Saturday, September 28, 2013

The final Christmas Puddings

Today was a day of baking. I finished off the christmas cooking, the house smelled amazing, and still does, and now I have two and a half months to mature the puddings while eagerly awaiting tasting them!
Christmas Puddings
Christmas Puddings

Yotam Ottolenghi

Tonight I tried a recipe from Yotam Ottolenghis Vegetarian book "Plenty". I wanted to cook the recipe from the front cover, as it looks amazing and I love eggplant! The recipe turned out so well, it was packed with an amazing array of flavours, quite unlike any vegetarian I have ever seen out at a restaurant before. This dish was roasted eggplant with thyme and olive oil. Then the sauce over the top was yoghurt, garlic and buttermilk, with pomegranate seeds sprinkled over the top. Amazing. On the side I did one of his salads. Basil, rocket, roasted almonds, dates, with an olive oil and pomegranate molasses sauce. Amazing as well! All this went down a treat with my sourdough to mop up the juices!
Roasted Eggplant

Home Made Sourdough

For the last few weeks I have been raising my own sourdough starter...and baking many sourdough loaves. They taste amazing, and it is a lot of fun. I am finding the process of baking sourdough to be one that is similar to brewing. The way you deal with raising the yeast is quite similar, and I always get that sense of amazement when I see that there is something alive in my bread! The sourdough liquid levian adds an amazing flavour to the bread, the first loaf worked perfectly and had the exact delicious characteristics that you would expect from sourdough.
It is going to be an interesting hobby to continue with to try and refine and get the best our of my bread.
Sourdough
Sourdough
Sourdough
Sourdough

Christmas Baking

This year I decided to get into the Christmas spirit early and bake some Christmas puddings, in order to let them mature for a few months before we eat them. I found a recipe from Maggie Beer, for a cumquat Christmas pudding. This is kinda funny, as I'm living in Vancouver, I have discovered that dumb ass North Americans have no idea what proper pudding is, nor do they seem interested in learning that their sloppy shit excuse for pudding is more like gelatinous custard. Anyways, this has made it difficult to find the required ingredients to make this pudding. Obviously they don't have cumquats here. So I ended up substituting for dried oranges. They also don't have good, affordable, dried citrus rind, WTF, so I ended up having to buy and dry my own oranges. This was actually quite fun, albeit a tad laborious. Next, good luck finding a good baking store here that sells Calico cloth....I ended up having to use cheese cloth. Anyways, that done, my Christmas pudding turned into a week long process, which is kinda cool as I think a Christmas pudding should have a lot of time, effort and love put into it! I mean you share it with all your close family and best friends on one of the most sharing days of the year.
The recipe made enough batter to serve 20 people. So I broke it up into one big pudding for 10 people, and then 4 smaller puddings so I can share them with Kate on special occasions or give out for Christmas gifts to close friends. The cooking process is amazing, steaming the puddings for a long time, before hanging them to mature for the next few months. The house just smells of delicious citrus, berries and spices while the puddings are boiling. I can't wait to eat them.
Thanks for reading. For the recipe check out Maggie Beer.
boiling pudding
pudding
the small puddings
Home dried oranges
Xmas Pudding Fruit Soaking
Xmas Pudding Batter

Turning 30

So I recently hit the big 30. I did all of the common whinging and complaining to make sure the masses heard what they wanted to hear. But really it isn't that bad, more an inspiration to keep pushing life harder while I can. Anyway my wife spoiled me with an amazing day! We woke early for a coffee on our balcony, followed by a swim at the West End Aquatic Center. From here we sea bussed it up False Creek then walked to WHole Foods for an awesome smoothie and buffet breakfast of fruit, yoghurt and museil. After this it was off to work, then Kate came by at lunch with Nuba take out, so we could eat in the sun up at a little peaceful community garden.
After work Kate whisked me off again to a Yoga class at chopra yoga, and then it was back home for an amazing Vegetarian dinner cooked by Kate, and eaten on our balcony! Wow. What a day. I'll remember that day for ever.
Nuba Lunch
Whole Foods Brekky
Fals Creek after swimming

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Marathon Training

Well it's that time again. The last few weeks of a five month marathon training schedule, and as seems to be the trend these days, the wheels are falling off at the last minute. An instability in my left leg has led me and the physio on a wild goose chase around my leg of fixing one problem, and then causing another one. I found that I had a very weak left glute, so I worked on this for a few weeks and have totally strengthened it up. It's amazing really how fast it gained strength. However in activating the glute more, my whole stride has been adjusted ever so slightly, and I am now getting a much better foot strike as in I am using more of my forefoot when I land, other than just landing on the outside of my foot. This however has caused the outside of my foot to activate different muscles, and bang, really sore upper foot / outer ankle. So from one injury that was preventing me training at capacity to another. At the moment it looks like I may just avoid running for the next few weeks until the marathon and hope all goes well on race day. Needless to say my goal of a sub 3hr marathon is starting to look much less likely. I just have to put faith in a year of good training and overall fitness pulling me across the line. Fingers Crossed.

Sunday, September 8, 2013

Clancy

So we got some sad news the other day. We took our car into the mechanic for a service and check over and discovered that there are too many things that need fixing to continue with the car. Unfortunately this week Clancy will head to the wreckers :-( We have had so many good times with Clancy, and I am glad that I took so many pictures of us with our car. I put together a photo set at flickr of all the photos I have, and needless to say, there are a lot of other trips that I didn't happen to document too. In total we put somewhere around 20,000 kms on the odometer. We drove from vancouver to Jasper, Banff, Kelowna and back. We drove Highway 20 in Washing ton, to Osooyus, then back to Vancouver. Whidbey Island, Highway 101, Oregon, Seattle twice. We took my mum and dad to Victoria on Vancouver Island, we made a trip to Uclulet and a trip for Thanksgiving to Tofino. On top of all of these amazing long trips, we have done lots of camping trips to all sorts of places, lots of day trips around Vancouver, Squamish, Whistler and Washington and also a LOT of ski trips to Whistler, Cypress, Seymour, Hemlock and Mt Baker.
Clancy will be missed but has provided so many fun times, we will always remember him :-)
Nairn Falls Campsite
Ty and Kate
Mt Baker

Monday, September 2, 2013

Baking Bread

So I have recently been given some nice bread recipes from my dad. They are more involved than bread that I have previously made, but it is way more fun and the final result is far superior than anything that I have ever made in terms of taste, aroma and texture. This loaf below is a cracked wheat loaf, using a mixture of brown and white flour, as well as the addition of some soaked bulghur form some added texture.
The Sponge
Kneading and Risen
Baked
First slice

Vancouver Triathlon

This morning I competed in my second Olympic distance Triathlon. It was the beautiful Vancouver Triathlon in Stanley Park. The weather was marginal at best, with a good rain storm and some lightning during the bike leg, but best thing was it kept the temperatures down. My time was better than my last Olympic Triathlon by 3 mins, which is OK I guess seeming I'm training for a marathon and not Triathlons at the moment, but the run leg was kinda slow. The swim however went really well and I felt great in the water which was awesome as I have been putting a lot of time into swimming recently. Anyways, I've got some good photos thanks to Kate.
Vancouver Triathlon 2013
Vancouver Triathlon 2013
Vancouver Triathlon 2013
Vancouver Triathlon 2013

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Homemade Bread

I made this amazing loaf of bread with a recipe that my old man gave me. It is a basic hearth loaf. You make up a yeast starter the night before, which looks and smells amazing as it ferments. The dough was the most amazing feeling dough that I have ever made. Super light and fluffy, elastic and just felt amazing. The loaf tasted amazing, cut well and just had this awesome yeast aroma.
Homemade Bread
Homemade Bread