Pear and Zucchini Soup

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Last week when I was struggling in the kitchen to make tasty food without killing myself, Leel suggested and inspired me to try the Food Network's Pear and Zucchini Soup. Ah soup, how I love thee. My husband is allergic to pears but he is away so this was another way to be rebellious in the kitchen.

You know I just had to change up the recipe a bit, right? I divided the recipe in half which is a good thing, even at half this makes a ton of soup! I have been living off it all weekend. You start off with the classic soup-making technique. I heated up some olive oil and butter and then added 1 diced carrot, celery stalk and small onion and sauteed them for 10 minutes.

I added 3 diced zucchini and 1 diced pear and a couple of sprigs of fresh thyme. The recipe calls for sage but I am not a huge fan so I used thyme instead and added a bay leaf. I cooked another ten minutes stirring occasionally. I added 2 cups of chicken stock and 1 cup of cider instead of 3 cups of water. Had to use up some of that cider! Plus, it added a lot of flavour. Also, every time I added ingredients I lightly seasoned with salt and pepper, I like layering the flavour that way instead of adding 1/2 tsp at the end. With the cider I also added 2 small peeled and diced potatoes. I brought everything to a boil, then turned down the heat so it was lightly simmering and then put on the lid. I let it simmer for 30 minutes.

While the soup was simmering away I fried up little pieces of chorizo sausage to use as garnish instead of the croutons. I wanted a little protein in the meal.

I love this picture, my blender looks like it is impersonating a ghost! I do not like using immersion blenders, they do not make the soup perfectly smooth the way a blender does. I removed thyme stalks and bay leaf and a little at a time I ladled the soup into the blender and pureed it with a cloth on top. This is important! I have ended up with soup all over my kitchen because I forgot to do this, make sure to cover and not over-fill the blender. Add soup gradually. I put the soup back into the pot, added 2 tbsp of cream and checked the seasoning.

Velvety, deep in flavour and absolutely delicious. A beautiful way to warm up on a cold winter's day. This recipe is worth the chopping and simmering time. Elegant and lovely, made the way I described, I give this recipe five out of five wooden spoons.

Getting naughty in the kitchen

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There is a big snowstorm outside which depresses me and makes me want to be bad, bad, bad! What is even worse is I made this breakfast two mornings in a show, my poor arteries.

So how is this naughty besides the calorie and grams of fat count on this plate? That is real bacon. Salt-reduced bacon, but real bacon. My husband is very anti-pork (long story) and for the first time while he is away and I am on my own I bought some bacon and fried it up and had it with Nutella-stuff Strawberry Craisin French Toast. Oh yeah, and some mandarin oranges for my token healthy side dish.

I can not go outside. I am stuck in here for god knows how long and I want comfort food with a pinch of rebellion. I may even make some seafood before he comes home, oh how he loathes shellfish, hehe.

So when do you get rebellious in the kitchen? What foods are on your naughty list? What pushes you over the edge of goodness towards foodie temptations?

What is your classic foodie mistake?

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Wow! All that apple cider for only 99 cents! What a deal right? They rarely have apple cider even available at my grocery store so I got super excited and even considered somehow getting two containers of it home. Good thing I did not put my poor back in jeopardy because I came home to find out that the apple cider's expiry date was that day. It was a real V8 moment for me. Someone smack my forehead!

This is my chronic foodie mistake. I tend to forget to check expiry dates all the time. What is worse and even more embarrassing is, sometimes I have no idea what today's date is. Heck, sometimes I have no idea what day of the week it is, thanks to living in a fibro fog. So even when I do check expiry dates I can not figure out how fresh the food is until I get home.

Last night I was speaking with friends and found out that they had made apple cider with a ton of cloves and tried to figure out what was wrong with it. I knew one friend who misread a chili recipe and got the quantities of chili powder and cayenne powder mixed up! The mistake I make in my kitchen all the time is not reading the entire recipe only to find out something takes hours to make and my tummy can not wait until midnight to eat!

I would love to hear your classic foodie mistake! Why not celebrate our stories and get over the foodie trauma together? It happens to everyone so be not afraid to confess your foodie mistakes here.

I'm back baby!

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I did it. I broke through that foodie wall and made this amazing Lime Chicken Sandwich on a Cheese and Chorizo Biscuit. This recipe is totally inspired by Rachael Ray who loves big flavours and that is what I always look for, with a dash of comfort food. I had this sandwich with Leel's recommended Zucchini & Pear Soup recipe for dinner last night and I was in heaven. I will post that later on but for now, onto the food!

Rachael recommended using a biscuit mix for these sandwiches but you know me, I prefer to make food from scratch when I can so I just made my cheese biscuits with some additions. For the original recipe and instructions click here. I made a double batch this time so I could have four big biscuits. I started by making my own fake-out buttermilk by adding some lime to 1 cup of skim milk.

Brandi asked me the other day about making your own self-rising flour. It got me wanting to try my own so this is what I did for this recipe: 2 cups of all purpose flour plus 3 tsp of baking powder and 1/4 tsp of salt to make two cups of self-rising flour. For this recipe I added an additional tsp of baking powder, 1 tsp of sugar and 1/2 tsp of salt. I mixed that all together and then grated in 1/3 of a cup of very cold butter and mixed it together a little. I added 3/4 cup of some cheddar and old cheddar plus about 1/4 cup of small diced cooked chorizo sausage and some chives. I added all the milk, mixed together with a spoon until it just comes together and then kneaded it very gently and made a square with it:

I sliced diagonally so I made four triangular wedges and then baked at 450F for 12 minutes.

As they were cooling off I made the mayonnaise topper.

I got some light mayo and added chopped tomatoes, red onion, green olives, lime juice, a tiny bit of hot sauce and salt and pepper. You want a more fine dice that this but I sliced my hand open while chopping the tomatoes, it is a wonder that I made this at all but you really need to do this, this mayo is amazing!

I sauteed two pieces of chicken in some olive oil, four minutes a side with salt and pepper and when they were close to being done a squeeze of lime on top.

Cut open the biscuit (look at all the goodies in there!), put down some of the mayo and top with slices of chicken.

The first thing that popped into my head when I took the first bite other than, oh my god, was this is the best club sandwich I have ever eaten! All the flavour elements were there: pork, chicken, mayo, cheese, tomatoes... It just did not have stacks of layers but I tell you, the stacks of flavours were totally there!

Now that the biscuits are made and I am out of chicken, I think I will save a little energy by picking up a roast chicken today to finish off the leftovers. There is always a way to save a little time in the kitchen and today is a baking day so I am all over that.

OK, I am feeling like I have my cooking and baking mojo back a little and am looking forward to the next foodie adventure! Thank you all for your support and ideas, you really helped me to keep looking for inspiration and find it!

Foodie Frustrations

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Oh, just look at that Strawberry Craisin Bread. So pretty, delicious and beautiful. How on earth could I be one frustrated foodie? Because of this:

Dum, dum, dum, duuuuuum....

I will not say where I got this recipe from because it is a foodie I admire but let's just say the meal was awful! I had to eat the crappy leftovers from the night before that I also hated because I could not stomach this meal. It is supposed to be a chicken stew with red wine and figs but it was nasty.

Not only that but I burned one hand the other day. Last night I sliced my finger open on the other hand. I am suffering from a lack of inspiration in the kitchen. Every recipe looks boring or unappetizing to me. My kitchen is almost always dark so my photos are disappointing. Yeah, I haven't been a super happy foodie lately.

I am determined to change this! How do I do it? I go back to the basics. I make recipe I know I love thus enjoying food again. Also, I get help from the tools in my kitchen to make life in there as easy as possible. I have posted this recipe before but I am always tweaking it and I like this version even more. Enjoy!

Strawberry Craisin Bread

Ingredients

1 1/3 cups water

1 egg

1/4 cup skim milk powder

1 1/4 tsp salt

1/4 cup packed brown sugar

2 tbsp coconut oil, shortening or room temperature butter

3 3/4 cup bread flour or all purpose flour

1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp bread machine yeast

1 cup of dried cranberries, this time I used cranberries that were naturally flavoured like strawberry

You put the ingredients into the breadmaker in the order they are listed in except for the dried cranberries and put the breadmaker on the 2 lb / 1 kg light setting and on the sweet cycle. Once the breadmaker starts beeping to let you know you can add stuff to it, add the cranberries.

That, is a beautiful and inspiring and tasty sight!

So I went back to the beginning. Bread making with a breadmaker is where I first started to bake. This was the second recipe I ever tried and it was love at first bite. This is true comfort food and a good place for me to begin to reconnect safely with food in the kitchen.

I would love any advice from you and hear how you stay inspired in the kitchen. Or am I the only one having issues? Do you have some great dinner recipes you would like to share? I find baking easy but good dinners are so hard to find. I know casseroles and stews are kind of "out" but at this time of year the are what I yearn for. I am looking for insight, inspiration and flavour. What do you need in your kitchen. Can I help?

Going retro in the kitchen? No thanks!

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Apparently it is supposed to be helpful to learn from the past and the idea of "retro" cuisine kind of intrigued me so I bought a copy of Better Homes and Gardens Gourmet Recipes Made Easy. I should have known better!

Cooking retro recipes from the 60s and 70s seems cool but when you look at a lot of the recipes they use a heck of a lot of canned products, especially soups, for their cooking. No thanks. I understand how liberating it must have been for women in the kitchen to make dinner so quickly and easily but I want fresh when I can have it. So I was surprised to see in Gourmet Recipes Made Easy that there were no cans involved in the cooking process! They used real food. Now I could finally test out retro cooking in my own kitchen.

I took on two recipes: Stuffed Sole Fillet and Pasta Verde. The fish was tasteless and awful so I will not go into the cooking process there. The pasta verde was quite delicious but a bit of a disaster. You let 2 eggs, 2 tbsp of whipping cream and 1 tbsp of butter come to room temperature. You fry up some mushrooms, onions and throw in some spinach I guess to give it the green/verde colour. Beat together the eggs and cream, toss pasta with the butter, coat with the egg/cream mixture and then add vegetables. I also added some parsley, I wanted my pasta verde to be green!

The eggs cooked immediately against the pasta so there were white flakes of egg white throughout the dish which turned my stomach. Passive cooking with raw eggs like that may have been cool decades ago but if it means ruining the look of my dish, no thanks. Although tasty because of all that cholesterol, I am thinking that there is a reason we do not eat like this on a regular basis.

I do not want short cuts. I want the real deal. Cooking techniques have evolved over time. With limited resources and energy, if I am going to spend time in the kitchen I want to do things as professionally as possible and for me, that does not include retro cooking. I am done.

Although I do love that leg warmers are back!

"Fame! I want to live forever.."