Plenty of Lime To Go Around Remember the scare mongering news stories about lime shortages a few years back? They spelled the end of Latin cuisine looming large in a post-citrus apocalypse sure to arrive within months. Everything from El Nino to drug cartels had conspired to create the perfect storm over supply lines from Mexico and points south. The price … Read More →
Hot Water + Cold Eggs = Easy Peeling If I was giving out ingredient awards, the beauty of free-range farm fresh eggs would be hard to beat. They outrank battery eggs by a mile on taste, colour, size, richness, and they behave better in any recipe you care to name. Whip-ability to protein content to Omega-3, Gamma-42b, or whichever Greek alphabet of nutrients … Read More →
Filling For One Easy Pie or Thirty Portable Pastries. You Choose. Samosas are perfect little portable treats beloved in their native India and Central Asia but also anywhere culinary cross-pollination has taken them around the globe. They’re tender and flaky pyramid-shaped pastries filled with spicy potato or other veg that, when exported to the west, are often supplemented with ground meats and local tweaks to spicing. … Read More →
Sometimes you have to improvise I often run into specific recipes that call for some ingredient or other that I’ve either run out of, can’t find locally, or don’t want to pay the premium price demanded to have shipped into the Canadian backwoods. The culinary supply lines for exotic goods are indeed stretched a bit thin up here at times … Read More →
Winter Comfort on a Roasting Pan Today marks the first day of winter for my local environment. Not some planetary equinox or giant red ‘X’ on a calendar. No, the first day of winter in my book is when it’s below freezing at high noon. We hit that today so let the cold weather cooking begin, Black Friday consumerism be damned. … Read More →
Corn Husks, Masa, & Meat All Optional Update: Want to go totally wrapper free? Check out my later post on “stacked” tamales. You’ve heard me bemoan the lack of Mexican food here in my corner of Canada before so I’ll spare you that misery again and just say that when you have a craving for tamales and can’t find either corn husks … Read More →
Fast & Delicious on Movie Night Sure you can go with plain old butter. You can get fancy with Parmesan. You can go healthy with nutritional yeast. But if you want special, you make a quick batch of caramel popcorn on movie night. There are hundreds of recipes for this stuff out there nowadays but most make huge batches and are … Read More →
Winter comfort for you and the cows Cold days call for hot food and nothing satisfies quite like a bowl of homemade chili. The history of the dish is well documented (and debated) so I’m not going down that path. Instead I’m going to bend the plethora of recipes out there into my vegetarian ways by using textured soy protein (TSP) with … Read More →
Beach not included Quick breads are really just overgrown muffins but they’re so much more convenient to make you can’t help but whip one together around teatime to satisfy a craving. The clue is right there in the name – they’re “quick”. The trick is keeping them light in texture and getting them to cook through properly. After … Read More →
Make lots. They disappear fast. I’ve often been accused of cheating with my answer to the “If you could only have one food on a deserted island…” question and I’m completely at ease with that assessment. I have two answers that meet the technical criteria of the query but each is so wildly diverse in its real-world application that I’ll … Read More →
Worth finding for your dumplings Tamari is to pedestrian soy sauce what ‘extra virgin’ is to olive oils. More intense and rich flavours come from the uniquely Japanese method of production linked to the manufacture of miso paste. While a few pennies more than utilitarian Chinese soy, the taste difference is worth seeking out the genuine article when you’re going … Read More →
Better than factory made. Easier than you think. In this dim sum missive, I must confess that I had long been a lazy sod when it came to dumpling wrappers. The convenient path was just to nab a packet of a hundred ready-made for a few bucks. I have now seen the error of my ways thanks to a late night pantry miscalculation … Read More →
Caesar & Romaine walk into a bar... My local GinormousMart has the mildly irritating habit of putting romaine hearts on sale in a massive six pack for cheaper than my usual three pack every time a fresh harvest comes in from the Quebec greenhouses. Coupled with my own homegrown micro-greens not getting that memo and continuing to produce non-stop, some weeks I … Read More →
Ouch. (edit: Months into this tale and it hasn’t ended well with warranty support – be sure to read the updates at the end of this post) I have to report a kitchen casualty. One of my most trusted pots has fallen in the line of duty. Years ago on the radio show we did a … Read More →
Not from a tin Happy Thanksgiving Canada! You should be cooking right now. For you folks down in the Colonies, we whacky Canadians turn the holiday season on its head and have Thanksgiving before Halloween up here. That is to say before our turkeys freeze and snow covers the cranberry bogs. If your cranberry sauce comes from a tin, … Read More →
Pretty. Tasty. Insanely easy to grow. The first hints of fall are showing up early in the mornings. A little gust of cool air here, the occasional drop of leaves there. Apples are growing fat and sweet. Deer wander past holding ‘to let’ brochures looking for winter apartments in the forest. All it all it’s been a mild summer here but … Read More →
Tastes nothing like footwear Bread is one of those things that people put off making at home for far too long because they believe it to be kitchen witchcraft which takes years to master, especially for anything beyond basic loaves. Not so. And while it might take a few casual hours rising before you’re eating bread with an artisan … Read More →
Big Mushroom. Big Flavour. “Simple is best.” It was the only English a gruff man originally from the Piedmont had said to me in half an hour of watching him cook. We were standing in his current home’s kitchen far removed from his native land but the balance of his commentary remained rapid-fire gabbles of Italian patiently translated by … Read More →
Any Port in a Milk-less Storm When a holiday closes all the stores and you’ve run out of cream for your tea, you have to improvise. Since I could find no cooperative cows nearby at teatime on Labour Day, I took to the shelves to test a few ideas. Fresh dairy for my tea is one of the few requirements that … Read More →
Concentration is Key Of course there are hundreds of ways to cook a mushroom. There are hundreds of varieties of mushrooms so that only makes sense. There is however one really wrong way to cook a mushroom that I see all too often. Let’s fix that. The water content of mushrooms varies but is usually at least 80% … Read More →
Quick. Delicious. No Cardboard. For those of you that don’t know, I’m addicted to pizza. Thick, thin, pan, deep dish, Italian, American, Naples, New York, Chicago, Naples again, Ancient Roman, wood oven, kamado, tandoor, vegetarian, Japanese squid and egg, Mongolian yak cheese… you name it, I’ll try it on a flat crust. I absolutely can’t get enough of the … Read More →
Naked or Dressed - You Decide My go-to oatmeal cookie recipe started life in an original edition (circa 1950) of the Betty Crocker ‘big red’ cookbook that’s been falling apart at the spine on my shelf for years. It’s a politically incorrect delight to read resplendent in its butter and fat and sugar and all those foodstuffs that have probably been … Read More →
Steel-Cut Oats Have Character Sometimes you simply wake up with a craving. Sometimes the power of suggestion gets to you. Sometimes you’re just trying to cobble together simple delights out of available pieces. I think it was all three for me today with an oatmeal cookie jones lurking in my pantry. I saw a package of the blasted things … Read More →
Fit for a watchman Sir Terry Pratchett succumb to what he called ‘the embuggerence’ in March of 2015. When first diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease years earlier he didn’t shy away from the topic, nor did he slow down to ‘take it easy’. He kept writing like a furious madman until his final days and was said to have … Read More →
