trying to get home for xmas. New traffic extension for Google Chrome: https://t.co/MXy7N9dU
| 21 December 2011
I actually posted this article last year in December, but I thought I'd highlight it again for a couple of different reasons.
First, it's the perfect time of year for gingerbread, so I thought you might need a bit of a refresher. My gingerbread recipe differs from the usual in that I use honey instead of molasses. I find the honey gives the cookies such a subtle sweetness that the underlying spices come shining through. I also decrease the amount of ginger and increase the amount of cinnamon, just because I like the balance of flavour that provides. I tweaked the recipe a bit, too. The cooking time of 25 minutes is fine if you want a hard cookie that won't crumble or bend when you're using it to make a house. But, this year I reduced the cooking time to about 10 minutes (depending on the size of the cookie). The cookie was still quite soft when I pulled it out and placed on a rack to cool, but it achieved a kind of perfect balance between being strong enough to build with and soft enough to eat. Give it a try, and let me know what you think.
Second, I sought out my inner geek and created a few gingerbread constructions that I thought might inspire you to follow your own imagination. I made a couple of Joseph Eichler- and Cliff May-inspired homes, Tintin and Snowy cookies (in honour of the upcoming release of The Adventures of Tintin - The Secret of the Unicorn) and a Tardis (for all the Doctor Who fans out there). As you'll see in the photos below, my creations didn't quite end up looking the way I pictured them in my mind. Pristine, perfectly sized constructions turned out somewhat disproportionate. I realized early on that I don't quite possess the spatial acuity required to put together such seemingly simple pieces. Oh well. It was great fun nonetheless.
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| 20 December 2011
For the last 20 or so years, I’ve cooked our Christmas turkey on the barbecue. While the revellers are inside knocking back nogs and roasting virtual chestnuts before an enclosed gas fire, the bird, largely unattended, slowly and surely becomes the golden-brown, moist and tender centrepiece of the season beneath the barbie lid, hissing away in the Vancouver rain.
Except for one small inconvenience — see below — this bird-on-the-barbie thing works very well. I fire up just one of the machine’s two gas elements, and the turkey sits above the unlit other. This means that the bird cooks in a heated ‘oven’, but not over a flame. The juices are deliciously contained, and on cue a few hours later, we’re into Christmas dinner.The inconvenience is that because there’s no roasting dish, there are none of the pan drippings needed to make gravy — the delicious, rib-sticking glue that really brings Christmas together. The gravy, the sauce, the jus is the finishing touch that has made magnificence of ordinary meals for hundreds and probably thousands of years.