Sunday Night Dinner at Grandma’s

There’s something to be said for making the house smell like roasted meat, adding aromatic warmth from slowly braising onions, peppercorns and bay leaf in hearty red wine for hours on end, steaming up the windows and infusing everything, including the curtains with the scent of home cooking. Admittedly, it’s a smell that’s not so enticing the day after.

It’s such an old-fashioned kind of smell, like home or grandma’s house. Actually I’m confident that I’ve out-grandma’d the older ladies in my building with the scents that come from our apartment on most Sunday nights. Cooking this way is about escapism. Before starting another work week, I take great pleasure in spending all day cooking dinner for the smells alone so I can bask in familiar scents and chase off any Sunday night stresses that come from thinking about going to work on Monday.

At the end of it all I expect a perfectly tender roast, and depending on the cut of meat, something that’s falling apart, served with a gravy-like sauce. If it’s beef and I’m feeling particularly nostalgic, I like to have horseradish, freshly grated or in a prepared cream sauce. Roasted root vegetables are the ideal accompaniment and you could use whatever you want but carrots, scattered with fresh thyme before being roasted and caramelized in butter and honey taste like tradition, barely updated. Really old-fashioned would be peas and carrots but I just can’t bring myself to take it that far. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi have an excellent take on them in their first book, Ottolenghi the Cookbook if you’re looking to combine the two together. Instead, I like the idea of turning peas into a vibrant side salad, adding in a bunch of watercress, chopped roughly with some fresh parsley and tarragon, and a warm vinaigrette made from shallots lightly sautéed in butter, cooled by a splash of red wine vinegar.

For our Sunday Night Dinner at Grandma’s post I wanted to share a roast beef recipe, something simple with gravy that would be heightened with a grating of fresh horseradish, but that idea was quickly thrown out as soon as I saw that the butcher had four beef cheeks – on the small side for beef cheeks – tucked behind a stack of skirt steaks, right up next to the beef neck roasts. I’m a sucker for anything “au poivre” in the colder months. Peppercorns, cream and mustard are undeniably harmonious flavours at the table. Beef cheeks au poivre is different in that the “au poivre” treatment usually happens after the meat gets a quick sear stove-top and the pan, a dramatic de-glazing with some brandy. The great thing about using beef cheeks for this dish is that they retain their shape after hours of cooking but melt in your mouth and could literally be eaten with a spoon if it wasn’t so inappropriate to do. It’s an incredibly rich dish that I’m all too happy to enjoy on any given Sunday night in the winter, with or without grandma.

Beef Cheeks Au Poivre

Serves 4

4 (approximately 830g in total) beef cheeks
3 tablespoons dijon mustard
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons olive oil
500ml red wine
2 large shallots, roughly chopped
1 bay leaf
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 x 30g tin green peppercorns in brine, drained
150ml whipping cream (35% M.F.)

Preheat the oven to 300°F.

Coat the beef cheeks generously with 2 tablespoons of the mustard, and season with salt and pepper. In a medium Dutch oven or other heavy-bottomed oven-proof pot with a tight fitting lid, heat the butter and oil over medium-high heat. Going in batches to avoid overcrowding the pot, brown the beef cheeks on all sides. Place the beef cheeks aside on a plate. Turn the heat down to low and add the shallots and red wine, and using a wooden spoon, scrape the brown bits from the bottom of the pot. Return the beef cheeks to the pot with any juices that have run out onto the plate. Toss in the bay leaf, cover with a lid and place in the oven for approximately 3.5 hours. Beef cheeks can take a lot of abuse without going dry or falling apart. You’ll know when they’re ready when they look like they’re about to fall apart, a bit like the meat is bound by gelatin – I’ve had some that take up to 7 hours.

Remove the beef cheeks from the pot and place on a plate, covered with foil to keep warm. With the pot back over low heat, whisk in the remaining 1 tablespoon of dijon mustard, whipping cream and green peppercorns. Serve the beef cheeks with the sauce poured over top.

If you’re making things ahead of time, you can separate the beef cheeks and the liquid left behind in the pot and refrigerate for a day or so. When ready to serve, re-heat the beef cheeks and rewarm the cooking liquid, adding the rest of the sauce ingredients as instructed above.

Gazelle Horns

This past Friday, Sarah Skinner’s dance collective, the Sisters of Salome put on a show themed The Tea Room to raise funds for their upcoming Toronto summer 2014 Fantasy Belly Dance show, which will be a full-length production inspired by the stories of the Arabian Nights. For Friday’s show, the dancers presented a traditional Moroccan tea ceremony to the audience, encompassing mint and rose water tea as well as various Moroccan delicacies.

This sounded like the ideal Crustcrumbs experience to us. I’m not generally a fan of rose or orange water but I could certainly be coerced into liking them in the right setting, like if a belly dancer happen to bring me a tray, spilling over in abundance with fragrant cookies. We also heard that the dancers would be balancing trays of candles on their heads in one of their routines, which meant we really couldn’t miss out on this performance.

When I use rose and orange water at home, I generally use it to clean my counters. Its powerful floral scent overwhelms the white vinegar and water solution I use, masking the vinegar scent, leaving my counters smelling like roses. I think it’s something Martha Stewart came up with, and you know – it’s a good thing.

But given the right setting those floral scents can work wonders and have the ability to transport a person across the globe to another time where the fragrance of roses and orange blossoms hang in the thick night air. When we were invited to contribute to the evenings delights, I knew I had to do something that incorporated those scents. Gazelle Horns fit in perfectly with the theme, as they are scented heavily with orange blossom water and almonds, and their elegant crescent shape would mimic the fluid moves of the dancers.

The pastry for these cookies is not what you might expect. It’s actually much closer to a pasta dough than a cookie dough. As such, I say go all the way and use a pasta machine to achieve the appropriate thinness. You could absolutely roll out the dough by hand, as it’s done traditionally but I’ve found the pasta roller makes a major difference in making this an easy production.

Gazelle Horns

Makes 30-40 cookies

For the filling:
340g jar almond butter, roasted and unsalted
115g icing sugar
25ml cold water
50g unsalted butter
1/8 teaspoon almond extract
2 tablespoons orange blossom water

For the pastry:
330g unbleached all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
50g unsalted butter, melted
150ml orange blossom water
1 large egg, beaten for egg wash
icing sugar, for garnish

Start making the filling by first draining off any liquid that has separated at the top of the jar of almond butter. In a small saucepan over low heat combine the icing sugar and water and heat just until the sugar is dissolved. Melt in the butter then add the almond butter and continue to stir until the mix is fully incorporated and smooth. With the pan off the heat, add the almond extract and orange blossom water and stir to incorporate. Refrigerate until ready to use. This mix can be made up to a week ahead of time.

To make the pastry, combine the flour and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with the dough hook. With the mixer on low speed add the butter and orange blossom water and mix for approximately 5-10 minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic, similar to a pasta dough. Wrap the dough tightly in plastic wrap and let rest at room temperature for 30 minutes before proceeding.

Divide the dough into four pieces and going one piece at a time, and using a pasta roller be it hand crank or an automatic attachment on your stand mixer, feed the dough through the roller, gradually working up the thinness as you would for pasta, until the dough is very thin, finishing around the 5 or 6 mark if using a Kitchen Aid stand mixer attachment. The idea here is that you want a sheet that’s tissue paper thin.

Preheat your oven to 350°F and line two baking trays with parchment paper.

This next part is a little bit like making ravioli and pierogi. Lay the thin sheet of pastry down on a work surface. Grab a teaspoon of the filling mixture and roll it into a 1 1/2” – 2” log with your hands and place on the end of the pastry sheet, giving yourself approximately a 3” border, and cut the square of pastry using a pastry cutting wheel. Using your finger, dab the egg wash sparingly along three of the four side of the pastry square. Fold the pastry over the log and press firmly to seal the pastry, while also shaping the pastry into a crescent shape. Using a ravioli cutter, cut the crescent, giving yourself approximately 1/4” between the filling and the edge, as the pastry will shrink as it bakes. If there isn’t enough of a border, the chances of the filling exploding out during baking are pretty good.

Place each crescent on a parchment-lined baking tray and keep refrigerated until the trays are full. Bake the trays for approximately 5-8 minutes. The dough will not brown but dry slightly. Transfer the crescents to a cooling rack and allow to cool before dusting with the icing sugar.

Vanilla and Sortilège Milkshake

While sick people food can be delicious (see chicken skin and whisky), most of the time it’s not. It’s got to be bland, light and often dairy-free to avoid upset stomachs. Consequences be damned. This is the milkshake to have when life is making you queasy.

Sortilège is a sweet Canadian liqueur made from whisky and maple syrup. I use it a lot in fall and winter cocktails – its sweetness is excellent for replacing the sweet vermouth in Manhattans made with a spicy bourbon such as Bulleit. It’s also wonderful for sipping straight – it’s syrupy-sweetness coats the glass and your throat – a very good thing to have while ice-skating on a pond somewhere in Québec, ideally next to a sugar shack, which is how I like to imagine this spirit came to be.

Vanilla and Sortilège Milkshake

makes 1 milkshake
250ml good-quality, store bought vanilla ice cream
150ml whole milk (3.5 % M.F.)
250ml whipping cream (35% M.F.)
6 tablespoons Sortilège

I like to make this right in the glass, using an immersion blender but you could use a milkshake machine if you have one or a regular blender. First, using a mixer, whip the cream until just starting to hold its shape, then add the Sortilège and continue to whip until firm. Because there’s quite a lot of liqueur in proportion to the cream, you can expect a fairly loose whipped cream. Next in a tall glass add the ice cream and the milk and blend until fully mixed. Top generously with the whipped cream.

Chicken Soup with “Matzo” Balls

Now that we’ve covered that chicken fat is good for you, as much as I hate to do it, we have to talk about soup. It’s a necessary evil when you’re sick. Soup is warm, easy to digest, and restorative. But it’s also prescriptive and that’s why I really don’t like it. We have soup when we’re sick, when we’re cold, when we want to clean out the crisper, when we don’t really want to eat at all. Soup is not the food we want to eat when we want to enjoy life but when we’re recoiling from it.

When you’re sick – like really sick, I don’t expect you to go to the effort of making this for yourself. I don’t think you could unless you’re a highly functioning sick person. You have to do a bit of shopping with a special trip to the butcher to pick up the chicken carcasses and a whole chicken, though you could also be one of those “I have my life together” people and have the chicken bones stashed in the freezer or better yet, a supply of your own chicken stock ready-to-go. Unless you’re that person, this post is really for your *caretaker to read.

This is the soup to eat when you’re sick and trying to get back to normal life. I didn’t grow up with matzo balls in my chicken soup and never really gave much thought into what they were until I was in university. When I finally got around to making them for myself I realized they were a refined version of what I’d already been doing to my soup, which was crumbling in as many soda crackers as would fit in my bowl. Matzo balls, it turns out are cracker dumplings. After this epiphany, I thought I could probably sub out the matzo meal and replace it with the soda crackers that I was familiar with having in my soup. Between the chicken fat and garlic in the soup, and the chicken fat and rosemary in the “matzo” balls, this is an aromatic bowlful, which should have you returning to full health and proper food in a couple of days time.

Chicken Soup with “Matzo” Balls

Makes approximately 3 litres

For the Chicken Soup Base
2 pounds chicken carcasses
2 carrots, unpeeled and roughly chopped
2 celery ribs, roughly chopped
1 onion, unpeeled with the root-end removed, halved
2 cloves garlic, unpeeled and halved
1 bunch parsley, stalks only
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
2 teaspoons fennel seeds
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1 parmesan rind, approximately 3” (optional)
water to cover

For the Chicken Soup
1 small chicken
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme or 1 tablespoon of fresh thyme
200g carrot, finely diced
270g parsnip, finely diced
20g celery, finely diced
2 large cloves of garlic, minced
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

For the “Matzo” Balls
(makes 17-18 balls)
20 (57g) unsalted soda crackers
2 tablespoons chicken fat (skimmed from the cold soup base)
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 teaspoon fresh rosemary, chopped finely
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt

To start, make the chicken soup base, which is really just a chicken stock with a few more assertive flavours such as garlic and fennel seeds. If you’ve made chicken stock before it’s likely you’ll ignore this recipe entirely and just use your own and that’s okay. Chicken stock is personal and largely comes down to what you feel like throwing in the stock pot. To make this stock, just like any other chicken stock, throw all ingredients into a large pot and fill with cold water so that the water comes just a couple inches above the contents. Heat to just barely a simmer for at least 3 hours. Don’t bother skimming the top. When you’re done, strain the stock into a large vessel, be it a heat-proof bowl or another pot and allow to cool before refrigerating over night. Discard the stock ingredients.

Preheat your oven to 400°F.

While the stock is simmering, remove the back from the chicken, and toss the back in with the rest of the stock ingredients. If you’re doing this on a different day than the stock, freeze the back for later use. On a quarter-sheet pan lined with parchment paper, place the chicken breast side-up and coat it with the olive oil. Sprinkle on the thyme and season generously with salt and pepper. Roast the chicken in the oven for approximately 45 minutes or until the juices run clear. Remove from the oven and allow to cool on the pan. Once it has cooled enough to handle, place the chicken on your board and pour any of the roast drippings into your chicken soup base. Remove the meat from the chicken, discarding the skin and bones. Dice or shred the meat into soup-spoon-sized pieces and store in the refrigerator until ready to assemble the soup.

To make the matzo balls, blitz the soda crackers in a food processor or blender until you have fine crumbs. If you wanted, you could also use the more traditional matzo meal in place of the soda crackers. In a small bowl combine the cracker crumbs with the rest of the matzo ball ingredients and cover tightly with plastic wrap. Refrigerate the matzo mix for approximately 30 minutes so the crackers can fully absorb the wet ingredients. Roll the mixture into small balls with your hands and drop carefully into a large pot of boiling water, being sure they don’t stick on their initial drop to the bottom. Turn the water down to a simmer and cover for 40 minutes by which time they will have plumped to almost double their original size. Strain out the matzo balls and store in an airtight container in the refrigerator until ready to use.

To assemble the soup, in a large pot add the chicken soup base along with the carrots, parsnips, celery, and garlic. Simmer the vegetable gently in the base until just tender. Add the diced chicken and season the soup with salt and freshly ground pepper. Add the matzo balls and serve.

*Note to caretaker: the choice of mug makes all the difference in the world to the sick person, so choose wisely.

Good Food for Sick People

The Internet is full of unqualified people doling out advice to other people and this blog is no exception. That’s why we’ve temporarily changed our tag line to the pushy “HOW TO EAT. WHERE TO EAT.” I love food under any circumstance but it can’t be just any kind of food. I need to be romanced. Gin and tonics are for lunch meetings whereas beer is for after work. Vanilla cakes with chocolate frosting are for birthdays, crustless tuna sandwiches are to be eaten poolside and well, lime slime-coated desserts are for Halloween. I want to tell you exactly how and where to eat food.

This is a good thing. If I were an actual nutritionist, I would be telling you to eat food that’s good for your heart, low in salt and sugar, and high in fiber because, while a nutritionist may have your best health in mind, they certainly aren’t thinking about your tastebuds. They can’t be trusted. And since this is the Internet and we have the power to choose the advice that we agree with the most, let’s just say whatever I say is healthy truly is. I know if I were going to choose between the advice given by a nutritionist and someone like me, I would simply go with the one with tastier food.

This pre-defensive ramble is all because I’m about to tell you how to eat when you’re sick. Unfortunately it’s November and with the colder, darker, wetter, and all-around crumbier weather, also comes cold and flu season. Not to mention the depression that comes with the acknowledgment that this is only the very beginnings of winter.

This food will make you feel so much better about it all! We’ve got no-cook remedies, a restorative chicken soup, and a happy-making milkshake that we’re going to roll out over a few posts. Let’s start with the no-cook stuff though because when you start to feel sick, the best thing to do is attack the virus as quickly as possible in order to catch it off-guard.

Chicken fat is the main line of defense against annoying colds. When you hear people waxing on about chicken soup and its magical curative properties, what they’re actually talking about is chicken fat. In her book, Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes, Jennifer McLagan tells us that poultry fat, chicken fat especially, is actually very good for you. It’s low in saturated fat but high in monounsaturated and polyunsaturated – those are the good ones. The monounsaturated fat has palmitoleic acid which is thought to help boost the immune system. This tidbit of information combined with McLagan’s obvious love for delicious food is all I really need to run with the idea that chicken fat is good for you.

Homemade chicken soup (the kind with fat floating on top) is all well and good when you have someone to make it for you when you’re sick but what happens when you leave the house in the morning feeling fine but by late afternoon, as the November sun is setting, you find yourself with a full-blown sore throat? First, blame someone else like your fellow subway commuters, then blame your office colleagues, then head to the grocery store on your way home and pick up a rotisserie chicken.

Not only do you not have to cook dinner tonight, leaving you time to get some sleep but a rotisserie bird’s skin – the non-gourmet type – is full of fat and salt. The fat will help boost your immune system and coat your sore throat at the same time, while the salt will help to kill any bacteria lingering back there. It also tastes really good!

Another quick and dirty, no-cook remedy is to have a shot of whisky and/or a shot of fernet because I think if we’re going to start following every nutritional bit of information offered on Goop then we should also start taking Buzzfeed articles more seriously, like this one on the 22 Excellent Reasons to Drink More Whiskey. The real reason I suggest whisky though is because the alcohol will kill the bacteria in the back of your throat and maybe help you by dulling that cool ache you’ve started to feel since coming home.

The other half of this boozy remedy is the fernet, which has a longer history of being a cure-all. This is a strongly flavoured – think Buckley’s cough syrup – Italian bitter that’s incredibly herbaceous. Bitters of course, are widely known for helping unsettled stomachs and opening up the digestive tract. The fernet does both of these things, meaning you don’t have to stop by the drug store on the way home – just open up your liquor cabinet.

It may all sound very untraditional but it really does help. And if it doesn’t, at the very least, a dinner of chicken skin and whisky won’t make you feel like you’re eating because you’re sick but that you’re eating to enjoy life, despite being sick.