Recipes
This is my recipe stream, where you can see all of my most recent recipe posts - if you'd like to browse recipe categories, or are looking for something more specific, please visit my Family Recipes page! I love experimenting and making things from scratch - baking pies, preserves, pickles, soups, salads, you name it - and coming up with delicious, easy recipes that become a part of my regular routine. Cooking your own food is really satisfying when it tastes delicious, and that's always my goal - food as good or better than I can get at a restaurant, but inexpensively and easily made in my own kitchen. I'm an advocate for trying new things - whether its making fresh pasta for the first time (still on my list to learn!) or making your own pie pastry (something I've been doing for years), it's often easy to make food from scratch, and it usually tastes a lot better. Check out my most recent recipes below!
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Fried Halloumi with Tomato Sauce
Halloumi is one of those cheeses that holds shape when it heats, going gorgeously soft inside and crisping up a little on the outside rather than going gooey-melty. Fried Halloumi with Tomato Sauce is a nice, simple dish that works best in the Summer, when all of the fresh ingredients are at their peak flavour. Halloumi is a soft, brined cheese that can be found in many Canadian grocery stores – it’s a salty cheese that holds its shape well when heated. I like to eat it fried, on its own as a snack, or raw, but the sweetness of the tomatoes helps vary the flavours on your tongue, and cuts…
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Pina Colada Popsicles
I found this recipe online and altered it slightly; it’s super-easy and super-delicious. They really do taste like Pina Colada Popsicles, even if you leave out the rum. If you are using rum, I totally recommend Sailor Jerry’s, which is my favourite – it’s very vanilla-y and super-delicious. The only annoying part about these popsicles is waiting for the popsicles to freeze, but then, is you get impatient, they’re pretty good as slush, too. And they’re a creamy treat for vegans! How nice! Ingredients 1 can pineapple chunks, in juice 1 banana 1 can coconut milk Rum (Optional) Directions Combine ingredients in a blender, then pour into popsicle moulds. Freeze (approx. 5…
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Nana’s Tea Biscuits
When I was little, we spent a lot of time at my Nana Cynthia’s house, and she involved us in making many delicious things. Several of my favourite recipes have come from her. Whether eating or hanging out, the kitchen was the centre of the home and definitely her domain – most of my memories of her are in her kitchen, a lit cigarette ((Always Player’s Plain!)) in one hand, and a glass of Papa’s home-made, sweet red wine in the other, telling me stories about her life as a teenager in and near London during WWII. She died a couple of years ago, and my mom has been…
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Simple Spaghetti with Sausage
Sometimes I just crave tomato sauce; not fresh tomatoes, or even cooked ones, but that hyper-sweet, almost candy-like tomato sauce that was a staple of my childhood spaghettis. I'm still working on this one - maybe more wine, some thyme, some balsamic vinegar? I
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White Pizza: Caramelized onions, mushrooms, and roasted garlic
One night, I was feeling adventurous and decided to try making pizza crust. Out of that batch, there was enough crust for two pizzas; one with a tomato base, and one white pizza. The tomato-based pizza was pretty good, and has become a staple of my pizza repertoire. But the white pizza was delicious, and after a pizza night, my sides are usually aching from having eaten too much of it. So here’s the recipe! This was the first time I’ve tried making my own pizza crusts from scratch, and while I always find it a bit frustrating, the results are usually pretty good. I’m going to experiment a bit more before…
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Jalapeno-Cheese Dip
A delicious, spicy, cheesy indulgence! My sisters and I made this Jalapeno-Cheese Dip for the first time last February, when I’d just moved to Toronto for a new job and was feeling quite lonely in the big city. They came up to visit, and we made and ate this while mostly-ignoring the Super Bowl in my big, weird empty condo sublet. It’s definitely comfort food, definitely not an everyday dish, but a good warming appetizer for special occasions (like sister nights!). 2 8-oz packages of cream cheese 1 cup of mayonnaise 4-6 jalapenos, chopped and deseeded 1 cup of cheddar cheese, shredded 1/2 cup of mozzarella cheese, shredded 1/4 cup diced green…
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Mini Doughnuts
A co-worker ((Shout-out to Georgia! Thanks for the recipe!)) brought these baked mini doughnuts to a potluck back in the Spring, and I ate about a dozen of them because they were so good, and I pestered her for the recipe until she surrendered it. But it’s been a busy year, and my dreams of mini doughnuts were put on hold. Last week I finally got myself over to good ol’ Tap Phong to buy some mini doughnut tins, and yesterday I found an unexpected gap in my schedule (I’m part of the team running the Toronto Christmas Market this year, and it’s been a fun, busy time), so I whipped up a…
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Buttermilk Pancakes
When I bake my favourite Chocolate Cupcake recipe, I’m always left with a huge amount of leftover buttermilk and no real idea what to do with it. Often enough, it would end up going to waste, until I started making this recipe. I always think of pancakes as being heavy, boring, and a bit of a hassle to make, but these Buttermilk Pancakes are quick, easy, and fluffy, and pretty good even without maple syrup. I bet they’d be great with honey, too, or with a little lemon juice and icing sugar, like Nana’s Crepes. Ingredients 2 eggs 2 cups all-purpose flour 2 tablespoons sugar 2 teaspoons baking powder 1…
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Chocolate Cupcakes
I swear, these chocolate cupcakes are the easiest thing in the whole world. You mix it all in one bowl. Â It takes less than 15 minutes, and then you pop them in the oven. Â Easy-peasy. Like many a child of the 80s, I grew up with cupcakes and cakes made from boxed cake mixes. Â Once I started baking and realized that making cakes from scratch required very little extra work, and resulted in a vastly superior flavour, I was kind-of confused as to why anyone thought that those boxed cake mixes were a good idea. To me, they always end up tasting like stale vegetable oil and sugar, even more…
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Ugly Soup
This is a recipe from my good friend and longtime co-conspirator Ashley, who is a great cook and sometimes posts recipes here. Some years ago when I was feeling pretty under-the-weather, she shared with me this recipe for a soup that she created. This is totally comfort food, for me, when the cold weather hits; it’s essentially a Chicken Noodle Soup, if Chicken Noodle Soup wasn’t salty, bland, and disgusting and was instead somewhat heavenly and delicious. Anyway, now you know where I stand on Chicken Noodle Soup. This recipe will do all of the things you want from said grotty soup, but will do them with vim, vigour, and…
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Lentils with Fennel and Sausage
My sister Cassie and I visited Paris last Spring, and by the time we’d gotten from Charles de Gaulle to our hotel in Montmartre and thrown our bags in our room, we were starving. We struck out looking for someplace that would satisfy both me and my vegetarian sister, and found this little corner restaurant with arborite tables and a friendly atmosphere and some vegetarian options on the menu. The waiters were super-nice (as was almost everyone in Paris), complimenting my pathetic attempts at speaking French, and my meal of lentils with fennel and sausage completely floored me. I love lentils in just about every way they can be served,…
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Garlic-Cheddar Biscuits
These are so good, the first time I made them there were none leftover that evening, and I’ve been making them as a apres-ski snack or as an accompaniment to my Hearty Ham and Bean Soup. They’re super-quick and super-easy! Ingredients 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 5 tablespoons butter 1 cup milk 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese 1/4 cup butter, melted 1 clove garlic, minced Directions Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. In a large bowl, sift together flour, salt and baking powder. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Make a well in the center of flour mixture. Add the milk…
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Quinoa and Corn Salad Recipe
We’ve been interested in picnicking for a few years now; something about packing up a lunch and going somewhere green and lovely to eat it on a blanket on the grass feels so special and nice. We’ve got one of those picnic knapsacks, with all of the cutlery and everything, which we’ve been using as our camp kitchen for years, and we’re building a list of excellent and easily-portable recipes. In the midst of an unexpectedly sweltering May day, we decided to make a few salads and bicycle down to the Trent-Severn Canal, on the bank of Little Lake, to have our first picnic of the year. This recipe, one…
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Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie
I always associate rhubarb with Summers at my Nana and Papa’s; they’d pick a fresh stalk of rhubarb and hand it to me with a small dish of sugar to dip the end in. Nana would make what she called ‘Rubarberry,’ a sauce of strawberries, rhubarb, and sugar that she and Papa loved to have on toast. And Papa tried his hand at Rhubarb wine, along with his other wine-making experiments (his mainstay was the sweet red wine that bubbled in demijohns in his basement throughout the Autumn). Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie has always been a favourite of mine, but somehow I never did get around to making it until this Spring,…
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Spiced Pickled Beets
There’s a restaurant in Peterborough called St. Veronus, where I was first introduced to the deliciousness of the spiced pickled beets. Beets on their own, boiled and served with butter, are terrific, and pickled beets are fine, but spiced pickled beets are something else altogether. My sister Sammi found this recipe a few years ago, and while it’s not exactly the same as the beets they serve at St. Veronus, I might believe that these beets are better. I think I’ve said before that I’m not a proponent of specialty gadgets and tools for cooking, but some things I do endorse. A kitchen scale is excellent, and if you’re canning,…
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Butter Chicken
This Butter Chicken recipe is a wonder. The perfect mix of salty-sweet and spice, I’d recommend upping any spice that you like. I often put twice as much of just about everything, and it works out just fine. I like to say that this recipe is better than your mom’s Butter Chicken, but considering that 70% of the people I know are of Irish descent, that’s not much of a challenge (bless their hearts, but the Irish aren’t known for their deft use of spices). Let’s just go with the idea that this is pretty damn good, and that all of the people I’ve made it for ask for the…
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Concord Grape Pie
From the time I was little and well into my teens, my Papa would drive to the Niagara Region every Autumn to buy bushels of concord grapes so that he could make his yearly supply of of sweet red wine. Â Sometimes I would help out with the press, but mostly I was just eager to steal some concord grapes for myself, that incredible sweet-tart burst of flavour a treat that came with my favourite season. Â In the following months, the demijohns would bubble away in the basement, filling the whole room with the smell of wine. As an adult, I’ve often bought concord grapes at the market and been instantly…
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Vegan-Friendly Lemon Herb Dip
Normally I shun pre-mixed spices, but oddly, Montreal steak seasoning is awesome in this dip.  I may or may not have noted before my recent obsession with thyme in my food, but it may spring from having a front yard full of creeping thyme.  When I make this, it usually goes pretty fast, and since a can of white beans holds about 2 cups, you might as well double it. I’m also not a fan of requiring special kitchen tools for recipes, but coffee grinders are great for all kinds of things, and I’m sure ingenious non-coffee-grinder-owners will find some way to mill your nuts. As dips go, this one is actually pretty…
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Hearty Ham and Bean Soup
Coming home from an afternoon of cross-country skiing, I was ravenous and craving something hearty and piping hot. Thinking over the things I had in my fridge (some leftover ham, a cup or so of navy beans, some vegetable stock, half a bottle of rose, I decided to try making a soup. The result was this beauty, a soup so delicious I’m glad I don’t have to share it with my vegetarian sisters (sorry, dudes!).
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Nana-Approved Turkey Pot Pie
2017 Update: I posted this Turkey Pot Pie recipe in 2010, and two years later my lovely Nana died. This recipe still reminds me of her; her approval meant a lot to me. 2010 Original post: This is essentially a basic turkey pot pie recipe, but I like to think that I’ve particularly made it mine by emphasizing the thyme, salt, and pepper. This savoury pie could probably handle a little sage, too, but have a light hand – the thyme really makes it irresistible. And don’t be stingy with the salt and pepper. I find too that no matter how badly I think I’ve screwed up the homemade pastry,…
