I think on October 3, 2009, I made a bet with Berry’s husband, who said we won’t make it 3 months. In fact, it’s the first of October, and we’ve gotten the entire year under our belt. Not without some drama, but gosh darn it we did it.

However, it must MUST be said that we could never have done it without the help of our talented, dedicated, creative and all around fabulous guest bloggers:

Peter
Deb
Della
Sage
Rolf
Rumon
Marty
Veronica & Bill
Sarah
Janelle
Diana
Monique
Stephanie
April
Robin
Ian & Kristin
Kathleen
Rob
Michelle & Teddy

Some of you were with us for the long haul, some of you just stopped in once to share your particular sparkle. But I’m so so very thankful that you joined us on this little adventure.

I can’t speak for Berry or Eva, but one of the the things I’ve enjoyed the most about blogging this year has been the ever growing network of people that have been drawn into the project. We’re from all across the country, we’re 20something to 70something years old. We’ve blogged from campsites, mexican hacienda’s, coffee shops and the kitchen counter. We’ve had illustrated posts, great photography, original recipes, travelogues, rants (yes, Eva, I’m looking at you) and sometimes just really inspired ideas of what to have for dinner. Along the way, we definitely entertained others – we’ve had 35,000+ visits to the site and 1,400+ comments.

I don’t know what’s next. I know that I need a rest from blogging for a while. I think that Eva may feel the same. (Berry is raring to go again!) I’m tossing around ideas along the lines of writing about west coast food, or trying to learn more about food photography. If you have some ideas about what you’d like to read, we’re all ears.

With my gratitude and thanks,

~Dea

In second year, the cold weather started and we started making cider again and it didn’t take long for us to use up all of our mulling spice tea bags! Chels said her mum could send us some more, but I wasn’t willing to wait for that. I looked at the ingredients of the Knudsen spice bags, and then began looking into recipes for mulled cider. The result: A very rough, thrown-together recipe for hot mulled cider. It never comes out exactly the same. It is always delicious and delivers the same warm, happy holiday feelings that I want from my cider.

Hot Mulled Cider, roughly, thrown-together, always good:

2 litres of apple juice (eye ball half of the 4 litre jug if you go through as much cider as we do)
Not the super sweet sunripe kind, but the kind that has some sediment, is probably organic, and maybe not pasteurized. It has a more rich apply flavour. It’s less like candy, and more like juice.

A 1 inch hunk of fresh ginger
Sliced very thin, or grated even. The idea to maximize the surface area and get that ginger juice in there.

A navel orange
Again, sliced thin, and put in the pot with the juice and ginger

2 cinnamon sticks

Some cloves
To taste! I like my cider really clovey and put at least 10 whole cloves. Some people don’t really like cloves. It’s a personal preference thing.

A few dried bay leaves
Broken up and put in the pot.

And brandy!
I put a shot of brandy in my mug before filling it up with cider. I got mixed reviews on how strong the cider was at last year’s Christmas party, so of course this is another “to taste” item.

I think that’s it. Put everything, minus the brandy, in a big pot and heat it up just to a simmer, but don’t boil it. Take it off heat and serve with some brandy. You can garnish the glass with a cinnamon stick and an orange. In my experience, it just gets taken out, but it does look nice!

Tah-dah!

If you like mulled cider and you like red wine, I strongly suggest you make mulled wine. It’s basically the same stuff, but with some cranberry juice and maybe a little sugar.

What I have learned about these hot holiday drinks is that they are always tasty, but rarely a precise recipe. Experiment and find your personal favourite way of doing things!

Happy Cider Season!

Monique

I’m really happy to say that I am blessed with an abundance of great coffee in my life. While I don’t drink a lot of it (1-4 cups a week) when I do I want it to be really really good (duh. I’m a food snob after all!). The nearest place to get a proper espresso near my office is Street Level Espresso. It’s a tiny shop (and I do mean tiny – this photo shows pretty much the whole place… no starbucks arm chairs here).

Photo courtesy Ken Gordon

Owner Ken Gordon’s girl-friday is the lovely Mal. Just this weekend Mal went to Toronto to represent Street Level, Victoria, and BC in the National Barista Championships (this was Mal’s first year competing!). In the competition, each barista must prepare and serve 12 coffee beverages – four espresso, four cappuccino, and four signature drinks for the judges. I went into the shop this morning to ask her how it went, and she offered to make me her signature drink, and we chatted about coffee a little.

Mal said that she loves the complexity of coffee–both the beans and the brewing. She pointed out that coffee beans come from far more places in the world than wine, and carry with them far more flavor profiles. If being a wine expert is tough, being a well versed bean lover is even a more daunting task. Mal also loves the science and nerdy goodness of learning how to extracting a perfect espresso. She also said that she loves that coffee brings people together – Street Level is always hopping with people chatting and connecting.

Mal’s signature drink is a shot of espresso supported by a little chia tea to bring out the flavours in the coffee. The espresso is a blend of beans and each brings it’s own flavours to the drink: Columbia (cocoa), Panama (spice and dried fruit) and Costa Rica (citrus). Mal brewed a black chia tea with cardamon, ginger and cinnamon, and put a small amount (1 tbls?) into the espresso cup. She also rimmed the cup with frehs lime. The tea and the lime helps bring out the notes of spice and citrus in the coffee, and makes the flavours pop. I’ve never tasted anything like it, and it was a real pleasure to drink. It was like a great wine – the flavours changed with every sip, inhale and exhale. I’ve suggested she name this drink the “Malacano”.

So my friends, go forth caffeinated, and have a wonderful day.

~Dea

ps – By the way, Ken and Mal make the BEST MOCHA IN TOWN. (read this testimonial. Really. Trust me).

pps – if you are in Vic and want to learn a lot about coffee (i.e. why does a Kenyan taste different than a Colombian bean?) head over to Habit Coffee and Culture for one of their free weekly coffee cuppings.

* See Note

I have to say, I am a lucky, lucky woman.  Why?  My boyfriend makes fantastic home-brew.  For several years now he’s been producing carefully tailored brews right in our apartment, and there’s no pleasure in life quite like the pleasure of tasting a beer that has been carefully planned and prepared over the course of weeks.  As summer approaches I can count on him to produce a gorgeous Belgian-style witbier, perfect for sipping in our camp chairs.  Other times he’ll turn out IPAs, Amber Ales, or whatever is tickling his creative fancy.

To those of you who have politely sipped at terrible home-brew and tried to pour it in the nearest house plant: trust me – there’s a whole other world out there.

I will attempt only a cursory intro to home-brewing today.  The process is far too involved to do justice in a little blog post.  However, if you are intrigued by what you see, don’t be intimidated!  Once you’re familiar with the process it’s quite easy and doesn’t have to take a lot of time.  In fact, fabulous results can be had with a method easier than the one I’m describing today.

A dear friend of ours got us into home-brewing, and introduced us to Dan’s Homebrewing Supplies. Dan is incredibly knowledgeable and stocks everything you could possibly need to make top-quality beers customized to your own tastes.  He offers many recipes to get you started, and will help you create your own recipes too.  This isn’t your standard “pick-a-boxed-beer-kit” U-brew kind of place.

Today’s beer is an ale loosely based on Liberty Ale by San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Company.  I’ll break it down by ingredient, and then roughly describe the process.  I’m not the expert in the house (and while we are careful we aren’t as meticulous as some brewers out there) so I acknowledge now that what I’m about to write should be taken as a loose guide only!

Malt

In brewing, Malt refers to grains (usually barley) that have been germinated, dried, and sometimes roasted.  In this recipe we’re using mostly Canadian-grown 2-row malt, which is a classic British beer malt, and a little bit of Carastan malt, a roasted malt that adds some body and sweet, toffee-like flavour.

Hops

Hops are flowers that not only flavour beer, but act as a natural preservative.  Hops add both bitterness and aroma to the beer.  We used two American varieties: Centennial and Cascade, which both have spicy, floral characters with a lot of grapefruit.

Yeast

Yeast ferments the sugars in the malt creating alcohol and CO2.  We used dry Nottingham yeast, a fairly neutral ale yeast that would let the malt and hop flavours really shine.

The Process

We used an “All grain” method for this beer, which means that we extracted all the sugars from the malt ourselves.  A quicker method that still yields excellent results makes use of malt extract and pretty much skips the mash and sparging steps I’m about to describe.

Mashing

Mashing is the process of soaking the malt in hot water to convert the complex starches into simple sugars that the yeast can easily ferment.  We use our camping cooler and diligent attention to keep the mash at the right temperature.  The sugary fluid that results from the mash is called Wort.

Sparging

Sparging combines two processes: draining filtered Wort from the mash tun (in this case our cooler) and flushing as much sugar out of the malt as possible with more hot water.  We modify our cooler to include a spigot that filters the wort through braided stainless steel cable, keeping all the grain debris out of the wort.

Boiling and Hopping

The boil serves three purposes.  First, it sterilizes the Wort.  Second, it purifies the Wort by removing undesirable compounds, some of which evaporate and some of which coagulate at this stage and can be removed later.  Third, the boil releases flavour from hops by releasing alpha acids.  Hops are often added at more than one stage of the boil.  Hops added early in the boil add lots of bitterness but little aroma while hops added near the end add little flavour but lots of aroma.  We added the Centennial hops at the beginning of the boil and some of the Cascades at the end.  More Cascade hops were reserved for a later stage.

Chilling

The Wort needs to be cooled very rapidly.  We used a cold water bath and ice.  We then strained out the hops and transfered the wort into the Primary Fermentor.

Fermentation and Dry-hopping

Once the Wort is cool enough, activated yeast is added and the beer is left to ferment.  The first stage, or Primary Fermentation, takes a few days – we usually let it go for a week.  During this time the fermentation is apparent from the bubbling in the bung (um, yeah) as CO2 escapes the fermentor.

When primary fermentation is complete the beer is carefully siphoned into the Secondary Fermentor (for this stage we use a gigantic glass bottle called a carboy).  For this beer we will be “dry-hopping” which means more hops are added to the Secondary to increase the beer’s aroma.  Secondary Fermentation clarifies the beer and can rejuvenate the yeast a bit.  We generally leave beer in the Secondary for two weeks.

Bottling

We don’t use kegs, so we rely on bottle conditioning to carbonate our beer.  The beer is carefully siphoned out of the secondary into another vessel and Priming Sugar is added.  The beer is then poured into bottles and capped.  The yeast in the beer gorge on this new sugar and create CO2 in the bottles.  After a few weeks in the bottles the beer is carbonated and ready to drink.

* * *

This batch is currently in the Primary, so we’ll probably get our first taste in mid-November, and it will continue to improve for several weeks after that.  This batch will produce about 23 litres of beer (about 65 standard sized bottles) from $30 worth of ingredients.  That’s about $0.46 per beer.

I’d share with you all if I could.  But please enjoy Drink Beer Day in whatever manner suits you best!  All my best, and thanks for a great year here at 365 Foods!

~ Sage

* Sorry. I don’t know who to attribute the beer mug photo to.  It’s on over 60 websites and I don’t know who the photographer is.

If someone other than me makes it.

I don’t know what it is with me trying to cook hashbrowns or generally any kind of shredded potatoes in a frying pan, but it never turns out. Is the pan too hot? Am I stirring them too often? Why are they sticking so much? These are all unanswerable conundrums to me. I need a potato tutorial. I come from german potato pancake people… shouldn’t this be second nature?

Mine corned beef hash looked like this… it went from very white to starting to singe. No lovely golden brown color. *sigh*

If you want to make corned beef hash, I would recommend any of the three fork or better recipes on epicurious. I wouldn’t presume to give you directions at this point!

~Dea

ps: OMG!! THIS IS MY SECOND LAST BLOG POST!!! Where did the year go??

You can make pancakes with those ingredients, for one thing, and thin crepes are a family favourite around here.

But friends of mine variously claimed that the best breakfast consists of steamed buckwheat noodles with soy sauce, Vietnamese Pho, and a fruit shake with protein powder. And an ex-boyfriend of mine was partial to a bowl of cold curry in bed in the morning (we’re no longer together…). So today we celebrate diversity as well.

Different countries like different things for breakfast – in Holland, it’s almost always a slice of dark bread with ham and a fried egg. In France, a bowl of good coffee and Croque Monsieur, the cholesterol-heavy fried ham and cheese sandwich of Paris sidewalk cafes. Maybe cold curry is a popular breakfast item in Delhi?

My friend Cy Marney (who hails from the southwest US) made a key observation: there’s the best breakfast, and there’s the best-tasting breakfast. For him, the “best” breakfast is yogurt with fresh berries and granola, but the “best-tasting” breakfast as a green chili enchilada with fried eggs on top. Ah yes, the old good for you versus tastes good dilemma.

Funnily enough, that exact choice became apparent when I made the “best breakfast ever” – which incorporated some (but definitely not all) of the suggestions above.

Three lucky teenagers woke up to a table spread with organic yogurt with honey granola, maple syrup and fresh strawberries; banana-blueberry French toast with creme fraiche; and crepes with maple syrup and crispy bacon. And coffee and orange juice, of course.

This breakfast called on the tastes of three different countries – France for the crepes, California, USA for the granola, and England for the French toast – because yes! It’s a recipe from my favourite (in so many ways) chef, Jamie Oliver.

Despite my best intentions, I personally passed over the granola and yogurt and focussed on the crepes, bacon, and French toast. Given the choice, my tastes became clear…

So what’s your idea of the best breakfast?

It’s been a pleasure being part of 365 Foods – thank to everyone!
~ Deb

Banana Blueberry French Toast, from Jamie Oliver:

Ingredients:
White bread slices
2 eggs
sugar
blueberries (and any other fruit you like)
banana
butter for frying
Creme fraiche

Method
Trim crusts from bread. Beat eggs with sugar. Toss blueberries with sugar and mix with mashed banana. Dip bread in egg, let excess drip off. Place dollop of fruit mixture in middle of bread and press another slice on top. Fry in butter til golden on both sides. Serve with a dollop of creme fraiche and any remaining fruit mixture.

French Crepes

Ingredients
1 cup white flour
1 egg
1 tsp salt
1.5 cups milk

Method
Put flour in bowl, make hole in middle. Crack egg in middle and sprinkle salt in as well. Whisk till lumpy, start adding milk bit by bit til batter in smooth. Leave to sit for 10 minutes. Fry ladlefuls of batter in butter on medium-high heat, turning the pan to spread it out – keep a stack warm in the oven til you’re ready to go. You have to watch these closely or they will burn – but don’t worry, the first pancake is almost always a write-off!

How many times have you been out for dinner when the food was mediocre at best but the service MADE the meal? Or a phenomenal dinner has been raised to sublime by the quality of the service?

That’s just the service we see: the “front of the house” staff whose job it is to make us feel intelligent,special, valued. A long retired veteran of service myself, I admit to sometimes taking that kind of thing for granted. After all, IT’S THEIR JOB to provide good service, right?

Well… I have had the pleasure of many, many dining experiences, from “fine” to “basic”, where the employees from front of house to back have worked exceptionally as a team to elevate the experience. From the care taken in preparing and plating the food to the genuinely friendly and helpful service. I was in a “family” restaurant yesterday in Vallejo, California. Burgers, omelettes, that kind of thing (not even licensed, much to Jim’s horror and dismay!). it could have been scary – bad part of town and all that – but the staff made it awesome. And it paid off. The place was packed, on a sleepy Friday afternoon in an area closely resembling a ghost town.

It should be recognized, though, that the food service employees I’ve mentioned so far at least have a chance of reaping a reward – in the form of gratuities or a share in them – for their service. but as I discussed on “National Food Checkout Day” (you’ll have to do a search for it; I’m currently blogging from the hotel bathroom on my Blackberry), the very inexpensive food we enjoy in North America comes with a very high social (and environmental) cost.

That cost is borne by “invisible” food service employees working for subsistence or starvation wages. Often these are recent immigrants without whose “unskilled” and poorly-remunerated labour the entire “cheap food” system depends.

What can we do about it? There is no easy answer. As discussed earlier, we have to steel ourselves to pay the REAL cost of what we consume. This may mean living slightly less “large”. We also have to resist further efforts to drive down the minimum wage. Support public education. I could go on. The point is, we KNOW there are real social costs to a cheap hamburger at a fast food joint. We’ve heard it all before. We just have to start making choices instead of blithely pretending everything’s ok.

In the meantime, raise a glass with me to all of the food service employees you’ve benefitted from in your lifetime. If you ARE a food service employee, raise a glass for yourself.

And the next time you go out for dinner, look at the food on your plate (or the burger in its wrapper) and think of how much it really cost.

~ Eva

Like Sage, I’m not really a fan of doing yet another blog about something sweet. And to be quite honest, when it comes to chocolate (I know, I know, “white” isn’t really chocolate, but anyway), I prefer mine dark. With maybe some sea salt.

So I’m going to tell you about pizza instead. Yes, we’ve already blogged about pizza. Several times in fact. But when Janelle and Deanna blogged recently about cheese pizza, I was inspired to try my hand at the amazing dough Janelle’s been on about. Including her special “retarded fermentation” trick.

But since she’s already told you all about that, I had to do something special to make my pizza worthy of mention.

Oh, I know: oven-roasted tomatoes and sage pesto (with roasted garlic). Yum.

The trick to oven-roasted tomatoes is time. I happened to have a lot of that, which is good. You slice a goodly amount of plum tomatoes in half lengthwise. Place on parchment-covered cookie sheet and add about 1 head of peeled garlic cloves. Drizzle the lot with a good extra-virgin olive oil, sprinkle on some fleur de sel and freshly-cracked pepper, then throw in a 250° oven for about 4 hours (keep an eye on the garlic; it will probably be ready after two hours). I didn’t want my tomatoes completely dried, which would have taken about 8 hours (or overnight). 

ready to go!

 Roasting tomatoes this way completely concentrates the flavour, giving a burst of rich tomatoey goodness on the pizza.

roasted tomatoey goodness

Sage pesto: blanch a big bunch of sage by immersing in boiling hot water, removing immediately and plunging into an ice bath.

ice bath with some of the sage

Dry the sage as well as possible and place in a food processor. Add in about half the roasted garlic (put the rest on the pizza itself), about 1/2 C of some toasted nut (I used walnuts – they went really well with the sage). Grate in about 1/2 C of parmesan (more to taste) and add a pinch of salt and some freshly-cracked pepper. Process, drizzling in extra-virgin olive oil until smooth. I usually stuff my leftover pesto into an ice cube tray and freeze it. The next time you want pesto, you’ve got handy little cubes in your freezer.

To my pizza I added garlic-butter brushed prawns (lightly grilled) and some goat brie to tie it all together.

The finished product. Soooo good!

Divine.

xx Eva

I think we’ve got it covered.

So, today I am “waving my magic wand” as we say, and decreeing that September 22nd be dedicated to something more wholesome: Bread.

No Knead Bread

Participating in this blog has fueled my interest in bread-baking.  Previous experiments with sourdough starter and home-baked bread wistfully convinced me that I really didn’t have a bread-baker’s schedule, but I’ve never been able to shake the desire to bake, and the blog has only magnified it.  I can’t count the number of times since reading J’s Cinnamon Roll post that I’ve reminded myself to buy the Tassajara Bread Book, nor can I count the number of online bread articles that I’ve lovingly saved into my bookmarks folder.

Eva didn’t know this.  She also didn’t know how much I enjoyed her blogs on Sourdough Rye and Homemade Bread. Yet somehow she was inspired to buy me “My Bread” by Jim Lahey.  I swear she didn’t know I had pored over a half-dozen articles about this guy and his breads.  A couple of nights after gleefully receiving the book I sat down and read it cover to cover.  Then I bought bread flour and started baking.

If you’re not familiar with Lahey’s basic method it is quite phenomenal.  You mix wet dough using a teeny amount of yeast, let it sit for 12 to 18 hours, fold it over a couple times, let it rise for another hour or two, and bake it inside a pre-heated dutch oven or similar lidded vessel inside your oven.  No kneading.  No fussing.  The result is a beautiful crusty boule with a rustic, chewy crumb.

There will be times when you want a soft, fine crumb, and times when you want the ritual of kneading.  There will be times you need a loaf in a few hours rather than a day.  But the effort-to-outcome ratio on Lahey’s recipes is astounding, and it’s great to have recipe options that don’t gobble up big blocks of (active) time.

I can’t recommend this book enough.  It’s full of instructive photographs and helpful guidelines.  Beyond the incredible assortment of bread and pizza recipes in the book, he offers up instructions for making condiments and sandwich fillings as well as recipes to make use of stale bread.

To get familiar with his techniques I started with the basic bread.  My second effort was the Pizza Bianca – a foccacia-like flat bread baked on a pizza stone.  The hardest thing about all this baking is deciding what to make next.

So, I offer great thanks to Eva for giving me an easy outlet for my baking desires.  And of course to Jim Lahey and all the other tremendous bakers out there who will inspire my efforts for years to come.

~Sage

Here’s a little photo essay of nearly everything I ate in 36 hours. You could judge me… or just admit you’re jealous!

1:30 pm – E and I hit the famous farmer’s market. We’re both starving. First stop was the House of Poland, for pirogies and chicken meatballs.

2:00 – full of potato dumpling goodness, we turn to Rogue Ales to quench our thirst. Bonus points to American farmer’s markets for allowing beer at the market.

2:45 – we’re already tired of walking. It’s hot. Better try a wheat beer (sadly, can’t remember what this was called). Eva?

3:00 What goes with beer better than pretzels!

3:15 Yay! B is here! More beer!

5:00 – we retreat to our room (and our room’s goldfish) after sampling our hotel’s free wine tasting. We brought Jerry a goldfish cracker for company.

8:00 We’re at Higgins, a french bistro inspired restaurant in south downtown. We start the evening with a lovely bottle of Gewurztraminer from Amity, an Oregon winery.

8:15 – B’s house made charcuterie plate arrives… which I help her devour. Amazing duck mouse, with an aspic topper. and I get to try lardo for the first time! Gold star for this plate!

8:16: fresh mussels in a garlic/ jalapeno broth. yum.

9:00 – Rissotto with heirloom tomatoes, fennel sausage and a pesto garnish.

9:30 Chocolate pot du creme, with the most perfect blackberries you have ever seen!

9:40 – I’m so funny, I make E and B cry.

10:30pm — long slow waddle home, after more wine. No photo available of either the wine or the waddle.

<<<Insert a nice long sleep here>>>

10:30 am! We’re up an at them. Mimosa, espresso and apple cider at the Bijou Cafe. On discovering our canadianess, the waiter proposes marriage, revealing that he wants to be able to fly fish more than 10 days a year. Nobody bites.

11:00 french toast with blackberry compote and whipped cream! B’s bacon and E’s chantrelle mushroom omelet also a hit.

2:00 – lunch in the Mississippi neighborhood of Portland. Big salads and a quesadilla. Lots of water for me, and a beer for E. The girls followed this up with a stop a the icecream store for chocolate and salted caramel cones…or was it honey lavender?

8:00 Dinner! This time at the Irving St. Kitchen in the Pearl District. Great funky decor and a lovely lovely waitress. Some of the best cocktails I’ve ever had ( you can check them out on their website). First up, Edamame puree, with radish and lightly pickles cucumbers.

8:30 a first for me…. herb roasted bone marrow! Served with pastrami marmalade, grilled peaches and a balsamic reduction. Ridiculously good.

9:30 – Oh yes I did! I ordered fried chicken (OMG!), collard greens, smashed potatoes, and country gravy (read, chicken gravy with bacon in it!). I may have been a southerner in another life.

11:30 – E and I round out the night at Portland’s famous Voodoo Donuts. I get this little guy (a “Voodoo” – raised yeast doughnut filled with raspberry jelly topped with chocolate frosting and a pretzel “stake”… looked like a penis to me) and something called an Old Dirty Bastard (raised yeast doughnut with chocolate frosting, Oreo’s and peanut butter). Eat 2 bites of both, and then collapse into a food coma.

Thus ends our time in Portland. Somehow I have to tell you about the amazing meal I had at Anchovies and Olives two nights later in Seattle (geoduck ceviche! Gnocchi w/ swiss chard, bacon and chantrelles!) . But I can’t right now, I’m stuffed.

~Dea