October 25, 2017
I never tire of potato salads and although I make them mostly in the summer when potatoes are garden fresh, this year I am extending the season as the weather is not that bad. My friend Philly gave me a bag of organic potatoes the other day and I made good use of them, transforming some into a leek and potato soup and the rest into this delicious salad. I usually steam potatoes rather than... View Article
September 1, 2017
Sleepless nights are great for leafing through cookbooks and last night in the wee hours of the morning I got up and picked up Yotam Ottolenghi cookbook “Plenty” off my cookbooks shelves. I had to laugh because I saw that I had tagged almost every page with a sticker meaning there is a recipe that I would like to try. Practically the entire book was tagged. This morning I checked the fridge to see what... View Article
August 19, 2017
In keeping with the nose to tail concept that doesn’t apply in my vegetarian kitchen, I am trying to use the whole plant, end to end and not waste any edible parts. You’d be surprised how much we waste in the foods we eat, throwing away good leaves, stems and even roots of some good vegetables. My company last weekend came bearing gifts from the garden, bringing beautiful beets with their greens still attached from... View Article
August 2, 2017
On my last trip to the local farm stands a few blocks behind where we live I picked a whole bunch of beautiful new and local produce. Small new potatoes, plump green onions, field cucumbers and these small sweet bunches of red and yellow beets. Normally I would roast them but I recently bought a new gadget for the kitchen, a sous vide immersion circulator, and decided to cook the beets sous vide. If the... View Article
July 31, 2017
We are lucky in the Okanagan to have winery restaurant chefs that pride themselves on creating dishes using local produce that are beautiful to look at and packed with flavour. One of my favourite is the Terrace Restaurant at Mission Hill winery. Not only the Tuscan architecture, the bell tower, the view and the beautiful wines, but the food at their Terrace restaurant is always outstanding. My gal friends were visiting from Calgary last week... View Article
July 19, 2017
Lentils are versatile and I use them all year, for soups and stews in the winter and salads in the summer. I often have cooked lentils in the fridge to pull out on the spur of the moment to make a lunch or dinner salad. In this salad I used leftover beets and carrots from my new sous vide experiment, more on that later, but you can make this without a sous vide by boiling... View Article
July 14, 2017
One of the culinary treasures of southern Italy (Puglia) is the burrata: a creamy, perishable cheese that is shipped daily to vendors and restaurants in other parts of the country to be consumed the same day. Burrata means “buttered” and in the categories of cheeses it is not a mozzarella, nor a mozzarella di bufala, although it is made with buffalo milk. To make burrata cheesemakers fill a thin skin of mozzarella with a mixture... View Article
July 8, 2017
If you have your grill fired up it’s an opportunity to try a few grilled salad versions with summer produce. I particularly like to grill radicchio and serve it as a warm salad and this time with a few shitake mushrooms I had on hand. If you don’t grill you can make this in a skillet on top of the stove. The process is simple: cut the radicchio in half or quarters, brush with... View Article
July 2, 2017
This spring was not a good season for artichokes locally. I barely saw an artichoke once or twice at the local grocery store and nothing at the markets. That’s unfortunate because I love cooking with them. On my last trip to the store though I found a few reasonable looking specimen and thought I’d take them. Instead of cooking the artichokes whole, I cut the outer leaves down almost to the heart and then into... View Article
June 30, 2017
Roasting cauliflower completely changes its flavour profile, bringing out caramelized, sweet and deep flavour. For this roast I drizzled the florets with a little saffron dissolved in water to get the golden colour that you see in the image. If you don’t like the flavour of saffron this dish will not cut it for you. You can try and substitute with turmeric, curry or even a little paprika instead, or leave the cauli plain. To... View Article
June 26, 2017
So I had the pickled beets from another recipe and wanted to use them with the rest of the Quinoa that I had cooked the day before. Since I sliced the beets very thin I thought they would be good as carpaccio layer under the quinoa, and then topped it with roasted asparagus and beautiful green Onion I got at the market the other day. I wasn’t quite sure how to plate it so tried... View Article
June 22, 2017
Just to vary the theme a bit from pasta and potato salads I thought I’d pull out the quinoa from the pantry and see what I can do with it. I had the Bob’s red Mill tri-coloured quinoa variety, meaning red, white and black little grains (seeds, actually) and I thought they’d make a nice background for roasted cauliflower. Since the weather improved here (not by much), lighter dishes are appropriate and this salad-like plate... View Article
