This is the cake I posted about on the Facebook page. The recipe is based off of the chocolate cake recipe in David Lebovitz’ book The Sweet Life in Paris (the one I gushed about in my travelogues, etc). Actually, based on my Food Network watching and reading other cake recipes, this is the cake recipe that many restaurants sell to you as a “warm chocolate cake” or, depending on how you bake it, a “molten lava cake”.
Hey, I just put up a page for the blog on FB. Basically, I spend a lot of time on Facebook, and write there in a more casual format very often. I will, of course, keep this blog active as a recipe index, and information storage – it’s not going anywhere.
The direct link is http://www.facebook.com/pages/No-More-Microwaves/142472095805879
Come and see us!
Gravlax, pronounced grav-lox, is a Swedish dish of cold-cured salmon. Gravlax is like smoked salmon, but instead of cold smoking it, it’s cured. Originally, it was cured by burying the salmon underground, hence grav (grave/buried under the ground) and lax (salmon), however you won’t need a shovel to make this recipe. It is incredibly simple to make, while still making you look incredibly impressive to all your friends, or even just yourself. Nothing quite like saying “oh yes, I cured the salmon myself.” Also, compared to smoked salmon, or even gravlax you’d buy in a supermarket, way cheaper.
Hello there No More Microwavers,
A quick introduction. I am Hilary, friend of Jeff, lover of eating, dissenter of outrageously unnecessary convenience foods, and new contributor to No More Microwaves. How I came to be a contributor of this blog all started one sunny afternoon while I was, perhaps paradoxically, working out at the gym and watching the Food Network. I caught a commercial for a ready-made meal that allows you to steam vegetables in the microwave and then use the leftover steam-juice as a sauce to pour over your veggies. Disgusting. I actually winced outwardly… And then I had an epiphany.
I thought, “Cooking from fresh is so easy, and so much more satisfying. Even if people only know how to cook a little, they accomplish something huge and avoid all this pre-made, make-you-feel-like-a-sack-of-shit overpriced industrial crap”, and immediately this blog name popped into my head. No More Microwaves. Perfect. I could not have said any better myself. I wondered if I could contribute to No More Microwaves; to share my thoughts about cooking, techniques, and pass on a few recipes here and there.
I talked to Jeff about my thoughts, and he graciously offered me a space in this blog to write about cooking and food-related things.
There are a lot of pre-made products in grocery stores these days. Pre-made meals, pre-made dressings, even pre-diced vegetables. Pre-fucking-diced vegetables! The strange thing is that many of these products are so simple, so much cheaper, and provide so much more of a feeling of accomplishment when you do it yourself. It boggles my mind how there is actually a need for these convenience foods that are already so simple anyway. Cooking isn’t hard. You just need to try.
I once read an article by JoAnn Jaffe and Michael Gertler that described cooking as a tactile process – where you need to recognize when something is the right consistency, understand flavours, etc., and so in this sense, knowing how to cook, is a way of knowing yourself.
My cooking style is based in simplicity. No water-baths or liquid nitrogen. Just honest, clean, and simple foods. My intent is to illuminate and celebrate how easy and satisfying cooking can be, and bring a cozy, home-y compliment to the international urban flair of No More Microwaves. Not to mention, join the crusade against microwaves. So, fuck ready-made! Pick up those knives and let’s cook!
Yours in cuisine,
Hilary
Not a whole lot, eh? Trust me, I’m still here – still paying attention to the site – but I’m stuck in a bit of a rut. You see, originally, this blog was supposed to be my personal online cookbook and, as such, contain only my personal recipes. It’s already moved a bit beyond that, but for the most part these are all recipes I’ve spent several years collecting and refining. However, I am not a chef (therefore my knowledge is relatively limited), so I’ve kind of run out of obvious things to write about.
I’m still cooking… constantly… though. I just haven’t been writing, yet. I’ve made a South Indian-style coconut stew, eggplant mash, Korean-style sesame beef, Thai seafood noodles, fried spicy noodles, curried coconut-butternut squash soup (which later became a weird chicken curry – not sure if I’d do that again), and a hybrid Indian Thanksgiving meal of turkey breast roasted in tandoori paste, spiced mashed potatoes, and cumin carrots that was interesting – tasty but also strange. Strange in that turkey is typically eaten only one way, so the mind remembers it very specifically and to taste it in a completely different context is very unusual. It forced me to taste “turkey” as a flavour – as a single ingredient – rather than “turkey” as the entire concept.
Chili powder in mashed potatoes, though – that is just fine for all occasions. Tandoori turkey also makes a great addition to tomato-based tikka masala sauce (which played the part of gravy).
I’m on the hunt for some new ideas – things to work on and play with. One day, I’ll figure out Hainanese Chicken Rice but that will be a day when I really want to deal with a whole chicken. Also, I’ve been wanting to make Phở for 2+ years now and just haven’t bothered on account of the time required to simmer stock (although I did just make Chinese chicken stock from a chicken carcass – which became an excellent chicken and corn soup as well as the base for a noodle bowl – so I’m just complaining for no reason) and because beef bones are not readily available at Sobeys. Weird. Also – I do have a recipe for a basic Malay curry sauce but I’m waiting until I can make the perfect roti prata (to dip in the sauce) before I post it. Man, you have not fully lived until you try a good prata.
Anyway, long story short – give me ideas! Post them here!
Basic Curry
Some days – a few every month – I’m not really in the mood for doing a lot of work to put food on the table. I still want something good, but uncomplicated and containing only a few, simple ingredients. Some days, that means grilled cheese sandwiches, and other days this recipe for simple chicken curry. “Curry is simple and not a lot of work?”, I hear you ask, incredulous. Well, it’s true – or more true than false.
After hearing and reading about the North African market in Marseille (pronounced mar-say), I knew I wanted to go, badly. Marseille has something like 800,000 people living in the city proper, and around 1/4 of them are immigrants from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria (known as the Maghreb, collectively) and this fact alone would be enough to interest me. In addition to a love of international foods, I also spend a lot of time reading about other cultures, history, and other demographic facts and figures. To skip a long non-food discussion, I was very interested in what this city was like – even moreso after hearing the rumours of its gritty, working-class reputation. What was it really like? How do these cultures manifest themselves in French urban life? What interesting things could I find in their market – things I may have never seen before, since Toronto has significantly less North African influence (if any, at all).
Happily, the rumours of Marseille’s dirty port-city vibe are somewhat misguided. Driving into Marseille, it is certainly evident that it is not Paris but, it is not ugly, either. Perhaps one might consider it ugly when compared to Paris’ seemingly permanent antique beauty, but Paris, to me, also feels like it is a fixed idea – whereas Marseille is a living, breathing city. The highway from Aix-en-Provence took us right onto the edge of the ports, and my first reaction to the scenery and layout was that it felt a lot like Toronto: highway along the water, downtown core arranged along one major north-south-ish street, glass buildings and rows upon rows of modern, but hardly fancy, shops and malls, dotted liberally with ethnic restaurants, trash, and commuters trying to get home (as opposed to tourists). It felt disarmingly familiar, in a very pleasant way. Sure, it’s no Paris, but this is a city I could actually relate to, while the big P is like the girl who thinks she’s too pretty for you, and really, you have nothing in common anyway.
We spent the next day and half recovering from our Parisian walk-a-thon by relaxing at the villa in Cairanne. Somewhere between the time we arrived in France, and the day we left for Italy, I also decided to make ratatouille (first time!). I can’t really remember which day it was, but I was inspired to create this simple French dish, because, on the flight from Toronto to Paris, Air France (not a bad airline, apart from luggage problems) gave us the ability to select movies from a long list of available features. We chose Disney’s Ratatouille – in part because I’ve never seen it, and because I felt I needed a crash course on contemporary French culture (and what better source?)
Cairanne is about a 7 hour drive from Paris. That’s a long way. In general, I don’t enjoy long car rides – mostly because in Ontario that means seeing a lot of the same scenery for 7 straight hours: farms, highway signage, lonely VIA stations, and truck stops. In France, I was sort of expecting the same, with the slight improvement in that the truck stops et al would be “French” and therefore “new” (to me) at least. Still, 7 hours of anything can be a bit much. My parents were driving us on this excursion, themselves on their way to the northern coast to see war memorials – so make that a 7 hour drive with my parents.
Luckily, I love my parents, and they’re not bad car company. My dad drives fast, and likes to take rest stops frequently to stretch our legs and purchase exotic flavours of Lays potato chips such as Bolognaise and Roast Chicken With Thyme (tastes like Thanksgiving dinner in chip form!). My dad likes chips a lot, you see. I’ve always been keen on Lays’ flavours in other countries ever since I had a flavour in Thailand that haunts me to this day – I couldn’t read the label, but the pictures on it suggested it was some kind of spicy ginger seafood concoction. There were other unidentifiable flavours as well – whatever they were, they were genius. The French lineup also features a flavour named Mustard and Pickles, which I have to guess tastes like spicy dill pickles(?) or something like that. Again, as Anuja detests all things involving vinegar, I would never have been allowed to purchase these if I saw them. Even the smell of the Thanksgiving chips (delicious!) turned her off. You might wonder how I, the intrepid home cook, can deal with someone with such particular taste problems. Sometimes I wonder myself.
As mentioned on previous posts, we spent August 16th to the 28th abroad, sampling foreign cuisines, cultures and lifestyles in France and Italy. By “we” I mean my immediate family (father, mother, brother, sister) and my siblings’ partners (as well as my lovely ladyfriend, Anuja); in a stroke of pure generosity and possibly insanity, my parents decided to finance flights for all of us, as well as the rental of a relatively large villa in Cairanne, a village in Provence.
In case you’ve never heard of Provence, it’s the south-eastern region of France, on the Mediterranean. We weren’t on the sea, however – Cairanne sits just north of Avignon and is firmly in farm country. Or, rather, wine country, as this part of France, like a few others, is highly dependent on their local wine economy. With a population under 1000, I was amazed at how many varieties of wine were offered under the Cairanne label. Plus, they were all, in their way, fantastic wines. I’m not much of a wine-taster, but I can tell the difference between a rich, complex red and a pitcher of grape juice – these were good wines. I will spare you too much wine chatter, though – suffice to say that if you love wines (as my parents do, as well as my sister, since her favourite wines in the world – the wines of Châteauneuf-du-Pape – were a mere 20 minutes away by car) then this region is where you want to be.
Well, sort of. I’m back in Toronto after a whirlwind tour of several locales in France (and a brief stop in Italy) but unfortunately, I can’t post much since my home cable and internet service has been interrupted due to a service upgrade that happened while we were away (and unable to authorize the upgrade, grr).
So, here I sit, blogging at work (employee of the year!) and unable to collect all the resources I need to write and post properly. I have planned a 4-part food summary of my trip, broken into relevant sections: Provence, Paris, Cinque Terre, and the North African Market in Marseilles. It’s coming.
In the meantime, enjoy this photograph of the villa my family rented in Cairanne, a small village in Provence. I should be back to normal with lots to post shortly.
For the next two weeks, I’ll be vacationing in France. I’ve been somewhat lax in updating the blog in the last few months, but I promise posts about my trip, and much more food in the Fall.
As the food and stories on this blog may suggest, Europe has never been a strong interest for me. I had somewhat resigned myself to never visiting, but my parents are kind and generous enough to sponsor a family trip (my lovely girlfriend included). We are renting a villa in Provence and since we are a food-oriented family (my brother does some occasional catering and maintains his own vegetable garden, and my sister works at a restaurant and once attempted to enroll in culinary classes / has the knives to prove it) occupying a villa (with full kitchen and outdoor charcoal bbq) in a land known for top-quality ingredients… well, we are planning a special kind of food vacation. Expect pictures upon my return, and maybe even some regional French recipes. Don’t count on that, though, unless it becomes some sort of French-Indian fusion.
Roti Jala
Roti Jala translates to “net bread” from Malay. For obvious reasons. In the simplest terms, it’s a coconut crepe. The batter is a similar formula to a crepe or thin pancake, except that coconut milk replaces regular milk. That sounds good, right? It is.
The tricky thing about this is achieving the pretty lace quality of the crepe. In Malaysia, they have these little plastic things called Roti Jala Molds. Here is a photo of one in action. I imagine they are ridiculously cheap, but unfortunately, they are not sold in Toronto – or, at least, I have no idea where I’d find one. I tried making roti jala without a mold (using a free-pour style out of a measuring cup) and I got a lot of blobs and large streaks of batter in the pan. It tastes fine, but does not make my eyes happy. I tried punching holes in the bottom of a styrofoam cup. That didn’t really work, either. The batter wouldn’t run through the holes until I punched them quite large, and then it just dripped out in blobs, making a mess.
Saag Paneer
Remember that time? The first time you went to an Indian restaurant (for buffet, naturally) and your eyes and nose were overwhelmed by unfamiliar colours and smells? Maybe you were more daring than me, but I hesitated when I swirled the ladle around in the tray of saag paneer. White cubes of something (I didn’t know what) hidden in a thick green soup of unknown origin. My gut reaction was repulsion, and I believe I made a comparison involving swamp slime.
As is often the case, I was wrong. So wrong. Perhaps the subtleties were lost in the dense haze of 2 dozen dishes mixing their smells in the same room, but saag paneer, despite its appearance, is a dish for kings. Or me. The paneer is rich with crisp, chewy edges and pillow-y center. The spinach is softened and thickened with cream, flavoured with a spice blend that is a good balance between earthy and delicate. It seems fairly simple (cheese+spinach+cream), but the flavours are layered and complex.
Mango Chutney
Oh, mango chutney, the ketchup of North Indian restaurants. Papadum served with chutneys, samosas with chutney – everyone’s familiar with the basic concept. Except they’re probably only familiar with the Western versions – “chutney” can refer to a wide class of preparations much different than what we commonly understand. That’s not what I want to talk about, though.
I want to talk about preserving, or pickling. This mango chutney is technically a pickle. In the simplest terms, a pickle is a mixture whose pH leans heavily towards acidity (<4.6 pH officially) and that acidity is strong enough to kill bacteria and other fun things – all of which means you can store it (the pickle) for quite a long time without it going bad. Since vinegar and lemon juice’s pHs are 2.4 and 2.2 respectively, either can be used here. To help keep the interior of the jar safe, we need a clean jar, and a tight lid. By clean, I mean it should probably be boiled (or washed in a hot cycle of a dishwasher) beforehand, and dried with a fresh towel.
Rendang Daging
Historically, this beef dish originates in Western Sumatra, Indonesia with the Minangkabau ethnic group, and dates back at least 500 years in literature. Or that’s what I’ve gleaned from Wikipedia, anyway. My personal experience with the dish dates back to a lunch-time cafeteria in Singapore. I remember enjoying the dish, but otherwise have completely forgotten the flavour. Maybe that’s a good thing, since cheap cafeterias ordinarily don’t produce the greatest versions of things. Who knows?
Whatever it was, though, it impressed me enough to inspire an ongoing quest to make rendang (pronounced ren-dahng, daging is dah-ging) at home, here in Canada. I found some Indofoods rendang spice packets at Loblaws, so it is popular enough to infiltrate the Western marketplace in some form, but the resulting mess was sub-standard. Hell, most of those spice packets produce only a pale imitation of the real thing. For many Southeast Asian foods, you need fresh ingredients. Lemongrass, ginger, shallots, garlic, and so on. Which means I needed a real recipe. For rendang, specifically, you need all of those aromatics and spices, plus one more crucial ingredient: infinite patience.
Khao Soi
Once upon a time, I was vacationing in Thailand and, instead of staying in one spot, I took buses and trains all over the country. One of the places I stopped was Chiang Mai, the largest city in Northern Thailand. I had my trusty Lonely Planet guidebook to get around, and one of the restaurants recommended in the book served a dish described as a “Shan-Yunnanese concoction of chicken, spicy curried broth and flat, squiggly noodles”. I’d never heard of it, but it sounded interesting and seemed to be popular in the city.
As it turned out, khao soi is something of a regional specialty and has inspired a small cult following (including blogs like The Quest for Khao Soi) as the dish is rarely made outside of Northern Thailand. It’s a shame, really – outside of Chiang Mai, it is somewhat difficult to find this dish on a menu, despite it being very Western palate-friendly, visually appealing and relatively cheap and easy to make, not to mention addictive as hell. However, it may be obscure because its roots are as peculiar as its isolation – it was invented through the travels of Chinese Muslim spice traders through Northern Laos, Thailand and Burma. The curry’s spice is flavoured with imported Burmese and Indian spices such as cumin, coriander seed, turmeric, fenugreek and cinnamon. Then it’s grounded in more commonly Thai ingredients like cilantro, galangal, chilies, kaffir lime, coconut milk broth seasoned with fish sauce and perhaps a bit of palm sugar.
Chana Masala
Chana Masala – another one of those Indian buffet staples – means simply “spiced chickpeas” (or close enough). My most memorable experience eating chana masala was not at a buffet, but at a downtown food court in Boston. It’s not that it was great food (it was good) but I did find it surprising that there was an Indian vendor at a food court. It made me realize that in Toronto, there is no food court (outside of Gerrard st.) I know of has any Indian food, and I’ve been to many food courts (sadly). One day, I hope that changes. I’m getting tired of Manchu Wok, and don’t even get me started on Subway. Ok, moving on…
Paratha – my Achilles heel. Not only is it bread, it’s fried bread. Fried, flaky, layered flat-bread – each inner layer is moist and buttery, the outer layer crispy and hot. Sigh. Like the ghee worked into the dough, I melt…
But let’s not get carried away. These things are so thick with ghee that even *I* feel a little guilty about indulging. You see, paratha is made by rolling out dough, slathering ghee on the surface, folding the dough over, and slathering on more ghee. You repeat this a few times until you have a rolled-out dough with multiple layers and pockets filled with ghee, ready to melt and sizzle instantly when the dough hits the pan.
