eveglass: (books)
I cancelled my Lufa Farms subscription last week because it was simply too expensive. Instead, I made a commitment to go to the Good Food Market, hosted by the NDG Food Depot. They've got some excellent deals, and since I only work half-days on Friday, it gives me more time to play around in the kitchen with whatever I've bought.

To keep the feel of the "not pretty but tasty" packages from Lufa, I decided to randomly roll what I'd buy from the market, and here's what I came up with during my first trip...


October 21, 2016 Good Food Market Basket )
eveglass: (books)
Week three of my Lufa Farms basket! And this week it's all random, all the time!

September 27, 2016 Lufa basket )
eveglass: (books)
Week two of my Lufa Farms baskets! Let's see what we got, shall we?



Here are some thoughts about it...

September 20, 2016 Lufa basket )
eveglass: (books)
Why milk something for only two posts when you can do three? Here are my thoughts on how the first week of meal planning went.

Review of meal plan for Sept. 10-16 )
eveglass: (books)
Today was the big day, my first Lufa Farms basket! Here's a link to my meal plan and prep for this basket. So what did it look like when it finally arrived? Glad you asked! Behold!


And now, because it's me, a wall of text about the above:
September 13, 2016 Lufa basket )
eveglass: (books)
For a while, I've considered joining Lufa Farms, a rooftop garden program here in Montreal. You select weekly basket items from their farm and their partner farms, and it's delivered CSA-style to your designated "pick up point." Riding the wave of September good intentions, this week I finally decided to take the plunge. My first pick-up day will be on Tuesday, and I got to prep my basket today.

My thought process and how I planned )

Meal plan for the week of Sept. 10-16, 2016 )

So that's where things stand right now. Will I be successful? I don't know. We'll how to see how things work out. Whew!
It all started when Marc left town for two weeks. There I was on a Sunday night, opening and closing the fridge, asking myself, "What do I want to make?" and coming up with the inevitable answer, "Nothing." Eventually I took myself out to dinner to a Vietnamese place around the corner and vowed that I wouldn't let it happen again.

Monday I woke up with a plan. I had to go groceries anyway, and I'd just seen a lovely crock-pot recipe for lamb korma. I found some chicken thighs I decided to use instead of the lamb, but it seemed like the recipe would work regardless. From there, I found myself in a spiral of, "Well, if I'm doing it anyway..."

See, the chicken korma uses half a can of coconut milk. So what to do with the other half? There's a recipe in The 4-Hour Chef by Tim Ferriss that I've been meaning to try for a while: coconut cauliflower curry mash. It's sort of like the cauliflower version of mashed potatoes. It uses half a can of coconut milk. So I picked up a (rather overpriced) cauliflower at the grocery store too.

Of course, the recipe only used about half the cauliflower. So what to do with the other half? Roasting is always a safe bet, so I did that, along with a little garam masala, because I figured I had a theme going.

I also had a bunch of leftover root vegetables from a pot roast stew I made last week, and I figured I really should use them up before they started going bad on me. So I roasted up about two pounds of carrots, also with garam masala, and about a pound and a half of baby white-fleshed potatoes. (This time with thyme, because I like to be contrarian.)

I had about three cups of cut-up butternut squash that I had to use also, and I'd found a nifty recipe for that too. (Hence why I had the thyme on hand for the potatoes.) It wasn't quite Indian, but what the heck, I felt like trying out the recipe and nothing as obvious as a themed dinner was gonna stop me.

Since I was doing all this work in the kitchen, I figured I might as well fry up the 3/4 of a package of bacon I had lying around, so I cut it into lardons and spent some time pushing it around the pan and draining it when there was too much grease at the bottom. (Probably about four times -- there was a lot of grease!)

And, finally, some rice. I had one last tupperware of home made vegetable stock that I used instead of water, and I figured that since I was on an Indian kick anyway, I'd try to add some Indian spices and see how it went. Into the pot went a cinnamon stick, some ground cardamom, a few cloves, and about a half-tablespoon of cumin seeds.

The crock pot chicken korma happened on Monday night and got packaged up around midnight, and all the rest I did over about three hours on Tuesday. (Not counting the 45 minutes of making up my chart of what spices needed to go with which dish, what appliances needed to be in action at what time, and so forth. I may be a geek.) I'd also bought a pumpkin pie at my grocery store on Monday, because I'd never had pumpkin pie before and couldn't find anywhere to buy just a single slice. So I had about 3/4 of that left.

Suffice it to say, there was a lot of food.

Tuesday morning, I put out the call to my friends, begging them to come over and eat dinner with me. I got four RSVPs, and one of them even brought wine, so we had an absolutely lovely time. The chicken korma was a big hit, and most of the vegetables were gone as well. (Mmm... roast vegetables.) The cauliflower mash was surprisingly tasty, definitely something I'd make again. My only sadness about the veggies is that the potatoes were nice and crispy out of the oven, but had gotten soggy by the time we ate them. So sad...

In any case, a good time was had by all, and I've got enough korma and rice leftovers to last me the rest of the week, I think. So... yay! Not sure if I'll do a big cooking job again before Marc gets home, but you never know.
In the continuing saga of my Rouxbe adventures, it's time for more steaming practice! Today's lesson was supposed to be steamed potatoes, steamed kale, and steamed bok choy. Alas, my fridge runs extremely cold and the bok choy froze, making it inedible for cooking. (Or at least, I think so. Does anyone know if leafy green vegetables are okay to use after they've frozen? It looked pretty yucky to me, anyway.)

The steamed potatoes were finished with some bacon lardons (that's "chunks" for the unenlightened -- yay fancy cooking terms!), dried Egyptian thyme, olive oil, salt and pepper. The kale was more simple, with just butter, salt, and pepper. Oh, and I put some lemon slices on the bottom of the steamer because I had them lying around and it seemed like the sort of thing that might go nicely. In retrospect, while the kale was still tasty, this was a mistake. I forgot rule #1 of cooking green vegetables: no acid! That might explain a few of the brown bits on the kale when I took them out of the steamer. Oh, well. Live and learn. They were still tasty.

Potatoes took about 19 minutes in boiling-water steam, the kale was about 4 minutes in simmering-water steam.

Because this didn't seem like enough food to make a meal on its own, I also added some homemade anadama bread and cheddar cheese, and Marc and I had a very tasty ploughman's lunch. Even the kale, which I'm not generally fond of, was very tasty. All told, not bad for a half-hour in the kitchen!
The latest in my Rouxbe lessons involved steaming. Today in particular was steamed lemon-garlic chicken with thyme and steamed broccoli with soy and sesame oil.

Since the steamer basket I have is actually kind of dangerous to use -- it's the kind that opens up like a flower, but there's no easy way of removing it from the steaming pot without risk of burn -- I decided to buy myself a present of a new steamer insert for my pots. This involved a bit of running around and a mishap at the store where they'd set aside the wrong thing for me (steamer basket =/= double boiler), but it all worked out in the end. Conveniently, the "universal" steamer basket from Lagostina actually fits two of my pots. This means that I could, say, make rice in my big saucepan and steam the meal in a smaller saucepan. Except that I need the same lid for both jobs. So... pasta it is! Pasta doesn't need a lid! Yay!

Surprisingly, this was a remarkably simple meal. Prep everything in the steamer basket, put over the water, cover, wait for a while, eat. I put the chicken breasts on top of sliced pieces of lemon (a trick I learned from the Rouxbe lesson on steaming) and then did the shorter broccoli after the chicken was done. I lost quite a bit of steam as it was going, but the steamer basket sits very high above the water, so I could put a lot in and not worry about it all boiling off.

I was worried about the timing for this, but in the end it all worked out. I turned on the burner for the pasta water the same time the chicken started steaming. It boiled around the time the chicken was done (remember how I needed the lid for the steamer?) and the pasta was done right around the same time as the broccoli. I was able to do the broccoli prep while the chicken was steaming and the plating while the broccoli was steaming. Yay for timing!

In this end this was a very tasty meal. Marc and I both enjoyed it very much. Definitely a keeper.
I've been following along with my Rouxbe course pretty solidly for a few weeks now, and most of the exercises I've come to recently have been dealing with vegetables and specifically with boiling vegetables. (The next lesson will be steaming, but for now we're at boiling and simmering.) I've learned a few very useful things. Did you know that vegetables are generally broken up into three categories? They are! Green vegetables, white and red vegetables, and orange and yellow vegetables. Boiled green vegetables should be cooked uncovered without an acid; white and red should be covered and have an acid added halfway through; and orange and yellow vegetables can go either way. (They're the bisexuals of the vegetable world. Racy!)

In any case, I haven't made a "real" recipe for this adventures in cooking lesson, even though I bought the ingredients for one. My house is full of leftovers and it just doesn't seem like the time. So instead I present to you one snack and three exercises. Onwards!

Avocados, broccoli, and potatoes, oh my! )
Now that I'm getting back into my Rouxbe cooking lessons, it was time for some more tasty practice. Today's lesson: submersion cooking techniques (poaching, simmering, and boiling), as demonstrated by making a soup. There were a number of soups to choose from, but I settled on the red lentil coconut soup. (For those not on Rouxbe, you can see the slightly-modified recipe here.)

How I fared with the new recipe )
Bonus feature: submersion cooking activity )
Adventures-in-cooking friends, I need your help! I want to take all my "adventures in cooking" LJ posts and transfer them over to a dedicated blog, which I one day might try to monetize. The focus of the blog will be me teaching myself to cook. The subtitle is going to be, "Learning to cook, one disaster at a time."

The problem is that I can't figure out what the blog title should be. I want something relatively catchy, easily searchable, and not liable to be drowned out by more popular blogs. Sadly, this means that both "Adventures in Cooking" and "Misadventures in Cooking" are out, as is "Julie's Adventures in Cooking" (given the success of Julie & Julia).

I've been toying with other ideas. For a while, "First Level Chef" seemed to be pretty good, but some friends in the field have indicated that a "first level chef" is actually a pretty highly-ranked chef and not, as I'd intended, the equivalent of a level-1 character in D&D. A number of friends have suggested titles blending in some of my other interests, like bardic and gaming, but I want the blog to be almost exclusively cooking-based and not to muddle the waters by adding in stuff like "The Bard's Cookbook" or "Bard 4 / Cook 1" or "Prestige Class: Cook" (all of which would be awesome for a blended-interest blog, but not so good for a purely cooking blog).

So... I need help! Can people suggest blog titles that indicate, "I don't know what I'm doing in the kitchen but I'm trying to learn"? I really like "Adventures in Cooking," but failing that, what else would be workable? Thanks!

Update: Current working title is "Almond, Basil, Cloves..." Thoughts?
For a few days, I've been craving mango lassi, but haven't been able to get anywhere that sells it. So I decided to make it myself. Problem #1: I didn't have any mangos at home, and all the stores were closed. However, I've seen recipes for "sweet lassi" that don't actually contain any fruit, so I decided to base myself on those.

Into the container for my hand blender went about 3/4 cup plain Greek yogurt (the 3.25% fat kind), 1/2 cup cold water, 3 tsp sugar, 1/4 tsp cinnamon (it should have been cardamom, but I don't have any cardamom in the house), a splash of vanilla, and a pinch of salt. Blend the whole thing up until it's smooth, serve over lots of ice cubes.

In the end, the texture was just about right (maybe just slightly too thin). The taste, though... Weirdly, it tasted like apple pie with ice cream. Must be the mixture of cinnamon and vanilla, because there weren't any apples in there. Very tasty, but just... unexpected. Marc and I both enjoyed it, and I'd probably make it again. It's very easy, very fast, and uses stuff I've got on hand. (Though I'd love to get some cardamom to try it "for real.")

Photo for posterity for people who are friended to me on Facebook.
Perhaps it was a stupid decision to make my first meal plan the same week I had an intermittent high fever for the first four days. But I was feeling okay when I made it (for certain definitions of "okay"), and I'd been tired of getting to 6 pm, looking around my kitchen, and saying, "There's nothing here to eat," so I figured it was the time.

My first meal plan is up on my Facebook for posterity (link here). I had plans, people. Big plans. That were mostly completely FUBARed after about Wednesday.

The week in more detail )

So that's where things stand. Even though I'd planned on cooking Thursday and maybe Saturday, that didn't happen. We have enough chicken left over for one or two servings, and enough vegetable leftovers for maybe four. (The crock pot chicken makes a lot of leftover vegetables.) We've got some leftover rice and about 2-3 cups of leftover cooking liquid from the chicken, effectively a chicken broth, that I'd really like to do something with in the next day or two. No idea what, though.

I never got around to making the vegetable stock from all the vegetable scraps I've accumulated in my cooking for the last week or two, but I'd really like to do that soon-ish, if only so that the vegetable scraps aren't taking up space in my tiny freezer.

The good news is that there was always food in the house to eat, which I suppose is the point of meal planning. The bad news is that plans went completely out the window by Wednesday, and the things we had in the house to eat were not always the things I wanted to eat. (Hence eating out Friday and Saturday evenings.)

Will I do it again? Maybe. Probably. But with the firm knowledge that meal plans, like all plans, rarely survive contact with reality.
Okay, you're all going to laugh at me this time. I apparently can't make hard-boiled eggs. I am the laughingstock of the culinary world.

See, I wanted to make some hard-boiled eggs for salads. I used the Rouxbe method: bring cold salted water to a boil, add eggs, reduce heat to a simmer, set timer for 12 minutes, then when the time's up place eggs into an ice bath to stop cooking and prevent the grey ring around the yolk that has been a feature of every single hard-boiled egg I've ever eaten. I let mine sit under running cold water because I don't have ice in the house right now, but what the heck. If they had the grey ring, I'd live.

Left them in the fridge until dinnertime. Took one out. Cracked it on the counter. The whites were still runny, let alone the yolk!

I think what did it in the end is that my "simmer" was closer to a "poach." I know, I know: bad chef, walking away from the kitchen before verifying the temperature. Mea maxima culpa.

Anyway, they're back in some hot water now. (New method: put eggs in cold salted water, bring to a boil, take off heat, let sit for 20 minutes, drain and cover with cold water, let sit for 15 minutes.) They will almost undoubtedly have the grey ring. I honestly don't care at this point.

So... there you go. My shameful confession. You may all take this brief moment to revel in your superior technique and let me know how *you* make your hard-boiled eggs.

Update: After the second cooking (method mentioned in penultimate paragraph), the eggs are actually perfect: hard-cooked all the way through but no sulfur ring. Yay!
It's been quite a while since I've done anything but gaming posts, and about two and a half months since my last "seven things" post, so I figure we're about due.

1. Work: Is having its ups and downs. Sometimes it's moderately busy, sometimes it's dead slow. My boss's last day is theoretically tomorrow, but I suspect he's going to stick around another few weeks until our Board of Directors meeting at the end of the month. I still have no idea who my new boss (#4 in two and a half years) is going to be, which is kind of nerve-wracking.

2. SCA: Speaking of the Board of Directors meeting, the specific timing of it conflicts with both Panteria and War of the Roses, two events I like to get to if I can. The fact that I'm missing both is kind of irritating. I will, on the other hand, try my best to be at Northern Region War Camp, where my house sister Alethea will be formally invited to join the Order of the Pelican. (Woot!)

3. Pennsic: As a subset of #2, Pennsic approaches. I'm registered for three classes: one session of "Your Persona in an Hour" and two of "Sexy, Silly, Scheming Saints." I'm about five weeks behind where I wanted to be in my readings of the Golden Legend, but I still have every confidence that I'll finish it in time to have new saint stories ready. I just wish I were going for the full two weeks instead of only one. I miss Pennsic.

4. Auntie Julie: Lyra is now just over two months old, and getting huge, at least comparatively. Still not doing much in terms of tricks, but definitely very cute and getting slightly more interactive every time I see her. Sadly, it'll still be a few years before I can teach her about roleplaying, but there's no rush.

5. Roleplaying: Obviously continuing full steam ahead. I'm in five games at the moment: two weekly (well, weekly-ish), two biweekly, and one occasional. Sometimes it feels like it's too much and I'd just like some free time back, but then I remember what life was like without gaming and I bite my tongue.

6. Cooking: Having done much lately except try a new recipe for "lembas bread", which turned out kind of like a cross between a biscuit and a cookie. Sadly, I've been sick the last week, which means I haven't really wanted to cook, and before that I was quite busy on the weekend. For good or ill, the busyness doesn't show any signs of abating any time soon, which means I'll have to figure out what to do about squeezing in "playing in the kitchen" time. (On the other hand, a few weeks ago I had a lovely time with my friend Eri at the Jean Talon Market and we made some awesome fish and chips afterwards.)

7. There Is No #7: Is it wrong that I'm having a hard time coming up with an appropriate #7? Almost everything else is pretty even keel, really. My birthday's in two and a half weeks, but that's gonna have it's own post, and there's not much else I feel like saying right now. So it's a sneaky "six things from my life" instead of seven things. So there.
This was my latest Rouxbe recipe, as I've started a unit on chicken. For those who have access to Rouxbe, the recipe is here. For those that don't, the short version is that you marinate chicken legs in olive oil, lemon zest, and red pepper flakes. Then you make a short stock with the backbones from the chicken legs and a bunch of vegetables. When you're ready to cook, you caramelize the skin side of the chicken in a hot pan, then finish it up in the oven, and then use the sucs (caramelized bits), onion, ginger, garlic, lemon juice, stock, toasted pine nuts, honey, and cilantro to make a pan sauce. (In the original recipe, there's supposed to be olives, but I don't really like olives, so I left them out.)

The end result is extremely tasty, but also takes quite a lot of time, especially making the stock.

A picture of my tasty, tasty lunch can be seen here.

More reflections behind here )

In any event, very tasty. Not sure I'd do a pan sauce again, or at least not one as involved as this one, but the marinated chicken was super-moist and tender, and I could definitely see myself using the pan-to-oven technique in the future. Mmm... food.
Another long day of cooking, courtesy of my Rouxbe course. I was going to do a long write-up of the stuff I did today (sweating practice using garlic cloves, tomato sauce, roasted brussels sprouts, roasted cauliflower, and pan-fried steak), but I'm tired and don't really think I have anything deep and meaningful to contribute. It's all techniques I've done before, for the most part, and just a matter of refining and practicing. I only have a few notes:

- As an exercise to demonstrate why sweating ingredients is important and distinct from browning, the course has us sweat a single minced garlic clove on low heat until softened, add a half-cup of water, simmer for 30 seconds, and then pour into a container. Repeat, but instead of sweating, brown the garlic. I will say this: pushing around a single minced clove of garlic on low heat for 15-20 minutes is probably someone's textbook definition of hell. It might even be mine. So... boring...

- I have a very hard time figuring out when the beef is done properly. I aimed at 6-7 minutes a side, which seems to have lead to about medium-well, but I honestly have no idea how I'd know the done-ness before I cut into it and eat. Any suggestions?

- I still have not achieved "flow." I'm calmer in the kitchen now, which is good, but things still take a very long time. All the food I mentioned above -- which really isn't all that much, in the end -- took about four and a half hours. I don't mind the long time, as I was home and not doing anything else anyway, but I'm really hoping it starts getting shorter as I gain more experience and know what I can multitask on and what requires singular focus. I'm still looking at my cooking practice the way I would a university class in which I get to eat my homework. And a 4-hour class a week is quite reasonable.

- I'm finding more and more that cooking is very holistic. Whereas I used to be very focused on timing ("It says cook for 5 minutes and it's been 7! Oh, no!"), the Rouxbe course is helping me identify cues in the cooking process so that I don't need to focus on the precise time. I'm now focusing more on the look of the food, how it sounds in the pan, what it smells like (admittedly difficult for me with my hyposmia, but I'm trying), etc. It's very multi-sensory and immersive, and I now understand how people with more experience can get into a zen-like state while cooking.

- Dishes. Oh, my god, the dishes. I'm so glad I clean as I go, because I used a lot of dishes today.

- I was quite tired from my four-and-a-half-hour sojourn into the world of cooking. So what did I do? Made cream biscuits. Yes, in Julie's brain, the way you relax after a long day of cooking is to do some baking. Sigh.
Friends, I think tonight may have been the first time in my entire life where I walked into the kitchen and felt confident at every single step of the way when I was cooking. This is a major milestone for me.

As I mentioned before, my next Rouxbe lesson was on pan frying. And with my brand-new All-Clad 12" stainless steel frying pan, I was up for the challenge.

First up: the water test to tell when the pan is ready for the oil. This is probably the coolest thing ever. The idea is that you add a small amount of water (maybe 1/8 tsp) every 15 seconds or so, and it'll behave differently as the pan heats up. In a cold pan, it'll just sit there. Eventually, it starts bubbling and evaporating. Sooner or later, it'll bubble but spawn off tiny beads. And when it's the perfect temperature, the water will form one mercury-like bead and bounce around the edge of the pan. Fun fact: my new pan takes about 7-8 minutes to heat up on medium heat, using my large burner. Which is much longer than I would have guessed, had I not known about the water test.

I got to feel knowledgeable when Marc was standing next to me and I was doing the water test on the heating-up pan. He saw the water evaporating and said, "I guess that means it's too hot?" And I was able to say, "Nope! Much too cold!"

I was also able to inform him that, assuming the pan is hot enough, a sticking ingredient will eventually un-stick itself once it's cooked for a few minutes, which he did not know and which I had not known before I took this module.

I had a few moments where I was worried my chicken breast medallions weren't cooked through enough, but it all worked out very well in the end. If I do anything differently, it might be to leave them just a little bit longer so they brown more. They were nicely caramelized, but they could have been even more nicely caramelized. Also, one of these days I'll have to learn how to make a pan sauce.

Supper was simple but delicious: the last of the couscous-with-vegetables I made for my knife skills practice, the roast carrots I made this afternoon (yes, this means that between the two of us, we've eaten almost an entire 2-lb bag of carrots just today), and the pan-fried chicken breast with a little lemon juice squeezed over top. Look, I made MEAT (tm) for my man! Now he won't need to die from eating only vegetables! Next lesson: pan-fried BEEF (tm), which is even more meat-like than MEAT (tm). Because I care.
As I mentioned last time, all the knife practice exercises I've been doing this week have left me with quite a lot of vegetables leftovers. Today my boss decided that it's slow enough in the office that we were entitled to a one-day spring break, so I decided to put some of my newfound cooking skills to use.

Just over two hours in the kitchen resulted in the following:
- one and a half trays of roasted carrots (most of a 2-lb bag)
- half a tray of roasted zucchini (one zucchini's worth)
- two trays of kale chips (half a bunch of kale, roasted)
- a small pot of tomato sauce (about a 15-oz can's worth)

Now, this might seem like a lot, and indeed it looked like a lot before I went through the roasting / sauce making process, but by the end, it looked like a whole lot less. The roasted carrots were so good that I kept munching them. A lot. The entire bag of carrots, raw, make me think, "Oh, dear God, who could possibly eat so many carrots?" After roasting, it was more like, "Yeah, I could totally eat all of these right now." Ditto for the kale chips.

So in the end, I've got about two cups of roasted carrots, a tiny amount of roasted zucchini (not as good as the carrots: still very mushy -- I'll have to find a better way of cooking them), and a soup-bowl of kale chips.

The tomato sauce did not turn out as good as the roast vegetables. It's... okay. But it's got that very acidic, "Whoa, I'm a TOMATO!" feel to it. I added some sugar, which cut the edge a bit, but not as much as I'd like. It might be because I added an entire can of tomato paste. See, I didn't want more leftovers, and there was a whole lotta juice that needed to get thickened up, and... Yeah. I may have overdone it. Just a bit. *looks down shamefully*

In any event, I find it okay. Marc doesn't really like it. I'll probably spoon some over the pan-fried chicken that I'm making tonight as my next Rouxbe lesson, and then have the rest with some pasta or something.

I'm still amazed at what looked like so much raw vegetables turned into so little cooked vegetables. It's barely enough for a couple of servings. I can't imagine how many vegetables I'd need to buy if I wanted to have enough for a whole week! Am I the only one who feels this way?

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