Food Matters – March is Nutrition Month

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Don Genova
Health Canada illustration

Health Canada illustration

March is Nutrition Month in Canada. That means a lot of messaging being sent out encouraging Canadians to eat healthy, and even a contest designed to help families come up with award-winning nutritious recipes. But does the messaging work? Are we changing our eating habits?

This month, eating healthy can result in fabulous prizes. That’s one way Health Canada and the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation are encouraging healthy eating with the Eat Well Recipe Contest. You can submit a favourite family recipe to win prizes, and the grand prize is a family cooking session with Chef Christine Cushing, and you get a two-minute segment of fame with a video made of the grand prize family cooking session. Deadline is Saturday, March 8th at midnight, so enter soon!

What I do like in this year’s message is the emphasis on family activities and education surrounding food. Here are some Health Canada suggestions: Plan meals together. That can help with valuable life skills such as organizing and budgeting. Kids can check flyers for healthy foods on sale, help write the grocery list, or put together a folder of favourite recipes.

Turn grocery shopping into a family field trip, I like that, especially if it includes going to a farmers’ market.

And, Get your kids into the kitchen. Younger kids can measure ingredients, mix, pour and stir. Have a pizza night where everyone makes their own mini pizzas, of course with health toppings.

All great suggestions but I think it’s going at the concept in the wrong direction. These suggestions have the parents imparting the knowledge of healthy food to the kids. What if the parents don’t have the knowledge to begin with? And I would suggest that in our current demographics it’s younger people who may actually have more knowledge of what a healthy food is than their parents do.  We’re within a couple of generations of parents who didn’t necessarily learn how to cook, what healthy eating really is, and how to spend their money in the best way to give their kids a healthy diet. All you have to do is look at our supermarkets and all the processed food that ends up in our shopping carts.

Is the food shopping driven by the parents, or by the demands of their children? That is the $64 question. Kids who are actually learning about nutrition at school will modify their parents shopping choices in one way, while parents may be driven by convenience needed in a busy life, OR their kids may be influencing by advertising, there are many more commercials on TV for frozen pizzas and fast food chains than there are for broccoli and potatoes. I know in my own family that when my niece was younger and learning about nutrition, she was constantly criticizing my poor sister and her shopping choices, because my niece was the one reading all the labels. I really do believe that it’s the younger generation that will make the difference here, as they have done with reusing and recycling, for example.

Healthy Harvest Tomato and Basil Sauce

Healthy Harvest Tomato and Basil Sauce

I try not to give into convenience too much, but that’s where label reading comes in handy. This week I bought some fresh roasted chicken tortelloni from Safeway’s Open Nature brand, and a jar of Healthy Harvest pasta sauce. Both with good flavour, a very short list of ingredients, no artificial ingredients, and the sauce makers claim the tomatoes are put into the jar within 48 hours of being harvested. While the water was boiling and the sauce warming, I made a salad from fresh greens and veggies, dressed it with olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. That’s it. Dinner made in less time that it would take to drive to a fast food restaurant, wait in the drive-through and drive home.

What about when you are dining out? Should restaurants be ordered to put calorie counts on their menus, as has happened in some jurisdictions and is being considered in Ontario right now? I’m in favour of the voluntary posting of calories, or the idea of checking online with an app or website. Mandatory posting seems to be a little draconian…where do you draw the line? Fast food restaurants only? Mid-range chains? You probably don’t want to know how many calories are in that cream sauce you love at your favourite French restaurant. Here in BC the government implemented the Informed Dining program in 2011. It’s a voluntary program where restaurants taking part put an Informed Dining logo on their menu and then you can request the nutrition info, which could be a brochure, a poster, or an insert in the menu, along with info on how many calories you should actually be consuming in a day and how much sodium, so you get some perspective.

Ken Stefanson 1937-2014

Ken Stefanson 1937-2014

RIP Ken Stefanson.  Some of you will remember Ken Stefanson, the Gabriola Gourmet Garlic guy, he passed away during heart surgery last week. I have featured him on my radio show and in this space a few times over the years, and many people would have known him as a very warm and gregarious vendor at many farmers’ markets on Vancouver Island over the years. Ken was my garlic mentor who advised me that in order to get the best harvest, I needed to plant my garlic by the light of the full moon, in mid-October, buck naked. I would always stop and have a chat with him at the Duncan Farmers’ Market, I purchased my seed garlic from him every year and the garlic I’m eating right now is the crop I harvested last summer from his seed. He will be sorely missed on Gabriola and of course at the farmers’ markets. My sympathies go out to his family.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Food Matters – This Little Piggy Didn’t Go To Market

Posted on January 30, 2014 by Don Genova
Photo courtesy BC Pork

Photo courtesy BC Pork

This little piggy didn’t get to market. (I’m not talking about the one in the photo) Over the past few weeks, pork producers in Ontario have been dealing with four confirmed outbreaks of porcine epidemic diarrhoea. It’s a virus that is almost always fatal to very young piglets that get it, and the outbreaks have BC pork producers worried in case they start to spread across Canada.

This virus is very bad news. Apparently it has a 95 to 100 percent fatality rate in piglets, and we are talking very young piglets, just 2 to 5 days old. This virus started showing up in the U-S in late spring and early summer last year, and has decimated herds there, with hundreds of fatalities in Ontario already. Once the piglets are two to three weeks old they build up a natural immunity to the disease. But it is very contagious, and can be spread quite easily through feces, saliva, and can even be transmitted by humans who might get it on their clothes. But I should also say that this disease poses no threat to humans at all, or to other species, and there is also no food safety concerns to worry about with this particular disease.

Here in BC, I started with the provincial ministry of agriculture, and their communications department sent me some relevant information, such as the fact that there have not been any cases of PED diagnosed here. When the ministry got wind of the U-S outbreaks last year, it started developing greater testing facilities here, and can now offer a 24-hour turnaround time on diagnostic samples, and since PED was diagnosed in Ontario, the Animal Health Centre in Abbottsford is offering PED testing to pork producers at no charge. Ministry staff is working with other provincial and federal agencies and producers, and here’s a key point: The Ministry also has committed to support the active surveillance of B.C. abattoirs that receive pigs from outside of B.C., by providing testing at no charge.

That’s important, because if you don’t have PED here to begin with, it could be brought in on pigs coming here to be processed from other jurisdictions. We get a LOT of our pork from Alberta, it is one of the provinces that would be hit hardest by an epidemic. Geraldine Auston at BC Pork told me that she has been arranging lots of conference calls with pork producers here, and especially in Alberta because of the amount of pork that is shipped here from there, and that all of her registered producers are implementing heightened bio-security measures.

Part of those measures means being very careful about who or what comes onto your farm, monitoring the source of the feed you may bring onto the farm, and being extra careful with sanitation when you are delivering pigs to the abattoir or picking up what you’ve had processed, because even a speck of infected manure could transfer from the yard of the abattoir to the wheels of your truck, for example. I also spoke with Allen McWilliam of Tannadice Farms up in Courtenay, who has a complete change of clothing ready to go when he finishes his business at the abattoir. He says pork producers here on the Island always feel a little isolated from what happens on the mainland, but that they can’t get complacent. He’s taking part in a webinar tomorrow morning during which he expects to learn a lot more about PED…and while he thinks he may learn more, he may also be more scared by the end of the session.

It almost sounds like what many of the poultry producers went through with the avian flu outbreak a few years ago, except that in this case, humans can’t get sick from PED, but yes, preventing the spread is very important. Allen McWilliams was telling me that sometimes people would call him to say his pigs were loose, out of their barn, but he knew it wasn’t true, so he would just go back to doing whatever he was doing. Now, when he gets those calls he goes out to look for those pigs, to make sure some unknowing neighbour doesn’t decide to do him a favour and put pigs that aren’t actually his, into his barn, introducing who knows what. Both Allen and Geraldine Auston from BC Pork raised their worries about smaller pig farms not having as stringent bio-security measures that could increase the risk of disease spreading through abattoirs, but Tom Henry sees it in a slightly different light. He’s a pork producer in Metchosin who says for some smaller farmers, really rigorous biosecurity is almost not possible. He relies a lot on gleaning, using food that would otherwise be wasted in the food service or grocery industry to feed his pigs to keep costs down, so it’s hard to monitor all the food sources. All the same, he’s not going to be buying pigs from other farms to raise on his farm for a while, and will really carefully monitor the health of his piglets so they can get to that natural immunity stage.

I know this sounds weird, but there could be an upside to Vancouver Island pork producers. This kind of story helps drive more people toward purchasing local pork. Tom Henry says he is now wholesaling his pigs to local butcher shops and charcuteries and grocery stores like the Red Barn Markets, Village Butcher, Whole Beast Salumeria, Choux Choux Charcuterie, and Heather McWilliam of Tannadice Farms says they are developing new lines of pork products like wieners and liverwurst to use up all the parts of their animals, and there are more people out there willing to pay a little bit more for a local product. It’s been very difficult for BC pork produces to make a living in the shadow of much cheaper product coming in from the Prairies and the United States. Geraldine Auston told me they have pretty much hit bottom with the number of farms and farmers out of the business, but if the current farms can stay healthy, there might be a bit of a rebound.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Food Matters – Cooking with Coconut Oil

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Don Genova

Trends in cooking come and go. Whether a style of cooking or a particular ingredient has staying power often depends on its perceived health benefits and almost certainly on its flavour. Today on Food Matters, I looked into coconut oil through a cookbook published by a local author.

Cooking with Coconut Oil

Cooking with Coconut Oil

Coconut oil hasn’t really been on my radar, but Vikram Vij did mention it as a growing trend he loves when he was here in Victoria a couple of weeks ago, and I did know that a food blogger and photographer I know from Sidney, Elizabeth Nyland, was working on a cookbook featuring coconut oil, so as soon as it came out I asked her to get me a copy and here it is, Cooking with Coconut Oil.

For Elizabeth it’s an oil she’s actually been using for years, and when her publisher approached her to do a cookbook on it she happily agreed. When we chatted yesterday, she told me that a few decades ago, coconut oil was seen as an evil oil.

Elizabeth Nyland

Elizabeth Nyland

“In the 80’s saturated fats were really vilified from a health standpoint, but they were everywhere, even your popcorn in movie theatres was popped in coconut oil, but with the vilification the use of coconut oil just dropped away, even though it has been used for thousands of years for a variety of purposes in other parts of the world. Finally a few years ago, and I don’t know who started promoting it, maybe the coconut oil companies, ha ha, but it’s come back, especially since we’ve learned that saturated fat from coconut isn’t as evil as they said it was.”

The health benefits ascribed to coconut oil are many and varied, and Elizabeth describes one concoction I’d really like to try instead of breakfast one morning in which you add coconut oil and butter made from milk from grass-fed cows to coffee for something called ‘bulletproof coffee’. It’s a big fat and caffeine bomb that is supposed to give you a lot of get up and go. Not everyone agrees, but I encourage you to do your own research on the benefits of coconut oil, which include anti-fungal and anti-viral properties. You might also be interested in this comparison of olive oil and coconut oil.

About the flavour: To me the flavour of the coconut oil is very neutral, and if you are really into coconut you can use coconut flour, which is a gluten-free product, and I should mention that all the recipes in Cooking with Coconut Oil are gluten-free and paleo friendly. Coconut butter, which Elizabeth also uses in some of her recipes, is made from dried coconut fibre, and definitely has a coconut flavour. I was able to take the dried coconut in my pantry, whizz it in my Thermomix for about 3 minutes with a little bit of heat and I had coconut butter.

Coconut flour, oil and butter.

Coconut flour, oil and butter

When I started shopping for coconut oil I was surprised to see a number of different brands in the supermarkets I looked in, so I asked Elizabeth what to look for: “I recommend organic coconut oil to stay away from pesticides, and you should make sure the oil is unrefined and virgin. Virgin means the oil is pressed from coconut, but the term is used because people are familiar with the idea of virgin olive oil. You don’t want refined oil because it may have been refined using hexane gas, and it doesn’t have to be labeled that way.”

Maple Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies

Maple Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies

The first thing I made with coconut oil was a veggie stir-fry. It has a high smoking point, so it’s pretty good with high heat, but I ate all of that, sorry! But I did bake a recipe from Elizabeth’s cookbook, and they are her maple-bacon chocolate chip cookies, so delicious I had to put them away soon after they came out of the oven or I may have eaten them all at once! To purchase Elizabeth’s cookbook, which is full of savoury and sweet recipes using coconut oil, just click here to get to amazon.ca and save 28% off the cover price.

 

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Guest Post – Restaurant review of Pizzeria Prima Strada

Posted on January 20, 2014 by Don Genova

My Food and Travel writing courses start next Monday! Some people wonder about what exactly it is that they will learn and how they can use it. With more and more bloggers posting restaurant reviews, I teach you how to do a proper review, paying attention to the key factors that should be noted in every review. To register or learn more, click here.

Here’s a sample of what one keen student was able to achieve after following my template and a bit of judicious editing. It’s good to be anonymous when you are reviewing, so my guest reviewer will simply be known as RC:

Pizzeria Prima Strada: A slice of Italy at home

Photo courtesy Pizzeria Prima Strada

A trip to Italy, fourteen years ago, completely destroyed my desire for pizza – the North American version, that is. All that changed when Pizzeria Prima Strada opened its doors in the vibrant Cook Street Village.

The restaurant is a much-longed-for addition to a city brimming with foodies. Let’s face it; pineapple and barbecue sauce swimming in a puddle of cheese atop a deep-dish crust does nothing to nurture one’s inner Italian. Unfortunately, that is what passed for pizza before Prima Strada stepped onto Victoria’s culinary scene.

Pizzeria Prima Strada has a rather unassuming exterior being nestled, almost in strip-mall fashion, between a fast food joint, and a coffee shop. However, immediately upon walking through the door, the visitor is greeted by the wonderful homey aroma of freshly-baked pizza. The atmosphere is casual, and the room is abuzz with chatter, and laughter. The earth-toned interior exudes warmth only outdone by the show-stopper of the room – the traditional wood-fired brick oven.

First-time visitors might like to sit at the bar that surrounds the oven, and watch as the chefs stretch and twirl the dough, sprinkle it with fresh, locally-sourced toppings, then fire-roast it in the 800-degree flame. We’ve been before, so many times that, well, let’s just say the notion of having to someday attend a Prima Strada Anonymous meeting no longer seems far-fetched; tonight, therefore, we opt for a table.

The staff is fun, and friendly, some of them having been here since the place opened five years ago. Their camaraderie creates a lasting, positive impression on their customers, making it feel like a true neighbourhood trattoria.

Tonight I start with the caprese salad ($10), and it doesn’t fail to delight. Thickly sliced , ripe heirloom tomatoes that have been marinated in balsamic vinegar are loosely, but attractively, sandwiched between equally-sized slabs of soft, white, mozzarella di bufala. Small glistening dollops of brilliant green basil pesto add a tang that balances the sweet balsamic, making me feel euphoric.

There are four of us, so we decide to split two pizzas. The first is hands down the most popular pizza on the menu – the Funghi ($15.50). The base, a mild porcini cream with a hint of pecorino cheese is topped with roasted succulent mushrooms, tender, sweet caramelized onions, and a pinch of fresh thyme. The crust is authentically Neapolitan – thin, crisp, yet chewy. We each pick up a slice, and fold it in half lengthwise – the traditional way of eating this type of pizza.

The second pizza, the Salsiccia Piccante, features house-made sausage, tomato, mozzarella, and roasted red bell peppers. The fennel in the sausage makes this spicy pizza pie quintessentially Italian. We share a bottle of Montepulciano D’Abruzzo DOC ($33), and the bouquet lends a liveliness of blueberry and cherry sensations, with hints of licorice that pair well with the earthy flavours in the pizzas.

There are six desserts on the menu, but the four of us, each armed with a tiny spoon, agree to share a tartufo – a large, hard ball of imported chocolate hazelnut gelato with a vanilla center ($6). Our waiter offers to top it with a shot of espresso, but we decline, as this delightful frozen orb comes already rolled in just the right amount of bittersweet cocoa powder to offset the sweetness.

Prima Strada succeeds at producing simple, and delicious Italian food. Owners Geoffrey Dallas, and wife Cristen DeCarolis-Dallas insist that the Caputo ’00’ flour is the secret to their perfect crust, and that minimal, fresh toppings prove their theory that quality trumps quantity. Clearly, they have done their homework, and judging by the nightly lineups at the door, it has paid off.

Don’t let the queue turn you away, though. A twenty-minute wait is a small price to pay compared to the nine-hour flight needed to get to Italy to find a comparable culinary experience.

 

 

Posted in Classes | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Food Matters – The One Where Don Had To Go To The Hospital

Posted on January 19, 2014 by Don Genova

Food allergies seem to be much more common these days, and they can be deadly. Peanut allergies have become so severe airlines no longer serve them on flights and many schools have instituted peanut-free policies, some even have dairy-free policies. When an adult gets suddenly stricken with a severe food allergy, though, it often comes as a complete surprise. That’s what happened to me and I’m finally ready to tell you about what happened.

I haven’t discussed my sudden allergic attack here on my blog or on my All Points West column since it happened last spring, since the source of the food allergy was a mystery then, and it’s still somewhat of a mystery, but after some testing and consulting with an allergist I have enough information to have sort of an eating plan to make sure it doesn’t happen again…

The day after my attack. Still 'stuck' with hook-ups for the heart monitors. That's my sister beside me.

It was the Saturday before Easter Sunday, so the end of last March. I had purchased some chunks of halibut on Friday. I made some skewers that I grilled that night, and for lunch the next day I made another skewer and then some ceviche with the leftover pieces. So, lime juice, fish sauce, chilli pepper, probably some garlic or green onion. Not too long after lunch the trouble started. I felt dizzy. Went to the bathroom, had the dry heaves for a couple of minutes, then felt better. 15 minutes later I was back in the bathroom. I was burning up, had a metallic taste in my mouth, and started to get dizzy again. Told my wife I was going to faint…and I did. She found me sitting on the toilet, unconscious. Called 9-1-1. She said my lips were blue and swollen. The first responders didn’t know whether I was suffering from heart attack or allergic reaction. I came to in the ambulance, on the way to the hospital in Duncan. I was probably out for 15 minutes or so.

At Cowichan District Hospital they worked on me for hours. Hives, swollen lips, low blood pressure, but a racing heartbeat. I kept asking for water, because my throat seemed so dry. That was actually because it was closing up, I guess! Finally they got me stabilized, and kept me overnight for observation of my heart and blood pressure. The ER doctor said I had an anaphylactic reaction to something I ate, that it was not food poisoning of any sort.

I have never had any kind of reaction like this before, and certainly not to halibut, which is one of my favourite fishes to eat. So I got a referral to an allergist in Victoria. This is where you discover the strain on our health care system. I had my attack on March 30th. I had to wait until October 31st to get an appointment with the allergist. In the meantime I avoided ALL seafood, and started carry around an epipen. During my first appointment he did some scratch testing, all negative. And he sent me for a blood test that would specifically test if I were allergic to halibut. Negative. He cleared me to eat shellfish, so shrimp, crab, clams, squid, octopus. But he said make sure I carry not just one epipen, but two. He asked me to come back on January 14th, so another two and a half months in between appointments, and bring some raw and cooked halibut with me. I did, he did scratch tests again with the raw and the cooked, no reaction, then I stayed in his office for nearly three hours, eating a few more bites of halibut every 20 minutes or so. No reaction.

Anisakis Simplex, a parasitic worm found in halibut

So my allergist is stumped for the time being. He says I can eat fish again, but to avoid fresh, raw fish. So sushi from a reputable restaurant is okay, because the raw fish has to be frozen before serving. Keep carrying the epipens. There is one other possibility he will investigate for me. There may have been a parasitic worm in the halibut I ate that day. It’s called Anisakis Simplex and you can be allergic to that parasite, to the point of the kind of attack I had. But there’s no simple test he can do for it. If I can get my hands on a piece of halibut with a worm in it, he can mush it up and do some more skin testing on me. At the same time, he advised me that in adults, some 30 percent of the cause of these anaphylactic attacks is never found.

I promised my wife that I would try to never submit her to that kind of experience again. She was so upset by the whole thing, since she was there for the whole experience while I was drifting in and out of consciousness. They had the crash cart there, a big team of people working on me, right out of a TV show, I guess. But I have gone back to eating shellfish, but I will avoid any kind of fish that might have that parasite in it. At the same time I feel challenged to solve the mystery, and my allergist is committed to helping me test for the parasite. I have to tell you it will be a while before I feel comfortable eating fish again…even though the tests show I don’t have an allergy to it. And the whole incident and process has given me a lot more understanding of what children and adults with food allergies go through and why they have to be so careful. And if I ever figure out what caused my attack, I’ll be sure to let you know.

***Update*** Thanks to those of you who emailed me or All Points West after hearing the show. Some of you thought I might have had a reaction to MSG in one of the sauces I used in the ceviche. Nope. I have been using fish sauce and soya sauce, no reactions.  Others thought the symptoms resembled scombroid poisoning. They did, except scombroid poisoning is not usually linked to a fish such as halibut. It is more common in fishes like tuna, mackerel, sardines and anchovies. Could there have been cross-contamination from other fish being stored in the same cooler as the halibut? Perhaps, but neither my wife, who also ate the halibut, or any other customers of the fishmonger reported any signs of illness.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Food Matters – Vij in Victoria

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Don Genova

Celebrity chefs are a part of a cultural phenomenon Canadians have embraced in the last twenty years. Unlike an actor, they don’t have to go to Hollywood to make it big. Give them a good cookbook or especially a show on Food Network Canada and they are halfway there. But they still really have to know how to cook. Yesterday I spent some time with one of Canada’s celebrity chefs on his quick visit to Victoria. To listen to our entire conversation, click here to listen to the mp3 audio file.

Vikram Vij is probably the most well-known East Indian chef we have here in Canada, especially to us here on the West Coast. Anyone who is into a more modern style of Indian food has likely been to the eponymous Vij’s in Vancouver, or perhaps to Rangoli, his more casual eatery right next door. He has a food cart in Vancouver called Vij’s Railway Express, there are cookbooks, Food Network appearances, and more.

Vij and the crew at Sutra

Last year he lent his support to another food outlet at the Victoria Public Market called Sutra, which has Vij-style take-out food, but also offers his complete line of frozen ‘boil-in-a-bag’ take-home dishes as well as a selection of his spices and spice blends. He came here to check up on the new operation and do a couple of cooking demos, one of which was at the Victoria Public Market yesterday at lunchtime.

People were clearly excited about his visit because all the seats in front of the Market kitchen were full about half an hour before his arrival and a little buzz ran through the crowd as he arrived. Karen Elgersma from Shaw TV was there to do an interview before the cooking demo and she admitted she was quite shaky and nervous just to be in his presence. Now that’s celebrity status.

What is it about him that people love so much? It could be because of his piercing blue eyes…and of course the taste of the food he has developed over the years with the help of his mother and his wife Meeru, but I think the main attraction is that he is so personable and honest with everyone. He doesn’t spend much time in the kitchen at Vij’s during service, he is circulating throughout the restaurant, greeting people, offering them some hot chai or snacks if they have to line up, which you frequently do, he does not take reservations, but he makes you feel special and is genuinely concerned about the experience he wants you to have. He finds that after all these years, even on the West Coast where we have a large Indo-Canadian population, Indian food still needs to be explained to people.

Part of Vij's Spice Palette

It’s not easy, because it can be so diverse, but to give you an example, he asked everyone at the start of his demo if they were allergic to curry. Vikram says at least once a day, someone walks into his restaurant and says they are allergic to curry. “But curry is made up of so many different ingredients. Maybe you’re allergic to cilantro, but you can just leave cilantro out, then. People tend to lump everything together. How can you be allergic to curry?

Vij's Indian Cuisine Cookbook

So that was the first lesson …curry can be a blend of many different spices and flavours and doesn’t have to be exactly the same each time.  Vikram then proceeded to take us through the recipe that has the most food stains on it in our copy of this cookbook he and his wife published a few years ago, Vij’s Inspired and Elegant Indian Cuisine. Vij Family’s Chicken Curry. I watched him make it, then went home and checked the recipe so I could make it for you. And I have to tell you that he definitely did things differently yesterday than what is printed in the book. But that’s okay. His analogy always is that of an artist using a palette of colours. If the artist wanted to make an entire canvas black with one dot, he can do it. If you want a curry with tons of hot pepper in it, you can do it, because you are the one that is ultimately going to enjoy it.

Vij's Chicken Curry

So I took to heart some of his tips and also went with what I had on hand at home. I used butter to cook the onions instead of vegetable oil, I had cumin seed instead of ground cumin, used up some frozen tomatoes along with fresh, and although the recipe calls for sour cream to blend into the curry, I used a can of coconut milk instead.

Here’s the recipe:

VIJ FAMILY’S CHICKEN CURRY

Number of Servings: 6

INGREDIENTS

½ cup (130 ml) canola oil

2 cups (500 ml) onion, finely chopped

1 3-in cinnamon stick

3 tbsp (60 ml) garlic, finely chopped

2 tbsp (30 ml) ginger, chopped

2 cups (500 ml) tomatoes, chopped

1 tbsp (15 ml) salt

½ tsp (2.5 ml) ground black pepper

1 tsp (5 ml) turmeric

1 tbsp (15 ml) ground cumin

1 tbsp (15 ml) ground coriander

1 tbsp (15 ml) garam masala (an aromatic blend of spices often used in Indian cooking, available in specialty stores)

½ tsp (2.5 ml) ground cayenne pepper

3 lb (1350 g) chicken thighs, bone in

1 cup (250 ml) sour cream, stirred

2 cups (500 ml) water

½ cup (130 ml) cilantro, chopped (including stems)

DIRECTIONS – In a large pan, heat oil on medium heat for 1 minute. Add onions and cinnamon, and sauté for another 4 minutes. Add ginger, garlic, tomatoes, salt, black pepper, turmeric, cumin, coriander, garam masala and cayenne. Cook for 5 minutes, or until oil separates.

Remove and discard skin from chicken thighs. Wash thighs and add to prepared mixture. Stir well. Cook chicken thighs for 10 minutes, until chicken looks cooked on the outside. Add sour cream and water and stir well. Increase heat to medium-high. When curry starts to boil, reduce heat to medium, cover and cook for 15 minutes, stirring 2 or 3 times, until chicken is completely cooked. Poke thighs with a knife. If meat is still pink, cook for 5 more minutes.

Remove and discard cinnamon stick. Cool curry for at least half an hour. Transfer cooled chicken to a mixing bowl. Wearing latex gloves, peel chicken meat off the bones. Discard bones and stir chicken back into curry. Just before serving, heat curry on medium heat until it starts to boil lightly. Stir in cilantro. To serve, divide curry evenly among six bowls. Serve with naan or rice.

My version of Vij's Curry

Places to find East Indian grocery items in Victoria:

Gobind Food Market 8-4011 Quadra St, Victoria 250-479-8884

Sutra at the Victoria Public Market also sells Vij’s spice products.

And check out this directory on Chef Heidi Fink’s website.

Posted in Food Matters | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment