Save Your Fork… There’s Pie

As I mentioned in the box cookie mix post of last week, it is entirely possible to make healthy and delicious cookies from scratch. And yes, ones that don’t taste like a patchouli-scented hippie named Sunrise made them. The secret to these ones, as is the secret to many things in life, is a little bit of hooch. Just a wee bit, for flavouring. Booze is my favourite spice, after all. And it’s not as if there’s enough to get anyone tipsy.

The original recipe is from 1001 Cookie Recipes by Gregg R. Gillespie, but we’re veering far off-course from his original intent. I’m providing the original recipe with my substitutions in italics after, plus notes at the end on the various ingredient changes. The end product here is a cookie that is crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside, with a great texture and a kiss of Amaretto.

Cornflake Cookies

2 cups all-purpose flour (2 cups spelt flour) [1]
2 tsp baking powder
1 cup butter at room temperature (1 cup non-hydrogenated margarine) [2]
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup brown sugar [3]
2 large eggs
1 Tbsp Amaretto
2 cups cornflakes (2 cups high-fibre mixed cereal) [4]
1 cup flaked coconut

Preheat the oven to 375′ F.

In a large bowl cream the butter and two sugars. Beat in the eggs and the Amaretto. Gradually blend in the flour and baking powder. Fold in the corn flakes and coconut.

Pinch off walnut-sized pieces of dough and roll into balls. Place 1-1/2 inches apart on ungreased baking sheets.

Bake for 10 to 12 minutes until lightly coloured. Transfer to wire racks to cool. (The original recipe also calls to sprinkle the warm cookies with icing sugar but that just makes them messy.)

Ingredient notes:
[1] Any whole grain flour would work here; spelt, kamut, whole wheat or rye.
[2] In Canada, President’s Choice makes a margarine called “Memories of Butter” - completely non-hydrogenated, yet still the right consistency to use in baking.
[3] You could easily cut both sugars by 1/4 to 1/3 and have no detrimental effects. The inclusion of the Amaretto and the coconut makes these quite sweet. More than a third will mess up the consistency, though.
[4] I use a cereal by Nature’s Path (ironically the same company that made the hated cookie mix) called Optimum Power. There’s 10g of fibre in a 3/4 cup serving, which would drag Cornflakes out back and kick its ass. Optimum Power has dried blueberries in the mix, and the addition of more dried blueberries would make this cookie even better.

In lieu of real content, I’m recycling the last few articles I wrote last year for Well Fed. So blah blah blah, appeared on the Well Fed Network, yadda, yadda yadda. There is another Sweets Expo occurring this coming May. I suspect Steve Almond will not be there.

One of the cool things about writing a book about a particular food item is that, whether you consider yourself to be or not, other people will look to you as an expert on that topic, and will heap free samples upon you in the hope that you will write about them. I met author Steve Almond as he was being gifted with container after container of free organic cotton candy. Despite his polite insistence that he couldn’t possibly carry six tubs of cotton candy home on a plane, the manufacturer wanted him to try every flavor.

Almond was in Toronto this past spring to give what he thought was a reading at the unfortunately named Canadian Sweets Expo (www.sweetsexpo.ca). Badly promoted and equally poorly organized, what was meant to be on par with the big candy shows in the US turned out to be a sad collection of local vendors of mostly waxy chocolate, oddly flavored jellybeans and some crazy chocolate-flavoured energy balls that made me extremely ill. Also present were a few Canadian Food Network celebrities, a face-painter (for the kids) and a circus troupe. Not exactly the type of forum where a well-known author and creative writing professor is going to be known for his non-fiction work on rare US candy bars.

Which is too bad, because CandyFreak is a sugar-laced tour of the rare, the wonderful and the delicious. It’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, minus Johnny Depp. A self-defined candy freak, Almond traveled far and wide to learn the story of some rare and wondrous local favorites. From the southern icon the GooGoo Cluster, to the darling of Boise, the Idaho Spud (which yours truly has never tried but desperately wants to – readers in Idaho, help a poor Canadian gal out, won’t you?), Almond tours factories, talks to chocolatiers, and waxes poetic about enrobers.

Along the way, he shares his personal candy quirks: he dislikes maple, compares coconut to bits of torn-off hangnails (which made me look at both coconut and hangnails in a very different light), and interviews chocolate engineer Dave Bolton, who compares the taste of mainstream milk chocolate to baby vomit. As a chocolate snob myself, I’d have to agree with Bolton – I never really had the right words to describe that slightly sour tang most milk chocolate bars have, and now I do.

In fact, the chapter where Almond visits Dave Bolton at the Lake Champlain chocolate factory is the most food-porn worthy in the book. And given that much of Almond’s short fiction leans to the more, uh… graphic, his skill at describing some of the bars Bolton creates definitely left me desperate for a chocolate fix.

I suppose I was aware, in an abstract way, that there were men and women upon this earth who served in this capacity, as chocolate engineers. In the same way that I was aware there are job titles out there such as bacon taster and sex surrogate, which is to say, job titles that made me want to weep at my own appointed lot in life. But I had never considered the prospect of visiting a chocolate engineer. I could think of nothing else for days.

Dave himself was hunched over a counter, scrutinizing what looked like an overgrown Junior Mint. He looked up when we came in and, almost reflexively, held the piece out to me. The dark chocolate shell gave way to an intense burst of sweet chewy fruit. The texture was soft enough to yield to the teeth, yet firm enough to absorb the musky undertones of the chocolate.

“What you’re eating,” Dave said, “is a dried cherry, infused with raspberry and covered in a Select Origin 75 percent dark chocolate.” He held out the bag. “Have another.”

Here is what I wanted to say to Dave Bolton at that precise moment: Take me home and love me long time, GI.

Almond’s appearance at the Sweets Expo didn’t come close to showing off his candy knowledge or writing skills. In a sad audience of about forty people, only four of us had actually read his book, and his planned reading instead became a surreal quiz show in which precocious three-year-olds were pushed onstage by their parents to meet Steve and collect a free GooGoo cluster after giving incorrect answers to questions based on the book.

If you dig candy, you owe it to yourself to read CandyFreak. Almond is sharp, witty and insightful, and his descriptions will send you headed for the nearest candy counter to get your freak on.

Note - Idaho Spuds have been acquired and consumed since this piece was written. They were an unfortunate disppointment.

Dragon’s Beard Candy. A traditional Lunar New Year treat.

The making of Takoyaki - fried squid balls - in a special Takoyaki pan. The process was fascinating to watch, especially when the balls were flipped.

Takoyaki serving suggestion - dust with ground seaweed (and possibly some powdered green tea) and add plenty of mayo. While these were definitely interesting, the strong flavour of the garnishes combined with the uncooked doughy centre was a real turn-off.

The rest of our swag - a box of shrimp chips, a pound bag of Chinese chestnuts, and a selection of Indonesian snack foods.

I spent Saturday in a conference room full of farmers and nutritionists. I scored a media pass to the Canadian Organic Growers conference, and besides the free organic lunch, everyone went home with a bag of organic swag. Most of the stuff was from President’s Choice Organics and included cereal, chocolate and tea. Some of the bags included pasta, while mine had a box of Nature’s Path organic chocolate chip cookie mix. We use other Nature’s Path products such as some of their cereals, and even the frozen waffles, so I was vaguely interested in the cookie mix.

As a die-hard home baker, I can’t remember the last time I bought a pre-made mix of anything [1]. My folks sometimes send me one of those “beer bread” mixes in a clay pot things at Christmas, but I think I still lived with my folks the last time I used a mix for anything. Certainly, they got used frequently when I was growing up, and I can recall my Grandmother using mixes for various things quite frequently, but then, it was the style of the time (her being a 50s housewife, after all), she had a brood of kids and grandkids to feed, and she hated cooking.

I was going to set the box aside for a food bank donation, but my curiosity got the better of me. Maybe they had figured out some way to make box mixes better these days. Maybe thirty years on, they were better tasting than stuff made from scratch.

The instructions were simple, dump the mix into a bowl and add 1/3 cup of oil and 5 Tablespoons of water. Which left me with a greasy, gritty dough. I checked the ingredients - organic whole wheat flour, organic sugar, organic chocolate chips, organic wheat bran, sea salt, organic soy flour, and some natural preservatives. Fair enough.

I baked them according to the instructions, noting that the calorie breakdown wisely counted 1/10 of the package instead of per cookie so that even if you made really small or really big cookies, a little bit of math was easier to do than to figure out if your yield was the same as the recipe (because don’t you just hate when you bake something and the yield is something like 70 cookies and you get 40 and they’re tiny??). I got 28 cookies out of the mix, which made a serving 2.8 cookies, at 150 calories and 2 grams of fat. Which really isn’t bad at all.

They looked a little weird when I pulled the pan out of the oven. Sort of… lumpy. Then the taste test confirmed it - those were some damned gritty cookies. If I had to explain them, I’d say they were like cookies made on the beach - salty and gritty. Part of this obviously comes from the fact that they’re made with whole wheat and bran. This makes for a much healthier cookie, but the mouthfeel was just too weird. This is what all those poor children born to hippies had to endure until retirement savings plans lured their parents off the commune and into yuppiedom.

I ate a couple more with tea this afternoon. They became marginally more bearable with something to wash them down, but I still found them far too salty, and the gritty texture is a real turn-off.

So the final judgment - I’ll take a pass. I’ve no idea how much such mixes go for in the supermarket or health food store, but it’s probably too much. The tiny amount of time saved really isn’t the tradeoff - there was still mixing to be done and only slightly fewer dishes to be washed than with a “from scratch” recipe. One of the positive aspects regularly mentioned with baking mixes is that the cook isn’t required to have a variety of flours and other ingredients on hand to make the item. This one didn’t even require an egg, and is, in fact, vegan - if you don’t count the fact that it was made in a facility that processes other products that contain milk.

Anyone who bakes regularly would have all the necessary ingredients on hand, however, and would undoubtedly turn out a far better product than this. Obviously, an organic mix with a low fat content and lots of fibre is far preferable to junkier cookies made with white flour, but a creative home baker can find ways to make even cookies healthy and delicious. This would be a good option for someone going to a cabin where hauling a variety of ingredients is inconvenient, and I’d even recommend mixes like this for people just learning to cook, but someone baking with the intention of turning out a great-tasting product will be sorely disappointed.

[1] Greg pointed out that we did, in fact, buy a boxed mix for Boston Cream Pie back in November of 2005, but as I had a broken arm at the time, he was the one who actually made the cake, and I think we each had a tiny piece before throwing the whole thing out because it was just gross.

I was always under the impression that during the lunar years, the animals represented were supposed to be honoured.

So all you people calling this “The Year of Bacon” had better just stop it.

It’s pretty much been determined that The Food Network has been dumbed down to make it more “entertaining” as opposed to educational. Cooking shows never give you the recipe for things anymore, and viewers choose their programming based on pretty hair, big boobs and which TV celebrity chef has the most gadgets for sale.

Apparently this desire to want to cook but not really put the effort into the process has created a whole new (lowered) standard in cookbooks. As today’s cooks are bewildered by basic techniques and standardized cooking terms, recipes get longer and more detailed in an effort to explain the process enough so that the inexperienced home cook can turn out a halfway decent product.

In today’s Toronto Star, Susan Sampson explores the difficulties faced by both cookbook publishers and food writers.

We don’t sauté. We cook, stirring.

We don’t combine. We toss gently. Or stir in. Or whisk.

And we never, ever julienne. We cut in matchstick strips.

It’s our way of speaking very s-l-o-w-l-y and enunciating as home cooking skills continue to slide downhill.

We are not alone. Cookbook editor Rux Martin, for example, also tries to avoid terms readers may not know, like blanch or baste.

The catch? “If you can’t use those terms, how do we educate cooks?” wonders Martin, an executive editor at Houghton Mifflin in Boston.

The situation is created by a variety of factors:

Cupcake pr0n for V-day.

Flower power.

As you can see by some of the examples, my frosting was a bit too soft so the fancy flowers I made with the funky set of flower tips all kind of oozed into the same shape. There is potential for an entire bouquet next time around, though.

But despite the pull of gravity, they’re still guaranteed to put you into a diabetic coma.

I cook breakfast. Every day.

Some days I do nothing more than put some fruit on cereal, but most mornings, Greg and I eat a real breakfast; buckwheat pancakes; quinoa and maple-glazed trout; scrambled eggs or sometimes oatmeal.

So when the weekend comes around, I am more than happy to toss aside my spatula and go out to brunch.

While brunch is the new dinner according to NOW Magazine food critic, Steven Davey, my colleague over at Gremolata, Ivy Knight, is more than happy to explain why a restaurant brunch is a very unhappy thing for the folks who actually have to cook it.

But, see… people like to go out for brunch because it allows them to eat foods they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, cook at home.

Many breakfast dishes are fussy, with many ingredients, all cooked á là minute, and if keeping two pots and two frying pans and maybe the oven all under control at the same time isn’t your cup of tea, going out for brunch where someone else can do the juggling for you probably is.

My plan this morning was to make crepes. I had a container of leftover sautéed mushrooms in the fridge from the mushroom pastries I made for dinner one night last week. I also had a bag of spinach that needed to be eaten. Spinach and mushroom crepes seemed like the answer, but the thought of singeing my fingertips while manually flipping the crepes had no appeal.

I pulled out a couple of multi-grain bagels and figured I could do an Eggs Florentine kind of thing, only without the eggs. Bagels and spinach and a mushroom cream sauce. Then Greg walked in and I stupidly asked him if he wanted it with eggs.

“Eggs are good,” he says. And then I think about whether I’m up for wilting spinach, building a sauce, toasting bagels and poaching eggs all at the same time.

“I’ll do the eggs,” he says. “I can do them in the microwave.”

A word of warning to you all - if your spouse ever offers to poach eggs in the microwave, immediately insist that they take you out for brunch.

Happy to have one less task, I agree, and Greg goes about finding instructions on the intarwebs, then dumping eggs into bowls with water and vinegar and piercing the yolks so they don’t explode.

All goes relatively well until the eggs start coming out. Even though he followed the instructions, microwaves are finicky things and the egg yolks are totally hard. We plate them anyway, as everything else - bagels, sauce and spinach - are all hot and ready. I poke one of the eggs yolks with a knife to see just how hard-cooked it is and…

KABLOOOOEY!!!!

Egg-explody.

Every surface within a two-foot radious is covered with egg.

And then my darling husband says, “Good thing that didn’t explode inside the microwave, huh?”

Because apparently, cleaning the egg from inside a small enclosed box is more of an effort than wiping egg off the wall, the counter, the toaster, the food processor, the sides of the cupboard, underneath the cupboards, the floor, my face, my shirt and yes, down my cleavage.

The most frustrating part is that had the eggs been poached properly, with the lovely oozing yolk, the dish would have been an absolute wonder (despite the fact that the mushroom sauce was kind of grey). With half-exploded overcooked yolks, it was still good, but not amazing.

Next time, I’ll do more of my meez ahead of time - finish the sauce and keep it warm, wilt the spinach and then reheat it in the microwave if necessary, all so I can pay attention to properly poaching the eggs.

Or I can insist that we go out for brunch and someone else can poach the damn eggs instead.

Bourdain is guest blogging again over on ruhlman.com, and as usual, he waxes philosophical on his favourite topic, The Food Network and its imminent decline. Working his way through the most well-known, he makes his feelings for you-know-who very well obvious:

RACHAEL: Complain all you want. It’s like railing against the pounding surf. She only grows stronger and more powerful. Her ear-shattering tones louder and louder. We KNOW she can’t cook. She shrewdly tells us so. So…what is she selling us? Really? She’s selling us satisfaction, the smug reassurance that mediocrity is quite enough. She’s a friendly, familiar face who appears regularly on our screens to tell us that “Even your dumb, lazy ass can cook this!” Wallowing in your own crapulence on your Cheeto-littered couch you watch her and think, “Hell…I could do that. I ain’t gonna…but I could–if I wanted! Now where’s my damn jug a Diet Pepsi?” Where the saintly Julia Child sought to raise expectations, to enlighten us, make us better–teach us–and in fact, did, Rachael uses her strange and terrible powers to narcotize her public with her hypnotic mantra of Yummo and Evoo and Sammys. “You’re doing just fine. You don’t even have to chop an onion–you can buy it already chopped. Aspire to nothing…Just sit there. Have another Triscuit…Sleep….sleep….” All emphasis mine.

Well.

So is Bourdain bang on? Is Rachael Ray the equivalent of Martha Stewart for the white trash set? It’s something I had never actually thought of, to be honest, but the man’s got a point.

Canadians At Table: A Culinary History of Canada
Dorothy Duncan

When I was in junior high school, I was very excited about taking history class. That was until I got to that class and realized “history” was really all about who won what war, and not about how people really lived. Feminists would interject here and mention that what I really was interested in was “HERstory”, and I guess to some degree, that would be right. Because what really turned my crank was learning about how people lived, and most of that centred around women. How did the pilgrims keep their teeth clean? What did the Egyptians use in place of pads or tampons? How did cooks make all of the things we cook today without the convenient appliances we take for granted?

This interest was so intense that it almost led me to become an archaeologist, until I learned that archaeologists spend an awful lot of time digging in the dirt under the hot sun. Turns out what I really wanted to be was an anthropologist, but by the time I figured that out, I had moved on to wanting to be a fashion designer, and my interest in history got set aside until I got into the study of food.

I’m guessing author Dorothy Duncan felt the same way. Starting out as a teacher, it wasn’t until she became a teacher-guide and curator at Black Creek Pioneer Village that she put together her love of history and her love of food to become a food historian.

Canadians at Table is really the culinary history of Canada. Starting with the foodways of the First Nations peoples, Duncan traces her way through each new wave of explorers, fur-traders and colonists from the fishing outposts of Newfoundland to the logging towns of British Columbia. Vividly describing the near-famine conditions many settlers were faced with;

One settler describes the daily round as “working from dawn to dark and then walking three miles to the river, catching fish by the light of the ‘fire jacks’ using the bone of a pike as a hook.” The fish, buds and leaves of trees, and milk from one cow brought from New Brunswick kept the family alive until August when a little crop of spring wheat headed out sufficiently to allow a change of diet.

Duncan also explains in detail the rather arduous and forbidding task of supplying and transporting foodstuffs to all of the fur trading posts located through the country.

As the book progresses, she discusses the Victorian influence on how Canadians ate and cooked, and explores in depth the reach of recipes and local cookbooks, as well as food-based community gatherings such as potlucks and oyster suppers, festivals featuring local produce such as agricultural fairs and either blossom or fruit festivals that took place in localized growing areas, such as the Apple Blossom Festival in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. She also explore the influence of the various mail-order catalogues and how they helped to expand the palates of non-urban Canadians.

Duncan doesn’t ignore the huge role played by farmer’s markets either, and talks about these in some depth. Toronto’s Kensington Market gets only a passing comment, which is too bad, for it’s an excellent example of not only the cultural shifts in our city and country but the foodways of these cultures as well. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to the role food has played in traditional celebrations from Hogmanay to Diwali.

In the later chapters, she discusses how progress such as electricity, refrigerators, prepared foods and microwaves have all had an influence on our changing diets. Duncan mentions the trend toward returning to the older style of eating with less processed foods, and a focus on fresh produce. There’s even a reference to the 100-mile diet - a trend today where people eat foods sourced from within a hundred mile radius of home, something the early settlers would have had no choice but to do.