At 50, D is in better shape than he has been in his life.  He goes to the gym three times a week and plays tennis another 1-2 times.  Last night was one of his mid-week tennis dates.  I had the grill all fired up when they guys arrived, D put down his racket and picked up his tongs.

There were three of us for dinner and I had three different steak cuts ready to go.  One was an inside round with very little visible fat or marbling.  The grain of the meat was very compact and dense and so that morning I had prepared a marinade to add some flavour and tenderness.  I had found the recipe on the Canada Beef website in the recipe section and picked up all kinds of other suggestions and tips while on the site.

The steaks that I had purchased varied in price per kg according to the cut.  What proved to be interesting, to those of you managing a grocery budget and thinking that a regular steak dinner might be too extravagant for your family, is that the steak that was the least expensive turned out to be the taste hit of the dinner.  With marination the inside round was certainly as tender as the sirloin and almost as flavourful as the rib steak.  Sometimes, when you are standing in front of the meat section at the grocery store, this is a tricky decision to make, so consult the Canadian Beef website.  The site puts steaks into grilling vs marinating vs simmering categories, so no matter what the cut or how little you spend, you will always be serving up a flavourful and tender steak.

D sliced all the steaks into medallions and we placed a platter on the table.  Beef can hold its own against other robust flavours and so I also served brown and wild rice pilaf, roasted beets, sauteed Swiss chard and pine nuts and a tomato, cucumber and feta salad with a precious stash of pungent olives that I had purchased while in Ireland this spring.

So in spite of the guys working a full day and then playing over two hours of tennis, they had been fortified to take on another day.

Kath’s quote: “People who like to cook like to talk about food….without one cook giving another cook a tip or two, human life might have died out a long time ago.”-Laurie Colwin

Love- that is all.

 

I arrived home from my weekend at Be Well Camp (details of our full itinerary in future posts) hosted by the Manitoba Canola Growers with two expectations: 1) I would have to hustle to get MSD (Mandatory Sunday Dinner) on the table and 2) dinner conversation may focus around what I had learned on my weekend away and that eating more items which had been produced by provincial growers and processors (no matter what the cost) was going to be my new mantra.

Imagine my delight when I walked in the door and was told to go directly to the dining table as dinner was being served.  There were purple and blonde beets from our Blue Lagoon crop share, wild chanterelle mushrooms which had been foraged from the Belair Forest where our beach house is located, wild rice linguine, and live, rope grown mussels simmered in canola oil, a splash of wine and local herbs.  I know, I know the mussels came from PEI but if Manitoba was adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean, we would have enjoyed Manitoba mussels instead.

I added two loaves of bread for dipping into the broth produced by the mussels.  One loaf was left over from my weekend breakfast basket which had been assembled by Chef Mary Jane Feekes of Benjamin’s in Selkirk MB and the other had been purchased a top of a hill at the Asessippi Autumn Feast.  The wheat had been milled, formed and baked in 45 minutes right before my eyes.

Our family is crazy about Floating Leaf brand rice blends and pasta that we have been tasting over the summer.  Floating Leaf is a Winnipeg producer of Shoal Lake Wild Rice and the linguine is made from stone ground wild rice flour, durum wheat semolina and farm fresh organic free run eggs. The artisan pasta is thinly rolled and slow dried at room temperature. When handled thusly, the unique nutty flavour of the rice is maintained.

For dessert we had the heavenly heart shaped cookies that had been made for us by the Kracher family of Freefield Organic Farms and pumpkin scones that the Frenchman had just whipped up (recipe in a future post).

I feel so blessed to have been invited on my weekend, but also to come home to a family who already “gets” the importance of from scratch-cooking with the best that Manitoba  has to offer.

Kath’s quote: “Cookery, or the art of preparing good and wholesome food, and of preserving all sorts of alimentary substances in a state fit for human sustenance, or rendering that agreeable to the taste which is essential to the support of life, and of pleasing the palate without injury to the system, is, strictly speaking, a branch of chemistry; but, important as it is both to our enjoyments and our health, it is also one of the latest cultivated branches of the science.”-Frederick Accum (1769-1838)

Love-that is all.

I am away and am posting this remotely (so sorry that there are no photos) but I thought you might be interested inthese 10 Hot Trends form the : CRFA’s Canadian Chef Survey

1.  Locally produced food and locally inspired dishes

2.  Sustainability

3.  Nutrition and health

4.  Organics

5.  Simplicity/back to basics

6.  Gluten-free/food allergy conscious

7.  Craft beer/microbreweries

8.  Artisans cheese

9.  Bite size/mini-desserts

10.  Quinoa/ancient grains

The Frenchman and Daughter #2 made up the team that drew the side dishes.  They decided to work independently on two separate little plates.

Both dishes included Le Grand Garden pesto.  D #2 assembled a silky cream of potato and butter nut squash soup.  She creatively initialed each bowl for every member of the family.

The Frenchman opted to use the same gorgeous green Garden pesto and blended it with chopped poached shrimp and feta and stuffed it into a mushroom cap.  Parmesan shards were melted on top.  He also grilled marinated artichokes to accompany the caps.

Both members of this team are very proficient in the kitchen and very confident in their skills.  This can create high drama just like the reality shows that we were recreating.

The third team made up of the Son and his wife (J1 & J2) drew the entree and the Le Grand Sundried Tomato pesto.  They worked somewhat independently as well but more harmoniously (they’ve known each other since they were 12, after all).

J2 fired up the barbie and stood in the snow flipping her grilled zucchini and eggplant disks.  She crumbled feta upon the circles when they had finished grilling.  She then stacked them Inukshuk style to accompany the chicken.

J1took a family favourite and modified it to incorporate the “hero” product.  First he pasted the inside of the breast with the bright, colourful and tasty pesto, then added cheese and fresh spinach that J2 had steamed for him.  After the ingredients were sealed inside he bathed it in a mixture of Dijon mustard and white wine.  This provided adherence for fresh bread crumb coating.  While these were baking, they created a spicy cream sauce from the pesto that was kicked up with some chili powder and tabasco.

Once the chicken was cooked and sliced, smudges of the sauce were placed atop in addition to dollops which graced the plate.  J1 loves hot sauces while he is aware that others in the family prefer more subtle tastes.

Before the end of the evening, we were declaring that we would all be anxious to purchase the Le Grand pestos on a regular basis because of the ease of handling, gorgeous bright colours and startlingly fresh tastes.    We also knew that these family cooking challenges would be a regular occurrence perhaps even involving extended family up at the cottage.

As I provided the live tweets and was the videographer and photographer, I did not do any of the cooking.  The rule in our family therefore, is that I did the dishes.  This was accomplished in two dishwasher loads that evening as well as (I’m guessing) 4 sink fulls of pots.  Hmm, next time, which cooking team, shall I try to get on?

Kath’s quote: “Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.”-Shirley Conran

The stage was set.  Teams were formed, courses were drawn, the three Le Grand Pestos were revealed as the secret ingredients, and oh yea, the wine was poured.

D had made a bread dough in the afternoon to bake a loaf to have with supper.  But when he and Daughter #1 picked the appetizer course, they quickly modified their plans to use the dough for pizza.

We were calling it pizza because they used our round pizza screens to bake it but it really tasted more like a flatbread.  No matter how you describe it-call it absolutely delicious.

The team made a couple of very strategic decisions.  At one time, they were contemplating the inclusion of corn meal crusted back bacon but decided instead to make the flatbread a true vegetarian recipe.

They started with huge smears of the gorgeous green pesto and then began layering on the roasted vegetables: yellow and red peppers, eggplant, mushrooms and butternut squash.

They went very easy on the cheese so that the complex and varied tastes of the roasted vegetables would shine through.  There was mozzarella, Parmesan and a light sprinkling of Bothwell’s red wine and sharp cheddar as well.

In addition, in order to offset the nuttiness of the pesto, they included roasted pine nuts to add some crunch.

The resulting appetizer course could have been our entire meal, but we kept warning each other to stop eating so we would have room for the other dishes that were still ahead.

I was looking for a flat bread quotation, when I came across this one regarding flatulence (with apologies to my vegetarian readers and friends).  Kath’s quote: “Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self-righteousness.”-Sir Robert Hutchinson