The Yum Yum Factor

Okay, it's been a bit of a sparse month for my poor yum yum factor. Between travelling over the holidays and stressing about my last month of no reEATS  , I have been neglecting this blog for a while now but this will all be done now that the year is over and I no longer have to commit to never repeating a recipe for dinner is over. I can relax, kick back and just cook for the fun of it again and , best of all, I can eat whatever I want, whenever I want, how many times I want to! This week, I made a pozole verde - a mexican pork soupy stew with hominy and lots of good green stuff. It was also my last official post on no reEATS for 2011 so I had to use it over there but I will share a link to it here. I had planned make this before we went away on our Xmas trip and use it as my friday soup the week before we left for Mexico to get the holiday started on a good note but it was just too busy. Making it after we returned home turned out to be an even better idea. Pozole Verde ...

I like to bake at christmas time and up until recently it was pretty much the only time I baked all year and unless they are all lying to me, my friends and family seem to really enjoy the treats I make for them. I get special requests for specific things and I always like to throw one or two new things into the mix. This year I had decided I would do chocolate pecan toffee, chambord dark chocolate truffles, lime melt aways (my mother in law would probably stop talking to me if I didn't make these for her), the cardamom ginger cookies I made for the Great Blogger Cookie Exchange and a delicious Lemon Almond Meringue that I found on Joy the Baker. There was one small snag this year though. We decided on Wednesday night to book a week in Tulum, Mexico, leaving Saturday, which is fabulous, no? Except that when I woke up Thursday morning, I realized that if I was going to put together baking gift boxes for Little Shack's teachers, I was going to have to make all of those thin...

So, it's Friday and I still haven't made any soup this week so the heat was on to come up with something cobbled together from what I had on hand already. I actually like the challenge and often come up with some of my favourite things that way - well,  if you can overlook the odd black bean peach chowder or an anchovy corn creme brûlée.

 I was so excited to sign on to participate in  The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap  because it meant I could connect with three other bloggers (most likely Canadian as shipping food across borders gets squicky in a post 9-11 world where xmas cookies are now eyed suspiciously ). It also meant that I would receive a dozen cookies from three of my fellow bloggers and that is always a great thing. I love eating other people's baked goods. My favourite and most requested cookie is a really spicy, crispy ginger snap but I have written about that on my blog and we were instructed to make something that we have never blogged about so that meant I either had to make something completely different or change up my standard ginger snap. I have been pretty obsessed with cardamom for the last few months so I started searching out a yummy sounding cookie with cardamom but all I was seeing were sugar cookies with cardamom added to the dough and that didn't interest me...

I had big plans to make a pozole this week but life and work got in the way and there was not going to be time to make anything that labour intensive. With pozole put on the back burner, I found that I couldn't stop thinking about the cream of tomato soup with grilled cheese croutons that Dianne made last week for no reEats. Unfortuntately, she wasn't happy with the recipe she used so I knew I would make up my own but I still love the idea of a creamy tomato soup with those grilled cheese croutons. I also wanted to try out my evaporated milk in place of creme again in a soup so I could keep the creamy texture without adding tons of unwanted fat. I have to tell you, I have not been disappointed with the evaporated milk yet and I have tried it in soups and sauces for months now. It lightens the soup up so that I can indulge more freely in the grilled cheese croutons. Dianne is right about those things - they are truly the star of the show! I used a sharp cheddar with flax...

So, Dianne,  my beautiful and generous friend and blogging partner in crime at no reEats  has an annual gingerbread house decorating party that I have had to miss for the last three years in a row because I am usually off on my christmas trip at that time. I was kind of exited but kind of stressed out by the fact that I was going to be able to attend this year's festivities. You see, as much as I love to drink wine and glue candy to a gingerbread house, I am mildly terrified of the other women who partake in this yearly event. To say that some of them are competitive would be like saying that I like to eat a little bit. The first time I went, I was so naive. I went to the Bulk Barn and just bought a bunch of festive looking candies and figured I would just wing it when I got there., expecting nothing more than good conversation, snacks and wine and a bunch of beaches moms relaxing with a nice little craft. By the time I arrived, the keeners were already there with their tool...

Last summer I had the most incredible squash pear soup with blue cheese and I have been craving it ever since. I had a squash to do a soup with this week and I was going back and forth between replicating the pear squash soup or doing something spicy with coconut and curry paste and , in the end, I chose to try out a pear soup. I found lots of great looking soups for inspiration and I finally settled on this soup from The Pastry Affair as my base but I switched out the apples and juice for pear, I added some pancetta and thyme and to cut the sweetness, I added just a bit of curry powder. I find curry has this ability to add a new depth of flavour with actually making the food taste like curry and I find I use a pinch of it here and there all the time. On it's own it's quite sweet but once you add the greek yogurt and the blue cheese, the sweetness sits in the background and lets the stinky socks and the sour tang of the yogurt play down. One of The Neighbour's lo...

It's weird weather out there and I am not as compelled to make nice, warming soups as you would think I would be seeing that it is the end of November. It might be the end of November but it is also going up to about 15C today which is more about grilling and taking long walks on the boardwalk than it is about hunkering down in the kitchen to make a hearty, long simmering soup. The perfect compromise is a nice, spicy soup that doesn't take all that long to throw together if you  used canned black beans instead of soaking dried. I am also starting to pine for Mexico since we would normally be leaving for our Xmas trip there next week but we went somewhere else last year and we aren't sure where we will end up this year. Shack's crazy work schedule dictates that we make all of our life decisions the night before so we could end up anywhere, at any time over the next month or so but for now, I will satisfy myself with a little taste of the country that I love so much. ...

The Kid was away this week from Monday until Wednesday so that always means a mushroom orgy for the adults. Little Shack certainly has a pretty good palette, he eats a really wide variety of foods and is, in many ways, less picky that his father but the one thing we have not been able to sway him over to are mushrooms. Clearly, there is something seriously wrong with my kid because anyone who will eat fish eyes, chicken bones, bone marrow and raw quail eggs but WON'T eat mushrooms has some issues. I mean, he is a nice kid and all and we will keep him but the mushroom thing is really starting to cramp our style. This is, therefore, the perfect soup for a kid free week and the adults were very, very happy. As always, I try to lighten up the foods that we love and so I subbed in evaporated milk for the cream and I don't think it suffered at all. It's still creamy enough but it's light and mushroomy and you don't feel guilty eating a big bowl of it. One big brigh...

Okay people, the holidays are quickly approaching and that means people dropping by with gifts and lovely bottles of wine to share and you need to be prepared. In the olden days, I would make fussy appetizers and hor d 'oeuvres that would require hours in the kitchen and would often take me away from my guests. The oohs and ahhs were good for the ego but I realized that just as I was ready to sit down and relax, my friends were getting their coats on to leave. I thought it was more important to wow them than to sit and have a glass of wine with them but with age comes wisdom and with wisdom comes a much more enjoyable, relaxed holiday season.  What I do now is make sure my fridge is stocked with a variety of nice cheeses, a couple of nice charcuterie items like pate, sliced italian salamis etc and spicy, savoury jams.jellies  and chutneys.  This way, I feel like I can invite friends over last minute without having to worry about what I am going to serve the...

My mom used to make a really fabulous soup that was full of stewing beef, tomatoes and cabbage and I never learned how to make it. I think my sister knows how but I never really paid enough attention because I was all about the fancy pants food and this was just a plain old soup to me. Now that she is gone, I really miss it and keep meaning to ask my sister if she can show me how mom made it but , of course, I keep forgetting. A container of leftover braised pot roast with espresso and balsamic  got me thinking that maybe I could make something like her soup with that because I am not crazy about pot roast in the first place and I really just made it for the boys and am always stumped with the leftovers. I was happy to find a use for it that was less pot roasty and more soupy. You can use less cabbage if you aren't crazy about cabbage but I love the stuff so I used quite a bit. I knew that there was beef, tomatoes, cabbage, carrots and celery but I couldn't reme...

So, this week I am going to feature a recipe that The Neighbours made and shared with me. I have been eating it for lunch every day and would have just made it myself if they hadn't already provided me with a big container to keep me happy all week. We are very lucky to have such awesome neighbours who are also such great friends and someone is always knocking on someone's door with a cookie to try or some sauce to give an opinion on. Sometimes we are tempted to add more things than we need to make a delicious soup and in this case, less is more and I was really glad that there is no cream or anything else heavy to weigh it down. It's a nice, light soup that has just the right amount of red pepper to tomato and that touch of honey cuts the acidity a bit. Perfect.  They read a few recipes and took what they liked from each and came up with this light, savoury soup: The Neighbour's Roasted Red Pepper Tomato Soup 3 medium onions chopped 3 large cloves of ...

I was one of six lucky Canadian food bloggers chosen to be featured in the holiday issue of Eat In Eat Out, Canada's first online magazine for foodies who love to eat - whether you like to cook and eat in or whether you are a restaurant junkie and love to eat out. You might be like me and fall somewhere in between and love to do both equally. We were asked to come up with two simple, original recipes for the holiday season. I always like to make a box of treats to give to friends and I try to have a good variety of sweets in there. This year there will be the same  ginger snaps  I make every year, meringues, these chocolate truffles and probably some toffee. I attended a crazy, multi day Hindu wedding this summer and I cannot get the sweets we ate out of my head. I don't know what they all were but they all seemed to taste like cardamom, sugar and pistachios and everything was covered in this delicate silver foil. I LOVE shiny things and couldn't' wait fo...

Okay, it's now officially fall and my kid wore his parka to school today so it's time to start up my Friday soup extravaganza. Since I already made my soup of the week and I posted it as my dinner on my other blog, no reEATS  I am kind of cheating by reposting it but I am not making soup again today since I am busy making cardamom dark chocolate truffles. I don't think anyone would begrudge me that pleasure just so I can squeeze in another soup which would only be a resentful pot of soup anyway. I will repost my soup here to get the ball rolling plus and this will bring me back to this blog in a regular way again. On no reEATS,  I have been dedicated to never repeating a dinner recipe for this entire year and I have to be honest, I have been struggling. That task has been so daunting at times that it has been all I can do to make sure that I make something photo worthy twice a week (three times a week every third week) that I have been woefully neglecting The Yum Yum Factor...

We woke up bright and early, got dressed and got out onto the street by 7:45 am.  The one nice thing about waking up that early is that we were greeted with the most beautiful sunrise, reflected in the glass of the new tower, 1WTC, that is being built  in the northwest corner of the World Trade Center site. We sat and looked at that for a while but neither of us wanted to miss one minute of precious time on our first full day exploring the city so we left in search of coffee and too see where the Wall Street Occupiers were camped out. As it turns out, they were basically right beside our hotel so we didn't have to look far. At that point there were only enough protesters to fill the small parkette with little spill over and it didn't seem like a big deal at all. They were all just waking up themselves so it looked like a sea of marathoners taking naps, wrapped in their metallic space blankets. The first thing I wanted to do was go to see the statue of Liberty because ...

I used to go to New York quite a bit in my younger years but it has been at least 20 years since my last visit and Shack had never been. We have kind of entertained the idea of going from time to time but we always ended up going somewhere else. We almost went last summer on our road trip to Newport but decided on Boston instead and then last Xmas, it was on the short list but New Orleans won out. This seemed like the perfect time to go. The fall weather is remarkable right now- New York can be really stinky and humid and terrible in the summer. The kid is old enough to leave home in the care of The Neighbours so we could actually go on our own which is something we have not done in the 12 1/2 years he has been in our possession and seeing that I barely saw Shack all summer due to his crazy work schedule, we jumped at the chance to get away. You don't know Shack but if you did you would understand that driving was the only acceptable way to get there. The car to Shack is what...

Okay, first for the highs. Last week I found myself in Chinatown and, as luck would have it, I had locked up my bike right across the street from the Kim Moon Bakery . When I first moved to the city almost 30 years ago, I was introduced to asian food in a huge way. Previously, my only experience with "oriental" food was a plate of chicken balls, fried rice and moo goo guy pan  with fortunes cookies for dessert. Pho Hung on Spadina, King Noodle and moon cakes from Kim Moon Bakery will always stand out in my mind as things that were proof that I wasn't in Kansas anymore. Now, a million years later, I enjoy introducing my kid to all of these foods and places that make Toronto my favourite eating place in the world. Sadly, he didn't fall in love with pho the way I did and he prefers Japanese food to a big bowl of steaming soup with egg noodles and bbq duck, but one love we do share are double yolk red bean moon cakes from Kim Moon. These things are sweet but no...

The other day I bought a 3 lb bag of vidalia onions even though I had no idea what I was going to do with them. In the summer, we usually cook them on the grill, wrapped in foil with some olive oil and balsamic. Since Shack worked every day for the entire summer, we didn't bbq at all so I didn't eat any vidalias and got so exited when I saw them that I couldn't just leave them there in the store. I knew there had to be a way of turning them into some sort of jam and so I went on an internet search for a recipe that would fit the bill. I found some really great sounding chutneys and jams but this one, from The Funky Kitchen, was the closest to the recipe I had clunking around in my head. I made some changes and some additions and I am happy to say that the resulting marmalade is exactly what I was hoping for. It will be great on roasted meat, in paninis, on crackers with blue cheese or on pizza and crostini. It's sweet and a bit spicy and full of delicious rosemary...

I have not had one minute to cook anything for the last couple of weeks between working at the Toronto Film Festival, school starting up and life in general. Today, I was gifted with a glorious day off mid festival and so I after yoga, i set off to the grocery store to gets supplies for dinner and found some lovely, Ontario peaches and knew I had to make a little batch of jam with them. I had been planning to do a plum jam with cinnamon and crystallized ginger but didn't get around to it so I made some peach jam with the ginger instead. I knew I didn't want to bother with pectin and because it was such a small batch, I wouldn't bother with a water bath either. I would keep a jar and give the other jar to The Neighbours. After searching around, I found this recipe for Peach Vanilla Jam on Seasons and Suppers and decided to use it with a couple of tweaks. This recipe only makes a couple medium sized jars or one larger one but I like the idea of making a jar to eat inste...