Dietitian’s Corner

Ming and I attended our first Jewish wedding yesterday and had a blast!  Ming got to wear a kippah, a Jewish skullcap, during the ceremony in the synagogue.  He would had left it on for the duration of the banquet but it fell off (oops).  There was a little hair clip inside, but it just didn’t stay on very well - must be that straight, slippery Chinese hair! 

One theme I noticed throughout the wedding and dinner was the emphasis on family.  Both parents walked down the aisle with the bride and groom, stood alongside the wedding party under the chuppa (canopy used in Jewish weddings), and took part in the ceremony.  Parents were also lifted up on chairs during the hora (celebratory dance at the beginning of the banquet) after the bride and groom were lifted up.  Even during the speeches, everyone emphasized the blending of two families, and not just the two individuals, and how each one of them was dearly loved and treated as though they were already a part of the family.   

Another theme was dancing, and boy, was there a lot of dancing!  From the moment the bride and groom arrive, there’s the hora, and then people are just dancing pretty much throughout dinner (except for a 20min break during the main course).  This was our first time attending a wedding where a live band played (note: we usually play music off CDs or iPODs at Chinese weddings!).  This band was amazing - they played all night, new songs, old songs, they never once sounded tired, and they looked like they were having just as good a time as everyone on the dance floor!  It was so cute to see people young and old on the dance floor having a good time, and it really added a celebratory feel to the evening. 

Now, about the food - there was a plethora of food last night!  It was all so good, and kosher!  Firstly the passed appetizers during cocktail hour - sliders (ie. bite-size hamburgers, so cute, so yummy), thick slices of smoked turkey and corned beef (think Schwartz’s) with mini-buns and a variety of yummy mustards and pickles, luscious smoked salmon with lots and lots of toppings (chopped egg yolks, chopped egg whites, minced shallots, lemon slices, capers, etc.) and more good bread, satay chicken on a stick, etc.  It was also the first wedding we went to with an open bar - there was no drunken behaviour, but the bar was packed all throughout the evening, and I can’t only imagine how long that talley at the end of the night must have been!  Green apple martinis were passed around, so I stole a sip from my colleague’s glass.  Very green apple-y, very sweet, which means dangerous to drink b/c it’s probably all liquour!  I was satisfied with just one sip to taste =)

I was starving by the time the ceremony was done, so I gobbled up quite a few appetizers (daintily of course).  Little did I know how much food there was going to be for the rest of the night!  I brought the menu home with me, so that I could get it straight for you:

- Appetizers: Assorted breads, rolls, flat breads, crudites, olives, and pickles; Lemon hummus and red pepper hummus and tuscan bean spread

- First Course Trio Plate: Grilled halibut with tropical salsa, cucumber wrap with greens and herbed dressing, beggars purse filled with grilled vegetables on a drizzle of hoisin sauce

- Main Course: Grilled chicken supreme with mounds of wild mushrooms, green and yellow peppers, and a red wine reduction

- Sides: red bell pepper filled with diced carrots, green beans, and yellow beans; Garlic mashed potato rosette on a sweet potato fritter; Basket of sweet potato fries with ketchup

- Dessert: Molten chocolate cake with raspberry sauce and fresh berries; Three-tier stand with plates of assorted cookies (black/white checkerboard, chocolate chunk, and oatmeal), skewers of fresh fruit, and chocolate bark with cranberries and almonds

Then, there was tea and coffee.  After which, more dessert was passed around: chocolate dipped cheesecake lollipops, bite size brownies, rice krispie squares dipped in chocolate, puff pastries with honey glaze, lemon mousse, tiramisu, strawberry shortcake…  Oh yes, there was also a late night fresh pretzel stand.  Whew! 

We went for a Summerlicious lunch at Il Fornaro (Avenue & Wilson) today.  The funny thing was that 75% of the patrons were Chinese!!  We think it’s b/c it was such a great deal ($15) - hehehe…  The lunch was OK, tho some of their dishes were a bit on the bland side.  This is what we had:

- Freshly baked bread with a creamy garlic dipping sauce and olives on the side (plus olive oil and balsamic vinegar for dipping)

- Appetizers: Minestrone soup; Baby arugula salad with pear slices, cherry tomatoes, toasted slivered almonds, goat cheese and a balsamic vinaigrette

- Mains: Wood grilled pizza with pepperoni, ham, sausage, and cheese; Wild mushroom and caramelized onion risotto with shaved Padaon cheese and truffle oil

- Dessert: Double chocolate cake; Tartufo ice cream

Now I must go and have a slice of my pineapple coconut ice cream birthday cake (from Baskin Robbins) that is awaiting me in our freezer!

I had a lovely birthday yesterday - in fact, it just felt like any other day, except for some extra birthday wishes and treats =)  I had a good day at work and enjoyed several intentional and unintentional birthday treats from my coworkers - two homemade (and fully decorated) red velvet cakes with mascarpone/cream cheese frosting, a delicious brownie dessert from Ruby Watcho (Lynn Crawford’s new restaurant), and a large coffee cupckae with butterscoth topping. 

For dinner, Ming took me to a Japanese restaurant close to our place (A Taste of Japan, 金田川).  Can I just say, I’ve discovered my new favorite sushi place in the neighborhood?  First of all, this place has Happy Hour from Mon-Fri 5-7pm, where lots of sushi and appetizers are $1 a piece.  This is perfect b/c I like to have variety, so I can have a couple pieces of several different kinds of sushi without feeling like I need to polish off an entire plate/roll by myself.  This restaurant also has a lot of interesting dishes.  Last night, we had salmon sushi, mini-unago hand roll (very cute presentation), shrimp and yam tempura, chicken teriyaki, fried oyster roll, and mango avocado roll (ie. California roll with mango inside instead of avocado, and avocado slices on top with a drizzle of mango sauce.  Everything was presented so nicely and tasted great. 

After dinner, we went to watch Salt.  I haven’t watched a movie on opening night and in Silvercity in a long time.  Our fave movie theatre is Rainbow at Promenade - $5 on Tuesdays, how can you beat that?  But, yesterday was a special day, so we thought we’d do something a little different.  Well, we waited in line for 40min (we were 2nd in line… such eager beavers!), waited in the theatre for another 40min, and then watched the movie, which was just over 1.5 hours.  The movie was good, but I think we’ll stick with Rainbow.  Besides, I’m not a bit fan of the reclining chairs at Silvercity!

Dinner was a cinch tonight - I made whole wheat fettucini with pan-seared scallops, shrimps, and peas in a garlic-lemon-butter sauce.  A great one dish meal, and easy to make on weeknights (or to serve when company is over!)

1 package of scallops (I happened to find large, sea scallops on sale at the store this week, but you can certainly use frozen sea or bay scallops)

1 package frozen shrimp, defrosted and peeled

Frozen peas (as much as you like)

1 package of whole wheat fettucini (or any other pasta you like)

2 lemons, freshly squeed

A pat of butter

3-4 cloves of garlic, minced

1/2 shallot, minced

Parmaggiano-Reggiano, shaved

1.  Rinse scallops and shrimp well, and drain.  Season with salt and pepper.

2.  In a pan, heat some olive oil, and sautee garlic and shallots.  Meanwhile, boil some water and cook the pasta.

3.  Pansear scallops and shrimp (you made need to do them in separate batches if your pan isn’t big enough) until semi-cooked.  Add lemon juice and peas, and let simmer for 1/2 minute.  Stir in butter until melted.

4.  Drain pasta and add to pan.  Shave Parmaggiano-Reggiano over top, mix well, and serve! 

Last night marked the beginning of a week of birthday meals!  Ming’s parents took us out for my birthday, and we had Peking duck and steamed oysters in the shell (my fave!), among other things.  My sweet little nephew also sang happy birthday to me (partially), and then proceeded to ask where my birthday cake was =) 

Tonight, my coworkers and I went out for a Summerlicious dinner at Five Doors North (on Yonge, between Eglinton and Davisville) to celebrate two birthdays (including mine), and an upcoming wedding (this weekend).  I had roasted beet salad with scallion dressing and crispy lotus chips as an appetizer, and also got to sample some other appetizers (crab cakes with scallion aioli and soy reduction; and grilled asparagus salad with olive oil poached tomatoes, gorgonzola, and chianti vinaigrette).  For the main, I had grilled veal ribeye with roasted cauliflower puree and garlic rapini.  I also got to sample their famous back ribs (which were lip-smacking good), and their eggplant parmigiana.  Unfortunately, dessert was a bit of a let down - their creme brulee wasn’t chilled enough, and had much too thick of a sugar coating on top.  Our coworkers were kind enough to ask the restaurant to send over some complimentary desserts to celebrate our birthdays, so we also got to try a flourless chocolate cake and a fruit and berry trifle.

Now that I’m absolutely stuffed (and completely sore from all the gardening and weed-pulling I did yesterday!), I can look forward to some other tasty meals this week, including sushi (how can I celebrate a birthday without sushi?!), a Summerlicious lunch at Il Fornaro, and my first Jewish and kosher wedding banquet at the end of the week.  I’m told there will be a station at the end of the night where fresh pretzels will be made - yum!!

Some friends came over for dinner tonight, and I decided to make a chicken Caesar pasta salad.  I kind of made this one up on my own, thought it’s really not that original.  It’s hearty and a great make-ahead dish for hot evenings like this!  Make this the night before, and then take it out of the fridge about 1/2 hour before serving to take the chill off of it.  Remember: don’t mix the romaine lettuce and croutins in until just before serving!  I served some veggies and dip and a mushroom frittata alongside this salad to balance it out.

6 chicken thighs (I used, bone-in, skin-on)

1 box whole-wheat short pasta (I used rigatoni, but you could use rotini, penne, bowties, etc)

Light Caesar Salad Dressing (I used the PC brand)

Croutons (I used the PC Roasted Garlic kind)

Parmaggiano-Reggiano (for grating)

1 Romaine heart, washed, chopped, and dried

1.  Preheat your oven to 350oF.  Season chicken thighs with salt, pepper, and olive oil, and roast for 30min.  Let cool, remove skin, and shred by hand.

2.  While the chicken is roasting, boil and salt a pot of water.  Once the water is boiling, cook pasta.  Drain and mix with dressing.

3.  Toss chicken into salad, add some more dressing, and mix well.  Refrigerate until ready to serve.

4.  Take salad out of fridge 1/2 hour before serving.  Wash, chop, and dry romaine lettuce (I did this the night before, and kept the lettuce covered in a strainer in the fridge).  Mix lettuce and croutons into salad, add more dressing as needed, and mix well.

5.  Just before serving, grate or shave Parmaggiano-Reggiano.  Serve with lemon wedges for guests to squeeze onto the salad.

Wow… it’s been a long time since I’ve posted.  What have I been doing?  Not much (food-wise) really.  I have to say that this heat is really killing my appetite and desire to do any sort of cooking.  My favorite snacks of late are: canned tuna (packed in olive oil, from Italy) with crackers and roasted-garlic-salted-fava beans.  I recently picked up some snacks from the US during a shopping trip to Niagara Falls (US side) - they looked interesting, but on the whole, weren’t that tasty.  I actually found out that some of them aren’t really unique to the States - in fact, they’re sold in Canada too!  Clearly I am not that familiar with the chips/candy aisle of my usual grocery store (that, or my usual grocery store only sells basic things!).

So, what have I been doing with all the time that I haven’t been blogging about food?  Well, for one, I’ve been watching lots of movies (love the free DVDs that I can borrow from the library at work).  We’ve watched a lot of movies that have been really good, but were unfortunately never released onto the big screen due to disputes with distributors and what not.

The other thing I’ve been doing a lot of is reading.  I must confess, I’ve never been much of a bookworm growing up.  But for some reason, I’ve recently had the desire to get back into reading (maybe b/c all my officemates are constantly reading).  Anyways, I am loving the books.  It’s a great way to pass the time commuting to/form work and it’s a great “escape”.  I intially started off with “Water for Elephants”, which is now being made into a movie, but I stopped partway b/c I just wasn’t that interested.  The next book I read was “Sarah’s Key”, which I wrote a brief review on.  Since then, I’ve also read “The Magician’s Nephew” (prequel to “The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe”).  Now, I finally know how that magic wardrobe came to be =)

Recently I’ve finished reading another book, a riveting epic called “The Book of Negroes”.

(Plot summary taken from amazon.ca)  “Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle - a string of slaves - Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic “Book of Negroes”. This book, an actual document, provides a short but immensely revealing record of freed Loyalist slaves who requested permission to leave the US for resettlement in Nova Scotia, only to find that the haven they sought was steeped in an oppression all of its own. Aminata’s eventual return to Sierra Leone - passing ships carrying thousands of slaves bound for America - is an engrossing account of an obscure but important chapter in history that saw 1,200 former slaves embark on a harrowing back-to-Africa odyssey.”

I’ve realized that I really like fiction stories based on real historical events, like Sarah’s Key, and now this book.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the author, Lawrence Hill, is a Canadian and lives in Burlington.  I also found out on Wikipedia that his brother (Dan Hill) was the guy who sang the ’70s balled “Sometimes When We Touch” (!).   

This book is written in first-person perspective, and as summarized above, tells the amazing life story of an African woman forced into slavery, and her journey to becoming a free person once again.  It really opened my eyes to the kinds of terrible inhumanities that these slaves endured, it caused me to empathize with their sheer hopelessness and despair, and it made me respect and marvel at the perseverance and endurance of this one woman who managed to survive, in spite of her losses.

Today we went out for lunch with Ming’s family after church to celebrate Father’s Day.  We went to Sierra Grill, which we’ve been to many times, though this is the first time we had brunch items.  Ming had a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich on rye, while I had my all-time brunch fave, eggs benedict (with smoked salmon).  I’ve always liked the salad bar at Sierra Grill, so I added that on to my order.  Well, after eating so much, I felt like I was in a bit of a food coma for the rest of the afternoon, and it was really hard to stay awake even having had a Coke with my lunch!

We had invited Ming’s parents over for dinner since my BIL/SIL had dinner plans with my SIL’s parents.  My FIL loves lobster, so I had originally planned to make lobster (stir-fried with Maggi soy sauce and garlic).  Well, when I inquired at the fish section of the Chinese supermarket, they told me they only had jumbo lobsters, and the smallest one was 5lb!!  There’s no way I’m cooking a 5lb lobster at home, so we gave up on that idea.

Since we were all still full from lunch, I ended up making a light (but still yummy!) dinner: rice cooked with Kabocha squash and mushrooms (this time I used garlic instead of shallots), steamed pork with Chinese preserved veggies (mui choy), and a new veggie dish I experimented with.

One of my fave dishes at People’s Restaurant (besides their seafood) is the spinach cooked in broth with gogi berries.  So, I decided to make it tonight, and it turned out great (and is ridiculously easy to make).  I think you could use pretty much any Chinese veggie for this dish - tonight I used baby Shanghai bok choy.  I essentially boiled about 2-3 cups of water (I was lazy and just used the water that was in the wok after steaming the pork!), added a few spoonfuls of chicken broth powder, threw in a handful of dried gogi berries, threw in the veggies, and put the lid on.  Once there was steam coming out from under the lid, the veggies were done!

I recently finished a really good book called “Sarah’s Key”.  It’s a fictional story based on the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup.  In July 1942, the French police (under Nazi orders) arrested tens of thousands of Jews in Paris, sent them off to camps just outside of Paris, and later sent them off to Auschwitz to be executed.  For decades, the French refused to acknowledge the role that the French played in the roundup, but French president Jacques Chirac finally publicly gave a public apology during a commemoration service in July 1995, 50+ years after the incident.

Sarah’s Key has two storylines.  The first is set in July 1942, when a young girl (Sarah) and her family are brutally arrested and transported to the camps.  As her family is being transported, Sarah tries to save her little brother by locking him in a hidden cupboard in their home, and promising to return to free him later.  The second story is set in modern-day Paris, where an American journalist based in Paris is writing an article on the Vel’ d’Hiv (for it’s 60th commemoration), and discovers a connection between herself and Sarah.

It was a heavy and sobering read, and as I read Sarah’s story, I kept thinking to myself, I can’t imagine living through that experience and then living with it in my memory for the rest of my life.  The Vel’ d’Hiv is a part of history that not many people are aware of (the book alludes to the French not ever being taught much about it), so I appreciated learning about that.

Our friends are packing up and moving to Ottawa, and tomorrow night there’s going to be a big farewell potluck dinner at their place.  I wanted to make dessert, but also wanted to make something that would be somewhat effortless and still substantial enough to feed a crowd.  I finally decided to make mango pudding, which is usually a crowd favorite, and to the rescue came my kitchen staples!  Gelatin powder + sugar + 1% milk + frozen mango puree (defrosted) + frozen mangoes (defrosted to make more puree and dice up) = mango pudding in 10 minutes tops!  All it has to do now is rest quietly in the fridge to set overnight.  I also refridgerated a can of fat-free evaporated milk to serve with the pudding.  This is my first time making a low fat version of the mango pudding - I usually use whipping cream or light cream, so we’ll see how it turns out!