I Drink Roses

I am a sucker for a pretty bottle. Marketing folks in the perfume industry know I am not alone, and the bottle design on a new fragrance can make or break the product. Think of Thierry Mugler’s Angel star, or Jean Paul Gaultier’s corset bottle. I am also a sucker for all things pink. So when I walked past an organic food store in my neighbourhood last month, I was instantly drawn to the display of bottles filled with pretty pink liquid.

Except this wasn’t perfume. This was a beverage.

Sence Nectar is made from “rare” Bulgarian roses. It’s essentially rose petal juice, sweetened slightly and available in a regular and “silver” version with 1/3 sugar. Think something of a cross between rose water and a thicker sweetened rose syrup.

Unfortunately, the guy at the health food store was better at selling it than the Sence website, which appears to be geared toward marketing it as a cocktail mix with a variety of drink recipes, and testimonials from bartenders, fashion designers and media. In fact, like rosehips which make great tea, Sence is high in Vitamin C, and is actually quite refreshing, if you’re into flowery flavours.

Greg didn’t like it at all, and I had the whole 1 litre tetrapak (about half the price of the swank bottle) to myself. Oddly though, despite my initial enthralment with the stuff, and despite the fact that I did really like it every time I had some, I ended up dumping about a third of the container when I realized it had passed the expiry date after sitting in my fridge for a month.

Maybe because I don’t drink a lot of cocktails (I kept meaning to use in it a martini with Hendrick’s gin, which also has some rose flavour), I didn’t get a chance to use the whole thing up, but it often seemed too sweet to drink more than a small glass at one time. It was refreshing when I was really parched, but the rest of the time it was a bit overpowering.

The company selling the stuff is based in Las Vegas, and the website claims there will be a rollout of related products such as truffles, preserves and even personal products like moist towelettes.

I think I probably succumbed to the same marketing machine that sells those pretty perfume bottles, without really caring about what was inside. I like rose-flavoured things, but it’s a flavour that is best in small doses. A whole litre of sweet rose juice is probably too much for one person, pretty bottle or not.

 

Chocolate Orange Pinwheels

Anyone still out there? I know, I suck. April completely got away from me, and while I’ve a long list of things to write about, I need more hours in my day. Between the passing of a beloved cat and there just being too many food events in Toronto for me to get to, it’s been a month of ups and downs.

I got myself signed up to help convert a local park from a crackhead haven into a place that is actually hospitable for regular folks, and the inclusion of a community garden has meant that it’s a project I’m particularly interested in seeing through.

My readers know that this isn’t really a recipe blog, but in lieu of real content and as a peace offering for being absent for so long, here’s the recipe for some cookies I made for our park clean-up last week. The original recipe comes from Jean Pare’s Company’s Coming Cookies book.

Chocolate Orange Pinwheels

1/2 cup butter or margarine
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
the grated rind of 1 orange
juice of 1 orange plus enough milk to make 3 Tbsp
1-3/4 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt
2 Tbsp cocoa
1 Tbsp margarine or butter, softened

Cream butter and sugar together, beat in egg, vanilla, rind, and juice/milk combo.

Stir flour, baking powder and salt together and add to wet ingredients. Mix into a ball, then divide into 2 equal portions.

To 1 portion add cocoa and remaining butter. Mix well.

Roll out each portion between sheets of waxed paper to 1/8 inch thick. Make both portions the same size in a rectangular shape. Remove top papers, then invert white layer over chocolate. Remove top paper and roll as for a jellyroll, removing bottom paper as you go. Wrap in waxed paper and chill overnight.

To bake, slice thinly and place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake in a 375′F oven for about 6 minutes. Makes 4 dozen.

 

Standing in the Dark

I’m a sucker for dark chocolate of just about any type, but I tend to avoid the stuff found in supermarket aisles or drugstore shelves. One of the only brands I will buy is Lindt, and then usually only when I know my stash of high-end stuff is getting low and I won’t have a chance to stock up any time soon.

I was in a drugstore last week and was lured to the fancy chocolate bar section where I grabbed a Lindt Creation 70% Caramel. Lindt’s Excellence Toffee Crunch milk chocolate bar with the toffee pieces is one of the few milk chocolates I’ll eat, so I figured the dark bar was probably just as good.

One shelf down was another display of dark chocolate bars; a selection of Nestlé Noir. I had heard good things about the Nestlé bars, but hadn’t thought of purchasing any myself, as I try to avoid Nestlé products whenever possible, just out of principle. But just for the hell of it, I grabbed the Nestlé Noir Eclat Caramel.

First of all, it wasn’t a real comparison, as the Lindt bar had more of a soft caramel filling, whereas the Nestlé bar was chunks of hard caramel, very similar to the Lindt milk chocolate bar.

Both fillings were great examples of their respective caramel style. The creamy Lindt filling was buttery with a brown sugar smell and while it wasn’t oozy, it melted nicely on the tongue. It was a touch sweet for pairing with dark chocolate, but the higher cacao percentage (70%) offset this somewhat.

The Nestle bar was full of tiny pieces of a harder caramel that totally made me think of the crust on a bowl of creme brulee. Again, these are similar to what Lindt uses in their milk chocolate bar, but they worked very nicely with the dark chocolate, even at a relatively low 64%.

The chocolate quality was not so great on the Nestlé bar, with the cliched waxy mouthfeel and slightly cloying flavour. Both bars were shiny and broke cleanly and melted nicely on the tongue.

Overall I’ve been in favour of the Lindt bar, but that may be my inner chocolate snob rearing her head. The Nestlé bar has a total of 9 different ingredients compared to the Lindt bar’s 14. And while that 14 includes bourbon vanilla beans, it also includes **sorbitol**, something completely unnecessary in a bar of chocolate.

But don’t count on the Nestlé bar being out of the woods just yet. I was quite bothered by the packaging which has little “it’s good to know” tips such as how chocolate is a good source of magnesium, and contains polyphenols and how it produces endorphins “which can increase feelings of well-being”. The whole explosion of dark chocolate bars in recent years from mainstream companies is based on a couple of studies that show heart-positive results from eating small amounts of the stuff. But in most cases, the processing necessary to turn raw cacao into a “chocolate bar”, especially one with crap like sorbitol in it, pretty much negates any positive benefits that might result.

I don’t think I’d buy either of these bars again, even in a chocolate emergency. Besides the fact that they were only okay in terms of quality and flavour, they’re likely both made with cacao from plantations where worker conditions are less than stellar. That, combined with the crap ingredients and the slightly skeezy “health benefits” marketing campaign sends me looking elsewhere for my chocolate fix.

 

Budder is Bedder

As a red-blooded Canuckistanian gal, I get the occasional craving for that wholly Canadian of treats, the butter tart. I used to make butter tarts fairly often as a kid because they were my Dad’s favourite treat, but I can’t actually recall making a batch since I moved out of my parents’ house in 1987. It’s not that they’re necessarily difficult to make, it’s just that, like most pastry items, I never really want a full batch. Generally I want one butter tart, maybe two, not twelve. So I tend to buy the things, preferably at bakeries where I can get a limited number and where they’re decently tasty.

My recent craving happened when I was nowhere near a decent bakery and a stroll through the bakery department of my admittedly low-end supermarket offered the option of a half-dozen of some pretty sad looking tarts, with an ingredient list that scared the beejeezus out of me.

At home, I realized that I don’t actually have a butter tart recipe. Not a one. I’ve got plenty of recipes for maple syrup pie/tarts, and I can drag out a number of books with southern-style pecan pie recipes, but none of those are butter tarts. So I turned to the intarwebs, but it got even more confusing.

Apparently I’m not the only person who can’t find a decent butter tart recipe because there’s an awful lot of people out there making butter tarts using pecan pie filling. You can tell this by looking at the ingredients. Southern pecan pie uses corn syrup for that oozy gooey runny centre. Real butter tarts do not.

Once I had weeded out the pecan pie recipes from the butter tart recipes, most of the what I found seemed to have roughly the same ingredients; butter, brown sugar, eggs, a bit of salt and some kind of acid - lemon juice or apple cider vinegar were the most common. What was striking were the variance in proportions. I found recipes that called for a full cup of butter for 12 tarts (!!!)  and other recipes that used only a Tablespoon - the diet version, perhaps?

I finally settled on one that called for a quarter cup of butter, which sounded reasonable in proportion to the other ingredients. It also called for maple syrup and vanilla which were nice flavour additions, although next time, I might go with rum instead of vanilla, especially for the raisin-topped ones.
As always, my pie crust was crap. I found a couple of recipes that called for sweet pastry like pate sucre, but that seemed like a sweetness overload. Butter tarts need a neutral pastry to balance the sugar from the filling. Pate sucre might have been easier to work with, though, as would a pate brisee, but I like the contrast of a butter-based filling and a shortening-based pastry. Butter filling and butter pastry, especially a sweet pastry, would just be too much.

I wasn’t completely happy with these. Again, my crust was crap and I didn’t get enough high heat on it at the beginning so in the time it took the pastry to cook, the filling was slightly overcooked. I need to play with these a bit and work on proportions. But the filling flavour was great - gorgeously caramelly with the maple undertone coming through nicely. Now that I’ve remembered how easy they are, I absolutely have to perfect these and get them just right.

 

I’ll See Your Organic Free-Range Chicken and Raise You a Tin of Lamb Mince

While the name Delia Smith is familiar to me, I’ll have to admit that I’m not especially familiar with her cookbooks. Given the recent fuss about her newest cookbook How To Cheat at Cooking, I sort of assumed she was one of those slack-assed Rachel Ray types with the canned goods and bagged greens, teaching fans how to spread salmonella in three easy steps.

But it turns out that Smith is more well-known for being the UK’s answer to Martha Stewart. She spent years teaching Britons how to cook real food, teaching them basic cookery techniques and classical dishes. How to Cheat at Cooking is apparently a rewrite of her first book published in 1971, but from there, her work was all about cooking with real, fresh ingredients.

Any new book sells better with a wave of press, and there is some speculation that Smith’s recent public comments about Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign against battery chickens might simply be desperate publicity spin. Smith claims that her recipes are designed to feed the poor, especially the chyllldrunnn (who will think of them?), but even poor kids are likely to turn up their noses at some of the stuff in her new book.

Last week, UK paper the Guardian reported on a dining event where some of England’s top chefs cooked up some of the recipes from How to Cheat at Cooking.

It is time, though, to taste. Out, first, comes the steaming risotto. “This,” remarks Giles kindly, “is like having a pig piss in your throat. It tastes of freezer and plastic. I don’t understand. If you can’t cook and you can’t afford to go out, eat a cheese sandwich.”

Granted, UK food writer Giles Coren isn’t the most tactful guy, but he has done spots for Gordon Ramsay’s The F-Word where he’s eaten out of dumpsters and cooked up squirrels. He’s as familiar with bad food as he is with the good stuff.

The article goes on to point out the difficulty of tracking down many of the prepared ingredients, as well as noting that the dishes don’t actually take less time than cooking up a version from scratch.

Which begs the question of why, and why now?

“She’s after the money,” says Giles, charitably. “I think she’s jealous of Jamie and Nigella and Hugh. It’s like old footballers who bemoan the fact there was never any money in the game when they were playing: Delia was a food star when food stars weren’t big. It’s like some old boxer coming out of retirement, Rocky Seven up for one last slugging match. But what she doesn’t realise is that the rules have changed, that nowadays people are motivated by different things: the environment, quality ingredients, nutrition. She’s come back for her slice of the pie - that’s her motivation.”

Other tasters were divided on the effect of Smith’s crusade, with a few citing the same explanation given for her US counterparts like Ray and Sandra Lee - that getting people back into the kitchen, even if they are cooking out of tins is better than nothing. But based on the tasting notes for the items prepared (which included cupcakes made with frozen mashed potatoes, and risotto made from… frozen pre-cooked risotto), most of the dishes are likely to send people running to order some take-out anyway.

So is the UK’s cookery sweetheart really thinking about the poor folks who can’t afford the organic produce and free-range chicken, or is she just a teensy bit jealous of the fame and fortune today’s celebrity chefs have experienced?

All I know is that lamb shouldn’t come from a can, yo.

 

Green & Black’s Hot Chocolate = Love in a Cup

Regular readers will know that I’m not much of a fan of huge corporations and the majority of products they sell. I prefer to support companies and businesses that make real food, and who have ethics and integrity. The problem is, small companies with ethics and integrity tend not to be able to compete with the big guys, and their best bet in terms of not just growing their business but in basic survival is to sell out to a corporation with clout who can afford the promotion and marketing expenses as well as the slotting fees that will get that little company’s products onto grocery store shelves.

Such is the case of, really, most indie health food and organic companies. Kashi is owned by Kellogg, Boca is owned by Kraft, Tom’s of Maine is owned by Colgate, and the list of stuff owned by Heinz/Hain Celestial is staggering. In terms of chocolate, my beloved Green and Black’s is owned by Cadbury Schweppes.

Some folks would see this corporate ownership as reason to stop buying the indie/organic products. But in a way, that’s sort of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We support these companies initially because we agree with their philosophy and like their product. In most cases with a corporate sale, that (hopefully) doesn’t change. It simply means that more people will be turned on to an already great product, that more land will be dedicated to growing organic ingredients, or that more people will be helped by an increase in sales to products that are fair-trade or ethically-produced.

Which is my roundabout way of explaining why I still love Green & Black’s chocolate.

 

The Real Food Revival

Three years is such a short time in the grand scheme of things, but in the publishing world, it can be an eternity. Books come and books go, and a lot of great books don’t get the publicity they deserve. Which is likely why I was able to find The Real Food Revival by Sherri Brooks Vinton and Ann Clark Espuelas at one of those deep-discount remaindered stores back before Christmas.

With a sub-title of “aisle by aisle, morsel by morsel”, Vinton’s search for real food in the supermarket aisles predates not just Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, but also Marion Nestle’s What to Eat. Taking on everything from baked goods to bottled water, Vinton gives a common-sense approach to finding, and demanding real food.

Neither Vinton or Espuelas are experts; they don’t have the nutritional background of Nestle or the science background of Pollan, yet they do their research and present a well-documented case for each of their claims. This makes the book refreshingly free of jargon and chemistry, something that can make for a dry read at best in similar works, and can be downright off-putting in some cases.

Each section offers vignettes of artisanal producers for the various aisles, from free-range organic farms, to cheese-makers and bakers to trout-farmers. Each chapter also offers tips on the Real Food Revival, with suggestions of actions individuals can take to ensure accessibility to real food options such as talking to your grocery store manager, joining a CSA, planting a garden, preserving your own food via canning or freezing or even simple ideas like making homemade gingerale in place of soft drinks.

A selection of chapter-appropriate recipes are included through-out, with a focus on eating seasonally, first and foremost, with additional emphasis on local and organic.

The book shows it age in the section on convenience foods, as we’re already into trends such as the addition of pro and pre-biotics that hadn’t seen the light of day in 2004/05 when the book was written.

The main message of The Real Food Revival remains relevant, though. We need to get back into our kitchens and start cooking from scratch. We need to maintain well-stocked pantries, and we need to spend more time thinking about what we eat.

 

The Real Food Dilemma

I haven’t had time in the past week to talk about the Michael Pollan lecture. Mostly, I think, because it’s wasn’t actually that inspiring. It wasn’t bad, don’t get me wrong, he just didn’t say much of anything new. The brief hour started with Pollan reading an excerpt from In Defense of Food, then being interviewed by CBC’s Matt Galloway. His answers were informative, articulate and witty, but it felt very much as if he’d done it all a hundred times before. And of course, he had. Disappointingly, there was no audience Q&A, so anyone who had questions for the author had to stand in line for an autograph, and I’m told, was rushed through pretty quickly.

The following day, there was an interview with Pollan in the Toronto Star in which he pretty much skewered the vegetarian community based on his three vegetarian sisters who apparently eat a lot of mock meat. I’m torn on this point between being chagrined and flipping the bird in his general direction, and nodding in agreement. During my time as a vegetarian, and even today when cooking at home, I used a lot of soy-based products to recreate comfort food dishes like cabbage rolls and sheperd’s pie. I know how processed these products are, but I’m drawn into the trap of it being easier than coming up with a straight-up vegetarian dish, especially when trying to include protein. On the other hand, I really like my rule of no meat at home, because my job has me out a couple of times a week stuffing my face with everything from chicken wings to foie gras. I don’t need more meat in my diet, and relying on the protein in eggs and peanut butter gets tired really fast.

The desire to eat “real food” has left me with a bit of a conundrum.

The other issue with Pollan is this so-called manifesto. I hate lists of rules and regulations like this, because there’s always so many exceptions, and people either try to live by them devotedly and feel guilty (or make excuses) when they can’t; i.e. The Hundred Mile Diet. So while I agree that we should be paying more for better quality food, the rule about not eating alone is just asinine.

In a similar vein, Michael Ruhlman made a post last week to his blog, outlining the wacky relationship people have with their food and the folks who produce it.

Americans have a hopelessly neurotic relationship with what they consume, of this there’s little disagreement, a neurosis that’s built into our culture from the broadest levels of agriculture and government, which demand that we subsidize farmers to grow crops you can’t eat without industrial processing, all the way down to our grocery store shelves, which are packed with confusing, marketing-spun messages about what’s good for us and what’s not.

And here’s the thing - we do have a really messed up relationship with food. We’re NOT willing to pay more for better quality; the subsidies in place have made us all think that food should be cheap. Sure there is a sector of the population who genuinely cannot afford to buy “real food”; I’ve worked with local food banks, those people are out there. But I am really disappointed by the number of people I see who have iPods, multiple cars, big screen TVs, designer clothes and go on expensive vacations, who say they can’t afford to pay more for their food. What they really mean is “won’t” because they’re not willing to make good food a priority.

Part of the problem is moderation - we’re used to those huge super-sized portions of empty calories, and don’t believe we can be satisfied on less. Shoppers are continually manipulated into believing that the health claims on the packages can be trusted, that they ARE eating good, healthy food, all the while Big Food is working to loosen the regulations. Dr. Yoni Freedhoff has recently reported on his blog on efforts to dilute health claims on packaged foods even further.

Given that the Canada Public Health Association is reporting that low level of health literacy means that “more than half of Canadian adults do not have the skills necessary to properly make daily decisions about their health”, it seems as if adding additional (potentially misleading) health claims to processed foods could carry an even greater risk than just straight up obesity.

Which all comes back to Pollan and his Eat Food message. The issue that nobody seems to have the answer for is HOW? Don’t shop in the middle aisles is an optimistic but naive assertion, which works to a limited extent, but not completely. Shop at farmer’s market is another that is good in theory but is not necessarily practical for the average family. Likewise “grow a garden”. How do we address the issue, not just of the purported lack of money, but a very real lack of time?

How do the “real food” pioneers get the message out to the people who need to hear it instead of just, as Pollan did at his lecture last week, preaching to the choir?

 

No Local Food for Local People

There’s always a lot of talk in the local and/or organic food movements about how local farmers just can’t keep up with the demand - that there’s just not enough local and organic produce to go around. I don’t know if the same system is in place here in Canada, but in the US at least, it appears that this dearth of local produce is the will of the government:

As a small organic vegetable producer in southern Minnesota, I know this because my efforts to expand production to meet regional demand have been severely hampered by the Agriculture Department’s commodity farm program. As I’ve looked into the politics behind those restrictions, I’ve come to understand that this is precisely the outcome that the program’s backers in California and Florida have in mind: they want to snuff out the local competition before it even gets started.

Read the piece on the NY Times website for the full story.

 

In Defense of the Peanut Butter Cookie

A strange thing happened to me in 1991. All of a sudden my peanut butter cookies started coming out hard - like rocks.

I have no idea where the recipe came from. It was the one my Mom always used, so it likely came from my Grandmother, a cookbook, or perhaps a Home Ec course when she was a teenager. It is exactly like the majority of recipes for peanut butter cookies found on the internet today, where creators of “original” recipes try to differentiate themselves by an extra quarter cup of peanut butter or by sticking a chocolate kiss on top.

In all likelihood, however, every peanut butter recipe in use can be traced back to an original recipe, which first appeared some time in the 1930s, possibly 1936.

Which never really explained why my cookies had started turning out hard.

At first, I blamed myself. I must have screwed it up somehow. But subsequent batches were also hard. I adjusted quantities and techniques, even considered that the oven might be acting up. Then I thought to consider the peanut butter itself.

In the early ’90s, the western world was going through a bit of a phase of environmental activism, much as we are today. I took these concerns to heart and started to change my purchasing habits, switching to all-natural or organic ingredients where I could find them. I was also, at the time, dating a guy whose relatives lived next door to a peanut farm, so all-natural peanut butter because a fixture in our house.

It was then that I realized what had happened. In switching to a freshly-ground, all-natural peanut butter, I had drastically altered the recipe without even knowing. The all-natural brands tout the inclusion of nothing but peanuts, while the grocery store brands are loaded with fun stuff such as corn syrup, shortening and icing sugar to keep it from separating.

In 1922, peanut butter was commercially-born when J. L. Rosefield of Rosefield Packing Company of Alameda, California perfected a process to keep the oil from separating in the peanut butter along with spoilage prevention methods. He marketed this commercial peanut butter under the name Skippy® as “churned” peanut butter, which was a smoother, creamier version of the coarse-textured original.

So, since 1922, most peanut butter available commercially has been “processed” in this manner. Which means that the original peanut butter cookie recipe was undoubtedly made with processed peanut butter, not the happy, healthy natural stuff. And without the added corn syrup, shortening and icing sugar, no version of the recipe works!

Which is, by all means, a eureka moment to figure that out, but also a disappointing one, for anyone who wants to avoid the added crap, not to mention transfats (shortening is hydrogenated), regular peanut butter is off the list. And so are peanut butter cookies.

Given that peanut butter cookies are one of those comfort foods that bring back sweet childhood memories of working in the kitchen with my Mom, I get cravings for them now and then. I usually head to a store or bakery and buy a couple, and that seems to satisfy the need for the things. But for home cooks, part of the experience of comfort food is in the making, and just eating ones that someone else has made isn’t enough. I need to roll the dough in my hands and then oh so carefully press those distinctive marks on the top with a fork. This was my job in the process as a little girl, and it brings back definite feelings of happiness and delight.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, I started keeping a pantry stocked with canned goods. Just in case. Toronto had also experienced the Blackout of ‘03, so having some stuff on hand just in case couldn’t hurt. For some reason, while buying stuff to stock that pantry, I grabbed a jar of regular peanut butter. Not sure why. Maybe under the theory that it would keep longer than the natural stuff. But I came across it a week or so ago, and have had peanut butter cookies on the brain ever since. I finally caved and made a batch last night, for the first time in probably 15 years or more.

I know they’re full of corn syrup and transfatty shortening and extra sugar. I don’t care. They’re that perfect combination of sweet and salty, with a crunchy bite on the outside that gives away to a soft tender interior. I know I lose all of my organic-local-sustainable food cred, but it doesn’t matter. Sometimes food is emotional and emotions transcend nutrition.