Let's Maple-Up Some Salmon!

French Canadians are supposedly known to drink maple syrup when the season comes. (I actually know one who does. Quite an awesome substitute for morning cofee!) The syrup season is HERE! Being just a Canadian, I settle for eating maple cream by the spoonful straight out of the little styrofoam cup that it comes in. Oh so delicious! I have great plans to make some soon. For now, I'll just maple-up some delicious salmon fillets for dinner. <3!

Another Vege-Fruit Soup Combo!

There's something to be said about vegetable fruit combos. Since the carrot orange ginger soup, I have been on the look out for more combos for soup. According to the internet, pear enhances the flavor of zucchini; mango does the same for cauliflower; and banana for avocado. I am not sure how the other two combo will turn out but zucchini + pear makes one awesome soup! Who knew? The internet sometimes gets (untested) stuff right!

Oh yeah! It's a nice grilled cheese you are spotting in the background. Aged white cheddar between 2 slices of my favorite bread. It's my favorite thing to complete a soup meal.

Carrot Soup With A Little Tang And Perk

Every weekend, I look over to Mr. L across the kitchen and ask "what would you like to eat this week?" just to see if he had anything on his mind. Last week, he smiled at me and said "soup, we should have some soup and make that carrot soup". Perfect, there is a bag of carrots that's been in the fridge! But carrot soup... It's so... It's carrots. I may not be a little kid anymore but I can't say that I love to eat them. I don't even like carrot cake and I LOVE cakes. There's a serious need to spice things up if I am going to make some carrot soup. Times like this, Google is my best friend. Waving the magic wand and voila, a carrot soup with much needed spicing up!

The recipe calls for an interesting combination of carrots, orange and ginger. The trouble with using oranges is that sometimes they don't taste very "orangy". I found these cute little orange things with knobs on the end of them in the grocery store. They are called Minneola tangelos, a funny fruit from crossing a grapefruit and a tangerine. I have no idea what they tasted like but a girl can have dreams for her tangelos to preform wonders in a carrot soup, no? The result is overwhelmingly tangy spicy carrot soup that will blow your socks off! The cheese bread that I bought from the store to go w/ the bread made a wonderful pairing. I need to figure out how to made some for the next time.

Romantic Night In Complete with Homemade Risotto

It's always great to stay in to cuddle on the comfy couch and watch a great action flick (or just a mediocre one considering recent productions). However, no good night in is complete without a romantic dinner. Here's my list for the perfect night in.

1. A boy or a pillow substitute - *loving boyfriend* CHECK!
2. Music to set the mood - *turns on the radio* CHECK!
3. Delicious dinner - *lamb steak with asparagus and mushroom risotto* CHECK!
4. Alcoholic beverage to accompany dinner - *Argentinian wine* CHECK!
5. Dessert - *Vineyard vidal icewine* CHECK!
6. After dinner activity - *rents movie on iTune* CHECK!
   

I also suggested that we dress up for the evening in, but that was shot down before I completed my sentence... Oh well! Everything is equally enjoyable in jeans. He did add to the evening by lighting some tea candles and floating them in a nice bowl. It was quite the romantic touch.

A Dish To Commemorate The New Dishes

First! I would like to say that I have made it to the "End of the World" and back! :D (More on Argentina cuisine in the next post.) The vacation has been great but all of us had agreed that it's a trip not a vacation. We all required a few extra days of rest before going back to function properly. This is especially true for those of us who had came down with the cold by the end of the trip.

For the first post of 2011, I thought that I should post something exciting from the end of 2010! The dish was made to celebrate the arrival of the new present that my boyfriend (who shall be dubbed Mr. L in all future posts) had received. They are nice blue stoneware dishes (heavy and retain heat very well). We agreed that something tasty must be served in them for a proper initiation of these dishes! Tada! Pulled geese fried rice, a tasty way of cooking some geese compote. Truth to be told, this is the fancy version of the "left over" fried rice that my dad used to make. It was the only dish next to instant noodles that he could master when I was young. Still, a great way to dispose any left overs! :D

38 oz of Mushrooms (White, Shitake, Portobello)

We had a fantastic cream of mushroom soup for dinner today. It was creamy and mushroomy! One bowl had more mushrooms than any mushroom soup that I've had in 25 years, combined. In preparation of this soup, I had bought 1 pack of portobello mushrooms (6 oz), 2 packs of white mushrooms (8 oz each), and 4 packs of shitake mushrooms (4 oz each). Oh yes, a total of 38 oz of mushrooms in one grocery shopping! There are probably going to be some staring from your fellow grocery shoppers. Hey, mushrooms are good for you... Are they not?

Did Anyone Say Dinner Bread?

Ever since I have made my first bread a few weeks ago, I have been practicing. For a recent dinner gathering, I decided to try my hand at making up my own recipe! This is a feta cheese bread. It's very flavourful and is a wonderful companion at the dinner table with any dish that has a sauce to soak up! The left over also makes for very good seasoned bread crumbs.

Moose Bourguignon or Is It Moose Ragout ?

Moose meat is one of the last things that I thought I would be cooking. Correction, all game meats are equally unlikely. I thought my culinary horizon would be limited to the ordinary live stocks. Lucky for me, I got to try cooking a nice moose blade steak fresh from a hunt that my boyfriend's parents went on a few weeks ago. It looked liked beef but is a bit leaner. It did not smell like beef but a little gamy as expected. Armed with no previous knowledge of moose meat, let the experiment began!

For my first try at a moose dish, I had chosen to base my experiment on Julia Child's Beef Bourguignon recipe. Though, I think due to the many many improvisation that was required, the final recipe can only be considered as a ragout with red wine. Oh well, one has to make do with what she has in the fridge. However, the next time I would follow Julia's recipe a little more closely and larded the meat to give the meat a little more tenderness.

Taste from Grandma Chien's Kitchen

Sometimes simpler is better. When I need some simplicity and comfort, I make my grandma's pork and eggs dish. It's a humbling looking dish but immensely delicious. It's one of her most loved by the family. It's always one of the first dishes to go at the dinner table during any family gatherings. Grandma spoke Ningpo-nese which is a dialect in China. She called this dish niogodei. For years, I have associated the name to the dish as anyone would associate the word tree to the tall brown thing with branches and leaves. As it turned out niogodei is how you say "肉跟蛋" in Ningpo-nese which means "meat and eggs". It's quite a literal description of the dish as it's made only with ground pork and eggs.

Sunday Morning Afternoon Brunch

Earlier this month my bf and I thought it would be a great idea to compile a list of recipes to try and work through them systematically. And that's what we did. Close to a 100 recipes are listed in an Excel workbook by categories. They are divided into appetizer, soup, main course, quiche, breakfast, dessert, cake, sweet, cookie, and bread. Most are self explanatory other than some subdivisions of the sweet stuff. He looked at it and said "Isn't this a bit much?" to me in the nicest possible way. I through him a glance and reminded him that he's pretty much only operating in the appetizer, soup, and main course section. The first Saturday of November rolled around and I thought, hey why don't we try a breakfast recipe and make it a Sunday morning brunch? We settled on a baked eggs recipe and went to bed.