Another amazing snowboarding trip, this time out to beautiful Whistler B.C.  The mountain, the food, and the people were incredible, it’s no wonder that there are so many ex-Ontarians in B.C.  Although the weather did not hold up during the bulk of the trip the snow and mountain were thousands of times better than anything in Ontario.

Brad took some awesome pics out there and put together a little video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

But the star of the day was the Italian bread!  Making this bread was a long and arduous process.  From beginning to end it took the better part of 5 hours to complete and 2 days worth of preparation.  The day before you need to prepare the biga which is a pre-ferment used to develop flavour.

The day of baking you need to cut up the biga and then let it sit for an hour to get to room temperature.
With the biga at room temperature you mix in all of your ingredients and begin to knead.  We did two batches, one by hand and the other with the stand mixer.  It took the both of us 30 minutes and multiple turns at the dough to get it to a consistency that we were happy with.  We were aiming to get to the consistency where you stretch a piece of dough between your fingers and it’s paper thin enough to let light through – this is called the window pane test.  We were not successful getting the dough to that consistency.  Our dough was stiff and tough but fortunately after an hour of rest the dough rose again and was once again tender.

We then formed our loaves, let them rise a second time, scored them, then baked them.  The bread turned out tender and moist with a nice chew.  The crust was soft and the bubble structure was fine.  It was a denser dough similar to a sandwich bread.  The flavour was pleasant with a delicate sweetness.  Definitely a good bread and alot of work!

For the inaugural oyster run we began with a drink at Fynn’s of Temple Bar followed by a dozen oysters at an unexpectedly busy Rodney’s.  We popped a bottle of Cava and devoured an assortment of oysters.  My favourite were the Mystic oysters from Connecticut (bottom right).

We followed this up with an order of fried oysters that were rich with butter and cooked to perfection.

After polishing off the bottle of Cava we headed to Oyster Boy and ordered a bottle of Proseco, a dozen Colville oysters, fish cakes, and oysters Rockefeller:

The oysters were some of the best of the night and the Rockefeller was superb.  After we had our fill here we moseyed over to Sweaty Betty’s for a warming drink of proper bourbon whiskey (Woodford Reserve) and stumbled up the Ossi strip to Fish Bar who were closing their kitchen (who does that at 10pm on this strip?) and ended up in Salt.  The oysters at Salt were fine but what really drew us in was a cool vibe in an awesome space.  A must try here is their Bacon Caesar that is smokey as hell and reminds me of Ardbeg, if you’re not familiar with that scotch it’s like licking a burnt branch, that’s still on fire…yum.

Have a Merry Christmas!

Mistake number 1: There can be as much as 25% difference between live-weight and dead-weight.  The Caja China calls for a maximum of 100lbs live-weight, the pig we purchased was 100lbs dead-weight, you do the math.

Mistake number 2: A 100lbs dead-weight pig needs a long time to come to room temperature, time that we did not have.

Although it took about 8hrs to roast a whole pig rather than the 5hrs that it should have took had we followed the instructions, the end product was well worthwhile!  Take a look at some of the pics:

Here’s the 3 bushels of tomatoes sourced from a local farm (thanks Dana for picking this up):

Next you wash the tomatoes:

After a good wash you need to remove the core:

Then you start boiling the cored tomatoes to loosen that skin:

Now it’s ready to be run through the mill:

With clean mason jars drop in a few basil leaves and seal finger tight:

Finally, process the sealed jars in a water bath for 30-45min and you’re done!

There you have it, doin’ da tomatoes!

After mixing that all up together cut the puff pastry up and place the mixture down the middle then roll over with the seam down:

Now cut into one inch pieces, apply an egg wash and bake at 425C for 25min:

The reward to effort ratio is high on the reward side for this one.  I’ll definitely be making this one again.

If I could put my feet up every night to a view like that I’d die a happy man. Katrina and I wanted to getaway from all the noise of the city (and life) so we traveled to Gananoque to check out the 1000 Islands. Who knew that such a beautiful place is so close to Toronto. We stayed in a cool little B&B that was walking distance from everywhere and everything to do in “the Gan”. The suites were newly renovated with modern touches. I would highly recommend the Islandview Inn B&B to anybody wanting to check out the area.

Here’s a pic of some of the islands: