As I said in my previous article, I was looking for things like black cardamom seeds, whole nutmeg, cinnamon sticks and cloves. While all of these spices were available at my local supermarket, most of them came in large bags and I was looking for just a fraction of that amount for this cake.

Pretty much by accident, we happened to be driving up Fraser street at that time and saw the yellow awnings of the store called Super Spice House. We immediately pulled over to the side of the street and I ran across to check out Super Spice House while Barb waited in the car.

Stepping into the Super Spice House shop was like being instantly transported into some place in India. There were rows upon rows of bins containing spices which were only partially familiar to me but it was the smell that was so exotic.

It took me far longer to find what I was looking for mostly because I spend an extra 15 minutes or so just browsing through the diverse selection of spices and foods that Super Spice House carried. I made several mental notes of some things that I may want to come back for and took my small selections of spices to the front to be paid. All in all, it cost me about $1.50 for what I needed which was a bargain by any measure.

No doubt, I will be returning back to Super Spice House in the future for when my cooking needs once again extend into the more exotic frontiers.

Baden

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Super Spice House
6169 Fraser St., Vancouver
604-323-2529

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Some of the tools in my kitchen get used on a regular basis while others are used only on specific occasions. My mandoline falls into the latter category.

I originally purchased my mandoline in Paris on our last visit in 2004 from a store called E. Dehillerin. E. Dehillerin is a kitchen supply store in Paris that has been around since 1820 and mostly caters to professional cooks. I have found that their selection of kitchen products is really quite diverse and they carry items that I have never seen in any other kitchen store in the world that I have visited.

The mandoline that I bought is made by a French company called Bron Coucke (made in France, of course) and is made of sturdy all-metal construction. It came with a small red case which contains 4 different sized cutting blocks which can be inserted into the mandoline so that you can julienne cut (ie: cut into match sticks) into different widths.

Without using one of these blades in the mandoline, you will only cut flat and a lever at the bottom of the mandoline allow the thickness of the cut to be infinitely adjustable. By reversing the direction of the cut and flipping a lever, you can use the wavy shaped blade instead of the flat one.

All of the blades in the mandoline and the inserts are incredibly sharp and while this would seem like a useful feature, it poses it’s own set of challenges. The mandoline has a round plastic guard that is supposed to be used to slide the food back and forth and protect your hand. However, I have generally stopped using this as it just doesn’t offer the same control as using my bare hands – especially when you are getting down to the last few slices. Consider that as you are sliding food back and forth (getting progressively closer to the razor-sharp cutting blade with each pass) that the thought of slicing my fingers open is pretty high on my mind.

Most of the usage of my mandoline seems to be around the Christmas season as a regular task that I use it for is to slice the red cabbage that we have with our December 24th Christmas dinner. The red cabbage (a fairly hard vegetable) needs to be sliced into even sized pieces. I also made a dish on the 25th made up of sliced butternut squash and yams. Both of these jobs were perfect tasks for the mandoline and were all completed in minutes with a minimum of effort (other than concentrating on not slicing my fingers off).

There are many different brands and styles of mandolines on the market and if you are interested in buying one you don’t need to go to Paris to buy one. In fact the model that I have is available in stores in Vancouver as well are much simpler (and less expensive) models. Depending on who much you think you may use a mandoline you can decide on how much you would want to spend on it if you wished to purchase one.

Personally, I can’t wait to visit E. Dehillerin again and see what other great things that they happen to carry that might be a good addition to my kitchen.

Baden

At that time, my blog was slowly increasing in readership and was ranked at the number three spot on Google searches for “excellent adventure”.

Yes, I know, some may say that this is a dubious honour, at best.

Nonetheless, I recently had noted that my site had overtaken another website called Bill and Ted’s Excellent Online Adventure (www.billandted.org) and was now rated as the number two page ranked site.

For those of you on the outside of the blogging world (known as the blogosphere to us on the inside) you might not appreciate the significance of Google range rankings but suffice to say that we think about these kinds of things all the time (when not thinking up new articles to write about).

As it stands right now, all that stands in the way of my blog site reaching the coveted number one page ranking position is the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure section of the hugely popular imdb.com (the Internet Movie Database) web site. If my blog site were to manage to replace the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure site as the number one page ranked site, my life would be complete and there would be nothing left to accomplish.

Well, maybe more of the food and travel stuff.

Baden

So fast forward to about a three weeks ago when we met at my Aunt Marlene’s place to talk about how we were going to divide up some of the cooking for the Christmas dinner which was going to be held at Marlene’s place this year. All of us were given specific dishes to make and I had also volunteered to make a Love cake as part of my assigned cooking tasks.

While I had been anxious to make Love cake on my own for some time now, there’s a fairly high expectation in my family of what Love cake should taste like. All of us had literally grown up on this as my grandmother had made it regularly year after year since when I was a kid. By all estimates, this recipe has been in my mother side of the family for at least 75 years. If my grandmother’s mother had made it before her then it would mean that it would perhaps have over 100 years of history in the family.

All of this was running through my mind on Wednesday night as I started the first night of what would be a two night process of making this Love cake for the first time. To say that the expectations would be high is not overstating the case by much. My family is normally an easy going lot but if I knew that if I were to screw up this recipe, I’d be changing my name and be forced to move out of town in the dead of night.

The preparation for making the cake started about two weeks ago when I started to collect the more exotic ingredients for the recipe. Items like black cardamom seeds and whole nutmeg could all be found in my local Save on Foods stores but they mostly all came in large packages which was much more than I needed. I ended up buying a number of the spices from a small shop on Fraser Street which sold Indian spices in bulk and the lot of them cost no more than about 50 cents.

Part of the preparation that I did the night before was mostly the grinding of the spices, sugar and cashews. As I was going to make the Love cake on a weekday night after work, I didn’t have time to do everything in one night so I split it over two nights.

The recipe that I documented when making the Love cake last year at Marlene’s involved grinding the cashews with a manual grinder as shown in this picture:

Not having such a device, I ended up using a small food processor. The end result was not as consistent in size as a manual grinder but it would suffice for the recipe. One of the other critical stages was to grind up the four main spices that made the core flavour of the cake: cardamom seeds, cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg. All of these spices were bought in their original hard form and not ground so they all went into my blender and after a few minutes on high speed resulted in a mixture that filled the kitchen with the most exotic aroma imaginable!

Sidebar: It’s now three days since I made the Love cake and I have washed my blender about 4 times but have been unable to remove the residue embedded into the plastic walls of the inside of the blender which was made by these spices.

The next day, the real baking started.

The timing that drove all of this baking was that I wanted to have the cake finished before December 24th and it needed two full days to sit before being able to serve it. That meant that Thursday after work was dedicated to a few hours in the kitchen.

The basis for the batter that makes up Love cake is sugar, the ground cashews and eggs. 14 eggs. Later on in the recipe the toasted wheatlets are added along with almost a full pound of butter. The batter is so heavy and thick at this point that it takes every last bit of power from my KitchenAid mixer just to turn the mixing paddles. If my mixer had one of the less powerful motors, I suspect that it would have burned out after about 5 minutes. Keep this in mind if you plan on making this recipe yourself.

Once all of the ingredients were mixed into the batter (including the ground spices and quarter cup of brandy), it went into the paper-lined baking pan. The notes that my aunt Marlene gave us called for the pan to be lined with not one, but two layers of brown paper bags, greased with butter.

However since I haven’t seen a paper grocery bag in about a decade, I used two layers of brown wrapping paper instead – something that we have in good supply as we have been wrapping Christmas gifts this week.

The Love cake went into the oven and after about 2 hours came out and then proceeded to sit on the top of the stove cooling for the next two days while I anxiously awaited my opportunity to test out the flavour. This happened to be this morning and I can only say that I wasn’t disappointed. In the time that I have been writing this article I have been back to the kitchen twice for successively larger pieces of Love cake.

Over the next two days I’ll have the opportunity to offer my cake to my other family members but I think that they will agree that this Love cake is ready to move forward for the next generation.

Baden

The first visit to A Kettle of Fish was around 1980 (just about a year after the restaurant originally opened) was with my parents and sister for an occasion that completely escapes me now. You would think that something like this would have stuck with me as it isn’t overstating the case my saying that my parents rarely went to restaurants like A Kettle of Fish – and almost never with “the kids”.

The occasion that took us to a nice restaurant like this was Barb’s mother Ruth’s birthday and it being a Monday night we had no problems getting a reservation.

As you may have already picked up by the name, A Kettle of Fish specializes in seafood dishes and does a pretty good job of pretty much all of them. The appetizer that I ordered was a simply named “Kettle Fish Soup” which was a delicious tomato-based soup with an assortment of mussels and pieces of fish. If the rest of the meal was an indication from the appetizer, we were in for an extraordinary meal.

For my main course, I had ordered the Seafood Medley. This dish was a combination of salmon, tuna, scallops and prawns served in a lemon-thyme sauce which was also really delicious.

When the time came to order dessert, I had already had my fill and was only open to have a finishing coffee to end my meal. However, Barb and Ruth were open to sharing a dessert and happened to order an orange Napoleon with almond cream filling. Barb and Ruth assured me that it tasted even better than it looked.

At the end of the evening, we were all walking back to the car and appreciating the great meal and service that we had experienced at A Kettle of Fish. It definitely won’t be 26 years before our next visit.

Baden

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A Kettle of Fish Restaurant
900 Pacific Street, Vancouver
604-682-6661

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