Wascally Wabbit

So this weekend I finally got a chance to make some rabbit. I have been wanting to try and make rabbit for a while but finding it is hard to do. I did find whole rabbit at the Healthy butcher on Queen st W.

WARNING: some people may find the next section disturbing. No blood as the rabbit is already cleaned, but these are pictures of me jointing the rabbit.

I found a really nice video on how to joint a rabbit on Jamie Oliver's website.

First I took the legs off. The front legs are really easy to take off and you can see them in the top middle of the next picture.

The back legs are a little harder to get through because there is a bone in the way but with a little worrying you can get around it without having to cut through the bone.

After the legs come off it was time to separate the back into nice sized sections. This required me to cut through bone and as was described in the video I used a large weight. My rolling pin is marble and I didn't want to smash a marble rolling pin into a metal knife so I used an old exercise weight.

Here you can see the belly flap meet as well. On the left side is the four back sections that look delicious. The stuff at the back right is actually the neck and tail parts which have a lot of bone and are hard to cook. We are gonna use them to make a stock. Nothing like rabbit noodle soup ;)

~(' ')~

winey salt

So ever so often the free metro newspaper actually has a good article. This past week there was an article about the TedX Toronto conference and a guy who started a webpage/company/blog all about preserving and canning (http://wellpreserved.ca/). Sadly I wasn't able to watch his talk due to work but I have been browsing the blog for the last couple of days and I came across this interesting idea for wine flavoured salt.

Now when I started my new job I was given a free bottle of wine. I don't like win. Everyone tells me its an acquired taste... I have tried to acquire it for a while but I don`t like wine. So I really didn't have an idea of what to do with this bottle of while. 6 months it has sat in on a shelf waiting for something to happen. Well today it is getting turned into salt.

Step 1: pour bottle of wine into pot.

Step 2: Boil the crap out of it until there is almost nothing left

Step 3: Dump 1 cup of coarse sea salt into the syrupy wine residue.

Step 4: mix well and spread out on a tray to air dry.

Step 5: ever so often run a fork through the salt just to mix it up. This will help keep it from sticking.

Mochi time

So I actually made this last weekend but since this weekend has been really crazy busy I don't think I will get a chance to do anything interesting.

For the last couple of weeks Talia and I have been having mochi deserts from the grocery store. The little bean filled ones.

I knew it was easy to make mochi but all the recipes I had ever seen used plastic wrap in a microwave. This really doesn't sit well with me so I had never tried it myself. Finally after much searching I found some videos that showed how to do it without too much difficulty and no microwave. I used the recipe from here.

Turning to pudding

It's been a while since I updated. Kind of busy with Fan expo and then a relaxing trip to the cottage.

This weekend is all rainy and I'm feeling kind of blah but I really wanted to have something to blog about so I decided to make banana and chocolate "puddings" with home made salted caramel sauce. I don't know why its called a pudding as its more of a mini cake but that's what it's called.

The recipe came from youtube via the FoodTube channel (link).

The melted caramel sauce was really fun to make and tastes really good. The recipe makes 10 but I only made 4 at first to try them out. I am going to make the rest tonight in celebration of Talia's first in person interview coming up this tuesday

~(' ')~

coconut gel cake

So this post is a little late. It was supposed to be posted last weekend but as usual I was distracted and didn't get around to it. So here goes:

On the weekend I decided to make a new dessert based off of this recipe. The problem was that I didn't have almond milk, shredded coconut or even coco powder. But I still really wanted to make this. So I made a few substitutions.

1) instead of almost milk I used regular milk and added in a little bit of almost extract.
2) I didn't have shredded coconut so I skipped the sugar completely. It was already petty sweet.
3) I used agar agar as the jelling agent and I didn't really know how much to add so I added a tbsp
4) I didn't have coco powder so instead of making it 2 layers I decided to make it 6 layers and RAINBOW. This was because I have been watching a lot of mlp recently.

I used a small bread loaf pan to mold the layers and because I don't own a blow torch I dipped the pan in boiling water for a couple of minutes to help melt the outer edge.

This took me a LOT longer than I expected because each layer needed about 20 minutes to gel in the fridge (they were very thin compared to the original recipe)

Unfortunately as you can see the dessert didn't quite come out correctly, when I flipped the pan over I found that all the different layers were separate instead of jelled together. I think this has to do with the fact that I didn't really bring the gel back up to heat between layers so a new layer didn't melt the previous layer a bit. Ultimately I think the main reason that this happened was that there wasn't enough agar in the mix.

Either way it was still tasty

~(' ')~

sweet sunday tradition continues

So a while ago Talia, Talia's best friend, and I  started a tradition of making sweet desserts on Sundays. It wasn't so much of a tradition as something that just happend a lot. And this Sunday is no different (except Tashy couldn't make it :(

Several weeks ago I decided to make a sorted food banofee pie for Tashy's birthday and in order to do that I had to make toffee by boiling condensed milk in its can. I did this and it turned out deliciously sweet. The bad part was I was left over with a small amount of extra toffee that has just been sitting in the fridge since then. So on the way home from adventures today I decided to drop by the store and pick up mini tart shells and a banana just to make mini bite sized pies... But after spending all afternoon and evening canning jam I decided to switch it up a bit.

Step 1: bake tart shells. Sadly I forgot to take pictures.

Step 2: fill with toffee. (the sweet stuff)

Step 3: add a slice of banana (the surprize)

Step 4: hide under a dollop home make red current jam (the tart - we like tart jams)

Step 5: enjoy and teat Tashy who couldn't be here :P

and let the canning begin

Couple of cooking updates. First was my first ever beer can chicken. I followed the recipe on sorted food (http://sortedfood.com/#!/search/chicken/) and it turned out fairly nicely. The chicken I used was quite a bit larger so in 45 minutes it wasnt completely cooked. The other difference was that my chicken has a hole by the neck so the beer (or in my case pear cider) didnt steam as much as it was supposed to.

The reason for this was that we arranged to get a really nice free range chicken from the St. Lawrence market.

While we were at the market Talia also found that the cucumbers were on sale so she decided she wanted to make some traditional russian pickels. After some excitement with her family and a story about a thumb being cut off she got the recipie. Unfortunately it required a black current leaf... having no place to get black current leaves around us we decided to travel over to my parents who have one in their back yard.

After a quick trip to the fabricland there and a stop for dinner we arrived at my parents to get the leaves... Only to find out that the cherry tree in the front yard was full of tasty sour cherries and my parents were away at the cottage. At this point we decided to pick them before the birds got to them all.

After spending a while pitting them I ended up which a nice batch of cherries. These badboys got processed into a cherry pie filling which is currently still processing but I do have some picks. The recipe I used came from here (http://www.simplebites.net/summer-canning-series-cherry-pie-filling-recipe/)

On a side note, last Thursday my parents came over to drop off a large batch of red currents that my Mom had picked. I spent Thursday night cleaning them with my Mom and them froze them for when I had a chance to make them today.

I modified this recipe (http://foodpreservation.about.com/od/Preserves/r/Red-Currant-Jam-Recipe.htm) because I had more red currents. Despise starting with 1.3 kg of currents I ended up only with 3 small jars of current jam.

~(' ')~

home made crisps

So I finally managed to get a chance to do some cooking today. It's been a busy month. So last weekend we picked up some kale because Talia tasted kale chips on the long weekend and despite saying she "Loathes Kale" she quite enjoyed it.

Recipe:
1 head of kale
3 pinches of salt
3 tsp paprika
6 tbsp of coconut oil.

So first I removed the stalk from the kale because I am told it is bitter. Then I washed the leaves and did a spin dry to make sure they were ad dry as possible. Then it was into a big bowl with 2 tbsp of oil, 1 tsp of paprika, and a pinch of salt. I did it in 3 batches of kale because the pizza trays would only hold about a third of the head of kale. I tossed the pale in the bowl and mixed it all together.
I spread the kale out on the trays and tossed in the oven at 375F for 15 minutes.

In total it took aboutn an hour (in most of which was me waiting) and I needed 7 pizza trays (2 would fit in the oven at a time)