Sucre à la crème

I went back to Ottawa for a few days last week and found that the brilliant canopy of scarlet and canary leaves I’d walked under near my mom’s house in late September had collapsed to the ground into deep, brown heaps. With the best of fall over in eastern Ontario, I had to content myself with afternoon walks in tepid sunlight and listening to the strangely satisfying sound of fallen leaves crunching under my feet.

I found more comfort in a big slab of sucre à la crème that my mom brought home from the office one day. Sucre à la crème, or sugar cream in English, is a traditional fudge from Quebec. The little squares of pure cream sugar, sometimes flavoured with a hint of maple, are a rich, sweet but simple treat that really seems to suit the cool fall season. Luckily for me, the wife of one of my mom’s colleagues, Louise Perron, excels at the art of making sucre à la crème. She regularly sends batches of it to the office to satisfy the many sweet-tooths on staff – including my mom who manages to bring home some to share…most of the time. Louise’s recipe is prepared in the microwave, making this the ultimate quick sugar fix.

Sucre à la crème Louise

1 cup soft brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
2 Tbsp butter
1 cup 35% cream
1 tsp pure maple extract (or vanilla)

In a large microwave-safe bowl, stir together the brown sugar, white sugar and cream. Microwave at full power for three minutes. Stir the ingredients and microwave at full power for another three minutes. Stir the ingredients again and microwave for another three minutes. Add the maple extract (or vanilla) and the butter. Using an electric mixer, beat the mixture for around two minutes. Check the texture and beat more if needed.

Pour the mixture into a square glass baking dish and allow to set. This recipe does not call for the mixture to be refrigerated but many others do, for around 1 hour or so. When set, you can cut this into squares to serve but Louise suggests leaving the sucre à la crème in a block until just before you are ready to serve, or eat, it because it will keep fresh longer.

Give peas a chance!

As a child, I loved the fairy tale of the princess and the pea.

I think it was idea of sleeping high atop 20 mattresses that intrigued me more than the tiny vegetable that caused the princess such a bad night’s sleep but I guess I’ve admired peas ever since.

I’ve been sadly neglecting my blog of late for no other reason than I’ve been doing too much cooking and eating and not enough writing during the fall harvest season.

One of the late summer recipes I’ve been wanting to share comes from Canada’s über chef Michael Stadtländer who is renowned for his ability to elevate less celebrated vegetables like the pea to high art.

I’ve been whipping up his version of cauliflower & pea soup with brown nutmeg butter for a couple of years now and it has become one of my favourite dishes to make in the early fall when the days are cooler but not quite cold enough for those dead-of-winter root-veggie-heavy soups.

I like the simple combination of creamy cauliflower and fragrant nutmeg butter studded with playful green peas that pop in my mouth. This soup is perfect dish for those who, like me, are not quite ready to dig out sweaters and scarves and leave summer behind.

Cauliflower Soup with Fresh Peas, Chervil and Nutmeg Butter

½ head medium-sized cauliflower
750 ml chicken stock
1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
2 Tbsp butter
1 generous handful fresh blanched green peas (or frozen)
1 Tbsp chopped chervil (if you can’t find this herb, use parsley)
2 Tbsp 35% cream
1 bay leaf
Brown nutmeg butter (recipe follows)

Sauté onion in butter. Add the cauliflower, roughly chopped (reserve some florets for garnish). Over low heat, add chicken stock and bay leaf. Simmer for 45 minutes.

Remove the bay leaf and add the cream. Purée and strain the soup.

Meanwhile, blanch the peas in salted water, for a maximum of two minutes. (They should soften, but retain their sweetness.) Lightly steam the remaining cauliflower.Season the florets with nutmeg butter and chervil. Pour soup into bowls and garnish with peas and cauliflower.

Nutmeg Butter

In a hot pan, melt 1 Tbsp butter. Remove it from the heat, add freshly grated nutmeg to taste and reserve. Note, you can freeze any leftover butter for later use.

Autumn Squash

Autumn gourds & squash, Byward Market, Ottawa, Early October 2008

Pesto, presto!

After another summer of cooking with fresh basil, I’ve decided it is the prima donna of herbs. Out in the garden, if it gets too much sun, it scorches, but plant it in a place with too little light and it becomes sullen and refuses to flourish.

When basil gets into the kitchen, it can become truly demanding and unreasonable when it doesn’t receive the attention it commands. Add it to hot dishes too early and it loses its flavour. Try to dry it for later use and it shrinks into a tasteless heap. Use too much of it and basil’s strong taste can easily overwhelm other ingredients and become more irritating than enjoyable. And don’t even think about letting this leafy diva languish in the fridge for more than a couple days or its emerald-coloured plume of leaves will quickly shrivel up and turn to a brown-green mush. “You should have used me first,” basil seems to protest, “before cooking with all that parsley and thyme.”

I’ve learned the hard way that basil will settle for nothing less than centre stage when it appears in recipes but, like all talented performers, if you can tame its temperamental nature, the results are usually memorable.

The challenge is keeping the green princess happy so that she sings, rather than sulks, when she hits the plate. And that usually involves a strong chorus of ingredients to back her up. The Italians figured this out long ago when they invented pesto. The classic easy-to-make oil and herb sauce hails from the Ligurian coast of Italy. Its pungent cast of olive oil, garlic, pine nuts and parmesan cheese complement basil brilliantly.

I like making pesto (and its French cousin pistou) in late summer to use up the last big bunches of fresh basil from the garden and farmer’s markets. When frozen in small batches, pesto is great way to preserve basil’s allegro summer tang and keep this leading lady of the herb garden performing well into the early winter. I toss it with pasta, stir it into mashed potatoes, add big dollops of it to tomato-based soups and spoon it over vegetables that need a bit of kick. Last week, my latest batch of pesto starred in an easy mid-week dinner atop a heap of steamed fresh green beans served alongside grilled pork chops.

Pesto

4 cups packed fresh basil leaves, washed if needed, and roughly chopped
1/2 cup pine nuts, toasted until golden and cooled

1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
2-4 garlic cloves, minced1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

In a food processor, purée basil with garlic. Slowly add in the oil while the processor is running. (You may need to adjust the amount of oil depending on what consistency you like. Less oil will give you a chunkier sauce, more will give you a creamier version.) Add in pine nuts and Parmesan cheese. Process until smooth. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Note: Pesto can be made 2 days ahead and chilled covered, or frozen up to 2 to 3 months.

My Cheatin' Heart

I admit that I cheat every now and then. Oh, not romantically or on tests or taxes but in the kitchen. Most people who know me think I make everything from scratch, especially considering how enthusiastically I can criticize processed foods. But those who know me really well know I sometimes take shortcuts.

Apparently I’m in good company. The oh-so-proper British cook Delia Smith has just released a book offering product-by-product recipes and tips on how to cheat in the kitchen. But good luck finding some of the brands she uses if you don’t live in England. When I cheat, I usually do it with a good old American classic, Campbell’s soup.

Despite all the hand-wringing in the press these days over processed foods and their effect on our health, I’ve had a long relationship with the red and white can that trumps nutritional facts. Like any illicit affair, I know it's bad for me, but I just can’t break it off.

It’s all my grandmother’s fault. Campbell’s soup figures prominently in her culinary repertoire and I can’t blame her. She was a young woman raising a family at the dawn of the processed food era when canned goods and their ilk heralded the liberation of women from the kitchen. My grandmother was raised on a farm and knew well the labour involved in growing, harvesting and preparing food from scratch. I’ve never asked her, but I imagine that, as a young mom filling her shopping basket with canned goods in those early days, the thought of speeding up dinner with processed food must have been as unbelievable but thrilling as the idea of man walking on the moon – which wouldn’t happen for a few years yet.

Unlike my generation of cooks, my grandma feels no shame in cracking open a can of Campbell’s. She uses it in almost all her signature recipes. Corn chowder (Cream of Corn soup), chicken stew (Cream of Mushroom soup) and her piece de resistance, creamy chicken vol-au-vents (Chicken a la King soup and a tin of Green Giant-brand sweet peas)

When I cheat, like I did this week, my Campbell’s soup of choice is invariably Tomato Rice. It reminds me of childhood Thanksgivings and the soup my mother made with leftover turkey. (Mom cheats, too!) We’d dine large on turkey-tomato-rice soup for almost a week – and never tired of it.

Some folks are probably shocked to know my secret. But I like to think it takes a strong cook to ‘fess up to taking shortcuts in the kitchen. I’ll go one step further and brag that I’ve even updated my mom’s signature cheat recipe for tomato-rice soup by using local seasonal produce to jazz it up. The result is the culinary equivalent of a quick nooner in a motel off the Interstate – or the perfect lunch for a cool late-summer day.

Cheater’s Tomato Rice Soup with Roast Chicken and Fresh Basil
1 10-oz can Campbell’s Tomato Rice soup
1 cup roast chicken meat (cooked) cut into bite-sized pieces
1 medium-size tomato, diced
2 Tbsp (or to taste) fresh basil leaves, cut in a chiffonade
1 Tbsp heavy cream

In a small pot, prepare soup according to directions on the can. While soup is warming, add chicken, tomato. Heat soup to desired temperature. Remove from heat. Add in basil and cream and serve with a crusty bun or crackers.

Salad Days 2008

Summer 2008 - some of the yummy things Michelle made and ate: grilled salmon salad; chilled psychedelic pink borscht; watercress vichyssoise; parsley potatoes Provençal; tomato-basil fried rice; blackberry-peach-ginger cobbler; eggplant pasta; Tokyo-style avocado-arugula salad; rubbarb crisp with Devon cream.

Flour Power

Despite being a city girl at heart, I’ve long harboured romantic notions about living in an old stone mill out in the country – complete with quaint waterwheel – but I’ve never given much thought to how flour actually got made back in the old days when farmers had to haul their grain in for processing.

So, during a recent trip to Ottawa, I was keen to visit one of the few remaining mills in Canada still producing flour in much the same way it did back in the mid-1800s. Watson's Mill was built alongside the Rideau River in 1860 in the picturesque town of Manotick and has been milling flour from locally grown wheat for almost 150 years.

While most other mills in North America have fallen into ruin or been converted into modern restaurants, museums or private residences, Watson’s Mill still has a lot of its original equipment, thanks in large part to Harry Watson, who owned and operated it as a working grist mill from 1946 until the mid-1960s.

Long before the local food movement had people clamouring for regional products or food scientists re-discovered the nutritional benefits of stone-ground wheat (author Michael Pollen paints an especially compelling portrait of what we lost when we stopped milling with stone in his book In Defense of Food), the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority purchased the mill and restored the millstones and other machinery to their original operating condition, including the water turbines which drive the millstone up to 120 revolutions a minute.

That’s enough power to produce the whole-wheat flour used to make the giant loaves of bread sold at the mill on weekends. Also available for purchase on a daily basis are two-, five-, 10 and 50-pound sacks of flour. The day I visited, the volunteers who mill the wheat couldn’t get these bagged fast enough for enthusiastic customers.

When it preserved the mill for its original use, the conservation authority could never have predicted how intense the demand for local, environmentally friendly products would become. According to staff, Watson’s Mill had about 24,000 visitors last year, an increase of 60 percent over 2006. In response, it expects to produce five tons of the powdery stuff this year. The wheat, incidentally, comes from a farm just outside Ottawa owned by the Ruiter family, some of whom I went to elementary school with.

Much of the newfound zeal for local flour has, no doubt, been fuelled by the recent 100-mile diet craze. After all, sourcing home-grown onions and carrots is a piece of cake in most parts of Canada – at least during the summer -- but when was the last time you baked bread using 100-percent stone-milled whole-wheat flour ground in your community from wheat harvested nearby?

While I only partially subscribe to the 100-mile philosophy myself, after watching grain flow through the mill’s loud orchestra of millstones, drums and chutes, I felt the baker’s flutter of delight at the thought of experimenting with such a pure, pre-industrial-revolution product. At the same time, after witnessing the amount of effort it takes to make flour the traditional way, I also felt an overwhelming sense of responsibility about not wasting it. The result? I put a lot of thought into what recipes would be truly mill flour-worthy. I didn’t want to adulterate the flour with too many processed, modern or exotic ingredients. My goal was to capture and celebrate the historical spirit of this novel foodstuff.

Not being a bread baker, I decided it would be too ambitious to try and make a loaf, especially since I had been warned that whole-wheat loaves can turn out very rustic and dense – think spelt bread. I had a few false starts – a batch of mixed berry muffins and a lemon blueberry coffee cake that didn’t quite meet expectations.

In the end, I channeled my inner pioneer and settled on a simple recipe for apple oatmeal pancakes. This produced a small, dense, but surprisingly moist, stack that I served with pats of butter and a big splash of maple syrup. Add to this a couple of fried eggs, a few slices of thick country bacon and a hot pot of coffee, and your inner pioneer will be ready for a hard day of farm work or stone milling.

Chunky Apple Oatmeal Pancakes

¾ cup whole-wheat flour
1/8 cup oats
2 Tbsp oat bran
½ tsp cinnamon
2 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
¼ cup raisins (optional)
½ cup finely chopped apple
1 cup pure apple juice

Combine dry ingredients. Add raisins and chopped apple. Stir in apple juice until dry ingredients are moistened. Heat a non-stick skillet over medium heat. Pour batter into the skillet. (Using a ¼ cup measure for each pancake, you should get approximately 6-8 pancakes.) Cook until bottoms are brown. Flip pancakes and brown the other side. Serve with a pat of butter and maple syrup.