Strawberry custard tart



The newest President's Choice Insider's Report features amongst its offerings a Patisserie-Style Strawberry Tart. As is often the case with commercially-available desserts, this offering contains dairy products, which means it's a no-no for me. Still, I was intrigued by the concept and decided to try my hand at making something similar.

A trip to Cayne's yesterday provided me with a tart pan, something which I never had a need for before I could make decent pie dough.

I sliced and macerated the strawberries yesterday, made the pie dough today, baked it blind, spread strawberry jam (this is what we had on-hand, I'd rather we had something without "glucose-fructose" in it), poured in a basic custard made of 5 eggs and a "lunch box mini" carton of unsweetened soy milk and added the strawberries. I sprinkled a little bit of sugar on the tart and baked it at 350° until the custard was set. Now I'm waiting for it to cool before I try it.

Longest stretch yet



Kara just spent a little under 9 consecutive hours awake — her longest stint yet. Fortunately for me, this was during a day in which I took her out in her stroller for about an hour and a half early on, then had a visit from my parents. Undoubtedly, her show of stamina can be attributed to all of the excitement today, but still, damn.

Someone's been feeding my baby methamphetamines

I have no other way to explain the fact that she can go to sleep a little after 8 pm, wake at 2 am for a half-hour, then again at 4:30 am, then wake for the day at 6:30 am.

When I find that guy, I'm gonna kill him.

Radiohead - How Can You Be Sure

A taste of (delicious, delicious) victory!



What's that expression about when you fall off the horse?

A conversation with Matt early last week had me deciding that I was going to look into tourtière recipes. A brief research-session showed that there was no such thing as a quintessential tourtiere. I decided to go to my favourite Western-food recipe site and chose this highly-rated recipe for tourtiere out of the lot — it's a good sign when a "grandma" recipe gets rave reviews.

The original recipe makes eight(!) pies, so I scaled it down to a more-manageable two. Four pounds of ground meat is just the right amount to fit my largest pan with enough room to stir. A trip to the supermarket proved that my options — as far as "liquid chicken seasoning" were concerned — were, unfortunately, chock-full of preservatives. I went with the lesser of several evils and settled on Knorr's Homestyle Chicken Stock. I might try to use homemade chicken stock next time.

I have yet to taste the pie itself, but the filling was perfect. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the spices don't much alter the flavour of the meat, whereas the chicken seasoning is what makes the pie taste authentically tourtiere-like.

After the "crushing" defeat I suffered at the hands of the latest batch of vegan crumb cake, it's not to score a victory again.