Since Eat Together went into hibernation in September, Ellen and I have been keeping ourselves busy and proving that it takes more than just a bit of cold weather to keep us down!
Ellen and her good friend Jane have started a new blog dedicated to chronicling their adventures in habitual pizza-making appropriately entitled Glorious Pizza Party.
I’ve taken up a project with my friend Alex called Ludzu & Xie Xie. Together we’ll be running pop-up dinners all over the city. Our next dinner, Fish Bowl, will be a two night stint at Gene Cafe on November 18th & 19th. Email us for more information at ludzuxiexie@gmail.com.
That’s it for now!
Photo by Michelle Sproule
Michelle Sproule did a really nice write up about Eat Together and Tin Can Studio up on Scout Magazine. There are lots of lovely pictures and you can read it all here.
We had a really good plan for dessert for the September edition of Eat Together. It was out of control. We were going to have deep fried figs with homemade honey ice cream and fresh blackberries.
The inspiration for this dessert came from the Zuni Cafe Cookbook. There was a recipe for deep fried figs served with cold whipped cream and raspberries that sounded like it would be so great and too good to pass up. So we went with it.
In theory, the dessert is really straightforward. Batter the fresh figs with buttermilk, then flour, deep fry in oil, and there you go, deep fried figs. Deep fried bursts of awesome.
Come the night of, it felt like everything that could have gone wrong with the figs - well, did. First the deep frying oil was way too hot. To the point of smoking and not letting up. So we took it off the heat…and never put it back on (it was smoking so hard!). Then the oil was too cold (duh). Then the batter wasn’t sticking evenly to the figs. And also this was all being done in the dark, with one light, and Ken needed a head lamp to see what he was doing (which, is more funny than bad). Then the figs looked ugly with this uneven batter, and whats more, they tasted not like dreamy deep fried juicy fruit bursts, but basically crispy overly greasy figs - aka, gross.
And this all happened right outside the Tin Can, with people being able to watch this process if they so wanted to, and probably hearing Ken and I kind of freaking out over what was happening.
We just couldn’t serve the figs deep fried, so we served them fresh with the blackberries and honey ice cream.
Thank god for the honey ice cream.
The honey ice cream was delicious enough that it became the center point in the dish and, what a fine center point it was. The recipe we referenced is from here. There are very few ingredients in making this ice cream happen, so do try to get the best honey you can, and do follow the note in the recipe of starting off with a moderate amount of honey (1/3 cup) and then upping it (up to or a little over a 1/2 cup) if you like it sweeter. We used a milder honey for the ice cream this time around, a wildflower one.
But in closing, the deep fried figs incident is one of many awkward moments that happened during Eat Together, and as embarrassing and slightly awful as they are, you just got to keep going (there’s simply no time to freak out even more) and most of the time you end up with something sweet. Like honey ice cream. And you need these mess-ups to make you thankful for when things do work out, and to put things in a healthy perspective.
Anyways! Enough about food and life metaphors. Here is the final dessert:
A button we gave out at the September edition of Eat Together.
And so. Here we are. At the last days of summer, seeing the last Eat Together of summer in the year 2011.
It was nice. We made this crazy, vibrant risotto - a beet risotto. One topped with goat cheese, basil, and white truffle oil. And a few other things that we’ll talk about later.
Thank you so much. We had a lot of fun cooking for everyone that came to this dinner and all those who have came to our past dinners.
Eat Together was born out of being dissatisfied with our day to day routines, and it ended up being so much better than we could have imagined (although there were some slight awkward moments in there too, but - you know, who cares, good outweighs the bad). We got to share beautiful vegetables and fruit grown and harvested by Tess. We got to cook things that we had always wanted to make but just never found the right moment to. We got to talk peoples’ ears off about how beautiful things like tomatoes and honey are (they’re - fyi - beautiful).
We don’t really know what’s in store for Eat Together after this, but we’ll be sure to tell you when we do. Until then, we will still be talking on here, and we hope you do still come around.
Although, Ken will be putting on a 30 person long table dinner at Southlands on September 25 with Alex Dadzis. Alex makes a delicious brunch every Sunday at the Dunlevy Snack Bar, so you know that this cook combination will produce a killer dinner. This dinner will be welcoming fall with local oysters, smoked duck, beets, and other autumn goods. The dinner is filling up quite fast, so reserve a spot in a timely manner! Contact: flysouthsupper@gmail.com.
Right away, Ken was like, let’s do panna cotta. I (Ellen), was not that into it (just because panna cotta is a really straightforward dessert and, I dunno, just not that exciting on the outset - it’s on almost every Italian dessert menu - I know, I know, cause it’s a classic Italian dessert - but let’s mix it up, yah?) But, what Ken wants, Ken gets. And also, I didn’t have any other ideas.
As we talked more and more about the panna cotta, we went through some variations. We knew right away that they should be served with edible flowers (holy beautiful!) and then to give it even more color, contrast, and texture - crushed pistachios. Then Ken was looking at the A16 book and they had a recipe that served panna cotta with blackberries and a buckwheat cookie. Because we knew that blackberries were at their absolute best at the time of the dinner, we knew we had to use them, and we were so in love with the idea of pistachios, that we went for a pistachio cookie.
I told everyone at the dinners my slight sob story about the prep work that went into the pistachio cookie. I unshelled 4 cups worth of pistachios and crushed them by hand. In a way it’s nice to be slow, but note to self: invest in a food processor.
Cookies. Absolutely incredible intense pistachio flavor. Here is the recipe that we referenced: http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/biscotti-al-pistacchio-recipe.html
The panna cotta. The presentation for this panna cotta was all of my girl food blog dreams manifested. When I sent Ken a photo of the panna cottas out of excitement and exclaimed about how beautiful they were, he said, “You’re such a girl…But they are nice.” It’s true. I am such a girl and I am just so ecstatic that the dessert got to be served and presented this way and that people got to experience this.
When planning the menu for the Late August edition of Eat Together, all the courses before and after the main course came easy and we knew exactly what we wanted to do and were really excited. But the main, we got pretty stumped on. We had set a challenge to ourselves for these summer dinners to be vegetarian (why? Long answer short - Ellen doesn’t eat meat right now, we wanted to focus and highlight the vegetables that Tess had worked so hard to produce and harvest, and we wanted to show that vegetarian doesn’t suck; but can be really fulfilling on many levels and is a cuisine that should be viewed as exciting rather than boring, bland, and unfulfilling).
On first thought, fulfilling main vegetarian courses are not as abundant as main meat courses. You can do many variations on main vegetarian courses, but it feels…almost like a cop out, it seems too easy to just swap in different ingredients and have that be a main dish to share with someone. There’s risotto, but that is a bit too heavy at this time of year. Polenta, same reason. Rice - we haven’t figured out a way to serve that yet without screaming…Asian or hippie. Gratins - something about it that doesn’t feel enough. Pies/Tarts - too lunchy. Pasta - oh pasta. We had done variations of pasta before for our dinners, ravioli, gnocchi - we just thought it wasn’t enough of a challenge to do it again. That it wasn’t exciting enough. Another one of the big things for us with Eat Together is that because the dinners happen ever so often, we always change the menu and want very different feelings for each dinner.
But - we went for the pasta. After being in our heads for so long, we remembered that the dishes are about highlighting the ingredients, and pasta, at this moment in summer, is a really good way to celebrate vegetables, especially tomatoes. Which we had a lot of. A lot.
And so, we present the main course: Homemade pasta with a slow oven dried tomato and garlic and chilli sauce.
It started out with lots of tomatoes (“shitloads” or to be more exact - around 7 pounds) being slow roasted on a bed of salt at a low temperature.
As you can see in the change of light in photos, the tomatoes roasted for a long time (overnight) in order to become these beautiful puckered bright red…(for lack of a better word)…things, or wait, let’s get precious here - jewels.
Ken thought the tomatoes were cool (rightly so) and showed them to our guests before we made the dish.
The tomatoes ended up in a sauce with garlic and chillies and were served with homemade pasta.
Summer harvest in a bowl.
Ken wanted to make the stock with prosciutto or smoked ham (typical in minestrone stock recipes to give the soup depth), to which I replied, “No.” He sighed, went off, and came back with this beautiful vegetable stock. This with the vegetables just picked from Tess’ garden - gosh am I ever glad that I said that.
Fried zucchini blossoms with homemade ricotta. You seriously cannot have enough fried zucchini blossoms. Seriously.
For the homemade ricotta, we referenced this recipe. We cannot tell you enough how easy and satisfying it is to make. It takes only 3 ingredients and a small ounce of will and you’ve got something that is a million times better than what you pay a gross amount for at the grocery store. There’s the satisfaction of knowing how to make something that seems so complicated (cheese! who knew!), but once you know, it makes you a bit more of an independent cook (yes!) and you can use it for so many other things.
The recipe that we linked gives a somewhat more softer ricotta than what people are more used to, so to make a more sturdy ricotta, we followed the note of using more milk than cream, so 3 1/2 cups of milk and 1/2 cup of cream. Even then though, the ricotta is still quite soft, but it does get more weighty when given more time to drain and sit in the refrigerator.
First course at Late August edition of Eat Together: Tomato Sorbet. One of the sweetest tomatoes around, the Sun Gold tomato (aptly named, the tomatoes look like literal small golden suns), was used to make this curious icy bite.
