The Yum Yum Factor

who wouldn't want a cookie with some Bugels on top?? One of my favourite cookies is my Compost Cookie Bar   - I used to make  Compost Cookie Bars for the kiddies  when The Kid was at his Magical Unicorn School, using fun junk like Cap'n Crunch, caramel corn, Bugels, candy canes. I was very popular at his school. I needed a dessert to serve with Chili Verde, Vegan Jackfruit Pozole and a Beet and Roasted Fennel Salad with Pepita Crema for a drop in dinner at The Depanneur . I guess I could have gone the more traditional Mexican cookie route but where's the fun in that? Green & Black had sent me a few bars of their Organic Maya Gold   to play around with and , after tasting it, I knew it would make the perfect base for Mexican Compost Cookie Bars. The 60% dark chocolate bar's flavours are taken from a traditional Mayan drink from Belize so it's full of nutmeg, cinnamon and orange - a love match with salty, porky, chicharron. Whe...

Okay, it's egg time. Well, it's always egg time around here since The Kid eats them almost every morning for breakfast, let's be honest. I love a good poached egg but what I don't love is a watery egg with wiggly whites sitting in a watery bowl. Blech. I have had great success with sous vide using my Anova to make  onsen tomago  , or eggs poached in the shell and when I am making ramen or bibimbap, this is my go to method but it's a bit fussy for 7:30am on a Tuesday morning before I have had my coffee, so that is where my Instant Pot comes in. The first time I tried them, they were perfect. I put them in a little steel mixing bowl, set it on the trivet with a cup of water and cooked them for 2 minutes at low pressure on steam and did a quick release. Lovely. This week, I picked up some silicone egg baskets and thought that these would be my new egg poaching dishes, cracked a couple of eggs into baskets and followed the formula that has b...

Because I love a challenge, I agreed to accept a giant vat of BioSteel Whey Protein Isolate , which is their brand name for protein powder, in order to come up with some tasty, protein rich recipes. Protein powder is not just for body builders and NHL hockey players, you know. It can be a godsend for people who need more protein and moms trying to sneak a bit into their picky kid's diet but the problem lies in the quality of the protein powders that are out there. Many other powders can contain stuff like processed soy, artificial flavours and sweeteners, fake colour and synthetic nutrients that are not all that easily absorbed by our bodies. BioSteel was developed by NHL trainer, Matt Nichol, who was sure he could do better and BioSteel was born. If it's good enough for Mats Sundin, it's good enough for me. The classic way for mere mortals to use it is to throw some into a morning smoothie but that can get boring and not everyone likes smoothies so that'...

Okay my people, the Instant Pot adventure continues. If you love to cook but live under a rock, the Instant Pot is a 7 in 1 electric pressure cooker that also serves as a slow cooker, rice cooker, steamer, yogurt maker and more and it is taking the world by storm by the look of it. I was given one to try out and review and I love it so much that I just bought a second one (it came last night!) and I am going to start teaching pressure cooking classes in Toronto with them. You could say I am obsessed.  I am going to honest here and admit that I had NO intention of trying to cook sauce and pasta all together in this thing. I thought it was going to be disgusting and watery. Most the recipes I was finding called for using a jarred sauce and I will be using a jarred spaghetti sauce right before I pose nude for Dog Lover's Almanac. Then i got the Cook's Illustrated pressure cooker book called Pressure Cooker Perfection and since America's Test Kitchen is my #1 go to ...

Okay, maybe it didn't make me a better lover but it certainly didn't make me any worse! Last week I made this chicken stew with beluga lentils   and it was so delicious and so easy that I am now on a mission to see how many variations I can come up with. I want to keep it from being boring and maintain the versatility that enables a dish like this to be added to the regular rotation. As I said before, this recipe is more of a template than a buttoned down recipe, allowing you to throw in what you have - the main ingredients being chicken and either brown, green or black lentils - the softer red and yellow will fall apart and turn into mush. I don't think I mentioned it before, but the basic idea for combining lentils and chicken thighs came from  Serious Eats . It was one of the first recipes I read when I was first researching ideas for my new pressure cooker. last week we had chicken thighs, fennel and beluga lentils because that is what was in my fridge Dec...

I have been having more adventures with my Instant Pot this week - this chili, a tomato based meat sauce for pasta and another chicken and lentil stew. Adapting my recipes to work in the pressure cooker requires a bit of math, a lot of research, a few hail Marys while throwing salt over both shoulders and an Om Shanti Shanti just to make sure my bases are covered, but I am finally starting to get it. I keep reading that pressure cooking is not intuitive cooking and I couldn't agree more so this is the one cooking method that is going to require constant reference to cooking charts until you really get the hang of it, no matter how accomplished you are in the kitchen. Pressure cooking has been a humbling experience but an exciting one at the same time, kind of like my reoccurring dream where I get married to Ryan Gosling. Okay, regarding the half hour chili in the title. If you use canned beans, you could cook it for more like between 15 and 20 minutes at high pressure so y...

Okay, I don't do New Year resolutions, for the most part but I am kind of making one anyway. Due to high level adulting that my life has required over the last 6 months, I have not been cooking enough. It's gotten to the point where our waitress worries about us if we haven't been to the pub in a couple of nights and that is just kind of sad, seeing that cooking is kind of what I am supposed to do over here. Enter my Instant Pot. Because of this stupid, crazy amazing thing I no longer really have an excuse to skip cooking dinner. I can throw together a delicious, nutritious stew like this in almost no time. Honestly, from the first chop of an onion to slopping it into a bowl and slamming it down on the table, this dish takes under 45 minutes. This is my favourite type of recipe because it's more of a template than a recipe.The possibilities are endless and the flavour combinations are only limited by what you happen to have in your kitchen at the moment. Ye...

Wanting to make a special treat for our wonderful friends, The Neighbours, I wracked my brains for a week. They are both really good cooks so I can't easily wow them but I recalled that the topic of scotch eggs had come up more than once over the holidays. They both have fond memories of his mother's scotch eggs so there is a sentimental attachment, making them the perfect dish to bid goodbye to one year and usher in the new. For this first trip down the old scotch egg highway, I didn't want to mess around with the classic recipe too much since I knew that this was a very nostalgic thing for my friends but you know that there will be Korean Scotch Eggs, Mexican Scotch Eggs and more coming down the pipe. Scotch Eggs Makes 6 eggs 7 large eggs 2 large, fresh sausages 2 scallions, minced about 1 tbls grainy mustard fresh pepper about 1/3 cup of flour spash of milk about 2/3 cup panko Put 6 eggs in a pot of cold water and bring to a boil. Let them boil...

It's a new year and I am starting to book some new, exciting events and classes. First up will be another Drop in Dinner at The Deppaneur here in Toronto on Friday, January 22 starting at 6pm. I will be serving this salad with either a delicious Pork Chili Verde or my vegan Jackfruit Pozole  , some Agua de Jamaica to wash it down and Mexicanish Compost Cookies for dessert. I made the salad that this was inspired by and it was delicious but some things just didn't work for me so I made some changes and tinkered with it and came up with this variation. Don't get me wrong, Rick Bayless's version was delicious but the dressing was thicker than I wanted and I found that the addition of orange juice brightened it up (and I thinned it out a bit too). So, you can make this yourself OR you can come to the Deppaneur, say hi and let me make it for you.  Beets, Roasted Fennel and Oranges with Pepita Crema adapted from Rick Bayless Ingredien...

I love me some turkey scotch broth almost as much as I love a big turkey dinner. I have shared my usual method for making soup after turkey dinner here  , but, as much as I love it, what I HATE about making it is the process. I either have to find room in my fridge for the turkey carcass or I'm forced to make stock right after dinner. Once I clean up the disaster in the kitchen (my kitchen looks like a tornado went through it after a turkey dinner) and let it simmer for a few hours it's way past this woman's bed time. But that's not the end either because I have to stay awake long enough to let it cool down sufficiently to refrigerate it only to find that there is no room for it in there anyway. All that and I still have to make the actual soup! No wonder people buy Campbell's and call it a day. So, this Instant Pot that I have been given has changed the game people. Right after dinner I broke down the bones, shoved them in the pot, added in all of the ...