Maple Mayhem

The year seems to be drifting by so fast, often right by me. This dinner puts us at Canada Day and I'm officially at the halfway mark of this project. In the first month of A Food Year I came across Noshblog, a finished blog that followed its author's attempt to eat a different dinner every day for a year and the only other person to my knowledge that has done such a thing (though I am sure there are others out there). Jon told me that the first few months were easy, but by the end of the year he was basically fed up with the whole thing. He checks in from time to time to see if I've had enough and thrown in the towel. This dinner begins the first week where I was seriously looking for the towel to throw.

I've been frustrated at certain times throughout the project and as I'm sure you have noticed I've fallen behind in posting. This week I didn't just fall behind in write-ups, I fell behind in cooking. After nearly all my produce was ruined by the chicken juice incident, the next day half of the staff at work quit and I ended up doubling my hours. Without a day off to go grocery shopping and being too tired to cook, I reached the end of the week with only a single dinner behind me and felt completely screwed. I started telling myself that I don't have to do this, that I can quit whenever I want to. Sure, I might let down a few thousand loyal readers and make Charlie (my web designer) incredibly irate, but I could just fade off into oblivion and try to forget about it. And then I started cooking again and all of that faded away. I'm still behind, but I'm not as behind, and I know I'll be able to catch up again.

I've spent a lot of time looking for authentic Canadian cuisine. As I may have mentioned before, the only indisputably Canadian dish I've found, aside from desserts (of which we have many) and poutine, is muskrat and onions, and I never have and never will consider eating a muskrat. Maple syrup is the most Canadian edible I can think of, so I made a dinner around that. My entree was Maple Glazed Chicken, which was far less sweet that I had expected. The skin was deliciously crisp, which was my favorite part, and the meat stayed incredibly tender. The addition of cumin, something that will never make an appearance in Canadian cuisine, gave it a sort of curried flavor. Shannon did not care for that as much, but still thought that the dish was good. From what I've read about caraway, it's possible that the cumin they called for was supposed to be caraway seed, but I stuck with the cumin.

I made Maple Glazed Beets, which were incredibly potent and flavorful, with a sort of pickled flavor. I am quite fond of beets, aside from how they like to stain everything purple, and having another way of giving them a pickled flavor is very nice. I haven't had beets since April, which I can honestly remember so vividly that it may as well have been yesterday. Strange how that happens.

To round out the plate I made some Waldorf Salad, with an addition of, you guessed it, maple syrup. Waldorf salad can comprise so many ingredients, but I left it incredibly simple because, well, my pantry is out of walnuts, raisins and numerous other things you might consider a good addition to it. Maybe I'm not particularly fond of apples in salad, unless you count Slaw, but the Waldorf salad doesn't really do it for me, no matter what the additions. I guess I just don't think something as crisp as a fresh apple should be combined with something creamy like yogurt or mayonnaise. At least I used several types of apples, so I had the adventurous task of trying to discern the differences in my mouth.