Month: September 2011

A wonderfully perfect, manic Monday meal: Red quinoa with salmon and spinach

~ Hilary ~ 10 Comments

Subtitle: Rekindling my love of quinoa. 

With every blogging slump, there must be a delicious and inspiring dish to get me out of it.

So here we are. A delicious meal. And a simple one too. As in beyond simple. So simple that I felt like I was cheating, in fact. Maybe I was. I used canned salmon. SHHH. Can snobs have no place here – not on a student food blog. I wasn’t even breaking any rules of the Food Bible, since the recipe that I adapted this salad-like meal from requested that very canned delicacy.

Also, it used quinoa. And not only that, but quinoa of the coloured variety. Totally rad.

I still consider myself a sheltered food lover, and had never actually tried canned salmon before tonight. As is, I only tried canned tuna a few weeks ago when I was inspired by some other-worldly forces to try my hand at making a tuna fish sandwich. Yes, I know, you’re rolling your eyes at me like I missed out on some integral part of childhood school lunch making. I couldn’t help it, okay? My mom’s a dietician and I was picky, choosing the standard peanut butter and jam as my sandwich topping of choice between grades one and 12.

Anyways… turns out canned salmon is not disastrously disgusting and is, in fact, really quite good. Cracking open a can rather than using the fresh stuff also meant that I cut at least half an hour off of dinner preparation time. That meant this meal was ready in – get this – 10 MINUTES. A dinner revelation. It was delicious.

I’m going to compliment myself furiously for a moment (so bear with me): I really, really like these pictures. I’ve been inspired by my roommate Brittany’s photography style (which is stunning), and want to start setting a scene in my photos. Beautiful food + beautiful setting (i.e. an IKEA table, bowl of spinach and dishtowel) = beautiful photos. I hope.

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(Peanut butter) Banana pancakes

~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

Jack Johnson ain’t got nothing on these.

Peanut butter has always been an essential part of my morning routine.

Whether it be a lightly sugared piece of peanut butter toast (my mom got me addicted to this strange combination long ag0) or peanut butter, crackers and apple sauce (my all-time favourite snack food breakfast), peanut butter makes me feel like I’m ready for the day.

Last week, I decided it was time for me to graduate from the realms of my pre-school peanut butter stylings and try something new. Hence the creation of these peanut butter banana pancakes.

Inspiration was also drawn from my roommate Brittany, who makes the best damn pancakes all the time. The girl is a healthy, pancake making machine. Check these out.

Making pancakes also allowed me to use my fantastic, new non-stick pan. It’s seriously gorgeous and I’m already having a passionate love affair with it. It sleeps in my room (but not actually). The pancakes slip-slided off the pan easily and came out perfectly. Well, as perfectly as they can be when the girl making them has a phobia of flipping food in pans. Really, I’m crippled by my fear. Omelettes and pancakes are my arch nemeses.

Even after these were cooked, they still had a great, peanut buttery goodness to them, which I loved. I ate three and took several nibbles out of the remaining few. Make these. I promise your day will be better because of it.

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Recreating traditional Greek cuisine: Moussaka and Greek salad

~ Hilary ~ 2 Comments

If there is one food that reminds me of my time spent in Greece, it is eggplant. It was everywhere – in main courses, in dips, … as well as in other places that I just can’t recall. I’m pretty sure I ate enough eggplant to prevent the Greek economy from defaulting for another month. Yes sir, they can thank me for that.

Since I considered moussaka to be a bit of a kitchen challenge, I decided to limit the chance of any potentially devastating results by using a Canadian Living recipe to make mine. Always delicious, always reliable. The recipe was so detailed that it took up two pages of my cookbook.

Prior to my European travels, I had always flipped right past the page, scoffing at what I thought was just some sort of bastardized shepherd’s pie. Now I have to prevent myself from drooling every time I see the picture. Ladylike, I know.

A word for the wise: if you are looking for a quick dinner solution, moussaka is not it. From start to finish, this one dish took about three hours in total. Okay, maybe two and a half. Either way, this is serious business.

Actually, this meal was the bearer of several unexpected delays.

First, the inevitable – eggplant and its high maintenance state that requires it to be salted, dehydrated, rinsed and patted dry before it goes in the oven. Your patience will be tested.

The next delay was thanks to utter disorganization on my part. I didn’t have milk, something that is normally a pretty integral part of any cheese sauce, of which this dish demanded. When I went to the corner store next door, they were out of all large cartons, and so I got several smaller ones to compensate. I only dropped them once on the way home.

Finally, my lack of baking pans (I had used them to bring these cupcakes to the journalism picnic) meant that I needed to borrow one from a neighbour, otherwise spend the next two hours broiling eggplant in rounds on a foil-lined pie plate. I decided to borrow. Here’s how that went:

Hilary walks down the street, sees mother and son out on porch. She decides to ask to borrow their baking sheet.
Kid: Aren’t you that girl with that famous name? Taylor Swift or something?
Me: Haha. Hilary Duff. Nice try.
Kid: I know where you live. I’m Raffi.

New friends are the best.

Another delicious memory of Greece was the, you guessed it, Greek salad.

THE TOMATOES. Amazing. I never truly appreciated tomatoes until I ate them in Greece. I’m not even going to try to explain. I just see them in a completely different light now. Our attempt was a poor Greek man’s Greek salad, but tasty nonetheless. It also utilized some fresh produce from the Lansdowne Farmer’s Market. On top of the eggplant for the moussaka, I got heirloom tomatoes and lovely, crunchy field cucumbers. Just perfect.

Oh yes, and Gord came over for dinner. He brought baklava, which we inhaled the second dinner was through. All I want is a world where someone feeds me honey soaked pastry with a pistachio centre. Is that really too much to ask?

PS: Don’t mind the pictures. Moussaka is about as photogenic as lasagna, which is to say not at all.

Now please, won’t someone just take me back here?

The dinner view in Oia, Santorini

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Four days, six dozen cupcakes, one big icing-induced stomach ache

~ Hilary ~ 1 Comment

Two things must be disclosed about me and my personality before this post begins:

1. I enjoy baking just for myself (you never would have guessed, right?), however the idea of baking for other people, specifically in potluck and/or BBQ settings really sends me over the moon.
2. I am incapable of saying no to any request that requires me to make copious amounts of baked goods.

More specifically, the first-year journalism student picnic that happened last Saturday.

Almost all the cupcakes

When my friend Averie asked if I wanted to bring a dessert to the event, I of course immediately knew that I would be bringing cupcakes. And lots of them. Since I’m not living with five other people anymore, two of whom had consistently hungry boyfriends, it’s a little more difficult to make the mass amount of cupcakes that I used to. I could eat them all, yes, but I’m trying to do things that aren’t detrimental to my health, remember?

Deciding what flavours of cupcakes to bring involved an extensive brainstorming session, one that saw me slumped out on our IKEA futon, scribbling ideas onto a piece of loose leaf. I didn’t want to make too many flavours that I had already tried, nor did I want to be super adventurous and become even more broke than I currently am (damn you Europe).

And so, after much inner conflict and personal indecisiveness, I settled on the following four flavours:

Featuring an attempted journalism-themed photography set-up

– Psychedelic cupcakes with a cream cheese icing*;
– Pumpkin cupcakes with a brown sugar cream cheese icing*;
– Snickerdoodle cupcakes with a cinnamon brown sugar cream cheese icing; and, my personal favourite,
– Mint double chocolate chip cupcakes with a peppermint buttercream icing

*repeat offenders

Once the key flavour decisions were made, I trekked over to the Bulk Barn where I, once again, managed to spend enough to put a noticeable influx in their quarterly budget report.  Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but I did buy so much cake flour, icing sugar and white sugar that it made my black shirt look like I had major dandruff issues. I brushed myself off and headed over to the actual grocery store, buying butter, eggs and cocoa galore. All in a days work.

What came next was not all in a day’s work.

I knew I wouldn’t have time to bake everything on Friday and Saturday and, considering I had training for two different jobs on those days, I knew time would be of the essence. The only logical thing to do was to start baking on Wednesday, before school started. For each of the next four days – Wednesday through to Saturday, I baked a batch of cupcakes a day. Budgeting my time effectively, I left the always-horrible task of icing until about 1:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, just a short three hours before the picnic was due to start.

Brief side-tracked confession: I hate everything about icing. Besides eating it. But really. The mixing, the PILES of icing sugar, the back-breaking piping work, the solidified chocolate ganache… the list goes on. </whine>

Oh wait, one more thing. Making icing also means I’m prone to accidents like this. Poor iPhone.

In the end, the cupcakes were done and delivered in time, thanks to a noble steed (my parents and their van) who just happened to be in town for the weekend. Life savers.

For those of you who aren’t j-school nerds, the -30- on the mint chocolate chip cupcakes is how a journalist indicates that a story is done. There, now you learned something today. You’re welcome.

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Kicking off soup season with a chicken barley soup

~ Hilary ~ 5 Comments

This post is dedicated to my dear boyfriend Matt, who is currently under the weather. Earlier today he disclosed to me a tragic tale about how he unwillingly needed to leave his house in order to purchase soup. Matt, this is the soup you can imagine that I’m to serving you. It tasted delicious. Enjoy, you sickie.

Now…

To many, fall means sweaters, boots and piles upon piles of leaves. While a serious fan of both the former and the latter, one of which allows me to reach optimum fashion levels (I really like layered clothing and black tights) and the other of which lets me to relive my ever-fleeting childhood, neither is what I think of immediately as autumn approaches. Nope, to me fall (and winter and early spring) is all about soup. With that, I officially declare that soup season has begun. It is not to end until the snow melts in the spring. That’s an order.

The best part about soup? It’s the king of all improvised foods. It lets you toss in absolutely anything, more specifically a large quantity of the pearl barley that I’ve had sitting in my pantry for about a year. To maximize the simplicity of this self-created recipe, I bought half a pre-cooked chicken from the deli section of my local grocery store. After a quick bike ride home my backpack smelled like a thousand Swiss Chalet branches. The dogs will be following me home from school, I know it.

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