Hungry In Hogtown

Vive le Québec livre! Au Pied de Cochon's pouding chomeur and our Montreal road trip

Choosing travel destinations based on cookbooks can seem foolish -- until you find the right cookbook, that is.  For me, one of those cookbooks is Au Pied de Cochon -- The Album.  After ogling it for a month and preparing the wonderful foie gras poutine recipe, Rachel and I decided to make the pilgrimage to la belle province for a meal at the source.  We just needed to find the opportunity.  So when it found us, in the form of our friends Jill and Rob, we packed our bags and thanked The Fates for giving us friends who are perpetually willing to venture near and far for good food.

For a restaurant praised by the likes of Anthony Bourdain and Gourmet, Au Pied de Cochon's dishes are surprisingly unrefined, and gratifyingly so.  Most reflect the traditions of pure laine quebecois and their descendants:  rustic and bold, devoid of pretension, yet elevated by the quality of the ingredients and the care taken in their preparation.  As an Album junkie, I arrived with a list as long as my arm of things I wanted to try.

SHF #34, Nosh In My Backyard: Regan Daley's wild blueberry pie and el Bulli's rhubarb with sugar and pepper

The summer heat shimmers around me and I can hear the oscillating buzz of grasshoppers as I sit on my front steps.  Time is stretching out and slowing down the way it does only for children. I don’t even realize I’m hungry until my mother appears with a pile of vermilion stalks on a plate, with a little bowl next to it.  I dip a rhubarb piece into the sugar in the bowl and bite down, savouring the shock of the sharp juicy sour crunch.

Rhubarb grew in a shady corner of our backyard, looking like horizontal ruffled elephant ears.  We’d pick the stems before they got too thick and woody, and cook them in jams and pies, while the children would often eat them raw with sugar as a treat.  Even though I hated celery and complained about its strings, I’d tear into rhubarb stalks with relish and valued the stringy fibres that straggled behind for their ability to hold extra sugar when I swept the stem through the sugar dish.

Ferran Adria offers a more sophisticated version of this childhood treat in el Bulli: 2003-2004.  He takes tender young raw rhubarb, carefully trimmed to minimize the tough fibres, and rolls them in demerara sugar and black pepper.  It’s a sharp dish -- the crystals of the sugar and the pepper’s heat seem to emphasize the sour taste -- but the added flavours round it out as well.  It’s surprisingly elegant for such a simple preparation.

It's also a perfect dish for the latest edition of Sugar High Friday, hosted by the passionate cook, which is all about going local.  Not only does rhubarb grow like a weed in our home province, Ontario, but the rhubarb we used to make our version of this dish was given to us by our friend Jill, who harvested the stalks from her mother's garden.

My parents no longer live at that house, but their current home does have another crop in the backyard.  Wild blueberry bushes dot the rocky brush behind their house in Sudbury, and it was an easy task to step out for fifteen minutes and return with a small pail of sapphire-hued treasures.  I say "was."  Construction crews are building a new housing development right over the backyard berry patch.  Sudbury’s economic boom is bad news for my blueberry pancake habit, which my mom has indulged during every summertime visit.  At least the construction reduces the chance of hungry bears coming into the yard, lured by the berries.

And there is simply no comparison between wild and farmed blueberries -- one of the reasons I gorge myself on blueberries at my parents’ house.  Sure, the domestic ones are just as pretty and twice the size, but they’re completely flat in flavour.  The wild ones pack a whallop of acidity and sweetness into each tiny globe, worth every sunburn and mosquito bite and sore back from picking that I’ve endured in their pursuit.

Regan Daley agrees.  "There is one thing you must remember in order to make this pie:  YOU NEED WILD BERRIES!  Never use the cultivated ones.  They make lousy pies, and lousy everything else for that matter," she states in her book In The Sweet Kitchen.  Blueberry pie has never been a real favourite
of mine, but I’d picked and brought back several pints of berries from my last visit, Rob was eager to try it, and Regan had not yet steered us wrong.

Her track record is still perfect.  The crust, made with lard and butter, is phenomenal:  light and crisp and flaky, we chased the last bits around the plate with our forks, unwilling to let any crumb go uneaten.  And the filling!  Rather than the stodgy, almost solid gel of store-bought blueberry pie, this is a juicy confederation of berries in all their summer glory.

We ate an astounding amount of the pie when it was fresh from the oven, and an even more surprising amount the next morning.  The recipe specifically mentions that, being comprised of flour, egg, and fruit, blueberry pie is an "honourable" breakfast food.  And though it may not be my mom's pancakes, it extends the tradition of fashioning simple, delicious treats from the bounty in the backyard.

I crumb in peace: deep fried rabbit ears and the politics of food

Some of you have seen the reaction to my post on el Bulli's deep fried rabbit ears.  Some of you even responded with insightful commentary of your own -- both for and against the dish -- and with expressions of support via comments and email, for which I'm extremely grateful.   Other comments were veiled threats and personal attacks.

You can imagine, then, how comforting it was to wake up Saturday morning to find my mother in law, our five year old niece, and three year old nephew baking chocolate chip cookies in our kitchen.  They used a recipe from the Joy of Cooking.  These cookies are outrageously good, especially warm from the oven with a glass of cold milk.

But what exactly is the connection between the cookies and milk in this post and the rabbit ears in the previous one?

Forza Italia! Homemade pizza margherita

For North American sports fans, the first taste of live Italian soccer can seem a little daunting.  We had spent only a few days in Rome when I dragged Rachel to the Stadio Olimpico for a match between AS Roma and Brescia.  Despite arriving an hour and a half before game time and being more than a block away from the stadium, we could already hear the unmistakable rumble of tens of thousands of Roma fans belting out the songs and chants any ultra can recite in their sleep.  The broad walkways leading to the stadium were lined with vendors selling posters, cards, banners, flares, and the ubiquitous scarves, or sciarpe, that are universal to soccer fans.

At the stadium gate, we were confronted by a line of Carabinieri with sub-machine guns.  This did not ease Rachel's already worried mind, nor did the helicopters hovering overhead.  Despite the fact that Roma was enjoying one of the best years in its history, a year that would culminate in winning lo scudetto, the tiny shield that signifies a Serie A championship, Roma's games had been marred by violence.  We're not talking drunken brawls either; no, 2001 included several spasms of violence the would eventually culminate in the stabbing of four opposing fans during Champions' League play near the end of the year.  The police were patting down fans before allowing them entry, but once they learned we were Canadian, we were allowed in immediately with approving nods at the scarves around our necks.

Once in the stands, we soaked up the environment around us.  This was calcio, "the kick," the beautiful game that drives untold millions of people to distraction.  Directly in front of us at the opposite end of the stadium lay the curva sud, home of the ultras that had created the cacophony of noise audible far beyond the stadium walls.  Though gametime was more than an hour away, this area was already a buzzing hive of banners, chants, and countless flares and other recreational incendiary devices.  To introduce Roma's starting lineup, the stadium announcer would first provide the player's number and first name, the huge crowd would then complete the introduction by roaring the player's last name with a single deafening voice.  The final show of devotion was the singing of the AS Roma anthem -- 80,000 people on their feet, scarves held high in a sea of maroon and orange, in a display of naked devotion (pardon my translation):

Roma Roma Roma,
core de stà città,
unico grande amore,
de tanta e tanta gente,
che fai sospirà.

Roma, Roma, Roma,
heart of this city,
single great love,
of so many, many people,
that you make breath.

To our right, behind a wall topped with large sheets of plexiglass, were the bresciani.  If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would've never believed it, but these people were not only segregated from the rest of the stadium by a wall, they were also surrounded by a cordon of police in riot gear.  In broken Italian, I asked one of the Romans in front of me what would happen to those fans if there were no protection.  He responded by running his finger along his throat in a gesture that is as ominous as it is obvious.

From the Colosseum to the Stadio Olimpico, Romans have always enjoyed an unquenchable thirst for spectacle.  The type of spectacle may have changed over the past two thousand years, but Rome's thirst for it has not.  On that day, AS Roma delivered, handily beating Brescia by a score of 3-1. 

The most important outcome of that game, for me at least, is an abiding love of the game of soccer, AS Roma (Lazio merda!), and gli Azzurri, the Italian national soccer team.

Thus was born my love of soccer.  Canada is not an ideal place for a fan of the beautiful game, but the situation is slowly improving.  Toronto will soon have its own professional team, and the city is currently in the grip of World Cup fever.  Ours is a city of immigrants, so the flags of virtually every country competing in the tournament festoon along storefronts, or wave out car windows, or hang on front porches.

Amongst the larger immigrant communities -- I'm looking at you Italians and Portuguese -- a positive result leads to mayhem.  I can still remember when Italy won the World Cup in 1982.  The celebration was large enough to bring parts of Toronto to a halt.

I'm not Italian myself -- I just play one on my blog -- but I feel compelled to show my support for the Azzurri through food.  In this I'm not alone.  Ivonne, from Cream Puffs in Venice, has demonstrated her allegiance by preparing red, white, and green risotti.

Our dish, pizza margherita, seems particularly appropriate as a show of support given its history.  It was invented by Raffaele Esposito, a Neapolitan pizzaiolo, to commemorate a visit of King Umberto I and Queen Margherita of Savoy.  The pizza was designed as an edible symbol, with the white of the mozzarella, the red of the tomato sauce, and the green of the basil representing the white, red, and green of the Italian flag.  The pizza was given its name after the queen expressed her love for it.

This pizza isn't just a symbol of Italy, it's also a microcosm of all that we love about its many cuisines: basic, fresh ingredients prepared simply.  Preparing simple dishes can be dangerous, however, if the ingredients aren't of the highest quality, and this pizza is no exception.  I made the pizza dough myself, proofing it the fridge for more than a day to ensure flavour.  For the tomato sauce I used salt, pepper, and a can of San Marzano tomatoes -- considered by Italians to be the finest tomatoes money can buy -- and reduced it to a loose sauce.

That leaves mozzarella.  Finding quality mozzarella is nearly impossible outside of southern Italy.  It is a cheese that must be eaten fresh, does not travel well, and ages not at all.  Unlike many of the world's most famous cheeses, mozzarella is best eaten the day it's made.  The finest mozzarella we've ever eaten was in a small hill town outside of Rome; it was moist, sweet, and delicate, and it is the standard against which I've judged every piece of mozzarella I've eaten since.  None have measured up.

It just so happened that one of our friends, Carlo, returned from his family's hometown in the Abruzzo last week.  Before catching his return flight, he visited Caseificio de Santis di Angelucci Marcello, a latteria in Sant'Eufemia, near Pescara, where he purchased many balls of fresh cow's milk mozzarella.  He very kindly shared a few of them with us, and do they ever make a difference.  Where North American grocery store mozzarella is plastic in both taste and texture, this mozzarella has a little sweetness and a delicate texture.  It also melts magnificently.

As a combination, the light, yeasty dough, sweet, melted cheese, anise-like basil, and acidic tomato sauce are a team with remarkable balance.  Here's hoping that the stingy defense of Fabio Cannavaro, the creativity of Francesco Totti, and the finishing touch of Luca Toni are the ingredients in yet another winning Italian combination.

Forza Italia!

Two great tastes: milk chocolate-peanut butter sandwich cookies

A girl can't live on liquid ravioli and coconut foam alone.  Sometimes I find myself craving a big green salad, or a nice hot bowl of steelcut oatmeal with brown sugar.  You know, something more substantial and homey than nori croquant.  Something a little more Betty Crocker than Ferran Adria.

That's why, the same day we made the liquid pea ravioli, I kept getting distracted by the recent issue of Bon Appétit.  It kept falling open to the same page, like a favourite centrefold.  This glossy photo, though, was of luscious peanut-butter and milk-chocolate sandwich cookies.  And what's more wholesome than chocolate chip cookies and PB chased down with some ice-cold milk?

In less time than you can say, "Recharge my foaming canister!", we whipped up a batch of these decadent treats.  Imagine chunks of Valrhona milk chocolate studding a crumbly dough flavoured with smooth Kraft peanut butter (the recipe specifically warns against using natural or fresh PB).  Now layer those cookies with a milk chocolate ganache into which you've slowly melted even more peanut butter. 

It's all my childhood cookie fantasies melded into one grown-up treat.  And let's not stop at peanut butter and milk chocolate!  Imagine almond butter, cashew butter, hazelnuts, dark chocolate, Nutella...

Mind you, it's no bowl of oatmeal.

For the recipe from the February 2006 issue of Bon Appétit, click here.  Assorted Valrhona bars, and bulk chips and pieces are available from Lively Life International Fine Foods in the St. Lawrence Market.

"Feel like makin' loaf!": Amanda Hesser's vanilla bean loaf

"Just admit vanilla is the finest of the flavours and I'll give you a piece," I demanded.

"C'mon, Rob," my friend pleaded.  "What if I admit that vanilla is a very fine flavour?"

"No, Dave," I replied, waving a fragrant slice of vanilla loaf in his direction, "you know what you need to say."

I'm really not comfortable emotionally blackmailing anyone, but Dave and I have a special friendship.  You see, Dave is a chocoholic, whereas I am a vanilla addict.  That doesn't mean he doesn't like vanilla and I don't like chocolate, it just means that we have a strong preference, a preference over which we've bickered for at least five years.

Our difference -- the chocolate versus vanilla chasm, if you will -- is, I think, the fundamental duality in human civilization.  Forget male and female, black and white, raw and cooked; nope, as far as I'm concerned, all I really need to know about a person is whether they prefer vanilla or chocolate.

Finger-bleeding good: fried chicken and biscuits

At Hungry In Hogtown, we pride ourselves on being fair and balanced.  That's why we're pleased to bring you this special report on the chilling events of this past weekend.  Did the Cuisinart attack Rob?  Was it provoked?  We report, you decide.

Cuisinart:
"Whirrrrrrrrr. Whirrrr.  Whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr."

Rob:
"Okay, Cuisinart, we're even.  But frankly, I'm not impressed.

"Yes, yes, I did inflict irreparable harm to your chopping blade while making nori croquant, but it was an accident.  Besides, didn't I make it up to you by buying a shiny new chopping blade?  Apparently not, because your unprovoked retaliation with said blade the other night can mean only one thing: war.

"It was a quiet Saturday night.  I was innocently preparing a delicious dinner for myself and my love. I sorted through many cookbooks and researched online to find the perfect fried chicken and biscuit recipes.  I went with Alton Brown, figuring that as a Southerner, he must know the secrets of fried chicken (be sure to use enough shortening to come 1/3 inch up the side of the pan, not 1/8) and biscuits.  I even took the time to break down my free range, organic chicken and soak it overnight in buttermilk.

IMBB #24: Nigella's lemon linguine, apple tarts, and the happy food dance

I have a "thing" for Nigella Lawson.  I know that sounds clichéd, and, for what it's worth, it is, but let me try to explain.  It all boils down to this: there's something magnetic about a woman who takes profound delight in the act of eating.  I don't mean this specifically about her, either.  It applies equally to all women, really.

My wife Rachel delights in good food.  Whenever she enjoys her first bite of something exceptional, she invariably does the "Happy Food Dance."  I believe it's a relic of her genetic heritage, because I've seen her mother perform the same seated hip wiggle.  If she especially loves what she's eating, Rachel has even been known to swing her shoulders a little, too.  The Happy Food Dance is so reliable I now use it as a barometer to measure the quality of any dish I prepare.

The flip side to my attraction to women who are passionate about food and cooking is a mistrust for people who don't enjoy or don't care about what they eat.  You know the type.  They view food as "fuel," or they refuse to try anything outside their comfort zone.  If a person can't open themselves up to the simple pleasures of a good meal, what else are they hiding?

The entrée and dessert we're presenting for the "Make it in 30 minutes" edition of Is My Blog Burning are not only quick and easy to prepare, they have both induced full body Happy Food Dances from Rachel.  That means quality, people.

God Save The Brownie Queen!

If ever forced to choose between me and a good brownie, I'm not sure what my wife would do.

Yes, she loves me, but just this evening my self-proclaimed "Brownie Queen" described the love triangle between her, brownies, and me thusly: "I have very, very strong feelings for you," she cooed, "but I also have very, very strong feelings about brownies."

It doesn't help that one of our closest friends, Ryan, harbours similar feelings (for brownies that is).  On a recent visit, he described brownies as perhaps his "favourite food."  The natural outcome of uttering such a statement in the presence of the Brownie Queen is quick and unavoidable.  "We have to make brownies!  Right now!"

And it was so.

Nutella, not just for the bedroom anymore

Ah, Valentine's Day, and who better to spend it with than Nigella Lawson?  Damn!  I mean your loved one, of course.  But what better to serve them than an unctuous, decadent, over the top, Nutella cake (the recipe is here) from her book, How to Be a Domestic Goddess?

What's so good about torta alla gianduia?  Well, it contains a whole jar of Nutella for one.  It's also made with a little Frangelico, a lot of hazelnuts, and a generous amount of melted dark chocolate.  Of course, if you needed any more reason to like it than, "it contains a whole jar of Nutella," then this is probably not the post for you.

I love Nutella.  There, I said it.  Of all the substances on earth, it's difficult to name one that is as delicious as this hazelnut-chocolate ambrosia.  Like most great foods, Nutella has its origins in Italy and, perhaps, its most ardent devotees. 

We saw this firsthand on our honeymoon.  Shortly before our departure, I learned of a café devoted to the product in Bologna, the city in which we happened to be spending the first week of our trip.  I'll admit to being a little disappointed with the Nutelleria.  I suppose I was expecting some sort of Homer Simpson-esque Nutella dream world, with rivers of Nutella and comically oversized jars that I could bring home for all my friends.  What we found, unfortunately, was a shop more McDonald's than Italian café.  You'll no doubt be proud to learn that, despite my disappointment, I somehow managed to eat a really fantastic Nutella crepe.  Ah, Bologna, non basta uno stomaco.

As for the cake, it's damn good too. The crumb is very moist and dense, almost ideal, really. The chocolate ganache icing is smooth, but has a lovely crunch because of the hazelnuts dotting its surface. The only disappointment, for me at least, is that despite an entire jar of the stuff, the cake does not have an overwhelmingly Nutella flavour; instead, the dark chocolate dominates, while the hazelnut elements play a supporting role. This is not to say that the cake is not delicious, it is. As per Nigella's suggestion, we enjoyed a slice with a little Frangelico. Between the alcohol, dessert, and each other's company we were rather content, and isn't that just the way it's supposed to be on Valentine's Day?