Saviolo
Saviolo's JournalOld Fashioned Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe
More holiday baking! This recipe is based on the old Toll House recipe that used to be on the back of the package of chips. The recipe changed years ago to be easier to measure and scale, but the cookies weren't as nice! This one is adapted from the earlier recipe, and we've just added some toffee chips. If you can find the Skor branded toffee chips, I definitely recommend them, 'cause they're amazing buttery toffee. If you can't, you can just break up any kind of nice hard toffee.
Snickerdoodle Cookie Recipe
The time for holiday baking is coming, and we realized we hadn't done many cookie videos. We don't eat a lot of sweets or anything, because neither of us have much of a sweet tooth, but we do still like the occasional treat like homemade cookies. Snickerdoodles are sort of an old school recipe, but they are really delicious. They've got a slight sour tang to them from the use of tartaric acid (or cream of tartar) as part of the leavening. You can usually find this ingredient at any grocery store either in the herbs/spices rack or in the "baking needs" aisle.
A couple of important notes: Don't overmix the dough, as this will leave your cookies kind of tough. Don't let it sit too long once it has been mixed. You'll want to get it wrapped up and into the fridge pretty quickly because the baking powder will interact with the cream of tartar and reduce the amount of rise you get. Don't handle the dough too much when it's warm. You'll want to get it nice and chilled in the fridge before you start rolling it into balls and rolling them in the cinnamon sugar. Also, you can very easily add other spices into the sugar mixture, like clove/nutmeg/ginger, to make these into pumpkin spice Snickerdoodles.
Homemade Asian Inspired Tuna Tartare Recipe
We got our hands on some stunning sushi-quality medium fat tuna, so we decided to make a tuna tartare out of it. Tartare usually refers to something like beef, but tuna tartare is a staple at a lot of higher end restaurants as a delicious appetizer or amuse-bouche. Unlike other raw fish dishes like ceviche or poke, tartare does not cure or marinate the fish in an acidic liquid like lime juice. Please make sure that if you're making this dish that you are using sushi-grade fish, which has been flash frozen and specially handled to make it safer for raw consumption, and also please don't keep leftovers hanging around! It should be eaten within 24 hours of making it.
I know some people have a hard time with raw fish, but this dish is just so delicious. It is lightly seasoned but full of amazing accent flavours. One thing we used that you won't have on hand is the calamondin hot sauce that we're in the process of making. You can replace that with a little dollop of any kind of hot sauce that you'd like. A bit of Tabasco or a tiny amount of Frank's Red Hot would be a lovely spicy accent along with a little dash of lemon or lime juice for a citrus zing. And if you're not into making the chips (deep frying is a pain, I know!), then serve this with nice little crackers or even just potato chips. It would probably even go decently well with something like ketchup chips or maybe even salt and vinegar.
Quick and Easy Spicy Mixed Vegetable Pickles - Escabeche Recipe
It's getting to the end of fresh veggie season here in Toronto, so it's time to start preserving some of that freshness for the cold months! This is a Mexican style spicy mixed pickle, and something you'd sometimes see at a really nice Mexican restaurant. It's the sort of thing they'd bring to your table as a starter along with chips and salsa while you're deciding what to order. This is probably more common in the US, I've definitely had that sort of thing happen to us at places in Texas, but not here in Southern Ontario.
This is a pretty traditional mix of veggies for a pickle like this, but you can make some changes to the veggies as well. Some include onion (even red onion, but be prepared for everything to change colour), and there are a bunch of different things you could add for variety. If you want to control the spiciness, you can remove the seeds from the jalapenos. This is not a fermented pickle, it's more of a quick pickle or refrigerator pickle. The solution is both too acidic and too salty for there to be much in the way of fermentation, but that's just fine, the brine we use here is more like a marinade. Typically we would say this pickle is optimal for eating after a couple of weeks in the fridge. The veggies have absorbed a lot of the brine and may be a little floppy, but still crunchy. Some people prefer to eat this after just a couple of days, it's really whatever you prefer!
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Gender: MaleHometown: Ottawa, Ontario
Home country: Canada
Current location: Toronto, Ontario
Member since: Wed Oct 29, 2008, 04:34 PM
Number of posts: 3,283
