The Yum Yum Factor

I really wanted Korean food the other day but I didn't feel like leaving the house, which happens. It was overcast, cold and dreary, I didn't have the car so that would also entail cramming my body onto the subway to go downtown...not today, Satan, not today. Luckily, I keep a pretty full pantry of Korean ingredients and had a couple pounds of chicken thighs in the freezer. I decided I could manage throwing a coat on over my pjs for a quick trip to the fancy pants organic market on the corner for some vegetables if it meant that I was going to be able to whip up some Spicy Korean Chicken Stew (Dakdoritang) Instead of the more traditional carrot, I threw in a sweet potato since they are both orange and added daikon because I like the texture and worked backwards on my math to adapt my regular recipe to the Instant Pot because not only did I not want to get dressed or leave the house, I also wanted it immediately. The one major change was to skin and debone the c...

It's summer. It's a bazillion degrees out there, you are invited to a BBQ and BAM! You are asked if you could bring dessert. If it were just your own family, you would throw a fiver at them and tell them to run to the store and bring back a bag of Mr Freezies but that isn't going to cut it. There is no way you are turning on the oven, so baking anything is immediately out. You could do an ice cream thing but you would have had to start planning that yesterday and you have to transport it without it melting all over the place. You could stop at the store and pick something up on the way to the party, which is actually a perfectly acceptable option but I have a job to do here, so, for today, that is out too. That leaves a trifle. Sure, you can make all of the elements yourself if you want, but why would you want to do that in this heat? Trifle requires no special skills, no craftiness and it is almost impossible to mess up but it looks like you took tons of time...

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...

When we were in Portugal, we ate some version of octopus salad everywhere we went. Some had tomato and onion, some were just bowls of chopped octopus, doused with copious amounts of olive oil, vinegar and herbs and others were brightened with lots of cilantro and lemon juice. I don't think I could even pick a favourite if I tried, but, if you put a gun to my head, I might say that it was the octopus salad we ate at Ponto Finale (check that meal out here  ). When I don't have the time or inclination to cook and prepare my own octopus, I buy a few chunks of cooked octopus in olive oil from my favourite little Italian grocery store and use that. This is a typical dinner for The Kid and I when we are on our own - just add some crusty bread and a green salad (and a frosty glass of rose for me) and you have got yourself the perfect summer meal and you never had to turn on a stove or do anything more strenuous than chop a tomato. Although I do love it with cilantro, for a ch...

It's throw back thursday and so I am sharing this recipe that I made back in March of 2011 for NoReEats and decided to make again tonight. I have made a few changes since I started making this dish in an effort to lighten it up without sacrificing any flavour because if that can't happen, I will always go with the original, full fatty creamy dish but, in this case, I am happy to report that it's every bit as delicious as the original version that sported a full cup of 35% cream. It's bad enough that we are putting bread crumbs on our pasta - we might as well just throw in a bowl of rice and some mashed potatoes, really. Think of it as an ode to carbs and just don't eat it every day. In the end, this pasta is everything I think pasta should be: quick, easy, flavourful and filling. Since we are leaving for our two week Jordanian adventure in a day and half-ACK- I am just trying to use up the food in the fridge and my fridge almost always contains arugula and b...

It's not every day that you are invited to a pickle tasting party, is it? I have been to wine tastings, beer tastings, scotch tastings and even chocolate tastings but this past weekend, my blogging buddy, Mom Who Runs  invited Shack and I to her home to taste pickles. She and I had talked pickles quite a bit and she knew that we are all mad for them and knew we would not say no. She asked me to bring something that would pair nicely with pickles and I drew a blank. I was thinking I could bring a bag of hamburgers or something or perhaps a pound of smoked meat, a loaf of rye bread and a case of Cott's Black Cherry Coke?  I think a mild cheese goes with pickles and I had a ball of Trader Joe's burrata burning a hole through my fridge door. I also had a bag of Le Grand Garden Pesto  that I was dying to try and, as luck would have it, a box of baby kale in the fridge, a few yellow and red small tomatoes and a chunk of red onion.  Most of my best invention...

We were invited to a BBQ this weekend and I wanted to bring a dessert. There was a big bag of dark purple plums sitting on the counter that I bought on a whim even though nobody really eats much fruit around here. We certainly use fruit for ice cream making and smoothies but none of us are ever likely to go and grab an actual piece of fruit and just eat it. I am not sure what possessed me to buy them because I really only wanted to eat one plum at the time but they came in a big bag and they were the price of a couple of plums at the grocery store, so the plums came home. Anyway, because I had this big bag of plums I knew I would have to bake something with them. I floated the idea of cinnamon plum ice cream to Shack but that was promptly shot down. He likes raspberry ice cream with no add ins so that is what has been going on in this house lately. I considered a plum pie but I am kind of afraid of pastry dough to be perfectly honest. Despite the fact that I adore pie, I a...

The ice cream making continues here at home with a batch of raspberry using the eggless recipe from earlier when we made Strawberry Ice Cream . Because I really can't deal with raspberry seeds, we pureed all of the fruit and strained it to make a really smooth, slightly tart ice cream. I wanted to add some little chunks of dark chocolate, but Shack was having none of that. The Kid and I like stuff in our ice cream - chocolate chunks, pieces of brownie, cookie dough or oreos. Shack, our picky toddler, likes his ice cream smooth and the only chunks he can handle are chunks of the fruit. I am not saying that this ice cream is not delicious, because it is, but what does a girl have to do to get a bit of dark chocolate chunks in her ice cream? We are going to have to work something out around here. Eggless Raspberry Ice Cream 1 cup whipping cream 1 cup 18% cream 1/2 cup sugar pinch salt 1 1/2 cup raspberries Mix the berries with 1/4 cup of the sugar and let macera...

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...