Sweet Potato Fries

January kinda sucks!  Not only did we come home from Montreal to -40 degree weather, but after all of the over indulging over the holidays (too many mince tarts) and in Montreal (mac and cheese, crème brûlée every night), I am now on a bit of a diet - no more treats for a while!

To ease myself into healthy eating, I made these sweet potato fries for dinner last night. (Sweet potatoes are healthy, and these are baked, not fried...Totally diet food, right?)

Ingredients
One large sweet potato
Coarse sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Good quality olive oil

Method
Preheat the oven to 425 F.

Either peel the potato or leave the skin on. After rinsing (and cleaning the sweet potato if it is not peeled), dry the potato well, to ensure that the olive oil will stick to it.

Slice the potato into thin strips. Toss with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, as well as the sea salt and black pepper. Place on a baking sheet, lined with foil, in one even layer.

Bake the fries in the oven for 15-20 minutes. Do not open the oven or fidget with them during this time. Just let them cook - this is the secret to crispy, oven baked fries. Take the pan out of the oven and flip the fries over. Once they're flipped, put them back in the oven for 10-15 minutes, depending on how crispy you like them. Again, do not open the oven. Remove from oven and you should have perfect fries, with both sides brown and crispy. One large sweet potato will serve 2-3 people as a side dish.

I like to serve the fries with what I jokingly call secret sauce. I mix together a bit of fat free mayo with some regular yellow mustard and dijon mustard. The secret ingredients are a bit of salt and pepper. Simple, but tasty!

Montreal

We went to Montreal for a cold and snowy, but wonderful winter vacation. What a beautiful city! Highlights included strolling around old Montreal, seeing the penguins and other critters at the Biodome, and taking a day trip up to Mont Tremblant.

My new toy also came right before our trip, a Canon Rebel T2i, so it was great timing to learn to use it, even though I think it will take me a while to master all of the settings...

Some pics from our trip:

Notre-Dame  Basilica

Notre-Dame Basilica

Jean-Talon Market

Premiere Moison Bakery

Premiere Moison Bakery

View from our hotel room - the lovely Hotel Le Dauphin Centre Ville

Mont Tremblant

Mont Tremblant

The food was also amazing. I would especially recommend Olive et Gourmando - the Macaroni and Cheese with truffle tapenade was truly amazing and only $15! I also ate lots of delicious bagels, smoked salmon and crème brûlée too.

Miracle Bread

Crusty, chewy, delicious European bakery-quality bread from your very own kitchen, with hardly any work—this is miracle bread indeed! I first read about this bread in an article by Jeffrey Steingarten in Vogue magazine about 5 years ago, though it has also been extensively written about by Mark Bittman in the New York Times. Even though I love Bitty, I side with Jeffrey Steingarten when it comes to this bread as his was the recipe I first used. (As an aside - I find Jeffrey to be endlessly entertaining - his article on how we are all making ice the wrong way is one of my particular favourites! I don't know where to find his old articles. In the Vogue archives maybe? Check it out if you can find it.)

The inventor of this bread, Jim Lahey, also has a cookbook out devoted to this bread and the many variations that it can be made into, that I am currently coveting. There is a recipe in it for pizza bianco, a delicious treat I first had in Rome, that I would love to try to make at home. Jim Lahey is an extremely provocative fellow, to say the least - click here to read a very interesting but slightly disturbing article in NY Magazine about him (hook worms anyone?)

Anyways, back to the bread. It is incredibly simple to make. There is no kneading or work involved, just mix the ingredients for about 30 seconds and that's pretty much it. The only tricky part is timing out the rise, as the initial rise time is approximately 18 hours, followed by another 2. You'll also need a very heavy casserole or cast iron pan. I use my cherished Le Creuset french oven that my mom got for her wedding almost 40 years ago and is still going strong.

Jeffrey Steingarten's Version of Jim Lahey's Miracle Bread

Ingredients
3 cups bread flour
2 tsp fine salt
1 tsp instant yeast
1 1/2 cups water, at room temperature
Coarse wheat bran

Equipment

Heavy Casserole

Coarse dish towel, or piece of canvas

Method

Using your fingers or a sturdy wooden spoon, thoroughly combine the first three ingredients in a 2-quart bowl. Pour in the water. Again with fingers or spoon, work the dry ingredients and water together for about 30 seconds until a rough wet dough has formed and all the flour has been absorbed.

Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and allow the dough to rise at warm room temperature for about 18 hours.  

Heavily flour your work surface. With a plastic dough scraper or your hands, invert the bowl over the floured surface as you pull out the dough, which will spread into an amoebiform blob onto your work surface. Dust it with flour and stretch it into a rough square about 10 inches on a side. Fold the square into thirds. It will now be a puffy strip about 4 inches wide and 10 inches long. Cover lightly and let rest for about 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, spread the dish towel on a flat surface. Rub a generous amount of flour into one half of the dish towel and sprinkle several tablespoons of bran over the flour. This is to prevent the dough from sticking to the towel, an occurrence that can ruin your life.

Fold the dough into thirds again, beginning at one of the short ends on the strip. The resulting package of dough should be nearly the shape of a cube.

Delicately brush off excess flour from the dough, and with your palms, very gently stretch the top layer part way down over the seams visible on two sides of the dough. With both hands, lift the dough onto the middle of the half of the dish towel you've just prepared.  Sprinkle the top of the dough, now really a loaf, with a little flour and bran. Cover with the other half of the dish towel or with plastic wrap. Let rise for 2 hours.

Halfway through, put the casserole and its cover in the oven, and turn the temperature to its highest setting, probably 500-550 degrees F. 

When another hour has passed, open the oven and remove the casserole cover. Slide your hand under thew towel where the loaf is resting, lift up towel and loaf, bring them over to the casserole, and, steadying the loaf with your hand, invert it into the casserole. Pull off the towel. Shake the casserole sideways if the loaf needs to be neatened. Cover the casserole, close the oven and bake for 20-30 minutes. Uncover the casserole and bake for another 20 to 30 minutes until the loaf is a handsome, golden to dark brown. Remove the loaf and let it cool until it is barely warm to the touch.

This makes one truly delicious loaf of no-knead bread. Try it once, and it will change your life.

Panettone - Finally!

I mentioned the other day that I really wanted to make Panettone for Christmas this year, as we saw it in Italy everywhere last year. Well I tried this recipe I found in Chatelaine a couple of weeks before Christmas and it was a total disaster! The taste was great, but the dough didn't rise properly and the Panettone were far too dense. I was pretty sure it was an issue with the yeast that was the culprit, and with a few modifications to the recipe I could make them perfect. I ran out of time to try the recipe before Christmas, as the recipe is complicated and requires at least 17 hours of resting time, and I had a very sick hubby on my hands in the days leading up to Christmas which didn't leave much time for baking (he is on the mend so all is good!).

So, instead of Christmas Panettone we had New Year's Panettone! I proofed the yeast (not called for in the original recipe) and the dough rose to perfection. The Panettone turned out golden brown, soft and buttery. Definitely worth the wait!

Ingredients
1 cup california raisins
2 tbsp dark rum
3 3/4 cups all purpose flour
2/3 cup granulated sugar
1/2 tsp salt
zest from 1 orange

1/2 tsp active dry yeast 

1/3 cup milk, warmed

1/2 tsp granulated sugar
3 eggs at room temperature
1 tbsp honey, warmed
2 tsp vanilla
1 1/4 cup unsalted butter, cubed, at room temperature
1/3 cup candied chopped orange peel
1/3 cup candied chopped citron peel
1 tbsp unsalted butter, melted

Method
Stir raisins with rum and 2 tbsp water in a small microwave-safe bowl. Microwave, uncovered, 1 min. Stir, then cover with plastic wrap and set aside.

Combine flour with sugar, salt, and orange zest in the bowl of a stand mixer. Mix, using the paddle attachment, at low speed.

Proof yeast in 1/3 cup of warmed milk and 1/2 tsp of sugar. Let stand for 10 minutes. Yeast mixture should be frothy and double in size (according to the package directions - my yeast didn't double in size but it was nice and frothy and it still worked well). Whisk eggs with 1/3 cup lukewarm water, honey and vanilla. Add yeast mixture to egg mixture. Gradually pour wet ingredients into flour mixture. Increase speed to medium-low. Continue beating, and add 1 1/4 cups butter, 1 tbsp at a time, until blended. Increase speed to medium-high and beat dough until smooth and elastic, about 8-10 min. (Stand mixer may move around the counter as the beating proceeds.)

Remove paddle, keeping dough in bowl. Drain raisins, discarding any liquid. Add to dough along with orange and citron peels. Gently knead fruit and butter into dough until combined. Cover bowl with plastic wrap and let rise until doubled in size, 12 to 15 hours.

Remove plastic wrap and lightly sprinkle top of dough with flour. Turn out onto a floured counter. Dust dough with a little more flour. Fold edges into the centre and place seam-side down in same mixing bowl. Cover with a damp kitchen towel (not terry cloth) and let rise at room temperature until doubled in size, about 5 hours.

Position oven rack in lower third of oven. Preheat to 350F.

Transfer dough onto a floured cutting board. Divide dough into 12 equal portions. (A kitchen scale will make this easier.) Place dough portions in 12 2 1/2-inch-wide paper baking molds, or in an ungreased 12-cup muffin tin. Dough will be about even with the top edges of molds. Brush tops with 1 tbsp melted butter.

Bake in lower third of oven until a skewer inserted into centre of a panettone comes out clean, 30 to 35 min.

A few pics of the Italian vacation that inspired me:

Positano

Sorrento

Siena

Florence

Cortina

Hitting the slopes in Cortina!

My husband and I at Teatro alla Scala in Milan.
We were lucky enough to see both the ballet Swan Lake and
the opera The Valkyrie.

View from our opera box at La Scala.

New Year's Day Brunch

Happy New Year! For a delicious brunch to start off 2012 we made Montreal bagels (the greatest bagels on the planet) with poached eggs and Hollandaise sauce. One of my favourite food writers Mark "Bitty" Bittman believes Hollandaise sauce is a once or twice a year luxury - so I may have almost reached my limit 12 hours into the new year! But at least I'm off to a fabulous start this year!

We poached the eggs according to Bitty's instructions in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian and then made blender Hollandaise sauce. We followed Ina Garten's recipe for Hollandaise, though it is almost identical to Bitty's, it yields a more manageable third of a cup instead of a full cup. I thought it was a bit too lemony though, so next time I'll cut back slightly on the lemon juice.

Blender Hollandaise

Ingredients
1 large egg yolk
1 1/2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
Pinch cayenne pepper
4 tablespoons butter
1/2 teaspoon salt

Method
Put the egg yolk, lemon juice, and cayenne in a blender. Pulse a couple times to combine.

Put the butter in a small microwave safe bowl and melt in a microwave until just melted. With the blender running, gradually add the melted butter into the egg to make a smooth frothy sauce. If the sauce is very thick, blend in a teaspoon of lukewarm water loosen it up. Season with the salt and serve immediately or keep warm in a small heat-proof bowl set over hot (but not simmering) water until ready to serve.