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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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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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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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Mango Chutney
About a week ago, I was grocery shopping and saw a flat of mangoes for $3. It was too good to turn down, but then I had a flat of overripe mangoes kicking around my kitchen. So I looked online at a bunch of recipes for canning mango chutney, combined a few, modified them to suit my own tastes, and came up with a chutney I’m pretty happy with. It’s a dead-simple recipe that would be a good one for first-timers, as it’s not too fussy and doesn’t take a lot of time. Just remember to wash everything in hot, soapy water, and let everything air-dry – that’s really the…
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Pumpkin Pie
One of the greatest pleasures of Autumn is pumpkin pie. I wasn’t converted until I was well into my twenties; the idea of vegetables in desserts didn’t sit well with me. Nowadays, as soon as the weather turns cooler I start to think of the creamy deliciousness of my own homemade pumpkin pie. I got this recipe from Terri, who took me under her wing when I was at theatre school and away from my family for the first time. Whether for Thanksgiving, Hallowe’en, or just to celebrate Fall and harvest-time, this easy pumpkin pie recipe is exactly the thing you’re looking for. As with all of my sweet recipes,…
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Pie Pastry (Basic)
This recipe is from a copy of The Canadian Cookbook which my Uncle Johnny gave to my Mom for Christmas in 1975. ((In a strange coincidence, I won a copy of the exact same book at a pie-making competition where the pie I’d entered used this pastry recipe!)) I’ve copied it directly with a couple of side notes where I differ from the ladies who wrote the recipe. Trust me when I say you should not go check with Martha or any of the other gods of the food world; just trust me and the 1970s, and follow this recipe to the letter, and you will have a pretty good…
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Nana Cynthia’s Crepes
My Nana Cynthia gave this recipe to my sister Sammi when she was about 10; we wanted crepes, so Sammi called up Nana and copied down the recipe from her. We were all pretty amused to see that Sammi had spelled them ‘creaps.’ To my mind, paper-thin, hot crepes with lemon juice and icing sugar are both the only way to eat crepes, and they are the best treat in the world. But this crepe is a neutral base, and you can use it for sweet or savoury fillings. This recipe simultaneously reminds me of my Nana and my sisters as well as Paris, which I’ve visited in the Springtime…
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Apple Pie
Easy-peasy, lovely and delicious, Apple Pie is the perfect thing for just about every day, if you feel like it. I know oldsters and orchard-owners will tell you all kinds of things about which apples make the best pie, but I’d say that MacIntoshes and Granny Smiths are the absolute best apples for pie making that are regularly available in most grocery stores (in Canada, anyway). I know other apples hold together better in the pie, but taste is my issue, not texture, and you can’t beat Macs and Grannies for perfect sweet-tartness. If you want a pie that tastes less like a straight-ahead old-fashioned version and more like candied…
