The Yum Yum Factor

I am not trying to reinvent the wheel here, or anything, but a friend made Middle Eastern Lentil Soup and so I decided to get some going as well. This is a soup I cook all the time and it's one of my favourite comfort foods but today, it's humid and dark and rainy and I need something with a bit more kick to it. I made my regular recipe, more or less but swapped out the spices for my favourite Turkish chili flakes, added a drizzle of my Crispy Garlic Chili Oil because that always makes everything better and a mound of my crispy fried shallots or onions that I always have in the pantry. They are tasty and easy and cheap and you can get them in any type of Asian grocery store. Wow, that's a lot of crispy things going on. Urfa Biber Maras Both are available online if you aren't lucky enough to have a Turkish grocery shop nearbye. I put them in everything and go through an alarming amount of them. Thankfully, I buy big jars of them at the Turkish store so I never run out. T...

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...

  I have been taxed with the task of making our food more heart healthy and although I have always assumed that we already eat very well, thank you very much, I have been shocked by how much sodium we consume. SHOCKED, I say. One of our favourite things to eat is ramen and when I did some digging, I realized that each bowl of delicious spicy miso ramen had over 3000mg of sodium and that isn't even accounting for some of the add ins. This will not do. I have spent weeks working on my favourite recipe and I have managed to get it down to under 700mg of sodium per bowl, which is still a bit high but nothing close to what we were used to. There is also some disagreement about how we process the sodium in miso and although it is significant, a traditional Japanese diet which is high is miso and soy sauce does not result in any sort of widespread heart disease and, in fact, may actually be considered part of a heart healthy diet. I am trying to cut the difference and not worry too much a...

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...

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...

I am Back!! I have been sick since mid April, hence my absence from the blog. I bet you thought I had quit, didn't you? After a lengthy bout with some sort of lung plague, I am finally emerging from the fog and forced myself to get in the kitchen today. Okay, I have been in the kitchen but it's been all grilled cheese sammies, frozen potstickers and soup, mostly made by The Kid as I croaked out instructions from my sick bed on the couch, Netflix droning on in the background. I have a Supper Club coming up and the first course will be a version of this Basque style Leek and Potato Soup with Cod and Serrano Ham so it seemed like it was as good a time as any to whip up a batch and make sure it is as delicious as I recall. It is. The Traditional Soup, called Porrusalda, if often made with cod but you would normally add a whack of reconstituted salt cod and cook it IN the broth for a chunk, rustic soup. It's absolutely delicious and homey and wonderful but I n...

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...

What to do with a couple of leftover, cooked chorizo, two potatoes and some leeks? MAKE SOUP!

You might have noticed that I am not publishing new recipes quite as often as I used to lately, but, trust me, I have a good excuse. A few months ago, I was hired on to design the menu for a new spot in Toronto's east end, The Kingston Social House. They wanted to launch a wine/cocktail spot with a small but tasty menu that only opens from Thursday to Saturday nights. There are lots of other exciting things happening on the other days - Brunch on the weekends by Thick Cut brunch , regular community based workshops, an upcoming Tuesday night Tapa thing by a group of chefs.... it's bringing the little neighbourhood of Birchcliffe Village back to life! Kingston Social Nights belongs to the women Now that I am the executive cooker lady at The Kingston Social , aside from the regular menu, I have to come up a weekly special as well as a soup and this eats up a ton of my cooking energy. If you live in Toronto, I invite you to come to the Social for a drink and somethin...

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...