When I decide to cook with meat, I go all out. I’m talking monster carnivore.
An aside: Reflecting on the past four days of dinner, I have had a different kind of protein every single night. I have eaten a small farm. Coming home and having your mom pay for groceries (AKA me not being cheap and making quinoa-based meals everyday) really does make a difference in terms of my diet.
As soon as my parents told me they were going out for supper on Saturday night, I knew I wanted to treat the youngest Duff to a brother-sister dinner. Since I have a never ending need to impress him, I decided to unleash the power of pizza. But it couldn’t just be any pizza. Or any meal, for that matter. After googling several different combinations of “food to serve to your teenage brother,” I went to the land of all things wholesome and delicious: The Pioneer Woman Cooks. I finally decided her Steakhouse Pizza was a creation worthy of being inhaled by a semi-appreciative, grunt-if-he-approves brother.
After a trip to the grocery store with my mom where I insisted that yes, a ball of good mozzarella was extremely necessary, and that a $12 flank steak was what needed to top this pizza, I got home and got cookin’.
The smells that came from the kitchen when this was being prepared were gasp-inducing. Within minutes of sautéing, the red onions became translucent strands, their shiny purple backs absorbing the the balsamic that was slowly reducing in the pan. Then there was the marinara sauce combined with even more balsamic and a hint of Worcestershire Sauce. When baking, the smell of it bubbling on the crust made me stick my head in the oven even more than usual to absorb the aroma.
Since no picture of the finished product can even begin to do the intricacy of this pizza justice, I thought I would stand on a kitchen chair and give you a bird’s eye view of the different layers.
And because photos like this always lend themselves well to gif animations, here you go! Knock yourself out with excitement. I know it’s not as good as the one of Oprah and bees, but it will have to do.
Garrett and I ate this in the family room while watching the Big Bang Theory. He said it was “actually good,” which in 18-year-old boy language means that he approves. I’m thrilled.
We all enjoyed the leftover 1.5 pizzas as a family the next day and I wish there had been more.
I swear he's happier than he looks!
Happy belated Valentines Day, ft. chocolate stuffed pink marble cupcakes
You know I always have a good reason for not blogging.
Unlike former hiatuses where I’ve still been cooking and baking loads of things, these past two weeks have been different, since I’m back home in Sudbury. Because of this, my mom has been the one doing all the cooking and baking. Have I mentioned that I’m spoiled?
So why am I home? Well at this point I am two weeks into a three-week internship with CBC Sudbury. It has been an absolutely amazing experience so far. It’s a small station, which means I got thrown into doing on-air stuff, editing and interviewing right off the bat. The past two weeks have been some of the most educational ones of my journalism career so far. Here are a few links to the things I’ve been working away on: an interview with the son of a man who died in the Ocean Ranger oil rig accident in 1982, a story I did about the shortage of working stoves in Sudbury (which resulted in more than half a dozen donations of the appliance!) and one portion of a three-part series I did on the behaviour of coaches in minor hockey.
One thing that has made my experience at CBC even better has been the friendliness of my co-workers. They’re always willing to help and have a great, down-to-earth sense of humour. This especially comes out when talking about our particular love-hate relationship with Valentines Day crafts.
Since I couldn’t pass on an opportunity to theme bake – even after actual Valentines Day was over – I made these cupcakes last night and brought them into the newsroom today. Next week: A CBC fondant cake!
Mushroom and barley risotto (a craving cured)
In past posts, I’ve admitted to several food cravings that I’m not so proud of. Be it five-minute cupcakes, half a bowl of unused cream cheese icing, or cold Kraft Dinner eaten straight from the fridge, these are the cravings that make me wonder how it is that I’m supposed to be a 20-something-year-old.
Then there’s the weird, but positive cravings. Like how I lose my mind for Magic Bullet smoothies after I go for a run. Or like how sometimes I cannot stop eating raspberries. You get the point.
This week’s bizarre and healthy choice came in the form of barley, that delicious grain that resembles the cutest of tiny beads. Barley is just the latest of the super grain family to catch my attention (its extended family tree includes my beloved quinoa and the elusive wheat berry). You can only imagine how thrilled I was when I received my latest issue of Canadian Living, flipped straight to the food section and discovered – low and behold – a brilliant series on Super Grains.
I did a flailing, happy food dance in my dining room.
My favourite of the recipes was one for mushroom and barley risotto. Mushrooms! Barley! Easily two of the best things in the universe. I set out to make this my Thursday night mission. I have a long day of classes on Friday, and said day is severely improved upon if I bring a delicious lunch of leftovers.
Since I didn’t have all the same ingredients as the recipe requested and since I am more frequently throwing caution to the wind and experimenting, my creation turned out a little differently than what you’ll see in the glossy pages of CL. Still, they get 100 per cent of the inspiration credit for this meal.
I added frozen peas and used fresh mushrooms rather than dry. I also made some other minor tweaks. This was yummy and reminded me of the rice risotto that Gord and I once made in Amsterdam.
Finally, winter photo season isn’t working out half as badly as I thought it would! I am totally digging these photos, and have fully delved into the wonderful world of Photoshop in order to make any lighting/colour adjustments that may be necessary. I may have gone a little overboard with the pine cones and oven rack props (fact: the latter was picked up off the side of the road, washed promptly and is now a multi-function house piece!), but hey, for someone who is used to standing on a chair on her outdoor patio to get a good shot, this is nothing. UPDATE: Okay, I just realized that you can’t see the pine cones in the photos I picked, but I promise you that they’re there. I’ll just have to include them in future photos. Aside: isn’t this bowl perfect for these photos?!
PPS: I imagine that this could easily be made vegetarian, should you choose to substitute the chicken stock with veggie stock.
Martha Stewart’s outrageous chocolate cookies
I warned you that this was going to be a Martha Stewart week.
These cookies have become a bit of a tradition among my group of friends. To understand the tradition, you must first understand my friend Amanda, for whom I made these cookies. Amanda loves her birthday. Loves it. More than a small child loves puppies and more than I love cheese. She always has a week’s worth of birthday festivities, appropriately called “Amandapalooza.”
Amanda and I on one of her birthday nights
It is my job, as old roommate and friend, to bake something for her. Last year I made these white chocolate Macadamia nut cookies for the first time. This year she had another cookie request. These.
Cookies + Instagram = Love
As far as I know, Amanda’s love for these cookies started on her birthday last year, when our old roommate Brittany (SHE IS IN PARIS NOW, GO LOOK AT HER BLOG!!) made her a batch. They are actually the perfect cookie – slightly crunchy on the outside and chewy and soft on the inside (so long as you don’t over bake them which I accidentally did with a batch of these…). They’re like a tiny brownie cookie, but better. A recipe like this obviously uses up a lot of chocolate, so it’s certainly a good thing that I always have an absurd amount on hand.
Since this was the second year in a row that the cookies were made, I declare it a tradition.
A tradition which I may whip up and eat solo in my bedroom once in awhile.
Heh.
Cheddar and broccoli macaroni and cheese
Lately, I’ve been experiencing an irrevocable craving for Kraft Dinner. Those who know me well, will know that I’m always craving cheese and pasta. Always. This didn’t help my cause.
An attempt to create the anti-KD
Nor did it help when one of my roommates had a bowl of uncovered, day-old Kraft Dinner sitting at the front of the fridge. If there is anything I love more than the cheesy, freshly made KD, it is slightly crusty, old pasta. Seriously. Judge me now and never read this blog again. Regardless of how much my culinary horizons have expanded through this blog, I will always enjoy cowering in the corner of my dining room picking away at clumpy noodles.
That’s one thing I’ve noticed over the past few weeks. As much as I love good food, I also love the guilty pleasure bad stuff. Like Kraft Dinner. Likely poorly grilled chicken nuggets. Like pizza that is just greasy enough that the weight of the oil forms deep trenches across the melted cheese.
I will eat soup noodles in my bedroom until the day I die.
To try and change my habits, I wanted to take one of my guilty pleasure foods – KD in this case – and make something healthy (yet just as satisfying) out of it. Hence this cheddar and broccoli macaroni and cheese, inspired originally by some random recipe I found on my Epicurious iPhone app. My dinner quickly became an improvised mac and cheese recipe, and I was melting butter, grating cheese and preparing cute little broccoli florets (okay, this is a lie, I bought the frozen, pre-cut ones…).
And tada – there you have it. An easy substitute to KD, featuring a vegetable that I gave the nastiest stink eye to as a kid. Turns out that when covered in melted cheese, broccoli can actually be something quite wonderful.
Mr. Elephant approved.
Tuxedo cupcakes with candy bow ties
Sometimes I am ridiculous. I present to you Exhibit A:
Really though, my obsession with baking hits a high whenever I am invited to any get together that is even vaguely themed. This week’s party? A classy-themed shindig planned by a fellow fourth-year journalism student, Joel (for those who follow my comments, he was the one who identified the correct way to pluralize stegosaurus).
Cupcakes are my go-to “bring to a party and have everyone fawn over you and be impressed” food, but things have gotten challenging lately. The challenge: I have made a countless number of cupcake recipes already (see my cupcake category in the drop down menu on the right), meaning that creativity has been ever the more difficult to uncover. Google, which is normally a constant source of inspiration, failed me this time around. If you enter the term “classy cupcake” you stumble on more tragically named bakeries than anything else.
What I’m saying is that extensive brainstorming went into finding the perfect cupcake for this party. At first, I thought of doing something infused with champagne, before realizing that I was far too lazy to go buy a bottle and that the resulting purchase would likely just throw me into a tizzy of early morning alcoholism. I thought of dipping strawberries in chocolate, stuffing raspberries with a ganache, mixing finely chopped mint leaves into a decadent filling… None of the combinations were quite right. Nor did I have time for them.
My guardian angel of the week, Martha Stewart, saved the day. One of my searches landed me on her slideshow of fancy cupcakes. I was clicking through photo after photo, bleary eyed and getting increasingly disgusted by the hypothetical pool of drool that was being induced by the pictured cupcakes. Then, just like that, it happened. I found the perfect solution to my problem. It was slide number 18 out of 30. Candy-Bow-Tie Cupcakes. Be still my beating heart.
Everything was a breeze from here. I quickly whipped up a plain chocolate cupcake batter, and baked 20 cupcakes with perfectly rounded tops. Then the real fun began: it was bow tie making time.
Aside: Why does bow tie have a space between words, while necktie is all one word? It seems unfair to me.
These candy bow ties were made with fruit by the foot candy, purchased at my handy dandy local corner store. I LOVED completely hated that I bought too many rolls, and my attentive bow tie, er, tying, was accompanied by the inhaling of nearly 15 feet of candy fun. We will not discuss the sugar crash that followed.
The bow tie making process is a little complicated to explain in words, and the instructions Martha (bless her soul) gives are not the easiest to follow. And so, I present my first video tutorial, made mid-sugar crash with a hairstyle that has been ruined by a morning of incessant head-in-the-oven cupcake checking. Please don’t judge. Update: Yep, there is most definitely an issue with lip-word co-ordination in this video. I blame my four-year-old laptop and the fact that it was running on reserve battery power at the time. Bear with me. Update 2: Oh god that’s a terrible screen capture.
I woke up at 7 a.m. on Friday morning to make the mint buttercream icing for the cupcakes (once again, I am so grateful for the silence of my new Kitchenaid hand mixer). Freya and I have a new roommate, who has already noticed that we bake way more than the average people. She came downstairs on Friday to the sight of me making Oreo cookie crumb suits for my cupcakes. I am not helping my cause, am I?
Anyways, the result was adorable, I thought. These are definitely one of the top five favourite things that I’ve made. Suit up!
The best black bean burgers
Try saying that 10 times fast.
Okay, so technically I haven’t tried that many black bean burgers in my life, so to call these “the best” may be a minor exaggeration. Regardless, tonight – a mild Wednesday evening in January – they were all I wanted.
I’ve been wanting to make black bean burgers for awhile, and, as a result, have been trolling food blog after food blog, continuously bookmarking recipes that I’d like to try. The irony here is that I ended up not using any of these recipes. In fact, I used no recipe at all.
What up, improvisation?
But okay, I’ll admit that I cheated slightly in my creation, since reading so many other black bean burger recipes gave me a pretty good grasp of what had to go into my own. Still, I was pleased when the mixture I created actually managed to form a patty and actually managed to taste delicious. I am so proud.
Our Magic Bullet – bless its little mechanized heart – was an integral part of the burger making process, and was the perfect device the mash and blend the black beans, corn, cilantro and egg whites. Everything else just kind of worked out after that lucky streak, and the result was a filling, high-in-protein meal that even the most ardent of carnivores wouldn’t turn down.
And I have leftovers for in between class on Thursday. #blackbeanburgerhappydance
Gord and I make dumplings, take two (Chinese New Year 2012)
Remember how last year Gord and I made potstickers and shrimp shumai to celebrate Chinese New Year? Well we did it again (with the dumplings, anyways)! This year, said dumplings/pot-stickers didn’t come out looking like turds. I thought it was an improvement, but you can decide that for yourself.
2011 (though I still like the plating)
Uncooked, 2012 (perfectly crimped, probably Gord's)
Having never made dumplings before last year’s day-long food fest, Gord and I spent much of our 2011 time perplexed over the best way to seal one side of the wonton wrapper to the other, while still creating something that looked even vaguely appetizing. This year, we were pros (well Gord was a pro, I was still crimping them closed incorrectly and eating wonton wrappers like raw pasta). The picture above illustrates how the finished, raw dumplings looked like cute little stegosaurus.
Of course, simplicity must come with another new challenge. This year’s challenge was uncontrollable, and not due to my lack of neat food origami skills.
Just as Gord and I were about to get our hands all up in the raw ground pork to make the dumpling filling, the water along his entire street went out. Water is kind of a crucial part of the whole cooking and cleaning process. So we decided Gord would be the solo mixer. After, his hands looked like he had just run them through a vat of zombie brains (seasoned with green onions). Much paper towel was utilized and a careful cooking process followed to avoid sickness.
Dumpling innards, pre-zombie brain mix-fest
Thank heavens I had brought along my trusty Carleton water bottle. It was filled to the brim with the great elixir of life, and leftover water doubled as our steaming and post-dumpling party cleaning fluid.
Take that, forces beyond my control – I have now successfully made bruschetta without power and dumplings without water.
PS: last year when I brought the dumplings home, we were stupid and packaged the soft, stuffed wonton membranes into a Ziploc bag. They promptly froze into one giant clump in the freezer, making the resulting photos of the defrosted dumplings (see above, again) even less appetizing. This year, we froze first, packaged after. There is now a bag of dumpling happiness sitting in my freezer which I will be steaming up on January 23.
PPS: Like last year, I will again use a shot glass to hold my soya sauce. Some things never change.
An ode to Italian wedding soup
Italian Wedding Soup + Hilary, Hilary + Italian Wedding Soup. It’s a loving equation like none other. This is my all-time favourite soup.
Like any significant relationship, we have a lengthy history, our ups and downs. But considering we’ve been in love for more than half a decade, I’d say our commitment to each other is something phenomenal.
We first met when I was so young, at East Side Mario’s, one of those restaurant chains that northern Ontario family’s such as my own relied upon for a decent meal out. I’m not sure how we were introduced – maybe it was my mother, always trying to set me up with vegetables, trying to get me to go on just one date with that nice spinach boy. I finally complied with her wishes. It was love at first taste. My soup was dressed in a clean white bowl, its top speckled with a blend of pepper and a load of Parmesan cheese. I was hooked.
As time went on, Italian wedding soup was always with me. It accompanied through my band camp days (three years, fyi), where the cook (conveniently my best friend’s mom), would always sneak me extra meatballs.
Things got shaky when I returned to East Side Mario’s, only to discover that the soup wasn’t how I remembered it. We had grown apart, and it had changed. There was less of it now, less warming love to sooth my hungry heart. We broke up temporarily.
My love was rekindled when my mom started making her own version of the soup. It was simple and fulfilling, everything that a good relationship should be. We started up again, and I haven’t looked back since. Now, this Italian wedding soup is what gets me through the winter. We spend full days together: breakfast, lunch, dinner. Sometimes he even stays over for a midnight snack. What would I do without you, Italian wedding soup?
Alright, I’m done.
Are you creeped out yet? I’m sorry. I just really, really like this soup. It only takes about half an hour to make, and the result is a giant pot of liquid gold that will get you through the next half week. Guests will be pleased, however I recommend that you keep this one all to yourself. If you must share, I enjoy packing it up in Mason jars and giving to your friends as a surprise, middle-of-class lunch.
PS: add freshly grated Parmesan cheese, please. It’s a beautiful threesome.
Chocolate cherry cupcakes with a Smarties cream cheese icing (Happy Birthday Ariel!)
What a flavour combination, huh?
Don’t give me that look because you think I’m crazy for combining cherries and Smarties. I know the look. It’s something like this:
Okay, let’s be real. I just wanted an excuse to post this picture. I’m sure you guys aren’t ACTUALLY making a face at me. Right? RIIIIGHT?
Well whatever. They were good. I’ll admit, I never thought the three things would ever be combined. That all changed, however, once I took a trip (well several trips, actually. About once a week for all of second and third year…) to my friendly neighbourhood Dairy Queen with my good friend Ariel.
Here’s the backstory: As one of her several high school jobs, Ariel had a stint serving ice cream at DQ. When you’re a teenager and left fairly unattended in a large, ice cream shop, what choice do you have but try different flavour combinations? Read: LETS THROW EVERYTHING INTO THE BLIZZARD MAKER, GUYS. I had a similar experience when I worked at Starbucks in grade 12 and we made a lemon poppy seed loaf frappuccino…
But anyways, this post is not about getting Ariel and I indicted for the mischievous things we did with industrial powered mixers in high school. Nope, this post is about belatedly celebrating Ariel’s birthday, which she was not in Ottawa for.
And what better way to celebrate then to transform her favourite kind of blizzard into cupcake form?
I was very wary as to how these would turn out. I’ve never used/bought/eaten cherry pie filling before, and was concerned as to how it would affect the batter. To play things safe, I strained the actual cherries into a bowl and the result underneath was a giant goop of something that looked like cough syrup mixed with zombie blood.
There was about a cup of this liquid-y goo
Though these cupcakes didn’t rise to become mountainous domes, they were moist and had scattering of cherry. My other old roommate Alex said they were good enough to be a wedding cake! The Smarties cream cheese icing reminded me of Smarties ice cream and was the perfect topping to these rich, chocolatey cupcakes. Blizzard transformation: complete.
Please pardon the lack of photos – I was in a rush to get to the actual birthday party!
Pulverization is best served by the pounding of a meat cleaver
PS: a third-year journalism student at Carleton swung by my baking session to interview me for her multimedia class. I posed awkwardly with my hand mixer which I described as the “love of my life” way too many times.
