Poutine pt.1: Homemade

 I decided to post about this first cause it's the easiest of the 3 I have left to post, and also has the least pictures. Which is important cause my phone hiccups and freezes and has to be rebooted after every 3 pictures I upload to Google Drive. I can't wait to have a new phone...

Poutine is fast food consisting of fries, cheese, and gravy, sometimes with other stuff thrown in. Very popular here in Quebec, it has spawned entire restaurants dedicated to it. I made some yesterday and decided to go all out and do a poutine tasting, with two different brands each of cheese, fries, and gravy. I love the stuff, but I only started liking it when I moved to Quebec, maybe due to the quality of the ones I had while I was living in Ontario as a kid.

Here are the fries I bought:

I didn't want to buy the fries of the brand with the largest share of the market (I think) cause hey they have enough money let's support the underdog. And I like trying brands of food I haven't tried before. I should have taken a pic of these out of the bag. Basically the Cavendish ones are long and brown with the skins still on, and the other ones are short and pale. I liked them both.

And the cheese:

This is fresh curd cheese (a.k.a. "squeaky cheese" cause it squeaks against your teeth when you eat it) that is sold all over Quebec. A lot of people argue that it's the only cheese to use for "authentic" poutine, personally I don't care what kind of cheese is on there as long as there's a lot of it. Most places that sell poutine who don't use curd cheese will use grated mozzarella. I prefer the brand in the small bag with the blue label personally, the flavor tastes more like curd cheese flavor to me rather than just cheddar.

And the gravy:

You can find cans or packets of instant mix of this stuff in every grocery store. There are several brands of it but I didn't have any preference among the store-bought stuff yet so I bought these two. St-Hubert is a chain of restaurants that has commercialized their poutine sauce, but I prefer the flavor of the Cordon Bleu brand personally. They're both ok, but the best poutine sauce I have had recently is from a little pizzeria inside Guy-Concordia metro. I dunno what's in it but it's awesome! I could eat that stuff forever. My next post about poutine will be about theirs.

And here's the finished product:

Pölsa attempt #1

Maybe I've been too over-ambitious in this blogging thing, either in how many times a week I planned on posting, or choosing recipes that are reasonably doable on a weeknight. I've been too busy cooking to blog for the past two four days, but did get the pölsa, the palt and the longanisa done. I'm going to keep trying to do it this way though with dishes that don't take as long to make and see if I can get the hang of it. I was debating skipping a week next week to use up all the food that I've made already but I'm looking forward to next week's cooking too much to do that :P

I'm calling this my first attempt at pölsa (pronounced peulsa, Swedish has a few extra vowels and this one in particular is similar to the pronunciation of the French word "peut" so that's why I'm writing it that way to help you pronounce it) because even if it turned out delicious it didn't taste like it was supposed to. Pölsa is basically ground organ meat and barley and spices that was originally made to use up scraps after butchering. It's very nutritious and hearty comfort food. It's usually served with a fried egg and some pickled beets and is sold by the can in stores in Sweden.

My mom doesn't have a recipe for it in any of her cookbooks and I couldn't find didn't look hard enough to find any in English recipes online except for this one, (I just tried googling "Swedish pölsa recipe" (if you just google "pölsa recipe" you just get recipes for "polska kielbasa" which is etymologically related to it, but not the same thing) again and going past the first page of results and got this, which I might ask my mother about whether it's worth making) which didn't have any measurements so I winged it, and my mom told me afterwards what changes had to be made. I guess I should have consulted her beforehand :P And now I have to try google-translating any Swedish results I find when searching for "pölsa recept". More research must be done!

When I went shopping for ingredients I went to an Asian grocery and asked for half a kilo each of pork liver and heart. As he bagged them I realized he probably misunderstood (or maybe just didn't want to cut the liver, or he wanted to sell more?) and gave me a kilo of each. So I decided to use it all anyways.

When I chopped them up and put them in the pot I didn't realize what an enormous amount of food it would make once I added an equal amount of pork, beef and cooked barley. I ended up having two big pots half full of the stuff, 6L in total. Luckily I have some friends and family who like it so I don't have to have it sitting in my freezer for 6 months while I finish it off lol. So change #1 I'm gonna do is scale this recipe down a lot.

Change # 2 is the ingredients. The website said to use liver, heart, pork and beef. I figured I'd start off with that, but it turned out tasting more like liver and onions than the pölsa I remembered eating during my trip to Sweden when I was 11 (although my memory might be wrong). My mom never made it herself so I can't compare to hers. So I asked my mom, and she said that you're not supposed to use as much liver, and no beef. She said that you can put anything in it really, but that was how she remembered it.

After some reading of a few more pölsa recipes on Swedish websites with the help of google translate I've decided I'll incorporate all the yummy-sounding variations into one recipe: I'll cook the meat WITH the barley, add some extra bouillon cubes, fry the onions before adding them, and add vinegar, anchovies, bay leaf and cloves.

So my tentative recipe for next time will be:

2lbs mixed organ meats
1lb fatty pork
1/2 lb pearl barley
3 medium onions, chopped
1 small tin of anchovies
1tbsp ground allspice
1tsp ground cloves
1tsp marjoram
1 bay leaf
1/4 cup vinegar
3 bouillon cubes
1tsp pepper

Cut the meat into 1-2" cubes and put it in a large pot with everything else and a bit of water (about 2" above the meat and barley I guess, I'll add more if needed). Simmer for about half an hour, stirring occasionally, or till the barley is tender. While the mixture is simmering fry the onions with two tablespoons of oil on medium-high heat while stirring often until they start to brown and then add them to the simmering mixture.

When it's done cooking drain the mixture, reserving the broth, and grind it finely with a meat grinder. Add the meat and barley mixture back to the broth and continue simmering it on very low heat for another 10-20 minutes, tasting it and adjusting seasonings as necessary.

Here is a picture I took while I was cooking it. I'll take a nicer picture on a plate with some other stuff  like this one when I re-make it.

Later: Poutine!

Bonus Material!: Carne Norte!

So yesterday I randomly decided to find out from Carlo's mom what that delicious Filipino dish with the meat and tomatoes and onion that her brother Tony made once was, and make some myself. She told me it's called carne norte, and it's made with corned beef, tomatoes, onion, garlic and potatoes. So I looked up a recipe as a general guideline and then went and bought some and made it! I didn't use potatoes in this version cause the one time I had it at Lolo's house it was made without it, and I was in a hurry so I wanted to save some time.

2 tomatoes, chopped
2 onions, chopped
3 cloves garlic, chopped
2 cans corned beef, cut into into 2" cubes

Fry the onions on med-high heat first in some oil. When they're translucent, add the rest of the ingredients, lower the heat to med-low and simmer for 10-20 minutes, stirring occasionally, till the liquid from the tomatoes has evaporated. Serve with rice or other carbs, and some veggies. We use milagrosa rice, apparently it's a favourite of Filipinos. We make it using only 1 part water to 1 part rice, rinsing/washing the rice 3 times well before cooking it. I never liked plain rice till I tried it the way Carlo's family makes it :) Now I can eat bowlfuls of the stuff!

I found the meat it a bit salty for my taste though so I'm gonna see if I can find low-salt corned beef.

Now I have to get myself to the store to buy stuff for the pölsa recipe I'll be posting later. Vi ses! ("see you later" in Swedish)

Menu and a picture

So here is my tentative menu for next week:

Menu July 15-21

Sunday: pölsa

Monday: palt

Tuesday: longanisa

Thursday: poutine


And here is the Swedish cookbook my mom lent me:

Hopefully a post next week...

I fell off my bike on Tuesday morning, necessitating a knee brace and a few evenings with my leg propped up, hence the lack of posts this week. I'll post up a menu for next week later today.

Another Attempt

So apparently it's been a year since I started this thing. Well I finally watched Julie and Julia the other day also a year after having downloaded it and decided to try and start posting on here again. I was lying in bed earlier and thought to myself "My mom has all these Swedish cookbooks and she won't be around forever. I have to start this soon!"

So I called my mom and told her about it. My first idea was to have her translate them all but that is a LOT of work, so my mom said "when I came to Canada (Montreal) I had to learn to cook from French cookbooks so you can learn enough Swedish to cook from Swedish cook books." I said sure, it can't be that hard with a Swedish-English dictionary and my mom only a phone call away to help if need be.

Vår Kokbok is my mom's favourite Swedish cookbook. She'll lend it to me on Monday so I can get started after then. I'm going to try and make a weekly menu with two Swedish dishes per week and one each of Filipino and French Canadian dishes and see how well I can keep up with that and revise it as need be. For the French Canadian dishes it would be cool to have accompanying posts about restaurant reviews of those dishes, but that will take a while seeing as our budget won't permit me to eat out as often as I'd like.

Like I told my sister, I definitely don't expect (or want) to get a book or a movie deal out of this like with Julie and Julia, or even any recognition, if I do it will be an unexpected side-effect, because I'm making this for my own reference, for my future kids reference, and for the enjoyment of whoever would like to view this online.

Here's a pic of me and my mor (mother in Swedish) from 2009, which I might update later:

I might post my menu later once I've made it. Varsogood!

Fail/laziness/lethargy

Ok so I got drunk and totally forgot to take picture about that whole sugar shack thing. Go me! Speaking of drunken cooking, I've started watching My Drunk Kitchen on Youtube, you should all watch it! It's even better than Epic Mealtime cause there's no macho sexist stupidity. I really think those two should do a video together lol.

Anyways, I think I might try to take pics of the individual components of the sugar shack meal one by one as I make them eventually and put them all together in one post, maybe, if I feel like it, sometime... lol. Oh well. I've been really busy going to the gym and trying to get enough sleep. Nuff' said. Till laters!

Here's a pretty food pic that is unrelated to anything but the fact that I feel like food blog posts should have pictures of food in them. I googled "pretty food pic" and this is what I got. Enjoy!: