I have decided to spin off the food section of this blog into its own entity: food.erwingerrits.com.

I am in the process of moving over the recipes I had on this blog, and am adding new ones as we make them. The theme will be Good Food Made Easy. My wife and I are trying to make healthy meals (mostly low GI) with less and less salt, fat, sugar, processed ingredients.

It will not so much be a “heath food” blog, but more a blog about how ordinary people, who may not be cooking so much due to various reasons, can pick up a spatula and create nice tasting, healthy meals from scratch in under 30 minutes. And in the process they may learn a few things about food and how ingredients work together and they can start to experiment themselves on some new recipes.

Too many times I have heard, by people that routinely eat unhealthy take out food or eat out many times a week: “I can’t cook”, or “I don’t have time to cook, I work full time, you know!”. First of all, anyone can learn how to cook, and well, let me tell you, both my wife and I work full time, and we still make a nutritious, healthy meal FROM SCRATCH nearly every weekday. AND we’re done cooking, eating and cleaning by 6 pm most nights.

Anyway, I hope that the new site will inspire people to start cooking a bit more at home rather than eating KFC or pizza several times a week.

These are a favourite of mine. Very rich, and very yummy. Easy to make with one bowl mixing and no fuss rolling of dough.

Ingredients for bottom:

9 x 13 baking pan
1/2 c sugar
1/2 c butter (softened)
2 large egg yolks
1 tsp Vanilla extract
1 1/2 c flour

In an electric mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until smooth. Add the yolks and vanilla and beat on high speed. Once incorporated, slow down the mixer and slowly add the flour until just incorporated (the dough will be crumbly). Do NOT over-process.

Prepare two sheets of waxed paper 10 x 14. Line your hands with plastic wrap and take the dough out of the bowl and shape it into a ball, avoiding direct contact with your skin. Then flatten the ball and put between the waxed paper sheets. Roll out the disk to a rough 10 x 14 shape. Slide dough and waxed paper sheets onto a cookie sheet and refrigerate for 15 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350 deg.

Once chilled take the top waxed paper off the dough and with bottom waxed paper and all, plop dough in the baking pan, the bottom waxed paper turns into a pan liner. Press the dough down into the pan, paying special attention to the corners which may be a bit hard because of the waxed paper. Press down the dough that is going up the sides into a 1/4″ x 1/4″ edge to contain the liquid that is going to be poured on in the next section. You can take bits from other parts of the bottom if you’re uneven. Decorate the edge with a fork or something similar.

Put a piece of aluminum foil on top of the crust and hold down with some pie weights or a large number of pennies to stop the dough from rising.

Bake for 15 minutes. Then remove the foil and weights and bake for another 7-9 minutes or until lightly golden.

While this is baking, prepare the filling:

In a heavy sauce pan, put the following ingredients:

1 c dark brown sugar
5 Tb butter
3 Tb heavy cream
3 Tb Maple syrup
2Tb Corn syrup

Bring the mixture to a slow boil while stirring, then let simmer for about a minute to dissolve the sugar.

And now the piece the resistance:

Coarsely chop 1 1/2 C Macadamia nuts (unsalted). If yours are salted, rinse off the salt and re-crisp them in the 350 degree oven for 5 minutes (no NOT roast them!).

Spread the nuts evenly over the bottom and pour over the sugar mixture until everything is nice and even. Bake in the oven for another 10 minutes or until sauce is bubbling.

Take out of the oven and let cool completely.

It should look something like this:

Take out the bars by pulling up on the waxed paper and place on a cutting board. Peel off the waxed paper:

Use an electric knife (or sharp large kitchen knife) and slice and dice the bars into 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 inch pieces:

You can keep them in a tin for up to two weeks, or freeze them to have some left for Christmas!

I thought I’d make a french onion soup for lunch while taking a break from the website stuff. Now, I know french onion soup is more of a winter dish, but hey, have you looked at the temperature lately? The soup turned out really nice, so I took a picture and decided to give you the recipe, should you be interested.

The main ingredient in this soup is not onions, it’s time: it takes about two hours to make two bowls of soup, so don’t start this as a last minute what-the-hell-are-we-making-for-lunch type of meal. It’s a lot of standing and stirring.

Remember, this makes TWO bowls, multiply all ingredients according to your number of guests:

• 3 medium onions, thinly sliced (makes about 4 cups worth)
• 3 tbs margarine/butter
• 1 tbs flour
• 1/2 tsp sugar
• 4 cups of beef broth
• 2 tbs Sherry
• 2 slices of bread
• 2 slices of cheese (swiss is best, but any will do, except cheddar)

Here we go:

In a large pot, melt margarine/butter, and add onions. Cook on LOW heat for about 45 minutes, stirring frequently.

After about 45 minutes, when the onions are starting get a bit pasty, add suger and flour, stir and cook for 3 minutes.

Add the beef broth, stir, and simmer uncovered for about 50 minutes, or until liquid has halved in volume. Add the Sherry about 10 minutes before it’s done.

Spoon the soup into oven-ready bowls, toast the bread slices and float on top of the soup. Cover the bread with cheese slices and broil in the oven until the cheese is bubbling and golden brown.

Enjoy (and apologize to your partner/family/co-workers for the rest of the day)

The Heart and Stroke Foundation released a ridiculous report this week about the cost of healthy foods across Canada. It found that Calgarians pay much more for healthy foods than say, Ottawa or even North Bay (if you know North Bay, you’d know it’s slightly… uhm… “out of the way”, adding transportation costs), and that in general, healthy foods are more expensive than unhealthy foods. They are implying that price is the biggest factor in Canadians eating less healthy.

The report relies heavily on volunteers who fed their families for a week by shopping at regular well known grocery stores. Items included 6 apples, bag of potatoes, whole wheat pasta, brown rice, 1% milk, cheddar cheese, lean ground beef, peanut butter among other things. They all shopped at different, but well known stores, severely flawing (is that a word?) the study, because in order to be able to compare findings, the parameters have to be the same.

The findings of the report are astonishing: it concludes healthy food is more expensive than non-healthy foods and it says prices on healthy foods vary widely across the country.

I don’t know about Brooks or Calgary, but the prices they give for Ottawa are plain ridiculous: $13.31 for less than two pounds of lean ground beef? $9.70 for 900g of whole wheat pasta? I am sorry, but I don’t think I will be able to find these prices on any stores around town, not even down town in the shop where the senators shop. Lean ground beef is usually $3.99/pound, and if you follow the sales, between Loblaws, Independent, Loebs, IGA, Value Mart, Farm Boy, Walmart and what have you, you can always pick it up on sale for $1.99/pound. $9 for whole wheat pasta? Go to the most expensive store, and it is sitting there right beside the regular pasta for about $2/900gr.

Here’s a thought: homemade pasta sauce. Tomato sauce, lean ground beef, peppers, onions, mushrooms, any veggie you want to throw in there, can of crushed tomatoes, tomato paste. make a big vat, freeze supper size portions, and you can have three, four meals made for about $12 TOTAL. And it’s all veggies in there.

No, I think the problem with Canadians eating less healthy foods is not price, but sheer laziness. It is much easier to open up a can of soup and zap it up, than to start by boiling down your beef bone, add celery, onion, chop your carrots, add some noodles, salt pepper. Of course, a can of soup is laden with fats and salts, whereas your own soup is lean and healthy.

The problem with healthy food is that you actually have to prepare it. You have to spend 30 mins before supper washing and chopping your veggies, and people don’t want to do that any more. They also do not want to drive to Walmart to pick up what’s cheap there, then head on to Loebs to pick up what’s on sale there, then head to Loblaws to shop sales there. If you plan your route, you can hit three, four stores on one saturday afternoon, and have bought only sale stuff to prepare suppers for the entire week. But you see, this requires effort.

It has nothing to do with price: picking up a pizza is so much easier, even though it’ll cost you $20 for one supper, whereas if you made pasta sauce, you would have had six suppers for the same money, and eat much, much healthier.

This report goes in my “give a break” file.