Our new fall and winter menus are finally ready! View our take home food shop menu and our monthly menus on our website – www.danashortt.ca

Interested in our full-service catering?

Go online (www.danashortt.ca) for sample menus or give us a call and we'll e-mail you the entire fall 2006 / winter 2007 catering menu. If you’d prefer, you can pop by the shop and pick up a hard copy of our catering menus.

TINY CHEDDAR BLACK PEPPER BISCUITS WITH HONEY THYME TURKEY & CRANBERRY-CHERRY COMPOTE

On September 17th, we were delighted to be involved in the 2nd annual “Taste Local! Taste Fresh!” event, sponsored by Food Link Waterloo Region.

“Taste Local! Taste Fresh! offers the public a unique opportunity to meet face-to-face with the farmers who grow and produce our food and to connect with the chefs who showcase the best tasting local food and farm products on their menus” (visit www.foodlink-waterlooregion.ca for more information).

The event was a great success – a sold out affair, offering food and drink to over 400 attendees!

Our pairing was with Snyder Heritage Turkey Farm of Bloomingdale (519-741-1447) and our hors d’oeuvres was tiny cheddar-black pepper herb biscuits with honey-thyme turkey and cranberry-cherry compote (quite wordy, but it sounds good, doesn’t it?)

If you don’t have time to make the everything for the hors d’oeuvres, try baking the biscuits as an alternative to bread, or serve the cranberry-cherry compote with your holiday turkey instead of traditional cranberry sauce.

Cheddar and Black Pepper Biscuits
(makes about 100 small pieces or 15 large biscuits)

• 3 cups all purpose flour
• 2 tablespoons baking powder
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
• ½ cup unsalted butter, grated or cut into small pieces
• 1 cup (4 ounces) grated cheddar cheese
• ¾ teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
• 1/3 cup buttermilk
• 1/3 cup cream

Preheat the oven to 400 F.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, sugar and black pepper. Cut in the butter and cheese. Refrigerate the dough for half an hour.

Gently stir the buttermilk into the chilled dough. Gather the mixture into a ball with your hands and on a well-floured surface, roll or pat the dough into a 12 x 8-inch rectangle approximately 3/4 inch thick.

Grease a baking sheet. Using a large spatula, or a couple of spatulas, transfer the dough to the baking sheet. Use a dough scraper or a knife to cut dough into 1½ “ squares. Separate the squares slightly on the baking sheet.

Bake the biscuits for 15 to 20 minutes, or until they’re very lightly browned.

Once cool, slice biscuits in half. Top with 1 tablespoon cranberry-cherry compote and a few small slices of honey-thyme turkey. Garnish with a small sprig of thyme, if desired.

Source: adapted from King Arthur Flour

Cranberry Cherry Compote
(makes about 4 cups)

• 12 ounces frozen apple juice, thawed
• 1 cup water
• 1 cup packed golden brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• ¼ teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
• 2 tablespoons Cointreau (or Triple Sec)
• 1 teaspoon grated orange peel
• ¾ cup dried tart cherries, roughly chopped
• 1- 12 ounce bag cranberries (fresh or frozen)
• ½ cup walnuts, toasted and roughly chopped (optional)

Bring first 5 ingredients to a boil in heavy medium saucepan over medium-high heat, stirring until sugar dissolves. Add Cointreau, orange peel and cherries; cook 2 minutes. Add cranberries; cook until berries pop, stirring occasionally, about 9 minutes. Remove from heat. Add walnuts. Transfer to bowl. Cover; chill overnight. (Can be made 1 week ahead. Keep chilled.) Serve cold or at room temperature.

Note: this freezes beautifully. Also wonderful on top of baked brie.

Honey Thyme Turkey
(makes about 20 main course servings or enough turkey for several hundred hors d’oeuvres)

Honey Thyme Butter

• ½ cup honey
• 2 tablespoons fresh thyme, minced
• ½ teaspoon grated lemon peel
• ¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• ½ cup unsalted butter, room temperature

Turkey

• 1 16 to 18 pound turkey
• 2 cups chopped onion
• 2 cups chopped celery with leaves

for butter:

Mix all ingredients together until well blended. Can be made 2 days ahead, covered and refrigerated. Bring back to room temperature before use.

for turkey:

Preheat oven to 375°F. Rinse turkey inside and out; pat dry with paper towels. Place turkey on rack set in large roasting pan. Starting at neck end, carefully slide hand between skin and breast meat to loosen skin. Rub ½ cup butter over breast meat under skin. Tie legs together loosely to hold shape. Rub balance of butter over the outside of the turkey. Arrange onions and celery around turkey in pan.

Roast turkey 30 minutes. Reduce oven temperature to 350°. Cover entire turkey (not pan) with foil and roast until meat thermometer inserted into thickest of thigh registers 175°F, basting occasionally with pan juices. This should take approximately 3 hours. Transfer turkey to platter; tent with foil and let stand 30 minutes (internal temperature of turkey will increase 5 to 10 degrees). Reserve mixture in pan if making gravy.

Turkey information

Snyder Hertitage Farms
1213 Maple Bend Rd., Bloomingdale
2006 Buy Local! Buy Fresh!
map listing # 35
Tel: (519) 741-1447
We sell: Turkey, maple syrup, pumkins, harvest decorations, firewood
Hours of operation: August-January, Monday - Saturday 9am-6pm
NO SUNDAY SALES
Additional Product Information: Our turkey is naturally grown and fed feed that is mixed

"total satisnacktion"

In the past, many of you have asked us if we had plans to sell gourmet gift baskets and packages for personal and corporate gifts.

The answer was always yes, but let’s face it, a lot of people sell gourmet gift baskets so I really wanted to take the time and come up with something different and unique to offer our customers.

I’m thrilled to announce that we are now offering our signature gourmet gift boxes, filled to the brim with the “best of dana shortt gourmet”.

So what makes our boxes unique?

I think that the most important feature is that many of the items are made from-scratch using our own secret recipes. Anything that’s not made by us is included because it’s been such a perennial favourite with our clients (and staff!)

It’s as important to me as it is to you that the recipient enjoy and actually EAT the contents – I want people to be excited about receiving our packages and eager to dive in and start eating, which is why all of our included items are ready to eat, open and satisfy.

The boxes have an elegant and modern look (a black base with a gold lid, tied up with a festive black ribbon) and I think that this presentation is a little more gender neutral.

Lastly, the boxes are easy to transport. If you’re picking up a few, they can easily be stacked on top of one another or packed in a suitcase.

We’re all so busy this time of year – if you’re behind on getting it to the recepient, there’s no need to fret - it can sit in the trunk for a while without getting damaged. None of the contents need to go in the fridge and all of them will last for several weeks after purchasing.

For more information on the boxes, please visit our website – www.danashortt.ca We have samples set up in the store and would be delighted to give you a taste of any of the featured items.

P.S. We also offer customized packages and boxes – you set the budget, and we’ll take care of the rest. Bring us a bottle of wine and we’ll happily include it in your package.

Ask us about our corporate discounts, available for groups of 10 or more…

We do a lot of baking here at Dana Shortt Gourmet. One of our best tips involves a simple cheese grater. In many baking recipes, it will instruct you to cut butter into small cubes, followed by rubbing the butter with your fingertips until it resembles a coarse meal or pea sized pieces. We avoid this process all together by simply grating the cold butter into the recipe. Its easy, creates less mess and keeps the butter very cold (an essential to making great pastry!)

Here’s another great tip involving butter and a grater. Sometimes we need butter to be at room temperature (i.e. when you are wanting to cream butter and sugar together to make cookies, for instance). On occasion, we forget to take it out of the fridge, leaving us with stone cold butter (and not enough time to wait for the butter to soften!) Grate the butter into your mixer and let it sit for a few minutes – it will be soft and ready to use in no time.

I love reading the latest food magazines and cookbooks, as well as attending culinary and catering tradeshows and seminars (one of the best parts of my job, I think!) Last January, I traveled to Las Vegas to attend the catersource conference – “the greatest gathering of caterers in the world”. It was a blast – I met a ton of fantastic professionals, some of whom shared their thoughts in a “what’s hot, what’s not” seminar.

Here are some of their thoughts of what’s hot for the 2006 year:

• interactive appetizers (i.e. food stations, fondue)
• “edible dust or sand” (i.e. porcini dust (dried, ground mushrooms) dusted over vegetables, meats or used as a ru
• serving a cheese course after dessert

To me, presentation is so important. Taste, of course, is number one, but I think most of you would agree that we eat with our eyes and a beautiful presentation can really make a difference in the overall perception of a dish.

One of the things I love most about working in the shop is helping our customers come up with creative and unique ways to use things that they already have (albeit collecting dust!) in their cupboards.

Here are a couple of ideas:

• serve an appetizer or first course portion of soup in a unique vessel – try a martini glass, demitasse (espresso) cup, funky coffee mug, shot glass or stemmed sherry glass.
• I love antique cups and saucers but few us have time for traditional tea. It seems like such a shame to let them sit unused in the china cabinet. At your next ladies brunch or luncheon, use them to serve a seasonal fresh fruit salad or dessert (chocolate mousse comes to mind!) a chilled or hot soup, or even for shrimp cocktail (put a little cocktail sauce in the bottom of the cup, and dangle the shrimps on the edge of the teacup. Everyone will appreciate having their own bit of sauce to use – especially people like me (and my Dad!) who LOVE lots of sauce.

If you would like to be removed from this list, please let me know and we will fulfill your request asap.