The Yum Yum Factor

I recently made my first roast beef using a crazy method that involves blasting the roast at 500F for about 5 minutes per pound before turning the oven off and walking away for two hours. It was a sirloin tip and I cooked it to a perfectly rare roast, much to our shock and awe. I am now officially a fan of roast beef and am anxious to try different cuts of beef using this method. I bought an outside round oven roast on sale and planned to try this crazy pants roasting method on it to see what would happen when you use a less tender cut of meat. Normally, I would throw this type of roast into the crock pot and let it cook til it fell apart. I went to see August: Osage County that afternoon with a couple of girlfriends and told Shack that if he was home, it would be great if he took the meat out of the fridge at 3pm so it could rest for two hours. If it came out any later than that, we would be looking at a dinner hour that would be require eating my meal in bed and eating roast b...

Who doesn't like meatloaf? You know who doesn't like meatloaf (apart from people who don't eat meat of course)? People who haven't eaten a delicious meatloaf, that's who. We eat it prepared in a few different ways to keep it interesting. One of our favourites is Italian Meatloaf  and Italian Meatloaf take 2  , we do a Korean Style Meatloaf  and a cranberry glazed turkey meatloaf that is full of thanksgiving flavours without the hassle of roasting a big turkey. I promised The Kid that I would make it this week. I am always looking for new ways to jazz things up a bit when I came across my smoked paprika. Hmmmm. What about doing some Spanish flavours in there? I am kind of all about Spanish food right now, ever since I did a tapas spread for our Christmas Eve soiree. I spent some time living and working in Madrid in my former life and these were the flavours that still linger in my noggin. I went out and got a bit of Spanish Manchego cheese and some quince ...

ATTENTION PLEASE MY FRIENDS: I don't know what is going on with blogger right now but it seems that my blog is possessed by demons that make my normal looking posts publish looking like they are all out of whack, the wrong colour font, the wrong size and, well the wrong font altogether. I am trying to figure out a way to work around this demonic possession but, for the moment, it is going to look like I have lost my mind and I ask for your forgiveness, your patience and a vial of holy water, a virgin goat and  these guys. Oh, and ask them to bring Chip All of my American friends are usually pretty disgusted when you describe the difference between a Bloody Mary and a Bloody Caesar to them. I didn't realize that Clamato juice was a Canadian thing at all until I was in my mid twenties and tried to order a caesar , probably in Miami, and nobody believed that we actually drank our vodka with tomato clam juice. Who can be happy with a vodka with plain old tomato juic...

even the little signs at Bobette and Belle are pretty This was another slow week around here. Thankfully, the weather has warmed up but I've been feeling a bit lazy and have spent too much time catching up on my Scandal and Justified. Do you watch Scandal? It is ridonkulously insane, completely unbelievable and so over the top it's one stop from cartoonish and I LOVE IT. I finally caught up yesterday so I am all ready for the third season to continue at the end of February. I was so stressed out by the way Huck is treating that poor girl that I couldn't do as much cooking as I would have liked to but I am sure you understand. ceviche from Seven Lives Last Saturday we made our regular jaunt to Kensington Market for ceviche at Seven Lives and this time , for the first time in a couple of weeks, we snagged a seat. If we can't get a seat, we don't go in so it means that we can go a couple of weeks striking out. They had a fresh, delectable sn...

Could someone please tell me why have I spent my entire life NOT making trifles? I think I had trifle once about a hundred years ago when I was 18 or 19. My own mother never made anything like it. She was more of a jello 1-2-3 kind of gal when she wasn't making pies, but I do have a fuzzy memory of eating it at a boyfriend's house. It must not have left much of an impression since I waited another hundred years to actually make one myself, although I do have very fond memories of jello 1-2-3.          I have a friend who makes all of these little desserts in jars whenever she hosts a party and there is almost always some sort of trifle along with something cheesecakey and something chocolately and this must be what sparked my interest. My Christmas  Rum and Eggnog Tres Leches Trifle  was everything I love about a dessert. It was delicious, although time consuming it was easy to make and, most important of all, it looked super impressive. I h...

Holy mother of god, it was ridiculously cold out there this week. It was the vortex of climate changey coldness in other parts of North America. In Toronto, it was just really, freaking cold. Because it was so cold, we didn't go out to eat as much as we would normally do and I did more cooking at home. On the weekend, we did go out to Mexican Salsa's  in the Market for that pozole up there just like we did last week . We were planning to go to Seven Lives again for ceviche but it was so packed when we walked by that we just kept on walking. This is the problem with places that are really fabulous and also really popular, right? On the way back to the car, it wasn't crowded at all but I had just finished a big bowl of pozole and no longer wanted any ceviche. First world problems. On Sunday, we met friends for lunch at a new BBQ restaurant on Mount Pleasant, south of Eglinton called Sandoozles . I wasn't even going to mention it but you know what? Our lunch was so d...

It is a new year and so it is time for a new pulled pork recipe. If you read this blog from time to time, you can't help but notice that we like our pork. Although we love all parts of the glorious pig, we do really like our pork shoulder. Some favourites have been an apple pulled pork , a Korean pulled pork , and   a second Korean pulled pork , we have done the momofuku pulled pork in the oven with nothing but tons of salt and brown sugar and make pork for tacos all the time like these carnitas . A pork shoulder jumps into the crock pot at least a couple times a month in the winter time and although I can't recall the last time we met one we didn't like immensely, I have been tinkering with something a bit more classic to make The Kid happy. Shack  makes a mustard mop that is out of this world (and I still can't get the recipe out of him because he is not a nice man) but I thought it would be good to come up with a bbq sauce version too. The Kid loves B...

I hate making New Year's resolutions. I don't mind quietly taking stock of myself and deciding that I will take note of a few things I would like to change, some improvements that could be made or other stuff that needs to be continued in the new year ahead but I never make any sort of declaration. I hate making a list of them and I hate attempting to commit myself to things I have no intention of following through with for an entire year. Let's be honest, I am not going to stop drinking red wine, I might start doing more yoga again and it's possible that I will endeavour to yell a little less but it won't be because I made a resolution to do so.

It's a two week roundup because I did not do a week in yum last week for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's the Christmas season and that is a pretty busy time and sometimes I prefer to just spend time living and not always documenting. It was also the week of the big power outage in Toronto and my neighbourhood was hit particularly hard. On Saturday night, after watching SNL, we retired to bed expecting to sleep but, instead, we both spent the entire night listening to the row of big, uncared for trees on our neighbour's property snap apart and fall on our building. At one point we felt the house shake and heart a huge THWAK and ran into The Kid's room. He was sleeping soundly, oblivious to the whole ordeal, but when I opened his blinds, there was a huge tree limb against it, blocking the bottom half of the window. I looked down and our truck was so covered in tree limbs that you couldn't see the vehicle. We moved The Kid out to the couch and returned to b...

We really don't like to go out on New Years Eve anymore. Just the thought of getting all dressed up, putting on makeup, getting a cab in the cold, being squished into a space with lots of really drunk people who are trying to have the BEST NIGHT OF THE YEAR is just exhausting to me. Back in the day we used to joke that NYE was for amateurs and that every night was NYE to us. We were young ,worked in the film business and we worked very hard but we also played very hard. Honestly, I think we were both secretly thrilled when we had a baby and could lay the blame on him for declining all the invitations until they just stopped coming and I was fine with that because I am just partied out. Now, the most exciting thing to happen on NYE around here is a rousing game of prosecco fuelled euchre with The Neighbours in our pjs and if everyone is actually still awake when the ball drops, it's a New Year's miracle. It's also a night for rich, decadent food because we ha...