Homemade Gnocchi in a Tomato Blue Cheese Sauce Recipe

We wanted to do something a little different this week. We very rarely do pasta of any kind because hubby tries to avoid carbs as much as possible, but we wanted to try this out and see how it worked, and it worked very well! Also a great way to get rid of some leftovers. Gnocchi are honestly pretty easy to make, it's just a matter of getting the right amount of flour to the amount of potato you're using, and it can vary greatly depending on how dry your flour is, how fresh the potatoes are, or even how humid it is in your kitchen! So, really it's a bit of a "go by feel" thing for the gnocchi.

For the sauce we cooked down the tomato soup recipe we did a while back on our channel, and it made a fantastic sauce. A little dried basil, some sauteed shallot, a dash of Marsala wine, and some blue cheese really added a lot of complexity and richness to an already excellent tomato base. Other things that you could substitute in include fresh basil, vermouth, Tabasco, parmesan, chili flakes, or oregano.

Chewy Oatmeal Rum Raisin Cookies Recipe

Whoops! Forgot to link this yesterday when the video went up. Just a simple little oatmeal raisin cookie recipe this week! Couple of really nice things about this recipe: It takes almost no time to mix up, because you want to make sure you don't overmix anything, and it also freezes very well, so you can bake off a few cookies whenever you want them. Also, one of the biggest problems with oatmeal raisin cookies is that people really don't treat the raisins right. If you reconstitute the raisins for a little while before you bake with them, it will prevent them from becoming tough and leathery. How you rehydrate is up to you, and if you don't want to use booze like we did, you can rehydrate them in white grape juice or apple juice as well.

I suspect that one of the big reason people don't like raisins in cookies is that they just aren't treated right, and they get far too dried out and tough in your cookie.

Welsh Rabbit/Welsh Rarebit Recipe

This is one of those recipes that has about a million variations. It can range from just slices of cheese melted on toast up to something a little more complicated like what we've done here. Essentially we've made a sauce mornay using cheddar, Dubliner, mustard, and a lovely dark beer (a porter in this case). Important considerations for this recipe are things like the quality of your bread, the type of cheeses you want to use, and the type of beer you want to use, as these will all affect the final product.

You want to make sure that the cheese you're using isn't too dry and has a decent fat content, or you run the risk of the sauce breaking. Also, the type of beer you use will change the flavour profile significantly. A very dark beer like a stout is traditional, but a porter or bock will work excellently. You might even get away with a strong Belgian ale (a trippel or quadruppel would give a sweet, malty accent). We do recommend serving this with a sour slaw or something similar, because it is extremely rich and unctuous and something bright to cut the very round flavour really helps out. Some fresh herbs sprinkled on top will also brighten up the very rich aroma, too (we used thyme).

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Tex-Mex Restaurant-style Enchilada Recipe

A while back we did the homestyle kind of enchiladas, a sort of layered casserole of tortillas and filling covered with cheese. But we also wanted to do a video about the restaurant style enchiladas! It has the benefit of using up a lot of leftovers, as well. It is also extra delicious when you use homemade corn tortillas (another recent video we did!).

The filling can be any sort of delicious thing. We used leftover beef chili, but you can use chicken tinge (or even the poulet grand-mere we did a few weeks ago). The flavour profile is really up to you.

Chicken Pot Pie Recipe

This week we're using up the last of the leftovers from our braised chicken recipe from a couple weeks ago. We're turning it into chicken pot pie! And you don't need some chicken stew or anything to make this, you can do it with chicken soup, or even just leftover roasted chicken and some chicken stock to turn into the gravy with the roux.

How you want the final product comes out will determine how you prepare and chop up the veggies and chicken. If you want it a little more rustic, leave everything in big pieces. If you want a more refined final product, then chop everything a little smaller. The egg wash really makes the pie come out beautifully and adds that golden crust to the top.

Homemade Apple Roses Recipe

We were actually surprised by how easy this was to make a delicious and beautiful apple rose pastry at home. You can use homemade puff (like the blitz puff we did recently) or you can use store bought puff pastry, this recipe is pretty versatile. For the apple, you want something that's sweet, but has a decent amount of tartness, and if it's not quite tart enough, just sprinkle on a little bit of lemon juice. We like using an apple with more red in the peel, because it gives it that red rose sort of impression after baking. Don't worry about lemon juice on the apple slices after cutting, it's going to get toasty and brown in the oven anyway.

The butter/sugar mixture is where most of the customization comes in. You can add all manner of different spices for different flavour profiles. You can also add a very small amount of liquor like rum or bourbon to the mix for a more nuanced flavour than just adding vanilla (or instead of the vanilla). For the apple, we recommend a good crisp sweet apple with nice tartness like a Fuji, Gala, or Honeycrisp.

Crostini Monsieur Recipe

What is a crostini monsieur, you ask? Well, it's something we devised to go with the delicious wine stewed chicken we made last week. This is a savoury sort of French toast concoction inspired by a croque monsieur sandwich. We made a savoury egg mixture to soak some day-old bread in, fried it up, and then broiled it with some excellent cheese on top. It made an amazing side dish to go with the stew, and was easy to bring back from leftover with a little time in the toaster oven.

You can adjust the flavour profile to match whatever you're cooking. We used thyme because the stew had a lot of thyme in it. If you're going to use garlic, shallot, or onion, it does help to grate it so that the flavour can really penetrate the whole egg mixture. Of course you can top it with whatever kind of cheese works best for you, but we recommend a good dry hard cheese like parmesan, Beemster XO, Mountain Oak, taleggio, or a nice aged gruyere like Compte.

White wine braised chicken: Poulet Grand-mere Recipe

After a couple of shorter videos, this week we did a bit more involved one. We wanted to do coq au vin, but we couldn't get our hands on a capon, so I just grabbed some nice bone-in skin-on thighs, and we made Poulet Grand-mère. Traditionally, this recipe would be used on an old old hen which is why the longer slower cooking time is particularly useful.

We did this over two days for a couple of different reasons. Firstly, it's much easier to skim off the chicken fat if it's cold or frozen. We just put it out on the balcony and used the giant Canadian freezer (we call it "winter&quot , and chilled the chicken and potatoes separately in the fridge. Second, once the potatoes are just cooked, letting them sit overnight will allow the starches to relax a little and it will make them easier to fry crispy and give them a fluffier texture when they're fried. Third, it just tastes better the second day after all of the flavours have had a chance to mix and meld.

Homemade Corn Tortillas Recipe

Super quick and easy one today. We've been making restaurant-style enchiladas lately, and we decided we were going to try making our own corn tortillas. Turns out it's dead easy, and you don't even need a tortilla press! We cook ours in our cast-iron skillet, and we get it nice and screaming hot, it just takes a minute per side, and you've got great tortillas. They're so good when they're fresh!