Mexican Hot Chocolate

If you've been following Janaki and Pascal's adventures on Instagram (@lemarchestgeorge + @janakilarsen), you will have, undoubtedly, seen little snippets of what is to arrive at our shop when they return.

Perhaps what I am most excited about is the arrival of traditional Mexican hot chocolate. Joaquinita Chocolate has been making this traditional sweet drink since 1898, and are famous throughout the state of Michoacan. These dark chocolate tablets are typically blended into warm milk with a molinillo, a traditional wooden utensil that somewhat resembles a hand whisk. It is made from a single piece of wood with loose rings that spin when you rub the handle back and forth between your palms. The rings emulsify the chocolate with the milk, giving it a slight froth, ensuring that the chocolate is incorporated properly into the milk.

Though there aren't any signs of it yet, Autumn is on its way, and the arrival of these tablets into our shop will make a great addition with the rainy days that are to come.

Lola demonstrating the use of the molinillo to incorporate the disk of chocolate into the milk. Note the use of her palms...

Just a little taste test...

We hope to fall into a chocolate-induced siesta soon enough!

Photographs: Janaki Larsen
Story: Issha Marie

Loose Morels

Klee is back from her mushroom-picking trip! She brought home some of these morels she has foraged and dried the whole lot of them. These will be sold in the shop soon, so keep an eye out for these on our shelves...

Photographs: Issha Marie

Meet The Maker: Easy, Tiger!

This is the first of a new series of blog posts where we will feature the makers behind some of the products we carry in our shop. We are focusing on one of our own for our very first Meet the Maker series - Taylor Jakubke. You can find Taylor behind our coffee bar a couple of days a week making your coffee-based drinks.

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Taylor Jakubke is a Certified Massage Practitioner and the creator of Easy Tiger bath salts. She often suggests 30-minute baths to her clients. Stress, she says, is held in the connective tissue. A bath with pure salts and essential oils induces relaxation and can help reset one's physiology. She started making custom blends for herself before she decided to make small batches of it to market to the masses. "If I ever owned a spa, these would be the salts I put in my clients' baths," Taylor remarks.

The name Easy Tiger comes from the popular colloquialiasm, "Easy, Tiger!" - a phrase one might say to someone who is on the verge of exploding from anger or stress.

Currently, the shop carries Easy Tiger Bath Salts in Skinny Dip - an energizing, citrus blend with grapefruit and lime - and Salty Bro - a rejuvenating epsom salt blend of eucalyptus and lavender.

Styled and photographed by Issha Marie. Ceramics by Janaki Larsen.

Beneath The Surface: A Kinfolk Gathering

A few months ago, at the height of spring and cherry blossom weather, we hosted a Kinfolk gathering in the space above the shop through Here There Studio. This gathering's theme, Beneath the Surface, celebrates the comforts of home and how Sundays should be spent. Here There Studio divided the gathering in two parts - a classic Sunday Roast and Afternoon Tea. The entire gathering was designed, organized, and prepared by Here There Studio, Victory Gardens, and chef Annabelle Choi with help of local vendors like Celsia Florist, Lissu Linens, and Janaki Larsen Ceramics, among plenty others, who helped make this event memorable, delicious, and beautiful.

Thank you very much to Alison Page for providing us with some snaps and behind-the-scenes photographs of this event.

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The Environment

Sunday Roast

Afternoon Tea

Photographs: Alison Page

Les Recettes de Ma Mère: One-pot Yunnanese Chicken

Saiarun lives a few houses away from the shop. She is a caregiver; she has been looking after a 97-year old woman for about 2 years. There is a light that shines about Saiarun - her smile reveals her spirited nature.

Most of us live in mighty fast times. There are days where some of us can even barely keep up with our schedules, much less pencil in any time to sustain ourselves through food. Saiarun (sigh-rune) grew up in a family whose food philosophy centred around quick, easy, and sustaining meals, and indeed, this thirty-minute dish she has chosen to prepare for us in this segment of Les Recettes de Ma Mère is still part of her regular repertoire of meals, and keeps very much to the way her mother prepared it.

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"My mom was a business woman... so all her meals had to be prepared quickly. The thing is, I never learned to cook as a child. My mom cooked. My sister cooked."

When Saiarun got married, she realized she finally had to learn how to cook, so she would watch her sister and her mom prepare meals. "I learn really fast, but I forget really fast, too." Once she had acquired the foundations of her everyday culinary repertoire - which flavours go with which, etc. - the act of cooking and preparing meals also became part of her everyday. Something that seemed so preternaturally engrained in her mother and her sister in her early days suddenly feels so natural to her once she her adult life hit. As she was chopping up the aromatics for her dish, she said, laughingly, "I learned how to cook... because my husband loves to eat."

This dish is easy to prepare, needs very few ingredients, takes very little effort, even after all of the mise-en-place, and best of all, it takes only half an hour to prepare.

One-pot Yunnanese Chicken
Preparation time: 30 minutes | Serves 6-8

Ingredients
2 large onions
cloves from a bulb and a half of garlic
2 large thumb-sized pieces of ginger (with skin on)
2 tbsp. of soy (plus extra for seasoning, if required)
1 tbsp. oyster sauce
2 tsp. ground tellicherry peppers
1 whole chicken, cut into manageable pieces
2 tbsp. grapeseed oil

Mise-en-place

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1) Mince the garlic and chop the onions. Set aside.

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2) Slice the ginger into oval coins, then slice those coins into little matchsticks (julienne).

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3) Take a butcher's cleaver, or your most sturdy knife, and cut the whole chicken into smaller pieces, a little larger than bite-sized. Saiarun says the trick to achieving this is to just give it all of the power you can; chicken bones are easy to cut through if you have a good, sharp knife. Of course, it is best to use a whole chicken for this, but if you feel a bit hesitant to tackle an entire chicken on your own, you can ask your butcher to do it for you, or, for convenience, purchase a few chicken pieces of your choice, enough to look like it came from one whole chicken.

Directions

1) Heat 2 tbsp. of grapeseed oil or any sort of neutral cooking oil in a large pot or dutch oven. Sauté the garlic first until fragrant and aromatic, before adding in the ginger and the onions. Sauté until the onions have softened and the ginger has imparted its fragrance.

Saiarun says it is important to add the garlic in first because the point is to have the garlic act as a flavourful undertone. It is not supposed to taste overly 'garlicky', even after using an entire bulb and a half. The ginger and the liquid aromatics are supposed to be in the forefront. The garlic here really acts as the flavour-base, so to speak.

2) Add the chicken pieces into the pot and stir for a few minutes, making sure to coat the chicken sufficiently with the sautéed aromatics.

3) Add the oyster sauce, soy sauce, and pepper into the pot. Stir to incorporate.

4) Cover the pot and leave it for ten minutes.

5) After 10 minutes, stir from time to time, to make sure the chicken does not stick to the pot. The chicken juices and fat would have been released at this time, melding with the dry and liquid aromatics to create a 'stock'.

6) Simmer on high, uncovered, for another 10 minutes to let some of those juices evaporate and reduce.

7) Season with more soy if needed, and take off the heat. Serve over steamed rice and garnish with fresh cilantro and chopped scallions.

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Photographs: Issha Marie

Happy Birthday, Canada!

Oh Canada! We are open our usual summer hours this holiday Wednesday!

With love,
from your friends at Le Marché St. George

An Evening Of...

We held a fundraiser for The Little Mountain Playground this past Saturday and the turn-out was absolutely spectacular! We thank everyone who came out to support the fundraiser; it truly was a beautiful Summer Solstice Eve.

Special thanks go out to all those who donated their time, energy, and resources to make this evening possible, and to our hardworking staff, who worked incredibly hard to make sure this evening ran smoothly.

To find out more about the playground, or to donate, visit People Power for Playgrounds.

Photographs: Kate Fearnall

Les Recettes de Ma Mère: Dorothy's Pierogies

We have been having some hot days lately, Vancouver. Pierogies, especially done Dorothy's way, are not your typical summer food.

But you can chase away the heaviness of pierogies with cold prosecco, and you know... it works. Pierogies and Prosecco in the summer - I will take it.

Kim Rossell

Kim Rossell lives in the apartment above the shop. If you have ever been to this year's Campesino Summer Pop-Up, marvelled at the space, and wished that you lived in this space... well... too bad... because Kim lives here. Janaki and the team turn her apartment into a pop-up shop whenever pop-up time arrives, and all of her books and personal dishes and furniture get stored away in the garage, or in her bedroom, for the duration of the pop-up run. She really and truly is a huge part of the Le Marché St George family.

Kim works as a body worker at the Fairmont Pacific Rim, but has plans to hold massage therapy sessions in her apartment above the shop. For fun, she tangos. I have never seen her dance - not yet - but every single time I run into her she is either running to tango practice or coming from a tango session.

This dish is really all about comfort, and the recipe is not in the pierogi itself... but in the sauce. It is rich and decadent and is the absolute perfect thing to eat when in the dead of winter in Edmonton.

Winter is a long way from now (we hope) so put this in your roster of easy meals to make when the cold days arrive. You can make pierogis from scratch, but for convenience's sake (and to perfectly demonstrate the sauce Dorothy (Kim's mother) adds on to those pillowy puffs of pure goodness), Kim opted to use frozen pierogies.

Dorothy's Pierogies
Preparation Time: 15-20 minutes. | Serves 3.

Ingredients
12 frozen pierogies
1 litre water
3 medium white onions, diced
5 strips of bacon
1 can of evaporated milk
olive oil + 1/4 cup of butter
salt and pepper to taste

1) Set your oven to broil and broil the bacon strips for five to seven minutes each side or until fat has mostly rendered and the bacon looks crispy. Drain on paper towels, and slice into bits. Set aside.

2) Set a litre of water to boil. Dice the onions.

3) Heat the olive oil and butter to medium heat. Once hot enough, fry the onions and bacon until onions are fragrant, slightly caramelized, and translucent and the bacon is crispy. Turn the heat down.

4) Boil the pierogies until it floats to the top. Drain, and fry on a separate skillet with olive oil and butter until the outside skins of the dumplings are slightly crispy and brown.

5) Add evaporated milk to the bacon and onion mixture and let the flavours mingle into the cream. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

6) Toss the crispened pierogies into the evaporated milk, bacon, and onion sauce and serve.

We ate these pierogies on a table adorned with peonies and washed these dumplings down with prosecco. Pierogies, Prosecco, and Peonies. How's that for a delicious and visually-appealing alliteration?

Photographs: Issha Marie

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Some notes: Linen napkins and Janaki Larsen ceramics can be found in our shop location or here, in our online shop.
Kim Rossell is now taking massage therapy bookings in her apartment above the shop. Simply e-mail her at kim. rossell (at) gmail (dot) com.

Les Recettes de Ma Mère: Frittata di Patate

Rita lives just across the street from the shop. She supplies the cafe with fresh-baked ciabatta almost everyday (these days), and, when you're lucky enough to visit the cafe on a particular day, a basket-full of warm zeppole - Italian doughnuts tossed in cinnamon and sugar. She is a painter, an avid gardener, and - I noted - quite the feisty woman. Of course, upon first meeting her, I had remarked on this fact out loud, and she responded with, "What? You think I'm going to be this frail old woman? Of course I am feisty!"

Rita is an advocate for the classics - simple home-cooked recipes done well, and most importantly, done right.

When I was a teenager, I watched copious amounts of cooking shows on the Food Network, and watched chef after chef tackle a frittata by first, starting it on the stovetop, and then finishing the frittata inside a hot oven. I mean, I was aware of this stovetop method too, but not quite like the way Rita tackles this. The result is almost pie-like - with a thick interior from the chunky potatoes and onions, and a crispy-golden shell, from the thin layer of egg encapsulating the vegetables inside. She claims the oven-way is the lazy way, and you know, given the strength and conviction of her words and that sassy sideways look that she gave me when I even mentioned the word 'oven'... I believe it. I won't ever dare make a frittata using the oven again.

Janaki: I've only ever seen a frittata made in an oven...

Rita: Pfft. The oven is the lazy way! You NEVER, EVER make a frittata in the oven!!!

Frittata di Patate
Preparation Time: approximately 30 minutes | Serves 4

Ingredients
2 large russet potatoes, skin peeled, cut into chunks
2 medium white onions, cut into chunks
4 large eggs
1 cup (or so) of vegetable oil
salt and pepper to taste

​Equipment
wok
spatula
slotted spoon
a bowl lined with paper towel
a shallow 8-inch frying pan
a dinner plate at least 2 inches in diameter wider than your frying pan

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Directions

1) Peel the skin off of the potatoes and cut them into large cubes.

2) Cut the medium white onions into large chunks.
3) Heat a cup or so of vegetable oil in a wok. Once hot, gently drop the potatoes in. Give the potatoes a stir once in a while with the spatula, to ensure the pieces cook evenly. Drop in the onions a few minutes after the potatoes start to brown and cook until the onions are softened and translucent but not caramelized.

4) Drain the potatoes and onions onto a bowl lined with paper towels and salt to taste. Set aside. Reserve a tablespoon on the frying oil for the next step.
5) Heat your frying pan with the reserve oil. In the meantime, beat four eggs and season. Once the pan is hot, gently pour in the beaten egg mixture and watch until the sides start to soufflé.

6) Pour in the fried potatoes and onions onto the souffléd egg base and gently work the potato-onion mixture into the egg with a rubber spatula.

7) Once the mixture starts to look like it will hold together well, take a large dinner plate and flip the frittata onto the plate. Gently return the flipped frittata onto the frying pan for about a minute to fry the other side. Rita does this about three times in fairly quick succession before finally turning over the finished frittata on to a plate to serve.

Rita working the potato and onion mixture into the egg mixture. By turning the pan into its side like this, she ensures the egg mixture spreads all over the surface of the pan.

Rita first plate-to-pan frittata flip. She does this around three times to ensure no wet yolks remain in the finished dish.

The onions have caramelized in the frying pan and the egg exterior has transformed into a crispy outer shell encapsulating the potatoes and onions.

The finished dish should not have any leftover runny-yolks from the egg running all over the plate and you should be able to transfer it onto a serving plate without difficulty.

Rita serves the finished dish with some ripe tomatoes and basil drizzled with a tiny bit of olive oil and salt. This dish can handily feed four as a light lunch, but I ate close to three-quarters of the frittata. Such is the power of dishes like these - simple in concept and construct, but no less powerful, sensory, and satisfying in nature.

Photographs and Words: Issha Marie

When Life Hands you Lemons...

May 30, 2015: Some of the neighbourhood kids organized a lemonade stand by the sidewalk adjacent to our shop to help raise funds for the Little Mountain Playground. The lemonade was a huge hit, and in the two hours that the stand was up, the kids were able to raise just a little over $100. The price of an ice-cold glass of homemade cucumber lemonade was by donation, and it was a beautiful day for it. Passersby and customers happily sipped a glassful or two on that particularly hot Saturday afternoon.

We are also holding a fundraiser for The Little Mountain Playground in the form of an elegant evening filled with local wines, oysters, and grilled sausages. Details and a link to the tickets can be purchased here.

After about an hour, the kids ran off to play 'hospital' in lieu of watching over the stand, so the adults (including myself) took over and jokingly tried to upsell the lemonade with promises of spiking the refreshing concoction with tequila... which, of course, we eventually did --- but for ourselves, not for the customers (stand down, City of Vancouver!).

Because, hey... when the kids hand you a lemonade stand... well... you know how it goes! ;-)

Photographs: Issha Marie