Flavour Flash – The Festive Special

As Canadian Thanksgiving approaches, we ponder the annual question associated with this holiday with trepidation. Not what to be thankful for, but rather… will it be too hot in Toronto to actually cook a roast bird and five side dishes on Thanksgiving Day? It’s about a 50/50 draw; some years early October is cool and rainy, other years temperatures can hit the high 20s.

Since it’s just Greg and I, we usually just cook a chicken, but I don’t relish standing in a hot kitchen with the oven and all the burners going if it’s going to be a warm day with a humidex. Besides, I can roast a chicken any time, I don’t need a holiday to do it, so while we want to do something to celebrate the day, I’m never inclined to actually break a sweat.

For the past couple of years in pandemic times, upscale local restaurants have filled the void with gorgeous multi-course menus delivered to our door. One of the options we considered this year included seared foie gras, so there’s lots to be thankful for.

In the past, though, the delivery options got no more fancy than Swiss Chalet.

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Where Can I Find – Kitchen Scale

scaleA friend contacted me recently looking for advice on where to find a kitchen scale. He was making beer and needed to measure various ingredients by weight.

The average home cook doesn’t really need a scale unless they’re working with dishes that need precise measurements or do a lot of baking. In chef’s school, we measured all baking ingredients by weight instead of the Imperial “cups” system to help ensure a level of quality control on our finished products. In countries that have fully adapted to the metric system, all recipe ingredients are measured in grams, so a kitchen scale might also be useful for people who cook from any UK cookbooks.

The other and more popular use for a home kitchen scale is for health and nutrition purposes – to measure out exact amounts of foods to help in following a specific diet.

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