Happy Holidays

It has been a few weeks of some good celebrating around here. We kicked things off with an amazing supper at the Red Ox Inn for our fifth anniversary on December 16th, then followed it up with a champagne breakfast the next morning at home.

Last week there were some elaborate Christmas preparations, including many cookies baked (you have to try these gems) and my first gluten-free Acadian pâté (meat pie), which was a resounding success on Christmas morning.

There was lots of feasting in the past few days, with turkey dinner on Christmas eve at Jacques’ brother’s house, and a 13-pound fresh ham here for Christmas dinner. More meat has been consumed in the past week than we usually eat in months – and there is lots left in the fridge.

(Just noticed in the above picture that of course, the Sriracha makes an appearance even on the Christmas table)

Another hit was our first homemade rillettes – made, surprisingly, with sardines. Rillettes is usually made with pork or other meat that is shredded and mixed with its own fat, then spread on bread. We fell in love with it in France a few years ago. The rillettes made with sardines was different, of course, but with green onions, cream cheese and lots of lemon juice, it was absolutely delicious.

I also made our traditional Danish rice pudding for Christmas eve. This time we swapped out the almonds for hazelnuts and walnuts and it was fantastic.

Something else amazing we discovered this holiday season? Mulled wine! I used this recipe (minus the eau-de-vie) and it got raves at our holiday party. Definitely going on the annual favourites list.

Lucie was, of course, incredibly spoiled with many beautiful gifts. This time of year definitely makes us realize how loved she is. Our gifts for her grandparents were photo books I made online with the best shots from her first six months. I was so excited to make and send these, and it was great to see my mom and Jacques’ parents open them over Skype. The reactions were great!

After looking at several sites I decided to make the book using Pinhole Press. Though it was on the pricier side, I really liked their designs and I’m really happy with the end result. I’m sure I’ll be creating more of these books as Lucie grows. We also received a beautiful photo book of my sister’s baby, Cash. So lovely!

As wonderful as the holidays are, I am really looking forward to starting the new year and getting back into routines. It’s kind of a crazy thing to say, since my life right now has very few routines compared to the way it used to be. But seeing January 1st on the calendar really makes me think about life in a new way, even now. It’s a time to set new goals and create new habits, and reflect on the past year. 

I hope to be back in a few days to talk about just that. For now, I hope you all enjoy the rest of the holiday season!

Happy New Year!

I have a feeling 2012 will be our biggest year ever.

Becoming an adult is crazy, isn't it? Everything seems to change so fast. Real careers emerge, plans change, you end up living in a city you never expected. Now we're about to become a real family. I can hardly believe it. I still feel like my 20-year-old self, heck, like my 15-year-old self, looking at the world with big eyes and big dreams, wondering what life will hold. I like to think I've become a bit wiser, more pragmatic, more compassionate, and definitely happier than I was then. But there's so much more to become, to do, to live.

The other day we saw the first glimpse of our baby on the ultrasound screen. I couldn’t believe how exciting it was. This is really happening!

The pictures here are from the days around New Year’s. I made the banana bread, which was delicious. I’ll share the recipe here soon. Unfortunately I didn’t eat the dumplings or drink the slushy-whipped cream concoction. One had gluten, the other alcohol.

I did form a few dumplings myself though. The dough was soft and silky. My friend’s parents who are visiting Edmonton from China were whipping them out awfully fast and showed me how. They looked delicious – this filling is spinach and egg, and there was another one with pork and shrimp.

 
Here’s to a new year with lots of new experiences and wonderful food shared with family and friends. J and I are aiming to have people over more often for simple dinner parties. We did a lot less entertaining in the past six months than we’d like, and we want to change that. I look forward to sharing it all with you. Thanks for reading The Little Red Kitchen in 2011!

A quiet Christmas

It has been a great four days off work. I’m a little sad I have to go back tomorrow, but grateful that I’ll have another long weekend for new year’s.

We had our quietest Christmas in many years. On Christmas Eve we went over to J’s brother and his wife’s house to spend the night. We took a lot of gear with us: gifts, food, and overnight clothes. We probably looked ridiculous riding the train.

For me, Christmas is all about the special food. I bought some delicious toffee that I’ve had my eye on for several months. It’s $8.50 for a small box so it’s not something I would normally buy, but the holidays are a time for splurging. I also picked up some hot-chocolate flavoured nougat at the farmers’ market  that had pieces of roasted almonds, marshmallows, and cinnamon. Very seasonal, I highly recommend it (it’s from The Newget Company for those in Edmonton).

We also brought over eggnog, homemade gluten-free gingersnaps, aged cheddar and bacon for Christmas morning breakfast, and ingredients to make a cocktail I had just read about online. It has a rosemary simple syrup, grapefruit juice, and sparkling water.

The cocktail was delicious, even without the gin. Refreshing and only slightly sweet. Again, very seasonal, but in a different way – piney and citrusy.

We spent most of Christmas eve preparing food and eating.  We ate a full turkey dinner, and J and I made an amazing cauliflower-bacon gratin from his new cookbook, Around My French Table by Dorie Greenspan. I bought it for him as a surprise and so far this book is knocking it out of the park. It’s beautiful, fun to read, and full of recipes we really want to make. J also said, “this book really makes me want to live in Paris again!” J lived there for a year after high school, studying music. Dorie Greenspan is American but lives part of the year in Paris and writes about it with great enthusiasm.

We opened most of our presents on Christmas eve (it’s an Acadian tradition). (Up above you can see a few of the baby books my Mom gave us, some gingerbread hearts from J’s stocking and David’s tea.) Then we collapsed at about 9:30. I think the incredibly rich Danish rice pudding might have had something to do with it. 

Christmas morning was low-key too. It started off with a delicious breakfast of hash browns, scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. For the first time in many months I ate one of my favourite food combinations: toast with peanut butter, cheddar cheese, and bacon. I know it sounds weird but you really have to try it …

Christmas night it was just the two of us. Our first and last (at least for a long time) Christmas by ourselves. It was lots of fun. We relaxed, watched youtube videos, and ate a slow, relaxed meal. We bought a few treats for ourselves to enjoy, and started off with thick juicy slices of buffalo mozzarella and dressed greens on slices of fried bread with roasted walnuts, topped with salt and pepper and a drizzle of basil oil. J put this together and the combo was perfect. The cheese (which we got at the Italian Centre) was amazing – soft and oozing. It made me think of all the delicious mozzarella we were eating in Italy at this time last year.

Then we enjoyed duck confit on crackers. We were so full after all that, we took a long break before our main course of this turkey casserole to use up some leftovers.

The rest of our time off proceeded in leisurely fashion. We didn’t do much the past few days but more cooking and baking. Tonight we made a Vietnamese soup to use up the rest of the turkey. This was the second recipe from Around My French Table, and again, absolutely fantastic. Incredibly easy and packed with flavour.

(you can see the leftover cauliflower-bacon gratin in the right of this photo)

I also made a gluten-free coconut cake yesterday that turned out really well. It’s sandwiched with raspberry jam and topped with coconut-lime icing. I love having time off to do more baking.

I’ve been feeling a lot better now that I’m well into my second trimester, and working much more comfortable hours at work. We’re looking forward to enjoying the next few months of pregnancy before things really get turned upside down.

Hope you all had very happy and food-filled holidays, wherever you are!

Christmases Past and Present

Christmas 2008 on PEI

When I was very little my family celebrated Christmas in Florida. For three years, we rented a house right on the canal near Marathon, in Key West. Those are the first Christmases I remember, and they were idyllic.

One year we couldn't find a real Christmas tree - this is Florida after all - so instead we bought a Norfolk Island pine. It was spindly, and only about 4 or 5 feet tall, but it ended up being the cutest tree ever. My Mom still has the tree ornaments we bought in those years. They remind us of warmer Christmases: slender, delicate seashells tied with ribbons, and brightly coloured wooden fish. I remember making decorations too: cutting squares out of paper and drawing with markers to create little flags that we strung on the tree.

There were sunny afternoons swimming in the canal, the time we rented a boat with my cousins, who lived in Florida, and spent the day driving around the maze of canals and jumping off the boat into the cool water. Lazy days at the Cabana Club, a nearby swimming pool on a beach. I think we spent nearly all our time in water of some kind.

My Dad had a crab trap set up in the canal behind out house, and I remember going with him to check the trap in the morning. I don't know if I liked eating fresh crab back then - I'd love to have some now. Eating on these trips was my parents' dream, especially my Dad's: he loved anything that came from the sea. He cooked fish year-round at home, but especially loved the freshest stuff in the summers from Nova Scotia and PEI. So being able to enjoy more fresh seafood over Christmas was fantastic.

As for food, what I remember most is the kid stuff: chili dogs at the canteen at the Cabana Club, and lots and lots of Christmas candy. Chocolate santas filled with marshmallow fluff, and sugar cookies left for Santa. Bowls of red pistachios that stained your fingers bright red, little paper baskets on the tree filled with candy and nuts. The baskets on the tree became a tradition that lasts to this day, when I'm lucky enough to celebrate Christmas with my family. We have red and white Swedish woven baskets, usually filled with peanut M and Ms or little wrapped candies. Going through the tree and picking out the candy is a great part of Christmas morning.

This year there were no paper baskets, no M and Ms, not even a Christmas tree. But there was much, much more. Chewy amaretti cookies studded with pine nuts. Soft, salty balls of snow-white buffalo mozzarella. One of the best Christmas days ever, cooking together in an extremely warm, unfamiliar kitchen with an 8-person extended family of three generations. Roasted, pureed butternut squash, roasted fennel with pistachios, mushroom risotto, lemony roast potatoes, chicken with red wine sauce, bottle after bottle of Italian wine. Singing carols, playing cards, telling stories. Midnight mass on Christmas Eve in a church with a statue by Michelangelo and a blue ceiling studded with stars, then a walk across a cobblestone piazza for hot chocolate and aged beef with parmesan at a little restaurant lit with Christmas lights. Wishing each other Merry Christmas at midnight, then peeking into the Pantheon, probably the most amazing building I've ever set foot in, listening at the doorway to the haunting notes of "Lo How a Rose E'er Blooming" waft up to the impossibly high, perfect ceiling.

Those and a hundred other memories have made this Christmas season one I'll never forget. We are back in Edmonton to ring in the new year, but my mind stays in Rome with my family. A broken compueter means no photos yet, but soon.
Happy New Year, and thank you all for taking the time to visit this litte corner of the internet in 2010.

Making Pâté

When I think of Christmas food in my family, the first thing that comes to mind is usually pâté. Pâté is Acadian meat pie, not to be confused with its lesser cousin, that Quebecois stuff, tourtiere (I actually like tourtiere but here I must play favourites). Pâté is made with chopped meat rather than ground, and usually has a biscuit crust instead of a regular pie crust. The spices can vary from recipe to recipe, but often include a mixture of coriander, summer savoury, marjoram and thyme.

When my dad was growing up in rural PEI in the 1940s and 50s, pâté was a Christmas Eve tradition. His family always celebrated Christmas with a big Réveillon after getting home from midnight Mass, and that’s when they ate pâté. The favoured condiment was mustard pickles.

As I got to know J’s family, I was surprised to learn that they eat pâté year-round. Well, why not? It’s so delicious that it doesn’t really make sense to save it for once a year. They also eat it with molasses. This also surprised me at first, but I’ve since learned that they pour molasses on just about everything.

I had never made pâté myself until this Christmas. When I was growing up my Mom made it sometimes, or we got some from my aunts to serve Christmas Eve. Two of my older sisters made it for a while every year, and maybe they still do. But it was never something I learned.

But this year, I got together with my cousin Natalie, who lives in St. Albert. Natalie’s father is my uncle Cyril, and he wrote out the Gallant family recipe, which I assume he originally got from his mother, my grandmother Regina (it may have been tweaked a bit by his wife Betty as well). In their family they make it every year, and Natalie and her three sisters sometimes get together to make it.

Pâté is best made in a group, because it is a lot of work. This year it was just the two of us, but our task for the day was made easier because Natalie had already cooked all of the meat, which is a huge step. All we had to do was make the dough, fill the pies, and bake them.

I’ve usually eaten pâté with chicken and pork, but the traditional recipe calls for wild rabbit or hare. J’s dad told us that when he was a kid, his remembers eating pâté filled with rabbit bones. Mmmm-mmmm.

Natalie showed me her dad’s typewritten recipe, which is more like a story than a recipe, and it’s probably how my dad would have written it too. But Natalie, in her organized, meticulous way, took that and created a table with all the ingredients and amounts. So great!

I felt like I was part of such a long tradition as we stood at the counter mixing our dough ingredients, adding the meat filling, and spreading the crust over top. I learned that the secret to a delicious crust is to use the stock from the meat as your liquid. Natalie, like her parents, always cooks her pies in big cookie sheets, rather than round pie plates, which is what I’ve always seen. I learned how to pat the dough on top of the meat filling and tuck it in all around to ensure no leaks. After baking, I came home with one huge rectangular pâté. I had to cut it into pieces so it would fit into our tiny apartment freezer.

Last week when J’s parents were visiting, we took out one of the pieces for supper one night. The crust was tender, the meat perfectly spiced. This pâté recipe is different from the Arsenault family recipe, but I knew mine was good when both J’s parents loved it.

Now that my Mom is visiting, I just have to try to find some mustard pickles before Christmas Eve.

Long weekends are the best

We had such a glorious weekend, and I had a lot of fun with the camera. Here are a few images I’d like to share with you:

 

 

…dying Easter eggs (which I was so excited about, but they actually came out pretty grainy and sort of weird-looking – but they looked nice once they got in the basket) 

…taking a trip to Little Italy and to the Italian Centre Shop

…having friends over for a delightful Easter dinner

…relaxing!

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend too. I will be back to share more recipes soon.