February 27, 2011

The Tallest Poppy (aka, Where to take your friends for brunch)

When you are driving north up Main Street from downtown, it can be easy to miss. Nestled next to the New Occidental is a restaurant with a cheerful yellow sign hanging over the door and a bear mannequin in the front window. It looks small and unassuming, but it’s one of my candidates for Best Brunch in Winnipeg. It’s a restaurant called The Tallest Poppy.

Brunch.

The Tallest Poppy has a lunch menu that makes me all kinds of happy (variety! surprise! creativity!), but I’m here today to tell you about their brunch. Brunch is a special sort of meal for me, combining some of my favourite breakfast foods with a much later time frame, and it eases me into lunchtime foods at the same time. The Tallest Poppy’s brunch does all this and serves local food whenever possible? Free run eggs? Antibiotic-free, naturally-raised meats? Yes, please!

We’d been to the restaurant for lunch a few times, but one Sunday morning we decided to try their brunch. I was sold on the first visit. Brunch at The Tallest Poppy is a four-course set affair, served family-style. What this means is that if there are four people at your table, you will each get a plate. Then the food arrives on a platter and you can help yourself to however much you want. You know – just like your family did. And just like back home, what you get depends on what the cook decided to make. The staff at The Tallest Poppy check for allergies or other dietary concerns before the food arrives, though, and do their best to help out people with dietary restrictions.

Brunch at the Tallest Poppy

So if you can’t pick what you’re having, what types of food can you expect? Well, we’ve been there for brunch many times now, and it’s different each time. However, there are themes. Fruit and vegetable salads are common at the beginning of the meal, although once we got smoothies and cute little individual oatmeal servings. Scones and latkes often grace the table, followed by omelets, quiches, or frittatas, often served with amazing sausages and bacon. And finally, there is dessert. Breakfast never has dessert – brunch always should. (Another reason why brunch is superior to breakfast.) Pie, lemon squares, cookies and muffins, oh my!

The brunch itself is $25 per person, but that includes everything, including the usual breakfast drinks (including Black Pearl coffee), tip, and taxes. (So really, if you figure $2 per drink, brunch itself is only about $17.) One note, though – it’s cash only!

Tallest Poppy's Twitter feed

The Tallest Poppy has an active Twitter account, where you can often find their specials and what’s on for brunch. Watching their Twitter feed for a while will give you an idea of the sort of things they serve for brunch. Bonus – you’ll also get their lunch specials during the week, and a neat little peek into restaurant life.

The Tallest Poppy is located at 631 Main Street. Brunch is served on Sundays only. They open for brunch on Sunday at about 10am, although during the winter they’ve been opening at 9am. If you have a large group, call ahead – their cozy dining room fills up quickly.

If you’re a friend of ours, and you’re in town one Sunday, don’t be surprised if we decide to drag you off for brunch at The Tallest Poppy. I love showing off Winnipeg’s excellent restaurants to visitors, and The Tallest Poppy is definitely on that list.

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February 20, 2011

Creamy Scrambled Eggs and Spinach

It’s getting to be that difficult time of year here in Winnipeg. The holidays are long past, but winter will just drag on and on for at least another month and a half. I find myself crawling out of bed later and later on weekends, unwilling to face the cold.

What makes it better? Brunch. If I’m going to climb out of bed an hour late on Sundays, I might as well combine breakfast and lunch for efficiency. To that end, this savory twist on scrambled eggs fits the bill.

Creamy Scrambled Eggs and Spinach

We’ve been using Gordon Ramsey’s method for making scrambled eggs for a while, and this variation works splendidly. It produces a creamy, almost smooth scrambled egg dish that is so different from the dry clods you’re used to from the local diner. It takes a lot longer than the “usual” way, but the results are so much better.

For this recipe you’ll need a medium non-stick saucepan and a silicone spoonula. I’ve tried making these scrambled eggs in a non-stick pan… and it wasn’t pretty. Do your dishwasher a favour!

As for ingredients, you’ll need:

  • 2 cups fresh spinach, roughly chopped
  • 1 TB olive oil
  • 6 eggs
  • 2 cubic inches feta cheese, crumbled (or about 3 tablespoons crumbled)
  • fresh ground black pepper
  • salt (optional)

A note about the cheese: I like goats’ milk feta, but you can use any feta you prefer.

Fill the saucepan about half full of water and bring to a boil. Add the spinach, stir, and let wilt for about three minutes. Drain the spinach and dry the pan. Squeeze as much water as you can out of the spinach. (You can do this easily by putting the wilted spinach in a bowl and using the back of a spoon to press the spinach against the side of the bowl. Tilt the bowl to drain the water, and the damp spinach will stick to the sides of the bowl.)

Whisk the eggs in a separate bowl until they are a uniform yellow.

Heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the drained spinach to the oil and quickly stir to break up the clump. Add the eggs and stir. Stir constantly over medium heat. Keep scraping the bottom of the pan to make sure clumps of cooked egg aren’t forming. If the egg mixture starts to set up too quickly, remove the pan from the heat and keep stirring. Return to the heat once you’ve broken up any clumps that started to form.

This will take a while, so be patient! Stir, stir, stir. At about the halfway mark (probably about six minutes in), add the crumbled feta and pepper. The feta won’t melt significantly, so you might want to add a bit of salt to the eggs as well.

Continue to stir the eggs, placing the pan on the heat and removing to control the heat, until they are almost set but still glossy. This usually takes about 10 to 12 minutes. If the glossiness goes away, they are overcooked. Keep in mind that the eggs will continue to cook just a bit after being removed from the stove. (If you overcook them, don’t worry. They’ll still be as good, but won’t taste as creamy.)

Serve immediately, with fruit and toast or popovers. Serves two!

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February 13, 2011

Book Review: Last Chance to Eat

My new job is dangerously close to the Millennium Library. This means that on any given lunch break, you may see me browsing the stacks, looking for more things to read. Once I found the food section, stuffed full of cookbooks and foodie porn, I knew I was done for.

Last Chance to Eat One of my recent reads was this amazing work by Gina Mallet. Last Chance to Eat is subtitled “The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World.” I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book I picked up on a whim. What I found was a memoir of growing up, food, taste, and what we’ve lost in the interest of progress.

The book has only five chapters, but each one is substantial, and devoted to one type of food: eggs, cheese, beef, fruits and vegetables, and fish. In each chapter, Mallet describes her clearest memories of that type of food, and then goes on to describe how that food has changed and what is available today. For example, she writes about the lowly apple: how once there were hundreds of apple varieties available in any given area, and each area of the world had its particular favourites. Over time, mostly through economics and trade, we got the situation we have today – three (or, at most, four) varieties of apples available in the average supermarket on an average day.

The story about the apples illustrates the theme running through this book: that we are slowly losing the variety of flavours that were once available to our grandparents. As larger farms and larger supermarkets need larger amounts of produce and meat to sell, the overall variety shrinks until only the most profitable varieties are left. At the Safeway or Superstore, we might find two varieties of potatoes – russet and red. If we’re lucky they might also have yellow. But at the farmers’ market I can find blue-skinned potatoes, blue-fleshed potatoes, pink potatoes, fingerlings… A wealth of variety that the mega-mart simply can’t provide.

But the loss of variety isn’t just due to market pressure, as Mallet points out. Governments have also had a hand in limiting what consumers can choose. Overly restrictive food safety regulations, such as those banning raw milk cheeses, have the state playing nanny to its silly citizens. Thus the number of foods we can choose between slowly dwindles, until we’re left with only the approved, the safe, and the most popular.

The book is interspersed with recipes using the foods she writes about. I neglected to try any of them before I returned the book, but I’ve been thinking of checking it back out for another read. Mallet’s prose is rich and dense, meandering from florid descriptions of taste and texture to reminisces of her life in Europe. And through it all, Mallet rings a gentle alarm. The next time you come across an unusual food, be it meat or cheese or vegetable, don’t be afraid to give it a try. You never know when your last chance to do so will come.

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February 6, 2011

First Impressions: Hy’s Steakhouse and Cocktail Bar

My husband is a carnivore, and for years he’s been promising to take me to Hy’s Steakhouse for a treat. We finally made it there last week, and I got my first look at the much-lauded Hy’s.

Hy’s is located at Portage and Main on the first floor of the Richardson Building. This makes it very convenient for downtown workers, since you can get to it without going outside from anywhere in the skywalk system.

From all that I’d heard, Hy’s is considered a higher-end steakhouse that caters to the business people who work in the area. Its warm, opulent-looking interior with high ceilings and rich wood paneling makes it a great place to bring a business client, although it might be a bit dark to do any serious work over dinner.

My husband loves to get a bloody caeser before dinner, and usually orders it extra spicy. The bar took him seriously, and made it extra spicy – much to his delight! The wine selection is extensive, which is good because Hy’s will not allow patrons to bring in outside wine for dinner.

Dinner entrees run from about $30 to $50 each, and come with your choice of potato or rice, and a token vegetable. (Additional vegetables can be purchased as a generous side, enough to share.) Although I didn’t order it this time, I decided I have to try the caesar salad appetizer next time; I watched in fascination as a waiter prepared the caesar dressing fresh in the dining room, and served it immediately. Desserts were quite large, much to my surprise (and to the dismay of my waistline!)

Hy’s is open for dinner at 5:00pm every day, and opens for lunch at 11:30am Monday through Friday.

First Impressions is just that – my first impressions of a restaurant. I adhere to the Food Blog Code of Ethics, and prefer to only do a full review of a restaurant after I’ve visited it at least twice, whenever possible. If I write a full review of this restaurant at a later date, I will add the link to this post.

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January 30, 2011

Chicken (or Turkey, or Duck, or Veal, or…) Stock

Before I started cooking, I considered broth and stock to be pretty much interchangeable. It’s only been fairly recently that I’ve realized there is a difference. The consensus seems to be that broth is made with meat, while stock is made with bones. Broth is suitable to be served as-is (to someone with a cold, for example). Stock, on the other hand, is usually used to make other things. Broth cooks quickly, while stock takes a long time to cook. If you put a whole chicken in a pot of water and boil it for an hour or so until the chicken is done, you have broth. If you roast a chicken, eat it, and then put the bones into a pot of water and simmer it for several hours, you have stock.

Some of the differences seem to run a bit deeper, but this seems to be a good place to start. The other thing that I should point out is that stock is insanely useful, and you should make some!

20100815

First, you need some bones. Whenever we have chicken or turkey, we almost always save the bones. (The exception is when the chicken was used in something really spicy that could bring an off flavour to the stock.) When I roast a chicken or we barbeque some chicken breasts, the bones go into a freezer bag and into the freezer. Once we have enough bones to fill our stock pot, we’ll wait until a slow Sunday afternoon and make stock.

The good stock at the grocery store can run up to $3.50 or more for a quart, and it’s always over-salted. Making your own stock at home, using stuff that you would have just thrown away, can represent some significant savings.

Plus, you can store it in quantities that make sense to you. Rather than buying a quart of stock and only using a cup, you can store your homemade stock in one, two, or four cup quantities. We typically do a mixture of these sizes: one cup bags are used for sauces, two cup bags are used for rice, quinoa or other grains, and four cup bags are used for risotto or soup. Measure the amount you want into a labeled freezer bag, press out the air, and place on a baking sheet. The bag will freeze flat, which makes it a cinch to store.

More frozen assets.

This “recipe” is more of a formula than a measured recipe. Adjust to your liking and what you have available. To make your own stock, you will need:

  • Roasted bones from poultry, beef or veal (Collect enough to fill up your largest pot.)
  • Old vegetables (Traditionally this is mireproix – carrots, celery and onion – but you can use any flavourful vegetables you have on hand.)
  • Water

Put the roasted bones into your largest pot. (When we made stock from the carcass of our 22lb Thanksgiving turkey, we used my water canner.) Add the vegetables, cut into large chunks. Cover everything with water and bring to a boil.

Once the water is boiling, lower the heat until it just simmers. Keep an eye on the stock. If foam forms on the surface of the stock, skim it off and discard. Let the stock simmer for several hours. The longer it simmers, the more gelatin and goodness will leech out of the bones and into your stock.

After several hours, remove from heat. Place a large bowl into the sink, and put a colander inside the bowl. (If you want really clear stock you can line the colander with cheesecloth, but that’s a bit too fussy for me.) Pour the stock through the colander into the bowl. Remove the colander, and discard the bones and vegetables. Use or freeze the stock as desired.

Note: I do not add salt to my stock, although I will sometimes add a small handful of peppercorns. Since I usually don’t know what I’ll be using the stock for, I prefer not to salt the stock.

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January 22, 2011

Welcome to the new Winnipeg Eats!

It was a long time coming, but welcome to the new site for Winnipeg Eats!

I’ve been thinking for a while about moving my blog to its own digs for quite some time. A few weeks ago, I got the gumption to go ahead and do it. I didn’t want to change too many things at once, so over the next few months you’re likely to see some changes to the design of the site, as well as a few new features.

With the new site I have some ideas for posts that I’d like to do, including introductions to ingredients or tools you might be unfamiliar with (and where you can find them), more news about food and related events in the Winnipeg area, food and cookbook reviews, and “first impressions” of restaurants. The first impressions will not be a review of the restaurant itself, since I like to only review restaurants that I’ve been to several times. Rather, the first impressions will be a sort of diary of my first trip to a restaurant – what we had, what the prices were like, and the general ambiance. If I am able to do a full review of the restaurant later, I will update the first impressions post with a link to the review. Also, I have a special project that I’m cooking up (haha) and once I have the details figured out I will let you know about it!

So, I hope you enjoy the new site. Don’t forget to update your links and bookmarks, and please subscribe to the RSS feed. I look forward to hearing your comments!

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January 17, 2011

North End shuttle program designed to combat food deserts

Back in 2009 I blogged an article in the Winnipeg Free Press on food deserts in Winnipeg. The most problematic areas in Winnipeg are the North End in general and Point Douglas specifically.

Like apples and oranges.

This week the CBC ran a piece on a joint program between the Public Health Agency of Canada and the North End Food Security Network that provides a shuttle service to residents. The free shuttle takes the residents to a grocery store (the article specifically mentioned the Sobey’s Cash and Carry near Arlington) and them brings them and their purchases home.

Giving low-income and limited-mobility people a chance to get good, healthy groceries is vital to combating diet-related problems such as obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Residents who take the bus to a grocery store face not only a long trip (and sometimes a difficult one in deep snow), but are limited to what they can carry. With limited mobility or other health problems, a person can only carry so much. Taking the taxi is not an option for many others, as a round trip can cost as much as $20-30.

The shuttle service will run until March, when a decision will be made whether to continue the shuttle. Hopefully this valuable service for area residents will continue.

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January 10, 2011

Red Thai Curry Chicken

I admit that when I first moved to Canada my palate was pretty limited. Exotic meant Chinese, and Chinese meant chow mein and chicken balls. Japanese food was looked upon in suspicion because it sounded like it would be all fish, and Indian food was out of the question – too hot!

Fortunately, I married a man whose tastes were wide and varied, and I let him cook for me. Over time, he got me to eat a lot of different foods that I never would have considered before. One of the dishes that he made for me was his red Thai curry chicken.

Thai Curry Chicken

He’d been making this dish for a few years when I realized that I was slowly being conditioned. It is a spicy dish, but the spiciness can be altered based on how much curry paste you put into the sauce. When he started making the curry, he’d only put a smattering of curry paste in it. Gradually he increased the “dosage” until it was at full strength. Sure enough, I’d been habituated to eat much spicier food than I had been willing to try when we got married.

I’d sort of like to call this dish “Bachelor Thai Curry Chicken.” It’s not authentic by any stretch of the imagination, and a lot of the ingredients come out of a can. On the other hand, it’s quick (super quick if you do all the chopping the night before) and a bit of a crowd-pleaser. My instructions below are to serve the curry over couscous, which makes a really creamy base for the curry, but basmati rice or quinoa would work just as well.

You will need:

  • 1 pound of skinless, boneless chicken (I like breasts but you can use thighs, too)
  • 2 400ml (13.5 fl oz) cans coconut milk
  • 2 284g (10 fl oz) cans cream of mushroom soup
  • 2 227g (8oz) cans sliced bamboo
  • 1 227g (8oz) can sliced water chestnuts (optional)
  • 3 sweet bell peppers (we like using one each red, orange and yellow)
  • 1 tbsp sugar
  • 1-2 tbsp fish sauce
  • 2 tbsp curry paste (this amount makes a curry with medium to high heat; increase or decrease the amount of curry paste to your taste)
  • 1 tbsp vegetable oil
  • 2 cups instant couscous

A note about the curry paste: you may need to do some experimentation to find a type you like that’s available in your area. In Winnipeg, all the major grocery stores carry the Thai Kitchen brand curry paste, which is what we use.

Seed the bell peppers and slice them into thin strips. Set aside.

Dice the chicken into bite-sized pieces.

Heat the vegetable oil in a large sauté pan over medium heat. Once the oil is hot, add the chicken. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the chicken is no longer pink inside.

Add mushroom soup and most of the coconut milk (retain about 1/2 cup). Stir to combine.

Mix the curry paste with the retained coconut milk. Mix it well and break up any lumps. (Even small lumps of curry paste can be a nasty surprise.) Add the curry and coconut milk mixture to the pan and stir.

Heat the chicken and sauce until the sauce is well combined and no longer lumpy. Stir in the sugar and fish sauce.

Add the sweet pepper strips and bamboo (and water chestnuts and baby corn, if using) to the pan. Stir.

Bring sauce to a boil, then lower to a simmer. Let cook until hot.

While the curry is heating through, bring two cups of water to a boil in a medium saucepan. When the water is boiling, add the instant couscous to the water. Remove from heat and cover. The couscous will be ready in about five minutes. Note: This makes a slightly dry couscous, which allows it to absorb some of the moisture and flavour from the curry sauce. If you’d rather have your couscous on the side, use two and a half cups of water, and let the couscous sit for 10 minutes.

To serve, place a scoop of couscous in a bowl and cover with the chicken curry. Let sit for a few minutes to cool, and to allow the couscous to absorb some of the sauce.

This is also fantastic the next day, reheated for lunch.

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January 2, 2011

New Years’ Resolution: Waste Not, Want Not (Part 2)

Yesterday, I presented my New Year’s foodie resolution – to stop wasting food. We do pretty good, since we already buy things with a plan and create strategies to use food before it goes off. We’re not always successful, as you can see in this photo, but we try our best! And in the new year, we hope to do better.

Sprouted potato.

Here are four more things that you (and we!) can do to stop wasting food.

Inventory your pantry before running to the store.
This is one that I am bad for not doing, and explains how we once ended up with four unopened bottles of Worcestershire sauce. After you’ve made your menu, check your pantry to make sure you’re not buying things that you already have.

Also, look for opportunities to substitute things! For example, if your recipe calls for sweet potatoes but you have a butternut squash sitting around, try substituting the squash for the sweet potatoes. This way you use the squash and save money by not buying sweet potatoes this week.

Exercise restraint.
I am my mother’s daughter, no matter how hard I try to deny it. So when I see a fantastic deal on something at the grocery store or the market, I want to grab it. Instead, I make myself pause and consider what else we already have.

A 10 pound bag of potatoes might be on sale for a great price, but if we already have 4 pounds of potatoes that we haven’t used yet, will the ten pound bag get used before the potatoes go off? This is why I’m so leery of shopping at a warehouse store like Costco. It’s easy to get sucked into a great deal (“Wow! Five gallons of mayonnaise!”) but if you’re not going to use it all before it goes bad, it might not be a good deal! One thing you can do, though, is break down large quantities of stuff like meats and freeze them in sensible, individually-wrapped packages. Which brings me to…

Freeze surpluses.
The world certainly changed when we got our chest freezer. No longer were we limited by the tiny over-fridge freezer. By the time the farmers’ market closed and my garden was put away for the winter, our freezer was filled to bursting with frozen beans, corn, shredded zucchini, peas, grass-fed ground beef, broccoli, pierogies, strawberries, raspberries, sausage, bacon, and an assortment of baked goods. Basically, if there wasn’t an immediate use for it, I froze it. This let me save a lot more of our garden produce this year than I was able to last year, which was a very good thing. This year my bean plants produced about 100 pounds of beans over the course of the summer, far more than we could eat on our own. (I’ll be doing a post later on in 2011 on how to save fresh vegetables by freezing them.)

My goal is to have the freezer mostly emptied by the time spring rolls around, so lots of our dinners right now have a “freezer dive” component to them. (Speaking of which, we have a giant bag of pierogies that we should start using…)

Use everything.
Recipes that encourage waste really irritate me. For example, I’ve run across lots of recipes that call for egg whites, and very often the recipe will encourage the cook to “discard the yolks.” Or a recipe for wilted swiss chard will direct the cook to cut out the swiss chard’s ribs and toss them, when they’re perfectly edible. The yolks can be kept in the fridge and added to an omelet tomorrow for breakfast. The chard ribs can be chopped and used like celery in a stir fry. There’s no excuse for using a tablespoon of tomato paste and leaving the rest in the fridge to slowly mold over.

So when I find a recipe that calls for one of these wasteful actions, I will add a meal later on in the same week that will use whatever the first recipe called to have discarded. There’s a certain sense of satisfaction knowing that you’ve just used your brain and saved yourself some money in the process.

Reducing our food waste is one of my resolutions for this year. What are your foodie resolutions?

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January 1, 2011

New Years’ Resolution: Waste Not, Want Not (Part 1)

I hope everyone had a safe and happy New Years! I’m not one for making a list of resolutions, but the beginning of the year is a natural time to think about things you want to change.

Happy New Year.

I never took economics in college, but I think it’s a no-brainer to say that the economic climate plays a role in what people think about. And journalists, who are always striving to find something of interest to their readers, tend to write about things that their readers are thinking about.

Thus, this year and last we have seen many articles about food waste. For example, this article from MacLeans in 2009 states that in Canada, almost 40% of all food produced is waste; it’s either destroyed or rots just after production, during transit, at the store, or once it reaches the consumer. Everyone with a crisper in their refrigerator has experienced the horror of realizing that the leafy green in the drawer might be a bit older than you thought, or digging through the freezer to find a lump of an unidentified meat-like substance freezer-burned beyond all recognition. Cleaning liquefied vegetables out of the fridge or tossing icy brown masses of food is no fun, and represents wasted food and money. And for people with gardens, it also represents wasted time and effort.

Besides just making sure to eat things before they go off, there are some things you can do to prevent wasting food.

Make a menu plan and a shopping list every week.
We’ve tried hard to minimize the amount of food we waste by planning out our meals, making shopping lists based on those meals, and then only buying what’s on our shopping list. (Even the best laid plans go astray, of course. We tend to make a lot of spontaneous purchases at the farmers’ market, since we never know what we’re going to find.) We leave some flex room if we find something intriguing that we’d like to try – for example, when we ran across dragonfruit for the first time. When we do find something neat, though, we’ll just buy enough to try it – not the big value size. In the end, making the menu, preparing the shopping list, and sticking to our plan makes sure that we’re only buying what we need.

Have a plan for the leftovers, too.
Over time, you come to learn which meals will typically have leftovers. As you create your dinner menu for the week, make another plan for the leftovers. One of the easiest things to do with leftovers is to take them to work the next day as your lunch. Not all things make good leftovers, of course, but many pastas, casseroles, curries, and one-dish meals make fantastic lunches. You can also keep things to incorporate into dinners later in the week. For example, leftover rice can be turned into fried rice. Leftover pasta sauce can be used as a sauce for a sandwich. Leftover chicken can be turned into chicken ala king or chicken salad. And salad greens that do not have dressing on them can go back into the fridge for tomorrow night’s dinner.

Tomorrow I’ll have four more ideas for you (and me!) to help stop wasting food that we buy.

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