Wish List: The ROM

East-facing façade of the Royal Ontario Museum,
built in 1933, courtesy of Wikipedia

It’s months shy of a decade since first I visited the ROM, the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto. Back then, the ROM was an example of Italianate Neo-Romanesque architecture – a beautiful building commanding Bloor Street. During my stay in 2002, I had heard about the new plans for the ROM and this talk about an addition that would look like a chrysalis. The vision of something so radically incongruous coming out of an original traditional structure always piques my fancy.

Now, with my recently-expedited renewed passport, I will be heading back to YYZ for work and I have taken an extra day to get there on my dime to return to this fantastic museum, which is Canada's largest museum of world culture and natural history and one of the largest museums in North America, in general. It’s no Bata Shoe Museum, but that’s okay.

While I am excited to see the dinosaur specimens and exhibits focusing on the War of 1812’s bicentennial; it’s the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal that is drawing me to the ROM. Inspired by the ROM’s gem and mineral collection, the Crystal was quickly dubbed as such because of its crystalline shape from the original concept sketch. The architect, Daniel Libeskind, initially penned his idea on paper napkins while attending a family wedding at the ROM. This new addition is composed of five interlocking, self-supporting prisms that, per the ROM’s website, “co-exist but are not attached to the original ROM building, except for the bridges that link them.” The exterior is a fourth glass and three-fourths aluminum and the interior houses seven galleries for artifacts and Canada’s largest temporary exhibition hall. Providing openness and accessibility as well as blurring the boundaries between the public street and the private galleries, the Crystal is where both people and artifacts interact to give the museum life.

The ROM addition sketch on a paper napkin

All images, except where noted, are courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum: Dawn of the Crystal Age.

Tomato Bredie

Building the bredie
in the slow cooker

My exposure to tomato bredie came after I chose the 1999 Man Booker Prize for Fiction winner, Disgrace, by J. M. Coetzee for bookclub. I googled South African cuisines to help develop the theme for the bookclub meal.

In my search, I found this: the Congo Cookbook, a collection of African recipes, which features excerpts from historic texts and rare recipes. One fine highlight was passages from Recipes: African Cooking (Foods of the World), a companion volume to Foods of the World: African Cooking by Laurens van der Post.

Van der Post mused on one of the South African dishes that come from the Cape Malay, bredie:

"Almost every country in the Western world has its meat stew. The Irish, of course, have Irish stew; the English, Lancashire hotpot; the Dutch, hutspot; the Germans, Eintopf; and the Hungarians, goulash. But only in South Africa is the dish of Oriental origin. The very word bredie is significant: it is a Malagasy word from Madagascar, and between the east coast of Madagascar and the world of India and Malaya there has been a steady coming and going since recorded history began. To this day, the bredies are a culinary reminder of that traffic."

Pretend it's lamb

Traditional bredies start with browning sliced onions; then laying mutton chunks for braising; adding the chosen vegetable, which lends its name to the bredie; and slow coking the dish with sweet spices – like cloves and cinnamon – garlic, and chiles. The quintessential bredie is the tomato bredie. The rich stew is full of umami and sweet, that gets a flavor sting of heat from the chiles and spices.

Tomato Bredie, adapted from Laurens van der Post's recipe

Ingredients:

• 1 large onion, peeled and sliced into 1/8 inch thick slices
• 1½ lbs. of boneless shoulder lamb (or beef), cut into 1-by-2-inch chunks
• 1 clove garlic, finely chopped
• 2 tsp hot chile powder (like a hot paprika or West African chile powder)
• ½ Tbsp sugar
• ½ Tbsp salt
• 3 medium tomatoes, peeled and sliced into 1/8 inch thick slices
• 28 oz. can of whole tomatoes, crushed by hand
• 2 whole cloves

The addition of the tomatoes,
this bredie's namesake

Directions:

1. Lay the bottom of the slow cooker with the onion rings and then top the onions with the lamb.
2. Top the lamb with garlic, chile powder, sugar and salt, then place the tomato slices over the meat and top the meat and tomatoes with the can of tomatoes.
3. Add the cloves and cover and cook on low for 7 to 9 hours (or high for 4 to 5 hours), until the stew is rich and thick.
4. Serve with a side of rice, if desired.

The finished product - oh so yummy!

myPics: Faneuil Hall

I was in Boston last weekend for the Marathon.  I was planning on watching my cousin run; yet due to the heat conditions, he was able to defer until 2013.  In the meantime, we took our other cousin who had never been to Beantown on a bit of a tourist run. During our stop in Faneuil Hall, I snapped a shot of the staircase.

myPics: Kosciuszko's House

At 0.02 acres, this building is America's smallest National Park. It is the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial, at 301 Pine Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

A Polish patriot and a hero of the American Revolution, Kościuszko returned to America to a hero's welcome after his wounding, capture, imprisonment, and banishment from his native Poland occupied by Russia, in 1796.  He lived in America for a year before returning to Europe, living life as a Polish émigré.  On October 15, 1817 Kościuszko died in Solothurn, Switzerland. In 1818 Kościuszko's body was transferred to Kraków, Poland; the Émigré was repatriated.

Today the building serves as a Memorial to Kościuszko's life and work. The displays focus on his work as a brilliant military engineer who designed successful fortifications during the American Revolution.

Cawl

Today I’m bringing you another recipe that you can prep and cook overnight so you can refrigerate while at work to have ready for dinner.

The Welsh Leek on a £1 Silver Proof Coin
with 24k Gold Plating, courtesy of the London Coin Company.

In anticipation of a trip to Wales and Scotland via England, I have been doing my research of all things Welsh and Scottish.  We all know that I got the whisky thing down right, even dropping the "e" when talking Scotch. Yet outside of a haggis, whisky (Scotland) and leeks (Wales), I do know what else to expect. (Scotch eggs might not even be Scottish; London department store Fortnum & Mason claims to have invented them in 1738. For more of a tie in, if you go to the Fortnum & Mason site for the week of April 1, the second photo is of the Queen and the two Duchesses taken on March 1st, St. David's Day, the Welsh nation holiday; Duchess Catherine is wearing a daffodil, the Welsh flower.)

Cawl is recognized as Wales’ national dish. Originally a simple concoction of meat and vegetables, cawl was regularly served in winter months as a two-course meal. The broth would be strained off and served as a light soup then the meat and vegetables would be the main course. Today, the dish has developed into a lamb and leek soup and most common recipes included start with mutton or lamb and leeks with the addition of potatoes, rutabagas, carrots and other seasonal vegetables.  All the pages about Welsh cuisine and food inform me that cawl should be started the day before so that any fat can be skimmed off and all the flavors can blend – perfect for the slow cooker.

Cawl, modified from the following cawl for slow cooker recipes: squidoo.com, bbc.co.uk - Mid Wales page and allrecipes.co.uk

Ingredients:

The finely chopped reserved parsley and leek.

• 2-3 lbs. lamb, shoulder (If lamb is difficult to get hold of, stewing beef is a good substitute. Sometimes I do half and half)
• 6 small potatoes, quartered (For durability in the slow cooker, I use small new red potatoes or Yukon golds)
• 3 leeks, washed and sliced, reserving 1 leek for serving
• 2 medium carrots, peeled and sliced
• 1 large onion, quartered and sliced
• 1 medium parsnip, peeled and sliced
• 1 small rutabaga or 2 small white turnips, peeled and cubed
• ½ small head of cabbage, shredded
• 2 Tbsp parsley, chopped, reserving 1 Tbsp for serving
• 1 tsp salt, or to taste
• 8-10 peppercorns, or to taste
• 10 cps water

Cawl, on the dinner table (and my
cluttered kitchen in the background. Shh!)

Directions:

1. Trim the fat from the meat as much as you can, and cube into ½ inch sized pieces.
2. Add the remaining ingredients but the reserved leek and parsley and cover with cold water.
3. Cook on Low for 8 hours.
4. Allow to cool (preferably 8 hours) and skim off all the fat.
5. Return to cook on High for 30 minutes or until at a good serving temperature
6. Finely chop the reserved leek and parsley
7. Top the cawl with the chopped leek and parsley and serve with bread.

After making this, I can recommend that you're going to need more salt than you think.  So I salted my cawl after cooking and after chilling and reheating.  I was surprised how the salt disappeared.  Also, when I revisit this, I might consider using some vegetable broth or stock to replace some of the water.

Lastly, if you are going to serve cawl the traditional two-course manner, I would make this suggestion. After removing the lamb and vegetable, add the reserved parsley and leeks to the broth.  This will add more texture to the soup when you serve it as the first course.