Hilary makes food

Watermelon Salsa (And a Blogger challenge finally completed) (And part one of my dinner party meal)

~ Hilary ~ 3 Comments

Well let me just say that WEEKS and WEEKS ago (JUNE 30) when my friend and fellow blogger Carly (check out her cheerful blog Carly Loves), challenged me to make a recipe “that contains an unexpected, out-of-place ingredient,” I was completed boggled.  Sure I’m creative, but food-wise?  I was just learning the ropes.  Obviously, I had a major case of chef’s block (is that a thing?), and endlessly searched the internet in hopes of finding something both shocking and delicious.  Failure.  The next logical step?  CALL MOM.  Of course, my dearest mother had a solution for me: watermelon salsa, a dish which I had curiously ignored during past home get-togethers.  After asking about half a million people if watermelon in salsa was unusual (I got an overwhelming “yes”), I decided to go forth with this recipe.  So I had the dish, the only question was when I should make it, which leads nicely into the second part of this post…

…I decided to have a dinner party!  Sick of cooking for just myself, and still dreading the thought of leftovers sitting in my fridge for days at a time, I decided to have some of my culinarily spoiled co-workers over for a casual three-course meal.  Not knowing what I should make for an appetizer, it dawned on me that this was the perfect opportunity for me to make the salsa.  Once I got to Loblaws, the Grocery Store Gods confirmed my choice to make this dish: both watermelon and tortilla chips were on sale, a miracle for my student budget.  Strangely enough, the end product hardly tasted like watermelon, and the combination of garlic, onion, soy sauce (weird) and brown sugar somehow made it delicious.  Even my roommate who is allergic to tomatoes could eat salsa for the very first time!  If you’re looking for the recipe, I’ll post it under my Recipes tab sometime in the next few days.

In the end, I think this salsa was a big hit, and it gave me an excuse to use my new 99¢ silver platter from Value Village!  Also, please note the impressive “watermelon bowl.”  I thought it was quite ingenious, and gave me one less dish to wash.  Hilary: 1, Messy Kitchen: 0.

Stay tuned over the next few days as I post course two and three from my very first dinner party!

Chicken Burger Melts & Mango Avocado Salad

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Never having made a burger of any kind from scratch before, the task of making one was long overdue.  Shaping my own chicken burger was…an experience.  Raw meat is the most disgusting thing in the universe, and having to touch it was absolutely awful.  To make my burger, I used Canadian Living’s “Chicken Burger Melts” recipe.  The best thing about this burger was that it allowed me to bring out my old friend, the George Foreman grill for the very first time since learning to cook!  Taking out that grill brought back many, many memories from my grilled cheese and plain-chicken-and-bbq-sauce days.

Side note: This burger also represents the first time I have eaten vegetables on a burger.  Big step.
Side note II: If purchasing a delicious, mouth-watering cheese such as brie to put on your burger, ensure that you do not eat 3/4 of the cheese prior to your dinner being cooked.  Personal experience has found that it is almost enough to kill your appetite.

As for the mango and avocado salad, I am happy to announce that I FINALLY know how to properly peel and cut these two delicious fruits, thanks to a bunchofonlinetutorials.  There was a slight moment of panic while making this salad, as my first avocado turned out to be bad on the inside.  The new grocery store near my house turned out to be a lifesaver, and I quickly dashed down there to pick up a lovely already-ripe avocado.  Disaster averted.

Also, exciting news!  As some of you may have noticed, I now have my very own DOMAIN NAME!!  Hoorah!  I was completely positive that I was going to accidentally delete my blog whilst trying to achieve this url, so I am very happy that we are still here!

Spiced Beef Skillet Dinner (and my first encounter with green olives)

~ Hilary ~ 2 Comments

I am beginning to distrust ground beef.  Making this meal, I casually took some ground beef out of the freezer (I never use things when I first buy them, I’m horrible!) and defrosted it in the microwave in preparation for skillet-frying.  This was a smooth process, and it wasn’t until I started to stove fry the beef that I suspected something fishy.  As I fried up this defrosted beef, my nose was unhappily tickled by an unpleasant scent.  Unsure of whether or not this smell was coming from the beef, and being the paranoid/neurotic person that I am, I shut off the stove and sniffed my way around the kitchen in search of this mysterious scent.  Unable to find the source, and being far too hungry to care any longer, I continued to cook the meat, smell and all.  In the future, I promise to use fresh ground beef, and avoid the freezer from here on in.

Another unhappy note: back in June, I announced that I discovered I did not like black olives.  It is with a heavy heart that I admit that green olives too have an absolutely awful flavour, and that their oil-based taste does not do me any favours.  When this meal was done, you could evidently tell I had picked around the green, doughnut shaped vegetable, and left them for the compost in a neat little pile on my plate.

All in all, this dish made fireworks go off in my mouth.  There were such bizarre spices in it, spices that I never thought would be seen together, including paprika, cinnamon, cumin, ginger and coriander.  Surprisingly enough, they all worked out, and the entire meal had a consistently spicy taste.  Perfect supper for someone who is trying to develop their palette!

The recipe was from my“Make it Tonight” cookbook, a book I need to start using more, since it has so many fantastic-looking recipes!  Perhaps I will cook my way through all of the Canadian Living cookbooks, a sort of Julie/Julia challenge, n’est pas?

PS: WHY can I NOT cook couscous?  The recipe in my cookbook was apparently “fail-proof,” however my couscous STILL ended up resembling mashed potatoes.  Couscous: a must conquer in the near-future.

Chicken Noodle Stir Fry

~ Hilary ~ 1 Comment

Well I have finally gotten sick of all the salads I’ve been making.

Even though all the salad main dishes I’ve made over the past two weeks have been delicious and healthy, I was craving something a little more substantial for last night’s dinner.  Searching through pages and pages of chicken recipes on Canadian Living’s website, I finally stumbled on this one for a chicken noodle stir fry.  Since this recipe was only the second stir fry I have ever made, I wasn’t 100% sure of how well it would work out.  All the ingredients were really simple, EXCEPT for baby bok choy.  Waltzing through the produce section of the grocery store, I found a tag for normal adult bok choy.  Alas, the adult’s baby was nowhere to be found, and I had to settle for using defrosted spinach as a disappointingly wilted alternative.

With the chicken marinated in a tasty soy sauce/sesame seed oil/garlicy mixture, and the added honey hoisin sauce at the end, this dish satisfied my every dinner desire.

Gord’s Dinner, Part Two: Mini Quiches

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At approximately 5:30 p.m. on Sunday evening, I decided that a salad could not possibly be enough for dinner (despite what Canadian Living said about it being a “main course dish”).  With such thought, I promptly began to mildly freak out, whipping open every cookbook in sight in an attempt to find something else to make.  Gord was due for dinner an exact hour after this breakdown occurred.

Since I am writing this post, I’m sure you have all guessed that I successfully managed to make a supplementary dish for dinner.  Inspired by a recipe for mini quiche lorraines in one of our house cookbooks, I quickly went to work creating my own spinoff of the classic recipe.  It was easy-peasy, and basically consisted of me lining greased muffin tins with pre-made pie crust, shoving some sandwich meat (ham) and mozzarella cheese in the base, and filling the rest of the tin up with an egg and milk mixture.  Sprinkle fresh chives on the top, and voila – an appetizer!  For once, I am extremely grateful for my overheated, possessed student oven, as it cooked these quiches in a record breaking 20 minutes.

And they were GOOD.  Quiche is probably one of my favourite foods, and the fact that I whipped these up in an hour makes me giddy with delight.  Nom, nom, nom, nom!