Maple Apricot Granola

I love granola but I don't love the additives in commercially available brands. Why buy that stuff when it's so easy to make your own? Plus you have the added advantage of customizing it with your favourite seeds, nuts and fruits. The following recipe is adapted from The Gourmet Cookbook.

1/4 cup ground flax seeds
6 cups of rolled oats (Quick oats work too)
2 cups sliced almonds
1 cup pumpkin seeds
1/2 unroasted sunflower seeds
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup oil (grapeseed or nut oil- almond would be good)
3/4 cup pure maple syrup (real - not Aunt Jemima!)
2 cups finely chopped dried apricots

Preheat oven to 350.

Mix all seeds, oats, almonds, salt, oil and maple syrup together in a large bowl. Spread on baking sheets and bake until granola is golden brown, about 30 minutes.

NB: Stir the granola often and keep a close eye on it, as it will burn easily.

Cool the granola and then stir in the chopped apricots. Store the granola in an airtight container.

IMG_3084, originally uploaded by 50 Ft Queenie.

The finished product! It's excellent with yogourt.

Maple Apricot Granola

White Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake

Every year, my friend Axel holds a big party for his birthday. It involves inviting all his friends over, drinking lots of beer and roasting a whole pig. Yes, an entire pig.

My contribution to this merry madness is cheesecake. It had become traditional for me to make Axel a birthday cheesecake. I have, in the past, made Bailey's cheesecake, Pina Colada cheesecake and Turtle cheesecake.

This year, I had two pints of organic raspberries in my fridge, and a bag of white chocolate baking chips. It was inevitable that I bake Axel a white chocolate raspberry cheesecake.

This may sound odd coming from the girl with Too Many Fancy Cookbooks, but the following recipe is adapted from one I found on the Philly Cream Cheese website. What can I say? They know their cream cheese.

Ingredients

• 1-1/4 cups graham cracker crumbs
• 1/4 cup butter, melted
• 3 pkg. (250 g each) cream cheese, softened
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 3 eggs
• 2 pints of fresh raspberries
• A handful or 2-3 squares of white chocolate
  

Heat oven to 350°F.

Mix crumbs and butter; press onto bottom of 9-inch springform pan.

Beat cream cheese, sugar and vanilla with mixer until well blended. I only had two packages of cream cheese on hand, but I did have an almost-full tub of mascarpone cheese, so I threw that in. It added a lovely creamy texture to the cheesecake. Add eggs, 1 at a time, mixing on low speed after each just until blended. Add the raspberries and mix into the batter by hand. Some berries will break and blend into the batter and some will stay whole. Just let them berries do their thing! Melt the white chocolate over a double boiler or a metal dish set over a pan of hot water and blend and melted chocolate into the batter. Pour over crust.

Bake 40 to 50 min. or until centre is almost set. Run knife around rim of pan to loosen cake; cool before removing rim. Refrigerate cheesecake 4 hours.

Not to put a fine point on it, this cheesecake is divine! The richness of the cheese and white chocolate is offset by the tartness of the berries.

Sorauren Park Farmer's Market

It appears that I am somewhat behind the ball - I could have sworn that the Sorauren Park Farmer's Market started tomorrow, but it turns out that it's been up and running since May 11.

If you live in the Parkdale/Roncesvalles/High Park area, you'll want to check out this market. It's located just southwest of Lansdowne and Dundas.

Directions and a full list of vendors can be found here. I'm disappointed that Montforte Dairy don't seem to be vending this year, because they make the most wonderful cheeses. Wasabi cheddar and sheep's milk cheese rolled in lavender are two of my particular favourites. I am very pleased, however, that Field Sparrow Farms has returned. They sell certified organic Angus beef. We bought a 20 lb freezer box last year, and walked away with enough steaks, roasts, stewing meat and ground beef to last us for the fall and winter. In fact, we're still working our way through it, and they threw in some free soup bones too.

Deer Valley Venison Farm is also back. I bought some stewing venison last year and tried my hand at braised venison with cherries this past winter. It turned out so well that I can't wait to get some other cuts of venison and try them out.

The market runs from 3 - 7 every Monday until late October.

Review - Manhattan

New cafes and restaurants are springing up all over Parkdale, and one of the newest is Manhattan. It's gotten a good reputation as a brunch place and when I found out that they are now serving dinner, it seemed the perfect place for a friend and I to have dinner on Friday night before checking out a couple of local nightspots.

The look of the place is gorgeous. It's a narrow room with a gleaming dark brown bar at the front of the room and tables flanked by brown leather armchairs and banquettes. Huge poster of jazz legends cover the walls. That's the good part. Unfortunately, the restaurant was almost freezing on Friday night. I swear that the tile floors were emanating cold air. We sat at the back of the room because we thought it might be warmer back there only be subjected to blasts of icy cold air, as if someone was opening and closing a door somewhere in the back.

The menu is short and very reasonably price, with no mains over $20. We ordered jerk chicken spring rolls with spicy mango chutney to share and I ordered grilled salmon for my entree. My friend had chicken risotto. There were four people in the restaurant, including us, so I'm not sure why it took 30 minutes for our appetizers to arrive. The server brought us some bread while we waited. It was nice crusty bread that appeared to have been brushed with olive oil and grilled lightly, but it was servved without any butter, or tapenade or spread. In a word, it was plain old toast.

The appetizers, when they arrived, were tasty but utterly lacking in the heat and spice you would expect from jerk chicken and spicy chutney. My salmon entree was flaky and moist, the rice fluffy and fragrant, but it was not in any way remarkable. I've had equally good grilled salmon fillets at many others places. My friend found her chicken risotto too salty and didn't eat most of it. We didn't ask for the dessert menu because we were so cold that we were dying to get somewhere warm and have a drink. My friend tried to pay with credit only to be told that they aren't set up to take credit cards yet. The ATM at the back the restaurant was out of service. Luckily, she had enough cash on hand to cover it, but that could easily have been a very awkward situation.

I'm willing to allow that they're still experiencing growing pains, and I'd be game to check them out in 2-3 months to see if they've improved.

Manhattan does have a lot of potential. Now all it has to do is live up to it.

Testing..with bonus shortcake.

I'm testing a new blog editor for the Mac, because Blogger's interface vexes me. I tried out MarsEdit in my other journal, so I'm trying Blogo in this journal.

To make this legal, since it is a food journal, here's a picture of some strawberry shortcake I baked this past summer. It should be noted that a proper shortcake is made with sweet tea biscuit and not sponge cake. The crumbly consistency of the tea biscuit is ideal for soaking up all the strawberry juice. It goes without saying that freshly made whipped cream is to be used, and never that stuff from a plastic container or...heavens forfend...a spray can.

Holiday baking time again

It's time once again to crank up the punk rock, open a bottle of wine and make a huge mess in the kitchen. It's holiday baking time!

Since biscotti proved so easy to make last year, I'm doing them again, and this year I'm using three recipes I found in The Gourmet Cookbook.

• Apricot Almond Biscotti dipped in milk chocolate
• Cranberry Pistachio Biscotti dipped in white chocolate
• Double Chocolate Walnut Biscotti maybe dipped in dark chocolate. I have to see how rich these before deciding whether to add extra chocolate.

It should be noted that the recipes don't call for dipping the cookies in chocolate. I just think everything's better with more chocolate.

On the shortbread front, I have a few options. I'm definitely making the Cheddar Cheese Pecan shortbreads again because I think my friends might riot if I didn't! Rosemary Pinenut Shortbread is also an option as is plain shortbread so that I can use the shortbread pan with the thistle design that I got for Christmas a couple of years ago.

So far, that's all I have formally planned to make, but knowing me, I'll probably make dried fruit and nut bark at the last minute or maybe a batch of truffles.

First step is to survey my pantry and make a list of ingredients I need to stock up on.

French bread!

Bread-making is one of those things that strikes fear into the hearts of fledgling bakers. Baking cakes and cookies isn't as daunting as baking bread, hence the popularity of bread machines. Being the stubborn type, I've been determined to learn how to make bread the old-fashioned way. My attempts at whole wheat bread with honey turned out well, but the dinner rolls didn't rise as much as they should have. They still tasted good though.

This weekend, I found a recipe for French loaf in my KitchenAid mixer cookbook, and decided to try it. By God, it worked! The recipe made two long crusty loaves of bread. The picture above is the remaining half of one of the loaves; M and I had devoured the other half with cheese and olives. The crust was perfectly golden and flaky, and the bread is warm, dense and doughy. It toasts very nicely too. Unlike many commercial baguettes, the crust isn't so dense that you have to knaw at it like a rabid dog.

The recipe was very simple: yeast, warm water, melted butter, salt and flour, and then water and egg white brushed on the bread 3/4 of the way through baking. The longest part of the process was letting the dough rise twice.

Picture Post: Crock Pot Roast

My parents gave me a crock pot for my birthday, and the first thing I made in it was an Asian pot roast.

Behold the crock pot in all its glory!

The marinade consisted of beef stock, sesame oil, soy sauce, sugar, minced garlic and black pepper. I threw in a splash of red wine too, just for good measure. A sliced onion was piled on top of the marinade.
















Add one pot roast and a variety of root vegetables, and eight hours later, dinner is ready!
















Sunday night dining chez S & M. Roast beef and potatoes is such a classic meal that it didn't need a fancy side dish. A simple green salad, some horseradish and a bottle red wine completed the meal. The combined pan juices and marinade made a lovely gravy.

What I did this past weekend

Homemade whole wheat bread sweetened with just a touch of honey. It turned out so well that I can't wait to bake some more.