Chocolate Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chip Cookies

Oatmeal Spice Anything Cookies - are so very adaptable that they've become a go-to staple whenever I need to whip up a quick batch of cookie goodness. I've made them with dried blueberries and white chocolate chunks, with cranberries and Christmas spices, pumpkin seeds and golden raisins, and an almost infinite variety of fruit, nuts, spices, and other goodies. So...why not chocolate?

Of course, I have already made them with chocolate chips - I'm not daft! But, it occurred to me that I don't often see recipes for cookies that are themselves both oat- and chocolate-based. Why not? Is there something mutually exclusive about the decadence of a chocolate cookie and the healthy image of the oatmeal cookie? Couldn't they be combined into a single, satisfying treat?

I had been toying with the notion for a little while, when I stumbled onto an ingredient that upped the ante considerably: peanut butter chips.

That did it. I bought some. I took them home. I squinted at my master recipe for a while, and finally, I made the adjustments that I hoped would satisfy everything that I knew these cookies could be.

Here they are:

Chocolate Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chip Cookies
Makes about 3 dozen (depending on size)
Total prep and cooking time: 45 minutes

1/2 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated white sugar
1/2 cup lightly packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup rolled oats
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 cup dutch-process cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
pinch of salt
1/4 teaspoon allspice
1 cup peanut butter chips
Preheat your oven to 350℉.

Lightly spray two large cookie sheets with canola oil.

In a medium mixing bowl, cream together the butter and sugars until thoroughly combined. Add the egg and vanilla extract, and mix again. You can do this by hand or with an electric mixer. Pour the oats over the wet mixture. Without stirring, sift the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and baking soda directly over the oats. Sprinkle the salt and the allspice over the flour mixture. With a wooden spoon, or on the lowest setting of your mixer, carefully begin to blend everything together. When it is starting to come together, add the peanut butter chips. Finish combining the ingredients until the peanut butter chips are all even distributed through the cookie dough.

Drop by tablespoon onto the prepared cookie sheets, leaving room for each cookie to expand a little. Use your fingers to gently flatten the cookies slightly. Bake at 350 F for 12-15 minutes, depending on size. Remove to racks to cool - they will be soft and flexible - downright bendy! - at first, but will firm up as they cool.

And, of course, they count as health food, thanks to the oatmeal, right?

Summer Fruit Salad

I adore fruit salad.

That is, I love fresh fruit. Fruit salad, as found in restaurants (often under the name "fruit cup" or simply arriving unannounced on the side of your brunch) is often lacking. The most heinous of the many crimes against fruit salad are as follows: too much filler (melon, canned pineapple, citrus sections from a tub), cut too long in advance (I'm pretty sure I've had some that were cut days before they got to me), fruits that don't complement each other (apples mixed in with soft stone fruits), the poorly cut (giant hunks of one fruit, tiny slivers of another) and, finally, what I think of as "interference" - some sort of nasty syrup poured over all as a "dressing".

Fruit salad is not difficult, and in the summer it need not be expensive. I eat fresh fruit year-round, when I can, and I therefore end up eating fairly seasonally, although I confess to occasionally succumbing to raspberries grown in Mexico in the dead of winter. In summer in Vancouver, there are explosions of local berries to choose from, and gorgeous stone fruits from the Okanagan. An embarrassment of riches, really.

While I'm not a hardened locavore (we don't grow papaya or mango around here), I do like to purchase the local version of those fruits that do well in our climate. The salad above contains local organic strawberries and blueberries, as well as papaya (not so local). I thought the combination of colours was pretty, and I find that generally three well-chosen fruits together make a very nice balance. I dressed it the way I dress most fruit salads (the non-dessert-y ones, anyway), which was simply with freshly squeezed lime juice. That's all you need, really, for most fruits.

This salad was made for a friend's bbq afternoon, and I was tickled pink when our host told me that it was the first time anyone had ever brought a fruit salad that wasn't full of things he hated. Perhaps that was luck, but I suspect it's because I didn't go the cheap filler route.

Now, before you think that I'm some crazed melon-hater, I should tell you that I rather like melon. We don't have it in the house due to allergy issues, but I have nothing against fresh melon, in season. I tend to prefer it on its own, but I've had melon-ball salads that were all different kinds of melon, and were absolutely delicious - but that's because it was someone using melon specifically to execute a particular effect, and not simply as coarsely-cut filler to reduce expenses. I also like fresh pineapple - one of my go-to fruit salads is the trio of fresh pineapple (diced small), kiwi, and blueberries - all drizzled with lime juice, naturally. Such a pretty combination of colours, with the green, yellow and blue. So delicious!

Getting back to restaurants, though, I know that one of the problems is that of suppliers. If you want the favourable, stable pricing from your supplier, you need to arrange a full-year gig, not just getting fruit in when it's not in season in your own backyard. This is why you can get limp, colourless tomato slices on your burger at the height of rioting tomato season. It's a tragic pay off, really.

So, in the summer, I eat a lot of fruit. I take fruit salads to work for my lunch as often as I can, and I take great delight in trying different flavours and combinations. It's pretty low effort for most fruit - maybe a bit of peeling and chopping, but for five or ten minutes' work, you get a splendid salad that cheers you right up at lunch time.

Using Up the Bits: Zucchini Balls

I do like zucchini, and I admire its versatility. My mother had an astonishing number of places to hide it when it overran the garden (and the neighbourhood), including a magnificent chocolate zucchini bundt cake and, more surprisingly, a sort of lemon curd whose bulk came from the skin-free pulp of the zucchini (not that you could tell).

As for me, I use zucchini in pasta sauces, in salads, as crudites, and of course the much-beloved Zucchini Fritters. Occasionally I stuff them, and that was what I was doing here...using a melon baller to remove scoops of zucchini flesh from the outer shell that would eventually house some meat-y rice-y affair. No photos of that dish, sorry; I got distracted by the fun possibilities of finding a way to use up the little zucchini balls that I had carved out. Half-balls, actually, as you can clearly see, since my goal was really just to empty out the shell of the zucchini, and I wasn't exactly heeding the form of the squash divots while carving.

I thought about tossing them into the freezer to be thrown in the next batch of curry or an upcoming pasta dish, but they were just so cute, and I couldn't resist doing something more immediate with them. So, I got out a wide skillet, heated a little olive oil until quite hot, and then threw in some cumin seeds. Once the seeds started to pop, I tossed in the little balls, and sauteed them briskly until they just picked up a little colour. A pinch of kosher salt, and voila! Tasty little side dish (or snack) that handily used up all the leftover bits, leaving me feeling virtuously waste-free and rather content at having a little extra something in the fridge.

Turns out, they were good both hot and cold, although a little slippery once chilled. This is definitely going to be the fate of the innards of the next summer squash that I feel the need to eviscerate. I'm betting that a few cherry tomatoes, and maybe some oil-cured black olives and some garlic would round this out into a perfectly wonderful dish all on its own.

Chicken Canzanese

I had some sage that needed using. A friend had uprooted a monstrous sage bush from his yard, and I became the beneficiary of a whole lot o' sage leaves that needed using (or drying) post haste.

Happily, my June 2010 issue of Cook's Illustrated had a recipe for Chicken Canzanese, an appealing-looking braised chicken and wine dish that is fairly different from anything I'd tried before. The dominant seasoning notes of the dish are fresh sage and garlic, but it also contains whole clove buds, which is an intriguing departure from the usual suspects.

The recipe suggested serving the dish over polenta, boiled potatoes, or noodles, and I decided that the generous amount of liquid in the dish could be converted into a nice sauce for linguine. In fact, it was a little on the too-thin side, but was delicious anyway. In the future, I think I would probably reduce the amount of cooking liquid by about 1/2 cup, which shouldn't be detrimental to the main braise, but would result in a slightly thicker sauce at the end.

There was, in fact, so very much sauce that I used it as the basis of a pot pie for the remaining pieces of chicken (stripped from their bones), the next day. Even so, there was more sauce than strictly necessary, and reducing the overall liquid by a half cup is definitely in this dish's future. It also could have taken even more sage, had I only known. I did add a little more to the pot pie, just because I could.

The flavour of this dish is fantastic - familiar, comforting, and somewhat sophisticated, all at the same time. It takes a little while to make, but is definitely worth the wait.

Chicken Canzanese
Adapted from Cook's Illustrated, June 2010

1 tablespoon olive oil
2 ounces of diced prosciutto cubes (very small)
4 garlic cloves (sliced lengthwise)
8 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs (back attached), trimmed of excess fat and skin)
2 teaspoons flour
2 cups dry white wine (or 1 1/2 cups...)
1 cup chicken stock or broth
4 clove buds
1 sprig of fresh rosemary, minced
12 whole fresh sage leaves (15 would be better)
2 bay leaves
pinch of red pepper flakes
juice from 1/2 lemon
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
kosher salt

Pre-heat oven to 325℉, with the rack at middle-lower position. Season the chicken lightly with kosher salt, and a little ground white pepper if you wish.

In a large skillet (minimum 12"), heat half the olive oil and saute the prosciutto cubes until fragrant, and add the garlic slices, cooking for just a minute or so until lightly golden (be careful not to burn). Remove to a small bowl and set aside.

Without cleaning the pan, add the rest of the olive oil and heat until very hot. Add the chicken pieces, skin side down, and cook without disturbing for about 8 minutes or until golden brown. Flip pieces over and cook a further 5 minutes. You may need to do this in two batches. Remove the chicken to a plate.

Remove some of the rendered fat from the pan, leaving about 2 tablespoons. Make a blond roux by adding the flour to the pan, and stirring and scraping with a wooden spoon or spatula until fragrant, about one minute. Add the wine and broth, slowly, stirring to make a smooth, if thin, sauce, continuing to scrape the bottom until all the browned bits have been scraped up off the bottom of the pan. If the sauce is lumping up on you, whisk vigorously until it smoothes out. Add in the clove buds, red pepper flakes, sage leaves, bay leaves, and reserved prosciutto and garlic.

Carefully return the chicken to the pan in a single layer, skin-side up so it sticks out of the liquid. Bake uncovered until tender, about 1 hour 15 minutes. You should check on the chicken after about 15 minutes into the cook time, and the liquid should be barely bubbling. If it is doing something else (or nothing) raise or lower your temperature slightly, accordingly. While the chicken cooks, you can prepare your side dish(es). A big green salad nicely complements the richness of the dish.

Remove chicken from pan to a clean plate, and tent loosely with tinfoil. Place pan over high heat on the stovetop, and boil vigorously until sauce is reduced and thickened. Turn off the heat and add the lemon juice, butter, and minced rosemary. Pour sauce around chicken, and serve.

This chicken was so incredibly tender, moist, and delicious, even when re-heated the next day in pot-pie format, that I will absolutely be making this dish again. Next time: less liquid, more sage. Next time, also, I will make a full recipe (even for the two of us) and plan to make another stunning pot pie out of the extra.

Not Quite Trifle, Almost Parfait

What do you do with a little leftover plain chocolate cake? Well, if you have some strawberries around, you cube up that cake and toss it with sliced strawberries and a big dollop of freshly whipped cream. If I had had the foresight to layer these carefully into parfait glasses, it would surely make an even prettier picture (although I would have had to cut the cubes of cake a little smaller).

When I made this, it was still a little early for strawberries, and they didn't have the most robust flavour. To give them a boost, I sliced them up and macerated them in a little cherry brandy and a pinch of sugar. This is a common treatment for strawberries in our house, especially if there isn't additional fruit available to make a fruit salad. After a couple of hours in the fridge, they were thrown into this ad hoc dessert for a late-night treat in front of the television.

It's not fancy, and it's not something I would ever plan to feed to company, for example, but it was a pretty nice way to say goodbye to the last of the cake that needed using up.

A few final words on whipped cream. If you are in the habit of buying self-whipping cream in a can, do give the old fashioned method a try: it doesn't take much time or effort, and the result is so luxuriously preferable to the sweet, fluffy canned version. You can control the sugar, too, or flavour it in other ways - the aforementioned brandy, for example, or a hint of vanilla extract.

Santa Fe Corn Pie (or, it took me long enough)

I found this recipe whilst surfing around the internet, as one does. I had bookmarked it, and then copy-pasted it into a document of Things I Want to Make, where it languished for about a year until I finally, randomly decided that it was about time. As I set about marshalling my shopping list to make sure I had all necessary components, I noticed that the credited author, Diane Clement, is local to me - a fellow Vancouverite, whose Tomato Fresh Food Cafe I have visited in the past, and whose cookbook "At The Tomato" is on my bookshelf, where it has been for a number of years.

When I got home, I cracked open the cookbook and discovered that the very same recipe had been waiting for me, at home, all this time.

It was delicious. And easy! It's a sort of quiche-y affair, and sort of a cornbread-y thing, and not quite a spoonbread. I will be making this again and again - for brunch, for lunch, for dinner, and maybe even for some kind of snack. It was easy, too - no fussing with pastry (which I enjoy, but don't always have the patience for at blink-o'clock in the morning. I suspect it is a useful make-ahead, where you leave it unbaked in the fridge the night before, and then simply pop it into the oven in the morning. In fact, I think I'll try that next.

The only significant addition that I made to this recipe was to sprinkle some smoked paprika over the top as a finisher. It gave a lovely smokey highlight to the dish without taking over the lovely corn-forward flavour. I also omitted the melted butter from the original recipe.

Santa Fe Corn Pie
(adapted from Diane Clement's At The Tomato)

3 large eggs, beaten
1 cup creamed corn
1 1/4 cups frozen corn – thawed by running it under hot water (in a strainer)
1/2 cup yellow cornmeal
3/4 cup sour cream
1 cup Monterey jack cheese grated
5 canned mild green chiles, chopped
1/4 teaspoon worchestershire sauce
few shots Tabasco sauce
3 tablespoons green onions, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon pimenton (smoked paprika)

Spritz a 10" pie plate with canola spray.

In a large bowl, combine all ingredients and stir with a big mixing spoon until thoroughly combined.  Pour into the pie plate and bake, uncovered, at 350 F for about 45 – 50 minutes or until golden and firm in the middle. 

She notes that the pie may be baked ahead and refrigerated for up to 3 days. I did take my leftovers to work for lunch the following day, and it warmed up beautifully in the microwave. Alongside a big green salad, it was a light, yet filling work lunch.

Yo ho ho, French Toast for breakfast

A while ago, I made some rum syrup, for some recipe or other. And I liked it so much, it stayed on in the kitchen to be incorporated into anything where a traditional maple syrup might have once gone, or really anything that could use some pirate flavours. Such as pancakes ( a frequent flyer, of late) and this time, by special request, French Toast.

I don't make French Toast all that often. It's easy enough, of course, but it seems rather a lot of work for something ultimately fairly ordinary. This time, however, I used a mild sourdough bread, and with the added bananas and rum syrup, well, I can see myself doing this again, and soon. I am always ridiculously thrilled to have fresh fruit at breakfast, a condition which has only worsened since our trip to Mexico last year, and French Toast provides a terrific vehicle - more so even than pancakes, I think.

Since I am almost constitutionally incapable of having an all-sweet breakfast, we added bacon, which is a fine additional to almost any meal.

If you don't have a favourite recipe for French Toast, you might enjoy this one, which is adapted from the Big Book of Breakfast by Maryana Vollstedt.

Basic French Toast

2 large eggs
1/2 cup 1% milk
dash salt
4 large slices of mild bakery sourdough
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
a little butter, for frying.

Mix the eggs, milk, salt and vanilla and pour into a shallow bowl. Dip the slices of bread briefly into the egg mixture, turning to coat, and put aside on a holding plate until they are all done.

Heat a large skillet over medium, and add a little butter (or canola oil). When the butter has melted (or oil heated) lay in two of the slices (or as many as will fit in a single, uncrowded layer), and cook for about three minutes per side. Remove to a rack in the oven to keep warm until they are all cooked.

Delicious with any sort of syrup, I'm sure, but extra pirate-y with rum syrup.

Feel Good Noodle Bowl

I've been sitting on this pic for a while, as it trickily sneaked under my radar when I was processing a large number of photos.

This is wonderfully comfort-foodish, even if your childhood didn't include Chinese steamed noodles, miso gravy, or tolerable vegetables. If you like any of these things now, this will be a go-to staple of those nights when you really feel like something that is simple, healthy, and tasty.

I can't even call it a recipe. It takes about three minutes to cook up some fresh Chinese steamed (or "steam") noodles (around here, they are sold in the produce dept. of most major grocery stoes), or other fresh noodles, dole them into bowls and top with freshly steamed vegetables of your choice. Drizzle with sauce, and devour.

I like snow peas (mangetouts) here, too, and chunks of steamed or roasted yam. You could try fennel bulb, red bell peppers, cubes of smoked tofu, baby corn, or sake-steamed shiitake mushrooms.

You can also switch things up to suit yourself - this is an eminently customizable dish. You could swap the miso gravy for a nice peanuty sate sauce, or perhaps even a little leftover curry sauce that you might happen to have in your freezer. You could change the noodles to your favourite type of rice, for a potentially (depending on the sauce, of course) gluten-free version. Even the sesame seeds are optional.

Best of all, once you are deliciously full, you can feel confident that you've gotten most of your vegetable needs down the hatch, while feeling like you're getting away with something. A little fresh fruit for dessert, should you be so lucky, and you're done.

Bento Greco

Bento, again, or as they might say on Iron Chef, "Bento, Greek Flavour."

The meatballs in the little silicone baking cup are spiced lamb, and the salad is the always fantastic and staple summer potluck salad, Chickpea and Orzo with Dill. I've changed the technique a little over the years, and now I combine everything but the orzo and cold water in a big bowl while the pasta cooks, and then, after running it under cold water to stop the cooking, giving it a half-hearted shake and add it to the rest. Quick toss, and you're done.

The olives tucked in with the meatballs are kalamatas. The cucumber is self-explanatory, but I confess it was going to be a Greek salad, originally - cukes, tomato, red onion, more feta, and green bell pepper. I discovered that the other vegetables were inexplicably not in my crisper, so I just went with sliced cucumbers, which I'm always happy to have with my lunch.

Between the chickpeas and the lamb, it was plenty of food. I removed the meatballs and heated them up in the microwave, but I was using fairly lean lamb, so they could have been eaten cold. They were leftovers from dinner the night before, and as you may know by now, I love taking leftover dinner for lunch.

A Brief Journey in Short Ribs

Spring is coming on fast, but there are still a few chilly days left that lend themselves to beefy braises and slow stews; just time to get in one more short rib dinner. Or three.


I kept it simple, to start. Rubbed the meat with a little kosher salt and olive oil, browned it well in a Dutch oven, deglazed with a cheap and cheerful Chilean carménère (Éstacion, $12, surprisingly drinkable), added a 400 ml tin of plain diced tomatoes with their juices and a half-cup of chicken stock. For seasoning, a sprig each of rosemary and thyme from the garden, 3 bay leaves, a few cloves of garlic (quartered lengthwise), and a dash of allspice. Once the dish was at a simmer, I put it in the oven, covered, at 300℉ for three hours. The last half-hour of waiting was pure agony, but the wait was worth it. Rich, meltingly tender, and with a deep, wonderful beefy flavour. Baked potato (since the oven was on anyway) and coleslaw rounded out the meal.I made extra, not that we'd have had the room for larger servings. No, the extra was for conversion purposes. I figure that any time I am waiting three hours for something to come out of the oven, I'm making it count. So, I cooked double the amount that we needed, and stored the leftovers in the braising liquid in the fridge.

The added bonus of advance preparation and chilling is that all of the lovely suet comes up to the surface, and an be quite easily lifted off (to feed the birds, or save for some other purpose), leaving a lean gel of braising liquid surrounding the still-on-the-bone meat.

So, what to do with the leftovers? Sandwiches, of course! I warmed up the meat and shredded it with a couple of forks (pulled pork style), and put it on toasted buns with a few pieces of the tomatoes from the braising liquid, topped the whole thing with a layer of edam cheese, and served with a spinach salad for super-fast dinner.


Since there was still a little shredded meat leftover that I couldn't cram onto the buns, and the rest of the braising liquid, I used the liquid as a base for a soup, adding a little extra broth, some carrot coins, corn, lima beans(!), and barley. At the end, the shredded meat went back into the pot to warm up. Embarassingly easy, and very delicious with a big hunk of bread to mop up the last bits.

Bring on spring. I'm feeling fortified.

Salad Tweaking (Pasta Salad Primavera)

If you have check out my Reviews blog, Much Ado About Diet, you'll see the test recipe for Dilled Pasta Salad with Spring Vegetables from the newly released Mayo Clinic Diet & Journal. As noted, we like all of the ingredients, and so we enjoyed the salad, but we also identified some issues for this recipe in terms of its end result on the plate, as well as the overall health scorecard. So I decided to give it a little salad makeover.


Right away, we were surprised by the amount of oil in the original dressing recipe. 1/4 cup seemed rather high for the amount of salad to be dressed and, in fact, it delivered an uncomfortably oily result. In the revised recipe below, we cut the amount of fat in half, using only two tablespoons of olive oil. That took care of the excessive greasiness, and still easily provided enough dressing to adequately season the salad.

The second thing we noted was that the use of both asparagus and green bell pepper gave an overall bitter quality to the entire salad, not to mention contributing to a rather monotone appearance. The few cherry tomatoes did break up the green and white pasta-scape, but left me thinking that the whole dish could benefit from more colour, and more natural vegetable sweetness. I switched out the green pepper for orange and red bell peppers, which are much sweeter and do not have that unripe bitter quality of the green.


I also felt that the amount of pasta could really support a much greater quantity of vegetable matter, allowing for larger portions that really only increased the fresh vegetable intake of any serving. More vegetables is generally considered an improvement, health-wise, so I increased all of the feature vegetables: 2 more asparagus stalks, an extra half bell pepper, extra tomatoes (the exact number is going to depend on the size of tomato you choose).

Finally, I thought the amount of fresh herb could use a boost, so I roughly doubled the chopped herbs. In the second iteration, I used tarragon instead of dill, but that was simply because I had it handy, and it plays well with the same vegetables.

I think the final salad was more visually appealing (the change of noodle was strictly due to availability at the time) with lots of colours and a nice balance between the astringent asparagus, the sweet peppers, and the acidity of the tomatoes. The flavours were bright, the pasta tasted seasoned, but not greasy, and this recipe has earned a place in my spring and summer repertoire. It's versatile, vegan, stores well in the fridge for a day or two, and is about perfect for potlucks or picnics.

Pasta Salad Primavera
adapted from The Mayo Clinic Diet & Journal
Serves 4

3 cups uncooked short pasta, such as rotini
10 asparagus stalks
1 orange bell pepper
1/2 red bell pepper
2 green onions
10 - 12 cocktail tomatoes

Dressing
2 Tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 Tablespoons rice vinegar (or white balsamic vinegar)
2 Tablespoons olive oil
large pinch kosher salt
black pepper to taste
1/2 cup fresh green herbs of your choice (e.g. tarragon, dill, basil, or parsley)

Trim the asparagus and slice into approximately two-centimeter chunks. Dice the peppers into medium-small dice. FInely slice the green onions. Cut the tomatoes as needed - quarters for strawberry tomatoes, halves for cherry tomatoes, and whole for grape.

Stir the dressing together while the pasta boils.

Drop the pasta into boiling, lightly salted water and cook until just tender. For the last two minutes of cooking time, add the asparagus to the pot of boiling pasta. When finished, drain and plunge the pasta and asparagus into ice water to stop the cooking process and cool it down. Rinse with fresh, cold water until all the pasta is cool to the touch. Drain well, shaking to get rid of any excess water.

In a large serving bowl, combine the chopped raw vegetables and dressing. Add the well-drained pasta and asparagus and toss so that the dressing gets evenly distributed. Serve right away, or chill until needed.

I'm Back...and I brought a Bento

I've missed you all.

As you can see, my fascination with Japanese food rages on unabated. I've been taking bento lunches to work (intermittently) over the past six months, and I've developed a taste for them. I have noted, though, that often when I make a Japanese-style dinner, it all gets devoured, and I don't have enough to take for lunch. I have not yet hit that point of obsessive wherein I get up an extra twenty minutes early to make a bento from scratch in the morning.

Clearly, I need to make bigger suppers, or starting eating dessert so that I will eat less of the actual dinner, to save the necessary room.

This bento is pretty self-explanatory: I'm still working on my scotch egg recipe (my dear friend Lisa beat me to making them with quail's eggs, darn it!), which is at least one dish that I'm guaranteed to have enough left for lunch, because those suckers are filling. I sliced up a piece of flourless wheat bread to go with, to provide a little grain-based anchor for the protein. (Update: Quail Scotch Eggs recipe now available)

I frequently take sliced vegetables in my work lunches. I don't usually take the time to make them cute, like the little radishes here, but something about making bento boxes inspires the more twee presentation, somehow. Zucchini half-rounds and peppers round things out, and I've got a little bit of Lighthouse brand salad dressing (bacon & blue cheese) to go with. For the record, while the flavours of blue cheese and bacon go beautifully together, the actual bacon particulate matter was kind of stringy and chewy. I'll stick to regular blue cheese dressing in the future.

The apple is unusual, for me: I love apples, but I don't usually eat a whole one, raw. Uncooked apples give me fairly nasty heartburn, so I tend to either slice one up and share it, or cook them into sauce, pie, crisps or crumbles, or other baked goods. However, Red Delicious seem to have fairly low acidity, so I gave it a try. I find that Delicious apples tend to be a bit mealy-textured, but it was a nice change from the usual berries or kiwi that I tend to have.

Diet Reviews

Diets? Really?

Yep. There's a lot of advice and information out there, and I'm doing my best to try and make sense of some of it. While many of these reviews will have content relating to weight loss, I will also be dealing with material intended to help improve and manage one's overall health.

Check out my new blog "Much Ado About Diet", where I'll be reviewing diet books, programs and related materials from time to time.

It is important to me to let you know that I do not, and will not, accept any payment or compensation for these reviews, although some of the items reviewed have been provided to me at no cost.

First up: The Mayo Clinic Diet and Journal (2010).

Ersatz Pizza, with lamb

I needed to use up the tortillas. They were lingering in the fridge a little longer than was ideal, and had gotten stale. If I was going to use them, it was going to have to be immediate, and something over high heat to crisp back some semblance of personality into them.

Fortunately for me, my corner grocery has a small, fresh meat section, and a butcher who comes in for a few hours in the morning to set up the various and sundry cuts necessary in the preparation of Vietnamese and Filipino dishes. This includes very thinly sliced raw lamb rounds which, it turns out, fry up blazingly fast. It's the same place that I get my thinly sliced beef for the Sesame Beef. They do a very nice thinly sliced meat.

In the interests of both creating a nicely sturdy surface to play on, and my desire to use up maximum tortillas, I chose to glue two tortillas together with freshly grated parmesan. After that, a thin smear of spinach pesto, followed by the seared lamb slices, some pine nuts that were also in need of being eaten, and some feta cheese. The lower right side also had a drizzle of pomegranate molasses, which I was initially unsure of, but it turned out delicious. The loaded tortillas were then shoved onto a baking sheet and slid under the broiler just long enough to crisp up the edges of the tortillas, and toast the pine nuts.

The final stage was performed post-broiler: a friend had given me a whole-spice blend called "Grains of Desire" which turned out to be a wonderfully fragrant mixture of black peppercorns, nutmeg (not whole, obviously), cloves, orange rind, rose petals, ginseng, and grains of paradise. The combined aroma reminded me a little of ras el hanout, a justly famous Moroccan spice blend, and indeed, shares an overlap of ingredients (although a good ras el hanout might have upwards of 40 spices within), most notably the rose petals and the grains of paradise.

I had been searching for the perfect dish to crack the seal on the spice mixture, and this was a good call. Lamb provided a beautiful backdrop for the flavours, and tied the whole impromptu dish together in a way that I could not have really predicted.

It's not really pizza, but I really don't know what else to call it. I know I'd love to have it again.

Sesame Beef Rice Bowl with Miso Gravy

My current enthusiasm for Japanese cuisine is clearly alive and well in the New Year.

Miso gravy is the only thing I ever really enjoyed from the famous, wildly overrated Naam restaurant in Kitsilano. They did a very nice sesame fries with miso gravy, and the gravy became so popular that they eventually marketed it to local supermarkets.

However, being fairly confident in my gravy-making abilities, it struck me that this should be pretty darn easy to do, just winging it. After, all, other bloggers have done just fine. Essentially, you get to make gravy however you like best, but using miso paste instead of roast drippings. If you want it vegetarian, use vegetable broth/stock for your liquid instead of meat stock. If you want it gluten-free, use chickpea flour as a thickener. If you want it to further complement Asian flavours, add soy sauce(or tamari), ginger and sesame oil. It is infinitely customizable, and quick to do. An immersion blender helps smooth out the garlic/ginger/onion particulate flavourings that I've used in this one. You can make it ahead, and store it in the fridge. It re-heats beautifully.

The sesame beef was very simple and quick, too. The marinade is from Just Bento, but I used sliced beef from our local Vietnamese butcher - very, very thin sheets, rather than the thin strips you would get from slicing minute steak, per the recipe. However, thin sheets of beef may not be readily available, so do as you see fit. I also didn't have any mirin (although I do now, it is not Hon mirin, which I understand to be the best), so I used sake - what with the brown sugar in the recipe, and my dislike of overly sweet meat dishes, it worked just fine - although, to be fair, I'm planning to re-do this with the mirin, just to see the difference.

To cook the beef, I simply heated a skillet until very hot, spritzed very lightly with canola oil, and sear the meat quickly in batches. It only took a few minutes to get through the lot - about a half-pound of meat, in total. At the end, I dumped the remaining marinade (not much left) into the pan and quickly scraped up the beefy goodness from the bottom of the pan, and then tossed it with the cooked beef.

The asparagus spears were quickly stir-fried, and the enoki mushrooms were steamed in sake. The radish is pretty self-explanatory, and the hint of pink over on the far side is some pickled ginger that I picked up at a local Korean market. Steeply angled green onion slivers complete the garnish (along with a few sesame seeds, for emphasis), and the whole lot is served on top of Nishiki steamed rice (gohan), with the gravy on the side for dipping the asparagus.

I am already planning when to make this again.

Venison Biscuit Pie

Biscuit Pie is one of my winter comfort staples. You can make it with just about anything that you can make into a stew, just like a regular pot-pie, but the topping is not the standard puff-pastry that starts crisp but quickly turns to greasy sog as you pierce the shell and begin to eat, and it isn't the industrial-tough standard pastry shell that tastes floury and has the texture of under-tanned leather. No, the topping here is, obviously, biscuit. If you can make a stew, you can make it into a biscuit pie.

You can get fancy, if you like, and cut out adorable little biscuit rounds and place them with great precision in some kind of fancy pattern before popping the pot into the oven, or you can do it the way my mother did her steak and kidney pie, which is to press the dough out into a single, surface-covering circle (or rectangle, if you use a baking dish instead of the stew pot), stab it vigorously with a fork to allow the steam to escape and promote even cooking, and simply lay it on top of the bubbling stew before shoving the whole thing in the oven. You get to break the crust into appropriately sized chunks with a swift scoop of your dishing spoon as you serve it up.

The bottom of the biscuit, once it is all cooked, will have absorbed just enough of the gravy from the stew to become meltingly tender, like using good bread to mop the bottom of a soup bowl.

My classic recipe is Steak & Mushroom Biscuit Pie, but for this one, I used some venison stew meat procured from the newly re-opened (and fabulous!) Jackson's Meats in Kitsilano, cremini mushrooms, carrot, parsnip, onion and garlic. The gravy is a little thinner here, because I wanted the venison flavour to pop, so it's a bit more jus like and less full-on gravy. The great thing is, you can customize that bit to your heart's content. I used red wine and vegetable stock to make the jus/gravy, and we added juniper berries to accent the venison (although, my juniper berries may not have been very fresh, and their flavour contribution was considerably more modest than I would have liked). The venison was dark and tender and lean, and the vegetables were cooked just through, and some fresh rosemary from my garden gave it a little hit of freshness that perked it, and me, right up.

If I'm feeling the need for a lot of biscuit in my dinner (the comfort food version), I will use a full batch of biscuits to fit my stew pot, but if there's lots of other food involved, salads and side dishes and whatnot, then I'll use a half-recipe, and shorten the cooking time a little.

Southwestern Skillet Dinner

I like one-pot meals. The clean up is easy, the leftovers transport well for lunches to work or school, and the potential for variety is infinite. That said, it's true that most of my skillet dinners feature rice or pasta or beans, or some two out of the three. Even so, this gives me choices ranging from creamy Tarragon Chicken Farfalle (influenced by French and Italian cuisines) to Southwestern Skillet Dinner shown here (nods to jambalaya, arroz con pollo, and the fabulous flavours of the American southwest).

The genesis for this recipe is from a previous dish I devised, the Southwestern Chicken Skillet, which suggests serving over rice or pasta. This variation omits the gravy-making slurry stage and the sour cream, and incorporates the rice right into the dish. Sour cream, of course, can be added as a garnish. A little cilantro right at the end wouldn't go amiss, either.

At Palle's request, we went with chunks of chicken thigh, rather than ground chicken for this version, and I really think that's the right call for an all-in-one dish like this. Served over rice, go with the ground or chunks, but with the rice mixed in, you want solid pieces of chicken.

When you get to the gravy-making stage, instead of making a slurry, simply add one cup (200 g) of parboiled rice, and one and half to two cups of water, depending on whether your pre-rice mixture is wet or dry and how soupy you would like the finished dish to be. I usually go with two cups. Bring to a gentle simmer, cover, turn the heat to very low, and let cook undisturbed until the rice has absorbed most of the liquid and gotten tender - 15 to 25 minutes, depending on how low your burner goes. If the mixture is still a bit wet, raise the heat and remove the lid for the last few minutes of cooking, and let the excess moisture evaporate away.

Scotch Eggs for dinner

This is technically also part of the Japanese cookery kick that I'm on right now.

I love Scotch eggs, but they're pretty few and far between on menus in these parts. Except, that is, for at Ping's, the funky little Yoshoku (western influenced Japanese comfort food) restaurant that opened up a year or two ago in my neighbourhood. Turns out, the Japanese are quite keen on the whole philosophy of Scotch eggs, and have embraced the idea of wrapping meat around a cooked, peeled egg and then dumping it into the fryer.

I don't tend to deep fry food at home, thanks to the mess and expense of the oil, so I had long considered Scotch eggs of any stripe to be out of my production possibilities. However, after seeing some pretty cute online versions that had been baked instead of fried, I figured the time had come to give it a whirl.

I figured I'd go with Japanese flavourings, so I used ground pork, which is what I had at hand, and seasoned it with a little ginger, soy sauce, white pepper, and garlic. I wrapped very thin patties around slightly under-cooked peeled, boiled eggs. Then, I baked them for about 25 to 30 minutes, rotating half way through. They stuck a bit while I was turning them, so parchment paper might be useful next time.


My sealing techniques were a bit dodgy, so some of the meat casing cracked along the seam where I had pressed the edges together, but overall the experiment was wildly successful. Delicious, in fact, and made even better by the fact of leftover Scotch eggs to take to work the following day. I intend to tweak this recipe over and over until I get perfect results on all the eggs. In the meantime, even the slightly lopsided ones are mighty good eats.

The rest of the meal sort of speaks for itself: simple onigiri (no filling, still practising the shaping side of things), a spinach and sesame salad (minus the actual sesame seeds which, it turned out, I was out of), and some beginner-level carved radishes, for a touch of kawai.

Chicken Teriyaki Donburi = Chikiteridon!

I had no idea that delicious chicken teriyaki was so darn easy.

I've become very interested in Japanese cuisine, of late. I learned how to make maki sushi years ago, but frankly it's not something that I tend to make at home. I have never been to Japan, so my assumptions about the cuisine are somewhat biased by the Japanese restaurants in Vancouver, and somewhat ruthless reading. I'm currently trolling for cookbook recommendations, if you have any suggestions, please leave me a comment or shoot an e-mail my way.

I recently purchased some Japanese rice, and have consequently been playing a little. I've always been fond of donburi - Japanese rice topped with assorted delicious bits - and I had some luck with an oyakodon (chicken and egg donburi) several years ago. Donburi is a favourite (and infinitely variable) and filling lunch when I'm out and about.

Chicken Teriyaki is one of those things that I tend to find, in restaurant preparations, rather too sweet for me, although I do like the flavours. Most of the attractive recipes that I could find specified a mixture of sake, mirin, sugar and soy sauce. Some had ginger and garlic, which doesn't seem to suit the smooth texture of the sauce. The most user-friendly recipe that I found was from Just Bento, a website devoted to the marvels of the bento lunch. This is also where I found the term "Chikiteri", which is quite wonderful. Here is my adaptation.

Chicken Teriyaki
Adapted from Just Bento

Serves 4
Total Prep & Cooking time: 45 minutes, including 30 minutes marinating time

Note: I didn't have mirin (alas! Next time!), so I made do with just sake. The good news is, it was excellent, so don't let a lack of mirin put you off making this as soon as possible.

¼ cup Japanese soy sauce (low sodium)
¼ cup sake
2 Tablespoons honey
1 Tablespoon plain rice vinegar
6 skinless chicken thighs
1 Tablespoon canola oil
2 green onions, sliced diagonally

Mix the soy sauce, sake, rice vinegar and honey in a wide, shallow dish.
Remove any big fatty bits from the chicken and slice the thighs into chopstick-friendly pieces – I cut with the grain into pieces roughly the size of short, fat, carrot sticks. Add the chicken to the soy sauce mixture, stir well, and allow to rest for 15 - 30 minutes (or overnight, if you can plan ahead).

Drain the chicken in a sieve, reserving the marinade.

In a large, non-stick skillet, heat the canola oil over high heat. Once it is hot enough for a drop of water to sizzle, add 1/3 of the drained chicken to the pan in a single layer. Let it cook without moving the pieces for 30 seconds, then add half the remaining chicken in the spaces around the first batch. Allow to cook further 30 seconds undisturbed, then stir through once and add the rest of the chicken to the pan. Let it cook undisturbed for about a minute (you can keep an eye on the earlier pieces, and flip them if they look like they’re going to burn otherwise) and then stir everything through so that the chicken browns and turns glossy on all sides.

Add the reserved marinade and stir through. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the chicken is a lovely dark golden brown and the sauce has reduced to the desired consistency.
Serve with Japanese rice, and garnish with green onions. Stir fried snow peas and shiitake mushrooms make a lovely accompaniment.

Garnish with green onion. Serve with Japanese rice, preferably, and some crisply cooked vegetables (upon reflection, I should have added some ginger to the mushrooms above).

Sweet Potato & Chicken Bisque

Quick, delicious, and a teensy bit unusual: perfect raining weather food.

Sweet Potato & Chicken Bisque
Adapted from Eating Well Magazine, October 2009

Serves 4 – 6
Total Time Prep & Cook: 45 minutes

2 large sweet potatoes (orange)
2 boneless chicken breast halves*
3 cups tomato juice
2 cups vegetable stock
1 tablespoon canola oil
½ cup unsalted peanut butter
1 habañero chile, julienned
1 heaping tablespoon grated ginger
1 small onion, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground allspice
Cilantro or green onion for garnish

Poke the sweet potatoes with a fork and microwave them until tender (approximately 10 minutes, together). Allow them to cool while you begin the rest of your prep.

Heat the canola oil in a large soup pot, and sauté the onion and garlic until translucent. Add the sliced chile, ginger, allspice and tomato juice, and allow to simmer gently for about 10 minutes.

Peel and dice the sweet potatoes. Place half of them in a blender or food processor along with the peanut butter and just enough of the stock to moisten. Process until smooth, gradually adding the rest of the stock until it becomes a smooth, thick liquid. It will look a bit like nacho cheese sauce in colour and consistency. Add the puree to the soup pot, and stir gently. Add the remaining diced sweet potatoes to the bisque, and stir though. Allow the soup to return to a bare simmer, stirring as needed to keep it from sticking to the bottom.

At this point, you can serve the soup as a lovely vegan dish. However, if you want a more robust meal, slice some raw chicken into bite-sized pieces (or cube up some extra firm tofu) and stir it into the soup. Allow the soup to continue to simmer very gently on the lowest setting for another ten minutes, or until chicken is cooked through.

Note: If you have leftover yams from dinner, you can save a step and some time.

Further Note: It is correct that no salt is added to the soup. The tomato juice and vegetable stock are salty enough. If you want more salt, add a pinch right at the end. But you probably won’t need to, and if you used salted peanut butter instead of unsalted, you definitely won’t need to.

* Or prawns. Try peeled, raw prawns in place of chicken, especially if you are going to be eating it all up instead of freezing leftovers.

Potato & Radish Salad with Dill

A last little taste of Summer. Is it too late to still be talking potato salad? This one is pretty basic - steamed, halved nugget potatoes and sliced raw radishes, tossed with a mountain of fresh dill and a little good quality mayonnaise mixed with sliced green onion and a tiny amount of crushed garlic. The ideal side dish for getting one last barbeque or picnic in, even if it's technically autumn already.

I didn't follow a recipe for this, I just eyeballed the ingredients, going easy on the mayo (you can always add more). Sadly, I failed to take the photo before we had dinner, and this technically was just the leftovers (perfect lunch for the next day!), but it was a beautiful, big heaping bowl of delicious salad, and I kind of want some right now.

Spicy Cheddar Corn Muffins

These were really quite outstanding. Excellent with a big pot of chili, or as a mid-morning snack. Warm is best - hot from the oven is the way to go if possible, but a few seconds in the microwave ought to do it once they've cooled completely.

Spicy Cheddar Corn Muffins

Makes 12 regular sized muffins

1 ½ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup yellow cornmeal
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
½ to 1 teaspoon cayenne
¼ teaspoon dried oregano leaves
1 ¼ cups shredded sharp cheddar cheese
½ cup fresh corn kernels*
2 serrano chiles, one finely chopped, one sliced into seedless rings
¼ cup melted butter
2 large eggs
¾ cup milk

Preheat oven to 425° F. Lightly spritz 12 regular sized muffin cups with canola oil.

In a large mixing bowl, combine flour, cornmeal, baking soda and baking powder, salt, herbs, and cheese. Short strands work best; toss the cheese well to keep the strands from clumping.

In another bowl, mix together the melted butter, eggs and milk. Stir in the chiles and corn kernels. Pour into a well in the centre of the flour mixture and fold together until just moistened. Do not over mix; the batter will be very thick and should not be completely smooth (but it should not have big clumps of flour).

Spoon the batter into the muffin cups. Bake on a centre rack for approximately 20 minutes, or until muffins are golden and toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove to a rack to cool or serve warm.

* You can use frozen corn kernels that have been rinsed well under hot water and thoroughly drained.

** Want a meaty variation? Add cooked, crumbled bacon.

Ruby Spanakopita

I am happy when my friends and neighbours over plant their gardens. When a co-worker e-mailed me to ask if I would like some chard, since her garden had exceeded her modest expectations by a significant factor, I was delighted. I didn't expect quite such a large amount, however. I didn't immediately know what to do with it all, until I remembered my mother saying that you could use chard wherever you used spinach, if you had young leaves and/or strong nerves.

I decided to give spanakopita a try. Chardokopita? Feeling rather fundamentally lazy, I decided not to make individual sized pies, but rather one big one to be sliced up for serving. As you can see, the ruby stems and veins give a pretty jewelled effect, even though most of the stems were removed prior to wilting.

I departed so thoroughly from the recipes that I found online that I must re-invent the instructions. This was well worth the effort:

Ruby Chard Spanakopita

9 to 10 cups cleaned, roughly chopped ruby chard leaves
1 medium onion, minced
2 green onions, sliced finely
3 cloves of garlic
1/3 cup fresh parsley, chopped
pinch of dry oregano leaves
pinch nutmeg (x2)
zest from one lemon
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
3/4 cup feta, crumbled
2 eggs
white pepper, to taste
small pinch of salt
about 10 sheets of fillo / phyllo dough

Preheat your oven to 350 F. Set the rack to the middle of the oven.

Saute the onions and garlic in a little olive oil until translucent, sprinkling with a tiny amount of salt to help them loosen up. Splash with a little water or vermouth, as you see fit, and add the chard leaves. Stir them until they are well wilted down. Remove them from the heat, and stir in the herbs, eggs, pepper, and lastly the cheese.

Line a 7 x11" glass baking dish with a layer of phyllo dough, coming up the sides of the dish. Mist/spritz lightly with olive oil (or canola, if you must), and repeat, overlapping the sheets a bit if necessary to make sure that the pastry comes all the way up on all sides of the dish. Repeat this a few times (each time spritzing with oil) until you have about five layers of pastry down. Sprinkle the lemon zest over the bottom of the pastry. Add the filling and smooth it with a spoon until it is flat and evenly spread about. Top with more layers of spritzed pastry, tucking the edges in nicely and finishing with a nice even spritz of olive oil and a good sprinkling of nutmeg.

Bake for about 40 minutes, or until golden. Cut into six large squares and serve with a nice salad (or some souvlaki!), or allow to cool and cut into tiny dessert-sized squares to serve as appetizers (either cold, or, ideally, re-heated in an oven for a few minutes until crisped).

I re-heats quite well in an oven, even a little toaster oven. If you must freeze some, re-heat directly into a pre-heated oven without allowing it to thaw.

I am undecided as to making another one for the freezer with the chard I have left, or venturing into saag territory instead.

Tortillas, carnitas and salsa, oh my!

For Canada Day, we went out for British pub food. For America Day, we stayed in and made Mexican food. It seemed strangely appropriate.I really like Mexican food. There's even (finally) a few places in town where you can get the good stuff, if you know where to look. Don't get me wrong, I like Tex-Mex and Cali-Mex quite a bit, too, but real Mexican food is in a class of its own, and is pretty darn amazing.

I've been meaning to try making flour tortillas for some time. I had made corn tortillas once before, to intermediate success (I didn't have a tortilla press, and ended up using my cast iron frying pan to squish them flat), but I hadn't ventured into the realm of flour tortillas. This weekend, I decided that it was time.

























I had bookmarked a Tortilla recipe on Orangette some time ago, and so I dusted it off (so to speak) and got going. I don't generally use vegetable shortening, but I would have used lard...except that I was fresh out. Lard is incredibly hard to source in my neighbourhood, so after a quick attempt to secure some, I decided to use the duck fat that I had standing by in the freezer. They turned out surprisingly well, and were as e asy as Molly (Orangette) suggested they would be. I think that next time, I might use a little less fat, as my other tortilla recipes are a bit leaner, and these ones were (deliciously) quite rich.

So, with a pile of fresh tortillas soon to be had, I needed to come up with a game plan for what to serve them with. I considered making tacos al pastor, since I have some fresh pineapple in the fridge, but lacked some of the other ingredients. I settled on carnitas, and chose David Lebovitz's recipe as my guideline. I note that I removed the cinnamon stick about half-way through the cooking process, because I didn't want it to overwhelm. It takes a while to make, but I was planning to be in the house attending to other matters most of the afternoon, so it worked out pretty well, timing wise.

For salsa, we went with a simple green salsa of garlic, cilantro, serrano chiles, and lime juice, with

just a touch of salt. Quick blitz in the mini-prep, and it was good to go, and hot as hell. You can find the inspiration for the green salsa in Brandon's comment on the Tortillas recipe link.

Finally, I figured a salad was in order. I combined roughly equal amounts of diced red pepper, radishes and avocado with corn kernels, a sprinkling of cilantro and the juice of a lime. A little salt was added at the table, to keep it from sogging out the dish, and to allow for individual tastes. It was remarkably good, and I intend to remember it the next time I'm wanting a salad for a potluck or picnic or barbeque-type event. Or, you know, the next time I'm making Mexican food.

To top things off, we had a little cocktail called the Capitan, which is essentially a Manhattan made with Pisco instead of bourbon. Lovely, really.

The very end of the evening, when we were lying around in a carnitas-induced coma, we dragged out the tiny bottle of Xtabentun, a fermented honey and anise liqueur that we brought back from our trip to the Yucatan in February. If only we had checked our baggage, we could have brought back more...

Strawberry Strata

The idea for this almost came to me in a dream. That is, the moment I thought of it, I couldn't figure out why I hadn't been making it for years - a complete no-brainer. It also seemed to be the perfect thing to make for breakfast in on a weekend when we had a houseguest who is vegetarian, and therefore unlikely to be receptive to my usual, sausage-laden stratas. Also, strawberries are just coming in to season, like some sort of strange culinary convergence.

The rules for strata are quite simple: it's a cross between french toast and bread pudding, and involves layers of lightly buttered bread, sandwiched with good things, and drowned in a royale made of 1/3 cup milk per egg, plus seasonings of your choice. You can see the basic, savoury recipe in the comments section below. The math is pretty consistent, if you need to serve more than the four people indicated there. Scale up as necessary.

However, for this slightly sweet, meat-free version, I had to throw out the playbook as far as the "good things" part went. The two layers of bread, okay, the egg/milk royale formula was okay, but how to replace the meats, cheeses, and vegetables for a fruit version? I eventually decided to spread the bread with softened cream cheese instead of butter, and that, plus slices strawberries, a mere sprinkling of sugar, and some cinnamon and ground cardamom, made up the middle layer. To prevent the strawberries from cooking to mush on the top, I reserved the sliced strawberries for the topping in a bowl in the fridge until ready to serve (macerating in a tiny amount of sugar). On the top of the strata, I dotted more pieces of cream cheese and gave another quick pass with the sugar spoon (my version was barely sweet, since I was very restrained in the amount of sugar that I used - less than a tablespoon all told - but your mileage may vary) and another hit of the spices.

I also added some vanilla extract to the royale, along with a tiny pinch of salt to coax all the flavours together. The royale was poured over the layers of strata the night before, and it rested in the fridge until morning. An hour and ten minutes later (the wetness of the strawberries required additional cooking time), out it came. For luxury's sake (and we did have company, after all) I topped the slices of strata with a big spoonful of Liberté's Méditerranée Coconut yoghurt, and then added the macerated strawberry slices. Creamy, silky goodness.

Next time, I'm going with sliced peaches, and mascarpone, with a shot of rum in the royale.

We had this on Mother's Day, according to the calendar. If my mother were still alive, I would totally make this for her.

Spicy Peanut Pasta

I have only been to The Foundation restaurant once, having been previously put off by stories of horrific service and, frankly, the dish-naming conventions (which I still find monumentally irritating). The service we got was fine, and the food...there was the real surprise. Excellent. Significantly superior to, for example, The Naam, to which it is frequently compared. However, I am not here to write a restaurant review. The dish that I ordered that night was called "Spicy Peenut" (sic). It appeared to contain things that I like, so I ordered it, and liked it so much that I immediately started conspiring over how to make it myself. It was a filling and satisfying dish, and I had to take some of it home. It actually re-heated fairly well, too.

Several weeks later, I decided to take a stab at it. The dish above is the result and, while it is not a dead-ringer, it was certainly a comparable and delicious rendition. I googled around to see if there were any recipes for it online, and came upon an entry for the sauce from Everybody Likes Sandwiches, and I had a good long look at her version before drafting my own.

Here it is:

Spicy Peanut Pasta with Cauliflower & Spinach

Serves 2
Total Time to Cook & Prep: 30 minutes

225 grams rotini pasta
1/2 head of cauliflower, cut into florets
150 grams homestyle fried tofu (atsu-age), cut into triangular slices
3 cups baby spinach, roughly chopped
1/4 cup roughly chopped roasted peanuts
2 green onions, sliced

Sauce

1/3 cup natural peanut butter
200 mL coconut milk
1 - 2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1 1/2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon sambal oelek
1 teaspoon ginger powder
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
dash of salt (to taste - you may need more if you are using unsalted peanut butter or light soy sauce)

Prepare the pasta in plenty of boiling, lightly salted water. About 5 minutes from the end of the pasta's cooking time, add the cauliflower florets, and continue to cook until pasta is done and florets are tender.

Meanwhile, in a high-sided, 12" skillet, fry the tofu slices until golden in a little vegetable oil, and set aside (this step is optional, actually). Combine all of the sauce ingredients in the emptied skillet, and stir over low heat until integrated. Taste and adjust for seasoning. If the mixture seems thicker than desirable in a pasta sauce, add a little of the hot pasta water, about 1/4 cup, until you reach the desired consistency. Turn heat to its lowest setting.

Add the tofu slices back into the skillet, and stir gently. Use a wire skimmer to remove the pasta and the cauliflower from the boiling water as soon as it is ready, and add directly to the skillet with the sauce. Stir gently, again adding a little pasta water if necessary to thin the sauce. Add the spinach and stir through carefully. Plate up in large pasta bowls, and garnish with chopped peanuts and green onions.

This dish is a great reminder that vegan food is neither boring nor inherently tasteless. It's definitely getting a return engagement at our place.

For What Ails You (and Me): Chicken Alphabet Soup

Big surprise, it's soup again.

I am constitutionally averse to tossing out the bones of a roasted chicken. Even if I don't have any immediate need for soup or stock, I would feel too wretched about discarding good food to allow myself to simply bag them up and put them in the garbage. At the very least, if completely knackered, I'll wrap them well and toss them into the freezer for future efforts. I inherited this behaviour from my mother, whom I cheerfully blame for a lot of my culinary quirks.

In the throes of the latest rounds of cold and 'flu and other things that go "sneeze" in the night (as well as cough, *snork*, hack), I decided it was time to put some culinary prescriptions into play. After all, isn't scientific investigation itself proving the value of a good homemade vat of chicken soup? Is it called "Jewish Penicillin" for nothing?

Frankly, even if it contains no medicinal value whatsoever, it counts as fluids (always a plus for the ill and infirm), and is both warming and comforting. Really, there's no downside at all, other than that you have to feel well enough to actually make it.

Fortunately, it's not hard.

I bought a free-range, organic chicken from the market, and roasted it up for dinner. We ate the choicest selections with some creamy Parmesan orzo and some broccoli and when the chicken had cooled sufficiently after dinner, I pulled the remaining meat from the bones and set it aside in the fridge. I poured off the accumulated juices and fat from the cast iron frying pan (the vessel in which I always roast my chickens) into a container in the fridge, and then bundled up the skin and bones. I wasn't nearly well enough to begin stock making at that point.

The next morning was Sunday, which meant that I could take my time. I simmered the bones with filtered water, bay leaves, a few sprigs of fresh thyme, a carrot, a bit of celery, a quartered onion, and some garlic. I didn't salt it, because there was already salt clinging to the skin, and you can always add more salt later. I brought the whole pot up to the barest of simmers, and let it carry on unmolested for a couple of hours, checking periodically to ensure that it wasn't boiling (which gives you a cloudy, opaque stock). Finally, I scraped away the chicken fat from the reserved drippings (reserve for later uses) and added the gelatinized dark goodness of the accumulated roast chicken juices into the stock.

When it was finished, I cooled it with the bones in the stock, then fished them out and strained the stock. One roasting chicken gave me about six cups of stock, but your mileage may vary depending on the size of your chicken.

From there, it was simple to assemble a classic comfort food. I still had some alphabet pasta left from my Alphabet Soup endeavor, so I went with that. The rest of the ingredients were, essentially, the same flavours that went into the soup. There's a reason for that - they are quite delicious. However, in the soup-making stage, they are cooked only until tender, not until exhausted. Simple soup-making: saute your aromatic vegetables and herbs in a little fat (the roast-rendered chicken fat, in this case), and once they are edging towards tender, add your stock. Add the pasta, bring it up to a gentle simmer, and once the pasta is cooked, add the reserved chicken meat, which you have chopped into soup-sized pieces.

Did I get better faster? Maybe. Did I feel better? Immediately!

Mexican Chickpea Salad

It may not seem like salad weather to everyone out there, with the sudden, aggressive return of sub-zero temperatures. The poor cherry trees are obviously trying to be on time with the pink blossoms, but winter's grim determination to keep a grip on us is thwarting their best efforts.

However, this may be when we need salad the most - especially those of us who recently returned from sunnier climes, and can hardly believe the rude shock of snow on the ground in March, for crying out loud. Best of all, this salad gives double value with the freshness of the spinach and the heartiness of the chickpeas, making it a good transitional salad/side dish for, oh say, a lovely achiote-rubbed pork tenderloin (which I failed to photograph, sorry).

This recipe was engineered by Palle, who has been researching traditional Yucatecan food since we returned from Mexico. Some tweaks and substitutions were necessary - for example, classically the salad would be made with chaya, an indigenous Mexican plant that is used for everything from stuffing chicken to being pureed into a sweet, lime-juice based cold beverage. Without access to chaya, he opted for baby spinach. I note that apparently chaya is toxic when raw, so I imagine that this recipe would be made with chaya leaves that had been simmered properly, first. Not under that restriction, we went with raw for the spinach.

Mexican Chickpea Salad

19 ounce can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
¼ cup diced red onion

Dressing #1
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
¼ teaspoon finely grated lime zest
¾ teaspoon ground cumin
pinch of cayenne (or other hot) pepper
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
4 cups baby spinach leaves (or prepared chaya, if available)

Dressing #2:
3 tablespoons plain yogurt
1 tablespoons fresh lime juice
½ teaspoon finely grated lime zest
¼ teaspoon honey

In a medium bowl, combine chickpeas, cilantro and onion.

In a small bowl, whisk together the oil, lime juice and zest, cumin, cayenne, salt and black pepper. Pour the dressing over the chickpea mixture and toss to coat evenly.

In another small bowl, stir together the yogurt, lime juice and zest, and honey.

Serve the chickpea salad over a bed of spinach leaves. Top with a drizzle of the yogurt dressing.

I'm pleased to report that any leftovers can be mixed all together and are equally delicious the next day. Also worth noting, the yogurt dressing on its own would make a delicious veggie dip, or even as a drizzle for kebabs, or in a nice pita sandwich stuffed with grilled things.