Life these days

Being at home with Lucie is awesome. I love the relaxed pace of my days, my morning coffee ritual, going out with Lu to run errands, being able to meet friends whenever I like. It’s really great.

Lucie is doing wonderfully. It’s hard to believe she is almost five months old. It sounds like a cliché, but we find ourselves loving her more and more every day. She changes all the time, becoming more aware of her surroundings and interacting with us and with her toys. Last week Jacques’ parents were here for a visit, and they remarked that she had changed so much even within the course of the week they were in Edmonton.

One of the best parts of maternity leave is having so much time to cook and bake. I have been spending lots of time in the kitchen, and I hope to share some of that with you soon. Despite the cold weather here, I definitely felt ready for the change of season, and we have been enjoying delicious autumnal meals: lots of soups, baked casseroles, and the hearty flavours of lentils, squash, swiss chard, and kale.

I still lots of catching up to do from the summer here on the blog, however. Over the next week or so I hope to write a bunch about my travels and culinary adventures on the road. Hope you enjoy it!

A summer feast and a gluten-free cookie

The other night, Jacques and I invited our friend Bethany over for a meal celebrating summer. It was really fantastic. Jacques chose all of the recipes from the great cookbook I bought him last Christmas – Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan. This book is a keeper. Everything we’ve made from it so far is really wonderful.

We went to the farmers’ market in the morning to collect our ingredients for the meal – eggs, bacon, green beans, tomatoes, rhubarb, and a delicious rhubarb wine. This time of year at the market is magical – the stands are overflowing with an abundance of beautiful vegetables and fruit. I particularly can’t resist buying a ton of fruit. This week we brought home peaches, cherries and little golden plums that we are enjoying. So far I’ve turned some of them into smoothies and popsicles.

We cooked four courses. The appetizer was a chickpea flour flatbread from Nice called Socca, and the main course was a deconstructed BLT salad with hard-boiled eggs. We did a cheese course of cheesy creme brulee with green beans, and dessert (which I forgot to photograph) was a salted buttery shortbread with roasted rhubarb.

Thinking back on this meal, I wish I could eat everything all over again. It was sublime. I think our favourite was the salad, which was outstanding. Arugula, crispy bacon, homemade croutons, juicy cherry tomatoes, topped with hard-boiled eggs, those topped with dollops of homemade mayonnaise. The blend of flavours and textures all came together into bitefuls of fresh summer flavour. Making your own mayonnaise makes all the difference. It is so, so good, and so easy.

The cheesy creme brulee is ingenious, salty and delicious, and also very easy to make. And I was stunned by how amazing the roasted rhubarb was. It breaks down into s silky tangle of tangy but sweet fruit. I think I’ll be roasting rhubarb lots more from now on.

The cookies is called a salted butter break-up, and it’s basically a large shortbread cookie that you bake in one piece and then take to the table for people to break off their own hunks. It has French grey salt in it, which gives a wonderful granular crunch of salt along with the sweetness. It easily converted to gluten-free, which was wonderful. You can see my recipe below.

None of the food on this menu screams “French” to me, except maybe the creme brulee. That’s the great thing about this cookbook. The recipes are incredibly diverse and mostly uncomplicated, including a delicious Vietnamese chicken soup and a fantastically rich cauliflower bacon gratin. And Dorie Greenspan is an exacting recipe writer, giving you precise instructions, telling you what you can make in advance, and including lots of variations on each recipe. There are so many more we’d like to try.

Lucie hung out with us on the balcony in her bouncy chair and on her activity mat, enjoying the fresh air. So far she is proving to be very amenable to most of our plans, and she is a great sleeper. Now that there is a baby in our lives, I’m sure we’ll be spending even more time at home cooking, and inviting friends over to share the meal.

Gluten-free Salted Butter Break-Ups
Adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table

Dorie tells us this recipe is traditional in the Poitou region of France, where butter is prized. If you can’t find sel gris (grey salt), which is slightly moist, grey salt, you can use another coarse salt. We bought a bag of sel gris at the Italian Centre, and it was delicious in these cookies.

127 g/4.5 oz tapioca starch
42 g/1.5 oz sweet rice flour
42 g/1.5 oz sorghum flour
3/4 – 1 tsp. sel gris
127 g/4.5 oz cold unsalted butter, cut into 18 pieces
3 to 5 tablespoons cold water
1 egg yolk, for the glaze

Mix together the starch and the flours and the salt in a medium bowl. Add the butter, and cut it into the flours using a pastry cutter. The mixture should end up looking like coarse meal, with some pea-sized chunks of butter and some smaller flakes. Add the water one tablespoon at a time and mix together with a wooden spoon. After a few tablespoons, start mixing with your hands so you can feel when the dough starts to come together. It should be fairly sticky and malleable, and almost form a ball.

Scrape the dough onto a work surface, form it into a square, and pat it down. Wrap the dough in a large square of plastic wrap and chill in the refrigerator for at least one hour. Dorie tells us the dough can be refrigerated for three days or frozen for two months.

When you’re ready to bake, centre a rack in the oven and preheat it to 350. Line a baking sheet with a silicone baking mat or parchment paper.

Remove the dough from the fridge, and, if it’s very hard, bash it a few times with your rolling pin to soften it. Put the dough between sheets of plastic wrap or waxed paper and roll it out to about a 1/4 inch thickness, about 5 by 11 inches. It doesn’t have to be an exact rectangle. Transfer the dough to the baking sheet.

Beat the egg yolk with a few drops of cold water and, using a pastry brush, paint the top of the dough with the egg glaze. Dorie’s recipe asks you to then score the dough in a crosshatch pattern. I tried this, but it doesn’t seem to stay scored in the oven with the GF dough, and doesn’t look great when it comes out, so I wouldn’t bother.

Bake the cookie for 30 to 40 minutes. In our oven, 35 minutes was perfect. It should be golden and firm to the touch, but have a little spring when pressed in the centre. Transfer the baking sheet to a rack and allow the cookie to cool to room temperature.

Serve whole and allow your guests to break pieces off. It will be messy but fun!

Introducing Lucie!

Here is our daughter Lucie when she was one day old. Hard to believe that day, May 27, is more than two months ago. Having a baby sure does change a lot of things. Including blogging frequency!

Here is Lucie again last week, when she was 9 weeks old. Jacques and I think she is pretty awesome.

More food posts to come. I really miss writing here and I’m hoping to do it more soon. Once life got a little bit back to normal Lucie and I started doing some traveling around Alberta with Jacques, who is touring in a play this summer. I want to write a bit about some of the food I ate, and about a magnificent meal we made the other night. Here’s to summer!

Gluten-free Eats at “Truck Stop”

The words “truck stop” bring to mind the Irving gas station in Aulac, New Brunswick. It’s a traditional stopping-place on the drive between Halifax, NS, and PEI, a drive my family made many times during my childhood and one I later made many times on my own.

I believe the gas station/restaurant combo in Aulac is officially called a “big stop”, but there were always many long-haul semi-trailers parked there when you pulled in, drawn by the enormous and super-high Irving sign beckoning you off the highway just past the NB border.

We rarely ate in the restaurant in Aulac, usually pulling in just to gas up, go for a pee break, and grab some road trip snacks. But as soon as you walk in the door to the convenience store and restaurant, you’re greeted by a tall glass case filled with mile-high cakes and pies, topped with clouds of puffy meringue or frosted with drifts of white curlicues. Strangely, even when we did eat at the diner, I don’t remember ever tasting one of those concoctions.

The truck stop I attended yesterday was of an entirely different nature. It involved food trucks rather than semi-trailers. These truck stops are organized by two local foodies, Sharon Yeo and Mack Male, the team behind last summer’s super-popular What the Truck?! festivals. This season they’ve expanded and teamed up with the Old Strathcona Business Association here in Edmonton to offer smaller, weekly food truck events throughout the month of May. The larger festivals will return this summer.

I think Sharon and Mack have done an awesome job capitalizing on the burgeoning food truck scene here in Edmonton, making more people aware of these trucks, and giving the truck owners a chance to meet and serve new customers.

I was especially excited about the event when I saw the menu posted online. It’s not always easy to find gluten-free options at food trucks (there are usually lots of sandwiches), but Molly’s Eats was offering an almost entirely GF menu. Checking back to the May 3 event, Molly’s had some delicious-sounding GF items then too. Go Molly! My friend Kathryn, who also eats GF, and I were pumped to try the food.

The truck stops are held at Wilbert McIntyre Park, right next to the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market just off Whyte Ave. It’s a great location, with plenty of room for people to line up and benches to sit and eat. Though it was a chilly evening on Thursday, there was a pretty good turnout, and when the sun shone it wasn’t too cold. I’m sure the event would attract even more people in really nice weather.

Kathryn and I both ordered the spicy tomato seafood soup ($6.50 for a small), and I also tried the hush puppies ($5) while she went for the fries duo ($5). At the last minute I decided to splurge on a chocolate sandwich cookie ($4). They looked divine.

After a 10-minute wait, our food came out and we went to sit on a bench to eat. The soup was delicious, with just the right amount of spice and several tiny shrimp. I expected more visible clams and crab, but I think they were chopped up quite finely. The hush puppies had a great texture, crunchy without being greasy, though they were a little bland in spite of the green onions, bacon and cheese. They came with a tiny cup of pesto, which helped amp up the flavour of the balls of dough. Kathryn’s fries were good, though some were soggy instead of crispy.

My favourite item was the sandwich cookie. Just the right amount of chocolatey sweetness, with a perfectly firm, chewy texture. The filling was a white chocolate ganache, but I thought I tasted mint, which I love. I haven’t yet been able to make a GF cookie like this and I really wish I could.

By the time we finished eating my hands were freezing and despite the sun, it was pretty cold. So we retreated to a cafe for tea for the rest of the evening.

It was a great outing, more of the kind I’ve been enjoying with all my free time lately. If this baby hasn’t popped out by next Thursday I may go to the truck stop again! Check out the schedule here – there is some change in which trucks are there from week to week.

Lists

I am all about making lists these days - which is really nothing new. I've always been a list-maker. Now, along with my weekly grocery lists and constant to-do list, the other lists have to do with baby things. Things to buy and things to do. I feel like there is still lots to get done ... but, I trust that this baby will wait long enough until I have time to do it all! (Or at least the really necessary things.)

Here are some of the nicer things on the list

} Get a haircut (long overdue)
} Visit the art gallery (also long overdue)
} Go for brunch with J – maybe to Culina?
} Make these cookies - one of my favourite flavour combinations
} And use the extra egg yolks to make this amazing curd again
} Organize all the adorable baby clothes we have received

And of course there are some things that will be not so much fun ... but I'll feel so good when they are done!

} Reorganize our filing system (talk about overdue ... I have been meaning to do this since we moved last September)
} Purge stuff taking up space in the baby's room
} Clean out the freezer (to make room for food we can eat after the birth)

About that last point ... I am planning to make a bunch of meals that I can freeze so we don't have to worry too much about food in the first crazy days after the baby is born. What are your favourite meals that can be frozen? I am thinking lasagna and other casseroles, and soups, but I don't have too much experience freezing stuff. We don't have a deep-freeze so room is limited. If you have suggestions please let me know!

More weekends like this

What a great weekend it was. It's rare that we have one with so few commitments and schedules to follow. As a result, there was lots of sleep and lots of relaxing.



We had lunch at one of our favourite casual restaurants ... 

… and supper at a newly discovered place right near our apartment - we'll definitely be back.



We took the streetcar across the High Level Bridge, and talked about how great it would be if that route ran year-round. It could whisk us right into Old Strathcona.

There was a birthday celebration.

With delicious almond-orange tuile cookies.

I made a huge whack of gluten-free pancakes, because I love eating them leftover. (I’ve been making these pancakes for a year now. They are so good. They always turn out. This time, J said he prefers them to glutinous pancakes. That’s a winner there, folks!)

And I took a very cold walk around the beautiful ice and snow sculptures on the Legislature Grounds.

I also finished a really good book and we watched this fascinating documentary on paper-folding. I even got some useful things done, like cleaning the bathroom and working on our new household budget. Wow! What a weekend.

Hopefully this winter there will be more weekends like this, as we get more and more used to the idea of a new family member coming our way soon.

Happy Weekend!

I must say I breathed a sigh of relief when I got off work this afternoon -- it's been a busy week.

These photos are from last weekend, which was very relaxing. I’m hoping the next few days are more of the same. I plan to visit the farmers' market for the first time in quite a while. I might take a ride on the High Level Bridge streetcar over to the Old Strathcona market. Now that the downtown market is year-round, it's been at least a year since I've made the trek over to the south side one. I've also never taken the streetcar across the bridge, which is running for free between the Ice on Whyte festival and the Alberta Heilongjiang Winter Festival on the leg grounds.

I'm also excited about a trip to La Shish Greek and Lebanese restaurant for a friend's birthday. She misses the Lebanese food in Charlottetown and wants to see how an Edmonton shawarma compares. Maybe eating so much of it back home is the reason why I've never been to a Lebanese restaurant here in Edmonton. There are so many other great ethnic foods to try that don't exist on PEI. I do love middle eastern food though, so I'm excited to try La Shish.

I hope you enjoy a relaxing, peaceful weekend!

St. Lawrence Market - Toronto

Visiting food markets in new cities is something I love to do when I’m traveling. Sadly I haven’t had many opportunities. I’m hoping to take in a market or two when we visit Europe this summer – so excited! I’ve heard so much about the Pike Place market in Seattle and the Ferry Building market in San Francisco. I really hope I get a chance to visit them someday. When we were in Vancouver last March I loved the Granville Island Public Market, and it immediately reminded me of the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto.

I first visited the St. Lawrence Market about a year ago, and I went back when I was in Toronto recently. It’s a pretty cool place, and just like the one on Granville Island, makes me wish we could have a market that was open during the week in Edmonton. It’s in a big old warehouse building downtown on Front street, and covers two floors. The top floor is mostly food and some kitchen-related items. When you head downstairs there is more food but also some arts and crafts mixed in.

There is so much to see.

Tantalizing cheese – big creamy wheels of it.

Lots of meat too.

Many varieties of shellfish.

Several bakeries (my mouth is watering at that Challah…).

Fresh Montreal bagels.

There’s a store on the lower level that has an astonishing array of bulk items – nuts, beans, all kinds of weird candies I’ve never heard of. They also sell different kinds of bulk salt, like Himalayan pink salt and smoked salt. It’s a great way to try new kinds of salt without paying an arm and a leg for a whole box. Last year I bought a small container of fleur de sel that’s not quite gone, and this year I bought Maldon salt. I haven’t tested them side by side yet to see if I can taste a big difference, but they’re both fantastic for sprinkling onto your food right before you eat.

The market also has many produce stands, both organic and non. When I was there in mid-May, they already had local berries. Jealous!

I can’t wait to discover more markets on my travels. Where are your favourite markets?

The Farmers' Market

The Charlottetown Farmers’ Market is one of my favourite places in the city. It’s airy and beautiful on a warm summer’s day, and cozy and homey in the middle of winter. Whenever I go there on Saturday morning, I usually end up bumping into at least a few people I know. It’s a great place to buy fresh produce or delicious baked goods, or get a coffee or breakfast and sit and chat with friends and strangers alike at the picnic-style tables.

But this post isn’t about the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market. I’m saving that for later. No, this post is about the new market that I’ve discovered right here in Edmonton: the Downtown Edmonton Farmers’ Market.

I am already in love with this market, and I’ve only been there once. But it’s been on my mind all week, and every day that goes by I think, “Yes! One day closer to Saturday when we can go back to the market!”

This market is four blocks from our apartment, on 104^th Street. Two blocks of the street are closed to traffic and open for vendors to set up their tents and stalls. People stroll along the street with cloth shopping bags, babies and dogs. Just like at every market I’ve been to, this market has a very community feel.

The amount and variety of produce are intense. J and I couldn’t believe it, having come from the tiny (but wonderful!) market back home. I’ve also been to the Halifax market, which is big and bountiful, but I think this one has even more produce.

Lots of farmers with greenhouses come to the market, so even this time of year we saw tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, lettuce and eggplant, which in an outdoor garden would be harvested earlier in the summer. There is also corn, carrots, potatoes, beets, zucchini, squash, chard, onions, garlic, herbs, peaches, nectarines, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, grapes, plums, apples and pears.

All of the fruit we saw was from B.C. – hence the summer variety. We talked to one woman who has a farm there. She and her husband spend part of every week going to several farmers’ markets in Alberta. They don’t sell fruit in B.C. at all.

There are also a lot of artisans at the market, and a lot of prepared food. J and I started off our trip with a stop at a stand selling Mexican food. He got a breakfast burrito and I got a quesadilla. They made their own salsa and guacamole and both were delicious. But this week I might have to sample from somewhere else, since there is so much on offer.

One of Jacques’ go-to stands at the Charlottetown market is the perogy stand. He loves them, and they are everywhere here in Alberta where there is a lot of Ukrainian heritage. We bought a bag of frozen perogies to enjoy later in the week.

Bison is everywhere.

We also discovered a stand selling the most succulent lime tarts in the world. We had to try one. This couple makes several kinds of tarts – lemon, lime, chocolate hazelnut, and some others I can’t remember. They also make quiches. The man was very nice and gave us samples of the lemon and lime curd that he makes himself. They were both heaven on a spoon – he doesn’t add too much sugar so they have a lot of tartness that makes the fruit sing, and the custard is velvety smooth. The shortbread crust was also perfect. This is an indulgence, and after about three bites I had had enough, but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to resist temptation when we go back.

The Queen of Tarts stand.

Lime curd...yum...

We came back from the market laden with peaches, blueberries, tomatoes, corn, zucchini, adorable “Thumbelina” carrots, potatoes, an onion, garlic, herbs and a cucumber. We turned all that beautiful produce into some beautiful meals that I will share with you soon.