beef, olive and goat cheese ragu

Ok, so just because something takes ages to cook, it doesn't need to be intimidating or especially involved. This dish takes 3-4 hours from start to finish, but for almost all that time it's quite hands-off. This recipe is ideal to start in the middle of a weekend afternoon - almost all the actual work is at the beginning and takes about 20 minutes. Then you have a lazy afternoon ahead of you while your dinner cooks itself! It really cooks itself, just like in Beauty and the Beast. Your knives and forks will dance all around, your candlesticks will flirt saucily with you while your sauce cooks. 

This ragout simultaneously rich and hearty as well as bright and peppy. Olives add salty bite and balance out the richness of the ragu.

beef and olive ragu with goats cheese

Adapted from Donna Hay Issue 68

• 1 pound fresh tomatoes or two cans tinned tomatoes
• 1 1/2 pounds stewing beef, beef shin or other beef cut suitable for slow cooking, cut into 1.5 inch chunks
• 2/3 cup kalamata or other olives of your choice 
• whole bulb of garlic, peeled and smashed 
• 2 shallots, sliced
• 2 cups beef broth
• 3 tbs grapeseed oil 
• salt and pepper 
• parsley, chopped
• goats cheese

In a large pot or dutch oven on medium high heat, sear beef on all sides until browned. Remove beef from pan and set aside. 

Add shallots and garlic to the pan and sauté until translucent and fragrant. Add tomatoes, olives, beef, broth, salt and pepper. Bring to a boil and then reduce heat to a very gentle simmer. Cover with a lid and cook for 2.5-3 hours, until the beef is fall-apart tender. 

Serve over pasta and top with parsley and crumbled goat cheese.

Try the grey stuff, it's delicious!

snickerdoodles

Snickerdoodles are quite a subdued, subtle cookie: soft sugar dough rolled in cinnamon sugar, baked until either chewy or crispy. But the name snickerdoodle sounds boisterous and unruly, like the name of a cookie made out of M&Ms and pretzels and marshmallows. The name etymology is disputed, but possibly stems from the German for snail noodle. I prefer to imagine that snickerdoodle means small humorous drawing. Whatever it means, there is a serious goofiness discrepancy between the name and the cookie. If you can move past this incongruous naming, you will be rewarded with a really fantastic cookie. These ones fall on the crisp side of the snickerdoodle spectrum, they are thin, with a shattery, cracked top and just tender middles. They really spread while baking so I only baked 6 cookies at a time on a baking sheet. The sheet will seem too empty, but they will really expand in the oven. 

snickerdoodles

from Martha Stewart

• 2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour

• 2 teaspoons cream of tartar

• 1 teaspoon baking soda

• big pinch salt

• 1/2 cup butter

• 1/2 cup vegetable shortening

• 1 3/4 cups sugar

• 1 tbs cinnamon

• 2 large eggs

• 2 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 400°F and line cookie sheets with parchment paper. Combine flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt in a bowl. 

Cream butter, shortening and 1 1/2 cups sugar in a stand mixer until light and fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla, beat on medium speed until combined, scraping down the sides of the bowl. 

Add dry ingredients and beat until evenly combined. Combine 1/4 cup sugar and cinnamon in a small bowl. Scoop balls of cookie dough with a medium cookie scoop or ice cream scoop and roll them in the cinnamon sugar. Place far apart on a cookie sheet and bake for around 7 minutes, turning the sheet half way through baking. 

Store in an airtight container for up to a week, if you have a lot of willpower. Mine didn't last a whole week...

chickpea fries with spicy aioli

I really like french fries. I like french fries way too much, I want to eat them all the time. I like them with stuff on them, I like them unadorned. I want to order them any time I see them on a menu, I have to hold myself back occasionally and order something an adult might eat. I also wanted to make them at home, and I have tried and failed. I have tried lots of different ways with very little success. Complicated methods that involve triple cooking, parboiling and freezing several times. I have tried frying quickly in super hot oil and more slowly in merely quite hot oil. I have tried the strangely convincing cold oil method that Cook's Illustrated lulled me into believing in, and then dashed all my hopes. I have still never made amazing, crispy fries at home.

Enter chickpea fries, or panisse as they are called in France, which are very easy to make at home and fill the french fries niche perfectly: salty, crispy and highly dippable. Traditionally these would be deep fried in olive oil, but deep frying is such a pain, and stinks up your house. I roasted these in a hot oven with a little slick of oil and they were beautifully crisp with puffy, pillowy soft insides. You can call them panisse if you are serving them at a dinner party and fries if you are serving them to a toddler. Or me.

These are slightly healthier (or a lot healthier, depending on how you assess the healthiness of potatoes and chickpeas) than potato fries, so eating a whole bunch of them doesn't give me the guilt hangover of eating a load of french fries. I mean, they are basically hummus. You can't feel too bad about eating hummus can you? No, you can't.

Chickpea flour might be tricky to find, but I have had good luck in most big grocery stores, or in Indian or Mediteranian groceries.

chickpea fries

Adapted from the New York Times

• 2 cups chickpea flour
• 1 cup water
• 1 tsp each, garlic powder, paprika, salt and pepper
• finely chopped parsley

Bring water to a boil in a medium sized saucepan. Slowly add in chickpea flour, stirring vigorously to avoid lumps. Cook over medium heat until very thick, like the texture of wet cement.

Pour batter into a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and chill for at least an hour, or overnight if you wish.

Pre-heat oven to 450°F. Cut the set batter into batons, squares or whatever shape you like. Batons are good for dipping though. Roast in hot oven in a little oil, turning fries after about 10 minutes, or when the bottoms are deep brown, and cook about 10 more minutes. Serve sprinkled with salt, pepper and parsley and dip in spicy aioli.

spicy aioli

• 1/2 cup mayonnaise (use vegan mayonnaise to make the whole recipe vegan) 
• 3 tbs lime juice
• 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
• 1 clove finely minced garlic
• 1 tsp each salt and pepper

Mix all ingredients well in a small bowl.

butter tart bars

I associate butter tarts with Christmas. When I was growing up, my family used to make dozens of butter tarts in advance and freeze them to eat over the holidays and bring to parties. Except that I developed a taste for frozen butter tarts and would eat directly from the frozen stash. We used to make them with frozen tart shells, which have a pleasing, slick quality and impossible identical thinness that I can never achieve with homemade pastry. I also find the homemade shells are often thicker than I like. I know I'm a blasphemer, but I think the pre-made shells were usually better.

Transforming the tarts into bars with a gooey, just-set filling over a shortbread crust is quicker and easier, with no fiddly shells to fill, and the texture of the base reminds me of the frozen pastry shells. Making butter tart bars seems a bit less Christmasy than tarts, so I don't feel weird making them all year round. Butter tarts usually have either raisins or nuts; I prefer raisins. Their stickiness enhances the goopiness of the filling. Butter tarts were developed in Canada and they are very similar to American pecan pie, but they are always made in bite-size tarts rather than as one big pie. Except when they are made as bars!

butter tart squares

adapted from Canadian Living

crust:

• 1 cup all-purpose flour

• 1/4 cup granulated sugar

• 1/2 cup butter

Preheat oven to 350°F. Blitz all ingredients together in a food processor until the texture of sand. Press into the bottom of a parchment-lined 9 inch baking tin. Prick all over with a fork, bake until pale gold, about 15 mins.

filling:

• 2 tbs butter, melted

• 2 eggs beaten

• 1 cup brown sugar

• 2 tbs all-purpose flour

• 1/2 tsp baking powder

• 1 tsp vanilla

• 1 pinch salt

• 2/3 cup raisins

Combine everything in a medium bowl, mix until evenly incorporated. Pour over hot crust and bake 20-25 mins, or until the top is crackly and crisp. The filling should still wiggle and jiggle a bit-it's very important not to overcook it so it winds up too set. Err on the side of slightly under baked.

Cool in the pan and cut into squares. These freeze well, but they taste great frozen, so watch out for snacking accidents.

Photos: Tyrel Hiebert

jammy walnut cookies

I'm totally fascinated by aquafaba, a new egg white substitute that has been getting popular in the last year or two. Aquafaba is something I have been unknowingly throwing away for years, and before I saw it in action, I couldn't really believe that it was actually going to work. Aquafaba is chickpea brine, the water that I have been tipping out of canned beans and pouring away down the drain! But it has a secret power to become an uncanny egg white replacer. It makes very fluffy, glossy meringues indistinguishable from egg white meringue. Uncooked aquafaba meringue has the faintest beany smell, but sugar and a bit of vanilla takes that away, and cooked, the stuff is an incredibly convincing egg white mimic. 

To make it work, it helps to reduce the aqua faba by about 25% to thicken it slightly, so 1 cup becomes 3/4 cup. To reduce, heat over medium heat in a small pan for around 10-15 minutes, checking the volume frequently until you get 3/4 the original volume.Now, every time I eat chickpeas I save the liquid in a jar in the freezer for later. I can be frozen and then reduced after, or reduced and then frozen.

These cookies are soft and chewy, with a molten, caramelly little jam puddle through the centre. 

jammy walnut cookies: 

Adapted from The New York TImes

• 1 ¾ cups blanched almonds, toasted

• 1 ½ cups walnuts, toasted

• 1 cup sugar

• 1/2 tsp cinnamon

• 1 tsp vanilla extract

• 1/2 cup aqua faba, reduced by 25%

• ½ cup raspberry jam

Grind almonds and walnuts in a food processor until mostly finely ground, a few bigger pieces are ok. Combine nuts with sugar, cinnamon and vanilla in a medium bowl. 

In the bowl of a stand mixer, mix aqua faba with the whisk attachment on medium speed until very frothy, about 3 minutes. Fold into nut mixture. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour, overnight if you like. 

Heat oven to 325°.  Scoop golf ball sized cookies onto a parchment lined baking sheet and cook for 15 minutes. Remove from oven, cool for a couple minutes and then carefully make in an indentation in the centre of each cookie. Drop a teaspoon of jam in each and then bake 10 more minutes, until the bottom edges of the cookies are golden brown and jam is bubbling. 

Kabocha, goat cheese and arugula pizza

Kabocha is a type of pumpkin. I like it for its mild sweetness, fluffy and slightly powdery quality. I especially like to cube it and roast it until it's chewy and caramelized on the outside and tender on the inside. Lately I have been roasting up a whole squash on weekends and then popping the crispy little cubes into salads, over rice and onto pizzas all week. It pairs really well with sharp greens like arugula and a bit of salty, tangy cheese. 

I'm not sure if the saucelessness of this pizza means it's maybe actually focaccia masquerading as pizza? It has no traditional sauce base, just some spicy, garlicky oil and a whole lot of arugula, which cooks down into a tasty goo underneath the cheese and squash. Anyway, maybe it's not a true pizza, but I feel weird saying I'm having focaccia for dinner, like eating an entire loaf of garlic bread for dinner or something. Which I would never do. But this is more substantial than a typical focaccia and has a deceptively large load of vegetables that make it a totally appropriate thing to eat for dinner. So it's a pizza I guess. 

kabocha, goat cheese and arugula pizza:

• 1 batch pizza dough (below) 
• 1/2 cup goat cheese, crumbled
• 1 cup mozzarella, sliced or shredded
• 1/2 a medium kabocha squash, peeled (if you want), cubed and roasted until golden brown
• a few big handfuls arugula, use more than you think you should
• 6 cloves garlic, minced
• big pinch chili flakes
• 2 tbs olive oil 
• 3 tbs pine nuts, toasted

Preheat oven to the hottest setting, 500°  or higher. 

In a small bowl combine oil, garlic and chilli flakes. Set aside. 

Stretch pizza to fit in a cookie sheet or onto a pizza stone if you have it. Brush with the garlic oil and top with the arugula in a big mound. It'll cook down a lot so use plenty. Sprinkle kabocha , cheeses and pine nuts on top and sprinkle a little salt and pepper over it all. 

Cook pizza in hot oven until the cheese is blistered and brown, and bottom of crust is dark brown. 

pizza dough

adapted from smitten kitchen

• 1 1/2 cups flour 
• 1 teaspoon  salt
• 3/4 teaspoon active dry yeast
• 1/2 cup warm water 
• 1 tablespoon olive oil

Put flour, salt and yeast in a bowl and add water and oil. Stir until everything mostly comes together. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead for a couple minutes. Lightly oil a bowl and place dough in the bowl, turning to coat dough with oil on all sides. Cover with a kitchen towel and let rise in a warm spot for 1-2 hours or until doubled in size.