The Yum Yum Factor

We are just all ice cream, all the time around here right now, aren't we? This week alone I have posted recipes for  Mango Coconut Frozen Yogurt , Raspberry and Strawberry egg free ice cream and I haven't even gotten around to talking about the peach ice cream that is currently languishing in my freezer. Thank god I have a 14 year old boy to eat it all. "Vietnamese iced coffee with milk" , also known as  ca phe sua da  or  cà phê sữa đá  It is also called  ca phe nau da    in northern Vietnam but the restaurants that I frequent call it cafe sua da so that is what I am going with. Call it whatever you like but I call it insanely delicious. If you have never had one, go find a Vietnamese restaurant today and get one and come back and finish reading this. It's okay, I'll wait. Calling it iced coffee with milk is incredibly misleading. What it really is is insanely strong, thick coffee with sweetened condensed milk that you mix to...

I feel like I ate a lot of things this week but I also feel like I ate lots of things I didn't need to eat and that don't really require sharing so that might be distracting me from the task at hand as I sit here trying to think of what to write. I am a hoarder of Groupon type coupons for restaurants and it's a good thing and a bad thing. It's great that we are forced to try new places that aren't in our normal neighbourhoods but some times it's bad because I lose track of them and then I realize that three of them will expire in the next five days and it's a mad rush to use them up. tiramisu- I managed to sneak a taste of before it disappeared Anyway, I had a Living Social coupon for Noce  on Queen St West that was, as usual,  going to expire in a few days but between waiting for Summerlicious to end (restaurants don't accept these coupon things during Winterlicious and Summerlicious) and wiggling around our wonky work schedules, the only day...

The ice cream making continues here at home with a batch of raspberry using the eggless recipe from earlier when we made Strawberry Ice Cream . Because I really can't deal with raspberry seeds, we pureed all of the fruit and strained it to make a really smooth, slightly tart ice cream. I wanted to add some little chunks of dark chocolate, but Shack was having none of that. The Kid and I like stuff in our ice cream - chocolate chunks, pieces of brownie, cookie dough or oreos. Shack, our picky toddler, likes his ice cream smooth and the only chunks he can handle are chunks of the fruit. I am not saying that this ice cream is not delicious, because it is, but what does a girl have to do to get a bit of dark chocolate chunks in her ice cream? We are going to have to work something out around here. Eggless Raspberry Ice Cream 1 cup whipping cream 1 cup 18% cream 1/2 cup sugar pinch salt 1 1/2 cup raspberries Mix the berries with 1/4 cup of the sugar and let macera...

Thanks to my prize winnings from Canadian Lentils , this family is now completely immersed in ice cream making. My first batch of Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Ice Cream  was a traditional egg custard based recipe and it was great. Needless, to say, it didn't last very long and it was time to make another batch but me being me, I was procrastinating over flavours for days. Shack decided he had waited long enough and was going to make ice cream the other night and started puttering around in the kitchen. I was trying not to interfere but when he asked me to go to the basement and get the frozen ice cream bowl from the freezer, I knew there was an information breakdown going on in there. I reminded him that you have to temper the eggs and make the custard, put the bowl over ice to cool it down and then refrigerate it for at least 2 hours before you can even think about actually churning it. It was pretty clear that he wasn't planning on using an actual recipe and was just goin...

We have a problem here at Casa Shack. Shack has been making a batch of ice cream a day at this point, always either raspberry or strawberry, experimenting only with the ratio of fat% in his cream/milk. It has been very tasty but I had to finally say ENOUGH! I would like to use my damned ice cream maker myself and I would like to eat something other than raspberry or strawberry ice cream. He graciously allowed me to make frozen yogurt as long as I put the freezer bowl right back into the freezer so HE could make more raspberry ice cream before bed tonight. I have created a monster. I did not intend to make this a coconut yogurt so I will be upfront right off the hop here. As I was dumping the yogurt into the food processor, I was initially horrified by the lumps in the bottom of the container and thought it was two years past it's best by date and was relieved to notice that my 0%MF PC greek yogurt contained shredded coconut so that was not rampant curdling. I HATE the...

What a hot, humid crazy week it has been here in Toronto. Who can actually even think about cooking? It's all I can do to even feel like eating so beyond making salad and drinking cold soda water, I have not been into much. Okay, I know I just told you that the best BBQ pork in the city was at Ka Ka on Gerrard  and now, here I am singing the praises of a totally different place this week. Well, these things happen and that is what makes Toronto so great. I can eat my BBQ from one place for years and then someone turns me onto to a new place and my BBQ world is set on it's head.  Last weekend we went  to Ho Ho BBQ   in Scarborough after I read about it on my new app, Chef's Feed. On this super cool app, you can follow tons of chefs and they recommend their favourite restaurants and their favourite dishes at those restaurants. Since downloading the app this week I have made a long list of places in the city where I want to eat now because if it's g...

The Neighbour has something like 321 siblings and out of that big group of family there are three sisters who have become known in our world as The Sisters.  Every year The Sisters come down from The Miramichi in New Brunswick to spend a week with The Neighbours and this is always a very busy, festive week full of belly laughs, lobster rolls, chips dipped in hot fudge and long island iced tea. This year, not only did they bring us a couple of HUGE clumps of rhubarb to plant in our garden, but a bag of chopped rhubarb to cook with as well. I have not been buying rhubarb this year because it has been kind of hard to find and when I do find it, it is ridiculously expensive and not even particularly nice. Come on, it's a damned weed and the grocery store wants to charge me $4 a stalk? What's next, hormone free dandelions for $9 a pound with a side of $20 organic poison ivy? Anyway, if that weren't enough good luck, another friend sent me a message that she had a big b...

Okay, for a year I did a regular Friday thing called "it's Friday, it must be soup!" and it seemed to go over well and all that but, come on. I am not going to make a new soup every single week and I rarely make soup at all in the summer. What I DO do all the time, all year long, is eat out, search the web for great looking food and food related shiz. So, I am now going to change Friday from soup day to a recap of the top stuff that happened in food that week. This first week is a bit light because between the flooding and The Kid not feeling well for a couple of days, we didn't really eat out at all, which is NOT the norm around here. We spent last Saturday at Lailey Vineyard  , sampling their tasty wines and eating sausages grilled over their old barrels. I LOVE their vidal and a little birdie there told me that the 2013 is going to be the best in years so keep that under your hat. We all really liked their 2012 Rose  even though I ended up spilling more of i...

I love chimichurri. If you read the blog at all, you might have already seen my Argentinian flank steak with chimichurri  or my roasted chicken with the stuff  . I often toss roast veggies in the sauce straight out of the oven but I had never thought of actually roasting them WITH the chimichurri until I saw the recipe in the Summer 2013 LCBO Food and Drink. The chimichurri recipe looked like a good, solid base but I like to add cilantro, use half the garlic and skip the red pepper flakes. I made these as part of our Canada Day BBQ and they were perfect. I like to avoid potato salads with mayo for these types of events and was getting bored of just plain old roasted mini potatoes to be honest. They were easy to whip up ahead of time and leave out for a couple of hours until it was time to eat. One less thing to either make last minute OR try to find room in the fridge for it and nobody died. People not dying from eating my food is always the sign of a great BBQ, in...

in my super fashionable USA tshirt no doubt getting ready to chow down on some KFC circ 1972 So, our July challenge for The Canadian Food Experience Project is to share a memory of some sort of regional specialty. I haven't really spent much time in my hometown over the last 30 years so I chose to go back in time and write about something from my childhood. How hard could that be?

I participated in a recipe contest in May sponsored by Canada Lentils called Love Your Lentils  and was pretty thrilled to learn that I came in second place. Congrats to the winner, Davine, with her Canadiana Baked Beans and to all of the bloggers who made it to the top ten.  My prize was a $500 gift certificate to Amazon.ca and man, did I shred that gift certificate like a boss. For days I shopped, put stuff in my basket and then took it all back out and started again. I even had a $500 camera lens in there at one point but my fellow Gastroposter, Libby Roach, encouraged me to get lots of smaller stuff because it would be way more fun to get a big box of treats than one little lens and she was right. When I opened that box I almost peed my pants. I don't know what I love the most yet. I finally got my Zojirushi rice cooker which I have been coveting for decades but am too cheap to actually pay for and threw in a $$ Zojirushi bento lunch contraption for The Kid sin...

It was so hot today that you couldn't even sit still outside without melting into a disgusting pile of sweat soup. Of course, I made the mistake of thinking it would be nice to walk down to the beach and do a bit of grocery shopping this morning. Walking down to the beach also means you have to walk back UP FROM the beach, which I did, carrying two heavy bags of food. By the time I arrived back home I knew a couple things for sure. I was NOT going to turn on my oven, boil water for pasta or go for another walk back down to the beach.  When it gets this hot and humid I always crave a bowl of vietnamese bun. Bun noodles are typically the very thin rice vermicelli noodles that you can find in any asian grocery store. Room temperature noodles, lots of fresh herbs, sweet/sour nuoc cham, raw veggies and a bit of fish - it doesn't get better than this. I am not sure if using salmon in this version of bun is very authentic but it delicious so I don't really care. We o...