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The one recipe in the Everyday Food book that I was surprised to see was Egg in the Hole. This is probably the first thing I ever learned to make on the stove top and I still enjoy frequently. I got Nuno into them as well but he's managed to take this recipe and run with it.
This is the Egg in the Hole made according to Everyday Food's instructions. The only difference from the way I make it is that it's made with olive oil instead of butter. Didn't think much of that revision, but it made a huge difference. In the past I've burned plenty of Egg in the Hole breakfasts because butter burns at such a low temperature. Olive oil is like Egg in the Hole insurance. The flavour is amazing too. We've actually switched to using olive oil instead of butter from now on.
The other day we were out of bread so Nuno improvised and used a flour tortilla instead. It's quite a neat twist. You can enjoy the egg more because there is less bread to eat around, the egg covers more surface of the tortilla and the cut-out hole makes for eating a soft-set center like scooping a tortilla chip.
It's quite crispy and nice and we were thinking that if you added just a little water to the pan near the end of cooking you will end up with a softer tortilla and you can then fill it with filling such as guacamole and salsa!
We're going on almost 2 months without a working oven. I finally called for a service on it and it looks like it's toast and we need a full replacement. All this time without baking steered me into the direction of no-bake desserts such as tirimisu, ice cream, chocolate covered bananas and Magnolia banana pudding. I ventured into Kraft Canada's site and became all too enticed by their layered dessert concoctions. I broke down and decided to do what all other gals before me have done and make a dead-simple assembled dessert. I figured if I'd do it up, I'd have to do it right! That meant buying all my ingredients at Wal-Mart. I had no idea where to find Cool Whip and once I found it I didn't realize it's frozen! After I worked out the initial kinks of starting something new I decided on, of course, a banana dessert.
This is Easy Banana Pudding Parfaits. Minimal time, minimal effort and Maximum Flavour! Holy cow, I LOVE this dessert. It's like the Magnolia Banana Pudding, only way less effort, time, cost, fat & calories. The best part is you can make these in single-serving portions so you're not at all obligated to eat the entire recipe - which is how desserts around here go. I just love that my Riedel Ice Wine stemware got some use. Classy move!
Now for the utter and total disaster of a recipe. Strawberry Whipped Sensation is one of the highest rated on Kraft Canada's site. It appeared to be a great way to enjoy fresh strawberries. Well, I took this one as far as freezing the assembled dessert when I snuck in a taste. What the? This is WAY TOO SWEET!! Like kill my teeth type of sweetness. I guess an entire can of condensed milk will do that. And Oreo cookies, yuck, yuck, yuck! I decided to salvage what I could. I scraped off the god awful broken Oreos and then mixed more Cool Whip into the strawberry creme. Then made a layer dessert using graham cracker base, strawberry creme layer, Cool Whip topping with strawberry Canadian flag. It tasted and looked great for our Canada Day celebration.
Last night we had Asparagus, Snap Pea and Avocado Pasta. This was published in Everyday Food magazine in June 2006. I've been meaning to try it and with the markets full of fresh asparagus, snow peas and basil I figured now was a great time to try this one out.
What was so great about this recipe, other than how absolutely delicious it is, is how great it was to create a dinner for Owen from the ingredients. I first gave him a couple bow tie pastas to eat/play with. Then boiled a few spears of asparagus and snap peas slightly longer than the rest. It was then blitzed in the food processor with 1/4 avocado, a few more farafalle and some of the pasta water. It was the perfect baby food texture and Owen happily gobbled up his entire portion.
If Everyday Food were to make a third book, this recipe should be published in it. We really enjoyed it and it will become a future dinner staple for sure!
No, Everyday Food did not have a recipe for a boston lettuce sandwich. This was my lunch of Chicken Salad sandwich. I'm not sure there is much to say other than it's the simplest way to use up leftover cooked chicken. It was great and can be reworked in so many ways. Did we even need a recipe for chicken salad?
Here is our super-healthy dinner last night. Asian Chicken Soup with a side of Lentils with Carrots and Spinach.
This is the first meal where I can say all the produce was locally grown! Yep, all our produce needs are in season right now and it feels pretty good to not have to rely on the supermarket for items like snow peas. Speaking of which, are so much larger and bountiful at the farmer's market than at the grocery store.
When it comes to making the Asian Chicken Soup in the future I feel that the vegetables in the soup could be chopped a little smaller and Nuno thinks a little more fresh ginger would be nice. I might even skip using soba noodles because I'm so finicky about the done-ness of these noodles and it's impossible to control that in a soup.
As for the lentil dish, I really don't think this could serve 4 people. We blitzed a portion for Owen and managed to finish the rest of it between us. This is the sort of side dish I'd love to have the next day for lunch, so I'll be doubling it next time around.
Here is last night's Grilled Chicken with Roasted-Pepper Sauce and Glazed Shallots.
It was nice to have Nuno bar-b-que chicken while I prepped the rest of the meal. Things can get a little hairy in the kitchen co-ordinating several recipes and Owen's dinner all in hopes of a simultaneous completion. The roasted red pepper sauce was 'meh' along with the chicken. I mean, lets face it, chicken breast de-boned and without skin on the BBQ is dry. So that's the last time we'll be making that one. One the other hand, the glazed shallots turned out absolutely amazing. It's not terribly appetizing to eat an onion for dinner, but these are really nice & sweet and came together perfectly.
I haven't really updated much on how the progress of feeding Owen has been going. I always prep Owen's meals from scratch. Actually, I'm probably a bit of a crazy mom because I will only buy produce that's organic and farmed locally. Luckily, with all my efforts, Owen doesn't seem to be rejecting anything. He's eating more and more and that includes three meals a day and nursing in between. Since he's tried all meats (and seems to enjoy salmon the most) I've started him on vegetables now. His favourites are sweet potato, spinach and carrots. Every morning Owen has a piece of whole grain toast cut into thirds length wise (makes for great finger food). It's a terrible mess and he only ends up eating half of the toast since the other half ends up, oh, everywhere. But I feel there is value in having Owen control how much he eats and begins to learn to feed himself.
In the past couple days I've started him on Balkan-style yogurt with his cereal, rehydrated unsulphured apricots and local apples. I steam most of his food and then process it in the food processor. I keep the left over water from steaming to reach a nice consistency with his meals. It's a bit of a perk when some of our Everyday Food meals are suitable for Owen, but that's certainly not a daily occurrence and he tends to find a whole dinner of new tastes a little overwhelming.
I've come across a couple great sites for recipes that I'm so excited to share!
The first is Kraft Canada's 'What's Cooking' magazine online.
Dating back to their early issues in 2000, Kraft has compiled all their recipes they published in What's Cooking and organized them according to issue. I'm hoping to spend a bit more time browsing around, but here is the link.
The second is Everyday Food's Online Recipe Index. I've never seen anything like this on the internet before. It's set up like a digital magazine recipe index.
They have published a couple digest recipe indexes before and I use mine all the time! It really helps maximize the use of all the Everyday Food back issues. But to have one now online, well, this one is so far superior to the printed copies. It is sorted alphabetically by keyword and if the recipe is online links are provided. I could spend hours browsing this index because not only is it full of recipes, the back pages provide their How-To's.With both hard and online copies I use it mostly for searching by key ingredients. The clever catch here is that in order to access it you must be an Everyday Food magazine subscriber. I highly recommend checking this site if you can get on it. Here's the link.
The term 'Grinder' is a regional name for a stuffed to the max submarine sandwich. I love to use this term when eating a huge American sandwich. I first became aware of grinders when I had to work on some ads for sub shops in Maryland. Then a couple years ago Nuno and I were in Boston and Nuno's cousin asked us if we'd ever had a "Grindah". I looked at him and repeated, "Grind-ah?" back to him in the Boston accent. It took a couple back and forths before I realized he was talking about Grinder sandwiches. It was hilarious and embarrassing. Here a photo of my very first Boston Grinder I had with Nuno's cousin.
Yesterday at Wegman's I saw that all the locals were lining up for deli fresh sandwiches in the Take-Out section of the store. I was curious to see what it was all about so I bought a Grinder! Actually, it's really just a turkey ranch variation on the grinder. But man, this is a small, and I could only eat half. But Wegman's sandwiches are fantastic.
It boosted my love for this store ten fold. I'm telling you, if I had known about these grinders when I was pregnant with those sub cravings, I don't know what I would have done. Probably ended up going into labour over there.
a.k.a - Junk Food Re-up. I talk about eating freshly prepared foods and home cooking often but I'm not beyond casual indulgences. I love food and even junk food is perfectly OK. In moderation of course.
As any Canadian knows, there are some grocery items that don't see the light of day up here but they somehow make it onto our radar. Living in Niagara has a real benefit of cross-border shopping for these items. I happened to need to do a couple exchanges at Target, so to maximize my time in the US, I decided to stop by Wegman's Grocery Store. I love shopping here but will typically spend only 10 minutes grabbing a couple things and then fleeing. But being on mat leave affords me a little more time to spend shopping for groceries. Since I spent a little more time at Wegman's yesterday and am now very familiar with their grocery selection, I figured I'd grab a frequent shopper's card while there. Looks like I've started a new habit.
For over a month now I've been keeping a mental list of items I can't seem to find in Canada. I somehow managed to find everything I was after at Wegman's. I'm very pleased to have found, hands down, the most difficult to find grocery item from Everyday Food. Spinach linguine! I'm not sure why, but even at the most stocked Italian markets it wasn't anywhere to be found. Not even in the fresh pasta sections of every grocery store (including Whole Foods). Also, I hope these M&M's Pretzels make it up here to Canada. I can't stand M&M's but the pretzel version is awesome!
Here is last night's Prosciutto & Fig Jam Sandwich.
This is a quick and easy dinner. The only real work was making the fig jam from scratch, but that is almost laugh-able at how easy it was. It made an entire pint of jam and can be stored in the fridge for up to a month, so I'm pleased about that. It'll be great on crackers with a slice of asiago.
I decided to check out Portage Bakery in Niagara Falls yesterday on a whim. It is a very authentic Italian bakery where as a kid, my dad would often pick up their sliced white bread. This bread is delicious and quite renowned around Niagara. I've never had any bread like it since. I didn't end up buying a loaf because I try and steer clear of processed white bread, but I did end up buying the ingredients for the Prosciutto Fig-Jam Sandwich (the loaf, fresh sliced prosciutto and asiago cheese). Oh, and I indulged in a couple baked goods - a pear & ricotta dessert and a pizzelle. Best pizzelle I've ever had and the pear & ricotta square was also quite good because it wasn't doused in sugar - it was exactly what I was looking for.
It was here that I thought I might start blogging about shopping for food. There are many markets, farm stands, bakeries and wineries in Niagara that I'd like to keep track of. I kinda feel like Anna Olson in her show, Fresh with how I journey out for fresh ingredients to use in my home baking and cooking. I'm still fairly new at learning what is in season and when, so I'm looking forward to this summer of experimenting with local and seasonal food. And a little extra boost is to shop for organic produce for Owen. It should be a fun summer.
Owen was good as gold and his personality really came through. Turns out he's a real ham and loves to impress people. The only real issue we had was that he was uncomfortable sleeping in a playpen alone in the room upstairs. I had to be in his line of vision to get him to sleep and he managed to wake quite a bit more often through the night.
We made my great-grandmother's recipe for Coconut Tarts and my-gosh! These are so crazy delicious. Raspberry filling with coconut custard on top. My grandmother's pastry is quite flaky and it's rich in a nice way but not overbearing. It is a nice platform for all the different desserts you can bake into it. She shared with me her butter tart recipe (which was all in her head).
I also typed out so many of my other favourite childhood desserts like marble squares, brownies, peanut chews, angel pie, maid-of-honour tarts and so many more. 
I'm sure as I work through them I'll be blogging about it. But it looks like in order to do that I'll have to deal with that pesky oven...
