Food 64 results

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 ...

Macaroni and Beef Casserole: Comfort food gets all haute cuisine

Food: Recipe - Macaroni and Beef Casserole As the modern food revolution continues to make the exotic feel everyday, it's also taking old standards such as the humble macaroni casserole and turning them into something that's not just comforting, but au courant By Louise Crosby Pick up a food magazine, check the Internet, or tune into your television and you’ll notice that the conversation around food these days is quite sophisticated – it’s all about cooking like the pros and how-to videos, organics and heritage crops, locally-grown and artisanal foods, and sustainable, small-scale farming. Ingredients that were once exotic are now everyday, there’s nothing the home cook can’t do. So a dish that harkens back to the 1950s and ’60s and calls to mind something Betty Draper might have taken to a neighbourhood pot luck in Mad Men, had she been friendlier, might strike you as passé. But you’d be wrong if you thought this Macaroni and Beef Casserole, developed by ...

Love tastes like Oatmeal Cookies

Food: Recipe - Thin and Crispy Oatmeal Cookies Making oatmeal cookies the way mom used to make is more than soul-comforting nostalgia, the results are one of life's most reliable pleasures. By Louise Crosby Before my mother moved into her retirement residence, where units come with microwaves but not stoves, she was a one-woman, cookie-making machine. She made Swedish cookies, sugar cookies, pinwheel cookies, chocolate cookies, peanut butter cookies, and more recently, crackle-topped, chewy-crispy ginger cookies, and chocolate chip cookies. She gave away almost everything she made, to her neighbours, to her kids, to anyone who came along. She was famous for her cookies. My mother is not sad to give up baking – after all, she just turned 90, Happy Birthday Mom! – but lots of people visit in her new place and, following tradition, she would like to serve them a cookie with their cup of tea. I feel a certain responsibility to help her out, having a big kitchen as I do, so ...

Steamed Maple Puddings transcend presentation insecurities

Food: Recipes - Steamed Maple Puddings They may not come out as pretty as a Donna Hay concoction, but even a less-photogenic maple steamed pudding is a sweet, soulful pleasure that's hard to beat By Louise Crosby Ok, here’s the story. I was so seduced by the photo of steamed maple pudding in Donna Hay’s gorgeous book The New Classics that I had to make it, had to share the recipe with you. I LOVE maple syrup and I LOVE pudding, so the combination seemed winning. What wasn’t winning, however, was the time I spent running around kitchen stores looking for the right ramekins, the way my puddings didn’t slip cleanly out of those ramekins like Donna’s but were raggedy around the edges, and the way the maple syrup sauce did not run down the sides of the puddings in an enticing way but sunk right into the cake batter. And finally, I whipped the cream a little too hard, so it sits atop each pudding like a hat rather than relaxing downwards, all creamy and luscious. Some ...

A river to skate away on, and yummy cup to warm up with

Food: Recipe - Chocolat Chaud Skating down Ottawa's famed Rideau Canal is an undeniable thrill, but after a day on ice, homemade chocolat chaud is the best way to relieve the bitter chill - without added sugar By Louise Crosby OTTAWA -- It’s the first week of Winterlude and the world’s largest skateway on the Rideau Canal has already closed because the ice has melted into a big wet puddle. The first three days of this annual winter festival were a big success, a carnival atmosphere in fact, with ice carvings and snow sculptures, pancake breakfasts, concerts, beaver tails and poutine. And of course, until the weather turned warm, skating. Before we go any further, and just to put everything into context, here’s a refresher on the Rideau Canal and its famous skateway (thank you Wikipedia): The canal itself, built in 1832, is 202 kilometres in length, and connects the City of Ottawa to Kingston, on Lake Ontario. The oldest continually operated canal system in North ...

Greening the bleak midwinter

Food: Recipe - Broccoli-Quinoa Salad with Buttermilk Dressing The colour palette may be all black and white this time of year, but you can treat your palate to a rainbow of taste with this delicious salad that feels like spring By Louise Crosby The winter colour palette is bleak but beautiful, all black and white and shades of grey. Snow has a way of softening the hard lines, of putting some magic into the landscape. There’s nothing prettier, for example, than a dusting of snow on bare branches, or an expanse of rooftops iced like cakes in white frosting. The only problem is that, at some point, our eyes long for colour. Many go south for their fix of pink bougainvillea and turquoise sea. Others buckle up their bootstraps and carry on, their eyes fixed on the horizon, where spring will appear. I’m in that second category, toughing it out, grasping at little life rafts to help me get through, life rafts like this bright green Broccoli-Quinoa Salad with Buttermilk ...

Don’t die: It’s Year of the Pulses

Food: Recipe - Curried Chickpea Soup with Tomatoes, Ginger and Cilantro The humble pulse could hold the key to a better future with a low carbon footprint and sky-high nutritional value By Louise Crosby Unless you were sleeping over the New Year, you will know that 2016 is International Year of Pulses. This piece of news might have struck you as slightly hilarious. With such serious issues facing humankind – climate change, the refugee crisis, Donald Trump – the United Nations dedicates an entire year to the celebration of lentils, chick peas, dried beans and peas? It’s actually not so crazy. First off, these humble members of the legume family are nutritious –  full of protein, fibre, vitamins and minerals – and low in fat. They can help manage diet-related diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. They’re also inexpensive and contribute to environmental sustainability. According to Pulse Canada, the national industry association and a big player in this ...

Gut food is good food

Recipe: Asian Chicken and Cabbage Salad Feeding your intestinal microbes doesn't take courage, just a gut sense and some simple recipes, such as this Asian salad full of flora-friendly ingredients By Louise Crosby I’m not one to make a long list of New Year’s resolutions, but there are a couple of things I’d like to accomplish in 2016. One is to clean out my attic, the other is to feed my microbes. Yes, microbes. All of a sudden, it seems, there are new books and TV shows about the bacteria that live in our intestines. Scientists have discovered they play a crucial role in our health, affecting everything from how we digest our food to the strength of our immune system and our outlook on life. Imbalances in our flora have been linked to disease, obesity, and depression. But how we feed these microorganisms is key: junk food kills them off, but a diet high in high-fibre fruits and vegetables, complex carbohydrates, nuts, seeds, probiotics, prebiotics, and fermented ...