The Moose Curry Experience Best of 2014

We like to think we learn a few new tricks every year.  We certainly make an effort to.

Thanks to a good friend sending us bitters (some homemade!), we are beginning to really understand cocktails.  The Old Fashioned, however, wins the year.  

The Best 2014 Food Discoveries chez The Moose Curry Experience

As chronic gifted under-achievers, we're nearly late in getting our "best of 2014" list together, but here it is.  Our favourite new finds, new techniques and new solutions from the last year, in no particular order.

The Old-Fashioned

Curious about a note on Facebook, I asked an old friend, “Tell me about the bitters?!” to which he replied, “Check your mailbox in a few days.”  Much to our excitement (and sudden anxiety), a package containing homemade rhubarb bitters, homemade celery bitters, and some small-batch artisan-y orange bitters arrived at the post office.  Determined to do these justice, we bought better liquor than we might otherwise and did a lot of experimentation.  It feels like we are beginning to understand cocktails.  Which is as good a gift as the bitters themselves.

The complete winner though, is the Old-Fashioned...  made sacrilegiously with good floral single-malt scotch.  It was a complete and utter delight to discover that whisky can be as good in a cocktail as it is on its own.  Maybe even better in a cocktail.  Fefe likes the Old Fashioned because it can come with a maraschino cherry.  I like it because it smells like storm petrels.

Pho

Good lord, you can make pho at home!

It's what's pho dinner.  It's what's pho lunch.  It's even what's pho breakfast.  I can't think of the last time we had any leftover roast (other than fennel-rubbed pork, see below) where the carcass wasn't used for pho broth... plus all the pho broth Fefe has made from meat bought specifically for that purpose.

We had to go to Corner Brook in the late winter, not a place we would normally be thrilled to drive to in late winter, but we were looking forward to it because a Vietnamese restaurant had opened there a few months earlier.  I was dreaming of pho as the date approached.  Unfortunately, as the date approached, the restaurant was temporarily closed down and it didn't reopen until we were safely back across the island.  So disappointing.  But I couldn't stop thinking about pho.  Finally, while I was fighting a really nasty summer flu and could only breathe with difficulty out of one nostril, Fefe Noir took pity on me.  All I wanted was a bowl of chicken noodle soup, but specifically chicken pho so I could taste it.  She scoured the miracle of the internet pho recipes and it turned out to be a lot less mysterious and difficult than we expected.  So much so, it's part of our phoking repertoire now.

Za’atar

I want to ask, “How is it we’ve never used za’atar before?”, but I know the answer.  It may have existed for centuries in the middle east, but it did not exist in Newfoundland in any easily obtainable way until 2014.  Even if we’d known what we were missing before now, we couldn't have made it ourselves since sumac is impossible to find here*.

We’re in love though.  Za’atar on pita, za’atar on yogurt, za’atar on cottage cheese, in soups, in salad dressing, on eggs, dips, cooked veg, raw veg, meats of all sorts… it’s endlessly charming.

*I have a sneaking suspicion that some smug Newfoundland resident is going to tell me about some really obvious place that’s always carried za’atar and sumac.  Bring it on.  I’d like another source because the last time I bought some it was marked down to half-price, often a sign that it will disappear from the shelves forever.  I’d rather spend money right here than give it to someone somewhere else to have it mailed to me.

Grates Cove Studio Cafe

If you drive northwest-ish (as best you can following the road) from our home for long enough, all the way to the end of the road, you will arrive at the end of the earth, in a town called Grates Cove.   A place where you might find a cow tethered in someone's front yard, where there are days you can count more humpbacked whales in the coastal waters than people you will lay your eyes on.  

But as you are coming into the town, this astounding thing happens: the Grates Cove Studios Cafe.  And this is not any old cafe, it's a cafe serving Louisiana classics like gumbo and etouffe. Literally at the end of the earth.  Did I say that already? Not just gumbo either, sushi, Korean bbq and stromboli.  In rural Newfoundland! By far our best restaurant discovery of the year.

BBQ Pizza

Shockingly easy, and it really works.  Pizza can be cooked, right from the raw dough stage, on your propane bbq.

Not pizza with bbq sauce, but pizza made right there on the bbq grill.  We know other people have been doing this for a long time.  I have a reasonably clear memory of reading about it more than a decade ago in a magazine… I have a less clear memory of which magazine (Food & Drink? Martha Stewart? Canadian Living?). 

At any rate, the new-to-us technique traveled to us with some of our summer guests… during their road trip they stayed with someone who made it for them, then they made it for us.  Then we made it pretty much every week until it got too cold outside for sane people to be standing out at the grill.  However, I’m reluctant to suggest we’ll never be out there in unseemly weather... if we get a repeat of #DarkNL this year, bbq pizza could make the outdoor winter cooking list**.

**Fefe is not convinced of our ability to get dough to rise if we can't heat the house.  I'm working on a plan that involves tea light candles and the tiny tent we gave the cats for Christmas...

6-Minute Egg

What can I say?  It's a bit embarrassing for food bloggers to admit they didn't even know how to a boil an egg until well past their early 30s (there has to be a joke in there somewhere), but the 6-minute egg was something of a revelation.  Still soft, but custard-sauce-thick rather than runny yet, hard enough to be peel-able.

Soft-ish boiled eggs were obviously sexy in 2014; poached-in-the-shell and 6-minute boiled eggs seemed to be everywhere.  Eventually, Fefe tried the technique to do eggs to go into a spinach pie... when they stayed custard-like even with a second cooking, we were hooked.  Now we look for excuses to top things with egg.

Bring a pot of water to a boil, plunge your eggs in, boil for 6 minutes, remove to cold running water until just cool enough to handle, peel and they are ready for use. 

Fennel with Pork

Fennel has always gone into our pork meatballs wrapped in lemon leaves, because that’s what the first recipe we used did and it was delicious.  Somehow, that failed to sink into our minds as an epic pairing until we were watching the Jamie Oliver cooks frugally series and he rubbed a pork roast with fennel.  Suddenly it was all dings and flashing lights and air horns in our minds: pork and fennel.  Of course!  Duh.  And holey shirts, what a lot of fennel we’ve been through since that moment.

As a matter of interest, you can make an outstanding bean soup with the bones and scraps of a fennel-crusted slow-cooked pork butt.

A Cast-Iron Griddle

The cast iron griddle pretty much lives on our stove nowadays.  

We can cook more than one tortilla at a time!  More than one pancake!  Enough peppers and garlic for a big pot of romesco sauce.  All the peppers and tomatillos for a batch of salsa.  Bacon and eggs AT THE SAME TIME.  Bacon and eggs and toutons, if you like.  Or just an army of toutons. Moose sausage for all our friends and relatives (if one of our friends or relatives would give us some moose sausage...).  

And, if you turn it over, there's a grill we haven't even started to use yet.

NOMA Cookbook

The NOMA cookbook entered our home in the summer of 2014.  It is a beautiful thing.  There's an almost perverse sincerity oozing from the pages.. the earnest dedication to a food politic/ ethic/ morality in the essays.  Seriously beautiful photographs.  Paper that you want to spend your afternoon stroking because of it's genuine paper-ness.   

I will spend the next few decades flipping through this book being inspired to think more and more about food origins and locality.  I will expand my foraging and gleaning habits and pay more attention to the wildness of wild food.

I will never cook from this book.  

The NOMA cookbook recipes are beyond my comprehension; it's like the experimental jazz of cookery.  It will prod and poke and challenge, but I will always be chasing the tune rather than catching it.  I love it.

Solving the Mystery of the Wooden Spoon Handles

Over the last couple of years, our wooden spoons have disappeared one by one.  The spoon part, anyway.  No matter how diligently we made sure they were far back on the counter, no matter how well rinsed we kept them, eventually every last wooden spoon was decapitated.  We had our suspicions but careful monitoring of the, um, culmination of the digestive process in all our pets left no clues.  

But no spoon-ends appeared either, no matter how many appliances were pulled from the wall and cleaned out from under.

Shortly before Christmas, during marshmallow-making season, the culprit was caught in the act.  We are still suspicious he had some feline help getting the spoon from the back of the counter to the edge.  We now have a better system for idle wooden spoons (mason jars are a bit like duct tape as a general problem solver...).

The wooden spoon thief in his natural habitat.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Sangria is one of the most delicious drinks of the holiday season.  Use white wine for a crisp, new-years-y feel.  

White wine sangria makes a great signature drink for your holiday cocktail party: fresh, crisp, boozy, and you can make the mix the day ahead.  Added bonus: fights scurvy...

Make-Ahead White Sangria Mix for your Holiday Party

Take advantage of the peak of citrus season and use fresh-
squeezed ingredients.

Get the mix ready the day before or the morning of your party.  

1 meyer lemon, sliced
1 lime, sliced
2 clementines, sliced
4 oz brandy
juice of 1-1/2 meyer lemons, 1 lime, 3 clementines

Put the sliced fruit in a pint-sized mason jar.  Add the brandy then top with the citrus juices.  This should almost exactly fill the jar.  Make up one jar of mix for each bottle of wine you anticipate turning into sangria.

Take a moment to marvel at how beautiful those jars of citrus fruit look, then put them in the fridge until you are ready to use.  (If it's a cold enough winter, you might be able to store them in your shed or a closed in porch... if you aren't sure, don't take the chance.)

~~~

Each pint-sized mason jar of citrus-brandy mix will do one 750 mL bottle of wine.  Use the jar to measure your sparkling lemonade, mix it all together and illico presto, you have sangria.

White Wine Sangria Instructions

Make sangria in a pitcher or punch bowl (depending on the size of your party and your aesthetic sensibility) with ice.  Since it's all pre-measured, you can start with as much as you want and easily top it up as needed. For each jar of sangria mix add:

1 bottle of crisp and bright white wine (like sauvignon blanc or pinot grigio)
2 cups* of decent sparkling lemonade**

*don't bother with a measuring cup, just fill your empty mix jar to the neck
**this saves you from having to make a syrup and figure out the right ratio of syrup to soda water, and still lets you avoid the HFCS pitfall of most soda pop 

...give it a stir and you're on! 

~~~

[Hi, Mom!  You can skip this paragraph, I won't be offended...]  A million years ago when we were undergrads living in a student apartment with a then-new-friend who is a now-old-friend, we had the occasional sangria party: everyone brought a bottle of cheap red wine and piece of fruit.  A big bucket was filled with the various wines of suspect origin, some cheap brandy or maybe whisky (or whatever was handy) was tipped in, grapefruit-ish Wink soda to dilute and sweeten, and masses of uncoordinated fruit were chopped and tossed in for good measure.  When the sangria ran out and the fruit mostly consumed, anyone left standing was likely to go out for breakfast.  This bucket-of-sangria fun, I must point out, was started by previous tenants of that apartment long before we moved in... a tradition that was inherited with the apartment.  A tradition that should undoubtedly stay with the apartment, because anyone over the age of 25 is probably not immortal enough for the consequences of such an event.

If I recall correctly, sangria parties were generally spring events, something to help shake off the long cold winter.  So for the longest time, I thought of sangria as a spring or summer drink.  Bubbles, fruit, ice... what's not summery about that? 

But, lo and behold, I was wrong.  

A few years ago, I was talking warm weather drinks with a Portuguese-immigrant friend who found it amusing that I associated sangria with summer because, so far as she is concerned, sangria is for Christmas.  What an epiphany!  Even without thinking too hard about it, I am happy to defer to the Portuguese on this.  

But think about it anyway: of course sangria is a Christmas drink.  Citrus is available year-round, but December is when it’s at its peak season.  It’s the time of year we buy crate after crate of clementines and the end of the season for boxes of mandarins wrapped in thick purple paper.  Meyer lemons and early blood oranges appear on the shelves, limes become so inexpensive you can buy them in dozens without having a panic attack at the till, and heavy boxes of grapefruit pre-ordered as fundraisers for school bands finally materialize.  It’s the most wonderful time of the year indeed.

So make sangria during the holiday season.  (In a pitcher or punch bowl.  No buckets.***)

***Unless, of course, you are a student... 

And a happy new year!

The advantage of fresh but pre-measured sangria mix could become abundantly clear as
the evening progresses... 

The Oldest Cocktails You'll Ever Drink

When Fefe Noir and caribougrrl go foraging for prehistoric water, it's just the tip of the iceberg...

It's a brilliant year for icebergs in our neck of the woods.  The more icebergs that drift down from Greenland, the more likely we are to find bits and pieces washed up on shore.

Along some parts of Newfoundland's coast, collecting iceberg pieces to use for cold drinks or to melt for fresh water is an annual ritual.  Down here in the southeast corner of the island, availability is a bit more hit and miss.  It's a good year for icebergs, so we've been scouring the coast for washed up ice and undertaking the terrible job of testing cocktail recipes worthy of ancient ice cubes.

Starting with the obvious ingredient of locally brewed Iceberg Beer (if you can't find this, substitute with a mexican lager), we bring you two cocktails perfect for drinking on the porch after mowing the lawn.

This beer-garita (left) and michelada (right) are made made with beer brewed with iceberg water and chilled with a few hunks of iceberg in the glass.

Iceberg Beer Michelada

sea salt

Use an ice pick or a chisel to crack up the iceberg bits.

small hunks of ice chipped from an iceberg
juice of 1/2 lime
juice from 1/2 small sweet orange (like a satsuma or clementine)
2 tsp jalapeno syrup
most of a bottle of iceberg beer

Salt the rim of a tall glass.  Fill glass with ice. Add the other ingredients in the order they are listed, give it a quick stir and garnish with citrus wedges and sliced jalapeno.

Both cocktails are salty and spicy.  The tequila gives the
beer-garita (left) a bigger kick.  The orange juice sweetens
the michelada (right) just enough to temper the salt.

Iceberg Beer-garita

sea salt
small hunks of ice chipped from an iceberg
juice of 1 lime
3 tsp jalapeno syrup
3/4 oz. silver tequila
iceberg beer

Salt the rim of a tall glass and fill with ice.  Add lime juice, tequila and syrup.  Give it a gentle stir then top up with beer.  Garnish with slices of fresh jalapeno and a wedge of lime.

~~~

(Ground-based) Iceberg Foraging and Handling

If the tide and currents are just right, you might come across a beach littered with car-trunk sized pieces of iceberg.  These are small in the grand scheme of an iceberg life, but they can be rather awkward to lug around.  Not only are they hard to get your arms around, but they're slippery as all get out.

The icebergs we see along the Avalon peninsula in the
southeast of Newfoundland have traveled about 3000 km
on their trip from western Greenland.

Foraging for usable iceberg pieces is serious business when you don't have a boat.  (We don't have a boat.)  You have to find bergy itty-bits that are big enough to make it worth the effort of bringing them home, but small enough you can wrangle them from the beach to the trunk of your car.  You are also confined to accessible beaches, and the tides and bergs are not always cooperative.

As the icebergs melt and crack and fall apart, small pieces
sometimes drift close enough to shore to capture.

Go for a drive, sticking to coastal roads.  Try not to be distracted by the spectacular view of gigantic, prehistoric, hunks of ice floating around willy-nilly in the ocean.  Be aware of them though, because they are a good sign that you might find some washed up bits, particularly when there are trails of broken up bits and pieces drifting toward shore.

The first day we went out looking for beached iceberg was the hottest day we've had yet this year.  The sun was shining, it was warm enough to wear short pants, and it was the Saturday of a long holiday weekend.  The holiday weekend when people head out to their cabins and summer homes for the first time in the year.  The holiday weekend at the beginning of tourist season.  There were people everywhere.  Every tiny, barely used side road, every dirt track down to a beach, every lookout.  But not one hunk of ice washed up... at least not one that has survived the eye of other iceberg foragers.

So here's another tip:  go out on a cold, foggy day.  Less competition.

To increase your chances of being the person in the right place at the right time, go iceberg foraging on cold, foggy days when the competition is low.

When you do find washed up ice on a beach you can get to, you want to be sure it's iceberg ice and not annual sea ice.  The pressure of thousands of years of snowfall accumulation results in a very hard ice, much harder than what's in your ice cube trays at home (sea ice is comparatively soft).  Most strikingly, iceberg ice is filled with tiny bubbles.  The same way the ice is made from water which froze 12,000 - 100,000 years ago, those bubbles are filled with air from the same time period.  Prehistoric water, prehistoric atmosphere. 

All those tiny bubbles in the ice are what make icebergs
appear white in colour.  They also contain air from tens
of thousands of years ago when the ice formed.

Despite all that air, the ice is heavy, so remember to lift with your legs.  If you have a pair of gloves handy, this will make the trip back to the car with your armload of ancient ice more comfortable.  You will get wet.  Waves will inevitably wash over your feet while you are wrestling the ice up to the tide line.  Your shirt will be soaked from carrying the berg, because, well, it's wet to begin with, and your body heat is enough to melt it a bit while you lug it.  So either wear your rubber boots and rain suit, or consider the frozen wetness a hazard of doing business... part of immersing yourself in the experience.

(Your mother-in-law's job during iceberg foraging trips is, apparently, to provide helpful advice from the back seat of the car.  She will be worried about your wet shirt.  Pay her no mind, it's not actually possible to catch the flu from an iceberg.  Also, unless you only took fist-sized pieces, she is wrong about it melting before you get home.)

If you wade out at all to retrieve ice, bear in mind that the water is still really cold this time of year.  Unless you're geared up with insulated waders, don't stand in it for too long.  Even prehistoric ice in your drink is not worth hypothermia.

Once you get it home, let the ice sit out for several hours to shed the salty seawater and any other surface contaminants.  If necessary, use a hammer and chisel to break it into hunks which will easily fit in your freezer.  Wrap well and freeze until needed.  Use the chisel again (or an actual ice pick) to break into drink-sized hunks.

If you want iceberg water, chisel into pieces small enough to maneuver into food-safe containers and leave it out to melt.  Bearing in mind that we've stopped heating the house because it's May (never mind that it's only a few degrees above freezing out, I'm in winter-denial): a large saucepan filled with iceberg pieces took nearly 3 days to melt completely, but there was enough for a pot of coffee by the time a day was gone.

~~~

Why bother with icebergs?  

There's something incredibly compelling about knowing you are holding the air and water that existed tens of thousands of years ago.  If you buy the local propaganda around iceberg products, this is water in it's purest form.  The scientist in me would argue that distilled water should be more pure, but there's no romance in distillation.  To be fair, this ice was formed before humans started burning petrochemicals and tossing plastic into the ocean, so the air and water is untainted by the industrial age.  I'm willing to forgive a bit of volcanic ash and some woolly mammoth farts captured in the Greenland glacial sheet, and think of it as the cleanest water available.  Plus, it's really really old, and that's just super cool. (Heh.  Get it?  Super cool...)

Get some really good coffee beans and use iceberg water
to brew up what might be the best cup of coffee you'll ever
drink.  

Definitely use the ice in cocktails. For one thing, it's a great conversation starter at a party.  For another, it's an excellent way to show off in front of your friends.  But also melt some water out and make coffee with it.  Trust me, it makes a seriously good cup of coffee.  Do NOT, however, waste iceberg water on Folgers or Maxwell House.  Go out and buy some really good coffee, in the form of fresh-roasted beans and grind it yourself.  Serendipitiously, we recently won some great coffee from Got My Beans through a The Food Gays giveway... definitely iceberg-water-worthy.

Choose ice that is small enough to handle, but big enough to be worth the effort of  the expedition.  After that, the choice is arbitrary.  This one reminded me of Tiktaalik emerging from primordial soup.  I left it because, well, it's creepy.

One of my all-time favourite Newfoundland words is "maggoty" and although the Dictionary of Newfoundland English will tell you the word refers primarily to salt cod which is full of blow-fly maggots, I've never heard it used to refer to actual maggots.  In my experience, it simply gets used to express that something is riddled with something else.  St. John's is maggoty with tourists in the summer.  The coast is maggoty with icebergs.

And it is, this year.  Maggoty with 'em.  The icebergs.  We're having a crummy, cold spring (minus that one Saturday), but it's a spectacular year for bergs.  Drop everything else and take advantage of it.

The best time to visit Newfoundland if you are hoping to see icebergs is during May and into early June.  

Halloween for Grown Ups

Halloween is exhausting for kids and grown ups alike.  But the kids end the night in a sugar low, passed out clutching a big bag full of candy.  What do the grown ups get?  With a little bit of planning, a really good scotch whisky cocktail, that's what.

Peppy Scotch & Lime

2 ice cubes
1-1/2 oz ginger and black pepper infused scotch (see below)
juice of 1/2 lime

Pour scotch over ice, top with lime juice, stir once to lightly mix.  Better than a scotch and lime because it's gingery and peppery.  Better than a whisky sour because it's dry.  

Ginger and Black Pepper Scotch

6 black peppercorns
5 very thin slices fresh ginger (or more, or less to taste)
6 oz. blended scotch

A good blended scotch is better than a crummy single malt.  Plus, infusing a blend is somehow less sacrilegious than infusing a single malt.  Just don't use a crummy blend, there's no point to it.

Place the peppercorns and ginger in a clean jar; pour scotch in.  Cap with a tight fitting lid and store in a dark place for 36-48 hours.  Strain into a second clean jar to remove ginger and pepper.  Voila!  Fait accompli.  Now make a drink.

~~~

Rushing to open the door before anyone knocks so that the dogs don't start barking like a pack of ferocious cerberus every time children approach the house.  Kids wrinkling their noses at nature's candy.  (Kidding, really, caribougrrl is no longer permitted to hand out dried fruit and cheese sticks.)

"I'm not a fairy!  I'm a fairy princess."

"Can I get an extra one for my dad?"

"I'm allergic to those."

"Want to see me do my frog dance?"

"My brother is a devil without the costume too."

"Do you have anything bigger than that?"

"I'm a cat princess, silly."

"Don't you even know who Optimus Prime is?"

"Noooooooooo!  I'm Snow White The Princess."

"Want to see my other frog dance?"


How many times did you have to pick up that big bowl of candy from the bench in the front hall?  You absolutely deserve a drink.