The Yum Yum Factor

The Windup Bird Cafe This has been another fun filled week of food and adventures what with three restaurant visits on Tuesday alone. I lunched at The County Cocktail, supped at The Windup Bird Cafe and joined the boys for a late night negroni at The Wren before coming home to bed. If you add in all of the lentil recipe testing, it was a full week of eating new things and man, am I stuffed.

I love being able to share stuff with you guys when I can and this month, Misura Canada is giving somebody a great box of goodies  so make sure you enter because if you don't enter, you can't win.

Okay, people it's all lentils all the time here in Lentilville. The Canadian Recipe Revelations Lentil Challenge is on and we have been eating nothing but lentils for the last week while I try out some ideas. I spent the weekend perfecting my appetizer entry, Cauliflower "Wings" Three Ways  and so today was lentil main dish day here. It was time to make my final run of these Swedish Meatless Balls. These meatballs are so tasty on their own that I think I am going to make them into burgers too and I would totally eat these on their own or with another sauce. Honestly, nobody even noticed that there was no meat in there.  When asked what smelled so good, I just said "Swedish Meatballs" knowing it's one of The Kid's favourites. I popped a plain ball into his mouth and all he said was "Jesus, Mary and Joseph" and skipped out the door to go to karate. That is some high praise. I LOVE these and I love meatballs. I love meatballs made with ...

Last week I spent a few days making batch after batch of mock chicken wings out of roasted cauliflower. Each batch was tweaked and tinkered with until I found the right batter and the right sauces to turn them into a healthy snack that could satisfy my unnatural wing cravings from time to time.  Do you know what really put these things over the top so that my taste buds yelled OH YES, BUFFALO WINGS BABY! was the blue cheese dip. I love blue cheese dip but I don't need to be eating something that is full of full fat sour cream and whatever else is usually in it. I am thrilled with this version and plan to bathe in it momentarily. Lightened Up Blue Cheese Dip Ingredients 1/4 cup 2% greek yogurt 2 tbls light mayo (I like Hellmans) 1 tbls buttermilk 1 tsp white balsamic vinegar pinch salt 1/4 cup crumbled blue cheese ( I use Castello Crumbled Danish ) Directions Whisk the yogurt, mayo, buttermilk, vinegar and salt together until smooth. Fold in the blu...

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 ...

tamale workshop with Paola of Santo Pecado Catering Dinos Wood Burning Oven Pizza After last week's failed adventure to the west end to eat dinner,  we ventured back out to Etobicoke to try the pizza at  Dino's   last weekend . Lots of Shack's friends have raved about this place, he was dying for pizza and it was a good day to go for a drive so that is how we ended up way in the wild, wild west in search of lunch. I was afraid that it was only a take out place after reading some reviews on the drive but thrilled to find that there are, in fact, a few tables so you can most definitely eat in. This is not a place to go for a lovely family dinner or a date or anything but I just wanted to let you know that you can eat in if you are okay with eating at table slapped down in front of the take out counter. The staff are so friendly that they make up any lack of decor or ambiance and the wood oven cranks out some damned fine pizza.

You know what I love about cooking vs baking? When you really mess something up while you are baking, you are often screwed, requiring the finished dish to be trashed and you waste all that time, energy and food. That reason, alone, is probably why I am more of a cooker than a baker. Well, that and the fact that I don't have much of a sweet tooth which one look at the tags on this blog will indicate. I am not ashamed to admit that I can be very absent minded. I cut myself a lot, I break glasses all the time and, in fact, we no longer buy nice stemware because I will just break it all. We use these plastic Govino glasses  and Shack only breaks out the real wine glasses when we have guests, allowing those guests to drink out of them. I am allowed to drink out of my little turkish tea glasses and actually prefer to drink my reds Italian style in the heavy, short rock glasses that are also on the approved drinking vessel list. Basically, I am treated like a toddler by own family ...

Chopping up a deep fried pig trotter for our crispy pata at Lamesa I am getting to the end of my winter rope over here and I know I am not alone. It is mid march and I am still wearing boots and a puffy, down parka and I object. To warm ourselves up last Sunday, we slathered ourselves in stinky suntan lotion, dug out the flip flops and made a big batch of ceviche  so we could fool ourselves that summer was just around the corner. It didn't last long but for for a brief moment I forgot that I still had to ice the frozen pond out back so that we wouldn't break a hip out there.

Whenever I find fresh poblano chilis at the market, I choose to see it as a sign from the cosmos, telling me that I need to make a batch of chili verde STAT. I am not one to ignore such signs but was seriously considering just taking them home to toast and freeze for a later date when I then turned the corner to see that pork shoulders were on sale. At that point it occurred to me that I would bring a pox on my house if I kept walking. It's like the universe wants us to eat more pork. Add to that the fact that I am working on a recipe that would require some sort of pulled pork and two pork roasts were in my cart before you could say Tha-tha-tha-that's all folks! Chili verde, a soupy stew of pork, tomatillos and green chilis, is more Southwestern than straight up Mexican and if we are going to be all hung up on authenticity, we should be using hatch chilis. I have been told, much like Texans refuse to call anything with beans in it chili, the fine people of the south...

There is nothing that tastes fresher or cleaner than ceviche and it's my go to dish when I have a spent a weekend of eating debauchery. There is no oil or added fat of any kind, it's raw, it's cold, it's fresh and it has crunch.You can eat a huge bowl of it and it will amount to almost nothing at the end of the day so you can sit right back down and eat another bowl, guilt free. Clearly, because this dish is not cooked, you want to buy yourself some really fresh fish from a reliable fishmonger like Hooked or my Beaches staple,  The Beach Fish House . Look, I don't know where you live but if you don't know where there is a great fish shop in your hood, take the time to find one. You can thank me later. Ceviche is a popular dish across Mexico, Central and South America and I have yet to meet one that I didn't love. Basically, it's fish or some sort of seafood, marinated in citrus and served cold and from that point, the variations are endless. Gra...

the best coffee I had all week was at the exclusive and elusive Soho House Last weekend Shack was working and Hank and I just hung out, not doing very much. It's hard to get excited about doing fun stuff when it's -56999C outside with a windchill that makes it feel like -79954C. When it's just the kid and I, we eat fish because crazy Shack doesn't really like to eat fish. It was nothing fancy, just some nice, simple pan fried steelhead trout on Saturday and then Sunday we watched the Oscars and they had leftovers from the pizza Shack ordered on his way home from work the night before. Just like the beautiful stars on the red carpet who have consumed nothing but lemon water and air for the previous two weeks so they can be suitable dehydrated, slim and light headed for the Oscars, I chose to dine on popcorn and broken dreams and the wish that whatever "Dr" did that to Kim Novack's face should be executed.

Ever since I started on this cooking beef with coffee adventure, the craving for some red chili pork will just not go away. Red chili pork or carne adovada is another one of those dishes that I rarely make myself because I have convinced myself that this south western classic too much work but now that I am down with soaking and pureeing the dried chilis, I realize that I am an idiot. Cooking with dried chilies is really not all that much work at all and it's changing my life, to be perfectly honest. Between the dried chilies and True Detective, I am a different woman. I feel like this is a dish that Rust would have enjoyed back in Texas when he actually ate food and wasn't busy snorting cocaine and killing bikers. This is for you Rust Cohle, although I fear that you aren't going to live long enough to join me for supper. While I was seriously craving red chili pork I was also dying for a big bowl of chili so it only made sense to add some black beans to my pork a...

is this the Yellow King? Sometimes I get tired about talking about food all the time, don't you? Let's chat about something else for a change. Grab a chair and take a seat and we'll chew the fat. True Detective. I am currently obsessed with this show, like millions of other people, and I have nothing better to do than poke around the internet, reading what other people think, trying to piece together bits of the puzzle and I am enjoying myself immensely. This morning, I am reading and reading and I think "hey, I will look up the cast in the final episode and see if there are any clues in there" Maybe a cast member from an earlier episode will come back or something. All I find is this one cast member who is there as three characters but without any sort of photos. Lyle R Guidroz Young Lyle is credited with being a  VooDoo Character, Mechanic and john. All of his credits are from the last couple of years, many of them uncredited and there are no pho...

sweet potato gnocchi with wild boar ragu from Le Select Bistro Oh my, what a busy week in YUM. The whole thing started with dinner at Splendido on Saturday night. We were attending an awards celebration later in the evening so a big group of us started it all off with a dinner in the private dining room downstairs. I have actually never been to Splendido and was ridiculously excited about the prospect of taking a meal there and starved all day so I could eat my fill. There were at least 30 of us so they had laid out two long tables and had the bar set up in the corner with at least five or six servers to cater to our every whim. I have to say, service at this place is impeccable and the party room or "the cellar" as it's called is very warm and cosy. We were served a couple of lovely little apps while we milled about, chatting and drinking wine and, in retrospect, they were among the best things we ate so I wished that I had paid more attention. This...