The Great Gingerbread House Bakeoff

Well Christmas is fast approaching, and in keeping with the true meaning of Christmas we decided to make a gingerbread house. Our good friends Daniel and Leanne were also keen to make a house so we got together and made gingerbread houses last weekend.

Daniel and Leanne decided to go the yummy lots of candy approach, while T and I went for the gingerbread replica of a turn of the 20th century Rocky Mountains log cabin.

I don't have a lot to say about it other than it was a fun activity, so I will just give a bit of a commentary on some of the photos.

First off there was the attempt at assembling the pieces. This didn't go so well, with big gaps between pretty much every wall. So we pulled it apart and tried again with another kind of icing


This worked much better and we managed to assemble the house with only a few gaps.

Daniel and Leanne chose a fancier design for their house

Next came the decorations. We chose to put chocolate rocks for the bottom half and then pretzel logs for the upper half, and a almond shingled roof mostly covered in snow
The path was made of root beer and latte jelly beans.



Now some of the details...
Under the exposed shingle section was a pile of snow that had fallen off the roof

A snowboarding gingerbread man was going down one side of the roof


A snow angel was in the snow on the ground next to the Sasquatch footprints


Santa was stuck in upside down in the chimney, and Rudolph was trying to help him out


Stained glass windows were made of crushed boiled candy, and when a tea-light candle is put inside it all glows.
Next year we plan on making a scale replica of Edinburgh Castle. Stay tuned.

Birthday Party

Well it is that time of year again. The time of year that is almost a month after my birthday. So I figure I should write a bit about what we did to celebrate the start of a new decade.

On my birthday we went out for a special celebratory dinner at Bishop's restaurant (I blogged about it a few years back when I went with Roz and Reuben just before leaving Canada). Once again it was a mighty fine meal. I especially loved the chantarelle mushroom soup that I had as a starter. It was super tasty, even T liked it, and she doesn't normally like mushrooms. I won't dwell any longer on that dining experience in this post, as there was another birthday celebration the following weekend that I happen to have a few photos of, and my dear wife is dying for me to blog about it.

Being the big 30 this year I decided to go all out and have a big party, so we invited Daniel and Leanne over for dinner.

First up we had a brie wheel baked in filo pastry with red pepper jelly and caramelised onions. It was a recipe I spotted in a Yaletown newspaper and looked pretty good in the article. The finished product also tasted rather good too. So a good start to the evening there.

Next up was a watermelon gazpacho. I had made this in New Zealand for a family gathering dinner sort of thing. I had very fond memories of this soup, but it seems the watermelon we bought may have been a little less flavourful than the the NZ version was. The soup still tasted OK though (well I thought it did, I can't speak for the others present), it just wasn't as good as last time.

Next up was a simple shrimp cocktail. I love shrimp, so I really enjoyed this course. The Jamie Oliver recipe I followed had toasted breadcrumbs to sprinkle on top. I had never seen that addition, but tried it anyway. It added a lovely crunch to the otherwise not so crunchy salad. Good job Jamie for adding that to the recipe, it is a winner of an idea.

Next up was a favourite recipe of T's from an Indian cookbook we bought a few months back. The cookbook is from the owner of Vij's, a very highly regarded Indian restaurant here in Vancouver. T and I went there for dinner a month or so after we were married, and it remains one of our favourite dining experiences. The dish we made was the one that I had at the restaurant, Lamb Popsicles with a Fenugreek cream curry sauce. The lamb cutlets are marinated in white wine, mustard salt and pepper and then pan fried. The sauce is not particularly good for you but oh so tasty. It is largely cream and oil, with salt, paprika, cayenne pepper, tumeric, garlic, lemon juice and fenugreek leaves adding the yummy flavour. We served this with a potato galette, that we made a bit healthier than the recipe by cutting back on the cream and butter.

The next course was a baked ham, with green beans. The ham was called a spiral cut ham, something I had never seen until Christmas in Arkansas last year. It is a half leg of ham that is partially cut already, so carving it is really easy. Also because it is semi-sliced the glaze is able to get inside the ham a bit more. To my shame I went for the easy option and just used the packet of glaze that came with the ham. On reading the list of ingredients later I have decided never to do that again. It had about 10 different forms of sugar and not much else, and didn't really taste all that great either.

For the final course, dessert we of course had to have a birthday cake. Well kind of. It was actually a traditional French wedding cake, called a croquembouche, or a pyramid of filled profiteroles as I knew it. In the lead up to my birthday T was asking what kind of cake I wanted, saying she would make whatever I wanted. I have vague memories of Mum making one of these pyramid shaped towers years ago, and I seem to recall that it took ages to make all the little cream puffs. I also recall really liking the toffee that holds the tower together. So it was a combination of wanting to give T a bit of a challenge and wanting that toffee that led me to choose a croquembouche cake. T did a wonderful job. I even gave her an easy way out option and said she could buy the cream puffs if she wanted, but she would have nothing of it. And the filling could have just been whipped cream, but she went the extra mile and made a custard creme filling. The toffee was interesting. We are blaming our stove. The first time we tried making it, somehow we must have heated it too long or something because it went from being a liquid to being flaky sugar again. So we had to try all over again, this time using a different element and a slightly higher heat. It worked much better, but was still a very clear colour, not at all how I had pictured it. Once the pyramid was assembled we were supposed to make the leftover toffee in to spun sugar, using two forks. Perhaps the instructions were not all that clear, or perhaps I just did it all wrong, but either way the spun sugar didn't really work out. The end result still was very tasty though. Sorry, but I didn't get a photo of it before we all tucked in and devoured T's handy work.

Monster Repellent

So I was looking through my cookbooks the other day and came across a very interesting sounding recipe. It was for a repellent for those nasty monsters that chase people at night. When I saw it I thought I just had to share it with y'all, just in case it may come in handy for you some day.

Monster Repellent (Repels even the scariest monsters)

1/8 cup vinegar (the smellier the better. This is because monsters can't stand the smell of vinegar, it makes them sneeze)
1/8 cup cooking oil (this is to make them slip over if they try chasing you)
1 tsp chili flakes or pepper flakes (this will make their mouths burn, and their eyes water if they rub their eyes)

Mix all ingredients together in a small bowl or cup and place by your bed.

Well I hope that helps some of you. Let me know your results; it has worked well for Tiffany.

Happy Birthday to T

So, July is a very special month in the Palmer household. It is the month where we celebrate that my darling wife is now yet another year older. I hear it is inappropriate to mention a lady's age, so I will just say that she used to be 32. To celebrate this passing of age, we had a quiet night at home, with T's favourite meal, Fettuccine Alfredo.

Later in the month however we had a right shindig with friends. Well, we had friends over for dinner, a game, and a birthday cake. It was my first attempt at making a birthday cake, and only my second ever attempt at a cake, so I was keen to document each step. Unfortunately I forgot to photograph a few of the steps, so will have to just show you a few of them.

The cake was a simple sponge cake, with milk chocolate mousse filling, and a cream cheese icing on the outside, not exactly what I would choose, but it was not my cake.

First off I made the sponge cakes (a logical place to start I'm sure you will agree). Once they had cooled I sliced them through the middle so there were 4 layers of cake.
Next step was to mix up the chocolate mousse. While that chilled a bit in the fridge I made the simple cinnamon syrup. This was just sugar, water and cinnamon sticks. The syrup was supposed to help the cake maintain a certain moistness.Once the syrup was chilled too I started the assembly phase. Each layer of the cake was brushed with the syrup before being liberally covered in the chocolate mousse. Then it was back in to the fridge to allow the mousse to set up a bit.

The next day was icing day. The chocolate mousse had set quite nicely, so the cake was able to stand quite stably. The original plan was to make a cake in the shape of Dug the dog from the animated movie Up. However I decided that a cake in the shape of an animated dog was hardly appropriate for someone of T's age, so I went for a simply iced cake with raspberries on top.

The cake was a bit on the sweet side, but tasted alright. Rudy seemed to enjoy it well enough, he managed to polish off a rather sizable slice.

Bread, bread and more bread

Well April and May have been all about bread here in the Palmer household. It all started when I noticed a growing buzz on the Internet around a bread recipe featured on the New York Times a year or two back. The appealing part of the recipe was that it required very little work and resulted in a fantastic looking (and apparently fantastic tasting) loaf. I had first come across this recipe last year some time but I lacked an important item used in the recipe, a heavy pot. That all changed however when T and I took a trip to Seattle and popped in to the outlet mall on the way. There we came across a Le Creuset store, and they were having a sale too! Well it didn't take too much convincing to get T to let me buy one, I just had to let her choose the colour. So we are now happy owners of a bright yellow Le Creuset cast iron/enamel pot. I'm not sure how we are going to get this heavy thing back to New Zealand, but I'm sure we will find a way.

So now that the missing pot was not a factor we could get on to baking wonderful home made bread whenever we wanted.... so long as we thought about it 20 hours ahead of time. All you have to do is mix up the dough to combine, then let it sit out for 18 hours, then give it a quick shape and rest it for another 2 hours before baking in a very hot oven in our yellow pot with the lid on for the first 20 minutes or so.


So here are a few photos of the no knead bread...


The bread after the initial 18 hour rise


Fresh out of the oven (and our cool yellow pot in the background


And just moments before it was devoured.


While looking at websites with the no knead bread I came across an interesting recipe for German Pancakes. So for dessert one night we decided to give it a try. We have since made it a couple more times. It is super quick and easy and looks really cool when it is in the oven puffing up.



Now our no knead bread is pretty jolly good, if I do say so myself. But when my sister-in-law Sharon mentioned there was a recipe for bread in 5 minutes a day I just had to look in to it more. She had just received a cookbook called "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day", and they have a rather useful website too. T had just joined the library and after a quick check we realised that the library has several copies of the book, so we put a request in for one and within a week I had a copy of the book in my hands. Oh the excitement. The whole deal with this technique is you mix up a big batch of dough - a rather wet dough - in a big bucket or container and then just let it sit in the fridge until you want to use some. Then you cut off a chunk of dough, shape it and let it rise before baking it in a pretty hot oven. There are a bunch of different types of dough in the book. So far we have tried the basic white dough, a peasant loaf, a brioche (very yummy), a challah dough (similar to brioche but not as rich), an olive oil dough, and now today we mixed up a Deli-Style Rye. Hmm, that is a lot of bread for less than a month, especially considering that we have made the white one at least 2 times, and each batch of dough makes about 4 small loaves.

So far we have not managed to make a basic white loaf that competes with the NY times no knead bread recipe, but the versatility of these doughs is particularly handy. We have made many basic loaves, a few pizzas, pita bread, naan bread, baguettes, cinnamon buns, brioche loaf, monkey bread (sooooo good). The brioche dough was particularly nice, it made the most delicious cinnamon buns, and they were not even as bad for us as the recipe in the book (we didn't make them too gooey with sugar and butter etc.). We undid all that being good a few days later though with the monkey bread. Little balls of dough dipped in butter then rolled in cinnamon and sugar, stacked in a loaf pan and baked to be a loaf that pulls apart. To help overcome the guilt we have had to start going to the gym in our building. Anyway we are very much enjoying this new bread technique and now own our very own copy of the book. And another great side effect is I now have even more food stuff to take photos of. So far the loaves all look very "rustic", but they are meant to be, so don't laugh at my wonky baguette please.

Cooking with T

So now that the wedding blog is out of the way I can get back to the food blogs. Most of my life isn't all that interesting to write about, so if you want any new material to read here then you will just have to put up with food stuff.

It figure T wouldn't mind me adding the odd photo of her crazy cooking skills too, so from time to time I will throw some of her culinary masterpieces in too.

Right, well I had better be quick with this. I have some cinnamon rolls in the oven and hope to have this blog all done before they are done. (Hopefully I will find time to do a bread blog soon and will be sure to give a cinnamon roll review as part of that.)

Slow Baked Salmon

OK first up there is the slow baked salmon. This was a neat looking idea from a blog I have been looking at a bit lately called steamykitchen. It is a pretty entertaining read at times and the photography is really good. The dish simply involved laying the salmon on a bed of sliced oranges and onions and baking it at a very low temperature. The salmon tasted pretty good, but the oranges were sadly lacking in flavour and juice, and the onions didn't really do it for me. The asparagus was wonderful though as was my new favourite vegetable, broccolini. A friend of T's (Kate) who was staying with us a few weeks back introduced us to it and I just can't get enough of it. YUUUUMMMMMM,

Bacon Wrapped Halibut with Asparagus and Lemon Mayo

This has been T's favourite meal I have made her so far (and a really simple meal too). The lemon mayo was nice and tangy, but the asparagus and fish worked well to offset the tanginess (just like Jamie Oliver said it would).

Oh well the cinnamon rolls are ready now, so I guess I didn't meet my target. Still I am have the other photos uploaded already so may as well continue.

Satay Chicken Curry

My wonderful wife made this for dinner one night recently, and she didn't use a box. It was a kind of Thai inspired chicken curry. It was scrumptous. I even enjoyed taking it to work for lunch the next day as well.

Tandori Chicken with Sour Cream and Chive Asparagus and Perogies

Yet another T creation, this time she still didn't use a box, but made good use of a bag of perogies from the frozen food section of the supermarket. As you may be able to tell there is plenty of asparagus around here in Vancouver at the moment and we have been making the most of it. I can't believe I disliked this wonderful vegetable for so many years.

Well that will have to do for today. The cinnamon rolls are smelling jolly good and I can't wait a minute longer. So I am not even going to bother spell checking this blog entry, you can just live with any poor spelling or grammatical errors that may have made their way in.

After a long break....

I am back!!!!

Apparently having T back in North America was even more of a distraction than she was when she was in PNG, as I kept finding my time disappearing and the blog was sadly neglected. Of course there was 3 weeks in Arkansas at Christmas, so that took me well out of my routine, and then another 10 days in Arkansas in February preparing for our wedding, then there was the wedding itself closely followed by the honeymoon. So really, I just simply have not had time to update all y'all with the goings on in my life and in my kitchen. Now that we are back in Vancouver and getting back in to a regular routine maybe the frequency will pick up.

So, I was discussing with T all the requests I have been getting to update my blog, and she made it quite clear that there would be trouble if my next entry was about what I have been cooking. Apparently it is important to her that I write something about the wedding and our honeymoon. So to keep the peace I will break from tradition and not write about my culinary adventures this time. All that said I will now start this entry again.

The Wedding, the blog post.

In case any of you have not heard the news yet, on 28 Feb I was married to the lovely Tiffany (more commonly known simply as T). The wedding took place in Hot Springs, Arkansas, the 8th most dangerous city in the US [edit: later research has shown it is the 13th most dangerous metropolitan area] , but thankfully through meticulous planning of security we managed to dodge all the bullets.

I flew down 9 days before the big day on American Airlines, and amazingly my luggage arrived with me this time (my bag was lost twice on my last trip to Arkansas, once on the way and then again on the way back to Vancouver). By that stage most of the wedding had been planned already, and there were just small details to sort out and organise. I was very supportive of T in this. I don't think I got in the way too much and just let her do what she needed to do. I'm sure I helped her laugh at the odd things stress was making her do. In between the organising we did manage to make a trip to Little Rock to watch the NZ Maori women's rugby 7's team play against the US women's 7's team. It was great to finally get to see a game of rugby again. But I digress, that is not really wedding related so much.

On the Sunday my family started arriving, starting with my parents who had just been on a cruise in the Caribbean. Then my brothers arrived with their wives on the Monday (sadly Craig's bag didn't get there for a few more days). The next few days involved showing the family around Hot Springs, including several trips to "the Walmart". I think we were averaging at least 2 Walmart trips a day. My family seemed to take great delight in mocking my navigational skills. I would like to point out that some of the directions I was given were not entirely accurate. The 1 hour drive from T's sister's place to the house were staying at managed to become a 2 1/2 hour drive, but at least I found the way eventually. By the end I thought I knew my way around pretty well. As it turned out I didn't, and we got a little lost trying to make our way to the church, oops.

The wedding itself went very well indeed. I made it there, so did T. We got married. A smashing time was had by all. T would really like me to tell you all about how I felt on the day. How seeing her walking down the isle took my breath away etc. but I think I know my readers well enough to know that they wouldn't want to read that kind of sappy stuff. If by any chance I am wrong, then feel free to visit T's blog, I'm sure she will update it soon or she will be in big trouble :)

I would like to point out a few very memorable things about the day though. First off, the wedding cake. This was an area I was did get involved in during the planning of the wedding. I didn't want a typical white wedding cake, and I knew T well enough to know she probably wouldn't want one either. So I had done a bit of a search on the internet for cakes and found that I really liked the topsy turvy style of cake, where each level of the cake is at an angle. One such cake I saw had a cute car on top with a road leading down the cake. We both loved this idea and totally stole it, but our one is way better (ok maybe I am a little biased). We even had little signposts down the road for the 4 countries that have been such big parts of our lives, USA, Canada, PNG and New Zealand.


The next memorable part of the day I would like to mention was the weather, and especially the weather during our photo session outside the bathhouses in downtown Hot Springs. It was freezing, so much in fact that it was snowing, making it rather cold. Fortunately I had a nice warm suit jacket on so I was ok. T on the other hand was a bit cold, but I'm sure she has learned a valuable lesson, when going out in the snow wear long sleeves.

Throughout the time my family were in Hot Springs a favourite passtime was looking for a good cup of coffee, a task that proved difficult. The store that looked most promising was unfortunately closed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, leading us to wonder how they managed to stay in business at all. As it so happened they were open on the wedding day while we were getting our photos done, so we stopped in at the end of the photo session. I now know where to go if I am ever in Hot Springs and feel the urge to have a decent cup of coffee. It was really very nice.

There are copyright issues stopping me from posting our official photos on the blog, but I can give a link to the photographers website where there is a highlight gallery. We are both very happy with the photos and are looking forward to getting our album printed. But in case you are not feeling inclined to follow that link, I will post a few other photos that friends took at the wedding.