Taco Pizza

If you think we eat a lot of pizza at our house, you'd be right.

When I left home at eighteen, I made leftovers into soup. In my twenties, I learned that I could make pizza out of almost any kind of leftover imaginable, and I did; my rampage through leftover chile con carne, curry, flank steak and mushrooms, baked bean and cheese, and whatever-was-in-the-crisper eventually led to the now-legendary Lapin Dijon Pizza of 1996 (sadly, no photo).

In my thirties, I relegated leftovers to quesadillas (including the surprisingly tasty Aloo Gobi quesadilla), and pursued more classic (ahem) forms of the pizza, that is, if you can include "cheeseburger" as a classic pizza option.

Nowadays, I just make pizza whenever I want pizza, and I still make it sometimes to use up ingredients. Sometimes, it takes on strange new territory (there was a mushroom-sauced roast beef pizza a couple of weeks ago that I completely forgot to take pictures of), the trendy (buffalo wing pizza with blue cheese sauce) or the time-honoured traditional (pepperoni from the deli counter, maybe mushrooms, maybe peppers, tomato sauce, cheese).

Pizza is a go-to dinner for a few of reasons:
1) It can be on the plate in an hour, even making the crust from scratch.
2) I almost always have the ingredients for making crust, some manner of sauce, and cheese
3) It can help me use up whatever is lurking in the fridge.

The leftover factor might be subtle, it needs to be said. The Taco pizza above was constructed out of a need to use up some black olives and a red pepper that wasn't going to put up with much more fridge time. Since I had some ground buffalo in the freezer (and I usually do), it was pretty easy to fry up the meat, season it up as if I were making tacos (chiles, onions, garlic, cumin - loads of cumin!) and spread it over the pressed-out crust.

For the crust, I substituted about a quarter of a cup of the flour with yellow cornmeal, just to give it a complementary flavour, a slight corniness, you might say. I also use cornmeal for dusting the pizza pan, to make sure the crust comes away nicely, so I already had the cornmeal out. (Expired link removed, please see comments below for recipe).

In this, somewhat rare incidence, I didn't use any sort of sauce at all, but made sure that the taco meat was fairly "saucy" or wet before spreading it in an even layer on the unbaked crust. Top with olives, confetti of red pepper, and cheddar cheese, and you have yourself a taco-flavoured pizza. Serve with a little drizzle of sour cream, if you like, or a side of guacamole.

International Bento (France): Terrine

It's bento time again! This time, in the manner of a fairly classic French picnic.

Palle made this terrine from veal and pork, lining the exterior with swirls of pancetta, although I rather tragically failed to show off the pretty edge to the slice when I was packing my bento (although you can see it in the photo below). Clearly I need more practice in making the bento show off the attractiveness of the ingredients. To be fair, it was a hasty assembly, and upon review I should have put the piccalilli relish (in the small container) into an even smaller cup and wedged it in with the lentils, which only come half-way up the side of their section of the container.

The lentils were braised in wine (and, I believe some chicken stock), and contain finely diced onion, celery and carrot (sauteed in olive oil), as well as some seasonings that I do not quite recall (again, Palle made this dish, along with the Piccalilli, which used cornichons as a foundation), but may have included both bayleaves and fresh thyme. They were excellent hot for dinner on the first night, and equally good cold the next day in my picnic.

Finally, one of my favourite-ever crunchy vegetables, the radish. No fancy carvings into roses or toadstools today, just a rushed quartering and cramming them into the bento.

This is one of the few bentos which I actually ate at cool-room temperature. Most of what I take in my bentos is refrigerated, and then removed to microwave-safe crockery to be re-heated, but this particular bento really didn't need re-heating at all. Perfect for taking one's lunch to the park, or the library steps, instead of staying cooped up in the office.

Note the wine below - while a nice Côtes du Rhone was the perfect accompaniment to the dinner the night before, I only drink wine at work for special occasions, such as when the boss is buying lunch, so just water for me for this bento!

Beans with Bacon

I'm a big fan of beans, and possibly a bigger fan of bacon. Fortunately, they need not be mutually exclusive.

I grew up eating Boston-style baked beans - sometimes the canned kind, but if we were lucky, the kind made from scratch, soaking the beans overnight and baking them slowly in the oven in a specially designed bean pot. Sweet and savory, hearty and comforting. Something that you wait for, and are rewarded for your patience.

I still like to make beans from scratch. Aside from the classic baked version, I developed a Stovetop version that only takes a couple of hours. It's not as good as the original, which takes about nine hours, but clocking in at under two hours, it's easier to wedge into my schedule (and it's still better than the canned kind).

The beans above, however, are not the "Boston" kind at all. They're a simple pot of pinto beans and bacon, with the flavour supplemented by onions and garlic, cooked with bayleaf and salt. It's a sort of foundation recipe, good on toast for a light supper, or to be seasoned up in the manner of your own choosing. I took inspiration from the Mexican dish called "thick beans", served as a protein/starch side dish, and often cooked with lots of lard. The lard in this recipe is only a little of the rendered bacon fat, but I've left the chunks of bacon in.

The thing that really elevated this dish was the quality of the bacon. My friend Rodney smokes his own bacon, and is extremely generous in sharing the bounty. I cut the bacon into thick lardons, and seared it quickly to render enough of the fat to saute some onions and garlic. Then I added the dried (washed) pinto beans, the bayleaf, and enough water to cover the beans generously, brought the whole thing to a simmer, and let it cook, covered over the lowest temperature on my stove until the onions and garlic dissolved, and the beans became tender. I checked on them periodically, topping up the water level as necessary as the beans absorbed the liquid.

The final stage was to add a little salt, and then mash up some of the beans and stir them back into the pot, thickening the gravy and cushioning the rest of the beans.

The beans were exactly what I wanted them to be (although I'm now contemplating making a spicy version, which would also be good). Even more, as the leftovers were turned into a delicious bean and bacon soup, which, on its own is a fine reason to cook up a big pot of beans.

International Bento (Japan): Tonkatsu Bento

As promised, a bento which ventures into Japanese content. In this case, the bento is an exact redux of the dinner from the night before (see below): tonkatsu, Japanese rice, miso-glazed carrots, and gingered daikon salad. The vegetable content was a little light, as I intended to combine the carrots with lotus root slices (very pretty together!) but failed to acquire the lotus root on my way home. Next time, I mean to do a combination of carrot, lotus, and burdock (gobo). The preparation is much like a kinpira, but with a little red miso mixed with water and sesame oil added in and reduced until it glazes the vegetable pieces. An extra vegetable, maybe something green to balance out the meal, too - perhaps a little finely chopped snow-pea "coleslaw", made in a vaguely sunomono-like fashion, would be a good addition here.

I'm very fond of tonkatsu, a breaded, shallow-fried pork cutlet, in this case made from a slightly pounded pork sirloin chop. The conventional flour/ dip in egg / dredge in crumbs is employed, using panko, the airy, coarse style of breadcrumb that gives Japanese breaded foods a delightfully fuzzy appearance. For the recipe, I refer you to Maki's excellent site Just Hungry, the sister site to Just Bento, which is a favourite resource for my forays into Japanese cuisine.

The little fish-shaped sauce bottle in the bento is filled with a Tonkatsu sauce which Palle assembled after perusing various recipes online and taking the best of them to form a hybrid (his favourite way to cook). I don't think he noted it down, though, so the next iteration might be quite different, depending on how well he remembers what he did. The little fish-bottle is one of a veritable school of fish bottles I got in a little box from a Japanese dollar-type store here in Vancouver. They are generally used for soy sauce, or other smooth and not-too-thick sauces that can be loaded by suction through the fish's "mouth". A bargain at two dollars for a box of them (if one doesn't make it home, I'm not too broken up by it).

If you recall my Fear of Frying post, you will know that this involves more oil and temperature control issues than I am strictly comfortable with, so making the Tonkatsu also helped me push my boundaries and further develop my frying skills. To be fair, I made a crash decision to shallow-fry the cutlets instead, using about an inch of oil in a large skillet, based on a different recipe that I found in a cookbook. The first two of the four cutlets I cooked were beautiful, but I had my predictable troubles controlling the heat for the second batch. The cutlets were all delicious, but the second batch were considerably less attractive.

More practice is clearly in order, but I was really happy with how well this turned out.

Jamaican Buffalo Pie

I don't get nearly enough pie in my life. One of the problems is that I am rather picky about the crust, and the leathery, greasy offerings of many of the pre-fab pies available are discouraging. Also, as is fairly well documented, I am quite lazy, so it is difficult to rouse myself up to make a double-crust pie on the spur of the moment. It can be done, however. It just takes a little craving.

My world is run by food cravings. It always has been, even at some fairly inopportune times. I am lucky to be able to indulge most of them. So, when an enormous craving for a savory pie hit pretty much juxtaposed with a wish for a Jamaican patty, I decided to combine the two: voilà, one double-crust pie, filled with a spicy, Jamaican patty-inspired filling, and less actual work than making a bunch of smaller patties.

I used ground buffalo meat, since that is what I had on hand, but a good quality beef would work as well, of course. I browned the buffalo with rather a lot of sliced green onions (white and green parts), seasoned it heavily with black pepper and allspice and lightly with hot curry powder and salt, added some chopped hot chiles and a generous slug of Matouk's Calypso sauce (I didn't have habaneros on hand, but the pie still had a big ol' kick). I thickened it with a flour-based slurry, but was careful to keep the amount of liquid really low, so it would act as a binder without sogging things out too badly. The seasoning was essentially just taste-and-tweak, so I'm afraid I can't impart the precise amounts.

Finally, since pies look more lovely with a shiny golden crust, I gave it a quick swipe of egg-wash, and loaded it into the oven on the middle rack at 375℉ for about 45 minutes.

Because this was done on a weeknight (and, see above re: lazy), there's a big flaw in the surface of the top crust (upper right quadrant) that I didn't bother to fix, but we successfully managed to ignore that and devoured the pie anyway, with coleslaw on the side.


I took a well-wrapped quarter pie to work the next day, to give to a co-worker friend whom I generally torture with descriptions of what I am cooking. It was received with great appreciation, and apparently re-heated splendidly.

International Bento (North America) Roast Chicken & Potatoes

I'm not heading back to school this week, nor am I sending a young person off to school. I will be going to work as usual, though, and at this time of year I find myself eagerly, even voraciously, reading up on all the latest ideas for packed lunches.

As those of you who follow this site know, I'm pretty enamored of bentos right now, along with most of the world, as evinced by the rampant proliferation of websites and cookbooks (many of which are very impressive indeed) dedicated to the art of the bento.

Since many, if not most, of my packed lunches are derived from dinner leftovers, working them into a bento format takes no great leaps of imagination. This bento was ridiculously simple - leftover cold roast chicken, which had been removed from the bone when it was still warm, and the attendant leftover roasted potato halves. I intended to either heat them up on a plate (my work has a microwave) or eat them cold, as is, but when lunchtime rolled around I realized that, with judicious application of the mayonnaise I keep in the fridge at work (for sandwich-related emergencies), I could make myself a tasty chicken and potato salad. So, that's what I did. I chopped up the potatoes a bit more, and the biggest pieces of chicken, and mixed them together with just enough mayonnaise to moisten them, and garnished heavily with black pepper. Very tasty!

The rest of the bento is self-explanatory: sliced cucumbers, and an assortment of fresh berries (get them while it's still technically summer).

My next bento will probably venture into Japanese territory, just for kicks, but stay tuned also for French bento, and more North American bento fun!

Chocolate Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chip Muffins

I was really very happy with my recent foray into the world of chocolate, oatmeal, and peanut butter. So much so, in fact, that I started thinking about other, non-cookie applications.

In a related note, I found myself picking gooey chocolate crumbs out of a muffin wrapper last week, having succumbed to the "chocolate muffin" at Tim Horton's. Yeah. Well. It wasn't so much a muffin, as a damp, massively sweet cupcake with an unstable texture. Looking at the online nutritional information, the only entry close to what I had is the "chocolate chip muffin", which is a whopping 430 calories, of which 16 grams of fat and 40 grams of sugar make up much of the payload. If it had been more pleasant an eating experience, and less of a crumby, sticky-fingered disaster, I wouldn't have minded so much, but...you call that a muffin? Really? We must be speaking different languages. I'd have rather had a doughnut. Or, er, "donut."

It got me thinking - why can't there be a chocolate muffin that is, in fact, a muffin and not an also-ran in the sweets department? Now, maybe if they'd backed down on the sugar overload, or added a hearty, muffin-friendly texturizer to give the creation a little backbone...and, before I knew it, I was drafting up a recipe.

The results were very pleasing indeed. A perfect lunchbox treat, in fact, or a quick breakfast snack on the go. Dare I say, perfect for back to school lunches (for those schools which don't have a peanut butter prohibition)?

Chocolate Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chip Muffins

3 tablespoons soft butter
½ cup brown sugar, lightly packed
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Pinch of cinnamon
1 cup all purpose flour
¾ cup rolled oats
1 teaspoon baking soda
1½ teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
½ cup dutch process cocoa powder
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons buttermilk
1 cup peanut butter chips

My own cryptic notes for assembly read as follows:
Muffin Method; 400℉ 20 minutes; 12 regular. Those of you who enjoy a little more specificity may want to follow these directions:

Preheat your oven to 400℉ with the rack set in the middle of the oven. Lightly grease (or spritz with canola oil) a 12 cup muffin pan.

In a medium mixing bowl, beat together butter, sugar, egg, and vanilla extract until smooth.

In a separate bowl, combine the oats, flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cocoa powder, and cinnamon,

Measure out the buttermilk for quick access.

Add about a third of the dry flour mixture to the beaten butter/egg mixture and combine until just blended. Then, pour in half the buttermilk, and stir it gently through. Repeat with the next third of dry mixture and the last of the buttermilk. Finally, fold in the last bit of dry mixture and add the peanut butter chips, carefully stirring it through just until all the flour is incorporated, handling gently to prevent toughness.

Distribute the batter between the greased muffin cups. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, depending on your oven (check after 20, and if the muffin tops are dry and show a little resilience when gently pressed, remove from oven. Allow muffins to cool in pan on a rack for a couple of minutes, then lift muffins out of cups to finish cooling on the racks.

Store in a sealed container in the fridge, once completely cool, and re-warm in the microwave for 20 seconds.

The muffins are just sweet enough - the peanut butter chips are actually little sweet bursts of peanuty tastiness, and the oatmeal gives the muffin a sturdy, satisfying texture without being heavy or dense.


For those interested in how the nutritional info stacks up, I used an online calculator to come up with a count of about 220 calories per muffin based on this recipe, including 20 grams of sugar and 8.3 grams of fat. Plus, over three grams of fibre, if that's your thing. It should be noted that I couldn't find an ingredient listing for the Reese's peanut butter chips that I used in the recipe, so my calculations are based on using Reese's pieces instead, which will skew the results at least somewhat. Plus, I'm never entirely sure how reliable online calculators are. Your mileage may vary. Still, all in all, a considerable nutritional improvement on the commercial muffin I was lamenting above.

International Bento (North America): Macaroni & Cheese

Moving right along in the world of bento, I decided to do one that was close to home. My home, that is. That means that the macaroni and cheese is home made.

I have two different mac and cheese recipes that I use. One is deluxe and decadent, involving eggs and multiple cheeses, and the other is somewhat leaner and absolutely quick as the boxed kind. The second one is a little more suitable for everyday (but maybe not every day) consumption. You can make it with whatever cheese you like, but I prefer sharp cheddar. This one was made with white sharp cheddar, which is not as picturesque, hence the smoked paprika decorative topping.

The rest of the bento is simple: some sliced zucchini and red bell peppers, and a few Rainier cherries for dessert. I removed the pasta to a ceramic plate to re-heat, since my bento is not microwave friendly.

Skillet Macaroni & Cheese
aka "Evapomac"

Serves 2
Total Time Prep & Cook: 20 minutes

1½ cups uncooked macaroni
¾ cup* canned evaporated milk**
2 cups water
1 tablespoon butter
½ teaspoon kosher salt (or ¼ teaspoon table salt)
½ teaspoon cornstarch
1 – 2 shakes of Tabasco sauce
1 ½ cups grated sharp Cheddar cheese
¾ cup grated Colby cheese (or Monterey Jack...or more Cheddar)

Bring the water and ½ cup of the milk to a boil in a large skillet or medium saucepan. Add the salt, butter, and the macaroni, and cook (stirring frequently) until the macaroni is tender and the liquid is reduced to a thin “sauce”.

Put the remaining ¼ cup of milk in a small bowl with the Tabasco and the cornstarch. Stir until smooth. Add to the cooked macaroni and stir until the sauce begins to thicken – no more than a minute or two over high heat. Turn off the heat and add the cheese, one handful at a time, stirring it in each time, and adding a little room-temperature water if necessary to adjust the consistency of the sauce as you go.

You can top it with some buttered, toasted breadcrumbs or parsley or something like that if you feel the need to be fancy, but really this is designed to be dumped into bowls and eaten in front of the television. Have a salad tomorrow.

Serves 2 people generously, or 4 people as a side dish.


*This is about ½ a 370 ml can. You can also use an entire 160 ml can, but add 2 tablespoons of milk or half-and-half with the cornstarch, to make up the difference

** don’t use sweetened condensed milk by mistake. Ew!

Spanish Pork Burgers

This was really, really good.

I'd made the Spanish Pork Burger recipe from Eating Well Magazine once before - well, once as burgers, and once as meatloaf, and I liked it. Finally having made it with pimentón de la vera (smoked paprika), and having vastly improved my burger seasoning skills, I absolutely love it.

What else did I do differently? Quite a few things, actually.

This time, I also used a smaller bun, a potato bun from my local supermarket's in-house bakery. It had a very, very slight sweetness to it that complemented the earthy lemon saffron mayonnaise (which sadly, is not visible in the picture, but is a delightful, vivid yellow), and the smokiness of the paprika. The lower bun-to burger patty ratio is generally more satisfying, I think. I didn't use Manchego cheese, this time, I simply used a nutty mozzarella that needed using up, and it was fine, if ever so slightly less Spanish. I didn't grate it, but simply laid it onto the pork patties in the grill pan.

That brings up another thing - the grill pan. This is definitely the right pan for the job - you get the slight char on the striped bits, without blackening the entire surface of the burger. It is infinitely more attractive, but also has a positive effect on the texture and flavour of the meat.


I also used the Piquillo peppers recommended in the recipe as opposed to regular roasted red peppers. I liked the firm texture and the flavour. I used them as a bottom layer between the mayonnaise and the pork patty, topped the pork with the cheese and then the sauteed onions, and then the toasted top bun. No other toppings were needed or wanted - they could be safely relegated to a salad on the side, and consumed leisurely after the burgers were devoured.

And devoured they were. I can hardly wait to have them again.

Fear of Frying #1: Southern Fried Chicken

I've always had something of a fear of frying. Not searing, or stir-frying, or tossing the perogies into a skillet with butter pan-frying kind of frying. You know. Frying. Deep frying, or at the very least, shallow-frying. I don't know whether it comes from a childhood immersed in 70's style health food obsessions, or simply the fact that my mother almost never fried anything. Maybe it's the waste of oil, the mess, and the general aura of guilt that seems to be evoked even by the word frying.

But, I do like fried foods. I like tempura, tonkatsu, southern-fried chicken, pakoras, fish and chips, doughnuts, and all kinds of delicious fried delights. So, I've set myself on a remedial course to learn how to fry without fear. First up: chicken.

I turn to the experts for advice, and in this case, I consulted Alton Brown's Fry Hard II episode of Good Eats, and the related cookbook. I learned that what makes southern-fried chicken "southern" is that it is shallow-fried in a couple of inches of oil which allow the skin to contact the bottom of the skillet during cooking, and is never fully immersed, which allows moisture to escape during cooking and prevents the crust from becoming a separate layer that simply peels off the chicken when you bite into it.

I dutifully soaked my chicken in buttermilk overnight, and seasoned up the pieces (all drumsticks, in this case) with the exact seasoning mixture he prescribes, right down to using smoked pimenton for the paprika, which is a variant mentioned in the Good Eats: The Early Years tome.

I tossed the pieces in flour, and allowed them the full recommended 15 minute resting time to allow the combination of flour and buttermilk to gelatinize and form the crust. This little nugget of wisdom appears in the book, but not the online recipe.

The frying itself was actually pretty easy: I laid the pieces gently into the preheated vegetable shortening (I used a frying thermometer to get the right temperature of 325 F), four legs per batch, set the timer, and watched in fascination as they cooked. Tongs to turn them over, and another short wait, then onto a rack placed over a tray to rest while the rest cooked up.

I confess that I was relieved that Alton had cautioned that the step he employs of seasoning the chicken with paprika prior to the flouring stage makes the cooked chicken quite dark, or I would have been afraid that I had burned it. As it was, I may have left the second batch in a little longer than strictly necessary - it was quite mahogany coloured - but every piece was juicy and delicious, and made me want to eat far far more than I ought.

As you can see above, we had our southern-fried chicken legs with mashed potatoes, chicken gravy (made from the de-fatted chicken drippings of chickens, aka "chicken gold", a little broth, and a flour/chickenfat roux) and, of course, coleslaw.

It turns out, the hardest thing about frying chicken at home is refraining from overindulgence.