Seahawks for the Double! SuperBowl Chili...

Over the course of our summer CSA box, we once again received spaghetti squash. I've tried in the past to like spaghetti squash, but it has just never really spoken to me.... Until now.

Turns out I needed something a little more substantial than marinara to take spaghetti squash from meh to mmm.

Of course this post is not timely at all, in terms of our farmshare or seasonally available produce. But it is super timely if you're planning on having chili for Superbowl Sunday today. The chili seen with the spaghetti squash in the above picture was just a quick weeknight chili. But below you'll find the recipe for what we munched on before the game (seen in the first pic of the dutch oven).

Weeknight Dinner: One-Pot Chicken with Mushrooms and Squash

We've been busy here. Three of the four kids have started skiing and we've been going once a week to take advantage of the fleetingly snow covered hills in our neck of the woods. Due to the ski shop-esque amounts of ski equipment and paraphernalia we now own, I've had to take some time to clean out clothing and closets and storage areas. Finally organising our mudroom closet was extremely satisfying though and I'm now pleasantly surprised at how neat at least one (albeit small) part of my house looks.

In the meantime, I've been ignoring my little bloggie here and I've been to miss the harsh white glow of the laptop screen burning into my retinas late at night. So today I made an effort to get a blog post in and intentionally kept the camera handy in the hopes that my dinner recipe tonight would be a keeper.

(Jump to the recipe...)

And pause...

Once in a while, the stars align and everything goes more or less according to plan. Hubby and I actually sat down to a quiet adult lunch while the boys are at school, one daughter naps and the other plays happily in her jumper.

Now I sit and digest (both are strange and rare sensations) and contemplate what I shall write to my neglected blog. Or rather, what I can write given the limited time that this total eclipse of child-demands will last and my proficiency on a phone keyboard.

Perhaps, I should stop while I'm ahead and simply say that Martha's tomato tart with its roasted garlic crust was heavenly, eaten in a quiet and clean (as can be expected) kitchen. And that soon my blog should be awash in photos and entries about Halloween prep.... If the heavens allow and all goes according to plan, of course.

P. S. And inevitably, I'm no longer sitting and digesting. Instead I'm nursing a baby to sleep and embellishing this post with pictures from my phone camera.

Radicchio and Corn Salad

This dinner was the epitome of eating as local as possible. The maple mustard chicken is locally raised and bought from our neighbourhood butcher. The carrots, potatoes and turnip that roasted under the chicken legs came from our Round the Bend Farm CSA box. And the beautiful chopped salad (save the dressing and cranberries) uses ingredients that are also from our CSA box.

(Jump to the recipe...)

Pasta Nicoise

It's been the summer of the salad. The cool weather has provided our farm and CSA box with much more lettuce than anyone probably ever imagined possible. There was a point in time when hubby and I were eating mammoth salads for lunch and dinner plus green smoothies for breakfast and snacks.
(Jump to the recipe...)

Vietnamese Sausage (Nem Nuong) Lettuce Wraps

Summer always calls for meals that are full of fresh and raw greens served with grill-marked meats. And although the heat never fully arrived this year that didn't stop anyone from firing up the charcoal and enjoying some outdoor cooking, right?


This summer, we've received such beautiful lettuce and radicchio from our farmshare that it was inevitable that we would consume a lot of it in cup/wrap form. And what's our favourite filling for our lettuce wraps? Nem nuong. Delicious grilled pork.

(Jump to the recipe)

Homemade American Cheese? Verdict? Worth it!

When I was pregnant with my first son, I had strange taste and smell aversions. (Subsequently, I discovered it was morning sickness, just without the tell-tale being sick part.) One of my weird taste and smell aversions was cheese. I thinking that I was exposing the cheese to too much moisture and it was going off really quickly... I don't know how much cheese I threw into the trash thinking it had gone bad before finally asking hubby to double-check for me.

Unfortunately, I loooove cheese and I craved for it. So I took to having processed cheese and soon bagels with a Kraft single nuked over top became a common breakfast for me. Funny to reminisce about it now - there I was, first time mom, trying so hard to do everything right for my unborn babe. All the while, feeding myself artificial cheese that was nuked (not even toasted!) over dollar-a-loaf-grocery-store bagels. I guess it could have been worse, I could have wanted spray cheese and a ramen cup ;) 

Kohlrabi and Corn Fritters

Jump to the recipe...

Every year, inevitably, we'll receive the other-worldly kohlrabi in our CSA box. The first year we got it I was stumped. What to do with this strange root? I've tried it in coleslaw (nothing spectacular and not really to my liking). I've also tried stir-frying it (too soggy), roasting it (delicious but too hot to turn on the oven that often) and boiling and pureeing it into soup (yummy but felt like just a riff on cauliflower soup). I had yet to find a way to prepare kohlrabi that was simple and tasty and uniquely "kohlrabi".

Garlic Scape and Pea Pesto

Am I late to the party? I only just discovered that you can make pesto with fresh peas and I love the result. Fresh... and sweet... and the colour! The colour is even better than regular basil pesto because it stays beautifully pale green through refrigeration or heating.

I originally set out to make a garlic scape pesto but wasn't sure if I could ever get the kids to eat it since scape pesto tends to be so spicy. Then I remembered seeing pictures of pea pesto and figured that if anything could tone down the super concentrated garlicky flavour that results from grinding up a bagful of scapes, it would be fresh peas from the pod.

Homemade Char Siu - Worth the Effort!

On my last trip to the butcher, I spied a truly beautiful pork shoulder - plump, marbled and deboned. Our usual go-to recipes for pork shoulder are jerk pork or pulled pork... however, with the weather being decidedly wintry, asking hubby to smoke pork for six+ hours in the snow seemed a bit absurd. Undaunted, I bought the almost four pound shoulder anyway reasoning that we would find some way to eat that pork.

Sweet Soup Dumplings (湯圓)

Mmmm... sweet soup dumplings. Chewy and warm and not too sweet. In our family we usually enjoy these around the winter solstice, but I know that a lot of families enjoy them during the new year and specifically to celebrate first full moon of Chinese New Year.

Usually, I make these every year with my father and sometimes my brothers if they are available. I have such fond memories of sitting around the dinner table with my family and making dumplings, pot stickers, spring rolls, etc. This year was extra special because it was the first time I made them with my family. 

Orange Peel and Anise Braised Short Ribs

We went out for dim sum this past weekend and it reminded me of how delicious the pairing of orange peel and beef are. Luckily, I had recently defrosted some short ribs with no clear plan of how I was going to prepare them. What resulted was buttery, melt in your mouth short ribs covered in a slightly citrus, fragrant, Asian inspired sauce.

Let's try a picture recipe this time:

Saving extra egg whites for that special occasion...

So the custard you made used 6 egg yolks... now, either you're in love with egg white omelettes or you need to find a way to save up those egg whites for another day.

Clean and Dry Pomegranate Seeds

Whew... had to take a short break from the craziness of Hallowe'en posting and recuperate a bit before the holidays hit. I feel a bit remiss ignoring my blog for so long though, so I'm going to ease back into the swing of things with a short post about how I usually deseed a pomegranate.

My kids loooove eating pomegranate arils which surprises me because I always figured that the little seeds inside would be a big obstacle to their enjoyment. In fact, one of my sons will occasionally spit out grape peels because "they too hard to bite!" But, go figure, they love pomegranates.

There are many ways to get those tasty seeds out of a pomegranate. If I'm in a hurry (and I'm juicing the seeds anyway) then I will bang my pomegranates with a wooden spoon for super fast removal, but tis always results in quite a few seeds completely smushed and a lot of sticky juice. Some people advocate peeling them inside a bowl of water, but I find that the arils get all wet and this detracts from their taste and attractiveness and they need to be laid out to dry before serving.

I've found that the easiest way to peel and deseed a pomegranate is simply... to peel and deseed the pomegranate. Of course that's easier said than done if you have no idea what you're dealing with inside that gleaming, ruby red skin. So this post is meant as an introduction to the anatomy of a pomegranate for those who are new to this wonderful fruit.

Delicata Squash Love Affair

[Back to normality... a bit... after the madness of Hallowe'en sewing...] I was introduced to delicata squash by our CSA box this summer and hubby and I are a little in love with this gorgeous heirloom squash. The appeal to us? Sweet, but not overly sweet. Soft, edible skin. Wonderful texture - powdery and smooth like the inside of a double baked potato or a really well fried Yukon Gold french fry. And no pumpkin aftertaste.

I gave it a little roast with a generous amount of butter and salt along with a sprinkling of brown sugar and they turned into the yummiest squash bites ever... Even my sons enjoyed the "sweet and salty french fries" that mommy offered them. So what else could I do with this great squash?

Deep fried like a potato chip? Roasted and blended into gnocchi or ravioli? What about grated for rosti? The possibilities seems so endless. Will keep you updated if I can find some at the local supermarket when the craziness of the next few days dies down.

Freezing Calzones: A Perfect School Lunch

Ahh, packing lunch for the kiddies... always so challenging. As I mentioned before, my kids always want to have the pre-packaged stuff that their friends get in their lunch bags. Never mind that mommy is trying hard to minimize the amount of (a) factory produced food we consume and (b) waste we produce.

So once in a while, I have to pull out a trump card to get my kids reinvigorated about their Food Inc-wary, stainless steel container lunches. Some good ol' standbys are anything related to pasta, pizza and hamburgers. (Ever notice how kids' favourite foods slowly evolve into a take-out menu? Where has my three year-old, school-naive son whose favourite dessert was red bean buns gone? Apparently, he's been swallowed up by this new SK kid who talks with his friends about how they all loooove ice cream ;)

Chicken and Eggplant Parmigiana Sandwich

We've had some lovely late summer vegetables in our CSA boxes lately - sweet peppers (finally!), eggplants and squash (more on this later). We've also harvested the last of our tomatoes and what hasn't been frozen has been made into some delicious tomato sauce-based pasta dinners. So last night I decided to use some of our leftover pasta sauce and some deep fried goodness to make parmigiana sandwiches.

Our sandwiches consisted of eggplant parmigiana, chicken parmigiana, mozzarella, roasted peppers and homemade marinara.... plus some La Bomba sauce for a hot and delicious kick.

Butter Dipped Radishes

Saw this trick a while back on Bon Appetit and thought that I would try it since we get a decent amount of radishes with our farmshare. It's basically a spin on radishes with butter and salt. The radishes are dipped into tempered, salted butter and then left to harden - almost as if they were chocolate dipped.

From Scratch: Green Curry Chicken

So I have a lot of thai basil in the garden right now and it's just perfect for making green curry paste. But what to do with the paste? Here's the obvious solution: green curry chicken.

From Scratch: Green Curry Paste

One thing I always grow in my gardens is basil. It's easy to grow, so much better when it's fresh and a real cost-saver considering that you pay $3 or more for a small bunch at the store. This year I was lucky enough to find organic sweet basil and thai basil seeds, so I have a lot of both growing in the garden... Just ask anyone I know if I've been in the business of dealing zip-top baggies of herbs at every recent girls' night-out.