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Pony: Saturday Night Dinner Redux
6.13.2005
Ok, so I am trying to do this little web project that describes a meal in stages: Shopping, cooking, eating and digesting. Interspersed with dialogue, description of company and anecdotes. Not sure how the template will work, but here is my first try (unedited):
Setting: Steamy Saturday in the middle of a heat wave. Kiff and I decide to invite Matt, Emily, and Kiff's brother, Dave, for some grub. This plan hits us as we bike along bloor west from Fiesta farms. "We are all invited to the same party afterwards. Why don't we make these guys some dinner first?"
Shopping:
Grain-fed, free-range chicken breasts at the butcher on Bloor at Roxton. Nice guys. Nice Prices. Nice chickens.
Organic asparagus from Dufferin Grove organic market (Thursdays: the atmosphere of a 1970's community picnic)
Yams, potatoes, mangoes, a cucumber and cherries from the College Street fruit market.
Prepping the chicken:
Put garlic, ginger syrup(from Dufferin Grove), chives (from garden), mint (ditto), parsley, lemon zest, 1/2 tsp cardamom seeds (not pods), lemon juice and olive oil. mixed in food processor. Covered and put in fridge to marinade for 3 hours (ideally longer).
Making the mango salad:
Dead simple and SOOOO tasty and fresh. Great esp. if you are not sure whether the marinade will be tasty (you can scoop it onto the chicken like a salsa). I actually got this recipe from Sarah my last year of university in Montreal and have made it religiously. It is Thai-inspired, I think, but most importantly it impresses your friends (the way spicy fruit should):
1 ripe mango julienned or diced
1/2 english cucumber peeled, seeded and diced
1 girly handful of basil, shredded
1/2 jalepeno pepper with some of the seeds or 1 bird pepper, no seeds (don't touch your eyes or anyone's private parts after chopping the chili. You don't want to have to learn this the hard way).
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar.
Here is a pic of the leftovers:
We didn't want to turn on the oven under any circumstances, so we chopped up the potatoes and yam really small, sprinked fresh herbs and olive oil and salt and wrapped them in tin foil on the bbq.
I am still a bit sad about the asparagus...I didn't wash it well enough. It was therefore a little sandy. Always scrub and wash your asparagus before you cook it (and my fave way of cooking it is on a tray with olive oil and rock salt in a 400C oven).
I also made a couple of tillapia filets. They are the only fish I eat, pretty much cuz they are so mild. I wrapped them in tin foil and tucked them in with a wasabi, ginger, tamari, sesame oil seasoning. They were tasty! (nb: all this tinfoil use is making me feel wasteful). I also forgot to take pics of the finished product before we all chowed down on them, but here are the dessicated remains featuring the fish in the foreground and the chicken in the background:
It was all really tasty. We had cherries for desert. Then Sarah came by (in the fog of a hangover but wearing a gorgeous outfit) with a box of apple strudel from her dad. And then Karlen and Tao came by looking sexy and overheated. Then Jesse. Then Abi who had gotten off work from the world of lime jello and comfortable shoes. There were a million conversations happening at once.
And we drank gin/vodka tonics. And then we set off on our bikes to Roncesvalles for a party where the hostess handed out freezies at the door to all newcomers.
The best part was riding home at 3am. The wind was cool, my shoulders bare. I could have kept cycling long after we made it home.
