Sunday Morning Breakfast Hash

This weekend featured so many of my favourite things. First, unplanned time. Nowhere to be and nothing to do (besides the usual weekend running around) which was wonderful after a hectic week. Second, a pile of fresh new books waiting to be read. (I just started Beautiful Ruins and I have The Prisoner of Heaven waiting patiently on my bedside table.) Third, lots of time in the kitchen. Spent churning out pancakes with Daniel, making banana cake with caramel sauce for Patrick and discovering the wonders of breakfast hash courtesy of some amazing chorizo sausage.

Seared Flank Steak with 'stop me before I drink this' Shallot-Mustard Sauce

I love flank steak. It is so easy to cook and can be prepared in so many different ways that it never feels like the same meal twice. Last Sunday we had Seared Flank Steak with Shallot-Mustard Sauce served with Roasted Sweet Potatoes with Apples and Maple-Sage Butter. Both recipes are from Fine Cooking and both are dishes I would definitely enjoy again. We were particularly enamoured with the Shallot-Mustard sauce. It came together as the last part of the meal and while I was reducing and whisking, simmering but not boiling I thought to myself 'Do we really need sauce? I bet the steak will be just fine without it.'. Man, was I wrong. Not totally wrong. The steak would have been fine with no sauce. But the sauce (which, if I'm being honest is mostly butter) made the meal. As the title of this post suggests.

Patio Ribs

We had our Sunday dinner on the patio this week. It was a no-brainer - perfect weather and ribs on the menu. It was a good dinner. David found Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce at the grocery store for the ribs. I made cornbread, garlic mashed potatoes and creamy coleslaw to round out the plate. There were brownies for dessert, left over from Saturday.

It felt so much like Summer vacation I felt bad about waking the boys up Monday morning for school, but the reality is we still have a month to go and Daniel is knee deep in EQAO testing this week. So I sent him off to school with a tummy full of buttermilk pancakes. Because it's never too soon to start eating emotionally, right?

Pulled Pork with Ginger-Bourbon Sauce

Sounds good doesn't it? I've made various versions of pulled pork, usually in the Summer. In a bid to transition from Winter to Spring meals I thought Pulled Pork with Ginger-Bourbon Sauce, from the March 2011 issue of Chatelaine, would make for a nice Sunday dinner. It's made in a slow cooker and is relatively fuss-free, which is nice when you are juggling a bajillion other things on the weekend. The pork smelled wonderful through the day, simmering on low with only some sliced onions and a can of ginger-ale to keep it company. I really liked this method of cooking pork for pulled pork sandwiches. The meat was falling apart by the time we took it out and combined it with the promised Ginger-Bourbon Sauce.

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.