delicious food – Turmeric and Twine

Lemon Ricotta Deep Dish Pancake with Cranberries and Chocolate For Your Sunday Brunch

September 22, 2013December 29, 2014Turmeric and TwineLeave a comment

Now beginning the recovery from my recent job/life debacle, I am finally starting to step away from a constant state of panic. I am happily settling into a new routine with my new job and generally feeling normal again. Fresh start. My new apartment is the biggest I’ve ever had in Korea and I love it. I’m looking forward to getting my kitchen set up and getting back to cooking.

For now, I’m enjoying making comforting, cozy foods. There is nothing better to get you back on track with your life than cooking the recipes you know and love.

Brunch is my favourite meal. It combines sweet, savory, bitter and greasy with flawless ease. It’s perfect for sleeping in or meeting a friend when recovering from the night before. Since you’re combining two meals, you can allow yourself to overeat (in some moderation) without guilt, or at least that’s what I tell myself.

I’m not usually attracted sweet foods in the morning, but since brunch is a gateway meal, I can make exceptions. This deep dish pancake is a perfect way to tie your sweet brunch to your savory brunch. It’s eggy texture and sour fruitiness invites the eater to have one bite with syrup, the next with a bit of bacon and the next mixed with quiche provençale. Or solo, of course. Wash it down with a sip of espresso macchiato. Viola! Brunch.

This recipe is very easy and the ingredients are easily found (even in Korea… Bless you, Costco). Invite a friend or two over for brunch, lounge around chatting and then work it off with a nice walk around town. Happy Sunday.

Lemon Ricotta Deep Dish Pancake with Cranberries and Chocolate

Ingredients

1 cup all purpose flour
5 eggs
½ cup milk
1 ½ cup ricotta cheese
2 tbsp softened butter
½ cup lemon juice (2 lemons)
3 tbsp sugar
½ tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp baking powder
2 tsp vanilla extract
½ cup fresh or frozen cranberries
½ cup chocolate chips

Directions

Preheat oven to 425ºF/220ºC/Gas Mark 7.

Spread butter around a 7 inch circular baking pan.

In a bowl, whisk eggs until frothy.

Leaving out the chocolate and cranberries, whisk in remaining ingredients in with the eggs until smooth.

Pour the mixture into the greased pan.

Sprinkle berries and chocolate on top of the pancake and gently press in.

Bake for 20-25 minutes.

Cut a piece for yourself and drizzle with maple syrup mixed with a touch of ricotta cheese.

Garnish with walnuts and cranberries.

Eat immediately and voraciously.

Roasted Curry Carrots with Garlic Cilantro Raita + Redwoods of Sonoma

January 22, 2013March 7, 2013Turmeric and Twine2 Comments

It’s winter and I’m out in the country with little excitement. I was struck with the winter blues about 2 weeks ago, and I haven’t successfully shaken them off yet. The Abode has been extremely quiet and the cocoon of winter makes me feel very internal. Having friends scattered literally all over the world and desiring varying sorts of comfort from each of them, I long for a teleportation device to aid me in quick visits. Anyone have one I could borrow?

I’ve been spending my days in alternating periods of busy-ness and sloth, but trying to be as productive as possible. I’ve taken to babying my knees, which have sadly become inflamed (winter!), preventing me from my daily runs. Boooo. I predict knee replacements in the future, hopefully many years from now. Poor little guys.

While visiting my sister in CA, we spent one cold, rainy day in Sonoma County. There, my sister, mum and I went to check out a redwood forest near Guerneville. It was very cold that day, and I was underdressed (having come from the east coast, I was foolishly optimistic about Northern California weather when packing my bag) so we didn’t spend as much time there as we’d have liked. But, we warmed ourselves up afterwards at Korbel vineyard tasting wines and champagnes.

I’ve never really been a fan of baked or roasted carrots. Perhaps I’ve held on to some bad childhood experiences, but until this summer I can’t really say that I’ve ever craved baked carrots.

The Abode farm yielded an excellent crop this year and there was a tonne of every sort of produce you could desire. Cooks were forced into finding creative ways to use large quantities of produce before the food went off. This is extra challenging due to eaters who are understandably bored of eating the same thing over and over. When faced with a huge sack of beautiful carrots that need to be used right away, roasting seemed like the best way to get people to eat a lot. Luckily, I was right.

The (not-so) secret to carrots is knowing how well they respond to sweet and savory combinations. Carrots are already loaded with natural sugars, and don’t need much more sugar to bring out the flavours. Just a pinch of added sugar will make your curried carrots pop.

Raita is a yogurt sauce originally from India. It is used to cool the palate when eating spicy food. Ingredients for raita can vary from region to region, but often contains cumin, cucumber, mint/cilantro and garlic. Even though the fries aren’t spicy, they pair beautifully with the raita.

Roasted Curry Carrots with Garlic Cilantro Raita

Ingredients

For the carrots

A dozen large carrots
1½-2 tbsp Indian curry powder
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp clove powder
2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
¼ cup cooking oil

For the raita

1 cup plain yogurt
¼ cup grated cucumber
¼ cup finely chopped cilantro
2 finely chopped cloves of garlic
1 tsp roasted cumin seeds (roasting instructions below)
½ tsp salt and pepper

Directions

Preheat oven at 400ºF/200ºC/Gas mark 4

Peel carrots if they are especially dirty, otherwise, just wash them well and remove the ugly bits. Cut off both ends. Quarter the carrots lengthwise into strips and then cut the strips into shorter pieces. Don’t worry about making the pieces perfectly uniform, and forget about it if using garden carrots. It’s just not possible.

In a large bowl, mix (with your hands) the carrots with the curry powder, cinnamon, clove powder, salt, sugar and oil. Mix until each carrot is well seasoned and lubricated. Add more oil, if needed.

Lay the carrot pieces on (a) baking sheet(s). Allow plenty of space for each piece. Do not crowd them, otherwise, they won’t cook properly. Place in the oven and cook for 35 to 45 minutes. Check every 10 minutes to stir the carrots.

While the carrots are cooking, roast the cumin seeds. Start by placing a frying pan over high heat to get hot. Once the pan is hot, add seeds and keep them in constant motion for 2 to 3 minutes. When the seeds are brown and you can smell a warm roasted smell, remove them from heat.

Mix the seeds with the rest of the raita ingredients in a bowl. Try to not eat all of the raita before the carrots are ready (it’ll be difficult).

Dip, slather, smother, scoop, drip, drizzle cool raita on hot carrots. Warning: You may want to avoid kissing anyone on days eating the raita. Raw garlic is not romantic.

Molecular Gastronomy: Bacon Wrapped Acorn Squash with Balsamic Caviar and Maple Sphere

December 18, 2012February 26, 2013Turmeric and Twine12 Comments

I’m slightly concerned about my post titles being a bit too long. I can admit that they’re all a mouth full… and somehow, they manage to keep growing. To me, this isn’t exactly a problem as I think naming a dish according to the ingredients it contains gives my readers a clear idea of what the post (and recipe) is about. I like to list the ingredients I feel are important to each dish, but since my recipe interests include things like flavour pairing and molecular gastronomy, I tend to think ALL of the ingredients are important. Woops. Predicament.

It’s also due to my own personal inability (or laziness) to come up with a catchy title. It’s clearly too challenging for me to plan a dish, make it, photograph it, write about it AND create a catchy title. That’s just taking it too far. Anyway, I personally like to see literal titles. Let the food speak for itself. Most people can look at the ingredients (if they’re relatively familiar with them) in a recipe and get a sense of whether or not they’ll like it. Right? The names and imagined flavours swirl around in your mind, forcing the idea of the dish into your mouth. I appreciate the honesty of a literal title… but again, there’s the whole length issue. What do you think? Let me know what sort of title catches your eye.

OK, so it turns out that this recipe is ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous in the best way. Nathan and Alex came to visit me some time ago. Just as passionate lovers never leave the bedroom, my foodie friends and I never left the kitchen over the three days they were around. Fevered moments of flavour creativity (some might say delirium) and collaboration were plentiful and virtuous food was abundant. The guys brought with them a gorgeous array of fresh farmer’s market produce. Most important of this haul was bacon. Locally butchered, farm fresh strips of fatty delight. It created a revolution in my home and became part of almost every meal.

While we played around with my molecular gastronomy kits, futzing with spheres and such, Nathan remembered once again that we had bacon. How he could’ve forgotten, I’m not sure. I certainly hadn’t stopped thinking about it. Luckily, he took that thought one step further and remembered the acorn squash he’d brought. It came to everyone’s attention that wrapping bacon around grilled acorn squash would be painfully good. I’m still in pain now. Oy vay.

First, we blanched our cut slices of squash in boiling water for 3 minutes (only 4 at a time so the water doesn’t cool).

Next, we grilled those beauties on a stove-top grill (pan frying is totally acceptable). Luckily, there was some bacon fat left on the grill which added extra flavour to the squash.

Now that our squash had those beautiful grill marks, we wrapped them (so hard) in bacon and baked them. Sadly, I must note that we had run out of bacon by that point, so not every piece of squash was wrapped.

I showed the boys how to make molecular balsamic caviar, which happily features in this dish.

Maple spheres are also featured. And just look at that little guy! Beautiful, isn’t it?

Of all the maple spheres we made (about 8) this one was the only sphere presentable enough for a photo. When making spheres, it is important that your ingredients have a certain level of calcium in them for the thin film to form properly. Apparently, maple syrup is lacking in the calcium department and the film did not form well. They kept sticking and breaking when I tried to move them. In the hopes of getting one or two out of it, I left some in the sodium alginate bath for a long time (about 15 minutes), which paid off. If I were to try making them again, I’d add some yogurt to the mixture to avoid the same problem.

Bacon Wrapped Acorn Squash with Balsamic Caviar and Maple Sphere

Ingredients

1 acorn squash- cleaned of seeds (with or without peel) and divided into 8-10 pieces

Strip bacon- lots

Balsamic caviar (video instructions below)

Maple sphere (video instructions below)

Water

Directions

Preheat your oven to 350 °F/ 180 °C/ Gas mark 4.

Boil a large pot of water. Place 3-4 pieces of squash in the water. Blanch them for 3 minutes then remove them from heat. Repeat until all pieces are blanched.

Grill or pan fry the squash on high heat until the surfaces are beautifully brown.

Place bacon wrapped squash in a casserole pan and bake for 25-30 minutes.

Garnish with balsamic caviar and maple sphere.

Eat and be amazed.

Thanks guys! It was fun!

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