I’ve had an extremely busy Sunday last weekend cooking and baking up a delicious homemade storm. Since coming back to Canada I have felt the need and want to create wonderful things for Chris and I to eat. The worlds cuisine has inspired and reminded me about how important food is. Before we left too many dinners simply consisted of broccoli, potatoes and a pork chop. You can imagine how uninspiring that gets after a few months. The following post is mostly about what I managed to do one Sunday afternoon and evening, except for the creation of the Sockeye Salmon.
If you like food, you might want to checkout some of our posts about food in Morocco, Iran, Cambodia, Turkey, Turkish breakfasts, Turkish food at Dilek National Park, Thailand cuisine and wonderful Italian cooking.
Chris is pretty excited to eat the Sockeye Salmon cooked on a Cedar plank.
Chris prepares the Salmon by cutting off the head, tail and fins.
He ensures the insides are clean and gives the entire fish a wash.
I just like how the water looks in this photo, especially with random fish parts.
For the past two hours, the cedar plank has been soaking in water. Before removing it from the water Chris stuffs the Salmon with fresh lemon slices and fresh dill. He also seasons it with some freshly ground pepper and Kosher salt.
The BBQ is hot and ready. The salmon is carefully placed on its cedar plank and cooked to perfection.
The salmon was complimented nicely with a salad: cut olives, blue cheese, red pepper, cucumber, green onions and lettuce.
The final result before the dinner party devoured the entire delicious creature. Even Zappa, the cat, enjoyed a nibble.
The next morning, I tossed some flour, yeast, sugar, butter and sliced walnuts into the bread maker for a fresh loaf of bread. I then used the bread to serve Chris and I homemade cinnamon-nutmeg French Toast topped with sliced bananas, icing sugar and Maple syrup.
While waiting the 2.5 hours for my bread to bake, I made shortbread cookies with some dinosaur cookie cutters I bought at the Buck-or-Two at the Grande Prairie Mall. I didn’t have any vanilla extract in the house, so I used the equivalent amount of Maple syrup instead. I also didn’t have any cornstarch. To replace this I used flour, doubling the amount of cornstarch it asked for. The cookies turned out amazing. We enjoyed them at my office Monday morning and at our Halloween party on Friday, October 29th.
For an interlude to my baking, I continued to paint designs on the papermache water jug I have to make for my belly dancing class. We are doing an Egyptian style of belly dance where we are supposed to be peasants with water jugs. I won’t admit how many hours this jug and the sewing of the dress took me. It’s ridiculous! The class seems more interested in costumes, dressing-up and performances than actually learning how to dance! Ha,ha. Nonetheless, I have a lot of fun at it. It’s a social experience more than anything. Thanks to my belly dance class I’ve actually met a couple other ladies in town and attended a belly dance workshop two weekends ago with my friend Marcia who’s in the weekly class with me.
Finally, I got the inspiration to make homemade chicken stock and soup. We had chicken bones from lunch and a frozen carcass from a few days before. I tossed them in a pot with water, 1 coursely chopped onion, 3 chopped carrots, 1 box of chicken stock, salt, pepper, thyme and oregano and let it simmer for about 3.5 hours.
While waiting for the soup to simmer, I cut up the vegetables I was going to use for the soup itself. We bought the carrots and potatoes from the Hutterites at the Grande Prairie Farmer’s Market.
Everything chopped up and ready to go.
The homemade chicken stock, soup and freshly baked homemade bread, just before I dove into it.
I ended the night by making a banana-squash loaf. I had cooked the squash the night before, so it only took 15-minutes to whip it together with a banana, flour, an egg, sugar, vanilla extract and baking soda before throwing it into the oven to bake for 1-hour. Um. Yummy!
