New York vs. Dom's Belly: Days 1 and 2

Well, here I am on my yearly pilgrimage to NYC, this time accompanied a fellow grad student pal SJ, and of course, staying with my very generous friend LT.

Day 1

We start things off right by drinking a couple Sam Adams on the train.
We arrive at Penn Station by train at 9:30pm and head up to LT's in Harlem to drop off our stuff. We then make a beeline back to the Columbia area to grab gigantor slices at Koronet.

My slice:Sarah's slice:Om nom nom nom!
Then SJ's friend R takes us to 1020 for some beers. I have a Brooklyn Pilsner and a Hefeweizen.

Day 2

Breakfast (in the far right tail of the probability distribution for breakfast time) at Kitchenette. Our waitress, Ebony, loves my haircut and SJ's coat. We love her for providing us with omelettes, biscuits, cheesy grits, and freshly squeezed orange juice.

I heart places that assume you want hot sauce.
SJ takes pretty pictures.Work all afternoon like good grad student bees in a coffee shop, then grabbed some groceries at the West Side Market and headed back to LT's place to make dinner: risotto with spinach, sauteed cremini mushrooms, and smoked gouda.
Take note: it has garnish and is overexposed. This makes it fine dining.
More to come, as my belly continues to battle with the wonderful gastronomic Godzilla that is New York City.

Smells Like Burning

Two farmers market purchases last week conspired to make my first every chutney attempt happen: crazy spicy Jamaican hot peppers and mangoes. I'm not sure why I even bough the mangoes. Probably because they were really cheap and that's great but its always a lottery with market mangoes. Will they suck (probably) or will they be an awesome find (not likely)?

These mangoes sucked.
The hot peppers were bought on a whim. A pile of green Jamaican ones and a some really hot red ones from Guyana. I decided to attempt spicy mango chutney with my suckey mangoes and hot peppers. Oh and some rather hard pears that had been in the fridge for a long time but still tasted pretty alright. There's some other stuff in there too.
I loosely followed this recipe but with pears instead of apples. I used 3 mangoes because their crappiness mostly meant that there wasn't a lot of usable mango flesh on them. I also used less sugar (1 cup and would probably only use half next time as it was still very sweet).
For spice I added two of the green Jamaican hot peppers and one hot red pepper. I really wasn't sure of how the burns-for-five-minutes-when-you-touch-your-tongue-to-it level of hottness was going to translate in the chutney so I didn't want to go totally overboard. While I was chopping the peppers up really tiny my eyes started watering and my nose started burning, I didn't think that was a good sign.
Everything into the pot (except the spices and lemon juice which are added at the end)It took about half an hour for everything to simmer down and thicken. For much of that it smelled like hot peppers through the kitchen and was irritating to breath. In the end though the spice mellowed out to just a pleasant after burn and I had two jars of delicious, delicious chutney! Seriously, so delicious.

Pie Club: Toronto Chapter

Last Saturday night, 116 Oxford St. was lucky enough to play host to Nate and Jess, who brought not only joviality and merriment, but also a hallowed old tradition from whence they came (the whence being Kingston). This tradition is Pie Club, and on Saturday (which was apparently National Pie Day - score!), the Toronto Chapter of Pie Club debuted with fantastical success. The rules of Pie Club are simple: make a pie you've never attempted before (sweet or savoury, we don't discriminate) and bring it to share. Also, don't talk about Pie Club. Alternatively, talk about Pie Club constantly to anyone who will listen. I made spinach fatayer (little Lebanese "pies") from the cookbook Ed's grandma used to use, which was bequeathed to Eddy and his sister Katherine by their Aunt Sandra this last Christmas. Behold:

Fatayer doughLemon juice and walnutsChoppin' onionsSpinachAssembling the fatayerAssembly complete!Baked and delicious.
And the rest of the pies (well most of them; I'm pretty sure that there were a bunch more things, including Cara's brilliant apple pie shots, that didn't get photographed because I got too drunk on pie to care):

Ed's "pop tarts" pre-bakingAnd post-bakingNate and Jess being merryBlueberry pie (pre-baking)Lingonberry pie (pre-baking)Quiche with swiss chard, caramelized red onion, and goat cheesePecan pieRustic apple pieSweet potato pieVeggie pot pieS'more pie
Ungh. I just finished eating some of the leftovers from this insane pie potluck and looking at all of these pictures brings me back to how ridiculously full I was afterwards. Phooooooooooo. Hope you all enjoyed looking at the spoils of pie war!

Phooooooooooooooo.

Man, Emily and I suck at doing this regularly.

I've got all these pictures of squash ravioli and soup that we made back in the fall when the farm share was raining squashes upon us, but I have lost motivation to post them. Perhaps you shall be rewarded with a squash post sometime in the near future. For now, I have promised my good pal Kyle that I would flog about Vietnamese noodle soup, so here it is.

I grew up with the wonderful smell of pho permeating the house, so to avoid ruining my childhood by screwing this up, the first time I ever made the stuff by myself, I emailed my mom about 3000 times asking questions. Here's the veganized version of my mom's pho recipe (let's skip over the fact that the veganization of this recipe might horrify my mom). The units are of course mom-style (i.e. there's no precise measurements), so you'll have to experiment a bit.

Ingredients:
onions, ginger, stock veggies, anise stars, rice noodles, green onion, cilantro, bean sprouts, lemon or lime slices, preferred protein, Sriracha and hoisin sauce.

1) Peel and halve a bunch of onions and slice some ginger lengthwise to expose the fleshy bits. Roast onions and ginger at about 400 degrees for 30-40 minutes. This step makes your house smell like heaven.

2) While the stuff is roasting, prepare the rest of your stock veggies (and chicken and beef bones if you're not veg). I've had good success with rutabaga (What the hell else is this disgusting turnipy horror good for? I welcome any recipes that will convince me it doesn't suck), carrots, and broccoli stems. Peel and dice to a size that allows for maximal surface area exposure to water without being so small it disintegrates after 5 minutes of cooking.

3) When roasting is done, toss the onions and ginger into the stock pot with all your veggies as well as a handful of anise stars. The anise stars in combination with the roasted onion and ginger really make it. Fill 'er up with water.

4) Let heat to a boil, then lower to a simmer. Simmer for a few hours. This step continues the "house smells awesome" trend.

5) While stock is going, prepare the rest: cook rice noodles, chop green onion and cilantro, prepare protein (I usually use some sort of tofu or "chicken").

6) Drain stock into another pot and season. I usually add some salt or soy sauce (fish sauce if you're not veg) and a bit of sugar to taste.

7) Serve broth over rice noodles. Let people dress their own bowls, and use Sriracha and hoisin for dipping.

Pic-tors!

And a bonus picture of the salsa I made with some of the leftovers from dinner (canned tomatoes, finely sliced onion, cilantro, lemon juice, hot sauce, salt, sugar.

Fall joy

Well the last month has been a whirlwind. The main food-related highlight was my visit to Whittamore's farm in Markham, near the Rouge River with Greg, Michelle, and Arthur. They usually have pick-your-own berries, and we went there looking for some late season strawberries and raspberries. Alas, we were too late and the first frost had just happened a few days before, killing off the last crop.

We did, however, race wheelbarrows with a mom and her kid, pick up some pumpkins and amazing honeycrisp apples, and stuff our faces with farmfresh cheese curds, biscuits, rye crackers, and onion jam. Even if you think onion jam sounds gross, you should give it a try. Think caramelized onions with sugar added till they're gooey, and spread across a cracker with some aged cheddar. A-ma-zing.

And now for photos of said adventure...

Pretty pumpkins from the pumpkin patch:

Me, showcasing my amazing picture-ruining talents:
Me and Arthur, mid-wheelbarrow race:
Tiny pioneery-lookin' church on the property:Greg looking sad because the berries are all dead. We actually ate a couple of full-sized-but-still-green strawberries that had been sheltered from the frost by leaves, and they were delicious! I can only imagine that they would have been amazing given the opportunity to ripen.
Leaving Whittamore's:Then we went to Michelle's parents beautiful home in Scarborough, where I rolled in the leaves:Mrs. Hilscher was nice enough to supply us with bundles of her homegrown chard:And then we finally arrived back downtown with all our booty:All in all, a lovely fall foodventure. Up next, butternut squash madness!

For some reason I've been baking like mad the last week. I baked two brownies, mint chocolate cupcakes and a cake of the same (these were a pretty big hit) and then for my friend's birthday today I made a double layer chocolate cake with creamy peanutbutter frosting. The cake and frosting recipe both came out of the Sinfully Vegan cookbook, which has so far not steered me wrong.
I made the two cake pieces last night. Then I cut off the rounded tops and frosted the first half and added chopped dark chocolate and peanuts:
Then I added the top layer and finished frosting. I used a plastic bag with a hole cut in it to frost around the top edge (which in the end was a little much, decoration wise). I covered the top with more chopped chocolate and peanuts and then pressed the remaining chopped peanuts to the sides of the cake. In the end it looked like this:
And damn was it tasty!

Emily

P.S. sorry for the crappy photos. I'll figure out how to take better indoor food photos one of these days. Also my camera lens is kind of dirty and I have nothing to clean it with.

I have been massively out-flogged lately... but I will now break my long silence for pizza and brownies.

I am back in room-mate land again, living with Katie in a lovely, homey uptown apartment whose windows offer a beautiful vantage of fights outside the Fox and Fiddle. I am once again nice and close to my friends and we've had some pretty good dinners and potlucks here in the last couple months.
Tonight Katie, Owen and I made pizza and peanutbutter brownies. Both turned out delicious!

The pizza, on homemade whole wheat crust, had tomatoes, sundried tomatoes, green pepper, artichoke hearts, black olives, hot peppers and caramelized onion. One side with smothered in the "teese" I bought in Portland. Vegan cheese generally sucks a lot but teese is pretty not bad and if you turn up the heat enough it actually melts. It tastes pretty passably like mozzarella. The other half had some goat cheese on it.


The peanut-butter brownie recipe came from the cookbook "Sinfully Vegan" and was dense, chewy chocolately deliciousness. The peanutbutter swirl part is peanutbutter, maple syrup and silken tofu whipped together in the food processor then swirled into the brownie batter with a knife.