Exploring the Kitchens of the World at Culture.licious

I've always wished I could be a fly on the wall in other people's kitchens. There is something neat about seeing other people make their favourite dishes in their own home.



Living in a city like Toronto, I'm always curious what people are cooking up in their kitchens on any given night. So when we were invited to visit Culture.licious, I was excited because I saw that the premise was various Master Cooks, home cooks like you and I, sharing their favourite dishes from their own culture. Currently they have representation from Panama, Vietnam, Kenya, Korea, Bosnia and India.

On a normal night, there will be one Master Chef cooking an appetizer, dinner and dessert with the class. We were lucky enough on our night to get three Master Chefs: Minh (Vietnam), Lizka (Panama) and Aleksandra (Bosnia). The cooking classes are run by Wendy Chung, world traveller and food lover who left the corporate world to pursue her dreams (her most recent job was as a CMA at Pepsi). You go girl!


The kitchen feels homey, warm and inviting. The food was tasty, healthy and simple - that, to me anyways, is what home cooking is all about. Our appetizer was double-fried plantains with chicken and peppers and a ketchup/mayo/mustard/Tabasco dipping sauce (the dish is called Patacones Fritos en Salsa). Main course was Lemongrass pork and beef skewers with vermicelli and traditional green onion sauce.

Dessert was apple and walnut strudel and, let me tell you, the way to roll a strudel is pretty incredible and involves a big-ass table cloth - watch our video below or click here to see how it's done!


We got to assist with certain tasks and we walked away with all the recipes. I'm all for learning more about the kitchens of the world and we're fortunate enough in Toronto to have venues like Culture.licious to help us do exactly that.

Yours in food,
-Stacey

Expand your home cooking repertoire: Get to know quinoa!

I have to be honest: Before receiving 500 Best Quinoa Recipes to review, I had never used quinoa in my home cooking. But I had heard a lot about it, and my interest was piqued, so the timing to try out a few recipes was perfect.

Quinoa (pronounced keen-wah) was first cultivated by the Incas. It's considered a seed, but is more specifically classified as a "pseudocereal" meaning that, while it is not technically a grass (true cereals are grasses), it can be used in the same way cereals are. It can be bought in various forms, including seeds, flakes, flour and pasta. While I've never had them before, you can eat the leaves of the quinoa plant - apparently they are good in a salad. Quinoa is closely related to spinach, chard and beets. This mighty plant yields a near-perfect balance of protein, carbohydrates and dietary fibre - for this reason, it is important to incorporate quinoa into vegetarian diets. It's also gluten-free - Celiacs, rejoice!

I chose two recipes to try, starting with a stew made mainly of green olives, shredded chicken, tomatoes, and chickpeas. The stew has officially become a regular part of our meal repertoire - I have already made it twice and plan to make it often, especially as winter approaches. We absolutely adore it - it is healthy, hearty and flavourful. It uses dried cilantro and a number of other aromatics along with reduced-sodium broth (I use less broth and add some water because it is already such a flavourful dish and I'm trying to keep it as healthy as possible). While the quinoa blends nicely into a stew, the green olives are my favourite part - despite the Mediterranean influences in the dish, black olives just wouldn't taste right. I used big plump green ones that still had their pits. And the best part: It's easy to transport leftovers to work for lunch!



The next recipe we tried was a salad with a horseradish dressing, cherry tomatoes, sugar snap peas and seared skirt steak. Condo living isn't the most conducive to searing a nice steak... This whole place turns smokey! But it was worth opening all the windows and the door to try this out. The colours just popped. I think I still need to perfect the horseradish dressing though - I found it a bit strong (didn't help that the only horseradish I came across was extra hot). The stew is still my favourite though, and. I think the salad is more a "once-in-a-while" recipe.

There are so many other items to try - I've only made two out of 500 recipes! There are a few breakfast ones I want to attempt. Later this week I'll be trying out a third recipe: crustless quiches starring quinoa and roasted red peppers. Yum!

I think every home cook should try expanding his/her at-home cooking repertoire, especially to find dishes that are healthy and tasty. For me it was all about getting comfortable with quinoa seeds. Next I may move onto using flour or flakes. Or I may try different methods of preparing it, like toasting it rather than using the pasta method to cook it. These recipes really make quinoa the star of the show. It's a good place to start and to get you comfortable with incorporating quinoa into your diet.

Yours in food,
-Stacey

Memory #1 in our new condo: The first meal!

I think most of us would agree that there are few moments in life that are more exciting than becoming a homeowner for the first time.

Back in July, Mark and I had our counter-offer on a condo accepted and we took possession yesterday - Even though we don't officially move 'til August 14, naturally we wanted our first meal for our first evening at our condo to be special! Pizza and beer would be easier, yes, but we are saving that for our friends when they help us move. Cooking was also a great way to test that all our appliances were in working order.

We decided to tackle making homemade chimichurri sauce - which turned out amazing and which we are now addicted to (we have had it before, but only in restaurants - it was so simple to make!) We spooned it over a steak that we cooked in our cast iron skillet.

We also just cooked up some quick gnocchi (admittedly not from scratch - it was late and we were hungry!) with lots of parmigiano reggiano on top.



We also baked some simple zucchini slices on stoneware with a bit of salt and olive oil in the oven. They were delicious.

Then for dessert we made my mom's simple recipe for apple crisp, or apple crumble as some call it. So delicious! And we forgot oven mitts so umm we had to be creative :P But we made it work!

Memory #1 in our first home: MADE. And it was a delicious memory indeed!

Yours in food,
-Stacey

Give yourself the gift of an end-of-the-week treat: A Friday Night Roast!

Most people wait until Sunday to make a roast or some other type of more elaborate home-cooked meal. Also, most people who don't have a family don't really bother with roasts at all. But Mark and I think there's something almost sacred about taking the time to make yourselves such a grand treat - and even better, we made it on a FRIDAY NIGHT! Screw waiting til Sunday. It was so much more rewarding to get home from a week at our full-time jobs and feed ourselves something hearty.

The slide show of delicious pictures speaks for themselves but, in short, Yorkshire Valley Farms helped us out by giving us two delicious organic grain-fed free-range chickens - they are air-chilled, rather than water-chilled (which tends to add more water and salt to the finished product and in turn it may block the true taste of the chicken from coming all the way through).

We rubbed the chicken with some salt (from Spain, brought back by our two good friends!), freshly-ground black pepper and a bit of olive oil/canola oil (our olive oil we have now, while extra virgin, is not really the tastiest, I find it a bit too grassy so we neutralized the flavour with canola). Softest, juiciest, and most flavourful chicken we've ever had by far, no joke.

We put the other chicken in the freezer and we'll probably use different seasonings on it - something more elaborate. We just wanted to get the true, unadulterated taste of the chicken first time around.

We paired it with a wine Inniskillin gave us to try - they have an East West Series of blended wines that use grapes both from their winery in British Columbia and their winery in Ontario. Certainly an interesting concept. We had the Riesling / Gewurtztraminer blend. While I'm generally a fan of sweet German Gewurtztraminer's, it was probably a good thing this one wasn't too sweet because the flavour of the chicken was so simple that it needed something that would complement it, but not outshine it. It did pair very well with our simple roast chicken, mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus.

For dessert I whipped up a Dutch Chocolate Icecream Mix my Mom was given for free by a lady at a craft sale. I know, sounds sketchy. Trust me, I was scared. It was actually pretty tasty - we had to add two cups of whipping cream and 1/2 a cup water to it and beat it like crazy, being careful to not let the cream separate.

Mark was telling me they treat Dutch Chocolate with alkali or something to take the bitterness out of it, which is why it tastes different, but the process also kills the antioxidants naturally found in chocolate so that sucks but it was tasty nonetheless.

Later this week we're planning on making a soup broth with the carcass and all the bones we've saved, potato peelings, and asparagus stems - then we'll add fresh celery, carrots and potatoes to it - yum!

Update (Jan 29): Soup has been made, and I also forgot to tell you guys where you can buy Yorkshire Valley organic products: Loblaws, Zehrs and Superstore locations across Ontario, and in the GTA at Big Carrot, Bloor Meat Market, Organic Garage, McEwans, and Dufferin Meats.

Yours in food,
-Stacey

P.S. please note the AMAZING custom aprons Mark and I got for Christmas from my sister and brother-in-law! Love you guys - thanks for supporting us!

Nobody's home: Is the death of the home cook imminent?

Earlier this week, Tasting Toronto had the pleasure of heading down to Edward Levesque's Kitchen in trendy Leslieville, for a lively panel discussion around whether or not home cooking is dead. A keystone of the talk was Michael Pollan's article in The New York Times magazine: Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, bemoaning the decline of home cooked meals. His most recent book is “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”



As tasting is Tasting Toronto's primary mandate, we have to mention a couple of delicious chicken appetizers we sampled: Stacey's favourite was the chicken sausage medallion with cilantro and guacamole served on a spoon, and Mark's favourite was the chicken liver terrine with an onion jam. We also had fried rice balls, chicken pizza, egg salad, rosemary frites, chicken satays with coconut-sesame dip, and ample red wine.




The event was brought to us by the Chicken Farmers of Canada. Theresa Albert from Food Network Canada moderated the panel discussion.

The panel had three bright and awesome foodie folks who helped colour the conversation:

Anna Withrow, Food writer / Founder of the LIVERight Awards (did you know a young child with a fatty liver has the same amount of damage done to the organ that a 60-year-old alcoholic has?)

Amanda Laird, Food Blogger and Communicator

Ryan Anderson, Web strategist and PR Blogger from Fat Canary

Anna talked about the health aspects of home cooking; Ryan was sharing his adventures in making everything from scratch, including butter, in The Home Cooking Challenge; and Amanda was discussing the intricacies of ingredient substitution and other fun cooking adventures on her blog.

The increasing time squeeze, longer work hours, or more entertainment options of modern life has left less and less time and mental space available for cooking meals at home. The advent of the microwave and TV dinners has even led to a redefining of "cooking" to include actual preparation of ingredients versus plopping something out of a package and zapping it.

Not only is home cooking a much cheaper and healthier alternative to take-out, it also need not consume a lot of time to prepare. Simple examples include roasting a chicken, or just plugging in a rice cooker or slow cooker.

Stacey asked a question that was plaguing her: Does any one group (group meaning vegans, vegetarians, meat-lovers, etc.) cook at home more than the others? The always-lovely Alexa Clark noted that she knows some vegans who spend a lot of time in the kitchen and don't enjoy it at all. Some thought meat eaters cooked more at home. It was really tough to say. It also got us thinking about other groups (in the sense of ethnicity), and whether certain ethnic groups make a point of cooking meals at home more than others.

All-in-all it was a very cool event with great conversation and excellent food and wine. A perfect end to a Monday night!

Additional links:

Chicken Feeds - the Chicken Farmers of Canada Blog - http://www.chickenfeeds.ca

The CFC Video Podcast - http://www.chickenfeeds.ca/category/podcast/