The Yum Yum Factor

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...

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...

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

You can keep your because I have been craving my brand of KFC - Spicy Korean "Fried" Chicken- all week. They are like the sexiest little chicken nuggets on earth - all spicy, sweet and crispy. YUM Traditional Korean Fried Chicken calls for double deep fried chicken served with or without and addictive, spicy/sweet gochujang sauce and, personally, I can't get enough of it. Because I don't really like to deep fry at home all that much I usually "oven fry" my chicken and when I really want to make it even more comforting, I just make some boneless, chicken nuggets so that I don't have to wrestle with bones and all that comes with an intact chicken leg. Sometimes a girl just doesn't want to deal with tendons and skin. My Spicy Korean "Fried" Chicken Recipe Regardless of what style of KFC you like, you are going to need some potato salad, right? Since this is Korean Fried Chicken, it stands to reason that I am going to make K...

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...

So, we all want to try to make better choices when we are buying food, right? We try to figure out which foods really need to be organic and which foods need to be, at least, certified hormone free. We are encouraged to go for a drive, meet farmers and see how their animals are raised, go to farmer's market and forge relationships with the growers and make better, informed purchases.  That's all very well until we come to seafood. How are we supposed to meet the sea farmers when it's best to eat wild seafood? How are we supposed to know how to check to see how the fish was caught, who caught it and whether something is overfished? Not so easy to do on our own. That's where the MSC comes in. The Marine Stewardship Council is an international, non profit organization that was formed to address them problem of unsustainable fishing and make sure that there are seafood supplies going forward. They work with fisheries, suppliers and retailers to encourage...

If you are not lucky enough to have a nonna of your very own, you can soothe your inner Italian soul with Per La Famiglia, Memories and Recipes of Southern Italian Home Kitchen, the newest cookbook by Emily Richards. Part cookbook, part scrapbook, the book is full of photos, memories and family stories and as soon as my complimentary copy showed up on my doorstep, I read the whole thing, cover to cover. I remember Emily Richards from the Canadian Living Test Kitchen back when I was a new mom and spent hours on end watching the food network. Alongside Elizabeth Baird, she injected a youthful enthusiasm for food that helped to inspire me to get out of bed and back into the kitchen again. Fast forward to today and Emily is still inspiring Canadians to get into the kitchen and cook delicious, whole foods as part of the Canadian Living Test Kitchen, regular daytime tv guest spots, cooking classes and cookbooks. The stories reflect the immigrant story for many, ma...

Because I love a challenge, I agreed to accept a giant vat of BioSteel Whey Protein Isolate , which is their brand name for protein powder, in order to come up with some tasty, protein rich recipes. Protein powder is not just for body builders and NHL hockey players, you know. It can be a godsend for people who need more protein and moms trying to sneak a bit into their picky kid's diet but the problem lies in the quality of the protein powders that are out there. Many other powders can contain stuff like processed soy, artificial flavours and sweeteners, fake colour and synthetic nutrients that are not all that easily absorbed by our bodies. BioSteel was developed by NHL trainer, Matt Nichol, who was sure he could do better and BioSteel was born. If it's good enough for Mats Sundin, it's good enough for me. The classic way for mere mortals to use it is to throw some into a morning smoothie but that can get boring and not everyone likes smoothies so that'...

This recipe is an oldie but a goodie and what with the weather holding fast at -30000556C for the last week or so, a young girl's thoughts turn to comfort foods. It's been all stews, soups and things that bubble up in the oven around here. This shepherds pie is a lightened up version of the classic, subbing chicken in for the ground meat, it leaves out the cream in favour of a mixture of stock and evaporated milk and you replace 1/3 of the potato /sweet potato with cauliflower for the topping. If you really want to lighten things up , you can replace as much as half of the potato with cauliflower if you like but it won't be quite as creamy. As always, feel free to change up your veg - if you don't like zucchini, replace it with something you do like - you know the drill by now. It's not that I don't enjoy a heavier, meatier shepherds pie once in a while but when I can make something a bit healthier without sacrificing the Yum, I like to do that. Chick...

When Dorset Cereals offered to send out a box of samples to 15 members of the Food Bloggers of Canada I was all over that like a plump pug on poutine. It was an easy choice because I already know that I really like Dorset granola and, to be honest, I don't really want to be taking free stuff from companies that I don't already like because I hate having to say bad stuff about people's products. It's so much easier to just accept things that I like because I prefer to keep things positive as much as I can. Also, I am afraid that if I diss somebody's Cheesits they are going to send their Cheesit hit men out in the night to whack me. Easier to just accept good stuff and keep it real, right?

 So, this is the first post of my first food blog so i probably should have picked something that is tried and true, something that i already know will wow the crowd but I have decided i have to use up that bit of sweet potato and those three rotting bananas so Sweet Potato Banana Muffins it is. It was either that or Sweet Potato Banana Chowder and that just didn't sound appetizing to me. (Just to be safe, I am also making Whole Wheat Boule with caramelized onions and old cheddar because bread is never terrible)   I searched the internet to see if there are actually any recipes for this and i was pleasantly surprised to see that i am not the first nut to want to pair these two ingredients. I decided to follow  this recipe i found on Noshings  with a few changes. I am going to use brown sugar instead of white sugar , i am adding some pumpkin pie spice because Little Shack is all hopped on all things pumpkin pie right now and i am adding some pecans for cru...