le sauce

jibaritos with guava paste

Months ago I learned what a jibarito was, when I came across it on a blog. I bookmarked the recipe for this grilled cheese sandwich that uses ripe plaintain in place of bread, but I could never make it--I was missing a key ingredient. And then a few weeks ago, my aunt walked into the kitchen with it: guava paste! Her friend brought it back with her from Guyana and gifted it to my aunt, who spread the jelly on toast as you might any other. And true to her generous nature, she brought some over with me, not knowing I'd searched for it in vain for some time now.

It was fitting that we made the jibaritos together--she cooks plantain but had never had it like this. Sections of the plantain roast in the oven before being pressed flat and pan-fried like a common grilled cheese sandwich. The guava paste is just the thing--brining out a little of the sweetness in the plantain and pairing so well the cheese as fruit preserves do. Having had it now, I can tell you that any jelly would make a decent substitute for guava paste, and jibaritos are special. The texture of the plantain, dense and almost fiberous, separates it completely from grilled cheese sandwiches in my mind. Jibaritos are a whole other new, delicious thing to enjoy and to crave suddenly and fixatedly a few times a year. You're welcome.

a l'orange

One rainy night in October, one bright idea for dinner.

Roasted butternut squash, pureed and slightly thinned into soup.

Orange, aged cheddar, grated coarsely and sandwiched between double-side-buttered bread. And more of that cheddar pressed onto the outside as it fries to form a crust.

'Tis the season for orange, after all. Less than a week until the spookiest night of the year...

first taste: bread and jam for frances

Childhood picture books, stories and TV shows that depicted food and dining made a real impression on me. Illustrations of steaming bowls of pasta or a piece of toast smothered in purple jam gave me my first taste of foods I'd yet to try, and are sometimes still the archetypes I hold food up to today. Instead of simply reminisce, I'm going to bring those dishes to life the way I imagined they'd be.

Given the title, you'd think this would be a post about bread and jam. But that's not the lunch that made the biggest impression on me in the book, Bread and Jam for Frances. Because while Frances started out eating bread and jam almost exclusively, she evolved, and when she did, she really did lunch right. 

For someone that started out hating eggs so much that she made a little song about her disdain, she sure embraced them later on. And you know who taught Frances how to truely appreciate lunch, nay, the art of eating? Her buddy, Albert. 

Albert could really pack a lunch (pun unintended, I swear), going as far as to bring a cardboard salt and pepper shaker to school to season his egg. It was these illustrations--of lunch laid out on a napkin, with themos, spoon and every detail carefully considered--that got me hooked on this book and makes me think of it fondly even today...

*Bread and Jam for Frances is by Russell Hoban, with pictures by Lillian Hoban

...as well as words like these! The description of Albert taking a bite of sandwich, egg and pickle in rotation tells of someone taking a moment and totally enjoying their lunch, in relative solitude too. I think I understood the sacredness of this ritual, even when I first read it at age 5 or 6. It probably rang true because I'm sure I ate my food in perfect rotation then. I kind of still do--do you? At the very least, I make it all "come out even" in the end, sad to see any one thing on my plate run out too soon.

I'd like to think Frances and Albert would appreciate the lunch I made in homage, pictured at top. Whether at home or another office, I've always respected and anticipated my lunch in the same way.

As an aside, is there anything more perfect, romantic, nostalgic and fair than the library? Le sigh...

(I'm looking at you, Toronto. xo)

working lunch: tacos

working from home sometimes means eating lunch standing up in an effort to make up for a really late start to the day, but sometimes it means having the luxury to make tacos with all the fixings. yesterday was taco tuesday at my office: black beans fried with garlic and jalapenos, strained yogurt in place of sour cream, salsa, chipotle and habanero sauces, fresh cheese, cilantro and jalapenos on top. taco tuesdays could become a weekly special on the "cafeteria menu". 

 

sesame soba noodle lunch

if packaged ramen noodles weren't, possibly, the worst thing to consume, i would eat one every day for lunch FOREVER and be extremely happy. but they're equally irresistible and scary, so i'm always trying to come up with ways to imitate and curb my cravings for them. a broth of water flavoured with dried shiitake and seaweed is usually where i start, and miso soup has often followed. but this time i turned to a sesame paste in my freezer from a recipe i made months ago. this particular sesame paste was flavoured with tomatoes and herbs, which i think is why it worked so well to round out the broth. and the nutty sesame itself made the soup luscious and aromatic. it was never intended to be a soup base so i can't fault this paste for not being perfect in this, but it was enough to get me thinking about how to create a healthy, vegetarian, ramen (or soba noodle!) soup option. something to work on, and i can't wait to get started.

sometimes i stir an egg into my soup while it's simmering, but in my lunch pictured above, i decided to poach one whole in the soup. toasted sesame seeds and scallions are always nice but do you ever put seasoned nori on your soups? that's nice too. do you have favourite additions? if you want to share them, i'd be grateful, as well as any ideas for that soup base. maybe we can come up with the perfect recipe before there's snow on the ground and we want need this soup every day.

working lunches

as i type this i'm eating my last lunch at my desk! did i mention that i "quit my day job"? this is my last week before heading out into the great unknown! ok, it's slightly known. i'll be devoting my entire waking moment to recipe writing, food writing and styling, other food-related things. details to come, as soon as i actually figure them out. i'm so excited. the first day in my new office (read: coffee shop with wi-fi) is on tuesday. 

but for now, i am still hard at work at the magazines, and having my last desk-lunch. would you believe i'm kind of going to miss it? lunch at my desk has never really been a bad thing. you know  i pack(ed) my lunch for work most days, eating leftovers from dinner the night before. so sitting down to a pile of spicy noodles or grilled vegetables on chevre toasts in the middle of an otherwise hectic day was a very welcome treat. i imagine my homemade lunches will still be the same, but what i'm going to miss is the occasional lunch treat i grabbed from around my workplace. i've been spoiled by being close enough to the st. lawrence market to walk down at lunchtime to grab groceries and pasta from the pizza place (fresh pasta in a delicious, garlic-y red sauce); or maybe hot pirogies or that famous eggplant parmesan sandwich that's too big to eat alone though i somehow manage. and i had to visit a new fave one last time, "bob's bulgogi" (pictured above), for the sweetest service and a container of spicy tofu bulgogi and free (!) seaweed soup.

this is good and bad. on the one hand, now my special treats from around here will seem even more special when i can i have them. on the other hand, i don't do well with unsatiated cravings. let's see how long i last before i need a fix. and how long it'll be before i need a little taste of what was my home away from home for ten, good great years.

a random leisurely weekend lunch (eggs poached in tomato sauce with olives and crusty bread)

this is what last weekend looked like: lots of food, lots of friends, lots of down time. this is what my upcoming weekend will look like: lots of food, lots of family, lots of work! 18 family members (little ones included) gathered at my parents' house to celebrate my cousin's birthday--a meal, that largely, james and i are preparing on our own. hi james! did i mention that part? oh, don't feel too bad for him, it's not that he didn't know we'd be helping in a major way. it's just that my cousin loves chinese food and my parents sort of defer to us when it comes to that cuisine. i  mean, my mom can COOK, and she makes a mean dry, chili/garlic long-bean stir-fry. yet she opts to make fried-rice with par-boiled rice (sorry, but that's not going to yield the expected result), and my dad would automatically curry any chinese noodles he got near enough to stir. so while they will be super sous chefs, james and i will be running things in the kitchen that day/night/all-weekend-who-are-we-kidding.

so i look back fondly for now on the weekend past, when i had time to make eggs poached in tomato sauce with black olives, eaten with buttered, crusty bread, in front of the tv watching an episode of lidia's italy on pbs. my favourite saturday afternoon ritual will probably be on hold for longer than i can bare to think about. because after this weekend, well, it all starts, doesn't it? season of chaos, here we come...

how to make dinner most nights, bring your lunch to work, and still have a life

a couple of month's ago, mark bittman asked his blog readers to share tips on brown-bagging it. my approach to workday lunches is certainly the "planned leftovers" approach. i often get comments on how great my lunch looks, but that's probably because it looks like dinner! if i didn't take the time to cook at night, i'd be scrambling to put together a lunch that looked medicore at best, but worse, tasted mediocre, and, i could argue, was less healthy and less affordable. so if making double the amount of food is easy enough, why aren't more people toting lunchboxes that are just as impressive? in my experience, it seems that most busy peers of mine are not actually cooking that often during the week. after i blurted out my thoughts in a comment to bittman, i thought they might be worth sharing here. i fleshed them out a little more. if it helps, here are my tips and strategy for weeknight cooking.

plan

it does take a lot of planning but it gets easier with practice. on the weekend, i plan what i’m going to make each night and do as much shopping over the weekend as possible. during the week, i may pick up a couple of ingredients i have to get fresh, but any more shopping than that after work means coming home a little later, a little more tired, and that’s only going to demotivate me to cook.

personally, i'm not a fan of big-batch cooking on the weekend. for me, being chained to the kitchen for longer than necessary on sunday is neither practical nor appealing. i’d much rather spend a little time in the kitchen on weeknights. that way i get a fresh hot meal every night, i don't have to eat the same food for several nights and i have fewer containers crowding the fridge. 

keep it easy--which does not mean boring

i have learned to make peace with the fact that we’re talking about weeknight cooking. despite having some experience with this, things always take longer than i thought they would to make or prep and i often start later than i intended to. if i didn't keep my weeknight meals simple, i'd get nothing else done in evenings. 

so i only put on the plan what i KNOW will be easy for me to make. that doesn't mean making a sandwich every night. for me it means that if i want to make a stir-fry, i'll make one that's quick for me to make, like soft and spicy tofu and mushrooms, the way i've always made them, and leave out snow pea shoots that take forever to clean. 

cook what you like and you'll like cooking

i don’t think of lunch when i cook, i think of what i want for dinner. i don’t worry about how transportable everything is, i just make what i love. so what if you have to put dressing in a little sauce container, toasted pumpkin seeds in another? the 4 minutes it takes to pack that lunch will be sooo worth it when you’re eating something much better than any lunch you might have bought within 4 blocks of your workplace (not to mention healthier and cheaper). plus it’s nourishing in another way–it gives you something to look forward to.

be flexible without giving up on the plan

my schedule isn’t so static that i stick to my plan 100% throughout the week. if i end up going out on a night that i’d planned to cook, i incorporate the unused produce into another dinner. or if i head out to lunch with friends spontaneously, the lunch i brought to work stays in the work fridge until the next day and i don’t have to make an extra portion of dinner that night.

for me, the cost and health benefits of cooking most nights and doubling dinner for lunch are great, but the main benefit is that i eat food i really love and am in the mood for, and that’s probably much tastier than what i might have had otherwise. looking forward to hearing how you approach this yourself every week--share your tips with me!

happy birthday (let's see how much we can eat in 72 hours)

capping off a weekend of celebrations which included two rich dinners out at restaurants, with a spread of 10 sri lankan dishes, qualifies as gluttony, i'm pretty sure. did i mention the bottles of wine and shots of vodka? the last thing we needed today was to sit down to a lunch like this, but that's the way my family likes to show love for someone on their birthday. so james' b-day weekend ended with this spread and, or course, a cake.

 

now i knew my parents and aunt were going to make some biryani, fried eggplant and potatoes--james' favourites. i should have known my aunt was going to make the jackfruit cutlets that he tosses back like kernels of popcorn. but i was still surprised to see freshly fried papadums, and...the other 5 dishes. i shouldn't have been but i was. i also shouldn't have polished off two plates in 15 minutes. but i did. le sigh. happy birthday, james. glad you were spoiled and you enjoyed the feasts. i'm going to pay for partying like it was my birthday too. trying to fit into clothes tomorrow morning for work is going to be fun.

dim sum and vampires

i had big plans for october. i planned to have 3 new recipes up here--savoury, saucy ones perfect for fall. buuuut....that required a lot of recipe testing and a lot of cooking. aaaaand, basically, i've been feeling really lazy and haven't been doing nearly as much work as i'd planned to (after my 9-5 work that is). you know what i have been doing a lot of? eating. and watching season 1 & 2 of true blood. and combining the two activities.

 

it's a good thing that james and i don't like many of the same shows, because we treat tv marathons together as the perfect excuse to pig out. take for example this little spread that james put out on a recent sunday afternoon spent watching sookie and bill the vampire's relationship develop. this feast which could have fed four, was really just dim sum for two. i picked up lots of vegetarian/fake-meat frozen dim sum options the last time i was at TNT supermarket: bbq "pork" buns, taro pancakes, turnip and sesame cakes, chive dumplings. james decided we needed to try them all together, with the requisite 7 condiments (well, certain sauces go better with specific dim sum pieces, i agree). so we gorged on the feast the way those tacky vampires that bill had staying in his lair did on poor, stupid, vamp-loving humans. good times. 

but we're almost out of both dim sum and episodes. and i'm getting back to work. check back very soon for a polenta recipe creamier than sookie stackhouse's skin.