[February 5, 2012]

Meat Candy

How many times has this happened to you? You’re planning on having people over for Super Bowl Party-Valentine’s Party-Oscar Party-May 24-Canada Day etc-etc-etc but you’re on a strict food budget. You only have enough cash for either meat snacks (of the chicken wings and meatball variety) or sugary treats (Timbits). Oh what a pickle!

Fear not! Avoid this calamity by doing what I do – make something that’s a little from column A, and a little from column B. Something so diabolically righteous it’s like the devil and God went on a date that went too far due to excessive drinking, then named their little guy Meat Candy! No one can turn down Meat Candy! Well, I guess a vegetarian can, but in my experience they usually carry around protein bars with them at all times for dietary emergencies such as this, so don’t feel bad. All of your meat-eating friends will love you and spread the word that you throw the best parties, even on a strict food budget.

Meat Candy

You’ll need:

4 beef short ribs, cut crosswise about 1.5 inches thick

2 cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced

1 knob of ginger, peeled and sliced

1 onion, peeled and sliced

1 carrot, peeled and roughly chopped

1 stalk of celery, roughly chopped

6 star anise

2 tablespoons Ssam Jang (Korean spicy bean paste)

2-3 cups of root beer

2 cups of chicken stock

2 tbsp olive oil

salt and pepper to season

1 cup shelled and roasted peanut

2 tablespoons green onion, sliced

Pre heat the oven to 325˚F. Lay the short ribs out on a cutting board and divide each into four or five even sized pieces. If you cut them into five, you’ll have to maneuver around one of the bones since there are only four of them, but you’ll figure that out. Properly season (like it’s snowing) the beef.

In a heavy-bottomed pot, heat the olive oil and sear the beef. Remove the meat from the pot and add in the onion, garlic and ginger. Sweat these ingredients over a medium low heat until the onions are soft and caramelized – maybe ten minutes or so. Add the carrots, celery, star anise, and Ssam Jang and cook for another ten minutes. Deglaze the pot with the root beer and the chicken stock, and then put the beef back in the pot. The liquid should just cover the solid ingredients, if not add more root beer. Bring to a simmer before putting a lid on it and placing in the oven.

Braise for about two and a half to three hours, or until the bone easily slips out of the rib. Remove the meat from the pot and strain the braising liquid on top. Cool down before refrigerating overnight.

The next day, pick or scrape the solidified fat from the top of the braising liquid.

In a pan, heat the meat in the sauce a little, just to get them warm all the way through. This will make it easier to pop the bones out and discard them. So do that, then place the meat on a cutting board so you can cut the meat into evenly sized “bites”. Put the meat back into the pan with the sauce and simmer until the sauce reduces to a glaze, and the meat pieces are all shiny.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the kitchen, place the roasted peanuts in a food processor and pulse them until they are chunky. Or crush them with a hammer or whatever your food processor alternative is. Add in the green onions and salt and pulse a little more, until the whole mixture looks like very coarse breadcrumbs. Transfer the mix into a bowl.

Take your sticky, warm meat and roll it around in the peanut until well coated. This can be a messy job so I like to use a fork and spoon to keep my fingers from getting all syrupy. Place the finished meat candy bites on a clean plate. Serve immediately while they’re still warm.

These little bad boys taste like a Snickers, except with meat instead of nougat. And without the chocolate. And as a bonus, they pair excellently with wine, beer, AND cocktails. I know…amazing, right? So dig in cheapskate, your party going to be a smashing success!

Posted in General, Recipes

[February 2, 2012]

Is Fish Meat?

Finally! A subject that has some worth in this online rag.

People assume because I own and work in a butcher shop, I must not eat a lot of fish. False! X Buzzer! Not! I’m blessed to have a shop in a market that boasts FOUR fish shops within spitting distance of each other (sometimes I wonder if they do spit at each other), and more importantly, they are all extremely close to us. So it’s super easy for us to walk over from the shop and get some beauty catch of the day from any of our friends. I realize it’s not always so easy to do the same wherever you are, but even most grocery stores have a decent seafood counter now. It is best to acquaint yourself with Oceanwise, which is an aquatic conservation program out of the Vancouver Aquarium. Check out their website to find out what underwater critters you should be eating. They kind of know what they’re talking about, so I trust them. If you’re looking for a store that is Oceanwise certified and crazy good, check out our homeboys and homegirls over at Hooked in Leslieville. They also kind of know what they’re talking about. Fact.

So anyway, a couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I want to lose some, if not all, of my fat gut. I stopped drinking, which is great for my body but boring as all hell. I’m boxing again, which is a killer workout. (For the record, I don’t boxercise. I hit things and deke out punches. And do burpies and jump squats. And then I barf in my mouth a little.) And perhaps most importantly, I eat less. Not in the way that models eat less than regular folk because it’s their job. Just in a “I’m not going to eat that whole lobe of foie gras” type of eating less. One great way to reduce calories is by eating fish. A nice spot of fish after a long day of work makes me feel all clean inside, like I swallowed a loofah. Ok, not really…that actually sounds painful. Like I swallowed OxyClean? Oh, forget it…it just makes me feel lighter, ya dig?

So with that in mind, here’s a nice, light fish dish that also allows me to play with comparative studies of flavours and ingredients. I quite enjoy implementing a couple of ingredients on a plate, but with different cooking methods. In this case: celery and peanuts. You’ll see what I mean.

Seared Tilapia with Peanut-Braised Celery and a Roasted Peanut and Celery Salsa

For the tilapia:

Two fillets of tilapia…duh. Get the farmed stuff from the USA – it’s a safer bet than from anywhere else. I bisected mine for smaller portions (about 3 oz each).

Salt and pepper

One tablespoon of olive oil

On a plate, season the tilapia with the olive oil and salt and pepper. Heat a pan over medium high heat. Sear the tilapia for about three or four minutes a side, or until it’s golden on the outside and just flaky throughout. Take it out of the pan and let it rest.

For the braised celery:

Four stalks of celery, each cut in half width-wise

One tablespoon of peanut butter

One teaspoon of sriracha

One clove of garlic, peeled and sliced

Two tablespoons of green onions, thinly sliced

Two tablespoons of cilantro, finely sliced

One cup of chicken stock

One teaspoon of olive oil

Salt and pepper

Wash and peel the celery. If you don’t peel the outside of the celery, it’ll be all stringy and gross when you cut into it post-braise. Ugh. In a small pot, sauté the celery and garlic in olive oil for a couple of minutes over medium heat. Season with salt and pepper. Add the chicken stock, peanut butter, and sriracha, then turn the heat down to simmer the celery for twenty minutes. Add the herbs for the last two minutes of cooking. Turn off the heat and set-aside until plating.

For the salsa:

Two tablespoons of shelled peanuts, roasted in a pan on the stovetop over medium heat

One stalk of celery, washed and finely diced

Half a green pepper, finely diced

Two tablespoons of green onions, thinly sliced

Two tablespoons of cilantro, finely sliced

Juice and zest of a half lime

Juice and zest of one lemon

One teaspoon of Vietnamese fish sauce (you can skip this, but please don’t)

Salt and pepper

Mix everything together and set aside until ready to use.

To plate:

Put four pieces of braised celery in the center of a plate. Lay the seared fish on top. Spoon the salsa on top of that. Spoon a bit of the braising liquid around the fish. Done.

Yummo!

So, the title of this blog is a question. The answer is no, fish is fish. Silly. But both fish and meat are delicious, and I recommend eating both with reckless abandon, unless of course you can’t fit into your sexy-pants (you know the ones). If your goal is to be able to fit through a doorway, you should go on the Biggest Loser. If your goal is to eat a tasty dinner that sits around 243 or so calories, eat stuff like this. Your insides will love you.

Posted in Recipes

[January 23, 2012]

On Writing Menus

Back when I was an honest to goodness chef, back when I smoked each cigarette like it was my last and drank enough coffee to make Eeyore excitable, one of my many jobs was creating new dishes for the menu. Most restaurants don’t have many whole menu changes unless the season changes and there is a demand to use new ingredients – springtime strawberries and asparagus for example – but there are usually small changes constantly happening on a restaurant menu that most customers would never notice even if they went to the restaurant every day, which no one does unless he or she is boring. These small changes usually affect the garnish on the plate. Before cooking school I though “garnish” meant that sprig of parsley placed artistically on top of your fries at Jack Astor’s, but garnish actually refers to whatever goes with the protein (sorry vegetarians, technically speaking you’re just eating variations of garnishes). So let’s say you have a beef tenderloin steak on your menu. You may serve it with Pommes Anna one week and change it to Truffade the next week. A little adjustment to the menu and voila! New dish. Ish.

Now that my restaurant cooking days have turned into home-cooking nights, one might think that my menu creating has dwindled, but this is simply not the case. Home cooks need to know how to come up with a dish that will please themselves and those eating the food – which is essentially the same thing a chef does, except they get paid $150,000 a year to do it. Not. Restaurant dishes can be fun to come up with, but there are usually a lot of factors to consider. There were a few things I had to keep in mind when I came up with a dish that would go on the printed menu. It is important to differentiate the printed menu from verbal specials because once your idea is committed to paper with ink, that’s it. It usually costs money to print menus in bulk and you can’t afford to change your mind the next day (unless you do the printing yourself in which case you can go nuts and spend your day writing and printing menus, like you have all the time in the world – or you’re an executive chef). So, in no particular order of course, here is a list of factors that can affect a menu dish.

What is available this time of year? This is the first thing I thought of, as everything has a season. Hundreds of cookbooks are devoted to this subject, so I won’t elaborate too much. This website is pretty useful for knowing what’s available here in Canada, though. http://www.eattheseasons.com/

What does the season inspire? In Toronto, January food is veeeeeery different from August food. You may have a simple pasta dish on a menu year round, but if you don’t have some kind of slowly cooked meat on your menu in January you’re missing out on some sweet customer appreciation there. In sweltering August, a chilled soup is just smart thinking. A dish reflects what it’s like outside.

What kind of food are you cooking? This was an easy one at the restaurant, because it was Italian. As long as I worked within the framework of classic Italian culinary ideologies, I had free reign. That’s harder than it sounds, because you don’t want to continuously propagate stereotypically Italian dishes (melon wrapped in prosciutto), but you do want to celebrate those dishes by creating more elaborate versions of them (Prosciutto and Fontina Panini with a Canteloupe Agrodolce). It was also important to do this “updating” because of the style of restaurant. If it were a more rustic environment, simpler plates would be in order. But it wasn’t.

What do the owners like/dislike? This is very important because unless as a chef you own your restaurant outright, there are always going to be other people who influence the menu. Owner doesn’t like cilantro? Then you’re not allowed to have it in the kitchen. Owner doesn’t like lamb fat? Best trim that fat, buster. Owner has a penchant for shrimp? You now always need a shrimp main course on there. Owner’s doctor tells him to stay away from salt? Well, that’s his problem. But at the end of the day, you do whatever the people signing the cheques tell you to do.

What kind of customers do you have? If you are an amazing chef with accolades, excellent reviews by all the best reviewers (like that means anything), and people devoting entire Flickr streams to your plates, chances are you don’t care about what kind of customers you have. You probably just continuously create dishes you want to, and people fly from all over the world to try them. And you’re a genius. And your name is Ferran Adria. If you are not Señor Adria, then you have to think about your demographic. If you’re a neighborhood restaurant, you’ll want to keep that burger that everyone loves on the menu forever. If you are a restaurant known for romance you’ll probably want to think about making your own chocolate bonbons as mignardises. If you have a drinking crowd, have drinking crowd snacks. When it comes to changing menu dishes, it’s best to know what your customers will let you get away with, otherwise they might go elsewhere. No stress.

What is your current menu lacking? This is interesting because it forces you to consider what already exists, and what is missing. If you have a menu full of grilled meats, you may want a couple of braised meats on there. How many vegetarian options do you have? If the answer is none, better get with the times. Are all of your highest selling dishes expensive to produce? Best to reconsider buying more truffles, sonny. You don’t have a Caesar Salad? Good, keep it that way.

Who are you trying to emulate? Everyone has heroes. Especially chefs. I used to get a lot of ideas from other chefs’ cookbooks or restaurant menus and freely adapt dishes to suit my tastes, and those of my customers. Take the Babbo Cookbook, for example. Mario Batali is probably the most well-respected and forward thinking Italian chef in North America. There are many other chefs in this category (Paul Bertolli, Marc Vetri, Chris Cosentino), and everyone will have his/her own preference, but it’s hard to deny Batali’s presence at the front of Italian dining this side of the pond. Now, the Babbo Cookbook is a beautiful book, full of amazing dishes, and when I needed some inspiration I would leaf through that book first. An old chef I worked for once told me there is nothing new in cooking, only newer takes on old ideas. Everyone bites everyone. (Unless of course you’re Ferran Adria, in which case everyone bites your style and actually gives it a name – molecular – so it seems like they are doing their own thing.) Don’t get me wrong, I think a good chef has a style uniquely their own, but as chefs we always strive to match or surpass our heroes. Just like that kid in The Incredibles.

These are a few of the things I would have to think about as a restaurant chef, but these rules all apply to those of you who enjoy throwing dinner parties. What’s in season is the most important step, followed closely with how you’re going to cook your ingredients. Do you want to create a French bistro feel to your meal? Then each dish must evoke that thought – I don’t care how good your spring rolls are. If your husband/wife hates scallops, then eat them on your own time. If your guests are observant Jews, don’t be a prick and slip some bacon into the Brussels sprouts. Is there a dish you are famous for amongst your friends – say a chocolate-hazelnut cake for example? Why not change it up a little and make it with almonds and serve it with a strawberry gelato? Do you read your favourite butcher’s blog to get inspiration? That’s a great idea!

I don’t cook for hundreds of people a night anymore, but my menu writing days are far from over. I love hosting dinner parties, and my wife and I routinely have friends and family over for Sunday roasts. Even if I’m just cooking for the two of us I think about every part of the dish and how it goes together. A cohesive dish on an inspired menu makes more than sense. It makes memories.

Posted in Cooking, General

[January 19, 2012]

I Heart Steak!

In the land of my front display window, there are many delights. There are hills of oxtails and valleys of bacon. There are the plains of lamb, which isn’t very plain at all; there are also the towers of pork chops, sometimes at such a precarious heights I wonder when they’ll topple onto the pork roasts. Across from the tower of pork, over the plains of lamb, there are the fields of beefsteaks. Muscled and fatty at the same time, the steaks are kings of the land. They are the items window shoppers drool over most. Sometimes I feel like the onlookers are pressed up against the glass as if the sidewalk was a car that just slammed on its brakes, sending passersby careening into the windshield of the steak section of my window. It’s quite funny, actually, from our side of the fence, so to speak.

Now, if someone actually comes in to take one of those steaks home with them (you know the drill – “I’m going to open this bottle of red wine here and let’s just see what happens, steak-y baby”) they usually have a few noble questions first. Here are the most frequently asked questions about our steak selection; I’ll try to answer them all.

Q. Can I get a steak?

A. Yes. Yes you can.

Q. What kind of steaks do you have there?

A. We carry quite a few cuts. Almost always we have ribeyes, striploins, tenderloins, top sirloins, and bone-in rib steak. Sometimes we have the forty day aged côtes de bœuf or the porterhouse. We also have a special few not-so-popular-but-super-tasty cuts we always want people to try. They rotate between flank, bavette, hanger (or onglet, which is what I’ll call it when the hanger isn’t selling so well), skirt, and flat-iron. Then we usually have the peppercorn-marinated eye of round steaks. And that selection will be bumped up when I get whole grass fed beef in, as then I’ll do all of the leg steak cuts (sirloin tips, inside rounds, etc.) as well as the few shoulder steak cuts (blades, cross ribs). Does that help, sir?

Q. I want something super tender, what should I get?

A. Tenderloin or flat-iron. Tenderloin is also sometimes called the filet mignon, or “dainty slice”, if you don’t speak French. I don’t recommend asking a butcher for a dainty slice, though. The flat-iron is a cut from the shoulder that comes a close second to tenderloin’s tenderness. It was super fashionable on restaurant menus in Toronto a few years back due to it’s relatively low price, great flavour, and said tenderness. Highly recommended.

Q. I like my steaks to have a bit of fat, whaddya got?

A. Take a ribeye. Or a bone-in rib chop if you’re hungry. For the record, the staff and I played the “what’s your favourite meal” game at the cottage last year and a charred bone in rib steak with a big rich southern Rhône wine was my answer. Absolutely genius on God’s part, there.

Q. Why is that steak not as red as that one??

A. Oh, that would be my old friend myoglobin up to his old tricks again. Myoglobin is a purplish-red protein in the muscle of the beef. When a steak is cut from the whole muscle and exposed to oxygen, the surface of the steak turns into bright, somewhat cherry red oxymyoglobin (are you following, kids?). In most supermarkets, the steak is kept on trays and wrapped in a special plastic that allows in just enough oxygen to keep the steak looking cherry red for few days. Our steaks are kept exposed to the air all the time, so they turn from this bright colour to a darker, deeper purple colour after a day or so. Now the steak is in the metamyoglobin stage, and will still be excellent to eat. The darker, drier steaks are mistaken for being not good and fresh. But I assure you they are delicious. In fact, I have quite a few customers who want the oldest, blackest steak I can give them. And believe me, they know what they’re talking about.

Q. How do I cook the steak?

A. Here is a foolproof method. Get a heavy-bottomed pan – cast iron is best but heavy stainless steel will do just fine – and put it on a medium high heat. 3 o’clock on your stovetop dial. Put your steak on a plate and salt it liberally. I mean, pretend it’s snowing on that bad boy. Do the same thing with freshly ground pepper. Drizzle olive oil on the steak and rub in over each side. When the pan is hot, and it will be if you’ve left it alone on the heat for five minutes at least, place the steak in the pan and let it sizzle. Leave it alone and don’t poke, prod or push it around. Depending on the thickness you’ll need to flip it over to its other side. With a 1” thick ribeye I’ll turn it after about five minutes. If you’re unsure, ask at the butcher’s; they should know. Let the steak sizzle for the same amount of time as the first side. Take the steak out of the pan and place it on a clean plate to rest for five minutes. Don’t cut into it to see if it’s done. Basically the only way you could have screwed it up is if it’s burnt shoe-leather. Otherwise even a well-done steak can be enjoyable. You won’t get the “feel” for internal cooking temperatures until you’ve cooked hundreds of steaks, so let’s just say practice makes perfect. Now the steak is ready to eat, which leads me to the last question.

Q. What should I eat it with?

A. Big red wine. A friend or lover. And a smile. As humans, we are privileged to be able to experience such enjoyment, so savour it. I don’t care if you’re listening to Edith Piaf by candlelight or watching The Bachelor in your underwear. Just don’t eat it while driving. That’s dangerous. Just trust me on that one.

I hope I was able to answer your questions, sir. Oh what’s that, you’d like pork instead? What do we have in pork? Serious? Well, let me tell you…

Posted in General, Meat Knowledge

[January 16, 2012]

Post-Holiday Fat Gut Syndrome

Holy turtlenecks was Christmas ever a busy time for us at the shop! Turkeys, prime ribs, hams, capons…you named it, and we cut it and sold it. Like most people in the foodservice industry at this time of year, we worked about twelve hours a day for two weeks. I don’t know about you, but after a long hard day at the bandsaw I like to relax with a nice big ole glass of “liquid inspiration” and something nice and fatty to put in my face. Steak? Yessir! Gin and Tonic? You betcha!! A whole meat lover’s pizza and a bottle of Carménère? Hell yeah!!! Now, the best (read: fattiest) part of the season’s indulgence is of course Christmas dinner. We have a tradition in my house of having at least three meats. This year it was roast beef, ham and a diabolical creation my brother-in-law named a “Ca-pork-on”. Basically I stuffed a capon with sausage and in turn stuffed the sausage with a large pork roast – an incredibly delicious work of indulgence. (Perhaps I’ll post the “recipe” for that next year.)

New Year’s Eve dinner was another extravagant eatfest that ended with a bellyache the following day that rivaled a Bruce County snowstorm in severity.

As you can imagine, after all of the long days and longer nights associated with the holidays, one’s body begins to change. Grey hairs appear; feet get swollen; eyes get baggier; belts get loosened. Now, once the first of January comes around these things can be corrected. Grey hair? Dye those out! Swollen feet? Nothing a little pedicure can’t fix. Baggy eyes? A little cosmetic surgery never hurt anyone! Fat gut? Well this seems to be a specialty of everyone from Richard Simmons to Gwyneth Paltrow (ok, not really her, but Jeebus, how much air does that skinny biz-natch eat for dinner?). Now I’m no specialist when it comes to dieting, but I am a bit of a specialist when it comes to knowing how to cook and eat good food. All kinds of food. So when that special day came, maybe a week or so after Christmas, when I got out of the shower, looked down and saw a fat gut, I thought, ‘alrighty then asshat..time to put the lamb leg down and think about this for a second or two’. I’m no different than everyone else this time of year. I want to change things and a new year feels like it’s a fresh start. Clean slate. All showered, crevices cleaned and ready to go.

So this is the new action plan. I have Post-Holiday Fat Gut Syndrome, or PHFGS for short (it kind of sounds like the name of a muppet this way, perhaps a purple muppet who stole all of the cookies from you know who). PHFGS is a pain in the back, *ahem*, so I’m getting rid of it. I will post recipes of dishes I make with this action plan in mind, and I swear that no matter what, they will be delicious. And not in that “Yay!!! We’re making healthy food!!!! Yaaaaaaay!!!!” way if you know what I mean. I hate those people. So with that in mind here’s my first recipe.

Breakfast in the Market

Start with a latte from Ozzy at Casa Acoreana in Kensington Market. Ask for one sugar and he really puts in about two. It’s a good sucker punch of calories to start the day. Follow this with a banana or two from the produce shop across the street from the coffee shop.

That’s it folks. This should be enough food to get you until lunch. I’ll give you a recipe for that in a bit. I’m sorry if you were looking for a more “meat” related recipe now, but what the hell, you shouldn’t eat meat with every meal! That’s a one way ticket to Goutville (formally known as Fattergutville, but no one likes redundancy). So follow me on the steaming and poaching trail to Healthytown, where everyone is sober, fit and smart! By the way, if you don’t want to live in Healthytown forever, you can always check out Normalweightrangeforyour Heights, where the occasional glass of Carménère and slice of pizza are heartily embraced.

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!

Posted in General

Categories

Previous

[February 5, 2012]

Meat Candy

[February 2, 2012]

Is Fish Meat?

[January 23, 2012]

On Writing Menus

[January 19, 2012]

I Heart Steak!

[January 16, 2012]

Post-Holiday Fat Gut Syndrome