Author: Hilary

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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Hi, my name is Hilary, and I’m a colour addict (an end-of-summer arts and crafts project)

~ Hilary ~ 6 Comments

Subtitle: I will blog about whatever I like, please and thank you.

As far as decorating my bedroom goes, I’m pretty big on colour. Want to know how big? Here’s a picture of my room at my parent’s house, painted circa grade 10.

This was also the time when I took embarrassing, myspace shots like this in said bedroom. You know you did it too. See that green blazer? That’s my high school band jacket. See the purple scarf? I wore that yesterday. Coolest kid in school, clearly.

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME EVER.

The one perk to moving halfway through high school? I got to paint my room two different colours. My brother picked black and red. Logically, I did what any colour-crazed teenage girl who had been living in a baby blue bedroom for the last seven years would do, and selected pink and yellow to go along with my already-lime green laden future room. Bless the girl who lived there first for picking such an atrociously bright colour.

So back to my first statement: I like my room full of colour and creativity. With such, you can only imagine my excitement when I discovered this frame at a design boutique in Vienna. I knew that the second I got home I would recreate it.

My inspiration

And it was so easy. This was all I needed.

This craft project was also simplified by the fact that I had in my possession a decently sized saw. It was in the toolbox my dad bought for me in second-year. This being said, shouldn’t every 20-something girl own at least one saw? Craft projects must be taken into consideration.

Now, since pencil crayons and their resulting shavings come out looking quite artistic, ensure that you take several pictures of both during and after the crafting process.

Then base the front of your future business cards around one of the photos you take. This is very important.

Before you know it, voila! You will have a ridiculously childish, Viennese inspired frame to help brighten up the already ceizure-inducing colour of your room. Admire for hours.

In total, this frame took about 2 hours to make, almost all of which was spent lounging out on the porch in the end-of-summer sun. I’ll post the extremely-simple instructions down below, in case you every have a desire to make a frame which will most definitely make you look like a Kindergarten teacher or teen mom. Ugh. Who am I.

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Whole-wheat strawberry and peach muffins (and my decision to finally cook for myself, and not for the blog)

~ Hilary ~ 7 Comments

That’s right – they’re packed with health.

For those of you who don’t know (which is likely everyone with the exception of my mom and my plentiful list of stalkers), I’ve recently changed student accommodations, moving from a house with one small, shabby kitchen into a house with a fairly decent sized there-is-actually-a-good-counter-per-person-ratio kitchen. Moving has also meant that I’m no longer living with five other girls (all of whom I still love, but living with that many people taunts the very best of co-operators). Rather, I’m now living with two – Brittany and Freya – the most athletically fit and enthusiastically energetic people I know. They’re a wonderful influence on me.

Brittany and Freya at this wicked new gelato place near our house

Their influence prompted the creation of these muffins. Since Britt and the Freymeister are both varsity athletes, it means that their meals are always jam packed with fruits, vegetables, healthy flours and honeys and oils that I only half like. Example: earlier in the day when I made these, Britt made red currant banana muffins with spelt flour (after trying them for scientific purposes, I can certify them as 100% delicious). I’m not sure what exactly spelt flour is or what its benefits are, but if B is using it than it must be good for you.

Point is, she inspired me to go above and beyond my basic all-purpose flour muffins and make them with whole-wheat flour. Yes, I know the use of whole-wheat flour does not automatically nominate me for the “healthy blogger of the year” award. I think Britt already has that one snagged. Rather, it’s just a tiny part of my September resolution to eat healthier at every meal.

Here’s the truth:

Although technically learning how to cook last year, I was terrible in the sense that I would only cook really healthy and good food for myself when I planned to blog about it. This being said, I was basically cooking for my blog, and not for me (my old roommates can vouch for the fact that I frequently had “blog desserts” that I would set aside and they would not be able to touch).

This year, things will be different. At each and every meal, I’m going to make the conscious effort to eat fruit and vegetables with or in said meal. And I’ll try not to snack, although snacking is my oldest and most dear friend. Hopefully from here on in we will just be friendly acquaintances.  I’ve already started out on this resolution, with stir frys, smoothies and fruit-buying galore. Lets see if I can keep it up once the real buzz of school begins.

In the meantime, I’ll just enjoy these muffins and revel in the fact that a whole-wheat something is better than a non-whole-wheat one. Heck, I’m no expert yet.

September muffins

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