Summertime Pickles

In the summer there are always a few things I look forward to; sun, freedom from school, and fresh local foods. In particular fresh ingredients ready to be made into pickles.

A two-step process, these 48hr pickles have been in the family for quite sometime. For the first time, this weekend I got the opportunity to learn how to make the recipe my grandmother taught my dad, which has now been passed down to me.

Pickles make for a great snack. I always tend to grab them as a side dish to a sandwich, or even if I am craving something salty. Below are the steps to making these delicious and simple dill, garlic home-made pickles.

1) Taking small baby sized cucumbers rinse, cut off both ends and any soft spots, and scrub with either a metal, or soft brush to get rid of any sharp edges.
2) While cutting the pickles in a large pot, boil water (the amount of jars you will be making) with a tablespoon of Pickling Salt to every jar of water.
3) cut garlic and fresh dill and place on top and throughout the jar of freshly washed cucumbers
4) after water and salt mixture has come to a boil, let it sit until room temperature, then pour into the jars right until the neck of the jar
5) seal each jar tightly and turn upside down over night. Turn right side up the next day and let the jars sit for 48hrs or until the ‘pickling’ process is completed (you can usually tell by colour and water mixture becoming cloudy)

After they have turned, enjoy!

Coffee with a side of sweet

Ever since June, I have been working at Starbucks in Toronto… one of the best jobs I have had to date. I love the people I work with, the atmosphere and just the fast paced work environment. Even a 4 hr shift feels like its been 2 minutes.

One thing which you begin to learn while working at Starbucks is the history behind coffee, the different aromas and tastes and best of all what food it is best paired with.

I take my coffee black, sometimes with a tiny bit of raw sugar…

However when I drink coffee, I always find an excuse to indulge in the extra calories and have something sweet on the side to compliment the taste of the drink. Today, I first had a major fail. I have always wanted to try Parisian Macarons, the colourful, delightful deserts sold at classy coffee shops… apparently my skills aren’t up to snuff with the classy pastries.

I then decided to try making some delicious ginger snaps and altered them my own way by adding some orange flavouring, therefore making orange ginger snaps. A great compliment to any cup of coffee, or nice brewed tea.

Ingredients:

3/4 cup shortening
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1/4 molasses or dark corn syrup
2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons soda
2 teaspoons ginger
some orange zest
splash of orange juice

combine brown sugar, shortening and eggs, blend til fluffy. add all other ingredients besides flour, blend again. add flour slowly and blend. chill for an hour or overnight. roll in small ball shapes, or cut with cookie cutters. bake @ 350 degrees for 12-15 minute. or until brown.

Key Lime Obsession

Reading week couldn’t have come soon enough! Between the thousands of words written for assignments, and the numerous organic chemistry concepts attempt at being memorized…I felt as though I needed this break a lot. I love any chance I have to come home back to Kitchener and visit friends, family and my dog.

It’s funny, the first few days of being at home are great. You get to see a few friends, sleep in your old bed and eat food in which you do not have to pay for. After a few days the home glamour starts to fade away…boredom sets in, and you start to lose count of how many hours you have been watching the Soprano’s for.

Today I thought why not dissolve this boredom with a long overdue cooking session- very European housewife style.

The winter blues often bring fond memories to my mind of warm, sunny times which I wish to revisit. Recently, I have been thinking lots about the trip I took back in grade 12 with my cousin down to the Florida Keys, Miami and the Bahamas. It was an amazingly beautiful trip with wonderful food-most delicious-key lime everything!

I love the idea of key lime pie, ice cream and even candies…I love that tangy taste. So today I attempted for the first time ever to make key lime tarts. They were both delicious and covered up my winter blues for a while.

When having my family taste them for the first time I asked “How would you describe these in one word?” My dad, Jerry responded “very, good”… not one word, but none the less glad to hear they were good!

Recipe:

-home made pie crust of store bought tart crusts/pie crust
-can of condensed milk
-1/2 cup white sugar
-3/4 cup fresh lime juice
-4 egg yolks
-pinch of salt

combine all ingredients, whisk until smooth. Pour into pie crusts, bake for 20-25 minutes once semi solid. Place in fridge for two hours…and garnish!

Enjoy 🙂

Baba’s Kitchen

When Christmas holidays creep near, and the smell of freshly baked shortbread cookies waft on by, it always bring thoughts of past holiday traditions and memories. For instance, the abundance of cookies my mom and I would make, the hustle and bustle of finding the best Christmas present for my sister, the midnight mass at church or better yet the Christmas meal with uncles and aunts hearing stories of their childhood.

Christmas season is most obviously meant for quality time with family and catching up with old friends. Ever since moving away for school to Toronto, it has become hard for me to constantly stay updated with the lives of friends and family. It also makes it difficult to spend quality time with them. Coming home at the beginning of the week I was looking forward to a few days of forgetting the school hum bug and concentrating on the fortunate family festivities.

One tradition we have started over the past few years is cooking the traditional Ukrainian food with our Baba Polischuk…Perogies. Now, I don’t mean those AWFUL store-bought frozen things, I mean hand-made dough and stuffing made with laughter and love. Joining my brother, Andrew and sister, Halyna, after some of the dough and fillings had been made I took on the role of perogy maker (also known as Perohy in Ukrainian).

The difficult thing about Perogies is that there is no set recipe as to how to make the dough, it’s truly an art of becoming one with the likeness of the dough. It is amazing to see my Baba look at a bowl of beige bland dough and she will say to us “more milk” or “more flour”. Over the years we have tried to learn the precious gift of Ukrainian cooking from our Baba and it is such a treasured talent to carry on throughout my life.

Here are some photos of the afternoon’s events. We made over 150 perogies, stuffed with potatoes/cheese, and home made blend of saurkraut

Merry Christmas!
or as we say it in Ukrainian: Веселий Рiздво

Baba enjoying her Perogies

Andrew always so proud

Halyna, wearing the token `Baba` Apron

Cheddar and Apple: The Flavoursome Fusion

I have this distinct memory, when my mom was making her usual fall apple pies. She would bake them in the oven, the house filling up with the delicious apple scent, and I knew when I smelt those pies…fall was here.

Another thing I always remember about my moms pies are the way in which she would eat them. She used to put cheddar cheese on the crust, something I always found so odd and unappealing. I never really understood why it would be eaten this way, she just said it tasted good.

After having a crazy month of midterms, assignments and just getting my life in order, I realized I should look into a ‘fall’ type recipe to try. Cheddar and apple scones were something I often heard about, but it was the whole ‘cheddar vs. apple’ thing that confused me. I tried to be optimistic, not really knowing what I was getting into.

Once completing these scones I now understand why the combination of cheddar and apple go so well together. Not only do you get the sweetness of the fresh fall apples, but you get the sharp flavours of the cheddar combining into a scone of wonders.

So if you want to  have a cheddar and apple epiphany like I did, follow this recipe!

1 3/4 cups flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/3 cup cold butter
1 cup buttermilk
1 cup shredded cheese
1 cup diced and peeled apples

–          Combine the first five ingredients into a large bowl

–          Then add the cold butter stirring until you get a crumb like mixture

–          Stir in buttermilk until mixture is moist

–          Gently fold in cheese and diced apples and knead 10 times on a floured surface

–          Pat into a 9 inch circle and cut into eight wedges

–          Place on a greased baking sheet and bake at 450 degrees F for 12-15 minutes until golden brown

Late Night Notion

I’m back, and bolder than ever before. Its taken me a while to get the energy to get back into my ‘flog’, but tonight is the night…

As I was sitting in my very common study area, writing an assignment for one of my classes, I realized it was really time I needed to get back into the whole food blogging flogging thing. All thanksgiving weekend I thought, this is perfect, my parents house full of food ready to be experimented with. Better yet, food I didn’t have to pay for!

Even though the very tempting fruit cellar was in front of me, i still, for some odd reason just did not feel up to it.

I recently just finished a novel called Eating Animals, by Jonathan Safran Foer over the weekend for a class assignment, and it really got me thinking. It has a lot to do with revealing the secrets of the food industry and production, and i thought to myself that I need to become more aware of local foods which I have in front of me and which are in season.

When researching what to make, I try to think of what I have been seeing in the grocery store lately…when it became planted in my mind. Tonight I would make, Butternut Squash Soup. I have always been a huge fan of this soup, but still to this day the can and boxed does not suffice.

So I searched a few recipes of a simply butternut squash soup and got some ideas and found out it is very simple to make!

1 Butternut squash cut into chunks
1 medium onion
a chunk of butter
6 cups of chicken stock
salt, pepper, nutmeg (and my own touch, sage)

First, glaze the chopped onion in a sauce pan. Add the chopped squash and chicken stock. From there let it simmer until it is tender. Blend the squash and broth together. Return to heat and add spices!

I never realized this recipe would be so simple, and I was nervous at first that something this easy would be ‘squashed’ miserably by the critic. I was pleasantly surprised when I got the thumbs up from my food tester, and in my opinion it tasted great too!

When thinking about butternut squash, I realized I didn’t really know much about the fruit, only that it reminded me of fall. Of course being the savvy googler I am, I found some pretty interesting facts. For instance, in Ontario, approximately 20 000 lbs per acre of squash can be grown per harvest! Squash is also full of great things for our body including; fibre, vitamin A and Beta Carotene.

I am noticing as I become more exposed to new vegetables and fruits, I am realizing how lucky we truly are for living in a province with such an abundance of great fruits and vegetables in season. Not only was this butternut squash soup inexpensive to make (around 10 dollars!) but it made a large portion to last for a day or so.

I am so happy to be trying out new recipes and most of all, ecstatic I didn’t totally quash the butternut squash soup!

enjoy!

Physiology or baking?

When starting the summer I knew what I was getting myself into. Physiology a/b, an 8 month course squeezed into 4 short months, approximately 10o days was well…essentially a ticket to school hell. I thought and knew I needed to endure it anyway, despite any physical, emotional and or psychological pain.

Over this long weekend I decided to make a trip back home, you know visit the friends and family while attempting to study. Needless to say, turns out May 24 weekend weather was ridiculously beautiful and distracting at the same time. Knowing I had a midterm coming up this week, I knew it would be a touch weekend of self-control.

So I proceeded in my habitual list of procrastination methods; Facebook, naps, looking for apartments, getting my bike ready to bring back to Toronto with me,  more internet and then decided it was about time that I use my creative baking skills to further procrastinate from the excruciating physiology pondering pain.

I wanted to make some sort of creative cupcakes/cookies. I saw this done a while ago and thought why not give it a try. I put my artistic skills to the test and created hamburger cupcakes.

It was simple, I just made a simple vanilla cupcake mix from scratch, tinted a bit of the batter with yellow food colouring (for the buns) and some with cocoa powder (for the meat). I then made red and yellow cream cheese icing for the ketchup and mustard, and some candy flakes dyed green with sprinkles for the relish.

Decorating these hamburger cupcakes was the best part. Taking what was a simple vanilla cupcake and making it something totally visually appealing was the challenge and took me away from the world of studying for an hour or two. Ray Kroc the creator of the MacDonald`s franchise once said `it requires a certain kind of mind to see beauty in a hamburger bun`- I feel as though i grasped this concept perfectly and made some beautifully creative hamburger cupcakes!

Why Hello Mr. Eggs Florentine…

When entering University I knew of 3 distinct ways of serving eggs;  scrambled, boiled and fried. I never thought that there were many other ways to ‘do’ eggs…until now.

Let me introduce you to a beloved friend of mine…Eggs Florentine. Recently, after having an Eggs Benedict breakfast which I fell in love with at Frans. I had no clue what this meal consisted of. Described by the waiter, it was said to be a poached egg placed on top of bacon, and Hollandaise sauce drizzled over the top, I thought why not give it a go.

One bite…and I fell in love. Something about a well-cooked egg over meat and bread with a buttery type sauce- whats one not to like about this combination?

Ask anyone, my friends, my family, and they will all tell you I have become eggs Benedict crazy. I knew when beginning this new ‘flog’ of mine (yes, i have dubbed thee food blog to flog), that I MUST try to make eggs Benedict.

Today i went for it and put every worry behind me about poaching eggs and decided to try making a rendition of eggs Benedict, eggs Florentine. Eggs Florentine has all the same aspects of eggs Benedict but instead of topping the english muffin with bacon, spinach is used as a substitute.

While having multiple burners going I whisked away the Hollandaise sauce, poached 3 eggs successfully (1 apparently was too emotionally distraught and fell apart) and grilled some fresh organic spinach all to create a delicious eggs Florentine for dinner. A very good first attempt!

When sitting down to write this blog I wondered what the history behind Eggs Benedict was, how the tasty brunch food all began. In 1984 a wall street broker in New York, suffering from a severe hangover went into a breakfast restaurant at the Waldorf Hotel and decided to order some “buttered toast, crisp bacon, two poached eggs, and a hooker of Hollandaise sauce”- this combination became a popular menu choice in the restaurant and was then later made into an official recipe in 1896 in The Boston Cooking School-Cook Book. (Nothing like some good educational food history for ya)

So remember if you feel like trying a different form of eggs, poaching is easy to do.
If wanting a rich and delectable dinner and especially most important for a University student, if suffering from a severe hangover, order some Eggs Benedict. Better yet try out a new combination of your own. I don’t know about you, but the sounds of a hangover creation named after myself would be an honour.