Happy Canada Day!

We’ll get to the low-key-Canadian-patriotic celebrating stuff in a minute.

First, I want to say thanks to all you lovely Internet People who sent emails, noticing that the Domestik Goddess was uncharacteristically quiet and wondering if I’d died… got me all misty-eyed, some of you!

“Rumours of my death are greatly exaggerated,” to crib from Mark Twain.

The truth is that I’ve been working super-long hours on a big new project, and it’s almost done. Well, done enough that I can come back to the real world now that the end is in sight! (Did I just call the Internet the “real world”?!?) Anyway, today I celebrated that long-awaited “Almost Done” milestone (and Canada Day, too) by spending a little quiet quality time with dogs, food and the traditional Maritime icons of beer and music
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Braised Asian Lemon Seitan

by guest on March 30, 2009

Mmmm… Chris Perrin is back this month with his recipe for Braised Asian Lemon Seitan to make you tastebuds do a Happy Dance, while you feel all healthy and full of nutritional virtue! When our favourite certified cook isnt busy serving up veg*n goodies at DomestikGoddess.com, Chris writes for BIAO Magazine, food-blogs at Blog Well Done, and is working on his own vegan cookbook. Enjoy!   ~ Jen

Braised Asian Lemon Seitan

chris perrin Braising is one of my favorite cooking techniques. It’s a wonderful way to get a bunch of flavor into a dish and it’s really simple. The good news is that seitan, my favorite vegan meat replacement, with its firm texture, stands up to braising extremely well. In fact, a good braise can loosen the sietan, make it more receptive to the juices you’re cooking it in, and improve the overall texture.

For those not familiar with the term braising, it means cooking food partially submerged in a flavorful liquid. The most important part is the “partially submerged”. The food is not completely covered by cooking liquid (that’s boiling or stewing). Instead, the food is usually covered half way so that the bottom is in the liquid, while the top is exposed to the air. The second most important part is “flavorful liquid” because whatever you are cooking will absorb the tastes of the liquid in which it’s cooked. Good braising liquid makes for a great braised dish. We’re going to use that to our advantage!
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nettie-zig-zag-quilt-closeupIf you’ve seen a zig-zag quilt, you’ll immediately see the fascination. It looks like giant bands of rick-rack trim sewn into a quilt — but really, the zig-zag effect is achieved with a series of triangles and a trick of the eye.

Now, you might look at a zig-zag quilt and figure it’s pretty straightforward to make — but it turns out there are a couple of different ways to cut your triangle pieces and a couple of different ways to assemble them, too.

Check out these quilt tutorials for great instructions and, better yet, for the photographs and illustrations that are soooo essential to make sense of each quilter’s cutting and piecing methods —
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