Grocery List Found at Queen & Bank

-milk
-V8 juice
-Glad foil wrap
-TP
-Sponges for dishes
-potatoes
-black pepper

Curry Powder?

Thank you to those who've emailed me about sticky rice & porcelain spoons. I like feedback. I recently received an email from my friend Irfan that intrigued me. He wanted to know what's up with curry powder. As someone who grew up eating Indian food, curry powder is something he'd never encountered before coming to Canada.
I would equate Irfan’s confusion about curry powder to my confusion over Minute Rice. How the heck did it get invented? And who uses the stuff?
Curry powder is a mixture of ground spices. I admit, I keep curry powder in my cupboard (mostly to use in Classy Chicken, which I will devote a whole blog entry to someday). My bottle of McCormick Hot Curry Powder lists the following ingredients: fenugreek, coriander, cumin, ginger, tumeric, celery seed, mace, red pepper, back pepper and dehydrated garlic. But I don’t think any self-respecting Indian home would have the stuff.
The word curry means is something akin to "sauce". Saag paneer and chicken tikka masala are two types of curries, but the variety and ratio of spices in each dish is different. The spices are precisely chosen and balanced. So no one would use a catch-all curry powder as seasoning. An Indian kitchen is stocked with separate containers of cumin, tumeric, cloves, cinnamon, and other spices.
So how did curry powder make its way into the picture then? Most seem to believe that its origins are British. And most believe its foundation is from the days of British colonialism in India. The Brits sought a way to bring the flavours of India back to Britain. The website menumagazine.co.uk gives a great history of curries. This part was particularly interesting:
In 1780 the first commercial curry powder appeared and in 1846 its fame was assured when William Makepeace Thackeray wrote a ‘Poem to Curry’ in his ‘ Kitchen Melodies’... Even Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico’s (1862-98) wrote in The Epicurean "Curry - the best comes from India. An imitation is made of one ounce of coriander seeds, two ounces of cayenne, a quarter ounce of cardamom seeds, one ounce salt, two ounces turmeric, one ounce ginger, half an ounce of mace and a third of an ounce of saffron".
The development of the curry industry in Britain has been peculiarly Anglo-Asian such that many people brandish ‘authenticity’ as if it were the Holy Grail. According to Camellia Panjabi "Ninety nine per cent of Indians do not have a tandoor and so neither Tandoori Chicken nor Naan are part of India’s middle class cuisine. This is even so in the Punjab, although some villages have communal tandoors where rotis can be baked. Ninety five per cent of Indians don’t know what a vindaloo, jhal farezi or, for that matter, a Madras curry is".
Click here for the curry poem/recipe.

Fred No More

So this is what I did to Fred: I cut him up and then let him bake in the oven. Then I tossed him with some scallops, shrimp, pasta and pesto sauce. It was all pretty yummy. The squash was sweet, but pretty delicate tasting so it complimented the seafood well. If I had added some grated parmesean and roasted pine nuts, I think the dish would have been even better. Fred lasted me three meals, so I was pleased.

Cake is Jesus

Pukka Gallery had a re-opening party this past weekend that involved cake performance art. It was put together by two Ottawa artists – Karina Bergmans and Jenny McMaster. Jenny wore one of her works: a three-tier cake dress. It was assessorized with Karina’s blueberry loafers. Karina displayed her plaster cake sculptures. Both read from Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman and Jenny sang the song "If I Had Known You Were Coming (I Would Have Baked You A Cake)". Cake was also served.
Karina and Jenny’s work explores how cake has come to represent more than just dessert. Jenny believes it’s come to stand for perceptions of female sexuality. It’s seen as a seductive decadence – a temptress. The idea of a woman jumping out of a cake links the seductiveness to femininity.
The concept from Karina and Jenny that I was most interested in is the idea that cake is a way for people to share a common experience. You expect cake at a birthday party or a wedding as the climax of the event. If it’s a birthday, people know to burst out into song when the cake is brought out. If it’s a wedding, the couple knows to wait for the cameras before making the first cut into the marzipan. And everyone feels the pressure to take a piece of the cake at a gathering, even if they’re not hungry or in the mood for cake. That’s because refusing is a lot like passing up the chance to be part of a greater whole. Even if a person does refuse cake, they’re often under pressure to explain why. My office is a perfect example of this. We serve cake at people’s birthdays more as a chance for people to take a break and gather than to actual eat cake. I actually love the ritual. Most of us at work usually don’t have time to take a lunch break most days, so bonding over someone’s birthday, sharing from the same plate of cake is a rare moment to pause. Then we rush back to our desks to meet deadlines. There’s a ceremony associated with cake that Jenny and Karina believe has come to replace some of the traditional ceremonies in people’s lives. Such as the rituals of church. Not that either of them think cake is the new religion. But there’s an adoration of food today that fits with that idea. It kind of makes sense. Is that a good thing? I don’t know. But in a society that is more diverse in beliefs, less church-going, living more individualized self-service lives, food seems to be one of the lasting pieces of common ground.

Fred

This is my squash, Fred. I bought him at the Ottawa Farmer’s Market last Sunday and he’s still sitting in my fridge. The photo doesn’t really do him justice. I took this picture of him right after I bought him. He’s a really great looking squash... which may be why I’ve been reluctant to cut him up. I’m still looking for the right squash recipe. I’ll have to eat him soon though. Or else he’ll turn on me.

le pie HOT!

I've posted Jason's recipe for le pie HOT! on the recipes site. It really is very good. Someone commented that using lemon juice to "cook" or soften the apple slices doesn't seem to keep with the spirit of the raw foods movement. It made me wonder if blending fruit or grinding nuts also go against the idea of keeping foods whole. After all, that's a very basic form of processing food. But apparently, the main belief of the raw foods movement is that foods not be heated to 118 degrees because that temperature degrades certain enzymes found naturally in foods to aid digestion. Fewer natual enzymes means the body needs to use more of its own metabolic enzymes to digest food, leading to a loss of energy. I'm not sure how the theories behind the raw vegan diet measure up to scientific scrutiny. I keep hearing the term "enzymes" but have yet to come across exactly what type of enzymes people are talking about. People who stick to a raw vegan diet are commendable though.

Easy as raw vegan pie...

Today I went to the SimplyRaw pie contest in the Glebe. The competition was for the best raw vegan pie in the city. Veganism is a diet where a person does not consume any animals or products from animals. No eggs, milk, cheese, honey, butter... and definitely no fish, chicken or other meats. The raw part is the philosophy of eating foods that have not been cooked or processed. The thinking is that if you keep foods raw, their nutrients will remain pure. That means no sugar, no flour, and definitely no oven. So you can see how creating a raw vegan pie can pose a few challenges.
Twenty people – many of them part of the raw foods movement in Ottawa -- entered the competition. I wasn’t sure what to expect beforehand. I pictured a lot of flax seed and dates. A lot of healthy, but beige looking food. So I was floored by the beauty of the pies. Mounds of raspberries and blueberries on one. Edible flowers on another. They were all bursting with colour.
And they had great names. Like Rawsome Monkey Mango Pie. Jason entered his apple and cherry pie as le pie hot. His friend Danielle entered a pie named Edward Norton (the name has to do with a trip she made to the video store once). So how to make a pie without eggs, milk, flour, butter or sugar?
The basic formula to making a raw vegan pie starts with a pie shell made out of ground nuts and some sort of sweet adhesive– it could be pureed dates or agave nectar. Then the pie is filled with a filling that’s often fruit-based – served as is or pureed in a blender with other ingredients. Pies can also be made with young coconut or raw chocolate. For the purpose of the competition, maple syrup was allowed (even though it needs to be cooked before it’s bottled) and so were cashews (even though they need to be cooked to remove their shells). Danielle spent three hours on her pie. It’s made with five coconuts. Jason spent about an hour on his.
The panel of judges included a newspaper food columnist, a host of the local noon hour television program, a local chef, and the Ontario provincial minister responsible for health promotion.
The crowd that had assembled to watch the judging definitely had a granola feel to it. A lot of hemp clothing and babies carried by mom or dad in fabric slings. I kept checking people’s feet for Birkenstocks (a few pairs). Booths set up at the pie contest included one for a vegetarian restauant, a vegan cracker company, and a company that offers body detoxification. We tried raw brownies at The Table booth while waiting for the judges to critique the pies. (The brownie was surprising good – ingredients were almond butter, maple syrup, pureed dates and carob powder.) We also got to try each of the pies after the judges were done with them. I had some of a mango pie, the blueberry pie and also Jason’s apple pie. The blueberry pie had a weird aftertaste to it – nothing very powerful, but something that reminds me of burning incense. The mango pie was okay – but the filling tasted like nothing more than sliced mangoes. I expect more from a pie filling. Jason’s pie was the best of the three I sampled (and I’m not just saying that). He says what makes the raw vegan apple pie work is that the apples are sliced very thin and then tossed with lime or lemon juice. Then the mixture sits in the fridge overnight so that the acid from the lime or lemon "cooks" the apples. He’s tried eating the pie without letting the filling sit overnight and it’s just not the same.
After the judges pulled back from the table, handed over the results, and went off to deal with their natural sugar highs, the crowd was left with three names: two runner-up’s and a winner. And guess what? Jason’s le pie hot got one of the prizes! He came in third for le pie hot. And on top of that, Danielle’s Edward Norton took home the blue ribbon! Both Jason and Danielle looked a little shocked when their names were called. They still looked shocked when they collected their prizes. The most amazing part of Danielle’s win is this was the first time she had ever made this pie. And she didn’t follow a recipe – it was all add a bit of this, try a dash of that.
I have to say, I was stunned by how people could bend themselves around some very strict restrictions to create some dazzling pies. You can check out the pics from the afternoon here.

Busy week

I can’t believe I haven’t posted since last Friday. It’s because I started my new job. I'm enjoying it. It's nice to have new challenges. Here’s a picture of the chocolate cupcakes Karla baked for me for my last day at my old job. I need to get her cupcake recipe. They're extremely moist and dense. And her icing is rich and creamy. If Karla ever quit working in our office, she should seriously think about creating a five-year plan for a cupcake bakery.

Sayonara Sushi

Hadeel is on a plane to Egypt as I type. She's going there to do a six month internship at an English newspaper. About a dozen of us took her out for dinner before she left. She was in the mood for sushi so we ended up at Suisha Gardens. It's an old, old restaurant in the city. I'd only been there once before. The sushi was nice. I think I've had so much grocery store sushi, I've forgotten how good sit-down sushi actually is. On Friday I had a tuna maki and a futo-maki. Both were quite nice. Then I helped Hadeel finish her crab maki. You know how some restaurants bring up certain memories? I think I'm going to think of Hadeel when I pass by the Suisha Gardens from now on. I'm going to miss her. Who else will watch Oprah and Dr.Phil while waiting for return calls at the office? I can't wait for her to tell me what the sushi is like in Cairo.

Legging Love

I don’t know what got into me, but I bought two pairs of leggings in the last week. The chocolate brown ones you see to the left, and also a pair of sheer black ones (I can pretend I’m Madonna with those ones). I have friends who think I’m insane to wear leggings. They see me wearing them, think back to junior high school and shudder.
It got me thinking about shudder foods from the 80s. Remember the burger McDonald's had where the two halves of the burger were kept separate? Apparently, this was so the side with the lettuce and tomato stayed cool while the side with the beef patty stayed hot. I also remember Jello Pudding Pops. And Pillsbury Pizza Pops. It was also the decade that the microwave was introduced into my family’s kitchen. It came with cookbooks on microwave cooking. I still remember the recipe for Spanish Potatoes. My parents use that same microwave – twenty years later. It’s huge. Though today, it’s mostly used to heat up leftovers and to make popcorn.