Salad

Summer salad 1: Grilled chicken and corn salad with walnuts

~ Hilary ~ 4 Comments

Ladies and gentlemen, the season of summer salads is upon us!

For those of you who were around last summer, you’ll recall that almost every meal I blogged about was some sort of unconventional and delicious salad.  This summer, with a newly discovered (and extremely passionate) love of quinoa, I charge back into the world of refreshingly fast dinners and cool patio meals.

Salads are like the soup of summer.  Just like their warm winter counterpart, you can virtually toss in anything you want, making them the perfect meal to clear out the crisper and dispose of your cheeses (not that I ever need help getting rid of my cheese).

Case in point: In a thrifty manner, I used up leftover spinach, walnuts, asparagus and corn in this meal.

My recipe was inspired by the mouthwatering salad that appears on the July 2011 cover of Canadian Living.  A few adjustments were made here and there, and voila!  A new salad was born, à la Hilary Makes.

PS: I really need to get a BBQ – the original recipe in CL called for grilled chicken, asparagus and corn cobs, all of which I had to fry up on the stove.  Boring!  I’m actually considering whipping out my DIY skills and making my own in the next few weeks.  It can be done.  Barbeque dinners (and patio cooking!) may soon be within my reach.  Or I might just light something on fire.  Fingers crossed for the former.

PPS: I added walnuts to the salad at the last minute (which is why you won’t notice them in my pictures).  I felt like there was a void in the salad that only they could fill.  It was the perfect addition, resulting in a honourable mention in the recipe title.

PPPS: I’m sorry that I practically write an entirely new blog post in my postscripts.

Doesn't that slot in my patio look like a place where you would slip a pizza into an oven? I often imagine that my porch is a pizza parlour. It keeps me entertained.

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Cinco de Mayo, pt. 1: Black bean, red pepper and corn salad with a lime dressing

~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

Cinco de Mayo always makes me nostalgic for the Spanish class I took back in grade nine.  My teacher was one of those fantastically exuberant educators who would bounce around the classroom, laughing playfully as your face contorted as you attempted to pronounce a word.

Our class fell in the second semester of the school year.  Needless to say, that teacher loved Cinco de Mayo.

As I ate my leftover green pepper and mushroom quinoa yesterday for lunch, it dawned on be that it was May 5.  Well that was that – the cardinal rules of food blogging say that a themed holiday must not be overlooked.  Sitting on the floor of my living room (we don’t have a single chair in our house yet), I started sketching out my dinner plans.

(Aside: This whole planning my dinner while eating my lunch thing is starting to become a dangerous trend, I’m practically living from meal to meal)

In true Hilary fashion, I ended up going all out for my fiesta last night.  As a result of my hard work and kitchen toils, I’m going to be doing three different posts, one for each of my three course.  That’s right.  On a Thursday night, I cooked myself a three course meal.  I am the queen of indulgences.

For my first course, I decided to make a salad that was inspired by a nacho dip my mom makes at home.  As my good friend Gord informs me, this is also quite similar to a sante fe salad he made back last September.  Please visit and shamelessly refresh his blog.

I had red pepper and red onion lying around already, meaning that I just had to run out (bike) and get a few more things at the grocery store.  At the last minute, I realized I had accidentally bought kidney beans instead of black beans (I tend to do a lot of incorrect buying, tsk, tsk), so get this – I ran to the corner store that is literally ten steps away from my front door, and bounded back to the kitchen in a record-breaking 30 seconds.  I love my house.

One more thing – in a complete and utter Cinco de Mayo fail, I realized we didn’t have chili powder.  Yeah. I know, what sort of sad Mexican-inspired meal doesn’t have this spice?  Luckily, a combination of oregano, cumin and hot pepper sauce saved my life.  Thank you Yahoo Answers.

The salad turned out to be refreshing and fast/inexpensive to make, meaning that it would be the perfect potluck/BBQ/quick dinner meal for any night this summer.  ENJOY.

PS: Just ate this for a leftover dinner.  The leftovers are actually BETTER.  A little bit of refrigerator chill time will make all the difference.

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Cajun Chicken Quinoa Salad

~ Hilary ~ 1 Comment

When I’m busy I always forget how much I love cooking.  Since I haven’t done that much dinner preparing this month, I was a little sluggish in making a final decision for this meal.  At first I was uninspired, standing alone atop a chair in my kitchen, gazing into the pantry with a spaced out look on my face.  I was so close to making Kraft Dinner.  Resisting the instinct to eat like a student, I finally decided to base my meal around three key ingredients: red pepper, red onion, and quinoa.

A simple google search informed me that I wasn’t insane in my dinner mission, and that the three ingredients I chose would actually go quite well together.  I’ve had an ungodly craving for chicken lately (bizarre, I know), so decided to throw that in for fun.  I found one recipe on the web that looked good, and decided to use it as a starting point for the dish you see below.

This turned out to be a great meal.  I’m currently studying in the library, deeply regretting my choice to leave my leftovers at home.  Guess what I’m having for dinner?  For students looking for a quick protein and fibre fix to get them through exams, this meal is stellar.  It also only takes about half an hour to prepare, which means you can get back to your work (or Facebook lurking) as quickly as possible.

Man, the thought of leftovers is killing me right now. Thank god Ariel is buying me a muffin. (Update: I just ate my leftovers for supper, I’m so happy right now)

See the recipe after the jump!

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Salmon Kedgeree

~ Hilary ~ 3 Comments

The best leftovers in the universe.

As you can probably tell by the massive gaps between recent posts, I’ve had a crazy busy March so far.  I seem to have started off my 21st year of life with a bang, and in the past weeks have managed to plan a six week trip to Europe (more to come on this later), meet some journalism idols while working at the Genie Awards, and do a variety of other extra curricular activities.  At the same time, the upcoming weeks will be a challenge.  There are huge assignments due, a March break tour guiding schedule at school, and television newsroom days.  I’m tired, I’m really, really tired.  I have gotten involved in way too many things this year and they’ve finally started to catch up with me.  I hate to say this, but I think I might be taking a bit of a blogging hiatus, or at the very least I won’t be able to post more than twice a week.  Summer, where are you?

On a positive note: daylight savings time was early this year, which means the season of outdoor food photography is upon us!  My poor patio has been neglected from photos for months now, and is begging for a little attention.  Also, I am interning at the National Post in Toronto for all of April so I’ll be getting the chance to have an amazing journalism experience, explore a new city, and hopefully cook loads.  I can’t wait.  AND Britt, my other friend Freya and I found the GREATEST house for next year that is so close to school.  There’s lots to look forward to post-March.

Anyways, here’s this salmon kedgeree dish I made a few days ago.  It’s great for anyone who loves curry and spice (warning: you and your kitchen will smell for days afterwards).  My craving for salmon lined up perfectly with it going on sale at the grocery store.  Don’t you just love it when things just work?

PS: Wikipedia tells me that kegeree is supposed to have egg. I disagree/didn’t have time to hard boil eggs before class.

Source: Canadian Living

Spinach Strawberry and Pear Salad

~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

On a warm, reminiscent of summer day, I rejoiced in the fact that I got to eat at a barbeque.  My attendance at this afternoon event meant that I could resist the delicious outdoor supper smells as I returned from my afternoon journalism story covering.  Since I was full of delicious hot dog and cotton candy goodness (I ate the latter on the bus, which is an extremely difficult task), I wasn’t that hungry for supper, so I decided to just make myself a light salad.

As of the late, I have discovered my favourite types of salad always involve baby spinach and some sort of fruit.  With this knowledge in mind, I decided to use these two key elements to whip up a quick and delicious spinach strawberry and pear salad.  The baby spinach I used was the stuff I had sitting in the fridge after I neglected to include it in my last blog post meal.  As for the strawberries, Britt and I went to the local farmer’s market at Lansdowne Park this morning, and had the most wonderful time browsing through the fresh produce and eating AMAZING macarons (the first time I’ve ever tried them).  The strawberries came fresh from the market (I also got peaches and carrots!) and cast a magical “fresh strawberry” spell over me.  I know I’ve been slacking on posting recipes lately, but here is the one for this salad:

Salad
– 1 cup of trimmed baby spinach
– 1/2 cup of strawberries, pitted and halved
–  Half a pear, thinly sliced
– 1/4 cup almonds, toasted (or not, since I burnt my first batch in the toaster oven and decided to settle with them un-toasted)

Dressing
– 1 tbsp vegetable oil
– 1/2 tbsp white wine vinegar
– 1/2 tsp granulated sugar
– pinch of salt and pepper

Toss and enjoy!

I hope this salad has the same magical effect on you that it had on me!

Oh, one more thing… I took this picture at around 7:17 this evening.  Please note that the sun now sets at 7:05, which meant that this picture was taken in the semi-dark at the end of my street under a streetlight.  People walked by and saw me crouched down beside the sidewalk, photographing my food.  I’m starting to think my entire neighbourhood thinks I’m off my rocker… I may have to think of alternative arrangements for darkened photography.