The Yum Yum Factor

For a few years I made artwork with glass. When The Kid was a toddler and we owned a SFX (that's special effects for you civilians) shop, I was awarded my own Harry Potter workspace in a corner, under the stairs. I had been dabbling in stained glass before that and this enabled me to finally work in a bigger format, all on my own.

There is a company called Back to the Roots  and they make products that help regular people connect to the food they eat. Their signature product is a kit that allows you to grow mushrooms out of recycled coffee grounds. They gave all of the Food Bloggers of Canada Conference members one of their mushroom growing kits so we could go home and grow some delicious edible fungas in our homes.

I love how a dish will take off in the blogosphere and suddenly you wake one morning and everyone but you is making cake pops or boozy popsicles. This seems to be happening with this one pot pasta technique. Martha Stewart featured this simple pasta dish  this month and, once again, she has inspired the masses to go out and throw raw pasta with other stuff in a pot and just throw caution to the wind and do something that kind of goes against everything we all believe about cooking pasta. I was a bit leery but then, the more I thought about it, it made sense. We use the starchy pasta water all the time to not only thin out sauces but to utilize the starch to make the sauce more cohesive and silky. It kind of serves as a binder so this could actually work and if it DOES actually work , it could revolutionize week night dinner. If we all know we can just throw all the crap we have sitting in the fridge in one pot and 10 or 12 minutes later we will have a complete, healthy din...

my own baked beans There is an interesting blogging project going on right now called  The Canadian Food Experience Project  and I am pretty exited to be a part of it. We will all post on the 7th of each month about the current challenge and the June challenge is to share your first Canadian Food Memory. I have been thinking of this for weeks and I have not been able to pinpoint one definitive Canadian food memory from my own youth. My friends from other provinces speak wistfully of dishes passed down from generation to generation and regional specialties that they pine for when they have been away from home for too long but all I could recall was Lipton Soup, Hamburger Helper and Minute Rice. When I moved to Quebec at 20, I had my first taste of ragoût de boulettes and cretons on toasts and everything changed. I had a French Canadian grandmother who certainly cooked all sorts of delicious regional treats but I don't recall eating any of them. Because my father did no...

This is what dinner often looks like around here when it's just The Kid and I. Shack is off working and doing manly things so there is no need to butcher and roast a beast and mash potatoes and all that Shack stuff.  He needs a good, solid dinner after a long day of work because he spends his entire day climbing and pulling and jumping off things while he hauls grown ass adults up into the air and that makes a guy hungry. The Kid and I , on the other hand, do nothing more strenuous than operate a mouse and try to remember to sit up straight and take a computer break every half an hour. Since we are not busy doing manly things, we are always happy with anything involving noodles, tofu, a few veggies and the salty goodness of asian condiments. I have been opening the fridge for days just to look at the package of deep fried tofu that has been sitting in there. One of my favourite things to do to deep fried tofu is a spicy stir fry like my green beans, tofu and mushrooms in black b...