Louise Crosby 53 results

Louise Crosby enjoyed a long career writing about food for The Ottawa Citizen and is now chief food writer and editor for The Ex-Press.

Vanilla is exotic, the proof is in the pudding

Food Recipe: Vanilla Bean Rice Pudding These days, when people say 'vanilla' they often mean boring, but the Mexican orchid flower responsible for the long, fragrant bean is anything but average -- and the same goes for this vanilla bean rice pudding By Louise Crosby This is turning out to be the summer of vanilla rice pudding. I’ve made this recipe – from food blogger Molly Wizenberg featured in bon appétit magazine – three times in the past two weeks, and as I write these words, another batch is burbling away on the stove. Eaten warm or icy cold from the refrigerator, it is rich and creamy and bursting with vanilla flavour, and we can’t get enough of it. I’ve made the pudding twice with a vanilla bean and once with a generous tablespoon of Nielsen-Massey Madagascar Bourbon vanilla bean paste, which makes an excellent substitute if your store runs out of beans. I also threw in a fat cinnamon stick during the cooking of the last batch, making the flavours even more ...

Super Bowl: Vegetarian Curry Laksa

Food: Vegetarian Curry Laksa Recipe Whether it's pho, bibimbap or a bucket of ramen, a meal in a bowl offers a mysterious delight, and this recipe for Vegetarian Curry Laksa is a culinary treasure you can eat with a spoon By Louise Crosby There’s something appealing about a meal in a bowl, everything contained in one space, relaxed, easy eating. Think of the Vietnamese dish pho – fragrant broth, rice noodles, vegetables and herbs. Or Korean bibimbap – sizzling rice with meat and assorted vegetables, chili pepper paste and a raw or fried egg served on top. But wait, there’s much, much more. I just got my hands on Lukas Volger’s new (vegetarian) cookbook, simply titled Bowl, and realize that when it comes to this kind of eating, the possibilities are endless. I want to cook this entire collection but for starters settled on this Vegetarian Curry Laksa, laksa being a popular noodle dish sold at hawker stalls in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Although there are ...

Carbonara won’t kill you

Food: Recipe - Carbonara Little crispy bits of smokey bacon mixed with creamy egg are what make Carbonara feel decadent, and thanks to new research that reassesses the dangers of saturated animal fats, you can eat it without angst over your arteries By Louise Crosby I used to think bacon was the worst thing you could eat, all that saturated animal fat clogging up the arteries, bringing on heart disease. Maybe it’s dawning on me that life is short, maybe it’s the recent thinking that saturated fat is not the killer we thought it was, but I’m eating bacon now and I don’t feel bad about it. Indeed, there is increasing evidence that the anti-saturated fat campaign underway for so many decades hasn’t worked, that the low-fat, high carbohydrate diet we’ve been advised to follow has only led to soaring rates of obesity and diabetes, while heart disease has not declined. Meanwhile, recent studies have found that saturated fats found in meat and dairy products are not as bad ...

Snack in a Snap: Cherry Almond Bars

Food: Recipe - Cherry Almond Bars When it's too early for rhubarb and too late for fruitcake, pick this cherry almond treat to feed your appetite for something fresh, fruity and dessert-y By Louise Crosby I wanted to do a blog on rhubarb this week to signal the arrival of spring, but alas, there was no rhubarb to be found. Spring is dragging its heels in these parts; warm weather is that elusive thing that could arrive next week, or the week after. We are waiting for so many things: crab apple blossoms, fiddleheads, green grass. We’re right on the verge but not quite there. Badly in need of something fresh and bright and new to eat, I found this recipe for cherry almond squares, ran up the street to our neighbourhood grocery to buy a bag of frozen cherries, and got to work. Now that’s coming to terms with reality. There’s nothing wrong with frozen cherries, in fact they work perfectly in these rich, crumbly squares. Combined in a pot with some sugar and lemon, they ...

Minestrone makes it homey

Food: Recipe - Minestrone It starts slowly with a pot of simmering white beans, but minestrone grows into a bowl that feeds the soul By Louise Crosby You could say the measure of wealth is not how many cars you have in your driveway, or how many holidays you take each year, but whether you have a batch of home-made soup in your refrigerator at the beginning of the week. Right now I’m thinking of minestrone, that thick, substantial Italian vegetable soup that will keep you going in good health for several days. We should all be so lucky. Minestrone is something you make when you have plenty of time and want to enjoy the process. It starts out slow and quiet with a pot of simmering white beans. As they are turning soft and creamy, you take a soup pot and start to build your vegetable base, sautéing onions, garlic, carrot and celery in plenty of olive oil and bacon drippings, should you go for bacon, then adding more layers of flavour with zucchini, green beans and potatoes, ...

Trading potato chips for cauliflower?

Food: Recipe - Parmesan Roasted Cauliflower If you're one of those self-abusing salty-greasy chip addicts, there's hope on the horizon in the form of a roasted, old cruciferous favourite: cauliflower baked to perfection with garlic and parmesan By Louise Crosby I have a terrible habit of eating potato chips while I’m getting dinner ready, just because I’m starving and can’t wait for dinner, and because they are so good. They’re not the best option for healthy snacking, obviously, so I make an effort to alternate with other foods like roasted, salted cashew nuts, hummus, cheese and crackers, and smoked salmon spread. All good, but the call of a potato chip is very strong. Then I discovered roasted cauliflower. Yes cauliflower, a star of the healthy cruciferous family. It is delicious divided into florets, tossed with olive oil and salt, and roasted in a hot oven until the edges are caramelized and crispy and the centre is soft. It’s also good with Indian spices like ...

OMC! Orange Marmalade Cake

Food: Recipe - Orange Marmalade Cake Voulez-vous cuisiner avec gloire ce coir? Orange Marmalade may be hard to make, but you need to avoid the psychedelic store-bought stuff in a jar if you want the right ingredient for a tart, candied dreamcake By Louise Crosby My love affair with marmalade began only recently when my friend Amanda gave me a jar she had made from the winter crop of knobbly-skinned Seville oranges. Her recipe comes from Ian Tamblyn’s great aunt Alicia, Ian being Amanda’s partner as well as a prolific, award-winning folk singer, songwriter, adventurer and playwright. Making Aunt Alicia’s marmalade is a three-day process that involves squeezing and reserving the juice, steeping the seeds and pith in water overnight, boiling the rinds and letting them sit, boiling the rinds again with sugar, the juice, and the pit-soaking water, sterilizing jars and melting wax. Quite a lot of work, but in the end she has exquisite marmalade, not as stiff as commercial ...

Don’t be a stranger to Spaghetti Collins

Food: Recipe - Spaghetti Collins When you're feeling like a noodle, Pascale Manale's Spaghetti Collins will be your friend for life -- onions, garlic and all By Louise Crosby If some of us are suffering from a certain end-of-winter, when-will-it-ever-feel-like-spring malaise, our usual enthusiasm for cooking, or doing much of anything for that matter, might possibly be lacking. Day after day of cold and rain, snow still on the ground, and the promise of another polar vortex bearing down – in April, of all months – can get a person down. Let’s just get take-out, we say to ourselves, sinking back into the pillows with our book. Well, here’s a simple and delicious pasta dish that should get us back into the kitchen. It’s called Spaghetti Collins and it comes from Pascal’s Manale restaurant in New Orleans, named after a friend of the owner. The recipe is included in Saveur: The New Classics Cookbook, put out by the editors of Saveur magazine. You can make it in no ...

Bean there, done that

Food: Recipe - Ucceletto Beans If you're looking for some long lead cooking that can help you stay healthy, the ever-humble bean is one of the best options By Louise Crosby I know busy people who spend Sunday afternoons in the kitchen making food to last well into the week. Stews, spaghetti sauce, soups, casseroles. This is the time for relaxed cooking, letting things simmer long and slow. Then come Monday or Tuesday night, after a long day at work, dinner is just a matter of heating things up, boiling some pasta or making a salad. Food is on the table in no time and you thank yourself for making the effort in advance. When I take a long look at meals, I often cook a pot of beans. Not the sweet pork and beans of our youth, although they can be very good, but chick peas or black beans, brown pintos or white Great Northerns, soaked overnight, then simmered for an hour or two with some aromatics for flavour – a quartered onion, some chopped carrot and celery, a head of garlic. ...

Pick a Pepper, Stuff a Pepper

Food: Recipe - Cheesy Stuffed Poblanos While stuffing peppers is a cross-cultural tradition, Mexico's passion for stuffing the warmly flavoured poblano is close to perfection By Louise Crosby For eons, people have been stuffing vegetables – with rice and other grains, beans, meats, cheeses. Think of eggplant stuffed with spiced lamb and pine nuts, pale green zucchini stuffed with ground beef and rice and cooked in a yogurt or tomato sauce, mushrooms stuffed with bread crumbs and cheese, squash stuffed with quinoa and feta. It’s a traditional and creative way to liven up a vegetable, make it the star attraction, in fact, and to pack more nutrition into your meal. Peppers are a natural for stuffing because they’re hollow, and in Mexico, chiles rellenos – poblano peppers filled with cheese, dipped in an egg batter, and fried – are a favourite food. America’s Test Kitchen The Complete Vegetarian Cookbook played with that idea by first microwaving the peppers for a ...