Blue Cheese Dip with Firecracker Shrimp

Notice how I didn't give the shrimp top billing on this recipe? The shrimp are awesome, but you could actually jar and sell, and in fact, get rich off this blue cheese dip. Consider it to be your next flavour vessel for anything on the planet that can be dipped. I was searching for shrimp recipes because I found a good sale on them, and loaded up. And I found a Firecracker Shrimp recipe that caught my eye.(from Andrew Zimmern) And just as a side note, they suggested a blue cheese dip. The shrimp were blah, so I've modified the recipe. But the blue cheese dip was heaven! So let's plan up the best snack there ever was.

You'll need for the dip:
1/3 cup mayonnaise
1/3 cup sour cream
1 tablespoon of finely chopped dill
3 tablespoons of red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce
$4.00 worth of good quality blue cheese, So a small chunk of it. I don't know how to measure cheese!

And for the shrimp:
1 egg beaten
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 finely chopped jalapeno pepper
1/4 teaspoon of cayenne powder
1 bag of frozen shrimp, shelled, deveined and thawed
1 cup of cornstarch (or more. I needed more.)
Vegetable oil for frying
Salt and pepper to season
1/4 cup of hot sauce (I used Frank's)
1/4 cup of melted butter
Celery to serve as a side. Or Carrots. Or whatever you like. Or an assortment of veggies.

To make the dip, put everything into the food processor and blend it up. The End.

For the shrimp, beat the egg, and whisk in the buttermilk, jalapeno and cayenne and add the shrimp and cover and refrigerate for an hour at least.

Heat 2 inches of oil to 375 degrees. Or since I don't own a thermometer, I heated the oil on med-hi heat until a bit of the corn starch thrown in the pot showed a boiling action.

Melt the butter and mix in the hot sauce in a separate saucepan .

Take the shrimp with your tongs and dredge in the corn starch and fry in the oil for a couple of minutes. It goes really fast. Remove from the oil and set to paper towels to drain. Salt it and when they're all fried, add to the hot sauce and flip it around for a few seconds and serve. Seems like no trouble to make at all. And it wasn't! Easy and Delish. Like I like! Enjoy friends.

Chicken Arepas or Reina Pepiada Arepas

Not to sound like Andy Williams, but - Where do I begin to tell the story of how great a love can be? This story has many beginnings. I have a very deep interest in South American flavours and cooking. I've been researching recipes for years. I also love Central American flavours, and most of all Mexican cooking. But living in rural Canada, I cannot obtain the ingredients. So I dream. BUT since I live in the vegetable capital of Canada, I'm very fortunate that we have migrant workers all during the season, and since we're in the Harvest season now, even more visitors to our little town. So our stores go to the trouble to stock their local ingredients. And after a ten year search, I found some P.A.N.! That's pre-cooked corn flour! It was better than winning the lottery for me. Finally, I could try to make Arepas. This is a cornbread that is popular in South America. Argentina and Ecuador especially. It's a disk like bread that you slice almost open and stuff with a multitude of different ingredients. Another beginning to my story is that I've never been to South America, and poverty dictates that I most likely never will. So I like to soak up their culture looking at photos of their landscape and art and food online. But you can't really know if you're absorbing it or not since you don't taste the flavours and savour the aroma in the streets. Hope for the best I guess.

So with my treasured P.A.N. I set about to make a recipe. Now here I go off the track again. I searched the internet and settled on a few different versions and combined them into one. I'm quite lazy about lard, so I used Canola oil and so on. And I have a stray cat issue in my backyard, and the violence and general grossness of it prohibits me from going out to grill. I should have though since I nearly burned the house down doing the bread in the oven. Oh let's not beat around the bush. It took me nearly three hours to buck up a chicken sandwich. The house was filled with thick smoke from top to bottom. I worry that not one of 4 smoke alarms went off since Mario complained of burning eyes from the smoke. My kitchen pretty much looked like a corn bomb exploded in it. I felt really discouraged and I will most certainly have to clean the oven tomorrow.

But that's not the story. The story is that only once in a Blue Moon do you find a recipe on the internet that literally hits it out of the ballpark as far as authenticity goes. I haven't had one like this since my Pozole Roja recipe. I've now learned that if a recipe takes hours and hours to make and has a ton of ingredients in it, you can't miss. If you're pacing the floors with worry and thinking you're going to have to dump it and call out for pizza, you've usually got a winner! And do you know why that is? It's because if you stick with it through thick and thin, your love is going to shine through when it hits the table. And that's what happened in my kitchen tonight. So let's roll with some Pure Love! This recipe was adapted from Julie Loria from the internet.

For the filling you'll need:
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1/2 onion sliced
salt and freshly ground pepper

1 ripe chopped avocado
1/3 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons white vinegar
2 tablespoons of chopped cilantro
1 jalapeno finely chopped
2 cloves finely chopped garlic
1 finely chopped red or yellow pepper
the other half of that onion, but finely chopped
2 green onions sliced
juice of half a lime
Salt and pepper to season

For the Arepas
3 cups of warm water
1 1/2 teaspoons of salt
3 cups of P.A.N. - or pre cooked cornmeal
2 tablespoons of canola oil or vegetable shortening melted. (I used Canola oil)

Boil the chicken breasts with the 1/2 sliced onion and salt and pepper for about 20 minutes until it's fully cooked and let it cool completely.
Mash the avocado, mayonnaise and vinegar together and add all the other ingredients. Let it chill and shred and add the chicken when it's cooled down. Season with salt and pepper and more vinegar to make it slightly tart. Keep in the fridge until you're ready to serve.

Now to the Arepas. I thought I would never try this recipe ever again until I tasted them. This undertaking is not for the faint of heart. But here is where I will help you out. Do Not Attempt to bake these in the oven. They must be crispy on the outside and the recipe dictates that you brown them in the frying pan and put them on the direct rack on the oven. Epic Fail. Seal them in the fry pan and for God's Sakes - Grill Them! The oil drips out of them and causes a God Almighty Disaster of smoke and disbelief! And now I know why everybody has an outside stove in South America.

Stir the 3 cups of warm water with the salt until the salt dissolves. Slowly add the 3 cups of cornmeal stirring with a wooden spoon. Make sure you have no lumps and let the dough sit aside for 5 minutes. Just enough time to pour a fresh drink since you'll be sweating now from the work of that. Add the canola oil or lard and mix it all in. Preheat your grill and a frying pan to medium heat with a bit of oil in it. Divide the dough into 6 portions and flatten each one out into 1 inch thick patties. Fry for 3 or 4 minutes and flip. They need to be golden brown. Set aside and then put them on the grill on low heat. Don't let them scorch. Keep flipping, but they need to be crispy on the outside. About 15 minutes in all. Let them cool and slice them 3/4 open to a Pita Pocket like state and stuff with your filling.

Lots of work, but off the charts for authentic flavour. This recipe has one of two places - Either you're trying to get your mind off your troubles, or you've found the sexiest Latin lover ever in life and you're looking for him to put a ring on it. Either way, you win. Cheers my friends!

Good Ol' Mac & Cheese

Macaroni and cheese holds a very dear place in my heart. It was my dad's favourite meal, so we ate it often growing up. And because we were pretty poor, it was a good and cheap way to feed five kids. Hahah except we always had it with a side of mashed potatoes and buttered bread. So maybe not the healthiest meal. But everybody left the table full and happy, and that's all that counted back in the day. And my dad hated spice of any kind. As most dads did back then. So my mom just boiled the noodles and layered them in a casserole dish with grated mild cheddar and topped it with smashed up saltines and baked it off. The End. No flavour at all. But thank God, Heinz had invented ketchup by then, and nobody took advantage of that more than I did!

Mac & cheese was the first dinner I ever learned to cook as a child so I could help my mom out and have supper ready by the time she got home from work. And it's been a staple on my dinner table my whole life because I learned it's something that kids really love, so I could be sure my LadyGirls weren't going to bed hungry. And like any of my recipes, it's evolved over the years as the girls got older and more adventurous with their taste buds. So the idea of mac & cheese in my mind, is that the pasta is the back beat of the dish and the cheese is the tempo. Like any pasta dish really. The sauce is the star of the show. And cheese on a platter with a nice bottle of red wine is lovely, but it really can't stand alone in a sauce. It needs enhancing. So I add a bit of spice and this and that to jazz it up.

All good, creamy mac & cheese recipes start with a classic Béchamel sauce and you whisk in your cheese and your macaroni noodles. And now you have a difficult choice to make. You can eat it at this stage and it's sumptuous and delicious. Or you can sprinkle some bread crumbs or Panko or even smashed Ritz crackers and bake it off. I'll give you the baked off version, but by all means, feel free to break away before the bake off stage and you won't be disappointed!

You'll need to boil some elbow macaroni in salted boiling water. Depending on how much you want, use 2 or 3 cups of dried pasta.

For the sauce:
1/3 cup melted butter
3 tablespoons of flour
1/2 teaspoon of salt and lots of freshly ground pepper
1/4 teaspoon of grated nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon of cayenne powder
1 tablespoon of Dijon mustard
2 1/2 cups of half and half or milk
3 cups of cheese. Use what you like. I used extra old white cheddar and Gruyere. (This ain't momma's mac & cheese) but you can use cheddar and parmesan. The cheese is your call since this is your signature mac & cheese. You can grate it if you like. I hate grating cheese, so I chop it into bite sized pieces.

For the topping:
Melt 1 tablespoon of butter and add 1/2 cup of breadcrumbs or Panko or smashed crackers. Mix it all together and sprinkle it over the top.

Preheat the oven to 350 if you're planning to bake this.
Boil the macaroni until still slightly firm to the bite. About 10-12 minutes and drain it well.

Melt the butter and whisk in the flour using medium heat. Add the salt, pepper, nutmeg, cayenne and Dijon and whisk for 3 or 4 minutes until it turns golden. Add the cream and whisk until it just comes up to the boil. It should be pretty thick by now. If it isn't, keep whisking and let it simmer for a few minutes till it thickens up. Turn off the heat and whisk in the cheese. It doesn't have to melt completely. About half melted is fine. And the macaroni and stir it all together.

You could eat it now. Or you can forge ahead with me.

Pour it all into a greased casserole dish and sprinkle the top with your topping. Bake it for 30 minutes until the topping is golden brown. Let it rest for 10 minutes before you serve it. And that's it! Serve it with anything or just have it on its own. Hahah I don't use ketchup on it anymore. (Now I use hot sauce!) Enjoy friends.

The Last Supper

Now it's no secret that I love football. I more than love it because it puts me in the same room as my beloved sister every Sunday for 17 weeks in a row. More than that even because then we have the playoffs. And have I ever mentioned that her and I are each other's biggest fan? We only need to make eye contact most of the time and we're both running to two different bathrooms because our middle aged bladders turned their backs on us a few years ago. So we bet on Proline and every pool we can get into, we make money every year, but mostly we laugh our heads off. And that happens to agree with my soul very much! BUT- that puts me out of the house every Sunday for about five months of the year. Thank God my LadyGirls have moved out and have lives of their own. But there is no big Sunday roast dinner for my partner. And really, that's his loss because he is not a football fan. So tonight I made a major meal to say goodbye. I'll be back in February!

I roasted a sirloin. Served it on a bed of mashed potatoes, along with some roasted corn on the cob and roasted golden beets. And topped it with sautéed mushrooms with shallot, garlic and jalapeno. And because I love all the flavours of Mexico, I put my own flavour spin on it all. I'll break it all down into each item, and you'll have to make your grocery list on the overall picture.

First thing you want to do is to chop the top off a whole head of garlic and put it in a piece of tin foil. Add some olive oil and salt and pepper and seal it and roast it off at 350 degrees for about half an hour. Put it aside and forget about it. You'll be squeezing this into your mashed potatoes later.

For the roast:
Use a sirloin tip and pre heat the oven to 375 degrees. Season it with salt, pepper, cumin, coriander and chili powder. Just sprinkle a goodly amount and don't worry about measurement. Roast it off at 20 minutes per pound uncovered in a shallow baking dish. Take it out of the oven and cover with tin foil and let it rest for 10 minutes.

So you'll plan out your vegetables based on the timing of your meat. The mashed potatoes will take about 20 minutes. The beets will be about 15 minutes and the corn will be about 30 minutes. And 20 minutes for the mushrooms.

For the corn:
Cover a cookie sheet in tin foil and break the corn cobs into 3 inch pieces. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle lightly with salt, pepper and whatever seasoning you like. I used cumin, coriander and chili powder to marry the flavour with the meat, but you could use a bit of seasoning salt or whatever you like on your corn. Put this in the oven 20 minutes before you're going to take the meat out.

For the beets:
Peel and chop into 1 inch pieces and toss with olive oil, salt, pepper and 1/2 a teaspoon of dried thyme. Add to the cookie sheet with the corn 10 or 15 minutes before you plan to remove your meat, making sure the pieces aren't too crowded or touching each other.

For the potatoes:
Boil the potatoes (use however many your need) in salted boiling water until they're tender (about 20 minutes). Drain and using an electric mixer, squeeze in your garlic, a goodly amount of butter and milk or cream and salt and pepper to season. Mix until smooth. Cover and set aside.

For the mushroom sauté:
Slice about 15 mushrooms. Finely dice 2 shallots. Finely chop 4 cloves of garlic and 1 jalapeno pepper. Melt some olive oil and butter in a fry pan. Add ingredients and season with salt, pepper, cumin and coriander. Saute until golden and add a squeeze of lime juice just before serving.

To assemble:
Smear the mashed potatoes on a platter. Top with sliced beef, Circle with the corn and roasted golden beets. Add the mushrooms to the top of all.

Easy and delicious my friends! And it really tells a story of how much you care before you go on your football sojourn for the next five months. And really, if you can't beat them, you really ought to join them! Cheers friends!

Braised beef short ribs

Here's a good one to perfect as we approach fall. It's a nice hearty meal to keep you warm all winter! Braised beef short ribs are just delightful and it took me two tries but I finally did it right. 

I actually wanted to do it with oxtail, but wouldn't you know, after seeing it for weeks at Farm Boy, the ONE day I go to get some, they're out! And no short ribs. I had to call a couple different butchers but I found some. Looking at the ribs, get more than you think you need because they shrink up quite a bit when they cook. For two of us, I got four ribs and that was only just barely enough (also they are so good that you'll want extra for leftovers!).

Get two bottles of red wine (or three, obvs, since you're going to drink while you cook at eat). In a large stock pot, reduce two of the bottles by boiling until they're at half the original volume. Meanwhile, lightly flour your ribs and sear them in a hot pan (dutch oven is perfect here). When they're seared on all sides, set them aside. 

Then do a rough chop of some shallots, garlic, carrots, leeks, onion, and celery. Put them into the skillet that the ribs were in and sautee until softened.  Throw in a few sprigs of rosemary and thyme. Add the ribs back in on top of the veggies and pour the reduced wine over top. It'll probably come about halfway up the ribs. Add beef stock until the ribs are just covered completely and stuff the dutch oven into the oven at 350 degrees for a good three and a half hours, at least. 

Next thing: remove the dutch oven, take out the ribs (careful you don't pull all the meat off the bone!) and set aside to keep warm. Strain the braising liquid into a stock pot and boil to reduce. All the braised veggies might be lovely to keep as a side dish, but you can also throw them out if they're mush. I threw mine out and made creamy mashed potatoes and blanched heirloom carrots with maple syrup instead. 

When the braising liquid is reduced to about 1 and 3/4 cups, stir in a tablespoon of butter and it will be syrupy and shiny. Serve the ribs on top of a mound of potatoes and a few carrots and pour over the sauce.

That's all! Soooo good. And if you have a man in your life, they will be putty in your hands! Muahahaha. 

Happy fall, y'all! 

Savoy Cabbage Soup

I'm sure I've mentioned that I'm participating in the Farm Share basket program this summer. But honestly, I had no idea just how much bounty Mother Nature had to share. I am literally up to my ass in harvest! I get a delivery every Thursday of fresh and organic fruit and vegetables for just $17.00 a week and that includes delivery. I've been blanching, and jarring and sharing and freezing and souping and - well you name it! So much veg. Almost to the point of too much responsibility and commitment. I'm sure by the time the program ends in October, I'll be truly ready to divorce this program since commitment has never really been my thing. But that's not the story.

The basket comes full of stuff and is really quite rough around the edges from coming straight from the farm, so the first thing you have to do is sort through it all and wash it and trim off the slough and organize it. And thank God, it reduces itself by half. Then you get to work with your imagination so as not to waste any of it. They send an email with what you're getting on Monday, so you can plan. Since I had all of that work today, I decided to just throw a soup together with what I had on hand and find a way to start using some of the Savoy Cabbage. Now you don't have to use cabbage in this recipe. You can use Swiss Chard or kale or whatever green you like. But I was jammed with cabbage, so that's what's real today.

You'll need
1 small onion finely chopped
3 tablespoons of olive oil
2 potatoes peeled and chopped into bite sized chunks
3 large leaves of green cabbage thinly sliced. I roll them up like a cigar and just slice through
4 cloves of finely chopped garlic
2 tablespoons of tomato paste
2 bay leaves
salt and pepper
1/4 tsp of dried chile flakes (or a bit more if you like a bit of spice)
1 chorizo sausage thinly sliced
1 can of chick peas drained (or garbanzo or kidney beans. Whatever you like)
1 quart of chicken stock. If you use the box, don't add salt till you're ready to serve

Heat the olive oil on medium heat and add the onion and potato and the bay leaves. Let that soften up, stirring often. Add the chorizo and stir it all around for a few minutes. Add the garlic and the sliced cabbage and a tiny bit of water (about 1/3 cup) and put the lid on and let it steam for a few minutes. Add the chili pepper flakes and some pepper and push everything to the side and add the tomato paste to the bottom of the pot and give it a minute to toast on it's own there. When it bubbles, stir everything up all together. Add the chicken broth and the chick peas. Bring it up to a boil and reduce the heat to low and let it simmer for at least an hour, but 2 is fine. The cabbage needs to be soft. But if you use kale or chard, much less time is needed. 20 - 30 minutes is all you need. Stir it about every 15 minutes and if you start running low on broth, add water or more chicken broth to keep it to a soup like consistency. Cabbage will require this, but kale and chard will not.

Taste it before you serve and now you can add your salt if needed, and pepper to taste. A nice loaf of crusty bread would be the dandy too for a side. Pretty easy and it cooks itself while you chop and blanch away and marvel at that crazy bitch Mother Nature. Hahah but winter is just around the corner now my friends and she'll give us nothing but heartache. Cheers!

Lasagna Roll Ups

So I'm pretty much starving to death. I had a toothache two weeks ago that required an emergency trip to the dentist. They put me on antibiotics for a week and told me to come back for a root canal. Now that might seem like a pretty routine thing to most of you, but for me, it's never routine. And anything that could go wrong did go wrong. But I'm used to that. And that's not the story. A recipe came up on my Facebook page for skinny lasagna roll ups. I had forgotten about lasagna roll ups and I sure as hell don't want to make a skinny version of them. There is nothing about eating carbohydrates that will ever make you skinny. That is an oxymoron. If you're trying to lose weight, don't eat pasta. Ever. Eat fish. Or chicken. But I haven't been able to eat for two weeks now, and I no longer need to lose weight, so I went Googling as I often do when I'm starving to death and decided to go with the Giada De Laurentis version of the roll up. Why is she so tiny and beautiful and lovely and she can also cook like God? A question for another day I guess because we're going to make her roll ups. And this isn't her exact recipe. It's mine because I think unsalted butter is shit and so on. Where she calls for milk, I use half and half. Oh, that explains why she's quite a bit tinier than me.

You'll need:
for the Béchamel sauce:
2 tablespoons of butter
2 tablespoons of flour (can you see a roux coming on?)
1 1/2 cups or so of half and half. Start with 1 cup and thin down if necessary. You're looking for thicker than pancake batter here, but not wallpaper glue
salt & pepper to season
A pinch of nutmeg. Go easy. You don't want your dinner to taste like pumpkin pie

And for the lasagna:
12 lasagna noodles
a splash of olive oil to add into the boiling water
salt for the boiling water

And the filling:
1 pack of frozen chopped spinach, thawed and squeezed of the excess moisture
1 container of ricotta cheese
1 cup grated Parmesan plus extra to put on before you put this in the oven
About 7 or 8 slices of chopped prosciutto
1 large egg beaten
salt and pepper.

1 1/2 cups of Marinara sauce (just use jarred here unless you're really into this)
1 cup of grated mozzarella (sure, use your own homemade if you made your marinara sauce)

Boil the lasagna noodles according to package directions. About 10 - 12 minutes. Drain and lay out flat so they don't stick. Make the Béchamel sauce thusly - Melt the butter and whisk in the flour. Add the salt, pepper, nutmeg and cream and bring just to the boil. Remove from heat. In a separate pot or in the microwave, melt 1/4 cup of butter.

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Put the melted butter into a casserole dish. Then add the Béchamel sauce.

Make the filling. Just stir it all together and spread it onto each lasagna noodle about 1/4 inch thick. Roll up the noodle and place it seam side down into the Béchamel sauce. Spoon the marinara sauce onto the top of everything and add the grated mozzarella and parmesan and some freshly ground pepper. Cover tightly and bake for 20 minutes. Then uncover and bake for 15 minutes more until the cheese browns. Let it sit for 10 minutes before you serve it.

This recipe is so hearty and delicious. Thank you lovely Giada! Share your beauty tips!