Other than making my turkey-stuffed stuffing, the other thing that got me thinking about blogging today was this article in the New York Times: Food Rules: You’re Dietary Dos and Don’ts, which I found thanks to my (still) favourite blog: Lifehacker. My favourite: “If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re not hungry”.
Turkey-stuffed Stuffing
That’s right, who needs stuffing-stuffed turkey when you can have turkey-stuffed stuffing?
With a low-key Thanksgiving dinner for two, a stuffed turkey was really not an option, so, loving stuffing as I do, I went for the next best: stuffed turkey breast…except (again, loving stuffing as I do) I didn’t modify the quantity of stuffing. Instead, I flattened the turkey breast, piled it with as must stuffing as I could, rolled it and tied it with inordinate lengths of cooking twine, and put it in a backaeoffe pan squeezing the rest of the stuffing around the side.
I was quite happy with the result, although there was way more than enough for two (more like 4, with leftovers). Of course stuffing that cooks outside a turkey is very different than that cooked inside, but it gave me a great idea for leftovers: we’ll make turkey noodle soup, and grill the outside stuffing (already partly grilled anyway) into croutons, to be eaten with turkey noodle soup! (And I’ll eat all the inside stuffing because it’s just so tasty).
On the topic of food, ages ago I had a big plan to post recipes on my blog. After 3 the effort was all but forgotten, and I have since deleted the lonely posts, and shifted them elsewhere. I have actually been a “member” of Allrecipes since 2000 (apparently anyway: their memory on this is clearly better than mine). While I have often gone there first to look for recipes for this or that, I had completely forgotten about the membership, and recently rediscovered and actually discovered some of the benefits. Maybe it wasn’t possible before, or maybe I just didn’t notice, but I can keep “private” recipes (such as those that have been taken from elsewhere and therefore they won’t knowingly allow you to publish for copyright reasons), I can keep “web links” to other recipes and other useful sites (in my case I plan to link to sites for ingredient substitution ideas and conversions of various measurements, since I often don’t have or can’t get what some recipes require). The downside of these two functions are that they are not indexed making it impossible to search my private recipes by ingredient, much less the web links. I’ve sent them a suggestion to do the former, but the latter is probably pretty much out of the question (not that I’ve asked). And of course I can publish recipes (although they are reviewed before they are posted) and I can rate and comment on other people’s recipes, and even comment on other people’s comments by indicating whether I found them helpful or not.
So I’m thinking about attempting to document my turkey-stuffed stuffing recipe and trying to publish it on AllRecipes, but I haven’t gotten up the guts just yet…
Anyway, HAPPY CANADIAN THANKSGIVING! Especially to those of you (us) without the benefit of the long weekend to truly enjoy and/or recover from it.
Speaking of fruit…
I just came across this article on how to freeze fruit, thanks to my favourite blog for just about everything, lifehacker. I just thought I’d share (also, blogging it helps me make sure I don’t lose the link 
)
Incidentally, I was very glad to see that the 2 litres of blueberries I froze yesterday unknowingly followed the right instructions, although I’m a bit surprised that they don’t suggest dry pack for raspberries and strawberries, especially since when I buy either of those frozen, I never by the kind in sugar or syrup.
Burpees and other healthy stuff
So, as you might have guessed, the 3 day lag of burpees back on June 17th, combined with some rather intense intensity at work, and the preparation of my wedding led to my sudden and unfortunate abandonment of the challenge. Since then I have done a set now and then, and promised myself that I would pick up where I left off, but it seems like the intense intensity is going nowhere, and we are in full preparation for one last wedding celebration and our honeymoon this fall. Is this an excuse? Perhaps.
That said, I have by no means abandoned attempts to generally improve my health, with the latest effort focusing on 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per day. It sounds so simple, but since I don’t eat huge quantities of food to begin with, I was surprised at how difficult it was. Even so, I believe that I hit the complete target for the first time possibly in my entire life yesterday after ramping up for the past week. The biggest challenge is that I’m not a fan of vegetables (although I love numerous different types of fruit) so my 5 servings have a clearly fruity leaning, but hey. I’m not complaining – I’m just happy that this motivation came suddenly and out of nowhere (well, not exactly nowhere: I’ve been buying blueberries just about every time I go to the grocery store since they first showed up this season, and an embarrassingly significant part of the motivation seems to have come from a form of marketing: a silly computer game that I came across last weekend called the Wonder Juice Machine, which provides (very tantalizing) recipes for smoothies after each level. Speaking of which, I haven’t actually made any since the fruit kick began (although we’ve had fresh-pressed orange+lemon juice 3 times in the past week) and we bought another stock of fruit yesterday, so I should go back and look at some recipes again – wahoo: an excuse to play games for a few minutes (before doing some work, because I’ve got an important deadline on Monday…and Tuesday…and Wednesday…and Friday: apparently Thursday will be my breathing day).
Staples, then and now (plus recipes for chicken quesadillas and nacho dip)
When I last lived in Canada, there were certain things you could almost always find in my kitchen (milk, butter, macaroni, spaghetti, Kraft Dinner, pickles, cereal, cheddar…). Well, not only these things of course.
Today this list is just the beginning (well, minus the KD, and with a few minor variations – like salted and unsalted butter, a few different types of pasta, not quite the same selection of cereal…).
Also, cheddar is no longer a staple, but a treat, since I only know of one store in Mulhouse that sells it, and it’s on the other side of town. The last time I bought cheddar (grocery shopping in Germany) I was disappointed that it was even more expensive than in Mulhouse, and a fair bit less tasty, so not really snackable…more cookable. I finally got around to using it today, with a great and easy recipe for quesadillas I found online (I should note, though, that the cooking time at each steps seems to be over-estimated). To my surprise, I had every key ingredient (this would have never happened to me in Canada) with the exception of Monterey Jack (which I doubt I’ll find here, and frankly would never have bothered with in Canada either) and bacon bits (which we actually do have quite frequently, but I didn’t see as being necessary for quesadillas anyway).
So how is this possible?
- chicken: I like to keep at least one or two types of meat handy in the freezer, and chicken breast is almost always one of them
- fajita seasoning: I have gotten in the habit of keeping a number of mexican-type bits and pieces on hand, although I tend to use a fair bit more taco seasoning (key ingredient in my favourite dip, which is based more or less on this recipe minus the olives and plus some mild or medium salsa depending on who I’m serving it to)
- vegetable oil: ok, so I didn’t list that in my staples, but it is something I always have on hand like, I suspect, most people
- onion: since we never seem to go through fresh onions fast enough when we have them, we got in the habit of buying chopped frozen onions (ditto for garlic, incidentally)
- green and red peppers: a few years ago, a friend had a birthday bbq, to which he supplied the meat, and asked the guests to brings other parts of the meal (salads, dessert…) and, to my surprise, my favourite salad was little more than green, yellow, and red peppers, with one other ingredient I can’t remember, and dressing. Then, thanks to the convenience of a frozen foods store, and with the same logic as onion, above, packages of chopped mixed peppers started appearing in our staples. More recently replaced by our own chopped peppers, giving us the option to mix or not (and also because the regularly grocery store doesn’t sell frozen chopped peppers, so we bought fresh and chopped and frozen what we wouldn’t eat free ourselves).
- flour tortillas: see fajita seasoning above: I’m even more likely to have these than fajita seasoning.
- cheddar: the only item I don’t have all the time, but you know that already, unless for some odd reason you didn’t start reading at the beginning of this post
So there you go, a look into the culinary life of a Canadian in France: eating Mexican (which reminds me, I heard that there’s a great Mexican restaurant in Mulhouse that I’ve never tried…I should do that sometime).
Culinary surprises
Having been a (very) difficult child in all things cuisine, I sometimes have difficulty trying new things (although, oddly, I tend to be more open when I’m in France than when I’m in Canada…even now). I am therefore often surprised when I actually like something that I either didn’t as a kid, or convinced myself that I didn’t (or wouldn’t).
My latest discovery was French onion soup. While I like the flavour onions bring to various dishes, I don’t generally like eating pieces of onion, so the idea of a soup full of them has always been a bit of a turnoff. When French onion soup was served at a family (Luc’s) meal, though, I couldn’t exactly say no. And thank goodness for that – it was so very tasty, and not just thanks to the thick layer of cheese on top.
My first such surprise in France was mushrooms, discovered in my first weeks here, when one of the Italians made some fantastic spaghetti with nothing more than olive oil and mushrooms (well, and spaghetti). Others have included cabbage salad, sashimi (and, later, sushi), tarte à la tomate, sauerkraut, goat cheese, raclette, reblochon, munster (and other stinky cheeses), frog legs (although not the easiest things to eat – the meat to bone ratio isn’t great), foie gras, smoked salmon, fish in general (and especially in a backeoffe), mustard (in all kinds of recipes), tarte flambée, carpaccio (ok, so enjoy raw beef didn’t really come as a surprise to me) and even wine (see also here).
I’m sure that there are lots more, but that’s already a pretty good start!
What stereotypes?
Today I ate frog legs (preceded by salmon and saint jacques terrine) followed by duck à l’orange (sooooo good) and dinner tonight is (French , of course) onion soup.
Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kanada anymore…
How do you like them apples?
I recently shared something I learned a long time ago with a colleague: there are as many varieties of grapefruits in the Caribbean as varieties of apples in North America. I don’t remember how that came up in conversation, but it floated back across my mind today while picking up some apples for one of my favourite dinners: filet mignon (of pork…if you’re interested, see my comment about the use of the term “filet mignon” in English versus French here) and cooked apples. The point is, there are lots of varieties of apples, and as a Canadian, I figure I should know a lot of them…but I don’t think I do. If you were to ask me to name as many types of apples as I could (which you haven’t, but I’m going to tell you anyway), MacIntosh and Granny Smith (my favourite) would clearly come first. Red delicious (“red” in France) come in soon after, since that’s what Luc usually uses for filet et pommes, and while I could name a few more, I couldn’t tell you anything about them. There were no “reds” today, so I went for Braeburn (which, incidentally, were absolutely excellent cooked). One alternative a couple of months ago was “canadas”. I haven’t the first clue what those are like, but I’m told that there are (or at least were at the time) too soft and starchy. Off the top of my head, it pretty much stops there… there’s golden something (golden delicious?). Oh, and I discovered “honey crunch” here a while ago, and I’ve already forgotten the two or three others I saw today. So how I do I like them apples? I don’t really know…
Secret ingredient
I never cease to be amazed by how easy it is to make (certain) tasty dishes, or by How much I like doing it with the right motivation. I’ve always liked baking, but not cooking, probably because baking is often more a question of following instructions and respecting given proportions (gee, this doesn’t give any insight into my personality quirks) while cooking requires more creativity and experimentation – something I’ve only developed a taste for since I’ve been in France. In that time, and always thanks to one person or another, I’ve discovered a tremendous number of ingredients and flavours that I never imagined I would enjoy.
I’ve also discovered a few indispensable ingredients that I can’t live without: crème fraiche being at the top of that list. The most surprising (to me at least) is chicken bouillon. This one is thanks to Luc, who learned to throw a cube (or part of one) during the cooking of several dishes, and I continue to be impressed at what a nice (but subtle) improvement it brings. Mustard was another surprise, especially since I still don’t like it, but man does it add a great flavour to baked or (better still) rotisserie chicken. So the secret is out (at least to the few of you that read this blog!). Hope it comes in handy.
Random photos
After attempting to take a picture of my strangely-shaped bread, I went through the various photos on my (work) telephone, and made some amusing (re)discoveries:
Canadian Jealousy for sale at Cora: 10€ per kilo (June 4, 2008)
Gift-wrapped goodness: My main course at Alchimy (remember when I told you about French Fusion cuisine?) (June 13, 2008)
Unwrapped goodness (but let me tell you that that plastic wrap was a royal pain during the actually chow time)
Someone else's goodness...or perhaps my entrée, I don't remember.
A mountain - probably in Switzerland, I think on my way to a meeting in Milan (July 24, 2008)
The top half of a vending machine probably at Basel train station. Why did I take this photo? Possibly the impressively wide range of snacks...as well as condoms and lighters. (September 18, 2008).
The bottom half of said vending machine. Fruit juice and Red Bull and Dairy-based beverages: oh my!
The whole reason I was looking at my mobile photos to begin with: my cratered cheese bread. Voilà.
Well, I thought it was funny.
