Crumb Cake Heaven

Yes, another post about baking Jodi did while I was visiting her recently! This time, a heavenly crumb cake with tons of crumb topping that was probably my favourite thing she made while I was there.


Jodi found the recipe here. Funnily enough, it originated from a Cook's Illustrated issue from 2007, which we found ironic after this post & video, but Jodi assured me there weren't 80 ingredients in it and the recipe was easy to follow. :)

Yes, the amount of crumb topping on this cake was very impressive. Usually, crumb cakes don't have enough crumbs on them for my liking, but this cake was not lacking in that department at all. Also the texture of the cake was blissfully velvety, probably due to the fact that it was made with cake flour. The recipe states that one should not substitute the cake flour with regular all purpose flour; I'd concur with that after eating the cake - it would not have been the same.


We ate quite a bit of the cake in one day, but Jodi did pack me with two slabs to take home with me on the train, for which I am very grateful. I'm definitely going to have to try this one out myself, soon.

Simple Stir Fry

I have at least three more posts coming up of Seattle-related food content, but for now, something simpler and less rich than the fare I had in that fair city: a simple stir fry.

As my trip neared its end - I got home last night, or more correctly this morning, at 12:35am - I knew I had to kind of come down from the eating high I'd been on for six days, so today, once I was up and lucid, I went to get some groceries. Pineapples were on sale at Kin's Farm Market for $2.99 each and they looked great, and Kin's also had asparagus on for cheap as well, two bunches for $4. After that, I made my obligatory trip to Wally World to buy my milk on the cheap, and I also picked up a bag of coleslaw mix, too. I then went to my favourite grocery store in these parts, T&T Supermarket, where I stocked up on veggies - cheap baby bok choy, spinach for salads, mushrooms, and a few other things - and I got a mini watermelon for $2.99. I also scored a piece of west coast salmon that should last me for two meals, and some really nice, thinly sliced sirloin. A can of mini corn and a can of water chestnuts completed the deal. The asparagus I got at Kin's reminded me of a great Kylie Kwong recipe that utilized that particular vegetable and mini corn, so I made myself a nice stir fry tonight. A little bit of rice and voilà.

I really love how Kylie's recipes are versatile and adaptable. I have learned so much from her books, and now that I have access to all kinds of actual Chinese grocery stores, I can start looking for ingredients I couldn't find at LOGS or in the Kootenays, and start exploring her cuisine again.

Rustic Apricot Orange Rose

Jodi baked another fabulous treat last week during my stay: a Rustic Apricot Orange Rose, made from the Poor Man's Brioche recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice, page 128. The filling was made with Apricot Orange Marmalade Freezerves, made by Sunfresh.

Jodi has a cool clear glass brioche pan. Excellent! I must find one of these!

And the results:

The brioche was fabulous: so flaky, moist, and almost cakey. Very tender, very buttery. And the filling was really good, too. Jodi says that you can get it from Amazon Fresh if you live in Seattle, or at Whole Foods in the freezer section. I was really impressed with the freshness and brightness of the flavours in it.

Lots of food to come in future posts!

Doughnuts in the Future

One place we went to last week was Top Pot Doughnuts, 2124 Fifth Avenue - right across from where we got our nails done. :) Touted as "hand-forged" these were definitely some awesome treats. We both chose the Bavarian Cream, though the Raspberry Bullseyes were very tempting.

Way better than Tim Horton's, I can tell you that!

I even treated Jodi and me to a copy of Top Pot's doughnut cookbook, which I plan on using! The recipes seem simple enough, though you have to be comfortable with deep frying. I am OK with that!

Lemon Scented Pull-apart Coffee Cake

Hot on the heels of my pumpkin/cinnamon pull-apart loaf from the other day, I had another pull-apart bread experience, this week in Seattle, that was just as exceptional. My friend Jodi, whom I am visiting, made this lemon pull-apart loaf Thursday. She had some issues with the dough - it needed a lot of flour added to it because it was too sticky - but the results were just great nonetheless.

Here is the original recipe.

Jodi made a marscapone glaze for this loaf instead of the glaze in the rec

ipe. It was very good. She didn't think it was that great, or that it went with the bread that well, but I certainly enjoyed it.

Here are some photos. Enjoy!

Saturday Laugh

My friend Jodi sent me this gem of a video, spoofing Cook's Illustrated Magazine. I've only ever read one issue of it, and it was OK but kind of didactic. This is a pretty funny video - enjoy!

Pull-apart Cinnamon Sugar Pumpkin Bread with Rum Butter Glaze

Oh, Pinterest, how do I love thee? Sometimes, way too much. But as I've said before, the food on it is unbelievable, and when I saw the recipe for this treat I knew I had to make it, and last week, I did. I even went and purchased a mini of rum for the glaze!

The original blog post & recipe is here.

So, let's get down to business. After making the dough (I used instant yeast so I didn't have to go through the extra step of activating it) and letting it rise, I went about shaping it. The instructions say to roll the dough out into a 20x12" rectangle, spread with the cinnamon sugar mixture, and cut that into six strips. Then you take those strips and lay them on top of each other, and then cut them into six squares. After that, you stack the squares on their edges in a loaf pan. I greased my loaf pan pretty well.


Then the loaf goes for another rise. This is where I had some issues. The squares were quite tightly packed in the pan, but as the loaf rose, the end ones rose up and out of the pan.


Upon baking, I got quite an odd-looking and lopsided loaf:


The other issue I had was that the bottom of the loaf caramelized to the loaf pan and I couldn't get the loaf out of the pan until it was rather cool and I could get my hands in and kind of tear it out by the roots. I just removed it straight to a platter for serving.


So, it wasn't over attractive. But so what? This was absolutely delicious! The rum & butter glaze was absolutely to die for, and that little recipe is going up my sleeve for some other ideas I have for it, like as a cinnamon roll glaze, for instance.

The only criticism I had was that the pumpkin flavour was quite lost with all the other flavours going on in here. It added a nice colour to the dough, though. But if I do this again, I might use more pumpkin or alter the recipe so that it's more of a brioche dough and just do a more plain pull apart loaf. But look at it! It's gorgeous!


My roommates and I tore into it and dipped the pieces in more glaze until we nearly devoured it. We left just enough for a small snack the next day.

Here it is again, from another angle:


Definitely a keeper of an idea. Go Pinterest! My roommate and I are working on another Pinterest recipe now, but it takes a while so I won't get a post up about it quite yet, but it should be worth the wait, especially if you love Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and vodka. :D

Latest Coyote's Kitchen Article

Bread 'n Molasses's last print edition was in the fall of 2011. Since then, they have launched an online version of the magazine, available here. The issue included my last printed Coyote's Kitchen article, and here it is, featuring Hungarian Goulash - the Betty Crackpot Crocker version my mom used to make for us. (The delay in posting was due to my scanner being in storage for a few months, and I was finally reunited with it last month.) No, it's not super authentic, I know that; but it sure was tasty and I got such a feeling of nostalgia when I made it.

Vietnamese Lunch

As I said in Sunday's post, I no longer have to rely on LOGS and there is a great variety of places to grocery shop down here. One of my favourite places to go is T&T Supermarket, a large Chinese chain. And I have one within walking distance! Needless to say, I go there often. They have good prices and because it's a large chain, the variety is stunning. The exotic ingredients are both puzzing (pigs uteri) and exciting (fresh keffir lime leaves). The store closest to me has a food court, too, and it has several different cultures represented there. There is Korean food, Thai food, Japanese food, of course Chinese food, and one place I've been to a couple of times, Vietnamese food.

I have always enjoyed Vietnamese food, and one of my favourites is salad rolls with shrimp. I've ordered these a couple of times, for the not-so-bad price of $4.75. They are made fresh (unlike Save-on Foods' ones, which are terrible) and come with a tangy sauce.


But look at what else is in theses salad rolls. On the bottom, there are a couple of slices of that pale sausage similar to the one I encountered in my pho experience last year. I was a little surprised when I first saw this, but once I tried it, I really liked it. The sausage is very mild in flavour and is a touch - just a touch - salty. It's really good!

I also tried something new at my last trip there, Vietnamese carioca. They were described as deep fried rice balls, and I could see that they were coated in coarse sugar and drizzled with caramel. But when I bit into one, it was like biting into soft, mushy marshmallow. They were not balls of whole grain rice. I think this is more of a rice flour dumpling, deep fried. And they were really good! The texture of the balls was quite decadent and they used real caramel for the drizzle, not a caramel sauce. That really impressed me.


Lunch that day was yummy, and it only cost $6!

Seattle!

Today I'm off to Seattle for a few days to visit my good friend Jodi. I was there over Christmas and New Years and had a fantastic time, and I know I'll have a fantastic time this trip, too. I also know the food will be amazing because Jodi is a ridiculously good cook and gourmand, and she has a Bradley smoker on her balcony she is not afraid to use!

This is the bourbon and orange marinated hickory smoked chicken she made on New Years Day:

This was so good you'd pay top dollar for it in a fancy restaurant, I swear.

Jodi is also famous for cookie breakfasts...(yes, we ate this for breakfast - several days in a row)...


...And epic turkey dinners with enough food to feed an army (there were two of us). The turkey she brined overnight - look at the colour it has!


I'll save the fondu photos for another time because I don't want anyone damaging any keyboards out there with all the drool I'm sure these photos are creating.

And of course, there is Starbucks in Seattle! This is the original, across from Pike Place Market. I snapped some photos but didn't go because there was always a huge line-up out the door! Luckily, on the walking route to Jodi's from Pike Place, there are plenty of Starbucks to choose from and they didn't have line-ups!

The West Coast adventure continues. And...I'm also going to Seattle again in April!

Lunch at Ikea

You know the deal: you move and all of a sudden you need bits and pieces of crap. And where else would you go to find said bits and pieces of crap besides Ikea (if you have one available to you, and I do now)? Luckily, my dad loves Ikea and whenever he's down here, he likes to go there and putter around for a few hours. He particularly likes Ikea's cafeteria. He drove me back from the Kootenays when I went to visit last month, and he stayed a few extra days to visit with my brother & SIL. I needed bits and pieces of crap for my new place, and Dad wanted to putter around. He also loves Ikea's food section & buys coffee beans from there whenever he can. We spent over 3 hours in Ikea one rainy afternoon, and started out with lunch.

There really wasn't anything on the menu that appealed to me, so I went with this Naiad Salad plate consisting of gravalax and a root vegetable salad in a citrus vinaigrette. It was accompanied by two crackers. For dessert, I had a piece of apple cake.

The salmon dish cost $7.95 or something ridiculous like that, and it came with a lot of gravalax! You wouldn't be able to buy that amount of salmon lox in the grocery store for that price. It was very good as was the root vegetable salad. The apple cake was OK. My dad had a bunch of things but I didn't get a picture. He was very happy indeed. Until we had to try to fit a flat-packed bookcase in his Subaru. But that's another story. :)

Application!

I got home Friday evening and as soon as I got in the door, my new roommate, T, said, "I have found a job for you!"

Check it here.

I have applied! We'll see what happens! I personally think it's a long shot, but there was no harm in trying at all. :)

Bye Bye LOGS!*

*Y'all remember LOGS, right? The local overpriced grocery store I had to rely on back home in Rossland?

I've been volunteering at a refugee resource centre in the neighbourhood of Hastings Sunrise for a few months now, and I'm really enjoying it there. There's a community kitchen and once a week I make lunch for the staff and clients and do some baking, too. The clients love it; many of them live in poverty. Since this is a non-profit organization that has a small operating budget, I have to keep my meals cheap without sacrificing healthiness, and to facilitate this I've learned where to shop for the best deal in the neighbourhood. And there is a lot of choice when it comes to small, independently-owned markets.

The one we utilize the most is John's Farm Market at 2438 East Hastings. Their produce is hands down the least expensive of all the stores in the three block radius I try to keep myself to when I go out to do the grocery shopping for my meal.

John's is a very cultural experience for me. Right out front, facing the street, is a roaster/display thingy that usually has in it a selection of whole roasted birds and parts of roasted pig. It's touted as "Chinese BBQ" and man, does it ever smell good! Here is a closer look:


Cool, eh?

In addition to produce, John's does a bustling hot Chinese food take-out business that also smells amazing.

Price-wise, they cannot be beaten. I made a big pot of veggie soup for $6. Onions were 99¢ for 3lbs, cabbage was 49¢/lb...And I decided to do some personal shopping there after I was done volunteering, and I got bananas for 59¢/lb, mushrooms for 99¢/lb, pineapples were two for $5, green peppers were cheap...And the place is always busy! Even their canned stuff was cheaper than other places, and I wound up getting all my spaghetti sauce ingredients there for under $5.

I love this place! And I love the fact that it's a small independent business and I don't have to have that whole big name grocery store experience when I go there. I'm so glad I don't have to rely on LOGS anymore for my groceries! The staff are attentive and friendly, and the place has a nice feel to it. I'll be making it a regular stop on my way home from volunteering each week! And I'll have to try the take-out sometime, too!

Hashbrown Casserole

C often refers to these as "Funeral Potatoes" because she remembers them being made for funerals. This is a big, hearty casserole that has ingredients in it that might give you a heart attack upon reading. But it's sooooooooo good. This was one of the dishes we made for the lunch banquet we catered last month. It was a huge hit. I'd definitely make this at home. We made a huge batch that filled four chafing dishes.

Hashbrown Casserole

For the casserole:
1 package hashbrowns (the bags were big...2lbs maybe? I don't remember)
2 cups sour cream
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese
1/4 cup chopped green onion

Topping:
2 cups crushed cornflakes
1/2 cup grated cheddar cheese

Combine all the casserole ingredients well and spoon into a 9x13" casserole dish that has been well-greased. For the topping, combine cornflakes and cheese and sprinkle on the top. Bake at 350F until piping hot in the middle - about 40 or so minutes.

I am actually craving this right now...

Pumpkin Chiffon Pie

I had the opportunity to do some catering last month during a trip back home, and one of the jobs was to prepare a banquet lunch for a seniors curling bonspiel. The food was copious and excellent, and it was very well-received. The menu included a stuffed chicken, a rich potato casserole, and a selection of pies, including this pumpkin chiffon pie recipe. This has been a favourite of my SIL's mom, C's, family for holiday gatherings, and this time we made it in bulk. It was delicious. The chiffon filling is like a pumpkin mousse; I might use the mousse for a cake filling one of these days as I can see it being very versatile. The recipe comes via C's sister, B.

Pumpkin Chiffon Pie

1 9" pie shell, blind baked and cooled

1 envelope gelatin
3/4 cup sugar, divided
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp nutmeg
2/3 cup evaporated milk
3 eggs, separated, yolks lightly beaten
1 1/4 cup pumpkin puree

Combine gelatin and 1/2 cup sugar, salt, and spices. Stir in the milk and beaten egg yolks. Cook, stirring constantly, over low heat, until thickened to custardy consistency. Whisk in pumpkin and chill.

Beat egg whites to stiff peaks, gradually adding the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar. Fold into cooled pumpkin. Pour into shell and chill. Serve with whipped cream.

We also made lemon meringue pies. Here's a peak at those, too.

Enjoy!