The Yum Yum Factor

It’s officially soup season and soup is where your electric pressure cooker becomes indispensable, especially with soups that contain dried beans, like this one. To make this on the stove would take twice as long with dried chickpeas and ain’t nobody got time for that. I know I am the Instant Pot lady but lately, I have using my Breville Fast Slow Pro in the kitchen and I am loving it again. The brand of electric pressure cooker you have in your kitchen is the best kind of pressure cooker - they all cook the same, timing doesn't change although sometime the functions have different names - your saute feature might not be called saute, older Instant Pots have a manual button and the newer ones have a pressure cook button in it's place but it's the same thing. This is a really lovely flavour with the warmth of the cinnamon and the heat of the harissa finished off with the brightness of the fresh herbs and lemon juice. North American cuisine rarely u...

It’s winter, it’s dreary and it’s cold and we all want some comfort food, right? My problem is that my idea of comfort food and my guy's idea of comfort food are not the same thing. This week he asked for Shepherd’s Pie. I have made turkey shepherd’s pie that tastes like Thanksgiving dinner that I liked but other than that, it’s really not my favourite dish. He doesn’t like lamb so that’s out and I just find the basic ground beef filling to be boring. Don't send me hate mail because I think Shepherd's Pie is boring, okay? I want to make something that will make everyone happy so I had to put my thinking cap on. my controversial beef patty pops Why not make a filling that I really like and top it with some mashed something or other and just call it a day? What I really wanted was something that was a bit spicy, like a Jamaican beef patty and I thought sweet potato would give a nice balance to the heat from the scotch bonnets. Patty filling is the right consist...

So, After searching for my recipe for pierogies in vain, I realized that I had posted it on my other blog, NoReEats  and it was originally posted on Feb 14, 2011. NoReEats was a year long challenge with two friends where we all commited to never repeating a recipe for dinner for an entire year. Each of us had to share a dinner twice a week (sharing the 7th day on a rotation) and, let me tell you, it was the WORST year of my life. Even the most creative cook with the most receptive family falls back on family favourites and when you take those away, pandemonium ensues. Normally, I repost just the recipe when I do this and skip whatever I wrote to precede it but this one was funny and I felt like it deserved a full repost. It has it all: marital discord over food pine mouth a great recipe So, in the spirit of #TBT or #ThrowBackThursday I give you How a Pierogi Saved My Marriage Feb 10   Garlic Roasted Cauliflower Pasta Feb 11   Sopa de Lima Feb 12 ...

For the last four days, I can't eat anything but soup after a difficult molar extraction. I know you feel me. There is only so much miso soup a gal can eat before she realizes that she is about to eat her own foot and when that happens, it's time to whip up something a little more hearty. My brain wants to eat steak and potato chips but my mouth has other ideas. When I make anything with potatoes, I always like to throw in a sweet potato to make it a bit more nutritious, flavourful and to give it some beautiful colour while I'm at it. Making it in the pressure cooker makes an easy soup, even easier and we are always on board with that. When you factor in the time it takes for the soup to come to pressure, you probably are not saving a ton of time but what you can do is throw everything in the pot, set the timer and walk away, catch up on American Horror Story and not worry that the pot is boiling over or losing too much liquid. Because there is no evaporat...

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...