August 21, 2010 - What’s happening in my kitchen?
The half-sours were delicious, but not very dilly. Research revealed the volunteer “dill” in my garden was in fact fennel. Oops! The 2m. (6 ft) hollow stems were the clincher. Great for salmon gravlax, not so great for dill pickles.

Coddled eggs

Moving house can turn up old memories attached to unused items too good to throw out, for which opportunistic gifting can make two parties happy. I dropped in and found my friend Jan contemplating a pair of egg coddlers that her mother had given her. They were in their original blue Royal Worcester divided box, the instructions still attached on a perforated card, meant to be torn off and saved for future reference, such as when they are regifted to a coddler newbie.

3 kinds of fermentation

August 2, 2010 - What’s happening in my kitchen?
Three kinds of fermentation – rising in an oiled bowl, a sourdough made with atta flour, in preparation for flatbreads tomorrow (regular carb friends will be here). Creme fraiche is fermenting in a homemade constant-heat box, lit with a 100 Watt bulb and regulated with a [...]

Eggs, cholesterol and diabetes

After many months away from the website, I’m back with some thoughts on eggs. I confess, I eat eggs almost every day for breakfast, one with its yolk, and some “just whites”. There’s a lot of research on eggs, partly because there is an organized egg industry that is interested in selling more eggs. In their favour, eggs are a traditional food, easy to cook in interesting recipes, and much maligned by the anti-cholesterol campaign. Here’s some of what I found.

Nopales: cactus with blood glucose benefits

Nopales are the fleshy pads of the prickly pear cactus. Nopales are eaten all day in Mexico: had them in scrambled eggs, and also as a breakfast side - delicious little stir-fry with onion and tomato, and probably lard. They appear in salads and stews, at all-inclusive resort buffets where they hold well in steam trays, and in fine dining that is serving up local and traditional foods.

Low-carb diet: Weight loss and lower blood pressure

A recently published study found low-carb ketogenic diet resulted in lower blood pressure than a weight loss regime using orlistat plus a low-fat diet (less than 30% of calories from fat). Orlistat is marketed as Xenical or Alli. It prevents the body from absorbing fat that was eaten. The study subjects were overweight (mean Body Mass Index of 39.3) with a mean age of 52. Although both groups lost about 10% in a year (20-25 lb.), the low-carb group showed better blood pressure results.

Las Mercedes: fine dining in Guanajuato

In Guanajuato, we had an excellent meal at Las Mercedes restaurant. We had spent the morning walking in the historic centre, seeing museums, and wandering through the tunnels that carry a good amount of vehicular traffic underground. The oldest tunnels were once riverbeds. Antonio Ojeda from Cacomixtle Group told us that the first tunnels were built with many arched bridges over the rivers that once ran through the city. I’ll be posting about our trip with Antonio soon.

Hijiki: Surprise in Guanajuato

I haven’t had hijiki in about 5 years. In fact, I might have cooked up some of the last hijiki in Canada. Okay, that’s probably an overstatement - others probably had a better inventory than I did. I don’t think my parents were the only ones who squirreled stuff away, bought a lot on sale, and generally liked to keep a cushion of stuff in the house, a trait I share. Think I once read that holocaust survivors had that tendency, and I wonder if the uprooting and internment of Japanese Canadians - albeit a less devastating event - had a similar effect. But back to the present - last week, I again had hijiki, in a lovely little restaurant in Guanajuato, in the highlands of colonial Mexico. What a delightful surprise - both the restaurant and the hijiki.

Lard: Better than butter

One of the reasons I love cooking while we’re travelling is so I can participate in the market, not just observe it. I looked forward to two weeks in San Miguel de Allende to shop and cook, as well as to change pace - too many days on the move and we started to ask each other, What city are we in? For the first few days, I went to El Nigromante, the market in the centro historico, the old colonial city. There’s another market, El Mercado de los Dios, not any farther from our apartment, but away from the city centre. Down that steep hill there is another world of shops and living, market stalls full of knock-off barbie-pink packages, shoe stores (so many shoe stores everywhere), and a bus terminal. As I walked around, snapping some pix, I heard many say “Chino” (Chinese) to each other; they were looking at me and I was looking at them. Kind of evens things out. Giving back in the amusing things to look at department.

Christmas morning: Absence and adventure

This morning, December 25, we had our tea, and opened presents with Christmas tunes playing and sunshine streaming in the windows here in San Miguel de Allende, a colonial town in the highlands of central Mexico. Having Christmas away had its ups and downs. There’s the warmth and sunshine, the excitement of new experiences, and then, there’s the missing our routine of decorating, seeing friends, our more-or-less annual party. We talked about having been on the road for almost seven weeks and how that’s working. The first thing we decided was that we liked our breakfast!