For me, growing up the farm, these early months of spring means it’s the season for maple syrup. When I was young, I can remember asking my dad what those taps on the trees were for. And now, as a chef, I’ve learned what they are for – great recipes!

With Easter quickly approaching, I’ve decided to throw a few recipes together which incorporate my favourite spring time ingredient. So here are just a few dishes made with maple syrup that you can make at home for your Easter brunch. Enjoy and have fun

Roger Genoe

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Ingredients:

2 Cups all purpose flour

2 Tbsp Sugar

4 Eggs

19 oz Milk

Combine the flour and sugar in a large mixing bowl. In a second bowl, combine milk and eggs.

Add wet ingredients to dry and let it stand for 15 minutes.

Cook Crepes in a small, non stick pan. Cool. Stack, wrap and store them in the fridge until you want to eat them.

For sweet crepes, warm them slightly in the microwave and top them with Maple Walnut Ice Cream… yumm

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Whole Roasted Chicken - Marinated Overnight with a Reduction of Balsamic Vinegar and Maple Syrup

See!? That sounds better! Like all our recipes for this Easter menu, I’ve included Maple Syrup. Here’s the recipe for the marinade:

1 Cup Maple Syrup

1/2 Cup Balsamic Vinegar

4 Cloves garlic

Sprig of Thyme

Reduce it by half and use it for marinating overnight and basting.

The natural sugars in the Maple Syrup will help glaze the chicken roast until the juice between the thigh and breast is clear. Be sure your oven isn’t too hot! 325 F at most.

Let the chicken rest before carving and serve it with oven baked sweet potato wedges.

Enjoy!

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As I promised: Here is the next recipe for your Easter Menu - have fun and enjoy cooking!

Here is an alternative for English muffins to jazz up your eggs benedict, even the kiddies can get their paws dirty with this one!

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp baking powder

Pinch of salt

1/4 cup cold unsalted butter

2/3 cup  shredded aged
cheddar

1/4 cup sour cream

1/4 cup sautéed bacon with drippings

2 eggs, lightly beaten

1/3 cup milk

4 tbsp maple syrup

1.    Stir together flour, sugar, baking powder and salt with a pastry cutter or with your hands

2.    Cut in cold butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs

3.    Add shredded cheddar, bacon and green onions

4.    Add all of the wet ingredients together, including the bacon drippings
(Reserve a little of the beaten eggs to brush onto the biscuits before they are baked)

5.    Combine your wet and dry ingredients

6.    Work the dough until it just comes together, then turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead 6-8 times

7.    Wrap dough in saran wrap and let the dough relax four ½ hour at room temperature

8.    Unwrap dough, roll out to 1 - 1½ inch thickness and cut dough with a round cookie cutter

9.    Brush with reserved beaten egg, bake at 375° for approximately 15 minutes

Once cooled, cut in half and toast the biscuits to use as the base for your eggs benedict.

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Eggs Benedict

Gently poached Eggs on Toasted English Muffin with peameal bacon and hollandaise sauce. Of course, I would suggest maple glazed ham instead of peameal bacon.

Looking for another great way to incorporate maple syrup into this classic recipe? Try homemade maple syrup and cheddar biscuits in place of English muffins (Find the recipe for these in the next ‘Chef’s News’).

Hollandaise Sauce:

Hollandaise sauce can seem a little complicated, but the trick is to have the clarified butter and egg yolks roughly the same temperature.

If you are feeling adventurous, feel free to add to the hollandaise sauce. Some popular classical derivatives of the Hollandaise sauce are:

Bearnaise – add tarragon

Choron – add tomato puree

Maltaise – add orange juice

Or, you could even try adding 4 parts hollandaise sauce to 1 part strawberry puree. Serve it with white asparagus. I know it sounds out there, but we will come back to this one in the up and coming issues of chefs news.

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It is that time of year again. Spring means different things to different people. For some, it is time for garage sales and car washes. For others, it is time to throw out those heavy coats and heavy shovels. For everyone, it is time to enjoy great whether, great company, and great celebrations!

For me, growing up the farm, these early months of spring means it’s the season for maple syrup. When I was young, I can remember asking my dad what those taps on the trees were for. And now, as a chef, I’ve learned what they are for – great recipes!

With Easter quickly approaching, I’ve decided to throw a few recipes together which incorporate my favourite spring time ingredient. So here are just a few dishes made with maple syrup that you can make at home for your Easter brunch. Enjoy and have fun

Roger Genoe

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for the last two weeks I have been wrapping my mind around how people were cooking in the Middle Ages. It’s pretty interesting, though. They had so many exotic spices like cardamom or saffron, but potatoes, granted for us, came later on. Interesting! I was trying to think of what we would cook nowadays, if we only had an open fire with a stew pot hanging above it…

Actually, the kitchens were often located outside, as a separate building because they burned down so often. So cooking was obviously always a hot business. I feel fortunate that I am a chef in modern times… although… they did have beer for breakfast…

Have a good time!

Roger Genoe

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Expecting to do some office work, I came into the restaurant this afternoon and was handed a bag of apples and a pair of gloves.  Safe Communities had invited a number of local restaurants to provide one course each for their charity event.  In an effort to create a wonderfully unique dish for this cause, our chefs put together some ideas that would take some experimenting and some extra hands.  That is how a day of office work turned into a day of trial and error in the kitchen for me.

My task was to make 150 apple and goat’s cheese caramel lollipops.  Roger showed me what to do but I quickly encountered some problems: As I started dipping the lollipops in the caramel, casualties came early and frequently since the goat’s cheese was falling off the sticks and getting stuck in the caramel creation Roger had put together to coat the lollipops.
With all of the casualties, we quickly realized that a surgeon’s skills would be required so we gathered some tools (chief among them being the Retrieval Spoon). We developed and exercised a number of revival techniques and soon discovered that the best healing process involved “50 CC’s of caramel, STAT!” (for reattachment purposes).
After a few surgeries, I called on the Chemists (better known as the Chefs) for some advice, and they shared some of their expertise with me (“If we heat the caramel to this temperature, and cool the cheese to this temperature then…”).
The “chemists” were close to solving the problem, but it required several hands. And so we became an assembly line.  Four of us stood in our assembly line which happened to face a window, and we wondered how strange we must look to the people looking in on us as they walked by.  By the end of the night we were no closer to perfecting our technique, but we’d had a lot of fun in the process.

The next day when I came in, I saw 150 beautifully complete Goat’s Cheese Lollipops sitting on the counter.  Roger, ever the experimenter and creator, had discovered the secret to candy making overnight. I forgot to ask how he did it (because I was too busy staring at all of our hard work and beaming with pride), but perhaps if Roger is feeling so kind one day, he might share his recipe for all of our readers (myself included)!
I never got to see the dish plated and served at the charity event, but I heard that our course was a complete success. No doubt it was thanks to all of my hard work! (Okay, MAYBE it had something to do with the rest of the great staff at One99 too…)

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“I would just like to reiterate how much I enjoyed my Night with the Chef at One 99 last Thursday. Al, Craig and Anthony were very professional and  gracious hosts who handled all my questions with all the patience of Job. I did not expect to be allowed to take  part in the workings of the kitchen as much as  I did and I was thrilled . It was fascinating to be able to watch and partake in the evening from behind the scenes. I will continue to be a patron of the restaurant for,I hope, many years to come.
Again my many thanks to Carla and Oscar, as well, for making the night and the meal I ate afterwards, very memorable.
Yours Truly
Don Gray”

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I’ve spent some time travelling across Canada. While learning about artisan cheeses I started to question… Why would anyone want a stinky cheese made from sheep`s milk and aged in pine needles? Weird maybe but the end result sent my taste buds into overdrive. Simply amazing, this would be perfect paired with wild grape gelee or even braised lamb shank.

For some, going to a cheese shop can be a bit over whelming. The smell alone can turn your nose up and leave you gasping for fresh air, but when you shop around you are guaranteed to find hidden gems that will exite your taste buds.

Here are a few tips on cheese buying:

Only buy what you can eat today. The biggest money waster when buying cheese is buying too much and having to throw old cheese away. If you’re buying cheese for you and some lucky person to share over a meal, a ¼ pound is plenty (and is usually the minimum quantity a cheese monger will permit). If you are entertaining a group, figure two ounces per head per cheese as a general rule of thumb.

Make good use of multi-purpose cheeses. Again this plays into the “waste not, want not” thought. Harder cheeses like Gruyere and cheddar last longer, and because they are so versatile you’re less likely to have leftover cheese sitting in your fridge. Think of cheese you can add to sandwiches, soups, and pasta. And because they are considered to be “everyday cheeses”, there are great quality versions for $12 per pound or less.

Look for Deals. Why do cheeses go on sale? Well, sometimes they are reaching the end of their ‘useful’ life but are still good to eat. In other words, they are good right now, but may not be in a week or so. Another more common reason is that we’ve got too many of one kind and want to move them before they reach their ‘end date’. Lastly, sales are always a good old-fashioned way to get customers into the store! So if the cheese you want is on sale, ask your cheese monger what the reason is. Keep in mind that if the cheese is really only a few days from being passé then you will want to buy small amounts. Finally, insist on tasting a sample before buying. Cheese can be expensive and sales are a great way to try new flavors.

When and What? Pressed sheep’s milk cheeses (like Manchego from Spain) are great for summertime – just be sure to let them reach room temperature before cutting them. This will help reduce the “weeping” of the fat from the cheese. I like to include cheese in my home entertaining all year round. But when the entertaining moves outdoors and the heat starts rising, some cheeses are best left behind. Even I would pass on Epoisses (a pungent unpasteurized cows milk ) on a hot and humid afternoon… and I’m cheese-obsessed. So do your guests a favor and stick to the mild side of the cheese spectrum and save the stinky ones for winter (or your well air-conditioned house). Goat’s milk cheeses are refreshingly mild and widely available during the summer time. Fresh chèvre logs covered with peppercorns or herbs make for a pretty presentation and are always a crowd pleaser.

Happy Cheese Hunting

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