rote grütze on ice cream

Rote grütze has been on my mind for the last seven summers.

My relatives served it to me in Hamburg when I was visiting, and I remember being surprised by the  tart red berries and cataloguing it in my mind as yet another delicious German dessert.

They served it – thick and saucy and full of berries – with a light vanilla sauce.

That is the traditional way to eat rote grütze and I heartily recommend it.

However, I happen to have vanilla ice cream on hand . . . and that led to the revelation that I could put rote grütze on top of ice cream instead of sauce on top of rote grütze.

Rote grütze literally means red groats. Groats, I have learned from extensive research, are any hulled cereal grain. Here, they refer to plump and ripe summertime berries.

You can gather up whatever red (or reddish) berries you like – cherries, raspberries, loganberries, blackberries, strawberries, blueberries, gooseberries – whatever is ripe.

But you must use red currants. Their crunchy seeds and tart flavour lift rote grütze well off the North American palate and transport it over to Deutschland.

Look at these currants. They are so excited to join the rote grütze that they’re actually dancing!

I hear you can also make weisse grütze (white groats) and grüne grütze (green groats), so I also bought some white currants to freeze and use later . . . Once I think of some good white and green fruit to add.

Here is my recipe for rote grütze. Substitute any berries you like for the cherries, raspberries and blueberries, but keep the currants. (Have I made myself clear on the currant issue?) I also used rum because rum and red berries are delicious. (Hallo, rumtopf!)

If you’d like to make a more traditional, thicker pudding instead of a sauce, add one or two extra tablespoons of cornstarch (and water to dissolve it).

I tried to take a good close-up for you, but as you can see, the ice cream could hardly wait to eat it up.

Prost!

rote grütze on ice cream

1 c. red currants

1 c. raspberries

1 c. cherries, pitted and roughly chopped

1 c. blueberries

1/4 c. honey

2 tbsp. lemon juice (one small lemon)

2 tbsp. cornstarch

1 tsp. vanilla

2 tbsp. rum

vanilla ice cream

Put the berries, honey, lemon juice and 1/4 c. water in a medium, heavy-bottomed pot. Set it over medium-low heat and bring it to a boil, stirring often.

Simmer for 5 to 10 minutes, stirring often, until the berries get juicy and soft. (If you’re feeling impatient at this point, you can spend your time bursting a few blueberries on the side of the pot.)

While the berries are cooking, use a small bowl to mix the cornstarch with 1/4 c. cold water. Mix well.

Once the berries are ready, stir in the cornstarch mixture. Keep stirring and simmer for another minute or two, until it has thickened.

Remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla and rum.

Serve immediately over vanilla ice cream or refrigerate until you’re ready for dessert. You can heat it up again at that point if you like, but it’s also lovely cold.

chocolate raspberry horse turds

Yup, you read that right: horse turds.

I was looking through a binder of my great-aunt’s recipes and came across this one from her sister, my late grandmother.

How could I resist?

Especially since it’s summer, it’s awfully hot in our little flat, and this dessert doesn’t require baking.

Ah, those words are like music to my ears. I have been longing to bake cookies for weeks, but the temperature has prevented me. Now, I can make do with horse turds.

I made a few changes, because this dessert comes from a time when it was not only acceptable to name a dessert horse turds, but also when most desserts included canned fruit and graham cracker crumbs. I have a certain bias against graham cracker crumbs and there is far too much fresh fruit to use canned right now.

May I present chocolate raspberry horse turds for your next dinner party? (Which will be slightly less sweltering because you didn’t turn on the oven to make this dessert.)

The brilliant thing about this recipe is that you can do almost anything you want with it. Use graham cracker crumbs if you like them. Use whatever fruit you feel like. Make a new kind of horse turd. If you do experiment, will you tell me what you did? I can envision a whole dessert tray of different kinds of horse turds . . .

And if you don’t feel it proper to call these horse turds with your polite company, what will you call them? In case I ever entertain royalty, it would be good to have another naming option.

A note: You can use either regular or gluten-free chocolate cookies. I used these because I am addicted to their salty, dark chocolate flavour.

chocolate raspberry horse turds

makes 12 horse turds

1 c. whipping cream

1/2 tsp. vanilla

2 tsp. sugar

12 marshmallows, cut into small pieces

1/2 c. raspberries or other fruit

3/4 c. chocolate cookie crumbs (about 1 1/3 c. before they’re crumbled)

Start whipping the cream. As it thickens, add the vanilla and sugar. Whip until it is as stiff as whip cream gets.

Use a bit of whip cream to coat your fingertips, and pull apart the marshmallow pieces. Throw them in and stir to coat them as you try to keep them relatively separate. Refrigerate for one hour.

In the meantime, wash and pat your raspberries dry. Put them in the fridge to stay cool, too.

Grind your cookie crumbs in a food processor, if necessary. (If you don’t have a food processor, put them in a plastic baggie and mash them with the heels of your hands.)

Prepare a cookie sheet with parchment paper or wax paper.

Once the whip cream and marshmallow mixture has been in the fridge for an hour, take it out and carefully fold in the raspberries.

Plop spoonfuls onto your prepared cookie sheet. Use another spoon to liberally sprinkle cookie crumbs over their tops. Refrigerate for 3 hours.

Use a spatula to lift each horse turd onto a plate. Eat with a spoon or dessert fork. Stay cool.

minestrone with summer herbs

This is a pantry soup, but also a herb garden soup.

Here’s how I made it: I looked in my cupboards and fridge, and then wandered out to the back deck to pick some herbs.

What? Those directions aren’t detailed enough for you?

They are in the spirit of minestrone, I think. Minestrone is an Italian soup that’s meant to be a jumble of veggies and beans and, sometimes, pasta.

Luckily, I made some notes as I went, so I can recreate this particular minestrone again. Although the flavour will always change, depending on which herbs are in season.

I am so proud of my eclectic little herb garden this year. For this soup, I used golden creeping marjoram, curly parsley, garlic chives, pineapple sage and spicy basil. You can use almost any herb you like: fresh or dry, depending on the season.

A note: I like to slice garlic instead of mince it. Garlic slices don’t burn as quickly as minces, especially when you’re sautéing them with onion for quite a while.

minestrone with summer herbs

makes 6 to 8 bowls

2 tbsp. olive oil

2 tbsp. butter

1 onion, diced

6 cloves garlic, sliced

4 stalks celery and any attached leaves, sliced

9 c. chicken stock

1/4 - 1/2 c. fresh herbs or 1 – 2 tbsp. dried herbs (a combination of marjoram, parsley, chives, sage, basil, oregano and coriander)

3 carrots, sliced

3 medium tomatoes, diced

19 fl. oz. (540 ml) canned white kidney beans, rinsed and strained

1 c. dry pasta

a rind of parmesan and parmesan to sprinkle on top

Heat a heavy-bottomed pot over medium-low heat. Add the olive oil and butter. Once it has melted together, add the onion, garlic and celery. Sauté until the onion has softened, 10 to 15 minutes.

Add the stock, herbs, carrots, tomatoes and parmesan rind. Bring to a boil.

Simmer until the vegetables are almost tender, 20 to 30 minutes. Add the beans and simmer another 10 minutes.

While the soup is simmering, boil your pasta in a separate pot. Cook until it’s al dente. Strain.

Once the vegetables in the soup are done, throw in the pasta and add salt and pepper to taste.

Fish out the parmesan rind. (It should resemble melting rubber at this point.)

Serve with freshly grated parmesan to sprinkle on top.

a bowl full of jelly

As long as I can remember, loganberry jelly has been my favourite.

I could only have it in the summer and at Christmas time when we went to Vancouver Island to visit my grandparents.

My grandma always had loganberry jelly in tiny baby food jars. (She and granddad liked them in small jars so they could eat different jellies and jams more often.)

My family gawked as I spread extremely thick layers of loganberry jelly on my toast every morning. But I was in heaven, so they let me be.

The loganberry is a cross between a raspberry and a blackberry. Apparently, my great-grandfather planted this loganberry. I’m guessing that would put it somewhere in the 1920s or 1930s.

That loganberry is still growing, on the edge of my grandparents' old garden outside of Courtenay. I visit it when I go up to see my uncle and aunt and cousins who still live on that land. These days, it only produces a few berries, but I still get pretty excited about it.

I know how to make my own loganberry jelly now, so I can have it year-round. My great-aunt Marjorie, my grandma’s sister, learned this jelly recipe from her mother. Marjorie taught me how to make it a few years after my grandma passed away.

This year, my husband and I picked berries and made jelly with our friends Catherine and Guthrie.

We boiled and strained and listened to records and boiled some more . . .

By midnight, we had this gorgeous, ruby red jelly. It tastes as good as it looks.

A note: This recipe looks inexact, but that’s only because you never know how much juice you have until you strain it. Once you strain it, the recipe becomes very exact. Read through the whole recipe first, and you'll have a sense of how much sugar and pectin you’ll need.

loganberry jelly

or raspberry or blackberry jelly

loganberries

water

powdered pectin

sugar

cheesecloth

Pour the loganberries into a giant pot. Add just enough water to come about halfway up to the height of the loganberries in the pot. (For raspberry jelly, you can add enough water to almost cover the raspberries.)

Bring to a boil, stirring every so often. Simmer until the berries are mushy and their juice is coming out, about half an hour.

While they are simmering, set up your straining station. Our family tradition goes like this: balance a broom handle across two chairs, which are back to back. Leave enough room for a giant bowl to sit on the floor in between the chairs. Cover the floor in between the chairs with newspaper to catch any splatters. Place the giant bowl on the newspaper.  Above the giant bowl, use the cheesecloth to make a sling that is at least three layers of cheesecloth thick. Knot the cheesecloth onto the broom handle twice. The empty cheesecloth sling then sits suspended over the bowl, ready for your berry mixture.

Once the berries are done simmering, very carefully pour or ladle them into the sling. (It’s good to have someone helping you at this point.) Leave them to drip for one to twelve hours.

Once the juice has dripped through, throw out the cheesecloth sling with its dried-up berries. Measure the juice as you return it to the pot.

Look at your pectin instructions and stir in the amount of pectin you need for the amount of juice you have. (For example, we had 16 cups of juice and used 4 packages of pectin.) Bring the juice to a boil.

While you’re waiting for the juice to boil, measure one cup of sugar for each cup of juice into a bowl. Once the juice is boiling, pour in the sugar and stir often. Bring it back to a rolling boil. Boil for 4 minutes. (For raspberry jelly, only boil 1 minute.)

Pour into sterilized jars and can.

honey orange cream

Cream cheese.

I love you, but sometimes I neglect you.

I pick you out, I bring you home, I use three tablespoons of you for a recipe, and then I desert you in the wilds of the fridge.

I let you get pushed farther and farther in, until you are finally wedged against the back, hidden behind jars of peanut butter and a more interesting jam.

But I want to change our relationship. I don’t want you to languish in the back of the fridge until you’ve reached your best-before date. I want to appreciate every last spoonful of you.

Will you trust me to change my ways? Because I’ve created this honey orange cream just for you. I can whip it up easily on a Saturday morning, while the crepes are cooking, the coffee beans are grinding, the bacon is sizzling, and the blueberries are bubbling.

You are so rich and creamy in this sauce, so essentially perfect for crepes or waffles or pancakes. Please, trust me again.

A note: You can easily adapt this recipe to whatever amount of cream cheese you have left over in the fridge. I’m sure you could also use lemon or even grapefruit instead of orange zest. The cream is very rich – a little goes a long way towards breakfast happiness.

honey orange cream

serves 4 to 6

4 oz. (125 g.) cream cheese

zest of half an orange

2 tbsp. milk

1 tbsp. honey

1 tsp. vanilla

Scrape the cream cheese, add the orange zest and pour the milk into a small pot on medium-low heat.

Stir every so often as it warms up and the cream cheese softens to mix with the milk. Turn the heat down to low.

Stir in the honey and vanilla. Stir often until it is runny enough to dribble over your breakfast fare.

chilli pasta

You know something will be a hit when a family has a code word for it. In this case, “CP.” Apparently, the kids get too excited otherwise. Even the two year old says, “Chilli pata! Chilli pata!”

This recipe comes from England originally, via Nova Scotia, and has now winged its way across Canada to land on the West Coast with me. Many thanks to my friend Leanne from Chester Basin, N.S. for passing it along. She got the recipe from her sister Denise, who lives in Plymouth, England. Leanne reports that every Tuesday is chilli pasta night for Denise’s family.

There are two secrets to this recipe: chilli pepper and back bacon. The two make a smooth and smoky alliance in this tomato sauce. I think they were destined for each other.
 

Speaking of back bacon, who knew how many names there are for it? Apparently, it’s sometimes called Canadian bacon or Irish bacon in the U.S., and can be called peameal bacon in Canada. I wonder what it’s called in the U.K.?

This is the ultimate weeknight dinner recipe. Throw a few things in a pot, let it simmer, boil up some pasta, grate a bit of cheese . . . and be astounded by how delicious it all is.

Chilli pepper and back bacon: a happy marriage indeed.

A note: You could put in less soup or no soup and still make a great sauce. I like the soup because it makes the sauce creamier.

Another note: This makes quite a runny sauce, which I like to coat all the noodles. However, if you prefer a thicker sauce, try straining the canned tomatoes and/or adding less soup.

chilli pasta 

serves 4 adults

1/2 lb. (230 g.) back bacon or "Canadian" bacon, chopped

1 tbsp. olive oil

1 onion, diced

3 cloves garlic, sliced thinly

1 1/5 c. mushrooms, sliced

28 oz. (800 ml.) good quality diced tomatoes

2 c. cream of tomato soup (less from a can where it’s condensed)

1/2 to 1 green chilli pepper or jalapeño pepper, minced finely

salt and pepper, to taste

pasta

parmesan or asiago cheese, grated

Heat heavy-bottomed pan over medium-low heat.

Add oil, then bacon. Stir and add onion, garlic and mushrooms. Cook until onion has softened.

Add chilli or jalapeño pepper, diced tomatoes and tomato soup.

Cover and simmer on low for about 30 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.

In the meantime, make the pasta and grate the cheese.

Once the sauce is ready, toss it with the pasta. Sprinkle cheese on top.

sweet oatcakes

Ever since I left Halifax nine years ago, I have missed eating Mrs P’s oatcakes. They are crumbly, almost sandwich-like things: round oatcakes stuck together with peanut butter icing and dipped in chocolate. They are the perfect thing to eat, sitting at a coffee shop downtown, trying to study, but actually thinking about where life will go.

Every time I go back to Halifax, I search out Mrs P’s oatcakes. If one coffee shop doesn’t carry them anymore, no, I can’t stay, I’m off to the next. A visit isn’t complete without a chocolate peanut butter oatcake (or seafood chowder, for that matter).

But those visits just aren’t enough.

I longed for my own oatcake source, and I realized Mrs P was probably never going to expand from her small bakery on Herring Cove Road outside Halifax to supply coffee shops in Victoria.

It was all up to me.

A chocolate peanut butter oatcake is a serious thing, so I did my research and came up with these. They loosely follow a recipe that’s all over the Internet for “Cape Breton Oatcakes.”

I made a few changes to make them better suit my memory, and added the chocolate and peanut butter icing, à la Mrs P. They’re easy to make – almost like making a pie with oats the way you cut in the butter and shortening.

Without the chocolate and the peanut butter icing, these oatcakes are pleasantly sweet, but not overly so. In fact, I’m already looking forward to making a savoury variation, probably with cheese and chipotle.

If you’re ever in Halifax, I’d highly recommend you find Mrs P’s oatcakes. But if you’re not, make these.

Mrs P, thank you for the inspiration. Bless you for coming up with the idea of putting oatcakes, peanut butter and chocolate together.

A note for gluten-free people:

This recipe will only work for you if you can tolerate oats. Make sure you find oats that were grown in an uncontaminated field and processed in an uncontaminated factory. My favourite oats come from Cream Hill Estates.

chocolate peanut butter oatcakes

bakes 60 wee oatcakes

2 c. rolled oats

2/3 c. oat flour

1 1/3 c. wheat flour

            Or gluten-free flours:

2/3 c. sweet white sorghum flour

            1/3 c. tapioca starch

            1/3 c. sweet rice flour

            1 1/2 tsp. xanthan gum or guar gum

1 1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

3/4 c. brown sugar

1/2 c. butter

1/2 c. vegetable shortening

up to 1/2 c. cold water

Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Line a cookie pan (or two) with parchment paper.

Pulse the rolled oats in the food processor a few times to break them up.

Stir the pulsed oats, oat flour, wheat or gluten-free flours, baking powder and salt together. Stir in the brown sugar.

Use a pastry blender or two knives to cut in the butter and vegetable shortening. Mix well.  Add a bit of cold water and stir together. Keep adding water until it holds together and isn’t crumbly (but also isn’t sticky).

Use your hands to spread and pat the dough onto a piece of parchment paper. Make it about 1/3 to 1/2 inch thick. With a butter knife, cut squares. Then cut each square diagonally in half to make triangles.

Place triangles on prepared cookie pan. They can be quite close together, as the cakes don’t expand as much as puff up while they bake.

Bake for 7 to 8 minutes, until their edges are just golden.

peanut butter icing

1/4 c. smooth peanut butter

1 1/2 c. icing or powdered sugar

1 tbsp. butter

1 tsp. vanilla

up to 2 tbsp. milk

+ 4 to 5 oz. dark chocolate for drizzling

Whip the peanut butter, icing sugar, butter and vanilla together. Slowly add the milk until you have a consistency that is easy to spread, but will also harden well.

assembling the oatcakes

Once the oatcakes are cooled, melt the chocolate in the top of a double boiler (or in a metal bowl suspended over boiling water).

Spread each oatcake with an untidy dollop of peanut butter icing.

Use a fork to drizzle chocolate over the peanut butter icing.

Chill the oatcakes in the fridge to allow the icing and chocolate to harden.

behold the small white bean

Meet the small white bean.

See how shy it is, trying to make its getaway? It slumps down to the bottom of the bowl, trying to evade my spoon. But I will catch it because it is delicious.

Small white bean, you say? What kind of small white bean?

Well . . . It came in a package labelled, “small white beans” and my mother-in-law’s soup recipe calls for “little white beans.”

And that’s all the information I’ve got. It is a shy bean, you see.

However, I am a journalist by profession, so I looked it up and have determined – fairly certainly – that it is a small white navy bean.

Whatever it is, it makes one of the most lovely, silky soups I’ve ever eaten.

This recipe comes from my Mennonite mother-in-law Loretta. It’s called “Ripe Bean Soup” – which must be a translation from Low German that didn’t quite work out in English. Because this recipe starts with dried beans.

Whatever it really means, it works. And it’s easy. The only trick is starting it a couple hours before dinnertime. Once you throw the beans and pork hock in the pot, you're pretty much done.

The small white beans make the soup unusually smooth and the smoked pork hock makes it incredibly tasty. You'll be glad you met the small white bean.

A note: Don’t be intimidated by that pork hock, if you haven’t used one before. I found a local smoked pork hock at the grocery store – it was less than $5. This is a Mennonite soup, so it must be economical!

ripe bean soup

makes 6 bowls

2 1/2 c. dried small white beans

2 tbsp. butter

12 – 14 c. water

1 1/2 – 2 lb. pork hock

1 onion, chopped finely

1/3 c. parsley, minced

1 tsp. salt

pepper to taste

1 tbsp. vinegar

1 – 2 tbsp. sour cream

Fill a big, heavy pot with the small white beans, butter, 12 cups of water and pork hock. (If you are a bit picky about fatty pieces of pork hock, you can carefully cut off the fat and skin, and just use the meat and bone in your soup.)

Bring to a boil and then reduce the heat until the stock simmers away. Cover. Let simmer for about 2 hours, until the beans are tender.

Half an hour before you’d like to eat, throw in the onion, parsley, salt, and some freshly ground pepper. Simmer. Part way through the cooking, taste and decide if you should add the other 2 cups of water and more salt. You might not need to.

Once the soup is ready and the beans are soft and splitting, stir in the vinegar and sour cream.

Garnish with a piece of parsley if you’re feeling fancy.