Gazpacho

If I had more time at home I would spend considerably more time outside growing a great vegetable garden. I love to prepare and share fresh picked local veggies and what better place than from your own back (or front) yard. Since I spend a great deal of time traveling for work it is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a vegetable garden. I do grow some low maintenance winter squash and kale, but my real passion is for heirloom tomatoes. Over 10 years ago I started to grow them in a plastic Home Depot greenhouse using tomato starts from local Metchosin farm stands. Since then I have collected my own seeds, enlarged my greenhouse and I get started on my own seedlings every January.

Delicious raw ingredients

By September we are swimming in 6-10 varieties of heirloom tomatoes. What do we do with this great abundance of tomatoes? Well, almost every day we have tomato salad, we share them with friends and family, they get frozen whole, we make tomato sauce for pizza or pasta, and I make gazpacho. To me gazpacho captures the essence of summer. Colourful heirloom tomatoes from my greenhouse; cucumbers, garlic, shallots, and peppers from my favorite local farmers; all swimming in organic tomato juice and topped off with the best olive oil from Tuscan Kitchen on Broad Street. It is so very delicious!

In early September I made a great batch of gazpacho for a Saturday night dinner party. I gathered a great selection of tomatoes: Aunt Rubies German Green, White Ghost (actually yellow), Black from Tula (dark mahogany), Green Zebras and Peach Zebras.

The tomatoes were chopped into 1/4 inch dice, then were joined by fuzzy cucumbers and shallots from Windwhipped Farm, garlic from Sea Bluff Farm and peppers from the Wulff’s. It looks so beautiful in a big chrome bowl before adding the tomato juice, but after a day of resting in the fridge it looks even better in our bowls!

Gazpacho

Central Oregon Thai

By virtue of my profession as a management consultant I have the pleasure of spending some of my time travelling to see clients away from my home in Victoria, BC. In late August I spent a week visiting a client just outside of Roseburg, Oregon - population 21,000. The town of Dillard/Winston is a small forest industry town just off of Interstate-5 in central Oregon. Small resource sector towns like this are typically known for their home style cooking, one or two chain restaurants and the compulsory greasy spoons. On my second day I noticed a sign for Hello Thai Cuisine (273 SW Main Street Winston, OR – 541-679-5897 – www.hello-thai.com ), I decided to pass on the 6 inch Subway sub and take a chance on Hello Thai.

I arrived at 11:45 am to a 30 cover restaurant with only 1 customer having the daily $6.90 lunch special; which today was sweet and sour pork with rice, this was not what I had in mind! The pleasant Thai server brought me some ice water while I reviewed the menu. That’s when I noticed the specialty dishes and the list of 15 lunch specials that were totally different than the daily single plate special. Now this was encouraging. I decided to have egg rolls to start followed by the Pad Kee Mao. I was thrilled with my whole lunch. The egg rolls were stuffed full of fresh vegetables, were perfectly deep fried and not in the least bit greasy. Then came the Chicken Pad Kee Mao. I was served a big plate of chicken and wide egg noodles tossed with onions, peppers, thai basil and mushrooms. The dish had just the right amount of spiciness that I offset with hot Thai ginger tea.



Thai Egg Rolls



Pad Kee Mao at Hello Thai

I had discovered a gem in Winston. I was not the only person to discover Hello Thai, by 12:15 the restaurant was packed with local business people, foresters and a couple colorful locals (who ordered the sweet and sour pork special). I spent the next few days with my client raving about the great little Thai restaurant serving the quality of food you would find in Vancouver or San Fransisco. If you happen to be driving I-5 in Oregon you need to take the 15 minute detour to enjoy some of the best Thai food and service on the West Coast!

Dim Sum in Victoria, BC

Well it has been quite some time since I have provided a blog update but I am back on track now! I don’t have a lot of photos to share from lunch today but I promise more in the future. We are blessed in Victoria when it comes to the quality of dim sum available, we have 3-4 great restaurants that have their own specialties and all produce great quality. Today we were having lunch at Golden City Seafood Restaurant (705 Fisgard Street Victoria BC, 250-386-8404) which is one of our two favourite dim sum restaurants.

Dim sum restaurants comes in two forms: cart service or menu ordered, each with their advantages. Golden City is based on the menu ordered service where you need to choose from 64 menu items, many of them with obscure names like: Ha Gow, Shanghai Dumpling or Pan Fried Meat Postickers; which leave the novice wondering what they are ordering. Other menu items like: Prawn Rice Rolls, Steamed Chicken Buns or Chicken Feet with Black Bean Sauce; are much more obvious! As a seasoned veteran I am happy to order off the menu, but I know it can be intimidating for the uninitiated. The menu can also lead to a lack of adventure based on the menu item description, for example, we enjoyed dim sum for over 10 years before discovering Stir Fried Daikon Cake with XO Sauce. It wasn’t until we saw some being served to another table that we decided to try a dish that is now one of our favourites. One we would order today!

When we arrived at Golden City the one and only cart swung by our table. Our regular server, a lovely Chinese lady with a huge smile always dressed in a traditional red dress, told us today they had neither the Prawn Stuffed Eggplant or the Deep Fried Prawn Rolls that we almost always order, so instead we took two other dishes: Deep Fried Spring Rolls and Deep Fried Taro Root Dumplings with Curry Chicken. As with many deep fried dim sum dishes, they are amazing right from the kitchen but lose their flavour as the cool down. So we quickly finished them off before ordering from the menu!

From their extensive menu we ordered an additional eight dishes, which turned out to be far too much for 3 of us. Prawn Dumpling (Ha Gow), steamed spareribs with garlic black bean sauce, stir fried daikon cake with XO sauce, pan fried chive dumplings, steamed prawn and chive dumpling, steamed prawn and cilantro dumpling, pan fried sticky rice, and bean curd roll with enoki mushrooms.

One of the most popular dishes in any dim sum restaurant is Ha Gow, there are no strange ingredients (shrimp, garlic in clear rice wrap) and it presents very well with four small dumplings. I use it as a leading indicator of the quality of the restaurant, if the Ha Gow isn’t good, odds are the rest of the order will be worse! At Golden City they are always excellent!



Pan Fried Chive Dumplings



Today we ordered both the steamed and the pan fried chive dumplings, which are prepared with shrimp, chives and of course garlic. The kitchen did not have any steamed chive dumplings today so they substituted a second order of pan fried instead. As you can see from the photo they look, and taste delicious, with a nice crispy rice wrap enveloping the inside.

One of our other favourite dishes which is not always available, even by special order, is the stir fried fried daikon cake with XO sauce. It was here at Golden City that we disciovered this amazing dish that is worth a try if you have the opportunity. The daikon cake is quite mild for a radish cake, but the XO sauce carries a bit of kick with some hot peppers. Unfortunalety for me, the cognac lover, there isn’t any cognac in this dish, but the Chinese spicy concoction makes this dish and many others, a real special treat, just like XO cognac.

Stir Fried Daikon Cake with XO Sauce

By the end of lunch we packed up 2 containers with our leftovers and headed off to the airport for a trip to Central Oregon where I discovered a gem of a Thai restaurant in the tiny town of Winston Oregon, just off of I-5.

Bison and Morel Mushrooms

Anyone who lives on the Westcoast knows about the abundance of wild mushrooms, no not the psychedelic type that teenagers and hippies harvest, I’m referring to delicious gourmet mushrooms like chanterelles and morels. While most mushrooms are harvested in the fall, the morel is the exception that shows up in the spring and early summer.

Morels are found in areas affected by forest fires in the previous 1-2 years, and are unmistakable given their sponge-like appearance, ranging in colour from black to yellow-brown and can grow to be 4-6” in height. I was thrilled to find a local mushroom forager at the Metchosin Farmers Market with fresh morels from Quesnel BC. I bought myself 1 pound of mushrooms for $16 and started planning dinner for Sunday and Monday. Tonight we would enjoy an appetizer from our local market!

In addition to the morels I bought some fava beans, DiMaggio onions and a fresh baked baguette. I started by sautéing the onion in some pernod butter, then added a half pound of sliced morels, which were cooked until softened, about 7 minutes (this is important when cooking fresh morels since they can cause an upset stomach if eaten raw). Whipping cream was added and reduced, followed by the prepared fava beans with their brilliant bright green colour.

We grilled slices of baguette, rubbed the toasted crostini with garlic, topped each with the mushroom sauté and finished them with fresh chopped tarragon. What a delightful way to start dinner.

Our Sunday dinner continued with bison striploin and local veggies. The bison striploins were grilled for barely 6 minutes for medium rare, and were dressed with only olive oil, salt and pepper to let the flavor of the young bison shine through. Served alongside were oven braised baby fennel and DiMaggio onions, sautéed rainbow chard and smashed german gold new potatoes. While I was tempted to prepare a sauce for this dinner I decided to let the flavours of the local bounty stand on their own. Now we are ready for a full and busy week of work!

TIGBG: Goes to Au Pied de Cochon, Montreal

This is Gonna Be Good: BrookLen Goes to Au Pied de Cochon, Montreal

Cooking at Home

I really enjoyed our four fabulous days in Montreal with the great variety of food and wine the city has to offer. At the same time I missed cooking! In preparation for Thursday night dinner I picked up my weekly meat and veggie box from Alex and Virginie at Wind Whipped Farm (http://www.windwhippedfarm.com/) . They are an amazing couple who have partnered with other local farmers who supply lamb, chicken and pork for the meat portion of the box program. The variety and quality of the veggies are always excellent. Dinner started with grilled hearts of romaine then the main course featured a smoked chicken from Stillmeadow Farm (http://www.stillmeadowfarm.ca/).

The grilled hearts of romaine were topped with oven roasted roma tomatoes from Glanford Greenhouses, croutons and Caesar salad dressing, heavy on anchovies and capers. Grilled romaine is always a nice start to a summer BBQ menu!

This beautiful local organic chicken was rotiserried on low heat while we smoked it with cherry wood chips. Wind Whipped Farm provided first of season red beets, served on top of their wilted greens, steamed new purple potatoes, and a sauté of baby zucchini, snow peas and DiMaggio onion tops.


We are so lucky to have so many great people providing top quality local ingredients for our table. They are all passionate about local, sustainable food supply for local residents and restaurants. In the coming weeks I will share with you some of these great local restaurants and their amazing food!

Montreal Day 4 - Monday July 11

I managed to get myself out of the room and down to the hotel gym at on Monday morning.  When someone consumes as much pork, foie gras and seafood as I had at APDC you need to do something to burn off the calories!  One hour and 500 calories later, I was lucky if I was 10% of the way to offsetting my caloric intake of the past 2 days.  Would I do it again you ask?  Well at least once per year!

On our last full day in Montreal we set our sights on some more clothes shopping on Rue St Catherines looking for good prices on the stylish clothes you see all of the locals wearing.  French Canadians have a sense of style that you don’t see in the rest of the country.  It does not seem to matter whether they are young or old, short or tall, skinny or heavy set.  They have a sense of style!  We were hoping to find a bit of that for ourselves before heading home.

On the way we stopped at a small restaurant in the office district just off St Catherines.  We spotted a pizza place that was 90% full at 1145 with men in business attire, women taking a break from a shopping trip downtown, and other local office workers.  Add to that the wood fired oven we were sold on having a couple pizzas to get us through the afternoon.  We managed to get a table near the door at ‘Il Focolaio’ (1223 Carre Phillips, 514-879-1045, www.ilfocolaio.ca) and within minutes the place was packed without a seat to be found.  Since building a wood fired cob oven in the summer of 2010 we are always looking for places to try and compare to what we are doing at home.  While they were quite good, I have to say I am happy with my home made pizzas which will be featured in the next couple weeks on my blog.

Later in the afternoon we dropped into the Plateau Lounge at our hotel, W Montreal.  As one would expect a lounge is almost empty on Monday at 1630.  We had an amazing cocktail called a ‘Cote d’Artagnan’ which consisted of cognac, whiskey, sweet vermouth and maple syrop with twists of lemon and orange.  I will share the drink recipe if/when I can convince the hotel to share it with me!  We asked the bartender for restaurant recommendations for Monday night, a night that most Montreal restaurants are closed.  She recommended ‘F-Bar’, a Portuguese restaurant at Place des Artes.  After a quick review of their website I was hopeful that we had stumbled upon another great Montreal restaurant.

We skipped making a reservation and walked over to Place des Artes where we came across two very modern restaurants along the waterpark.  Both were brand new glass and steel buildings (we should have taken pictures) that were no more than 16 feet wide, with 12 foot ceilings and seemed to stretch forever from the front door, through the bar, the dining area, then to the kitchen at the very end.  We were in for a really pleasant surprise!

The restaurant was busy but not overcrowded for 1800 on a Monday night.  The hostess brought us to a great table beside the bar where Jeff and Phil could see at least half of the dishes being served to other patrons, since I was facing the window I didn’t have the advantage of seeing the amazing dishes being ushered to one table and the next.  After the first 5 minutes of watching plates pass by Jeff knew exactly what he was having for a starter and the main was obvious from the menu.

Tonight we each decided to order different appies and mains, share…  maybe but not for sure…

For starters we ordered the pea soup featured on the menu and their website, the mackerel that we saw going to another table, and the charcuterie platter.  I had the charcuterie platter with 3-4 slices each of salami, prosciutto, capicolla, chorizo, brawn (jellied pig head), rabbit/sweetbread terrine as well as a bowl of pickled gherkins, radishes, mushrooms and pearl onions.  I have ordered many charcuterie platters before and have often felt ripped off by the portions, not so at F bar, where the platter was delicious and generous.  Phil ordered the pea soup which I had assumed was a hot pea soup.  He kindly offered to share but I kindly refused.  It wasn’t until our flight home that he told us it was a refreshing cold pea soup with crispy bacon and fresh mint foam, now I wish I’d taken him up on his offer. 

As much as we both enjoyed our starters, nothing could compare to Jeff’s mackerel.  Two fillets of mackerel served on 3 sauces (almond, coco bean and chorizo/pepper).  I could have eaten 3 orders alone!  Simply amazing.

For our mains we ordered the lamb burger, cod (morue) and Magret duck breast.  Again Jeff scored on his choice of mains, the magret duck breast.  The duck was served in round stainless tin on top of new potatoes, olives, DiMaggio onions, mushrooms, strips of guanciale and tarragon.  The duck breast, although not overly large, was seared to rare perfection.  What an incredible dinner.

The lamb burger with salad and fries was Phil’s choice.  He was thrilled to bite into his burger on a home-made Portuguese bun to find it cooked medium rare, the way all burgers should be served (if you trust the chef).  It was served on top of a nice slow roasted slice of onion and topped with a cucumber-mint raita, not something you’d expect on a burger but it really worked with the lamb burger.  The fries looked well prepared but were a bit soft (they needed to be eaten first, but Phil was far too eager to try the lamb), not nearly as good as everything else at F bar.

My black cod was also served in a stainless metal tin like the duck but with a much simpler presentation.  The seared black cod was just barely cooked through, as I like it, layered atop mashed potatos and braised fennel.  The mashed potatoes were a very complex preparation of ‘sardine parmentier’ which consists of mashed yellow potatoes, sardines, grainy Dijon mustard and cream.  An amazing combination that I will try at home after making a batch of APDC mashed potatoes!

Dinner at F bar was a great way to wrap-up our trip to Montreal.  The total bill including a couple good local beer, a nice bottle of Portuguese white wine, tip and tax was $220.  F bar and her sister restaurant ‘Ferreira Café’ on Rue Peel are strong recommendations for anyone travelling to Montreal.  Now it is time to pack all our new clothes, amaro, pastis and chocolate from ‘Chocolats de Chloe’.  I did not provide a review of Chocolats de Chloe (546 Rue Duluth Est, 514-849-5550, www.leschocolatsdechloe.com) but if you like chocolate you’ll love this shop that only uses Valrhona, my favourite chocolate, in everything she makes.