Smokes Like a Fish, Drinks Like a Chimney

There is something of a poetic northern-ness in a sauce made with smoked fish and vodka. Skål! 

Rose pasta sauce with smoked fish on homemade pasta.  Other than vodka, without the trimmings, is there a better way to get through the end of pantry and freezer season?

Smoked Fish Vodka Sauce with Fettuccine

2 tbsp olive oil

Use a vodka with some flavour in it, none of that invisible
stuff you bought in your teens early 20s.

10 cloves garlic, smashed (or less if you are afraid of garlic, but this really isn't overly garlicky)
2 dried red chili peppers
6 plum tomatoes, peeled and diced
4 tbsp vodka
1/4 lb of smoked char (or substitute with smoked salmon or trout), torn or crumbled into small bits
4 tbsp heavy cream
1 tbsp butter

a three-egg batch of hand-made pasta, cut in fettuccine (or wider) size


In a large skillet, heat olive oil over medium.  Add smashed garlic and chilies.  Cook, stirring, until the garlic is softened.  Increase heat to med-high and add chopped tomatoes.  Bring to a boil and reduce heat to med-low.  Stir occasionally until reduced by about a third.  Add vodka, and continue to let the sauce reduce.

Don't worry about precise chopping or mincing of
ingredients, not only will it all cook down to mush, but
you're going to blend it up anyway.

Put a big pot of water on for your pasta. (If it boils before you are ready for it, turn it down to a simmer until you are ready.)

When the tomatoes are mostly broken down and the sauce looks thick, remove from heat.  Allow to cool enough to puree in a blender.  If you are fastidious, wipe your pan clean and pour sauce back into it through a sieve.  If you can tolerate a more rustic sauce, just return the blended sauce to your skillet.

Bring back to a slow boil after adding the smoked fish, then
reduce the heat and stir in the cream and butter.  Once the
butter is melted and it's all nice and evenly combined the
sauce is ready.

Re-heat the sauce over medium. When it starts bubbling, stir in the smoked char. Cook the pasta now.  When the sauce to returns to a consistent bubble, reduce heat to low and stir in the cream and butter.  When the butter is melted and the cream is combined remove from heat.  This should happen about the same time your pasta is cooked.  Stir a wee bit of the pasta water into the sauce for good measure.  Drain the pasta and serve with sauce.

Makes 4 large or 6 moderate servings.

~~~

I like this sauce for poetic reasons as well as gustatory ones.  Although it's roots are admittedly in penne alla vodka, it's a great pasta for northern latitudes: smoked fish and vodka.  This is not a light meal, but it's not so heavy it will put you into a coma either. Good comfort food for the distressingly cold evenings we're still experiencing here.  In May.

You can almost smell the smoked char through the computer screen, can't you?  To serve, garnish with chive (admittedly, chive is, in fact, growing already) and some old hard Italian cheese like Sovrano.

We emerged from a few weeks of fog into a stretch of sunshine, so at least we're starting to build stores of vitamin D again.  Back to fog for a few days, but sun promised in the long-range forecast.  It's all a bit maddening even when the sun is shining because it looks like summer... as long as you are looking at the sky and the sea, and not at the brown hills and the leafless trees.  Yet, ridiculously, I may need to mow the lawn tomorrow for crabgrass control, but none of the desirables are out yet.*  Definitely still pantry, freezer and booze season.

*Okay, that's not technically true. The garlic is coming up nicely and just this morning our rhubarb started to leaf out.  Early flowers like snowdrops, crocus and alpine primrose are out.  But seriously, it's mid-May already.

Make hay and all that.  We'll still head out into that brilliant light, completely under-dressed for what turns out to be a very frigid coastal hike.  We'll blame the icebergs for this instead of poor planning, but we all know the ocean will be cold for months still and the chilly onshore breeze will be welcome in July.  We'll go out to garden, and be too hot with the sun on our backs, stripping down to t-shirts... until we stop moving anyway and need to pile sweaters and gloves back on.  We'll wear our sandals, even though our toes are frozen, because for two full hours one afternoon sometime last week it was warm enough to get them out and now, dammit, it's sandal season.  We'll sit out on the porch wrapped in blankets because we want to have just one beer outside.

They make really good smoked char up in Nain, Labrador.

The only real proper evidence of spring is that trout season opened on the weekend.  And although I swear the best fish for this recipe is smoked char from the Torngat Fish Producers Co-op of northern Labrador I suppose some of your home-smoked trout** would work too.

**If you want to send us some of that home-smoked trout, we'd be happy to try it out for you before you make it... you know, just in case I'm wrong...

There is a season, churn, churn, churn

Leave your food processors and stand mixers unplugged and make butter the hard way.  Be humbled and astounded by the mere fact of butter.

Make your own creamy pale yellow butter.  The bonus prize is all that lovely buttermilk.

The big piles of snow shoveled and plowed over the last few months have reduced themselves to piles of dirt, grit, gravel, chunks of asphalt, Tim Horton's cups, and unpaired mittens.  Forget the disappearing snow or the fact that we're getting more days above freezing than below.  Fog is the hope and promise of spring, don't let anyone ever tell you it's gloomy.  

Sure, there's still snow in the woods and a chance of flurries in the forecast, but it's been over a week since we've been able to see the sun through all the fog.  Gulls are mostly seen in pairs.  The crab boats are busy.  The garlic and rhubarb are emerging.  Moose-on-the-road reports have increased suddenly.  These are the most reliable signs of spring in this corner of the world.

A sure sign of spring: gulls are most commonly seen in pairs right now.

We had one actual nearly-warm and almost-sunny day in April.  Since then, no matter how cold it's been, we refuse to have more winter.  Joggers are out in shorts, people have stopped scraping their windshields, last year's popsicles have finally sold out of the stores.. if you don't believe this craziness, Little Red Chicken can confirm it.  Between the defiance-induced cold exposure and the population-level sugar high that comes with that mythical chocolate-egg-laying rabbit, we're giddily unhinged this time of year.  

There was a bit of Newfoundland silliness last week on twitter, starting with a quip about a butter-throwing local prison gang.  Quite frankly, it's hard to imagine a proper gang in Newfoundland's prison system.  Calling themselves the St. John's Mob makes it almost, well, cute.  I know they're probably feeling serious as all get out but it's all difficult to take seriously when their serious riot was negotiated to an end, reportedly, by the provision of two cigarettes*.  That's not even one cigarette per gang member.

*proof, perhaps, that no good can come of the no-smoking-in-prisons-rule... if inmates are willing to riot for two cigarettes, causing nearly $100,000 of damage, maybe there's a better solution to workplace health & safety issues, because, butter or not, it doesn't sound like safety increased.  

Here's something: two news stories I came across have referenced the butter throwing.  One story reports butter, another story reports margarine.  As though they are interchangeable.

Here's something else: when someone in Newfoundland says "butter", unless you ask for clarification, it is impossible to know whether they mean butter or they mean margarine.  Mind-boggling-ly, it's as though it makes no difference.

I'm not even going to waste blog space to debate the relative merits of butter and margarine.  There is nothing good about margarine (unless you have an allergy to butter or you are vegan).  Butter is superior in every way.  No contest, no question.

So I got to thinking about this unhappy state of things, where butter and margarine stand as equals.  There is something completely mucked up about our relationship to food if we treat these as two sides of the same coin.  They aren't even the same currency.  Have we become so distant from our food that we just shrug and say, "butter, magarine... whatever"?  Probably not you, dear lovely food-friendly readers, but nonetheless, I propose this exercise in getting up close and personal with our food:  this week, make some butter.



In fact, leave your food processors and stand mixers unplugged and make butter the hard way, so you can be humbled and astounded by the mere fact of butter.

How to Make Butter in 2 Easy Steps

 (+ 1 Demanding and Time-Consuming Step)

Putting a whisk ball or marble or other food safe object in your jar
means you are getting more work done with every shake.  We haven't
conducted the proper scientific experiment, but we think it makes the
 butter making more efficient.

1.  Fill a jar 1/2 to 2/3 full of whipping cream.

2.  Tighten the lid so it won't leak out.

3.  Shake it until it turns into butter.

It's that easy, even the hard way.**

**okay, you aren't quite done because you have to strain off the buttermilk, then wash and salt (optional) the butter...

We cultured our cream first by inoculating it with yogurt whey and letting it sit out on the counter overnight.  This is a completely unnecessary step for getting butter, but it will make the butter european-y in taste (tangy rather than sweet) and it prolongs the shelf-life.  Don't get hung up on shelf life though; you will use the butter before it goes off.

(Get a load of how clever this was:  we put some plain yogurt with active bacteria in a gold mesh coffee drip filter over our jar of cream and swished the jar around once in a while during the evening, then left the set-up overnight.  In the morning: cultured cream in the jar + yogurt cheese in the filter.  Use yogurt cheese like you would use cream cheese.)

Put your cream in the jar, screw the lid on tightly, and start to shake.  

After a bit of shaking, the whole jar will be white and full.

Keep shaking.  Take turns shaking.  If you have miniature humans in your house, particularly competitive ones, give them each a jar and see who gets to butter first.

Like any of us, you're a busy person.  You haven't got time to stand around your kitchen all day, shaking a jar of cream.  Especially a jar you are still handling with some skepticism.

So don't stand in your kitchen.  Take your jar of cream with you when you walk the dogs.

Miss Bella is a bit skeptical about whether this walk is actually for her benefit.

Shake the butter while you're running errands. 

Another sure sign of spring: potholes.  Take advantage of the plow-ravaged,
bumpy roads... seriously, take that jar of cream-turning-to-butter everywhere.
Just keep shaking.

If nothing seems to be happening, carefully unscrew the lid and put some sort of clean object in the jar.  Something that will move through the thick cream to amplify the effects of shaking.  (Fefe Noir has essentially zero patience, so we stole the wire ball with a counter weight out of our fancy whisk and dropped it in the jar.  Fefe is convinced this made the difference between getting butter and not.  I think we would have ended up with butter anyway, just not as quickly.)

If you are still waiting for the butter magic to happen, fire up Netflix and shake your jar while you watch Julie & Julia.  (How is it possible we'd never watched this before?).  What better movie for butter making?

Eventually, the thick whiteness will begin to tinge with yellow and start
to clump up.

For a long time, you will have a jar completely filled with white.  Then you'll think maybe you're seeing a tinge of yellow and some large air pockets.  You'll think that alternatively you may be losing your mind.  Then you'll notice a definite change of colour and it will feel more liquid again.  Then, in what will seem like a sudden shift, you will have butter.  Clumps of lovely pale yellow butter sitting in buttermilk.

Congratulations, you performed a miracle.  You made your own butter.

Then, all of a sudden, it's butter.  I don't know if Julia Child would approve
of such rustic pursuits as actually making it yourself, but she obviously
approved of butter.

The rest of it now is really tying up the loose ends.  The butter making has already happened.

Line a sieve with cheesecloth and drain the buttermilk from the butter.  Pour the buttermilk into clean containers and store in the fridge until you use it.  

Strain the buttermilk into a container for storing.  There are a million ways to
use it, and it's very difficult to buy genuine buttermilk in supermarkets.

Gently knead the butter to press out all the milk solids.  If you want to salt the butter, knead in about 1/2 tsp of salt per pound of butter... or more or less to taste.

Fill a large bowl with ice water.  Wash the butter by kneading it in the ice water, draining out the liquid and refilling with clean water, until the water is no longer milky.  Put it in a lidded container or wrap it in waxed paper or otherwise store it like you would store butter.

Washing the butter in ice water keeps it from melting from the heat of
your hands.

Use the butter before it goes rancid (a week or so if unsalted, a bit longer salted, quite a bit longer cultured, salted or not).  Never mind the shelf life, you made this butter, use this an excuse to butter everything until it's gone.

~~~

Where are my days?
Where are my nights?
Where is the springtime?
I wanna fly, I wanna fly, I wanna fly.
~ John(athan) Denver Seagull... ;)

Lavender Ice Cream

You will never want vanilla ice cream again.

Lavender Ice Cream

a posie of lavender in flower (5-10g)
2 c. skim milk (for a richer and somewhat softer ice cream, use whole milk; if whole milk makes you panic but skim milk makes you sad, use 1% or 2%... one way or another, this is a hell of a good ice cream)
175 g clover syrup (or use honey)
3 egg yolks (fresh eggs from happy chickens are best)
1 c. whipping cream

Pull flowers from lavender stalks and set aside.

In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, combine milk and remaining lavender (stems and all).  Heat on medium setting, stirring regularly, until bubbles form on the edges of the pan.  Remove from heat and let sit, covered, for about 20 minutes to let the lavender flavour infuse the milk.

Beat clover syrup together with egg yolks in a heat-proof bowl.  Slowly pour milk and lavender into egg mixture, stirring quickly as you go.  Pour this mixture back into the pan and cook, stirring constantly, until the custard is thick enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon.  This takes about 10 minutes over medium (erring slightly on the low side) heat.  If you overcook, the custard will begin to separate.

Pour the custard through a sieve (to remove lavender) into a heat proof bowl, lay waxed paper over the surface of the custard to prevent a skin from forming and let cool to room temperature.  Refrigerate for at least a couple of hours, preferably overnight... you want this as cold as possible without being frozen.

In a large chilled mixing bowl, whip cream until doubled in volume and soft peaks form.  Shift the whipping cream to one side of the bowl, pour the custard into the other side, then fold together.  This does not need to be absolutely thoroughly combined since your ice cream maker will do some of that work for you.  Try to not lose whipped cream volume when combining.  Chill mixture.  Freeze in ice cream maker following manufacturer's instructions.  Fold lavender flowers into ice cream to provide a few flecks of purple colour.

If you don't have an ice cream maker, pour into a freeze-able container, stir in the lavender flowers, and stick in the freezer.  Every hour or so, scrape down the edges and gently fold the frozen part into the rest of the mixture.  Keep doing this until properly frozen.

~~~

When I realized this post (ice cream already made, photos already taken) was going to coincide with Food Day Canada, I wondered if we should delay posting. But then I realized, quite serendipitously, all the ingredients here are Canadian.  Assuming you think of the home-Made in Canada syrup as being a Canadian ingredient... so maybe stretching things a bit, but if you used Canadian honey, that would remove the grey area....

Lavender from the garden, syrup made from wild flowers that are walking distance from the house, milk products from Newfoundland dairies.  And the prettiest eggs around, from happy chickens that live a short drive away (some good eggs were purchased from Some Good Market).  If you notice in the photo, we need this ice cream: it's so hot even the eggs are sweating.