Archive for February, 2011
I’m so excited that the space that once was Nectar Desserts, conveniently located a few blocks from my house, is now Without Papers (a play on the fact that Angelo and the guys making the pizza are true Italians) Pizza, owned by the folks at Sugo. It’s open (Tues-Sun) from 11 till 11, has a wine menu and Steam Whistle on tap and long comfy benches and padded stools. Not only do they make fab pizza in a nail polish red pizza oven, they
make their own ice cream.
There are (silent) movies projected on the walls – yesterday it was Barbarella.
They make everything in-house – like warm spiced olives.
And the best meatballs I’ve had in ages.
And the aforementioned ice cream – in a cherry cola float. Or root beer. Or ginger ale.
And yes, there’s pizza. Mike’s favorite was the Hogwild: spicy wild boar sausage and prosciutto, braised rapini, friulano, roasted garlic panna. Above is the Parma: prosciutto di Parma, fresh arugula, bocconcini, tomato sauce.
Welcome to the ‘hood!
February 17 2011 | eating out | 14 Comments »
9 out of 10 firemen can’t be wrong.
So Friday morning, you may have heard, I did a cooking segment on BT at the new Le Creuset store in Chinook (yes, I’m working on free stuff here! there are channels to go through!) WITH the firemen from the 2011 Hot Stuff calendar. Yes, my job does not suck at all some days. Although it must be said that Jill had a little more firefigher attention than I did. Possibly a lot.
We cooked with beef – ground sirloin, which comes from a single cut (sirloin) rather than a bunch (which you typically get with ground beef), which I like the idea of, plus you get the taste of a steak in ground form. Bonus: ground sirloin has about the same amount of fat as the extra-lean ground beef you’ll get at the grocery store, but with far better flavour and texture. Our theme was cooking with beef and beefcakes, surrounded by Le Creuset. Forget whiskers on kittens – these are a few of my favourite things. The coffee at Phil & Sebastian right next door completed me.
We made shepherd’s pies, a beefy Moroccan dish with olives and couscous, and these stuffed shells.
(Or rather they made them, under my -loose- direction.) They had it covered. They did a little improv. When the second wave of firemen arrived to eat, the consensus was the stuffed shells were their favourite. They’re like little two-bite lasagnas, filled with beef, spinach and ricotta and topped with melty cheese. How could you not adore them? I must admit I’ve always wondered who buys giant pasta shells to stuff – but despite their slipperiness and the fact that several tore or broke and were nibbled on by W or fed to the dog, I’ll be making them again. It was quick – I cooked up the beef, onion and garlic while boiling the shells, added it to some ricotta and spinach (the second time I added a spoonful of pesto, too), spooned the mixture into the shells (kids love getting in on this part, and it wasn’t at all finicky), poured sauce over, sprinkled with cheese and baked until bubbly. Easy. They freeze well (before baking), so you can make a big batch, divide it between two baking dishes, eat one right away and freeze the other for another night. Bake it straight from frozen.
Here’s the recipe – it’s very adaptable though – we didn’t measure particularly closely.
Florentine Beef & Cheese-Stuffed Shells
The best part about this gussied-up twist on lasagna is that it makes two pans – that means you can stash one away for a no-effort dinner another night. If you have kids around, small hands are particularly adept at stuffing pasta shells. Recipe courtesy of beefinfo.org.
1 box (340 g) jumbo pasta shells (approx. 44 shells)
1 lb (500 g) lean or extra lean ground beef sirloin
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2-3 large garlic cloves, minced
1 tsp. (5 mL) Italian seasoning
1 pkg. (454 g) light ricotta cheese
1 pkg. (300 g) frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed dry
1 1/2 cups (375 mL) shredded part-skim mozzarella cheese
1/2 tsp (2 mL) pepper
4 cups (1 L) pasta sauce
1/4 cup (50 mL) grated Parmesan cheese
Cook pasta shells according to package directions. Drain and set aside. (Don’t worry if some shells tear – you won’t need them all.)
Meanwhile, cook the beef, onion, garlic and Italian seasoning in large, deep skillet set over medium heat until the beef is thoroughly cooked and any liquid has evaporated. Remove from heat. Stir in the ricotta, spinach, 1 cup of the mozzarella and pepper. Spoon about 2 tablespoons of the filling into each of about 32 shells.
Spread about a cup of the pasta sauce into each of 9×13-inch baking dish and a 9-inch glass pie plate (or similar sized baking dishes). Place 20 filled shells in the larger baking dish, and 10 to 12 in the pie plate. Drizzle the remaining pasta sauce over the shells, sprinkle with remaining mozzarella and Parmesan. (At this point the dish can be covered and refrigerated overnight or frozen for up to 4 months). Cover loosely with foil and bake in 350°F oven for 30 minutes. Uncover and bake for 5 minutes, until bubbly around the edges and golden on top.
Makes 10 servings.
February 16 2011 | beef and freezable and pasta | 16 Comments »
Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone. We made these cookies for W’s kindergarten class, but I don’t think heart cookies should be reserved for Valentine’s Day. They don’t even need to be on a stick.
Just think of the possibilities! All you need is a window in your dough, and some smashed hard candies. Any shape window – any colour of candy. Perfect for parties, birthday or otherwise! If you had little letter or number cutters in honour of the birthday boy/girl – how cute would that be? Or yellow stars! Blue moons! More than one window, which opens up the potential for happy faces!
I must say I’m feeling very Martha today. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
You can use any rolled cookie dough – I used a sugar dough made with some butter, some canola oil. If you want the recipe, or complete stained glass cookie on a stick formula, I posted it over at the Family Kitchen.
February 13 2011 | cookies & squares and Family Kitchen | 16 Comments »
Weekend mornings, particularly on those days that involve hockey games and long dog walks, call for warm scones – the big coffee shop-style ones with crunchy sugar on top. (I buy mine at Middle Eastern and Mediterranean markets – far cheaper than at gourmet shops.) When it happens to be the weekend before Valentine’s day, white chocolate and dried cherries seem more in order. Sue dried a case of Okanagan cherries last summer and brought me a bag, and they’re still being rationed in my freezer. I decided they best be put to good use, rather than succumb to freezer burn, filed away as too special to eat. If you don’t have dried cherries (or can’t afford them – cha-ching) cranberries are a fine substitute. Feel free to add dark chocolate instead of white, too.
I’m sorry to add an extra click to some of these recipes, but I have myself a paid gig over at the Family Kitchen. I love that I’ve managed to turn writing about food into an actual job, something I’ve wanted to do since grade 3 and told my class of wannabe nurses and firefighters that I wanted to be the food editor of Canadian Living magazine when I grew up, and websites have turned into a new media outlet – so I write for newspapers and magazines, and now for a website as well. (Besides here, of course, which is its very own thing and my favourite place of them all.) Julie Van Rosendaal meets Mary Tyler Moore meets Joan Jetson.
So that’s why I sometimes direct you over to the Family Kitchen for a recipe – I’ve posted it there, but want you to know about it. (Also, our pay is determined by traffic numbers. Just sayin’.)
So – this is one of the recipes I posted over at the Family Kitchen.
February 13 2011 | leftovers | 6 Comments »
I’m pretty smitten with this new soup. Although it uses ingredients I’m more than familiar with, the combination is somehow unlike any soup I’ve made before. Perhaps it’s the whole head of garlic. If I was the sort to do up a weekly meal plan, have meatless Mondays and pork chop Tuesdays and such, I’d make room for this soup.
Despite starting the day (at 4 am!) with firefighters straight from the 2011 hotstuff calendar, my day wasn’t so hot, teetering on about an hour and a half of sleep. It capped off a rough week – I was grateful when my sister brought Vietnamese food home from work to feed us all. Wouldn’t it be nice to be five again and ride home in the back seat, sobbing if you’re overtired and feel like a good wail, and have someone carry you inside, put your jammies on and make popcorn and apple slices for you to eat in front of How to Train Your Dragon? (The upside to not being 5 is the ability to crack open a bottle of wine to go with said popcorn and movie.)
I made this soup last week, actually, for a new little thing I’m doing for Calgary Co-op. No money is involved here – it stemmed from a conversation about the common misconception that it’s too expensive to eat well, and how to change that perception. Yes, fast food is cheap. Cooking from scratch is cheaper. I suggested to the folks at Co-op that we run a recipe with price breakdown in the Calgary Herald every Thursday, rather than the usual weekly flyer-style price listings. After all, advertising the price of ground beef for $1.79 per pound or tomatoes for $.99 a pound doesn’t make sense to many, including a good percentage of twentysomethings who don’t know how many tomatoes come in a pound and if it’s really a good deal, anyway. But to have a recipe that utilizes seasonal and sale ingredients in a way that will feed a family for less than $5 each might be more helpful to the home cook, don’t you think? With a little shopping list and everything.
So that’s how this soup came to be. It was in yesterday’s paper. It’s one to clip and save.
By the way, our cooking segment was at the Le Creuset store in Chinook this morning – let that be a hint about what the next Free Stuff will be. I’m working on it!
Spolumbo’s Sausage & Chickpea Soup
Adapted from the March 1995 issue of Bon Appétit.
canola or olive oil, for cooking
1 lb. Spolumbos chicken apple or turkey cranberry sausage (2-3 sausages)
1 head garlic, cloves separated, peeled and chopped
1 jalapeño pepper, seeded and finely chopped
1 tsp. cumin
1 14 oz (398 mL) can diced tomatoes, undrained
1-2 19 oz. (540 mL) cans chickpeas, rinsed and drained
1 L chicken or beef stock
a squeeze of fresh lime juice
fresh cilantro
1 avocado, peeled and chopped
In a large saucepan or Dutch oven, heat a drizzle of oil over medium-high heat. Add sausage and garlic and sauté until the sausage is golden brown and cooked through, breaking up with your spoon. Add the jalapeño and cumin and cook for another minute or two.
Add the tomatoes, chickpeas and stock and bring to a simmer. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook for 30 minutes, until everything is cooked through and the broth has thickened slightly. Add a squeeze of lime, season with salt and pepper and serve hot, topped with fresh cilantro, chopped avocado, and extra lime wedges alongside. Serves 4.
Come join Soup-a-Palooza at TidyMom and Dine and Dish sponsored by Bush’s Beans, Hip Hostess, Pillsbury and Westminster Crackers!
February 11 2011 | freezable and soup | 30 Comments »
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