Baked Pork with Piquant Sauce

The pork and sauce is a recipe I found Gordon Ramsay's new cookbook Fast Food, which contains a number of recipes from his show The F Word (which is one of my favourite cooking shows, and is probably the only one of Ramsay's NOT shown on the Food Network in Canada). So I have two recommendations here before I even get to the food.

The first is the tv show. (I downloaded it. Sorry Channel4 - sell the show to the Food Network Canada and I wouldn't have to go about watching it that way.) There are three seasons so far, and each has followed the same basic pattern. The restaurant, The F Word, serves one three course meal per week that anyone could cook at home, usually cooked by an amateur brigade of cooks. Most of the episodes have either a little blurb from someone else about unusual food items (horse milk, for instance) or about outrageous food related things (an example: the amount of meat in sausages, and what counts as meat). I'm not quite sure why it's so compelling to me, but it really is. (Even without his usual vitriol, though that's present as well.) I hope another season is out soon, because I do enjoy it a lot.

The cookbook is both a hit and a miss. It's quite beautiful, full of a lot of pictures and meals that look and sound amazing. Everything looks quite easy to make, which is part of the point, and is probably the only thing that got me to buy the book instead of just flipping through it. (Nothing worse than buying a cookbook and discovering you'll never use it because you just know you'll never be deep-frying poached eggs or whatever.)

The miss... I live in Canada, not Britain, and it's remarkable how different the common foods are. There are so many things I either won't be able to make or would have to start substituting ingredients for. Another miss (for me) is that there are so many fish/seafood recipes. I'm willing to try the fish recipes, if I can find the types of fish he requests, but there is a lot I've never heard of or seen here. (Porgy, hake,...) And finally... a few of the recipes are a little bit... lame. Prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, for example, which seems a bit too standard to be worth including.

At any rate, this pork dish was really delicious. The sauce - made of mushrooms, red pepper, onion, hot pepper, and canned diced tomato - was really fantastic and went well with the pork, which was fairly plain. (Salt, pepper, garlic and rosemary on top, with a bit of olive oil.)

The broccoli is just steamed, so a bit boring but I wish I'd bought more because it was so good that I want to eat it again tomorrow. (But sautéed, maybe, with some red pepper flakes.) The rice came from a local curry restaurant and it tastes amazing and I wish I could figure out exactly how to make it for myself. (It's got fennel seeds in it, I can tell that much, but otherwise, I don't know.) Indian rice probably wasn't the best match for this, but the fennel, at least, was quite nice with the sauce, so it wasn't as bad a combination as it might have been. (Mostly I just didn't want to cook my own, and my brother in law happened to be ordering butter chicken, so I had him pick up rice as well.)

Anyway, I'm fairly certain I'll make this again. It made far too much food, but there are leftovers for tomorrow, so I'm happy about that.

Chicken in Cream Sauce with Whole Wheat Spaghetti and a Salad

A while back I was cooking my way through a cookbook called... i think Fixing Dinner, which is about family meal planning and that sort of thing. Which, whatever, but I was interested in the recipes. I kind of went off track and got distracted by other things, but this is one of the recipes I hadn't tried yet.

I had planned to cook something from a Gordon Ramsay cookbook, but I took out chicken by mistake, rather than pork, so I needed to find something else, and this was something I had all the ingredients for. It was really quite easy to cook this, which is part of the point of Sandi Richard's book, and it tasted very good.

And I'm sort of falling asleep here, so I'm going to be off to bed, rather than taking time to think of more to say.

Fried Fish with Roasted Potatoes and Green Peas

This is a couple days old now, but I think I didn't post it in favour of going to bed and then I just never got around to it the next day. I also didn't really get around to eating it.

Well, that's not quite true. I did try eating it, but I didn't like the fish very much. It was somehow watery tasting, and the texture was sort of watery as well. Damp, almost, like eating flaky jello. So maybe I prefer firmer fish, or something. I don't know. Anyway, I wound up throwing away the fish after a few bites.

The potatoes were nice, if very basic - just parboiled, then roasted with fresh rosemary and garlic. And the peas, which were meant to be mashed, were heated with a little white wine vinegar, and salt and pepper.

The three recipes came from a cookbook I picked up a little while ago, Fast Food by Gordon Ramsay. When I was at the grocery store, I couldn't remember what sort of fish I needed for the recipe, so I picked up sole because it looked nice and it was cheap, but the recipe does suggest something else... cod or haddock, I think, so I do think I'll try it again someday with a different type of fish. With any luck, I'll like it better.

Beef and Mushroom Stew with Fingerling Potatoes and Russian Salad

This isn't the best photo of this (though it's better than the last one I took almost a year ago) but beef and mushroom stew is one of the best things I cook. Yum. I wish I could remember where I found the recipe, because I've been working off a much reduced version of it and I know I don't do all the steps or use all the ingredients and someday I'd like to try it as it's meant to be. At any rate, it's very good.

These were the first fingerling potatoes I've ever bought, but I'm not much impressed. I had to peel most of them because they were a bit green skinned. But that's not the potatoes' fault. I blame President's Choice. (And why, anyway, is there a brand name on my potatoes?)

Spinach and Feta Turkey Sausage with Potatoes and Corn

So... first dinner in the new house. Or first dinner cooked by me in the new house. My brother in law made a couple things I'd have liked to photograph but didn't because the camera was packed. It's a bit too bad this wasn't something nicer looking or more interesting than a sausage and potatoes, but it's a Saturday night and I'm gearing up for a long night at work, so more effort than that is not something I wanted to expend.

So, the sausage is maybe the last stop on my previously never ending quest to find a healthy sausage. I think, by definition, sausages are nasty. Mostly made of the fatty, leftover bits of "meat" and then spiced so you don't realize you're eating the second most garbagey of the garbagey bits (hot dogs being last stop, I'm convinced).

This sausage, and I've thrown out the packaging a couple days ago so I can't check the brand name, clocks in a low 110 calories with... I think it was 4 or 5 grams of fat. Which tells me that either they're lying - and Canadian law allows for something like a 20% margin of error in nutritional tables, so who knows - or that they're actually made of the good bits. (Which would explain the price. Which wasn't exorbitant, but higher than average, I think.) A point in favour of my guess that they're made of the good bits is that even when I pierced it, very little fatty liquid came out. They weren't dry, but not nearly so oily as you'd normally expect.

It was a different sort of taste, good, but not quite what I imagined. I'm not sure what I imagined, but I didn't get any flavour of feta at all and the spinach was only a mild presence. It'll be a while before these are gone (since it was quite a large package and I really don't eat sausage all that often) but I think I'll definitely buy these again in the future.

The rest is pretty standard. I microwaved the corn, because I didn't want to dirty another pot, and the potatoes are just boiled and then dressed with a little butter and herbes de provence, which was probably not the best way to use the herb mix, but I only recently bought it and wanted to see what it would taste like against something without much flavour. It was nice.

Montreal Smoked Meat with Mustard Cream Cheese on Foccacia

Okay, one last picture before I move. This is my new favourite sandwich that I've been making and taking to work all week for lunch.

Basically, you mash a bit of whole grain mustard and ground pepper into (low fat!) cream cheese for the base. Then Montreal Smoked meat or pastrami. Then pickles. It would have something green and leafy, but I didn't want to buy any more food before moving, so I've been doing (happily) without.

Delicious.

The idea for this came from a new cookbook I picked up recently, Gordon Ramsay's Fast Food. (I forget what parts of his recipe I didn't use. He definitely uses pastrami and I think he uses arugula or something similar as the greens. At any rate, if I get nothing else from the cookbook, this sandwich is worth it. (Well, maybe not worth twenty-odd dollars, but pretty close.)

This isn't a terribly nice looking picture - I didn't even pick the sandwich up off the cutting board and it's all messy looking and I just kind of folded the meat to show the cream cheese and folded the meat to make it look more... meaty (since I'm pretty chintzy with meat on sandwiches; I don't like a big layer of the stuff) and yes. It's not pretty, but it is tasty.

Cucumber-Cream Cheese Foccacia Sandwich

This is probably the last thing I'll post for the next week or so, until we're moved and settled into the new house. It feels a bit boring for a last post before a big change, but I had exactly that much energy in me for cooking tonight. (In other words, no energy at all, but couldn't quite justify take out or fast food.)

I used to make cucumber and cream cheese wraps all the time, sometimes with tomato and sometimes without, but I never really tried it on a sandwich like this. I made it a bit more like a Greek salad this time, with the red onion, and probably that would be pretty fantastic with Feta in place of the cream cheese, though I'd need to drizzle it with a little oil and vinegar so that it wouldn't be too dry. (But not too soggy, either.)

Anyway, it was really good, if a bit light for a dinner.

Chili with Cheese

Chili with Cheese (on new dishes!)
Originally uploaded by hold your spin

This is a very pointless post because I'm only updating to point out my pretty new dishes. I haven't been letting myself look too closely at anything anywhere in a while because I always want to buy the plates and bowls that catch my eye, but I don't really need them. I fell in love with the colour of these, though, so I had to have them.

The chili itself was only so-so. I don't understand what went wrong with it, but you couldn't even taste the chili powder or cayenne or hot sauce or cumin or anything else that I put into it. You could feel a tiny hit of heat on your tongue, but it just was like bland tomato sauce on beef. I really hope the leftovers tomorrow will have some flavour, but I'm not holding out hope just now.

Pork and Sweet Potato with Spicy Orange-Thyme Sauce

I've been sitting here for a couple minutes trying to decide what to say about this one, but I haven't really got any ideas in particular. It's a recipe that I tore out of some magazine or other - I don't remember which, but I found it in a stack of papers when I was doing some packing today. How convenient that I had pork and a lonely, aging (but still usable and tasty) organic garnet yam in the cupboard.

The sauce, which wasn't so much a sauce as just... something to cook the potatoes in and that I reduced until it was just a sticky mess on the bottom of the pan, was a bit too sweet for my tastes, so I think if I try this again, which I think I will, I'll have to try it with something else in place of the orange juice. I don't know if it needs that sweetness at all, so maybe I could do it with just chicken stock, but then the orange flavour wouldn't be there. Or maybe I can just reduce the amount of orange juice as compared to water in the recipe. (It uses equal parts of both.)

Anyway, it wasn't as spicy as I'd hoped, so I think I could add a bit more zing to the recipe as well, and maybe that might help to cut a bit of the sweetness. My brother in law thought maybe serving it with something like asparagus would help, so that the slight bitterness of the vegetable would help pull it back.

Tasty, though, so I think I'll try to make this again and see how it goes.

Spicy Chicken on Rice Pilaf with Edamame and Tomato

A week or so ago I picked up a new magazine (well, the second edition of) called Clean Eating. It's mainly full of recipes, with a handful of articles about health and healthy living. And the rice and chicken recipes came from it. Both were good but not spectacular. I could eat both again, but wouldn't likely go out of my way to make them.

I do like the idea of the chicken - it's sort of marinated in a dressing made of low fat plain yogurt with spices, but since it didn't get time to sit in the mixture, the flavour didn't travel beyond the surface of the chicken. And too, it only had chili powder and garlic in it (and lime juice). The lime juice was nice, but it was a bit... boring. I think most people could come up with a more interesting flavour mix with a well-stocked spice rack and a blindfold on than that.

The rice.. it didn't really taste of anything. It had cumin and oregano in it, but it just sort of tasted like damp brown rice. I wouldn't mind to try it again, but... differently. I think I'd use a different method to cook the rice, and then separately sauté the onions with the spices and stir them in after. Not quite the same, but it might work better (for me)

Roasted Tomato Pizza with Garlicky White Bean Puree

Another pizza experiment, and my final one at least until I've moved. (Not buying anything that'll have to get chucked in the freezer; we're trying to use things up, rather than add to them.) This isn't at all the pizza I'd planned to make with my last pizza shell - it was going to have roasted zucchini and eggplant and bell peppers and mushroom and onion and feta cheese on it. But I used up all my feta cheese yesterday with that Greek salad, so I had to change plans.

I decided to do a version of this salad instead, just without the artichokes and olives. I had already packed the cookbook, though, so I had to figure out a way to translate the concept without even the recipe as a reference.

So I came up with the idea of a bean puree as the base. I didn't want it to be too blandly beany, so I heated the beans in a bit of oil with a lot of garlic, (dried) basil, salt and pepper, then mashed them up with a potato masher and used them in place of a sauce. The tomatoes were roasted with oil, basil, garlic, salt and pepper. I peeled off the skins when I put them on the pizza, so they wouldn't hold their form so strongly (those little tomatoes had strong, thick skins).

I was going to do it as a cheese-free pizza, with an egg cracked over the centre and baked on (to reference the hard-boiled eggs from the salad), but I chickened out and just used a bit of mozzarella cheese instead.

It was really tasty. The taste of the garlic was quite strong in the puree, and I really liked the texture of the soft mashed beans. The tomatoes were exquisite. But I should have learned from my last go around with bean puree on pizza that it doesn't look nice once it cooks. The edges dry out so much.

Maybe if I try it again, I should pre-cook the pizza shell with a bit of olive oil or something, or a sauce (though I really wanted to use the beans in place of a sauce), then pile the hot bean puree on top, add the rest of the ingredients and only just give it a quick few minutes under the broiler to melt and brown the cheese.

Roast Beast with Mashed Potatoes, Steamed Carrots and Two-Dollar Tomatoes

Yum. We've been doing a lot of family dinners lately - every Sunday, as part of the Empty-the-Freezer quest - and it's been quite nice having a big proper dinner together. (We're running low on roasts, finally, as we've now only got two left, one pork roast and another beef roast.)

This was a pretty simple roast. The recipe book called it 5 Minute Roast, by which they mean the prep part takes less than five minutes. My sister did most of that, but I'd guess that was about all the time we put into it before putting it into the oven. It maybe came out a touch dry - the thermometer wasn't registering properly. (It was reading 85 degrees, but you can see plainly that it's well done, and so should have read nearer to 160.) But it tasted very good and with a little of the juices spooned over top, it didn't seem dry at all.

That's some more of my delicious tomato. I was going to eat it with some mozzarella slices, but the cheese smelled like it had gone off, so I chucked it. Alas. Anyway, that tomato is so good that it was maybe nearly a crime to have doctored it with salt and pepper.

Question, though: what turns mashed potatoes into a gluey paste? The last two times my brother-in-law has made them, they've come out with the most bizarre texture.

Greek Salad

This is a pretty standard thing, just tomatoes, cucumber, red onion, goat feta and a homemade dressing. But it looked and tasted phenomenal. I could eat that every day. But only with tomatoes that good.

This is the dressing I made:

1.5 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp lemon juice
a splash of white wine vinegar
1 garlic clove, crushed
salt and black pepper, to taste (go easy on the salt if you are using it with feta, since it's so salty on its own)
1/4-1/2 tsp dried oregano (it's nicer fresh, but I always wind up throwing out most of the package, so I don't buy it often)
1/4 tsp dried thyme

Whisk all the ingredients together until it emulsifies. It should look almost creamy, with the flavouring bits suspended in the dressing. If you let it sit - which really improves the flavour by making the garlic punch through, but isn't necessary - you'll need to whisk it again before you put it over the salad. Taste to check the proportions before using it - you might like more olive oil than I've used. (I think most recipes use something closer to a 2:1 or 2.5:1 proportion of oil to vinegar, but I prefer a really lemony taste.)

This makes, I guess, about 3 tbsp dressing, which is more than enough for one huge dinner sized salad (like the one in my picture). That huge salad is comprised of about 1 large tomato (it's a 1/4 of a big tomato plus 3 or 4 cocktail size tomatoes), 1/2 an English cucumber, 1/4 red onion, 1.5 oz (~45g) goat feta. There was about 1 tbsp of dressing leftover on the plate.

Anyway, I was a bit surprised to find these tomatoes at the grocery store yesterday. They always get hothouse tomatoes (which these are, but they're also local to Alberta) but usually only the standard varieties - grape and cherry, cocktail, mid-sized on the vine, and the regular large round tomatoes. These ones were interesting enough (and smelled good enough) that I had to buy them. (Even though that one single big tomato cost me $2 on its own. The tub of Sweet Zebrinos only cost 90c though.)

They still smelled like they were just plucked off the plants today. So. Good.

Mediterranean Pasta Salad

As a part of my Empty-the-Freezer quest, I finally decided to use up some of a Mediterranean vegetable mix that I've had sitting around for quite a long time. I didn't really have any specific ideas about how to use the vegetables, but came up with an idea over the last few days for a pasta salad with tuna in it and lemon. It tasted quite good, but it was a little dry, so I think I need to work on it a bit more to get it to work out a little better.

I was really impressed with the taste of the goat's milk feta. I'd never tried it before and I was worried about how pungent and goaty it would be, but it really is quite mild compared to Chèvre, which I'm not always a huge fan of. I'm so used to cow's milk feta, but this had a much more delicate and light flavour, and it wasn't over-powered by the salty brine.

At any rate, this was (for me) a really interesting take on pasta salad, since the one I grew up on was more... pasta with ham and celery and mayo and surely other things I've forgotten. There was a lightness and freshness to the flavour that I really enjoyed, though I do need to tweak the sauce to be... more saucy.

Souffléd Cheese Omelette

Another recipe from my favourite vegetarian cookbook, Jack Bishop's A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen. According to the book, it's a sort of combination frittata and soufflé, which seems to be a pretty good description except that it can't support the weight of the things that are normally packed into a frittata - this just contains cheese and some ground black and red pepper. It was meant to have blue cheese in it, but I don't really like that, so I used a shredded blend I already had in the fridge - cheddar and Monterey jack with jalapeño and tomato.

It was delicious and fluffy and light and cheesy and wonderful.

If I'd been a touch less lazy, I'd have made a salad to go along with it, which would have been nice for the picture. But I was that lazy.

Ravioli Aglio e Olio with a Tomato-Cucumber Salad

I live in a neighbourhood that was (at one time, anyway) very Italian. I don't really know if the population of the area is so much Italian anymore, but there are Italian restaurants and specialty stores everywhere around here. I've never been into any of them, but if I ever went into one of the stores, I'd be willing to bet if I had the money, I'd come walking out with a pasta machine. Then I'd use it once, decide it was too much bother, and put it away for when I have more time. Anyway, why make my own pasta when I can buy it fresh and made by some company far more capable than me?

So this is spinach and cheese ravioli with olive oil and garlic and parsley and Parmesan cheese. And tomato and cucumber slices with mozzarella.

Really lazy (maybe, maybe a 10 minute meal), but really tasty.

Pork Sauerbraten with Lazy Cabbage Rolls and a Green Salad

So... this turned into a kind of meat heavy meal. Which I blame entirely on my sister. Even though it's not her fault.

Basically, I found a recipe for pork Sauerbraten that I wanted to try out. And then I was trying to decide what to serve with it, since I don't like spaetzle, which was what the recipe suggested. In the freezer was a bag of cabbage roll mix, which my sister had made and which I thought was comprised mainly of rice with a little meat. Turns out it was comprised mainly of meat with just a little bit of rice.

Anyway, the sauerbraten recipe is another Pork! Fork! recipe from Put Pork on Your Fork. I used a smaller bone-in roast, and made it in the slow cooker, rather than properly roasting it. It was really delicious, though I did find the vinegar a touch strong. (Probably I didn't need to marinate the meat for so long, since it was a significantly smaller roast.) The gravy, which is so white because it's got a huge lot of sour cream in it, was really tasty too, though nobody else in my house would try it.

The cabbage roll mix... well, I made it the lazy way. Cook the meat mixture in a frying pan, then transfer to a baking dish. In the same frying pan, cook off a bunch of sliced cabbage until it wilts, then dump it and a cup or so of tomato juice over the meat. Bake for about 30 minutes or until it's bubbling. Delicious.

My sister's husband made the salad for us, and just off on the edge of the plate you can sort of see some asparagus that my sister made, but it was a bit overcooked, so nobody ate it.

Caramelized Onion Pizza with Gorgonzola and Toasted Walnuts

This picture has been sitting around for almost a week, waiting for me to get around to deciding whether or not to post it. Thing is... I never ate it. But I decided to put it up anyway, since it was an interesting experiment, if not one I'd like to repeat. Or rather, one I might repeat if I use a slightly different ingredient or two next time.

This was part three of my (soon to be) four part March pizza odyssey. (The pizza shells come in a pack of four.) The recipe came from a vegetarian cookbook of mine A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen by Jack Bishop. His recipes have always been really delicious when I've made them, and I think this one probably is too, but I just have not developed a taste for blue cheese.

This is a pizza without a sauce. The base is just a huge mound of caramelized onions, which have been finished with a bit of balsamic vinegar. (I was too lazy to cook it off properly, so the onions were a bit more pungent than sweet, but I still think they tasted delicious. My sister thought it smelled foul.) It was baked with some crumbled gorgonzola over top (I read somewhere that gorgonzola is a bit more mild of a blue cheese, but I don't know if that's true, and if that was mild... I'd hate to taste the properly pungent stuff) and then in the last couple minutes of the baking time, I added crumbed walnuts.

When I went to eat the pizza... everything was fine up until I got my first bit of gorgonzola, and then I immediately pitched the lot of it into the bin and went out for McDonalds. (Or not McDonalds, but... something that wasn't covered with blue cheese at any rate.)

Mexican Taco Salad Pizza with Refried Beans

It's.... a taco salad pizza. I guess. With refried beans in place of the ground beef.

I don't think it's possible to do anything new with pizza anymore, but this weird idea came to me today (I'm sure someone else somewhere else sometime else came up with it first) and I absolutely had to make it.

So, from the bottom up: a pizza shell, half a can of refried beans cooked with half a packet of taco seasoning (I should have made my own, but I was too lazy) and a bit of water, cheese (cheddar and an Italian blend), slices of tomato. So I baked that until it was heated through, the cheese was melted and the crust was darkened. (Obviously I darkened it a bit too much, but that's what I get for wiping up the counter when I should have been taking it out of the oven.) Once it was out of the oven, I topped it with lettuce and more tomatoes. If I'd had salsa, I'd have spooned some of that on top. And if I'd had green onions, I'd have used some of those. And if I'd thought of putting sour cream on it, I might have done that too.

It was really good. Even my sister and her husband liked it, though they think I should use beef rather than beans next time.

Pizza Margherita

One of the things I do for my job is make price labels to go on the shelves at the grocery store, and today the dairy guy asked me to make some new labels for the mozzarella cheeses because the old ones had almost all fallen off. (They're in a shoddy channel and rarely last out the week before I'm replacing some of them.) And I suddenly got a craving, standing in my work room with an armload of mozzarella cheeses, for tomato and mozzarella cheese pizza.

How fortunate I work in a grocery store. Of course, I still managed to forget fresh basil (I had to dollop on pesto to get that basil flavour) and the tomatoes weren't quite ripe enough, but I think it still came together well enough in the end.

Pizza Margherita is one of my absolute favourite pizzas. It's so simple, but completely delicious. And even if this isn't quite a proper one, it was the best thing I've had to eat in ages.

Madras Fried Rice

This is kind of... a mishmash of things. I had some spiced rice leftover from a while back and wanted to use it up, so I thought... why not an Indian fried rice. So I bought some veal scallopini (it was cheaper than pre-sliced stirfry beef) and cooked it with Madras curry paste, some carrots, onions and peas. Then I tossed in the rice, cooked it until it was really hot and dug in.

I used too much curry paste, so it was the wrong kind of spicy, but it still tasted good, even if it'll probably give me a gut ache.

So a while ago I'd bought a package thing for making biryani, but I never got around to it and the spice paste for cooking the vegetables/meat expired. But there was a packet of spices in it that you were meant to cook in with the rice, so I did. Altogether I added an inch of cinnamon, 4 or 5 peppercorns, 2 green cardamom pods, 4 cloves and the hugest bay leaf I've ever seen in my life.

The flavour of the rice wasn't really strong - it still mainly tasted like basmati rice - but it smelled amazing, which added something interesting to the experience of eating it. I'll definitely try it again, though I may leave out the cinnamon.

Gingery-Dijon Pork Roast with Roasted Potatoes, Green Beans and Piroshky

I've not given up on this blog, but I have been very much not in the mood for it lately. Not even the blog, just the food, I suppose. Maybe it's the winter doldrums, but I do tend to latch onto comfort foods and easy, lazy junk foods around this time of year, and it's been worse with my grandfather having been sick and then dying because it's made me not want to care about anything else. Make a decent dinner or mope and eat a row oreos for dinner? The oreos would win out.

There have been a few meals that I haven't posted in the meantime. Besides the old standards that aren't worth a photograph (or have already been photographed.) My sister and I made roast chicken last week, with mashed potatoes, stuffing and salad. But I've posted that meal before, so no sense in posting it again.

And a while back I made this really gorgeous rice pilaf-ish thing. Well, not a pilaf, but I don't really know what to call it. It was a flavoured rice that's meant to be served with something else, but... I didn't feel up to making anything else, so I wound up freezing the rice. Tomorrow I'm going to try making a kind of faux-Indian, faux-fried rice with some of the leftovers.

At any rate, we've been making proper Sunday dinners around here the last couple weeks. Last week was the chicken, this week was a pork leg roast we got from my aunt and uncle. (A pig of which we could find out the provenance, even. It's not often I get meat like that, since generally I can't afford the good stuff where you can find out.) The reason for the Sunday dinners is that we're working on emptying the freezer. There's quite a lot of roasts and hams and probably another chicken in there. We could almost eat a roast a day for half a month, I'm sure. (The aforementioned aunt and uncle give us a lot of meat. Every time we see them, they send a small cooler of meat back home with us. Sometimes it's from deer they've hunted, sometimes pork.)

I've never cooked a pork roast before - or a roast of any sort, actually - so I went looking for a website that's slapped on the labels of a lot of pork packages around here - putporkonyourfork.com. I found a recipe for a pork roast that I was able to adapt to the bone-in roast we had. They call it Sensational Pork Roast, but I call it Gingery-Dijon Roast because those were the two predominant flavours. I think I used a fair bit more ginger than it called for, but it tasted amazing.

The roasted potato recipe was one I found from Giada de Laurentiis, but I found it a bit more greasy than I really care for. (I drained off a lot of oil, and then blotted the potatoes with paper towel to get rid of some more.) They did taste very nice, though, once I'd got rid of some of the excess oil and they'd cooled off enough to eat.

The piroshky are leftover from Christmas - my mom made them and left a bunch in the freezer for us. Still tasty, though we pulled out the sauerkraut filled ones, which I don't care for quite as much as the beef/cabbage ones. The green beans were also from the freezer. I'm not so found of them, though, since they just don't cook up as nicely as fresh. They tasted good, but it's a texture thing.

Turkey Sausage with Perogies and Green Beans

This hasn't really been the month for updates, has it? I've either been not cooking or cooking things I've made before or making things that aren't interesting enough to bother with. But mostly I think I've just not been cooking.

I don't really know if this counts as cooking, since mostly it was just heating and reheating, but it did taste very good. The green beans were just barely steamed, then tossed with a bit of butter and lemon juice. The sausage is just reheated, since it's pre-cooked. The perogies were a bit more labour intensive, though.

Usually when I make perogies, I bake them. It's both lazy and wrong, but also much better for me. Perogies are pretty high in calories to begin with, but when you do them the proper way, they're little gift-wrapped heart attacks.

First, you boil them in water until they float. Then you drain them, let them dry a little over a bit of heat, then toss in a metric ton of butter and cook them until they get crispy and a bit golden. I was too lazy and trying to avoid using too much butter to get them to the golden stage today, but if I were being proper about it, that's what I'd do. And then, you have to top them with sour cream, and in ideal circumstances, fried bacon and onions. I don't have any bacon (and don't really eat it any other times, so I didn't want to buy it) so I had to use a few nasty simulated bacon bits to add some colour. Anyway, all of that - perogy, butter, sour cream, bacon, and onions - adds up to the food of the Gods of Clogged Arteries and Happy Taste Buds.

Rotini with Turkey-Tomato Sauce and Roasted Garlic Baguette

At the bakery today they gave me a sample of this new bread they're making, the name of which I can't remember, but it's basically a short baguette that's baked with roasted garlic in the dough. It was so ridiculously tasty, just fresh from the oven. So I had to buy one. (Even though it wasn't fresh from the oven anymore 7 hours later when I bought it.)

And since I was having garlic bread, I had to make pasta to go with it. This was kind of a thrown together thing. I had an uncooked, frozen turkey burger leftover from a couple days ago, so I thawed it out to use for the sauce tonight.

The sauce was made of fried carrots, garlic, onion, and mushrooms - just using up things from the fridge - and oregano and some sort of spice mix from the cupboard, and then added and cooked the turkey. After that, I added tomato sauce (from a can) and then served it on whole wheat rotini.

I sometimes find whole grain pasta kind of heavy or stodgy and not very good, but it really is great with a good tomato sauce with a lot of flavours in it. (Just don't try to serve it with pesto...)

Lemon Chicken with Green and Wax Beans and Baked Paprika Potato Wedges

So I bought this new cookbook the other day called Tapas, which is, of course, a collection of Spanish tapas recipes. There's nothing about any of these three recipes that strikes me as particularly Spanish or particularly tapas-like, but I don't suppose I know a whole lot about either. They were tasty, no matter where they come from.

I couldn't seem to get the chicken to brown tonight, but I didn't want it to dry out, so I gave up on that bit. It was a really simple dish - cooked down onion (though I used shallots) and garlic in oil, then add the chicken, once browned, grate lemon peel over and squeeze in the lemon juice. Add chopped parsley at the end and season. Delicious and easy.

The potatoes were supposed to be fried in a ton of oil, but I baked them in the oven instead, with not a lot of oil. They don't crisp up the same way, but it's a lot more healthy. I probably should have added more cayenne to the spice mix (cayenne, paprika, cumin) but they were very tasty anyway.

Lemon Turkey Soup

This is such a terribly unattractive photo - the broth looks like water and the sugar snap peas are nearly olive green (especially next to the vibrant green parsley) - but it was the second day of this soup, and snap peas don't hold up well for a reheat (in terms of colour, anyway).

I pretty much always use tomatoes or tomato juice or crushed tomatoes in my soups, but I always have a hard time photographing reddish soups. You can't see the other ingredients very well and the colour doesn't seem to translate very well either. So I found a recipe for Lemon Chicken Noodle Soup and decided to give it a try.

It was a pretty basic recipe - broth with carrots and celery, cooked cubed chicken breast, dried oregano, fresh parsley, crushed garlic, a handful of noodles (cooked separately and added at the end), and a squeeze or two of lemon juice. I used some leftover turkey from the freezer in place of the chicken and the snap peas in place of celery (since I didn't have any) and added some shallots.

It really was quite good, though I found the lemon a touch strong for my tastes (I'm finicky about lemon, though), and I found myself missing the tomato. Next time I'll stick to what I do and like best, I suppose.

White Bean and Spinach Ragout

I'm starting to get a small backlog of photos and entries that I need to update, but I haven't been at all happy with my photos lately and so I've resisted updating. This is one of the photos I'm not really happy about.

Actually, there wasn't a lot about this meal that I was happy about. It didn't really taste bad, I don't think, but it somehow turned my stomach and I wound up tossing it all straight into the trash. I couldn't tell what flavour or if it was all of them together put me off so much, but I just couldn't eat it.

So it looks like a dirty ugly mess, my stomach turned into a dirty ugly mess at the thought of eating it, and... I don't know. I'm disappointed that it didn't work out for me. It should have been perfect because I quite like all the component parts.

Maybe I'll try it again someday. We'll see.

Roasted Tomato and White Bean Salad with Hard-boiled Eggs

I should have updated this a couple days ago, but I suppose I've just been a bit lazy. Actually, I've been a lot lazy - it's taken a lot of effort to get out of bed most days the last little while. (But I did shovel the walk and part of the driveway today! That took energy! Energy which is now gone, resulting in me burrowing into bed to watch TV on my laptop.)

Anyway, I broke into one of my vegetarian cookbooks again and dug out this recipe. It's been quite a bit changed, to suit what things I had in my cupboard, but it turned out really lovely. I think it could use a... more constructed vinaigrette (since this just had all the components poured over top - I'd rather whisk it together properly and have all the flavours blending) but this is a bit of a kitchen sink recipe, so I think I could make it a dozen times and have a dozen different outcomes.

A few bits of it were wasted - the artichoke hearts and the olives, in particular. I don't really like olives and never have, but decided to try them out anyway, since there are a lot of things I like now that I never used to. But they're still much too salty, and I find the flavour too pungent. The artichokes, also, tasted too much of salt, though I did rinse them. Maybe another time I should try oil-marinated artichokes, rather than the ones canned with a brine.

Anyway, the roasted plum tomatoes were really delicious, as was the rest of the salad, really. It was definitely good enough to make again.

Asparagus Tartlet

I've been lazy again. I haven't really felt up to cooking the last little while, and so I haven't. I've been eating a lot of crap or else nothing, and it's (once again) got to stop. So.

Tonight I was going to make turkey meatballs and a Caesar(ish) salad, but I didn't feel up to it. I was making a menu for next week, though, and was flipping through a cookbook/gardening book I've got called Shoots, Leaves and Eats trying to find a recipe for something I cooked a while back (Balti Vegetables) and I found this instead.

I'd never made pastry before and was a little scared of the prospect, but it really wasn't that difficult AND I was able to adjust it to just one serving. (Imagine that, a being able to make just one single tart. I would love to create a cookbook of single serving desserts or other baked things that don't involve putting the leftovers in the fridge.)

I didn't realize the pastry would shrink, though, as it was cooking - there was a 1-cm rim on the tart, which shrunk down to about a 1/4-cm rim (it's a bit bigger in some parts) so I guess there was a reason the recipe said to make a 2.5-cm rim. There wasn't a lot left by the time this shrunk down and I was worried the egg would just slide right off before I got it in the oven, but it came out all right anyway.

Anyway, the flavour of this was really nice. The asparagus tasted fantastic - it was frozen asparagus, which I don't usually use - and the cheese was delicious and I overcooked the egg a little but it was so so good anyway, and now I want to cook everything tucked into a little pastry tart.

Five-spice Pork with Citrus-Mango Salsa on Cinnamon-scented Rice

I seem to be craving citrus the last few days. Mostly I don't eat citrus fruit - when I think of oranges, I think of my parents making me eat one every single night ever before I went to bed. It made me never want to eat oranges again. So even though I don't dislike the taste of oranges, I never actually want to eat them. (I make an exception for Mandarin Oranges, but they're almost like candy at Christmas.)

Over the weekend, I saw tangelos at the grocery store and bought them on a whim. And then yesterday my sister was trying to talk herself out of cooking because her recipe seemed too complicated and I made the orange salsa for her so that she couldn't use the excuse. Well, I cut up the tangelos for her salsa (since the oranges we had didn't look as nice) and with the cilantro on it, it was so good! So I had to make my own citrus salsa for dinner today.

The tangelos at my work looked awful, but while I was looking for oranges I found blood oranges! I'd never actually seen one before, so I had to buy a couple. And then one of the produce guys told me he'd get some Cara Cara oranges out of the back for me to buy as well. They're a bit like a pink grapefruit in colour, but are very sweet and so good, even to a non-citrus lover like me.

Anyway, I found a recipe for a 5-spice pork tenderloin with a mango salsa that you're meant to eat wrapped in an egg-coated tortilla (kind of like French toast, I guess...), so I picked and chose bits of the recipe to use. The meat was really fantastic, and it tasted great with the salsa and the cinnamon rice, which had been frozen from something I made a while ago. I think the cinnamon flavour was much more apparent with this recipe than it was in the meal for which it was intended. Definitely a good thing that I had so much of it left-over.

Baked Potato with Green Peppercorn Cheese and Mushroom Cream Sauce

This sort of looks bland and dull - it's so beige - but it was really tasty. I wasn't really feeling up to a big proper supper tonight, but I wanted something warm and filling, so... baked potato. It's kind of a little one, but it was the perfect size for tonight.

The beige stuff up top is a mushroom cream sauce, without the cream. It turns out both cartons of cream in the fridge expired a couple days ago, so I used non-fat milk instead. It was quite good anyway. The mushrooms were cooked in a bit of butter and over it all I grated some weird cheese stuffed full of green peppercorns. (I don't know what sort of cheese it was - I would guess it's about the same hardness as a Cheddar, but it didn't have any of the flavour of a cheddar cheese.) Anyway, it added a nice little spark to the mushroom sauce.

Good stuff all around.

Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies

For somebody who never really bakes, I've posted a lot of baking the last while. It's not that I haven't been cooking, it's just that I haven't been cooking things worth posting about. Tonight I had a mushroom burger (from a box) with roasted potatoes (from a box). Which... boring. I didn't even have a bun to put the burger on. I made eggs a few days back, with leftover ham and fried mashed potatoes... but it was one of those toss together meals where everything's a little bit singed and none of it looks terribly good... so I deleted the photos. I'll probably be eating a lot of things out of the freezer for the next little while because I'm trying to save money for a root canal. It's there, so I might as well use it, anyway.

At any rate, this is the last of the Christmas baking, and only one month too late. (Almost to the day. I baked them on the 26th.) I took them all to work - half for a friend, and half I fed to the night crew - so fortunately they're all gone and I can't just sit around and eat chocolate cookies with mint chocolate chips until my tummy bursts.

These cookies are actually the exact same recipe as these Chocolate Toffee Cookies that I made a while back, but this time I used mint chocolate chips in place of the toffee, and I added a touch more oil and water. They were much nicer this time, a bit chewy instead of crunchy.

Super easy, anyway. Here's how:

Ingredients

1 box chocolate cake mix
1/2 cup oil
1 egg
1/4 cup water
1 cup chocolate chips

Mix together all the ingredients except the chips until just moistened. Stir in chips. Spoon out 1 tbsp of mix onto greased baking sheets, placing cookies about 2 inches apart. Bake at 350F for 10-12 minutes or until the edges are set. Cool, eat, enjoy.

You should get about 48 cookies. I got 42, plus a bit of raw cookie dough in my tummy. Yum.

I still think it might benefit from a bit of strong coffee, just to bring out the taste of the chocolate, but that'd probably be better if I weren't using mint chips.

Anyway, I kind of used a generous 1/2 cup of oil and a very generous 1/4 cup water. It wasn't runny, at all, but it wasn't such a dry mix as it was the first time I tried it.

Recipe: Mixed Bean Soup with Ham (and Swiss)

This is my second time posting this particular soup, but I've changed it a little and this is probably the better picture. (Still get the slightly weird colour though off tomato based soups. Such a strange orange. I suppose I should learn to adjust things like that in photoshop, but that seems like so much effort.)

At any rate, I wanted to post the recipe so that I don't lose it. I kind of cobbled it together myself from a few different places and have been adjusting bits of it and I'm pretty happy with it, so I'd hate to lose it now.


Mixed Bean Soup with Ham
Makes about 10 cups.

1-2 tbsp olive or canola oil
1 lg onion, diced
3 carrots, diced, sliced or chopped
3 celery stalks, diced
6 garlic cloves, minced

3 dried bay leaves
1 tbsp + 1 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp ground sage
2 tsp oregano
2 tsp marjoram
1 tsp cilantro
1/8-1/4 tsp chipotle chili powder

1 19oz/540ml can mixed beans, drained and rinsed
4 cups vegetable or chicken stock (reduced sodium!)
1 19oz/540ml can crushed or diced tomatoes
4oz/110g cooked ham, cubed
2oz/60g Swiss cheese, cubed (optional)

freshly ground black pepper to taste
fresh cilantro for garnish, chopped (optional)

1. Cook the onions, carrots, and celery in oil until softened. I tend to leave the vegetables with a little bit of a bite to them, but they probably cooked (today) over medium heat for about 15-20 minutes. If you do it for that long, you can just add things as you chop, you don't need to have it all prepped before starting. Keep the heat low enough that the onions don't burn. Once the onions, at least, are softened, add the garlic and cook for a minute or two. I gave a range for the oil because I'm not really sure what I used. I started with probably a little less than 1 tbsp, but I added more when I added the celery (that was the last thing I chopped) because it seemed a little dry. Also, I have a tendency to be chintzy with oil, so you might want to use more.

2. Add all the herbs, stirring to coat the vegetables. I didn't have any oregano today, so I used basil and parsley in place of it, and that tasted quite good. Before the mixture dries out too much, add in the rinsed beans. Stir to coat them with the spice mixture as well, and let cook for a couple minutes - it'll add a nicer flavour to the beans than if you just pour the stock in straight away.

3. Add stock, crushed tomatoes, and diced ham to the vegetable base. Bring up to a boil, then let simmer for as long as you want to wait for supper. I probably leave it about 30 minutes before eating. Taste before serving, adjust seasonings and add black pepper. Garnish with a little grated Swiss cheese or chopped cilantro or both or neither.


It won't be spicy at all with the amount of chipotle chili powder I've suggested, but it should have a smoky flavour. If you want a spicy soup, add more chili powder (though maybe just a regular one, rather than chipotle, since I find the smokiness can be overwhelming if you use too much) or some cayenne pepper or add a pinch of red pepper flakes to the mirepoix.

If you happen to have old dried out Swiss cheese, this is a really nice way to use it up. Chop it up and toss it into the soup along with the ham and it'll kind of get stringy and lovely in the soup, but doesn't completely dissolve or melt into the soup. (That's what I did today.) If you have fresher Swiss, use it as a garnish or stir in just before serving. If you have no Swiss (or don't like it), just skip that bit.

Also, this works really well as a vegetarian or vegan soup - just leave out the ham/cheese and be sure to use a vegetarian vegetable stock. You'll probably need to add salt, though, since the ham does the job of adding salt to the non-veg. version.

Thai Chicken Salad

This is yet another of the Sandi Richard recipes. (I'm nearly done the book, actually. I mean, not the entire thing, but every single recipe in it that I'm willing to cook.) She seems to have a bit of a thing about making healthier versions of often unhealthy meals, which is common with diet books (see, for example, any of the books by the Eat, Shrink and Be Merry authors).

In some of the cases, her results look a bit disastrous -- her butter chicken looks completely disgusting and the ingredients list doesn't really resemble ANY recipe I've ever seen for butter chicken -- but this one is really very good. I wanted to eat it all, even though it was way more food than I really wanted or needed to eat.

Curried Red Lentils with Caramelized Onions and Cinnamon-scented Rice

This looks, as my grandma would say, like a dog's breakfast. But did it ever taste good.

I find it sort of... odd and distracting that the lentils, which start out red, cook up yellow. But they're a fantastic shade of it, at least. I wasn't really sure what to expect when I decided to try out this recipe, but I think I imagined something a little more thick than it turned out. It's a bit like a very thick soup or a very thin stew. It could have used a bit more salt, and I think I'd like it a touch spicier, but it was really good.

There's such a big pile of caramelized onions on there (half an onion, actually) but they're so lovely, I don't think there could be enough. The rice was cooked with a stick of cinnamon in it. I thought maybe it'd colour the rice a little, but it didn't at all. It makes only a subtle change in the taste of the rice, but it was nice.

Baked Ham with Colcannon and Mixed Vegetables

I've been a very lazy cook this month, and as I've a dentist appointment today, it might continue on for another day or two. I don't really know what, if anything, they're going to do with my teeth today, but if I end up having anything done that requires freezing my mouth... I'll probably not be cooking tonight (or possibly tomorrow night, we'll see...).

At any rate, in light of my laziness, I decided I should do something a little more put together than toasted cheese sandwiches with ketchup. So on Sunday, I made this.

The ham is just one of those pre-cooked ones you can buy for $12 anywhere, but my work had them for $5 for a couple days last week. So, honey ham. I didn't do anything to it besides re-heat it in a bath of pineapple juice.

I'd found a colcannon recipe a while back, in a cookbook of mine, and decided that I needed to try it sometime when cooking for my sister and her husband. They're both mashed potato fiends, and they're both cabbage fiends. Seemed a recipe made in their version of heaven. I wound up using a different recipe (found here). I didn't quite follow the directions - I only crisped up one side, gave it the flip and crisped the other, rather than doing it in two layers with a crunchy layer on the top, bottom, and middle - but did use his basic proportions for things.

I always wonder when I make things like this, that are so culturally specific, if I'm making them the way they're "supposed" to be made. But I suppose that's a bit of a ridiculous thing to be concerned about, since probably every Irish cook out there makes a slightly different variation on the theme. Like trying to find the definitive apple pie recipe. Anyway, it was quite good, so authentic or not, I'll probably make it again.

Fruit and Barley-stuffed Pork with Roasted Potatoes and Veggies

I eat a lot of cucumber and tomatoes, don't I? I've had to resort to buying the horribly expensive grape and cherry tomatoes because they're the only ones through the winter that seem to taste like a tomato is meant to taste. I suppose I should aim more for eating in tune with the seasons, but I love tomatoes too much not to have them.

At any rate, this isn't the nicest looking dinner. I was too lazy to trim the fat off the pork and so it left that nasty looking scum in the barley stuffing and I think that it should be seared before being baked so that the top of the meat would brown up a bit. The stuffing had a lot of fruit and nice flavours in it that worked well with the meat, though, and it had a really nice flavour.

The potatoes came from a bag. I was feeling lazy last night. It'd be cheaper and just as tasty to peel my own potatoes and roast them, though.

Vegan Chocolate Cake (with non-vegan chocolate icing)

When I came home from work yesterday, the very last thing I wanted to do was... well, anything. I didn't want to cook. I didn't want to read. I didn't want to watch tv. I didn't want to do anything. But I went to check my email, and then I started looking for a file with some addresses I needed, and then... I found a recipe for vegan chocolate cake.

I don't like baking. I'm not vegan. I didn't want to eat cake.

Somehow it seemed like the best thing to do at that moment. So I baked a cake. And it turned out beautifully. And deliciously.

However, a plain chocolate cake does not a pretty picture make, so it turned into a whole saga of how to decorate a chocolate cake when you have no icing sugar. Well, I had a half bag of frozen mixed fruits, so I made myself a very simple (and tasty) fruit glaze.

But the pictures were awful. They came out terribly dark and the sauce was the same colour as the cake. (Alas, that's what happens when your mixed fruit is really just a bag of frozen blueberries with a few strawberries and some peach slices thrown in as an afterthought.) So I threw out almost a quarter of the cake (from wasted photo attempts) and put the rest away and bought myself some chocolate icing today. (The icing is probably not vegan. I didn't look, but I don't really care because I'm not vegan anyway.)

I didn't really want to ice the cake because I didn't want the sweetness that icing invariably adds, but it does make for a better picture - there's some contrast in the colour, at least - and it was cheaper than a bag of icing sugar.

Anyway, now that it's all iced, it's sitting in the fridge waiting for someone to eat it, but since I'm the only chocolate eater in the house, it'll probably get tossed before it's done. Still... that's the easiest scratch cake I've ever made in my life, and it came out better than pretty much any cake I've tried to make. So I'm pretty impressed with my single bout with vegan baking. Who knew it'd be so easy to make a good cake without using any eggs?

Spinach-stuffed Sweet Potato with Gingered Snow Peas

Another very good dinner, though I don't particularly care for the wait time when baking potatoes. (I can't talk myself into trying the microwave for that.) The sweet potato is stuffed with spinach sautéed in Thai red curry paste and lots of ginger. And there's just a hint of coconut milk, though the flavour doesn't come through as strongly as I'd have liked. The sugar snap peas have also been sautéed in ginger. Yum.

Spicy Cabbage on Chinese Noodles

Any idea just how hard it is to photograph food when it's all the same shade of bland? Slightly golden cabbage, onion, garlic, noodles, and to top it all off... chopped peanuts.

I'm glad I had cucumber and tomato in the fridge to add a little colour to the plate though. If I'd had a red chili, I'd have sliced that up to sprinkle on top to help things out as well. I'm not sure that using a black bowl was the brightest idea - I never quite like how the food looks against it and can never decide where to take the picture, on my usual black coffee table (where you can't distinguish between plate and table) or on the red tablecloth covered table (which throws off the colour of the food on the plate) - but it's probably a much better idea than my favourite white plate. The gold on white would have probably been worse.

Don't get me wrong though, this is delicious. Coming from a position of someone who loves cooked cabbage, of course, but there isn't a real taste of cabbage so much as the chili-garlic sauce that gives it its kick. And the salty crunch of peanuts. I'm glad there are leftovers for lunch tomorrow.

Pan-fried Noodle Cake with Stir-fried Baby Bok Choy

Yum.

This was good, and ridiculously easy. It's basically just steamed Chinese noodles that've been fried in a bit of oil until it holds its shape, with boy choy that's been stir-fried with garlic, ginger, and a sauce made of hoisin sauce, rice vinegar, water and black pepper.

I'm going to be cooking mostly vegetarian foods most of the week, for no real reason except that I started flipping through a vegetarian cookbook and marked a ton of things to make. The book, which I've recently posted a recipe out of - A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen - is one of those loosely vegetarian books. He cooks with butter and tons of eggs and all kinds of dairy. So really he's not vegetarian so much as he doesn't seem to eat the flesh of animals.

Anyway, this particular recipe is delicious. I don't think I've ever used Hoisin Sauce before, so I wasn't sure what sort of flavour to expect. A little sweeter than I imagined, but good.

Blackened Chicken on Harissa Quinoa Pilaf with Steamed Broccoli

A lot of spicy things tonight - I kept sneezing while it was cooking, and it wasn't even because I've not been well. I couldn't get the chili/ cumin/harissa/pepper or whatever it was out of my nose.

I've made this chicken before, though this time I had to use chipotle chili powder (as we tossed the plain chili powder), which changed the flavour in a subtle, but very nice way. It was quite smoky this time, and though I was worried it wouldn't be as good, I think it came out pretty well.

For Christmas this year my mom picked up some strange Victorian Epicure spices for my sister and I. One of the ones she got for me was a Harissa blend (it comes with instructions on making the paste that most recipes seem to use). I don't really have too many ideas about how to use such a thing, but fortunately my mom asked for some recipes. The quinoa recipe is one that she got by way of a VE salesperson up in Yukon or NWT. I didn't really follow the recipe, but it gave me the bones of what ended up on the plate. It was quite tasty, really.

The leftovers of the chicken are going to be diced up and mixed into part of the leftover quinoa for lunch tomorrow. Yum.

Ham and Bean Soup

In another "use up what's in the freezer" kick, I decided to make a ham and mixed bean soup. I had half a can of frozen mixed beans, a lot of ham steak, and plenty of base vegetables in the fridge, so that's how this soup came about.

Most of the recipes I looked at wanted me to blend everything, but I don't have an immersion blender, and pouring it all into a blender was too much hassle for me. So I didn't follow a recipe and came up with this on the fly. I sautéed carrots, onion and celery, then added garlic, a whole lot of herbs, the beans, diced ham, chicken stock, and the tomatoes. Usually I like recipes because then if it tastes funny, I have someone to blame other than myself, but this came out really well, so it's all good. (I wish I'd had a can of crushed tomatoes to use rather than diced, though.)

I really wish I could figure out the trick to plating and photographing soup. I suppose I could help myself out a fair bit by not traipsing around the house sloshing the soup around the bowl (so I wouldn't get the gross looking rim of soup scum). And I shouldn't have shot something with so much red in it against the red tablecloth.

Recipe: Quinoa Pilaf with Caramelized Onions and Toasted Pecans

I had a request for this recipe, recently, so here it is, reproduced from Jack Bishop's A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen. I don't remember anymore what, if anything, I changed from that original recipe, so I'm going to assume that I followed it directly (though I definitely cooked only half).

1/4 cup chopped pecans
3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 medium onions, diced
1medium red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded and diced
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground ginger
1 1/2 cups quinoa, rinsed in a fine strainer under cold running water
3 cups water
1/4 cup minced fresh parsley leaves
salt and freshly ground black pepper

1. Place the pecans in a large sauté pan over medium heat. Toast, shaking the pan occasionally to turn the nuts, until fragrant, about 4 minutes. Set aside on a plate.

2. Add the oil to the empty pan, raise the heat to medium-high, and heat briefly. Add the onions and bell pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, until softened and beginning to brown, about 5 minutes. Stir in the cinnamon and ginger and stir-cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the quinoa and stir-cook until toasted, about 1 minute.

3. Carefully add the water to the pan - it will sputter - and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, cover, and simmer gently until the quinoa is tender and the liquid has been absorbed, 15 to 20 minutes. Stir in the parsley and toasted pecans and adjust the seasonings, adding salt and pepper to taste. Serve immediately.

This makes 3-4 main course servings. I didn't find that the onions caramelize particularly well in this cooking time, so you might need to add a bit more time for that to happen.


The cookbook this recipe is from is one of my favourites - there's such a wealth of information in it, aside from the recipes themselves, which have all (that I've tried...) been delicious. It's a massive book, making it a bit unwieldy for actually using, but every time I flip through it, I find something else I want to make.

Recipe: Apricot-topped Curry Burger

I've been sick, which is why I haven't really been making anything to post. Last Wednesday I'd taken out a pork loin chop to make ginger pork, and beef to thaw for making into a meatloaf on Thursday, but I wound up so sick I spent all of Wednesday in bed and I skipped work on Thursday. I ate crackers and chicken soup.

On Thursday I made the ginger pork, just because I didn't want the meat to go to waste, but I couldn't taste anything and it hurt to swallow, so I wound up throwing it out. Friday, fortunately, I felt a fair bit better, so I decided to make the meatloaf. We always go out for dinner on Fridays, though, and I decided to make burgers instead as they'd cook faster and I didn't want to be stuck with food in the oven when my sister and brother-in-law wanted to leave.

I had to cut one apart to be sure they were cooked since our meat thermometre seems determined not to read anything above 100F, so I took a bite of that cut one that day. And oh my god, so good. Both pictures since have been microwave reheated, which is not my favourite thing to do to meat, but these burgers were so moist and juicy that even the microwave couldn't sap the goodness out of them.

So this recipe is kind of a hack job, taking parts of a meatloaf recipe from Sandi Richard's The Dinner Fix and adapting parts of a chicken recipe from YOU: On a Diet. Richard likes to cook with jams and chutneys and things like that, but I can't and won't buy one of every flavour of jam out there just so that when her recipe asks for plum sauce mixed with peach jam I'll be set. So I decided to use the topping from this chicken recipe. It was a smart move, I think.

Apricot topping
8 dried apricots
2 shallots
1 tbsp + 1tsp olive oil
2 tbsp white wine
1/4 tsp curry powder
1/8 tsp cinnamon

Chop up the apricots and shallots, making them fairly fine. Add ingredients to a hot frying pan and cook, stirring, until most of the liquid has cooked away. Set aside. If you want, you can process or blend the mixture until smooth, or just leave it chunky as in the picture. (I processed it when I used it as a chicken topper.)

I didn't have white wine, so I used a tiny little splash of white wine vinegar and 2 tbsp of water. I don't know what difference that makes for the recipe, but it would probably be better with the wine. It uses a lot of oil, which comes directly from YOU, and I considered using less, but I used it all anyway because I thought it maybe helps keep the burger moist. A fair bit of the oil cooked off in the oven, and it doesn't taste or feel oily, so I don't think it hurts to use it all.

Burgers or Meatloaf
1 lb extra lean ground beef
salt, fresh ground black pepper
1 egg
1/4 c fine breadcrumbs
1 garlic clove, minced
1 tsp garam masala
1 tbsp Madras curry paste (I used Patak's brand, which is quite spicy, but I imagine you could use whatever type and brand of curry paste you like or already have; the recipe asks for Tandoori curry paste, but I had Madras, so that's what I used.)

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Shape into a long flat meatloaf or into four burgers. Place on a baking sheet. Top with apricot topping. Bake in a 350F oven until cooked through. It's done when a thermometre reads 180F. (My burgers took about 25 minutes, but we've an oven liner in the oven at the moment that seems to add to the cooking time. Though it does keep the oven clean. The recipe, which is for a 2-lb meatloaf, says it requires a 50 minute cooking time.)

My burgers were moist and juicy and delicious. A little bit spicy and a little bit sweet and just really good.

Apricot-topped Curry Burger with Roasted Potatoes and Green Peas

I cannot rave about the burger (which was meant to be a meatloaf and actually sort of has the texture of one) enough. But I have to go to work, so I can't actually rave about it right now. But so so so good.

I'll post a bit more about it, and a recipe, tomorrow. Because it's that good and if anyone ever tries anything I've put up here, I hope they'd try that.

Orzo with Chicken and Peas

Today I transfered the photos from my "Food" folder to a sub-folder "2007." There were 170 photos. I was a bit shocked by that, really, since the whole picture taking thing only started when, after bugging a friend to post more pictures more often (of anything, he doesn't do food photography), he told me that I should reciprocate. I couldn't think what to take pictures of (I don't have a photographer's eye at all), so... food.

It pushed me to try harder. In the kitchen, I mean. I love cooking, but a lot of the time I found cooking for one a little bit overwhelming. I don't like or want to eat leftovers for three days after making anything... but so many cookbooks are designed for 4-6 serving recipes.

What I've discovered is that it is a lot easier to cut recipes down for one than you'd expect. I've maybe just gotten good at it, but I can tell now when and where I need to adjust amounts. I've figured out what things don't adjust well. I've learned a lot about what can be frozen. I've discovered that I eat more healthy more often when I change things up a lot.

I have a tendency to fall into ruts when I get tired of cooking - I used to eat toast for dinner for a week straight, sometimes - but one of the rules I had for myself is that I'd not post duplicate pictures. (I've broken that rule a couple times when I've changed things or much preferred the later photo.) Not posting duplicates meant that if I wanted to keep up a fairly steady posting schedule, then I had to keep trying new things. And trying new things makes it much harder to fall into a rut because there's always some new plan coming up.

Anyway, I didn't really want to post some long year in review type thing and now I've gone and done it.

So, the food.

This recipe is one that I found on another food blog, Culinography. (Her picture is much prettier than mine - see here.) I've been craving carbs a lot lately - my last four picture-worthy meals have been pasta dishes, and for lunch today I had a sandwich - and today I'm not feeling especially great, so this recipe was perfect for me. Quick, easy, and a little bit carby.

I think my carb craving is maybe something to do with winter (or something to do with having eaten so many of them over the Christmas holidays and now I just don't want to go back to my usual light-on-the-carbs diet) and this was a bit too light to be a good solid winter dish. But that's probably a good thing, since I need/want to put the kibosh on eating heavy foods for a while anyway. (I shall promptly follow up that statement with a dinner of meat and potatoes later on this week. But never mind that.)