Side surprise

This meal was one of those rare times where the side steals the show. The chicken is good and is a great fast and cheap option. But really, it's all about that blurry little pile of beans and corn in the background there. That, my friends, is succotash.

Trials and Tribulations

I must confess: when it comes to cooking and blogging about cooking, I'm a bit rusty. Getting back into the swing of things has taken a bit longer than I anticipated. In the kitchen, I feel disorganized, out of sorts, like I've misplaced whatever meager skills I once possessed, perhaps accidentally discarding them in the compost bin like so many vegetable peelings. It's not that I'm not into it; more the feeling that I suddenly don't know what I'm doing anymore. So it totally makes sense that I'd try to take on two recipes at the same time on a weeknight.

A story

I was just wondering to myself how other people with food blogs find interesting things to say about their recipes. Fact is not every meal has a story. Sometimes dinner is just dinner. Take this one for instance.

T.V. eye

D. and I have a little bit of repartee we repeat just about every time we’re about to sit down for dinner. Just as we are serving ourselves in the kitchen, one will ask the other “Shall we eat at the table like real grown ups or in front of the TV like savages?”

Most days of the week, we are savages and none more so than the first couple of days after the weekend when we try to get caught up on all the shows our cable-less selves missed when they first aired on Sunday night. Dinner time is also our time for our stories.

What a sap

It’s springtime in eastern Canada, which means maple syrup season. The amber stuff seems to be enjoying a spell as a hot ingredient, thanks to Quebec’s Martin Picard of Au Pied de Cochon fame and his new maple syrup-centric cookbook, Au Pied de Cochon Sugar Shack.

Dinner for two

Yesterday was a Monday, and a particularly odious example of the genre at that. I shuffled up from the subway in a mood as grey as the February sky and dialed D. on the phone to discuss dinner. It was one of those days where neither of us were feeling particularly inspired, so I defaulted to one of my always-good-in-a-pinch recipes.

It’s a good one for bad moods. What hard heart can resist the smell of roasting chicken and garlic, the brightness of citrus and fennel? One whisky sour and a half hour of bustling in the kitchen later, my mood was substantially improved.

Signature move

My first cookbook was the Reader’s Digest 30 Minute Cookbook. If I recall correctly, it was a gift from my sister, a way to keep me from starving after I finished college and took my first trembling steps towards becoming a grown up (a process that continues today). Truth be told, I don’t know if I’ve made more than a half dozen recipes out of it in the decade-plus it’s been in my possession, but I’ve kept it around, its unabashed plebeianism setting it apart from the Julias and Marthas on our cookbook shelf. Why?

Hello sunshine

Friday afternoon in Trinity Bellwoods Park with a 1/4 roast chicken with green bean, arugula and potato salad from Inigo and a couple of local cold ones.

Summer's off to a good start

Handle the heat

Sometimes when I cook — usually when I’m making a big meal for company — I wonder to myself  “could I do this for a living?”

I’m sure that’s a question any enthusiastic amateur chef has pondered at one point or another; for me, it comes at a stage in my life where I wouldn’t say no to a new career path. And what finer thing than to do that which you love?

Well, lots of reasons. Professional cooking is a meat grinder. After seeing this I don’t know why anyone does it. Still, there’s got to be a way to make a living in food that won’t end with one demoralized, drug-addled or dead. But then I’ll have a cooking experience in my own kitchen that's so transcendent, it gets me thinking.

Wing ding

As D.'s academic career amps up, she's getting more opportunities to travel to conferences and other academic-y things that academics do. In 2011, she's already been to conferences in three different cities, which to my second-tier-college-diploma-toting eye seems like a sure sign that she's doing something right in her chosen field. Great for her, but I fear I'm going to have to get used to cooking for one a little more often.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained

One thing I need to work on in the kitchen is keeping an even keel when things don’t go well. As D. can testify, it doesn’t take much to put me off my game; mistakes haunt me and leave me in a deep funk until well after the plates have cleared.

And I’m not even talking about big time, “Omigod, dinner is ruined!” failures, but small, often correctable errors, like accidentally doubling the amount of bacon in my bologenese sauce (sure, it was fatty and overpoweringly bacon-y, but really: who doesn’t like bacon?) My reaction to these is usually completely out of proportion to the size of the error with kitchen implements hurled into the sink and long strings of cuss words hurled into the air.

Synchronicity

This was one of those unplanned meals, the kind where you see a recipe, look at the contents of the fridge and find a match to be made.

The recipe comes from this month’s Martha Stewart Living Holiday edition and originally calls for veal and chives, not to mention a helluva lot more butter. But using turkey and less butter gives the illusion that you’re eating healthy or “heart smart” as they say. As for the parsely, well, you gotta use that stuff up somehow.

From the vaults

Yikes. Forgive the lack of updates. Believe me, it's not for a lack of cooking either: just this past week I braised a brisket and staged a dinner for six with a (dare I say perfect) roasted prime rib as the cornerstone. Trouble is, whenever I cook event meals, I tend to be too busy, well, cooking (not to mention chatting and drinking)  to bother with photos. Since I got nothin' at the moment, I thought I'd reprint one of my favourite recipes from my original tumblr blog.

On a lighter note

I felt like taking a break from my recent run of one-pot dishes with this quick and healthy (relatively, anyway) weeknight supper. It’s hard to go wrong with breaded and fried chicken, whether its classic chicken parm or its northern cousin schnitzel. In this case, the crunchy, moist chicken floats on a bed of tart greens. Crisp and sweet apples add a seasonal touch to the salad.

Brrrrr...

This weekend, the grey skies sent down a smattering of tiny snowflakes that spiraled to earth and melted immediately. Not much of a snowfall, but the message was clear: winter's on the way.

Gobble gobble

Canadian Thanksgiving came and went. This year for the first time ever, we were left to our own devices with no family obligations, which also means no one to do the cooking and washing up for you. We decided to do our own holiday feast instead, complete with roast turkey, the requisite trimmings (stuffing, mashed sweet potatoes, etc.), and a few fellow holiday orphans as guests.

A note here: neither D. nor I are big fans of the big bird traditionally at the centre of Thanksgiving celebrations. They require so much work and are so easy to screw up. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have a story or two about gathering around a platter of desiccated turkey on Thanksgiving or at Christmas. But tradition is tradition and we felt that, this year at least, we’d abide by it, just to see if we could pull it off. Next time, I’d rather do a roast.

Falling over.

The idea was to celebrate my birthday and the changing of the seasons with a proper fall favourite: a hearty dish combining chicken, sausages, sweet dried prunes and tart apples in a tangy sauce. The kind of thing one enjoys over buttery mashed potatoes with a salad of fall greens. While wearing a sweater.

Good Livin'

“Chicken fried steak /country gravy and bourbon straight
Ain’t it great? /It’s good livin’!”-The Supersuckers-“Good Livin’”

I don't think you need any special reason to have chicken and waffles on a Tuesday night.