The Yum Yum Factor

I am back from a ten day trip to Barcelona and man, am I fired up! I just spent 10 days eating and drinking and exploring, I lugged home three sizes of paella pans, cazuelas, spices, dried peppers, black sea salt and a brain overloaded with ideas.  Keep your eyes peeled for my upcoming posts about my trip, about what we ate, what we saw and where we went, but, for now, here is what is happening in the upcoming month: For our March Supper Club, I am going to do a bit of a Mexican/Greek mash up. There will be tasty cocktails, great food and great dining companions, as always, so go reserve your seat now Get your tickets for our March 18 Supper Club Opaaa! Upcoming Cooking Classes for March For the cheap and cheerful crowd, I have two What's For Dinner Classes at the Musgrave Loblaws in March. You pay $15 and get a $15 dollar gift card for your trouble. March 8 March 22 Also, my next series of Instant Pot classes this month will be taking place ...

Okay, Toronto Peeps, it's a new year and we are starting up our monthly Supper Clubs at The Kingston Social House, in Toronto's East East End. The first dinner of the year, this Sunday, January 21, will feature one of my favourite meals to cook and eat - my Peruvian Flavah dinner. We start with Aguadito de Pollo, a hearty chicken soup that is full of cilantro, white rice as well as black rice, chicken, aji amarillo all topped off with crispy chicken skin.

You may have noticed that I am not keeping up with my regular pace on the blog. For the last 8 years, I've tried to add at least 1 or 2 recipes a week but my own cooking gigs have kept me out of my own kitchen since the fall. During the holiday season, I was so busy working for my friend in his catering company, that I barely made more than a piece of toast at home. Day after day, I would break down up to 40 lbs of beef into stew meat and then braise it all in the oven, making another 5 or 6 restaurant pans of scalloped potatoes, moussaka, or cutting up and marinating about a metric ton of chicken thighs followed by at least three evening parties a week so trust me, when I got home, we were ordering take out and apart from playing Candy Crush and checking twitter, I barely looked at a camera or a computer. December, in the catering business, is not for the faint of heart, weak of back or fallen of arches. Now, it's the new year and I am finally feeling like get...

I get it, I don't always feel like cooking some huge holiday meal either. I find, as my son gets older, we do less and less Christmasy stuff and spend the time off hanging out together. We go to movies, we play inappropriate games like Cards Against Humanity and visit friends because nobody has time to get together apart from Christmas. It has been a couple of years since our last, big, Xmas eve open house and I can't remember the last time I hosted a giant dinner. Our new ritual is to get up, go for dim sum and drive our Christmas Dog (we babysit her while her family flies out west to visit family) back to her family at their chalet and spend a few days drinking too much wine, eating too much food and relaxing. Now, does this mean I still don't want to eat turkey and enjoy the flavours of Christmas? Of course not. I LOVE turkey, I love stuffing, I love mashed potatoes and gravy and eggnog. Sometimes, when I can't even imagine cooking a turkey, I make something ...

It's an Ugly Sweater Party!

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...

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