Kitchen Diary

There’s a pork knuckle smoking in there. Will be served with the first of the home made sauerkraut tomorrow.

It’s snowing in Toronto. Which is the perfect excuse to break out the serious comfort food, even for brunch.

Our friends Rob and Christine are visiting from Kincardine and before they’re heading back onto the northern highways sustenance is in order. I’ve been wanting to make baked beans for weeks now, so this was all the reason I needed.

I bake my beans in beer. This was one of these accidental discoveries that just work out and move on to become a staple in the kitchen. Beer, especially dark beer, is much undervalued as a base for slow and low braising. A dark ale or even porter transforms itself into a rich, malty liquid that infuses whatever is braised in it with warmth and comfort. I was making baked beans one day, found out that I was out of an kind of stock, it was cold and snowy so I didn’t want to leave the house and just substituted a bottle of dark beer for the beef stock I was planning on using. The result was so spectacular that I’ve never looked back since. This time I used Mill Street Coffee Porter as a base, rich, bitter and dark, with just a hint of a coffee nose in there. Great for drinking and equally excellent for cooking.

Here’s how:

Soak the bean of your choice overnight. Then, early in the morning, preheat the oven to 350º. Drain your beans. In an ovenproof dish put the diced pork product of your choice. This can be bacon, ham, a shank bone, whatever you’ve got in the house. I had some thick slices of smoked ham handy, so this was diced and added. Bacon you will probably want to fry off quickly, with the ham I didn’t bother. If you’re vegetarian, or are cooking for one, the rind of a Parmesan cheese makes a great substitute for meat. Parmesan rinds have been used in Italy as a flavouring ingredient for centuries. They get removed before serving and add a rich, deep flavour.

I then added a can of tomatoes, squashed and pushed into rough chunks. Smoked paprika, about a heaped teaspoon full,  went in next, some maple syrup and a generous dash of molasses. Mustard, a heaped spoon full. Then the beans, then two bottles of Coffee Porter. I mixed everything up, covered the pan and off it went into the oven. About an hour in I discovered some caramelized onions in the fridge and some braised beef cubes (leftover from stock making) so these went in too. There’s no need to be in any way worried about baked beans, if it has flavour, in it goes. Three hours later and all of the liquid had been absorbed, the beans were tender and one dish was taken care of. Tangy and smoky and sweet, with real depth coming from the beer.

Next up, for the vegetarians, I roasted some squash. Acorn squash in this case, from the Mennonite farm. This is a really simple and fantastically delicious dish. Take squash of your choice, cut in half and clean out the seeds. Cut into slices, rub with olive oil, smoked paprika and a little bit of salt and maple syrup, then put it in the oven. Make sure to lay the slices on the side, so the squash caramelizes gently. I put the beans on the bottom shelf, the squash at the top and at about 400-425º both were happy.

After about 20 minutes check and turn the squash pieces over, to caramelize the other side. 10 minutes later, throw in a handful of walnuts, drizzle over some additional maple syrup and just stir everything up a little, so the syrup covers the squash and the nuts.

When all soft and lovely take out, let cool a little and serve with good goats cheese and an additional drizzle of good olive oil. Sweet and savory and earthy and peppery all at once.

Other dishes on this morning’s menu were a caramelized onion and fennel tart (recipe here), scrambled eggs and a chicken soup with matzo balls.

Day three since three large heads of white cabbage got packed into a Chinese kimchi pot, bruised, covered with salt water and left to their own devices. Lacto-acid fermentation all the way. Kimchi pots have a water lip at the top, allowing fermentation gases to escape but keeping oxygen out.

Texture: crunchy.

Smell: 5/10.

There’s definitely something happening in there. I think I’ll try a taste test tomorrow. So far no mould, nothing that looks in any way spoiled.

This time of year, I love few things more than a good chicken soup. There’s just something deeply restorative about a golden bowl of broth, the thinnest carrot slivers drifting lazily underneath little globules of fat. So, yesterday I went up to the farm store and bought an old laying hen. Tough, unfit to be roasted, but full of flavour and oh just so perfect for the soup I had in mind.

The family running the store is Polish, they own their own farm outside Toronto and much of the meat they sell at the store is raised on their own land. They also know their food and when I told the lady behind the counter that I was planning on making soup she threw in a thick slice of beef shin, for extra flavour.

Now, until then I had only ever made chicken soup with chicken. Beef was for beef stock, surely, but then again who am I to argue with elderly Polish ladies? Exactly. And bone marrow makes everything taste better anyway so I was happy to go with it.

I started by making the broth. In the stock pot went the vegetables. A bunch of tough, huge carrots sliced diagonally into large chunks. Three large red onions, just cut through the middle, a bunch of sticks of celery. Garlic cloves, unpeeled, a small handful. Pepper corns, bay leaves, salt, the beef and the cut up chicken. I added water until everything was just covered and then brought the pot to the boil. Once there, the heat got reduced to the barest simmer, any scum that formed was skimmed off and I left everything pretty much alone for three hours.

The beef, I must admit, made a difference. It didn’t make the soup taste of beef, it made the chicken taste more of chicken, it intensified the flavour. Definitely a keeper from now on. Once done I took out the meat first and let it cool on a tray - the cats go nuts over it and if they like it and eat it, it would be a shame to throw it away, overcooked as it is.

Then the broth got filtered through a fine sieve. Resist the temptation to press the solids through the sieve, that’ll make your soup cloudy and where’s the fun in that? If I can be bothered I sometimes filter the soup once more through a clean sieve lined with cheese cloth, but this time it looked pretty good after just one pass.

Part one was done.

I only found out some years ago that there’s a Jewish part to our family, when my mother put a stone on my grandmother’s grave, something I had never seen her do before. Questioning revealed a confused history of identities hidden to ensure survival, both in Germany and in Russia, but still alive enough for my mother to feel it important to observe one last rite. I of course am now using this heritage as an excuse to raid the Jewish larder, so matzo balls were called for to complete the chicken soup.

Matzo balls are pretty easy, just follow the instructions on the package. Two eggs, 1/2 a cup of oil or chicken fat, salt and pepper. Mash it all up, add the matzo meal and mix. Let stand for 10 minutes and then form balls the size of walnuts.

Many recipes call for finishing the matzo balls in boiling water, but I really don’t see the point in that. Surely the idea is to get them to be as tasty as possible, so I finish mine off in the simmering chicken stock, regardless of authenticity. Julienne some carrots and just blanch them in the stock when the matzo balls are almost done and serve with maybe just a spritz of lemon. Soup to cure whatever might ail you.

PS: For a more exact recipe for matzo ball soup take a look at the Smitten Kitchen. Take a look anyway, it’s a very cool food blog and well worth reading.

Smoked meats. The words alone send me back to my early childhood on the farm. Every fall my grandfather slaughtered a pig for the family and smoked much of the meat. Unlike me today he had the use of an entire smoking room filled with meaty, smoky goodness.

To this day I remember walking into the small brick room, dark and pungent, and looking up to the hams and sausages gently swaying in the smoke rising from wood shavings barely smoldering in an iron pan. And without fail grandfather used to take out his pocket knife and shave off two slices of ham or sausage which we consumed in silent companionship. Then he tended the fire and we walked back into the fall weather outside where for the remainder of the day I smelled my sweater, salivating just from the smoky smell caught in it’s fibers.

Given this love for all things cured it took me surprisingly long to start smoking my own foods. Lack of space, and living far from the country in central London, had something to do with it. Keeping a hardwood fire smoldering for days is fine on the farm but would probably attract comments in the inner city. Since we’ve moved to Toronto we have more space, with the neighbours just far enough away to test the, smoky, waters.

I bought a portable barbecue/fire bowl/hot smoker many years ago at the Muji department store. Like many Muji articles, it looked great, was affordable and I liked the idea of being able to cook wherever, whenever. Those days I used to drive an old Land Rover and the idea was to just strap it to the back and have a kitchen with me wherever I happend to be.

In the end it never saw much use. Whenever we cook outside, we  tend to have hungry friends around and it is just too small to feed more than two people at a time. Still, I liked it well enough to keep it around and it moved with us to Canada.

When I started looking to buy a smoker I remembered the old barbecue and sure enough, there it was stashed away in the garage, dusty and almost forgotten but with all it’s parts present and accounted for. To smoke, the fire box gets lifted out from within the bucket, then sits underneath it, with the bottom vents wide open. The food to be smoked sits on a rack in the the middle of the drum and the top is closed by the lid, creating an instant hot smoker.

And today was the perfect cold and blustery fall day to smoke a lovely free range pork tenderloin I had picked up at the farm store.

The local hardware store happened to have smoking chips on offer, cherry and hickory. I marinated the meat in cracked black pepper, salt, smoked paprika and half a star anise, all mashed up in the mortar and held together by a bit of olive oil.

The fire box got filled with lumpwood charcoal and lit. Once the coals were hot, I added the soaked wood chips, put the pork on the rack, opened the vents at the bottom of the barrel and almost completely closed them at the top. Then the barrell got put onto the fire box and within a minute or two I had smoke. By this time it had started to rain, so I moved the entire assembly into the garage, with the door wide open. Initial paranoia about causing a flaming inferno, our garage is little more than a glorified wooden shed, gave way to paranoia about the neighbours calling the fire brigade, as smoke started building and billowed out of all available gaps in the building, of which there are many.

However, the fire stayed where it belonged, the neighbours either didn’t care or didn’t see and I smoked the pork for about 45 minutes. By this time it was getting seriously cold and damp and I was running out of time, so I then finished it in the oven at 375º for another 20 minutes. Covered it, let is rest, sliced it paper thin and served it with the roasting juices. And all of a sudden I was five years old again, standing next to my granddad in the smoke room, a thin sliver of intensely flavoured meat in hand. Nice and the perfect ending to a lovely fall day.

Note: Smoke sticks to you, I had forgotten just how much. I had to take two showers before I stopped smelling like bacon.

Six months ago my food blog, the kitchen diary, disappeared off my server. Gone, crashed, deleted, non recoverable. And no back-ups, apparently. Which was a pretty depressing experience.

It too me a while to get the energy together to start again, but this weekend I finally decided to start afresh. I’ve been doing a lot of reading, a lot of cooking and it was time to start writing again.

Last weekend we spent in the country, with perfect Ontario fall weather. Cold enough all day to justify a fire in the wood burner, much to Anja’s delight, warm enough to stay outside and enjoy the sunshine. And to cook.

We had friends staying with us, foody friends too, so we needed something fun. I had picked up some Ontario lamb shanks from the farm shop up in Roncesvalles Avenue and decided to braise them with root vegetables and red wine over a hardwood fire.

Anja’s brother had a cooking tripod made some years ago that can be used either with a grille or with a cast iron pot. He never much used it and after lending it to us it slowly but surely moved into our possession until in the end he made the transfer of custody permanent. We still have a lot of maple from the year before last in the woodshed, all cured and dry. Vegetables I decided to pick up from the Mennonite farm we usually go to. It was the last day they were open before shutting down for winter, so I picked up a lot of stuff. Beautiful small pumpkins, $5.00 a bag, a huge net of red onions, carrots, potatoes. Stuff that’ll last for a couple of weeks in the garage.

I started by sauteing the vegetables in a little olive oil. Heat control is by raising and lowering the pot, an exact science this is not. I waited for a bit of a fond to build up, then I browned the lamb shanks, added a bottle of dark red wine, some beef stock. I added some thyme from the garden, some smoked paprika. Closed it all up, raised the pot from the fire until it simmered ever so gently and left it pretty much alone for four hours, until the meat came off the bone and was tender enough to eat with a spoon. I then lowered to pot into the fire and let the stock reduce until it turned dark, sticky and smoky from the fire.

In the meantime I had braised a large handful of French puy lentils with a mirepoix of carrots, red onion and celery in chicken stock until almost done.

I cut the top off a couple of the small Mennonite bought pumpkins, cleaned them out, filled them with the lentils, covered them up again and baked everything in a hot oven until soft and wonderful, about 40 minutes.

I threw a stick of cinnamon into the baking dish which perfumed both the food and house.