The Yum Yum Factor

I don't trust people who don't love bacon. Even my friends who don't eat meat will admit that the smell of frying bacon is enough to send them over the edge and those who were not always vegetarian can still get teary eyed over the memory of the taste. To me, bacon is a perfect food. It is salty, fatty, crispy, smoky and it is just as great with sweet as it is with savoury. Honestly, even bad bacon is tasty but why not just go with GREAT bacon? I was approached by duBreton to come up with a recipe using their product to celebrate International Bacon Day, which takes place this year on September 3.Since I am one of the 90% of Canadians who love bacon, I jumped at the chance. To to be honest, it was a struggle to narrow my ideas down to one recipe. I had made a version of this crispy coating a while back to accompany my first ever pressure cooker mac and cheese recipe (I also used it again on my second pressure cooker mac and cheese recipe   ) and I make sure to ...

Corn season is now upon us here in Ontario and that means bushels of the sweetest, tenderest Peaches and Cream corn imaginable and it's cheap so we are eating lots of it. Apart from eating it lightly cooked with lots of melted butter and salt, I am currently having a love affair with corn soup. Usually, I am a corn chowder gal but I have found a new corn soup spirit animal. Let me be perfectly clear - the  pressure cooker corn soup from Kenji Lopez at Serious Eats is absolutely amazing and it's perfect, as it. The tarragon and the sweet corn were made for each other, it's smooth, rich and so creamy that you would swear, on your grandmother's foot pedal sewing machine, that there was a ton of creamy in it but there isn't. It's truly perfect and I have made it a million times already. This soup is NOT at attempt to improve upon it but a way to use this fool proof technique to make another flavour profile happen. I had already eaten my weight in this sou...

Okay, so when I complain about it being too cold, there being too much snow and starting whining that I need some warm, sunny weather, smack me in the head. Today, it is 34C (93F) but feels like 44C (111F) and still, my stupid family expects to be fed. Food. Which usually requires cooking. By me. WHATEVER I am making a tofu green curry in my Wizard Pot aka Instant Pot and to go with it, I whipped up a riff on my Spicy Gazpacho that would complement the curry but adding some yummy thai flavours like lemongrass, mint, cilantro and lime juice. This soup is best served ice cold, so, a nice touch is to freeze some of the soup in an ice cube tray to drop into each bowl of soup. That way, you get your ice cold soup but don't have to deal with it getting watered down by melting ice cube. As always, taste, taste taste and then tweak if you want. If you think it could use more lime juice, knock yourself out. More hot pepper? More lemongrass? Go nuts. Just don't skip the fish ...

Some days I feel lazy. I don't want to haul out my spice bins, measure out a whack of them to make my own curry but I am starving and I just want to eat ASAP. I might be out of homemade chicken stock too so I will often just grab a box of my emergency stash of chicken broth (low sodium Campbell's for the most part) from the pantry and bag of curry powder. In the days of yore, this soup would have taken far too long for a last minute meal, requiring over an hour to simmer, but with a pressure cooker, suddenly it's doable for lunch. From the very start of chopping to the minute you lift the lid and ladle the soup into your bowl, you will squeak in just under the 30 minute mark, tops, under 25 minutes if you rush it with a ten minute NPR. My regular Indian Split Pea Soup takes an hour and a half to cook  Today, I was lucky to find a leek, a half of a giant head of cauliflower to use in place of potato so that my soup can have that thick heartiness that potato gives...