Menus from an Orchard Table

It’s been a year (a year!) and summer has rolled around again.

And of course, with summer, comes ice cream!

This batch was made with lavender from the farmer’s market and honey from the apiary down the street.

This was also my first time making homemade ice cream, and it was amazingly rich and creamy – I may never eat store-bought ice cream again!

I hope you have some equally sweet treats planned for your summer!

I’m currently experimenting with a cleanse, and I thought initially it would be really tough to make any of the recipes in this book while I was on such a limited diet.

But there are actually a few which are cleanse-friendly, one of which is this super-easy green been dish.

I’d never had my beans roasted before, but it’s a very tasty way to do them, and it’s always nice to find a different way to eat the same old veggies.

I didn’t have whole cumin seeds to toast, but a sprinkling of ground cumin over top of the dish was great, and the mint added a nice hit of freshness to the deep spice and caramelized flavours of the roast beans.

Oh this entry was a long time coming! I’d meant to share it with you before I headed out on a business trip a couple weeks ago, and I lost the draft on the way to the airport!

Anyhow, here it is, and it’s another good ‘un!

I made this as part of one of our semi-regular market brunches. Market Brunch you ask? Yes! We hit the farmer’s market that sets up only a block away on Sunday mornings, pick up whatever looks good, and come home to make brunch. It’s lovely – you should try it!

The spiced bread ingredients aren’t from the market, but since baking it the day before is recommended, it lends itself to an easy mixing of the cheese-spread and toasting of the slices just before brunch. Though fair warning: you may want to lay off the mimosas until after you’ve toasted your croutons under the broiler, unless you want to go through most of the loaf before you get un-burnt pieces (luckily it makes lots extra).

My favourite thing about this dish is how it’s another fine example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. The earthy spices with the rich cheese and the bright onion & lemon and the peppery picked-that-morning radishes. Absolutely divine.

This recipe also lent itself well to a few substitutions I made:

And check out my quenelles! Easier than I thought they’d be to make, you simply scoop a creamy substance from one spoon to another until they resemble the classic boat shape. So pretty, so tasty!

I am not a salad person. And yet, Heidi Noble’s “Art of the Green Salad” is the recipe (served to me by a friend) that was the catalyst for buying this book. That does not speak to a sudden affection for salads, but the remarkability of that particular salad.

It was really the dressing that won me over. I didn’t think I could enjoy a salad more than I enjoyed that particular salad. And then comes this recipe, where we get the same concept (fresh, seasonal greens), the same dressing, and add the amazing goodness of blue cheese, honeycomb and hazelnuts!

It blew my freakin’ mind.

Neil and I have been experimenting with new food sources lately, trying to focus on the provenance of what we’re eating, re-connecting with what’s seasonal and getting as close to the producer as possible. We’ve joined a CSA for the first time to get the bulk of our veggies for the season, and it’s leafy-greens time. We are awash in salad greens.

Specifically this week it was spinach, komatsuna, baby red-romaine, mizuna and mesclun mix of other baby greens, which is a perfect mix for this salad.

The rest of the ingredients came from the local farmer’s market, which has also just kicked off its season.

New for me in this salad experience was the addition of honeycomb. Noble mentions in the book that the salad was always a hit at Joie, not least because of its novelty – most people hadn’t had it before. It was fantastically delicious. Eating honeycomb is a bit hard to describe, but if you’ve ever had Dutch Stroopwafel, it’s like the best, freshest, gooiest version of that. Not quite as sickly sweet as eating straight honey, melt-in-your mouth and absolutely decadent.

As I continue to build my own relationship with salads (since with the CSA it’s learn to love salads right now, or learn to love adding significantly to the compost heap) I’ve discovered that I adore salads if they’ve got cheese and nuts in them. So this salad, with its hazelnuts and blue cheese is already poised to be a favourite. The amazing trifecta of that, plus the fantastic dressing, and then the unexpected decadence of the honeycomb put it over the top.

I’m over the moon.

If you’re already a lover of rabbit foods, you may not be quite so smitten. But if you need a bit of convincing of the merits of a green salad, try this one. If it doesn’t win you over, I’ll eat my hat. And your salad.

The post in which my earlier hubris over the great success with the braised oxtails gets the best of me!

I was aiming for a quick weeknight meal, since things have been a bit busy ’round these parts, and a fritatta-type thing with fennel salad seemed like a great option.

It was, though things didn’t turn out exactly as planned.

The fennel salad was great – shaved fennel is still one of my favourite salad greens (and pretty much the sole thing we use our mandoline for) – and the addition of some hard, salty sheep’s cheese was excellent.

The torta, well, it was tasty, but pretty ugly.

One kitchen skill that’s always been tough for me is tempering eggs (tempering refers to the blending of ingredients at different temperatures). When working with eggs, the challenge comes in not scrambling them with the heat of your hot ingredients before you really want to start the cooking process. It involves slowly mixing the ingredients to gradually bring the cooler eggs up to temperature, and requires a lot of patience (which I am generally pretty short on).

This particular application didn’t completely fail, but I had scrambled the eggs enough by the time they hit the pan that my tart didn’t really have any sort of hope of flipping cleanly. I tried anyhow, and the result was a messy pan and a lot of cursing.

Thankfully, eggs and potatoes are pretty forgiving foodstuffs, and it still tasted great as a scramble instead of a torta. And the fennel salad was an excellent accompaniment. Making this again, I’d probably try baking it in the oven, rather than torturing myself trying to flip it. Which would, conveniently, also alleviate much of my “temper” tantrum.

This has got to be my favorite recipe in this book so far. I’m sure it’s a combination of preparation and cooking method for this particular recipe, and getting used to the style of the book as a whole, but it came together perfectly.

It’s also one of the few recipes in which the mirepoix (there go those fancy French words again! It just refers to the mixture of onion, carrots and celery that form the base of a dish) is still part of the final dish, as opposed to strained out and tossed away after their flavor has been extracted. Neil especially likes this part, since throwing out food (even when it’s flavoring agents that have done their job and are just soggy shells of their former selves) always irks him.

We planned from the outset to make the ragù preparation of this dish, and the vegetables made an awesome textural addition to the seared, then oven-braised meat.

The finished meat came off the bones and shredded perfectly, and the sauce was absolutely divine. We made a quick batch of pasta while we were waiting for the braise to cook, and our fresh noodles with the rich sauce was a flawless execution of rainy day (which it was) comfort food.

If we know eachother (or if we don’t, and you’d like to meet), bring over a bottle of red and an oxtail any time. I’d make this again in a heartbeat.

This one’s out of the Sides section of the book, but it makes a great main for a quick weeknight meal too. And I’m so craving a big dose of spring and summer, green beans and tomatoes seemed like a perfect plate of wishful thinking.

There’s really not too much to it: beans, tomato, bacon, egg, anchovies, dressing. Unlike most of the recipes I’ve tried in the book so far, this one is far less complicated than it sounds (the others are exactly as complicated as they sound, sometimes more-so).

At one point I thought I might’ve been in for a long side-trek through the wilds of mise-en-place when the recipe asks for two tomatoes “cut into a concassé” (instructions for which are on a different page) but it turns out that just means “peeled, seeded and cut into 1/2″ dice.”

There are actually a lot of French cooking terms sprinkled through the book, always with explanations and instructions. Ordinarily I’d find writing like that utterly precocious, but in this book it just adds to the earnestness with which Heidi Noble uses her French culinary training and the spirit of generations of French chefs to create beautiful, delicious dishes out of the bounty in her own backyard.

Admittedly, being so early in the season, my imported beans and tomatoes gave only a glimpse of the goodness that’s to come, but I’m definitely looking forward to creating this again in the heat of July, out on the patio, or in a picnic at the beach.

Just in time for Easter, I figured I’d try out one of the rabbit recipes from this book. I’ve always heard that rabbit works a lot like chicken in terms of cooking function, and the recipe actually states you can use a chicken if you can’t find rabbit where you are.

(Jen’s tip: the book doesn’t mention this, but if you use a chicken, use the breasts as you would the loins, but cut the breast halves in half again lengthwise. Double the amount of pancetta and end up with four rolls instead of two.)

Turns out everything I’d heard was correct, the rabbit meat was very similar in texture and colour to chicken, and the anatomy isn’t entirely unfamiliar. The “wings” attach a little differently, and instead of breasts on the front, there are loins running down the spine to take off.

But the rabbit came with an added bonus: giblets! I haven’t seen a chicken with giblets of any sort for a long time, so to open up the carcass and find those little chef’s treats inside was… well… a treat!

Good thing too. We fried them up with some thyme, LOTS of butter and finished them with lemon juice while everything else was cooking. The sustenance was really welcome, since this recipe took FOREVER.

The gist of the preparation is to sear, then braise the rabbit limbs, and at the same time to make a short stock with the carcass. Near the end of the cooking process, wrap the loins in pancetta and cook those off. Finish everything off by combining the braising liquid with the stock, and reduce the hell out of those. Add the crème and mustard (among other things) and reduce again.

I left about 30 minutes to complete all the reduction steps, because I am clearly not smart enough for this particular recipe. I was left with fully 4 litres of liquid to reduce, none of which could be reduced at a full rolling-boil without breaking it. All told, the entire reduction process took about 2.5 hours. CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED!

We were actually so hungry that I forgot about taking pictures of the sauce, but I did manage a shot of the final plate, with the rabbit & sauce over some roasted root vegetables.

We didn’t really feel like this recipe was “worth waiting for” considering the colossal cock-up on the timing, but if you leave yourself enough time for all the reducing, the rabbit is a really delicious alternative to chicken. I’ll definitely make rabbit again, though I’ll read the sauce recipe a little more carefully next time.

I’m pretty excited now that we’re well on our way into Spring! Here in Vancouver the weather has just started to cooperate and bring us some much-needed sunshine after the coldest March on record. Spring’s also when a lot of people come out of hibernation and start getting social again – and our group kicked things off with a wonderful Spring Local Food Potluck hosted by fellow cookthebook.ca author Jen.

I decided to make the Goat Cheese Pannacotta recipe for this one. It’s easy to get local goat milk here, and since the recipe works with either soft goat cheese or goat yogurt, I figured I’d make my own yogurt to put in it.

The yogurt vs. cheese thing turned out to be a lifesaver, since my yogurt didn’t actually set! (It’s still a hit & miss homemade foodstuff for me). But I was left with just enough curd to to put in the recipe with the goat milk, and it turned out beautifully.

In fact, this whole thing was incredibly simple. Alongside creme brulee, pannacotta is another dish that looks & sounds far more complicated than it is.

Mix up your ingredients & pour into buttered ramekins (my ramekin supply falls far short of the 12 that are called for here, so I used 6 dessert bowls), refrigerate to set.

The book recommends serving them over roast beets, sliced up carpaccio-style. I just chopped mine into chunks to make life a bit easier – the last thing I want to be doing in the middle of someone else’s party is fussing over plating a complicated buffet dish.

Next time I plate this though, I’ll definitely spoon the beets over the pannacotta, or maybe drizzle them with some beet-juice or balsamic or something, so they look a bit less stark and other-worldly (which I suppose is a risk one takes with gelatin/molded food).

But what my plate lacked in beauty, it totally made up for in taste!

This is a bit sacrilegious coming from someone whose husband grew up on a goat dairy, but… I’m just not a huge fan of goat-dairy products. It tastes like goats smell. Not that I mind the smell of goat, or farms in general, but for whatever reason goat milk, cheese and yogurt just don’t do it for me.

However, when you mix those up with a bit of lemon juice and zest and a few other bits and bobs, then gelatinize and chill – wow. These little cakes were so incredibly light and mild and delicious. I was completely surprised by them! And they were still a perfect pairing for the beets.

So perhaps there’s still hope for me and the goats after all.

Pork Belly is one of those dishes I’m always surprised by. I never think to order it in restaurants, then end up drooling over it on someone else’s plate (and if that someone else is the husband, stealing bites). Thankfully, the husband was flipping through this book as I was looking for the next recipe to make, and with his love of Pork Belly, he zeroed in on this fantastic dish.

This one starts with a great, Asian-inspired spice rub, and sits on a tray in the fridge overnight as the salt draws any excess moisture out of the meat and the spices infuse the pork belly with flavour. Or at least, that’s the ideal scenario. We ended up out late the night before Pork Belly Day, so I did the rub/fridge thing in the morning for about 6 hours worth of absorbing. Were I to do this one again, I’d be keen to let it go overnight – I think the flavour would be a lot more intense.

Not that it was any sort of disappointment in the flavour department. After rendering the fat side of the pork belly until it’s got a good, golden colour on it, it’s then braised in a mix of vegetables that’ve been sauteed in the rendered fat from the initial crisping, white wine, stock and apple juice.

I’d read of the sear/braise/sear technique for making super crispy chicken thighs in a recent issue of Cook’s Illustrated, so was pretty interested in seeing how a practical application would work. Turns out, quite well!

Once they come out of the braise, the pork bellies are browned again to crisp up all the edges. We served them on a bed of braised red cabbage.

Mine turned out a bit darker and crustier than the golden, translucent fat-layer shown in the picture in the book (this book is pretty short on photos of the recipes, for those to whom that kind of thing’s important), but it was damn good nonetheless. Definitely a keeper.