my ultrasound on Friday. Now it's possible I'm a little biased, but I think you'll agree that this might be the most beautiful baby IN THE WORLD.

Three more breads

I bought my first brand new, all about bread cookbook a couple of months ago. The Easy Way to Artisan Breads and Pastries. I'd borrowed this book from the library and once I sat down and started reading it I knew I had to have my own copy, there were just too many wonderful sounding recipes to try.

I ordered it from Amazon.ca and before it came but while we still had the library copy Scott flipped thru it looking for what would be our first bread out of the book. He chose, but unfortunately neither of us looked too closely at the recipe. When the weekend morning came to bake I realized that the recipe required a sourdough starter, something I didn't have. Scott was disappointed - he'd been looking forward to making Bacon Bread, but I said hey, we'll just find another basic loaf recipe and add bacon. Why not?

We cooked up some bacon and while the dough was mixing Scott grabbed some of the chopped red onion I had on the counter for another dish and threw it in. We were now making Bacon Onion Bread, people! My biggest loaf pan was smaller than the recipe called for and the bread rose like a son of a gun.


Thank goodness Mary was online that morning for advice - my bread was browning way too fast and I was afraid it would be burned on the outside before it was done on the inside. She had me lower the oven temperature and told me to take the breads temperature close to the end of cooking time which I'd never done before.


The bread came out huge, mushroom shaped and lovely. The smell was amazing - like bacon shoved up your nose, but in a good way. We've got some more ideas for the ultimate Bacon Onion Bread and will be working on them soon.

___________________________________

Another recent bread we baked was King Arthur Flour's Onion Buns. These were fun to make - you roll the dough into a rectangle, sprinkle it with dried minced onion (we did half with the minced onion and half with fresh sauteed onion), roll them up into a log, then cut into rolls.


The onion flavor wasn't very strong, however these buns are the nicest buns I've ever made. Their taste and texture were fabulous. They were a family favorite, I think my Mom's favorite bread I've made them so far.


_____________________________________

I can't get enough of King Arthur Flours blog, and here's another bread I made from their archives, Vermont Maple Oatmeal bread. Scott and I are total condiment/spice junkies, have WAY too many of both in the kitchen, so I normally try to stay away from recipes that require me to buy even more seasonings. But this bread....it called to me. So I bought the maple sugar and the maple extract and they now happily live in my spice cupboard with eleventy jillion other bottles.



It was totally worth it though. So nice and flavorful and hearty.
Vermont Maple Oatmeal Bread

What I have been doing instead of keeping up with you and your blogs the past couple of months.

Eating.

Eating healthy.

Honest, there are strawberries under the whip cream.

Going for walks.

Celebrating.

Working in the garden.

Painting.

Reading.

Getting presents from family.


Counting down until Baby is born!


The littlest Flames fan arrives this winter.

A Tale of Two Burgers

We've been grilling fools over here lately, and I wanted to share 2 fabulous burger recipes with you. They are so good. You should make them.

First up is a burger from the latest Food Network Magazine. The lead story on the cover is Best Burgers From Bobby Flay, promoting his new book Burgers, Fries and Shakes. I saw enough reviews on blogs to know that this is a book worth owning. I was drawn to the recipe for his Dallas Burger, a burger with homemade bbq sauce, dry rub, and coleslaw. It's a recipe he created for his wife, who loves bbq'd brisket. We love brisket too, so this was the one to try first.

The burger is a little time consuming - if you go whole hog you make not only the burger patties from scratch, but also the dry rub, coleslaw and bbq sauce. But not an awful amount of time. Be patient, it's worth it.


This burger is SO GOOD, and it's the bbq sauce and coleslaw that really make it fabulous.


Look at that! We had them 2 nights in a row. I think I'm drooling a little right now.....

Dallas Burger

_______________________________________

The other burger is also from Food Network, from their Ultimate Recipe Showdown show. I've only seen the show once, but luckily for me, it was the Burger episode, the episode that brought this burger into my life.

Sorry if I sound a little dramatic, but damn, this Vietnamese Bistro Burger rocks.


You may recall my recent post about how much we love and miss Vietnamese food. This is another easy flavorful Vietnamese recipe that we will be making a lot of. The patty is made of ground pork seasoned with lime, ginger, soy and fish sauce. Make sure you make the pickled carrot and daikon salad, it's fabulous on the burger.


I could go on for days about how wonderful this burger is. I won't though. I'll just say one more time it's easy and delicious and hopefully you are going to try these, cause you'll love them.


Vietnamese Bistro Burger

New West Knife Works

I read once that all you need in the kitchen equipment wise is one pot, one pan and one knife, or something like that. I can't imagine that there are many food bloggers out there who have such a sparse kitchen. There are some areas in the kitchen you can cheap out on and some you shouldn't. Cheap/poor quality knives are probably the worst thing you can have in your kitchen, and I should know; it was only this year that I actually got some good knives in my kitchen.


One of those knives arrived courtesy of New West Knife Works, a company from Wyoming that make some of the most beautiful knives I have ever seen. New West has 2 lines of knives - the Phoenix Knives and the Fusionwood Knives. The Phoenix are "Japanese kitchen knives with a Western flair" and are made with 33 layers of steel. 33! The Fusionwoods are made with a stainless steel blade and an amazingly gorgeous hardwood handle, which has been infused with dye in layers of colors.


I received the Fusionwood Chopper with the Harvest color handle. From the second we opened the packaging we were smitten. The 5 1/2 inch blade was safely covered in a leather sheath. The handle, as I've mentioned, was stunning, layer upon layer of color. I've never seen anything like it.


The knife, as a quality knife should, felt solid and heavy in my hand. The blade is wonderfully strong and sharp. This is a smallish knife, but perfect for chopping vegetables, fruits and herbs. It has whizzed through all the tasks it's been given wonderfully from mincing to chopping to julienne-ing.


This company and their products have been written about in numerous magazines - Cooking Light, Wine Spectator, Sunset, Gourmet and many more, all with good reason. New West has a Non-Commercial Lifetime Guarantee on their knives - if you are not happy with your purchase they will replace it free. Break or damage your knife while using it improperly (but why would you be using these gorgeous knives improperly???) and they will replace it at half price. If you are looking to invest in a quality knife, head over to their website and check out the awesome selection.

If you're a Facebooker, check out their page and become a fan.

Strawberry Mint Agua Fresca
Grilling For Life, Bobby Flay

Serves 4

1 cup very cold water
1 cup crushed ice
3 cups chopped ripe strawberries
2 tb chopped fresh mint
4 mint sprigs, for garnish

Combine all the ingredients except the mint sprigs in a blender and blend until smooth. Pour into 4 glasses and garnish with the mint sprigs.