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 have been taking my time, slowly converting many of my favourite recipes to work in my pressure cookers. Although I am a hard core Instant Pot fan ( I own four of them), I was given a Breville Fast Slow Pro at the end of the year to try out it.  In order to get a good feeling for it,  I have made it my personal kitchen pressure cooker, with the Instant Pots taking a well deserved break.  Like the Instant Pot, the Breville does double duty as a slow cooker, it cooks rice, it has the sauté  feature as well as a reduce feature and you can also steam things in it. It doesn't have the yogurt function, but for me, this is not a deal breaker at all as you can make yogurt without a pressure cooker and if you don't plan to make yogurt at home, you won't miss it at all. I could write up a long, drawn out review but, to be honest, I agree with pretty much everything that Laura, over at Hip Pressure Cooking, has to say in her review  so you might as well ...

I have a cooking demo coming up this weekend at Harbourfront for the Hot and Spicy Festival where will talk about Blend and Extend while serving up my Mushroom Beef Kofta . To freshen your memory, Blend and Extend is a marriage between Mushrooms Canada and Ontario Beef where you replace a portion of ground beef with ground mushrooms in your recipes. This makes your meat go farther, cuts out lots of saturated fat, adds a portion of vegetable to the dish and really just lightens up whatever you are making. Because of this, my brain is on a full on blend and extend, mushroom trajectory. Now, The Kid has been gainfully employed all summer long at Harbourfront as a nerd camp counsellor but because his bento doesn't fit in his Murse (ManPurse) that he takes to work, he has been taking a smaller lunch bag with only cold items. It has been the summer of sandwiches for the poor, young soul who has had to learn to love sandwiches in a hurry. School starts next week and school mean...

Whenever I find fresh poblano chilis at the market, I choose to see it as a sign from the cosmos, telling me that I need to make a batch of chili verde STAT. I am not one to ignore such signs but was seriously considering just taking them home to toast and freeze for a later date when I then turned the corner to see that pork shoulders were on sale. At that point it occurred to me that I would bring a pox on my house if I kept walking. It's like the universe wants us to eat more pork. Add to that the fact that I am working on a recipe that would require some sort of pulled pork and two pork roasts were in my cart before you could say Tha-tha-tha-that's all folks! Chili verde, a soupy stew of pork, tomatillos and green chilis, is more Southwestern than straight up Mexican and if we are going to be all hung up on authenticity, we should be using hatch chilis. I have been told, much like Texans refuse to call anything with beans in it chili, the fine people of the south...