Roast lamb and beer bread!

A week or so ago, Chris and I wanted to cook a roast on the weekend, so we got a venison roast out of the back of the freezer and tried to defrost it, but in the process it got a little warm so we decided to be safe, rather than sorry, and threw it out. Fortunately we had a boneless lamb roast sitting in the freezer too, so I started defrosting it on Friday, and Chris took over that part of supper. He used a sauce that he had cooked a venison roast in last year - Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, onion soup mix powder, worcestershire sauce, etc. It end up making a very tasty gravy, very easily. He also stuffed the roast with slivers of garlic, which is never a bad thing! This was all added to a crock pot and slow-cooked all day. At the end he took the meat out, added some Greek red wine (Kouros brand) to the crock to lift the fond and add a little more flavour, and made a gravy with the help of a little corn starch. Along with this he made some delicious garlicky whipped potatoes, and cooked up the last of the asparagus (a little too long, admittedly, and it was cold by the time supper was served, but it was still good...I just plain love asparagus).

Well meanwhile I did laundry all day (from 11am until...3?) - eight loads all told. Don't look at me like that, I haven't done laundry in two weeks, it's not that make an inordinate amount of laundry! Anyways, when I was bringing the last load up it occured to me that it would be awesome to have some nice crispy bread to sop the gravy up with. It was a little late in the game to whip the bread maker out, but there was just enough time to go to Sobey's before it closed and get a foccacia which I could crisp up in the oven. Well, I came in, hung up my laundry, and relaxed by grabbing my laptop and checking Facebook (there's three flights of stairs between me and the laundry room!) Anyways I saw that Heather had posted a link to a recipe for beer bread from Ezra Pound Cake. I was curious, because 1) I had a bottle of beer in the fridge, 2) I wanted to make some quick bread, and 3) I'd had beer bread before, and was fairly sure I liked it.

Well, it turns out beer bread is a "quick" bread which doesn't require yeast, which is fine by me! It is definitely closed to a biscuit than a bread though, so keep that in mind. Also, it doesn't taste much like beer - I used a locally-produced (Moncton NB) Pumphouse Scotch Ale, which, ironically, was the beer I was drinking at the Pumphouse while I was trying beer bread for the first time! It's really quite tasty and smooth - a little bit sweet, a little bit bitter, and a little bit smokey, I thought it would be a perfect candidate for this experiment (although next time I might try something heavier).

Here's the recipe, from Ezra Pound Cake .com!

Beer Bread

From Rebecca Crump (EzraPoundCake.com)

Makes 1 loaf

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 bottle (12 ounces) beer
• 1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted (Note: Feel free to reduce to 1/4 cup.)

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9-x-5-x-3-inch loaf pan.

2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.

3. Using a wooden spoon, stir the beer into the dry ingredients until just mixed.

4. Pour half the melted butter into the loaf pan. Then spoon the batter into the pan, and pour the rest of the butter on top of the batter.

5. Bake for 50 to 60 minutes, until golden brown. Serve immediately.

Ok, so there's the beer fizzing away on top of the dry ingredients...I maybe should have had a slightly bigger bowl? I also had a hard time getting all of the flour to mix in, I felt the mixture was a bit dry.

My other concern was the amount of butter. I used a frozen stick of President's Choice organic unsalted butter which I melted in the microwave, but it wasn't a full stick - it was like, 4/5s of a stick. And once I poured half of it on the bottom, I was thinking "this is probably too much butter"; by the time I was pouring it over the top I was thinking "Holy sh*t, this is WAY too much butter...it will either be crispy and delicious, or a soupy mess".


So...do you see what I mean about the excessive amount of butter (the oregano and freshly-ground black pepper were my own special touches)? I just found out about 2 minutes ago that Heather used the 1/4c. of butter, and I think next time that's what I'll do. The one step I don't have pictures of is the FIRE! Yes, that's right, as the bread was rising and the butter was sizzling, the butter was flowing out of the loaf pan and drizzling onto the element below...and started to catch fire! Flames, in my oven! Eeek! Chris had the good sense to snuff the fire out with a cookie sheet, and took it out. I suggested that maybe the pan could sit on the cookie sheet so it could catch the drips...and it worked! No more flames! Of course, this wasn't as impressive as the time someone I know opened up a toaster oven and a foot-long flame shot out, but still, a little scary!

Fifty minutes later I finally got to meet my bouncing baby beer bread! And it wasn't swimming in butter! Yay! I thought it was tasty-looking and crispy, but I still didn't know what the texture was going to be like - the beer bread at the Pumphouse was fairly bready, as far as I could recall...when I tried this, it was more like a homemade biscuit, which was and wasn't dissapointing at the same time. I like biscuits, and this is the closest I've ever come to making them, but it's not what I was expecting. Still, I'd do it again, just...with less butter next time. Speaking of butter, I noticed something interesting when we turned the loaf out to cut it...




OMG LOOK AT THAT CRUST!!! It's like somebody deep-fried it...which they pretty much did. Chris told me that he could feel butter oozing out of it...I believe him!

Also, next time I'm going to put some herbs and spices into it, just to give it another taste dimension...cumin might be nice?

Anyways I'm looking forward to snacking on some of this tomorrow morning for breakfast...maybe I'll warm it up and spread a little goat cheese on it? ;)

Thai green curry with pork and green beans over rice vermicelli

I made this curry a week or two ago and haven't had a chance to post it, but I wanted to make a point to, if only to remind myself that:

1) Yes, there is such a thing as "too much fish sauce". I kind of went from "hmm, kind of bland" to "flavour overload" fairly quickly.

2) If you have enough sauce in the pan, you can rehydrate rice noodles in it and they will taste AMAZING.

This is made from two pork chops I deboned, frozen green and yellow string beans, store-bought green curry paste, coconut milk, fish sauce and Vietnamese rice vermacelli noodles. I would definitely make it again but next time, I would maybe add more paste, not more fish sauce....

Halvas

I made halvas (the stove-top kind with semolina and syrup), and it's goopy. Like applesauce. I guess I shouldn't have insisted on adding all of the syrup and maybe should have just stopped when it got to the right consistency (and thrown the excess syrup out)? Or perhaps I didn't brown the semolina enough first? I added chilled syrup to semolina I had just taken off the heat, if that's any help...

Hot cocoa

If you like chai tea, or chocolate combined with cinnamon or chilies, then you are going to love this.

I took a picture, which looked like crap, so I won't bother with it. I also modified it from a recipe from Michael Smith's Chef at Home...

Super awesome spicy aromatic hot cocoa

-milk (I poured some 1% milk into the mug I wanted to use, then poured it into the pot...this mug usually will hold approx. 3c of coffee).
- cocoa powder (I used 2 heaping tbs of Fry's cocoa)
- brown sugar (1-2 tbs)
- vanilla powder (a Greek product - I didn't want to use artificial vanilla, whereas Michael Smith calls for real vanilla extract)
- dark chocolate (I took a block of Baker's Secret semi-sweet baking chocolate, which is a smallish cube, and cut/shaved it all up into small bits, and threw it into the milk)
- one cinnamon stick, broken into a few pieces
- 3-5 cardamom pods, cracked
- 3-5 whole cloves
- sprinkle of powdered nutmeg
- sprinkle of powdered allspice
- sprinkle of freshly-cracked black pepper
- sprinkle of cayenne pepper

Heat this up at a low temperature, whisking often. Strain (I have a mesh strainer that fits right on top of my mugs), and drink slowly, enjoying the symphony of flavours dancing around in your mouth!

Dakos

There were a lot of Greek dishes that I ate for the first time when I went to Thessaloniki & Chania in the summer of 2008, and dakos was one of those. My aunt would make these as a snack while I was staying with her, and they were just SOOOooooo delicious! I've had to wait a while to replicate them, because I can't buy rusks east of Montreal, and it's an 8-9 hour drive from here...

She (my thia Renna) sent us a giant package of food a while ago, and included in it was a bag of rusks from the little bakery in Galatas, my family's village. So that was one authentic ingredient tracked down. Another was the bag of good Cretan wild oregano, still on the branch. I'll never be able to replicate the cheese she used, because it was made by my uncle with milk from his own goats! (and it was every bit as amazing as you'd think!), so I had to settle for feta...and feta made in Nova Scotia (Holmstead brand), which isn't terrible...at least it's produced by a Greek! My tomatoes weren't great, they never really are here. I realized they needed to be used up so I decided to take the plunge and use up my rusks so I could use them up, but they were already getting mouldy. I threw the softer of the pair out, but the second one was fine except for a bit of mould around the stem area, so I cut it off and used it (I wanted dakos and couldn't turn back now!). I'd read that it was best to put the tomato on first, THEN the olive oil if you have hard rusks you need to soften, so that's what I did...I threw the tomato in our new mini-food processor which left kind of a chunky, pulpy liquid. I was fine with this since I wanted the rusks to soften. Then I drizzled oil, crumbled some cheese, drizzled some more oil, then carefully crumbled my oregano over it all. I was worried that the rusks would have gotten soggy in the meantime, but they hadn't! In fact, they had absorbed little moisture at all, and were cutting up the inside of my mouth instead. Oh well, it was worth it because these were tasty! I think tastier tomatoes would have helped, and maybe I could have sprinkled some water on the rusks first? Dunno...

Καλή όρεξη!

Observations

I've noticed a few things while out shopping this afternoon:

1) Superstore (a local grocery store chain) has stopped selling their loose-leaf chai tea with whole spices. This makes me sad as it was awesome, and I am almost out. I noticed it on sale a little while ago but it didn't occur to me that it was going to be going out of production. They still sell a chai that comes in tea bags, but it just isn't the same! And here I was ready to wax rhapsodic about its charming qualities yesterday...

2) Superstore has heavy-gauge aluminum cookware, which I have been looking for ever since *somebody* in the blogosphere, I no longer remember who, mentioned that it was the secret to crispy, delicious pites. I want to buy the cake pan for this purpose, but can't decide if it's too small. Oh and speaking of Superstore, I bought some of their own-brand phyllo for my next project...we'll see if it's any fresher than the Krinos stuff they have at Scoop and Save.

3) I love halva. Seriously. And I feel a little ashamed to say so but I think I prefer a Turkish brand (Koska)! At first I thought it was too oily, but its creaminess won me over. There are times though when I do prefer a crumblier Macedonian halva. If anyone is keeping score, my favorite flavours are pistachio and cocoa (especially Koska's cocoa, because it has some flavour to it!), but I'd eat any halva if you coated it in chocolate!

I think that's all for now...hopefully I'll cook something of interest on the weekend...and then starting next week I'll have to try putting something in the slow cooker every Tuesday, because I have class from 4:30-7:30 pm and that way I have a warm meal waiting for me, without having to yang at Chris to do it for me!

EDIT: Actually, one more thing! While I was at Scoop and Save I noticed that they now carry Yiotis brand products! Or at least they carry some: the vanilla, chocolate, and "assorted" pudding mixes, the creme caramel, instant whipped cream, instant bechamel, etc. I don't know if I'd ever buy any of it (maybe the creme caramel?), but any time they start selling more Greek products I can't help but be happy.

Hortopita

So, I finally broke down last night and moved the box of phyllo from my freezer down to my fridge to thaw overnight...I was going to make a pita (Greek pastry pie)! Since I had a bag of mixed "Euro Greens" (kale, spinach, swiss chard, beet greens, mustard greens, etc.), I decided to make a hortopita, or wild greens pie. I knew I didn't have a lot of cheese (about half a pack of feta), so I combined some recipes from The Greek Mama's Kitchen: Authentic Home-style Recipes - part of it was from a leek and swiss chard pie recipe, part from a kalitsounia recipe. I cooked up a semolina, milk, and egg mixture, added onions and garlic fried up with cumin, coriander, oregano, and sumac (I thought the extra moisture of lemon juice would be detrimental) and as much feta as I had. I wilted the greens and pressed some of the water out of them, then went to work with the phyllo.

I'll admit it, it was tricky. The top sheets were dry and brittle, as were the bottom ones, which meant they would tear where they had been folded, or stick together, but once I got to the middle of the stack it was easier. I had some salted butter in the back of the fridge so I melted some, brushed it on the phyllo and layered the sheets in a baking pan, turning it every few sheets at a time. I poured the semolina mixture in, topped that with the greens, covered that with the rest of the phyllo except for the last one. I folded the excess phyllo toward the centre, covered that with the last sheet, and tucked in the edges. I sprinkled the top with cold water and sesame seeds, threw it in the oven, and...behold!

(mmm, crispy golden brown!)

Now that I've gotten over my phyllo-phobia, I'll be making a lot more pites! Maybe even every weekend! I think next time though, it'll be a baklava...