The Yum Yum Factor

  More adventures in adopting a more heart healthy diet mean more vegetarian meals with less sodium, healthier fats and a soupçon of cheese to punch it up. We have been having a lot of braised beans like the braised romano beans on polenta that I did for Ontario Beans. these beans have become a weekly thing in our house I know that all kinds of beans are now approved so it was time to move onto lentils. My favourite lentils are either Beluga or Du Puy but I haven't been able to find those on any of my online ordering platforms and I have been using plain old green lentils and, rest assured, they work just fine. Just don't use the red lentils because they disintegrate into mush, which is delightful in other recipes, but not in this one. If you use low sodium broth, use less kosher salt. If you use a salt free broth, you will have to up your salt a bit but the roasted tomato/feta and chili oil add so much flavour and saltiness that you don't need as much as you might normally...

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 ...

What to do with a 1 lb bag of gorgeous, organic baby red potatoes? I have been eyeing this recipe for Baby Potato Roast  on Relish the Bite forever and so I used it as my inspiration for this dish. Many of the spices she uses will not be familiar or easy to find for many people and I already have my own spices that I like to use so I made quite a few changes. Also, I thought some beluga lentils would be nice so they could get a bit crispy and add some protein so those were added to the mix as well but this delicious recipe was the inspiration for my own Indian Spiced Baby Potatoes. Earth Fresh Foods asked me if I would come up with a recipe using their Organic Red Baby Potatoes if they sent me a bag, so, of course, I said yes. Earth Fresh are Canadian producers of premium potatoes, carrots and onions but they specialize in potatoes, sourcing their products in 9 Provinces and 38 States. These are some nice potatoes and you can find them at Longos and Metro. Because t...

The Contest Once again, the time comes in a young girl's life where she has to come up with a recipe for the annual Lentil's Canada recipe contest. This year, the theme is "Star of the Show" and all of the entrants must make a short video to go with their recipe, so here is mine   - please feel free to go and watch it, like it, share it using the hashtag #LoveLentils . You can see all of the great entries  here  2016 has been declared the International Year of the Pulse by the UN and the fact that Canada is the world's largest producer and exporter of lentils was not lost on me. Even though I cook with them often anyway, I am making a concerted effort to make sure they are on the menu at least a couple times a week this winter. Last year, my Dulce De Lentil Ice Cream took first place in the Dessert Catagory, was featured in the Ebook along with my Spicy Caramel Corn With Crispy Lentils , a runner up in the freestyle catagory. The year before, my C...

I think I might start a series called "Instant Pot Diaries" where I can share my experiments and fails and not just the successes because otherwise I think it makes it seem like everything I make works like clockwork the first try. This couldn't be farther from the truth, to be honest. Some things come out perfectly the 1st, 2nd and 3rd times and other things require a bit more tinkering. From now on, when I am offering tips, lessons learned, failures and other times where I fall flat on my face, I will tag it "instant pot diaries" so you can have all of my shame in one convenient place.

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...

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...

So, it's done. Another year, another batch of exciting lentil recipes for the contest over at Canadian Lentils. This year I deep fried them, I roasted them, I turned them into caramel and praline in my attempts to not hide the lentils, but to whip them into submission, force them to break out of their little lentil rut and celebrate them.  All in all, I am pretty exited about all three recipes and encourage you guys to try them out and see how delicious a lentil can be.

I love the way the crispy black beluga lentils mimic caviar  This is it. This is my final entry for the  Lentil Recipe Revelations Challenge  and I think it's a doozer. I had made some of this beluga lentil za'atar at the beginning of my recipe development phase and although I wasn't sure what I was going to do with it, I knew they would make an appearance. They are perfect when you want to add a bit of crunch to something and the addition of the za'atar turns the lentils into an actual condiment. I have been sprinkling them on food and eating them straight out of the container for weeks now while I munch and I think. I munch and I think. What to do with these brilliant little black pearls? I found a beet dip in the cookbook, Jerusalem and fell madly in love with it, making variations of it all the time. How you can not fall in love with anything this delicious that is also so bright and colourful? For this appetizer, I used less yogurt so that it is thicker-...

Like any normal human being, I love caramel corn. I also love my roasted lentils AND I love gochujang, that magic, sticky, sweet, spicy Korean hot pepper paste. I bought my first tub of gochujang in a mall called K-Town so, naturally, I am calling this confection "K Corn". Props to my Korean grocery store peeps who are responsible for igniting my love affair with Korean food. This candied popcorn is sweet, it's spicy and it's crunchy, thanks to crispy roasted french lentils and nutty sesame seeds. I had to hide this stuff just so I could have enough to photograph because both of my guys wouldn't stop wandering into the kitchen to sneak handfuls of this caramel corn all night. This is the only snack you will ever need again. It took me a few tries to get the caramel just right but using the base recipe from The Kitchn  as my foundation, it finally all came together. You can find gochujang  at any Korean or Japanese grocery store as well as most general ...

As much as I love roasted cauliflower, sometimes I get a bit tired of it and this past week, I realized that I had been staring at the last head of cauliflower for days, not quite knowing what to do with it. I had already made Korean Cauliflower Wings for The Neighbour's Super Bowl party and I wanted something similar but not made with a batter and a little lighter and, maybe some crunch would be nice. Sometimes I just walk around for days, obsessively thinking "spicy, crunchy. Spicy, crunchy, gochujang. Spicy, crunchy, gochujang, cauliflower" until it just sort of sneaks up from behind me and whacks me in the head. "ROASTED CAULIFLOWER WITH CRISPY LENTILS AND GOCHUJANG SAUCE" These days I am knee deep in lentils because I am trying to come up with some new recipes for the annual  Revelations Challenge over at Canadian Lentils . I have been doing all sorts of interesting thing to these little pulses for a couple of days now but one of the best things I ha...

It's that time of year again folks! It's time for this year's  Lentil Recipe Revelations Challenge  and I am ready to try my hand at reinventing the lentil again with three interesting new recipes, but first up: Dessert. Last year, my  "Cauliflower Wings Three Ways" took the grand prize. This year I have put even more pressure on myself to top that feat with something new and fresh, but, most importantly, something delicious that doesn't try to hide the lentil flavour. So, all that said, my first recipe is this ice cream. It started with the lentil praline, which is delicious on it's own and a great nut free praline option for people who have allergies. I had to eventually hide the canister of praline or it was going to disappear before I even had a chance to do anything with it because it's just that addictive. It's nutty and sweet but the taste of the roasted lentil still shines through. Originally, I was going to just do a ...

It was not only Easter weekend, but the birthday weekend for The Kid so there was a whole lot of eating going on. The first stop on our birthday weekend culinary extravaganza was a visit to Luckee , Susar Lee's brand spanking new Chinese restaurant in the Soho Metropolitan Hotel on Wellington. You know, I don't think that Susar Lee has ever actually served straight up Chinese food in the city before? The first time I ate at one of his restaurants was a million years ago at Lotus, his first, tiny restaurant located in an old house downtown. It was the late 80's and I was in my early twenties and knew NOTHING about fine dining. I would save up my pennies, make a reservation for 1, get all dressed up and go there alone to enjoy a meal like nothing I had ever tasted. I had my first taste of lamb at Lotus. I dined alone because nobody I knew would spend that kind of money on dinner and although I didn't really understand what I was eating, I knew it was special and it...