Friday, 20 May 2016

Something for Newfoundland



Newfoundland & Labrador Fish & Brewis



Ingredients: (4 servings)
4 cakes hard bread, broken in pieces
500 gr salt cod, pieces or boned
6 slices salt pork thick
1 med onion, finely chopped
Method
1.In two separate containers, soak salt fish and hard bread in cold water for approx 6-8 hours or overnight. In the morning drain and replace both with cold water.
2.For the fish; bring to a slow boil and let simmer for approx 20 minutes. Remove from heat and drain. Skin, bone and flake fish – set-aside.
3.For the hard bread; in a saucepan, place hard bread and cover with enough water. Bring to a slow boil and simmer for approx 5 minutes. Remove from heat and drain. Squeeze out excess water from the hard bread and mix in flaked fish. Blend well.
4.In a skillet, low heat, fry salt pork until all fat is extracted. Remove rendered pork. Add onions and cook until golden brown. Spoon fat and onions over fish and brewis. Garnish with scrunchions (rendered salt pork). This meal is excellent with a cup of good steeped tea and fresh homemade bread with molasses.




Friday, 13 May 2016

Dessert while sitting around a camp fire

Nanaimo Bars
Ingretients


16 squares

30 m thick make app.
125 ml butter, softened
65 ml white sugar
75 ml unsweetened cocoa powder
1 egg, beaten
375 ml graham cracker crumbs
250 ml flaked coconut
125 ml finely chopped almonds (optional)
125 ml butter, softened
50 ml heavy cream
30 ml custard powder
500 ml confectioners' sugar
4 ( 28 gr )squares semisweet baking chocolate
30 gr butter

1.In the top of a double boiler, combine 125 ml butter, white sugar and cocoa powder. Stir occasionally until melted and smooth. Beat in the egg, stirring until thick, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove from heat and mix in the graham cracker crumbs, coconut and almonds (if you like). Press into the bottom of an ungreased 20 x 20 cm pan.
2.For the middle layer, cream together 125 ml butter, heavy cream and custard powder until light and fluffy. Mix in the confectioners' sugar until smooth. Spread over the bottom layer in the pan. Chill to set.
3.While the second layer is chilling, melt the semisweet chocolate and 30 ml butter together in the microwave or over low heat. Spread over the chilled bars. Let the chocolate set before cutting into squares.

Saturday, 7 May 2016

A bit about Maple Syrup


A History of Maple syrup

Maple syrup: Canada produces a whopping 85 % of the world’s syrup .Gilbertson Maple Syrup Producers of Joseph Islands Ontario Canada producer is one of the largest maple syrup producer in the world
A History of Maple syrup

No one is really sure just how long people have been practicing the art and science of making this wonderful product from the sap of a tree. However, there are two basic schools of thought about the origin of maple syrup.

The first group identifies with Canadians legend and lore that maple syrup and maple sugar was being made before recorded history. Canadians were the first to discover 'sinzibuckwud', the Algonquin word for maple syrup, meaning literally 'drawn from wood'.

The Native were the first to recognize the sap as a source of energy and nutrition. They would use their tomahawks to make V-shaped incisions in the trees. Then, they would insert reeds or concave pieces of bark to run the sap into buckets made from birch bark. Due to the lack of proper equipment, the sap was slightly concentrated either by throwing hot stones in the bucket, or by leaving it overnight and disposing with the layer of ice out which had formed on top. It was drunk as a sweet drink or used in cooking. It is possible that maple-cured bacon began with this process.

Before the advent of Europeans, the Natives used clay pots to boil maple sap over simple fires protected only by a roof of tree branches. This was the first version of the sugar shack. Over the years, this evolved to the point where the sugar shack is not only a place where maple syrup is produced, but also a gathering place where a traditional meal can be enjoyed.

However, some historians maintain that the Natives did not have the technology or tools to perform the necessary boiling of sap to make either product let alone both.

The first white settlers and fur traders introduced wooden buckets to the process, as well as iron and copper kettles. In the early days of colonization, it was the Natives who showed French settlers how to tap the trunk of a tree at the outset of spring, harvest the sap and boil it to evaporate some of the water. This custom quickly became an integral part of colony life and during the 17th and 18th centuries, syrup was a major source of high quality pure sugar. Later, however, they would learn to bore holes in the trees and hang their buckets on home-made spouts.

Maple Sugar production was especially important due to the fact that other types of sugar were hard to find and expensive. It was as common on the table as salt is today.

Even if production methods have been streamlined since colonial days, they remain basically the same. The sap must first be collected and distilled carefully so that you get the same totally natural, totally pure syrup without any chemical agents or preservatives.

Early maple syrup was made by boiling 40 gallons of sap over an open fire until you had one gallon of syrup. This was both time consuming and labor intensive, especially considering that the sap needed to be hauled to the fire in the first place.

The process underwent little change over the first two hundred years of recorded maple making. However, Mid 1850's, the tin can was invented. The tin can was made of sheet metal. It didn’t take syrup makers long to realize that a large flat sheet metal pan was more efficient for boiling than a heavy rounded iron kettle which let much of the heat slide past.

Virtually all syrup makers in the past were self sufficient dairy farmers who made syrup and sugar during the off season of the farm for their own use and for extra income. These farmers were, and continue to be, folks who look at a process and say to themselves, 'There has to be a faster, more efficient, easier way to do this.' Then, in approximately 1864, a Canadian borrowed some design ideas from sorghum evaporators and put a series of baffles in the flat pans to channel the boiling sap. The ideas continued to flow. In 1872 a Vermonter developed an evaporator with two pans and a metal arch or firebox which greatly decreased boiling time. Seventeen years later, in 1889, another Canadian bent the tin that formed the bottom of a pan into a series of flues which increased the heated surface area of the pan and again decreased boiling time.

For the most part technology stayed at this point for almost another century, until the 1960’s, when it was no longer a self sufficient enterprise with large families as farm hands. Because syrup making is so labuor intensive a farmer could no longer afford to hire the large crew it would take to gather all the buckets and haul the sap to the evaporator house. During the energy crunch of the 1970’s, syrup makers responded with another surge of technological breakthroughs. Tubing systems, which had been experimented with since the early part of the century, were perfected and the sap came directly from the tree to the evaporator house. Vacuum pumps were added to the tubing systems. Pre-heaters were developed to "recycle" heat lost in the steam. Reverse-osmosis filters were developed to take a portion of water out of the sap before it was boiled. Several producers even obtained surplus desalinization machines from the U.S. Navy and used them to take a portion of water out of the sap prior to boiling. In fact, one is still in use by a producer South-East of Grand Rapids, Michigan.