Good Friday Scramble

Eggs are the perfect food for everyone, but especially for vegetarians. It's not an exaggeration to say that eating 10-20 eggs a week will do a body good — excellent protein, essential fatty acids, and pretty much the whole gamut of nutrients that contribute to the health of the brain and nervous system. I have two or three locally produced free-range and flax-fed eggs for breakfast almost every day, usually gently soft boiled or fried at a low-heat to keep the yolks soft to preserve their nutrients, along with some sourdough toast with butter, and some fruit. Simple and quick… but it can get just a little boring some days. Fortunately eggs are about the most forgiving ingredient for combining with just about anything you like, so a good tasty scramble with my favourite vegetables and spices livens things up and are just about as quick and easy as cooking the eggs plain. I find that eggs go especially well with hot spices, onions, mushrooms, celery, and almost any member of the nightshade family of vegetables (tomatoes, potatoes and peppers), and to make things even quicker in the morning any or all of these added ingredients for a scramble fry can be cut up and refrigerated the night before.

For this Good Friday I made an scrambled eggs with all my favourite scramble ingredients: mushrooms, celery, green onions, jalapeno peppers, and cayenne powder. Just fry up sliced white mushrooms in butter at medium-high heat until the moisture is gone and they're nice and brown. Turn down the heat, add some more butter to replace the butter absorbed by the mushrooms, and add lots of finely chopped up jalapeno peppers, the white parts of the green onions, and celery to give the scramble some crunch. While this is frying, break some eggs in a bowl and add plenty of yoghurt or milk, cayenne powder, the green parts of the onion, and whisk the mixture until well combined. After a few minutes, add the egg mixture to the pan and stir-fry until the eggs are cooked. Sprinkle on some sea salt and fresh ground black pepper, toast and butter some slices of Irish Soda Bread, and you've got a fantastic breakfast feast.

Irish Soda Bread

As the name suggests, Irish Soda Bread is a traditional bread originating in Ireland in the 1800's. It is a fairly dense bread, and if you have never tried it, think of it as a cross between a scone or tea biscuit and a muffin, though it is not very sweet, which makes it a satisfying addition to any meal or breakfast. There are many variations on the traditional recipe, and some bakers add raisins, caraway seeds and even whiskey.

I've tried a few variations of Irish Soda Bread in the past, and this is my version of the traditional recipe. I decided not to use raisins as they make for a sweeter bread (though the bread is very tasty with raisins), and you can omit the egg and baking powder if desired if you want a bread that is closer to the original version. Increase the baking soda to 2 teaspoons if you omit the baking powder and use a little less flour is you choose to add raisins or if you omit the egg.

Irish Soda Bread

5 cups of flour
2 tablespoons of sugar
1 teaspoon of sea salt
1 teaspoon of baking soda
1 teaspoon of baking powder
4 tablespoons of cold butter
1 cup raisins (optional)
1 egg, lightly beaten
2 cups buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Sift together the flour, sugar, salt, baking soda and baking powder in a large bowl.

Using a pastry cutter or two knives, cut the butter until the flour mixture until it resembles a coarse meal. If you are including raisins, stir them into the flour and butter mixture.

Make a deep well in the center of the flour mixture. Add the beaten egg and buttermilk and mix until the dough stiffens up. Dust your hands with some flour and gently knead the dough until it forms into a rough ball. If the dough is sticky, add more flour.

Form the dough into the round loaf and transfer to a lightly greased baking sheet or cast iron skillet. Score the top of the loaf with a 1/2 inch deep X shape across the top. Bake in the oven until the bread is golden brown - roughly 35-40 minutes. The bread is done when a cake tester inserted into the center of the loaf comes out clean.

Cool on a baking sheet and serve as is or with butter. This bread is best eaten within a few days, as it dries out rather quickly. Store in a covered container to preserve freshness.

Cracked Black Pepper Rice

This dish has been a staple rice dish in my kitchen as it is easy to prepare and appeals to a wide variety of tastes. It is best served chilled or at room temperature, so if you are making a more complex meal, you can make it up ahead of time. The process is rather unique, as you use a large quantity of water for a relatively small quantity of rice and cook the rice at a full boil instead of reducing the temperature to a simmer. The result is a nice sticky, zesty rice.

Cracked Black Pepper Basmati Rice

1 1/4 cups of basmati or other long-grain white rice
8 cups of water
1 - 2 tablespoons of fresh lemon or lime juice
3 tablespoons of butter
2 small bay leaves, or fresh curry leaves, crushed or finely chopped
1 teaspoon of sea salt
2 - 3 teaspoons of cracked black pepper

1. Rinse and soak basmati rice in a cup of the water for about 20 minutes. Drain into a strainer, and let dry for 15 minutes, reserving the soaking water.

2. Bring the water, including the water used for soaking the rice, lemon or lime juice, a dab of the butter and bay leaf to a full boil in a large pot over high heat. Stirring constantly, pour in the rice in a slow steady stream. Cook uncovered in briskly boiling water for 12 - 15 minutes or until rice is just tender and fluffy.

3. Pour the rice into a strainer, and drain. Let cool for about 2 minutes, pick out the bay leaves and spoon the rice into a large bowl. Stir in the remaining butter, salt and black pepper. Toss gently to mix.

4. Chill or let cool to room temperature.

Serves 5 - 6 people

Adapted from "Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking" by Yamuna Devi.

Tuscan Bean Soup With Fresh Rosemary

The following dish is based on a recipe appearing in "Delia's Vegetarian Collection", a cookbook compiled by Delia Smith featuring over 250 mouthwatering recipes. The photographs are orgasmic, and each recipe could easily be featured in the finest gourmet restaurant. If you have a creative flare for cooking and like to experiment with a variety of foods, this is the cookbook for you. Cheese lovers in particular will treasure this book throughout their cooking career. Though many of the recipes require a time commitment in the kitchen, especially if you are feeling ambitious and looking to cook up a three or four course meal, the directions are very easy to follow and well worth the effort. This selection is one of the easier dishes to prepare and a favorite in my kitchen.

Tuscan Bean and Pasta Soup with Rosemary

1 cup of dried romano or pinto beans
1/2 cup of spiral shaped or small tubes pasta
1 heaping tablespoon of fresh rosemary, finely chopped
2 tablespoons of olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 1/2 tablespoons of tomato paste
grated parmesan, for garnishing individual servings
salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Soak the beans overnight in 8 cups of cold water.

2. Drain the beans, reserving the soaking liquid.

3. Heat the oil in a large saucepan, add the onion and cook gently for about 10 minutes. Then add the garlic and cook for another minute. Next, add the tomato paste and rosemary, stir for a minute, then add the beans, together with 6 cups of the reserved cooking liquid and some salt (about 1 - 1 1/2 teaspoons). Simmer gently, partially covered, for about an hour, or until the beans are tender.

4. Add black pepper to taste, then pour half of the soup into a blender and blend until smooth. Alternately, you can use a convenient electric hand blender to blend a portion of the soup within the pot.

Homemade Maple Syrup from Muskoka

A visit to my parent's home in Muskoka this past weekend coincided with the annual running of the maple sap, the short period when temperatures climb above freezing during the day and fall back below again at night that heralds every year the end of the long, cold and dreary Muskoka winter. As a child, the beginning of the Muskoka spring was a special time when my brother and I put on our winter boots and tramped about helping our folks to gather the clear sap from the hard sugar maples scattered among the beeches, cherries, oaks, birches and hemlocks of their hilly 95-acre wooded property. Turning the bountiful sap into pure delicious home-made maple syrup was an annual treat! It's been a thirty year tradition in my family, and although I've missed out on the occasion for many years now since I moved to foggier pastures, I was fortunate to once again help with the syrup… even if I mostly just stood around taking photographs, enjoying the tantalizing aroma of boiling sap, and asking questions so that I could share the process and experience with my readers.

Pure maple syrup isn't just a tasty way to dress up pancakes and ice cream; it's a far healthier alternative than refined sweeteners like sugar and corn syrup. It takes about forty gallons of maple sap to make just one gallon of syrup, so the syrup is in effect concentrated tree nutrients — calcium, potassium, phosphorus, manganese, magnesium and even iron, as well as trace amounts of B vitamins and essential amino acids. In fact, 1/4 cup of pure syrup has more calcium than the same amount of milk and more potassium than a banana. And all of these nutrients remain in the syrup during the boiling, concentrating and filtering stages, so here's a sweet that shouldn't make you feel guilty.

The sap

As soon as the days start to climb above freezing temperatures, usually around mid- to late-March, my dad goes about drilling 2 to 2 1/2 inch holes in good well-grown hard maple trees that are at least 10 inches in diameter. These days he taps about sixty trees not too far away from the syrup shack. When my brother and I were little, he'd tap over 100 trees. Wherever possible, he drills the holes on the south sides of the trees where the sap runs faster, although the holes must be drilled at least 6 inches away from the scars of previous years' drilling. After drilling, a stainless steel spout is tapped into the hole from which the sap runs into a galvanized steel pail hanging from a wire hook on the spout. The best sap runs occur when the temperature is about -5°C at night followed by a quick warming in the morning to about plus 5 or 6°C. The sap won't run when it's either too cold or too warm, but every season yields at least a couple of weeks worth of good days. On an ideal day, one tree might produce almost a gallon of sap, and over the course of the syrup season, usually about three weeks, an average maple tree will give about 10 or 12 gallons from each tap hole.

To make quality maple syrup, the sap must be fresh and cold, which means it must be gathered and boiled in the same sugarbush. If the sap is allowed to collect too long before boiling, it will sour and spoil. As soon as there's enough sap in the buckets, the pails are collected and carried to the syrup shack built by my dad, and collected into large containers. After skimming off any dirt, twigs or insects that surface at the top, the maple sap is ready for boiling.

The boil

It takes a lot of time and fuel to boil a large volume of sap into concentrated syrup, and so the process is usually started in the morning. Like most traditional sugarmakers, our family burns wood cut from our own woodlot to boil the sap and evaporate the water content. A large, shallow 40-gallon steel pan sits on top of a wide iron-cast woodstove, both made by my grandfather. Once the fire is going, the raw sap is poured into the pan and the rest of the process is pretty much simply, as my father says, "boil, boil and boil." The smell of the boiling sap is heavenly, and I can stand for minutes with my head in the steam just inhaling the delicious vapours.

As the liquid in the pan goes down through evaporation, more raw sap can be added throughout the day. One good day's pan-full can take twenty-four hours to boil away into syrup, and wood is added to the fire occasionally to maintain the boil. More dirt comes to the top in the foam, and the foam is skimmed off once in a while. A small forty-gallon batch won't be done until the evening, but most batches are just allowed to sit covered up overnight before firing up the stove again in the morning and finishing off the maple syrup.

The syrup

When the sap has been reduced and starts to thicken, a thermometer is added to the mix. As the sap concentrates, the boiling point rises. Finished syrup boils at 7° Fahrenheit above the boiling point of water, and as the temperature of the boiling sap approaches this point, the boiling is carefully watched to prevent burning and overheating. The maple syrup is done when the temperature reaches 218° Fahrenheit — but that's the temperature for our sugarbush, as the boiling point varies with altitude and barometric pressure, so sugarmakers should always check the boiling point of water when they're making syrup and add 7° to find out when their syrup is done.

As soon as the boiling point has been reached, the maple syrup is drained off into large pails through filters made of felt to remove any last suspended particles and to improve the appearance of the syrup. After filtering, we bring the syrup into the house to cool down just a little. The maple syrup is bottled while still warm.

I just brought some home with me, and I can't wait to try it again. Commercial syrups simply don't compare with the real thing — they're usually made with corn syrup, artificial flavours and additives, and only sometimes with a little real maple syrup. I think I'll whip up some of my famous oatmeal apple pancakes this weekend and pour on some fresh real maple syrup. I'll make sure to pass on the recipe.

Mung Beans with Paneer Cheese

Paneer cheese is one of my favorite foods. Soon I will be making my own, but if you don't have the time or inclination, you can easily purchase a block of paneer or a bag of pre-fried cubes at your local Indian grocery store. The following recipe is a flavorful combination of buttery soft mung beans, paneer cheese, tomatoes and spices. It goes very well with subtle rice dishes like Pulao Rice. I've adapted the dish from Lord Krishna's Cuisine by Yamuna Devi.

As I noted in a previous post, this cookbook was essentially responsible for my interest in Indian cooking in the first place. I received it as a gift shortly after becoming a vegetarian, and with the aid of the detailed and easy-to-follow instructions, I familiarized myself with the essentials of Indian cuisine. I highly recommend it for beginners and veteran Indian chefs alike, as there is a wide range of recipes and processes presented by a proven master of Indian cooking.

Mung Beans and Paneer Cheese

Recipe by Lisa Turner Adapted from Lord Krishna's Cuisine: The Art of Indian Vegetarian Cooking Cuisine: Indian Published on April 2, 2007 A flavorful combination of buttery-soft and sweet mung beans, golden-brown fried paneer cheese, tomatoes and spices — a wonderful dish to serve to guests Print this recipe Ingredients: 1 1/4 cups dried whole mung beans 3 1/4 cups water 1 1/2 teaspoons turmeric 3/4 teaspoon cayenne 1/2 teaspoon paprika 1/2 tablespoon brown sugar 1-inch piece fresh ginger, minced or grated 6 tablespoons ghee or oil and butter (2 tablespoons if using pre-fried paneer cheese) 8 to 12 ounces (200 - 300 grams) paneer cheese, cut into 1/2 inch cubes 1 1/2 teaspoons cumin seeds 1/2 teaspoon asafoetida 1 1/2 teaspoons garam masala 1 teaspoon ground coriander 1 teaspoon amchoor (dried mango) powder 2 tomatoes, diced 3 - 4 tablespoons plain yogurt or sour cream 2 teaspoons sea salt juice from 1 lemon 4 tablespoons fresh parsley or coriander, chopped Instructions: Rinse the mung beans and soak for 6 hours or overnight in several inches of water with a little yogurt whey or lemon juice added. Drain and rinse. Bring the 3 1/4 cups of water to a boil in a large saucepan. Add the turmeric, cayenne, paprika, sugar, ginger and 1 tablespoon of the ghee or oil and butter mixture. Add the beans, reduce the heat to low, and partially cover. Gently simmer for 50 to 60 minutes or until the beans are butter-soft but not mashed or broken. Remove from heat. Transfer 1 cup of the beans to a bowl and mash with a fork or potato masher. Return to the pan. Alternately, use a hand blender to mash a small portion of the beans in the pan. If using fresh un-pre-fried paneer, heat 4 tablespoons of the ghee or oil and butter mixture in a large saucepan or wok over medium heat. When hot, add the cheese cubes and stir-fry for about 5 to 10 minutes, constantly turning the cubes to brown them evenly on all sides. As they turn crisp and golden, remove with a slotted spoon and drop them into the cooked beans. If using pre-fried paneer cheese cubes, add directly to the pan of cooked beans. Heat the remaining ghee or oil and butter mixture in a frying pan over medium heat. Toss in the cumin seeds and stir for a few minutes or until they turn brown. Add the asafoetida, amchoor powder, garam masala and coriander, and immediately add the tomatoes. Cook for 8 to 10 minutes or until the tomatoes turn into a thick paste. Pour the tomato mixture into the beans, then add the yogurt or sour cream, lemon juice, salt, parsley, and gently mix./p> Serve hot or warm./p> Makes 6 servings

Quinoa Soup with Corn

This simple soup has long been one of my favourite recipes for quinoa, a nutrient packed and intense flavoured grain that was the staple food in the South American Andes for thousands of years. As a grain, it has no rival for its nutritional value — not only does it have the highest and most complete protein profile of all grains, it has more calcium than milk and is a very good source of lysine, iron, phosphorus, B vitamins and vitamin E. Best of all, its slightly sweet and sour and nutty flavour makes it absolutely delicious, and this easy-to-make soup takes full advantage of all of its goodness.

Quinoa Soup with Corn

3 cups of water or vegetable broth
1/2 cup of quinoa
1/4 - 1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
dash of cumin
dash of turmeric
1/2 teaspoon of celery seed
2 cloves of garlic, finely minced
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 small carrot, diced
1 small stalk of celery, finely chopped
1 cup of fresh of frozen corn
2 tablespoons of chopped parsley or cilantro
2 tablespoons of fresh lemon or lime juice
1 teaspoon of sea salt

Put the quinoa in a fine strainer and rinse well in water water. Many people recommend rubbing the grains together while rinsing to reduce the slight bitterness found in the surface of the quinoa, but unless you're eating it plain I find this step to be unnecessary. Soak the quinoa in the water or broth overnight, where you'll find it starts sprouting amazingly quickly.

In a medium sized pot, bring the quinoa and soaking liquid, spices, celery seed, garlic, onion, carrots and celery to a boil.

Reduce the heat and cook for about 10 minutes.

Add the corn and cook for another 3 minutes.

Next add the parsley or cilantro and cook for another minute.

Remove from the heat and add the lemon or lime juice and the salt.

Can be served hot or cold.