Vichyssoise

What do you get when you bring together four food bloggers and the idea to all cook something from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking? A helluva lot of delicious food and many full bellies. Not that any of us were complaining, that’s for sure.
It was all Julie’s idea. In honour of the [...]

Roasted Chickpeas with Chard

I can’t say I’ve ever gone out of my way to buy/cook/eat chard. But there was something about Julie’s entry during her year-long, post-a-day, blog-a-thon involving roasted chickpeas and chard that, for some unknown reason, really appealed to me. I filed it away, figuratively, for a future date and carried on with things.

So, when a [...]

In search of the perfect burger

In the moments that followed the first bite, as the flavour of beef and bacon and cheese filled our mouths, we knew this was one of our more brilliant plans.

Of course, it didn’t start out that way.
It started out as a tongue-in-cheek joke, a nod to our mutual love of burgers. But as [...]

Fettucine with Roasted Tomato Sauce

The actual title of this blog post would have been far too long:
Fettucine with Roasted Tomato Sauce and Balsamic Reduction, as well as testing out the new KitchenAid pasta attachment.

It’s a bit of a double barreled post, really. Call it multi-tasking.
Actually, that’s a bit of a lie too. The actual, actual title of this post [...]

Potato Pizza with Rosemary

I love the French word for potato: pomme de terre.
Apple of the earth.
It’s so evocative. It speaks of wholesomeness and simplicity. The dusty rows in farmer’s fields, the pockmarked tubers hidden under clumps of dirt and the round potatoes that tumble out when finally unearthed.
Also, it’s a damn tasty vegetable.

My love of potatoes goes back [...]

Penne alla Vodka

I don’t cook much with alcohol.

Sure, there’s been the odd wine reduction sauce, a shot or two of brandy to a roasted tomato soup to round out the taste or a splash of sherry in my chicken tetrazzini. But the goal in these recipes is to add that hint of flavour, to enhance the [...]

Pasta Bolognese

I grew up in a family of six (four kids, two parents). I like to think this is why I’m completely incapable of making meals for just one or two people. It just never really occurs to me to halve a recipe. Or when I’m just creating something, it never looks to me like I’m [...]

Butternut Squash in Coconut Milk

Are you ever shopping and see something you think you need only to find when you get home that you already have, say, five of those already? No? Well, you’re smarter than me then.
A couple of months ago I saw coconut milk on sale, so I picked up a few cans. I like my curries [...]

Thai Seafood Chowder

Holy overdue blog update, Batman. Where have the last four weeks gone?
Oh yeah, into the fog that was subzero December, followed by a crazy flight home for the holidays and then nesting at the parents’ house as the snow never stopped falling and then back at work for a brutal one-week crime wave.
Phew.
I barely even [...]

Roasted Tomato Soup

Sometimes, my apartment is the place where tomatoes go to die. I buy them, forget about them, and the slowly grow old, wrinkling away in their clamshell package until I’m utterly baffled about what I can do with them.
And then I had a brainwave (triggered in no small part by a recipe I saw over [...]