The Yum Yum Factor

When EarthFresh comes calling and offers me a couple bags of free potatoes so I can come up with a new recipe, I am always in. EarthFresh is a Canadian company that produce great quality potatoes, carrots and onions and my favourite thing that they do, apart from providing me with FREE BAGS OF POTATOES YO! is they pack the potatoes in a light blocking bag. I bet you didn't realize that potatoes can turn totally green after about 12 hours of fluorescent grocery store lightening - let's not even talk about how I look under those zombie lights. There is a reason that when you store potatoes it always instructs you to put them in a cool, DARK place. I buy these potatoes all the time, ever since whipping up these Indian Spiced Potatoes using their organic baby reds, so i am no stranger to these babies. Aaaaanyway, they were looking for me to come up with some sort of a potato salad and since this tomato vinaigrette is current obsession, I saw no reason wh...

What to do with a 1 lb bag of gorgeous, organic baby red potatoes? I have been eyeing this recipe for Baby Potato Roast  on Relish the Bite forever and so I used it as my inspiration for this dish. Many of the spices she uses will not be familiar or easy to find for many people and I already have my own spices that I like to use so I made quite a few changes. Also, I thought some beluga lentils would be nice so they could get a bit crispy and add some protein so those were added to the mix as well but this delicious recipe was the inspiration for my own Indian Spiced Baby Potatoes. Earth Fresh Foods asked me if I would come up with a recipe using their Organic Red Baby Potatoes if they sent me a bag, so, of course, I said yes. Earth Fresh are Canadian producers of premium potatoes, carrots and onions but they specialize in potatoes, sourcing their products in 9 Provinces and 38 States. These are some nice potatoes and you can find them at Longos and Metro. Because t...

Okay, this is not a review of my newest kitchen toy, the Actifry Express XL by T-Fal because I just got it and have only used it once to make french fries. This particular Actifry is brand new in Canada and it cooks food up to 30% faster than the previous machines. It is also HUGE. It looks like a big, black spaceship, which I like but, honestly, it's huge and you need to have a lot of space to store this baby. This one makes enough food to feed six though, so if you have a whack of kids, this one would be your best bet.  It's got a nice, big digital screen so it's really easy to set the time and comes totally assembled so you can basically pop it out of the box, take out the bowl and the blade, give them a quick wash, pop them back in and go.  I will say that the french fries that came out of it were crispy and tasty and that I used less than a tbls of olive oil to make 750 grams of potato/sweet potato fries, so that is a good thing. Are they as crispy a...

Earlier this week, I whipped up The King's Crashed Potatoes  using a bag of Blushing Belles, little yellow fleshed, pink skinned creamers from The Little Potato Company . We ended up eating those little crashed potatoes all week - with dinner, with breakfast and as a snack.

This recipe is one of my most requested in real life and I just realized I have never out it up on the blog. I did post in on my other blog,  NoReEats  , a few years ago but it's time to repost it here. I don't always do it with a spatchcocked chicken and it works the same with skin on, bone in chicken pieces. Today I am making it with a couple lbs of thighs, for instance but if you are using a whole bird, spatchcock it. The olive oil really gives he lemony sauce a silky texture that is worth the effort just on its own but thankfully the potatoes and the chicken are equally addictive.  One word about about the amount of water added- I have heard from many people that the amount needed varies due to different cooking vessels, oven temps etc so I would suggest starting with 1/2 cup the first time you make it. Just keep an eye on it and if it looks like it starts drying out , add more, 1/4 cup at a time to ensure that there is always a bit of water in the pan. Yo...

Kwaf  is offering two great Xmas wine packages for the holidays and it was my job to pair each package with a recipe. The  Quintessential Christmas Dinner  package was a no brainer since I had just posted my recipe for Portuguese Corn Bread stuffing and those wines are all about turkey dinner but the  Three Brilliant Reds  pack was more of a challenge. At the breakfast tasting last week, I decided that although beef is the obvious meat to serve with bold reds, it would be nicer to do some lamb. Now, The Kid and I love lamb but Shack doesn't so I rarely cook it and I didn't have anything in the archives at all. That meant that I was going to have to come up with something on the fly. I bought some really nice lamb stew meat and sat and stared at it for a while, trying to think of something tasty, simple but nice enough to serve to guests over the holidays but not so involved that it would make entertaining a pain. I couldn't get a shepherd's pie out o...

It's time for my monthly post for  The Great Canadian Food Experience Project  where Canadian bloggers from across our nation write about a different subject each month. This month we are sharing our cherished canadian recipes. As I have said before, I didn't grow up eating anything particularly Canadian or worth sharing so it wasn't until I moved to Montreal that I discovered this regional cooking thing. I will be honest and admit that I lived there for over two years before I tried poutine. I was super health conscious and rarely ate fried foods or junk food and I kind of thought poutine sounded disgusting. Of course, one night - well wee hours of the morning really- after a couple of drinks I was convinced to try my friend's poutine. Holy life changing experience batman. I am so happy that poutine has become "a thing" and you can find it everywhere now. You can find super fancy pants, gourmet poutine with stewed lamb shank , artisan virgin goat mil...

I love chimichurri. If you read the blog at all, you might have already seen my Argentinian flank steak with chimichurri  or my roasted chicken with the stuff  . I often toss roast veggies in the sauce straight out of the oven but I had never thought of actually roasting them WITH the chimichurri until I saw the recipe in the Summer 2013 LCBO Food and Drink. The chimichurri recipe looked like a good, solid base but I like to add cilantro, use half the garlic and skip the red pepper flakes. I made these as part of our Canada Day BBQ and they were perfect. I like to avoid potato salads with mayo for these types of events and was getting bored of just plain old roasted mini potatoes to be honest. They were easy to whip up ahead of time and leave out for a couple of hours until it was time to eat. One less thing to either make last minute OR try to find room in the fridge for it and nobody died. People not dying from eating my food is always the sign of a great BBQ, in...

I love fig jam so much. I love it with cheese and I love it straight off the spoon but I really love to cook with it. The high sugar content means lots of yummy caramelization and that makes it a wonderful thing to baste roasted meats with. I kept seeing this recipe everywhere. I sweat to god, if you google pork tenderloin fig jam, this comes up on a bazillion web sites so I figured it must be pretty good. Since it was also Halloween, I made colcannon to go with it and although it might not be the first side dish that comes to mind when making a spicy figgy bit of pork, it was actually quite delicious together and was happily gobbled up and gave some nice, starchy substance to line the tummy in preparation for a candy assault after dinner. Just because I can, this was what left my house after polishing off a big plate of pork and colcannon. I don't know you, but I like to keep my evil demon necromancers happy. He looks pretty cheery, no? I used less hot sauce than the...