Manuel Latruwe, a bakery in Calgary

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When we were in Calgary, S, his dad and I bought a delicious baguette for crab melts and also treated ourselves to some mini pastry cakes at a bakery called Manuel Latruwe. I love its French name. S speaks it very well and always sounds like he has a mouthful of ripe plums when he says the Lattruooe part :) It is indeed a very desirable place to visit. Our favourite, pictured above, is called Temptation. I’m not sure what was in it, but it was light and moussey and delicious.


Exotic, a mango-flavoured pastry cake at Manuel Latruwe.


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Manuel Latruwe
1333 - First Street SE
Calgary, Alta.
403. 261.1092


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Orzo with fennel and pancetta

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I was recently introduced to orzo, a wee member of the pasta family. Anything delicious wins me over, but anything delicious and cute has a definite monopoly. This is a nice lunch to take to work :)

Orzo with fennel and pancetta
Serves two

1 cup orzo
¼ cup cubed pancetta or bacon
2 finely minced shallots
½ cup thawed frozen peas
1/2 cup finely chopped fennel bulb
1 cup chicken broth (or a combo of broth and water)
2 Tbsp white wine
favourite fresh herb for garnish, torn
salt and pepper

Cook the orzo according to the directions on the package. Reserve half a cup of pasta water in case you need to add some liquid to the final dish.

Cube the pancetta and fry it with minced shallots in olive oil in a frying pan on medium high heat for five minutes or so. Then add the thawed peas and finely chopped fennel, stirring to coat them in the oil. Add chicken broth or water and then stir occasionally, uncovered, until the liquid had reduced by half. Add the wine to deglaze the bottom bits, and cooked it for a minute. Finally, add the precooked orzo and season with salt and pepper. Garnish with your favourite chopped fresh herb.

William J. Walter Saucissier in Gatineau

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Squeaky, S and I were so excited when this beautiful sight above greeted us through the door of William J. Walter. If you love sausages as we do, it's like finding a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!

There were at least 100 different kinds of sausage to choose from. I found the usual favourites like chorizo, Oktoberfest and Italian, but they also had some really creative flavour combinations. We bought duck and herbes de Provence sausages that were perfect in my favourite pasta dish, rotini with sausage and wild mushrooms. We also bought some mango and goat's cheese sausages that I am contemplating serving in a bun with a little homemade mango chutney. There are many more delicious varieties on my list for our next visit: white wine and shallot, broccoli cheddar and cheese and mushroom, yum.

They have a list of all their sausages if you ask for it. And many are allergy friendly, such as gluten-free, lactose-free, without pork or without garlic. This is also where we got that lovely duck rillette from my last post.

William J. Walter Saucissier
129, rue St-Joseph
Gatineau (Hull area), Que.
819.205.1533


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Duck rillette with foie gras

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I had the day off today and made a charcuterie lunch for S and myself. We ate a duck rillette with foie gras that we bought on the weekend from a great little sausage shop in Hull-Gatineau.

It was delicious on baguette. It was made by Aux trois p'tits cochons verts, a charcuterie-maker just north of Montreal.

I think I like rillettes better than pâtés. They have a coarser texture and you can see that the meat has been finely shredded as opposed to pureed into a paste. Rillette meats are slow-cooked until tender, shredded with two forks in the manner of pulled pork, and then mixed with warm fats until spreadable. They are meant to be served at room temperature with breads.

Foie gras was added to this one, which made it sinfully rich. To assuage my feelings of guilt about having a full-out fat fest, I also laid out some cherries, cherry tomatoes and hummus on the table. But who's kidding who, the rillette stole the show ;)


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Yamakake soba

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Yamakake soba literally translates to Japanese-mountain-potato-covered soba. I had this for the first time in Calgary last month with S and his Dad, who says it's a very authentic Japanese dish. He made it for lunch one day and we helped him.

It was quite an experience eating this. Japanese food is so often an adventure in textures. The white sauce you see in the photo is mostly grated nagaimo, also known as Japanese mountain yam, a white root vegetable. It looks like a giant parsnip or daikon, but when you grate it, it gets all gluey and slimy. You eat it raw, seasoned with a little marinade, but that's it. It's an acquired taste and I had a bit of trouble finishing my bowl. There's also a hot version that I will ask S's dad to make me the next time we are in Calgary.

Here's to Japanese food adventures!

Yamakake soba (Japanese-mountain-yam-covered soba)

one whole nagaimo or Japanese mountain yam (about nine inches long)
green onions, finely sliced for garnish
nori, one large sheet finely torn for garnish
dash of soy sauce
dash of ponzu
1 egg yolk
2 portions soba or buckwheat noodle

Wash the nagaimo and peel it with a vegetable peeler until all of the brown spots underneath the skin have completely disappeared.

Grate the nagaimo on your finest grater over a mixing bowl. We used a ginger grater like this one. Be prepared to be hands deep in slime!

To the grated nagaimo, add the egg yolk, soy sauce and ponzu, but not too much. You still want the mixture to stay predominantly white. Garnish with the green onion and nori and serve.

If you decide to try and eat this with chopsticks as I did, be prepared for a long lunch as the noodles keep sliding all over the place. This was a fun lunch :)

Homemade crab melts

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S's dad showed us how to make this beautiful crab melt on baguette.

To prepare the building blocks, we sauteed some spinach, sliced onions and minced garlic in a frying pan on the stovetop, and added a pinch of dried crab stock. We cut the baguette into wide slices and cut the slices in half for open-faced sandwiches. We took the meat from three big frozen crab legs and defrosted it in the microwave. Lastly, we thickly sliced some Swiss cheese.

To build the sandwich, we first added a layer of bruschetta topping (garlic and tomato mixture) from a jar. Then we added a layer of spinach mixture, then the crab meat and lastly the cheese.

We toasted the sandwiches in a 400 degree oven for about 15 minutes, or until the cheese was bubbly and melted. It was so good and I loved the taste of the real crab we used. The crab was from T&T, and we have one of those in Ottawa now too!


Step one: Add bruschetta topping and spinach mixture.


Step two: Add the crab meat.


Step three: Top with a big thick slice of Swiss cheese before popping in the oven.

How to store clams in a clam bath

Hello everyone, I'm sorry that I have not blogged very much of late. S and I have been travelling and I haven't been near a computer that much. I am going to make it up to you with lots of posts :)

We are in Calgary right now and I learned something very interesting today about how to store live clams. S's dad, who is quite an accomplished cook, has taught us a simple way to keep live clams happy and healthy for many days at a time. We will no longer worry about cooking clams the same day we buy them.

You make a salt solution that approximates the salinity of the ocean at 3.2 per cent and keep the clams in it at room temperature. We put five teaspoons (32 g) of salt in 1 litre of water, mixed it up really well and then put that in a big plastic bowl on the kitchen counter. Then we took our clams (just bought that afternoon from T&T), rinsed them in the sink with fresh water, and put them into the salt water. This amount just covered our batch of 45 or so clams.

Then S's dad pulled out a very rusty vegetable peeler and stuck it in with the clams. The clams don't like the iron and open up and squirt out their sand in protest! So stick something rusty in there about three hours before you want to cook your clams so that they expel their sand.

Our clams opened up right away and stuck out their snouts. Then there was a symphony of squirting clams! One got a good trajectory going and squirted the kitchen window and its curtain. We had to cover the bowl with cellophane to keep things under control.

If you intend to keep your clams overnight, just remember to put the rusty implement in a few hours before you eat the clams. You don't want your clams unhappy for longer than they need to be! Love your seafood and it will love you back in the dish that you create with it. Tonight we are making linguine with clams for S's Dad, who loves seafood.

Have a nice dinner tonight everyone :)