Thinking Ahead: Thanksgiving Recipes and Inspiration

Gobble, gobble. The autumn leaves and chestnuts are starting to fall from the trees and October is just around the corner. And you know what that means... Thanksgiving. Family gatherings, big dinners and that inevitable feeling of sleepiness from too much wine and turkey. Whether you're just starting to think about hosting a dinner or you've already set the date and sent out the invitations, here's a few recipe ideas and inspirations.

You can also hear me live on the CBC's On the Island tomorrow (Wednesday) morning chatting about this very subject from 7:50 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. If you miss the show, you can also download the podcast anytime. The interview with me is six minutes in.

So, when it comes to food, Thanksgiving is all about the sides. I mean the turkey is there but what I really get excited about is all the fixings. The stuffing and gravy, potatoes and Brussels sprouts and the cranberry sauce. Especially the cranberry sauce. For a twist this year, try a new recipe or simply make a little change to an old family classic. By changing or adding even one ingredient, you can add a flair to this year's dinner and really wow your family and friends.

Ideas for Thanksgiving Sides:
*Gravy: try adding freshly chopped sage or rosemary, a splash of red or white wine or a little Dijon mustard.

*Potatoes: add some caramelized onions, finely grated Parmesan cheese, garlic or chopped sauteed kale. You could also try mashing half potatoes with half sweet potatoes, parsnips or even cauliflower.

*Stuffing: try wild rice instead of bread. Or, you could try adding sausage, apples, apricots, fennel, dates, currents or golden raisins. You could also try using a different kind of bread then you usually do, like cornbread or sourdough.

One of my favorite thanksgiving traditions is making homemade cranberry sauce with orange juice, a little orange zest and Cassis black current liquor. I’ll stand in the kitchen and eat it by the spoonful if no one is watching.


Cranberry Sauce with Cassis
Inspired and adapted only slightly from Rouxbe's Cassis Cranberry Sauce
If you like a sweeter cranberry sauce, add one full cup of sugar.

Ingredients
1 cup cold water
3/4 cup sugar
1 bag fresh cranberries (14 ounces)
1/2 large orange, juiced
1/2 teaspoon orange zest
1/4 cup Crème de cassis (black current liqueur)

Directions
In a medium sauce pan, add water and sugar and bring to a boil. Once the sugar dissolves, add cranberries, orange zest and juice and bring back to a boil.

Once it's boiling, turn down the heat and let simmer for about 20-25 minutes. This depends on how thick you want your sauce. Add the cassis and stir everything together. Once you reach the consistency you want, turn off the heat.

Keep in mind the sauce will thicken as it cools. Serve warm or at room temperature.

How to make fried green tomatoes

I've always wondered about how to make fried green tomatoes and if they're any good. It's a seasonal southern dish that's similar to the year-round southern classic, fried chicken. And I can see why it's such a southern classic. They're a great way to use of end of season tomatoes, both tasty and economical. It's a much better to fry them up and eat them rather then simply tossing them into the compost.


If you're anything like me, you may have a few lingering unripened tomatoes still hanging on your tomato plants. Everyone I've spoken with agrees it wasn't a good year for tomatoes and this means it's a good year for trying this dish out for the first time. I tried Simply Recipes' version with great success which includes drudging the tomato slices in flour, milk, eggs then breadcrumbs. You could also try dipping each tomato slice in buttermilk and then a cornmeal mix (half cornmeal and half flour) instead.

If you have any unripened tomatoes hanging around, try this recipe out and let me know what you think. I enjoyed making them because, well, now I can say I've tried them. Fried green tomatoes taste good because they're fried (doesn't almost anything taste good when it's fried?), they taste similar to ripe tomatoes once their cooked and it's one of those downhome meals, feels earthy and resourceful.


Fried Green Tomatoes
Source Simply Recipes

Ingredients
3 medium, firm green tomatoes
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup milk
2 beaten eggs
2/3 cup fine dry bread crumbs
1/4 cup olive oil
freshly ground salt and pepper to taste

Directions
Cut unpeeled tomatoes into 1/2 inch slices. Sprinkle slices with salt and pepper. Let tomato slices stand for 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, place flour, milk, eggs, and bread crumbs in separate shallow dishes.

Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a skillet on medium heat. Dip tomato slices in milk, then flour, then eggs, then bread crumbs. In the skillet, fry half of the coated tomato slices at a time, for 4-6 minutes on each side or until brown. As you cook the rest of the tomatoes, add olive oil as needed. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Serve with hot sauce and enjoy.

The Pictures: Feast of Fields 2010

Here's a slide show of the best from this year's Feast of Fields hosted by Parry Bay Sheep Farm in Metchosin. The day started early with a torrential downpour leaving many people wondering if this year's Feast was really going ahead. By noon the rain had stopped and the skies had cleared, making way for another remarkable event.

About 600 people enjoyed the afternoon in gumboots, walking the sloping pasture and sampling amazing food, beer, wine, spirits, cider, coffee and tea. A big kudos to everyone involved!



Created with flickr slideshow from softsea.

Some of the MANY highlights from this year include:
*Markus' Wharfside Restaurant's tender smoked wild B.C. salmon with lemon creme and dill on crostini.
*Chateau Victoria's Vista 18 and their bbq'd sablefish collars, Granville Island artisan kasu and soy marinade.
*Chef Heidi Fink and her team who served up wheat crisp, Moroccan-spiced vegetables with an amazing mint chutney. A little secret, you'll get the recipe if you take one of her Indian cooking classes.
*Spinnaker's chocolate truffles which were long gone by my second lap around.
*Devour Food and their amazing Laarb, a Laos dish of spicy marinated ground pork served on a lettuce leaf.
Amuse Bistro's Victoria Gin and Code's Corner Fram tomato water cocktail.

Check out another food blogger, Interpretive Stance, and her list of favorites. It's no surprise we shared the same thoughts on how the day unfolded, the downpour that morning was unbelievable. You can also check out some of my photographs from last year's Feast. Here's to another incredible Feast on Vancouver Island.

Italian Turkey Stew with Fennel and White Beans

I've just returned from a few days in Vancouver, visiting my uber-pregnant sister who's now four days overdue. Since coming home, I keep thinking to myself "I wonder if she's having contractions now" about every hour. And it's only a matter of time before I'm right. One of these hours she will be having contractions.

While I was visiting, I stayed one night with my lovely friend Anya and she made us one of her own recipes for dinner. A stew of fennel, canned tomatoes, white beans and fennel sausage. I couldn't have asked for a more perfect dinner on a cool, rainy evening in Vancouver. Needless to say, immediately after getting back I picked up the ingredients I needed to make it for Jeremy and myself.


I call this an Italian stew because it's rustic and simple and uses good quality ingredients. But there's also another reason why I'm calling this an Italian stew. While I was at the grocery store I realized I've become just a little obsessed since my trip to Italy last fall. While standing in the check out wearing my favorite over sized Italian scarf that I bought in Verona, I looked down and noticed a distinctive theme to my groceries. Italian sausages, Italissima canned tomatoes, La Molisana canned white beans and Italian flat-leaf parsley. Serious, it seems a little over the top even to me but I just can't help myself. Italian food really is one of the best in the world.

Try making this stew like an Italian would, adding ingredients without measuring each one out and tasting as you go to adjust the flavours. Add more garlic, chili peppers, salt and pepper until it's just right.


Italian Turkey Stew with Fennel and White Beans (serves 4)

Ingredients
olive oil
1-2 onions, sliced
2 fennel bulbs, trimmed and thinly sliced
4 garlic cloves, minced
3 turkey sausages, remove meat from casing
2 bay leaves
2 cans (28 oz) of tomatoes
1-2 teaspoons red chili flakes
1 can (398 ml) white beans
half bunch of kale or spinach, washed and chopped
Italian flat-leaf parsley, chopped
salt and pepper
dash of balsamic vinegar

Directions
In a large pot over a medium heat, saute onions for 10-15 minutes until golden. Add fennel, garlic and the meat of the three sausages. Using a large spoon, break the sausage meat apart and stir being careful not to burn the garlic. Once the meat has browned, add the tomatoes, bay leaves, beans, chili flakes, salt and pepper.

Bring the stew to a boil and then turn the heat down and simmer for about 30 minutes. The key is to continue simmering until the fennel is soft. Also, taste the stew along the way and adjust flavours to your liking. Once the fennel is tender, add chopped kale (or spinach), parsley and a dash of balsamic vinegar. Simmer for a few more minutes until the greens have wilted. Serve and enjoy.

Burgers Gone Wild

Earlier this summer I had the privilege to work on the promotional magazine for the third annual Rifflandia Festival, a music festival held in Victoria from September 23-26. I wrote the feature food article and am just tickled pink with how it turned out. Editor Chris Long and I staged a blind taste test with three local foodies, six burgers and countless laughs pursued. The magazine is out and available around town at places like Market on Yates and Ditch Records so if you live in Victoria, pick a copy up and check out page 102.

Kicking back waiting for the burgers to arrive: Street Level Espresso's Ken Gordon (l) and photographer Peter Gardner (r).

Burgers Gone Wild

“The best burger I’ve had in my life was at the Pink Bicycle where they had an organic kangaroo burger with pickled beets, fried egg, bacon, pineapple, Shiraz cherry sauce and a really big bun,” claims Ken Gordon. “Because of how thick the pickled beets were, as you bite into the burger it appeared to dribble blood out of the sides of the bun.”

Hamburgers have been around for a seriously long time. The first reference to ground beef as hamburger dates back to the invention of mechanical meat choppers in the early 1800’s. By 1920, the first A&W Root Beer stand had opened and drive-in hamburger joints with carhops on roller skates began springing up everywhere.

Hamburgers quickly became synonymous with American fast food restaurants like McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s and the In-N-Out Burger. Cheap food that is at the same time loved and detested and leaves you feeling dirty. Processed cheese dirty. And just as soon as fast food joints began mass-producing them, there was a split in quality. Lines were drawn and the sides were clear. You had cheap as you can make ‘em fast food hamburgers and homemade, grilled on the bbq burgers.

Over the past decade, the burger scene has struck gold all over the globe. It started in 2001 when chef Daniel Boulud took a jab at burgers with his sirloin burger stuffed with braised short ribs and foie gras on a Parmesan bun. People went crazy for it and were suddenly willing to pay big bucks for a burger. Now in Manhattan, you can get a burger topped with gold flakes and served with truffles.

While Victoria isn’t New York, we do have an amazing and growing gourmet burger scene. Just coming out of their second summer, the Pink Bicycle is Victoria’s newest gourmet burger joint. And mini burgers or “sliders” are being served up around town like at Smiths Pub and Veneto. Perhaps we’re ready to give Fuddruckers, the make your own hamburger joint, a second chance?

Burgers may well be the single greatest food North America has to offer. Even if you don’t eat a lot of meat, chances are you still love a good burger. So why are some local restaurants messing with our humble hamburger and taking it to new heights? The truth? You, me, everyone we know loves the familiar but wants something new, something real and something just a little on the wild side.

pt. 11 The Blind Burger Taste Test

Earlier this summer, we caught up with Morgan Hradecky of the Pink Bicycle, Andrew Elliott of Smiths Pub and Ken Gordon of Street Level Espresso at the Pink Bicycle Gourmet Burger Joint. The guys agreed to a blindfolded taste test where they blindly compared some of cheapest, middle of the road and best burgers in town. Hellz yeah this was fun, but it was also a way to find out what some local gourmets think about burgers.

You’d think these guys would totally go for a basic, diner style burger from one of Victoria’s institutions like the deluxe cheeseburger from the Beacon Drive-In. But the processed cheese did not go over well. The overall experience was “if I got a corndog with this burger, I wouldn’t expect it to be cooked on the inside,” said Ken. And Wendy’s Baconator Double faired worse. “I get the feeling that whoever made this burger makes thousands of burgers. They don’t just make burgers for forty of their friends.” While that doesn’t sound all that bad, that the guys inability to finish the third of the burger they were given speaks volumes about the quality of this burger.

The next stop was White Spot’s Legendary Burger with its equally legendary Triple “O” sauce. The burger had a pungent, overpowering pickle flavor and a cold bun. And muffled between bites came what everyone was thinking, “I would have enjoyed this more on the ferry.”

The last burger on the blindfolded taste test was the Black and Blue Burger from the Flying Otter Grill. Blindfolded or not, the refined palates and sense of taste Morgan, Andrew and Ken displayed was seriously impressive. The Cajun spice rub and flame-charred patty were detected right away. Although the patty was a little too flame-charred for the guys, all round they enjoyed the nicely melted blue cheese and the soft, quality bun.

When it comes to sitting down for an enjoyable meal the new gourmet burgers win big with quality, freshness and quality. As the price of the burgers went up, so did our tasters’ liking. And what do these guys think make a great burger? Real, quality meat that’s cooked but crumbles in your mouth, a nice fresh bun that’s lightly toasted but soft when you bite into it and melted cheese.

Because It's Fun To Say: Baba Ghanoush

Baba Ghanoush or eggplant spread tastes better then it sounds. Sure it's fun to say but more then that it's delicious. If you like eggplant that is. Up until yesterday I hadn't ever made it before. But now that I have, my fridge won't be without it for the next month. Seriously. With eggplant being in season now until October, I'm going to ride out the remainder of the season with this amazing spread.


This spread is a Middle Eastern dish of roasted and charred eggplant that's pureed with garlic, lemon juice, tahini, olive oil, salt and pepper. It has a creamy, smoky flavour of rich eggplant. Like hummus, it goes well with bread (pita especially), raw or roasted vegetables and salad. This recipe is from Donna Hay's Modern Classics Book 1. It's a standard recipe that you could dress up by adding cumin, parsley or chopped pistachios. But you don't need to.

Some of my other favorite recipes for eggplant are marinated eggplant antipasto and eggplant parmesan. I also recently made Jamie Oliver's Aubergine Parmigiana which is (not surprisingly) better tasting and easier to make then the previous recipe I was using. Okay, that's it for me. I'm off to the gym so I can have more pita and baba ghanoush later today.


Baba Ghanoush

Ingredients
2 eggplants
1/4 cup tahini
1 garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/3 cup olive oil
salt and pepper

Directions
Cut each eggplant lengthwise. Score it in a diamond pattern, cutting through most of the flesh, but leaving the skin intact. Rub the surface with olive oil, salt and pepper. Roast in the oven or on a barbecue until the skins are blackened and the pulp is soft.

Allow to cool and remove the pulp from the skin. In a food processor, puree the eggplant, tahini, garlic, lemon juice, salt and pepper. With the motor running, gradually pour in olive oil until you get the consistency you like (1/3 cup olive oil or less).

Serve as a dip or with roasted vegetables.