The Ontario Table

Archive for April, 2012

Exploring Los Angeles

Blog, Los Angeles, lynn ogryzloLeave a comment

If you’ve never been to Los Angeles, I recommend a bus tour to familiarize yourself with the entertainment capital. Few people live in Los Angeles, but most live in the surrounding neighbourhoods most famous are Beverly Hills and Hollywood. We started at the Staples Centre, home of the Lakers and Clippers and also home to the Grammy Awards. We drove down 11th Street pass the Nokia Theatre, home of the Emmy Awards and an area with great shops, restaurants and museums to our destination of Olvera Street, the oldest street in the city.

On our way we past a caravan of vans, trailers and busses, one of the many movie shoots happening in the city. There were over 200 movies shot on the streets of Los Angeles last year and CSI New York is almost exclusively shot on the streets of LA. We passed Fig and 7th, an intersection with giant steps that go down. It’s the site of a shopping centre that’s 5 floors below ground.

We drive through Bunker Hill the area where skyscrapers replaced charming Victorian homes. Interestingly, until a decade ago Los Angeles had a 12 story building restriction so the only location to build when the restriction was lifted was an old section of town called Bunker Hill. Today there are dozens of skyscrapers standing over the low lying city, one of the biggest is the Bank of America building where Richard Greer walked barefoot in the grass in the movie, Pretty Woman.

We passed the Walt Disney Concert Hall, a giant stainless steel building that had to be acid washed because the glare from the California sun on the building caused not only traffic accidents but also cause the air conditioners in neighbouring buildings to run constantly. Even though the building was acid washed, it certainly doesn’t distract from the beauty of this magnificent building and to see the difference, there was a large section left untouched at the back of the building. Trees were planted around it to manage the glare. It’s definitely a magnificent site to see.

We finally reached Olvera Street, a pedestrian walkway flanked with beautiful buildings of Spanish architecture and a square where Online Blackjack buskers of all sorts entertain. Walk the private street and it’s filled with stalls with leather goods, Mexican blankets and dozens of other delightful souvenirs, restaurants and take-away Mexican foods.

After a quick lunch, the bus makes its way to Hollywood. We drive along the San Gabriel Mountain range and the majestic Hollywood sign comes into site. The sign was originally erected by a reality company to sell the houses in the area below. When the homes were sold, the realtor left the sign. Over the years the sign fell into disrepair and the city decided it wanted the landmark permanently. They offered celebrities an opportunity to buy individual letters for the sum of $27,000. Alice Cooper was the first to buy a letter followed by Bob Hope and others. The sign is now a permanent fixture on the side of the mountain.

We drove down Hollywood Boulevard, a street that is strongly eclectic in nature. People come from around the world to read the famous names that are inscribed in stars studded into the sidewalks. There are 2,400 stars in total on this 2-mile walk and 200 sit empty, waiting for a famous name to fill it. Of course Hollywood Boulevard is famous for the red-carpet walk into the Kodak Theatre for the annual Oscars. This is the same spot where I’ll be returning later in the evening for a private party.

We got back on the bus and drove through the beautiful streets of Beverly Hills where even the smallest house is valued at $2 million dollars. Each street is strategically tree lined with a different variety of tree, it’s beautiful. Next was a drive down Santa Monica Boulevard, through Beverly Hills and down Rodeo Drive lined with the most expensive stores in the world. Some of the stores are by appointment only with a minimum purchase of $14,000 per appointment. If nothing is purchased, a consultation fee of $1,500 is charged to the credit card that must be surrendered when you become a customer. It’s one of the most affluent areas of the US.

Travelling to Los Angeles? Check this out www.discoverlosangeles.com

Read all of the stories in the 4 day trip.

A Season for Honey?

Blog, honey, Ontario Beekeepers Association4 Comments

Did you know that honey is the third sweetest harvest in Ontario? First is icewine, second is maple syrup and now we’re entering honey season. That’s right, there is a season to Ontario’s golden nectar.

Here are a few sweet facts. Did you know that to produce one pound of honey, a bee needs to extract nectar from 3 to 4 million blossoms, traveling the equivalent of one and a half times around the world? It boggles my mind to think about it. More amazing is the fact that it takes 12 bees a lifetime to produce one teaspoon of honey. Honey bees are responsible for every third mouthful of food we eat because they pollinate all of our flowering fruit trees and vegetable plants and the plants that our farm animals eat. So I think it’s safe to say, no bees – no food!

There is actually a cycle to honey production just like there is a cycle to growing peaches. We know with peaches, the trees are dormant in the winter months and it’s easy for us to watch them wake up in the spring as they dress themselves with such beautiful blossoms. Then we wait as tiny fruit begins to form and ripen. Then comes the harvest and we indulge until we can’t eat any more but were satisfied that our psyche has been pampered with the best this world has to offer.

So now take the peach cycle and lets talk honey. The colony of bees sleep all winter long feeding off the honey that the beekeeper leaves in their hives. Then in the spring the bees start collecting nectar from primarily dandelions. Dandelion honey is rare because the bees feed on this themselves. The beekeeper won’t extract any honey until the bee colony is strong enough to produce enough for both themselves and us.

The first harvested honey of the year is usually clover and that may be May or June, depending on the season. The first honey is typically light in colour and as the season progresses, the bees feed on fruit blossoms, wildflowers, and goldenrod and the honey becomes a little darker. The last honey harvest of the year is buckwheat, the darkest honey of them all and that traditionally takes place in October, depending on the weather.

So this means we’re just entering honey season! Honey is sweet, delicious, and needs no processing. It’s one of the most natural Online Pokies products you can buy. With a hot knife, beekeepers scrape off the top layer of a honeycomb. Then the combs are transferred to a centrifuge where the liquid honey is gently separated from the comb. The honey trickles into a vat and left there until it’s bottled.

Many beekeepers will bottle varietal honey’s by keeping the various honey’s separate and bottling them separately. Others will process honey only once a year therefore blending all of the distinctive honey’s into one perhaps more balanced blend. Either way, it’s a matter of personal choice. I’m waiting for beekeepers to put a harvest year on the bottles of honey and we can begin to talk about the season and how its affected the flavour of the honey as we now talk about wine.

I like a dark, stronger honey in my tea, but in cooking I prefer a lighter honey. I replace sugar in an apple pie recipe with honey and will boil the apple peels in honey and water to make a delicious syrup to serve with my apple pie. Basting pork tenderloin with honey, searing it and finishing it off in the oven creates a crunchy sweetish crust to the meat. Half and pit juicy peaches and baste them with honey before you grill them on the barbecue. Served with whipped cream it’s an easy and delicious dessert.

It’s interesting that beekeepers have relatively small farms. This is because most beekeepers only have one beeyard on their property and they look for other agricultural sites around them to locate the rest. The arrangement is the farmer who allows a beeyard on their property will receive a pail of honey at the end of the year as payment. The farmer is happy to have his crops pollinated and the beekeeper is happy to have the honey to sell. I know one farmer who has a beeyard on a blueberry farm and his blueberry honey is among his most popular sellers.

It’s honey season and this year get out there and meet your neighbourhood beekeeper and ask for small amounts of honey throughout the summer so you can taste the differences of the season.

 

For more information on honey, see www.ontariobee.com

Click here for delicious recipes using fresh harvested honey and if you’re looking for more ways to use honey, get yourself The Ontario Table cookbook!

Click here for my photo album of seductive honey pictures

 

Food Obsessions of the Wrong Kind

beef, Blog, cooking, food, food obsessions, local foodLeave a comment

I’m having people over for dinner. I thought I’m make a juicy prime rib roast. When done well, it’s a dish that I swear is guided by the gods. I’ll rub the outside with black peppercorns and the inside will be meaty, succulent and so tender it will easily yield to a fork. I’ll slice it very thick and lay a piece on everyone’s dish with a compliment of freshly grated horseradish and warm popovers (Yorkshire Pudding) to sop up the juices.

Then come the confessions in the form of requests. One guest doesn’t eat red meat and the other guest’s favourite meal is prime rib; I have one vegetarian and another who has sworn off wheat and dairy, all in the name of a healthier diet.

All this talk of a healthy diet is putting me right off my food! It seems to me that there is an awful lot of talk about what we can’t or won’t eat, but not enough talk about what we can eat.

Over a decade ago I wrote a story about how butter will kill you and broccoli will save your life so I suppose I share some of the blame for our modern day food terrorism. But really, do we need to label some delicious foods as dangerous and talk so much about how what we are eating is eating us?

It seems to me that when someone talks of eating healthier, they talk of how they have cut down on their coffee consumption. Carbohydrate scares are sending some into eating piles of sausages and denying themselves their daily bread. In kitchen stores where you’d once find carbohydrate counters, they’ve been replaced with fat-gram counters. Fat is our new metaphor for evil and it can be either animal or dairy. Cow’s milk is emma watson pokies the new Satan of nutrition as mothers are being told to beware and char grilled steaks are now carcinogenic.

Civil disobedience with flavor comes from those who take the road filled with faux foods; ice cream without cream, and eggs without yolks. Other products labeled fat-free, sugar-free, calorie-free and ‘lean’ are consumed in a flavour vacuum with a blind eye. Just turn the package over and the list of chemical additives, fillers and flavour enhancers should be enough to steer anyone down a different road. This is why most people overeat; all of this faux food makes you want to eat more and more when all you really wanted in the first place was some good food.

Those of us who love food are trying to figure out how we can savour the best of what there is and at the same time, take care of ourselves. This is, in fact, the main topic of any food writer’s life these days, finding the middle ground. For me, it has always been moderation and in those exceptional times when I find myself moderating moderation it’s always over really good food. I would rather one mouthful of a luscious, artisan made caramel ice-cream than a gallon of supermarket frozen dairy product.

All of this leads me to think about our little affluent part of the world and how others less fortunate would envy all that we shun. We are obsessed with food and if it isn’t food, it’s the conflict with food and torturous exercise

For my grandparents who lived through the depression, a meal with meat was a luxury. I wonder what my grandchildren will say about the culinary silliness that is obsessing us today.

 

Click here for some amazing recipes, http://on.fb.me/zgTZEZ

Here is my Pinterest world of good food, http://bit.ly/HVBzcw

Im making doughnuts not donuts!

bakery, Blog, cooking, donut, local food, lynn ogryzlo, Recipes1 Comment

You may wonder what kind of stress can there possibly be when you eat for a living, but believe me, I can have a few pretty bad days. So here I am in the middle of the worst day ever! I’m refusing to answer the phone any longer for fear it may be another fire that I may or may not be able to put out.

So what do you do on your bad days? I head for the sanctity of my kitchen and make something that makes me feel good. Usually it’s something sweet and today is no different. Today I’m making doughnuts. I use the English spelling instead of the American simply to distinguish between the sea of homogeneous dough balls, circles and twists from the pure luxurious joy one experiences from sinking your teeth into a warm, sugary home made doughnut – oh, yum.

Raised in a family who cooked really well, doughnuts are one of my many comfort foods. I remember my grandmother deep frying doughnuts and as fast as they cooked (and doughnuts cook almost instantaneously!) we gobbled them up. They were warm, soft, and sweet with a chewy outside and billowy inside. They were the culinary equivalent of a grandmothers love.

Of course, there are as many different recipes for doughnuts as there are calories in each one. My grandmother made traditional doughnuts with a yeasty dough that rose not once but twice. Today is not a good day and I need an immediate act of mercy so these won’t do.

Apparently, my habit is to make doughnuts in the fall because all I can find among my scribbled notes are recipes for pumpkin doughnuts and apple cider doughnuts. Ah finally, I find a recipe for Old-Fashioned Sour Cream Doughnuts I found on a food blog one day. There is a note scribbled on the recipe that raves about the fantastic food blog called Christie’s Corner, written by Charmian Christie. Check it out, it’s really good.

The great thing about doughnuts is, the basic ones are never high maintenance. With a well stocked pantry, I have all the ingredients I need to make a batch of love – or in other words, Old-Fashioned Sour Cream Doughnuts. I can just imagine my grandmother frying them up for me right now.

Unlike my grandmother, I wheeled my KitchenAide from the pantry and plugged it in to do the work for me. It creamed the shortening and sugar together until it was a golden sand mixture, then I added the egg yolks one at a time and the sand turned to a thick cream as I scrapped down the sides of the giant bowl.

Homemade DoughnutsI mixed the dry ingredients together and added it little by little to the yellow cream Levitra Online with intermittent scoops of sour cream. In the end the dough was quite sticky and wet. I wondered if perhaps I should add more flour. I resisted for now, covered the bowl and refrigerated it while I got back to putting out another fire.

I was successful in smoothing out one catastrophe and was feeling much better as I made my way back into my kitchen to fry up the doughnuts. Chilled, the dough was a bit firmer and I used a lot of flour on my hands, work surface and rolling pin. It was workable. I emptied a bottle of canola oil into a deep pot and set the gas to high.

I have a series of round cookie cutters so I was feeling no pressure to shape the perfect doughnut. When the hot oil was ready, I dropped in the first doughnut and the oil sizzled and sputtered. I dropped in the second one and that’s when I realized my perfect doughnuts weren’t so perfect after all. They are too big for the pot and I can only cook one at a time, aughhh.

I reworked the dough and cut out smaller doughnuts only to find I had no instrument to cut a hole small enough – now what? Finally, I found the top of a glue stick – hey, it worked!

Doughnuts cook incredibly fast and you certainly don’t have to cook them for as long as I did. I tried to reach a light golden brown colour but by the time I could get them out of the oil and onto a rack, they’d overcooked. There is a real skill to frying doghnuts and not wanting to be outdone by a doughnut, I made a vow to do this again real soon.

The recipe for the glaze looked like it would make way too much for me, so I whisked up about a third of the recipe. Next time I’ll buy some white vanilla so I can have a beautiful white glaze instead of a dull glaze, and my doughnuts were a darker brown than I would have like too, but for today, it didn’t matter.

I sat in my big arm chair in the living room with a hot cup of tea and a plate full of 2 glazed doughnuts and 2 doughnut holes. I bit into the warm dough and the world seemed Homemade Doughnutsto instantly disappear as my teeth sank into the soft, sweet, billowy cloud with the silky texture of the glaze luxuriating across my palate and finding its way deep into my psyche.

Thanks Charmian for the delicious doughnuts and for giving me my “moment of love” that helped to turn my upside down world, right again.

Click here for the complete recipe, http://on.fb.me/HxLJ7U

When Recipes Become Yours

Blog, food, Health & Lifestyle Magazine, local food, lynn ogryzloLeave a comment

It’s going to be a lazy day and I feel like puttering I the kitchen. Before I head to the gym for my usual early morning workout, I pull together a small grocery list so I can swing by my favourite grocers on the way home.

Cynthia Liedtke is Editorial Assistant for Health & Lifestyle Magazine (www.healthandlifestyle.ca) and she sent me a few copies of her magazine. It’s a purse-size magazine focused on wellness with inspiring interviews of celebrities and their health struggles like Clara Hughes battle with depression and Lisa Ray’s challenges with a rare form of blood cancer. There is a deluge of information from both traditional and alternative specialists on natural health products, diets, lifestyle issues and of course food.

Flipping through the magazines, the recipe that caught my eye was the Beluga Lentils with Porcini Mushrooms, Asparagus and a Sunny Egg. It came from the featured cookbook, The Eat-Clean Diet, Vegetarian Cookbook by Tosca Reno. The photo looked downright delicious and I just had to have it. So I begin.

Shopping didn’t go so well, couldn’t find beluga lentils anywhere so I settled for red. From the picture in the book it looks like there’s a huge difference, but I’m moving ahead anyway. I read the package directions for the lentils and end up with a very bland orange pudding. The starch on these little, overlooked lentils just took over. In the garbage that batch goes and I start again.

This time the lentils are cooked with bay leaves, a clove of garlic and lots of salted water for only 5 minutes instead of the 20 minutes recommended. The lentils are al dente and all looks good to go.

I took some dried porcini mushrooms and soaked them in boiling water for the recommended 5 minutes. Next I drained them uk online blackjack and the recipe instructions said, “cook until lightly browned”. Well, there’s no darker brown than the colour of hydrated porcini mushrooms. I put them in a dry sauté pan and let the remaining water steam off them. Nice and dry, I added some extra virgin olive oil, minced, fresh garlic and dried thyme. It began to sizzle and as I stirred I could see how these mushrooms were absorbing all the wonderful flavours in the pan – yum, I added them to the cooled red lentils in a bowl.

The recipe calls for asparagus to be cooked separately but I’m not a fan of all that fuss so I cleaned them, cut them up and cooked them in the same skillet as the mushrooms and tossed them into the salad. The recipe didn’t call for any salt or pepper but again, I took the liberty and seasoned it.

Ok, now the egg, well I never did cook any, I guess the family was just too hungry or the salad was just so good there was simply not enough time to cook an egg. I think it was the later.

Like all good recipes, they’re guidelines and if you dare to adventure into them, they eventually become yours just by adapting it to your needs and likes. I will hunt for Beluga lentils though; it just looked so delicious in the magazine – although mine doesn’t look that bad either.

Btw, The Eat-Clean Diet made the New York Times best-selling list and it’s promoted as a must for anyone wanting to lose weight, help the planet or just spice things up a bit. I’ll probably pick it up next time I’m in the book store. Thanks Cynthia, I can see this becoming a delicious and long friendship.

Click for the original recipe, http://ow.ly/a8AJN
Click for more photos, http://bit.ly/HqXJUe

Prairie Beef Ribs

beef recipes, Blog, cooking, food, grilling, lynn ogryzlo, smoking1 Comment

It’s Easter and we’re barbecuing! In the Canadian prairies, barbecue means beef and beef ribs are a favorite. Some people claim beef ribs are tough and fatty when barbecued and they’re absolutely right – that is, if you don’t know how to cook them.

Beef short ribs are cut from the bottom end of the rib cage called the “plate” or from the chuck area and the meat is as tough as brisket. However, if your beef ribs are cooking up tough you’re simply not cooking them long enough. Beef ribs can only be tenderized through a long, slow cooking process and smoking is the perfect way to do them.

Many people pre-boil ribs for tenderness. My advice is DON’T! You’re just robbing yourself of a whole lot of flavor and it will require more barbecue sauce than you can imagine to make them even begin to taste decent.

Think of it this way, if ribs need plenty of sauce to taste good, then the cook needs more practice slow cooking or smoking ribs. I don’t serve sauce on my ribs and I definitely don’t baste the ribs with sauce while they’re cooking. There’s nothing wrong with barbecue sauce, but it liquid electronic cigarettes should be used as a compliment to the meat, not as a replacement for lack of flavor.

You can certainly marinate ribs in the refrigerator overnight but for traditional Canadian beef ribs, just put on a good dry rub a few hours before cooking and that should be the extent of your flavouring. Rubs are easy to mix together and they keep in your cupboard for whenever you want them.

Rubs are mixtures of many dry ingredients from spices such as red and black pepper, cumin, ginger and dry mustard to onion flakes, allspice and garlic powder. Dried herbs such as basil, rosemary, parsley or thyme. If you want a bit of a sweet flavour, you can add brown sugar to the mix and for a spicy rib, throw in some cayenne and chili powder, ancho or chipotle peppers to give it a bit of heat.

Mix these ingredients together and store them in an airtight container until your ready to use them. Then just pat a good layer of rub over the ribs and massage it into the meat. Let them sit refrigerated for a few hours before smoking them.

For complete recipe and smoking instructions, click here http://on.fb.me/HX2nxj

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