You all know that I love me some preserving. Let me turn some fruits into jam or pickle some vegetables and I’m a happy camper. I’m particularly happy when I get to crack open a jar of preserved peaches in February.
A few (ok, many) months ago the folks at Thomas Allen gave me a copy of Mourad Lahlou’s cookbook, . The recipes looked delicious but many of them required preserved lemons. Now living in Toronto (at the time), finding preserved lemons should be a breeze but I’m always worried about what people put in products to preserve them. Luckily Lahlou’s cookbook has a dead simple recipe for preserved lemons.
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Well folks, American Thanksgiving is upon us. Or, as I like to call it: the last Thursday in November. Being Canadian, American Thanksgiving is just another day albeit with the promise of crazy sales and all good TV shows being preempted in favour of football.
I know, I totally sound like the Grinch Who Stole Thanksgiving. It might be because I’ve never experienced a true American Thanksgiving (insert violins). Despite having lived in the U.S. on and off for about 7 years, I guess I normally flee to Canada when I have the time off. But thanks to all the American media I have a clear vision of what Thanksgiving looks like and more importantly… what it tastes like.
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While I’m pretty good about eating most foods (despite my dislike for raisins and cucumbers), I can be oddly picky about certain things. Anyone who has ever had brunch with me knows about my “egg thing”. It’s not that I don’t like eggs, it’s just that on any day I can be pretty particular about how my eggs are prepared. For years I wouldn’t eat eggs Benedict because runny yolks freaked me out. These days how much a runny egg freaks me out depends on how I feel, which direction the sun is shining and if I can hear a crow in the distance. So I’ll order a poached egg and ask for the yolks a bit harder BUT not too hard because hard-boiled eggs also occasionally freak me out. It’s tough being me.
The other food that I have a challenging relationship with are bananas. I love having a banana at breakfast each morning whether it’s on toast, with my yogurt or just on my own. The problem is that for me bananas have such a limited shelf life. They’re never ripe enough when I get them from the supermarket, then there’s maybe a day or two when they’re optimal but as soon as the skin is super yellow and maybe starts to see a speck or two of black the banana is ruined for me. RUINED. At that point I either try to choke it back OR I throw them in my freezer for later use.
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Second year of business school is a pretty glorious time for me. Not only do I (sort of) have this whole school thing down, my classes this quarter are interesting but don’t have a ton of work, I have a good sense of who my friends are PLUS I’m lucky enough to have already signed a job offer for when I graduate. To quote the great French Montana, “I ain’t worried ’bout nothin'” (well, except the things I AM worried about… but that’s another post).
This has basically left me with some time on my hands. Last year around this time not only was I knee deep in learning how to be a student again after 7 years out of the game, but I was also in the thick of trying to get a job in consulting. So without my social calendar packed with recruiting events, I find that I have these stretches of time for me, myself and I. Which explains why the blog is back with a vengeance.
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One of my favourite things about travelling is discovering new dishes to bring back with me. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a food native to the city/country, for example, when I came back from London I almost immediately made this fish with romesco sauce. But oftentimes it is something local… like my love for making French macarons. While in Turkey my travel buddy and I ate A LOT of lentil soup. It’s not like we had it every day or anything, but considering my normal lentil soup consumption, it felt like we definitely had a lot of the stuff.
And for good reason… the Turks can hook up a cup of lentil soup! It’s pretty magical. It’s usually not the brown/greenish lentil soups that I normally eat. It’s also usually not chunky and more of a pureed situation. What brought me a particular level of joy was the fact that most of the soups had an oddly meaty depth to them which really complimented the lentil flavour. Couple that with an unfamiliar spice profile and I was basically in heaven.
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I couldn’t help it… another Ottolenghi recipe. And another vegetarian recipe! Maybe I’m losing my meaty edge?
The other day I was having two of my best girls over for a little dinner, a lot of wine (4 bottles, 3 girls) and all manner of storytelling before a night out on the town in Chicago. I was feeling especially inspired and creative which meant that I spent a few days trying to come up with a great menu. Given my current obsession with Middle Eastern flavours I was pretty hellbent on coming up with an Ottolenghi-based menu. A few months back I needed to make an impressive meal for someone and Ottolenghi served me well… so why not make the best for my girls? I also wanted to use some of the stuff in my fridge, hence my desire to use up this butternut squash that I had acquired while visiting a pumpkin patch a week or two earlier.
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While on vacation in London a few years ago I fell in love with Ottolenghi. Ottolenghi is a popular takeaway restaurant mini-chain in London that has a wide range of foods with many flavours inspired by the Middle East. While in London I had a great lunch there one day and then subsequently went back almost every day for breakfast. While the breakfast pastries were amazing what really caught my eye were the platters filled with amazing looking salads, grains and even meat dishes. Definitely the kind of stuff I would love to prepare at home.
Fast forward a few months to one of my standard bookstore walkabouts, when I came across a cookbook called … of Ottolenghi! The book was beautiful and all about vegetables and I immediately added it to my cookbook wishlist. THEN a few months later I discovered that he released another cookbook called which as the name implies, is all about recipes from Israel. I’ve since acquired both cookbooks and have fallen in love! Not only are the cookbooks themselves gorgeous to look at, but the flavour combinations are really interesting AND happen to work very well.
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As you may have gleaned from my posts over the past year, business school is weird. Sure we’re in school, but we lead oddly extravagant and indulgent lifestyles. Not that we sit around eating caviar everyday (which is obviously the epitome of extravagant) but a lot of us take every opportunity to travel. In the past year I’ve been to Thailand, NYC, Indiana, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Bahrain, Oman, UAE and now Croatia and Turkey.
Basically, over the summer we all intern and then have about 3 weeks off. Rather than saving all of our hard-earned money, we plan extended vacations before school starts. I spent the first week hanging around Chicago/Evanston and then headed to Croatia for 5 days. Croatia was magical. We spent a day in Split and then transitioned to Hvar for a few days where about 18 of us rented a villa on the water. Needless to say it was amazing.
From there I met up with one of my besties for a Turkish adventure. Turkey was on my radar as I begun to learn more about the Middle East prior to our travels over spring break. I liked that Turkey was at the intersection of Islam and Christianity. Also that it spans two continents. And incidentally once we were in the Middle East, one of my favourite meals was actually at a Turkish restaurant. Go figure. So when the political situation made Turkey a not-so-great travel option we were sad. But then things calmed down somewhat so we said YOLO and booked a ticket.
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Those who know me know that despite my appearance I don’t put a huge emphasis on eating healthy. I mean I eat healthy in the sense that I prepare most of my own foods and don’t eat a ton of junk food. BUT I also don’t think too hard about things. My favourite foods include burgers and pizza. Deep fried is a food group to me. Doughnuts make me weak in the knees.When in doubt I say add more butter or bacon (and sometimes both!). While I do enjoy eating foods that aren’t the best for me, I also listen to my body and feed it tons of fruits, veggies and legumes as it demands. I do a pretty aggressive menu plan each week where I plot out what I’m eating for each meal that week. Typically the week ends up with a good balance of meat, fish, vegetarian and vegan options without me consciously making an effort to include or exclude any particular foods.
I say all this to say that for the longest time I strongly believed in the motto “you don’t win friends with salad”.
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I’ve been doing some thinking these days and I’ve come to the conclusion that ribs are probably in my top 10 favourite foods. Not only are there multiple cuts of ribs, but so many flavour possibilities once you start integrating recipes from different cultures. Sure, barbecue ribs are delicious but who doesn’t love some sweet and sour ribs or some Korean ribs? Feel me?
This time around we’re talking barbecue ribs. I’ve said this before but if I weren’t Jamaican I’d probably want to be from the South (of the USA) because the food is just so dang good. I’m pretty sure I was a Southern grandmother in a previous life. I could eat barbecue for days, have an intense love for mac and cheese, load up my plate with some baked beans and don’t forget the collard greens. Basically this means that whenever I come across a new recipe for barbecue ribs I usually file it away to make it later.
