It sure gets cold in the winter. But that shouldn’t stop you from going on a romantic picnic. Instead of cold potato salad, pack this German-style potato salad with yummy bacon, potatoes, celeriac, and dill pickles served warm to keep you snug and satisfied. Cuddle on—or under—a warm fuzzy blanket with a snuggle buddy . . . and don’t be surprised if your next picnic is a family picnic.1 large celeriac

4 large waxy potatoes

3 large dill pickles

1 bunch fresh dill, chopped

1 lemon

1 shallot

1 clove garlic

6 slices thick-cut bacon

1 Tbsp vegetable oil

2 Tbsp butter

salt and pepper

2 Tbsp sour cream

1 Tbsp grainy mustard

Peel the celeriac by cutting off the top and bottom. Lay it on a flat side, and use your big knife to trim the gnarly skin off the sides. Peel your potatoes. Cut the potatoes and celeriac into approximately 1 1/2- to 2- inch cubes. Place them in a large pot and fill it up with cold water. (Do not salt the water.)

Get the pot on high heat, and while it comes to a boil prep the rest of the salad. The celeriac will float to the top, but that’s cool.

Cut the pickles into large rounds the size of the potato chunks. Chop the dill. Zest and juice the lemon into the same bowl. Mince the shallots and garlic.

When the water just starts to boil, you can start the bacon. Lay out your 6 slices of bacon in a very large cold pan and place the pan onto medium heat. Drizzle in the oil and let the fat render out of the bacon.

Back to the potatoes. Check for doneness by taking out a big piece of potato from the bottom of the pot and cutting it or biting into it. You’ll know it needs more cooking if it’s raw and crunchy. Don’t worry about checking the celeriac, as celeriac a little undercooked is fine, and you can’t really overcook it either.

When the potatoes and celeriac are ready, drain them into a colander and let them sit for 10 minutes until they have released a lot of their excess moisture.

When the bacon is crispy, transfer to a paper towel–lined plate.

In the bacon fat add the shallots, garlic, and butter. When the shallots are soft, add the potatoes and celeriac. Toss to coat, and then sprinkle in the lemon juice and zest. Salt and pepper generously. Transfer to a bowl and gently mix in the pickles, dill, sour cream, and mustard. Crumble the bacon and sprinkle it on top.

Serves yourself and 7 hungry friends.

Like, hey dudes, happy 4-20-2011.

Do you need to make something deliciously righteous? Just wrap your head around the concept of a brownie that you mix and bake in one pot. Did that just blow your mind?

Dude, just wait until you try this gooey, fudgy brownie with a sticky-icky centre like a molten chocolate cake. I guarantee your mooching buds will be rolling around looking for freebies when they catch a whiff of this righteous brownie.

Half baked pot brownies

excerpted from Kitchen Scraps: A Humourous Illustrated Cookbook

4 oz bittersweet chocolate

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup cold unsalted butter, in pieces

2 large eggs

1/2 cup flour

1/4 cup cocoa powder

1/4 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 350°F.

In a medium-sized pot—with a metal handle, not plastic, so the whole thing can go into the oven—melt the chocolate over low heat. As soon as the chocolate melts, remove the pot from the heat.

Add the sugar, and mix with a wooden spoon until grainy but incorporated. Add the cold butter a bit at a time while you continue to mix.

Add 1 egg at a time and mix until smooth.

Sift together the flour, cocoa powder, and salt in a separate bowl. Add the dry mixture directly into the pot a third at a time, stirring after each addition. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides of the pot so nothing burns on the edges, and blap the whole thing into the oven for 30 to 35 minutes. It will still be nice and gooey in the middle. If you want it to be more firm, bake for another 5 to 10 minutes.

Let the brownies cool on the stovetop . . . Be careful not to let anyone touch the hot pot handle.

To serve you can either use a big spoon to scoop out individual servings, or if you got the major munchies you can clean out the pot all by yourself with a little spoon.

Kitchen Scraps won big time at the Canadian Food Blog Awards in the Best Professional Food Blogger category. And in my humble Canadian way I would like to say thank you to Beer and Buttertarts.

Along with the Canadian spirit here is a great Canadian recipe excerpted from Kitchen Scraps: A Humourous Illustrated Cookbook.

It’s ripe with innuendo

LumberJack Flap Jacks

Perhaps the wood is always best first thing in the morning, because nothing gets lumberjacks up faster than morning wood. But what keeps lumberjacks going all day long? Light, fluffy pancakes, full of hearty energy to keep their axes swinging from morning to night. And if you want to go at it all day like a lumberjack, here is a lunch recipe to keep you going all day.

BMP: Bacon and maple syrup on pancake

Pack a hearty lunch with your leftover pancakes. Just slap a couple pieces of bacon (the regular kind or Canadian bacon) and a swizzle of maple syrup between two pancakes, and voilà, you have a pancake picnic. Also try adding lettuce and tomato and a gloop of mayo for a hearty BLT.

AWESOMENESS! Check out my new HOW TO CUT AN ONION VIDEO on the brand new Swerve Magazine website! Righteous camera stylings by Randy Gibson.

Plus!! Check out how to use the onion to make Foul Mouthed French and their Stinking Onion Soup, excerpted from Kitchen Scraps: A Humourous Illustrated Cookbook. Still time to buy the Award winning cookbook before I get ‘Jamie-Famous’… I mean, before Christmas.

The French are foul-mouthed. They find enormous pleasure in cussing, eating stinky cheese, and smoking like chimneys. But for some reason they have a globally recognized technique for kissing that involves a lot of tasting of the other person’s mouth. The ultimate contradiction is that the national soup of France is comprised nearly entirely of onions.

Foul-Mouthed French and Their Stinking Onion Soup

a stale French baguette

5 white or yellow medium-sized onions

3 Tbsp vegetable oil

2 Tbsp butter

1 Tbsp flour

1 glass of red wine

3 sprigs of thyme

bay leaf

4 cups water

salt and pepper

8 oz Gruyère, grated

Tear up the French bread into 2-inch chunks, and put it in an oven at 200°F. (Don’t worry about preheating the oven.) Dry out the bread while you prepare everything else.

Ciseler the onions.

Heat a large pot over medium heat. When it’s hot, add the oil and the onions. Now you can chill out and, if you have a TV nearby, put on something French with subtitles while you slowly cook the onions . . . because it’s going to take a while—about 30 to 40 minutes.

As the onions cook, they will release moisture. Think of it as forcing the onions to perspire in a sauna and cleaning their smelliness from the inside out. The next thing is the onions will slowly start to turn brown. The sugars deep inside in the onions are being released and caramelizing.

Success of this dish lies in your ability to walk the thin line between golden brown and burnt to merde. You need enough colour so the onions give the soup flavour that will carry it without the help of stock. Just as they are beginning to look perfectly browned and the bottom of the pan is covered with crispy brown flavour clingers, it is time to melt in the butter. Mix it in smoothly, then sprinkle on the flour and stir it quickly to avoid lumps. Cook this for about 30 seconds. Then crank up the heat and toss in the red wine to deglaze the pan. The liquid will help release all the clingy bits on the bottom, which translate into flavour.

When it stops smelling like raw booze, toss in the thyme and water. Bring it to a rapid boil and reduce it by a third, approximately 30 minutes.

While your soup reduces it’s a good time to take the bread out of the oven. Then crank up the broil setting for the final meltdown.

When the soup has reduced, taste it for salt and pepper, and season as needed. It may need lots of both at this point (although seasoning it before this reduces may result in something too salty).

Fill up a deep bowl with chunks of dried-out French bread. Scoop in the onion soup to cover, making sure you gets lots of onion and also plenty of broth for the bread to soak up. Cover the whole thing with a big messy handful of cheese, and blap it onto a tray and into the oven. Keep an eye on it until the cheese gets crusty, bubbly, and golden-brown delicious.

Serve it sizzling with a bottle of French red wine.

Paradox Decoded

By slowly cooking the onions you replace its harsh sulphurous stench with a much more palatable sweetness. To emphasize this sweetness, this recipe uses only water instead of stock, allowing the onion to stand out.

Nipply weather means a very inhibiting change of wardrobe for nudists. Fight the cold outside with warm deliciously tender gnudi inside your tummy.
These pasta dumplings are easy to prepare, but take some extra time to form in the fridge. The result is well worth the wait when you take your first bite of these yummy little bundles of warmth.

After you get that warm fuzzy feeling go for a bare-rump romp in the snow, but you may want to wear something to keep Jack Frost from nipping at your nipply bits.

Ingredients

300g  ricotta

100g grated parmesan

1 egg

pinch salt

4 cups semolina flour

¼ cup butter

2 cloves garlic, crushed

5 sage leaves

1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar

Procedure

In a bowl, mix together the ricotta, parmesan, egg and pinch of salt. In a deep dish with straight sides cover the bottom of the dish with half of the semolina flour. Place the ricotta bowl next to the semolina dish. Grab a spoonful of the ricotta mix, roll it in your palms to make a perfect ball. This is good practice for making snowballs. Place the balls in the bed of semolina flour with space between each ball.

Bury the ricotta balls with the remaining semolina flour, cover with plastic wrap and place in the fridge for 48-72 hours. The semolina flour will extract the moisture from the ricotta and form its own natural pasta shell. The shell is delicate and requires gentle handling and cooking, but the result is a rich, tender ball of ricotta pasta in your mouth.

To cook, fill a pot with 2 inches of salty water and bring to a very gentle simmer. A rapid boil will tear the gnudi to shreds.

In a frying pan over medium heat, melt the butter with sage leaves and grated garlic. Cook it slowly until the butter begins to get brown. Before it gets too brown add the vinegar for flavour and to stop the cooking. Remove the pan from the heat so it does not continue to get brown or burn.

When you are ready to cook the gnudi, carefully extract the tender little dumplings and gingerly shake off the excess flour. Don’t shake off too much, more will cook off while it boils, but that is fine. Place a few in the gently simmering water and cook for 5 minutes. Remove them with a slotted spoon, don’t dump into a strainer or they will fall apart. Place them directly in the brown butter sauce and flip to coat in sauce. Serve eight on a warm plate with a nice sprinkling of parmesan cheese. Don’t eat the sage, it is certainly edible, but it is only there to add flavour.

Plan to feed 4 people, but expect to want to make them again immediately… oh wait they take two days to make… better make more next time.

Earn your bachelors degree at the Academy of Incendiary Arts, the culinary school for fire-breathing dragons or people with blowtorches. 

Take a look and buy the book!

The blessed eggs of St. Benedictus

If you’ve ever been afraid to make hollandaise, have faith we’re here to show you the way to enlightenment with a whole new way to make hollandaise! … and there are 5 awesome variations on the recipe for you to enjoy.

Take a look and buy the book!

Swerve Magazine is where the whole illustrated recipe thing started. To celebrate the launch of Kitchen Scraps: a humorous illustrated cookbook the Editor of Swerve, Shelley, offered up some primo Feature story real estate in a recent issue.

Here’s a look at the 8-pager for all of you followers who ain’t from around here…

Check out the little inter-rootial beet and horseradish baby… so sweet, so hot!

Take a look and buy the book!

Take a look and buy the book!