works of wanderlust

Tag: recipe

  • Backyard Canadian Tacos

    What do you get if you cross a campfire cooking enthusiast with a suburban Canadian stuck at home during a pandemic craving some southern-spiced fare?

    Maybe …you get an experimental campfire taco recipe.

    After grilling up the vegetable platter that would become a fire-roasted homemade salsa, I kept the fire stoked for some marinated flank steak that served for some makeshift pseudo-barbacoa filling for my Saturday supper plans.

    The Marinade

    1 little lime juiced
    1 medium lemon juiced
    6 glugs of olive oil
    1 dollop of salt
    1 nudge of ground chipotle chiles

    I mixed all that together in a bowl, emulsifying the oils with the citrus, and poured it over the steak to marinate.

    The meat and marinade rested for a ninety minutes before I got down to the business of cooking it low and slow over a bed of campfire coals.

    The result was delicious.

    The meat was seasoned enough as to not overpower the flavours of the salsa or roasted peppers I’d added, but held its own sliced thin and wrapped into toasted shells.

    Next time I may go with a thinner cut of meat as bringing up the internal temperature over the hot campfire coals left a bit of a drier, chewier crust to form on the outside.

    And folks who like spicy food will definitely want to amp up the pepper or chili quantity in their own version.

    All ’round, not a bad Mexican-style substitute for a Canadian backyard lockdown, and a taco recipe I will be building on and from as the summer rolls on.

  • Campfire Salsa

    I’ve been looking for an excuse to break away from the purely carnivore approach I’ve thus far taken with my backyard firepit culinary experimentation.

    I may like my fire-grilled meats, but I’ve also had some great vegetarian fare that partook of the smoke and flame. And here I’m thinking well-beyond the starches like wrapping a potato in some aluminum foil to sit in the hot coals or pan-frying some mushrooms atop the heat. Both are excellent, of course, but I was hoping to branch out and be a little more adventurous.

    Inspiration struck from a variety of sources, but the mere notion of getting some peppers over a bed of charcoal got ramped up to a full-blown idea when a Youtuber I watch spun up a wicked salsa recipe over the fire in his backyard.

    A trip to the local grocer found me with the following fresh ingredients:

    4 vine-ripened tomatoes
    1 head of garlic
    1 medium white onion
    1 large spicy pepper
    1 sweet yellow bell pepper
    2 limes
    1 bag of locally made tortilla chips

    The Roast-ening

    The ultimate plan was to cook up some seasoned flank steak that could be chopped up as a kind of psuedo-barbacoa taco filling and to make a full meal centred around that same theme. The salsa would be the side dish and filler, and a necessary one for tacos some might say.

    I got a fire ready and let the wood burn down for a good hour before I dared put any actual food on it. I’ve learned some tough lessons over the last month when it comes to being too anxious to get your grub on the flames.

    I will admit I got a little cautious with my yellow pepper and pierced the skin with a knife as it sat among the other sizzling veggies. The bell pepper seemed to have a life of its own, rocking to and fro on the cast iron grills. I’d just watched a video last night about food bursting explosively from overheating so I was feeling nervous as my blackening pepper seemed to hiss and crackle over the coals.

    Fire roasting vegetables, by the way, smells amazing. I didn’t think I’d notice much, but the heat brought out the scents of the garlic and the onions and the tomatoes as I hovered nearby tending and turning them. Yum!

    When it was all done I brought them inside to cool and finish the preparation.

    (Garlic stays really hot, I will tell you. Even after ten minutes when I accidentally touched the core of the garlic stem I burned the tip of my finger!)

    Char scraped, seeds scrapped, and stems sidelined, all the good roasted bits went into the food processor with some salt. I squeezed the roasted limes in too, and even put in a bunch of the pulp which flowed eagerly out of the rind. Pulse blend magical.

    Result… a mild and delicious salsa.

    Were I not cooking for a spice-hesitant family, and were I not (surprise!) allergic to jalapenos I may have spiced it up a few notches. I like my spice but the fam does not. The flavour, though, makes up for the lack of spicyness … and you could, of course, add as much spice as you wanted to bring up the temperature.

    My only mistake was not doubling the recipe and jarring some of the extra.

  • Banoffee Swirl Ice Cream

    Tales from the Cast Iron Guy Creamery

    If you, like me, avoid those recipe blogs that spend the first fifteen pages of text explaining the backstory of the recipe, then I have a treat for you… merely two paragraphs, a photo, and of course a delicious ice cream recipe to follow.

    Our travel-food story goes something like this: After obsessing over the UK holiday film Love, Actually and specifically that scene where Keira Knightly’s character shows up with a slice of pie for her husband’s buddy, my wife became slightly obsessed with finding her own slice of banoffee pie when we visited the UK in 2006. It was darn good. And it turns out no one in Canada bothers to consistently sell it. Anywhere. Instead we learned how to make banoffee pie — actually a fairly simple pie consisting of a graham crust, dulce de leche, bananas, whipped cream, and a baker’s selection of sprinkled garnish. Then last year, after procuring ourselves an ice cream maker attachment for the stand mixer, I stumbled on the idea of adapting the banoffee pie recipe into a banoffee ice cream recipe… an effort I undertook for the third time earlier this week:

    Recipe

    500 ml heavy cream 
    250 ml full fat milk 
    160 ml white sugar
    2 ml  salt 
    6 egg yolks, separated 
    1 ripe banana
    5 ml vanilla 
    75 g coarsely crumbled graham crackers
    160 ml dulce de leche

    In a saucepan I combined the cream, milk, salt and sugar and heated to about 125F or until the sugar dissolved completely.

    Meanwhile, I separated the eggs from their yokes and combined the yokes with the banana which I’d mashed as smoothly as I could with a small whisk. I tempered the egg/banana slurry with the hot cream mix. This meant scooping and drizzling a few measuring cups full of hot cream mixture into the egg mixture and stirring furiously to bring the temperature up in the eggs while avoiding making the contents of banana breakfast burrito…. in other words, avoiding scrambling the eggs.

    Then, when things were up to temp, I combined the two mixes fully, heating and pasturizing the custard base at about 170F in the saucepan.

    This needed to cool. I filtered the whole thing through a fine wire mesh seive into a juice jug. There was a couple tablespoons worth of banana pulp that didn’t filter, but the flavour of the bananas was already infused into base so I just discarded that pulp and moved on.

    Four to six hours in the fridge likely would have been long enough, but I find I get best results in my particular ice cream churn with an overnight chill. In the morning I stirred the custard mix again and added the vanilla before firing up the ice cream maker attachment for my stand mixer.

    I am aware that making dulce de leche at home is possible. From what I understand it involves carmelizing (in a sealed can) sweetened condensed milk in an effort if done wrong can result in explosive-level pressurization of said can. Fortunately, I’m able to buy ready-to-serve dulce de leche from the supermarket, so I got that ready by the far less dangerous action of peeling the lid off the can.

    I also took this opportunity to crumble the graham crackers up in a bowl.

    The ice cream churn did it’s thing for about twenty minutes after which I added the cracker crumbles to the mixer. This combined for another minute or so.

    The final stage, in a chilled bowl, was to “swirl” in the dulce de leche. A scoop of ice cream into the container followed by a drizzle of the sauce followed by another scoop of ice cream… and so on until everything was layered together and ready for the freezer.

    The result of all this work is a delicious banana ice cream swirled with the cool caramel flavour of dulce de leche and provided a wee crunch by the graham crackers… or as close to a banoffee pie as I can get in ice cream form. And as much as I like pie, ice cream is darned amazing, too.

  • Backyard Ribs: Part One, The Rub

    It’s the first Saturday in May and I woke up to a clear blue sky and a weather forecast that was begging for a day outdoors.

    It’s always a gamble, of course, to plan twelve hours ahead of your cooking time for a backyard grill, particularly something as elaborate as a fire smoking some pork ribs. The rain could appear over the horizon and soak the suburbs. The weather could turn cold on a dime still this early in the season. Or the wind could push through and make building a fire a hurculean feat.

    I took the gamble, though.

    I had my reasons for stopping by a new local grocery store last night and a big one point five kilogram pack of ribs caught my eye. “I’m making ribs on the fire tomorrow.” I told my wife as stocked up the fridge with my purchases upon returning home.

    “Oooh. Yum!” She replied.

    “I’m also making it up as I go along.” I told her.

    That got a less enthusiastic response.

    I’ve never grilled ribs over an open fire, so tonight is going to be an adventure. It’s a new-to-me process, but makes use of lots of practiced skills that add up to what I hope will be a success. So, I’ll start with what I know, a basic dry rub and about eight hours in the fridge to let it season up a bit.

    Dry Rub Recipe

    60ml brown sugar
    15ml salt
    15ml ground black pepper
    15ml paprika
    30ml garlic powder
    30ml onion powder
    10ml ground celery seed
    10ml ground mustard
    10ml cumin

    I spread this evenly on the washed and dried ribs. There was enough in this batch for about 2kg of meat, so I had a little bit left over when everything had been generously coated and wrapped.

    Dry rubs have a couple of positive features I’m looking for in their use: Flavour. Tenderizing. Simplicty. And more, I’m sure.

    I don’t have much room in the fridge for a big old marinade right now, either, and we’ve been trying to cut back on single-use plastic like large zip bags (he writes as he posts a photo of cling wrap on his countertop.)

    But for more important results, back to things like flavour and texture. If you look at the recipe, for example, this particular rub has a solid tablespoon of salt. Eight hours resting in that much salt has an effect on the meat that is essentially a preliminary cure. It’s not going to make this into a true cure of the meat, but it will start to draw some of the moisture from the tissue and will have a tenderizing effect on the final texture.

    My basic rub recipe also has a lot of sugar. Partly, it’s there to even out the spices. Literally. The sugar is a good way to bulk up the rub and make sure it spreads evenly across the meat and doesn’t concentrate too much of the spice unevenly as my untrained hands dash it across the raw flesh. Also, while I’ll add a sauce when I put these over the fire, that sugar in the rub will be the start of the carmelization during the first exposure to heat that will crank up the sticky sweet flavour many people associate with ribs.

    The cooking of these gorgeous hunks of meat will happen later today, and I’ll photograph and post the results in the upcoming part two.

    For now, cross your fingers for that weather holding out!

  • Savoury Avacado Chicken in a Cast Iron Wok

    I’ve read all manner of reviews about one of the epic cast iron pieces in my collection, the fourteen inch wok, and it turns out the idea of a big and heavy iron wok is divisive and controversial.

    A traditional wok (which I do not own) is an agile tool. It is light. It’s meant to be brought up to screeching hot temperatures in which food is moved, flipped, agitated, swirled and stirred with motion of both a scoop in the hand and by tossing and lifting the wok itself. Wok cooking is truly an art form.

    It does turn out however that a residential gas stovetop with modest ventilation is not an ideal place to cook in a traditional wok. On the other hand, a wok-shaped bowl of cast iron is pretty darn good enough to replicate some of the properties of a wok. In fact, having spent the last two years learning how to cook well in my cast iron wok has been a remarkably rewarding experience.

    And a tasty one.

    Our challenge in the wok has been learning to cook dishes that have a curious cultural legacy here in North America. Not everything cooks well in a wok. Woks have a very narrow purpose even in experimenting across cultural recipes. Again, this may be a sensitive topic for some, but as a result of colonial history and inequalities among those who settled here over the generations, in the twenty-first century we have what I understand is a unique form of cuisine: North American Style Asian food. Or as one of my running pals who hails from Hong Kong reminds me frequently “not real Chinese food.”

    What I’ve read is that cooking styles and spices mingled with availability of ingredients and limited by tastes linked back to various European ancestries meant that traditional cooking was almost impossible. Immigrants who crossed the Pacific rather than the Altantic set up restaurants as a means to make a living and a life here. They found that they needed to invent dishes that brought the knowledge and experience from their homelands but would be palatable to western tastes (so people would buy and eat it) so dishes like General Tao’s Chicken, Chop Suey, or Ginger Beef became locally known as “Chinese food” but were never dishes that one would actually find in China.

    Fast forward to my kitchen, and decades of savouring those shopping mall food court noodle and rice clamshells of spicy goodness. A cast iron wok in my kitchen and a very Canadian-style of recipe that brings together a mish-mash of cultural and regional styles, ingredients, and flavours that results in many various stir-fry-style dishes something like Savoury Avacado Chicken:

    The Recipe

    First, mix up the following as a deglazing sauce and then set aside.

    125 ml water
    15 ml of cornstarch
    small packet of chicken bouillon powder
    15 ml of lemon juice

    As you heat up the wok to get it screaming hot, mise en place your main ingredients, frying in succession the chicken, then the peppers and mushrooms, then adding the spices and diced avacados until it all comes together into a lovely stir fried jumble.

    vegetable oil and/or sesame oil for pan
    450 grams chicken breast meat (cubed)
    handful red bell pepper (diced)
    handful white mushrooms (sliced)

    10 ml curry powder
    salt and pepper to taste
    1 large avacado (diced)
    toasted sesame seeds to garnish

    Deglaze the whole thing with the boullion/lemon juice mix from earlier, and serve over rice garnished with a sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds.

    Thus, the controversy of the cast iron wok: not an authentic wok, sure, but I’m not cooking authentic recipes. It all evens out, right?