Tag Archives: cocktails

How I Eat: Dinner

eggplantlunch

Every week, without fail, these three dinners will be eaten in my home:

- Tacos, with tortillas from La Tortilleria in Kensington Market, black or pinto beans and guacamole. Other rotating additions include rice, tomatillo salsa or sautéed veg.

- Whole wheat pasta. Toppings include garlic, oil and parsley, to which it’s great to add some pepper flakes, chopped olives, chopped anchovies, sausage, and/or a squeeze of lemon; canned tomatoes with some or all of the above; this great harissa and kale recipe from 101 Cookbooks.

- Stir-fry of some sort. Right now I’m really into Mark Bittman’s braised eggplant with tofu and shiitakes, but any Asian green or mushroom will work. I like to keep my stirfries very simple and cut my veg pretty small. I hate random horrible chunks of undercooked veg, a la Spring Rolls. Ech. Usually I make double rice and then eat a simpler stir-fry with egg a day or two later.

Luckily I’m not tired of these meals despite making them for 872 years. It’s much easier to make dinner on a workday when I can do it in 45 minutes or less on autopilot. I could probably make tacos with my eyes closed. Other meals that are on semi-regular rotation include pad thai, chili, mac and cheese, and veg with soba noodles and a tahini-miso dressing. Le Jenk makes a wicked paella…hmmm, haven’t had that lately.

As for new meals, I’m hitting How to Cook Everything Vegetarian pretty hard lately. The eggplant/tofu/shiitake stir fry is awesome, the bean burgers are pretty good, the seaweed stirfry was kinda meh, the braised radishes were so clever and yummy…overall, it’s a terrific book, very inspiring. More elaborate meals have been scarce lately, due to an extreme lack of time. I need to give this massive Spanish cookbook some love—I’ve only made squid in it’s own ink, which was very tasty, and really strange-looking.

As far as processed food, the main offenders for us are tofu, St. Lawrence Market perogies (aka the best perogies east of Roncesvalles), Pacific organic soups (the buttery corn and cheesy tomato are awesome) and, sadly, hummus and baba ganoush. I say sadly because hummus and baba ganoush are so easy to make, and I hate buying them in plastic containers, but that’s life for the time-crunched. I wish I could take the containers back to be refilled.

Cheap dinner out is the urban girl’s lifesaver. Regulars in my neighbourhood include Manpuku, Pho Hung (even after my Vietnamese hair dresser told me “you know, I hate to say this, but it’s for Caucasians”), Fresh (don’t love it, but good when I’ve eaten more junk/meat than I like), and C’est What (close to work; great beer). When making a parental visit to Scarborough, Tangerine (by my parents’ place) and Shahi Karahi (by his) are our favourites. Fish pakoras are a must at the first, chicken tikka rolls at the second.

Fancy dinners out don’t happen too often—we’d both rather save our money for holidays. I’d like to try Ame. The standout of the past year is probably Nota Bene (those ethereal onion rings are the coolest); longer term favourites are Foxley, Crush and Cava. If I were rich, I’d have been to Hashimoto by now. We went to Amaya recently, which was pretty awesome. The prawn appetizer and subcontinentally-spiced cocktails really stood out, and the prices were much better than Indian Rice Factory. But neither is as good as Vij’s.

And that, at long last, is how I eat.

If you missed any parts, here’s breakfast, lunch, snacks, ethics and shopping. Hungry yet?

Gin, Tomatoes, Perfection

mojotonicohero

The emergence of a new, savoury, gin-based cocktail is cause for celebration—this is delicious and you should stop what you’re doing and make one immediately. I’m going to paste the recipe in case one day the NYT starts charging for archives, but the back story is fun reading. FYI, I used parsley, chives, cinnamon basil and coriander for the mixed herbs. That’s just what I had around, but it was a perfect combo.

Heirloom Tomato Mojotonico adapted from Nacional 27

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, for rim

1/2 lime, cut into sections

1/2 cup heirloom tomatoes, roughly chopped

1/4 cup fresh herbs (like basil, tarragon, thyme, chives or mint) loosely packed and not chopped

1 1/2 ounces gin

2 ounces tonic water, or to taste.

Rim a 16-ounce glass by moistening the edge with a lime wedge, then dipping the glass into a small plate filled with equal parts salt and pepper. Into the same glass add the tomatoes, herbs and lime sections, then muddle, gently, until the mixture is equal parts juice and solids. Add ice, stir, then add the gin, and stir again. Top with the tonic water.

Yield: 1 drink.

Get a spine: food magazines

foodwinecvrjune2009Leafed through the new Food & Wine today—I don’t have my own outdoor space right now, so reading a grilling-themed food mag was slightly masochistic, but the burger on the cover looked so juicy. There were some good ideas in there that I might force encourage friends to let me try on their barbecues. The main piece, “20 Smart Tips for Everyday Grilling,” had some particularly tasty-looking recipes, including a whole roundup of salsas, dips and sauces made from grilled veggies: think pineapples, red bell peppers and red chiles, grilled then blended with fresh mint and lime. Yummy. Scott, if you’re reading this, they also suggested putting soaked allspice berries onto your coals when making jerk chicken, for that flowery aroma. 

I also liked Christian DeBenedetti’s piece on San Diego brewpubs—when I wrote a summer beer roundup for ROB last year, I got a crash course on brewmaking from Brian May, the owner of Beerbistro. Since then, I’ve been a hardcore hops hound, so I appreciate anything that expands my tiny store of beer knowledge. The story on Argentinian-style outdoor grilling was hunger-inducing, too: oh, to have a life where I could spend all day cooking meats and cheeses over coals outside my Uruguayan cottage. I could also see myself making some of the sauces and relishes for sausages, too. Overall, it’s a good issue, lots of attractive ideas and accessible to real home cooks, rather than straight up food porn. One thing I’m absolutely going to try is the Portonic cocktail: Portuguese white port, lime juice, ice and tonic—plus bitter melon on skewers! Crazy. But I bet that bitter flavour would make this drink a kickass aperitif on a hot evening. 

gastronomicawinter2009I also took a look at the winter issue of Gastronomica, which is more in the food porn vein. Or more like intense food nerdery—it’s a journal put out by UC Berkeley, and sometimes the pieces have a fairly academic slant. There’s lots of international and cultural food analysis, plus gorgeous, huge artsy food photos and even the occasional poem. It’s for gluttons who are also readers, so basically I pretty much love it. 

I was at the opening of the Leslieville Cheese Market’s new west-end shop last night, where I chatted with a friend about Ontario’s ridiculous paternalistic approach to cheese making. In short, the government is obsessed with pasteurization of dairy products (even as everyone ignores entire aisles of processed frozen food products that are incredibly vulnerable to deadly bacteria). Not only are Ontario cheesemakers prevented from making truly raw-milk cheeses, they also must buy their milk from a common silo that combines the milk from a number of dairies before pasteurizing happens. So a dairy farmer can’t make cheese from her own cows, let alone sell milk to her cheesemaking neighbour. This means that fromageurs can’t control their cows’ diet, or even choose to use only the milk of certain breeds. If you don’t care about cheese, you don’t think this is a big deal, but for cheese nerds, all these rules are a straightjackets to cheesemakers’ imaginations, and our enjoyment.

So, I was pretty absorbed in Eric LeMay’s humour piece Illegal Cheese, about sneaking a suitcase of Parisian fromage into the similarly draconian United States. He waxes poetic about the cheeses he ate on his travels, getting almost dirty: “If you’ve caught the seminal whiff of a Saint-Marcellin or relished the cunnilingual mush of a Rocamadour, you know cheese celebrates Eros in all its meanings.” I also enjoyed his description of a particularly stinky cheese he didn’t care for, Livarot, which he and his girlfriend nicknamed Gérard Depardieu: “why do the French find so alluring what strikes us as raunchy, hulking and nearly grotesque?” Good one. 

Having just written about pad thai this morning, I also liked Alexandra Greeley’s “Finding Pad Thai,” which summed up the history of the Thailand’s signature dish. The opening to this piece was a bit flat—as writers, we should all agree to quit cobbling together “amazing facts” from lazy Google research, it makes us look bad. But after the pedestrian intro, there’s some good stuff in here. Like that pad Thai’s global popularity was contrived by a 1940s politician, who purposely bigged up the dish among his people, partly to encourage them to eat more diversely, and partly to help establish a non-Chinese identity. Cultures are made, not born, apparently. Greeley also gets at why street vendor pad Thai will always be better than restaurant versions—those ladies with their five-foot woks are making the stuff all day, every day. There’s a recipe at the end that looks good, perhaps I’ll see how it compares to what we’ve been doing. And there are plenty more words about food in this fat issue of Gastronomica but it’s Friday, and sunny—I think I’m going to go outside.