Green Island Gingerbread

Because I have the Cantina open, and because this is really too good to be lost, here is the famous Green Island Gingerbread. The gingerbread itself is very dark and deep, richly — almost excessively — ginger. Good three days later, the kind of thing old travellers would have taken on a journey. But the sauce, which would not travel well even if there was ever any left over, is completely stunning.

Gingerbread Green Island

Preheat oven to 325º
mix in small bowl:
4 t ground ginger
4 t ground cinnamon
2 t baking soda
1/2 t ground cloves
1/2 t ground pepper
1/2 t salt

Beat till fluffy, with electric mixer, in a large mixing bowl:
1 C butter
1 C brown sugar

Beat in:
2 C fancy unsulphured (or try blackstrap) molasses
2 eggs

Beat in the spice mixture, then with a wooden spoon, stir in:
3 1/4 C flour

When that's incorporated, stir in:
1 C boiling water
and if you like, either:
1 C finely chopped candied ginger OR
1 C California raisins, plumped in 1/2 C boiling water for 20 minutes, then drained

Turn into a 9” x 13” greased cake pan, bake for 60-65 minutes.

If making ahead, cover pan with foil and store at room temperature for two days. Or turn out and wrap cake in plastic, then foil, and freeze for up to one month.


MAPLE SAUCE:

3/4 C butter
2 eggs
2 C icing sugar
1/2 C maple syrup
2 T rum or 1 t vanilla

Melt butter in a medium saucepan over low heat. In a medium bowl, whisk eggs. While constantly whisking, slowly drizzle melted butter into eggs, then whisk in icing sugar till smooth, then maple syrup and rum or vanilla. Pour back into the saucepan and stir over medium heat just until mixture starts to bubble. Immediately pour into small pitcher and serve over squares of gingerbread. Sauce will keep, covered in the fridge, for 3 days. (But there won’t be any to keep.) Microwave low heat till warm.

Joy of Cookeryingery

For Tom Kelly, who asked "Why is cooking such pleasure?"

Doing something simple and useful, with an immediate and gratifying purpose: making things delicious for the ones you love. Putting order to a small chaos of disparate ingredients, making something new out of this and this and this separate thing, synthesizing.

Because my father did all the cooking when I was young, and he loved it. My mother baked but really did not enjoy the trudge of every night dinner. My father taught me how to mince an onion efficiently, how to experiment, not to be afraid of trying some wild new idea from the newspaper. (The Saturday Globe and Mail recipes by Lucy Waverman are always worth a try.)

Pleasure of the kitchen: the smell of coriander and cumin, the brisk crunch of slicing celery, the brilliant colours of red pepper and orange peel and the tenderest green of the interior leaves of Brussels sprouts. Cocoa, bitter and beautiful, the oily talcum feel of Fry's between your fingers. The elastic beauty of bread dough properly kneaded, properly risen, properly punched down. Fiddleheads and squid and pickled beets and butterscotch sauce, how can those things co-exist? But better not to use them in one single recipe, I think.

Making breakfast: poaching eggs to exactly the degree of doneness that pleases you most, drying them slightly before placing them on perfectly-buttered perfectly-browned toast, grinding a fresh dust of pepper over them, and serving them on a good plate with a shiny substantial knife and fork, and a cloth napkin. This is ACHIEVABLE! and it is PERFECT! What else in life can you be so certain of perfecting? And for about 27 cents. Well, 40 if you use organic eggs, which I highly recommend.

When you are finished your work people are nourished and happy, and with any luck the kitchen is not too big a nightmare. And if you are still not convinced about the glory of cooking, make a cake. Here is the best chocolate cake recipe in the world, and I'll follow it with the best carrot cake. Some people are connoisseurs of wine or whiskey or cigars: my area of expertise is cake.


Chocolate Birthday Cake

1 2/3 c flour
1 1/2 t soda
1 t salt
1/2 c becel
1 1/2 c sugar
2 eggs
2/3 c cocoa
1 t vanilla
1 1/2 c buttermilk

Oven 350º Grease and flour two round baking pans, 8” or 9”, or one oblong 9"x13".
Stir dry ingredients together in a small bowl. Beat butter, sugar and eggs together in a large mixing bowl for three minutes. Beat in cocoa and vanilla, then add a third of the dry ingredients alternately with buttermilk (half each time), ending with the last of the dry ingredients. Don't worry if the mixture curdles, it will bake out fine.
Bake 30 minutes for layers, 35-40 for oblong.


You can serve that as it is, with ice cream, or with a shiny fudge icing made by melting 1/2 cup butter in a medium saucepan, stirring in 4 T cocoa until perfectly smooth, then adding 2 cups icing sugar, beating till smooth-ish, and adding 1 teaspoon vanilla and enough boiling water, 1 teaspoon at a time, to stir up a shiny smooth spreadable icing. Water must be boiling to get that gloss.


Or you can make a really fancy, really sweet dressed up cake à la Betty Crocker from the 50s:

Buttermallow Cake

Bake chocolate cake in 9" x 13" pan, let cool. Spread butterscotch filling over the cake, then frost with marshmallow frosting. Melt 1/2 cup chocolate chips or 1 square chocolate, pop into a plastic bag, snip a tiny corner off the bag and draw straight lines lengthwise down the cake. Then draw a clean knife through the lines width-wise to create napoleon markings. Don’t draw the knife down too deeply – you don’t want to mix the butterscotch filling in with the icing.

Butterscotch filling:

1/2 C brown sugar
1/4 C cornstarch
pinch of salt
1/2 C water
1 T butter

Stir sugar, cornstarch and salt together in small saucepan. Add water and cook, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens and boils. Boil gently and stir one minute. Blend in butter. Cool.

Marshmallow frosting

2 egg whites
11/2 C sugar
1/4 t cream of tartar
1 T light corn syrup
1/3 C water
16 large marshmallows, quartered

Combine egg whites, sugar, cream of tartar, syrup and water in top of a double boiler. Place over boiling water. Beat with electric hand mixer until stiff peaks form, scraping pan occasionally (about seven minutes). Remove from heat. Add marshmallows quickly and continue beating until of spreading consistency.


But maybe you don't like chocolate cake?

Here's the Uber Carrot Cake, best I've ever made, after years of trying.

Best Carrot Cake

3 eggs
3/4 c buttermilk
3/4 c oil
2 c dark brown sugar
2 c unbleached flour
2 t baking soda
2 t cinnamon
1 t fresh-ground nutmeg
1/2 t salt
1 c crushed pineapple, drained
2 c grated carrots
1 c good dark raisins
1 c coarsely ground chopped walnuts
3/4 c shredded unsweetened coconut

With electric mixer, beat eggs, buttermilk, oil and sugar till blended. Add flour, soda, spices and salt, and blend. Stir in pineapple, carrots, walnuts and coconut. Pour into two greased 8” square pans or one 9x13” pan and bake at 350º for 55 minutes.

Ice with orange cream cheese icing: beat one cup soft butter and 2 cups cold cream cheese until creamed. Add the grated rind of one orange, 1 t vanilla, and enough icing sugar (about 1 cup) to make a light icing.

Or make JoY of Cooking’s

Cream Cheese icing
(have the cream cheese cold, straight from the fridge, but the butter at room temperature)
Beat with a mixer until just blended:
8 oz. cream cheese
1/2 cup butter
2 teaspoons vanilla

Add one cup at a time and beat just until smooth:
2 - 2 1/2 cups icing sugar

You can stir in some grated orange rind or cinnamon, if you like.

Refrigerate the cake.

Salmon Chanted Evening

Salmon again, just can't get enough.

This is a new way: heat oven to 425º and place salmon fillets skin side down in an oven dish. I use a smallish 8" one, which I completely fill with salmon pieces. Salt and fresh-ground pepper the fish. Slice a lemon paper-thin, and arrange the lemon slices, overlapping slightly, over the fish. When the oven is hot, pop the dish in the oven and bake for 12 minutes per inch of thickness. There's just enough time to roast some potatoes if you have a convection oven, as I suddenly do: before you start the fish, slice two or three potatoes lengthwise into eighths, toss with a little olive oil and lay them out on a foil-covered cookie sheet (unless you are against foil, in which case just use the cookie sheet but be prepared to work at the cleaning later), salt and fresh-ground pepper generously, and slide the sheet onto the top shelf of the oven to cook while you get the salmon ready. If your oven is non-convection, or as we call it, Ordinary, then the potatoes will need about 40 minutes. You can turn them half way through but you don't really need to.

The salmon comes out tender and gently lemon-spiked. The potatoes are crisp and slightly wicked. You could steam some green beans or broccoli while the salmon and potatoes are cooking, or just make a big green salad. Equal parts lemon juice and olive oil shaken together in a jar (with a bit of salt and a very small smidge of sugar) make a good dressing.

We feel healthy and holy after this dinner, but it is as good as fish and chips.

Stewing

Reading a review of Patricia Pearson's new book A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours & Mine), which sounds like a short tour through my own mind, I realize that my anxieties don't follow me into the kitchen, and that's probably why I like to cook. Food is also an excellent depression and anxiety medication, although over-dosing one's self is a danger.

Here's one of the best anti-anxiety kitchen remedies: winter stew. Frankly, it's much better than pot roast, described below. My mother's stew was thrown together the minute she slammed home from work, while she stood at the stove in her coat trying to get her five fractious children fed fast, but it's a good one:

First, put the butter in the freezer. Trust me. Next, set a big pot of lightly-salted water on high to boil. Quickly scrub four potatoes, cut into 1 inch dice, and pop into the water, even if it's not yet boiling. Peel and slice 6 carrots (and a couple of parsnips, if you like them) and add them to the water too. Peel and eighth (as opposed to quarter) lengthwise two white onions and toss them into the stewpot.

There are the veg cooking, now the meat: cube and brown, in a large frying pan, one pound of round steak, and toss a couple of tablespoons of flour into the frying pan as the meat approaches browning, so that the flour has time to brown and cook a little too. Add enough flour to absorb the fat released by the meat, making a kind of roux around and among the meat cubes. Salt and ground pepper in now, but go easy on the salt. Open a large can of diced tomatoes and use the can lid to help drain the juice into the frying pan, stirring well to smooth out all the flour/roux lumps. Add vegetable water from the stewpot to make a gravy, and add the diced tomatoes to the vegetables in the stewpot. When the gravy is smooth, check the vegetables in the stewpot: there should only be about the same amount of water in the pot as volume of gravy in the frying pan. If necessary, remove (and reserve, because you might want to add it back later) some of the water in the stewpot. Then pour the frying-pan-full of meat and gravy into the stewpot, turn down the heat to medium, and let it all bubble away melding while you throw some biscuits in the oven.

Cheese Biscuits made FAST
(Also known as Current Biscuits, after Azana)

Heat the oven to 450º

2 cups flour
2 tablespoons sugar
1 t salt
3 t baking powder
Fluff all that with a fork. Grate 1/3 cup of freezing cold butter into the flour, using the medium grater, not the lemon zest size. Stir lightly, so that the butter gets coated with flour. Dice enough cheddar cheese to make about half a cup, and toss that into the bowl, turning to coat as well. You can add half a cup of washed currants, too, if those please you; or some chopped parsley and green onions, if you want to go mad. Once all the dry ingredients are stirred together, pour in 3/4 cup of cold milk—maybe as much as a cup, depending on the humidity and the flour—and mix very gently just until all the dough is damp. Drop the batter from the mixing spoon onto a cookie sheet lined with a silpat mat, and bake for 10-15 minutes on the top rack until the biscuits are risen and browned.

When the biscuits are done, toss a cup of frozen green peas into the stew, and call those children to the table.

Rot Post

Making pot roast this morning I had rot-post running through my head. Probably because of a rotten tooth which has been cleaned out — "Have you got all the necrotic tissue, doctor?" the dental assistant politely inquired — and while simultaneously thinking about rot and helping Will tune his guitar with a web tuner, I burned the oil in the beautiful Le Creuset pot, which is all you need to make pot roast.

There's the crux: the pot makes the roast. Winners/Homesense sells Le Creuset seconds from time to time (how I got mine, of course) which are pretty prime for seconds.

Bring a little peanut oil to swirling hot but not smoking, and brown a good piece of chuck roast on all sides, sitting the roast down and not moving it for a good three minutes to create that worthy brown crust, then shifting to another face for more. Don't walk away and tune a guitar while you're doing this. Once it's browned, set it down again flat on the pan bottom, and pour in a large can of crushed tomatoes and the last half of the bottle of red wine from the other night, and about a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce. You might like more of that, but I go easy on it at first. Depending on the tomatoes, you might also wish to salt the sauce. Certainly add a good grinding of pepper. Toss in a big onion, roughly chopped, and a carrot and a piece of celery, both chopped, if you have room. You can also add those later when things have cooked down a bit.

Put the lid on, and either leave it on top of the stove to simmer or pop it into the oven at 275º for most of the afternoon. This is stew, really. But it's good, when the wind blows down the chimney flue.