Category: Cooking

Cottage Supper

Supper at the cottage is always an informal affair. We often come to the table in bathing suits (if we’re not freezing after coming out of the lake), or wrapped up in sweaters and woolly socks when the evening turns chilly.

Food is often served directly from the stove, but this day we were feeling especially fancy, so we placed on the table in the dishes they were cooked in.

The main part of this dinner was an easy dish that my family has always tongue-in-cheek called “slop”. Basically, you fry up some onions and garlic (or in this case, garlic scapes), add ground beef (or a ground beef/ground chicken/ground turkey mixture, depending on what we have on hand), frying until browned. Drain off the grease, add a can of cream of mushroom soup, and a can of water. Optionally, you may add cooked frozen vegetables to the mixture at this point. Boil down the soup mixture until it has the consistency of a thick gravy. Serve the meat mixture over mashed potatoes or rice.

This time we served slop with a number of vegetables on the side; I had cherry tomatoes with basil, topped with goat cheese, as well as steamed spinach. We also served Brussels sprouts and broccoli, both steamed.

Still Waters

Some days begin with a jolt, a jump out of bed, a hustle to get out the door. On the other hand, some days begin with reading in bed, a relaxed breakfast, and a trip down to the dock.

Breakfast at my parents’ rented cottage this day was eggs over easy, fried mushrooms, sliced avocado, and leftover fruit salad with a bit of maple syrup (slightly mushier than fresh, but still very tasty).

After breakfast, while the dishwasher ran (and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate having a dishwasher at the cottage, what a luxury), I strolled down to the lake to take in the view. The water was like glass, reflecting the clear blue sky.

The water was so still and clear that I could watch the small fish (probably rock bass) that enjoy the shelter of the dock and the retaining wall.

Even the canoe that passed by left barely a ripple in the lake. The canoeist waved a quiet hello to me as he passed by, and we both continued to enjoy the calm of the morning.

Perfect Moment

I don’t believe that there is such thing as a perfect day, or a perfect week. Life being what it is, you can’t expect everything to go smoothly for that length of time — but I don’t think you should expect it to. Life is full of ups and downs. However, I think it’s important to recognize and appreciate when you have a perfect moment. This was one of mine:

I was sitting on the dock at the cottage with a good book, chocolate fudge zucchini cookies, and my knitting. We’d just been for a swim in the rather-cool lake, so I was enjoying the warmth of my hoodie. The girls were enjoying some quiet time of their own on chairs beside me, Thing 1 reading a book, and Thing 2 listening to music on her headphones. For a few minutes there was calm, peace, fresh air and a gorgeous view.

Then it was time to make dinner.

Chocolate Fudge Zucchini Cookies: Rebaked

My kids and I munched our way through my first batch of chocolate fudge zucchini cookies in a matter of days, so I decided to bake some more.

Although I loved the flavour and moist softness of the original recipe, I wasn’t terribly happy with the texture that the grated zucchini gave to the cookies. This time I microwaved the zucchini first, covered, for four minutes, which softened it up nicely. Then I ran the zucchini through my blender until it had the consistency of a smoothie. I followed the rest of the recipe to the letter, and it worked out wonderfully. No stringy bits, just fantastic chocolate flavour and moist texture.

My kids prefer this version too. Thing 1 was quite willing to model the non-stringy inside of the cookie for me so long as she got the broken cookie as payment.

New Cookware

When it comes to garage sale and thrift store shopping, my mother is my role model. Actually, that’s true when it comes to shopping in general. My mom can go into a clothing store and find three pairs of trousers and a shirt, all that fit well, all for 75% off or greater, in less than fifteen minutes. I will go into the same store and come back with maybe one of those pieces. It’s as if she has some kind of supernatural ability to sniff out bargains.

Case in point: my mom bought me some new cookware at garage sales this past month, both for about $2.00 apiece. The first was a pretty vintage 1970’s-ish Dutch oven. I love this style of enameled piece, and although my mom gave me her old one a while back, she was not ashamed to admit that this one was in better shape. As a bonus, it’s also bigger.

Mom also found me this adorable pumpkin pie plate, virtually brand new; it still had the cardboard insert to protect between the top and bottom parts from each other. I doubt it has ever been used. I think it will be perfect for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, when pumpkin pie is often my main contribution to the meal. The temperature at night is telling me that fall isn’t far off, so it won’t be long until I get a chance to use this dish.

Birthday Dinner

Yesterday was my husband’s birthday, and the tradition at our house is that you get to eat whatever you want (within reason) on your birthday. This often involves going out to a restaurant, but this year my husband asked me to make his dinner instead. His choice of dinner necessitated a special trip to T&T Supermarket for ingredients, which was, as usual, an event in itself. Every time we go, we have a meal in the cafeteria, and then the kids have to check out all of the samples and go watch the live fish and seafood in their tanks. We also have to peruse the produce and packaged goods sections for food we’ve never tried before, and for ingredients for new recipes we’d like to try. There is no such thing as a quick trip to T&T with my family.

The main meal that my husband requested was California Ramen from page 86 of Simply Ramen (Amy Kimoto-Khan of easypeasyjapanesey.com, 2016). My copy of the book was actually a birthday gift to me from my husband a few months back, and I feel this may have been a not-so-subtle hint on his part. This dish is based California roll sushi, with toppings of avocado, cucumber, and crab. The recipe recommends fresh Dungeness crab, but I had never cooked live crab before, and I have to admit that I chickened out and used frozen crab instead. I distributed one package of frozen crab meat out around our family of four, but I admit that I probably could have used half as much crab and been just as happy. I also ended up using soft-boiled eggs instead of the marinated half-cooked eggs recommended, mostly because I misread the directions and didn’t realize they had to start marinading two days before the dish was to be made. Whoops.

The standout flavour of this dish, though, was the shoyu base broth. I’d never made it before, but it was both delicious and very simple. It packed a huge amount of flavour and tasty aroma into what I would have thought is just another slow-cooker broth. The recipe calls for dashi granules and soy sauce (both of which are high in sodium) and salt, but I had to take into account my family’s tastes. I left the salt out, and I am glad I did. The broth was just fine without it. In addition to the broth, I ended up with a lovely cooked chicken and melt-in-your-mouth oxtail (both of which are supposed to be discarded after being strained out of the base), so that’s two meals in one, really. All in all, it was a 10/10 recipe, and I will definitely make it again after I use up the leftovers that I froze! Now I want to try all of the bases in this book, especially the tonkotsu — my absolute favourite when I go to a ramen restaurant.

Of course, no birthday in our house is complete without dessert, and as my husband is not a big fan of sweet dishes, I made him up a fresh reduced-sugar blueberry pie. I cut down the sugar from the recipe by a third, but the blueberries were so sweet by themselves that I could probably have reduced it by a half or more. Once again, I used the Purity Pastry crust from page 73 of the Purity Cookbook (2001 edition), and the fresh fruit pie filling formula on page 228 of The Canadian Living Cookbook by Carol Ferguson (1987). I made a latticework crust, which turned out pretty well considering that a) it was only my second time making one, and b) Thing 2 somehow managed to step on the edge of uncooked pie while I was showing it to her, and I had to totally reassemble it. If you’re pondering the logistics of that, be aware that there was a stool involved so she could see what I was working on at the counter, and that the pie’s innards all fell out onto a clean baking sheet.

As many of my pies do, the blueberry one did not stand up well to a serving knife… It kind of crumbled and fell apart. I figure that’s not so bad because that means that the crust is nice and flaky. And yes, I did keep thinking of The Frantics’ A Piece of Pie while I was making this dessert. “Great big blueberries!”

Chocolate Fudge Zucchini Cookies

I recently discovered that the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum has a whole list of recipes that it provides free of charge in PDF format. There are a number of what I would consider typical, traditional Canadian dishes on there — but there were also a number I’d never heard of as well. So of course I had to check them out.

I’d been craving sweets, so I decided that the first recipe I’d try from this collection was the Chocolate Fudge Zucchini Cookies. Also, although I didn’t grow any myself this year, zucchini is in season and hence is really affordable at the moment. And wow, was I ever happy with how these cookies turned out! They were soft and moist without falling apart, and incredibly rich. The recipe called for the cookies to be dropped by tablespoons onto the baking pans, but although the composition of the dough was too thick for this and each cookie had to be hand-formed, I don’t think that this affected the final product in a negative way.

I think that the only thing I’d change about this recipe is how the zucchini is prepared. The recipe calls for it to be finely shredded, but I found that this still left a few stringy bits in the otherwise-soft texture of the cookie. In the future, I might try peeling the zucchini first, or running it through the blender to change the texture. I wouldn’t want to get rid of it, though, as that’s what makes it so moist!

Campfire

The formula for a perfect night at the cottage is as follows:

One small campfire, plus:

Jumbo sparklers lit in the campfire, plus:

Perfectly toasted marshmallows on green sticks, plus:

S’mores!

(For those not in the know, that’s a toasted marshmallow and a square of chocolate sandwiched between graham crackers, called “s’mores” because you always want “some more”.)

Stormy Supper

The other day we had a couple of friends over for dinner at the cottage that my parents are renting, which is always a lovely way to spend an evening. I feared that our plans may have been dashed when a harsh wind blew in from the west, raising whitecaps on the lake, and causing the power to flicker. I was afraid that I wouldn’t get the chance to finish cooking dinner before the incoming storm knocked the power out entirely, and we might have to serve our guests peanut butter and banana sandwiches and leftover salad.

Luckily, although the power went down for a few seconds here and there, it was on for long enough to prepare a decent meal — even though we kept candles lit and flashlights on hand anyway just in case. We had a plethora of leftover salads to choose from: potato salad, macaroni salad, coleslaw, kale and cabbage salad, and some spinach & fruit & goat cheese salad like I’d had a few days previous. I picked the spinach and macaroni salads for myself, along with a sweet mustard baked sausage, and some boiled baby potatoes.

Once the storm blew in, the wind let up a little bit, with torrential rain, lightning, and thunder taking the center stage. My photos are exposed so that it’s possible to actually see what was going on outside, but to the naked eye it was as if dusk had arrived hours early.

I felt truly lucky to be indoors watching the weather under a good, stout roof — even a roof with gutters plugged with pine needles so that the water cascaded over them instead of flowing down the pipes. Instead of enjoying a lovely dinner at the cottage watching nature’s show, we could have been on a family camping trip.

Breakfast Visitor

Breakfast at the cottage this week (well, more like brunch) consisted of pancakes with fresh fruit. The pancakes weren’t from scratch; when traveling and cooking, commercial mixes mean that you have to bring along about half as many bulky containers. My favourite pancake mix since childhood is Aunt Jemima Complete Buttermilk Pancake — the kind where you just add water. We used to use this mix all the time when my family went camping when I was a kid, so the flavour and texture are very homey to me.

The fruit mix was grapes, apples, oranges, strawberries, and there might have been a peach there too. Of course, we had to serve it with real maple syrup. That’s Canadian cottaging/camping for you: the pancakes may be an instant mix, but the syrup has to be real.

We also had a visitor for breakfast this morning. A great blue heron stopped on the cottage’s dock, which we could see from the dining room. This large wading bird fished off of the dock calmly for a few minutes, courteously allowing me enough time to grab my camera and change my lens to a telephoto so I could snap a few pictures.

Patience exhausted (or possibly just not finding any fish nearby), the heron took off to make its rounds of the lake to hunt its own breakfast.