Shortly after telling my husband I was working on a recipe for Falafel Spiced Tomatoes and Salmon, I served him the above dish. He poked around the plate and looked at me with a sad face. “Where are the falafels?” he asked. I explained that “falafel spiced” was a qualifying adjective for the roasted tomatoes. There are no actual falafels in this recipe. The tomatoes are roasted in the same spices that are used in the making of falafels. He was pretty impressed with the fact that I was able to name the correct part of speech.
This recipe is inspired by a Joshua McFadden recipe for Falafel Spiced Tomatoes and Chickpeas on Flatbread, that I bookmarked in August of 2015 and have been meaning to make for the past 3 Septembers when heirloom tomatoes are at their most glorious. Given that we are smack in the middle of January, I decided to use rainbow grape tomatoes and just roast them with the falafel spices (garlic, sumac, ground cumin and corriander and red pepper flakes). I started the salmon fillets, skin side down in a hot pan with melted butter, to get the skin really crispy. Baste the flesh with the melted butter once or twice, then transfer pan to hot oven to finish cooking. The tomatoes are so flavourful, that I kept the seasoning on the salmon simple, just salt and pepper. Something green on the plate will make you feel virtuous! I went with sauteed green beans and some toasted salted almonds. Some chopped mint, parsley and cilantro, if you like it, are also welcome.
Apologies to all who tried to access my blog over the last few days and were unable to connect. I’ve had some technological issues, something about exceeding the allowable CPU’s and plugins not properly updated. Sadly, my skill-set does not extend to understanding the issues much less fixing them. I turned my problem over to the talented Hillary Little, and put my talents to work on problems I can solve.
I spent the better part of the week perfecting pomegranate braised chicken. I already have one pomegranate chicken recipe on the blog, and while it’s very delicious, it’s been in my weekly dinner rotation for over 7 years now and I’m bored with it. The chicken is braised in a tomato based sauce, enhanced with some pomegranate molasses. I really wanted a more vibrant, pronounced pomegranate flavour.
In my quest to perfect pomegranate chicken, I made it several times this week. In round one, I loaded up on pomegranate molasses in the braising liquid. The finished sauce was way too bitter. Strike one. I also had the brilliant idea of making it a one pan dish and added the uncooked Israeli couscous to the pan, with the browned chicken and braising liquid. Â By the time the chicken was done, the couscous was too mushy. Strike two.
In round three, I used less pomegranate molasses and added some white wine and chicken stock to round out the braising liquid. It was better than round one, but the pomegranate flavour was really muted. Strike three.
A quick web search revealed an epicurious.com recipe that cleverly used pomegranate juice as the braising liquid. Wish I’d thought of that! As the chicken braisedin the oven, the juice reduced down to a thick, rich, sweet-tart sauce. Exactly what I was trying to achieve.
I started with bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs. I really wanted the extra flavour that braising on the bone would bring. Season the chicken liberally with salt and paprika and put it in the skillet on high heat, skin side down. Leave it alone for a good 5-8 minutes to give it a chance to really get brown. There’s flavour in the brown. Remove the chicken and pour off some of that rendered fat. Saute the onions until light brown. Cumin and cinnamon add great depth of flavour and ground pistachios add body and texture to the sauce.  I used a combination of pomegranate juiceand chicken stock for the braising liquid. Vegetable stock or water would also be fine.Â
Israeli couscous is the perfect starch to sop up all that braising liquid. I added tons of fresh mint and Italian parsley to give it a lively herbal note. Toasted chopped pistachios and pomegranate seeds added crunch. A squirt of lemon juice and big glug of extra virgin olive oil brought it all together.
We’re not really a big game-playing family. The one and only time I ever played a board game with my husband was early on in our relationship. We were on the same team for a friendly game of Trivial Pursuit. The category was sports and leisure and it was a baseball question, the only sport I know anything about. I got so excited that I knew the answer, I shouted it out. Unfortunately, it was the other team’s question. My husband declared a moratorium on game playing with me after that.
But, on a visit to see us in December, my youngest son started a game of tag, and it’s still going on. Sadly, he was playing tag with a wicked cold. He caught it first, passed it on to my husband, and now I am “it”, sneezing and coughing my way through January. Normally, when I’m sick, I lose my appetite, so I sort of got excited about being sick at the beginning of January. I figured this would be the perfect way to lose my December cookie weight. But this cold left me feeling ravenous. I couldn’t seem to eat enough to make me feel satisfied. I was craving carbs.Soup seemed like the perfect remedy. Hot enough to soothe my sore throat and packed with lots of starchy things to make me feel full. This is my take on the classic Tuscan soup, Minestra di Faro Lucchese. (Farro soup in the style of Lucca). I used Mark Bittman’s New York Times recipe as my starting point and adapted slightly from there.  I added a heaping tablespoon of tomato paste to the sauteed onions and celery, to really deepen the flavour of this soup. I also slipped in a big pinch of red pepper flakes. While spicy heat is not a typical addition to the classic recipe, my tastebuds were so dulled by my cold that I wanted the soup to really pack a punch of flavour. Plus, spicy food makes my nose run, so I figured that the soup would work to cleanse my sinuses. The final adaptation I made was the addition of a rind of Parmesan cheese to the simmering soup. I always save my rinds and keep them in the freezer in a zip-loc bag to add to soups and stews. This soup does not fall under the “fast food” category. You need to soak the beans the night before. You could use canned beans, but I think that the texture would not be the same. The original recipe called for adding the farro and beans at the same time. I found that the beans needed at least 90 minutes of simmering to get tender, so I added the farro during the last 30 minutes of cooking, so that it would still retain some chew, the way I like it. I also waited and added the carrots at the end of the cooking time, rather than at the beginning with the celery and onions, so that they would not be too mushy.
Serve with lots of chopped Italian parsley and fresh basil for a hit of verdant freshness. Don’t forget the Parmesan cheese.
Anybody else out there taking a break from cookies this week? Yeah, I thought so. We are too. Personally, I don’t like to use the “D” word (diet). I just prefer to take a break from certain foods for a while if my eating habits have been unbalanced. December has a way of unbalancing us.  I don’t normally make New Year’s resolutions but this year I have promised myself to begin each day facing the bathroom mirror, flexing my arms and uttering the affirmation, “Damn, look at those chiseled arms!”Â
This salad is sure to bring some balance back into your life. It is extremely flavourful and satisfying. The dressing is an umami bomb, containing both nutritional yeast and Parmesan. Nutritional yeast is not just for vegans. It adds a cheesy, nutty, savory flavour that can give any dish a zesty boost.
Now is the time to splurge on the green or orange cauliflower and those pretty artisan lettuces you see at the grocery store.I bought a 4 pack of Artisanal lettuces. The box contained sweet, crisp green little gem lettuce (the one that looks like mini romaine), mild and nutty red oak leaf lettuce and a zesty red tango lettuce. Arugula and some romaine hearts would be a fine substitute if that’s all you can find.
Whisk together some lime zest, lime juice, honey, dijon, nutritional yeast, parmesan and olive oil. Cut your cauliflower into quarters, remove the hard core and thinly shave it. Use a mandoline or just a sharp knife and use this as a chance to work on your knife skills. I love my little knife sharpener. It’s so easy to use.Â
Cracking the code on making crispy sweet potato fries has been an elusive goal of mine for a while now. (Yes, I know I have lofty goals!) I have mastered regular fries, but sweet potato fries are a real challenge. Even when deep-fried, they only remain crispy for about a minute before they go limp. The issue, I have discovered, is that sweet potatoes are higher in sugar and lower in starch than Russett potatoes (the best potato for french fries, by the way).
Leave it to Cook’s Illustrated to figure out how to do it. Cornstarch is the secret ingredient. To counterbalance the low starch content, the sweet potatoes, are given a bath in a cornstarch-water slurry.
Start with peeled sweet potatoes cut in half lengthwise, and then into 3/4 inch wedges.  In order to ensure that the interior of the sweet potatoes become tender, they are blanched in salted boiling water with a teaspoon of baking soda. The baking soda makes the surface of the potatoes a bit sticky so that the cornstarch has something to grab on to. Initially, the cornstarch mixture will be quite thin. Keep stirring gently and the heat of the sweet potatoes will thicken the water-cornstarch mixture and coat the sweet potato wedges perfectly. That unsightly orange sludge coating the wedges will be converted into a shatteringly crispy exterior once fried.Heat oil to 325°F for perfect frying. You’ll have to fry them in batches. Salt them as soon as they come out of the oil. The first batch can stay warm on a rack in a 200°F oven while you fry the rest. Admittedly, these sweet potato fries take some work to prepare. Creamy and soft on the inside, and audibly crunchy on the surface, they are worth both the effort and the calories. These aren’t something you’ll prepare on a weekly basis, but for a special occasion, please reward yourself. They will be making an appearance on our new year’s eve table.
My photo shoot took over an hour and when I tasted the fries at the end, and they were still crunchy.  I like to serve the fries with a chipotle mayo dipping sauce and a sprinkle of dukkah. Take 1-2 chipotle chiles in adobo, remove the seeds and puree. I mix this into 1/2 a cup of Hellman’s mayo (light is perfectly fine, just don’t use the fat-free).
Just in case you haven’t had enough chocolate or sugar by this point in December, I’m bringing you Marbled Peanut Butter Truffles. You’re welcome! This is an old recipe, from the December 1988 issue of Gourmet Magazine. It has stood the test of time. My girlfriend Marla and I would spend a weekend in my kitchen every December creating hundreds of these truffles for gifts. We kept it simple and just rolled them in cocoa powder. I have updated the recipe slightly, by dipping them in a mixture of bittersweet, milk and white chocolate to create a marbled coating.
Bittersweet chocolate, peanut butter, cream, and butter are melted together. Chill for about 3-4 hours and then use a small scoop to form truffles. Melt bittersweet, milk and white chocolate. Get organized and set up the dipping station. Once you start, the dipping goes fairly quickly. Check it out in this video I created.
While maple might not be the first flavour that leaps to mind for holiday baking, these cookies might change your mind.  Like many Canadians, I grew up eating maple sandwich cookies, so I have a certain nostalgic fondness for them. One of these and a paper cup filled with apple juice takes me right back to nursery school!It’s been a while since I’ve snacked on a maple sandwich cookie, but as soon as I saw them being made on The Great Canadian Baking Show, I couldn’t stop craving them. While Canada’s version of the British original is a bit staid, at least we weren’t pulled from the air after the first 2 episodes for inappropriate behavior from one of our judges. Another fallen culinary hero. Mostly, I feel sad for all the contestants on the U.S. show that never got to showcase their talent.
Just reread that last paragraph and realized that my guilty pleasure for reality TV has been exposed. Not all reality TV though. Only shows that showcase actual skill or talent, such as Top Chef and Project Runway. The less drama and conflict between the contestants, the more I love it. Have any of you caught Masterchef Australia? Completely addictive.
The cookies are a simple shortbread dough, using unsalted butter, icing sugar, all-purpose flour, salt and a bit of maple extract. Do yourself a favour and roll out the dough between 2 sheets of parchment paper as soon as you make it. Then chill the sheet of dough.Cut out shapes from chilled dough. If you want to get really fancy, you can draw the veining of the leaf with the tip of a paring knife. Or, if like me, your drawing talents suck, invest in one of these fondant cutters. It works best if you let the dough soften up a bit before you try to stamp the vein imprint on the cookie. Before baking, I sprinkled each cookie with coarse sanding sugar and just a touch of flaky sea salt. The filling for the sandwich cookies is made from unsalted butter, icing sugar and maple butter.  I have tried a few different brands of maple butter and they were all pretty amazing. This one is from Vermont, this one is from Quebec. If maple is your jam, these cookies are for you. The maple flavour is intense and rich. They are the perfect accompaniment to a cup of tea. Â
My youngest sister is a kindergarten teacher. I tell you this because it will help to explain the sentence that comes next. For my mom’s 82nd birthday, she organized a sleepover party. Mom’s 6 children, assorted spouses, and 14 grandchildren were all invited over to mom’s for the night, complete with pajamas and sleeping bags.Such a momentous occasion called for an epic party snack. I knew immediately what I wanted to bring ….Chicago popcorn. In case you’ve never heard of it, Chicago popcorn is a mix of caramel corn and cheddar cheese popcorn.That sweet-salt combo is delicious and highly addictive.
I started with the cheddar popcorn first. Most of the recipes I found online called for a mixture of cheddar cheese powder, dried mustard and a pinch of cayenne. Melted butter was the instrument of choice for getting all that powder to stick. In the midst of all these similar recipes, there was one that stood out like a beacon, calling to me. It was the headline of this one that got my attention. “Alton’s convinced he’s “cracked the code” on the cheesy dust found on Cheetos.”
Cheetos are my guilty pleasure. But not all Cheetos are created equal. Alton Brown put it much more eloquently than I ever could, “The best flavor on earth is that of crunchy Cheetos. Not the regular ones. They’re crap. Just the crunchies.”
If Alton Brown could recreate that flavour to put on popcorn, I needed to learn the secret. The first ingredient is the requisite cheddar cheese powder, which you can buy at Bulk Barn, or online, or just rip open a bag of the powder that comes in the box of KD. In addition, Alton includes buttermilk powder, nutritional yeast and Kraft parmesan cheese (that stuff in the green can). Those last 2 ingredients are real umami bombs.For the caramel corn, I started out with my favourite caramel corn recipe (minus the nuts).  When I tasted it with the cheddar popcorn, the texture was all wrong. It was way too hard. I did a quick online search and learned from Sally, that a tiny bit of baking soda added at the end of the cooking process will cause the mixture to foam up. This foam contains thousands of carbon dioxide bubbles. Once the caramel is poured over the popcorn and cooled, the trapped air bubbles create a softer texture. So you won’t break a tooth.
Barbari bread is a type of Iranian flatbread. It is fairly thick and more commonly known as Persian Flatbread in North America. Neighbourhood bakeries in Iran bake this bread three times a day for their customers. A typical Iranian breakfast begins with hot sweet tea followed by barbari with feta or salted butter and jam. Kids are greeted with barbari, feta, walnuts and fresh herbs for their after-school snack. Beats Oreos any day of the week!
If you have never baked with yeast before, don’t be scared. I’ll walk you through what you need to know. There are 2 types of yeast commonly available at the supermarket, Rapid Rise and  Active Dry yeast (also called Traditional). Active dry yeast needs to be dissolved in water before using while rapid rise yeast can be mixed right into the dough. I like to use the active dry yeast because I can see that it is indeed active when I watch it bubble up in the water. Always check the expiry date on the package.
The key is to make sure the water is at the right temperature, between 95°F -115°F. Any hotter and it will kill the yeast, and any cooler and the yeast will take a very long time to activate. I usually stir a teaspoon of sugar into my water to give the yeast something to help activate it. Yeast uses sugar as food. It takes a few minutes for the yeast to activate.The dough comes together in a stand mixer in about 6-8 minutes. Then set the dough aside to rise for about an hour.
This recipe makes 2 flatbreads. They are easily formed by shaping the dough into two 9 inch logs and then gently stretching each into a 14×5 inch rectangle. To prevent the bread from puffing up too much in the oven, drag your fingers (or the handle of a long wooden spoon) to press five lengthwise grooves into the dough.Before baking the bread is brushed with the special glaze made from flour, sugar, oil, and water. It sort of looks like wallpaper paste. This glaze, known as “roomal” is an ancient solution to “steaming” your oven. The roomal adds additional moisture directly to the surface of the bread as it bakes, allowing it to rise fully. It has the added advantage of giving the crust a satiny shine. I sprinkled my first loaf with sesame seeds, nigella seeds, and salt.  I gave the second loaf a generous sprinkle of za’atar.  I prepared a batch of honey roasted tomatoes.  I served the sesame and nigella flatbread with burrata cheese, roasted tomatoes, fresh basil and a generous glug of extra virgin olive oil. Don’t forget a sprinkle of coarse sea salt, please.I did a more typical Iranian topping for the za’atar flatbread.  I doctored up some storebought labneh with pomegranate molasses and pomegranate seeds. Labneh (Middle Eastern strained yogurt) is similar to Greek yogurt but thicker in consistency, almost like soft cream cheese. It’s tangier and creamier than yogurt. If you can’t find it, it’s easy to make your own. I spread the flatbread with labneh, scattered some toasted walnuts and fresh mint on top and finished it with an extra drizzle of pomegranate molasses.Â
 The first night of Chanukah is this week, on Tuesday night.  Flushed with the success of my Beehive challahs at Rosh Hashanah, I. wanted to create something special for Chanukah. A crazy thought floated into my head. What about building a menorah out of brownies? I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wasn’t really sure how to go about creating it. I wasn’t one of those kids that played with building blocks, Leggo or puzzles. Barbie was more my thing.
I started with my favourite brownie recipe from Chef Michael Smith. I decided to switch out the cocoa powder with malted milk powder and added in some chopped malted milk balls for extra crunch. I chilled the brownies until firm and then I cut out an oval for the base. Using a small round cookie cutter I cut out little circles for the candle holders. I did a slightly larger circle for the shamash (helper) candle. I finally got a chance to use my food stylist tweezers! I mixed up some blue royal icing and glued on some edible blue pearls.  To hold the candles I glued each one to a malted milk ball. I figured out that I needed to trim the bottom and top of the balls flat before gluing with royal icing.Even if you decide not to make a menorah, these malted chocolate brownies would make a delicious addition to your Chanukah party.
Shortly after telling my husband I was working on a recipe for Falafel Spiced Tomatoes and Salmon, I served him the above dish. He poked around the plate and looked at me with a sad face. “Where are the falafels?” he asked. I explained that “falafel spiced” was a qualifying adjective for the roasted tomatoes. There are no actual falafels in this recipe. The tomatoes are roasted in the same spices that are used in the making of falafels. He was pretty impressed with the fact that I was able to name the correct part of speech.
I started the salmon fillets, skin side down in a hot pan with melted butter, to get the skin really crispy. Baste the flesh with the melted butter once or twice, then transfer pan to hot oven to finish cooking.
The tomatoes are so flavourful, that I kept the seasoning on the salmon simple, just salt and pepper. Something green on the plate will make you feel virtuous! I went with sauteed green beans and some toasted salted almonds. Some chopped mint, parsley and cilantro, if you like it, are also welcome.
