and things went downhill from there

I considered eggs and toast for breakfast, but decided to go for the vegan option of bannock.

It's just flour, water, salt and baking powder. Totally vegan.

I made a shaggy dough, tore it into four pieces and fried it in a hot pan. It was crispy on the outside and pillowy on the inside. And it picked up a heavenly flavour from the leftover bacon fat I fried it in.

Oh. Yeah.

If one is being pedantic, the bacon fat probably made it a bit less vegan. Still delicious, though.

I picked up some stir-fry noodles and green onions earlier this week with an eye to trying my hand at peanut noodles. atara made some for dinner a couple of weeks back and they were a big hit. I just wanted to try my own twist on them.

The basics of the sauce are just peanut butter, dark soy sauce, rice vinegar, sugar, sesame oil and chilli oil. I didn't have chilli oil, so I substituted some fermented soy-chilli paste. It packed a bit more heat than I wanted, so next time I may skip it, or swap in gochujang or gochugaru instead - I think both would work well with this recipe.



The in individual squares of noodles in the pack that I bought were perfect for single servings. Besides the topping of green onion, I also added a generous dollop of chilli crisp. The latter really tied everything together. If you've never heard of, or tried chilli crisp, go out and buy some now. You can thank me later.

And while I'm posting food, here's a bonus picture of today's breakfast.



There's this misnomer out there that avocado toast is "fancy'. It's literally just toast and eggs with a mashed up avocado. Well, in this case mashed up with lemon juice, kosher salt, freshly-ground black pepper and a little smidgen of minced garlic. I finished it with a pinch of smoked salt flakes and red pepper flakes.

Did you ever have one of those ideas that seemed good in your head at the time?

Since we couldn't agree on what we wanted for breakfast this morning, we ended up taking turns in the kitchen and feeding ourselves. atara made herself some "dippy eggs" with bacon and toast. Since I was planning to make myself pancakes - which would take longer - I let her use the kitchen first.

I decided to have eggs and bacon with the pancakes, so I gave the frying pan a quick wipe and put it back on the heat with two slices of bacon. While they slowly rendered out, I started throwing together some pancake batter.

I mixed up most of the wet ingredients first - an egg, milk, vanilla and sour cream (part of my reason for making pancakes was to use up some of our leftover sour cream). I let that sit for a moment while I tossed together flour, sugar, baking powder, and baking soda in another bowl. I was walking over with the salt when I was struck by an intriguing idea.

The reason I had not added any oil to the wet ingredients was that I was still debating on whether I was just going to use oil, or get fancy and add melted butter. As I was about to add some salt, I noticed the container of bacon grease that atara had left on the stove to cool, and it occurred to me that I had a third option.

I mean, what's bacon grease but meat butter with lots of delicious, delicious cholesterol? I estimated that between the amount she'd left, and the amount I was producing with the bacon I was cooking, it would be the perfect quantity for a batch of pancakes.

So when my bacon was done cooking, I removed it to some paper towels and poured the fat into the container on the stove so that it would cool a bit. I let it sit for about a minute to tame itself and then whisked it into the wet ingredients before dumping in the dry and stirring it together into a batter.

The batter was a strange colour, and I worried that I might end up with dense, greasy pancakes. I worried for nothing. These were some of the lightest, fluffiest pancakes I've had in some time. And they were delicious. I mean, they had bacon fat in them. How could they NOT be delicious?

So ... yeah. This was one of those ideas that seemed good in my head and turned out to be even better than I'd hoped.

This morning, I had one of those ideas that sounded really good on paper, but that I might have reconsidered if I had done some online research (I haven't done any research, so I can't say for sure if I'd have had second thoughts).

It started innocuously enough with some dried lobster mushrooms reconstituting in about 1½ cups of hot chicken stock. While those soaked, I chopped up the ½ of a red onion I had in the fridge and a clove of garlic. It looked like it needed something more, so I grabbed some of my smoked chicken from the basement freezer and cubed about the same quantity of that as I had of onion. I grabbed about the same amount of frozen peas and set them aside too.

I debated leading off with olive oil, but I didn't want to be in danger of making breakfast too healthy, so I reached for the butter instead and started sauteeing the onions over medium heat. When they were just starting to turn translucent, I dumped in the chicken and fished the mushrooms out of the stock. They were not quite done yet, but I knew they would have time to finish in the quinoa. I tossed them in with the chicken and onions, let them mingle a bit before finally adding the garlic and a bit more butter.

When the garlic was smelling pretty good, I poured ½ cup of red quinoa into the pan and set myself on a course of impending failure. I sprinkled in some chipotle pepper and a good dash of chilli powder, along with a bit of kosher salt. I added a tiny bit more butter and stirred things about until the quinoa started to stick, and a fond started building up on the bottom of the pan. I dumped in the frozen peas to tame things a bit and then deglazed the pan with about ¼ cup of sherry.

Once that had cooked off, I started adding the warm chicken stock a bit at a time, adding more as it cooked down. Because I'd got the idea in my stupid head that I was going to make risotto-style quinoa. I'd purposely made more stock than I would normally need if I had cooked quinoa the proper way, but as I neared the end of the stock, and the quinoa was still pebbly-hard, it dawned on me that I had miscalculated somewhere along the way.

Also, it didn't taste especially good. It had a slightly unpleasant bitterness to it. I added a bit more chipotle and chilli to cover that, and then in an act of desperation, I tossed in a bit of nutmeg. Why nutmeg? I guess I've been watching too many 18th-century cooking shows, and nutmeg seemed to go into everything back then. I figured that at best, it would offset the bitterness, and at worst it couldn't hurt too much.

Once I ran out of stock, I started adding the leftover hot water from the kettle I'd heated for coffee, and then I covered it with a lid to see if I could coax the crunchy quinoa into absorbing some of the liquid. It took a couple more additions of water and another ten minutes, but it eventually cooked down to a pleasing al dente.

I scraped the mixture into a bowl (the peas were all but mush by this point), cleaned the pan, and cracked a couple of eggs into another bit of butter. I hit them with a dash of salt and chipotle pepper and then cooked them covered until they were set up as a good sunny-side-up consistency. I slid them out onto the quinoa and resolved that I was going to eat every last bit of this miserable failure.

This was the best quinoa bowl I've had to date. I credit the nutmeg - it was really astonishing how well it harmonized with the other ingredients. All hints of the earlier bitterness were gone. I give it two begrudging thumbs up because it had no business tasting so good.

Tangentially-related, I made bacon, eggs and cheddar biscuits for breakfast this morning (pictured).

We have a couple of cast-iron pans that I keep forgetting to use, which is a shame because they are always a delight to cook with. I purchased the smaller of the two at a nearby hardware co-op shortly before the start of the pandemic, but the bigger one is a bit of a mystery.

We picked up the second-hand twelve-inch pan at a thrift shop more years ago than either of us care to remember. It looked like it had never been used, and they were selling it for a couple of bucks, so I tossed it into the cart.

The interesting thing about this pan is that it has no markings on it as to where it was made, nor who manufactured it. The underside of the pan has a plain, Canadian-style maple leaf embossed on it, and the handle has the the raised number "12" on it. Other than some protruding bumps to facilitate handling, there are no other markings.

It works great. I just wish I would remember to use it more often.

Today on "Cooking With plonq": I carried through on an idea that I'd been tossing about in my head yesterday. This is French toast with a very small twist.

I bought a loaf of brioche sandwich bread last week, and the last few slices were starting to edge toward stale this morning. I also bought a carton of buttermilk last week that still had about 1/3 of it left -- you can probably see where this is going. Hint: the buttermilk is the "twist".

I whipped together two eggs, just over half a cup of buttermilk, a tablespoon of sugar, a big pinch of kosher salt and some vanilla in a bowl. And nutmeg, because I add that to everything. I laid three slices of bread in a pie tin and poured the custard over them.

I put a pan on the stove with a generous knob of butter in it and turned the bread a few times while I waited for the butter to melt and foam up. Then I fried it in the butter and plated it as seen here.

This was really good. It slight tang that balanced the maple syrup I added after this picture was taken. If you have never made French toast with buttermilk, I recommend giving this a try.

I did some more fiddling with that pancake recipe I posted about here the other day.

The two changes I made were to add a bit of sugar to the dry mix, and then substitute almond flour for the regular flour. My reasoning was that since I was using almond milk anyway, that I may as well double down and use almond flour. If I try this again, I may do some research for an egg substitute as well.

I'd still cook them in butter, though, because that stuff is amazing.

I mixed everything up, and am pleased to announce that it was an unmitigated success ... failure ... mixed bag. I discovered that the almond flour browns faster than regular flour does, so the pancakes were turning too dark before they had a chance to cook all the way through. The first one ended up more the consistency of a crepe than a pancake. The second one was still a bit undercooked in the middle. By the time I got to the third, I had lowered the temperature, and covered the pan for the first part of cooking. It was the best of the lot.

I think the key takeaway for next time (because there will be a next time) is that I will start at a lower temperature, and cover them for the cooking process.

The texture was a bit strange, and it will take some work to master the cooking of them, but these pancakes were delicious. These were not my prettiest pancakes ever, but they are the best tasting ones I've produced.

One of the things I plan to do after I retire is explore local restaurants. My goal is to venture out at least a couple of times a week to sample a wide variety of breakfast and lunch places, hopefully hitting a different one each time. A good friend of mine is retiring later this year, and when I mentioned this plan to him, he immediately said, "Sign me up!"

Ultimately I want to walk or cycle to as many of them as I can, or walk there and take the bus home again; the idea is to get exercise as well as a meal. My plan for my retirement years does not consist of sitting on my butt as I slowly fade away.

I know it's not a unique or new idea, but I am also planning to BLOG about the places as I visit them. I am torn between creating a public BLOG for it (maybe see if I can coax my dear wife to give me some space on one that she has already created), or just post it here.

I may experiment with a few formats before I settle on something consistent, so please bear with me. Also, don't expect a lot of entries on this until I'm actually retired in a year.

Name:
Relli's Breakfast & More
Home Style Cooking

Location:
Attached to the Green Brier Inn, North Main St, Winnipeg

Date:
August 11, 2017

atara and I spotted this new place when we were walking down Main Street a couple of weeks ago to hit up a local butcher shop. There have been a couple of other restaurants that have set up shop in the front of the Green Brier over the years, but each has looked sketchier than the one before.

At this point I should probably give some background on the Green Brier itself. This is a pub located in the north part of Winnipeg, with an attached liquor vendor, and (as I mentioned above) a succession of restaurants occupying the other street-front portion of the building. In fairness to the pub, I have only been in there once, and it was long before its renovations a few years ago. At the time when I visited, it radiated an unwelcoming, stabby kind of vibe that caused my friend and I to exchange an uneasy glance before we wheeled and walked out again by unspoken, mutual agreement.

The fact that there was drunken, off-key karaoke taking place at the time did not hurt our decision process.

When we passed this new restaurant (New as of June this year, as I later learned from the owner), I told atara of my plan to walk down there for breakfast at some point during my week of vacation. Yesterday I followed through on that.

Between the gaily painted window - which features a smiling portrait of (who I presume to be) the self-same Relli taking an order, and a grinning cup of coffee holding a breakfast sandwich - and the Venetian blinds inside, I could not see into the restaurant from the street. I dithered outside for a minute, trying to find a write-up about the restaurant on my phone before I finally admitted to myself that I was just procrastinating.

I opened the door and ventured into a rather pleasant, homey little diner. It had five tables in total, one of which was occupied by a family of four, and another by a young woman who was drinking coffee and reading the paper. It did not take me long to figure out that she is the owner's daughter, first when she offered me a menu and told me to help myself to coffee, and again later when I heard her complain, "Mom, I'm not even supposed to be working today."

Mother and daughter were both very friendly, and quickly defused any hesitation I may have felt about trying the new restaurant.

The menu selection was fairly limited - if memory serves me, they offered a maximum of five or six breakfast selections. I glanced over the options quickly before choosing the pork chop and eggs, as pictured below.



The coffee was fine, but not extraordinary. It tended toward the lighter and thinner end of the spectrum for my liking, but it was fresh thanks to the high throughput. If one was looking solely for coffee, I would steer them toward other outlooks first, but I would not actively discourage them from coming here.

I ordered the eggs with my meal sunny-side-up, and they were cooked to near perfection. Most place are pretty good when it comes to eggs, but it is nevertheless a nice treat when they nail it. The potatoes were also handled well. The breakfast potatoes are usually the things I dread most when I try a new place, but these had just a nice amount of crunch where they were browned, and just enough onion mixed in to give them a good flavour. It's possible that they were cooked from frozen, but I'd still rate them around the same level as what you will usually get from one of those family-style chain restaurants.

The rye toast could have been left in the toaster for another minute in my opinion, but I will take slightly light toast over burnt any day. The toast was buttered, but not saturated as some places are wont to do. When I say buttered, I think it is more likely that it was margarined - at least, that's the impression I was left with from the taste and texture of the spread. They offered no sides (jam, jelly, peanut butter), and I did not see any readily available for patrons. They probably would have brought some if I had asked, but I was satisfied to dip the toast ends into the egg yolks and enjoyed it that way. Still, next time I will ask for peanut butter.

The only real disappointment with the breakfast was the pork chop. I have seen some thin cuts of meat in my time, but it takes real skill to shave off a chop this thin. It's not like I think the breakfast needed a thick chop - it was quite filling, and the chop was more for flavour than anything else, and I understand that a thin chop cuts the cooking time during the busy breakfast hours. It was well-seasoned and flavourful. My issue with the pork chop was that it was overcooked. It was not quite reduced to jerky, but it was tough and chewy. One does not want to serve raw pork, but this one would have benefited from a minute or two less on the griddle.

The slice of strawberry and summer melon were a nice finish, but in a small enough portion that I would almost classify them as garnish rather than as part of a meal.

Overall, I would rate the meal as good, but not great. The diner was clean, and the atmosphere was friendly. The food was about on par with what you would expect from a little family-run diner.

I won't actually give a review-style rating for the place since I have only been there once, and I like to return and try other dishes before I actually do a review, so I'll finish with a tentative rating of will return.