My friend Pam, whom I met in university, once took a year of culinary school and is a huge foodie, and some of my fondest food memories come from living at her house one summer. Her mother, an Austrian lady named Elke, is a wonderful cook, and wonderful person too. She welcomes everyone with open arms. (Her schnitzel was the best, and so was her pasta sauce, and so was her peach pie, and her amaaaaazing Dutch apple pie....Okay, I'm salivating now).... I think between Pam and I, those were the only things we requested over and over and over..... They have a nice garden in their backyard, and when I visited Pam last summer we went out and picked berries to go in our morning yogurt. I vaguely remember picking our own potatoes too, but I'm not sure if we did, or we just talked about it. I also love their grape arbor.... Okay, back to cookbooks. Pam has a GREAT collection, is how I got started on that subject. My brother Martin also has an amazing cookbook collection, he likes to collect old ones too, so it's pretty neat to see the old recipes in them.
So, I spent awhile deliberating over my first two choices, and I ended up with David Rocco's Made In Italy (from amazon.ca) and Lynn Ogryzlo's The Ontario Table. My third choice I picked up quickly, a cookbook of around-the-world recipes by Gordon Ramsay. We had been on a kick of watching his TV show, Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. Great television, and I used to like watching Hell's Kitchen too. I totally get a kick out of his foul language, which I'm sure is part of his popularity. Either you love him or hate him, and I think he is hilarious. I have always wanted to try his actual food, since he is always busy fixing other people's menus. I have to say it was not the recipe book I was looking for.
In David Rocco's Made In Italy, I found the ultimate in food porn. Reading this book is like wandering through a sunny Italian day, with lush photos, evoking an experience that you can live vicariously. You don't even have to like or want to cook the recipes. You can practically smell the produce in the market stalls, and taste the golden green olive oil, and feel the sea breeze wafting by you. The atmosphere of the text is warm and inviting, like being embraced into an extended Italian family. I LOVE LOVE LOVE this cookbook. (It doesn't hurt that David Rocco himself is pretty easy on the eyes, and he even shares photos of his gorgeous wife and adorable baby twin daughters.)
My second choice, I also loved. The Ontario Table by Lynn Ogryzlo is a beautiful road trip through Ontario, so you can support your local markets and farmers, and Canadian economy, because you learn where to find the best ingredients that we produce, and just about every main course has a wine pairing for an Ontario wine, which is also brilliant.
So, I had a specific cuisine (Italian), and a great Ontario book, and what I really wanted was a fantastic multicultural experience in a cookbook. So I'm sorry Gordon, your cookbook had nice recipes in it, but it wasn't the one that inspired me the most. I took it back after Christmas and exchanged it for one I hadn't noticed before, by Roger Mooking and Allan Magee, called Everyday Exotic. He uses a pretty neat concept where he creates several dishes using what he calls an "obedient ingredient". I had been wanting to make the passion fruit satays for awhile, and a couple of weeks ago asked our produce manager if he was bringing any in, so he decided to....
So I made them!! I decided to use chicken instead of pork, not being a fan of pork (other than bacon, which is mostly salt, which is why I like it). Wow, I just found this recipe online, from his book, I'm surprised, so I will link you to it here: Passionfruit Pork Satays, with herbed couscous and vegetable stirfry. I only marinated the chicken for half an hour but it definitely picked up some great flavour from the basil and passionfruit in that short amount of time. When I made the passionfruit "tzaziki", I found it strange that it called for whole milk, when I had used coconut milk in the marinade, so I just used coconut milk there too.
These were really great and fresh. I would definitely make them again, and the herbed couscous was very low-key, but a perfect side dish. I just used a pre-packaged stir fry blend of veggies, but used garlic and sesame oil too, and I did throw in some fresh ginger as well... I LOVE sesame oil, a little goes a long way, it is very flavourful.
Passionfruit look like Max's Miracle Pill from The Princess Bride, you know the one with chocolate coating so it goes down easier? Except you have to wait, what? a good hour before you go swimming after? lol. LOVE that movie. Okay, that's what passionfruit looks like. Brown balls of uninterestingness. But open them up, and they are a viscous greenyellow. Kind of strange, but at least interesting, and emit a lovely tropical fragrance that reminds me of papaya...but a bit sharper and tangier. The seeds stay in whatever you're cooking, and add some crunch.
Actually, my first thought on cutting a passionfruit in half is that it reminded me of that big monster in the desert, where Luke Skywalker, Chewbaca, and Han Solo get thrown into by Jabba the Hutt. It is called the belly of the Sarlacc, in the skirmish at the Great Pit of Carkoon. Do you see the difference? I don't see the difference. :)
Anyway, together, they look pretty cool, though I must say a lot of tropical fruit look like they come from an alien planet....Although they probably don't think that in the tropical region they come from. 
Check these out: Dragonfruit are way more mainstream than they used to be, and once upon a time I can remember paying $7 or $8 dollars for one, but they were so cool-looking, I had to try it. They are also beautiful on the inside, with white flesh and thousands of tiny black seeds, looking sort of like kiwifruit seeds, but this fruit is very mild in flavour, and my girls love them, so now that they are about $3 each I buy one now and then for them.
This week is the first time we've tried starfruit, also known as carambola, though they are pretty common too. And finally there is the cherimboya, an amazing looking green fruit, that looks like it is painted on the outside, that was not ripe when I bought it but ripened within a few days, and has a white interior with black seeds. The green colour had faded a bit too. It tasted like a combination of banana and tropical flavours. Very interesting. Here's a photo of their innards:
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