The Yum Yum Factor

I enjoy the challenge of offering a vegetarian version of dishes I serve that are an equally delicious version of the meal that the carnivores are going to eat instead of completely different plate. I wanted to put  Aguadito do Pollo  on an upcoming menu and I knew I wanted to feed the vegetarians something that will have the same flavour profile and so I tried a few things. Aguadito de Pollo is a traditional Peruvian meal that is often served for breakfast after a big party aka for a hangover, making it a staple for New Year's Day or after a big wedding or party. Adding tofu was okay but not great and I also didn't feel like the Jackfruit worked - I wanted something that would really add some heartiness and also have the soft texture of the pulled chicken and neither of those options did that for me. Using a small white bean -either cannellini or navy beans- hit all the right notes. Other than no crispy chicken skin, I didn't feel like I was losing anything by replacing th...

Hello, fellow home sheltering peeps. It's been a looooong couple months, hasn't it? Where are we now, anyway? Is sourdough over? Have we started canning and panic buying all the Bell jars and pectin yet? I know that finding vegetable plants for me wee, city garden is probably going to be a hellscape, but hey, what can you do when you live in a shoe?  Aaaanyway, I have a few processed foods that I unabashedly love. I LOVE good instant ramen. I love to soup it up with poached egg, chili sauce, vegetables, leftover meat or seafood. Love it. I also love Campbells Everyday Gourmet Sweet Potato Tomatillo Soup. A big bowl of that with a grilled cheese to dip into it...ahhh. For some reason, and this precedes the pandemic so I know it's not soup panic hoarding, I haven't been able to find it for months. I had thrown some canned tomatillos in the freezer a few weeks ago and decided to try to recreate it at home. It's very weird for me to want to create a Campbe...

Mujadara, mujaddara, mejadra - I have seen many variations on the spelling and slight variations of the recipe, depending on which part of the Arab world it is coming from. Christian Arabs eat this during lent, it's popular with Jewish communities from Israel to Syria and Egypt and it should be popular with you too. Packed full of flavour and protein, it makes a great vegetarian meal alongside some steamed or roasted vegetables. I served it with harissa yogurt and shrimp fried in the shallot oil for these photos. You can drizzle some Zhug or other hot sauce, serve with yogurt or smother it in fresh herbs like mint, cilantro and parsley - that's all up to you. What I give you is a solid, basic recipe for mujadara made in the Instant Pot. Doing it in the pressure cooker means you don't have to cook the lentils and rice separately and no babysitting the rice on the stove is required. I do cook the crispy shallots in a small frying pan because I don't find that sauté ...

Tulum Ruins Hello there, my peoples! Just want to check in to let anyone who is paying attention that I am alive and well and am home after, what feels like, non stop travelling since the New Year. I have soooo much more to share about my two trips to Mexico City and my recent week near Playa del Carmen - yes, I have been to Mexico three times so far this year. Yes, I love Mexico. In the meantime, my upcoming Peruvian supper club at the Depanneur has sold out but  There are still spots left for my next Instant Pot Class  so if you are in the Toronto area, click that link and grab one before it sells out. These daytime classes are a bit of a new addition to the Depanneur and they are proving to be quite popular. So, I had to let my Friday roundup feature, The Week in Yum, lapse for the last couple of years because I was insanely busy cooking. I was working with the Kingston Social for their first 6 months, I was teaching regularly, doing recipe features for Vita...

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 the holiday season and I have decided to take off the last couple of weeks leading up to Christmas so that I can get back in my own kitchen and just cook for my family after a busy year of cooking for other people. My family, understandably, is thrilled. The cobbler's family has no shoes syndrome is real. One of the first things I tried last week was the Instant Pot Beef Dip from  Amy and Jacky at pressure cook recipes  . Their methods are so well tested and always work like a charm, and this one was fabulous, as expected. Looking for something with a bit more kick, I used their recipe as a jumping off point to make this Korean Beef Dip. I often make really sloppy, delicious grilled cheese sandwiches out of my Korean Meatloaf and immediately thought that I would LOVE to make a Korean Beef Dip - all the same flavours in the meatloaf grilled cheese with with a spicy jus to dip the sandwich in? YES PLEASE This sandwich is perfect - sharp cheddar and kimchi/gochuja...

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...

I make my  Instant Pot Butter Chicken  fairly often but I don't always plan well enough to marinate the meat overnight and I do believe that an overnight marinade is essential to achieve a rich depth of flavour in the final dish and avoid it tasting like bland chicken plunked into delicious sauce. My theory was that if I added the chicken marinade ingredients INTO the meatballs, it wouldn't have to sit for so long before I can cook the finished dish. We also really, really love meatballs. A quick search for meatballs on The Yum Yum Factor will reveal my obsession with these orbs of tender delight so it stands to reason that I eventually try to meatballify every favourite recipe at some point. I have been mulling a meatball conversion with Butter Chicken for a while but I have been so busy cooking at work, that I have barely cooked more than scrambled eggs in my own kitchen all year but I finally got around to making it this week. don't be alarmed by...

I've gotta be honest, I have not loved my attempts at making Thai beef curries in my pressure cooker up until now. It just always felt like the sauce was a little too thin and it lacked body but I didn't want to add more coconut milk and then dilute the red curry flavour. What to do? This time, after it was done the initial pressure cook, I threw in some potato and sweet potato and when it was done, much of the sweet potato had kind of broken down and melted into the sauce, thickening it up nicely without diluting the intensity of the red curry paste. I also really like the sweetness it adds - it really balances out the heat of the red curry beautifully and kind of mellows it slightly without diluting the flavour, which is exactly what it was missing. BAM Another recipe finally converted to work in the Instant Pot (you can make it in any brand of electric pressure cooker, of course). This curry usually simmers for at least two hours on the stove top so cutting that...

You may have noticed that I am not keeping up with my regular pace on the blog. For the last 8 years, I've tried to add at least 1 or 2 recipes a week but my own cooking gigs have kept me out of my own kitchen since the fall. During the holiday season, I was so busy working for my friend in his catering company, that I barely made more than a piece of toast at home. Day after day, I would break down up to 40 lbs of beef into stew meat and then braise it all in the oven, making another 5 or 6 restaurant pans of scalloped potatoes, moussaka, or cutting up and marinating about a metric ton of chicken thighs followed by at least three evening parties a week so trust me, when I got home, we were ordering take out and apart from playing Candy Crush and checking twitter, I barely looked at a camera or a computer. December, in the catering business, is not for the faint of heart, weak of back or fallen of arches. Now, it's the new year and I am finally feeling like get...

The Kingston Social and I are teaming up again for the new year and resurrecting our monthly Supper Clubs, starting in January. For my first menu, I will be doing a Yum style Peruvian dinner. My MVP pop up was one of my most popular of 2017 but, not one to rest of my laurels,  I really wanted to add something new to the meal and because it will be in January, soup just makes sense. This particular soup is based on the classic Peruvian soup, Aguadito de Pollo, also known as Levanta Muertos which translates into a soup to wake the dead due to it's restorative, nourishing properties and I have been told that it may or may not be great for a hangover. I am down with that. The soup, at it's most simple, is made with tons of cilantro, chicken and vegetables, usually served with whole, skin on chicken legs or thighs but that is not really my thing. Instead, I removed the skin, crisped it up until it was transformed into a chicken chicharon/cracker. It is crispy, salty an...