Smoker fail

My last batch of smoked salmon was terrible. The worst. I never thought the day would come when smoked salmon would be so awful I'd rather throw it away than eat it. It did. One thing I've learned now, is how important it is to give the fish a really good long bath before putting it in the smoker. You cant just rinse off the brine, because the salt is still soaked right in there! And don't leave it in the smoker too long, either. There's nothing worse than really really inedibly dry salty fish.

The smoking process amplifies the saltiness, so its best to be cautious with the time at first. The thickness of the cut does make a difference to how long it should stay in. 1/2" thick means 2-3 hours in the smoker, no more. It should still be oily when it comes out. Also, I'd avoid cherry wood for fish, its too bitter tasting. Apple is great. Oh well, live and learn.

Anyway, my refined approach to smoking fish is a 24-48 hour brining with something that has a good balance of sweet and salty (for example, 50/50 maple syrup and soy sauce), enough to cover the fish completely in the container, with some good quality rock salt rubbed into the flesh before adding the brine mix to it. Quantities of each depend of course on how much fish you're actually preparing. Let the mix stand for 24 hours in a cool area (NOT cold), then bathe (and by bathe I mean soak!) for 2 hours minimum to extract the bulk of the salt. Then you dry the fish off, let it stand a few hours to develop a "pellicle" (a very weird sliminess that is totally important to the curing process) and then smoke for whatever seems sensible given the dryness and saltiness you want.

After smoking, I like to let it dry for a while in a cool (not cold!) area. Hard to do this in an apartment, unfortunately.

I've only ever used an electric smoker. I'd love to try a natural smoke fire to do this, but its an awful lot of work that I'm not ready to invest until the zombie apocalypse requires it.

Pan-fried Oatcakes, a personal favorite!

OK so its winter, and there's a certain need in winter to eat hearty meals, but who's got the time! Well, one of the easiest ways to get that need satisfied is with oatmeal. Now me, I've never been a big fan of porridge-style hot cereal, but being Scottish and all I love oats, so when I stumbled across the oatcake idea in a recipe book, well the idea just hit the spot so to speak.So, this is one of the staples you will find in my fridge almost all the time.

Now, many people are attached to the idea of sweetened oats as a breakfast dish, so when I mention adding cheese to the oats and pan-frying it, I get a lot of groans of contempt and/or disgust from these people. Until they try them! So here's the deal. There are virtually limitless ideas that you can mix in with the oats for variety, I've tried this out so many different ways that I could do a whole cookbook just on oatcakes. However, the best way, in my humble opinion, is the simplest, it turns out kind of like a simple risotto but its so much easier to make. So what I'll do here is give you the instructions to make the oatcakes, and then a few of the better suggestions on how to prepare them. The decision is entirely dependent on your mood, or if you are serving them with anything else.

So you start with your oats. As I mentioned earlier, you want to go for more of a risotto texture, rather than polenta, so its important to use an oat flake that keeps its shape after cooking and doesn't turn to mush. I have tried many different and exotic forms of oats, wild oats, organic oats, quick oats, steel-cut oats, blah blah blah. They invariably produced inferior results to the ordinary porridge oats, particularly in the texture department. Porridge oats are nice and chewy, large flake, and they retain their shape and consistency after being cooked. I usually just fill my small saucepan about 1/3 full with oats, fill it up with water so that all the oats are underwater with about 1" of water covering it (incidentally this is a pretty reliable trick with cooking rice too, you put in just enough water so that if you stick your finger in it the water will come up to the first crease in your finger at the point when you are just touching the oats/rice). As an estimate, I'd say this ratio is about 2 1/2 cups of oats and 3 1/2 cups of water, but that's not very precise, sorry. Next time I'll try measuring and let you know.

Put this on the stove, medium heat, to boil, and add about a half teaspoon of salt (the salt is important!). Once boiling, put on the lid, and turn off the heat. You have to keep an eye on this though, because you really really don't want to burn this. Not only will your recipe be ruined (even if its only a little bit at the bottom, the rest of the batch will take the burnt flavor), but your pot will be ruined too if you scorch the oats. You can scrub and scrub forever, and it will never, ever come off. I don't know why.

Anyway, once the oats have absorbed the water, remove from the heat and add your chosen ingredients.
If the oats are too dry (oat mixture should be sticky and quite moist), just add a bit more water to it, mix it around, and cover up again with the lid to steam it in, and then add the other ingredients.

Once you've added whatever add-ons you want |(see below for some suggestions), you mix the whole thing together to get a fairly even distribution of goods (like chocolate chip cookie dough), and spoon the mix into a baking dish. I usually use my 9" round glass pie-plate because I can cut them into wedges, but anything will do as long as its at least 1 1/2" deep. You want your oatcakes to be no more than 1" thick, 3/4" would be ideal, 1/2" would be too thin to get out of the pie-plate intact. If you have too much mix, you can just keep it in the fridge and heat it up again for breakfast or whatever.

So you have your oat mix in the baking dish, you take a piece of saran wrap and a flat spatula (or your hand, hand pressed is kinda fun), place it over the top, and press the warm mix into the pan evenly, so that it looks kind of like a cake before being baked. With the saran wrap on the top still, stick your baking dish into the fridge to set the oat mix into a loaf-sort of. This saran wrap isn't critical if you're going to pan fry it within a couple of hours, but if you plan to leave it in the fridge overnight, it will become crusty if its exposed to the air for that long.

Once set, cut the oatcake into manageable pieces. I cut my pie into 6 wedges. Heat up a frying pan with some light cooking oil - I'm in the habit of using rice bran oil, it has a good taste and cooks at high-temperature. Coconut oil is also fantastic, it gets a little bit of a movie-theater-popcorn aroma! Now again, you dont want to have the pan set on high, because you dont want to scorch your oats. Med-high is good (7 out of 10), no higher. Lift out your oatcakes from the pie plate, and place them in the hot pan. I can do 3 wedges at a time, but that totally depends on how big you cut the pieces and how big your pan is.

Just cook long enough to brown on both sides, turning occasionally, and then you're done! I do up the whole batch in the pan, and keep the cooked ones in a plastic container so I can just microwave one for like 40 seconds, and get on the road to the skytrain in the morning.  I rarely wake up with enough time to make myself a proper breakfast.

So, the added ingredients? My personal favorite, as long as its for a sit-down meal, is to just make plain oatcakes, with a drizzle of flaxseed oil or olive oil on the top, and a sprinkling of finely grated parmesan cheese, with a finely chopped herb such as basil, thyme or rosemary. Heavenly! I serve this with a side of plain yogurt sometimes, if I want something creamy, but its amazing just on its own.

If I'm really feeling debaucherous, I'll go to my favorite fish shop in Vancouver ("Finest at Sea" on Arbutus Street http://www.finestatsea.com/), and get some smoked teriyaki sablefish to have with the oatcakes - ridiculously, prohibitively expensive (I feel bad if I eat more that one piece at a time!), but this is truly amazing taste/texture combination!!! And plus I just feel so healthy and Scandinavian eating fish for breakfast!

In other versions I've added garlic and chives to the oats; mixed in some chipotle puree and sharp cheddar; mushrooms; red peppers; imitation crab and creamcheese; chorizo; and the list goes on. I've tried them with sour cream, pesto, horseradish, peanut sauce, tomato sauce, and curry sauce. All good. Trust me when I say this, these things are truly delicious, and so versatile.

Slayer christmas light-up!

Three things I love:
Creative disturbances, Christmas lights, and metal. Does it get any better than this?? I wish I had thought of it myself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFjI7gT1FvI

Italian take on Chicken Cordon Bleu

Today's efforts were on chicken stuffing. Grandpa's still in the hospital, so I cooked up a family pack of chicken breasts, stuffed with two different variations on the Cordon Bleu recipe. My mum said she doesn't really like the traditional cordon bleu, so the first batch was stuffed with bacon and swiss. I havent tried this one yet, because I made them up to give to my mum and grandma again, so we will hear the verdict soon enough. The second batch was awesome and I would totally do it again, it was stuffed with proscuitto and fontina cheese, two of my all-time favorites so it was guaranteed to please at least me. It may sound selfish, but I kind of want to keep this batch for myself...

So here's the cooking instructions. The process is a bit time-consuming, so if you're going to bother doing it you might as well make a whole batch of them and keep them in the freezer to cook for quick dinners later on.

The trick to doing this is pounding the chicken breasts thin enough that they will roll up well and cover up the cheese stuffing, otherwise when you put them in the pan the cheese all oozes out the sides and you have none left inside when you go to eat it, which sucks.

So what I did was place the breasts between two sheets of wax paper while I beat them up. Butchers wrap would work even better, but you cant see through it so... there's pros and cons. Anyway, so you start out by butterflying the breast, which in case you arent familiar with the term means you cut the breast open on the flat side, kind of like opening a book. To pound it out, use the flat side of the mallet, rather than the dimpled side (which is for tenderizing), otherwise your breast winds up full of holes and no-one needs a breast full of holes, know what I'm sayin'.

When you've got all your flat slabs of chicken, place 1 1/2 slices of proscuitto on the chicken and lay a couple of slices of fontina cheese on top of the ham. Then you roll it up from the short side into a nice fat little mound. Try to make sure all the stuffing is inside. If its not, its not a big deal, but its just in everyone's best interest not to lose your stuffing.

Once you've got all the breasts stuffed, you want to bread them. I used the two-bowl method, one with a mix of egg and water, and the other a mix of breadcrumbs, herbs, and I added some shake-n-bake just for laughs. Actually that was because I was kind of short on bread. But anyway, you take a rolled up breast and dip it in the egg mix, make sure all exposed parts of the chicken are dipped, and then roll it in the bread crumbs. Place to the side and repeat with all remaining breasts. Then, because I like an extra crispy breading I put them all in for a second wash in the egg and crumb mixes.

To cook, place a couple of teaspoons of light cooking oil in a frying pan, pre-heat the pan to a medium heat, and lightly brown them. When you have them all browned in the pan, place the lot of them on a tray and finish them in the oven on 360 for about 15 minutes. Your kitchen will likely be a complete disaster by this point.

If you want to freeze these and heat up later, make sure to thaw completely before reheating or they will be cold in the middle or get overcooked. You can either heat them up again in the oven for like 7 or 8 minutes, or just microwave them for 1.5 minutes.

A new take on Shepherds Pie

OK so my grandpa went into the hospital for an operation, and while he was in there I figured I'd cook up some pre-made dinners for my mom and grandma so they didn't have to worry about cooking during that stressful time. Here is a recap of my first-ever attempt at Shepherds Pie.

I was never really a fan of it growing up, but my mom loved it, so whats a rebellious kid like me to do other than change the recipe. They seemed to like it, in spite of my unconventional approach.

Cooking instructions:
I started by frying up 1 lb of good extra lean ground beef. When it was almost cooked through, i added 1 small yellow (red would be OK too) onion, cut into small dice about 1/4", and 3 big cloves of garlic minced coarsely. At the end, I mixed in 1 tbsp of chili powder.

While that was cooking, I boiled up about 8 red potatoes, with the skins left on, cut in half to cook a bit faster. When they were soft all through, I mashed them up (after draining the water of course, silly) with about 1/2 a cup of sour cream, a tablespoon of butter, and three triangles of that Laughing Cow cheese that comes in the foil wrap, garlic-herb flavour. I added in about 2 tbsp worth of minced up fresh rosemary and some salt and fresh ground pepper.
When that was finished, i put the beef mix into a baking pan, dumped on top a couple of cans of  mixed vegetables (more on this later), and then spooned the potato mix evenly on top of it all, and put it in the oven to bake. It took about 1/2 an hour to get browned up a bit on the top, with the oven set to 375.

Results:
If I had it to do again I would, change two things - use different vegetables, and add more cheese. I wanted the potatoes to be cheesy, and they were, but not enough. I'd probably go with four triangles next time.
The canned veggies werent bad, but the beans came out overcooked, so next time I might just go with canned carrots or corn, or maybe just use fresh carrots instead.

Anyway, at the end of the day its a good meal to have in the fridge for lunches to take to work.

Welcome to Cheryl's test kitchen!

Hello everyone, this is something I've wanted to set up for ages, but since I'm essentially illiterate in the ways of modern technology the possibility of blogging has eluded me until now... until Tammy and John sent me the link to their travel blog, and there it was, "click here to set up your blog". It couldn't have been easier.

So anyway, here I will post some of the more repeatable recipes I've discovered by accident out of the very limited ingredients in my fridge. I will also share with you some of the more helpful skills I've picked up, such as smoking fish and plumbing repair, interspersed with running commentary about life as a single girl in Vancouver. I could write a book about that. 

Hopefully some of this will prove interesting, especially if you are in need of some inspiration in the kitchen and are too lazy to shop.