Neither Foodie Nor Photographer

I just like cooking.  I don't want to spend all day learning new blogging tools, or getting the right shot in the right light.  I just want to cook good food for my hubbie and friends and then share what I do in the blogging forum.

Quality ingredients, fresh spices and herbs, a sharp knife - and I'm good to go.   I love the exotic deli experience, and I do love trying the new and adventurous.  But when it gets right down to it, I just love simple good food made with sound intention and love of the art.  

Why the declaration?  I've been surfing the food blogs a bit lately and there are some fancy pants sites out there. This isn't one of them. Just so you know, on this blog I only share the food I make for a small group of friends and for my small family.  It's not foodie food, just good eats.

Blue Cheese 'n Greens

Nothing mind-blowingly original about this salad.  But I always forget how much I love giant chunks of blue cheese with a mixed salad. This one has slivers of yellow pepper, celery, mixed greens and tomatoes. And of course there are handfuls of chunked blue cheese.  A little squeeze of lemon, a drizzle of olive oil, a sprinkle of sea salt and I'm in salad heaven.    

Mm Mm Primordial Soup

From start to finish, I laughed out loud at Julia Child making Primordial Soup at the Smithsonian.

Apple Buckwheat Pancakes

Leaving fruit sitting on trees is a hard thing to do. There are old orchards owned by no one anymore; the trees stuffed with apples. There are apple trees by the beach full of tiny sour apples that are little flavour explosions. But we can only make so much apple juice and bake so many strudels...This morning I made buckwheat pancakes with little chunks of apple and pear. I also replaced the liquid in the recipe (use any pancake recipe) with apple juice and added a 1/4tsp of cinnamon. I softened the fruit a little in a shallow pot and compensated for the liquid from the simmered fruit in the batter so the pancakes wouldn't be too runny. These were really sweet, very hearty pancakes well steeped in the best Canadian maple syrup. It is coming on winter!

Fall Arugula Pasta

This summer it was impossible to keep up with watering my meager herb garden. At a certain point I just surrendered and left the little souls to make do with humidity... which there was precious little of. So today, when I was planting bulbs for my giant "lily forest", I was thrilled to discover the arugula had made a come-back.

So how to best use arugula without other salad greens? I decided to toss the leaves with hot pasta, this wilts them nicely without cooking them. In addition, I topped it with thinly sliced hot salami and shallots, which were lightly pan fried in a little olive oil. I also added some roasted pine nuts, chopped green olives, shaved Parmesan cheese and a little drizzle of organic olive oil. Very, very satisfying!

Tomato Paste

One image that will stick in my mind forever - and ever- is the mounds of smoothed tomato paste in the street markets of Palermo, Sicily. It made me swoon. Culinarily speaking...
And apparently, making tomato paste isn't complicated, you just have to reduce, reduce, reduce. But there are many recipes, many takes on this traditional food stuff. I made more of a puree that didn't involve removing seeds or centers, just because I couldn't bare to throw that much of the tomato away. I roasted all this in the oven instead of reducing it on the stove top. When it was done it was a very flavourful addition to some roasted squash, and really tasty on bbq ribs too.

I cut up a dozen Roma tomatoes, 8 cloves of garlic, and one shallot - all grown on Hornby Island. I held off on adding herbs so the paste would be more versatile. Adding fresh herbs to a particular dish is something I like to play with at the time of cooking. These tomatoes were roasted until they were close to paste-like in consistency (with a little help from the hand-held blender). I froze cubes of the mix to use as I need it. Viva Sicilia!

Chicken Sausage Stew

Not a conventional stew, mind you. More of a 'melange', if you will... We have come to love the sausages made at Brambles, a local shop with a great artisan meat counter. Their meat sourcing is local and their sausages in particular make a great frozen pantry item to squirrel away from town trips off Hornby in to Courtenay.

These sausages were spicy Chicken, which I fried in a pan, then chopped into four sections, added chopped peppers, button mushrooms and finished with a heaping of local spinach. In a side pot, I boiled some russet potatoes and had this sausage mix over potato pieces. It was flavorful, satisfying and took about 15 to make. Sticks to yer bones too!