52 Parties in 52 weeks

The Birthday

I’m getting old. No. I am old. People are going to want to mark my senescence with some sort of celebration. It’s going to happen. I want it to be on my terms. In the past, nothing has made me happier than packing the house full of friends, with cake, and food. As I age, I increasingly want to be alone. But giving up the chance to party? I’m not that old!

The theme: Bollywood Brunch

Menu:

Iced Chai

Minted fruit salad

Indian Spiced Omelettes

Potato cakes

Srikhand Ice cream sandwiches

6pm

Inspiration: Pimms Cups

The essence of summer in a glass. Sparkling lemonade, cucumbers, strawberries, citrus and spiced gin. What more could you want?

If you’re nice, I might like you enough to make one for you.

7pm

June 19: Waffling

As this year draws to a close, I’ve been flipping through the inspiration posts, because I would like to make as many of them as is possible before my time here ends. I can across the ice cream planes, the waffles that taste like ice cream cones, and decided why not.

The recipe is in the inspiration post, so I’m not going to duplicate it here. I am however going to tell you that even though the instructions say “Stir together the egg white, sugar and vanilla” what they want you to do is whip the egg white to soft peaks.

There is no leavening agent in the recipe, so if you just stir, you’ll end up with sorry waffles indeed. Also, I ended up adding 3/4 cup of water to the batter, because otherwise it’s more paste than batter, and my waffle iron doesn’t cope well with paste.

Beyond that - the waffles are perfect with ice cream and a peach tangerine smoothie the colour of a sunrise. Ideal for lazy Saturday mornings when all you want to do it lie in and watch shadows chase each other across the ceiling and relish the fact that it’s summer, properly.

7pm

She wasn’t bitter. She was sad, though. But it was a hopeful kind of sad. The kind of sad that just takes time.

Via To Write Love on Her Arms: Behind The Scenes

7pm

June 19: Brunch Inspiration

I’m always a little afraid to try Japanese food, but honestly, how difficult could this be?

8pm

June 12: Pancake Love

I haven’t really entertained since my return from London. Part of me really enjoyed being on my own, doing my own thing, on my own time without having to be accountable to anyone for anything. It’s not something I feel I have the luxury of in this city. Since my return, life has been a bit of a trip. There have been a number of surprises, and pleasant or not, I hate surprises. It’s mostly because I’m a bit of a control freak - okay, I’m a total control freak. Things that I can’t change don’t sit well with me, at all. As a result of this recent string of surprises, I lapsed into a bit of an antisocial bubble. It’s not like me, but it does happen.

Mercifully, I’ve snapped out of it, mostly. I do occasionally have my super anti social moments, and will probably continue to do so as I deal with the repercussions of said surprises. That said, brunches are on!

I was feeling particularly lazy on Saturday morning, and while I had planned to do a grocery run and make omelettes, bed and my pile of Winterson texts were just so much more appealing. While in London I rekindled my love of text, and I’m finding it rejuvenates and restores me far more efficiently than anything else. Of course, this was also the perfect excuse to skip spinning (which terrifies me!).

Eventually I convinced myself to roll out of bed and set about making brunch. I knew JM and JT were coming, with a plus one each. Since JM lists pancakes as his breakfast food of choice, I figured why not. I make pancakes using Alton Brown’s base recipe, which I tweak contingent on the ingredients. The pancakes I made today had coconut milk instead of cows milk, a hit of cinnamon, a kiss of vanilla and were littered with shards of green apple and asian pear.

For 5 people’s worth of pancakes:

3 cups of flour

3 cups of milk

3 eggs

3 tbsp of melted butter

3 tsps baking powder

a big pinch of salt

a big pinch of cinnamon

1 tbsp of vanilla extract

1 large green apple, sliced

1 large asian pear, sliced

1. Combine the eggs, milk, melted butter and vanilla in a bowl. Whisk to homogenize.
2. Dump in the flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. Whisk until just combined. Lumps are absolutely fine.
3. Heat a pan over medium heat and just brush with oil/butter. When the pan is hot, pour on a ladle worth of batter and cover the surface with fruit. You can add as much or as little as you’d like.
4. When the surface of the pancake is cratered with bubbles, flip it and cook for another 45ish seconds, just to take the raw edge off the fruit.
5. Flip back over, and serve with butter, syrup and more fruit.

Huge thanks for JM for bringing the syrup, and to JT for bringing the strawberries :)

8pm

May 08: Just like mom used to make

Apple pie is one of those things that some people associate with home, and family and mom. Few things say home as well as pie, so much so that my real estate agent will light pie scented candles and buy a pie to put on the counter at every home he stages.

This weekend is mother’s day, and for the first time in years, my mother and I will be in the same country when it happens. I will be spending the day with her, but we’ll be working together. It’s better than nothing. Like everyone else, I have a complicated relationship with my mother. On the one hand, I know she’s an individual, with a personality, and needs and wants of her own, and that I should be supportive and encouraging and such. However, on the other hand, I walk around with the expectation that even though I don’t always offer her any sort of unconditionality, she should extend it to me.

In other ways, my relationship with my mother has informed large parts of my life, particularly the way I entertain. The few traditions that we do uphold are focused around hospitality, and around the fact that creating the perfect experience for your guests is the ultimate goal worth making sacrifices for. This means always having enough supplies such that extra guests can be accommodated with little to no effort. It means going out of your way to source things that you know will make them more comfortable/happier. It means stocking their favorites ahead of your own, and looking out for their best interests.

Today, in order to celebrate the weekend where we deliberately chose to remember the happier things about our lives with our mothers, I made a batch of cinnamon caramel apple waffles instead. Given how easy waffles are to make, I’m a little disappointed i myself that I don’t make them more. The batter is no more difficult than pancake batter, and there’s no flipping involved. Crepes are more complicated and I make them more often. I guess it’s because I’ve always pretended that waffle irons are difficult to clean, but that’s just not true. They just need a quick wipe down and they’re done.

To make the waffles I took a standard waffle recipe (2.5 cups flour, 2 cups milk, 4 egg yolk, 1 tbsp baking powder, 1/2 tsp salt, 1 cup of veg oil, all stirred together, then lightened with 4 softly peaked egg whites) and stirred half a cup of warm caramel syrup into the milk, and added a big pinch of cinnamon. Once the batter was in the waffle iron I topped it w/ some thinly sliced apple before leaving them to cook. It turned out pretty gorgeously. Next time, I may swap out half the oil for apple sauce. Apparently the house smelled like pie. Mission accomplished.

8pm

Inspiration: Childhood Favourites

I hated eggplant as a child, with a passion that still surprises me. The strange, bland taste of it, the weird too slimy, or crunchy spongy texture of it, the fact that it isn’t hugely nutrient rich made it easy to dislike. I refused to eat anything that contained identifiable pieces of it, which didn’t sit well with my parents who both adore it.

Of course, they did what good parents do, and tricked me into eating it. Growing up in the middle east, Lebanese food was cheap, and easily available. That said, it’s even cheaper to make at home. The notion of going to the store to buy hummus still weirds me out because it’s super easy to make. We always had a jar of tahina, a clay colored sesame seed paste that is utterly divine, sitting in the fridge for when we wanted a super quick mezze spread to tame the afternoon munchies.

Mutabal, or baja ghanoush is dead easy to make, and the smoky, salty, creamy almost but not quite fatty texture of it is something I will never stop loving. It is perfection, laced with a glass green, peppery olive oil and a big pinch of earthy paprika and scooped up with flat bread fresh from the oven. I could eat it for every meal in the summertime, and will definitely be making it for at least one al fresco brunch this year.

10am

Inspiration: Sweet Tart

Given my colonial upbringing, I don’t have a lot of strong food memories of more traditional Indian foods, because I didn’t really encounter them growing up, and in all honestly, sometimes they just sound really strange.

One of my staffers at the restaurant hailed from the western indian state of Gujurat, via South Africa. He was by far one of the most dedicated and talented people I’ve ever had the pleasure of hiring. As such, when we (my parents and I) like people who work for us, we will go a little bit out of our way to ensure they adore working for us, as much as we enjoy having them. One sneaky way we do this is by making them their favourite foods. (Aside: Growing up in a household where guests are treated like gods, and where hospitality matters more than anything else, makes transitioning to a space where hospitality is a business confusing. Clients become a weirdly extended family, and you end up treating staff like offspring and siblings. It’s a strange, strange phenomenon.) His favourite food was mango shrikhand, served with freshly made pooris.

To me, the notion of super creamy mango flavoured yogurt, combined with deep fried whole wheat flat bread was just plain weird. I love yogurt, but I like it best in it’s light, tart, natural state. I’m also a bit averse to fried dough in general. Still, my mother made it for him, and he insisted I try some. To be polite, and because I’m a bit of a pushover, I did. The combination is actually mindblowingly delicious.

The heat and the nutty fattiness of the bread combines incredibly well with the tangy sweet creamy cool richness of the yogurt, creating an oral sensation that is at once piping hot and refreshingly cold, blissfully sweet and pleasingly tart. It still sounds wierd, but it’s actually quite heavenly.

I was thinking about it the other day, while contemplating making frozen yogurt. I like fro yo, but I’ve had the best results using my vitamix that blitzes things into a beautiful oblivion, which results in a creamy sweet frozen product. Regular blenders have no hope of accomplishing this, and so you get grainy things riddled with ice shards. I reasoned however, that if i drain off most of the liquid in the yogurt, leaving mostly milk solids, fat and protein, that creamy frozen state of being will be much easier to accomplish.

I see shrikhand ice cream sandwiches at a future climbing dinner.

10am

April 28 - Super healthy 1 pot dinner.

Last Wednesday, after my final driver’s ed class (I know, it was a stupid thing to do to myself) I was utterly exhausted. I’d left work earlier, to say a final good bye to @hanzhansen and WH as they left Toronto forever, for VanCity. I ended up taking 4 bottles of the lovely gewurztraminer and a box of things back with me, which meant carrying them to class and then carrying them home. Needless to say I was completely wiped out by the time I got home.

Mercifully, my incredible room mate @_emy had graciously taken care of all of the prep work required to make this super easy, very healthy dinner. I’d planned it, because Wednesday dinners have also become rock climber dinners, and they more than anyone else need the high quality protein and carbs that this meal provides. Plus it’s inexpensive, chock full of antioxidants and so easy to put together on a night when you’re dead on your feet.

I have posted a variant of this recipe, but figured a quick rehash wouldn’t hurt. For 4 adults wash and soak 2 cups of rice. You can use any kind you like. I generally use a basmati, because that’s what my family has been using for ages, but you can use short grain rice, brown rice, or whatever works for you. The minimum soak time for rice, in my house is 15 minutes, but don’t soak it for longer than a couple of hours or the grains will start to fall apart.

While the rice is soaking, roughly chop a carrot or two, a couple of well washed ribs of celery and an onion. You want the dice to be the same size as the beans you’re using. You can also add peppers and spinach to this mix. Heat an equal quantity of olive oil and butter in a pan that will be large enough to hold both the cooked rice, and the beans. See my previous post for details on the combined use of fat, or check out Nina Plank’s book on Real Food.

When the fat is hot, add a big pinch of red chili flakes, a tsp of cumin powder and all the veg. Saute over medium high heat until the onions are just starting to turn gold, and the carrots and celery are tender.

While the veg is cooking, open and drain a can of beans. I like black beans for the anthocyanins and for the fact that they impart a lovely color to the cooked rice. Once the veg is where you want it to be, tip in the beans, and the drained rice. Stir gently to disperse the veg and beans through the rice. Refill the can with water to swirl our any remaining colour and pour it in. You want the water level to just cover the rice, so depending on the size of the can you may need a little bit more. Add a big pinch of salt to the pot, and some fresh chopped thyme or tarragon. Cook, partially covered for approx 15 minutes, or until all the water is absorbed. Once that happens, fluff the rice with a fork, and you’re ready to serve. I set this on the table with a jar of salsa and some shredded Colby cheese.

NOTE: As an alternate to water, you can use a blend of 1/2 water, and 1/2 coconut milk for a lovely floral touch. You can also use any kind of stock, or tomato juice for the rice. This is a super versatile dish, and also works well as a side, if you’re cooking animal protein and need a starch.

It’s quick, cheap and easy. The perfect dinner for hungry friends, cooks who are a little dead on their feet and incredibly easy to load into the dishwasher. What more could I ask for?

7pm