Bacon butties and other things cold weather excuses

It’s snowing.  And it’s still crazy scary cold.  So after work today I stopped off at the grocery store to get some vegetables, fruit, bread and eggs so I can achieve my dream for the next three days and stay home.  I will only go outside my apartment to do laundry and to take out the garbage– nothing else!  I feel in need of a mini-hibernation.

This brings me to my next eating challenge.  How do you eat in cold weather without getting fat?  When it is cold all sorts of atavistic instincts come to the fore and your body demands to be fat.  It’s quite hopeless because you can’t buy salad greens even if you were willing to eat them.  And who comes home when it’s -35 and wants to eat a green salad?  No, you want stews and treacle pudding and roast lamb and potatoes and everything hot and savoury.

For lunch today I had chicken soup, a bacon butty, juice, a pear, and a fruit bar.  I probably could have eaten more if it had been available.   I’m planning on fruit salad being part of my dinner tonight (pineapples were on sale for $3) but I can’t vouch for how the rest of it will go.  The world is white and icy, the snow is still falling, and the temperature falling with it.  I’m consumed with envy for everyone who doesn’t live on the Canadian prairies, and I need nice things to eat.  Wouldn’t you?

It occurs to me that maybe some of you don’t know what a bacon butty is.  It’s another great creation brought to us by the UK.  Well, it’s great when you make it at home and pure disappointment when bought on the train– one of those things.  It’s buttered white bread filled with bacon.  It sounds like nothing but when you make it at home with good bacon and bread it is heaven.

It’s like chip butties.  I always turned my nose up, thinking how fattening and unhealthy that was, and then I tried it out of curiousity.   I now have one more thing I have to strenuously resist eating.  You take chips (that’s french fries but thick cut ones) with salt and vinegar and while they are nice and hot put them in buttered white bread.  You wouldn’t believe how good it is but take a tip from me and don’t try it if you have any concerns about healthy eating.  It’s an instant addiction.

Here is now a mini-list of fattening things I love desperately but never eat because I like to think I am maintaining my health if not my figure:

• Chip butties
• Bagels with cream cheese and lox
• Milkshakes
• Steamed puddings
• Cheesecake
• Chili cheese fries

I’ve been contemplating this list for the past few seconds.  It’s a good thing the weather is so bad, otherwise I think I would have to go make a poutine run.

Eating While Sick

You know the saying “5 stages of grief”? I think I am now completing the five stages of eating while sick.

• Stage 1: Don’t want to eat at all (the “I want to die” stage);
• Stage 2: Want to eat but have no energy to open a can;
• Stage 3: Start opening cans (aka the “soup” stage);
• Stage 4: Toast and soup stage (aka “I’m cooking again!” stage); and, finally
• Stage 5: Making real meals again, though abbreviated versions.

Yes, I think tonight I finally hit stage 5. I didn’t have it in me to be inventive, so I roasted some chicken, boiled some potatoes, and had green beans and peas with it. I’ve even made a banana chocolate chip cake, not that I need it, but I had some bananas and buttermilk that needed using. True, I ran out of steam and couldn’t manage a gravy and I won’t be icing the cake, but still– I’m back! I even have plans for my leftover potatoes.

This has come just in time too because I am that fed up with eating things on toast– beans on toast, mushrooms on toast, ham omelette with toast, and I was about to have Welsh rarebit when I got into stage 5 just in the nick of time before I turned into a piece of toast myself.

I have come to the solemn conclusion that eating properly is an essential part of a happy life.  I could wax philosophic about it but I’m pretty sure you already know anything I could tell you about it.

The Tragedy of My Life

     This slightly repellent-looking pie is this weekend’s installment of the pie project — buttermilk raisin pie. I love raisins so I expected to like this with a nutmeg-scented custard around them. Unfortunately the buttermilk hits your nose as you take a bite and gives you the impression you are eating dairy that has gone “off”. Totally revolting, plus the pie is supposed to be chilled and it turns out I don’t like cold raisins. At least my pastry was light and flaky, which is one more sign my health is coming back.

     Today I am hating Edmonton. I had church this morning at 9 am. A blizzard was forecast for today but I had to teach a Sunday School class, so I felt I had to go. My mum and my aunt had the same reaction when I told them yesterday about the blizzard. My aunt: “Now, it’s not like you are one of these women who has a bloke to take care of things, so promise me you will be careful and not go out if it’s dangerous!” My mum: “You don’t have a man to help out and take care of the driving, so be careful!”

     I was privately convinced I could handle it. Sure, I’m the stereotypical female who is secretly afraid of cars because she doesn’t understand how they work, but what is a blizzard? Snow + wind = no problem. It wasn’t so bad when I got to church– it was snowing fine powdery stuff, the wind wasn’t too bad and it was only -15 celcius. But the wind was getting up some speed through the morning and I left early to get myself home. The wind was blowing, the snow falling fast and heavy, ice slicked the roads where the wind had blown the snow clear, and the temperature was dropping (it’s now -22 celcius or -8 fahrenheit and still going down). So much for having paid $200 to get my car heater fixed– as fast as I scraped the ice off the inside of my windows, it re-formed.

     Picture me driving in second gear, prising my fingers loose from their tense grip on the steering wheel to take my ice scraper and run it over the window every few seconds to clear a space through which I could peer at the road ahead.    Picture the raging hatred I feel for the Alberta drivers with 4-wheel drive who are acting like they have never heard of black ice. I got back to my apartment building to find that my already narrow parking space had been turned into a snowdrift, but I managed to park without hitting any neighboring vehicles. I staggered into my apartment feeling like an (angry, weepy) wrung-out rag.

     And this brings me to the tragedy of my life: to always look completely capable to the point of deluding myself and to not in sober fact really be all that capable. I know this is anti-modern woman, but I do wish in situations like these I had a man taking care of the driving, the parking, etc! Life would be much less stressful.

Saving money with freezing

I decided a couple of months ago that maybe I should respond to some of the search terms with which people find my blog. These odd search terms sometimes indicate general-type questions, like “How do I make the perfect meal?” or “I don’t understand pie making”. Another one that I am going to respond to here is a general question about freezing food.

As a poverty-stricken student I’ve learned that when staple items for your kitchen are on sale, you buy two and freeze one if need be. I think it’s pretty obvious what can be frozen in terms of bread, vegetables etc., but you might not know that you can freeze cheese and butter for later use, and it will be fine.

You can also freeze egg whites, which I find useful. I am always making things that call for egg yolks, so rather than throw out the egg whites I put the whites in a sealed plastic bag and once I have accumulated enough I make a pavlova, meringue, or white cake.

I’ve heard of people freezing bananas to cook them later.  Of course, the skin goes black but I have been assured that the banana when thawed bakes up just fine.  Somehow I’ve never been able to bring myself to try it, but I can attest that the Arizona habit of freezing grapes to eat in hot weather works too.

I regularly freeze unbaked pastry shells. You can freeze baked choux pastry forms, but if it’s basic shortcrust, flaky, or pate sucree, you need to roll it out, form it, and leave it unbaked for freezing, because it will taste much better if you bake it just before eating. If you freeze unbaked pastry shells, remember that the butter and fats within the pastry will absorb odours from your freezer: double-wrap them (I usually wrap first in saran wrap and then in foil) and then remember you need to use them within a month.

I also think a note should be made here about meat. My sister and I had a roommate once while doing our undergraduate degrees who was from California and had not been properly raised by her mother. One of her stomach-churning habits was to take cooked meat, freeze it, re-heat it for eating, and then freeze it again, several times. We tried to explain to her that handling meat in that way leads to things like worms but she refused to believe us and got offended. Of course.

Sometimes I wonder if I am spending too much money as a graduate student by renting an apartment all for myself. Then I remember experiences like that and feel grateful I’ve managed to maintain my own space.

And speaking of freezing, I want to mention that the weather forecast is for a sudden drop in temperature starting Sunday afternoon. Monday’s high temperature is supposed to be -29 celcius. Really, I cannot wait to leave Edmonton, despite all the great people that live here.

Welsh Food

As a half-Welsh girl, my ears always perk up when I hear of a specifically “Welsh” dish. This interest is separate from my general interest in British cooking, which is also fueled by my attachment to my racial heritage and by the food I ate in my childhood.

Some Welsh things are semi-famous, like Caerphilly cheese (white, mild, crumbly), Welsh rarebit, and cawl (stewed meat and vegetables in broth). Some are less famous and I would only know about them because my grandfather ate them, like cockles and laverbread.

Laverbread is a mixture of cooked, pureed laver seaweed with oatmeal. It’s cooked in bacon fat and served with bacon. My grandfather loved this dish, and it was at his encouraging I first tried it as a teenager. I thought it was disgusting and wouldn’t have more than one bite! Years later, on another visit, I tried again. I had learned to like sushi and through it had acquired a taste for seaweed. That helped me realize that laverbread is actually pretty good to eat, if you like seaweed.

Welsh cakes, on the other hand, I loved as a child and as an adult I can’t really understand why I love them. They are small dry cakes with a bit of spice and raisins and cooked in a frying pan. Then they are dropped in some sugar on each side to sweeten them. I don’t think if I made them for anyone other than my sisters they would be that impressed– I think this is one of those things you eat for nostalgia as an adult. Great picnic food, though.

Next time I am in Cardiff, I want to:

• Try cockles
• Eat lots of pikelets (note to self: lose weight ready to re-gain while in Wales)
• Get a good recipe for bara brith to make part of the family repertoire
• Try out some of the Welsh government’s “True Taste of Wales” accredited restaurants
• Try salt marsh lamb

I’m wondering if there is any general characterization I can make for you about Welsh food as a regional cuisine, but I don’t think I can. Lots of leeks and lamb, obviously. The problem is that it is essentially “peasant” food, but the kind of peasant food most of us can hardly afford to eat now: fresh vegetables, lots of good meat, fresh eggs, full-fat dairy products, local cheeses, teatime treats. Growing up, much of the time dinner was about a good piece of meat or fish with two or three vegetables. Traditional Welsh cooking is based on plain cooking of great ingredients, which doesn’t sound that exciting, especially when put next to French peasant cooking! but it is a very healthy family-friendly way to eat.