And the winner is...

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"I'm a writer, music geek, amateur foodie, and bride-to-be..."

Laura Downs from foodie blog Loverly won the contest for Eat, Shrink and Be Merry!

Laura will also be writing a story for The Food Network Blog, interviewing the author of The Happy Baker Erin Bolger as well as covering the opening of her local farmers market.

You must check out the cupcakes she made for her fiance, so cute! She did portraits of her and her fiance for his birthday. Fabulous!

I hope you enjoy your copy of Eat, Shrink and Be Merry Laura!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the contest!

Recipe Review: The Neelys' Grandma Jean's Potato Salad

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Please note: I forgot to mention that you also add some chopped onion and celery to the salad!

I had almost given up on finding the perfect potato salad recipe. I had tried so many and most of them were flavourless and boring. A couple of summers ago I saw the Neelys make their Grandma Jean's Potato Salad and decided to try again. This tastes like my childhood! Nothing fancy, just delicious. Perfect!

The recipe calls for five large red potatoes but I prefer to buy a bag of potato nuggets and cut them in half and leave the really small ones whole. I bring them to a boil and then simmer for ten minutes. I also start making my hard boiled eggs at the same time.

While those are cooking I make the dressing. So simple! Miracle whip, relish, mustard, sugar and salt. I keep that in the fridge until everything else is ready.

I can not emphasize how important it is to cool everything down completely before putting all the components together. I made this once and I guess it was still hot and the flavours were just not there. So be patient. It is worth it!

In a big bowl add the potatoes and the sliced hard boiled eggs.

Add the dressing and stir to coat. Sprinkle with paprika, add some sliced egg as garnish and voila! The perfect potato salad. Five out of five wooden spoons. Tangy and creamy, this is one of the few salads I make all the time, especially when it starts to get warm and sunny. Which it is, finally! I celebrated the return of the sun by making this recipe yesterday only to have a giant storm roll by.

Thankfully this morning I woke up to brilliant sunshine and will be enjoying this dish again with dinner tonight.

Recipe Review: Chef Academy Grandma Louise's Tomato Sauce

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Yesterday I finally had a whole day to myself in the kitchen. What bliss! Life has been insane lately. From hibernating and just getting by all winter to life going crazy, I have been having a hard time keeping up. Then, yesterday came. What was I going to make?

Food Network's Chef Academy inspired me to try Chef Jean Christophe Novelli's Grandma Louise's Tomato Sauce. I have made tomato sauce from scratch before but it is usually disappointingly bland but I figured if I was going to try again, this was the one to try.

The recipe is for restaurant-portions so I had to change it a bit, I was not going to be cooking six pounds of tomatoes. Just these four tomatoes cost me $8! You cut them up and put them in a hot and dry Dutch oven:

Add some salt, pepper and some sugar (no exactly measurements, grrr). Add star anise (which I quickly removed, I hate that flavour) and vanilla. When tomatoes start to cook, mash a little and simmer for one to two hours. Which is exactly what I did. And then I looked at the ingredients and saw that it also called for a bay leaf and fresh thyme. They just were not written into the cooking instructions. Damn it!

It was too late for the bay leaf but I threw in the fresh thyme with the garlic at the end. I also added some basil and olive oil. That's it! That's your sauce.

I sauteed some shiitake mushrooms and boiled some tortellini, put them together and topped with some of the sauce.



I seasoned with salt and pepper and topped the pasta with some Parmesan.

The sauce was more like tomato paste than a tomato sauce. It did have lots of flavour but I prefer there to be a little heat in the sauce, as well as a bit of a bite from a little vinegar. I am sure food purists will like this sauce, it is just too simple for my taste. Due to the time involved, the expense of the tomatoes as well as the poorly written instructions, I give this recipe three out of five wooden spoons.

I do love the show Chef Academy and it was very cool to make the recipes Chef Jean Christophe Novelli teaches in class. Even though this was not a huge hit for me, I still had a lot of fun playing chef school in my kitchen. More recipes to come!

My first risotto... and perhaps my last!

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The lovely Val Outmezguine from The Food Network made a video of her cooking Shroomy Risotto for the first time and totally inspired me to try too. I printed out the recipe for mushroom risotto, did all the prep work ahead of time and then fell asleep for hours on the couch! Not a good start. It was well after dinner time and I was rushing so of course, it was a bit of a disaster. My bad!

I heated up the oil in a large Dutch oven and then added the shallots which immediately burned. Burned?! Bloody hell! So, I started again. You saute the shallots and then add the mushrooms. No problem. The rest of my dinner was in the oven so I could focus my time and attention on the risotto. What could go wrong?

After the mushrooms are done releasing their juices you add the risotto and stir to coat. Keep cooking them until they begin to crackle a bit. Then you add some wine. Fine. As this is going on, I am listening to CBC's Barbara Budd's final night on As It Happens. I have been a listener to this program for over ten years as I prepare dinner and I will miss Barbara so much. This seemed like a smart thing to do as I stir and stir my risotto, unable to leave it unattended.

I got to the point in the recipe where I started to add the warm broth. You add a ladle full and then stir, stir, stir until the rice has absorbed the liquid. This all seemed good and fine until I realized that I had only been doing this for 10 minutes and there was another 10 minutes of cooking time left and I was almost out of broth. Thankfully I remembered that Val said one cup of risotto can absorb five cups of broth so I ran to the fridge, got my carton of broth and heated it up.

Twenty minutes go by and I take a bite. Hard little grains, far from creamy goodness, this was going to take a lot longer than I thought. Fine, I decide to just keep heating up broth, add it to the risotto and keep stirring.

We get to the end of As It Happens where Barbara takes the times to thank all her listeners and I sense some tears coming to my eyes. Then the fire alarm goes off! Crap! I can not leave the stove to fan away smoke from the alarm so I yell for my husband to help. He runs upstairs and gets our huge room ran and blows away the smoke. I turn on the fan above the stove and have no idea where this phantom smoke is coming from. Then I remember that I had timed my salmon wrapped in phyllo pastry to finish along with the risotto ten minutes ago! Yup, that is what is burning. Time to take it out of the oven.

Finally, the risotto was done. I added at least an extra two cups of broth to this risotto and it took a minimum of ten extra minutes for the dish to be done! I was so relieved when I could add the Parmesan and dill (I was out of thyme) and eat!

It was close to 9:30 by the time we ate dinner, no natural light to make the photo look at all appetizing. The saddest part of all? I think my husband prefers the boxed risotto! Comes with less drama and swearing. I loved the risotto, I thought it was fabulous actually but was it worth all that work? Hmm..... And what exactly did I do wrong?

Needless to say we had a lot leftover. Not a dish that reheats well, I put it in a weekend frittata which ended up being absolutely delicious. At least there was a happy ending to my first risotto story.

Cookbook Giveaway!

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Janet and Greta Podleski from the show Eat, Shrink and Be Merry on the Canadian Food Network generously donated their latest cookbook to one of my lucky readers for a cookbook giveaway! The book is signed by them too and is absolutely full of fantastic recipes. I envy the winner on this one. I have their other cookbooks and they are well used, loved and falling apart.

These ladies know their food. Their perspective is focused on nutritiously fabulous delicious food. I have been big fans of these women for many years now and have even been in contact with Greta here and there via their blog. The introduction of this book is so entertaining to read (I could not help but sneak a peek) and their phenomenal success story is so inspiring. They were the underdog in the publishing world and then struck it big by going independent with a little help from The Wealthy Barber and his mom.

The cookbook is filled with puns, funny illustrations and their goofy personalities. If you have ever watched the show, these two sister are endlessly entertaining. The only moments they are serious are when they talk about food but they always mix it with fun.

Thank you Janet and Greta for donating your fantastic cookbook to one of my lucky readers! To enter, leave a comment and make sure there is a way for me to contact you through either a blog or email address. If you don't, I will pick someone else as the winner. Contest closes Thursday. Good luck everybody!

Recipe Review: Alton Brown's "The Chewy"

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Friday afternoon was another cold and dreary day so of course I had to bake. It was a long and crazy week for me and my husband so I cheered us up by making Alton Brown's recipe for "The Chewy" chocolate chip cookie. We had missed our friend Mike's birthday so I also made these for him, saved the batter in the fridge until right before we left so they were nice and fresh from the oven.

This is a bit of an unusual recipe because you do not cream room temperature butter with sugar. Nope, you melt it first! You melt it, dissolve it with the sugar, add the eggs and the vanilla and then the dry sifted ingredients like a regular cookie. Except, you use bread flour instead of all purpose! Then you add the chocolate chips to the batter and chill. The recipe does not say for how long so I chilled them for an hour.

I used my two-ounce ice cream scoop as specified and only baked six cookies at a time in a 375F oven.

The first batch were pretty darn perfect. Then I read (yes, I forgot to read the whole recipe) that you are supposed to turn the sheets around after 5 minutes. Which I did afterwards and then I had problems with over baking and then under baking. When I made Mike's I did not turn them around, I just baked for around 14 minutes and they were fine. These cookies are so big though that they do go darker than I like them to be, since you have to keep them in long enough to bake all the way through. Next time I might use my smaller scoop and bake them for a shorter period of time.

I hope you enjoyed the cookies Mike! Once we got there I found out that Eric's birthday had just passed as well. Time to do more baking!

These are pretty great cookies. They do not get hard over time but they are pretty challenging not to over bake at this size. I give these cookies three and a half out of five wooden spoons.

Tutorial: How to make bread pudding

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Last weekend I was inspired to try something new for brunch and checked out the Neelys' recipe for bread pudding. I made some changes and created my own version using my leftover Craisin Bread that I had in the freezer. You do not need a lot of special ingredients for this recipe but you do need a little time for the bread to sit and absorb the liquid as well as cook in the oven.

You need: 4 eggs, 3 cups of milk (I used 2 cups of buttermilk and 1 cup of skim), 2 tbsp of butter, 1 tsp of vanilla, 1 tsp ground cinnamon, 1/2 cup of brown sugar, 2 tsp of rum extract and six thick slices of bread, cubed or torn.

Put the milk, butter, vanilla, cinnamon, brown sugar and rum extract into a saucepan and warm up until the butter melts and the sugar dissolves.

Temper (pour slowly) the warm mixture into the eggs slowly, whisking the entire time. This will warm up the eggs without cooking them. We are making batter, not scrambled eggs.

Put the cubed bread into a large buttered casserole dish and cover with the batter. Let sit for at least 15 minutes but the longer you let it sit, the better. I was in a hurry (hungry!) so I just let mine sit for 15 minutes.

Bake in a 350F oven 50 minutes and watch it puff up and souffle!

Delicious! If you like moist treats like me, you will love this for brunch. My husband really thought he was not going to like it but in fact loved it. The only person on this earth who would hate it is my sister Jamie, this is way too wet for you Jamie!

I like to think of this recipe as baked French toast. In fact I drizzled it with some syrup and loved all the flavours going on. On my Facebook page I found out that down south people eat this cold! I had absolutely no idea you could do that. I think I will keep eat mine piping hot out of the oven with some turkey bacon and fruit. What a treat for the weekend!