The Yum Yum Factor

the arroz de tomate of my dreams A few years ago we spent a couple of weeks in Northern Portugal and there were a few dishes that we ate constantly. We ate the garlicky clams with butter, vihno verde and cilantro every single day, the kid ate grilled sardines at least three times a day and at every meal, there was a bowl of tomato rice. Sometimes it was really soupy, like that one down there from Ponto Final  (I wrote about it here  ). It came in an earthenware cauldron and it continued to bubble and roil for most of the meal. That one was soupy and full of sausage but other times we were served a thicker version, usually with nothing else added in. I had forgotten about tomato rice until I attended a supper club that featured a multi course Portugese feast, prepared by my friend Paula Costa, of the blog, My Portuguese Kitchen   . Her rice was thick and creamy and full of seafood and since that night, I keep thinking about making it but it's been hot, I ...

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 ...

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...

So, it's the end of June and it's finally getting really hot and that means I don't want to eat hot food anymore. I start craving ceviche, salads and watermelon by the kilo and something I always think I want to make, but never do, is gazpacho. I really like all kinds of gazpacho so look for some other versions throughout the summer.  This particular dish was inspired by my June SupperClub menu which is mostly Middle Eastern but with a touch of Jamaican flavours, thanks to my Jerk Lamb Kofta . I always start my menu with one dish and then base the rest of menu around that so this time, I wanted something as first course that would be refreshing and light and lean a little towards Jamaica. Both the soup and the pickled jerk shrimp are great on their own (a bowl of shrimp with some bread to sop up the pickling liquid is a great meal in it's own right) but I find that something magical happens when you put the two together. Spicy Gazpacho with Jerk Pickled Shri...

Once again, a box of frozen puff pastry solved all of my problems. I wanted to bring a nice app to an summer poolside party but although it had to be pretty and delicious, it also had to be kind of quick and easy. Since, as always, I had a box of my favourite pre rolled puff pastry from PC in the freezer and a container of ricotta, it was obvious that I would make a little tart. A quick trip up to the Magical Asian produce store provided some nice yellow cocktail tomatoes, red cherry tomatoes and some Ontario asparagus. You can mix it up and use whatever bit of vegetable you have - it would be just as delicious with freshly shucked peas or leftover roasted vegetables, for instance. You can mix the ricotta hours ahead of time and if you can't find z'atar you can just sprinkle a bit of fresh thyme over the top but do try to find the z'atar because z'atar makes everything better. Tomato, Asparagus and Ricotta Tart makes 24 app servings or 12 large piece...

If you read this blog, or know us personally, you will know that there are only a handful of ways to eat pasta in this house. Shack, who loves pasta above all other things, really just means spaghetti/rotini with tomato sauce and meatballs OR with meat sauce, which is just really tomato sauce with meatballs smashed up in it. The only two exceptions are, of course, lasagna which is just a shape shifting pan of spaghetti and meat sauce and carbonara but that has lots of bacon in it and, well, BACON. I, on the other hand, love all forms of pasta with all kinds of sauces - olive oil sauces, cream sauces, fettuccine, farfalle, orecchiette - you put a bowl of some sort of carby goodness in front of me and I will be happy but if I say I'm cooking "pasta" for dinner, I mean meatballs/meat sauce/marinara with spaghetti or rotini, maybe penne if he is feeling adventurous. For that reason, I  was absolutely certain that I must have written down my recipe for plain old spaghett...

Winter is just around the corner and I find myself craving stuff like chili, stew and soup. Went I came to the blog looking for my chili, I was surprised to find that I didn't have a straight up recipe for my regular chili. I found a great recipe for  Red Chili Pork and Beans , Lentil Chili , and a Chili Chicken Soup  but no simple, meaty chili. I was sure that I had posted it at some point and after a search, I found it on No reEats, the blog that documented my year of never repeating a recipe. To be honest, that year was such a blur of stress and mental anguish, that I think I have blocked most of the meals from my memory in order to protect my fragile psyche.  I made a batch of this stuff over the weekend and realized that I had to share it with you guys because it's too good to keep to myself. This fills my 5 quart heavy pot or my 5 quart crock pot. It freezes beautifully by the way. Chili with Chorizo makes approx 4-5 quarts small glug olive oil 500 ...

So, recently, I finally made  Marcella Hazan's buttery tomato sauce and, unlike the other 98% of the food world, I didn't totally fall in love with it. I found it a bit too rich and buttery (if that can even happen) and missed the olive oil taste in my marinara. I didn't dislike it, I just didn't love it beyond all other sauces. What I did like was the silky texture the butter gave it and the ease of preparation and I wanted to try it again with less butter and some olive oil replacing the lost butter, finally settling on a ratio of 2 tbls butter/3 tbls of olive oil. This mix gave me the rich, silky texture but the olive oil flavour I was missing so much. Shack woke up on Sunday morning with a craving for cabbage rolls but, unfortunately, he didn't share that with me until early afternoon. Cabbage rolls are not something you can just whip on on a whim. My mom, who was famous in our family for a couple of dishes, made a mean cabbage roll and I miss them treme...

So, as a food blogger, you can't escape food trends. You wake up one morning and suddenly every man and his dog is making one pot pasta and then a few months later it's nothing but cake pops as far as the eye can see. Sometimes you get lucky and you are one of the mavericks who makes boozy popsicles before the trends catches on and you can feel like a rock star for two minutes but you usually just sit there wondering where in the hell these trends are manufactured. On the whole, I tend to shy away from many of them unless they truly intrigue me (which is also why I tend to stay away from holiday themed posts because, lets be honest, with 3330000000098898.43 food blogs out there making halloween themed recipes, do you really need any more from me?) With the recent passing of Marcella Hazan, the grandmother of Italian cuisine who taught generations of North Americans how to cook Italian food, we are seeing a retrending of her famous tomato sauce. This sauce c...

Don't you just love mustard? I have at least a dozen types of mustard in my fridge at any given time and I have also recently started dabbling in the making of my own mustard, which is pretty damned exiting for me. I don't get out much. Anyway, the #1 staple in my fridge is always Maille old style whole grain mustard. I usually have their honey mustard as well but the giant jar of grainy mustard is alway in there. I use it in sauces like this one, in vinaigrettes, on meats, with grilled sausages and in sandwiches. The boys prefer plain old yellow mustard on their sandwiches because they are freaks but not me. When Maille asked for Canadian bloggers to be Maille Mustard Mavericks I was all over that like a Toronto racoon on a green bin the day after Christmas. I almost felt guilty grabbing a free jar of grainy mustard because it's not a new product for me at all but who can say no to a free jar of something they already love? The Maille store ...

I love how a dish will take off in the blogosphere and suddenly you wake one morning and everyone but you is making cake pops or boozy popsicles. This seems to be happening with this one pot pasta technique. Martha Stewart featured this simple pasta dish  this month and, once again, she has inspired the masses to go out and throw raw pasta with other stuff in a pot and just throw caution to the wind and do something that kind of goes against everything we all believe about cooking pasta. I was a bit leery but then, the more I thought about it, it made sense. We use the starchy pasta water all the time to not only thin out sauces but to utilize the starch to make the sauce more cohesive and silky. It kind of serves as a binder so this could actually work and if it DOES actually work , it could revolutionize week night dinner. If we all know we can just throw all the crap we have sitting in the fridge in one pot and 10 or 12 minutes later we will have a complete, healthy din...

I made these incredible toasts from Not Without Salt last night and I ended up with half a baguette's worth of toasted bread left since The Kid didn't come home for dinner. I kept staring at them all day, wondering what to do with them when I thought "fattoush!" I just got myself the cookbook, Jerusalem, and after reading it cover to cover I am mildly obsessed with all things middle eastern right now. I often find myself walking down the street and "fattoush!" will just pop into my head and I have to run home and open Jerusalem and read it a bit to calm myself down.

I don't think I have ever met a meatball that I didn't like. In this house we are all about the lovely balls of meat. Whether it's swedish meatballs, spaghetti and meatballs, my vietnamese bbq pork meatballs, sticky meatballs, saucy meatballs, spicy korean meatballs or lamb and mint meatballs - any meat that can get jammed into my meat grinder ends up as a meatball at some point, so watch your step when you visit.

This is something we eat a lot during the summer months when tomatoes are at their peak. It seems like such a shame to cook them for those few precious weeks that we have local tomatoes that are succulent and perfect. Nothing is better than a perfectly ripe tomato from your own garden, sliced up with nothing but a bit of sea salt and a grind of black pepper. mmmmm These tomatoes that I used for these weren't local but they were really juicy and sweet and delicious and so instead of throwing them into another salad, I made this pasta. The first time I ever had this was on my first day in Milan about a million years ago. I was going to work with my friend, John, who had been living there for months already so he picked me up from the airport and brought me back to his apartment, where I would be staying for a while so that I could shower and freshen up and maybe nap a bit before we went to explore the neighbourhood. He mixed the tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, basil and a b...