Dessert By Candy

Close Call

Today I want to tell you the story of a lasagna Bolognese that did not came to be. A few weekends ago, I made a big batch of ragu alla Bolognese on a quiet Saturday afternoon. I loosely followed the recipe on Fine Cooking. It was a simmering haven of comfort from the minute the onion hit the pot to the moment I greedily slurped the last strand of tagliatelle coated with sauce.

The great thing about ragu is leftover. It would be a pity if you’re only making enough for one meal since the time and effort are the same. The meaty taste of grass-fed beef and the sweetness of carrot, onion, celery meld together into something magical after hours of simmering. After a satisfying dinner of fresh tagliatelle tossed in ragu, I packed away three containers of leftover sauce to the freezer. I told Little Brother to help himself to the leftovers in case he wanted to take home some quick meal options for weekdays.

Rebellious: Semlor After Easter

I am infatuated by Scandinavian dessert lately but learning about them outside of their native countries is not so easy. While there is an over abundance of recipes on French, North American, Italian, and to some extent, Austrian style dessert, the popularity of dessert from other culture hasn’t caught on in Toronto. That’s too bad because based on limited exposure in my travels, there are lots to admire. Especially if you love marzipan as much as I do!

I had the privilege to visit parts of Denmark and Sweden in the company of locals with the biggest sweet tooth. They introduced me to various dessert made famous in different parts of towns on our sugar-filled road trips. Unfortunately, I visited in the warmer time of year with plenty of sunlight and missed out on the annual semla craze. This Swedish treat is only available between new year and Easter. I invite you to find out more about semla in the Sweden Tourism website. It’s a really fun read on the dessert’s history and current popularity. Swedes take their semlor seriously.

My own search for semla began with an enticing photo in Saveur magazine. I love the haunting taste of cardamom in baked goods and it led me to that recipe. Upon a closer look, my enthusiasm dampened. The proportions and directions of that recipe just looked wonky. The scathing reviews did not help either but I learned one important thing. Aside from cardamom and cream, a semla is not a semla without marzipan.

Sitting Pretty At The Catbird Seat

Dining at Noma back in 2011 is a highlight of my dining experiences. When I found out in February that Noma alum Trevor Moran recently took over Nashville’s The Catbird Seat restaurant, I immediately tried to book a reservation. But not so fast! With only 20 bar seats surrounding the open kitchen, scoring a reservation was a challenge in itself. Similar to Noma, there is a strict reservation system that inspired me to schedule a calendar entry 30 days in advance of my visit. I woke up in the middle of the night to catch that slim window of opportunity when reservation opened for the date I wanted to dine at the restaurant. Within minutes, the place was fully booked. Making dinner reservation is serious business.

I have to admit ditching my teammates for a late night fancy dinner felt a little weird. The discreet entrance opened into a tiny vestibule with chair on one end and elevator on the other which led directly to the restaurant upstairs. The set up felt like a private club. I walked through the pink neon lit tunnel into the dining room and was immediately excited about the evening ahead. The U-shape bar surrounded the open kitchen with five chefs working on various courses of the tasting menu. My appetite for great food and my culinary curiosity would be equally satisfied.

Nashville Good Eats

I paid a short visit to Nashville over the Easter long weekend and just got back home yesterday. Needless to say, I haven’t cooked or baked anything in what feels like an eternity. My dinner last night was rescued by homemade dumplings that I stashed away in the freezer. I debated briefly if I should defrost a container of ragu alla Bolognese but decided that I was not in the mood for pasta.

The primary purpose of my trip was training camp with my fellow speed skating teammates. Our team owner has a skate shop in Nashville and he took us to many of his favourite training locations including the abandoned Cornelia Fort Airport. I had a breakthrough with my concussion recovery last week and was well enough to participate in most of the training skates. I am happy to report that the exercising ceased to trigger concussion symptoms! I felt a little unwell from noisy restaurants and booming voice of the roller derby announcer but earplugs helped a lot. In between all the workouts, I managed to squeeze in some good eats around town.

The highlight of my dining weekend was a coveted reservation at The Catbird Seat. I will write more about that in my next post because there are so much I want to tell you. Today, I’ll show you a bunch of casual meals I enjoyed in Nashville.

Dinner. 15 Minutes. Go!

Main course salad is a mainstay of my diet especially on warmer days. It was more than a little disappointing that in just one week we enjoyed mild days of 20C before plummeted back to below freezing with added snow. It felt like adding insult to injury after the harsh winter we endured. No matter. I had my heart set on spring and I made it happen on my dinner plate.

Lucky for me, I was in no shortage of great ingredients that evoke memories of sultry evenings. Last Friday I went to Whole Foods with much anticipation. It was their annual one day sale on champagne mangoes. $9 for a case of 16 large juicy mangoes! I bought a case with a mix of both ripe and under-ripe ones, some for eating out of hand and others for green mango salad. An abundance of tropical fruit in April felt like an affordable luxury.

I created a kale green mango salad with toasted tempeh for dinner earlier this week. Without the smidgen of fish sauce I added to the peanut lime dressing, this is a vegan main source salad high on flavour and dense in nutrients. Did I also mention it was made in 15 minutes flat?

Egg White In A Box

I cannot keep up with my consumption of egg whites in candy making. With cakes and pastries, recipes often call for yolks and I end up with an abundance of egg whites. That’s easy to manage because the whites keep well in fridge. Yolks, on the other hand, tend to dry out or at least much more perishable. With many candy recipes calling for egg whites, I just can’t balance it all without being wasteful. And throwing away egg yolks is a crime in my eyes. I can only make so many batches of ice cream, pastry cream, and custard.

It’s only logical that I want to experiment with egg whites in a carton. It is cheaper than buying whole eggs and I would not need to worry about what to do with the yolks! I bought a carton of free run egg whites to experiment. The brochure claims that it is good for making meringue and angel food cake, both of which depends highly on how well the egg white whips to volume. I used the tried and true marshmallow recipe from The Liddabit Sweets Cookbook. This recipe gave me endless joy in the form of matcha kinako, strawberry orange flower, yuzu, marionberry amaretto, and ginger flavour homemade marshmallows. I am confident enough by now that I would not mess it up. The success and failure would be entirely dependent on the use of liquid egg white. This time, I would flavour the batch with 1 1/2 tablespoon of cocoa powder and 2 tablespoons of malted milk powder.

Valiant Effort: My First Kouign Amann

What was I thinking when I decided to conquer kouign amann last weekend? It all started with a step-by-step photo essay (with recipe) on food52. They made it look so approachable. Easy, even. Although I made laminated dough a few times in baking classes, I only made it once at home a long time ago. I am just not a huge fan of all that waiting for the dough to relax before another envelop fold. Somehow, the promise of buttery caramelized treat trumped all my hesitation and I tackled the recipe like a champ.

What is kouign amann you ask? Think of a croissant with caramelized sugar built into the buttery layers. So instead of folds of butter-bread, you have stacks of butter-bread-caramelized sugar. It’s really awesome actually. It is a little messy to make but I can think of many more challenging baking projects. With the weather forecast calling for thunderstorm on Sunday, I thought I had a whole day to make kouign amann at a leisurely pace.

Lighten Up

When the temperature climbs, I turn to lighter dishes. While my dinner can lighten up, I wish I can do the same with my mood. This week I’m finally making real progress on clearing those pesky concussion symptoms. Feeling “normal” is very much underrated until you can no longer take it for granted. One thing that I learned from previous concussion recoveries is that getting upset, especially crying, is horrible for healing. Unfortunately, a common symptom for concussion is depression. Put the two together and you can see the vicious cycle that feeds itself. As luck would have it, similar to my experience in 2012, I once again have to deal with break up and concussion recovery at the same time. I spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to detach myself from emotions even though I have endless amount of tears to shed. It’s almost a comical situation if I am not so sad about it all.

Without training nor a significant other, I have a lot of free time on weekends. I keep myself occupied with boring repetitive tasks in the kitchen. Last Saturday, I spent hours cutting up huge amounts of green papaya, cucumbers, carrots, daikons, and Vietnamese sausage into skinny matchsticks. They are the building blocks for summer rolls and green papaya salad. Exactly how much cutting and chopping did I do? Well, I had enough rolls and salads for 6 dinners. Ridiculous. No wonder my hand was sore from holding the knife for so long.

Delayed Take Two

Some recipes demand immediate action to transform words to food. Others can be a drawn out affair lasting months or years. I first made BAKED’s Chocolate Root Beer Bundt Cake last year after a year-long search for ingredients. I never wrote about it even though it was one of my most unusual tasty memories from that Saturday of tasting 19 different cakes. I wrote at length about my Mont Blanc, which was my last minute back up. The Mont Blanc was regal and ethereal. It only made the brown on brown confection all the more homely. I long to rave about the soda fountain fun of a cake that mixes root beer and chocolate in harmony.

But I didn’t because I was too embarrassed about the photographic evidence of my first attempt. No amount of food styling skill could save my sad looking cake. And so I forgot about it for months. Last night was one of those miserable rainy evenings. I finished my rehab exercises early and was looking for things to do. I looked in my pantry and realized I had all the ingredients for Chocolate Root Beer Bundt Take Two.

Chocolate Toffee Matzah Crunch

I try to make sense of chocolate toffee matzah crunch but cannot. These unleavened crackers are coated with crunchy toffee and rich chocolate and they are popping up in fancy grocers this time of year. I live in a neighbourhood with significant Jewish population so supermarkets dedicate aisles of kosher for Passover items for a while. Out of curiosity, I looked up the symbolism of matzah and that was how I started going “huh?”.

For those who are unfamiliar with Passover and do not feel like looking it up, it marks the exodus of Jews from Egypt. They left in such hurry that the bread had no time to rise so eating unleavened matzah is the custom for Passover. Matzah also symbolises humility whereas risen bread signifies arrogance. I did not know a simple piece of bread can be so loaded with cultural significance. In this context, it makes absolutely no sense to create a decadent sweet loaded with chocolate and toffee.