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.

Leftover Lentils Breakfast Pizza

Part salad, part sandwich, part eggs and toast... hard to pin down, but entirely moreish.

(This is a Free Style entry into the Lentil Recipe Revelations Challenge: keep reading to find out how to help us win!)

Use up leftovers from the fridge to make this protein-packed breakfast pizza.  Makes a good breakfast, a great lunch, or a really fantastic post-workout snack.

Smoky Lentil & Egg Breakfast Pizza

1/2 c. canned green lentils*, rinsed and drained
1/2 med yellow or white onion*, minced
1 small fresh pepper, minced (hot or sweet, whichever you prefer at breakfast/brunch/post-workout-snack hour; we used jalapeno)
7 cm (~2.5 inches) section of chorizo , diced
1/3 c. crumbled feta or queso fresco (use queso fresco if you have it, it's difficult to come by here so we used feta)
2 lemon wedges**
pinch of salt
1/4 tsp smoked hot paprika
2 small naan bread or 2 greek pita
olive oil for drizzling
2 handfuls of leafy greens such as arugula, turnip green, spinach or kale
2 eggs

*a good way to use leftovers from the rice & lentil cakes with dal recipe
** might be leftover from your dinner party bar...

Preheat oven to 375F and line a baking tray with parchment paper or a silicone liner.

The cooked or canned lentils, the smoked paprika and the lemon wedges
are MUSTS.  Pretty much anything else can be swapped for something
else in your fridge or pantry.  I just can't put The Moose Curry Experience
guarantee behind it.

In a bowl, mix together lentils, onion, pepper, chorizo and cheese.  Squeeze lemon juice over the mixture, season with salt and smoked paprika, and toss to distribute. (If your chorizo is pre-cooked, you can stop here and have a lovely salad.)

Place naan or pita on baking sheet.  Drizzle bread with a reasonable but generous amount of olive oil, then USE YOUR CLEAN HANDS to spread the oil evenly over the bread.  Don't wash your hands yet.  Use your oil-covered hands to transfer the leafy greens from your prep board and spread them on the bread (this leaves some oil on the greens, but not too much).  Don't wash up yet... no need to waste the oil, rub what's left into your hands as a moisturizer!

Spoon half the lentil mixture onto each bread, leaving the center free of lentils.

Carefully crack an egg into the middle of each bread (your lentil mixture is acting like a wall to keep it in place... pretty clever, eh?). Sprinkle the egg with more smoked paprika to garnish.

Transfer to oven and immediately turn the temperature down to 350F.  Bake for 22 minutes (in our oven this does a thick but still runny egg... cook more or less depending how you like your eggs). 

Serve on a plate and eat at the table, or transfer to a cutting board and eat standing up at the counter.

22 minutes at 350F gives you a hot, thick and runny yolk, just the way you should like it.  If you don't like a runny yolk (ahem, caribougrrl...) leave it in for longer, or maybe just take advantage of uneven heat in your oven and eat the more-cooked one.

Makes 2 pizzas.  Serves 4 for snacks, 2 for brunch, or 1 really hungry person any time of day.

~~~

We left you with some strange leftover ingredients the night of your Reconstructed Dal and Rice dinner party. I mean, who uses just half an onion? Part of a can of green lentils? What are you supposed to do with that?  Breakfast pizza, that's what.

So you had too much fun and stayed up too late, that's okay.  You probably woke up feeling anxious for no apparent reason... maybe you dragged your over-tired self out for a run jog speedwalk long, sluggish dog walk just to prove you hadn't really overdone it.

Anyway, you're likely hungry and looking at a bunch of bits and pieces of stuff in the fridge that don't seem to go together.  Maybe you focused so much on having everything for the party, you forgot to plan anything specific for the next day.

No problem.  This is so easy, you can make it before your first cup of coffee.   (Er, during your first cup of coffee anyway.)  Make a pot of coffee.  Take the lazy way out and stream a gentle but happy Songza playlist.  And make this salad-sandwich-eggs&toast-leftover-lentils pizza-like-thing.  

(If you managed the faster than a sluggish dog walk activity, the cooking time is exactly right for stretching.)  

I promise you won't be sorry.

~~~

Now for the shameless self-promotion. If you like this recipe, please say so! Part of the contest criteria is how well received the lentil recipes are. Leave us a comment on this page*** telling us how delicious the meal looks. Go to the Canadian Lentils Facebook Page and "like", "share", and/or comment on our recipe. Go there anyway, as it's your best source right now to find inspiration for what to do with lentils.

***there seem to be problems leaving comments from iProducts... I am still trying to figure out how to fix this, but in the meantime, feel free to leave a comment on the Canadian Lentils Facebook post!

Dandelion "Three Ways" Pizza

(I love when chefs on those reality cooking contest shows make things "three ways", so the name derives from that, they're just sensibly all in one bite, not spread out pretentiously across a platter.)

1 recipe dandelion flower pizza dough (see below)
a handful or two of semolina or corn meal
1 recipe dandelion green pesto (at room temperature so it's spreadable)
grated or crumbled feta cheese (preferably sheep's milk feta, unless you have a different preference)
1-2 large shallots, thinly sliced
1 tbsp (or more or less) dandelion capers
fresh ground black pepper to taste

Pre-heat the oven and a pizza stone on the lowest shelf to 450F.  If you don't have a pizza stone, don't panic.  You can use a baking sheet instead, but use second-to-bottom shelf or higher up.  There is a certain je ne sais quoi that will be missing from the baking sheet technique, but quite frankly if you've never used a pizza stone, you won't know what you're missing, so you won't miss it.  Ignorance is bliss and all that.  (Pizza stones are not terribly expensive and WILL change your life, so consider buying one.)

A batch of dandelion flower pizza dough will make about 4 individual pizzas (the plate in the picture is a pretty ordinary sized dinner plate).  So, divide dough into 4 portions and roll out on a semolina or cornmeal dusted board to a 7 or 8 inch diameter pizza base.  Let rise, covered by a damp cloth, until obviously thickened (~20 minutes in a warm house).  You can use as much of the dough as you need and store the remainder in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.

Spread pesto on your risen pizza dough.  The toppings of the pizza will weigh down the dough where you put them, allowing the dough where they are missing to rise more during cooking, resulting in the relatively thick pizza crust.  This is important to know so you can decide how widely to spread your pesto... it depends entirely on how much crust you want.

Cover the pesto layer with feta, cover the feta with shallot, sprinkle dandelion capers over the shallot.  Add fresh ground pepper to taste.  The toppings in the ingredient list will do for about 4 individual pizzas, so adjust for the number of servings you are preparing.  Since pizza is really photogenic at this stage, here's what ours looked like:

Slide your pizza onto the pizza stone. This sounds easy, it often is, but sometimes things go wrong... so take a deep breath and find your zen center or whatever you do to calm yourself.  The semolina or cormeal on the board will help with the slide; you may want a spatula (or clean broad putty knife) on hand to help get the pizza moving.  If you have put a lot of toppings on, these might weigh it down and make it difficult to slide, so be aware.  Hover the board just over where you want the pizza to be, slide the pizza forward as you pull the board back and voila, you pizza should land well.  This is now going to sound very cheeky, but: do try to do this swiftly so you don't lose too much oven heat.

Bake for 12-16 minutes until crust is golden brown, cheese is melty and shallots are just a bit crispy in parts.

Dandelion Flower Pizza Dough

1 c. yellow dandelion fluff
2 c. unbleached white all-purpose flour + 1/2 c. as needed + more for kneading as kneaded (heh)
1/2 tsp. salt
1 c. hot water (tap-hot, no hotter)
2-1/4 tsp active dry yeast (traditional)
1 tbsp sugar
2 tsp unfiltered extra virgin olive oil (filtered will also work, as will non-virgins)

If you can't get the dandelions out, roots and all, before they flower, the least you can do is remove the flowers before they seed, right?  To collect the dandelion fluff, pick a bunch of dandelion flowers (avoid the ones with insects) and chop off the green end, leaving you with the lovely yellow fluffy part (petals, nectar, pollen, etc.)... do this until you have 1 cup's worth.  Work quickly so they don't brown.

In a large bowl, mix together dandelion fluff, 2 c. flour and salt.

In a heat proof bowl, mix sugar into hot water, sprinkle yeast over water to proof.  When the yeast is foamy, you are good to go.  If it doesn't foam try again with slightly cooler water (in case it was too hot)... if it still doesn't foam, chances are good you need to toss out your dud yeast and make a trip to the store.

Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the yeast mixture and oil.  Stir flour mixture in gradually until smooth and elastic.  Stir in more flour, a handful. at a time until you have a soft dough.

Turn out onto a well floured surface; knead until dough is smooth and starts to push back at you (5-10 minutes). Add flour as you need it (i.e. add flour if it gets sticky).  When it's ready, if you poke it, the imprint should slowly but absolutely, surely fill back in.

Rub a little olive oil on your hands and rub your hands over the surface of the dough.  Cover loosely with a damp cloth and let rest until doubled in bulk (30-60 minutes, thereabouts, depending on how warm and how moist your house is... ours is bloody freezing so we could be waiting for a couple of hours or more).  Punch down and knead lightly to remove trapped air bubbles; let rest for 10 minutes.  Now it's ready to use.

~~~

Given the success of drawing dandelion flavour out in our vodka infusion, we decided to give it a try as a bread flavour.  A quick Google search indicated other people had also tried this, so we figured that if we were crazy, at least we had company.  Our first attempt was with whole wheat flour, but whole wheat competes too heavily with the dandelion flavour... it also just isn't nearly as pretty because that beautiful yellow gets lost.  So really, use white flour.

The taste of dandelion bread is difficult to describe.  It tastes different than regular-arsed pizza dough.  Sunnier?  Buttery?  Floral-y and nectar-y?  Depends how many martinis you tasted beforehand...

The three-ways of dandelion in one dish might sound overwhelming, but we think it works, not just as a novelty, but as a dish.  And any day that ends with fewer dandelions in the yard than it started with is a good day.