Going Domestic

the great potato mix-up

These Potato Kugel Bites weren't really what I was intending to make for dinner this evening. The recipe and accompanying photo in the magazine that I'd admired last week was different - baked on a cookie sheet, not in a muffin pan. They're still good, though.

I guess I should have cut the recipe out when I'd found it, instead of thinking that I'd somehow be able to find it again amid my stack of magazines. This happens to be all the time - I'll see a recipe, think "I must make that! It looks really good!" but I will forget about it, or lose track of it, for a really long time.

Things I Miss

• Cream of Mushroom soup - hardly a nutritional star, but handy to have in the pantry for last-minute casseroles and such.
• Graham wafers - I didn't feel really guilty about allowing Madeline a couple as snack, and how am I going to make cheesecake with graham wafer crumbs?
• Big boxes of cereal - we're going through a small box of Special K each week!
• Perogies - I guess I'll have to make them from scratch if I want any to eat.
• Vanilla yogurt - my favourite for smoothies and breakfasts. Especially Activa.
• Frozen fruit - this was a popular snack for Madeline back in Canada, and an important ingredient in those smoothies ...
• Ground flaxseed - I have no idea where I would even look for this here in Bangkok, and it's a big ingredient in my fave muffin recipe!

Sometimes grocery shopping gets me a little down here. I find it harder to eat healthfully. Hopefully in six months time I'll be back on my feet.

i thought the moon was made of green cheese

Mooncake. From Starbucks, no less. Starbucks is quite prolific in Bangkok, which surprised me. Chris brought this mooncake home yesterday, and it might meet it's demise later tonight. I've always associated mooncakes with the Chinese culture, so I wasn't really expecting to see them here, but I've read that a large number of Thais are of Chinese ancestry. That might explain the adoption of the tradition.

I never realized that mooncakes sported American corporate logos, though :)

The filling is, appropriately, cappuccino.

Off topic, but I have brownie pan envy. Check out what my sister has!

Eggs-cellent

It has taken over five years of viewing the Food Network for Alton Brown to grow on me, but he has. I am not sure why I didn't give the guy a chance earlier - maybe I thought that his show was too slow or didn't find the costumed-actor segments of the program amusing. It was actually Alton in print that has led me to change my mind, actually. I received a copy of I'm Just Here for the Food: Version 2.0 for Christmas, and it appeals to the geek in me like no other cookbook ever has. I learned how to trick up a gas barbeque with a hairdryer (not trying that one at home, I must say), I learned why I ought to have a pressure cooker, and I now have a groovy set of fridge magnets depicting happy farm animals displaying their best cuts of meat. When on earth did food science become so interesting?

Alton suggests making humble scrambled eggs over a double boiler. I tried that for lunch today. Know what? They were the best scrambled eggs I've ever made.

little bunny foo-foo

Reunited with my silpat and parchment just in time for Easter! My sous chef preferred to eat sprinkles with the cookie on the side, but at least the raw dough wasn't tempting!

Duck in a Box

  Duck in a Box 
  Originally uploaded by goingdomestic.

Intriguing, huh?

I had been eyeing this product in the freezer section of Superstore (ahem ... Dominion in NL) since it came out in December. I love Peking Duck. At least, I think I do. I've only had the real thing once, but I remember loving how it was served for wrapping with lettuce, wrapping in a little yummy pancake, and then as soup. Yum.

We finally bought the Peking-Duck-in-a-box a couple of weeks ago, and I brought it out for dinner earlier this past week, when I didn't feel like actually cooking. The box contained two frozen pre-cooked duck legs (thigh and drumstick), and a package of yummy sauce. All I had to do was heat up the meat, and then pour the sauce over it. It was very far from an authentic Peking Duck experience, but it was still really tasty. If we buy it again (and I would), we'd have to get two packages, as our 2.5 year-old would probably eat an entire leg all on her own.

Behold ...

  Heart-Shaped Pizza 
  Originally uploaded by goingdomestic.

It really was heart-shaped! 

If anyone wants the details, this is a photo of the heart-shaped Popeye pizza from Boston Pizza. It's topped with a tangy tomato sauce, roasted garlic, spinach, and feta. My favourite.

mealtime *should* be an adventure, right?

Chris flew home from Edmonton yesterday, and we brought with him a thawing bag of Lemongrass-Relajo Pork from a new eatery there called Wild Tangerine. It's been sitting in our fridge ever since, and I am kind of intrigued about it. I guess the idea is that I stick the entire shiny bag in boiling water to cook it. That's a new one for me. (I wonder if the bag is heat-safe plastic? Hmm ...)

I also tried googling the word "relajo" to find out what it is, but I didn't get any English-language results that looked promising. Whatever it is, I hope that it's tasty ...

This will be my last post for SaBloBoMo, I'm sure. I thought that I'd write more about a book that I mentioned briefly back in the fall, Peter Mayle's French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew. It's my favourite book about food ever.

Why did I like it so much? Because Mayle's genial and descriptive narration made me hungry enough to want to eat frog's legs. In fact, I'd love to go to the frog leg festival that he wrote about. And truffles. And escargot. This book made me want to travel to France so that I can eat escargot off of a sheet of aluminum foil with a tooth pick, at a side-of-the-road makeshift restaurant. The entire book goes on like this - it's a tour of various food-oriented celebrations across the French countryside. The idea of enjoying eating while on the road as much as sight-seeing isn't a new concept for Chris or I (case in point: our multiple daily trips to Gelatissimo in Sydney). One of these days we'll go back to France and have that Bresse chicken that we've been imagining - I know it!

if you give laura a cooking lesson ...

I'm not certain if I've posted about this before, but I have zero talent when it comes to cooking things in the pancake-or-similar department. I am not totally sure why. After burning my first batch of sweet potato rosti yesterday, I thought that maybe I had my pan too hot. I used a much cooler pan for my second batch, and they never did brown properly, until I transfered them to a hotter pan. Bah.

It's a good thing that they're yummy little things, or else I would never cook them again.

Sweet Potato Rosti (from Today's Parent, Jan 2007)

• grate two small sweet potatos and half a small onion onto a clean dish towel
• squeeze dish towel to remove excess moisture
• in a medium bowl, beat two eggs, then add the grated mixture. Add 1/2 teaspoon each of salt and nutmeg. Add ground black pepper to taste.
• heat up a large non-stick pan with 2 tablespoons of olive oil, then drop spoonfuls of batter into the pan (aim for six patties), and flatten. Cook each side 5-6 minutes until golden.

The "cook each side 5-6 minutes" part is where I went wrong. It was more like 2-3 minutes ...

Anyway, this brings me back to SaBloBoMo and one of my favourite books to read my daughter: If You Give a Pig a Pancake by Laura Joffe Numeroff. 

I have a feeling that this book isn't as popular as it's cookie-lovin'-mouse cousin, but I think it deserves to be. The illustrations are delightful; this pig has a sweet expression and is light on her totters (especially when she's wearing tap shoes). She can arrange furniture, wear a tool belt, and is a respectable interior designer. And she's there for her pals. Some very positive traits, I think. It takes about three minutes to read through this book, which is a nice length for a toddler Madeline's age. She has some books that are wordier, and it's rare that I get to finish all of the text on each page before a small set of fingers set about turning to the next one!

We have a few other books in this series at home, and this one is similar in that an animal makes increasingly outrageous requests of his or her child host.  If there is something that I don't like about this book, it's that events don't build on each other quite as naturally as they do in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. Sometimes it's a pretty big stretch with this one.

pickier reader than eater

I have always loved a good book, but more often than not, my definition of a good book doesn't include anything in the science fiction or fantasy genre. I tried to love The Hobbit, but I kept losing track of who all the characters were and where they were going. I tried to get into Wicked, but I found myself skipping every single paragraph about munchkin politics, which was a fair amount of the novel. About ten years ago, though, I went through a phase where I was obsessed with Arthurian legend. Of course, I read The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

I hated it. I hated that it drifted from the Arthurian geneology that most Arthurian researchers believed to be true (which I accepted as proper, as well). This bugged me to no end! The book is more about early Christianity and established paganism running into each other than the exploits of the Round Table companions, and I felt that many of the characters deserved more development than they got in this novel. I know that I'm probably in the minority and most people rave about this book, but it just wasn't interesting to me. I think that my favourite pieces of Arthurian fiction are The Wicked Day (the geneology of this one still is irritating, but it's an interesting study of the character Mordred) and a trilogy by Persia Woolley (Child of the Northern Spring, Queen of the Summer Stars, and Guinevere: The Legend in Autumn), which I suspect may be out of print.  I don't know if I still have my copies of the Woolley books; I might have to borrow them from the library the next time I want to read them.

I have food related tie-in to King Arthur: the King Cake (galette des rois) tradition is alive and well in Newfoundland, or at least the part that I live in (though the Wikipedia entry only discusses the tradition from the context of New Orleans and mardi gras).  We didn't bake our own; Chris picked one up at Auntie Crae's after reading about them. Ours had a teeny tiny ceramic cow in it.