The Yum Yum Factor

  More adventures in adopting a more heart healthy diet mean more vegetarian meals with less sodium, healthier fats and a soupçon of cheese to punch it up. We have been having a lot of braised beans like the braised romano beans on polenta that I did for Ontario Beans. these beans have become a weekly thing in our house I know that all kinds of beans are now approved so it was time to move onto lentils. My favourite lentils are either Beluga or Du Puy but I haven't been able to find those on any of my online ordering platforms and I have been using plain old green lentils and, rest assured, they work just fine. Just don't use the red lentils because they disintegrate into mush, which is delightful in other recipes, but not in this one. If you use low sodium broth, use less kosher salt. If you use a salt free broth, you will have to up your salt a bit but the roasted tomato/feta and chili oil add so much flavour and saltiness that you don't need as much as you might normally...

  I have been taxed with the task of making our food more heart healthy and although I have always assumed that we already eat very well, thank you very much, I have been shocked by how much sodium we consume. SHOCKED, I say. One of our favourite things to eat is ramen and when I did some digging, I realized that each bowl of delicious spicy miso ramen had over 3000mg of sodium and that isn't even accounting for some of the add ins. This will not do. I have spent weeks working on my favourite recipe and I have managed to get it down to under 700mg of sodium per bowl, which is still a bit high but nothing close to what we were used to. There is also some disagreement about how we process the sodium in miso and although it is significant, a traditional Japanese diet which is high is miso and soy sauce does not result in any sort of widespread heart disease and, in fact, may actually be considered part of a heart healthy diet. I am trying to cut the difference and not worry too much a...

  I tried to make shakshuka for five days.  Day 1: ordered all the ingredients I needed online for delivery. Shit, can't get it til tomorrow. No problem, we will eat something else tonight but super excited for tomorrow's dinner Day 2: groceries come! Time to start.....oh, wait, what? You feel like ordering Thai? But I was...okay, Thai does sound like it would hit the spot. Shakshuka tomorrow, FOR SURE Day 3: make the shakshuka tomato/red pepper sauce in anticipation of tonight's shakshuka. Sit outside with my neighbours for a glass of wine and the next thing I know, we grab The Kid and venture on down to sit on the patio at The Pub. It's the only place that will let us take a table for 8 so we can sit at opposite ends of the table and their salt and pepper wings are really delicious..... Day 4: TODAY IS THE DAY. WE are making this damned shakshuka if it kills me, but first, a visit to drop off something to friends we haven't seen since January. Go to drop it off on...

I make my  Instant Pot Butter Chicken  fairly often but I don't always plan well enough to marinate the meat overnight and I do believe that an overnight marinade is essential to achieve a rich depth of flavour in the final dish and avoid it tasting like bland chicken plunked into delicious sauce. My theory was that if I added the chicken marinade ingredients INTO the meatballs, it wouldn't have to sit for so long before I can cook the finished dish. We also really, really love meatballs. A quick search for meatballs on The Yum Yum Factor will reveal my obsession with these orbs of tender delight so it stands to reason that I eventually try to meatballify every favourite recipe at some point. I have been mulling a meatball conversion with Butter Chicken for a while but I have been so busy cooking at work, that I have barely cooked more than scrambled eggs in my own kitchen all year but I finally got around to making it this week. don't be alarmed by...

I am Back!! I have been sick since mid April, hence my absence from the blog. I bet you thought I had quit, didn't you? After a lengthy bout with some sort of lung plague, I am finally emerging from the fog and forced myself to get in the kitchen today. Okay, I have been in the kitchen but it's been all grilled cheese sammies, frozen potstickers and soup, mostly made by The Kid as I croaked out instructions from my sick bed on the couch, Netflix droning on in the background. I have a Supper Club coming up and the first course will be a version of this Basque style Leek and Potato Soup with Cod and Serrano Ham so it seemed like it was as good a time as any to whip up a batch and make sure it is as delicious as I recall. It is. The Traditional Soup, called Porrusalda, if often made with cod but you would normally add a whack of reconstituted salt cod and cook it IN the broth for a chunk, rustic soup. It's absolutely delicious and homey and wonderful but I n...

I've gotta be honest, I have not loved my attempts at making Thai beef curries in my pressure cooker up until now. It just always felt like the sauce was a little too thin and it lacked body but I didn't want to add more coconut milk and then dilute the red curry flavour. What to do? This time, after it was done the initial pressure cook, I threw in some potato and sweet potato and when it was done, much of the sweet potato had kind of broken down and melted into the sauce, thickening it up nicely without diluting the intensity of the red curry paste. I also really like the sweetness it adds - it really balances out the heat of the red curry beautifully and kind of mellows it slightly without diluting the flavour, which is exactly what it was missing. BAM Another recipe finally converted to work in the Instant Pot (you can make it in any brand of electric pressure cooker, of course). This curry usually simmers for at least two hours on the stove top so cutting that...

You may have noticed that I am not keeping up with my regular pace on the blog. For the last 8 years, I've tried to add at least 1 or 2 recipes a week but my own cooking gigs have kept me out of my own kitchen since the fall. During the holiday season, I was so busy working for my friend in his catering company, that I barely made more than a piece of toast at home. Day after day, I would break down up to 40 lbs of beef into stew meat and then braise it all in the oven, making another 5 or 6 restaurant pans of scalloped potatoes, moussaka, or cutting up and marinating about a metric ton of chicken thighs followed by at least three evening parties a week so trust me, when I got home, we were ordering take out and apart from playing Candy Crush and checking twitter, I barely looked at a camera or a computer. December, in the catering business, is not for the faint of heart, weak of back or fallen of arches. Now, it's the new year and I am finally feeling like get...

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 ...

The Kingston Social and I are teaming up again for the new year and resurrecting our monthly Supper Clubs, starting in January. For my first menu, I will be doing a Yum style Peruvian dinner. My MVP pop up was one of my most popular of 2017 but, not one to rest of my laurels,  I really wanted to add something new to the meal and because it will be in January, soup just makes sense. This particular soup is based on the classic Peruvian soup, Aguadito de Pollo, also known as Levanta Muertos which translates into a soup to wake the dead due to it's restorative, nourishing properties and I have been told that it may or may not be great for a hangover. I am down with that. The soup, at it's most simple, is made with tons of cilantro, chicken and vegetables, usually served with whole, skin on chicken legs or thighs but that is not really my thing. Instead, I removed the skin, crisped it up until it was transformed into a chicken chicharon/cracker. It is crispy, salty an...

Holy crap, I have been so busy cooking for other people that I have not even had time to cook at home, apart from a grilled cheese here and there. I have a few down days before plunging back into the fire next week so, in an effort to practice what I preach, it's time to get into my own kitchen. I have some interesting recipes that are not quite ready for prime time that will be coming soon, but, in the meantime,  I am still going through some of my favourite crock pot recipes and adapting them to the Instant Pot  since it is supposedly almost mid November and should be feeling like winter by now. I know that most of you think of ribs as a summer BBQ dish but for me, it's always been more of a winter thing so  I have started eyeballing the pork ribs at the butcher. I used to either do them slow and low for hours and hours, wrapped in foil in a low oven or all day in the crockpot for days when I am going to be out too long for that. The problem with the crockp...