Grilled Shrimp Salad with Corn and Avocado

I wasn't actually expecting much from this salad. So I was pleasantly surprised when it turned out to be amazing. Obviously I wouldn't have made it if I didn't think it would be good, but honestly, I tried it out of guilt. I've made quite a few good meals this Summer but not a lot have featured vegetables. So before I ran out to buy groceries Saturday morning I went on to Epicurious looking for a good Summer salad. I found one.

Cottage Eats

The only thing better than a perfect weather day at the cottage is a perfect weather day that includes amazing food. This year we ate well from sun-up to sun-down. We made grilled nachos, which were simple but very effective, and a paella that was more complicated but also tasty. First, the nachos -

Slice, slice, baby...

Wow. That's possibly the worst title I've come up with so far. And now you have Vanilla Ice stuck in your head. Sorry about that.

I finally got around to cracking open the mandoline I got for Christmas to make a Sunday dinner dish. I actually bought this for myself a couple of weeks before Christmas at the William Ashley Warehouse sale, an event I have never attended before but was introduced to in 2010 thanks to my SIL. Wow. Let's just say the mandoline was one of many purchases I made that day. Kitchen stuff. On sale! See you in 2011 Will!

My mandoline is a Zyliss. I had never used a mandoline before this weekend but I had heard many horror stories of people cutting off fingertips when using these devices, so the first time I used it I sliced some beets as practice. I figured if I cut myself I wouldn't freak out because the blood would just mingle with the beet juice and I'd be none the wiser. Except for the missing digit. Thankfully, the beet experiment went just fine, meaning I didn't cut myself. So I moved on to potatoes.

Happy (Chinese) New Year!

My kids both attended a wonderful pre-school program called the University Lab School. My husband and I both loved this school but more importantly, both of the boys loved it too. We all learned a lot of things at 'the Lab School' and made many great memories. One of my favourites was watching the kids celebrate Chinese New Year. They did it up right, every year, with a 'snack' feast of Chinese favourites and a parade of noisy revellers wreaking havoc through the halls, warding off evil and helping to usher in a prosperous New Year. I don't do a ton of theme menus for our Sunday dinners but this week, with Chinese New Year approaching, I couldn't resist.

Three Bean Chili

Chili is one of those foods that I know better than to make as a Sunday dinner dish. As much as I want my family to try new foods there are limits; even my husband, who never declines anything I put in front of him at dinner, draws the line at chili. Particularly vegetarian chili. So I rarely make it. Apparently none of them appreciate beans like I do. This week I had a real craving for chili so decided I'd make a batch knowing that I'll have to freeze half of it and spend the next couple of months eating it for lunch every day. Not the worst lunch fate I can imagine.

Tacos? Really?

I've noted before that my kids aren't very adventurous eaters. A trait I expect they inherited from my husband, who only really got adventurous after he married me. Take that however you like.

So I was very surprised the other evening when D. brought home the hot lunch order form from his school and we sat down to make our selections. In the past we have ordered from the hot lunch menu sparingly. Chicken nuggets, check. All other offerings? No thanks. I was all ready to check off our one meal when D. said "You know what mum? I think I'd also like to sign up for taco day.". Rea-a-ally? Our first foray into unknown food territory and we're going Mexican? Al-righty. He continued to scan the form and said "And hot dog day too. I mean, a hot dog is just a bun, some meat and some mustard. I like all those things, right?". Um, yes, yes you do. And I've said that to him, oh, a billion times since he's been old enough to consider hot dogs as a possible food choice.

Snow Day!

So remember when I said it started snowing Sunday afternoon? Well it hasn't stopped since, which means we've shoveled our driveway a bazillion times and we have a backyard that looks like this:

After rolling out of bed this morning I checked the web and discovered that school was closed as was my place of employment. Woo-hoo! Snow day! Serious snow day. In fact I'm not sure where we're going to put all of the snow that is rapidly (re)filling our driveway. The kids went out to play this morning and I briefly considered attaching some kind of lead to the younger one in case he went under. Between no school, unlimited snow play and discovering Netflix can stream SpongeBob cartoons the boys are pretty much in heaven. My idea of heaven on a snow day? Baking, of course! I thought it might be a good afternoon to try out Julekake, a recipe that caught D's eye in his quest for a Christmas morning breakfast treat. More on that in another post.

Another great thing about having a snow day is that you can have Sunday dinner leftovers for lunch. I made the most scrumptious Skillet Chicken Pot Pie last night. It's from The Complete America's Test Kitchen TV Show Cookbook (page 40) which I picked up for half price on Boxing Day last year. I love this cookbook, which is brought to you by Cook's Illustrated. I also love Cook's Illustrated, although they are one of the few recipe sites on the web that require you to pay for access. Which I totally understand since a revenue model of 'let's give away everything we do for free' isn't all that sustainable. So I'm not going to reproduce the recipe here. I'll show it to you though:


This Chicken Pot Pie is such a great concept. It's made in one pan (apart from the biscuits, which are baked separately) and uses convenience products like boneless chicken breasts and frozen peas/carrots. The sauce is butter, flour, chicken broth and cream. You can likely note specks of thyme in the sauce as well, along with some chopped onion and celery. This is seriously good stuff. I'm glad I took a picture of this dish in the kitchen because by the time I got to the dining table with my portion, the plate beside me looked like this:

Happily there was more than enough for seconds. D. actually made the biscuits for this dish since I was working on a new Christmas cookie recipe, the details of which I will share later. I even caught him in biscuit-making action:

Why yes, that is a 'vintage' Tupperware pastry rolling mat. I stole it from my mom and she either hasn't noticed or is too polite to say anything.

Maple Mustard Pork Chops

The weekends before Christmas are so busy! We're not quite out of November so why does it feel like December is already over? The next few Sundays I need to do some baking since we have lots of people in our lives in need of holiday cheer. I've been making note of cookie recipes the last few weeks trying to narrow down what to make this year....

Our Sunday dinner last week was a recipe I've made before, Maple Mustard Pork Chops. I find that I tend to shy away from spicy sauces when cooking for the family. The kids aren't so adventerous and D. doesn't really like too much heat. Sweet sauces, however, go over well with my crew. This particular sauce is made with maple syrup, which means when I'm selling the dish to the boys I can say 'It's like pancakes'. Actually, my older son also loves mustard, so no wonder he didn't balk at all when it came to this particular dinner. He isn't a green bean lover, that's a nod to P's palate, but he got a substitution of carrots so all was well.

December typically promises some good eats around our house. We have lots o' birthdays to celebrate and I am oh so excited because we're going to The Only for dinner on my birthday. I had one of the best meals of my life at The Only last year and have been wanting to go back for ages. The menu changes with the seasons (and often week to week) and makes the most of what is fresh and local. Last time out I had the Chef's tasting menu, which turned out to be quite an adventerous choice. I'm torn between trying the tasting menu again or ordering off the menu. Either way I doubt I will be disappointed!

And now, for something a little different...

When planning our sunday dinners, I tend to default to chicken an awful lot. I'm not sure why. All of us actually like beef, although when the kids were small I tended to avoid hamburger as I was certain I was going to give them e coli. That's when we discovered the wonders of ground soy. But I digress.

If you're going to make roast beef for dinner I figure you should go all out and serve it with all the traditional trimmings, which brings to (my) mind mashed potatoes, gravy, corn and popovers, which are kind of like Yorkshire Pudding. For this week's sunday dinner we bought a beautiful roast at Remark, a local 'boutique' grocery store. They have a wonderful meat counter at Remark. I bought some fresh lamb there a while back for Thanksgiving that was superb. What I like about shopping at Remark is how friendly and knowledgeable their staff are. For example, while I was browsing for the right size and cut of beef for my recipe, a staff person asked me what I was looking for, noted I wouldn't find that size of cut out in the case and offered to get me a fresh piece.

I didn't do anything fancy with my oven roast. I used a recipe from my New Canadian Basics cookbook for the roast, gravy and popovers. The roast was 4 pounds, and I rubbed it with a combination of olive oil, wooster sauce, Dijon mustard, garlic cloves, dried thyme and pepper. It went in to the oven on a rack in a roasting pan that had about an inch of water in the bottom; it started at very high heat (500F) for 30 minutes then I reduced the heat to 275F and let it roast until it was medium well, about an hour and a half longer.

The gravy I made using butter and flour because there wasn't a lot of fat on the roast for drippings. The water in the bottom of the pan had mostly evaporated by the time gravy was on my mind, so I threw in a few tablespoons of butter and some beef stock (about a cup and a half), scraped up what was stuck to the bottom of my roasting pan and thickened it with a 1/4 cup or so of flour. I poured the whole works through a sieve once it appeared a good consistency and happily, it tasted pretty good.

Popovers are one of those dishes that make me wish for one of these. Because I have to bake them at a different temperature than the beef I end up making them after the roast is done and they take about 30 minutes to cook. New Canadian Basics does say I could make them a day ahead but let's be realistic - I ain't that organized. Be forewarned: some of the ingredients for popovers have to be at room temperature. They sound fussy but are actually very easy to make.

Popovers
2 eggs, at room temperature
1 cup milk, at room temperature
1 tbsp butter, melted
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 450F. Grease 12 muffin cups. Beat eggs lightly in bowl, stir in milk and butter. Add flour and salt mixing with a fork until just nearly smooth. Fill muffin cups half way full. Bake for 15 minutes, reduce heat to 350F and bake 15 minutes longer or until well puffed and brown.

This is where it gets funky. I found that after 30 minutes my popovers were done. The recipe suggests you snip the tops of your popovers and return them to the oven for 10 more minutes to make them browned and crisp outside, nearly hollow inside. But we kind of like the chewy yummy-ness you get when you skip this step, which admittedly we discovered because we were too impatient to wait another ten minutes to eat.

This was a really well received sunday dinner. I think that since we started with sunday dinners (eat in the dining room, have to take at least one bite of everything served) the boys have grown to like our little tradition and even look forward to it each week. It's exposed them to foods they wouldn't necessarily have tried otherwise, and while sometimes it has taken a couple tries, they do discover new foods they like. Such as beef, which we no longer have to pretend is chicken.

Trick or Treat!

Tonight, in honour of Halloween, we had an orange menu for Sunday dinner - pumpkin soup, cheese and bacon buns, carrot sticks and mandarin orange slices.

Cheese and bacon buns are a comfort food that I remember from when I was a kid. They aren't hard to make. First fry some bacon, say 6-8 slices, and set aside. Line a cookie sheet with foil, split some burger buns and place on aforementioned foil-lined cookie sheet. Top burger buns with either cheese whiz or a cheese slice; choose the petroleum-based cheese product of your choice. Now cut the bacon into bite-sized pieces. I use kitchen scissors to do this. Sprinkle the bacon generously on the buns (I make 6 at a time). Now set your oven to broil (high) and place the buns under the broiler for 3-5 minutes. I personally like when my cheese gets slightly charred under the broiler. As I learned the hard way tonight, my kids do not. Instead they accuse you of burning their food. I made these bacon-less and tried to sell them as open-faced grilled cheese for the kids and yet they still rejected them. And don't get me started on their reaction to pumpkin soup, which they at least tasted this time, unlike when I served it at Thanksgiving. 'Yuk' was one of the nicer things they had to say...


For dessert I made a chocolate brownie snack cake with spiderweb glaze which the kids liked just fine, of course, but I found somewhat disappointing:

The cake ate fine, and was super easy to make, but my glaze wasn't runny enough so the presentation suffered as a result. Which is kind of ironic, because normally when I'm working with icing sugar my problem is all about the runny, as in I can't make it stiff enough. I blame this on multi-tasking. Because as I was making the icing I glanced out my kitchen window and noticed this:


So of course I had to run out and take some pictures. This maple has granny smith apple green leaves Spring and Summer, then in the Fall, seemingly overnight it turns a brilliant red. We've been so busy I hadn't even noticed it had turned until today. Between this and the need to wear mittens to trick or treat comfortably tonight (we are closing in on about 160 treats doled out), I'd say it won't be long before we get some white stuff visiting the neighbourhood.

Howja like them apples?

I made a lot of different dishes with apples this weekend. A lot. And the whole time I was peeling and chopping, slicing and dicing, I kept hearing Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting in my head; the scene where he bangs on the window to get the attention of an obnoxious college student in a bar who was (also) hitting on Minnie Driver and he says "You like apples? Yeah? I got har numba. Howja like them apples?" Note that this is said with a plummy Boston accent, which I've cleverly related using 'har' for 'her', 'numba' for 'number' and 'howja' for 'how do you'. None of which is relevant to any of the cooking I did, although when I finally stepped out of the kitchen Sunday and sat down at the computer I discovered Matt Damon and his wife had a baby this past Wednesday. Coincidence? Yup, pretty much.

So. Apples. On Wednesday I had a library book due back at the public library, so I dropped it in on my way home from work. As is my practice I scanned the cookbook section to see if anything inspiring was on the shelves. I went away with Lucy Waverman's A Year in Lucy's Kitchen. I'm familiar with Waverman's work, having noticed her recipes in the LCBO Food & Drink magazine and The Globe and Mail. What made me pick up AYILK was the premise - it's a recipe book made up of menus. I love cookbooks that give you menus. I'm not sure I've ever made an entire menu from a cookbook but I love the possibility that I might. Or even that I could. If I wanted to.

Lucy sets up her book by season, so I flipped to Fall and found a Halloween menu that sounded promising. In particular I decided to make Braised Chicken with Apples and Sausage along with the suggested side of Spiced Sweet Potato Fries. Lucy's menu rounds out this dinner with a pumpkin soup; I recently made a delightful pumpkin soup but was more in the mood for squash soup. In particular, a squash apple soup caught my eye in another book I brought home from the library: get cooking, by Mollie Katzen.

If I'm being honest, none of these recipes really wowed me. The squash soup was good, but the granny smith apple it included added a sweetness that I didn't care for, and the addition of lemon juice didn't save the flavour. The chicken was super moist and the apples that cooked along with it were a lovely accompaniment to the meat, but I think I prefer roast chicken. The sweet potato fries were good (P. nearly ate a whole wedge!). But just good. Period. So the meal wasn't bad, it was just a little....unremarkable.

I'll definitely need to aim for remarkable next Sunday since it's Halloween. When I was a kid, we had cheese and bacon buns every Halloween. They were orange (cheese whiz orange...mmmm) and if you were creative with your bacon, you could make your dinner look like a jack o' lantern. We aren't huge on Halloween around here, but we make an effort. Some of us more than others. This is the first year I've gotten the 'mom please let me just buy a costume' speech from my son, after my years of attempting unique homemade creations. So next Sunday will be an homage to Halloween. Here's a preview of the preparations we've done around our house to be suitably festive.

Thankful - Birthday Edition

Our niece turned 1 on Saturday, so we headed down the highway for a birthday/Thanksgiving celebration. Just like Thanksgiving weekend, this was another great day for traveling. We spotted a handful of gliders soaring among the fluffy white clouds and enjoyed lots of lovely Fall colour during the back road portions of our trip, when we didn't have our eyes glued to our Nintendo DSi-xls. Ahem.

I was very much looking forward to this dinner since we had lamb with my family for Thanksgiving. Nothing says Fall like turkey! We had a great meal in A&J's brand-spanking new house, which hopefully will host many more such dinners long into the future. Given the meal it produced, the kitchen works just fine!


While I love 'traditional' dinners that feature familiar flavours and dishes, I also like to experiment and try new things to keep special meals interesting. I love that we had roasted potatoes with our turkey instead of the more typical mashed, since it made me think to try a Parsnip Crumble recipe I've had earmarked in my recipe book hungry for comfort, which I've mentioned in a previous post.

Parsnip Crumble has the consistency of mashed potatoes, so I thought this dish would make a perfect complement to the roast potatoes - no competing with mashed. To make parsnip crumble you basically peel and chop 4-5 medium parsnips, boil them for 20 minutes, then mash them with butter and sour cream. Top them with an oat/brown sugar/flour/butter/nutmeg crumble mixed with fresh chopped cranberries. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes and you're good to go.

I think this dish travelled well, and it tasted fine, but next time out I would add more butter/sour cream and do a better job mashing. My parsnips had lumps, which weren't necessarily bad...I just would have preferred a smoother base. Parsnips are actually quite sweet, so the addition of the butter and sour cream cuts that a bit.

I think the real star of the dinner table were the roasted potatoes. Sure, they made a complete mess of a couple of baking pans, but the men were up to the challenge of soaking, chipping and generally rehabilitating said pans. Or at least I think they were. I wandered off after doing some (light) after-dinner dish duty to the more delightful task of hanging out with my niece for some girl talk. Luckily I was able to get the recipe for the roasted potatoes from my SIL so I can attempt to replicate their wonderfulness. They are an Ina Garten recipe from Food Network:

Rosemary Roasted Potatoes

• 1 1/2 pounds small red or white-skinned potatoes (or a mixture)
• 1/8 cup good olive oil
• 3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1 tablespoons minced garlic (3 cloves)
• 2 tablespoons minced fresh rosemary leaves

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Cut the potatoes in half or quarters and place in a bowl with the olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic and rosemary; toss until the potatoes are well coated. Dump the potatoes on a baking sheet and spread out into 1 layer; roast in the oven for at least 1 hour, or until browned and crisp. Flip twice with a spatula during cooking to ensure even browning. Remove the potatoes from the oven, season to taste and serve.

Two For One

I've already admitted that I buy food I think is pretty, even if I have no intention of eating it. Now I'm going to expose my husband's bad grocery shopping habit.

D. can't seem to resist buying 2 for 1 items. Even if we don't need it, even if it isn't something he likes, he'll bring it home because it was on sale, 2 for 1! (He also tends to buy things in very, very large sizes. Like, beyond econo-size, even. But I digress.) A month or so ago he brought home 2 for 1 pork tenderloins. Which wasn't actually a bad score, because you can do a lot with pork tenderloin and everyone in our house likes pork. But when I opened up the first of two pork tenderloin packages I found...two pork tenderloins. In his 2 for 1 haste D. had actually bought 4 pork tenderloins. The first package I used when we were still grilling but the second package has been lingering in our freezer. Sunday I decided it was go time. And since we'd already exhausted my typical pork tenderloin dishes with the first two loins, I could try something new.

My kids like food you can eat on a stick. I noticed this when I fed them fruit as toddlers. They ate fruit more readily and more abundantly if I gave them toothpicks to spear with. Sadly this phenomenon did not translate to vegetables...which are harder to sell, even on a stick. But I wondered if I could do something stick-tastic with meat. I found my answer thanks to MyRecipes.com, which aggregates recipes from a number of magazines including my favourite, Cooking Light.

Pork Satay with Peanut Dipping Sauce comes courtesy of Oxmoor House, who appear to be a publisher of cookbooks. Only problem with this recipe - I didn't have chicken broth, a necessary ingredient in their Peanut Dipping Sauce. So I decided to use their pork recipe but sub-in another peanut dipping sauce that I found in my Canadian Basics cookbook that didn't require the broth.

This proved to be a good recipe for a Sunday dinner for a couple of reasons. One, you have to pound the tenderloin to make it thin for threading on skewers, so you can work out a lot of 'darn the weekend is over already and it's back to work' aggression. Two, once you've pounded the pork and marinaded the pork and threaded the pork you only have to broil it for a few minutes each side to finish it off. So it's fast and doesn't take up a lot of oven time. Three, everyone ate it with no complaints because it tasted great. The marinade also has peanut butter, so you may find the dipping sauce is overkill but I liked it. I find there are two kinds of people in the world, those who dip and those who do not. I dip, D. does not. So there was lots of sauce left over. Here is how I made the sauce:

Peanut Dipping Sauce

1/3 cup smooth peanut butter
3 tbsp each: sugar, soy sauce, lime juice
1 tbsp each: minced garlic, minced fresh ginger, dark seasame oil
1/2 tsp (or to taste) chile paste or hot pepper sauce
1/4 cup warm water or coconut milk

Blend all ingredients in food processer until smooth.

Overall this was a great dinner, enjoyed as part of our triumphant 'holy cow I can't believe we ran 10K today' euphoria.

Mac and Cheese, hold the radioactive powder stuff...

This weekend included a trip to Stratford to see Evita, one of the musical offerings of the Stratford Festival's 2010 season. It was a great performance and I had a nice afternoon exploring the great shops of Ontario Street with my SIL. Since we attended a Sunday matinee, there was no Sunday Dinner chez Robinson. I did, however, leave the husband, BIL and kids a huge casserole dish of macaroni and cheese for lunch.

I was so disappointed when my kids discovered Kraft Dinner. I wasn't responsible for this discovery but really, it made no difference how it was introduced. Once tasted, the neon-orange anemic noodles immediately usurped my version. I still puzzle as to what it is exactly that makes KD an attractive food option to kids. I mean, KD is to macaroni and cheese what the Big Mac is to a real hamburger, which is to say a pale imitation.

And yet every once in a while I serve up the good stuff hoping to lure my boys back to my way of thinking when it comes to mac and cheese. It didn't work. Which, while disappointing still has an upside since I just scarfed the remaining portion for lunch.

Macaroni and Cheese

2 tbsp butter
2 tbsp flour
1 cup milk, heated
1 1/2 cups cheese, grated (I used mild or medium)
1 1/2 cups cooked macaroni

Cook macaroni according to package instructions. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Melt butter over low heat in small saucepan. Add flour, stirring to combine. Slowly add heated milk, stirring until thick. Add cheddar about 1/2 cup at a time, melting into milk mixture.

Drain macaroni and place in casserole dish. Pour milk/cheese mixture over pasta and stir to combine. Top with grated cheese (another 1/2 cup) if desired. If you like crusty cheese (and who doesn't) I highly recommend this step!

Now Sunday Dinners (or lunches) are often all about the dessert at our house. There was a lovely pan of Sweet Maries at our house for the kids to finish off after mac and cheese (funny - they never turn up their noses at dessert) but SIL and I left well before these were brought out. Luckily we stumbled across Balzac's Coffee during our Ontario Street travels. Luckily Balzac's had Magic Cookie Squares. Luckily we were both happy to consider a Magic Cookie Square lunch. I've tried several MCS recipes over the years, from that espoused by Cook's Illustrated to the one typed out and preserved in the Optimist Cookbook I got from my mom years ago circa the 70's. The Eagle Brand website has a version that is totally reliable (and available!) so here it is - click!

Chocolate Mocha Cream Cake

I love food magazines. I've tried to curb how many I buy and stick to getting my foodie fix through websites like food gawker but try as I might I can't fully resist the glossy pages of what my husband calls my food porn. I have gotten more selective the last couple of years, but I still have literally dozens of pages of recipes that I have clipped from various magazines stuffed in a box alongside my recipe books. I go through them every season looking for something new to make. This past Sunday I finally got around to trying the 'Category Winner - Desserts' from a Cooking Light Recipe contest that I think is circa 2006. It's called One-Bowl Chocolate Mocha Cream Cake. It's fabulous. Truly. I can't believe I didn't get a picture...I must have been too distracted licking my plate.

Those of you acquainted with McCain Deep and Delicious Chocolate Cake - OBCMC Cake is kind of like that. But better. The cake part is moist and studded with chunks of chocolate. The icing is whipped, melt in your mouth deliciousness with just a hint of mocha flavour. I must admit that I originally wanted to try this cake because it calls for one jar of Marshmallow Fluff, and I have always wanted to buy said product. A win-win all around. No one was disappointed in this cake, which I served at our 'back to school' Sunday dinner. The main course was good too - (Steak Frites with Shallot pan reduction) but really, we only had eyes for dessert.

Cottage Food

I think this Summer was a record for our cottage attendance. We made it up three times, once each in June, July and August. Never before attempted, never before accomplished!

While at the cottage we tend to eat. A lot. Which is why I'm glad we only went up three times. Ahem.

I have a few favourite dishes from the cottage this Summer. I always try to attempt something new, something different, something I wouldn't necessarily try at home when we're North. This year we finally got to make 'Frogmore Stew', a recipe that has been clipped and patiently waiting to be executed for years now. It's another Cooking Light find that you can get here. I served it with small dinner rolls but next time will make corn bread, since I've found a reliable (and yummy) version! This was so easy to put together, effortless - which is nice at the cottage.

Cottage Food

This past weekend we spent at the cottage with friends. We've done this particular 'friends weekend' at Limestone Lake for five years now, and every year we seem to have great weather and great food. This year was no exception.

I try to keep food simple at the cottage, since we're meant to be relaxing not slaving over a complicated meal. This year I reached for a recipe I had torn out of an LCBO flyer in early Spring for Mini Burgers when it came time for Saturday lunch. These burgers came together in a snap - combine ground beef and pork with chili sauce, mustard, wooster, egg, and bread crumbs, shape into small patties and you're off to the races. All that's left to do is grill 'em and top 'em.



My favourite sous-chef, James, had the honour of forming and grilling our meat patties. He did an excellent job as they came off the grill perfectly cooked and needing very little in the way of condiments. You know you have a good burger on your hands when toppings are optional. We offered grated cheddar and some grilled mushrooms and onions to our crowd. We served the burgers on some lovely mini whole-grain dinner rolls with a side of coleslaw, potato chips and some iced tea lemondade.


I was pleasantly suprised by how yummy the coleslaw was since I found the recipe in one of the cookbooks that lives at the cottage. It's an old Better Homes and Gardens title: The Meat Cookbook. Despite appearances, this cookbook does have recipes for more than just meat and includes a number of different coleslaw recipes. I tried the mayonaise based dressing that was super quick to make: 1/2 cup mayo, 2 tbsp prepared mustard, 1 tbsp wooster sauce, 1/2 tsp paprika. I mixed this up and added to a bag of pre-shredded coleslaw mix and let it sit for a few hours before serving.

Later that evening after dinner we enjoyed a great key-lime pie courtesy of James. I missed some of the prep but it looked pretty basic. I know I saw egg yolks, sweetened condensed milk and keylime juice go into the filling, and it was served up in a graham cracker crust. The pie was fantastic, even if we cheated and didn't use real whipping cream for the top. We used Dream Whip, which I'm sure isn't even food but it was fast and actually pretty tasty.


Sue also brought joy to the masses with her homemade chocolate chip cookies and marble-walnut brownies. I didn't get pictures of these treats; understandable in a cottage featuring six children under the age of 7! We ate well, played hard and laughed often. The recipe for a great weekend.

Ribs. Mmmmmm.....

Ribs are something that I've only ever made once before in my life and they were a complicated affair, thanks mostly to a time consuming root beer based barbeque sauce. I saw ribs in the grocery store last week and they went into the cart pretty quickly, mostly owing to a find I had made several weeks earlier during a quick cross border hop to Port Huron.

It's no secret among those who know me well that I love U.S. grocery stores. The selection is so much more varied than Canada and occassionally you stumble across something you might actually want to try! While trolling the aisles of Meijer in PH I came across a bottle of Sweet Baby Ray's Vidalia Onion BBQ sauce. I'm partial to sweet onions and the price tag ($1.50) was too good to pass up. Fast forward to my local grocery store; I couldn't resist picking up some pork ribs knowing I had a simple sauce solution waiting for me at home.

I think that ribs must be one of those foods that everyone has an opinion about as regards the 'best' way to cook them. I was going for 'quick and simple' so opted to read the package directions on the back of the styrofoam tray. The directions indicated I should boil the ribs for 30-40 minutes then grill them, basting with desired sauce. So that's what I did. More on the outcome in a second, because first I want to talk about side dishes.

I still can't get enough of roasted asparagus, it's my current go-to vegetable, so that was a given for one side. For the other I decided to make coleslaw, because somehow ribs don't work for me without coleslaw. Luckily bagged coleslaw mix was on sale at the grocery store, so whipping up a batch of my foolproof slaw proved very easy indeed. To my bag of slaw I added:

1/2 cup white vinegar
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp celery seed

Put all of the above into a microwave safe measuring cup and heat one minute, then stir to dissolve sugar. Pour this over your bag of coleslaw mix (typically shredded cabbage / carrot mix) toss it all together and then stick it in the fridge until you're ready to eat. This particular recipe (From The New Canadian Basics Cookbook) is also excellent with tourtiere. But I digress.

Keeping with my 'simple' theme I went to the freezer for my last side dish - Cavendish Potato Wedges. I think I've mentioned these before. They are quite good for a frozen potato product. I know making fresh wedges isn't all that hard but I find when I buy potatoes a good number of them sprout on me before I've decided to use them.

So there you have it - ribs, roasted asparagus, coleslaw and potato wedges. The ribs turned out very well for a 'last minute' effort. After I boiled the ribs I grilled them on the BBQ for about 20 minutes, brushing with sauce near the end of the cooking time since I knew the sugar in the sauce would cause some charring (sounds better than burning, doesn't it?). If you do this leave the meaty side of the ribs 'up' on the grill until the very end - put them on the grill bone side down. The sauce was very, very good. Bones were picked dry, fingers were sucked clean. Kudos Sweet Baby Ray, kudos.



I tried to sell ribs as brontosaurus bones to the boys and they were intrigued by this dish until they figured out that if I was serving brontosaurus bones they would likely be bigger than the table at which we were eating. So a lot of carrot sticks were consumed at Sunday dinner this week. My husband loved this offering and we still have about half a jar of SBR left...I see more ribs in our future.

There's more than one way....

...to roast a chicken. Surely you didn't think cat was on the menu? Which reminds me of a funny story I read about buying fresh rabbit. A few months ago when we were in Target, I picked up a copy of The Sharper Your Knife The Less You Cry, a memoir about a woman who chucks it all to attend Cordon Bleu cooking school in France. In one memorable classroom lesson, she learns that it is always wise to buy fresh rabbit with the head attached because fresh skinned rabbit looks a lot like fresh skinned cat. Meow.

But I digress. I know that I did a roast chicken a few weeks back but roast chicken is just such an easy Sunday dinner and there are so many variations to roast chicken (not to mention my kids will eat it without making too much of a fuss) that I find myself falling back on this old standard quite a bit. This version is a simple combination of rosemary and tarragon (chopped fine) mixed with some unsalted butter (and dijon mustard) then rubbed all over the bird. It's called Bistro Roast Chicken and the recipe is available via Cooking Light. I served the chicken with roast fingerling potatoes and roasted asparagus. It was all very, very good.

Catching Up

I'm a few Sundays behind (3 to be exact) for which I have no great excuse. So let's just get to it.

Linguine with Chicken and Sun-Dried Tomatoes is a sentimental favourite that I can't help making every few months. This was the first recipe I tried from epicurious, a website that was recommended to me by a colleague at work when the Internet was still a fad. Yes, I'm that old.

I like this recipe because it brings together a number of ingredients that my husband would say he doesn't like, yet he mops his plate whenever I plunk this down in front of him. The sauce combines balsamic vinegar, sugar, sun-dried tomatoes and basil with a bit of chicken broth. Thus far I have always made two chicken breasts with enough of the sauce/dressing for four, and we still manage to devour every last bit. This dish is also impressive enough, and easy enough, to serve company which I have many times.

The flavours of this dish can be quite strong, so the boys received a serving of plain linguine with some chicken I had pan-fried but removed before the sauce step. I drizzled a bit of the sauce over each kid plate to give it some kick; I can't say they thanked me for it. My older son thinks all pasta should be consumed drowned in V-8 juice and my younger son doesn't much care for pasta at all. So not a raging success, but a blast from the past for my husband and I who savoured every mouthful.