Friday, November 30, 2007

Fishies for Paul

This year Paul's birthday falls on a Saturday. We went out with all his friends on his actual birthday, so I made him a birthday dinner the night before.


I wanted to keep things simple, because I wouldn't have a lot of time when I came home to cook. So I decided on a menu of rice, green beans and poached fish. I modified a poached fish recipe I tried earlier in the year to make this one. This was fast and kind of fancy tasting - sadly, it may have been a little lacking in the presentation category.

Poached Haddock

4 pieces haddock
1 stalk lemongrass, chopped into one 1 inch pieces, and squashed a bit
1 shallot, finely chopped
1 glass white wine
unsalted butter about a tablespoon

1. Add 1/2 tsp butter to a frying pan with a lid and soften the onions. Add the white wine and lemongrass and bring to a boil. (I reduced the liquid and this point quite a lot and added some water back in, but you could skip this.)
2. Add the fish and cover the pan with the lid. The fish probably won't be fully covered, I flipped mine over after about 3 mins.
3. Cook about 3 mins longer, until opaque all the way through.
4. Remove the fish from the pan to your serving dish and cover them with tin foil. Meanwhile, increase the heat under the pan and reduce the wine mixture by about 1/2. Add about a 1 tsp of butter, and heat until it starts bubbling again.
5. Remove bits of lemongrass from the sauce and serve.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

Cinnamon Molesses Ice-Cream

Paul loves cinnamon ice-cream. So when our friend Yannick made some last weekend when I was over cooking with him and I saw how simple his recipe was I decided to try it myself.

The original recipe that Yannick made called for brown sugar - but my brown sugar was a little hard and sometimes I find it is a little tricky to get all the lumps out.

I took this recipe over to my parents house and we had it with pumpkin and apple pies. It worked well with both kinds of pie and is also nice on its own.

Cinnamon Molasses Ice-Cream
1 cup milk
3/4 cup white sugar
2 tbsp molasses
2 cups whipping cream
1.5 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla

1. Dissolve sugar and molasses in the milk.
2. Add cinnamon, vanilla and whipping cream and whisk - but don't whisk too much or you will incorporate a lot of air.
3. Freeze in your ice-cream maker.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

St. Lawerence Market

The best part about going to the St. Lawerence Market is coming home and eating a huge sticky bun, and reading the newspaper.