Pender has a “Mediterranean” climate, meaning that we get more sun, higher temperatures, and less rain than Vancouver and Victoria.  Grape vines grow well here — if you don’t have one in your own garden, you’re bound to know a friend or relative with one!

I was a bit late getting around to collecting the leaves from our vine this year, but it’s been a little cooler than usual, so I still found lots of palm-sized tender leaves near the end of the new growth on each stem — those are the ones you want.

Dolmades recipes abound on the internet,  so I’ll leave you to find those on your own.

You can also use grape leaves to wrap meat or fish in.  The leaves impart a subtle aroma and taste to the meat, and keep everything juicy, whether you steam them in a bamboo steamer, or barbecue them on the grill.

The other night, I mixed some unripened goat’s cheese with some fresh herbs and a little olive oil, then wrapped up spoonfuls in leaves that I had lightly brushed with olive oil (that helps the leaf to stick to itself when you roll it up).

We grilled the little bundles alongside our wings.  The cheese was warm and lightly melted, and absolutely delicious spread on slices of fresh baguette.  The leaves are pleasantly smoky, but a little to chewy to eat more than one.

Next time, I’ll be using some of the larger leaves to wrap sockeye fillets destined for the grill.  Can’t wait!

If you’ve been out at a Farmer`s Market in the last couple of weeks, you`ve probably seen bundles of these little curly-cues for sale.  Known as garlic greens, flowers or scapes – they are harvested from the tops of garlic plants at this time of yearby many growers in order to send all of the sun`s energy to the bulb developing under the soil.

Love the look and idea of these things but unsure how to use them?

Well, it’s Top Five Friday, so here are my 5 best ideas for incorporating garlic scapes into your everyday cuisine…

Garlic scapes have a mild garlic flavour that is slightly sharp when raw, but that mellows when cooked…just like garlic cloves.  To use, trim off the flower end, as well as any tough bottom ends.  Slice thinly on the bias and toss raw into salads, or:

1.  Use them like basil and make Garlic Scape Pesto.  Process trimmed scapes, herb of choice (lemon balm, parsley, or cilantro are good choices), parmesan cheese, olive oil, s+p until smooth — serve on pasta, over fish, mix with mayo for sandwiches…

2.  Use them like green beans and make this wonderful dish from Kathy Gori (use 1/2 beans, 1/2 scapes — all scapes would make for a truly garlicky dish…)

3.  Use them like green onions and put a new twist on a classic Spanish dish.  Blanch 6-8″ lengths until crisp tender, then grill until almost limp.  Serve with Romesco Sauce for dipping.

4.  Use them like peas – slice them into 1/4″ rounds and toss into Chinese Fried Rice.

5.  Use them like garlic –  finely mince scapes and shallot, sweat in olive oil, then mix with breadcrumbs, fresh basil, parsley, s+p — stuff into hollowed out tomatoes and bake at 350° F until golden.  Voilà…Tomato Provençal!

 Any other ideas out there?  Love to hear ‘em!

Don’t have a lot on my plate today — as if you didn’t notice.

• Galloping Goose Bacon & Fennel Confit
• Cold BC Spot Prawns on blanched Washington Asparagus
• BC New Potato Salad with Yellow Pepper Romesco
• BC Tomato, Cucumber and Red Onion Salad with a Salted Meyer Lemon vinaigrette
• Hard-boiled Pender Island Eggs
• All on a bed of local lettuce, baby kale and dandelion greens.

Seasonal, sustainable, local, foraged, a fridge cleaner — and a freakin’ amazing dinner, if I do say so myself.

The Cobb Salad was first made by the owner of the Brown Derby Restaurant in Hollywood.  It was a late night impromptu snack served by Bob Cobb to some of his more influential customers.  He grabbed whatever was in the fridge at the time, and created a sensation that has been served millions of times since it`s birthday in 1937.

Mr Cobb`s salad included chicken breast, lettuce, tomatoes, watercress, chives, avocado, cheese and French dressing.

I had intended to add some avocado and feta to my version, but 3 obstacles precluded their inclusion:

1. I was kind of grooving on the (mostly) local thing
2. I couldn’t fit anymore on the family-size serving platter
3. There’s only so much food 2 people can should eat

And so ended our 2nd meal created from 2 pounds of live Spot Prawns — I managed to squeeze (literally) a Prawn Bisque out of the heads and shells, and from that, I made some Prawn Crackers for the Dooze.  Three and a half meals from $20 worth of local seafood.  Not too bad for the first Prawn Saturday of the Season…what will happen for Week 2?  Any suggestions?

Shrimp salad on a toasted kaiser with bacon, lettuce, tomato and cucumber –aka the Shrimp Salad Club.

I like sandwiches.  I like sandwiches very much indeed.

I make shrimp salad my combining hand peeled shrimp (it just looks nicer than machine peeled, don`t you think?), a little mayonnaise, a squirt of ketchup, a small spoon of horseradish, thinly sliced green onion, chopped cilantro salt and pepper.

Who needs seafood sauce from a jar?

So much more colourful than last years batch! I finally settled on a permanent pattern as well — knitting is enjoyably mindless when you have a simple pattern to guide you.

The yarn is Bernat Handicrafter Cotton, and I used a set of (2) 5mm needles (US size 8).  I don’t do gauges, but I can tell you that I make my dishclothes about 8″x8″ (20cm x 20cm) – do the math if you want, or just work by trial and error.

(And yes, I know that my conversions in parentheses are inconsistent.  Sometimes I work in metric, sometimes I work in imperial.  It’s a Canadian thing.)

Knitted Dishcloth
Project time:  About 2 hours.

Cast On 37 stitches

Row 1 – Work in a seed stitch (k1, p1, k1) to end of row.

Rows 2 thru 5 – Repeat Row 1

Row 5 – k1, p1, k1, p1, k29, p1, k1, p1, k1

Row 6 – p1, k1, p1, k1, p29, k1, p1, k1, p1

Rows 7+ – Repeat Rows 5 & 6 until dishcloth measures 7″ (17.5cm)

Repeat Row 1 for a total of 5 rows to complete dishcloth border.

Cast Off in seed stitch.

]]> http://islandvittles.com/2010/05/09/hand-knitted-dishclothes/feed/ 0 http://islandvittles.com/2010/04/30/olive-oil-poached-salmon-salted-citrus-gremolata/ http://islandvittles.com/2010/04/30/olive-oil-poached-salmon-salted-citrus-gremolata/#comments Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:39:26 +0000 Theresa http://islandvittles.com/?p=2043

Exotic & luxurious sounding, but quick and easy to cook — any night of the week.  Served with a mixed rice pilaf and a small side salad, we were feasting on rich, moist (but not oily) salmon in under an hour…

Pull skin-on salmon fillets out the fridge and allow to rest while you start the rice.

Once the rice is started, rinse some preserved citrus peel well, and cut into julienne strips.  (I used tangerine, Meyer lemon and sweet limes.)  Add to olive oil in a non-reactive saucepan, along with coarse salt and a few whole peppercorns.  You need enough olive oil to cover the fillets completely, and a big enough pan to cook the salmon in a single layer.  Bring the olive oil up to a VERY STEADY 175-180° F (80-82° C) over med heat.

To make the gremolata, finely mince more salted citrus peel, and toss with minced flat parsley, a little lemon or lime juice, minced garlic, coarse salt and freshly cracked pepper.

When the oil is to temperature (and the rice is cooked and resting), season the salmon with s+p and add to the oil.  Poach until 1 or 2 small white droplets appear on the surface of the salmon (medium rare)  (see **tip below).  Remove from the oil immediately, and drain on paper towels.  Rest for a couple of minutes while you get a small salad together.

I don’t have a pic of our salad, but it was a handful of fresh spring greens, a couple of sorrel leaves from the plant on the deck, some tender dandelion shoots and some cherry tomatoes, all tossed with a red wine vinaigrette.

Serve the salmon on top of a mound of rice, and garnish with the gremolata.  Enjoy!

** Tips:

• Cooking time will vary with the thickness of the salmon — our relatively thin fillets took 5-6 minutes — if you have thicker fillets, you may want to increase the heat slightly just after you add the salmon to bring up the temperature of the oil.  Use a thermometer to monitor the oil temperature, and do not allow it to go above 180° F (82° C).  Inch thick fillets will take approx. 10-12 minutes to cook to medium rare.
• Fresh lemon, lime and orange peel can be substituted for the preserved.  Use a zester on the fresh citrus and ensure you avoid using any of the white pith that lies beneath the peel.
• To reuse the oil, strain through cheesecloth, and store covered in the fridge for up to 1 week.

Friday may have been the last day of class, but there’s never any slacking off at the San Francisco Baking Institute.  (seriously.)

On the calendar for Day 5:  Chocolate Salted Caramel Tart, Quiche, Strawberry Breton Tart and Tarte Bourdaloue.

Yes, that’s 4 “tarts” from 3 doughs — no time for dilly-dallying.

The pâte à foncer formed the base for our quiche.  A rich dough that uses pastry flour, milk, yolks and butter.  It’s French, so you expect butter — but in this case we have 75% of the flour weight in butter.  That’s 3 parts butter to 4 parts flour, folks.  Tasty…indeed.  I made grilled chicken club quiches, with bacon and cheddar.

The Tarte Bourdaloue is a pâte sucrée shell, filled with raspberry purée, frangipane and pears.  The sucrée contains all purpose flour, almond meal, powdered sugar, 45% butter and 34% of the flour weight in egg yolks.  It seems we’re getting richer as we go…

The sable Breton was the biggest surprise of the day (for me, at least).  It is a crumbly, crispy dough that forms the perfect base for a light fruit tart.  We used pistachio cream, strawberries and apricot glaze.  I loved this dough!  Thirty percent yolks, 70% sugar, 75% butter and a little baking powder combine with pastry flour to make what is, essentially, a crazy-rich sugar cookie.

The Creamy Chocolate Tart with Salted Caramel is a blind-baked chocolate pâte sucrée, filled with a salted caramel sauce and dark chocolate crèmeux, and finished with a black chocolate glaze.  So much goodness in a 6″ tart…

And to top it off, my classmates all sang Happy Birthday to me — and the School presented me with this gorgeous Charlotte.  Thanks to everyone at the San Francisco Baking Institute, and all of my classmates.  I couldn’t have had a better day!

This little fella is a Paris-Brest, named after the predecessor to the Tour de France. It`s a pastry made from choux, a classic french dough used to make eclairs, gougeres, cream puffs, Parisian Gnocchi and another few dozen other good things…

Today was my first day in a week-long course at the San Francisco Baking Institute. A gift I planned long ago to soften the blow of a milestone birthday hitting me later this week. (I`ll let you guess the number.)

Choux can be tricky. It`s one of those things that is a little different everytime you make it…here, our instructor, Juliette, is showing us what a ready-to-go choux dough looks like: Smooth and shiny, and drops from the spoon in a nice, even V.

We also learned the professional way to load up a piping bag, and how to pipe even, consistent eclairs.  Tomorrow we get to fill them…

A while back, I had a bit of a salt-curing extravaganza.  I preserved some Meyer lemons, some sweet limes and some tangerines.

After the work was done, I had a sleepless night of excitement dreaming up all the ways I would use my precious citrus.   It was a sugar plums dancing in their heads kind of moment.  (Some people never grow up.)

When you remove your cured fruit from the jar, rinse it well to remove the residual salt.  Finely mince the peel and add it to any number of dishes.  The peel is the most often used, but as you’ll see, I’ve also used the flesh and the juice — SPARINGLY — this is salty stuff.

Wanna see how I’ve used them so far?

Harissa Wings with Moroccan Cured Lemon & Blue Cheese Dip – I pureed the flesh and peel of a salted lemon into the harissa marinade for the wings, and then folded some finely minced peel into the blue cheese dip for an extra hit of lemon.

Cornish Game Hen with Aranciata and Preserved Tangerine Gastrique – I stuffed some minced tangerine peel and thyme under the bid’s skin.  I used more minced peel in the gastrique.

Potato Latkes with Meyer Lemon & Dill Creme Fraiche – I stirred some minced peel into the creme fraiche – simple, yet profound.

Thai Noodle Salad with salted sweet lime – I tossed the minced peel into the salad, and used a bit of juice to add flavour to the dressing.

Preserved Lemon Twist in Maple Blossom Schnapps – tasty when the booze is gone!

Salt-Cured Sweet Lime and Ancho Mayo – peel pureed into homemade mayonnaise.

How have you used your preserved citrus?

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