Strangely Delicious, Predictably Gross-Looking

 

Rustic Spinach Tart – Recipe Origin Unknown

My boyfriend was home for reading week, and I figured this was the perfect opportunity for some domestic experimentation.  Doesn’t spinach pie sound awesome?  Didn’t think so.  And I like spinach.  A lot.

Step 1.  Gather bizarre ingredients.

Step 2.  Make a perfect pie crust using your grandmother’s recipe.  Perfect.

Step 3.  Pile weird ingredients on top of each other, atop half the perfect pie crust.

Step 4.  Cover it with the other half of the pie crust.

Step 5.  Flute it.  However one does that.

Step 6.  Bake.

Step 7.  Behold!  Your creation!

So, this looks pretty normal, but the clear presence of ectoplasm suggests something sinister inside.

It does kind of look like the Frankenstein’s monster of pies.  It tasted pretty awesome, though.  And I cannot express enough that the crust was perfect.

We couldn’t eat all of it, though, and left the remainder in my boyfriend’s parents’ fridge to find when they returned from Florida.  It was, perhaps, not the most generous thing I could have left for them.  Tee hee.

Salt Adventure

 

Mi Pescado a La Sal – Jamie Oliver’s Food Escapes

 

My father gave me this awesome cookbook for my birthday one year.  The only problem with the cookbook is that it calls for such crazy international ingredients that I basically have to take a trip to a major centre to be able to purchase the ingredients. 

First, I drove to Toronto to visit my boyfriend. 

Then I used ALL HIS SALT.

It’s mixed here with fennel, eggs and lemon peel.  I’m not sure how much the effort of peeling the lemons was worth in resulting flavour.

Then I pressed him into journeying downtown to Kensington Market for fish and sundries.

 

Though the recipe called for seabass, the closest thing the fish market we went to had was trout.  Luckily, we were able to meet Jamie’s totally enforceable requirement of sustainable catching due to the fish market’s ethics (not mine, I’ll take any fish, any time).

As I’m obviously opposed to sustainable seafood, I defaced the aquatic body by stuffing it full of earthly trappings like basil and parsley.

Then I buried it in lemon-fennel-egg salt.

And then baked the shit out of it.

Rewind: At the ethical fish market, my boyfriend eyed some oysters, bought them, then realized he had no oyster shucker.  So we went on a magical journey through Chinatown in the cold, carrying $40 worth of ethically magical fish and mollusks looking for the one store on Spadina that carries oyster shuckers, passing it once, giving up and then finding it on the way back.  Sigh.

The shucking went well, though, so we had these too.

 

And then I attempted to make the accompanying aioli, which calls for a mortar and pestle, which my boyfriend doesn’t own.  So I first attempted to scrape the garlic and salt together on a cutting board with the flat of a knife, and then I used all three of the food processors in my boyfriend’s apartment, all to no avail.  Jamie’s picture looks like yellow-y mayonnaise.  Tears ensued.  Behold, the failure aioli.

If you look really closely, you can see the chunks of garlic that the impossibly dull blades of the blender just pushed around the salty olive oil.  Sigh.  But, back to the fish!  Next I had to bust it out of its salty prison.

 

And then bust its tender, juicy flesh out of its own scaly prison.

And then drizzle it with failure aioli and side it with boyfriend’s delicious experimental couscous and accompanying olive and cucumber salad. 

Buen provecho!