Food Like That: Recipes your mouth will like

A cake I always bake during plum season and freeze pieces for later use. When I grew up, plum cake and potato soup was a regular meal. I don't like the dough very thick, so I roll it out really thin and use the rest of the dough for a braid.

10 years ago today, I ate food from McDonald's for the last time. That makes today my 10 year McDonald's free anniversary.

I was driving back across Canada from a co-op term in Ottawa. 3 long days of a variety of different road food. We stopped at Kamloops for a refuel and some food, on the final stretch of the drive home. McDonald's, McChicken meal.

10 minutes after the meal, I felt bad. Stomache in knots, pasty mouth, and generally bad feeling. I put two and two together (finally) -- whenever I ate at McDonald's, I felt bad afterwards. That was it, I decided -- no more! I wouldn't eat anything from there, ever again.

Now, 10 years later, I haven't broken that rule. I've still gone on road trips, but I've opted out of McDonald's. That's not to say that I haven't eaten other "fast food". I tend to pick something like Tim Horton's -- where you can soup, and chilli, and sandwiches, all of which don't seem to induce the bad feeling that I got at the big "M" in the past.

Thinking about this as my 10 year anniversary, I got to thinking about what might be an appropriate meal to eat -- and the appropriate meal to eat at each yearly anniversary. Of course, I recently posted about The Omnivore's Hundred, so that's a likely place to look for inspiration.

I had joked about doing some sort of live action food event -- like duplicating a McDonald's meal out of "real" ingredients. Instead I'm hanging out on Bowen eating fresh plums and beans from the garden. The McPheasant will have to wait for next year...

I saw this on Travis' blog, and since I can't resist lists involving food, here is my "Omnivore's Hundred" list of foods that I've eaten (originally from Very Good Taste). I actually seem to recall filling out a shorter list before, but I can't find it at the moment. Update: it's another BBC list -- 50 things to eat before you die, which I had already filled out on Lists of Bests here.

This is called "Opa's" because my dad has made this (or something similar to it) for a long time. The three basic ingredients always remain the same: sauted squid, tomatoes, and some sort of meat. Opa usually uses some nice thick cut bacon or some German speck.

I usually do an Asian-style grated carrot salad with sesame oil, but the meal I was making was very mediterranean. I was going for something light and summery, and I think it worked really well as a palate cleanser / small starter. Next time I would adjust it to have a little more zing: it was a bit too sweet, so maybe balsamic vinegar would have gone better.

I never make mayonnaise-based potato salads, but lean towards German-style vinegar dressings. I often add mustard because a) I love Dijon and b) it adds a bit of creamyness. This particular mix has me adding cream cheese, because it happened to be sitting around and seemed a good fit for the fresh mint.

I bought some lupini beans a couple of weeks ago on a trip to Bosa (an Italian grocery store on Victoria just off of Kingsway -- and a second giant one on Boundary). I like beans in general and hadn't seen these before, especially in the well known Unico brand. Lots of the Unico beans have recipes on the inside, so I figured I could make that even if I didn't find other recipes.

Turns out, the main "recipe" for Lupini beans (also known as lupin beans (wikipedia)) is to salt them and eat them out of a bowl as a snack: you squeeze the outer shell and the bean pops out into your mouth. Well, that was rather unexciting, and the beans weren't really that great, either. From the wikipedia link, turns out that lupin beans are being cultured potentially as a replacement for soy beans, since they also grow in colder climates.

Strawberries! Before heading over to Bowen Island for the July 1st holiday, I convinced James to drive us out to Westham Island to go to Emma Lea Farms. Well, actually, it's James that knows the place -- I thought we should U Pick the berries, but Monique made a funny joke about the time and chiropractor bill vs. just picking them up. I ended up buying a flat for $27.50 along with some new potatoes to take over to Bowen.

By the way, James has an excellent series on his blog where he's making up menus for his imaginary restaurant, Purloined. Check out Purloined's July menu.

Bowen! A great time as always -- super hot, so we did some beach picnicking and lots of swimming. The strawberries were prepped, and ended up in strawberry rhubarb jam as well as a strawberry torte (not sure what this is called -- my mom takes a sponge cake like base and then puts cut strawberries on top and covers them with gelatin). The new potatoes ended up as potato salad, which I'll post the recipe for.

Another fun piece of cooking on Bowen was some simple chicken legs done in my grandmother's old cast iron pot. Slow cooked over low heat on the stove top after browning in left over bacon fat, with some onions, garlic, mushrooms, and zucchini added.

Oh yes -- I did do some pork back ribs boiled in wine and then marinated in a from scratch BBQ sauce that I made. Needs more tinkering before I can post the recipe.

My favourite cake in spring, it combines the fresh taste of sour rhubarb with sweet meringue and there is not too much dough, just enough to carry the toppings.

Picking up rhubarb at the Farmers Market.

I finally will have the recipe on this site, and, should I lose the little square piece of paper with the recipe written on both sides by my mother in 1976, I can come here to find it again!

Here are the pictures I took of both sides of the handwritten recipe. Note that the baking powder was forgotten on the list of ingredients.

I often make eggplant slices baked in the oven, and when I saw these "baby" eggplants, I thought they would be good whole. And they are! Here's a page with a bunch of different kinds of eggplants pictured: http://www.evergreenseeds.com/oreg.html

Sablefish poached in coconut milk with green peppers, cilantro, and fresh ground pink peppercorns. Served over basmati rice with crushed almonds.

Dessert? A few spoonfuls of Liberté Mediterranée Lemon Yogourt. 8% milk fat, and you can taste it in every delicous spoonfuls. 

Penticton? That was a couple of weekends ago, the long weekend in May. Driving in the hills, we ended up stopping in at the Dirty Laundry winery. A great stop, very nice wines -- I was surprised by how good the whites were, and came back with a Riesling and a dry Gewürtztraminer. The other haul from Penticton was a large selection of used cookbooks.

I'm currently looking for two things when I'm looking for cookbooks. One is a focus on seasonal recipes. I got two great books in this category: Pleasures of the Good Earth, and Food in Good Season.

The second is picking various "local" cookbooks -- you know, the ones put together by the Ladies' Auxilary, the local church, or whatever. Not quite in this category (since it's an actual published book), is one of my favourite cookbooks of all time -- Nutbread and Nostalgia, by the Junior League of South Bend Indiana.

Anyway, I got a handful of these local cookbooks. Some coil bound, like Country Church Cooking, by Josephburg Men's Choral Society, which has a hilarious picture that I have to scan. Others are literally tied with some twine and mimeographed. Sure, you get a ton of macaroni salads and Joe's Quick Pasta Sauce, but there are often really unique recipes hidden here and there.

And that's it for tonight.