Tag Archives: corn

The whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts and Charred Corn Slaw

A few weeks ago we hosted our Triennial (my new word for the day – that’s once every three years) family reunion at our cottage, We started doing this in 2000. This summer we totalled 38 various aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews and several other various hangers oners. I wrote about the genesis of these reunions a few years ago, here. My youngest sister (I have 4 sisters and one lucky brother!) likes to plan activities for these reunions. She is a kindergarten teacher. My other sisters, brother, and I tolerate it to humour her, plus, she is so bossy, we all end up doing what she says anyways, just to keep the peace.

On the second morning of the reunion we all played “The Amazing Race-Wedding Edition“, in honour of our brother’s upcoming nuptials in two weeks. Under the guise of helping the betrothed couple prepare for the wedding we were divided into teams and went off on a car rally-treasure hunt to the lovely town of Perth, Ontario.

We did a similar type of activity at the last reunion, in 2009, and my oldest son asked me if participation in this year’s hunt was optional. I patiently explained to him that no, participation was not optional and that the reason for this was so that when his parents, and/or aunts and uncles are dead and he and all his cousins are sitting around at the Shiva house, they will have shared memories to reminisce and laugh about. Making memories for your kids is one of the most important tasks for a parent.

The “Race” was fast and furious. Several members of our family are quite competitive and play hard to win. In fact, I would suggest that if you ever visit Perth, and stop in at the delicious Sunflower Bake Shop (where we had to visit to obtain a list of cupcake flavours that they make and then recommend the one that should be served at the wedding), you might not want to mention our family’s name. Apparently we are now blacklisted from that establishment. But don’t let that stop you. Their lemon pound cake is killer!

On our journey we were instructed to stop in at Jersey Joe’s Pizza and Sub. Our task was to create a perfect pizza for the happy couple to eat at 2:00 am after their wedding. We were to get a price for the pie and take a picture with Jersey Joe. Bonus points were promised if we brought a box back to the cottage. Jersey Joe was a real sweetheart and he makes a mean pizza pie!

The last task of the race ended proved to be the most controversial. We wound up at the Perth Dairy Queen where we had to create a custom Blizzard that the happy couple would taste and judge.

Most of the teams assumed that the custom blizzard had to contain ingredients that were available at the DQ. However, one team, who declared themselves to be “outside the box thinkers” interpreted this task much more loosely. Knowing my brother’s penchant for bacon, Butterfingers candy bars and Hostess Twinkies, they procured these items before arriving at the DQ and mixed them into their custom blizzard.

Fortunately for all the other teams, the “outside the box thinker’s” blizzard was the sixth of seven blizzards that the happy (but by now, quite nauseous) couple had to taste. My brother turned a pale shade of green as his sweetheart shoved a mouthful of blizzard coated bacon bits into his mouth. One sister was heard to quip, “Cheaters never prosper.”

That afternoon, more than a few family members signed up for naptime!

Not all the weekend’s activities were compulsory. On Friday morning we held a swim marathon. Attendance at this event was totally optional and there were only 6 of us who participated in the 2 kilometer swim to an island in the middle of our lake. My youngest sister, brother and I first did the swim about 6 years ago and it has become a time-honoured tradition ever since. We discovered that the owner of the cottage on the island we swim to is a heart surgeon. That always gives us comfort as we gasp our way across the lake.My brother-in-law Brandon had a big bowl of Double Coconut Granola for breakfast and claimed it was the perfect fuel to jet him across the lake. My cousin Lewis tried some when we got back and now is a member of our Breakfast Club!

The Jell-O eating contest drew a huge crowd, as we cheered on my brother, the undefeated champion. He took gold in 2003 (Watermelon), 2006 (Chocolate Pudding) and 2009 (Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce). In our food races, we prize speed over quantity. Whoever finishes their plate first wins. We organize it in heats of 3 and then the winners of each heat go against each other until a final winner emerges.

In the finals it was the uncontested champ (my brother) against his beloved (my future sister-in-law). She slurped faster than he did and is now our family’s new hero. Secretly, just between you and me, I think he threw the race to let her win, because that’s just the kind of sweet guy my brother is!

Shockingly, there was close to perfect attendance for Friday night’s blind Prosecco tasting. We kept score on the chalkboard covered fridge and Villa Sandi eked out a close one against second place Mionetto and third place Blu Giovello. Santa Margherita Valdobbiadene got one lonely vote (Mine!)

For our Friday night dinner, we set up tables on the lawn and covered them with white cloths, and candles. It looked so beautiful, we could have held the wedding right then and there!

As the sun was setting a feeling of peace and dare I say, serenity, came over me. As I looked around at this incredible gathering the phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts“came to mind. So true when applied to family! I hope that my children and their cousins will continue this wonderful tradition we have started.

Last week, as I was making this slaw for the fourth time in less than 3 weeks, it occurred to me that this phrase, (The whole is greater than the sum of its parts) is equally applicable to coleslaw! Somehow when combined, lowly cabbage, pedestrian carrots, celery and green onion and ordinary farm stand corn come together in a kind of wondrous culinary synergy to create a really kick ass slaw.

Rather than grilling the corn, which I find makes the kernels tough and a bit leathery to chew, I prefer to gently saute them in a pan. As they brown and begin to snap, crackle and pop out of the pan, they become even sweeter due to caramelization.

For the dressing I wanted to blend a perfect balance of sweet (honey), salty (kosher salt), hot (chipotle in adobo) and sour (lime juice). I smoothed the whole thing out with a dollop of light mayo. For the final touch I coarsely chopped a huge handful of cilantro, but if you are a member of the cilantro haters club, feel free to leave it out!

Click here to print the recipe for Charred Corn Slaw.

Aperitivo for One

7 Replies

I learned about the concept of “Aperitivo” when I was in Italy last fall. Aperitivo are pre-dinner drinks accompanied by appetizers. Derived from the Latin aperitivus, to open, aperitivo is meant to stimulate the appetite and tease the taste buds, previewing the delights of dinner. In my mind, I picture stylish Italian men in their Armani or DSquared2 clothing, and Italian women in their classic navy or black sheath dresses with a scarf knotted effortlessly around their necks, stopping whatever they are doing at precisely 5:00 pm, donning their helmets, hopping onto their Vespas and heading out to the nearest bar for Aperitivo.

In Italy there is an “Aperitivo Culture”. It is a very social custom where people meet in bars to catch up on the happenings of the day, to drink and to eat. Typical aperitivo snacks can be as simple as olives and chips, or more elaborate fare, like frito misto, arancini, potato croquettes and assorted crostini.

This is such a civilized custom. Sadly, during, most of the year I am just too busy to stop whatever I am doing at 5 pm for Aperitivo, but come the summer, when I am up at my cottage, I indulge. Almost every day at 5:30 pm I pour myself a glass of Prosecco or white wine and have a little snack. Some days it’s just carrot sticks and humus but some days, I will treat myself to something more elaborate. Now, full disclosure here, most weekdays it is Aperitivo for one. Which sort of goes against the whole social aspect of the custom, but don’t feel too sorry for me. I thoroughly enjoy my own company and find myself quite amusing! I have been voted the 5th funniest of our family (we are a family of 5, but they just don’t appreciate my sense of humour!)

My new favourite white wine this summer is Dog Point Sauvignon Blanc. From the Marlborough region of new Zealand, it is a fantastic white wine for summer quaffing. It is refreshingly acidic with an intense concentration of citrus flavours, notably grapefruit. It has a crisp lingering finish and is the perfect choice for summer aperitivo.

This week I found that I had a surplus of tomatoes on the counter. My local supermarket has been carrying some beautiful heirloom tomatoes as well as Kumato tomatoes, which are sweeter than regular tomatoes and are a godsend in the winter months. I also discovered the first early corn of the season, being sold roadside near my cottage, so I picked up a few ears and decided to make a corn-tomato salsa.

The July-August issue of Cook’s Illustrated featured a corn salsa recipe that I decided to try. Most corn salsa recipes call for grilling the corn, but sometimes you just can’t be bothered to fire up the grill if all you are making is some corn for salsa. Using the corn raw was considered, but raw corn kernels always seem too starchy. Boiling the kernels destroyed the “freshness” you want from a corn salsa. Keith Dresser of Cook’s Illustrated solved this problem by coming up with quite a genius solution. He explains,

“Softening the hull without overcooking the center seemed impossible until I considered salsa’s natural partner: the tortilla chip. Corn tortillas are formed out of masa, a dough made with ground hominy, which is dried corn that has been soaked in alkaline limewater. This ancient process, called nixtamalization, was first used by Mesoamerican cultures thousands of years ago to soften corn and loosen the hulls.

Could I get a similar effect by introducing alkali to the cooking water for my corn? A quarter teaspoon of baking soda added to the boiling water worked like magic: As the corn steeped, its hulls softened just enough that they weren’t leathery, but the kernels still burst with crisp sweetness.”

I have much love and admiration for the food science geeks at Cook’s Illustrated.

Here’s my tip for getting the corn off the cob without having the kernels flying all over the kitchen: invert a small bowl into a bigger bowl. Stand the corn cob on the smaller bowl and use a sharp knife to cut off the corn. The kernels will land in the bigger bowl, not the floor. You will thank me later!

Tomatoes, jalapeno, cilantro, shallots, lime juice, salt and a drop of honey finish off the salsa.

If you have corn or flour tortillas in the freezer, take the time to make your own tortilla chips. I used whole wheat flour tortillas, brushed them with vegetable oil and sprinkled them with a little kosher salt. Then I cut them into strips, instead of triangles. Bake them at 350 °F for about 10 minutes, until crispy. They look so pretty when you stand them in a mug or vase. Sometimes I buy the flax or spinach tortillas and delude myself into thinking that these are really healthy!

Click here to print recipe for Tomato Corn Salsa .

Pour a glass of something cold, gather all the amusing people you can find and enjoy Aperitivo. And if you drink alone, I won’t judge.

Rye Galette

5 Replies

When I started this blog over two years ago, I never imagined that it would be read by college and university students. Yet, somehow, I seem to have garnered a following among the 20 something crowd. It started with the daughters of my friends. One young woman, my god-daughter, has set my blog as her home page and was worried about me when I went 10 days without blogging. She actually called her mom to ask if everything was ok with me . How sweet is that?

Then it grew to include my daughter’s friends. She was quite proud of her mom and told her friends about my blog. I am sure they checked it out, just to be polite, because they are such nice young women!

However, I think they kept returning to the blog because they loved to read stories about my daughter and then tease and embarrass her. This was when they were in high school. Over the past 2 years they have moved onto university and have just recently moved out of residence and into their own apartments. Now they are interested in cooking, so they read the blog for recipes. And they have told their friends about it. So a big shout out to all my girls at McGill, Queens, Emerson and Ryerson!

My daughter’s best friend, spent many hours at our home when they were in high school. She loved eating at our house, especially when I made peanut butter bark, as her brother has a peanut allergy, so she couldn’t have it at home. Once she moved into her own apartment, she began asking me for recipes. She has turned out to be a wonderful cook (one minor mishap with vegetarian chili – but we won’t talk about that). She became obsessed with my galettes (free form tarts) and in May she made a Roasted Tomato and Gruyère Galette for her mom for Mother’s day and told me it was one of her proudest moments! It makes me so happy to see the next generation taking an interest in cooking and baking.

My sons, by the way, do not tell anyone their mother is a blogger. The oldest, probably for fear that his friends will read something humiliating about him, and the youngest because he can’t imagine his mother has time for anything but him!

Flushed with success at my recent venture into whole grains baking, I decided to try Kim Boyce’s Rustic Rye Dough and create a galette with that. In her book, “Good to the Grain”, Kim gives a lyrical description of this dough.

“The method for making this dough is similar to that for a rough puff pastry, a method I learned while working with Sherry Yard at Spago. It calls for letting a rough dough, made from chunks of butter and moist clumps of flour, rest in the refrigerator to give the gluten time to relax and the flour time to absorb the water. After an hour, the dough is rolled and folded a few times to create long “laminated” layers of butter throughout the dough, which give it its flakiness.”

Of course I waited to make the galette until my daughter’s galette obsessed friend was coming for a visit to the cottage. I filled the tart with spinach, corn, Asiago and provolone cheese and sliced tomatoes. The nutty flavour of the rye dough was perfect with that filling. Now of course my daughter’s friend wants to know how to make this, so here is a step by step tutorial, with video, to help her on her way.

Click here to print the recipe for Rustic Rye Dough .

Click here to print recipe for Asiago, Spinach, Corn and Tomato Galette

Multi-Grain Corn Cakes

6 Replies

Sometimes when I finish a book,I have a very hard time starting a new one. With certain books, the characters stay with you for a long time and you are reluctant to begin a new book, because you aren’t quite ready to say goodbye to the old one. This happened to me after finishing “The Faith Club”, a true story written shortly after the horror of 9/11.

“Welcome to the Faith Club. We’re three mothers from three faiths—Islam, Christianity, and Judaism—who got together to write a picture book for our children that would highlight the connections between our religions. But no sooner had we started talking about our beliefs and how to explain them to our children than our differences led to misunderstandings. Our project nearly fell apart.”

At this point, you may be wondering if you missed something here. When did Salt and Serenity stop writing about food, and start reviewing books, and what about those multi-grain corn cakes? I actually came to make these corn cakes because I couldn’t pick up another novel quite yet. You see, I took “Good to the Grain” (Kim Boyce’s new book about baking with whole grains) to bed with me to read last week.

I have made several things from the book, and enjoyed them very much, but then I somehow got sidetracked and forgot about it. I stayed up very late reading, and in the morning I was raring to go to bake with whole grains.

In the multigrain chapter of the book, Kim gives a recipe for a multigrain flour mix consisting of whole wheat flour, oat flour, barley flour,millet flour and rye flour. I headed out to my local bulk food store and stocked up. She says to mix up a batch of these flours and keep it in the jar on the counter to use in all sorts of recipes.

I decided to adapt my regular corn cakes recipe and substitute the all-purpose flour in the recipe with this mixture.

They looked good, but the taste was bitter and the texture was leaden. Had to toss that batch. I decided to take a step back and add whole grains a bit more slowly. I played around a bit more and threw out a few more corn cakes until I finally hit upon this combination of grains:

As I was cutting the corn off the cob, I pondered the milk decision, buttermilk or whole milk?

I decided to mix up a batch of each, The buttermilk mixture (on the left) looked so much more promising, thicker and all bubbly. I had high hopes for it!

By this time, it was getting close to lunch, so I threw in a diced jalapeno pepper.

The buttermilk batch did indeed cook up higher and a bit fluffier, but I found the taste of the whole milk one have a purer corn flavour. The buttermilk seemed to subdue the corn flavour and overpower it.

At last, I found the perfect combination. This final batch, had the goodness of whole grains, the crunch from corn meal and fresh corn, the heat of jalapenos and the fresh dairy taste from whole milk. Fried in a little bit of butter, these corn cakes were crispy around the edges and soft on the inside. They disappeared very quickly.

All that was left was the mess!

To print this recipe click Multi-Grain Corn Cakes

Summer Crostini

4 Replies

There are times when you feel like being culinarily creative and making beautiful lunches like these for weekend cottage guests.

And there are times when you don’t feel like moving from here:

and want to suggest to those guests that they just help themselves to a peanut butter and sour cherry jam sandwich!

Happily there are several options in between these two. Option #1, and my personal favourite, is when weekend guests are invited and invariably ask what they can bring, suggest “lunch for Saturday.” When my mother heard that I do this on a regular basis, she was horrified. Had she not raised me to be a gracious host?

Actually, I think that people feel happy to contribute when being invited for the weekend (or longer, and those to whom I am referring, know exactly who you are!) And truthfully, it’s not the cooking that I mind. It’s the planning and figuring out what to make that takes up so much mental energy. So it’s nice to let someone else figure it all out and just show up at the table and be surprised. However, there is a caveat here. Make sure that your friends are comfortable in the kitchen and possess a basic skill set for preparing meals.

I have one friend who used to use up every dish, pot and utensil when she prepared her meals. We would eat brunch at 2 in the afternoon. They were exquisite brunches but way too much for a cottage. Happily, she has gotten into the swing of things and now prepares perfect meals without destroying the kitchen. This friend is in fact, so comfortable in my kitchen and knows exactly where everything goes, that she and my husband joke that in the event of my demise, she will just slip seamlessly into place and become the woman of the house. Truthfully, all my friends are wonderful cooks and I love having them take over my kitchen.

Another friend makes sure we always have enough wine and her salads and salad dressings are so creative and inspiring. Did you ever notice how much better salad tastes when someone else makes it?

One friend takes her responsibility so seriously that she begins researching the meal she will prepare as soon as we settle on a weekend. She is an extremely accomplished cook and last year we feasted on Peruvian Grilled Chicken, Chile Roasted Sweet Potatoes and a 7 Layer Coconut Cake for our Saturday night dinner. Her husband is a skilled mixologist and she just told me he has perfected the Negroni, so I am looking forward to sampling that when they come to visit in August.

Option # 2, if you just aren’t comfortable turning over your kitchen, or have control issues or whatever, is to cook on auto-pilot. Perfect one special lunch and just make it every weekend, for the rotation of guests that turn up. If you have different guests every weekend they won’t know that you do this and you will look perfectly at ease turning out a wonderful lunch.

Here is my auto-pilot lunch that got its test spin last weekend, to rave reviews, I may add. These crostinis will be appearing on the menu every Saturday for the next 8 weeks!

These crostini were featured in an article in the June 2011 issue of Bon Appetit. I have adapted them slightly. The first one features ripe peaches, ricotta and honey. I made Homemade Ricotta Cheese, but feel free to use store-bought. Just don’t try making this with less than perfectly ripe peaches. Although the peaches I bought were not yet local, they were the “tree ripened” variety, and after a few days on the kitchen counter, they smelled like peaches.

The finished crostini get a drizzle of honey just before serving.

The second crostini has a base of feta, sour cream and pickled jalapenos. It is topped with grilled corn, cilantro and a squeeze of lime. For these I used a multi-grain baguette and rubbed the grilled bread slices with a garlic clove.

I set out all the prepared ingredients on trays and let everyone assemble their own. Much easier and way more fun. There are so many excellent quality Artisan breads available in supermarkets now. Have fun with your choices but be sure you slice the bread thinly (less than 1/2 an inch thick). You want the toppings to be the star, not the bread.

Salt and Serenity

Tales from my kitchen