OMC! Orange Marmalade Cake
Food: Recipe - Orange Marmalade Cake
Voulez-vous cuisiner avec gloire ce coir? Orange Marmalade may be hard to make, but you need to avoid the psychedelic store-bought stuff in a jar if you want the right ingredient for a tart, candied dreamcake
By Louise Crosby
My love affair with marmalade began only recently when my friend Amanda gave me a jar she had made from the winter crop of knobbly-skinned Seville oranges. Her recipe comes from Ian Tamblyn’s great aunt Alicia, Ian being Amanda’s partner as well as a prolific, award-winning folk singer, songwriter, adventurer and playwright. Making Aunt Alicia’s marmalade is a three-day process that involves squeezing and reserving the juice, steeping the seeds and pith in water overnight, boiling the rinds and letting them sit, boiling the rinds again with sugar, the juice, and the pit-soaking water, sterilizing jars and melting wax. Quite a lot of work, but in the end she has exquisite marmalade, not as stiff as commercial ...
Don’t be a stranger to Spaghetti Collins
Food: Recipe - Spaghetti Collins
When you're feeling like a noodle, Pascale Manale's Spaghetti Collins will be your friend for life -- onions, garlic and all
By Louise Crosby
If some of us are suffering from a certain end-of-winter, when-will-it-ever-feel-like-spring malaise, our usual enthusiasm for cooking, or doing much of anything for that matter, might possibly be lacking. Day after day of cold and rain, snow still on the ground, and the promise of another polar vortex bearing down – in April, of all months – can get a person down. Let’s just get take-out, we say to ourselves, sinking back into the pillows with our book.
Well, here’s a simple and delicious pasta dish that should get us back into the kitchen. It’s called Spaghetti Collins and it comes from Pascal’s Manale restaurant in New Orleans, named after a friend of the owner. The recipe is included in Saveur: The New Classics Cookbook, put out by the editors of Saveur magazine. You can make it in no ...
Bean there, done that
Food: Recipe - Ucceletto Beans
If you're looking for some long lead cooking that can help you stay healthy, the ever-humble bean is one of the best options
By Louise Crosby
I know busy people who spend Sunday afternoons in the kitchen making food to last well into the week. Stews, spaghetti sauce, soups, casseroles. This is the time for relaxed cooking, letting things simmer long and slow. Then come Monday or Tuesday night, after a long day at work, dinner is just a matter of heating things up, boiling some pasta or making a salad. Food is on the table in no time and you thank yourself for making the effort in advance.
When I take a long look at meals, I often cook a pot of beans. Not the sweet pork and beans of our youth, although they can be very good, but chick peas or black beans, brown pintos or white Great Northerns, soaked overnight, then simmered for an hour or two with some aromatics for flavour – a quartered onion, some chopped carrot and celery, a head of garlic. ...
Close encounters on the third base line
Sports: Jays' Spring Training in Dunedin
Whether you're sponging up the baseball, sponging off the spilled beer, or buying a sponge in a seaside tourist shop, catching Blue Jays spring training in Dunedin is a ball fan's beery version of Valhalla
By Jay Stone
DUNEDIN, Fla. — On my first day in Dunedin this year, I went to a spring training baseball game and saw a pitcher named Pat Venditte, who can throw with either arm. He has a special six-finger glove with a thumb at each end, and he can put it on whichever hand he wants and throw with the other arm.
Venditte, who is in the Toronto Blue Jays camp, has been in the league for a while — he was with the Yankees two years ago and Oakland last year — and there’s even a rule named after him. It says that he has to declare which arm he’s going to throw with against a switch-hitter. This keeps baseball, which is kind of a leisurely sport anyway, from becoming an endless game of chicken, with Venditte moving his glove from ...
Pick a Pepper, Stuff a Pepper
Food: Recipe - Cheesy Stuffed Poblanos
While stuffing peppers is a cross-cultural tradition, Mexico's passion for stuffing the warmly flavoured poblano is close to perfection
By Louise Crosby
For eons, people have been stuffing vegetables – with rice and other grains, beans, meats, cheeses. Think of eggplant stuffed with spiced lamb and pine nuts, pale green zucchini stuffed with ground beef and rice and cooked in a yogurt or tomato sauce, mushrooms stuffed with bread crumbs and cheese, squash stuffed with quinoa and feta. It’s a traditional and creative way to liven up a vegetable, make it the star attraction, in fact, and to pack more nutrition into your meal.
Peppers are a natural for stuffing because they’re hollow, and in Mexico, chiles rellenos – poblano peppers filled with cheese, dipped in an egg batter, and fried – are a favourite food. America’s Test Kitchen The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook played with that idea by first microwaving the peppers for a ...
Macaroni and Beef Casserole: Comfort food gets all haute cuisine
Food: Recipe - Macaroni and Beef Casserole
As the modern food revolution continues to make the exotic feel everyday, it's also taking old standards such as the humble macaroni casserole and turning them into something that's not just comforting, but au courant
By Louise Crosby
Pick up a food magazine, check the Internet, or tune into your television and you’ll notice that the conversation around food these days is quite sophisticated – it’s all about cooking like the pros and how-to videos, organics and heritage crops, locally-grown and artisanal foods, and sustainable, small-scale farming. Ingredients that were once exotic are now everyday, there’s nothing the home cook can’t do. So a dish that harkens back to the 1950s and ’60s and calls to mind something Betty Draper might have taken to a neighbourhood pot luck in Mad Men, had she been friendlier, might strike you as passé.
But you’d be wrong if you thought this Macaroni and Beef Casserole, developed by ...
Love tastes like Oatmeal Cookies
Food: Recipe - Thin and Crispy Oatmeal Cookies
Making oatmeal cookies the way mom used to make is more than soul-comforting nostalgia, the results are one of life's most reliable pleasures.
By Louise Crosby
Before my mother moved into her retirement residence, where units come with microwaves but not stoves, she was a one-woman, cookie-making machine. She made Swedish cookies, sugar cookies, pinwheel cookies, chocolate cookies, peanut butter cookies, and more recently, crackle-topped, chewy-crispy ginger cookies, and chocolate chip cookies. She gave away almost everything she made, to her neighbours, to her kids, to anyone who came along. She was famous for her cookies.
My mother is not sad to give up baking – after all, she just turned 90, Happy Birthday Mom! – but lots of people visit in her new place and, following tradition, she would like to serve them a cookie with their cup of tea. I feel a certain responsibility to help her out, having a big kitchen as I do, so ...
Pop This! Las Vegas!
Podcast: Pop This!
Packed with miniaturized monoliths and Disneyfied recreations of the Old World, Las Vegas sits at the intersection of generic sin and stand alone silliness, making for a perfect expression of popular culture
Featuring Lisa Christiansen and Andrea Warner. Produced by Andrea Gin.
A sampling of what you might hear in Episode 15: Visiting Las Vegas
I was at a birthday where they had exotic animals.
One had teeth that looked like they were made out of clarinet reeds.
Las Vegas... has a lot of ladies and dudes on the prowl.
And Mariah Carey.
I'm worried that I don't like magic shows or Cirque du Soleil. But I do like food.
Then you have to go to the Cosmo. [The Cosmopolitan] hotel has the best restaurants, and they have nice drinks at the gambling machines.
Gambling machines...?
Go to the Spanish restaurant run by José Andrés.
They have cool old records as wallpaper.
That's what I want. I want the secret Vegas.
Go to the Thomas Keller ...
Steamed Maple Puddings transcend presentation insecurities
Food: Recipes - Steamed Maple Puddings
They may not come out as pretty as a Donna Hay concoction, but even a less-photogenic maple steamed pudding is a sweet, soulful pleasure that's hard to beat
By Louise Crosby
Ok, here’s the story. I was so seduced by the photo of steamed maple pudding in Donna Hay’s gorgeous book The New Classics that I had to make it, had to share the recipe with you. I LOVE maple syrup and I LOVE pudding, so the combination seemed winning.
What wasn’t winning, however, was the time I spent running around kitchen stores looking for the right ramekins, the way my puddings didn’t slip cleanly out of those ramekins like Donna’s but were raggedy around the edges, and the way the maple syrup sauce did not run down the sides of the puddings in an enticing way but sunk right into the cake batter. And finally, I whipped the cream a little too hard, so it sits atop each pudding like a hat rather than relaxing downwards, all creamy and luscious. Some ...
A river to skate away on, and yummy cup to warm up with
Food: Recipe - Chocolat Chaud
Skating down Ottawa's famed Rideau Canal is an undeniable thrill, but after a day on ice, homemade chocolat chaud is the best way to relieve the bitter chill - without added sugar
By Louise Crosby
OTTAWA -- It’s the first week of Winterlude and the world’s largest skateway on the Rideau Canal has already closed because the ice has melted into a big wet puddle. The first three days of this annual winter festival were a big success, a carnival atmosphere in fact, with ice carvings and snow sculptures, pancake breakfasts, concerts, beaver tails and poutine. And of course, until the weather turned warm, skating.
Before we go any further, and just to put everything into context, here’s a refresher on the Rideau Canal and its famous skateway (thank you Wikipedia): The canal itself, built in 1832, is 202 kilometres in length, and connects the City of Ottawa to Kingston, on Lake Ontario. The oldest continually operated canal system in North ...
