The Yum Yum Factor

I get it, I don't always feel like cooking some huge holiday meal either. I find, as my son gets older, we do less and less Christmasy stuff and spend the time off hanging out together. We go to movies, we play inappropriate games like Cards Against Humanity and visit friends because nobody has time to get together apart from Christmas. It has been a couple of years since our last, big, Xmas eve open house and I can't remember the last time I hosted a giant dinner. Our new ritual is to get up, go for dim sum and drive our Christmas Dog (we babysit her while her family flies out west to visit family) back to her family at their chalet and spend a few days drinking too much wine, eating too much food and relaxing. Now, does this mean I still don't want to eat turkey and enjoy the flavours of Christmas? Of course not. I LOVE turkey, I love stuffing, I love mashed potatoes and gravy and eggnog. Sometimes, when I can't even imagine cooking a turkey, I make something ...

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...

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.

As much as I love roasted cauliflower, sometimes I get a bit tired of it and this past week, I realized that I had been staring at the last head of cauliflower for days, not quite knowing what to do with it. I had already made Korean Cauliflower Wings for The Neighbour's Super Bowl party and I wanted something similar but not made with a batter and a little lighter and, maybe some crunch would be nice. Sometimes I just walk around for days, obsessively thinking "spicy, crunchy. Spicy, crunchy, gochujang. Spicy, crunchy, gochujang, cauliflower" until it just sort of sneaks up from behind me and whacks me in the head. "ROASTED CAULIFLOWER WITH CRISPY LENTILS AND GOCHUJANG SAUCE" These days I am knee deep in lentils because I am trying to come up with some new recipes for the annual  Revelations Challenge over at Canadian Lentils . I have been doing all sorts of interesting thing to these little pulses for a couple of days now but one of the best things I ha...

This recipe is an oldie but a goodie and what with the weather holding fast at -30000556C for the last week or so, a young girl's thoughts turn to comfort foods. It's been all stews, soups and things that bubble up in the oven around here. This shepherds pie is a lightened up version of the classic, subbing chicken in for the ground meat, it leaves out the cream in favour of a mixture of stock and evaporated milk and you replace 1/3 of the potato /sweet potato with cauliflower for the topping. If you really want to lighten things up , you can replace as much as half of the potato with cauliflower if you like but it won't be quite as creamy. As always, feel free to change up your veg - if you don't like zucchini, replace it with something you do like - you know the drill by now. It's not that I don't enjoy a heavier, meatier shepherds pie once in a while but when I can make something a bit healthier without sacrificing the Yum, I like to do that. Chick...

Did I miss the memo that cauliflower is the new black or something? I saw this cauliflower fried rice on The Kitchn the other day and was very intrigued by the idea of being able to eat big bowls of fried rice without actually worrying about the whole eating a big bowl of fried rice part. I already use  cauliflower to make "wings"    which was part of a food blogging trend this past year and  although I haven't tried the cauliflower pizza crust, that was happening all over the damned internet as well so I guess I was somewhat aware that cauliflower was a bit of a thing. Curious, I started to google around and found a zillion recipes for dishes using this pulsed cauliflower as a stand in for a myriad of grains like rice and bulgur, for potatoes and I am pretty sure that you can use it to fuel your car, to power your laptop and as a coffee substitute in a pinch. I think I just saw a dog wearing a cauliflower rain coat just today at the park. Thank god we love ...

It's almost spring and a young girl's thoughts turn to..... lentils! Canadian Lentils is having another recipe contest . I was pretty stoked to come in second place last year with my classic Indian dal,   Parippu  but this time I wanted to not only do something completely different from my previous entry, I wanted to do something different with the actual lentils. In my head I kept thinking that there must be a way to use ground lentils in something. For two weeks I thought about ground lentils day and night. Could they work as a coating for frying, as a filler in meatballs, as a facial scrub? In the end I almost settled on seared scallops with a lentil crust but that would use just a couple tbls of the actual lentils and so it was back to the drawing board. I was about to give up on the whole idea of using ground lentils when I remembered this recipe for a battered, baked cauliflower in Buffalo wing sauce that was everywhere during SuperBowl season and ...

It's finally time to throw in the towel and admit that it is now winter. Despite the fact that nature has been teasing us with sunny, springlike weather for the last week, the end is nigh and that means we are going to need some soup so It's Friday It Must Be Soup is resurrected. I am not sure how I came to make this soup because I went to the store with a different intention altogether. It started out as an idea to make a kind of mexican potato leek soup using some roasted jalapeño peppers and cilantro but then I saw the lovely cauliflower calling to me. "Hey lady! Don't I look delicious? Why are you ignoring me over here? I am just as boring looking as a potato. Have you no heart?" You know, it certainly did look delicious so I grabbed it up, still thinking I would stick to the plan but then I didn't like the look of the leeks and they were way too expensive. I thought about how delicious roasted cauliflower is with some cumin and then I could roast ...

This is not rocket science but it is one of our favourite ways to eat cauliflower and I am always surprised when people tell me they have never roasted cauliflower. Even people who think they hate the stuff will eat it if it's roasted. We do it all sorts of ways, with different herbs and spices but my favourite is most simple - olive oil, curry powder and garlic. I always make a huge batch because I snack on it cold the next day and if you puree it you can add it to some mashed potatoes or turn it into soup or mix some of it with quinoa for a salad. Roasted Curried Cauliflower 1 head cauliflower Olive oil 1/2 tbls curry powder kosher salt a handful of garlic cloves Preheat the oven to 400F Wash your cauliflower and chop it into florets - if you are in a hurry, chop them up small but they cook better if you leave them a bit larger and roast it for a longer period of time. Put it in a big bowl and drizzle with some olive oil, sprinkle with kosher salt and the curry...

Some of you may know that I am participating in a year long challenge to never repeat a recipe twice in 2011 and we are documenting in on a blog called no reEATS . I like to think of my little family as a group of very non picky, adventurous eaters. My kid eats every manner of seafood, will suck a shrimp head before biting it off and spitting it to the side, whole fish served head on makes him giddy with glee and would eat octopus sushi for breakfast every morning if I would let him. I forget that, from time to time, they have some weird ideas about food and because I will truly eat almost anything within reason and there are only a very ingredients that I cannot physically swallow, like snotty okra or squeaky tripe, I have no patience for picky eating for picky eating's sake.

Cauliflower Soup with Pecorino Romano and Truffle Oil Once again, the veggies that I had neglected to eat earlier in the week chose my soup for me. I had two small heads of cauliflower that would stare forlornly at me every time I opened the fridge, begging to be turned into something delectable and worthwhile. They desperately wanted a purpose so, eventually, I had to give in. After much searching around, I found a recipe that sounded perfect using my Epicurious app on my iphone, Cauliflower Soup with Pecorino Romano and Truffle Oil. I will tell you right off the bat, I had no intention of buying a bottle of truffle oil just to sprinkle on my soup but to my great surprise, I actually had a tiny bottle of it in my cupboard! Someone must have given some to me as a gift and I had forgotten all about it. Some foodie I am. smoked bacon So, I followed the recipe pretty closely (as closely as I am capable of anyway) . I left out the celery because I didn't have any an...