food

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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Peanut butter apple breakfast bake

~ Hilary ~ 4 Comments

Oh wow, breakfast has been changed forever.

Let me explain the story behind this post.

For the past two years I’ve been living with her, I’ve witnessed my health-nut, super athlete roommate Brittany making fancy, morning-energizer breakfasts.  This means that while I’m sitting like a schlump in my purple Asian pajamas (don’t ask) eating Cheerios or peanut butter toast, she is cooking up a storm in the kitchen.  At 7:30 a.m.  Amazing, right?

Most often, this kitchen mania would result in what I now know to call a breakfast bake.

Informal definition:
Breakfast bake (noun) – some huge chunk of baked item that partially resembles a cake; in Britt’s case, this bake often includes spoonfuls of (my forgotten and leftover from making muffins) pumpkin puree, an impressively grainy looking flour, and some strange nut butter and/or coconut substance that she has bought from the food shelves of Winners.

Until today, I had never given these morning meals much thought but, with my rebirth as a fairly healthy person after a month of pure gluttony, I figured I should try one out.

Right as I decided to concoct my own recipe, low and behold, Britt posts hers on her awesome new blog, B Out There.  How does that saying go?  Oh right, great minds think alike.  Even cross continent (B is from Whitehorse), our brains are somehow in sync.

I must also give credit to the originator of the breakfast bake, Ashley from the blog the Edible Perspective.  Thank you for bringing this morning meal into my life.

I knew I wanted to include peanut butter and apple in my breakfast bake, so I fiddled around with Britt’s instructions until I got my adapted Hilary recipe.  A few key differences involve me using whole wheat flour instead of whole grain flour (this was because I forgot the name of the correct flour in a moment of Bulk Barn panic), my use of normal milk instead of the bizarre I-will-never-buy almond milk, and my addition of chocolate chips as a topping (because COME ON, everything is better with chocolate).

One quick tangent: UH, what the heck are chia seeds?  I bought some just for the sake of being fair to the recipe, but they just kind of look like poppy seeds (and I never want to see a poppy seed ever again, for reasons that only my roommates will understand).  Okay, Wikipedia tells me that they’re healthy and chalk full of omega-3’s.  I guess that’s cool.

End result?

A major case of the omnomnom’s.  The bake is the perfect energizer before my morning bike rides, so I am going to make them loads.  For the record, this recipe actually makes quite a large breakfast cake, so tiny appetites could probably share.  As for me?  No sharing.  Just me and a very large glass of milk.  Mornings just got a hell of a lot better.

As always, see recipe after the jump!

Ensure you mix everything together well with your very own Piggy Wiggy spatula! (see recipe below, you'll understand)

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Green pepper, chicken and mushroom quinoa with a sweet chili sauce

~ Hilary ~ 4 Comments

Before I begin, let me just say that someone needs to create a website where you input the ingredients used in a meal and the site, in turn, churns out a shortened recipe name.  Sort of like a bit.ly for recipes.  Until this fantastic site is created, my post names shall continue to be the length of a short story.  Apologies.

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Fact: I totally forgot how much I loved cooking.

For the past two months I have been neglecting my love of homemade food.  This neglect has come in favour of studying (read: all I ate was bagels bought from Tim Hortons), food made by my aunt (which was delicious, but I was spoiled), or food bought from a variety of overpriced Toronto locations.  The latter made up most of my time in Toronto and, while I discovered a bunch of great new places, I really shouldn’t have been prematurely spending my summer income on gourmet vegan meals and mouthwatering cheesecakes.  But man, was it good while it lasted.

Now that I’m back in Ottawa for the summer (hooray!), I figured it was about time I got back to cooking.  I moved into a new house on Monday, which means that I am finally free of last year’s closet-sized kitchen and its oven that made the temperature in the depths of hell feel chilly.  I am now, however, limited by the fact that we only have a single pan and one very large stockpot.  We have no baking pans and no oven mitts.  Something will have to be done about that (the solution will likely come in the form of today’s IKEA trip with my friend Will).

But anyways, in the nature of me trying to get back into healthy eating, I headed down to the grocery store to stock up on veggies galore.  I kitchen improvised (something I want to do almost all the time now) with this meal, creating a supper that was filling, healthy and wielded a spicy kick.  Just the way I like it.

Also, NEWSFLASH: I like mushrooms!  I added some in for good measure.

See recipe under the pictures.  These shots were taken outside on my new porch.  I don’t even need to stand on a chair to take them.  Happiness achieved.

PS: check out how green our grass is – at least all this miserable weather paid off in the form of optimum yard colouring.

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Lemon Ricotta Pancakes with Fresh Berries

~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

I am so blissfully breakfast full.

Tuesday is my “chill out and sleep in until 8:30” morning, and I decided to extend the luxury of the morning into a gourmet breakfast.

I’m not one to normally make big breakfasts, so this was a treat for me.

As fancy as this might look, it was really quite a practical meal.  Leftover in my fridge I had ricotta cheese, lemons, strawberries and blueberries.  The typical university student fare, right?  Perhaps not… Anyways, you can imagine my excitement when I found a recipe on Canadian Living that used all four of these ingredients.

Now, since I had no desire to be eating these pancakes for the remainder of the week, I cut the recipe in half and tweaked a few things to make up for my lack of raspberries, etc. I also added twice the amount of lemon rind, mostly because I got overly enthusiastic while zesting.  That’s my bad, but I will stick by my guns when I say you can never have too much lemon rind.  Also, I didn’t put blueberries in my pancakes as the original recipe requested.  I’m not a huge blueberry person.  If you are, however, a lover of these petite berries, throw them in. They’ll go nicely with the lemon. (PS: you can find my recipe under the pictures)

The pancakes turned out great.  I drizzled them with some real maple syrup and piled my fork high with pancake and berries.  I am not even ashamed to admit that I ate five (GLUTTONY).  There was actually just the right amount of lemon, and the flavours made me feel like I was sinfully indulging in dessert for breakfast.  Morning calorie splurges are well deserved.

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Grilled Chicken and Red Pepper Sandwich with Brie

~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

I finally got sick of eating sesame seed bagels with strawberry cream cheese.  After a day of March Break tour guiding yesterday, I was famished and knew I needed to make myself something delicious and nutritious for supper. I haven’t cooked in a little while and it seemed as though I was a little out of practice with this whole meal decision thing. Because of this, I wandered around the grocery store for a torturous amount of time, pondering what it was that I wanted to eat.  Now that I look back, the answer was so simple.

I wanted a sandwich.

I’ve been craving a gourmet sandwich ever since I made my mom the pear, ham and gruyere sandwich over reading week. As I walked up and down the deli aisle of the grocery store, I was practically drooling in anticipation.  But what would I put on my sandwich?  Since I’m not a fan of duplicate blog posts, I needed to make something dramatically different than my mom’s fruity fare.  So I improvised.  I was getting a huge chunk of brie anyways (because I eat an unhealthy amount of cheese), and decided to build my sandwich around this.  Add some grilled chicken, red pepper and leftover red onion and voila!  I’m a master sandwich maker (no sexist jokes, please).  Also, the only protein I’ve eaten in what seems like weeks has been cheese, so it was nice to have some chicken in there.  Finally, I had some parsley leftover in the fridge, so I decided to throw that in for fun.  I popped the entire sandwich in the toaster oven for a bit and everything got heated, melty and ultra flavourful.  I’m almost salivating just thinking about it.

The recipe is under the pictures, ch-ch-check it out!

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