Pink cous cous

This dish is visually  stunning and delicious. It's the perfect side dish for anything lightly seasoned, fish or chicken work best. Make it in advance and serve it room temp. I'm always looking for creative ways to cook up super simple ingredients. Pink cous cous INGREDIENTS: 
3 celery stocks - chopped small squares
3 purple carrots - chopped small squares
2 garlic cloves - finely chopped
splash red wine vinegar about 1/4 cup 
splash water
1 cup Israeli cous cous
salt & pepper
olive oil
parsley or carrot tops - handful chopped 
PREP: boil 1 cup Israeli cous cous in boiling water - cook like pasta and drain/ rinse after if needed. Set aside to cool. Place all ingredients - leaving out cous cous parsley and water in bowl to marinate. Heat up pan with splash of olive oil add mixture to hot pan  and cover for 2-3 mins. Add splash of water and sort of sautee everything, until vinegar burns off and veg is slightly tender - you still want everything to have a bite 5-10 mins. Take off heat. Add chopped parsley cous cous and veg mixture in a clean bowl and serve. You can add an extra drizzle of olive oil and splash of lemon. 

My first turkey roast

So I bought this beautiful turkey breast from Bretta farms and I decided tonight would be the night I finally tried roasting a turkey. This was the easiest way to do it as the breast is a small section of this giant bird, and will only take 1 hour to an hour an a half. The turkey has already been de-boned but still had the skin on which will keep the turkey moist it will also be a perfect  pocket for flavoring this delicious bird. Tonight I have decided to roast up some veggies including sweet potato, carrot and parsnip. 
Roast turkey INGREDIENTS: 
1 5-6 pound turkey breast - skin on
sage - few sprigs finely chopped
thyme - few sprigs finely chopped
rosemary - few sprigs finely chopped
garlic - 2 cloves finely chopped
dried mustard seeds - 1 tbs ground
paprika (optional) - 
dry white wine
chicken stock 
salt and pepper
PREP: finely chop herbs  spices & garlic coat entire breast and under the skin. 
COOK: in roasting pan at 350 degrees for 1.5 hours. Add 1 cup dry white wine and 3 cups chicken stock in bottom of pan, and place in oven checking after 30 mins. If turkey begins to seem dry cover with tin foil. After 1.2 hours check with meat thermometer if cooked through, let sit for 10 mins before serving. 

Ode to the holy root vegetable

You've heard me talk about them before but I just can't get enough of these wonderful tuberosus delights. The Jerusalem artichoke  has absolutely no significance to its name sake Jerusalem - in fact I don't even think they grown in Israel at all. Jerusalem artichokes or sunchokes  are void of any  resemblance to artichokes all together not in taste texture or appearance. They taste more like a water chestnut or jicama. Weirdly enough Jerusalem artichokes are potato like dirt dwellers that are closely related to the sunflower family. They grow naturally from the Eastern seaboard from Georgia to Nova Scotia. FACT: In the 1600's the Jerusalem artichokes were accepted into French culture solely based on the fact that they bore the name artichoke. However they quickly fell into obscurity when  potatoes became more widely accepted - they had previously been rejected because they were considered suspicious. One thing is for sure, these things are just fabulous! Roasted pureed or raw they always add something to the dish, just know they take a bit longer to cook then other root vegetables *if cooking on stove top cook at low temp to reduce browning, they are best roasted. This recipe is my homage to the Jerusalem artichoke. 

Holy root puree INGREDIENTS: 

5 large jerusalem artichokes or more 1 1/2 pounds - rough chop

1 cooking onion - rough chop

2 cloves of garlic - rough chop

celery leaves - 1 cup rough chop

butter - 1 tbs

olive oil - drizzle 

1/2 lemon -  zest & juice 

thyme - 3-4 sprigs

nutmeg - 1tsp or less

splash white wine - dry (optional)

milk (1 percent or higher) - 1 cup 

veggie stock - 4 cups 

COOK: Sautee (sweat) onion, garlic and celery in butter and olive oil, add chokes and cook for 5 mins. Add the lemon juice, stock, wine, nutmeg and thyme and bring to a boil - cook until chokes are tender. Remove thyme sprigs and puree everything until smooth. Transfer mixture back to the pot, and cook on medium heat, add milk and zest and enjoy.

Sometimes you just want a burger and fries!

When we eat red meat at our house I usually make some sort of kefta or kebab Middle eastern style burger. My Bf just loves beef that way, and while I do think they are delicious and satisfying sometime I just want a freaking burger. So tonight we had naked burgers and baked fries INGREDIENTS:

1 pound lean ground organic beef 

Montreal Steak spice 

2 sweet potatoes

2 yukon golds

sea salt, & pepper

whatever toppings you like. 

PREP: cut potatoes in to desired slices. Splash of oil s&p.  Add 1/2 tbs spice mix, and form burgers, let sit for a few hours in the refrigerator or over night. 

COOK: Potatoes -  oven roast 350 for about 35 mins, or more. Salt when cooked. Grill on bbq or in a grill pan 5-10 mins - I like burgers medium. 

4 Life Natural Foods

One of my favorite Kensington destinations it's a go-to organics haven for locovores and Tomato Snobs alike. The staff is super friendly and the selections are SA-WEET! They also carry some of my favorite products from DGM (Dufferin Grove Market) including Forbes Wild Foods an amazing local line of forgaged goods.  Last sunny Friday was officially the first nice day in Toronto I celebrated by treating myself to a lovely walk in Kensington with this place in mind. I had seen it on some other Toronto food blog, and when I missed  my weekly trip to the market I knew its would be the perfect day for a review. Shane was the lovely guy who helped me. I had some questions about black radishes and concerns about their soft spots. He taught me that if I put veggies that have gone a bit soft in a bowl with cold water it would firm back up... Interesting... He also said that if it the radish wasn't good I should come back and let him know, and he would give me a fresh one. Mega points!!! I love anywhere with good customer service, it's very important and these days very hard to find. Shane and I blabbed about jerusalem artichokes and how much we love eating them raw, and bla bla bla I could have chatted all day. Moral of the story is GO THERE! It's great, and not over priced. 

Friday night dinner with the bf's rents

Last Friday I decided to make dinner for my boyfriends mom. His father/her husband was out of town and I thought it would be nice if we made dinner super easy for her. We showed up with a two course dinner, already made.  Yes I scored major brownie points that evening. I made a roasted jerusalem artichoke soup, with lemon and thyme. Pink cous cous salad and red snapper in a lemon beurre blanc sauce.  Just slightly fancy but my bf cringes every time he hears the word fish, so I have to make it sound like something a bit more appealing. Luckily this dish completely changed his mind about our scaley fillet friends. He tells me that his aversion to fish grew from many years of being forced to eat over cooked fish on a pretty much daily basis. His father is a vegetarian, and before the days of soy beef and tofurky the only other option was fish or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, not exactly dinner. Over all the meal was a big hit, mother happy, left overs for father when he returns home from late day of traveling and my pescaphobic boyfriend is now a complete convert. I feel like foodie superhero, now if only I could change water into wine. 

Candy flowers - the best bouquet ever!

A few weeks ago my boyfriend decided  to get creative with a bowl of licorice. I was working away at my computer it was Saturday afternoon and he was working through a hangover from his birthday celebration the night before.  I looked over to find him with a rolling pin sculpting me a bowl of beautiful licorice flowers. It was so cute! He described the flowers as water lilies, but I think they look a bit more like orchids, either way they were so pretty. I had to take a picture of them. There's nothing better then a surprise bouquet of flowers, especially when the flowers are made of candy. 

Tase this ________ I think it's gone bad.

Has anyone ever been asked to taste something because someone else isn't sure if it's gone bad or not? Or do you know someone who keeps food sitting around for ages, because their not sure when to throw it out. Brought to us by The Foundation for Neo-cognitive & Ontologoical Research and Development I stumbleupon this useful table that basically gives you a guideline for when things go bad. I feel like I should blow it up, frame it and give it to my grandmother, who perpetually feeds us spoiled food and has absolutely no concept that food can go bad even in the freezer after a period of time. She seems to think the freezer magically transports the food back in time, and makes it edible for eternity. She's also the type of woman who moves with whatever she has in her fridge, pantry or freezer. Meaning that weather she is moving to Florida for the winter, or is back to Toronto for the spring, or moving from the condo she's been living in for 10 years she takes absolutely everything with her. I once heard her ask my mother to make a cous cous salad and freeze it so she could serve it at a dinner party a month later in Florida. Like they don't have cous cous in Florida? I'm still scratching my head over this one. My most recent horror came just a few months ago. My boyfriend and I were visiting her in Florida and she decided she wanted to make a Greek salad for lunch. I saw the feta cheese come out of the freezer, and the tomatoes come out of the fridge and I imediatly threw up in my mouth. I asked that she please leave the cheese and tomatoes off my salad, but she obviously refused and began yelling at me for being such a food snob. She loves to argue that I have no idea what I'm talking about when I tell her not to put the tomatoes in the fridge. As not to create any more issues I tell her just to make the salad the way she wants and throw everything in. Then she asks my bf and I if we like olives we both said sure! Little did we know that the best before date was 8 years earlier. Eewww. 
I sat down to eat my salad, and knew right away there was a whole bunch of things wrong in my bowl.  I ate as fast as I could, and just pushed the olives off to the side - at this point I didn't know they had gone extinct. My boyfriend noticed that I had an entire bowl of olives left, and he began pilling them onto his plate. I couldn't believe my eyes, I knew sometimes he had weird taste in food, but I was really shocked that he couldn't taste anything wrong with them. I think he was just trying to get grandma to like him or something cause those things tasted like a dead rat. Not that I know what a dead rat taste like, but i'm guessing. When I finished eating I quickly started to clean up. I wanted to check the labels on the items I had just been fed simply out of curiosity. I knew they had been over due, but I couldn't have ever guessed how long overdue they actually were. The feta was at least 6 months old and the olives were just rediculous. They were older then my youngest cousin. I showed my bf the horror I had just seen, and I'll never forget the way he looked at me after that. I don't think he'll be as eager to eat anything she feeds him again. 
Anyways getting back to the point of this post. FOOD GOES BAD! Especially the food you should be eating. One of the "Food Rules" in Dr. Michael Pollan states that you should only eat foods that  will eventually rot. And to my dear grandmother this doesn't mean you should eventually eat foods once they've gone rotten. All teasing aside, she's actually a very good cook, now if only I could teach her about properly caring for her ingredients. To all you hoarders out there, stop cutting the mold off your cheese, and your bread. Spend less on groceries, and go more often. Learn to eat what you buy, and learn when it's time to say goodbye to your pantry. 

International eating

I stumbled upon this sweet webpage that has links to a bunch of different  recipes for International cuisine. It's called the world health circle of international cooking, and boy is it useful. With almost 80 different types of cuisine you can cook from any walk of the globe anytime! So for your next cultural food experience check this site out for great recipe ideas. Let me know if anything is note worthy, and I promise to do just the same.

Everything Sababa ?

Sababa is definitely a best kept secret in Toronto. Technically in Thornhill, although we wont hold that against them it's easily one of the best Middle Eastern restaurants around.  My bf and I always have the debate weather 
or not it holds the #1 or 2 spot.  He always argues that Sababa takes the cake, but I'm torn between Jerusalem, Mashu Mashu, and my all time favorite shewarma place Bagel Nash. I'll get around to reviewing all of these places individually later. Sababa is a legendary institution for many reasons the first being the food, and the second being that they have the best grocery and take out place connected to the restaurant. Great selection of Middle Eastern treats including baklava, Turkish delight and other imported products. They also have a bakery making pita fresh everyday. Definitely worth the trip up north. 
Last night  were having a big dinner party in honor of my dads girlfriends birthday. There were nine of us, and we all love this type of food. To start, Sara (my dads gf) made the most delicious lentil soup, which she gave me the recipe for, and I will be writing about very soon. We gulped the soups back, and waisted no time getting to the main event pita and hummos, baba ganoush  teheena also known as tahini & falafel. There was pleanty of tabbouleh and mixed salad, rice, fried tomatoes and eggplant, kefta, chicken and lamb kebab. I'm not a huge fan of their baba ganoush, but everything else is top notch. I love to drench my rice in the tomatoes - they are to die for. The best way to enjoy Middle Eastern food is to mash everything up into a pita. All the flavors taste great together, you just have to find the right balance and what type of meat suits you best. Their kefta kebab is my personal fave, although I wouldn't discriminate since everything is delicious. All in all as you can see we totally pigged out, but then again what are birthdays for.