The Yum Yum Factor

So, we all want to try to make better choices when we are buying food, right? We try to figure out which foods really need to be organic and which foods need to be, at least, certified hormone free. We are encouraged to go for a drive, meet farmers and see how their animals are raised, go to farmer's market and forge relationships with the growers and make better, informed purchases.  That's all very well until we come to seafood. How are we supposed to meet the sea farmers when it's best to eat wild seafood? How are we supposed to know how to check to see how the fish was caught, who caught it and whether something is overfished? Not so easy to do on our own. That's where the MSC comes in. The Marine Stewardship Council is an international, non profit organization that was formed to address them problem of unsustainable fishing and make sure that there are seafood supplies going forward. They work with fisheries, suppliers and retailers to encourage...

I love a challenge. I was asked by MSC (the Marine Stewardship Council) to throw a little #OceanToPlate dinner for friends using MSC certified seafood and because that felt too easy, I chose to invite my friend who claims to hate seafood. To add to the challenge, she and her husband are on a restrictive diet at the moment and so they couldn't have rice, potatoes, beets, or pasta which are all my usual suspects when I am feeding them.

If you live in Toronto, you have probably had shortbread from Mary Macleod's at some point. Unlike most other self named companies, there really is a Mary Macleod and she started baking her famous chocolate crunch shortbread in 1981. Even after 30 years in the business, Mary, herself, still spends time in the kitchen coming up with new treats like the Butterscotch Shortbread Crumbs I used to make the crust for this cheesecake. I was more than happy to accept a free bag of cookie crumbs to experiment with because I would happily buy them anyway. I used to live right across the street from Mary's shop on Queen St East for a few years and so I was very familiar with the product. It's not like I had ever run over there in my pjs and grabbed a few cookies to go with my morning coffee or anything.....

You know, even people like me get sick of eating out all the time and need to take a break. Even when we went to NYC before Xmas, it was so nice to not feel like I had to hit all of the hottest restaurants and if I forgot to photograph what we ate, oh well. For the first time, in a long time, we just wandered, popped into any old place that looked interesting, snacked here and there and just concentrated on being in the city. I put photos on instagram and updated fun stuff that we did but it wasn't all just food, food, food.

If you are not lucky enough to have a nonna of your very own, you can soothe your inner Italian soul with Per La Famiglia, Memories and Recipes of Southern Italian Home Kitchen, the newest cookbook by Emily Richards. Part cookbook, part scrapbook, the book is full of photos, memories and family stories and as soon as my complimentary copy showed up on my doorstep, I read the whole thing, cover to cover. I remember Emily Richards from the Canadian Living Test Kitchen back when I was a new mom and spent hours on end watching the food network. Alongside Elizabeth Baird, she injected a youthful enthusiasm for food that helped to inspire me to get out of bed and back into the kitchen again. Fast forward to today and Emily is still inspiring Canadians to get into the kitchen and cook delicious, whole foods as part of the Canadian Living Test Kitchen, regular daytime tv guest spots, cooking classes and cookbooks. The stories reflect the immigrant story for many, ma...

Feed Tomorrow 2015 Most people who read food blogs probably don't have to worry about having enough healthy, whole foods to eat and to feed their families. We might complain about that $8 cauliflower and wait, crankily, for the price to come back down before we start buying it again but, on the whole, while still watching for sales and clipping the odd coupon, we go about our daily business, never having to agonize over how we are going to make the food in our kitchen stretch out and last until the next payday.

*I don't know what is going on with my template but at this time, I can't do anything about this damned all caps sitch, so my apologies in advance. I am not screaming at you. I haven't met a pulled pork that I don't love. I love South Carolina style with a mustard mop, I love it with tomato based BBQ sauce and a carnita will never be kicked out of my bed for eating crackers. All that said, the one I like to make at home is this recipe - gochujang is my spirit animal.  Before getting this pressure cooker, this was another one of those dishes that required planning a day before. Even if I didn't marinate the meat overnight, I had to get it ready first thing in the morning so it could sit for at least an hour or so and then get into the crock pot by mid morning to make sure the meat was cooked by dinner time. Frankly, I am just not always that together so it means that I don't make it all that often. The pressure cooker means that I can actually ru...

Getting to the Aga Khan Museum is not easy if you don't drive so let's get that out of the way right now. It's tucked away on Wynford Drive (basically Don Mills and Eglinton), a stone's throw from the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre and there is ample parking available on site. The last thing you would expect to see here, on the outskirts of the city proper, is a large, ultra modern building with a shimmering white granite top. The grounds are huge, with gardens and reflecting pools and I cannot wait for summer so that I can return and explore them. 

One of the most comforting soups that I make is this Greek lemony chicken soup that is thickened with egg. Sometimes I make it with orzo but because I prefer to use a nice, starchy rice like arborio it usually takes a solid 45 minutes or so to make even if I have the chicken stock on hand. That's not super time consuming, by any means, but on nights where I realize that it is 7pm and I forgot to make dinner (which actually happens more than you can imagine),  knowing that I can whip this up in about ten minutes is thrilling in my little world.  If you want to make this on the stove, just cook it for about 30 minutes to make sure the rice is soft and tender. Oh, and after you add the egg, don't bring it back to a boil, just heat until just about to simmer and steaming - we don't want any scrambled eggs in our soup. I used Litehouse Salad Blend dehydrated herbs for this because in the winter, it can be difficult to find fresh herbs. Okay, its more likely that it...

Jackfruit Pozole   uses vegetable stock   So many dishes start with stock or broth so having a freezer stash of 1/2 cup pucks of stock is a life saver, especially if you are pressure cooking because you can just throw those frozen pucks in without worrying about defrosting or measuring. There is no magic formula to making broths and stock in the pressure cooker and I am not going to talk to you about "bone broth" which is kind of just the hipster term for a super long cooked meat stock that turns to gelatin when it's cooled down. I am just talking about the good, old, dependable workhorse of the kitchen. I am also not going to get into the semantics of whether this is broth or stock because we are not kitchen scientists (okay, I do play one on TV) and we are just looking for flavourful liquid to use in most of our recipes that is homemade, not full of additives and fake flavourings and, because of the pressure cooker, take a fraction of the time as a sto...

One of my favourite things to make in my Instant Pot is risotto, which surprises nobody more than me. I have always railed against any recipes that claim to result in a creamy, rich risotto that ditches the need to stand in front of the stove, glass of wine in hand, and stir for 20 solid minutes. BAH! I said as I laughed in the face of the no stir, oven baked, microwaved risotto methods that were going to change my life. BAH! Bah, indeed because pressure cooker risotto is that recipe. I remained doubtful until I got my pressure cooker cookbook from America's Test Kitchen. Cook's Illustrated is like my bible and I use it to reference everything from recipes, methods and ingredients to products. They test the hell out of everything so we don't have to and they explain why what they did works so well so when they assure me that risotto cooked in the pressure cooker is amazing, I am pretty much obligated to try it. So, fast forward to today and I haven't ...