An easy appetizer for the weekend

I mentioned our scotch-tasting party in Monday’s post. Although Martin had the meal figured out in advance, we realized — just before our guests arrived — that we hadn’t thought about appetizers. Given that people were coming mid-afternoon to drink scotch, it seemed imperative to offer a substantial nosh that could sop up the booze and help our guests stay standing for dinner.

Enter my trusted supply of make-ahead caramelized onions. Since time was short and our menu featured lamb curry, coconut-zucchini curry and basmati rice, I picked up a few packages of Naan bread at the grocery store, covered it in a thick swath of thawed caramelized onions and a generous amount of shredded extra old cheddar cheese. I cranked the oven to 400F (200C) and popped in my concoction. Voila! I had a hearty appetizer prepared in less than 20 minutes (fortunately, I live close to the store!).

So, if this weekend you find yourself needing an appetizer to appease your Easter feasters while they await the ham and scalloped potatoes, feel free to fall back on this easy idea. You’ll find the directions for making caramelized onions in my original post.

Tell me about the instant appetizer that saved the day when you needed a last-minute offering for guests by replying in the comments section below.

High altitude bread baking

One of the things I enjoy most about my job is the interaction I have with my readers (In fact, it was a craving for more contact with the outside world that led me to begin this blog in the first place, so feel free to comment and ask questions as often as you like!)

As you may have noted, there’s a ‘?’ icon on the right hand side of each page of this blog. If you’ve never clicked on it, you might not know that it opens up an email form so that you can ask me a question. While some people have used this feature to ask for clarification or more info about something I’ve posted, every once in a while I get a question that I think deserves to be shared with more people. A question recently posed by Joyce from Saskatchewan fell into this category.

Joyce wrote:
I live in southwest Saskatchewan on the prairies. One of my sons moved to Calgary. When we visit I take my bread-making machine, as they love fresh bread. They live in the southwest part of the city up by the top of the Olympic ski jump. The bread that I make here is twice the size of what turns out there. Could the altitude - I think they are about 1500 feet higher there than we are here - make a difference? If so do you have any suggestions? Thanks.

The answer is that yes, altitude can greatly affect your kitchen activities. According to Susan Purdy, an expert on high altitude cooking:

“As the elevation rises, three major factors may cause a recipe to need adjustment in ingredients, cooking times, and/or temperatures. The higher in elevation you go:
1. The lower the boiling point of water
2. The faster liquids (and moisture in general) evaporate
3. The more quickly leavening gases expand”

Needless to say, moisture and leavening are both important when baking bread so elevation is certainly causing havoc with Joyce’s baking. Since the yeast is acting more quickly at a higher elevation, it sounds like the bread machine is allowing the bread to over-expand and then it is falling before the machine starts to bake. So, Joyce and other high altitude bakers, if your bread machine won’t allow you to cut back on the rising time, you may need to pull your dough out and shape by hand and bake the bread in the oven before it has a chance to over proof and fall.

The best source I’ve found for overall advice on high altitude cooking is Susan Purdy’s book called Pie in the Sky. She also has excellent info posted in an article at Epicurious. For advice specific to cake and cookie baking you can also check out the Crisco website for free.

Thanks again for your question Joyce!

More on men and cooking

In the weeks since I first wrote about the cooking habits of modern men, I’ve noticed many Internet searches often bring people to that particular blog post (the other topic everyone seems to love is gourmet cupcakes!). As often as several times a day, my blog stat chart indicates that someone arrives here after searching for information about men and cooking. It’s obvious that people are curious to know what men are up to in the kitchen. I only wish I could see who’s doing the searching. Is it over-tired women hoping that change is in the offing? Male home cooks looking for camaraderie and validation that what they are doing is normal and acceptable? I can only guess.

Last week I missed a press event held by GE to promote their new Café series of appliances (if it had been hosted by Jack Donaghy I would definitely have made an effort to attend!). Although I couldn’t attend, the publicist sent me the media kit, which contained more info about men in the kitchen. So, since you seem so interested, I’ll share the details with you here:

• 80% of Canadian men report that they shop for menu ingredients, prepare the house, serve guests and help with clean up when they and their spouses entertain

• 60% of men are involved in cooking when guests come over

• 53% of men say they would cook more often if their appliances had a many, professional look and feel. (BTW, ladies, the picture above is of a kitchen that GE thinks will make men feel right at home and encourage them to rattle pans more often).

According to publicist Laura Garcia, these findings were the result of a random, national telephone survey conducted in January. The responses of 1,002 Canadian adults were used to calculate these statistics.

Cooking vs. recipe testing

I went to chef school originally because I really love to cook. And after all these years, I have to say that I still truly enjoy my time in the kitchen. People are often surprised when they hear my test kitchen colleagues and I say that we enjoy cooking at home. In their minds, cooking all day at work would be more than enough to take the edge off the thrill. What these folks don’t realize is that recipe testing and cooking are similar but quite different activities.

Recipe testing is much slower than regular cooking and more constrained. When you test a recipe, you’re basically doing a science experiment that measures the limits of the chemical reactions and flavour results created by combining specific amounts of particular ingredients. A big part of recipe testing is evaluating each word (especially the verbs!) in a recipe method to ensure that anyone who can read will be able to follow the directions and have very similar results.

Cooking, by comparison, is free and easy! You can make substitutions, you don’t have to measure everything by volume and weight and angst about whether it would be better to call for ‘8 pickle slices’ or ‘1/2 jar sliced sandwich style pickles.’ No, when you cook you just get to create. That’s why after a day of thinking about, handling and tasting food, it’s still fun to cook at home. I can imagine that bus drivers get a similar thrill when they drive down the street without having to pull over at every block.

Then there’s recipe evaluation. That’s what sites like Leite’s Culinaria call recipe testing. In this case, people try published, presumably fully-tested recipes and recommend them (or not) to other readers. Unlike true recipe testing, this task is almost as simple (and fun) as cooking. You’re really just making sure that the recipe fulfills the promise of its title, makes the noted number of servings and tastes good. Great work if you can get it! If the recipe testing was done well, then the evaluations will always be good.

If you’re a cook who would like to dabble in recipe testing to transform your personal recipes into instructions that anyone can follow, you’ll need some basic tools to get started. Top on your list will be:

• Liquid and dry measuring cups and spoons

• A good scale (my favourite is electronic)

• A ruler and a flexible dressmaker’s tape measure

• A digital timer that counts up as well as down

We recently purchased a recipe calculator as well (it’s in the picture above) for the test kitchen. It’s a great tool for doing conversions between metric and imperial measures and a wonderful help when scaling up recipes.

Learning to cook

For everyone who enjoys cooking, there’s one dish that divides the time between when they were learning to cook and when they became someone who people acknowledge as a person who can cook. Quite a milestone!

The first dish I mastered came from a hardcover cookbook that my Aunt Doreen had cast aside. It had a lofty title like Great Dishes of France that should have intimidated a 12-year old but instead made me take it seriously. (In those days I believed that if information was in a book, it was sacred and special — I hadn’t read Shopaholic Takes Manhattan yet). Aunty Doreen’s cookbook was as thick as my grandmother’s family bible and just as impoverished for illustration. I remember thinking of the recipes in this book as so much more special and worthy than the ones in my mother’s Five Roses Cookbook and I took to studying my aunt’s book carefully.

I think I made quite a few things from that book but the one that I mastered, surprising no one as much as myself; was Chicken Marengo (that’s the version I made in the picture). At the time, I didn’t know this dish was connected to Napoleon Bonaparte but I knew that it was special because after I served it to them for dinner, my family looked at me in a new way.

I polled my Facebook group and foodie friends to find out what dishes they first mastered. Here are their answers.

• The first recipe I perfected, was shortbread cookies. I remember taking them — pretty classic butter, sugar and flour rounds, decorated with red and green glace cherries — to my mother who was visiting with a friend in the living room. Lavish praise ensued, and I was hooked. Who doesn’t like baking when the results are so pleasing?

Elizabeth Baird, Toronto, Ont.

• I’m embarrassed to admit it, but the first meal I mastered at a young age was Hamburger Helper!

Although, I remember a few mishaps in the cookie department — potato-chip cookies seemed like a good combination but never really came together well, then there was the shortbread made with coarse salt….

Regan Windsor, Sanford, Mba.

• I remember coming home from school for lunch to discover a dining room table lined with three to four different types of freshly baked homemade cookies. Once a week, my mom would bake up a selection to keep us happy at lunch and after school. That first decision to choose which cookie to have after lunch was a killer — chocolate chip, peanut butter, oatmeal, oatmeal raisin. Logically, the first recipe I mastered was the chocolate chip cookie. To this day, I follow the same recipe my mom pulled from her Canadian cookbook, which was so beautifully earmarked, with sugar, eggs and butter — a sign of a well-loved cookbook in our house.

Caroline Coulson, Toronto, Ont.

• I mastered making peanut brittle when I was nine. Watching melting sugar being transformed into amber liquid hooked me on cooking and baking. Sweet memories!

Norene Gilletz, Toronto, Ont.

• The first dish I mastered was chili. It’s so easygoing - measurements can be approximate - you can just add this and that and keep tasting until it’s about right. And it tastes even better the next day!

I knew I had mastered it when I won the Calgary Stampede Chili Cook-off at age 12. Not the kids’ cook-off, the grown-ups one! To be honest, I couldn’t even remember what exactly had gone into it!

Julie Van Rosendaal, Calgary, Alta.

• I was about 12 and I made this pineapple cheesecake. You know, the no-bake kind with gelatin and a tin of crushed pineapple? My Dad and my uncle Bob would polish off the 9” x 13” pan in one sitting.

Donna Paluk, Winnipeg Beach, Mba.

• My forte at the tender age of seven was cookies from no less than The Betty Crocker’s Girls and Boys Cookbook. I recall oatmeal chocolate chip were a triumph, shortbreads were a flop (given that I subbed out butter for “Betty Lou” Margarine — some neon-yellow nightmare my parents thought was better for us!) I’d sit my Curious George stuffed monkey on the counter and speak to him in my best Julia Child-inflected warble. It was love at first mix!

Mary Luz Mejia , Toronto, Ont.

• I gave my first dinner party at age 16…lasagna and Caesar salad. Friends still mention it and lasagna always takes me back there.

Ruth Daniels, Halifax, N.S.

• Believe it or not, the first recipe I made on my own (with my mother helping as needed) was bread. My sister and I took bread-baking as part of 4H Club in our early teens. I remember it was a braided loaf. It was my first encounter with the mysteries of yeast, kneading and egg wash. How wonderful it smelled and how proud I was to serve it to my family.

Later, when I had my own place after university, pasta with broccoli, tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese was a staple one-pot dish.

Julia Armstrong, Toronto, Ont.

• The first real meal I perfected (with only a little guidance from Mom) was Creamed Ham and Peas on Toast. I was determined to make it to earn my Housekeeping Badge as a Brownie (I was in Grade 3 or 4). My mom showed me how to make the white sauce (I had no idea at the time that it was the classical French Bechamel Sauce) and I added the rest.

This effort was to make up for my first, miserable failure — I made Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and Grilled Cheese Sandwiches — the soup boiled over; I burnt the sandwiches; and after Mom wiped up the soup and my tears, she taught me the best lesson: that mistakes in the kitchen are not the end of the world and are the best way to learn!

Anna Olson, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
What’s the first dish you mastered? Please tell me by using the comments section below.