Happy Victoria Day: My Seoulful supper

Victoria Day fell early this year.  May Two-Four as it's known in some circles, is a moveable feast that occurs on the Monday before 25 May.  For monarchists, it marks Queen Victoria's birthday and marks Canadian celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II's birthday. For others, the long weekend is the day cottages open, gardens are turned over, and summer (unofficially) begins.

To be honest, it was hard to see last weekend as the start of the hot season.  After days of warming weather and sunshine, I was reminded that I live in Canada.  Days after filling my planter with twizzled corkscrew grass, bursting fuchsia, and trailing plants, the skies greyed and the wind blew cold.

I've lurked in nurseries for about a month, looking for inspiration and a promise of warmer weather.  I fully admit to not knowing what I'm doing in the garden and I rarely know what's in the trays and containers loaded into my cart.  Whenever those green-aproned attendants ask to assist, I hand over my BlackBerry's trove of pictures of flowers and plants I've seen in other people's gardens.  My soil type is dirt--the kind that has worms deep down, beyond the miner bees.  The amount of light my patch receives is better predicted by a roulette wheel than experience, thanks to the condo manager's tree butchers.  My garden faces front, sort of.

A few weeks ago I looked wistfully at a display of hundreds of fluffy petaled flowers, their colours reminiscent of hot climate countries: blooms of saffron, cerise, beet, mango and mustard reminded me that what was under a coverlet of white, and is now a muddy brown will be alive with brilliant colours.  An aproned guide whispered it was too cold to plant them.  I should have bought some anyway and kept them in my dining room window. One week later those pots were gone and replaced  beacons of yet-to-come frost warnings: snow white, blush white, apple white, and pallid, slightly greyed shades of lavender, lemon and underripe cherry.

I left with two dahlias -- one that looked like an exploding yellow-tinged pink grapefruit, and another of the deepest and most lascivious pink.

No sooner were they in the ground than I scrambled to protect my prizes from yet more frost.  My neighbours are used to my eccentricities, but I'm certain I raised some eyebrows by protecting my front garden's latest inhabitants with upturned pots and basins.

This weekend the extended forecast has lulled me into believing Spring frosts are history. The protective covers gone and my potted herbs and decorative containers are back in the sunshine.   I don't want to have to play the protect the plants jig until autumn. But I will.  If I have to.

But that's this weekend, not last.

Victoria Day weekend's bright, beautiful skies masqued cooler temperatures.  Normally I'd keep to a simple holiday weekend menu of seared burgers, salad and fries.  A Victoria sponge and fruity scones also make an almost obligatory appearance.

But not this year.  In my mind, it was just too cold for any of it.  My mind remained with those lost sari-coloured blooms as I rummaged through my freezer.

The bundle of Jacob's Ladders of beef short ribs thawed as I found some red-spined Swiss chard in the bigscarymegamart.  For whatever reason, I fixated on a Korean-inspired supper.  While Korea's climate strictly isn't tropical, I don't believe they endure -30C temps for weeks at a time, as we do in here in the Great White North.

Feeling rather lazy and in an "it's close enough" mood, I springboarded (sprungboard?) off this Asian-Style Braised Short Ribs recipe. Don't let the unexciting umber fool you--it belies a memory of south east Asia, borrowing from several territories.  One of my favourite Korean side dishes is a cold, sesame'd spinach dish called "sigeumchi namul." It's just as easy to make as the the short ribs, and adaptable to any green leafy that flutters by.  Served with rice and a vinegary cucumber and radish salad it made a rather lovely supper.


Korean-style Swiss chard
Adapted from Maangchi's sigeumchi namul recipe

1 bunch of Swiss Chard, chopped into 3-5cm widths
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
1 green onion, finely sliced
2dspn/2tsp  20ml soy sauce
1tsp  5ml nam pla
1 Tbsp  15ml sesame oil
pinch sugar
a spoonful of sesame seeds

Blanch the greens in salted water.  After rinsing in ice water, gently squeeze out the water.

Mix the garlic, green onion, soy sauce, nam pla, sesame oil and sugar.  Add the greens and mix by hand.  Sprinkle in the seeds and toss by hand.

cheers!
jasmine
I'm a quill for hire!

Happy Victoria Day! Bleu cheese stuffed burgers

It's the end of the world, as we know it...and I feel fine.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who had REM's music trilling through their brain yesterday morning as we (*gasp*) awoke and found life to be business as usual.

For those of you who don't know, or have forgotten, an end-of-the-world obsessed Harold Camping (an American radio evangelist) rejigged his calculations (notice the "re") and pronounced 21 May 2011 as the beginning of the end. Along with this was something like 200 million "true believers" were to be welcomed to the afterlife, and a tsunami-inducing earthquake was supposed to hit somewhere in the Pacific.

I'm not going to mention the dearth of reports mentioning people beamed up for their one-on-one with whomever they believe to be their maker. I've not read any evidence supporting a one-day more than 10-fold increase in average daily deaths on the 21st. I won't even hint that the earthquake's target area is known for regular seismic activity and the two *small* earthquakes that did happen didn't trigger tsunami warnings.

Really...It seemed like a pretty normal kind of day.

So while the nonagenarian preacher (with what I think of as an unhealthy obsession with the obliteration of the Earth) is "flabbergasted" that the end of days didn't come (or maybe he's just bewildered, that if it stealthily occurred, why the rapture didn't save him or apparently anyone he knew) the rest of the world ticks on...

And for those of us in Canada, it means getting on with our Victoria Day long weekend.

Victoria Day is Canada's unofficial start of summer. Those with cottages travel out to open them up for the season, gardens are turned, annuals are planted, and barbecues are fired up.

Well, just because I don't have a cottage, I've already taken care of my garden, the dahlias are in, and I don't have a barbecue doesn't mean I can't partake in the first long weekend of the season in appropriate fashion...

I suppose if I actually believed Saturday was the end of everything I may have planned a more appropriate menu...but really...if it's my last meal on Earth, I wouldn't have changed my game plan. I wouldn't have stopped eating red meat and bleu cheese and I wouldn't pour the gin down the drain.

For a last meal, why would I meander too far off my You Are What You Eat list? Why should I take on uncharacteristically trendy foodish airs or make a wholesale change in what I do in hopes that these last-minute changes in the final fleeting moments would change the inevitable?

So for this Victoria Day (or end of days day or not end of days day), my beginning of summer offering is a burger stuffed with bleu cheese and topped with red onions and fried mushrooms.

To me the key to a good homemade hamburger patty is to keep it as simple as possible.

Use ground chuck, fully speckled with flecks of white fat (regular ground beef, not lean or extra lean), salt and pepper. That's it: no eggs, no dried onion soup mix, no panade. For a bleu cheese-stuffed burger, look for a medium-firm cheese--I used Australia's King Island Dairy's Roaring Forties bleu--if you go with a softer cheese, you run the risk of it melting out of the burger while it cooks.

Top it however you wish. I chose dijon mustard, fried mushrooms and red onions. I will say if you happen to have any leftover bourgignon sauce in your freezer (as I tend to have) that works well with this burger.

Bleu cheese-stuffed burgers
Yield 4

Ingredients
500g (1lb) ground chuck, or medium ground beef
0.25tsp salt (or to taste)
0.5tsp pepper (or to taste)
4tsp medium-firm bleu cheese
four buns (hamburger, ciabbata, foccacia, etc)

Condiments and toppings (to taste)
Lettuce
Fried Mushrooms
Sliced red onions
Dijon mustard
Garlicky dill pickles

Method
Mix the salt, pepper and meat together. Divide into four equal portions.

Take each portion and form a ball, then push on one side to make a bowl- or a well-like shape. Add one teaspoon of cheese to the bottom of the well and close up the meat around the cheese. Press and form into a patty. Refrigerate until ready to cook.

Fry or grill until done. Serve on a bun and top as you please.

cheers!

jasmine

I'm a quill for hire!