The Yum Yum Factor

It's no secret that I am a lover of all things custard and caramel. Creme brulee? I'm there Creme caramel? Can't stop me. Dulce de Leche? Hold my earrings

If you like ceviche, you are going to love aguachile.  A true aguachile (chile water) from the Sinaloa region of Mexico, at it's most basic, is made by pouring a spicy puree of chiles and water over raw shrimp, some red onion, radish and cucumber. From there, people add cilantro, lime juice and more but, unlike ceviche, you are going to eat it when the shrimp are still pretty raw - sort of like a spicy, Mexican shrimp sashimi. This requires ridiculously fresh, sushi grade seafood and since that is not always available to us, I like to use cooked seafood (or, you can marinate the raw shrimp/fish in lime juice for an hour or so in advance as you would for a traditional ceviche before adding the aguachile for serving). If you don't like octopus, you can substitute any seafood you like - if you don't want to eat it raw, cook it lightly beforehand. I am not sure I would use $$$ sushi grade tuna, for example, only because its so expensive and this sauce is very s...

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...

I love a challenge. I was asked by MSC (the Marine Stewardship Council) to throw a little #OceanToPlate dinner for friends using MSC certified seafood and because that felt too easy, I chose to invite my friend who claims to hate seafood. To add to the challenge, she and her husband are on a restrictive diet at the moment and so they couldn't have rice, potatoes, beets, or pasta which are all my usual suspects when I am feeding them.

Never mind when Harry Met Sally. Whatever. Tonight, my new Anova met Instant Pot and it was glorious. Although I just got a new  Anova Precision Cooker Wifi  , I have had an Anova sous vide for over a year now and I love it but this one is even cooler.

I'm not gonna lie, when the fine people from Foods from Spain offered me a free case or two of persimmons to experiment with, there was no way I was going to refuse. After being introduced to this fruit in Spain,  I realized that we only eat them raw and that I have never tried to cook with them before. Now was my chance to rectify that situation. These sweet, seedless little beauties have finally arrived in Ontario all the way from Ribera del Xuquer, Spain (at Metro and Sobeys) and they will be available until mid January. Actually, they are available until January or until they are all gone so you should grab some soon to incorporate into your holiday menus. Because these Persimon®  persimmons don't need to be ripened, they are ready to use straight from the store. Knowing that they are already ripe takes some of the guesswork out of purchasing a fruit that might not be so familiar and you won't have to stand in the aisle, shaking it, squeezing it and knocking ...

EastSide Social  Last week, we finally made it to EastSide Social in Lesliville , admittedly a little late to the party. People have been raving about this new east end eatery since it opened last summer but, for some reason, I had it in my head that this was going to be straight up Halifax cuisine and, this will earn me some death threats, I have never visited the east coast for the food. To me, I have memories of lobsters boiled to within an inch of their lives, weird tasting donairs that the locals go mad for and all to often, thick, gluey chowder. I have always loved the east coast for the people, the scenery and the ocean and just kind of resigned myself to the food situation.

I love the idea of pork souvlaki. I love the flavours, I love the charcoal flavour that the grill imparts and I love any meat that gets dipped in lots of tzatziki. What I don't love is dry, leathery meat and, unfortunately, that is almost always the case when people try to cook small chunks of lean meat over the grill. That's where sous vide comes in. I just made my regular marinade and instead of cutting the pork into bite sized pieces, I cut my pork tenderloins into 1" slices and then after 24 hours of soaking in the fridge, I sous vide them before cutting some of the disks into chunks and skewering them (I left half of them as is and grilled the medallions, which worked even better) right before we threw them on the grill for a quick char. I finally have my perfect pork souvlaki - tender, moist (OH MY GOD THAT HORRIBLE WORD AGAIN) and with all the wonderful souvlaki flavours but without the dry, overcooked bits that are almost unavoidable when you grill them fro...

The Kid's sweet 16 is upon us and we always kick off the birthday week with a family BBQ. We are going out for fancy pants Japanese on the actual day so i had thought a Greek mezes style meal would be nice and was planning to do my usual pork and chicken souvlaki but using the sous vide this time. The more I thought about it, the idea of doing two kinds of souvlaki felt kind of boring. I really wanted to sous vide the pork for souvlaki to see if it would solve the dilemma of dry pork, one of my pork souvlaki pet peeves (which it did, recipe coming soon), so that left the chicken. What could I do with chicken that would be easy to feed a crowd, that could be made ahead and just heated up before dinner? As I stared at my tray of boneless, skinless chicken thighs, visions of meatballs began to dance in my head. What if I threw the thighs into the meat grinder and added all of the flavours that would go into the souvlaki marinade along with some ground mushrooms for good meas...

I have added a new feature to the blog, right over there ------------> It's a yummly button so that you can save my recipes straight to your yummly box. I have been using yummly, myself, forever and for some reason I just never got around to adding The Yum Yum Factor to their gene pool. If you aren't using yummly to search for recipes, it's time to change that so go over there and check it out but first, go straight to The Yum Yum Factor page   (don't worry if there isn't anything there yet - this is a new venture so it will take time to get it going) So, let's move on to something to eat, I am starving. Char siu is that sweet, sticky Chinese BBQ pork that you see hanging from hooks in the window of any decent Chinese restaurant. I make my own version of char sui all the time at home so it made sense that my first attempt at doing some sous vide pork tenderloin would be a batch of this stuff, right? I didn't really change anything, apart from t...

Okay, time for a sous vide recap: Again, what is sous vide and what the hell is an immersion heater/circulator/cooker?

This is my first attempt at using one of my own recipes for the sous vide cooker and I am kind of going rogue with the technique which is probably why it was a mix of mainly success with some bumps in the road. I have been wanting to make another asian flavoured meatball like my Vietnamese meatballs but with a nod to Japan for a long time now. We LOVE our little Vietnamese meatballs made with chicken or pork but it's really easy to bake them just a smidge too long and dry them out. Now, with sous vide, they never overcook so, like the sausages, all they require is a little kiss with a hot pan afterwards to brown them up.

Okay, so, for me, the two reasons for owning a sous vide are the ability to make the perfect steak and also the perfect egg. With a couple of weeks under my belt, I kind of feel like I have a handle on those two things and I am ready to move on.

I wish I was a Mariachi. At least I wish I had Mariachi pants.

I love sausages. The only thing I DON'T love about sausages is that they can be a bugger to cook. When you grill them, you can end up with half of them burnt on the outside but still underdone on the inside and then the other ones are overcooked and dried out. Don't even get me started about them busting open before they are done and losing all of their delicious juices. In the winter, I poach them, which works well, but I couldn't help but think that sous vide might be the answer to all of my sausage dreams. As always, I read a hundred articles about sous vide pork sausages before I started and the general consensus was to cook them at 60C or 140F for anywhere from 1 to 2 hours. I had three types of pork sausage and, as you can see down there, I sealed some of them in my Food Saver bags and I left the two Italian sweet sausages for the zip lock bag. I used my Anova Precision Cooker with my polycarbonate bin and I watched House of Cards while they cooked. I...

 So, here is the first important lesson that I just learned for you, you're welcome. We were out and about and decided to splurge on an expensive bit of meat at The Friendly Butcher on Yonge St. for our next sous vide dinner. Because we had made an amazing strip loin in an hour, we were excited to see what kind of results we would get with this cut, a favourite of ours for the grill. We get home, I prepare a mojo to marinate the steak in since we decided we would turn it into tacos and then I sat down to check on times and temps for flank steak. Well, as it happens, cooking a sous vide flank steak is not ANYTHING like making a strip loin because flank steak requires five million years in the water bath. I read at least 20 recipes and charts and it looked like it was going to require anywhere between 18 hours and 48 hours. So much for tacos for dinner. Flank steak is considered a leaner, tougher cut of meat so it requires a much longer cooking time to soften the...

the 13 minute at 75C egg was almost perfect but that white was still just a bit too runny for me I'm a bit obsessed with poached eggs and, to be honest, for most of my life, I never made them at home. They are fussy, the white are always all over the place, I either undercook them or overcook them half the time and I always have to drain off the water from the bottom of the bowl before I eat them. Never mind the headache of trying to make them for more than one or two people, keeping them all hot, holding them over in a water bath, yadda yadda. It's just easier to order them in a restaurant that specializes in great breakfasts. With that in mind, it makes sense that the very first thing I made with my hand dandy Anova sous vide cooker was a poached egg. Actually, I made half a dozen poached eggsI had barely busted that baby out of the packaging before I was firing up a big pot of water. At first, I was cooking them at between 63C and 65C , which is touted as being THE...

Okay, so I am just starting to embark on this Sous Vide adventure and I am going to take you along for the ride. I promise to be honest, to share my colossal failures as well as my successes and to spare you the expense, frustration and heartache that goes hand in hand with learning any new cooking technique. Because I love, I will do that for you.

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.