Milk Calendar Mondays

Well here we are...the final Milk Calendar Monday. I'd like to add "ever" to the end of that last sentence, but who knows, it may come back...but not for a long, long time.

The new calendar arrived a few weeks ago and I do admit that, at first glance, the recipes look more interesting via Indian, Thai, Greek and Vietnamese influences, but it also keeps some of what really bugged me in the 2008 calendar--I don' think anyone will successfully convince me that adding three cups of milk to a curry is a good thing.

The final 2008 recipe is their Almond Cranberry Loaf. Gosh, it looked pretty on the calendar...and it was marginally seasonal--cranberries always get me into a Christmassy mood. The recipe read well enough, and as usual the "for the adventurous" recommendation of adding dried apricots and substituting hazelnuts for almonds made me sigh...heavily.

Here, I admit to a couple of changes, to suit what was in my pantry. I'd actually run out of milk the day I made this, so instead I used the equal amount of yoghurt. I also was in the midst of fruitcaking (yes, I am a charter member, founding president and chief fruit macertator of the Fruitcake Liberation Front), so I was up to my elbows in pecans and chucked them into the bread instead of almonds. But I did use the apricots as recommended for the adventurous.

The bread itself wasn't too bad--a bit heavy, and I do like my fruit breads fruitier. Overall, a mostly inoffensive cake.

For those of you who want to relive my pain, here's a link to all the Milk Calendar Monday adventures.

I don't know about you, but I think I deserve a mug of heavily cognac-ed egg nog after this year-long adventure.


cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: Vibrant broccoli soup

Sometimes I wonder where bland diets come from....not medically-necessitated bland diets, but diets that lack interesting flavours and textures.

And yes, I'm fully aware that "interesting" is a highly subjective term...I find the works by English Renaissance dramatists interesting, am fairly sure not everyone shares my literary diversions.

I suppose those who prefer foods deficient in...sparkle...may not have been exposed to said sparkle. Maybe they think sparkle is frightening in the same way people are afraid of roller coasters or bungee jumping: that's nice for some, but not for me, thank you very much.

I don't think there's a problem with the occasional settling for something a little less than wow. At the very least, you appreciate the wow even more when you (deservedly return to it). Unfortunately, there are some who decrease their culinary sparkle so subtly they don't realise they've lost their sparkle. They stop cooking for themselves and become increasingly reliant on lowest common denominator prefab foods (cafeteria offerings, the frozen foods aisle), a mood strikes and doesn't let go, they get lazy and find the walk to the spice cupboard just too far...

So, when I spied this month's dairy calendar recipe (Vibrant broccoli soup) I wondered how...sparkly...it would be. The ingredient list didn't put it into the "Oh my dear word, what on Earth were they thinking" category...but it didn't fall into the "Oh my dear word, this looks as if it has real potential" category either. It did fall into the "Oh my dear word, they think a bit of garlic and chilli flake is daring...no, wait, they think Swiss Chard and Cheddar are daring...so sans bitter greens and pretty much universally accepted cheese this is...um...lowest common denominator."

I will say this. It is a good recipe for a basic thick veggie soup. You can sub a number of veggies for the broccoli (I immediately thought of cauliflower and carrot, but you can probably do a whole host of other flavours and colours) and play with the spicing. It was quick and very easy. It was also reminiscent of institutional food...like what you get in hospital or on certain airlines: inoffensive and lacked sparkle.

Oh well...



cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: Sweet potato bake with crispy garlic topping

So...have you yet recovered from last month's MCM guest blogger's post?

Yeah...it was pretty...wretched... the food, not the post.

Fearless, yet fatigued, with this project...okay..., that's not quite right. I am afraid of this project. I'm afraid of lost time and ingredients which I'll never regain nor resuscitate. I'm afraid of what horrid little prank will be played upon me, my sometimes guest and everyone else who innocently tries one of the recipes. It really is quite hit-or-miss as to whether I'll be able to stomach the results.

Anyway...where was I...

Fearless, yet fatigued, with this project I spied the October recipe: Sweet potato bake with crispy garlic topping and thought...hmmm...it looks okay...and it reads okay...but is it really okay? The answer: Yes. It was okay.

In the grand scheme of things, this was an okay recipe. In the grand scheme of the Milk Calendar recipes, it was a phenomenol recipe. It was easy. It was garlickly. It had textures that varied from soft to crunchy. There was even a bit of tang. The only thing I would probably change is to use roughly half the amount of topping. Just too much breadcrumbs. And maybe lower the milk to about one cup's worth.

But that's not the story I'm going to tell you....I'm going to tell you about my craptastic kitchen weekend.

Yes. It's a word. Look it up.

It's also proof that things happen in threes.

Craptastical event 1:
I awoke at 5am (yes, 5am) for no apparent reason. Couldn't get back to sleep, and read a chunk of the fabulous book that lay by my bed. After a while I decided to do something useful with my time and decided to bake yet another banana bread (three breads in one week). Everything was going well until I put my sugar jar back on the shelf.

And it broke.

A 128 fluid ounce jar.....shards of glass...grains of sugar...everywhere...in my pantry, on the floor.

I loved that jar. I really did. It was big and had a big mouth so I could scoop or pour. But now it's in the bin...along with about 2kgs of sugar.

Wah.

Craptastical event 2.
Sunday morning I had a craving for a toasted Montréal-style bagel schmeared with cream cheese. Mmmmm....One of the local bakeries pays homage to the infamous M-style bagel and I happened to have picked some up.

I don't have a bagel slicer...but I do have a very sharp serrated knife.

At some point my knife mistook my left hand's middle finger for the bagel.

10 minutes of profuse exsanguination and who knows how many litres of water later I decided against stitches...at the very least, the blood loss left me a bit woozy so driving myself to hospital may not have been a wise idea.

Do you see how many Es, Ds and Cs there are in this post? I hope you appreciate how much pain I'm enduring to type this. I will say I'm a ridiculously fast healer when it comes to things like this--34 hours later and you can just barely see the gash...but I can really, really feel it.

Owie owie owie owie.

Craptastical event 3:
Needless to say, I was pretty useless in the kitchen, so the exbf had to prepare much of it. Kind of like another cooking by proxy exercise. No big worries. This was a pretty easy recipe (the rest of the meal was slightly more complicated). Everything was going well until I decided to follow the recipe and turn on Beelzebub's broiler.

I'd never used it before.

And what follows is entirely my fault. Not his...either one (exbf or the stove).

It didn't take long to put out the fire. It was pretty small and the universal lid pretty much smothered it. The house was filled with smoke and I had to run around and open windows and turn on the bathroom and kitchen fans (owieowieowieowie). The exbf took care of the smoke alarm...and scraping the charred crust off the gratin.

I suppose that much breadrcumb topping was necesary...otherwise the entire dish would have been ... well ... charcoal. See the little black specs in the photo? Not all the charred bits were removed.

The taste, although barbecuey, wasn't bad...but it would be better without the carbon...both in the air and in the dish.

Oh well...today was a much better day....

cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: Kids Crazy Meatball Wraps

Yes, I'm cutting it close. No I didn't forget or bail out of this month's recipe. Just poor time management.

I thought, for a change of pace, it would be good to have someone (who's not me) who ate the meal actually report on it...just in case anyone's thinking I've lost my objectivity with this project.

So...here's the exbf with his take on this month's recipe. My comments are bracketed and in pinky-mauve.

Jasmine has been working her way through the recipes on the Milk Calendar and I have the distinct honour (or shall I say I seem to be paying a penance for things I’ve done and have yet to do) by playing the occasional role of guinea-pig.

I have to admit that while I like her cooking, I dread meals taken from Milk Calendar recipes. The mere mention of those words strike terror in my stomach because that it’s apparent the Milk Calendar’s approach seems to be to take some innocent recipe whose original form involves no milk and inflict dairy upon it. They seem to have little regard for how this affects the taste or texture. The end results are usually nearly tasteless and only barely digestible.

Since Jasmine’s cooking is usually a lot better than that, I have to assume the problem is the recipes and not the cook.

I would expect that this does not need to be said but if you are at all lactose intolerant, avoid the Milk Calendar recipes. After many I’ve tried, I can say the same caveat goes if you have functional taste buds combined with any level of desire to use them while eating.

This month’s offering was Kids’ Crazy Meatball Wraps which was meat-balls in a ketchup and I assume milk-based sauce that had corn in it in a wrap (Jasmine: yes, I chose the ketchup version...after so many disappointing meals I wasn't going to use my homemade tomato sauce, the good bottled tomato sauce or my homemade ketchup) :

“A fun dinner will get the kids excited and parents will be thrilled to make an easy, nutritious meal that everyone will love. Serve crisp veggie sticks on the side.”

The title of the recipe is like “employee empowerment”: if they have to tell you that they’re empowering their employees, they aren’t. In the same way, if they tell you it’s “crazy” and a “meal that everyone will love” it isn’t insane (Jasmine: Well, I question the thought processes behind mixing milk with ketchup and corn and carrots--exactly how much sugar should one have in a meal?) and you’ll probably be hard pressed to find a group of people who value good flavoured food to love it…choke it down, maybe.

I swear they’ve got a time warp back there to the 1950s or 1960s. It struck me as something a cautiously adventurous cook circa 1963 [1] who had heard of a burrito, but who had never actually seen one and who was a bit worried their families might reject anything truly exotic, might have come up with. The best one can say for it was that it was inoffensively bland and easy to chew. My favourite part of the meal was the pickles she served with them.

I would recommend this recipe for people easy intimidated by flavour. It might also be suitable for people in a persistent vegetative state, assuming they can handle semi-solid food.


1: Young readers should be grateful that they missed the era in which cutting-edge home-cooked cuisine in Ontario involved such knee-trembling excitement as Jell-O With Things That Are Almost Certainly Food (or at least Food-like) In and Pork Chops Baked to the Consistency of Tent Pegs. The reason Canadians have in recent years tended to be a little chubbier than previous generations is because until the 1970s, a surprising percentage of our food was only barely edible (Jasmine: Hmmm…you seem to forget the processed foods, fast foods and all those other things that the Milk Calendar people apparently want their readers to not rely so heavily upon, but I'd usually gladly take over certain Milk Calendar recipes I've made).


cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: Chicken and Fresh Spinach Tortellini

Dare I say it?

This is the sort of thing the Milk Calendar people should be aiming for when developing and choosing recipes for their calendar.

You read right. Two passing grade recipes in a row. Who'da thunk it?

When you actually read this month's recipe for Chicken and Fresh Spinach Tortellini, you might easily figure out why it works: the dairy component (in this case milk) serves a real purpose. That is the milk is supposed to be there and substituting it for water or stock or wine would probably make the recipe worse.

Milk wasn't used to boil rice. Milk wasn't used as pasta water.

The milk was used for sauce. And not some wretched, bland and pallid imitation of what should have been a bold and flavourful coating. It was a sauce that worked well enough and easily adapted to the cook's preference.

In keeping with the calendar's raison d'être it is an extremely easy recipe. And in keeping with the other recipes, it is designed so as to not offend Canadian's stereotypically timid tastebuds. The "adventurous" additions really aren't that daring: bitter greens (Swiss chard) and bacon (pancetta)--but I'm a half-bacon-fiend who's more than Swiss chard friendly, I went that route.

I made a couple of changes to the recipe--instead of baby spinach, I used grown up spinach (I'm beginning an antipathy for baby veggies--apart from the price, I'm increasingly unconvinced of their flavour) and my dining companion has a citrus allergy, so I didn't use the lemon rind, but to add the teeniest bit of sharpness used a about a quarter tsp of white wine vinegar.

It was a pretty effortless affair and the recipe came together in a rather quick fashion--I think I had dinner on the table within about -45 minutes, from start of prep to dishing out the pasta. To keep it as a one-pot dish, I crisped the bacon in the cooking pot, removed the pieces, but kept the fat in the pot when whisking the flour into Ahe milk. The flavour was pretty good--it would definitely benefit from a bay leaf and the bacon should be manditory--tried it without and it didn't work for me or my friend...and if you aren't making your own stock and like me used an insta-boullion, you may want to keep the bacon fat in the dish because of the lovely all-over depth it added to the dish.


cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: Sensational Smoothies

For those of you who've followed my little Milk Calendar experiment, you know that I don't think very highly of many of the recipes I've tried thus far. What started off as a bit of curiosity, a bit of fun and a bit of a yen for easy and tasty recipes more often than not ends up a bit of disappointment, a bit of frustration and a yen for the fast food mall up the street.

Last month's recipe was bad..badbadbadbadbad. The one before set off my snark-o-meter. The one before that was good-okay. To save pixel space, let's just agree to say that that's a good summation of all the recipes thus far.

So I hope you understand when I admit to being a bit...ummm...trepidacious when I try the next calendar recipe. And you won't be overly surprised when that trepidation turns to paranoia when the recipe works, is somewhat tasty and makes me almost happy that I tried it.

July's sensational smoothies were already in my bad books for using "sensational" in the title. Basically, I thought the milk people were trying too hard to sell me on the concept--shades of the travesty that was "Faster-than-take-out chicken and veggie chow mein." Maybe it was a self-preservation thing, but I decided to try two of the three offered recipes--blueberry-banana-orange and pomegranate sunrise I opted out of the raspberry lemon. But allow me to put on record here that I think "pomegranate sunrise" is a nauseating title, reminiscent of some 1970s disco-crazed lippy colour.

Okay...they weren't "sensational" by my rather middling standards, but they were sensational by the calendar's.

The blueberry smoothie was quite pretty with its bubbly mauve top, and while the pomegranate one was not as pristinely delineated as in the calendar's picture, was still quite attractive.

Both smoothies were very quick, tasty and surprisingly hunger-ending. Who'd have thunk recipes when in their original and untampered states would hold their own?

So here's where my innate paraonoia kicks in...

Is this the token "hey, it works and I might want to have it again" recipe? Or is this just the beginning of a better half of the calendar to lull you into looking forward to the next calendar? You know...enough good recipes at the end to make you forget about the bad stuff that happened in the first half, so by the time the next calendar comes tucked between sales flyers for all those things the shops over-ordered and are trying to convince you that your Great Auntie Ermintrude would love for Christmas, forget how...unappetising the recipes were in the first half of the year.

I don't know but we've got the balance of 2008 to find out.


cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: Super-Fast Chicken and Vegetable Curry

Okay...so I'm a little early with this month's Milk Calendar Monday adventure. I suppose I could have waited until next week, or the week after. But while sometimes these recipes are the gustatory equivalent of forcing yourself to clean out a meat-filled freezer that's been accidentally unplugged during the hottest weekend of the year, the subsequent post can be like cup of sweet, steaming hot mint tea that not only masks the taste of the sorry excuse for "adventurous" but it makes your tummy feel good.

And this blog is pretty much about feel-good tummies.

As Elizabeth noted during May's post, June's offering is the Super-fast chicken and vegetable curry. She wasn't the only one afraid to look at the recipe.

I really tried to go into this month's recipe with an open mind and receptive tastebuds. But the truth is My Dear Little Mummy is the best-ever South Indian cook. Period. She makes the very yummiest curries--hot, mild, swathed in gravy, thickened juiced clinging to each and every piece of meat--she has never, ever, ever made a bad curry (spaghetti, muffins, and the occasional soup can be different stories). Yes, I do make my own curries--while not quite as good a Mummy's, my offerings do have their fans.

As expected, the dairy people provided a very, very, simple "curry." You aren't making your own masala, nor are you really layering any flavours. Such exercises take time, and I suppose if one of your objectives is to quickly pull together a meal (and when I say quickly, I do mean a combined prep and cooking time of less than 30 minutes), such tasty things are sacrificed. Also, Indian food carries the unfortunate stigma of being complicated with long ingredients lists. For the novice, uncertain, or lazy amongst us, spying half a dozen spices could be off-putting.

For me, the off-putting parts were *surprise* the half-litre of milk and the cornstarch. I know why the milk is there (the half-cup of yoghurt probably wouldn't be enough to warrant its calendar placement), but, again, I think it's a waste of good milk. I know the cornstarch is there to mimic the effects of long-cooking--to produce a clingy gravy--but the starch combined with the milk made is seem rather nursery-food like to me.

And yes, I went the "adventurous" route (sans coriander leaf--totally forgot to pick some up, and as it wasn't in the main recipe, I didn't feel like nipping out to the shop) and used fresh ginger and chillies. The other changes I made were using hot curry powder, instead of mild (I don't have any mild right now and didn't feel like making some) and toasted almonds instead of peanuts..and I used more nuts than called for.
I served it to a friend (one who is not Indian). He thought it acceptable in a non-curry-like way. To him it was perhaps a soup; it could be a stew. He admitted that if he went to a restaurant and ordered a curry and received what this recipe produced, he'd probably feel misled.

Me...I thought it had as much bearing to curry as Chef Alphadoodlio's canned kiddie-friendly pasgetti does to anything Mama Cream Puff makes for our favourite Cream Puff.

And again, I have no idea what I did wrong, but this recipe made so much I could have easily filled my sink basin with the "curry." In fact, I swear it kept reproducing in my wok...regardless of how much of the stuff I dished out, the quantity never seemed to change. I even checked underneath the wok to see if there was some sort of tube system hooked up to it to automatically refill my vessel with the stuff. Nope...no tube system...just a lot of "curry."

We both agreed that something was missing--it was definitely lacking in something. I began listing the ways I would fix this recipe, and try and keep it within the easy, commonly pantrifed and thoroughly dairied mandate the recipes seem to follow. Get rid of the half-litre of milk and the corn starch (but keep the yoghurt). Tweak the spicing with some black mustard and fenugreek...maybe some others. Add fried onions along with an acid--lemon or lime juice.

But then I realised my version might actually take some effort...which would make it palatable...and perhaps people would like it...which doesn't seem in keeping with several of the recipes I've tried thus far...

Meh.

cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: Faster-than-Take-Out Chicken and Veggie Chow Mein

Hmmm...this month's Milk Calendar recipe, "Faster-than-Take-Out Chicken and Veggie Chow Mein," seems to have unleashed my not-so inner snarkiness.

Let's start with the title.

Could it be any longer?

Well, yes it could be.

It could be something like "Here's another excuse to use some perfectly good milk in a recipe which would be better off without it, but we can't admit it because this is the Milk Calendar, and we need to encourage people to cook with milk, so stirfries are fast and easy so we'll get people to use milk in their stirfries and cook at home instead of getting a greasy takeaway which actually tastes better but again, we can't admit to that either."

Like most marketing ploys, the title was more spin than fact. It took me longer than the indicated 20 minutes (prep and cooking) to get the meal on a plate. Granted, I'm not the speediest slicer or shrimp peeler and "deveiner," but I don' think I'm *that* slow.

"Wait a minute. Shrimp? I thought that was funny looking chicken." I hear you think (warning: I've gone back to reading your minds).

Yes, you are correct. That is shrimp.

Which brings me to snarkiness fodder number two:

I decided to go with the "adventurous" suggestions of using shrimp instead of chicken, and add hoisin sauce, soy sauce and Chinese cabbage to the wok.

Woo. That's really adventurous, isn't it? I mean, if I were allergic to shrimp or Chinese leaf, I suppose it would be, but I'm not allergic to those things.

The thing is...I don't know anyone who's never made a stir-fry...which is what this really is. I've always treated such edible beasties as kitchen sink suppers: slice up whatever's lying around, toss them into a hot wok with onions, garlic and ginger, stir it about and add spices and sauces before tipping onto some steaming noodles et voila! Stir-fry.

But I guess, technically, this isn't a regular stirfry. It's a chow mein. According to a non-Chinese friend it means slice up whatever's lying around, toss them into a hot wok with onions, garlic and ginger, stir it about and add spices and sauces before tipping onto some steaming noodles et voila! Chow mein.

The recipe itself wasn't too bad, and unless you're feeding a professional hockey player, the recipe provides ample portioning for six...or gargantuan portioning for the recommend four people.

Again, I didn't see the point of the milk in the saucing. I'm convinced it contributed to an odd nursery food-like smell: sort of sickly sweet and reminiscent of the smell emanating from children who are fed far too many processed foods by parents who either don't know how to properly feed their wee ones or are too self-obsessed to spend more than the minimum amount of time in the kitchen, with anything that vaguely resembled food untouched by food scientists and marketers. You know the smell.

So...the verdict? It's not a bad recipe (well, it's not a truly great one--but it's not in the running for the worst). If I were to categorise it, it would fall into the "with a few tweaks it could be more palatable" category. But then, it's a food that doesn't really need a recipe...does it?


cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: Cinnamon Crunch Raspberry Muffins

For those of you who flipped your Milk Calendar to April and wondered about my adventure with Salmon and Rice Primavera, well, you'll just have to keep on wondering. Or you can do the recipe and assume that whatever you thought of it will be exactly my reaction. I didn't attempt the recipe because of a salmon allergy (how wrong is that?).

So this month's Milk Calendar Monday recipe let me dive into one of the extra eight recipes. I really wonder why they separate these out from the others. I mean, yes, it's always good to give your customers more than they asked for (well, more in a good way... higher prices, unending telephone trees, days of headaches to get a simple thing done are NOT examples of this), but these...um...hidden...recipes always look more interesting and tasty than the monthly spotlights. I'd have been happier if the Easy Jambalaya recipe (yes, I do drone on about that one) was hidden on one the back pages and the recipe I chose instead was on a calendar page.

I must admit, after reading Brilynn's comment about the carrot cake I was more than a little trepedatious about trying the extra recipes. I mean, were these the ones that (in some wise person's mind) weren't good enough to be the monthly pin-up: you know, passively attractive with a good personality? Knowing I had to pick something, I went with the Cinnamon Crunch Raspberry Muffins.

This is a muffin that uses whole wheat flour, which in my mind is a travesty of an inclusion in muffin or cake recipes. I simply don't want those nubbly little bits in my crumb, thank you very much. I want more of a cakey crumb, with texture coming from fruits, nuts or some sort of topping...not from the flour itself.

Luckily for me (and the calendar and anyone reading this) I can carve off that part of my brain that would normally taint my final opinion, stick it into the freezer and just evaluate something on its merits as-is.

Which is a good thing for this recipe.

I liked this muffin. I liked the crumb, really liked the lemony-raspberry flavour and thought the crunchy topping's texture was pretty bang-on. The only thing I didn't really care for was the lemon juice in the crunchy topping--there's more than enough lemon in the cake so there's no need to use it on top. I think I know why it's mixed with the oats and sugar, but I'd rather use water (okay, I'd rather use butter, but this is supposed to be "healthier" than that).

Why did I like this, even thought I don't like wheatie nubblies in my cakes? I think it's because the oats disguised the nubblies and texturally tricked my tongue into liking the muffin. Hey, that's perfectly okay...I'm one for feeding people unfavourite food and then rejoicing when they tell me they like it before they find out it was aubergine or it contained fish sauce (I don't let them rescind their yums when they find out it's a food they don't like).

So, in my humble opinion, we've got a good recipe with this one. So much so that I'm seriously considering changing some of my favourite muffin recipes to include whole wheat and the crunchy topping....

cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: One-Pot Tomato Parmesan Rotini

Workasaurus has been wreaking havoc overtime, travelling up and down the 401, visiting Ivonne and me, crashing on our chesterfields and begging rides to and from our offices.

I don't know about our Dear Little Puff of Cream , but whenever the Worky shows up over here, it seems as if its rather presumptuous cousin, Deadlineadactyl also arrives in tow, shrieking out calendaric countdowns, sometimes skipping a date or three. Yeah, they are both favourites right now, and the prime reasons for me neglecting all my bloggy friends.

To say the least, right now bulk cooking and reheating home-made frozen goodies is how I'm keeping myself going...well, that and lots of coffee...lots of Tim Horton coffee (and before the Canadians ask, I've only one ONE coffee out of about 20-30 cups...meh).

Anyway, this weekend I decided to venture into the March Milk Calendar recipe for One-Pot Tomato Parmesan Rotini. Given how...um...not good the February travesty was, I was apprehensive as to whether I could stomach this one.

It's easy and quick (I made up about five-ish servings in about 30 minutes). Yes, I'd like it to be zippier--substitute the parm with asiago, perhaps tinned tomatoes with roasted tomatoes as well, but on the whole, this milk-cooked pasta with chunks of broccoli isn't too bad--better than cafeteria food. I think if I make it again, I'd really want to put in some good chunks of bacon...pretty much everything is improved with bacon.


cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: Easy Jambalaya

Elizabeth of Blog From Our Kitchen noted in January's MCM post

"...I must say that I do get a kick out of looking at the "for the adventurous" section at the bottom of the recipe. I'm amazed at what is sometimes considered to be 'adventurous.'"

Sometimes recipe writers try too hard. Sure, their intentions may be innocuous--helpful, even--but every once in a while even the best-laid plans of mince and mandoline may be best left in that dark place where recipes never are never committed to paper (or pixels).

I fully understand many Canadians do not live in urban centres and may not have easy access to the same ingredients as those who live in larger cities. Heck, I live in one of our larger cities and I have trouble reliably finding chipotles in adobo sauce in our mainstream grocers. I also know that because not everyone was raised with Asian, Central American or even Mediterranean foods (among others), balancing culinary timidity with an honest curiosity of different flavours can be daunting.

Call them tamed, simplified or brutishly dumbed down, creating a non-offensive and easy version of a famed, complex and flavourful dish isn't an easy job. Add to that a pre-requisite ingredient normally absent in many other versions, and you risk a final product that's, at best, lacking. Yes, you could help someone out of their comfort zone and give them the courage to try different flavours, cuisines and cooking techniques, but sometimes you could simply be passing on misinformation.

Am I being a food snob? I don't think so.

Sigh...

Entitled "Easy Jambalaya" I was torn between two reactions: the lazy-I-want-it-now part of me was excited at the prospect of a jambalaya that didn't take hours to make...combined with...oh gawd, what did they leave out to make it appealing to the masses. Yes, it's easy and designed so anyone with access with the most basic kitchen can make this. But it's also boring and unsatisfying.

I made one substitution -- thought the can of crushed tomatoes was a can of stewed tomatoes...and then when I realised I had the correct quantity of tomato sauce, I used that instead of opening up a new tin...if anything, my substitution added more flavour to the dish.

As written, its flavours are dull and lifeless. There's no depth of flavour attained from browned chicken, quantities of smoked or andouille sausage. I'm used to sautéeing onions, peppers and celery until they've released their basic goodness. I'm also used to garlic and bay leaves. Yup...no garlic in this recipe--sacrificed in the name of the hoi polloi? Probably. Don't know why the versatile bay leaf was omitted.

I tasted it after it was "done." It wasn't. I had to doctor it--heavily to bring it to the barely passable zone. If I had some garlic powder I'd have tipped some in, but I did add some chicken stock, along with a plethora of spices and a good dollop of hot sauce. And that's why my photo looks so much different than what's in the calendar.

A friend was over to try it. As we ate we tried to figure out why it wasn't working for us. We both agreed that the milk should have been left out and a rich chicken stock would have been better. I prefer my jambalaya with sausage, chicken and shrimp. He wasn't specific with the type of meat, just the quantity...it needed a lot more meat--and I'm in full agreement. We both thought it needed garlic and more seasoning.

The "adventurous" recommendation of adding shrimp would not help this dish in the slightest.

cheers!
jasmine

Milk Calendar Mondays: Roast Beef Dinner Salad

Found tucked amidst sales flyers and the colour comics, November's new Milk Calendar's arrival is a an anticipated bit of Canadiana, linking together potentially millions of families across the country. Think I'm kidding? More than 2 million were distributed in Saturday newspapers.

I remember being little, leafing through its pages from --the full-colour pictures represented "Canadian" food for me--not what I got a lot of as a youngster. My Dear Little Mummy (okay, she was My Dear Big Mummy then) rarely cooked from it. Apart from the occasional muffin or cake, the recipes went largely untried in our household.

So there it dangled on a bare nail, part art, part time keeper and reminder of bills to be paid and those already paid. Each month had a different meal or treat--everything from milkshakes and smoothies to pastas and, of course cakes and other sweets. Each beautifully photographed to entice the home cook to cook with milk and its kindred foods. At the end of the year, the calendar came down and was stored in the basement, with the other calendars.

Ashamedly, I continued Mummy's tradition of not cooking from it. Yes, I looked forward to receiving the calendar, flipping through the pages and salivating at some of the photos and recipes, but it never really crossed my mind to try the recipes. Inexplicable, really, given I'm pretty much willing to try any kitchen treat at least once.

When this year's calendar arrived, I decided to change that. Not because this year's recipes seem better than last (they don't), or because I've recently developed a hankering for dairy (that's been an ongoing craving ever since I was little, much to Mum's chagrin). I don't know what it was, but I decided this year the calendar to use as more than a record keeper of my household goings ons. So once a month...probably on a Monday, I'll post that month's recipe.

January's recipe for Roast Beef Dinner Salad is quick, satisfying, and different from the usual leftover meal. It's ludicrously simple: lettuce leaves strewn with waves of roast beef, crumbles of tangy old cheddar, juicy little tomatoes, crunchy croutons and fingers of cooked green beans, dressed in a creamy horseradish and thyme vinaigrette.

I'll probably come back to this, but change it up a bit--add sauteed mushrooms and onions and switch the horseradish and cheddar for blue cheese.

Simple, delicious and easily adaptable, this is definitely worth a try.

cheers!
jasmine

"2008 Milk Calendar"