Introducing Erin McDowell of The Apartment Kitchen

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I have recently joined Adopt-a-Blogger, a wonderful mentorship program created by Kristen over at Dine & Dish. Through the program, mentors with blogs over a year old — that's me! — help fledgling food bloggers just starting out. I'd like to introduce you to my match, Erin McDowell of The Apartment Kitchen.

Erin is a recent grad of the Culinary Institute of America and works in its cookbook publishing department, a very cool job from what she has told me so far. In fact, when we first met she was in the middle of a cookie photo shoot! “There are so many cookies in my office right now, and the smell is both heavenly and deadly,” she wrote. Seriously, how fun would that be?

Erin currently writes two blogs, The Apartment Kitchen, where she uses her training to make delicious food on a budget, and Absence Makes the Heart Grow Hungry, a joint blog with her mom and brother. Each week, they post recipes after cooking the same ingredient in their different homes across the country to “keep the family table alive, long-distance style,” Erin says.
— Asha


Erin, what's your blog all about?
After I graduated from culinary school, I was excited to dive into cooking at home — until I realized my kitchen was about as bare as could be. I decided to start a blog about my journey towards cooking easy, delicious and inexpensive meals without a lot of equipment. It's been fun using the training I received in school but in a different environment — it's forced me to think creatively and come up with new, exciting solutions!

Of all the subjects out there, why did you choose to blog about food?
Food is everything to me, but I only realized it a few years ago. When I was a senior in high school, the idea of culinary school hit me. It was only after I started that I realized that it was the perfect choice for me. I grew up around food. My mother is an unbelievable cook, and everyone in the family found their way into cooking one way or another!

Your blog is relatively young. In a few lines, can you please sum up its history/important milestones during its growth so far?
The most exciting moment was having a recipe recognized by Saveur Magazine. I also really enjoyed being a part of the food contests at Food52, it's so much fun with lots of other cooks and bloggers, and I won one competition!

Who is your audience?
I get a lot of new cooks, people who are looking for easy meals or don't have a lot of equipment either, but I've also found that a lot of foodies and fellow food bloggers tune in, too!

What new relationships/friendships have you made as a result of food blogging?
It's been amazing to see where my readers come from: India, Russia, Spain, France, even Argentina! My favorite interactions have been with people who ask me to help them with a kitchen dilemma or to develop a recipe. It's fun to work together to find a solution!

Do you have a team that helps you with your blog, or is it a one-person operation?
My friend Chris is my right hand man in all things blog-related. He really inspired me to do some new and interesting things with my blog and he became my webmaster. He's helped me design the blog and figure out all that fancy HTML and formatting stuff that I had no clue about.

How do you use social media to promote your blog?
It took me awhile to jump on the bandwagon, but I have a Twitter account (@apartmentcooker) and a Facebook page (The Apartment Kitchen), which have been really fantastic tools when it comes to connecting with readers.

Tell me a bit about one of your heroes or mentors when it comes to food and cooking, and what you have learned from them.
My mother is always at the top of that list...she taught me so much about how food influences people's lives and the importance of home cooked meals and eating around the dinner table. Other (perhaps more well-known) influences are Lidia Bastianich, who cooks delicious food and stays true to her heritage and shares it with others, and Irena Chalmers, who taught me so much about food writing.

Do you have a favourite food memory from your childhood or recent past?
So many! But just the other day I was reminded of my first kitchen job: I went into the bakeshop at 3:00 a.m. to make and bake all of the breakfast pastries. Our specialty was scones, and two days a week I had to deliver them to a local coffee shop after my shift. Sometimes I would run home and surprise my parents with an array of warm scones just as they woke up, and we'd sit on the porch and eat them as the sun came up.

One of the key themes of your blog is staying within a budget — given your gourmet training, what advice do you have for uncompromising foodies on a shoestring budget?
The best advice I can give to anyone is to build a good pantry: spices, oils, vinegars, seasonings, condiments, aromatic vegetables and so on. It can seem expensive at first, but once you have a good basis in your kitchen, you can make almost anything, including deliciously gourmet items after buying just one or two things. The other day my boyfriend requested his favorite turkey meatloaf, and all we had to buy was one pound of ground turkey!

So that's Erin of The Apartment Kitchen! We'll keep you posted about the interesting things will be trying together.
—Asha

Ottawa's Wine and Food Show

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I had a fantastic time at the Ottawa Wine and Food Show last weekend with S and friends, and my long-lost brother who I haven't seen since Thanksgiving! Some other highlights included (in the photo, clockwise from the top): a mackerel salad from Le Cordon Bleu, learning what's really in ground beef from local chef Duane Keats, smoked salmon from the Pelican Fishery & Grill, and meeting the leader of the Ottawa's Slow Food chapter, Peggy Hall.

First on the agenda was attending a food demonstration by Duane Keats, chef at Luxe Bistro in Ottawa's Byward Market. He taught everyone in the audience a great cost-saving skill: how to skin and fillet a whole fish. He demonstrated on a giant fresh halibut and an equally gargantuan fresh salmon. At 10 lbs, each normally yields 15 portions at his restaurant.

While his sous-chef showed us how to similarly fillet a big hunk of striploin, Duane told us something disturbing about ground beef, namely that it's made mostly from connective tissue called silver skin that's trimmed from cuts like this. It's tough and you can't chew it, like "beef bubblegum," he said. But if you remove it, your steaks won't curl during cooking.

At the demo, I had the pleasure of sitting beside Peggy Hall, the leader of Slow Food Ottawa, an organization that connects people who love to eat with local producers and their foods. She told me that one of her big challenges this year will be to raise the profile of Ontario wines by encouraging Ottawa-area restaurants to feature them on their wine lists.

My personal wine find of the evening was a delicious 2004 Spanish Rioja called Marqués de Riscal Reserve. We also spent a lot of time at the Argentine wine counter and sampled a few tasty Slovenian wines — Cviček and Refošk. I had no idea that Slovenia had such a big wine industry, but it stands to reason as it shares a border with Italy and also benefits from that Mediterranean climate that's so good for grapes.

And of course, the food was sublime. Em served us some mackerel salad at Le Cordon Bleu's booth — so fresh and tasty. She is Le Cordon Bleu's best employee ever. And we had a rich lobster mac and cheese from Foundation, and a wonderful smoked salmon appetizer with red onions, capers and a special sauce from Pelican Fishery & Grill.

As usual, it was magical and I can't wait until next year!

Celebrity chef sighting: Jamie Stunt

Jamie Stunt, chef at Oz Kafe, on Flickr by beFOODled.

S, myself, and Squeaky and Calimocho went to Oz Kafe for dinner on Sunday night and guess who was taking five at the bar — the head chef, Jamie Stunt.


Chef Jamie Stunt at the Ottawa Wine and Food Show on Flickr by beFOODled.

The first time I saw Jamie was in November 2008 at the Ottawa Wine and Food Show's 100-mile cook-off.


Roasted lamb chop on Flickr by beFOODled.

In less than an hour, he made an appetizer, a main and a dessert. Above is a photo of his roasted lamb chop with a pumpkin and wild boar sausage hash, Brussels sprouts and a cranberry-apple chutney, and his appetizer in the background. For dessert, he made French toast with artisan bakery bread, apple butter and cheese.


Ryan, server extraordinaire, and Ozlem Balpinar, owner of Oz Kafe, on Flickr by beFOODled.

This is Jamie's employer, Ozlem Balpinar, and Ryan, one of her servers extraordinaire. Ozlem is originally from Turkey and has lived in Ottawa since she was 10.

Oz is consistently delicious and a neighbourhood favourite with many of my friends. The following photos are of dishes that S and I have had here in the past: freshly caught halibut with lobster salad, grilled asparagus and roasted potatoes, and bison with fiddleheads and garlic mashed potatoes. I have written a longer review of Oz Kafe on Food Network Canada.


The fish special at Oz Kafe, on Flickr by beFOODled.


Bison and fiddleheads at Oz Kafe, on Flickr by beFOODled.

Got to go because I am now officially dying of hunger. Note to self: no more blogging before dinner.

Celebrity chef sighting: Michael Smith

Celebrity chef Michael Smith at Le Cordon Bleu Ottawa on Flickr by beFOODled.

Last Friday, Michael Smith was in Ottawa and he made a quick visit to the Le Cordon Bleu culinary school. My friend works there and here she is posing with him in the school's demonstration kitchen. (Shady, this is how you should always roll.)

Unfortunately I was in Montreal (I would never say these words in any other circumstances), otherwise I would have been there, too, with bells on and a big cheesy grin.

Michael Smith is a Canadian celebrity chef who has starred in four cooking shows on Food Network Canada, the latest being Chef Abroad and Chef at Home. He is also a chef emeritus of The Inn At Bay Fortune, a restaurant on Prince Edward Island, where he lives.

That makes two friends now who have chilled with famous chefs (Squeaky and Gordon and now Em and Michael), but I am not jealous. I, too, have had a celebrity chef alert. Deets to follow so stay tuned...

Gordon Ramsay sighting in Toronto

Gordon Ramsay and my friends in Toronto on Flickr by beFOODled.

Celebrity chef alert! Gordon Ramsay is in Canada and my lucky friends sat next to him in the Toronto airport last night. They said he was very nice (not potty-mouthed at all ;) and he even generously posed for a photo with them. Apparently he was in Toronto for a book signing. After I told my colleagues at work, one of them said he knew someone else who also saw him there. So there has been one degree of separation between me and Gordon Ramsay, which is kinda fun!

The Ottawa wine and food show

S and I went to the Ottawa Wine and Food Show last week. We tasted the wine of 500-year-old vines and found out which winery made a pact with the devil to keep thieving hands at bay! We also met some local chefs, including The Piggy Market's David Neil pictured below with his girlfriend, a student at Ottawa's Cordon Bleu culinary school. They took part in a 100-mile cook-off hosted by celebrity chef Ken Kostick.

Thirsty for more details? Read the full story in my guest post on Food Network's Food for Thought :)

Secrets and Shortcuts: Salads 3.0

Iceberg lettuce? Romaine? Dullsville. Bags of designer lettuce? Expensive. Short-lived. I was watching Jamie at Home today, and he inspired me with some sage advice about salads.

Basically, save all those boring varieties for the rabbits, or skeet-shooting if you are Jamie Oliver, and get yourself five or six interesting salad greens, such as:

• endive
• arugula (rocket)
• watercress
• red-leaf lettuce
• green-leaf lettuce
• baby spinach
• radicchio (Italian chicory)

You can also use fresh herbs as salad leaves if you keep the leaves whole instead of chopping them. Some herbs that work well this way are:

• mint
• tarragon (goes well with arugula)
  
• basil
• parsley

When you get them home, wash them in the sink in cold water, and then spin dry in a salad spinner filled halfway each time. Tuck the leaves gently in a giant, tea-towel-lined tupperware container, and store them in the fridge where they'll last for about four days.

Stay tuned for some nice salad and dressing ideas using these ingredients, coming soon!

Food TV Favourites: Michael Smith

Food Channel, why do I love thee? Let me count the chefs...

Episode 1: Michael Smith from Chef at Home
Of all the chefs on Food TV, I like Michael Smith the best. He's a trained chef, and I can tell he knows his stuff just by the way he explains things. He breaks down everything he does and why into very simple building blocks, and his reasoning makes so much sense that you won't have trouble committing it to memory. For example, take the way he explains braising, which means cooking in a little bit of liquid. He starts always his braises with chopped onions, carrots and celery as base flavourings for the meat, and then builds on that with liquids, aromatics and garnishes that go together naturally - like apple juice, cinnamon and raisins. Or orange juice and rosemary. He also takes time to segue into trips to the grocery store, where he gives tips on how to choose the best ingredients. He really surprised me when he said the most flavourful cuts of meat are the cheaper, less tender cuts. And he gives practical tips about equipment, too. I like the fact that even though he is knife happy and has a whole drawerful of blades, he admits you really only need three: a chef's knife, a paring knife and a bread knife. Very good advice for a frugal gourmet like me!

Local Food Celebrities

I went to Toronto's first-ever Green Living Show in late April. It was a huge hit, and they had a star-studded speaker lineup, I must say. The couple from the 100 Mile Diet were there to talk about their year of local eating in Vancouver and Gill Deacon, Daryl Hannah and Jamie Kennedy, all spoke at the podium about the importance of local eating.