Mango and Chicken Stir-fry

This Cat Cora cookbook, Cooking from The Hip, is pretty quickly becoming a favourite cookbook. There's a lot of really tasty things in this book and it really is full of the sort of things that I can make with mostly ingredients that I've already got (or can fairly easily get) and can do in a short enough amount of time that I don't feel like I've wasted a bunch of my day on cooking and then cleaning.

Stir-fry isn't really something that I think of as needing a recipe; the sauce, maybe, but even that doesn't or shouldn't need a lot of work. This is a pretty standard recipe - soy sauce, ginger, garlic and diced serrano pepper to marinate the meat - and then vegetables of choice. She suggests, and I used because I had all of them, carrots, broccoli, and snow peas.

The thing that males this stir-fry interesting is the addition of fruit. Cora suggests peaches or mango, and let's face it: May in Alberta is not exactly peach season. It's not exactly mango season either, since mangoes (like most fruits) don't grow here, but I can get a nicer Mexican mango this time of year than I can get... Chilean peaches any time of year. (They're hard and never ripen properly and why even bother, really?)

Okay, I'm going to interrupt myself for a minute because there's this amusing story my boss likes to tell about bananas. My job - I work in a grocery store - is to deal with signage and labelling, but generally speaking we don't have a lot of control over what's printed on the signs. I mean, we could change most signs to say almost anything we want, but we could also get fired for doing so. And there are people in an office somewhere who get paid to decide what our signs are going to say. So someone, somewhere along the way decided to make the signs for bananas read: "Bananas - Imported." And one day someone came up and read the sign and said, incredulously, to my boss, "Bananas are imported?!" Like, oh my god! I'm never going to buy a banana again if it's not 100% pure Alberta grown banana. Where in Canada did that person think they came from? Our hidden tropics off the coast of Northern Quebec?

Which leads me to something else. Right now, there's a show on TV called The 100 Mile Diet (at least I think it's called that) which deals with a town or a group of people in a town in BC somewhere where they agreed to go on a 100 Mile Diet for a year (I think - I haven't seen the show). And I wonder how that would work in Saskatchewan, where I'm from. I mean... in my backyard we grew very small cherries, smallish plums, and small apples in the summer, but other than that, it's really not a fruit growing region of the world. (We do have wild Saskatoon berries, and presumably blueberries though I've never seen those. And raspberries/strawberries can be grown there.) And it's far too cold to be growing lettuce or other greens during the winter. How on earth would anyone survive such a diet without getting scurvy? I mean, yes, you could can or freeze a lot of produce (now) and obviously the First Nations people survived the winters there (back in the day), but I think it'd be a pretty depressing show wherein all the people on the diet find themselves losing weight, getting ill, and being in general incredibly frustrated by the experience. I don't know. I find the 100 mile diet both intriguing and maybe... pointless. I can imagine every one of those people on the show going out for a Tim Horton's coffee and a bar of chocolate as soon as filming was over.

In any case, what I wanted to say about the mango in my stir-fry was that heated up it became impossibly sweet and delicious. It was like some whole other fruit I'd never tasted before and it was a really delicious addition to the stir-fry. Something I'd try again, for sure.

Linguine with Roasted Tomato and Red Pepper Sauce

I have a tendency to buy a lot of food related things and then never finish them. I have couscous, quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth, several varieties of rice, flax seeds, every sort of nut under the sun, jars of two sorts of pesto, two sorts of curry paste (maybe three... hm, I can't remember if I have a Thai green curry paste or not), Alfredo sauce, tomato sauce, a squeeze tube of tomato paste, a squeeze tube of aioli, bottles of four or five sorts of vinegar, bottles of fish sauce, oyster sauce, chili sauce, sweet chili sauce, sriracha, and sambal oeleck. Of which I've used... one (a mild curry sauce) in the last two or three weeks. And that's just the short list of infrequently used things I've bought.

So sometimes I'll go on a kick of finding recipes to use up some of those ingredients. (Or else I'll try to freeze it. All the nuts and some of the grains are in the freezer.) Today was "Finish the jar of roasted red peppers" day.

The easiest recipe to hand (besides just eating them straight from the jar) was another Cat Cora recipe, this one for roasted tomato and red pepper sauce. The general gist of the recipe is to cook and blend together roasted red peppers with roasted cherry tomatoes, some garlic, chicken stock, salt and pepper. You can finish it with cream, but we had no cream in the fridge and the only dairy I had (skim milk) was expired, so I gave that bit a miss.

I think this is the most disappointing of the Cora recipes that I've tried, but that's mainly because my sauce wasn't quite as saucy as I'd have liked. That's probably because I didn't have enough red peppers but didn't add more tomatoes or use less broth to compensate. It was tasty, but I wasn't so in love with it that I've got plans to make it again or even vague inklings of making it again. It was easy and flavourful enough, but I'd have been as happy eating a sauce from a jar. (Not that I need another one in the fridge.)

Lettuce Gyros with Spicy Halibut

Hey look! It's another Cat Cora meal!

Once again, it was really delicious and surprisingly simple. As Cora says in the blurb before the recipe, this is a sort of California version of gyros, with fish rather than lamb and lettuce cups to replace the carb-heavy pitas that are usually wrapped around the filling.

Although Cora recommends using a double layer of lettuce cup - radicchio and butter lettuce - I used only radicchio because I was too cheap to buy both. (I'm unlikely to use butter lettuce for anything else, as I'm not a particularly big fan of the stuff.) I found the radicchio a bit too bitter, so it would probably have been smart to use the second lettuce leaf to help balance it.

In any case, my lettuce cups have a light layer of shredded leaf lettuce in the bottom (I had some in the fridge), then chunks of baked spicy halibut, a spoonful of fresh tomato salsa, and a dollop of tzatziki.

The halibut was marinated briefly in an olive oil, lime juice, chili powder, cumin and cayenne concoction, which was pleasantly spicy and well suited to the cooling tomato salsa (tomato, red onion, cilantro, lime juice, and olive oil - I skipped oregano as I had none) and tzatziki, which I crapped out on a bought pre-made.

In any case: delicious. I could see myself eating this in proper pita wraps, in the North American version of pita bread (the drier, harder type you typically find), or just on a bed of lettuce, though I'm unlikely to try it again with these more dramatically interesting radicchio cups.

Baked Salmon on Hashbrowns with Yellow Pepper

This is yet another Cat Cora recipe. There something a little bit surprising about just how simple the recipes in Cooking From the Hip are. I suppose I expected something a little more complicated, but these are (for the most part) meant to be things anyone could cook for any dinner without too much prep or complicated ingredients or anything. Which is nice, but it would also be nice to see a cookbook designed to be a little more like what she'd serve in a restaurant.

In any case, simple and easy can be very tasty and this is all three. The salmon was salted, peppered, and baked while I cooked red onion and yellow pepper until they'd softened, then added (dried, Cora uses fresh) tarragon, salt, pepper, and shredded potatoes. Because I was watching The Big Bang Theory at the same time, I kind of burned my hash, but once I stirred it all up, it wasn't noticeable. Really, a tasty dinner and the sort of easy that I could do over and over again.

Red Pepper and Chickpea Soup with Potato Latkes

These are another couple recipes from Cat Cora's Cooking from the Hip. It seems like I'm on a bit of a roll with her recipes right now, but I'm running into the point where most of what I still want to make involves fish, so I'll stop making so much of it so quickly - I can never quite talk myself into fish more often than once every week or two. a lot of the other things that I'm interested in are things I don't think I'd go to the trouble of making - sushi, for example - or things I'd like to try but can't get my hands on the ingredients easily or cheaply enough.

In any case, this soup didn't photograph well because my red pepper puree didn't really puree that well. It came out a bit chunky rather than smooth, but I'd used a mini-food chopper rather than a blender or food processor. The flavour was pretty amazing though. It's a very simple soup - onions, garlic, chickpeas, pureed red peppers, vegetable stock, and rosemary - but it tasted more complicated than that. I was really impressed though; I'd definitely make it again.

According to the recipe notes, this soup is called Rivithia in Greece, where it's eaten during the fast before Easter when meat isn't allowed. Most of the recipes I looked at online were basically just chickpea soup - chickpeas and rosemary and a few seasonings - but I think the red peppers really added something special to the soup.

The potato latkes were my first successful attempt at making a vegetable pancake. And they tasted pretty fantastic, if I say so myself. They kind of reminded me of colcannon a bit, though with onion rather than cabbage or kale. The recipe asked for sweet potatoes rather than plain potatoes, but you can only really buy sweet potatoes here (at major grocery chains) around the holidays, so I went the lazy route and bought a bag of pre-shredded potatoes.

All around a pretty good, if somewhat light, vegetarian meal. Though maybe light isn't really the word for it, since the chickpeas (for me) are hearty enough to make up for any lack of meat.

Feta Turkey Burger with Tzatziki

This is kind of sort of not quite another recipe from Cat Cora's Cooking from the Hip. I was going to make a recipe for spicy fish, but I forgot to take fish out of the freezer before work and there was nothing really appealing looking at the store on my way home. So I bought ground turkey instead and decided to make a Greek inspired burger.

There is a recipe in the cookbook for Lamb burgers with black olives, so I used that recipe, but substituted turkey for the lamb and skipped the olive altogether - I've never developed a taste for olives. Too salty. I still had leftover tzatziki from the night before, so I used that in place of her garlic sauce, which is just yogurt with garlic.

This was quite tasty. I think I should have added more onion to the burgers and probably more oregano, but they had a really nice flavour, especially the bits of feta scattered throughout, and of course it was brilliant with the tzatziki. My pitas were a bit dry, so it broke when I tried to fold it closed. Messy eating, but it tasted too good for me to care.

Cat Cora's Pork Skewers with Tzatziki

I don't very much like this photo, but nevertheless. I recently bought a bargain bin copy of Cat Cora's cookbook Cooking from the Hip. The book is broken up into four sections - fast, easy, fun, and phenomenal - which each have recipes for appetizers, main courses, side dishes, and desserts. I'm not quite sure how she decided which recipes went into which section, since I'm pretty sure (without actually looking) this recipe came from the fast section, but while it cooked quickly, I did most of the prep a day in advance and I wouldn't have called that bit of it fast.

The name Cora gave this recipe isn't a very evocative one: pork skewers with (avocado) tzatziki. The pork is marinated in citrus, garlic, chili powder, and red pepper flakes over-night. It was much less spicy than I'd hoped, but it had occasional bursts of heat alongside the much stronger lemony flavour.

The tzatziki recipe included avocado, but I'm not really a big fan of avocado, so I used bits of the avocado tzatziki recipe blended with a second tzatziki recipe from the book, one for Feta-Mint Tzatziki (though I skipped the mint). The tzatziki, which I also made a day ahead to let the flavours blend, was exquisite. I usually buy a pre-made one, but it was better tasting homemade, so I'm glad I went to the trouble. I could have eaten every drop in that glass and then some. I didn't. but I could have. (The garlic is lingering, though. In a big way.)

I made a big mess eating this, since my pita tore when I was opening it and then just kept tearing further as I ate, but drippiness aside, there's really nothing I can complain about. It didn't photograph well, but since I really care more about eating the food than I do about taking pretty pictures, that's pretty irrelevant.