There's A Clear Winner, But Second Place Isn't Bad I have long used my fancy Japanese rice cooker to make steel cut oats. It can allow for timed cooking AND the all important pre-soak. But you protest “the pressure cooker can too!” and you’d be correct but for one caveat. You can’t pressure cook dairy without creating a curdled mess and milk is what … Read More →
Rich & Golden Calories For A Cold January You know those piles of discount panettone that popped up on Boxing Day? Don’t pass them by. For the low, low price of a couple bucks you can have phenomenal French toast well into the new year. For the uninitiated, panettone is a decadent Italian holiday tradition in bread form. Rich in butter and dried … Read More →
Half Price Dairy Math Below Milk and dairy are some of my most troublesome pantry staples when it comes to maintaining both fresh supply and budget integrity up here in market-price-controlled Canada. Tinned evaporated milk can occasionally take the edge off those needs (and makes for better Mac & Cheese anyway) but sometimes you need the genuine fresh article. Just … Read More →
What Well Dressed Tacos Are Wearing This Season When you hail from a hot climate, you’re going to end up with sour dairy. That’s how nature works. Thankfully sour doesn’t mean spoiled in many cases and clever food cultures have learned to embrace ambient heat and bacteria to give us all sorts of fabulous tastes from kefir to yogurt. The kitchens of Mexico … Read More →
Fresh & Tart, No Cow Needed My neighbourhood Megamarket tries hard to appeal to fringe food types like myself. They have a ‘natural foods’ section despite the skeptical local attitudes towards quinoa and nutritional yeast. But this lack of local enthusiasm means their well-meaning dairy and fresh section often goes unsold. Their policy is to slap ‘50% off’ stickers on everything … Read More →
Gratin any veg you have handy If you aren’t making gratins from scratch at home, sell your kitchen now because you obviously don’t know what ovens are used for in a civilized world. Eat takeaway food from polystyrene boxes the rest of your days and ponder your culinary sins over a pot noodle. On yet another of my forays into the … Read More →
Sometimes you have to improvise I often run into specific recipes that call for some ingredient or other that I’ve either run out of, can’t find locally, or don’t want to pay the premium price demanded to have shipped into the Canadian backwoods. The culinary supply lines for exotic goods are indeed stretched a bit thin up here at times … Read More →
Any Port in a Milk-less Storm When a holiday closes all the stores and you’ve run out of cream for your tea, you have to improvise. Since I could find no cooperative cows nearby at teatime on Labour Day, I took to the shelves to test a few ideas. Fresh dairy for my tea is one of the few requirements that … Read More →
