The Yum Yum Factor

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 ...

In today's admission of food snobbery,  I had convinced myself that I hated the idea of a make ahead breakfast casserole type dish. Monkey bread could go take a hike and if you thought I was going to eat soggy white bread french toast in a casserole dish, you had another thing coming but when it was time to whip up a few brunch dishes at the request of a friend's husband that I could drop off the night before, it kept creeping into my brain. I made a frittata, which is always good the next day but everything I thought I wanted to make that would be more on the sweet side of things worked best made on the day. I was pretty sure my friend would love a french toast bake though and since it was her birthday brunch, not mine, I set out to make one that would make me happy as well. I used croissants in place of bread and, trust me, this is the one time that those doughy, bread like grocery store croissants work better than a really well made, flaky croissant, so get those. They...

This recipe is an oldie but a goodie and what with the weather holding fast at -30000556C for the last week or so, a young girl's thoughts turn to comfort foods. It's been all stews, soups and things that bubble up in the oven around here. This shepherds pie is a lightened up version of the classic, subbing chicken in for the ground meat, it leaves out the cream in favour of a mixture of stock and evaporated milk and you replace 1/3 of the potato /sweet potato with cauliflower for the topping. If you really want to lighten things up , you can replace as much as half of the potato with cauliflower if you like but it won't be quite as creamy. As always, feel free to change up your veg - if you don't like zucchini, replace it with something you do like - you know the drill by now. It's not that I don't enjoy a heavier, meatier shepherds pie once in a while but when I can make something a bit healthier without sacrificing the Yum, I like to do that. Chick...

In conjunction with my Misura giveaway , I was given the task of coming up with a recipe featuring some of their products. As soon as I saw this sedani pasta, I knew what I wanted to make immediately and so they sent me some pasta and a bag of whole wheat rusks, which are perfect for bread crumb making. Back when I first started blogging, one of my first dishes was a chili verde lasagna . One  of the reasons I started blogging in the first place was to participate in my friend's month long lasagna challenge. Jen, from Piccante Dolce , was hosting this challenge and she encouraged me to start food blogging so I took that opportunity to try the whole thing out back in November of 2010. Clearly, it worked out well because here I am, carrying the torch, although Jen has taken some time off to start a family. The other dish I made for this challenge was pastitsio , which is kind of like Greek lasagna. For years I have been toying with the idea of doing a bunch of fusion style pastit...

ATTENTION PLEASE MY FRIENDS: I don't know what is going on with blogger right now but it seems that my blog is possessed by demons that make my normal looking posts publish looking like they are all out of whack, the wrong colour font, the wrong size and, well the wrong font altogether. I am trying to figure out a way to work around this demonic possession but, for the moment, it is going to look like I have lost my mind and I ask for your forgiveness, your patience and a vial of holy water, a virgin goat and  these guys. Oh, and ask them to bring Chip All of my American friends are usually pretty disgusted when you describe the difference between a Bloody Mary and a Bloody Caesar to them. I didn't realize that Clamato juice was a Canadian thing at all until I was in my mid twenties and tried to order a caesar , probably in Miami, and nobody believed that we actually drank our vodka with tomato clam juice. Who can be happy with a vodka with plain old tomato juic...

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...

Today, I made something that I never, ever thought I would make. It is something that i have never eaten and have never wanted to eat. The Food Network Canada cooking club challenge for March is a tuna noodle casserole and to be honest, everything about tuna noodle casserole makes me queasy. Hot canned tuna in a creamy sauce just doesn't do it for me. At all. We don't even really do mac and cheese and I think it's just that I don't really like casseroles in general. On the other hand, I really like the monthly cooking club challenges and although I have clearly put it off as long as possible, it was now or never since March will be over before we know it. I mentioned making it last night and found out that even Shack had never eaten tuna noodle casserole but he was willing to try it. I had toyed with the idea of getting a piece of real tuna and searing it and doing something with that but what if we all hated it? How bitter would I be if I wasted a 20 dollar pie...