November 26, 2020

Old Fashioned Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe

More holiday baking! This recipe is based on the old Toll House recipe that used to be on the back of the package of chips. The recipe changed years ago to be easier to measure and scale, but the cookies weren't as nice! This one is adapted from the earlier recipe, and we've just added some toffee chips. If you can find the Skor branded toffee chips, I definitely recommend them, 'cause they're amazing buttery toffee. If you can't, you can just break up any kind of nice hard toffee.

November 19, 2020

Snickerdoodle Cookie Recipe

The time for holiday baking is coming, and we realized we hadn't done many cookie videos. We don't eat a lot of sweets or anything, because neither of us have much of a sweet tooth, but we do still like the occasional treat like homemade cookies. Snickerdoodles are sort of an old school recipe, but they are really delicious. They've got a slight sour tang to them from the use of tartaric acid (or cream of tartar) as part of the leavening. You can usually find this ingredient at any grocery store either in the herbs/spices rack or in the "baking needs" aisle.

A couple of important notes: Don't overmix the dough, as this will leave your cookies kind of tough. Don't let it sit too long once it has been mixed. You'll want to get it wrapped up and into the fridge pretty quickly because the baking powder will interact with the cream of tartar and reduce the amount of rise you get. Don't handle the dough too much when it's warm. You'll want to get it nice and chilled in the fridge before you start rolling it into balls and rolling them in the cinnamon sugar. Also, you can very easily add other spices into the sugar mixture, like clove/nutmeg/ginger, to make these into pumpkin spice Snickerdoodles.

November 12, 2020

Homemade Asian Inspired Tuna Tartare Recipe

We got our hands on some stunning sushi-quality medium fat tuna, so we decided to make a tuna tartare out of it. Tartare usually refers to something like beef, but tuna tartare is a staple at a lot of higher end restaurants as a delicious appetizer or amuse-bouche. Unlike other raw fish dishes like ceviche or poke, tartare does not cure or marinate the fish in an acidic liquid like lime juice. Please make sure that if you're making this dish that you are using sushi-grade fish, which has been flash frozen and specially handled to make it safer for raw consumption, and also please don't keep leftovers hanging around! It should be eaten within 24 hours of making it.

I know some people have a hard time with raw fish, but this dish is just so delicious. It is lightly seasoned but full of amazing accent flavours. One thing we used that you won't have on hand is the calamondin hot sauce that we're in the process of making. You can replace that with a little dollop of any kind of hot sauce that you'd like. A bit of Tabasco or a tiny amount of Frank's Red Hot would be a lovely spicy accent along with a little dash of lemon or lime juice for a citrus zing. And if you're not into making the chips (deep frying is a pain, I know!), then serve this with nice little crackers or even just potato chips. It would probably even go decently well with something like ketchup chips or maybe even salt and vinegar.

November 5, 2020

Quick and Easy Spicy Mixed Vegetable Pickles - Escabeche Recipe

It's getting to the end of fresh veggie season here in Toronto, so it's time to start preserving some of that freshness for the cold months! This is a Mexican style spicy mixed pickle, and something you'd sometimes see at a really nice Mexican restaurant. It's the sort of thing they'd bring to your table as a starter along with chips and salsa while you're deciding what to order. This is probably more common in the US, I've definitely had that sort of thing happen to us at places in Texas, but not here in Southern Ontario.

This is a pretty traditional mix of veggies for a pickle like this, but you can make some changes to the veggies as well. Some include onion (even red onion, but be prepared for everything to change colour), and there are a bunch of different things you could add for variety. If you want to control the spiciness, you can remove the seeds from the jalapenos. This is not a fermented pickle, it's more of a quick pickle or refrigerator pickle. The solution is both too acidic and too salty for there to be much in the way of fermentation, but that's just fine, the brine we use here is more like a marinade. Typically we would say this pickle is optimal for eating after a couple of weeks in the fridge. The veggies have absorbed a lot of the brine and may be a little floppy, but still crunchy. Some people prefer to eat this after just a couple of days, it's really whatever you prefer!

October 29, 2020

Simple Jalapeno Cream Sauce Recipe

Just a simple and delicious one this week. This is adapted from a restaurant that hubby ate at, and they had this really excellent simple creamy jalapeno dish (Nicaraguan pollo jalapeno). He made a couple of alterations and adapted it into this super easy recipe. You do have to keep an eye on it, you definitely don't want to scorch your cream, but so long as you keep stirring it regularly, it won't stick and burn. We added this sauce to our squash soup, as well as over some roasted chicken, and it worked very well. Would make a decent stand-in for chimichurri, as well.

Please note: adding things like cilantro and parsley to a dish like this does slightly lower their shelf life. Because these leafy greens have some chemical compounds like thymol, which will reduce the amount of flavour over time, you can only keep this in the fridge for about a week. It will still be safe to eat after that time, but you may notice that it loses much of its interesting flavour, and becomes "just hot."

October 22, 2020

Hearty Kabocha Squash Soup Recipe

We subscribe to a produce delivery service that is a network of -very- local farmers all in the same city as we live. It's awesome getting fresh seasonal veggies and fruit, and right now we're starting to get into the perfect season for squash and other gourds. A couple of weeks ago, they sent us this amazing kabocha squash, and we decided to turn it into soup. Cannot recommend enough, it was absolutely delicious. Dead simple, too. Just make sure you chop the squash into small enough pieces that it cooks in a reasonable amount of time!

You can change the flavour profile quite easily by changing up the herbs you use in this soup. You can spice it up with the addition of some dried chili flakes, as well. If you want to keep this vegan, you can omit the cream and change the stock to vegetable or mushroom stock, and those will work just fine. You could even use water. Also, make sure that you're salting enough. The squash is quite starchy, so it will soak up a lot of salt.

October 15, 2020

Sous-vide Fried Chicken Recipe

So, a few weeks ago we did a video on fried chicken. A classic, obviously. But after we got our immersion circulator, we discovered that there is a method for sous-vide fried chicken, and let me tell you: It is SO EASY. Basically, you're going to cook your chicken parts in the sous-vide until it's completely cooked all the way through (and since you have such good control of the temperature, they won't overcook) then you do your dredging, breading, and frying. You can fry it at a slightly higher temperature for a very short time because the insides are already cooked! The result comes out incredibly moist, good crispy outside, and seasoned just how you want.

A quick note about the salt: I know lots of people want to control their salt intake and reduce their sodium, but what we did here was basically giving the chicken a salt cure, which helps it stay more moist and juicy after cooking. It also seasons the meat before you get to the dredging. We added some fresh herbs in there and it gave everything this lovely aroma when it was fried.

October 11, 2020

Mitch McConnell says this out loud with his mouth for people to hear:

https://twitter.com/MollyJongFast/status/1315293590713663489?s=20

Hannity: I was shocked that uh... that former president Obama left so many vacancies and didn't try to fill those positions. Senator-

McConnell: I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. I was in charge of the uh... of what we did in the last two years of the Obama
administration.

Hannity: I give you... I... and I will give you full credit for that. And by the way, take a bow, alright. That was a good line.

October 8, 2020

Cornbread Custard Recipe

This recipe is adapted from when hubby used to work at a well-known creole fine dining place in Houston called Brennan's. They would make more cornbread than they needed, and the leftovers would get turned into this custard on subsequent nights. It's rich and delicious, and you can toss whatever kind of veggies you have in there. It's perfect for getting rid of leftovers, and that's exactly what we did here with some of the leftover fiesta corn from last week's recipe.

You can use whatever type of cheese you want. We didn't have a whole lot on hand, so we chopped up a little bit of single-serving snacking cheese. The smoked cheddar added a really lovely smokiness to the custard, and the whole thing came out delicious. This is a great side dish with Thanksgiving coming up. Make a little extra cornbread and let it get a -little- bit stale (you don't want it completely dried out, but it soaks up the egg mixture a bit better if it's a day or two old.

October 7, 2020

It's Actually Quite Funny That Trump Got Covid - SOME MORE NEWS