Pump up the iron!

Saturday's a night to slow down and take our time fiddling in the kitchen and assembling a supper. Tonight that means chicken livers with bacon and onions, perogies and cheese on the side.
Food that makes you want to go bowling...

A relative of Friday night pizza

Her fat litte cousin, Tortellini.

This was almost as easy as pizza, as making the sauce meant pulling out one of those squared-off milk containers (their shape makes they fit well in there) of sausagey sauce from the freezer.

Fresh bread, grated cheese and along with the tortellini and sauce -- and we didn't even have to wait around for the delivery guy.

Anything can happen

Going into the city to attend an event meant another night of restaurant food. Because it's en route, we headed for an old favourite, an old-timey cafe that serves good solid food.

It felt like the first night of winter in Vancouver, in other words, a miserable night.

I did my best to park near as possible to the restaurant, but since our last visit the place has gone considerably upscale with a refit. As a result, I marched right past it. Since this was during the worst of the downpour, both of us managed to get completely soaked. When we finally retraced our steps to the place, we were grateful to get inside. Hot food to warm us was key.

I ordered the traditional open-faced turkey sandwich, complete with traditional trimmings. I love the fact that it's always real turkey served here -- big chunks of both dark and light meat piled onto the sandwich. None of that pre-chewed stuff that comes in a tube, the kind they have to shave so it looks like you're getting a pile of meat, even if it's mostly just air.

The DM had pretty much the same, only he opted for fries instead of mashies, and pork instead of turkey on the sandwich.

Quick stop supper

An evening for a school concert, so we needed to grab something fast. We tried a new Vietnamese place and were both very happy with our piled-high bowls of vermicelli, topped with grilled pork. The real treats were buried at the bottom of the bowl -- slivers of vegies, the most recognizable being cucumber and fennel. Quick, delicious and satisfying.

Mixed-up Mexi

That fat little chicken we started on the other night was sitting in the fridge, waiting for a second chance. There was still quite a bit of the mixed rice I'd made as well, so I broke up the breast meat, blended it with the rice, and stuffed the mix into tortillas. The result? Sort of wraps, sort of burritos.

I added a little tin of chorizo peppers to the 'Coq au vin' sauce from the chicken, cooked it a bit for the flavours to blend, then poured that over top of the roll-ups.

I opened a tin of refried beans (not worth cooking them from scratch for two of us) and put those into the oven to heat through at the same time, then topped both pans with grated cheese at the last minute. Because we'd spotted a few fresh helvellas on a late afternoon walk, those went over top of the beans too.

Not really Mexican, but close enough for a Tuesday.

All-in-the-oven supper

I saved a bit of sauerkraut for just such a supper as this -- a night of using things up -- and managed to cook up all of it in the oven.

Because I'd decided to use at least some of the insides from the Halloween pumpkins, tonight was the night for that too. Improvising some, I made three loaves of pumpkin bread, and since those meant the oven would be on, I put the supper in there too.

Those 'au gratin' scalloped potatoes are part of the meal, and a pan of baked sausages (the homemade bockwurst) goes with it. That sauerkraut I mentioned cooked again with the sausages.

Instead of a salad, a few beets from the fridge (ones I'd marinated the other day) plus a dollop of good mustard, and we're set.

Hot food, a warm house, and three loaves that I hope will taste as good as they smell.

Coincidental

This morning I finished reading a book called Trauma Farm.
It’s a memoir of living on a farm on Salt Spring Island, but also a rambling treatise on what we eat and how it’s grown.

We still had some of those windfall Brussels sprouts I wanted to use, so the whole idea of foraged or pure foods gave me my theme. I must have had the sound of the clucking chickens from Salt Spring in mind, as I decided tonight was the night for one of the free-range birds from the freezer.

I wanted to make something different, so browsed through a couple of cookbooks. Coq au Vin sounded like a dish worthy of these special birds, so I set about compiling a reasonable facsimile of the ingredients and cleared out a jar of last year’s dried chanterelles in the process.

Two cups of wine sounded like a lot, but then I remembered a less-than-successful batch of port from a few years back – something I wouldn’t mind using as much as a bottle of drinkable wine. I figured that using it might also solve the problem of adding bourbon, as specified in the recipe I’d found.

And then wouldn’t you know it, rinsing out the empty bottle, I remembered helping with bottling it. Where else, but Trauma Farm.

Cheers.