Tag: delicious

Foods of Canada, Sunday Edition…

 With Canada Day just a few days away, local foods are on my mind. Also, I expect this will be the last year for this country-sized veg garden, so we are making the most of the harvest. Today’s special: Rhubarb Maple Crisp.

Fill your dish with sliced rhubarb, and drizzle lightly with maple syrup.

For the topping, mix melted butter and syrup (about 1/3c of each) with 1/3c sliced almonds and enough rolled oats (large flake) to cover your dish – around 3c.

Bake in a 375 oven for 45-50 minutes, until the rhubarb is bubbling and cooked through, and the top is golden.

 
We served ours with some fat free plain yogurt, delicious and creamy. 

  

Where's the Veg?



OK, so technically a tomato is a fruit. Nonetheless, a tried and true weight management strategy is to make sure you get some fruit or veg in every meal. We like to add tomato, diced cucumber, or grated carrot to our tuna sandwiches (on whole grain homemade rye bread). Replace half the mayo with Dijon will also give your tuna salad a flavour kick! 

What's a "Goatmeal"?

Glorious oatmeal! Somehow this delicious breakfast treat gained the nickname “Goatmeal” in our house…but whatever you call it, it is a warm, wonderful way to start the day. We’ve been to the gym and are safe inside observing the trees dance to another “weather event”. Hopefully Kid Two and his gal are safely ensconced in their home after a trip to Brazil.

Here’s how you make it:

In a micro-safe casserole (for two): 3/4c large flake rolled oats, 1T each raisins and walnuts, a good sprinkling of cinnamon, and a large Apple, diced. (Wash well and leave the skin on; we all need the fibre!). Microwave on your machine’s oatmeal cycle or 3 mins on high, 5 on medium. Stir and serve with milk and a little brown sugar (you won’t need much, and if you don’t want any, it is still delicious). Have a great day!

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Necessity is the Mother of the…Bulgurito?

Number one child arrived home yesterday, and we had great plans to make bean burritos for dinner. Somehow in the midst of all the harvesting, pickling, canning, and freezing, though, our food inventory-keeping went awry. We were okay with substituting chickpeas and Jacob’s cattle beans for the black beans. But no tortillas, either? That was problematic. So we hit on a plan. Bulgur would play the part of the tortilla, in a manner of speaking. For three:

Boil 1 cup (250ml) water. Add 1/2 cup (125ml) bulgur and 1 tsp (5ml) olive oil, and simmer for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook 3 cloves of garlic and 1 tsp (5ml) chipotle powder in 1 Tbsp (15ml) olive oil. Add a drained can of beans or about 2 cups (500ml) beans and 1/2 cup (125ml) broth. (Go crazy – black beans, chickpeas, whatever strikes your fancy…we are improvising now). Simmer until bulgur is cooked.

Line 3 bowls with greens – we still have mizuna in the garden, so that’s what we used. Stir the bulgur into the bean mix and spoon over the greens. Top with chopped tomato, diced avocado, fat free yogurt, salsa, and grated cheese. (Did I mention we were also out of salsa?) Spicy chioggia relish to the rescue!

All this is to say, in a cost-conscious kitchen, it isn’t always necessary to run to the store when you’re short on ingredients for a recipe. Use a little imagination and you might invent a whole new kind of delicious.

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Gardens Gone Wild: Harvest Niçoise

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We’ve been traveling, attending a couple of family weddings and doing a little business along the way. It didn’t seem realistic to ask them to postpone their special events on account of our vegetable patch, so the consequences when we got home were, well, interesting…

First, beans were just nicely coming into bloom when we left. Which means Jack’s beanstalk had nothing on us when we arrived back. Beets are still growing, and we’ve already harvested potatoes. A few tomatoes were spared the post tropical storm blight that has attacked local crops.

All in all, we had the makings of a lovely salad (and roasted veg are in our future). The eggs, olives, and tuna are not our own, but the rest is absolutely home grown.

For two:

Cook 2 small red potatoes and 1 large golden beet (reserve the greens for the salad). Throw the beans in to blanch, just at the end of cooking.
Hard boil 2 eggs.
Chill all of this (we cooked ours at breakfast time).

Arrange the chopped greens on a plate. Top with the cooked, cooled veggies, some sliced tomato, olives, and good quality water packed tuna.

For the dressing, mix 1T/15ml each of Dijon, olive oil, and vinegar (your choice).

Enjoy!

Cherry Berry Muffins

We started our day with these delicious muffins (check the recipe pages) and a hot steaming mug of Full Steam Titanic 1912 coffee…a fantastic start to the day!

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Leftovers for Breakfast

After a fast walking round of golf on a hilly course yesterday, we were definitely hungry. So we took advantage of our garden produce and topped a whole wheat pizza crust (find out how in our recipes section) with a thin layer of homemade zucchini relish from our storag. Then a layer of spinach, chopped oregano, mushrooms, sliced radish, and green onions. A light sprinkle of feta and cheddar finished it – not so much that the veg would steam.

This morning the leftover slices made a great breakfast, topped with a perfectly poached egg.

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Summer is nearly here!

We have lived in other jurisdictions where the middle of June seems like an unlikely start to summer. It’s already been hot for ages. But here in Atlantic Canada, even when the temperature is in the 20s (70s or 80s, my Fahrenheit friends), the wind is sufficient that it rarely feels hot.

But today we had an awesome, sunny, warmish day. And so we barbecued. This is the result. Veg from our garden, except local tomatoes and spuds.

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To Jamie…and Beyond!

So we are always searching for inspiration. This week we were researching a variety of Jamie Oliver recipes. Today we adapted the Hit ‘N’ Run Panbaked Chicken. We used what we had…carrots, parsnips, olives for extra flavour…and it was beyond awesome. Experiment and make your own veggie combos. We guarantee it will be tremendous.

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Cream and Smoke are Signs of Spring

Finally the snow is receding and the barbecue is accessible. We are working on the “use what is on sale or in the freezer” methodology, and this week we found a great deal on local ground beef. So in addition to making a batch of meatballs for later in the week, we made tomato, avocado and bacon ( salute to the lovely Marianne) burgers. Yum!

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