Flavours of PEI: Potato and Bacon Soup

Well I am getting to the end of my recipe testing for the cookbook Flavours of Prince Edward Island: A Culinary Journey but I wanted to share a recipe with you for their Yukon Gold Potato and Bacon Soup.

First, you can not test PEI recipes without a dish focused on potatoes, right? It is what they are most famous for when it comes to food! Second, my grocery store never seems to have "Yukon Gold" so I went with just regular baking potatoes. Anyone can make this soup. It is an easy and flavourful recipe.



Heat 3 tbsp of butter in a large sauce pan and then add 1/2 lb of diced bacon. That is a ton of bacon so I only used four strips of turkey bacon (and it is a good thing I did!). Cook over medium heat until bacon is half-cooked.



Add 1 cup of chopped onions, 1/2 cup of chopped carrots and 1/2 cup of chopped celery and cook for five minutes.



Add five cups of peeled diced potatoes, yes, I said five cups!!!  Then add 8 cups of chicken stock and bring to a boil. I did not measure, I just added enough broth to cover the veggies.



Reduce heat ad add 1/2 tsp of dried sage. Cover and simmer until potatoes are tender. I cooked mine for 15 minutes. Puree in a blender in small batches. Season with salt and pepper.

Now I thought I was smart by using my food mill instead! Because my potatoes were so starchy I was worried about the blender turning dinner into a goopey mess so I used my food mill instead. Which in turn strained out all the bacon! So... use a blender!



Top with lots of cheese, add a dollops of sour cream if you would like or stir in whipping cream. I choose low fat sour cream and sprinkled with chives.

On such a dark and miserable cold day in Nova Scotia, this was a very good soup. Filling and tasty. It would probably be a lot better with REAL bacon but I was making this for dinner for me and my husband who does not eat pork. Next time I might add some hot sauce or something to give it additional boost of flavour and heat, it has been damn cold in Nova Scotia!

I give this recipe four out of five wooden spoons. 

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Michael Smith's Mushroom Miso Broth with Buckwheat Noodles

Last year I spent the entire month of February dedicated to Asian foods so click here if you want some recipe ideas to celebrate Asian culture and the new year through food

I know, it seems I am going all Michael Smith crazy but in fact I am recipe testing his book The Best of Chef at Home: Essential Recipes for Today's Kitchen. When I saw that he had a recipe for miso soup, I thought it would be the perfect recipe to test during this cold and bitter week.

I love miso soup. It is exotic, unusual and healthy. Some people start their day with a bowl of miso in broth and I am almost tempted. There is something about miso that just makes you feel better. A great soup on a rotten cold day and we get those all the time. I have typed the recipe as it appears in the cookbook but note that when I made it I divided it in half since I was just cooking just for myself.



Bring 4 cups of chicken broth or water to a simmer in a stockpot. Grate in a small knob of ginger into the broth. I had some firm cubed tofu in the freezer so I added it to the pot. For me, tofu is essential for a good miso soup and adds protein to complete the meal.



Thinly slice 2 cups of shiitake or button mushrooms. I used a bit of both.



Add mushrooms and simmer for about ten minutes.



You will be using soba noodles in this recipe which I adore! So much healthier for you than regular noodles, these are worth the additional expense and truly make the dish.



Add the soba noodles and cook for approximately 5 minutes. OK, now here is where I went off the flavour map. Chef Smith says to add 4 heaping tablespoons of miso paste, a dash or two of hot pepper sauce, 1 sheet of nori seaweed finely shredded with scissors and 2 green onions finely sliced and cook for one minute. Everything I have learned about miso says to NEVER cook it so instead I just put a little of all of the above at the bottom of my bowl and poured the soup on top:



First, because of the miso, I would recommend using 2 cups broth and 2 cups water for this recipe. It gets very salty fast, especially when you simmer the broth for 10 minutes. I used a sodium-reduced broth and wow, still very salty. I would rather my salt and flavour come from the miso instead of the broth anyway. Overall, the soup was OK. I was hoping for more, to be honest. This is a good base of a recipe but on its own, a little ordinary. A drizzle of sesame oil would have been great, maybe a handful of green peas tossed in the last few minutes...

As with most of Michael Smith's recipe there is nothing wrong with it. It is just lacking something. As a result, I can only give this soup four out of five wooden spoons. Since I feel a little lacklustre about this dish and how I did, I am still not sure I have shifted the energy and got my foodie mojo back, damn it.

Michael Smith's Butterscotch Sauce

After my peanut butter disasters I decided the only way I was going to change my foodie mojo was redemption. What started this all off in the first place was my weird caramel spider on my mini mud pies. I decided to take Ava up on her recipe suggestion and make Michael Smith's Butterscotch Sauce.

Working with boiling sugar scares the hell out of me so I figured this would be a bit of a sacrifice on my part which I thought might help appease the foodie gods. Whenever you work with boiling sugar make sure to have a glass of ice water on hand in case some gets on your skin. Which, as usually, I totally forgot to do, adding yet another dimension of danger to this challenge.



You are supposed to pour the sugar into the middle of the water in a mound in a sauce pan which I found disappeared so quickly I could not really get a photo of it. You do this to avoid getting sugar along the sides of the pan where it is like to crystallize and not dissolve.



Heat over high heat without stirring. No sloshing please! First it will dissolve into a syrup and then over time (quite a bit of time) it will begin to brown. Sugar darkens super fast so move on the next step as soon as you see this happening. I personally could smell it caramelize before I saw it so I grabbed for my butter.



I very carefully added it to the sugar and then whisked it in. The butter should bring down the temperature but see how dark it is getting even with the butter? You got to move quickly.



Whisk in the whipping/heavy cream and then some vanilla. Take off the heat. I personally let it cool before moving it into a mason jar:



Ava is right, at first it seems to be quite a thin sauce but once it chills it thickens. The mason jar really is the perfect vessel for the sauce once it had cooled down a bit.



It fits perfectly! Extra points for that! I am also a sucker for stuff in pretty jars. It warms my heart.

i

Considering all the sugar and fat in the sauce, I drizzled it over some fat free frozen vanilla yogurt to feel a little less guilty. It was divine! I mean, it really was perfect. It had that true and classic butterscotch flavour I have loved since I was a kid and really took a pretty typical dessert and made it feel special and a little homemade.

Was this sauce enough to turn my bad luck in the kitchen around? Are the foodie gods appeased with me sacrificing potential personal well being in the form of fear, safety and high fat content in my diet? You will just have to wait and see! In the meantime, make this sauce. 


I give it five out of five wooden spoons. 

Welcome to My Peanut Butter Nightmare

Yes, because I was still an optimist at this point about making a treat with peanut butter... I tried again. I thought it was fate. All grumpy from my peanut butter brownies turning into saturated sugary hell I sat down in front of the TV and watched the show Cook Yourself Thin for the first time. I thought it was fate that they were making a treat with peanut butter.

One thing I love about their approach is that they do not preach eliminating all this or that. They are usually about boosting goodness into regular treats like adding vegetables, fiber, fruit... an approach I wholeheartedly love and agree with. The woman who was getting a calorie makeover loved to dip chocolate into peanut butter as a snack so they came up with an alternative: Peanut Butter Dream Bars. I was confused and intrigued at the same time but decided to give it a shot. It was a no-bake treat which I always appreciate in the summer so if I loved these they were be fabulous months from now.



You combine ground low fat cookie crumbs with oats, sugar and a bit of salt. Then you add in melted butter. Yes, I said melted butter. Three tablespoons of it!



Then stir in one tablespoon of peanut butter and transfer to a parchment-lined loaf pan:

I used a measuring cup to really push down the crumb crust so it would come together. Then I put it in the fridge and worked on the filling. 

You are supposed to use an electric mixer for the filling but I used my food processor which I find for so little filling works better. In it you beat together room temperature cream cheese until it is light and fluffy. Um, it is only 1.5 oz so it did not really get light and fluffy. I tried, had it in there a while. Then you add a little salt, some peanut butter and vanilla and whip together for seven minutes (a little excessive!) until it doubles in volume:



Well that did not happen, not really. I watched this episode, they were not working with huge amounts of filling so I just used this.



Spread evening over cookie crust. OK, the crust absolutely would not stay together. It kept lifting up and became a huge mess, mixing in with the peanut butter. Now I put it in the fridge for 10 minutes, not the freezer, which is my bad. At every other point in the recipe you put it in the fridge so I got confused.



While the bars are chilling melt chocolate chips. On the show the chocolate was used as drizzle over the bars but without adding butter, shortening or whipping cream I knew what was going to happen.



Yup, a big clump that sticks together. It is interesting that the recipe says to spread over the chocolate over the dessert in a thin layer because that is not what they did on the show!



Everything just wanted to fall apart and stick to my spatula so I did my best to cover the evidence with the chocolate. I put it in the fridge for hours, even though the recipe said it would be done in ten minutes, hoping it would stay together.



Nope, it all crumbled apart! I lifted the parchment paper and smooshed everything back together and put it in the freezer for hours...



This was the best piece I could salvage and when I lifted it up to eat it, the entire cookie crumb base fell off. Not only that, when I gathered some of the crumbs in my hand with the filling and tasted it just so I could see what it would have been like had it been a success, it tasted weird! I did not like it at all. My husband thought "it wasn't bad" but then he likes almost all desserts that involve chocolate. Me? I would not eat another bite if you paid me.

I am not sure whose fault this peanut butter nightmare is but I do know one thing. It seems a tad ridiculous to me that making a treat with additional cookies, cream cheese and butter is supposed to be healthier for you than chocolate dipped in peanut butter. Yes, add more fat and carbs with some token oats and it is much better for you!

I think the issue for the woman on that episode was portion control. I would have suggested she allow herself to have two pieces of a high-quality dark chocolate bar filled with dried fruit dipped it into a jar of all-natural antioxidant-rich peanut butter once a day. That would be her treat for the day rather than making this monstrosity that just does not make any "health sense" to me.

Has anyone else watched the show Cook Yourself Thin? Are there recipes from it that you love? Please, let me know and I will give the show a second chance. Perhaps their cooking is better than their sweet treats? I really do like their approach to eating well, too bad this was such a flavour and logistical nightmare of a dish!

The Peanut Butter Brownie Disaster

She looks deceivingly beautiful and delicious, doesn't she???!!! 

I must make something very clear, this is not a recipe review. The following is totally all my bad and not Ina's fault for me completely screwing up her brownies. This is one of the worst times of year for me when it comes to food. If you want to find out why, go here. If you want to hear how not to make brownies, continue reading.

I seem to have a curse when it comes to making brownies. I have had very limited success with them but when I heard that it was National Peanut Butter Day last week, I really, REALLY wanted to make some peanut butter brownies. At the time, I thought it was a good idea.



Ina's recipe makes a huge sheet tray of brownies which I did not need so I attempted to divide the recipe in half and bake it in a much smaller dish. You begin by melting butter and chocolate in a double boiler.



It is here that all goes wrong. Yup, early on in the game... Normally I am really good at dividing recipes in half. But as you can see, there are only two eggs below with all that sugar, coffee and vanilla. When I went to go get the eggs, I mentally divided the six eggs called for in the recipe in half. By the time I got to the kitchen counter, I then divided the three eggs in half by adding one egg and yolk. Aren't I so smart? Yes, my short term memory is that bad which is why I am always reading and re-reading a recipe as I make something. Except on National Peanut Butter Day. Bloody hell. So at this point, I am totally oblivious to my stupid mistake.



You stir in the melted butter and chocolate into the egg and sugar mixture, followed by flour, baking soda and salt that has been sifted together. Stir until just combined.



Toss chocolate chips with some flour and add to the batter. Pour into baking dish.



Add peanut butter and swirl together with the knife. At this point I thought to myself, this is going to taste amazing!



Excited, I put it in the oven for about 12 minutes, tapped a little like Ina's says to do and then baked another 10 minutes or so. At some point, I started to feel weird. Like I knew something was wrong. I mentally went over my process and had the cold shock of what I had done creep up my spine. I felt sick and stupid at the same time and became too scared to look at the results when the timer went off. Do I really have to open that oven door?



Yeah, that just does not look right. My husband came home around this time and was able to eat the peanut butter chocolate goo because it was still warm and goopy. The next day it solidified enough so I could cut it out with a decorative biscuit cutter and top it with some frozen vanilla yogurt. You can pretty much dress up any disaster for a sweet photo, doesn't mean it will taste good.



Aww... it looks pretty, too bad it tastes like hell! I took one bite of this and it was a grainy sugar bomb. My husband ate the last of this piece but the rest ended up in the compost. What a shame! What waste...

Yes, the winter foodie blues are here and the gremlins are messing with my frozen brain. Life with fibromyalgia can be so frustrating. Normally the kitchen is one place I kind of don't screw things up but during the winter all bets are off.

Disasters, here I come.