Friday February 3, 2012

Dinner for 6

Deep Fried Spring Roll
Pad Thai

 Thai Beef Salad
 Kao Mok Gai (Chicken Braised in Rice with Turmeric & Spices) Served with Sweet Chilli Sauce
Wine Poached Pears with Yoghurt and Berries and Vanilla-Cinnamon Sauce

Thai food again.  I loved the deep fried spring rolls so much I just had to make them again and share them with others.  This time I had all the ingredients.  I didn't get a picture of them before they were gobbled up by the guest though.

I served three main dishes. Pad Thai.  This is a really easy recipe and was quite tasty.

Thai beef salad.  The beef may seem a little rare to some but it is the way we like it.  I use this recipe often but I used a little less beef and more salad than called for this time.  It is from a meal plan that is heavy on protein and I find it a little much when serving it along side other dishes.   

Chicken braised in rice with turmeric and spices needed a little tweaking.  I couldn't find Cassia bark so I used Cinnamon stick instead and I decided to use boneless, skinless chicken thighs instead of the legs and thighs cut into pieces it called for.  The chicken tasted delicious but unfortunately some of the rice was still hard.  It needed more liquid than was called for.  Not that I could have fit any more in my pan.  This dish was to big for my biggest fry pan.  

This dessert is another of my favourites.  I have made these a few times. The recipe is for two but it is easy to alter for more. I love the combination of yoghurt, berries and almonds with the poached pears and sauce.  Plus it is easy, not to filling, rich or sweet and looks fancy. 

Sources for the menu: Deep Fried Spring Rolls and Pad Thai are from Simply Thai Cooking . Thai Beef Salad is from The CSIRO Total Well Being Diet  by Dr. Manny Noakes & Dr. Peter Clifton. The Kao Mok Gai is out if a beautiful cookbook full of fantastic pictures and authentic recipes called Thai Street Food by David Thompson.  It is like a coffee table book filled with great recipes.  The Wine Poached Pears is out of Cuisine Tonight For Two  (the actual one in the photo with the 101 new recipes).

Friday January 27, 2012

Dinner for 2

Handmade Deep Fried Spring Rolls
Thai Spicy Noodles
Berries with Cheesecake Cream 

The key to making Thai food, as with most Asian cuisine, is preparation.  If you have everything chopped and measured then when it comes time to cook you can rapidly add things.  Some ingredients for the filling of the spring rolls was to be added while cooking only 30 seconds after the last. 

I loved the filling in these spring rolls.  I actually could have ate it on it's own.  I used egg roll wrappers, mostly because I couldn't find spring roll wrappers, but I also like egg roll wrappers.  I also left out the optional dried black fungus.  It isn't that I don't like it it is just that I didn't have any in the pantry.  I might have had my oil a touch too hot so they got a little darker than I would have liked.  Please excuse the paper towel in the photo, I was just felt they would become soggy while sitting if I left them on the plate.

The Thai Spicy Noodle dish was very tasty but a bit of a disaster.  My noodles were over cooked (I didn't pay attention to the time) so they became a big blob.  We ended up leaving them on the serving plate and eating everything else.

Both of the sauces were also made from scratch.

Desert was the Berries with Cheesecake Cream again.  This has become a favourite in our house hold.

  

Sources for the menu: The starter, main and sauces were all out of Simply Thai Cooking by Wandee Young and Byron Ayanoglu (I have the Third Edition) and the Berries and Cheesecake Cream is a recipe by Matt Tebbutt  that I found in the Jamie Magazine 2011/12 Yearbook.

Friday January 20, 2012

Dinner for 2

Clam Fideos with Kielbasa & Smoked Paprika
Spinach-Fennel Salad with Orange Vinaigrette

This is the second dinner I made for my blog and I totally forgot to take a picture.  It looked fantastic too, trust me.  This was my first time cooking clams.  I have prepared a lot of oysters and I have cooked mussels once but never clams.  I substituted the fideos pasta with a short thin pasta (like cut angel hair) I found at the grocery store.  It must be significantly thinner because the first time I went to toast it before cooking it burn completely.  Good thing I had a whole bag.  I adjusted the time of toasting and it worked out nicely.  I also substituted kielbasa for the linguica as I couldn't find it anywhere.  It was a lovely rustic one pan dish.  

The spinach-fennel salad was a wonderful fresh side to this dish.  I also served it with some fresh thick bread.  

Dessert tonight was a bakery bought chocolate cake that we shared with the kids as it was just the two of us for dinner this week.

Sources for the menu:  This one was again out of my Cuisine Tonight for Two Magazine.

Friday January 13, 2012

Dinner for 4

Balsamic Mushrooms with Goat Cheese Toasts
Bacon Wrapped Pork with Jezebel Sauce
Pan-Roasted Brussel Sprouts
Brown Butter Mashed Celery Root
Berries with Cheesecake Cream

As this was my first Friday night dinner blog I am sorry I forgot to take a photo of the starter.  They were tasty and easy to make.
 

The dinner was very tasty but the first thing I noticed when I looked at the photos for this blog was how bland the plate looked.  For the sake of the photo I should have had some more Brussel Sprouts green side up and for the sake of the plate maybe I should have done Sweet Potato Mash instead of the Celery Root Mash for more colour.  Jezebel sauce is easy and has become a new favourite with roast pork at my house.  Everything was fairly straight forward and all came together nicely.

The Berries and Cheesecake Cream has also become a new favourite easy dessert.  I am not a big fan of fussy many stepped deserts.  I served it with a Chocolate Marshmallow from Bobbette & Belle Artisanal Pastries in Toronto  and a Shortbread Cookie.

Sources for the menu:  Balsamic Mushrooms with Goat Cheese toast was adapted from a recipe from Iain Hewitson, Huey's Bloody Good Recipes , Bacon Wrapped Pork with Jezebel Sauce and Pan-Roasted Brussel Sprouts was adapted from a Cuisine for Two magazine (I love these magazines for proper portion sizes when cooking for 2.  I doubled the recipe in this case to serve 4), Brown Butter Mashed Celery Root is from Micheal Smith's cookbook The Best of Chef at Home,and Berries and Cheesecake cream is a recipe by Matt Tebbutt  that I found in the Jamie Magazine 2011/12 Yearbook.

The Evolution of Friday Nights

So here is a Canadian girl living down under with three kids and my husband starts working in China while doing his MBA at the same time.  This leaves me to hold down the fort all by myself for a good chunk of the time.  He could be gone a week or more at a time and was away over at least part of the weekends often.  Lucky for me I had some made some fantastic friends who became my most treasured support group during those eighteen months.

One of our friends is a fabulous cook and he would volunteer to come to my bigger kitchen and cook for our families.  He also loved to entertain with his wife and kids in their home. Wine and beer were always drunk along side his fabulous food and good memories were made.  Another friend who lived one street over was also a fantastic cook and she would host us along with some other friends on Friday evenings.  They had a pool which was a fantastic way for the kids to end a busy week, swimming with friends.  Beautiful food would be cooked but sometimes it would be spur of the moment pot-luck and sometimes we would just order pizza and drink beautiful wine.  Other days I would have the gang over to my house. Casual or formal, lunch or dinner, we would have great food and fabulous company.  I really wouldn't have survived those many months without my family of friends.  There was also quite the party when Rob completed his MBA.

Then the unthinkable ... after six fantastic years in Australia we were to return to Canada.  Gone were my treasured friends and support group.  As luck would have it, we managed to land around the corner from one of my sisters and her family.  I don't work outside the home so I look forward to socialising on Friday nights.  Unfortunately, even though my husband looks forward to Fridays he is knackered from the long hours he works and all the travel he does.  He really has no interest in going out but he doesn't mind having people over.  It was then that I hatched the 'Friday Night Dinner' plan.  I would plan and prep during the day on Fridays so that we could have spectacular, restaurant quality meals on Friday nights. Others could join us without the pressure of heading to a restaurant or the expense.  A salute to the wonderful evenings spent at our neighbours in Australia.

I would be able to fulfil my passion for cooking and need to socialise with grown ups and my husband could kick back and relax in his home.  Sometimes it is only dinner for 2, most weeks it is dinner for 4 (my sister and her partner and son over) but I am hoping to cook for 6 or 8 more often to establish a new base of great friends.  I feed the kids first, something easy and kid friendly, so they can go off and play while the grown ups enjoy fantastic quality food in a relaxed home environment.

I started in 2011.  It has been fantastic!  I get to do what I love.  I get to improve my timing, technique and even try new things.  I get to hear people tell me how great my cooking is (I really like that part).  And with any luck I will make some new friends who will become my new support group and help fill the void left in my life when I had to leave Australia.

My Beginnings

I grew up eating meat, potatoes and vegetable for the most part.  Our family would have Chinese food from the local take out place once a year and pizza on the odd occasion.  Sometimes there were spaghetti dinners or casseroles.  There was no spice in our life and all veggies were cooked to death.  But my parents did do their own canning, pickling, blanched and froze vegetables that were in season.  Plus they made their own jam, maple syrup, bread and plenty of cookies.  At the time I didn't really appreciate all of the hard work and I would have done anything for some 'Wonder Bread' and an 'Oreo'. 

My Dad had a set of cook books that he would break out on occasion. My sisters and I would run screaming in terror at the sight of them because it meant something new and 'exotic'.  My poor Father couldn't even try to make anything creative without a chorus of 'OH NOOOO!'.  That of course has come back to bite me with my 3 kids.  Even though they have dinned from a wider range of food than I ever did. When they were little (some of them still are) they would turn their nose up at anything new.  At least they don't run screaming.  Sorry Dad.

When I moved out to attend university I lived off rice, pasta, eggs and 'Mr. Noodles' (I could buy them 4 for $1).  Certainly nothing fancy for those 4 years.  It was about sustaining myself cheaply not cooking with passion, although I would make spaghetti carbonara on occasion as taught to me by a guy I met from Italy. 

After getting married I started cooking a wider range of food.  Mostly Italian pasta and meat dishes.  I would experiment with the odd recipe out of a magazine or the newspaper but I really wasn't making anything spectacular.  Then it happened.  That EUREKA moment.  We had moved to Australia and I had access to so much fresh produce and seafood.  I was introduced to a more European style of shopping ... daily.  There were bakeries, fish mongers, green groceries, butchers and bottle shops all within walking distance of my home.  I also discovered TV chefs, on the all night food channel after I had my 3rd child.  They made everything look so easy.  So I bought a cook book and started to cook.  Anything and everything.

Spicy Things, New Things, Crazy Things and I found out I had a real flare for it.  My love for great food had began and well ... I wanted to share it.