Four Foods on Friday

Another round of Four Foods on Friday, this one including one of my all-time favourite soup recipes. Thank you so much to Val for running this weekly event!

#1. Egg salad or deviled eggs. How do you prepare?
Oh, I feel quite pathetic in admitting this. I've never actually made egg salad or deviled eggs. I love deviled eggs, but have never had an occasion to make them! But I know my aunt makes a killer version with some mayo and relish and some paprika sprinkled on top.

#2. French fries. Do you make homemade or frozen?
Homemade, all the way. A couple of weeks ago I made cheese, ranch, and bacon oven fries. When you make fries yourself, they're so much better for you than processed and/or deep fried french fries (er...if you're not covering them in cheese, bacon, and ranch dressing!) and just as good.

#3. Gravy. What do you use - homemade, jar, can or from a package?
Homemade, so gravy is a rare treat for me. Living alone, I don't make roast chicken and mashed potatoes anymore, so I don't have the juices to make gravy with. My favourite trick when I do make gravy, however, is adding some wine.



#4. Share a recipe for a hot (temperature, not spice) dish.
My favourite warm-me-up dish is a Williams-Sonoma recipe for Beer and Cheddar soup. You can use white cheddar or regular cheddar, and the more aged, the better.

This soup is quite rich but the flavour is phenomenal! Beer lovers should be salivating right now.

The photo is above, the original recipe can be found here, and my preferred version of the recipe can be found after the jump.



My Take on Williams-Sonoma's Ale-Cheddar Soup
Ingredients:
4 Tbs. (1/2 stick) unsalted butter
1 onion, finely diced
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1 3/4 cups milk
1 3/4 cups chicken stock
1 bottle (12 fl. oz.) light ale
1 Tbs. Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp. dry mustard
1 1/4 lb. aged white cheddar cheese, grated
Salt and lots of freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Cayenne pepper, to taste

Directions:

In a stockpot over medium-low heat, melt the butter. Add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until very soft, 10 to 15 minutes. Stir in the flour and cook for 3 to 5 minutes. Increase the heat to medium-high and whisk in the milk and stock. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring often, until thickened, about 10 minutes.

Using an immersion blender, puree the soup until smooth. Williams-Sonoma says to strain the soup through a sieve, which you're welcome to do, but the texture is still wonderful as-is, so why dirty another dish

Return the mixture to the pot and set over medium heat. Add the ale, Worcestershire and mustard and simmer for 5 minutes. Whisk in the cheese 1/2 cup at a time, letting each addition melt before adding more; do not allow the soup to boil. Season with salt and cayenne.

Ladle the soup into warmed bowls and serve immediately. Serves 4 to 6.

Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my 21st birthday! It's not as exciting as if I were an American (I've been legally drinking in Canada for two years now), although I will definitely appreciate being able to have a drink with dinner when I go to the States from now on.

It's been a great birthday so far for my foodie side. My boyfriend has given me my gifts already. He bought me a kitchen scale, a bamboo cutting board, and a heavy duty stainless steel stock pot. I can now make British recipes with better accuracy, throw out my crappy, distorted Ikea cutting boards, and make recipes that call for a heavy bottomed saucepan! Talk about exciting news.


As you can see, I'm already putting the cutting board to good use.

To me, food-related gifts from him are actually quite romantic. When we lived together, he would tease me about the kitchen gadgets I was always bringing home. He insists I have way too much kitchen stuff. But he also told me that he likes to buy it for me anyway because cooking makes me so happy, and he knows that any kitchen thing he gets me is going to be well-used. So even though someday our cupboards will be bursting at the seams and he won't be able to open a drawer without a lemon zester, melon baller, or piping bag jumping out, he buys it anyway because he just likes to see me happy. Is that awesome or what?

Photos of all of the gifts after the jump, if you're interested.

Cuisinart 3-quart Saucepan

Fresco digital kitchen scale

A very sturdy bamboo cutting board

The Trials and Tribulations of Thai Red Curry

If there's one dish that I never seem to get sick of, it's got to be Thai red curry. I love the complex, spicy flavour and how well it pairs with almost any type of meat or vegetable. I love the way it makes even the most boring batch of white rice seem mouthwatering. And I love that I never seem to get sick of it. Is that too redundant?


It took my boyfriend and I awhile to find the perfect ingredients. We bought Thai Kitchen's red curry paste, but found that we tasted more heat than flavour. After our scorched taste buds recovered, we tracked down Maesri brand red curry paste from the local Thai grocer for a quarter of the price and a lot more flavour. $1 a can vs. $4 for a tiny jar, to be precise.

We also learned to check the ingredient list when buying coconut milk. There is a wide variety of brands out there, and a ton of them are composed of nothing but water and coconut extract! The best canned coconut milk contains nothing but coconut milk, but it may cost you up to $4 a can if you're buying it from a non-Asian grocer. It's worth the trip to an Asian grocer to save the money -- we typically spend $1 a can or less for pure coconut milk.

A bag of kaffir lime leaves rounds out the ingredient list. We bought a huge bag of dried leaves for about $3. Our local grocer does sell fresh leaves, but it's not always practical to make the trip for fresh lime leaves, and the dried leaves work just fine for us.

We've tried out a variety of recipes, too. We used Michael Smith's recipe for awhile, which called for chicken stock to be boiled down. It made a ton of sauce, but it didn't quite have the potency of restaurant-quality curry.


But we hit jackpot with Gordon Ramsay's red curry. It follows similar techniques to other recipes, but Ramsay found the right combination. We make our curry by combining Ramsay's technique with Michael Smith's easygoing, "some of this, some of that" style. The photos are from a previous batch, one with broccoli and mushrooms. Find the recipe for how we made it last night after the jump.

Red Thai Curry With Chicken and Bell Pepper
Serves 4 (or 2 with some left for a great lunch!)

2 tbsp. canola oil
3 tbsp. red curry paste
1 can coconut milk
4 chicken thighs, skins removed
1 bell pepper (any colour), chopped into bite size chunks
1 to 3 tbsp. fish sauce
Approx 1. tbsp grated ginger
Lime juice
A handful of kaffir lime leaves
Rice for 4, about 4 cups cooked (we always cheat and use Minute Rice to speed up the process--bad foodies, bad!)

Heat canola oil in a wide saucepan over medium heat. Fry chicken thighs until browned. Remove to a cutting board to cool.

Fry curry paste in leftover oil until fragrant, 1-2 minutes. Add ginger to paste and cook about 1 minute more.

Remove cooled thigh meat from bones and and add to curry mixture. Add coconut milk, pepper, fish sauce to taste, and lime leaves and stir well to combine. Cook 3-5 minutes or until desired consistency is reached. Keep in mind that the longer the sauce cooks, the spicier it will become as the flavour will become more concentrated. Add a splash of lime juice to taste and serve the sauce over cooked rice.

Please note that this sauce is quite spicy -- I would rate it about a 7 on a scale of 1-10. If you don't like spicy food, you probably won't enjoy it. But if you do -- you'll love it.

Four Foods on Friday

Time for another round of Four Foods on Friday! I'm loving this. I'm always either commuting to London to spend the weekend with my boyfriend on Fridays, or welcoming him here with a nice hot meal. I appreciate taking it easy like this. And it's fun, to boot. Here we go:

#1. Artichokes. Love em or leave em?
In pasta or in artichoke and spinach dip (or any kind of dip), I'm a huge fan. On pizza or by themselves? Ick.

#2. What’s your favorite kind of bean?
I've only recent grown to like beans at all. As it turns out, I really like black beans. I discovered that on a trip to Cuba over Christmas last year. They served black beans and rice together, and I loved it! They're great in South American-inspired soups, too, like tortilla soup. Yum.

#3. Share a recipe for any kind of cake.
This is going to sound a little nutty, but I'm not much of a cake person. I certainly don't have any original cake recipes. But I have been itching to try making a coconut cake anyway, and Barefoot Contessa's version looks delicious and elegant.

Photo Credit: Food Network

#4. What’s your favorite dairy product?
Cheese. Cheese. Cheese!! What else? My Italy posts are still to come, but I will say that my boyfriend brought me a huge round of pecorino cheese from Italy. I can't wait to have some.

Tuesdays With Dorie: Chunky Peanut Butter and Oatmeal Chocolate Chipsters

This week's Tuesdays With Dorie recipe, Chunky Peanut Butter and Oatmeal Chocolate Chipsters chosen by Stefany of Proceed with Caution, is good. That's it. Just good. Not amazing, not a must-bake. It makes the grade, but I don't find myself craving it as I normally do with Dorie recipes.

Oatmeal, peanut butter, and chocolate chips is a good start to any cookie recipe, and the cookies' hint of cinnamon and nutmeg adds that unexpected twist that Dorie always seems to think of. So I'm not sure why I'm not loving these cookies. I'm just not.

How did you like the recipe, for my TWD visitors?

I won't be able to visit your blogs til later in the week; I'm currently taking a vacation day from work and spending time with my boyfriend, who just returned from Italy yesterday--the beauty of scheduled posting--but I can't wait to see how everyone's turned out. Maybe someone else thought of a creative twist to take these cookies beyond "just good."