And Now For Something Completely Different In Reading Material


On the cookbook front I have the album Au Pied de Cochon, which I have been wanting to test and review for some time now. It is not to every one's taste or philosophy, which makes it all that more interesting to ponder. For those not familiar with the Montreal institution, Anthony Bourdain captures it best.

" A one man Dionysian orgy of my favorite things ... a completely unrestrained in-your-face feast of crispy duck fat, unctuous duck livers, moist flavourful blood sausages, marrow-filled bones, tender, lovingly slow-cooked birds, stuffed rabbit, sumptuous and hearty stews - and always: pork, pork, pork - in all its fatty, crispy, and inspiring glory." He has "his own madly enthusiastic signature takes on Quebecois sugar-shack staples like poutine, heaping thick slabs of melting foie gras, foie gras sauce and foie gras fat on the already artery-clogging goodness of hand-cut frits, demi-glace and fresh curds."
As you can see, the book and restaurant has the potential to be unpopular with some folks. Myself, I am looking forward to trying out the recipes, and would love to experience Martin Picard's enthusiasm in person. I don't like to eat slabs of foie gras for the simple reason that I get full so fast from all the richness. But if prepared perfectly I enjoy it. Thankfully my friends who are better human beings allow me my occasional forays into the forbidden. You can be sure the politically correct will not be invited to the recipe testing feast coming up this summer!

OK, I am a tinge troubled by my enthusiasm in looking forward to eating foie gras. Perhaps this calls for a post on how it produced. For now I will provide two articles on foie gras production. The first is on production in France. The smallish farm produces goose foie gras, and the article is from the perspective of someone who eats foie gras. The second is from an animal rights group. Foie gras production is not for the squeamish.

Books for Thoughts on Food


I have got quite a substantial reading list for this summer...although no summer novels yet. Any suggestions?
Perhaps I should finish Don Quixote. Candy and * were reading it last year, so I thought I would give it a go yet once again. Got as far as the windmills, perhaps a little further. I have noticed that everyone talks about the windmills whenever they mention the novel. I believe the reason the windmills are referred to so often is that no one actually reads any further than the bloody windmills.
That said, I am determined to finish it, so voila, another book on the list.
So far the list looks like this:

Hungry Planet: What the World Eats
Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism WARNING: This is an unpleasant clip. If you want to stick to light food topics, skip it, if you want to think about food globally and politically, then the idea of Klein's "shock doctrine" goes hand in hand with it.
Stuffed and Starved Here is a clip of Patel talking about biofuels, the contradiction of too many fat and too many thin people, and trade policies related to food.
Don Quixote
The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Coutries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It
Extraordinary Evil

Rustic Cheese Souffle



I love cheese souffles. Before starting, I always think they are going to be a complete pain to make, and then surprised at how quickly the souffle gets into the oven. I also like using up all scraps of cheese found at the bottom of the cheese drawer.
I almost always make extra Bechamel or Cheese sauce to 1) tempt the kids to eat more broccoli 2) use it to top a moussaka or lasagna later in the week. Here is the description of the classic Bechamel from Herrings Dictionary of Classical and Modern Cookery.

Bechamel: white roux moistened with milk, seasoned with salt; a larded onion added, boiled, strained. May be improved with cream.

Here is the cheese sauce.
Mornay: Bechamel sauce beaten with butter, mixed with grated Parmesan and Swiss cheese. May be bound with egg yolks before butter is added.

Here is my recipe for Cheese Sauce.
This is the most time consuming element of the souffle. Having it on hand in the fridge can speed up getting dinner on the table.
Depending on what I am going to use the sauce for, I usually make it thicker than I would for pouring as it can always be thinned for a pouring sauce, but needs to be thicker for souffles and pouring over the top of casseroles like moussaka.

4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons flour
2 cups milk, plus extra for thinning later
1/2 an onion, with a bay leaf skewered to the outer skin with 2 cloves
a few pinches salt
1 teaspoon dijon mustard
white pepper to taste
a tiny pinch of cayenne or hot paprika
1 1/2 cups (or a little more) assorted cheese, with old cheddar being the highest proportion

1. In a medium sized, thick bottomed saucepan on medium heat, melt the butter and dump in the flour. Stir often until the flour mixture gets a sandy texture and lightens in colour.
2. Add the milk slowly while whisking continuously with a wire whisk. Continue stirring until with the whisk until sauce thickens. Reduce heat to low and add the onion.
3. Let simmer on low for 10 minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon often to keep the sauce from browning on the bottom. Taste the bechamel. You want to taste just a hint of onion and bay leaf and no trace of flour. Remove the onion if you are pleased with the flavour.
4. Add salt, pepper, cayenne or paprika and mustard to taste, keeping in mind that you still have the cheese to add. If I don't have old cheddar cheese I add a little extra mustard to punch up the flavour abit. Stir in the cheese with a wooden spoon. Use as soon as the cheese is melted.
Note: I don't always add the onion, bay leaf and clove - although I love the flavour, and I also love how the onion looks with the bay leaf attached to it. The reality is that I don't always have time for the extra step...well, in all honesty, its not only time, its just laziness. The souffle does not suffer from the lack of it.

Rustic Cheese Souffle
The rustic part just means dump the batter into any buttered and breadcrumbed oven proof container you can find. I have used saucepans, fry pans, bowls and in this case a low brimmed casserole.

1 cup cheese sauce, above
an extra handful of grated cheese scraps
4 eggs, separated

Preheat the oven to 375.
1. Stir the cheese scraps and egg yolks into the slightly cooled cheese sauce.
2. Beat the egg whites into soft peaks, (try not to beat them into crusty, dryish peaks, they don't fold in so nicely), then fold into the cheese sauce mixture. Using a balloon whisk which you may have used to beat the egg whites are an easy way to keep the souffle batter airy.
3. Pour into a generously buttered and breadcrumbed dish that can accommodate the rise of the souffle. It usually doubles in size before deflating when you plunge the serving spoon into the cumulus of egg.
Bake at 375 oven for about 20 to 35 minutes, depending on how deep your dish is. My shallow dish takes around 25 minutes. Eat right away.


The salad in the photo is Arugula, Caramelized Onions with Sage, Goat Cheese, Pecans and a Lemon Vinaigrette. It was really, really good! (the onions were leftovers)

Here is information I should have included with the photos. They are 9 of 24 families photographed for the book Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. This link has a good description of the book. Here is a link to the article in Time where you will find a few more family photographs than posted here.

Hello Everyone,
Wrote my last exam yesterday and am so happy to be back blogging rather than my books. A friend of mine sent me this little visual study on what some folks eat. The idea was for each family to present all the food and drink they consume in one week.

Food for thought.

Italy : The Manzo family of Sicily
Food expenditure for one week: 214.36 Euros or $260.11


Germany : The Melander family of Bargteheide
Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07


United States : The Revis family of North Carolina.
Food expenditure for one week $341.98


Mexico : The Casales family of Cuernavaca
Food expenditure for one week: 1, 862.78 Mexican Pesos or $89.09


Poland : The Sobczynscy family of Konstancin-Jeziorna
Food expenditure for one week: 582.48 Zlotys or $151.27


Egypt : The Ahmed family of Cairo
Food expenditure for one week: 387.85 Egyptian Pounds or $68.53


Ecuador : The Ayme family of Tingo
Food expenditure for one week: $31.55


Bhutan : The Namgay family of Shingkhey Village
Food expenditure for one week: 224.93 ngultrum or $5.03


Chad: The Aboubakar family of Breidjing Camp
Food expenditure for one week: 685 CFA Francs or $1.23

Keep the Love Alive
Alright, now just keep feeding your little starter everyday or second day for as long as you can, repeating the procedure of 1/4 cup starter, 3 tablespoons water and 2/3 cup flour (discarding or baking with the remaining starter)kneaded into a stiff dough.
I have made bread from my starter and was pleasantly surprised by the results. (I am eating it right now, and I would be in such trouble if any in the house knew I was eating shattering bread crust bread while over the keyboard)
Sorry Glezer, for some reason I wasn't confident about how well the starter and bread recipe would work. And lord knows, I did not follow the recipe exactly near the end...I over proofed the bread by about 10 hours, (had wine with dinner thereby letting the dough rise overnight!) but because the starter was a little slow, the dough only deflated slightly when I put it on the baking stone.
I will write the rest of the recipe tonight.
Really wish I had pictures to post of my loaf.

That's It For The Starter
Alright, I fed the starter again, made it into a very stiff dough using the same process as the last. This weekend I'll test its mettle and make some bread.
So sorry there have been no pictures. The new camera that we bought to replace the broken one has mysteriously vanished. Bit of a concern since it cost more than the last. How does one lose a new camera? We hadn't even taken it out of the house yet.
Considering someone just stole our car stereo in the middle of the day in the Science World parking lot, I have the horrible feeling that someone stepped in the door and snitched it under our noses.
Vancouver has a ridiculous level of small crime. Actually, its not too shabby on organized crime either.