Mulligatawny soup

Mulligatawny is an Anglo-Indian soup that is curry based. There are countless variations but this recipe is my own. A shout out goes to Ganges in NDG whose Mulligatawny has greatly inspired this one. I've had a lot of request for this recipe so I'm glad to share it. You may be put off by the amount of spices needed to complete it, but they are so worth it and this soup is really not complicated once you have them.

You can buy ground spices if you'd like. However, buying them whole and grinding them yourself will give you stronger, fresher flavours.

Servers 6 people
Ingredients

Spices

• 1 tsp black peppercorns, ground
• 1 tsp cumin seed, ground
• 1 tsp mustard seed, whole
• 1 tsp red pepper, ground
• 1 tsp of turmeric, ground
• 1 tsp of coriander seed, ground
• 1 cinnamon stick, whole
• 3 cloves, whole 
• 4 green cardamoms, whole
• 1 tsp of black caraway seeds, whole (optional)
• 1/2 tsp of curry powder

Soup

• 1/2 cup of yellow split peas
• 3 tbsp of ghee (clarified butter) or regular butter
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 inch piece of ginger, minced or grated
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 2 carrots, diced
• 2 parsley roots (or parsnips if you can't find this), diced
• 3 tbsp of all purpose flour
• 2 potatoes, cubed
• 6 cups of vegetable of chicken broth
• 1/2 cup of coconut milk
• juice of 1 lemon
• 1 large handful of fresh cilantro

Step 1: Cooking the yellow split peas

Rinse the split peas thoroughly under cold water. Place in a saucepan with 2 cups of water. Bring to a boil and simmer, covered for roughly 45 minutes until the split peas fall apart. Drain and set aside. You can begin the rest of the soup during this cooking time.

Step 2: The spices and soup base

Mix all the spices in a small bowl.

Melt the ghee or butter in a large saucepan on medium heat. Add the garlic, ginger, and onions and cook for roughly 5 minutes, until the onions have softened. Add the carrots and parsley root (or parsnip) and cook for another 5 minutes.Add your spice mix and cook for 1 minute, until fragrant.

Add the flour and mix and cook thoroughly for 2 minutes. You've just created a roux which will help thicken your soup and give it more texture. Slowly add your broth to the saucepan, stirring constantly.

Keep stirring while bringing the broth to a boil. To quicken this process, you can always boil your broth separately before using it. A whisk is quite helpful as well at this point. Once your broth starts boiling, you'll notice that it will thicken as well. 

Add your potatoes, lower the heat and cover the pan. Simmer until tender, around 15 minutes. Fish out and remove the cloves, cardamom pods and cinnamon stick. You can always leave them in, but your guests may not appreciate biting into something hard when eating the soup. Add the split peas, coconut milk and lemon juice. 

Heat through. When ready to serve, add the cilantro. If you add the cilantro too early, it will lose all of it's brightness and freshness.

Serve hot with fresh naan bread and a wedge of lemon per bowl. 

Creamy Caramel Cheesecake

I love this cheesecake. I don't post many desserts since I don't have much of a sweet tooth. So it came as a surprise to me how much I enjoyed this recipe and wanted to share it with you. It's made with toffee bits which are melted in the cheese batter as it bakes. I also love the unexpected and pleasant surprise of a thin layer of chocolate between the crust and the cheesecake filling.

This recipe is adapted from the Bite Me recipe book by Julie Albert and Lisa Gnat.

Feeds 12 people
Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cups of Graham baking crumbs (original recipe calls for Oreo crumbs, so pick whatever you prefer)
• 1/2 cup of melted butter
• 1/4 cup whipping cream
• 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate
• 4 x 250g packages of cream cheese, room temperature
• 1 cup of sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 1 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract
• 2 cups chopped toffee bits (see picture below for reference)
• 1/4 cup caramel sauce (store bought or you can make your own)

Found in most grocery stores

Step 1: The crust

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Take a 9 inch loose bottom pan and wrap the outside with aluminum foil. This helps prevent any messes caused by potential leaking from the cake. Mix the baking crumbs with the melted butter and press this mixture over the bottom and halfway up the sides of the pan.

Melt the chocolate with the whipping cream in a saucepan and pour evenly over the crust. Chill the crust in the fridge while you prepare the filling.

Step 2: The filling

With an electric mixer, beat the cream cheese together until smooth.

Before

After!

Gradually add the sugar to the cheese and mix together. Add the eggs one at time until well blended in.

Your filling should have more of a liquid consistency now. Don't forget to scrape the bottom of your mixing bowl once in a while to make sure there isn't any unmixed clumps of cream cheese stuck there. Add the vanilla extract and mix in the toffee bits.

Step 3: Baking the cake

Your filling is now complete. Pour it into your pan on top of the prepared crust. Spoon the caramel sauce over the top of the filling. Don't worry if some of it sinks in, it will still taste good!

Place your pan on a baking sheet on the medium rack of your over. Bake for 1h15 minutes. Depending if you have a convection oven or not, you may require more time. Mine needed maybe another 10 minutes more than this time to be completely set in the middle.

Remove from the oven and let the cheesecake cool to room temperature. Cover with a plastic wrap and chill for several hours before serving. The longer the better. Enjoy!

Jamie Oliver's Salmon en Croûte

I recently made this recipe for a group of friends and the feedback was positive enough for it to warrant some writing space on my blog. It is adapted from Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution cookbook (which has great, unpretentious and no-nonsense recipes). It's basically salmon with various toppings including cheese cooked in puff pastry. Salmon has a robust enough flavour to not be overpowered by the savory ingredients of this recipe.

Feeds 6 people
Ingredients

• 800g salmon fillet (I remove the skin but you can leave it on if you prefer)
• 1 package of puff pastry (I use Tenderflake, thawed)
• some flour for dusting
• olive oil
• salt and pepper
• 1/4 cup of tapenade (black olive paste)
• fresh basil leaves
• 2 ripe tomatoes, sliced
• 4 regular size bocconcini (fresh mozzarella), sliced
• 1 egg

Step 1: Preparing the puff pastry

Preheat your oven to 400°F. It's good to work quickly with puff pastry because keeping the dough cold will yield better results. Roll it out using a rolling pin and some flour to prevent it from sticking. Roll it out to the same size as the pan you will be using, roughly 6" by 12".  

Step 2: Preparing the filet and the toppings

Season your fillet with salt and pepper and a little drizzle of oil.

Place the fillet seasoned side down in the middle of the puff pastry. My fillet is extra big because I was feeding many people. 

Spread on the tapenade.

Then place your basil leaves on the fish, along with the sliced tomatoes and bocconcini pieces. Sprinkle with more salt and pepper and drizzle again with olive oil.

Step 3: Baking your salmon

Gather up the edges of the puff pastry around the salmon fillet and brush the pastry with some egg wash.

Place in the over (middle rack worked fine for me, but Jamie Oliver recommends to put it at the very bottom of the oven). Place an empty pan on the rack above your salmon to protect the top from over browning. Bake for roughly 35 minutes and there you have it!

Crudessence

In an effort to expand my horizons in the word of veganism, I decided to drag my husband down to one of Montreal's most known vegan restaurants: Crudessence. Not only does Crudessence serve vegan only, the food is also completely bio, gluten free, and "alive". Alive meaning raw, or at least mostly raw.

We dined at the Crudessence on Mackay (there is also one on Rachel). We went on a Saturday night and even though we were only two I had made reservations. I highly recommend to do this because half an hour after we arrived, the place was packed.

Drinks

I think that the choice of drinks is one of the best thing about Crudessence. They have a wide variety of selections, including hot chocolate made with coconut butter and cashews as well as teas and tisanes. They also have a fun selection of juice mixes, smoothies, and elixirs, which are not cheap (6.25$ for 9 oz) but totally worth it in my opinion. 

Anthony had the Ruby Lips, which is a mix of apple, carrot, beet, and ginger topped with a watercress garnish. This is a beautiful mix of flavour which worked quite harmoniously.

I had the Kombu Mojito. This juice is more on the acidic side, which I very much enjoyed. It has pineapple, mint, lemon, and kombucha. Now I had no idea what kombucha was, so I looked it up after I had it. According to wikiepida, kombucha is a effervescent fermentation of sweetened tea that is used as a functional food and the kombucha culuture is actually a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast...Yummers! In any case, it was quite tasty and I would definitely have it again. It's good to have a dose of symbiotic bacteria and yeast once is a while.

Appetizer

Not knowing what to pick, we went for the Discovery plate, which is a mix of appetizers to sample.

The two tall shot glasses had the raw soup of the day, which was a carrot and apple soup. It tasted good. You can't really go wrong with carrots and apples though. There was some hummus, and a nut yogurt which, again, good but somewhat forgettable. 

I was also disappointed with the crispy kale. It felt like we had the bottom of the batch with very small broken pieces with little taste. I honestly have done a better job at home with crispy kale than what what served here. 

The maki rolls were good. They were made with sprouts and a vege pâté which tasted like salmon. I also enjoyed the faux-egg pâté, which tasted like the inside of a deviled egg. As you can see, the presentation is quite lovely and very pleasing to the eye. 

Main course

Crudessence is know for the Öm Burger, so my husband decided to try it out.

It doesn't look like a hamburger at all. The patty is a mix of vegetables, mushrooms, flax seeds and sundried tomatoes. The bread is chapati, (Indian flat bread) topped with a caper aïoli sauce which tastes like mayonnaise. For an extra 1.25$ each, you can get a slice of butternut squash cheese and eggplant bacon. For another extra 3.75$, your burger comes with a delicious salad. This dish was very good. You wouldn't mistake this burger for a meat burger, but the flavours were fantastic and satisfying  The salad was worth the extra money as it has many different levels of vegginess to it and is quite fun to explore.

I picked my main course for the specials menu. It's called the Samurai.

You can't tell much from the picture, but underneath all that greenery, there's a generous serving of soba noodles (buckwheat noodles) served with goji berries, kale, arami (type of seaweed), shitake mushrooms, and veggie balls. Unfortunately, I was not overly fond of this dish. The biggest problem were the soggy noodles. They were quite overcooked (so much for raw food) and therefore mushy and unpleasant to eat. The overall flavours were good and I enjoyed the veggie balls, but after experience fantastic Japanese restaurants like Kazu and Imadake, I suppose I was bound to be disappointed with Crudessence's take on Japanese cuisine.

Dessert

First up is the the blueberry un-cheesecake. Again, my husband hit the jackpot with this one. It was fantastic! The cheese is made from fermented cashews (again, yummers) and coconut oil and the crust is made with Brazil nuts and fig. I honestly thought that this tasted better than regular cheese cake, it was that good. I'm going to try to look up a recipe for this and attempt to duplicate it.

Next came my dessert: the Brownie. As much as I raved over the cheesecake, I wholeheartedly disliked this brownie. Raw cocoa, pecan, and walnut based. I suppose the rawness is what made it taste so dry. However, what I think was the most unforgivable about this dessert is the fact that the walnuts were rancid. For a restaurant that prides itself on fresh raw bio ingredients, this was very unfortunate. I'm glad I paid the extra 2.75$ for the ice cream side, because it was very pleasant and a good way to wash down the aftertaste of rancidness.

Service

Overall, the service was okay. Our waitress was very pleasant but overworked due to the busy evening. They only had two waitresses when they would have obviously needed a third. As a result, the service was a bit slow and the wrong dessert was brought to me at first (which, in retrospect, I should have kept). Again, I don't blame the waitress, she was really nice and knowledgeable about the food.

The verdict

Would I go back to Crudessence? Obviously, if I had ordered my husband's menu choices I might have said yes. However, due to mushy noodles and rancid nuts, and a 110$ bill, I have to say that I would not purposely go back at my own initiation. I would gladly try it again if I'm invited and hopefully make better menu choices. I believe Crusdessence has a lot of potential, but is easily a hit or miss experience.

Thai shrimp dumpling soup

This is a long recipe, but worth it. Anybody who likes Thai food and shrimps will fall in love with it. Every time I've done it, it's been an amazing hit, with lots of oohs and aahs from my dinner guests.

This recipe is inspired greatly by the shrimp dumpling soup in the Diva Cooking recipe book from Victoria Blashford-Snell and Jennifer Joyce. Mostly, I've changed the flavour from a Tom Yum soup to a red Thai curry soup. It's relatively easy to make if you have a food processor, but there are many steps involved. Don't be put off by some of the more exotic ingredients, you can find almost all of them in larger supermarkets. And if you have an Asian market nearby, all the better.

Step 1: The curry paste

The base of this soup and basically what gives it it's distinctive flavour is a red Thai curry paste. You can, of course, buy it at the supermarket, but I like to make my own. Believe me, you will taste the difference and there's something very satisfying about making curry from scratch.

Ingredients

• 3 to 6 chilies, seeded if you prefer less heat
• 2 tsp coriander seeds
• 1 tsp of cumin seeds
• 1/2 tsp paprika powder
• 1 tsp of ground turmeric
• 4 shallots
• 4 garlic cloves
• 1 inch piece of chopped ginger
• 4 cilantro roots (make sure you buy cilantro with the roots still attached)
• 2 tbsp chopped cilantro stocks
• 1 tsp of lime zest
• 2 lemongrass stems (trimmed, white parts only) or 3 tbsp of lemongrass paste
• 1 tsp of shrimp paste (found in Asian supermarkets, can be substituted with anchovy paste)
• 2 kaffir lime leaves (you can find these at Loblaws with the GDion spices)
• 2 tbsp of vegetable oil

Kaffir lime leaves

Lemongrass

Toast the seeds on a dry frying pan over medium heat until fragrant and ground to a powder. Place all of the ingredients in a food processor.

Before

Process until smooth. Don't worry if there are still some chunks left, mine never gets completely smooth. You can add a bit of water if it's the paste is too thick.

After

Keep in an airtight container in the fridge until ready to use. The curry paste should last around 2 weeks in the fridge.

Step 2: The shrimp dumplings

What you will need to feed 4 greedy people or 6 regular people.

Ingredients

• 2 garlic cloves
• 2 inch piece of ginger root
• 2 shallots
• 2 pounds of raw shrimps, shell on (very important)
• 2 egg whites
• 2 tsp of cornstarch
• 4 tbsp of chopped fresh cilantro
• salt and pepper

Peel the shrimp and set aside the shells for later. You will use them in your stock.

Place the garlic cloves, ginger and shallots in a food processor and pulse until finely chopped. Add the rest of the ingredients and process until it forms a rough paste. Chill until needed.

Yummy shrimp purée!

Step 3: The stock, part 1

Next step is making your stock.

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp of vegetable oil
• reserved shrimp shells
• 8 cups of water
• 2 inch ginger root, chopped
• 6 garlic cloves, sliced
• 1 handful of cilantro stalks, chopped

Heat the oil over medium heat and add the shrimps shells. Cook until shells are pink.

Add the rest of the stock ingredients. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and cover. Simmer for 20 minutes.

Strain the stock into a bowl and discard the solids.

Step 4: The stock, part 2

Now that you have a flavourful liquid ready for your soup, it's time to add that wonderful paste you made earlier along with the finishing touches.

Ingredients

• 1 tbsp of vegetable oil
• 3 tbsp of Thai red curry paste
• 1x14oz can of coconut milk
• 4 lime leaves
• 2 tbsp of Thai fish sauce (available in Asian section of food markets)
• juice of 1 lime
• 1 cup of fresh mushrooms, chopped (Enoki mushrooms are wonderful in this recipe, but you can use shitakes, brown shimeji, or whatever you like)
• 1 can of baby corn, drained and cut in half
• 1 handful of basil leaves, torn
• 1 handful of cilantro leaves, chopped

Heat the oil over medium heat in the saucepan. Add the curry paste and fry for roughly 1 minute. Add the stock from part 1 and the rest of the ingredients except the basil and cilantro. Bring back to a boil and simmer for 5 minutes.

Now it's time to make the shrimp dumplings. Using a teaspoon and sightly moist hands, form the shrimp mixture into little balls and drop them into the simmering soup. Cook them for a few minutes until the balls float to the top.

Ladle into bowls and garnish with basil and cilantro and you're done! You won't believe how tasty it is, especially after all that hard work. I've tried many soups in Thai restaurants and this tastes just as good if not better.

Savour every bite!

Making and baking a good pizza

I have been trying for so long to make a half decent pizza dough. My standards are high because I'm half Italian and the people in my family make fantastic pizzas, especially my dad. Not bothering to compete with the best, I wanted to find my own unique way of creating a good pizza. And after many, many failures and handfuls of cornmeal scattered around the floor of my kitchen, I can finally say with pride that I know how to make a damn good pizza!

I want to share with you what worked for me and hopefully save some of you the hardships that I had  to endure. Just like any recipe, you have to find out what works best with your tools and your own style of cooking. Please note that the following instructions work best for a thin crust pizza. I think that I have a lot of helpful information in this post, but feel free to experiment and change things up to figure out how to make your pizza even better!

Okay, here goes.

 Step 1: Making the dough

First of all, the flour you use makes a big difference. There's a lot of science behind what makes a flour better than another for pizza dough. One big factor is the percentage of gluten in the flour. Gluten is a protein that will make your dough rise and give it elasticity. In the case of pizza, you need a flour with more gluten than regular white flour, but less than bread flour (which can make your crust too heavy). The answer: TIPO 00 flour.

There are different brands of this type of flour. I used this one and it's works beautifully, but any TIPO 00 should be fine. This typo of flour makes the dough easy to stretch and performs well at high temperatures. It may be hard to find in big grocery stores. I bought this at a little shop on Monkland called Le Garde Manger Italien.

Now that we have the flour covered let's move on to the recipe. I like to use a slightly adapted version of the Neo-Neapolitan pizza dough recipe from Peter Reinhart's American Pie. 

For four 10 ounce dough balls

• 5 cups of TIPO 00 flour

• 1 tablespoon sugar or 1 tablespoon honey

• 3 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt

• 1 teaspoon instant yeast (same as rapid rise yeast)

• 2 tablespoons olive oil

• 2 cups room-temperature water

Stir together all the ingredients in a 4-quart bowl or the bowl of an electric stand mixer until combined.

Fit mixer with dough hook; mix on low speed for about 4 minutes, or until all the flour gathers to form a coarse ball.Let dough rest for 5 minutes, then mix again on med-low speed for 2 more minutes, or until the dough clears the sides of the bowl and sticks just a little to the bottom.

If the dough is too soft and sticky to hold its shape, mix in more flour by the tablespoonful; if it is too stiff or dry, mix in more water by the tablespoonful.

Divide the dough into 4-equal portions; round each piece into a ball and brush or rub each ball with olive oil.Place each ball inside its own zip-lock freezer bag; let the balls sit at room temperature for 15 minutes, then put them in the refrigerator overnight.

Yes you read right, you let the dough rise in the fridge for roughly 24 hour. This rising method is becoming increasingly more popular with pizza makers. The theory behind it being that a slow rise will yield a more flavorful dough. I have tried this and it works. Don't worry if your dough doesn't rise as much as it would at room temperature, this is normal. 

Step 2: Baking the dough

The next day, freeze any dough balls you won't be using and remove from the fridge two hours in advance the ones you will use. The dough needs to be at room temperature before using.

If you don't have have pizza stone, you should get one. I'm not saying that you can't make a good pizza without one, because that's completely untrue. However, it does make a huge difference if you're looking for a wood oven style pizza from your dough. Pizza stones are not expensive (I bought mine for 15$). 

Mine is starting to get"seasoned", meaning that a non stick coating is building up with time and usage. On a side note, never wash a pizza stone with any kind of detergent because it will seep into the stone and give your pizza an unwanted je ne sais quoi flavour. Just scrape off any residue and rinse with warm water.

You'll want to preheat your oven with the pizza stone in it. You want your pizza stone to be hot before using it, or else it'll defeat it's purpose. Don't put a cold pizza stone in a hot oven, because it may crack. Crank up your oven to at least 500°F and once it reaches this temperature, wait at least 30 minutes to give the stone enough time to heat up. As for the positioning of the stone in the oven, there are a lot of different opinions about this. Some say if you place the stone too low, the bottom of the pizza will cook too fast and the top will be undercooked. Others say the opposite if you place it too high, so I just put in the middle. I say it all depends of what kind of crust you want and what type of oven you're using.

Another very useful tool is a pizza paddle.

You have no idea how many times I completely messed up my pizza trying to transfer it onto the hot pizza stone (hence the earlier reference to cornmeal all over my kitchen floor, I was using the back of a pizza pan). This baby is a life saver. Just sprinkle some cornmeal on it and you can easily transfer your pizza onto the stone will very little fuss. 

Next, form the dough. Pat dough into flat disk and let it rest to make gluten relax. 

Roll out dough on a heavily floured surface. If the dough starts to retract too much, let it rest for a few minutes before continuing. Shape your dough as you desire and transfer it to the pizza peel. At this point, it's good to have your ingredients ready in advance so that you can garnish the dough quickly. 

If you take too much time, the dough may start to stick to the pizza peel. When you're done, give the peel a few shakes to make sure the dough is loose and slides easily.

Now take you pizza peel and with a few jiggles transfer the pizza onto the pizza stone in the oven. 

Another side note: Don't use parchment paper. It may make it easier to transfer the pizza onto the stone, but the texture of the dough will be affected. Others disagree online, but I've baked two at once, one with parchment paper and one direct on the stone and there was a major difference. 

Bake the pizza for roughly 6-7 minutes, but again this all depends on how crispy you like your dough and how thick it is. Remove from oven and enjoy the wonderful, thin crust restaurant style pizza right in the comfort of your home. Takes 28 hours to prepare, 2 minutes to eat, and it's worth it.

Now that is one fine pizza, booyah!