The Empty Month

Due to medical reasons too boring to get into on this blog (don't worry, I'm not dying or anything) I have been put on a very... interesting diet for the month of January. I have become a walking caricature: no dairy, no soy, no gluten, no corn (might as well start crossfit while I'm at it). Also, a whole host of other non-trendy things to avoid - of particular interest to regular blog readers, no red kidney beans or lentils.

Needless to say, this is a bit of a shock. Any one of the above would be a big change, but all combined just seem a bit ridiculous. Basically all my conventional protein sources are gone, along with essentially all fake meats (But what about Daiya you say. It has pea powder in it. Peas are also on the verboten list because why not). Beer and scotch, my alcohol favourites, are offline.

Most restaurants are no-go, as there's corn syrup, butter or soy sauce (depending on the restaurant) in so many things. Even at home, there are going to be big changes in what I eat. Of the six meals on this blog's front page, all are vegan yet all would run afoul of the new regulations.

However, things aren't that bad (and not just because this is a very trivial problem in the grand scheme of things). I'm not completely vegan because I can eat eggs, so that's a protein source right there. Same with nuts. Chickpeas are still in the green list and there are all sorts of other high-protein beans I can try. Like Mung Beans! That's a thing.

And even though all the recipes on the front page were offside, they can be reigned in. In some cases, it's as simple as not adding soy sauce.

Moreover, it's a good opportunity to try new things and really think about what I'm eating. Like this noodle soup that I whipped up.

I'm not going to blog the recipe because it was very spur of the moment, but the broth was veggie stock with mushrooms, red wine and cayenne pepper. It tasted good and fit all the new criteria.

I was going to blog about recipes under the label "The Empty Month". But after thinking about it, "The Experimental Month" is much more apt (and optimistic).

Cheese Sandwich

I have had thousands of cheese sandwiches over the course of my life. A not insignificant percentage of those have followed the same basic template: marble cheese, lettuce and Hellmann's® Real Mayonnaise. There are, of course, variations. Sometimes I do some substitution: a different type of cheese or hummus instead of mayonnaise. I will not put in another type of mayonnaise because I hate them (though I do want to try crafting Bittman's homemade stuff). Occasionally I will augment the sandwich with tomatoes, or avocados, or an olive with a toothpick through it ('cause I'm classy).

Cheese Sandwich

The sandwich I had today fit the normal template, though I added arugula to the lettuce. I find arugula on its own to be too bitter, but it works great with others. One of my favourite things about my standard form sandwich is that you can hold it in one hand and it will stay self contained. The problem with a lot of sandwiches (and with my optionals of avocado and tomato) is that they go against the basic principle of sandwichdom. You bite into the sandwich and the filling shoots out in all directions. I've been in restaurants where the bread is such a small fraction of the overall sandwich that it doesn't even survive first contact. One can only imagine what the Earl of Sandwich would think!

KD Spicy Szechwan [sic] BOLD Snack Cup

On my way to see Avatar, I was given a gift. No, it wasn't the gorgeous-but-vapid movie – but some food pressed into my hand in a booth inside the Scotiabank (née Paramount) Theatre. To be more specific, it was Kraft Dinner Spicy Szechwan [sic] BOLD Snack Cup. Actually, I got another flavour as well – but I discarded that one after reading the ingredients and discovering various meat products.

The Snack Cup sat around a for a while, until one day I decided to try it. Now, I'm no stranger to KD. Gosh, in my precooking days I packed away a lot of it. One of my patented tricks was to use Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup instead of milk! (It's slightly painful to write that – though, of course, now I just eat lentils all day which is bad in a different way). Still, even to me the idea of putting a cup in a microwave for a couple of minutes and then eating the chemicals inside seemed a bit sketchy. The over-exuberance of the KD website didn't help as they rhapsodized: "any time is the right time to make Kraft Dinner the highlight of your day." I have my problems, but if Kraft Dinner is ever the highlight of my day, you have permission to shoot me.

So how it did actually taste? I would definitely disagree with their oddly capitalized "For snacking, it's Gotta Be KD BOLD Snack Cups" slogan, but then again I wouldn't go as far as this blog which termed it a "culinary horror" that was the food equivalent of Mao's Long March. My verdict is "meh". It wasn't awful, but it certainly wasn't good. Nor was it remotely spicy. It was unassumingly bland, with a hint of soy sauce. I've put "Chinese" as one of the tags in this post entirely ironically. Although, it is possible that this product is a piece of conceptual art wickedly satirizing the problematic nature of Chinese industrialization.

Christmas time is here, by golly

Eastern orthodox christmas that is. Still, I thought it would be a good time to blog about my family Christmas. Gentle readers, I have – I confess – let you down by not posting over the break as much as I thought. Hopefully this will help remedy matters.

My Jewish family had our traditional christmas day: open presents (I got tree fungus!) and watch a movie (we saw Up In The Air which was quite good). For dinner we invited over one of my mom's Buddhist co-workers and had another traditional meal of Raclette. Raclette is sort of a swiss fondu that we discovered during a trip to Montreal many years ago. Appropriately enough, it starts with the eponymous raclette cheese:

After acquiring a slice of raclette cheese you place it inside the raclette maker, which is a device that melts the cheese on the bottom and while on top it grills items that you will pour the said cheese over. The middle slots melt the cheese faster, so those are always prized. It uses a lot of electricity (actually dims the lights in our house) but we only pull it out once a year or so (usually on Christmas).

While you can pretty much pour the raclette over anything we generally have a staple of items: gerkins, cocktail onions, boiled potatoes and french bread. We made a few changes this year, we couldn't find any french bread so we used bagels instead. I also supplemented the gerkins with conventional dill pickles which, quite frankly, I prefer anyway.

The meal itself is delicious, mainly becaues of the massive amounts of cheese it involves. It's incredibly unhealthy and very bad for the environment, but you're allowed to have a few of those every year.

Coming up next, our Christmas Day desserts. Plus, a post on Hannukah if I get around to it.

Martin the Warrior

A few weeks ago my washing machine tried to kill me. It was the first, but not the last, instance of attempted murder in this sordid story.

I was just washing my clothing when it started to shake and heave and emit banging sounds louder than the Battle of Thermopylae. When I went to investigate it literally charged at me. A side note, I hate it when people use "literally" to mean "figuratively". But, aside from the anthropomorphizing implicit in the statement, I'm telling the truth here: that washing machine actually lunged several feet toward me as if demonically possessed. For a while my roommate and I did laundry as a team effort, when it got to the spin cycle we would both go and restrain the washing machine so it would stay in one place. We realized, ultimately, that this was both not particularly safe nor a good use of our time. Before we could decide whether we should stop doing that the spin cycle broke all together. So, no trying to kill us = good; clothes still completely wet after come out of dryer = bad.

Our landlady got a washing machine repairman to come over who made an interesting discovery. We had acquired a pet. A mouse was living inside the washing machine and had gnawed through some of the wires (he didn't see the mouse, but did find... evidence of its life inside the machine). We decided to name it Charles Martin. Also, my roommate got some traps from our landlady to kill him. I was a little sad as I went to bed, knowing he couldn't resist the delicious cheese laid out. Poor little guy.

I was right that Charles Martin couldn't resist the cheese. What I was less right about was my assumption regarding his mortality. Because when I woke up, the cheese was gone and the trap was unsprung. Over the next few days my roommate tried various combinations of cheese and peanut butter and every morning the situation was the same: no food, no mouse. He even got up in the middle of the night one time, noticed the cheese was gone, put more in and woke up to find it gone.

Last week, I noticed the trap was different. Hewing to the adage about better mousetraps, my roommate had beaten a path to Canadian Tire's door and bought an evil looking spring-loaded trap with a hair trigger. He put it out, laden with peanut butter, knowing that this trap would get the mouse. But in the morning, the peanut butter was still there. Charles Martin had outsmarted us! He became somewhat of a folk hero in my mind. Much like the protagonist of the excellent Fantastic Mr. Fox (seriously, go see it), he was a wild animal besting us in a battle of wits and stealing our food. His very existance was a critique of our petty bourgeois student life style and our social norms about property.

This morning there was a dead mouse in the trap.

He was grey with cute little white paws and a long pink tail. I buried him in the garden next to the ivy. Requiescat in pace, Charles Martin.

The Nachos

The International Day of the Nacho occured last week, and how better to celebrate than a post on nachos?

Nachos are probably my favourite pub food. I wouldn't pretense to call myself a connoisseur, but I've had a lot of nachos and have many fine memories of some of the best like my friend Jeremy's multi-layered Super Bowl nachos or The Gem Bar & Grill's refried bean dip covered nachos. I also have bad memories of the worst nachos I've ever had: at a crappy place on St. Clair Street that will go unnamed. Even though I didn't know that International Day of the Nacho was last wednesday, I ended up having quite a few nachos last week. First up, I made myself some bareboned nachos in the hotel room using nacho chips, cheese and salsa. There wasn't a grater, so I sliced the cheese up with a sharp knife. They were okay, but they didn't have the wide range of toppings that the professionally done nachos I had at two different restaurants:

Christie's Carriage House Pub
Christie's had an impressive number of beers on tap, including the awesomely titled "Back Hand of God Stout". It was a tough choice, but I ended up going with Phillips Blue Buck, a local Victoria beer.

The name came from a contest after a lawsuit was threatened over their previous name "Blue Truck" (it was alleged as being too similar to a Vancouver craftbeer named Red Truck). While Christie's had a fair number of vegetarian options, I decided to go with the nachos:

I liked the nachos, but they had a central flaw: the cheese was baked in. Now, I'm all about baking nachos, but I think that nacho cheese should have a gooey consistency. This was the opposite, the cheese was embedded into the chip. In one way though, the picture doesn't do them justice as you can't see the jalapeños and tomatoes that were in the dish. Still, definitely not the best nachos I've had.

Ein-Stein's
'Stein's does not have the range of beer that Christie's has. Indeed they are the "local drinking hole" I mentioned here that prompted me to give up cheap beer. One thing that 'Stein's does very well though is pub food. Naturally, we had to order the nachos:

They were amazing. The cheese was perfectly melted. This was no accident, such is the dedication to detail of the chef that after baking he runs the nachos through a microwave to get that desired consistency. There was a good selection of toppings such as jalapeños and olives and they were well distributed. At some places after a while you start just getting plain nacho chips. At 'Stein's there is an abundance of cheese and toppings and no chip is left behind. We ended up ordering another, bigger, plate of nachos later in the evening. Traditionally, if my friends and I are ordering pub food at 'Stein's we get the party platter but I think that nachos should be the new paradigm. They are excellent.

Christie's Carriage House Pub
1739 Fort Street, Victoria, British Columbia

Ein-Stein Café and Pub
229 College Street, Toronto, Ontario