Christmas Baskets
As with past years, my better half and I put together some Christmas baskets as gifts for colleagues and friends. This year we substituted local artisanal products for individually-wrapped chocolate.

For a sweet component, we ordered various assortments of truffles from local Koko's Chocolates, hand made by Ottawan Lori Sword.

Koko's 8-piece Sampler
In fact, when giving chocolate during Christmas 2009, we only gave Koko's, ordering box upon box of varying sizes. I even replaced my family's annual box of Hershey's Pot of Gold with a 16-piece box of Koko's.

For the Christmas baskets, we paired 8-piece sampler boxes with bottles of hand-mixed Refashionista mint tea ($8/jar), ordered from Etsy.

Mint Tea

Regarding Koko's chocolates, many of my colleagues are chocoholics. Their thoughts:

• "These are really good chocolates" (she, losing complete interest in other chocolates on her desk)
• "They look like works of art" (after he opened the box and proceeded to walk around the office to show them off)
• "The chocolate is so...umm...crisp" (he, referring to the perfectly tempered chocolate)
• "The flavour. OMG!" (he, after popping the Triple Chocolate truffle in his mouth)
• "Excellent!" (she, reminiscing about having finished the box)

To my dear friend Yannick, I told "My goal this Christmas is to get you off of Godiva. These should do it!" I should ask him his thoughts. Stay tuned!

Christmas Pot Luck
This year, the Christmas parties we attended included a pot luck. For it, we pointed our hosts to foodiePrints and said, "anything goes!" One, selected char-siu. His better half, lemon chiffon cupcakes.

Knowing both friends are fond of the dark sugars from maple syrup, I modified foodiePrints' char-siu recipe to employ palm sugar, sugar that is analagous in flavour. Since palm sugar usually comes packed in puck-like shapes, I heated the marinade mixture in a double boiler to help the chunk of sugar dissolve. It was a straight substitution, palm sugar for regular sugar.

Here is the test batch, using boneless pork butt (aka: pork shoulder)

Finished Char-Siu taken out of the Oven, Glazed

Char-Siu being Sliced

Char-Siu Sliced
The batch we brought to the pot luck was a crowd pleaser, most everyone asking for the recipe.

Regarding the lemon chiffon cup cakes, Jenn decided to substitute a Kastella sponge for the chiffon sponge. I iced the resultant baked and cooled cup cakes with the same marshmallow icing we used for a batch of chiffon cupcakes that were sold at a Breast Cancer fundraiser during this past year's Glebe Garage Sale.

Kastella Cupcakes with Lemon Marshmallow Icing
The only modification, I flavoured the icing with lemon to cut the sweetness of the Kastella. To do so, I made a syrup by boiling down a mixture, consisting of the zest of 1 lemon, the juice of 2 lemons, a 1/2 cup sugar, and a 1/2 cup water. Once the mixture was reduced to 1/3 the volume, it was left to cool. 7 tbsp of it were then added to the marshmallow icing mixture, replacing both the 6 tbsp water and 1 tbsp table syrup.

By the time desserts were served, potluck party-goers were full. One of our hosts decided to eat the leftover cupcakes with milk, using them to fuel his morning marathon training.

One of the other guests brought a very pleasant lemon and poppy seed cake from The Cake Shop (250 Greenbank Road).

Lemon Poppy Seed Cake

Cake Served

Cake Box
It was quite good, moist, naturally lemony, not too sweet, and every bite was evenly distributed with poppy seeds. Yum.

Office Christmas Party
This year, my office Christmas Party was held at the up and coming Les Brasseurs Du Temps (BDT), a brewpub located in Gatineau. According to the Real Ontario tourism website, the site was formerly the Hull Waterworks building. Colleagues told me the building that borders on a creek was once a museum. The waiter, who served my guests and I the first time I visited, said the building once housed a mill and brewery, circa 1821. Whatever its previous incarnations, on May 21, 2009, owner Alain Geoffroy opened the doors to an eatery that features beers brewed in house by brew-master Dominique Gosselin.

Inside, the visuals are mostly wood, from wood paneled walls to hardwood floors. The tables are painted black and the ceiling is extremely high, betraying the buildings former heritage as something other than a brewpub. Needless to say, it is a very open space.

Dining Room

Table
Beneath the bar area, which is opposite the 100 seater dining room and an adjacent open kitchen is the brewhouse. A spiraling pathway leads from the restaurant down to it.

Bar with 13 taps

Brewhouse
The restaurant is disarmingly informal and its bilingual staff were knowledgeable about BDT's beers during both my visits.

Along one of its walls is a chalkboard, listing the many in-house brewed beers. Its beer menu includes other Quebec microbrews as well.

Chalkboard

That late afternoon when my colleagues and I assembled for our Christmas party, I ordered an ESB.

ESB
I am not an aficionado, so the nuances and the sheer variety of in-house brewed beers was lost on me. I can only say with any surety that my glass of beer was pleasant to my palate. When I first dined at BDT, my more knowledgeable quests ordered tasting glasses of several in-house brews. They enjoyed their samples very much.

Food-wise, the menu recommends beer pairings with several dishes.

Menu
That said, I found the food spotty. According to our Christmas Party's waiter, BDT's chef is consulting only. A colleague later told me the chef comes from Chelsea's acclaimed Les Fougères. BDT's kitchen is thus made up of line cooks who have only been cooking together since May.

It explains a lot. When I ate lunch at BDT the first time, I ordered the Joe Monferrand Burger with bison ($15), which came topped with pan-fried crispy bacon, melted gouda, and a tomato salsa. While I found it somewhat under-seasoned, one of my guests, a Cordon Bleu-trained Chef, disagrees. We all ordered the same plates and we all left satisfied.

Unfortunately, when I came back with my colleagues, things were somewhat different. I ordered the charcuiterie "duo de terrines" ($8) to start. What was served was a very tame, but decent plate of pork terrines, accompanied by Dijon mustard, caramelized onion relish, whole black olives, and drizzles of a fruity extra-virgin olive oil.

Charcuiterie Appetizer
I enjoyed it.

My main, a one-piece beer battered fish and chips ($12), demonstrated that the consulting chef must not have been consulting that afternoon.

Fish and Chips
The batter around my fish was thick and greasy. Inside, the white fleshed fish, which reminded me of basa, was dry and harsh. The fries were fried until they were hollow.

If ever you fry up from scratch fries (freshly cut from potatoes), you forget a fry from one batch, and it turns up in your next, you will find that it develops a dark crust and the potato within seemingly disappears, leaving a large air space. I was served a plate of these. I am also not sure why I was served three "Dixie" containers of mayonnaise.

Oddly enough, mine was the only plate with hollow fries. My colleagues each received better batches of fries. Though visibly glistening, they would have benefited from being better drained of oil.

Our waiter, being extremely helpful received my customary 15% tip, but I did tell her about my over cooked fries as she took my mostly eaten plate. I had hoped the issue would be brought back to the kitchen.

Later on, I would hear BDT's kitchen somehow found a way to produce a fish and chips that resembled gelatinous lutefisk. The diner, none other than @refashionista and her family.

At the moment, unless you know the chef's in, I suggest sticking with the beer and nibbling on menu items that need little attention from BDT's kitchen.


BDT's Business Card

More after the jump...

In Ottawa, the battle between big box and locally owned has descended upon Chinatown. With a newly opened T&T supermarket, the Vancouver originating chain's 4th largest in Canada, pressure has been applied on Chinatown. Chinatown shops are smaller, locally-owned, and specialized in Vietnamese, Thai, Chinese, and Malay groceries. The monopoly the shops once enjoyed is gone.

Now, the formerly pre-eminent Kowloon Market in Chinatown, once an extremely crowded and bustling business, has lost significant customer-base. The store is far less busy on Saturdays, normally peek shopping hours. Parents who drop off their children for Saturday Chinese language school, caravan to T&T in the Riverside South area. They fill its enormous parking lot, making Ottawa's T&T the consistently busiest one I have ever come across. Do not expect a leisurely shopping experience after 10:00 am. For perspective, I have been to several T&T's in Vancouver (including its first location), Toronto, and Edmonton.

To make matters worse, many of the shops lost employees to T&T. The butcher Jenn and I frequented at Kowloon Market for barbecued meats is now masterfully wielding her cleaver at T&T. In-house bakers, fish mongers, and cashiers defected. Even waiters from Chinatown restaurants, familiar faces from Yangtze (700 Somerset Street W.) and Chu Sing (691 Somerset Street W.), can be found working shifts at T&T. Prevalent reasons: better pay and an opportunity for benefits.

With significant turnover, some of the bakery at Kownloon Market has changed. Prices have been knocked down to compete with T&T and the buns are physically bigger. Curious, Jenn and I purchased baked (as opposed to steamed) barbecue pork (char-siu) buns (bao or baozi) from both T&T ($1.39) and Kowloon market ($1.09) and compared them. In the process, we happened to attempt to re-invent American South comfort food, fried chicken on a waffle, but more on that later.

Regarding the buns, both were brushed with an egg wash to brown. The Kowloon Market bao seemed more evenly browned.

T&T (left) and Kowloon Market (right) Char-Siu Bao
Both were baked in-house the morning they were purchased.

Customarily, our T&T bao came individually wrapped in a self-sealing cellophane bag.

Individually-wrapped Bao
In fact, no matter where you go, bao from T&T are sold in the same bags. In fact, the char-siu bao pictured above was purchased from the T&T in the West Edmonton Mall.

To compare the Ottawa T&T and Kowloon Market originating bao, we weighed them and cut them open to look at their crumb and fillings.

Firstly, off to the scales:

T&T Char-siu Bao - 150 g

Kowloon Market Char-siu Bao - 144 g

Next, dissection:

T&T (left) and Kowloon Market (right) Char-Siu Bao
Both white bread buns had the texture of super market dinner rolls, only sweeter. The T&T bao's filling was more centered. Conversely, the Kowloon Market's was off-center and it was much more red in colour.


T&T Char-Siu Bao Filling
Filling-wise, the T&T filling was predominately lean meat and included little sauce.


Kowloon Market Char-Siu Bao Filling
The Kowloon market filling was a mixture of fatty meat, onions, and sauce.


T&T (left) and Kowloon Market (right) Char-Siu Bao
Flavour-wise, we found the T&T filling less intensely flavoured and more savoury. The Kowloon Market filling was strongly flavoured, tasting almost entirely of hoisin sauce.

If I were forced to choose, I would slightly favour the T&T char-siu bao, but bao wasn't our lunch that day.

At Kowloon market, Jenn and I eyed the hanging roasted pig after picking up a char-siu bao for the comparison. When we saddled up to the counter at the back of the store, we lucked out, ordering 2 lbs of belly-portion crackled roast pork.

Belly Portion Crackled Roast Pork

With our roast pork sporting an expertly crackled skin that was crisp and flavourful, I decided to stop off at Viva Loca in the Irving Greenberg Theatre Centre, home of Great Canada Theater Company (GCTC) for something to accompany it. The theater center is located at the corner of Holland Avenue and Wellington Street W.

Oat and Whole Wheat Pancakes
We used the stack of made-to-order oat and whole wheat pancakes to re-invent the fried chicken on a waffle.

Roasted Pork Belly with Crackling on a Pancake
And yes, it tasted great with maple syrup.

As an aside, we observed Loblaws Superstore on Richmond Road selling individually-wrapped and nor Northern Chinese-style buns, starting in September 2009.

A Variety of Bao from Loblaws Superstore
A closer look at the labels reveals the source of the bao.

Source from a Toronto Bakery
Purchased from Jin Xin Bakery Ltd in Markham, Ontario, the buns are shipped in in refrigerated trucks, arriving cold. Not only is it interesting that the Loblaws CEO Galen Weston has been espousing the virtues of locally sourced produce and products when one of his Superstores sells trucked-in bakery, but Weston completely missed the point about why Asian supermarkets have in-house bakeries. Customers like fresh buns, not ones that taste stale. Shipping perishable buns in refrigerated trucks causes them, like fresh bread, to change texture. Refrigeration changes the protein and starch structure of fresh bakery. At least this means Loblaws Superstore cannot compete with T&T and Chinatown supermarkets.

Particulars:
Ottawa T&T
224 Hunt Club Road (corner of Hunt Club and Riverside)
(613)731-8113

Kowloon Market
712 Somerset Street W.
(613)233-1108

Viva Loca
1233 Wellington Street W.
(613)728-8482

Loblaws Super Store
190 Richmond Road
(613)722-5890

As @askaroundottawa tweeted, many Ottawans were taken aback by this morning's freak blizzard. It being two weeks into April, she asked her followers, "Who ordered the snow?" She then suggested that it was perhaps mother nature proving those of us presumptive who put away our winter gear.

I want to go on record saying, "It wasn't me!" I recall specifically asking mother nature to tell her over-achiever, Jack Frost, to knock it off. And no, the unamusing weather was not a dream, restricted to some unlucky few.

Evidence from Environment Canada
Apparently, our snowy weather system is also moving south, causing farmers in the American mid-west some worry.

For those of us caught ill-prepared, I propose the following dish to shall we say "warm the cockles": chicken dumplings in chicken stock with shredded lettuce and sliced char-siu (Chinese barbecued pork).

Bowl of Chicken Dumplings
The idiom is British and means "make you feel happy." I picked it up from watching too many cooking shows from the UK. Damn BBC and Channel4 (pre-9:00 pm) for putting on such great television. Much of what's on the Food Network pales in comparison.

Anyhow, bowls of dumplings in broth happen to be what my better half serves up to her friends and family "to cure whatever ails you." This particular batch of chicken dumplings was home made, as was the stock.

Plate ready for cooking

Dumplings cooking

Cooked and ready to plate

Slicing up some barbecued pork
The recipe for the dumplings follows that of the pork variety that was posted on foodiePrints a little while ago, only the folding was a little different as we used pot sticker wrappers from Chinatown. Since it was post Christmas (hence the festive tablecloth), Jenn felt that we needed a change from turkey and sliced up some char-siu to accompany. The char-siu was store-bought, but shipped by friends from Markahm to Ottawa.

To make your own bowl of instant comfort, you can easily pickup frozen dumplings from the local mega-mart or Asian grocery store. Cook them up as instructed, usually directly from frozen. Heat up some ready-made chicken broth from a carton and plate it up...erm "bowl" it up. Garnish with chopped green onions and you may be able to put up with Jack Frost for a little while longer...

There's nothing more characteristic of a Chinese deli than the glazed Char-siu hanging in the window. Char-siu, otherwise known as Chinese Barbecued Pork, isn't really barbecued in the traditional sense. It consists of strips of fatty pork that are hung from forks and cooked in a vertical roaster. Its Chinese name, Char-siu, means "fork roasted."

Because most home cooks don't have access to a powerful vertical roaster, we need to resort to slow roasting Char-siu horizontally in an oven. One weekend, I decided to determine if the Chinese Barbecued pork can actually be made on the barbecue. What turned out was actually more authentic than any recipe I've tried in an oven. Moreover, the pork actually developed smoke ring. Its added smokiness complemented the sweet and tangy glaze.


Sliced

Smoke Ring

A smoke ring is the pink discoloration under the surface "crust" of smoked meat. According to about.com, it is caused by nitric acid build-up from the absorption of nitrogen dioxide through the surface of the meat. Nitrogen dioxide is produced from combustion. It reacts with the moisture in the meat, creating nitric acid.

Recipe follows:

More after the jump...

Found in Chinese barbecue houses (aka: Chinese delis according to Martin Yan), this sticky sweet roasted pork is an iconic meat in Chinese cuisine. Sliced, char-siu is served with steamed white rice and in sandwiches. Chopped, char-siu is mixed into omelettes, fried rice and dumpling fillings. Shredded, char-siu even ends up in spring rolls, my baked spring rolls for one. Of course, char-siu also shows up in baked char-siu buns, which are favorites from any Chinese bakery. A steamed version of the char-siu bun is served with dim sum.

The picture above comes from Wikipedia.com.

Char-siu literally means "fork roasted" in Cantonese. Its etymological source most likely has to do with the fork-shaped hooks that the strips of pork hang off of in the vertical roaster.

Besides Chinese barbecue houses, which are few and far between, char siu is also available at some Asian grocery stores. You will find it hanging with soy sauce chicken, salt baked chicken, whole roasted pig, and roasted duck. Like other Chinese take-away meats, char-siu is purchased by weight and is typically sliced for you in the store.

In Ottawa, you can find Char-siu at the Kowloon Market (720 Somerset Street West) or Uni Mart (on Montreal Road, across from the Rideau bridge).

The following recipe is one you can make at home:

More after the jump...