Sometimes, when it’s really, really hot, a crazy cool-down idea will take shape around here.
Like injecting a watermelon with vodka — circa Lollapalooza ’93 — which is the last (and more age-appropriate) time I considered using a syringe to introduce alcohol into fruit. Back then it was a scheme to get booze past the festival gate checkpoint — a scheme we never got around to actually attempting… Read the rest of this entry »
A rather delicate looking salad — and a slightly more classic presentation that I gave you yesterday. So what’s on the plate?
Golden beets, soft goat’s cheese and homegrown baby greens dressed in a Roasted Tomato & Jalapeno Vinaigrette. The edible flowers are rocket and calendula — it’s almost too pretty to eat!
I said almost.
A summer salad of grilled halloumi cheese, local heirloom tomatoes, some (very) baby greens from my container garden, a squeeze of lemon, a pour of olive oil, and a crack of fresh pepper — most definitely worthy of a late afternoon lunch on the back deck.
Too bad the weather was more worthy of a sou’wester and oilskin coat ensemble.
(We ate inside.)
We loved this — talked about it for 2 days — that said, once you learn the number of steps involved to get it to its ultimate end , it’s highly unlikely that you’ll want to attempt it — even if you could find some “lamb riblets” – which is what these delectable Lamb Flat Bread Sandwiches started out as before I cooked the bejesus out of them.
A Fridgecleaner Flatbread Pizza that would have had Odysseus home years earlier.
Leftover flatbread dough, partially cooked on the stovetop, then dressed with pizza sauce from the freezer, mozzarella, mushrooms and onions, and browned in our workhorse of a countertop convection oven.
Out of the oven, we dressed them with leftover basil oil, freshly roasted red peppers, cilantro rescued from the vegetable drawer and one of my very favourite locally produced preserves…
Classic bisques are thickened with rice, but all of my culinary instructors used roux to thicken their bisques. Rice, no matter how finely you puree it, will always be grainy.
A roux is a combination of equal parts, by weight, of flour and fat that are cooked together to form a paste. The cooking eliminates the raw flour taste, and the fat-coated starch particles are prevented from congregating together in lumps when added to liquid — making roux the front runner to thicken anything you want smooth and creamy — like a bisque.
Sunday Lunch has been hijacked today, for the sake of shameless alliteration. Truth be told, I’m partial to assonance — who doesn’t prefer a little assonance? — but you can’t have everything.
“Alliteration is pleasant and precious, but some fancy assonance can make you dance in your pants,” that’s what my mama used to say.
Acutally, she never said that. And I (still) call her Mom. But I really do like assonance, if that counts for anything.
Shrimp salad on a toasted kaiser with bacon, lettuce, tomato and cucumber –aka the Shrimp Salad Club.
I like sandwiches. I like sandwiches very much indeed.
No, we’re not on bread and water rations for Sunday Lunch here at Island Vittles.
That said, if I was restricted to bread only, I would choose this flatbread as my mainstay. Do you think they`d let me have a little dip to go with it?
No, probably not. Read the rest of this entry »
Koda and I took a walk up Mt. Norman on South Pender Island last week. The new viewpoint is a lovely place to have a picnic lunch…an open-faced sandwich with cold frikadeller, lettuce, red pepper, crispy fried onions and mayo on MBM’s Seedy Light Rye.
Frikadeller? It’s a Danish cross between a meatloaf and a meatball, you pronounce it much differently than it’s spelled, and it makes probably the best meatloaf/meatball style sandwich in the universe. Read the rest of this entry »
