That my lunch #2

Whenever I visit Tres Carnales, there is a constant debate with my lunch mates over which tacos are their best. My favourite is usually whatever kind I order that day. Today it was tacos al pastor: slow-roasted pork, radishes, salsa verde. They were especially good with their new pickled onions (not pictured).

A red sauce joint

Bucatini all'amatriciana has been on my kitchen to-do list ever since I had it in Vancouver a few years ago. A simple tomato sauce where the sweetness of the tomatoes plays off the saltiness of the guanciale (cured pork jowl) and the heat of peperoncini, it's a winning dish with very few ingredients. The snag is that one of those few ingredients, guanciale, was tough to come by in my frozen corner of the world.

Cabbage patch

I should like cabbage. I’m part-German, part-Ukrainian. I should love cabbage. But I don’t. I associate cabbage with sauerkraut, cabbage rolls and kimchi, dishes I’ve never actually tasted because of the olfactory similarities to hot garbage.

Recently, though, I’ve started to realize that maybe it’s not the cabbage itself that’s the issue. Don’t hate the vegetable, hate the method. So, when half a head of Napa cabbage appeared in our fridge one day, I gave it a tentative sniff and decided to give it a shot.

Market Mondays

Last week, D. had a pretty brilliant idea for the seemingly impossible task of making Mondays less crummy: instead of heading home after work to cobble a meal together out of whatever is in the fridge, we would rendezvous with our friend and sort-of neighbour Jessica at the local farmer’s market and pull together a dinner from whatever we find there.

Chop to it

I guess I’m on a bit of a pepper kick (if two posts with dishes involving pepper can be called a kick).

I spotted the original recipe for this on Serious Eats this a day after I stumbled across the downtown location of Cumbrae Meats a week after reading about the latter in the Joe Beef cookbook. I love maple and black pepper and had been craving a good pork chop for a while, so it seemed like synchronicity at work.

Put some pep in your step

How were everyone’s holidays? We had a lovely time. The Christmas season was filled with long walks in the park and an awful lot of good brown liquor. I also spent a fair amount of time leafing through the latest additions to my cookbook arsenal, “The Art of Living According to Joe Beef" and Thomas Keller’s “Ad Hoc at Home.” It was good.

Currant events

Every holiday season, I find myself asking the same question: “Why is it so hard to find recipes for cookies at this time of year?”

Ha ha.