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...

The weather has been so lovely this week and suddenly,  February feel more like March so I am having a hard time getting excited about making more stick to the ribs weekly specials at The Kingston Social. My brain is all about spring and sun and the need to be warm so all I want to eat is ceviche and fish and salad, drink Gin and Tonics on the porch and pretend it's time to start on the garden. With that in mind, I looked to North Africa for inspiration after making some carrots roasted with ras el hanout, a Moroccan spice blend, during my last cooking class at Loblaws. Ras el Hanout (means head of the shop or top shelf in Arabic) = North Africa = chermoula and chermoula = some type of seafood and since my latest obsession happens to be sous vide shrimp, a dish was born. You might think it silly to cook shrimp using sous vide when they already cook in minutes on the stove top but sous vide results in the most amazing texture. Since I intended to almost pickle the shrimp...

Last week I hosted my monthly Supper Club at The Kingston Social, here in Toronto and the dinner was a Middle Eastern Feast with a touch of Jamaican thrown in for good measure. Each time I host, I like to try one new dish that isn't always mine but that I am dying to try out and this time, I really wanted to make this Moroccan Orange Cake  on the blog, Kitchen Confidante. I found the recipe so intriguing - using fresh bread crumbs in place of flour, the idea of soaking it in an orange syrup afterwards so it would almost like a cakey baklava was screaming YAAAAASSSSSSS. So, on the day, I realized that I only had an 8" spring form pan but the recipe called for normal cake pan so I borrowed one of those. I buttered and floured the pan and I made the cake only to discover that it WOULD NOT COME OUT! I had to, basically, dig the cake out of the pan as it stuck to the bottom and I found myself with three chunks of cake and a whack of crumbs on a day where I was going to have to...

Sometimes the only thing that dictates my soup choices are the foods that are going to rot in my fridge if I don't use them up and although that doesn't sound very appealing on paper,  I don't think that it is unique. I rarely plan out a soup and then go and shop for all of the ingredients and that is what happened this week. Soup is THE perfect way to throw whatever you have lying around in a pot with some stock - leftover roasted veggies, fresh veggies, it's all good. Because I had bought a huge bag of carrots to make last week's turkey scotch broth   and we don't eat a ton of carrots as an actual vegetable, I wanted to make sure I used them up. I poked through a few cookbooks and checked online and found this recipe at Taste Space on tastespotting and it was pretty close to what I was looking for. I didn't want anything gingery or overly sweet, which carrot soups can often be. This Moroccan carrot soup was going to be my Friday soup, with just a cou...

I really love soup. I love almost any soup and I can't recall the last time I ate a soup that I disliked enough to think "well, I will die happy if I never have to eat THAT soup again". Now that winter is closing in on us, I will most likely make at least one soup a week until spring when I will become obsessed with grilling and forget all about soup. This is my first soup of the week and I will endeavour to share a new soup every week and I will call it "It's Friday So It Must Be Soup!" I love red lentils and so I am always on the look out for new and exiting things to do with them. While I was perusing Taste Spotting, I found this great looking recipe for Morrocan Red Lentil Soup at  Alice In Paris Loves Art and Tea  and it will definately be something I make again this winter. 2 Tbsp Olive Oil or Canola (25 ml)   2 Onions, chopped   5 cloves of Garlic, minced   2 Celery stalks , chopped (1 Carrot ,chopped.....my addition)   1 tsp Pepper (...