Dos Equis?

From xkcd:

A lazy Saturday calls for...

... sangria!

I've been looking for a good sangria recipe for quite a while. I found one here, at Livefire. It's very simple:

I've modified it slightly:

750 ml bottle of Rioja

500 ml bottle of sparkling water

1 lime

1 lemon

1 orange

1/4 cup brandy

4 tbsp simple syrup

1 tbsp cinnamon

a smattering of blueberries

Slice the fruit thin (including the blueberries). Mix with the brandy and wine, let sit as long as you can stand it, then add everything else and serve over ice.

Delish. There's something super decadent about blogging with a sangria in my hand...

Blueberry buttermilk pancakes

Taking pictures of food inside is hard. Especially the less featureful food, like a pancake. So that pancake might not look like a million bucks, but it was delicious. Trust me.

My mother's recipe for buttermilk pancakes is the base here. She's big on healthfood, so in her recipe the whole-wheat flour is 50:50 with the all-purpose. Experimentation has taught me that 50:50 is too dry, but that less than 1/4:3/4 is too insubstantial. This recipe is perfect.

¼ cup whole wheat flour

¾ cup all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk

2 tbsp vegetable oil

1 egg

blueberries

Mix dry ingredients. As with any baking powder recipe, you want to have the liquid/solid contact to be as brief as possible. Then beat the egg, and slowly add the oil to the egg. This is an emulsion, so you want to suspend the oil in the egg. Add the buttermilk slowly to the egg mixture. EMULSION!!!

Add the liquids to the solids, and mix gently, until the point that your batter is thick with lumps in it. You don't want to mix out the lumps, because that will destroy the leavening power of the baking powder.

Ladle out the batter into a medium-hot pan, and toss a few blueberries into the pancake. This is important. If you mix the blueberries into the batter prior to frying, you'll break them, and have a purple batter with mushed blueberries in it. It's prettier if you add the berries to the batter after you start cooking. YUM!

Flip the pancake when you see about 45 seconds after you see bubbles forming in the top of the batter. Delcioso! The pancake will spend less time on the second side than on the first. It's already quite hot, so flip it, cook it a bit more, then toss it onto a plate.

Serve with REAL maple syrup. Trust a Canadian. You really want the real stuff.

It'll be delicious.

Ostrich burger!

Well, after enjoying some lovely ostrich scrambled eggs, you knew that we would have to eat the bird itself... Right? RIGHT???

We start with the raw, ground ostrich meat. It's pretty low in fat.

So to juice it up a bit, we mix in some homemade, raw chopped bacon (I hope to eventually post on homemade bacon, but I haven't made any since before I started the blog - but look at the header of Indirect Heat to see a picture of homemade bacon). This should increase the fat content (it's a trick we've tried before with other low-fat meats).

Then we mix it all up, and form patties. We didn't want to overwhelm the flavour of the ostrich meat (indeed, we wanted to be able to taste it - not knowing what ostrich tastes like).



And onto the screaming hot grill, a few minutes on each side.



Again, no cheese going on here, we want to taste ostrich.



Starting to look a little tasty, don't you think?

The final formed burger we served with home-grown green zebra tomatoes, dressed on a bun. And the verdict? Meh.

Ostrich meat is bland. Bland, bland, bland. Not surprising it hasn't really caught on. Even fattened up with bacon, it's still a very mild flavour. Granted, we didn't give it the full benefit of seasoning (salt-only) as we wanted to be able to taste the meat - but still - bacon and salt made ostrich meat barely noticeable. We'll need a pretty good reason to try this again.