Yum

I have some time to be completely reclusive this week.  I have the week off work and P is out of town for a few days…. I do not have to see any other human beings.  That can be good or it can be bad.  I can do those things that are shameful when you’re around others. I’m thinking of one thing in particular… something I remember doing when I was much younger and living with my parents.  This indulgence was reserved for Friday nights and with very good reason.

My mother would fry… YES… fry some good dark dense rye bread, NOT white bread — she always called that bread ‘javex bread’ largely due to its colour and partly due to the fact that you could squish it like a tissue and end up with a cherry sized ball —  but I digress… we would then fry it in a pan with a little bit of oil. Then she would peel several numerous garlic cloves and while the bread was still hot we would take the garlic and rub it on both sides of the nicely browned and crispy fried bread.  The garlic hit from this is shall I say A.M.A.Z.I.N.G and not for the faint hearted!

Hours later your mouth still feels the burn from the garlic and even more hours later the garlic seeps through your pores and offends anyone within visual distance who may have an aversion to the wafting of garlic oozing from your body.  Hence the Friday night ritual… so that one may have enough time to exude all evidence of the indulgence.

There are many ways to make topinky and when I looked it up on the internet many people egg wash the bread or add eggs or do all sorts of crazy things, things we never did.

Growing up with this treat you can imagine my shock when I would then go to restaurants and order garlic bread and would be presented with a thick slice of white… WHITE bread that was sometimes crispy and sometimes soggy with butter and hardly a hint of garlic. Most of the time you can’t even tell there’s garlic in there and then they actually feel the need to add parsley… Okay maybe that was for the aesthetics but still! Needless to say I have long since given up eating this bread.

I have the fortunate pleasure of living with a man that isn’t offended or deterred by the ever present garlic in our house either on the table or wafting from my skin but if there’s even a remote chance of meeting up with anyone else I will will refrain.  So be warned!  Just as a side note this indulgence is much less offensive if enjoyed by everyone around you! So make a huge batch and SHARE the love!  🙂

Topinky

• Dark Bread – a good Hungarian thinly sliced bread is best here
• Duck fat (because I had some) or a bit of oil for the pan
• 1 clove (at least) of fresh garlic for each slice of bread
• Sprinkle of sea salt if you wish

Either coat your bread with duck fat or drizzle a bit of oil in a pan. Bring to medium heat and fry the bread until it’s nicely browned.  Remove from pan and rub the garlic on both sides of each slice of bread… Now here, depending on how hungry you are, I was starving so though one slice was covered in cheese and some slow roasted tomatoes the other just had to remain true to the spirit of topinky.  You can dress them or not… I would suggest having at least one naked.  Enjoy and stay away for a couple of days from anyone who hasn’t indulged… be warned!  🙂

I’m not generally one to buy into trends, at least not quickly. I heard about this Sous Vide trend a while back and didn’t really think much about it. It seemed odd to me. But since that first time I heard about it everywhere I seemed to look the Sous Vide method of cooking was popping up, on blogs, instagram… everywhere!  Seemed to be so simple and a very effective way of cooking and controlling your cooking.  If you don’t yet know about it, which is highly unlikely I’m guessing because sometimes I’m a little slow, just Google it and you will find an insane amount of information online.

Essentially it’s a water immersion method of cooking food. Though the big excitement seems to be mostly about they way this method manages to consistently cook meat, you can certainly cook any food this way. You take your food, season it, seal it in a bag and then immerse it in a temperature controlled water bath for a as little as an hour for proteins like fish, to one or more hours for various cuts of beef.  The tougher the meat the longer the bath and it apparently all comes out tasting super tender and juicy and perfect every time… Hmmmm…. interesting?  The idea behind it is that all the juices in the meat stay in the meat and the gentle cooking doesn’t destroy the cells, you don’t lose any of the flavour and because you’re setting a very specific temperature that doesn’t overcook the meat even if you bath it for quite some time longer.  The thing that got me was the notion of cooking an egg for hours and still having the yolk soft boiled and runny… WHAT?!  Seriously…. it’s all about temperature specific control.

I must say that it didn’t take me too long to really consider this.  To be clear it is not a quick cooking method, unless of course you can wrap your head around thinking of your meals in advance, bagging and throwing them in the water bath and forgetting about them for quite some time.  Then the actual ‘hands on’ cooking time is really just a quick sear in a pan to give the meat some color.  I did some research online and decided that this was an endeavour I was up for.

Mother’s day and my birthday almost collide each spring so this year rather than allow my partner to do his usual gift shopping, which by the way works out quite well for me, I decided I’d point him in the direction of this kitchen toy, though still expensive it has come down drastically from the price I’d been quoted the first time I heard about it…  $1200.00!  This hefty price tag was attached to commercial versions of the machine and since then they’ve come up with much more affordable options for home cooks ranging between about $300 – 500.

I’d made lamb chops once before years ago, lamb is a pretty expensive meat that requires very specific cooking, something that isn’t easy to accomplish using the traditional cooking methods.  The sous vide makes this super simple and so this was my first journey into immersion cooking… I needed to make the perfect lamb chops…. bath at 140 degrees F for about 2 1/2 hours then a quick pan sear in butter and dinner is served.

I have to say that I’m impressed at how these turned out.  I seasoned these in the bag and threw them in the bath as soon as I got home from work, did a few things around the house, we went for our walk and when we came home I quickly pan seared them in butter… I just couldn’t resist.  They were juicy and tender and might I say perfectly cooked though I feel a little hard pressed to take all the credit. The sous vide makes it so incredibly simple it feels like cheating!  I feel like I’m going a little sous vide crazy now…thinking about all the cool things I can make, and trust that they’ll be cooked just right…. I’m truly addicted and though some things can take several days, it seems pretty easy to just throw them in and forget about them…. and have several things going at once, staggering them so that you can have dinner ready for every evening after work.

Garlic Rosemary Lamb Chops in the Sous Vide

• 4 lamb chops
• 2 garlic cloves
• 1 teaspoon fresh rosemary
• 1 teaspoon fresh thyme
• salt and pepper
• 1 tablespoon butter (optional as the meat doesn’t really need it)

Preheat the sous vide to 140 degrees F.

Salt and pepper the lamb chops, sprinkle them with rosemary and thyme and lay sliced garlic on each of the chops. Add in a tablespoon of butter and place the seasoned chops into a bag.  Seal the bag and immerse in the sous vide.  Cook for about an hour per inch of lamb chop thickness, I cooked mine for about 2 1/2 hours.  Once they are done sear quickly on high heat just to brown them and serve.

Yum

I am not even going to apologize… nope… not for single second.  To be clear, I’m also not going to point this post out to my health care professional, because even though I am not apologetic in any way, I’m also not a psychopath and I’m well aware that I should be riddled with guilt as a result of what I’m about to share with you.

Look at these!!!!!  Seriously!  Who among us does not go weak at the knees at the sight of fried food? Yes, I know — It’s much more popular to brag about having a glass of wine or a weakness for chocolate or something a little more seemingly refined…and there is a time and place for that. I say let’s not forget the underdog — the deep fried crispy, juicy and well seasoned mini foods that we love and love to hate … I for one think that fried foods are lacking in air time these days.  I do not discriminate… Make no mistake… I have a very long list of foods that make me h.a.p.p.y!  And today — May long weekend Monday, when it snowed… YES… snowed after it poured freezing rain overnight… All this just after we experienced an unexpected reprieve from electricity for most of the daylight hours in our neck of the woods thanks to a very windy, cold and dreary day… I think these are well deserved. Can’t you just taste them?

We tried a new piece of kitchen equipment a little while ago — you know the one… add a spoon of oil and set it awhirl for what — 30 minutes you say!  Much too long to have to wait between batches of the food most of us burn our fingers on as we grab for them while they’re still blazing hot… and small batches. The wings were not bad that way but the matchstick fries just could not be accomplished.  I hesitate to admit that we cleaned the day old kitchen machine and ran…. ran I tell you… back to the store regretful that we ever even thought for a second that it might be remotely capable of achieving the same results that the good old fashioned and out of fashion deep fryer would…. because it just DIDN’T.

So why fight what works?  It just doesn’t make sense does it?  We didn’t think so, so after I had made P throw out our very old and clunky deep fryer and after we tried to replace it with that trendy kitchen gadget we gave in to our undeniable love for fried food and bought a new deep fryer, filled it with oil… yes…. OIL and set to work on some true unabashed comfort food.  So here you go… I dare you to indulge in these… maybe not everyday, that would just be wrong, but once in a while when the world outside seems to be going insane and you need some comfort in the form of fried food….. OMG… they are so damned good!

Chicken Wings

• couple dozen wings
• bowl full of flour
• Seasoning of choice
• *** and yes…. a deep fryer!

Dredge the wings in flour as you wait for the fryer to heat up… toss the floured wings into the fryer and cook for 7-9 minutes.  Toss the fried wings into a bowl lined with a paper towel or two and season quickly with your seasoning of choice….. enjoy… don’t make excuses… just simply enjoy!