70's nostalgia Archives

This is a photo of my backyard. Last week 40 centimeters of snow fell on our city and yesterday, to add insult to injury, an additional 25 centimeters piled up! That’s over 2 feet of snow for those of you not familiar with the metric system. In any language, it’s a sh#@load of snow!

Just In case there is any doubt about where I fall on the love-hate spectrum of winter, I reside on the far right. I despise winter! However, my oldest son recently became certified to teach skiing, so in the generous spirit of the season, I am thrilled for him and all the skiers out there.

Last week, I promised no more cookie postings in December. However, I did not promise no more sugar. I couldn’t go cold turkey without sugar, so there is just a little bit of brown sugar in the following recipe. I felt that I needed to offer you a warm buffer against the nastiness that is winter.

A big bowl of steaming hot tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich are the consummate comfort lunchtime meal for many a school age child. That being said, my childhood lunchtime never included this classic tummy warmer.

When I was growing up, my sisters and I came home from school everyday for lunch. Our public school was a short 8-minute walk from our house. The walk could be done in 7 minutes if we took the shortcut, but I seem to recall that we had to pass by a scary house if we took it, so we toughed out the extra minute. We always watched the Flintstones at lunchtime and usually ate Kraft Dinner or a Swanson’s Chicken Pot Pie or a T.V. Dinner. Hey, it was the 70’s and we were a modern family!

I never really developed a taste for tomato soup until recently. I tried Campbell’s tomato soup in university and didn’t particularly care for it. If I needed comfort, my go-to soup was my mom’s chicken soup or, in a pinch, Campbell’s Chicken Noodle.

Lately, I have been noticing tomato soup popping up on restaurant menus and on all the food web sites and magazines. The world is a darker and scarier place now and I suppose tomato soup is the quintessential reminder of those simpler, gentler times.

I discovered this Brown Sugar Roasted Tomato Soup on www.seriouseats.com. I get an e-mail everyday from them. Serious Eats is a website focused on celebrating and sharing food enthusiasm through blogs, video and online community. They are passionate about food, informative, inclusive and, most importantly, they make me laugh.

Instead of serving this soup with the traditional grilled cheese sandwich, it gets a topping of cheddar cheese croutons. Brilliant, and quite delicious, this may become your new favourite go to comfort food when your world seems a little too treacherous and uncertain to handle.

Canned tomatoes are drained and then topped with a little brown sugar to enhance their natural sweetness. A quick roasting in the oven and the tomatoes and brown sugar caramelize into sweet deliciousness.

Finely grated cheddar cheese and olive oil get massaged into some whole grain bread cubes and then the whole lot gets tossed into a hot oven.

Click here to print recipe for Brown Sugar Roasted Tomato Soup.

I could wax poetic here and spin a lyrical little tale about how the nip in the air and the gorgeous scarlet and golden maple leaves have inspired me to make some homey dish that smacks of nostalgia. But, if I’m to be completely honest, the reason I baked these chicken artichoke pot pies was because I was cleaning up the basement storage room and I found this box of freaking adorable barnyard cooky cutters. (Why did they misspell cookie?).

I seem to recall buying them when the kids were little and had grandiose plans for baking sugar cookies with them and letting them ~~decorate them with coloured royal icing~~ suck icing from the piping bags, but sadly we never did it. It is possible they were used with play-doh at some point!

That little metal chicken was calling out to me and I instantly knew that I wanted to make chicken pot pies. As a child of the 70’s I was practically weaned on Swanson Chicken Pot Pies and TV Dinners. Carol Brady was my second mother and I so badly wished that Alice was our housekeeper. Not that my mom was a bad cook, but she had 6 kids and was very busy cleaning all the time, so frozen meals were a big part of my childhood. Our favourite dessert was Sara Lee Banana Cake. One of my sisters always snuck into the freezer and picked the icing off the top of the cake. We never did discover who it was.

This chicken pot pie is inspired by a Chicken and Artichoke Casserole that I used to make all the time at one of my very first full-time kitchen jobs. I was working at Dinah’s Cupboard. It was run by a woman named Dinah Koo. The little shop, in the Yorkville neighbourhood was Toronto’s first Gourmet take-out food shop. Dinah was an amazing woman to work for. She demanded perfection and precision in everything we made. She taught me a great deal about discipline in the kitchen. Food quality always came first but following close on its heels was presentation. She knew how to make food look beautiful. It was also at Dinah’s Kitchen that I learned to love salt. Before any of the dishes left our kitchen to be sold in the food shop, Dinah or her brother Barry would taste them. Without fail, almost every time I got the response “more salt”!

I cringe when I hear people boast “Oh, I don’t use any salt when cooking.”, as if that’s a good thing. And then I hope I never get invited to eat at their house! Salt is an integral ingredient in cooking as well as baking. It fills out the flavour of foods. If it is absent, food just tastes flat. British restaurant critic Jay Raynor said it best, “Salt is the difference between eating in Technicolor and eating in black and white.” If loving salt is wrong, then I don’t want to be right. Sorry, I’ll get off my ~~salt~~ soap box now and stop lecturing you on the evils of cooking without salt.

I decided to make mini pot pies, because they are so adorable and because I knew we would have leftovers and I could stash them in the freezer and bake them another day.

I started with poaching chicken breasts. Buy chicken breasts on the bone and then cut the meat off the bone before you add them to the pot. That way, you can remove the breast meat after 20 minutes, when it is perfectly cooked and continue cooking the vegetables and bones to extract the maximum amount of flavour, so that you will have a really great stock.

Once the chicken is poached and you have your stock, make the pastry. I decided to add some poppy seeds to the dough, for a bit of crunch. This recipe for the dough comes from chatelaine.com. It is a bit unusual in that instead of cutting the cold butter or shortening into the flour and then adding liquid, they melt the butter with the water and then mix it into the dry ingredients. You can make the dough with all butter, half butter and half shortening or all shortening, the choice is yours. Just don’t forget to add the salt.

While the dough is chilling, prepare the chicken and artichoke filling. I like the addition of leeks, rather than onions as a flavour base. Leeks need to be cleaned very well in cold water. Slice lengthwise and then into 1/2 inch pieces. Place in a bowl of cold water and use your hands to swish the leeks around. Scoop out leeks that have floated to the top of the bowl.

Flour is added to the sautéed vegetables and then chicken stock and white wine are added.

Once the mixture simmers for a few minutes, I added the artichokes, diced chicken meat, frozen peas and some parsley. I also added the zest of one lemon and a few teaspoons of Siracha sauce for some zip.