Food

I should update more often. These photos are a bit old (except for the desserts).

David must have let me borrow his metropass this day, because I decided I wanted to go here:



So I did.




It's a nice Jewish bakery that sells mandelbrot (biscotti) and I bought some. I decided I also needed a hot pastry immediately, so I bought this vegetable one.



It's better out of focus. Although it was filled with about five different kinds of vegetables it was all held together with a flavourless white sauce. I have nothing against white sauces, but when they are thicker than normal and have little flavour it's basically like eating paste.

Fast-forward to the exciting future that is my fridge; she's filled with numerous preserves and leftover pastry. Pastry is a terrible thing to go to waste, so I combined it with some sour cherry jam. The egg wash I used also had a bit of honey, which was a mistake. It made the pastries look too brown. As you can see I didn't spend much time applying the egg wash evenly, or shaping my dough properly. Look at the ugly lip on that turnover, tsk.



Aaand then I made some fruit tarts in my desserts class. The one on the right is the one I presented, the one on the left I threw together when I remembered I was supposed to make two.



None of the custard should be visible, so ooops. I was in a rush. The recipe for the crust is called "sweet paste" and that's an accurate description. Well it doesn't sound very appetizing, but it makes a rich crust with a texture that I can't quite describe. It isn't flaky, and when you're rolling it out it mostly just falls apart. The best thing to do is roll it in to a large, vaguely circular shape and quickly plop it in your tart pan. Then all you have to do is trim the excess and neatly press the dough in to the fluted sides of the pan to make sure it bakes up prettily.

Take out

As most people know I am fairly lazy. So when my kitchen is messy (usually) and I don't feel like cooking (often) I try to find cheap food elsewhere. Ding Dong Bakery on Spadina is a good, inexpensive Chinese bakery. I'm not crazy about everything baked and Chinese but after several visits I think I now know what to buy and what not to. I like everything on this plate but the curry beef in the bun is a bit too sweet for me. I will have to only buy the flaky curry (I assume it's beef, it didn't say) pastries from now on.



I had never tried any of these before but I already knew I was not a huge fan of glutinous rice. It must depend on the preparation because I love the little mochi balls filled with red bean paste or ice cream that the Japanese make. The rice was more normal in the rice/mushroom/pork thing and it even had real, tasty mushrooms and pork (wow!) but everything tasted too strongly of Chinese cooking wine. The cupcakes are very plain, basically just a tall paper cup filled with spongecake. If I were to make a spongey cupcake in those dimensions I think I would have a couple of layers of jam or some sort of cream to make it more interesting, but maybe that would be too much.




And sometimes you just want a big, cheap burrito. Fulla beans.




This is pumpkin bread with a ricotta icing. I figured if you can make cream cheese icing, why not ricotta? Italians sweeten ricotta and put it in a shocking number of desserts so I assume it must be somewhat edible. First of all, I should have drained the ricotta better so my icing would be thicker. I thought the taste was good and (other than the thinness) the texture was good. I had to attack the ricotta with an immersion blender for a bit to make it nice and smooth.

I was mauled by wildebeests

and that is why I haven't updated this blog in so long. I don't expect to be mauled by any other wildebeests, but I didn't exactly expect the first attack to occur in my elevator either. Oh the trauma.

Fooood? Hardly. Just kidding Sara, vegan food can be FUN. Did you know that apples are vegan? I do now! I certainly don't eat apples anymore because of it, but here's some pictures of some vegan food that Sara and I made anyway.

Here's some gnocchi with sundried tomato pesto. Gnocchi (as I'm sure everyone knows) is a perplexing combination of pasta AND potato! Those Irishtalians.




I made some lentil soup with coconut milk and some non-spicy spices (although I then threw in about 8 chilies because for some reason the recipe didn't call for any). The recipe is very good and from a lovely (real!) photofoodblog called Orangette.
These are vegan chai tea cupcakes. Normally I don't like cinnamon or cocoa powder on anything (like when truffles are rolled in cocoa powder, blech!) but since icing is fat+sugar+fat'n'sugar it basically turns in to chocolate in your mouth. Hooray for what is basically the worst photo composition ever.




These are vegan pumkpkin oatmeal cookies that I made all by my lonesome on a different day. They ended up being vegan because I had no eggs (that when cracked open didn't smell like the sawdust flavoured apples rotting in my fridge). They were a bit too soft for my liking; next time I will flatten them more and use more oats and less flour. Oatmeal cookies should hardly have any flour, so I'm not sure why I wasn't bright enough to adjust the recipe beforehand.




This almond candy was a garnish for a dessert in my Restaurant Cooking class. I gave it to Jenny to use as a garnish for some future cupcakes. They really stick to your teeth, which I later learned means they were not cooked properly. They should be more brittle. I took this picture in the lovely photography box that my father gave to me. I should have used more light.




This is some very un-vegan dulce de leche. As wikipedia will tell you, that means "milk candy" or something. In a language. It has two ingredients: sugar and whole milk (I added a bit of vanilla which apparently makes it more like confiture du lait). You cook it quite slowly and it turns into a deliciously indulgent spread for your morning bagels.

blurry things

David's balcony offers pretty good views of the city and comes with sleepy, lazy pigeons.






Joy is also prohibited in the Broadview and Danforth area.




I like the King-Broadview streetcar sometimes.

It's still Christmastimeish

Christmas cookies? Why not. I was bored so I decided to make these ginger molasses crinkles in a few different ways. Nothing really groundbreakingly different of course, I was just curious. I had never used my silicone baking sheet for anything so I decided I would use it for these. I also used a normal baking pan aaaand some of the cookies were rolled in granulated sugar, and some in powdered (because it makes such a difference, right?).
The silicone was deceptive.



It doesn't feel particularly hot to the touch so I popped it back in the oven for a bit which was a mistake. It wasn't a disaster but I'll know for next time.

This is probably a normal metal pan with cookies on it. Yup.



And these are the cookies awaiting Santa (but not really). You will note that the glass was not filled because the picture was not taken on Christmas Eve. Santa probably doesn't visit soulless condo dwellers anyway.




Lamb curry. Yes, cookies to curry. Also, saffron rice. This is the kind of stuff you would get in an Indian restaurant, but a real Indian person would spit in your eye if you suggested that they might serve something like it in their home. It is quite tasty however.




This picture is much more recent. I had heard that Bulldog Coffee makes like, real espresso and uses real chocolate and stuff, so I had their Bavarian chocolate latte and it was incredibly good. I also scarfed a tasty walnut muffin and my friend had a cappuccino (the fern art on top is a bit hard to see, I didn't want the other patrons to give me too many odd looks).

must be Santa

I think Santa must have dropped off a big bag of bagels at the Carousel Bakery in St. Lawrence Market for me.
It's more likely that their baker, who hails from Montreal, knows how to make delicious bagels. They're not quite the Montreal style (which I find too small) but I definitely enjoyed them. Normally I go to the Carousel Bakery so one of the employees can tell me that their beautiful, large whole wheat sandwich loaf for $1.95 is sold out, but the six bagels were on sale for the same price.




Air freshener. I mean, veggie stock. I'm not quite sure why I took a picture of it.




This is my IKEA tree. It's a bit scrawny and lopsided, but I love it anyway. It's sort of a work in progress.




Peanut butter and date cookies because I haven't made cookies in forever.




Why is this (overexposed) fruit and wine crumble floating above Adelaide Street?




You may have noticed that these little aluminum pans keep showing up. They're from my school and although they're quite handy I would not buy them for myself. I should get a glass dish that size though.
This is a shepherd's pie with a Duchesse potato mixture (about a kg. of yukon gold, two egg yolks and a pinch of nutmeg) piped on top. Why we couldn't just throw mashed potatoes on there I have no idea. As you can see I still need to practice my piping.
You should ALSO note (Mom) that this is a shepherd's pie because I added ground lamb. It would be a cottage pie if made with beef.

little boxes

In banquet class we had lots of beef. I would say more beef than we could handle, but clearly that's not the case. Here are some very generic looking beef (and Guinness) pies:



After class I reheated them in the oven and enjoyed them with a friend.



Yay IKEA. I got me a 6'x6' shelf. I'm going to put my life on it.




Some friends are coming up from Ottawa this weekend and I think Sara is making some sort of walnut molasses bread, among other things. I'll take some pictures to showcase her excellent baking skills.