Local diets begone!

Posted: November 16, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Home Cooking, Recipes | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments

As of November 1st Terra’s all Nova Scotia diet finally came to an end. We decided to celebrate by inviting the gang over for a multi-course, all night Italian feast like no other we’ve hosted. As luck would have it, the selected night also coincided with a visit from our dear friend Adriana Palanca. What a way to welcome back food.

On the big day we had a ton to do. Shopping at the market, booze, dishes and glasses to pick up, lunch and finally a full afternoon in the kitchen. Bliss! Once home Terra made a fresh batch of her expert apple sauce and jarred it up for take-home gifts. In the kitchen Adriana and I made pasta and tomato sauce. With that done there were vegetables to prep, the antipasto platter to build and two chickens to tie-up. I knew the night of food would go late so the invite was for 5pm. I was only setting the table as NickPick and Doug showed.

We kept the food coming steadily trying to leave enough time between courses for wine refills, burps and the hope of digestion. By evening’s end we ate five courses, two less than I would have liked, but for 10 people we did some damage. The true sign of a successful dinner party here is when Doug says he’s so full he’s getting angry. Which he did, and always as he plates more. What a guy. The others were no slouches either. But those who went for more lasagna gasped a bit when I showed off the two chickens and vegetables about to be roasted. They thought the lasagna was the meal. Bwahaha!

The menu:

  • Cannelloni beans and onions marinated in olive oil and wine vinegar on bread
  • Olives and pickled mushrooms
  • Prosciutto and various salumi
  • Pecorino with aged balsamic
  • Olives Ascolane (Fried stuffed olives)
  • Lasagna
  • Roast chickens with sautéed carrots and roast beets with garlic
  • Chad’s homemade pistachio ice cream (killer)

It all went down with help from insults, jokes, Italian beers, champagne, 10 bottles of wine and finally limoncello.

No one would disagree the culinary stars of the night were the stuffed olives and lasagna. Both Palanca inspired and made possible with her awesome help. We even put in a long distance call to Mama in NDG for live tips!

Adriana calls Olives Ascolane “little prayers” and here’s why. Originally from Ascoli Piceno, the recipe calls for each olive to be carefully opened to remove the pit and stuffed with incredibly fine, sautéed ground beef and olive meat. The olive is then reshaped,
rolled in fine bread crumbs and fried. No we didn’t make them! That would be insane. Fourtunetly I happen to have a source that keeps me well stocked. Serve them hot with a lemon wedge to complete the miracle.

The lasagna though, was entirely homemade. We made a seven egg and olive oil pasta
that was light and airy like linen. The thin sheets dried in the dining room for an hour before a quick boil. Together with the tomato sauce, we had 12 gorgeously thin layers, bubbling with cheese after an hour or so in the oven.

By 11pm the chickens hit the table. It had been about an hour break since the last course and with all the wine going around we were ready to eat again. I seem to recall Chad and Shawn saying they were actually hungry. Nice! The closers were bowls of smooth, cool ice cream, made by Chad, which completely hit the spot. A fine ending.

This was easily our best dinner party yet. We celebrated Terra’s will power to eat local for a month and welcomed back to the table what she missed the most; olive oil, salt, pepper, citrus and pasta. Thankfully we had friends on hand willing to endure over seven hours of eating and who still asked for seconds.

The November Steak Vegetarian Challenge

Posted: December 13, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: General, Home Cooking, Local Ingredients | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

To be or not to be a vegetarian? That is the question.

We were on one of our weekend trips to the Valley earlier this fall. Typically they include feasts, farts, relaxation and a visit to the awesome Canning Village Meat Market. During this particular visit to the store we spotted some gorgeous valley-grown beef on display. We couldn’t make up our minds about how many to buy, the price, or should we just buy something else. I’m sure that butcher saw us coming from a mile away. He upped his sales pitch by using all the latest culinary catch phrases that send us typically urban eaters into a frenzy, “local”, “grass fed” and “organic”. We were an easy target. We picked up four strip-loin steaks along with some pork products. What are you gonna do? They were magnificent looking.

This brings us to a few weeks ago on one of the last Sundays of November. I suggested to Terra about having the last two steaks that night with vegetables we had also bought in the valley. We agreed and I fired up the BBQ for the last time this year. I was outside with a flashlight checking for doneness when I had an idea. Why not go vegetarian for a while after this meal? I came inside with the steaks –rare for me, medium rare for Terra– and told her the plan. As we ate we created some rules to make this work. Seeing as we’re meat eaters and didn’t want this to be forever. Planning had already started with the rest of the SixTop staff for an “Xmas in the Valley” blow-out this year (post to come). The menu naturally includes meat so our first rule would be a time frame. Stay vegetarian until December 24th. The second would be dinner parties. If a friend’s dinner invitation has meat on the menu, we wouldn’t turn it down. Last would be eating out. We agreed we would maintain the veg. regiment at restaurants.

So now with a few weeks to go until Xmas I think the experiment is going well. Aside of a few steps off the path due to parties and caving in to the awesomeness that is bacon once we’ve been eating well. But it hasn’t been always easy. Our challenges have been lunch and eating out. It’s harder to find something to make a sandwich without something like tuna-salad or cold-cuts. And when you’re not brown bagging it there isn’t a huge lunch choice when eating out. Actually eating out in general has been the biggest hurtle. A lot of restaurants with several pages of items have only two or three vegetarian selections. And it’s no surprise that North American style restaurants tend to focus on meat and a side while ethnic restaurants had way more options for meals that could consist of vegetables only. This suited us fine as we find most of the better restaurants in Halifax are ethnic.

So there you have it. This experiment has made us realize a few things about our eating habits. One is that we don’t eat that much meat to begin with, which was a pleasant surprise. We also realized that meat tends to be more of a treat when we do eat it or it’s only used as an ingredient. I don’t think we’ll ever stop eating meat completely but we’d both be fine with keeping up this amount of eating vegetables.

Oh, and that steak back in November? It was divine.

Quick, Pull My Blogging Finger

Posted: October 12, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: General | Tags: , , , , , | 3 Comments

During our most recent get-together, we shared a seasonal growler of locally-made Propeller Pumpkin Ale. This hearty, satisfying brew was supposed to serve as the inspiration for my first Six Top entry, but, alas, there’s a more important issue to address…

If there’s a theme to our gatherings, aside from the food, it’s the aftermath: a group of half-smiling, over-indulged, slightly bloated, partly lactose-intolerant individuals crawling their way to the living room.  With a groggy sense of regret, and a few loosened belt buckles, we sit and stare at our after-dinner drinks, wondering to ourselves how a body can continually betray its appetite.  But just 10 minutes ago I was enjoying roasted carrots and shallots. Why am I now so frightened and curious about the health of my intestinal tract? And why am I so reluctant to pass wind among my culinary brethren?

Yes, unfortunate as it is, fantastic cuisine comes with a price. And the price is gas.

Whether it’s repulsive flatulence or obnoxious belching (that’s “farting” and “burping” for you laypeople) intestinal gas is a normal process for maintaining digestive health. Especially farting. In fact, the primary reason for farting is to release toxin buildup of partially digested food.  This keeps such toxins from entering the blood stream and contributing to disease. On average, people produce 1-3 pints of intestinal gas each day, so that’s a lot of potential toxins!  Nasty.

But farts do more than release toxins. They ease the discomfort of bloating—that tight, swollen feeling which inspires the false promise of “never eating like that again”—while lowering blood pressure. Read on:

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in Maryland, have discovered that the gas leading to flatulence is produced from an enzyme called CSE – a substance that also relaxes the blood vessels and lowers blood pressure. CSE production starts inside the cells that line the blood vessels. The odor comes from bacteria in the gut that generate small amounts of hydrogen sulphide, a toxic gas whose use might now be further developed to help with blood pressure treatment.

Scientists engineered mice that were deficient in CSE, depleting their levels of hydrogen sulphide. The mice were found to have blood pressure readings 20 mm/Hg higher than normal mice.  They then added a blood pressure drug, methacholine, but it didn’t help. That told the researchers that hydrogen sulphide is responsible for the blood vessel relaxation.

No sh*t!  This means that every fart we suppress is actually hurting us. In other words, we NEED to fart, despite the protests of angry friends and insulted family. What’s more, if the average person launches 14 farts a day (as reported) then anything less should be considered polite.

Okay, okay. On a more serious note, farting is actually an indicator of how well we digest our food.  Too many gassy farts signals room for improvement, meaning we need to eat healthier. This means choosing whole, unprocessed foods (found in abundance on Chad and Lindsay’s farm), chewing repeatedly before swallowing (until food becomes liquid), and avoiding foods that don’t “sit well with us” (due to allergies and genetics). It also helps to take a half-hour rest after every meal, which keeps blood flow focused on the area where it’s needed most: our guts.

So, no matter what you call it—cutting the cheese, floating biscuits, bunting, fanny whispering—the point is that farting should be celebrated as a natural body process, as much a part of eating as the food itself.

Ahh, what a relief.