I used a combination of asian mushrooms (fresh and dried) to make a hearty Chinese gravy that is quick and easy to make. I served it over a plate of steamed soft tofu. You could also serve this mushroom gravy over steamed broccoli or a plate of stir fried Chinese vegetables.
Photo below: This dish would have been more visually appealing if I had used fresh shimeji (aka beech) mushrooms, but they weren’t in season at the time.
I had a variety of fresh herbs left over from making herbed focaccia, so I bought a small log of goat cheese, covered it with herbs, and enjoyed it warm with grilled vegetables. Crumble it and use it in recipes the way you would with plain goat cheese. When entertaining, this makes an elegant spread for crackers and it makes a great addition to any cheese platter. Read the rest of this entry »
If you love the taste of fresh Italian parsley or if you have a ton of it in your herb garden, try making a parsley salad. It can be eaten as a side salad or it can be used as a garnish. I suggest only using young parsley as parsley leaves toughen as they mature.
During my search for my favourite oatmeal raisin cookies (recipe here), I came up with a buttery, chewy, oatmeal cookie base. So I adapted that recipe for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies in 2 ways – a standard cookie that’s thick and healthier and another one that’s thin and not so healthy. Both recipes make chewy cookies but the second recipe makes great crunchy cookies too.
The first recipe below makes cookies that are on the thin side (the way I like them). They’re buttery and chewy in the middle with beautifully crisp edges. The second recipe makes cookies that are healthier, heartier (ie. “oatier”), and thicker. They can be made chewy or crunchy to suit your preference. Both recipes have received great reviews but I personally like the first recipe (the less healthy one) a lot more [of course]. 🙂
Check out my tips for baking cookies.
I gave up trying macaroni and cheese recipes years ago. I never made one that people didn’t like, but I never found one that I could enjoy. Recently, it occurred to me that maybe it’s because I don’t like what baking does to the texture of this dish. So I tested that theory and made a stove top macaroni and cheese for the first time. I liked it a lot more than baked macaroni. The macaroni and cheese recipe is pretty standard, but I made it better in two ways: The first was adding a crunchy panko crumb topping and the second was mixing in peas and canned tuna in olive oil. The texture and flavour of canned tuna in olive oil is by far superior to canned tuna in water, and makes a world of difference in this dish.
This is served cold and can be eaten as an appetizer or part of the main course.
I made this several times using different concentrations of alcohol. I tried shaoxing cooking wine, shaoxing cooking wine with 14% alcohol, and whiskey (40% alcohol). In my opinion, the 14% shaoxing cooking wine was the best choice (strong enough to come through in the meat and not too strong like the whiskey was). I’ve also found that it’s important to make the chicken noticeably salty (without overdoing it) to compliment the bitterness of the alcohol.
[I just found a recipe for Chinese drunken chicken served hot in a broth that uses mirin. I can’t wait to try it. I have a feeling it will taste even better than cold drunken chicken.]
Note that I prefer my chicken to be JUST cooked through so I’ve adjusted the cooking time in the recipe (to 12 minutes) for those of you who prefer your chicken a bit more well done than this.
Frozen strawberries are convenient to have on hand throughout the year for smoothies, alcoholic beverages, strawberry sauce, desserts, etc. So I stock up on fresh strawberries in the summer and freeze them for the fall and winter. I recently found a bag of strawberries at the bottom of my deep freezer from two years ago. To my surprise, when I defrosted them, they still looked and tasted great! So I thought I’d share my method for freezing strawberries. It’s tedious and time consuming, but well worth it, in my opinion.
Photo below: Strawberries defrosting. After spending 2 years in the deep freezer, they were still great.
On a side note, this post is for my sister who suggested that I create an encyclopedia of “How to” on food and cooking. I guess this is a start 😉
Early this year, Ed started taking an interest in cooking, and I love it 🙂 He’s made cupcakes (recipe here) and brownies (recipe here) and more recently, beer butt chicken. I liked the beer butt chicken so much that I asked him to show me how he made it, so that I could post it on my food blog. The skin is beautifully crispy, the beer keeps the meat moist, and it’s really easy to make.
Rice vermicelli soup bowls are very easy and quick to make. They’re perfect for cold days. [I made it this summer because I caught a cold and wanted something hot and comforting that didn’t require any effort. This was exactly what I needed, despite the blazing sun and humidity outside. But seriously… who catches a cold in the middle of a heat stroke? It’s embarrassing haha]
To make this, you only need one pot and you can use any combination of meats and vegetables that you like. Most people marinate the meat like they would for any other Chinese dish (ie. with soy sauce), but I prefer to keep it Very simple. I use a little bit of salt because I like to keep the colour of the soup as clear as possible and because the pickled cabbage adds enough flavour.
I’ve been testing chocolate cake recipes for a while now. Although they were all good, none of them were food blog worthy. I never thought that the first chocolate cake recipe deserving of a post would be the easiest chocolate cake recipe I’ve ever tried.
Let me count the ways I love this recipe:
The #1 reason: I love the texture of this cake. It’s moist and soft, with a great density and perfect crumb tightness (in my opinion). And it doesn’t use buttermilk! [I don’t like buttermilk.]
2. It’s a ridiculously simple and easy recipe. You really don’t need to use a mixer for the cake batter (you’ll need a mixer if you’re making your frosting from scratch, though). Also, this cake doesn’t require butter, so you don’t have to worry about pre-softening butter, which means you could make this at the drop of a hat.
3. This is the perfect casual chocolate cake. It’s a great weeknight dessert. This recipe isn’t about making a pretty-looking cake (although you could if you wanted to). So if you’re just making this for your family (or if you’re like me and you’re just making it for yourself), it’s perfect because it only makes an 8 in x 8 in square cake in a single layer. It requires minimal effort because you don’t have to remove the cake from the pan before serving, you don’t have to make a layer cake, and you frost only the top of the cake, still in the pan. [Fewer dishes to wash.]
4. I like the story behind this recipe. See Cookie Madness’s blog for the full story about how she found this recipe hand written on an index card in her mom’s binder of recipe clippings.
5. For almost a decade now, I’ve known that one of the secrets to achieving a beautifully textured cake is to add mayonnaise. The cake recipes [containing mayonnaise] that I’ve seen simply added it to a cake mix or a standard cake recipe. This never seemed appealing to me, because I thought it would make the cake too oily. So I never tried it. But when I noticed that mayonnaise is a key ingredient in this recipe (substituting for your typical butter or vegetable oil), I was finally ready [and very excited] to test this mayonnaise-in-cake theory. It really does work. The cake was not oily at all and you would never know there was mayonnaise in it.
Gambas al ajillo, or shrimp with garlic, is a Spanish tapas (ie. appetizer). I first tried it in a popular local restaurant years ago. It’s garlicky and spicy, and so simple to make at home. The first time Ed tried it, he liked it so much that I made it for him two days in a row. I’ve re-created the dish that’s served at Chez Piggy, Kingston, ON, but I doubt it’s very authentic. At the restaurant, they serve this sizzling on a hot plate but I use my small cast iron pan instead.
On a side note, I find Chez Piggy to be extremely over rated and over priced. I never go on my own accord. This is one of the few things that I like on their menu but they tend to overcook the shrimp and they charge $11 for 6 shrimp. It only cost me $2 to make this at home. (I got a bag of President’s Choice frozen large shrimp for just $5 on sale.)
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I tried several different cashew chicken recipes in search of my favourite and came up with this one. The best part about this recipe is that you don’t have to marinate the meat because the sauce is flavourful enough. I like the simplicity of using sugar snap peas or snow peas. Many people prefer to use a combination of peppers for the colour, so use any vegetables that you like.
Cooking with Alison 