With a super huge promise that I’d continue posting, Tracy has set me up with a domain. Head over to http://intothefridge.com for your reading pleasure!

Despite having had some fun times, my absolute lack of updating and a million half-written posts has spelled doom for this poor little blog. However, I am moving on and up with my cheap-eating food blog idea, and would like to invite both of my readers to visit Wok of Ages, where I’ll be assuming the role of teacher and sharing recipes and ideas on how to eat well while broke.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Due to frenetically working on an essay, I completely spaced on posting yesterday. Oh well, I’ll continue to try to keep up my regular posting schedule about food-related goodies.

Well, today I’m not cooking a thing because I’m stuck at school all day working on ANOTHER essay (which I should be tackling right now), and so instead I’m going to talk a little bit about buying food, and eating cheaply. It’s the direction I’m interested in taking this blog as my complete lack of financial management abilities ensure I live paycheque to paycheque. Also, I’m certainly not a high quality cook, I’m an alright one – my skills lie in eating well on practically nothing, not haute cuisine.

I can’t spend too long on the post, so I’ll state my first rule of eating cheaply, and subsequent posts are going to give you a few more rules.

STAY AWAY FROM PACKAGED FOOD.

If you have no money, don’t fucking buy kraft dinner. That’s the worst thing you can do. Even the cheap stuff isn’t -that- much food for money, and the pasta is going to be atrocious. No nutrition, and filling on pasta with pretty much no protein is never very satisfying. The same goes with frozen, premade dinners, sauces in packets, all that kind of stuff. The only exception I make is ramen noodles, which Tracy loves quite dearly, and I can do a few different things with, cooking wise. The basic rule is that if somebody has done any of the cooking for you when you buy something, you are wasting money.

(pictures have been taken, but not uploaded, you’ll see them tomorrow!)

Dragging out a chop from the freezer for today, which is always a guaranteed success. Tracy likes pork chops, and I think I’ve become pretty good at cooking them. The intent here it to do it up on a cast iron pan, and then use the drippings from the pan to make yorkshire pudding. Yummy! On the side, I’m doing a quick slaw of grated carrots with some red wine vinegar.

Here are the recipes I’m using:

Carrot Slaw:

– Some carrots
– Some red wine vinegar
– Dash of olive oil

As the concept of quick is vital here, I just ran the carrots through the grater on my food processor, threw in a couple of tablespoons of red wine vinegar and the last of my precious olive oil. Tossed with my fingers, and serve. This is a favorite of mine, it’s tasty, refreshing, and healthy.

Pork Chops:

– Pork chops (strangely enough)
– Couple teaspoons each of cumin, coriander, and black pepper

For the spice rub, I toasted the whole seeds in the pan for the chops, and then threw them in my coffee grinder. Once done, they got rubbed over the chop.

Now for the chop itself, I like thick pork chops, cooked to medium, and juicy as you can get. Just to restate myself – medium. Pork does NOT need to be cooked until well done. In the good old days, pigs ate a great deal of garbage, and from this they got a parasite, trichinosis which could survive until it was killed by heat and be transferred to a human. Not food poisoning. Modern farming conditions have effectively eliminated this parasite as a threat, and so pork can now be cooked to a mild pink, instead of white. This means the leaner meat we get nowadays can remain juicy and tender, instead of with the texture of shoe leather.

Anyways, my method of cooking chops is simple. Cast iron pan on maximum heat until it’s white-hot, and then sear the chops for two minutes on each side. Remove from heat, cover with foil, and leave for ten minutes. Dead simple, and you get incredibly juicy, easy pork chops this way. Also, some smoke in the kitchen.

Porkshire Pudding:

– 2 cups flour
– 2 cups milk
– 1/4 cup drippings
– 4 large eggs
– 1 1/2 teaspoons salt

Holy shit did THIS fail. Haha. Wow. So I figured out the basic idea being yorkshire puddings, and recently made dutch babies (a sweet variety without pan drippings) that turned out wonderfully. So I decided to give yorkshire pudding a shot. The idea here is you just blend the above ingredients, and then pour onto pan drippings (usually from a beef roast, I used my chop drippings) and then throw it in the oven at 400 for a half an hour.

Well, I think I screwed up this recipe. The recipe above was cut in half, and it ended up having too much flour. What I hoped for was this puffy spectacle of a yorkshire pudding, Instead, I got this:

Whatever. My porkshire flatbread was actually pretty tasty – not a complete loss, but certainly did not end up the way I expected it to.

The Verdict:

This is really “just another night with Dave and Tracy” food. It took very little time to whip up, the chops were delicious, the porkshire flatbread was filling if anything, and the carrot slaw vanished from my plate in seconds. It doesn’t seem to have been as popular with Tracy, but oh well, more for me!

An offshoot from national novel writing month, national blog writing month is an informal competition to write a blog post every day of the month of November. As I never update this blog, I’ve decided to try this out. So every day this month, you’ll see a short post from me on whatever it is I’m cooking/eating.

Today:

Poverty Soup!

As we’re living paycheque to paycheque until employment stuff settles for the both of us (having been horribly sick doesn’t help things), we’re going on the last scraps in the kitchen until I get paid. Tracy, who’s still not well, requested some soup, so here we go!

Ingredients:

1 litre beef stock (this is just some oxo bullion and water, which I keep on hand in case I run out of decent stock)
1 really large carrot
1 onion
3 cloves garlic
1/2 cup alphabet pasta (fun!)
Two teaspoons rosemary
1 tablespoon something to fry the veggies in
1 bay leaf
Salt & pepper

This is about as basic as it gets, but I think my greatest skill as a cook is the ability to consistently make good food when there’s really nothing in the house. Procedure is simple – dice the onions and garlic, cube the carrots, fry them up in whatever I have left. As I’m even out of oil, I dipped into some baking lard.

Toss the lard into a pot and heat it on medium low heat. Once the lard has melted, toss in your onions, garlic, and carrots. Fry, stirring occasionally so that you don’t brown anything. Browning probably wouldn’t be bad, bit of caramel flavour, but that’s not the plan today. Once carrots are soft, pour in the beef stock (water/bouillion), add the bay leaf and the rosemary, and simmer for at least five minutes so the pasta softens. Season to taste. I left it for around twenty minutes so that the dried herbs properly flavoured the soup without turning the pasta

For those of you who don’t cook (I think only family really reads this and I know all of you cook, but bear with me), the basic idea here is that canned soup is unnecessary, and this is -cheap-. I doubt two dollars went into all the ingredients here, and five minutes of effort. Any number of flavours can be used here, Tracy is sick and so I decided not to get too adventurous. Everyone loves rosemary!

Pour in a bowl, and serve! A decent pot of soup to warm us up on a very chilly November day. No picture as our camera is dead, but you’ll see crap like this every day, so get used to it!

Not everything turns out perfectly, but we do try.

Dave does this thing with his hamburgers, where he heats the cast iron pan to near molten temperatures, puts the burger in, and flips it constantly. According to Heston Blumenthal of In Search of Perfection, this seals in the juices. Dave makes delicious burgers, but it does tend to smoke the place up a bit.

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

Frying burgers!

The picture below is Jello in a pot. We discovered, upon checking the jello in the fridge, that it hadn’t started to set, despite being in the fridge for a few hours. Something didn’t look quite right about the liquid, so I had to ask. Was there one cup of hot water and a cup of cold? The cold water had gone missing from the equation. Not wanting to waste 37 cents worth of jello, we popped it back in a pot, put the pot on the stove, and heated it up again. Once it appeared to be hot enough – some arbitrary temperature we didn’t bother to check – we added the cold water in and put everything back in the fridge. We’ll come back to this later for an update on whether or not it worked. But in the meantime, it makes for a good story!

Dave discovers Jello also needs cold water!

Every time I mention to someone that cooking is a hobby of mine, I’m immediately asked what my ‘best’ recipe is. Most what I do involves just randomly grabbing recipes from the internet and trying them out; I don’t have many staples, and I have even less I’d say that I can really show off. There was the occasional dish I thought I could do really well. I think I know how to PROPERLY barbecue an excellent steak, my penne with veggies dish is a long term favorite of Tracy, and some trickier common recipes like lasagna go over well.

But since I started cooking, I’ve had an obsession with making a good ragu bolognese. Normally served over spaghetti (traditionally tagliatelle) it’s the Italian sauce that everybody knows and loves. I’ve never made pasta from scratch, though I intend to learn, but I have learned how to make the next best thing.

Gnocchi.

Gnocchi (pronounced nyo-kee, I got this wrong for years) are wonderful little potato dumplings which are as versatile as pasta, much easier to make, and something which most cooks don’t really bother with. I’ve made them several times now, and have generally been quite satisfied with the results. This, with the ragu, are two things I know I can make well, and know I can impress people with.

So today I present the dish which I feel is the signature Dave dish – Gnocchi Di Patate Con Ragu Di Agnello. Or boiled potatoes dumplings in a lamb meat sauce. It should be noted that I usually make my ragus with ground pork, but thought I’d give lamb a whirl.

Ragu With Lamb:

1 pound ground lamb
1/3 cup of diced red wine salami (this can be substituted with proscuitto, parma ham, pancetta, good bacon, etc…)
2 small onions
2 stalks of celery
2 medium sized carrots
Good extra virgin olive oil
1 tin of tomato paste
1/2 cup of whole milk
1/2 cup of chicken broth (you should really use white wine for this, which I didn’t have at the time of writing)
A good handful of fresh basil or oreagno. Rosemary also might work since we’ve got lamb here.

Most of what I’ve learned here comes from reading the fantastic website http://fxcuisine.com, a food blog by a French speaking Swiss home cook who has done several ragu recipes, as well as variety of different research from cookbooks and other web sites. This is a blend of various recipes and techniques I’ve read, and certainly not that traditional. Oh well!

As I was quite intent on making this properly, I started with meticulously dicing my vegetables. Small tiny cubes, all the same size… which I fail at achieving, but this is about as close as I can hope to without serious, regular practice.

After that I put my mitts on this beautiful salami we picked up from the Mediterranean market in town, and diced a good chunk of it up. A little easier to work with than the vegetables since it’s one consistent shape.

Meanwhile I had thrown a big pot on the stove with several turns of olive oil in the bottom to heat up at medium-low heat. Once ready, all those little veggies cubes go in to build a soffrito; the base for the sauce. After I’ve given the onions plenty to sweat about, the salami goes in as well to add its fatty goodness. This all merrily sizzled away for a while until it was time for the second phase of my insane plan.

Now came  a trick. I grabbed my ground lamb, and switch burners on the stove – moving my large pot to a small burner. Shoving all the vegetables to one side, I turned the burner to medium high, and on the empty pot, slowly added the lamb, which I roughed up with a metal flipper as it browned. As each batch got browned, that got stirred in with veggies and shoved to the side.

Describing this as tedious doesn’t do it justice – the lamb seemed much harder to break up than other ground meats, and I ended up with a few meatballs in the pot. They broken down during the cooking process, so no harm done! Step two was sauce reduction! This obviously required a higher heat, so back on the main burner, it got cranked up to medium high, and I quickly added my chicken broth. This reduced in no time to a very thick consistency. After that, the milk.

Since whole milk is best for this, I tossed in a bit of cream as well. This all merrily reduced down around everything. Without the tomato, this would still be just delicious. But we’re adding tomato anyways. Now I’m always faced of the choice between canned whole plum tomatoes or tomato paste. Whole plum tomatoes give a consistency of millions of vegetables chunks in an extremely thin sauce. Tomato paste makes everything extremely thick and has a wonderful, velvety texture. Going with paste for the gnocchi.

Now, for the more patient, you can repeat the same step I did with browning the meat – scraping away a spot on high heat for you to caramelize the tomato paste in small batches. I didn’t do that this time, and just stirred the can in willy nilly, but it’s definitely worth the time.

Now everything looks a good deal like a proper ragu, and it’s time to let the flavours marry. This got thrown down to a low heat, lidded, with a pitcher of filtered water nearby in case it gets dry. I’d recommend letting a sauce like this cook for at least two hours, but I went hardcore and it cooked for at least four by the end of it. We tried a few pictures here, but there was too much steam to really get a good shot, so you can imagine the previous photos but uh, red.

Either way, this gave me time to play some Civilization and destroy the Carthaginians!

Gnocchi:

Four medium sized potatoes
At least a cup and a half of flour
One egg
Salt and pepper
Lots and lots of boiling waterfall
Couple tablespoons of butterfly
A generous helping of high quality parmesan (I used grana padano, but parmiagno reggiano is what you want)
A potato ricer or mill

Whereas the ragu really just involves chopping things up, fiddling with meat in a pan, and waiting for half a day, the gnocchi is a little easier to get wrong. The idea is to make a dough with mashed potatoes, roll it out, chop it into little dumplings, shape the dumplings, and boil them for a few minutes. I added the extra step of briefly frying them in butter, because I’m not going to pretend this is health food and butter is delicious.

Water is an absolute no-no in gnocchi dough, and so skinning and chopping up the potatoes to boil them conventionally isn’t an option. Usually, I bake them, but I don’t want to wait an hour – and so they just went into the water with skins on! Much more wholesome than having the little layabouts go skinny dipping.

Forty-five minutes in, the potatoes were done – during this time I also diced up some basil and oregano and threw it in the ragu. Reason I waited is that after a certain point I find fresh herbs go bitter. At this time, I had to fish out the spuds and peel the bastards.

This little step was about as much fun as getting locked in a closet with fourteen rabid cats and Hitler  – simply because the potatoes were REALLY hot. I couldn’t really wait though – if the potatoes cool, it screws up the texture of the gnocchi as they get all starchy. So I mangle a couple with a spoon before I give up and burn my fingers removing the skins. Now, it’s time to mash.

A potato masher, in this case, will not do. Gnocchi can’t have ANY lumps, and you want an airy texture. An invention my mother got me hooked on, the potato ricer, is perfect. If you like mashed potatoes – buy a potato ricer. Nothing gives them a nicer texture. Here’s a shot of the potato ricer in action.

Oh yeah.

Now it’s the fun part! The riced potato got ten minutes to cool down as forming dough whilst screaming in agony isn’t really worth it. The technique here is (I think) the same one used to make paste dough. Form a little well in your potatoes, and then drop in an egg.

Once that’s done, I beat the egg within the potatoes, seasoned with some salt and pepper, and started caving in the sides of the well.

As I did this, flour got liberally sprinkled over everything. This continued until the well had completely caved in, and enough flour was added to lose the stickiness. At this point, it got treated like a normal dough and was quickly kneaded into a ball. Gnocchi dough should be airy – a minimum of work to make it just right. Also, for any of you who bake, nothing quite feels as nice as potato dough. So smooth and silky. Almost… sensual.

*cough*

Now comes the tedious part. Ripping off a handful of dough from the dough ball, I quickly rolled it out into a long dowel-shaped… stick a little wider than my thumb.

Using a fork, I chopped off 1/2 inch bits, and dusted those with flour. Now, these can be boiled like gnocchi and will be fine. But they’re not fun to look at, and won’t hold sauce. Time for shaping!

This was the hardest thing for me to learn, and frankly, I think this recipe is the first time I got most of them just right. The trick is to take a fork, hold it at a 45 degree angle, press down the dumpling, and roll it off. The undersides will curl up, and the top will be creased. Like so:

I vainly tried to get Tracy to help/join in the fun, but she knew tedious work when she saw it, and was also battling Gandhi for control of the known world. C’est la vie. It should also be noted that consistency when doing this is EXTREMELY hard. To get every gnocchi to be of a perfect size and shape take either hours of work or years of practice. I don’t have either to spare. Still, they turned out alright.

So now it’s setup time. While forming the gnocchi I’d tossed out the potato skin water (ewww) and set on a fresh pot with plenty of salt. A plate was set up for the gnocchi, and finally a pan with some butter in it to quickly sauté the little buggers.

Cooking them, luckily, is the easiest part. Going with around nine at a time (I had a big pot) I tossed the gnocchi in, and simply waited for them to float. Once they floated, they were done – into the pan and another batch into the water. I used a small sieve to lift them out of the water. They can’t be poured out or they’ll break up and all the hard work will have been for naught.

Either way, once they were out of the pan and hit the plate – they were done! Onto the gnocchi went a hearty ladle of ragu, and finally a generous helping of grana padano!

The Verdict:

Well thank GOD these turned out. If this was going to be my “I’ll try to cook something I know I’m good at” blog post I’d look a right ass if they didn’t. Either way, the gnocchi were light and delicious, and words cannot describe how good the ragu was. Lamb was a great choice for the ragu and added an incredible depth of flavour to the rich, velvety sauce. Perfection is a poor word, so I’ll say that everything here was as good as I could have ever hoped and may be one of my best meals ever. Yay me!

As a note, I actually intend on submitting restaurant reviews to the local paper. This is my first attempt at such a review, obviously it needs proper editing and to have the length cut in half, but I’d appreciate comments from anybody who reads this as this is a first step towards an intended career path.

The O’Keefe ranch is a famous tourist destination in the north Okanagan, being a resident and not a vistor, I’d never checked out the place. Sort of like when our friend Tim forbid us from seeing the CN Tower whilst we lived in Toronto. Real locals never visit the tourist traps. However, the restaurant is apparently good, Tracy’s parents adore it, and we’re looking for a place to hold our wedding dinner.

For the unaware, O’Keefe is a historical site, replete with actors in costume going through the daily lives of ranchers from a hundred years ago. Apparently quite similar to the Fort Edmonton Park attraction in my home town of Edmonton.

As per typical mid-August weather, it was blisteringly hot when we pulled in. It seemed a cheery place, nestled amongst the ubiquitous brown hills of the region. The outside of the building was nice enough, dark stained wood with large, inviting windows.

Inside of the restaurant it was a huge, wide open room with plenty of sunlight coming through the huge windows, some of which were nice stained glass. Almost everything was wooden, and decorated with black and white photographs of old ranch scenes. Dark stained supports hung overhead, a good deal below the roof. All in all the decor was about right for the theme of the place – it let you know where you were without overwhelming you in minutiae.

We were greeted by a friendly, efficient young waitress who whisked us to a window side table. Our table was dark wood with matching chairs that were surprisingly comfortable. The view outside, sadly, didn’t amount to much more than the side of a hill. As a treat, a sewage truck pulled into view for the second half of our meal.

We settled in with our lunch menus and gave them a good once over. The menus themselves were a little tattered, but were attractively laid out, and much more importantly, not too large. They were about the right size and gave a good summary of standard western fare, with an invitingly large sandwich section.

I noticed a special of sausage and kraut on a bun which wasn’t mentioned, but as we’re considering getting married here I decided to delve a little deeper. Tracy squealed with delight at a french fries offering with ‘real gravy’, but also wanted soup and something else. We ended up splitting an appetizer of fries while I selected a panini with chicken and sausage, and she chose the beef dip.

As we waited for our meals I gave the place a good once over. Everything was kept extremely clean, although the one lone fly that had wandered in decided we were his best friends in the whole world. The cutlery was a little flimsy for my taste, but it’s a small thing to pick on as good, heavy cutlery edges you into the world of fine dining, which isn’t what the place was about. The room we were in looked to have around twenty or so tables with a few booths. Although the layout was basic, it functioned quite well, and had a cheery little bar with a selection of local wines and beer.

My coffee soon arrived, which was perfectly acceptable. Soon, the fries were happily plunked down in front of us, and I was immediately disappointed to find out that they were frozen fries, not made on site, and a little overcooked. Although not normally a sin in my eyes, the gravy was the real thing, and such quality gravy shouldn’t be wasted on frozen fries. We picked at the fries and oohed at the gravy for a bit, and before we’d finished, our entrees arrived.

It was at this point I realized that my claims to literacy and knowing anything about food were completely debunked. While I had read panini, a kind of Italian sandwich, the menu had actually read penne. Once I realised I’d accidentally ordered pasta, Tracy began howling with laughter. Oh well, I love penne, as mistakes go, I’ve made worse.

My pasta dish was an enormous helping, more appropriate for dinner than lunch, but was inviting to look at. Large slices of sausage sat atop a bed of penne, red pepper, chicken, and sundried tomatoes, and was covered with parmesan. Tracy’s beef dip looked like all beef dips, as you can’t do much to gussy a beef dip up. Her small cup of bacon and potato soup looked quite nice, though.

My pasta dish was one of the pricier options at the menu, and at sixteen dollars, was just what I think a sixteen dollar bowl of pasta should be. The ham sausage on top was delicious and probably from Mennonites. Creamy without being too heavy, the sauce had just enough garlic for me, and the sundried tomatoes added some needed tartness to cut the richness of the dish. However, the penne was a little overcooked, and the red peppers added nothing.

Large chunks of roasted red pepper would have done amazing things to the dish. What we had was the occasional thin strip that had likely been briefly pan fried. Roasted red peppers and perhaps a touch of acid in the sauce, maybe even just a lemon squeezed over top would have truly elevated this dish. As such, it was comforting, good, and worth its slightly higher price tag on the menu.

Tracy’s beef dip was… a beef dip. I was able to steal a taste and a dunk in the jus, and would have liked the bowl the jus was served in to be a little bigger. Well done beef is extremely dry and you need to just soak that stuff up. Nothing to complain about, and although she ate her soup before I could steal a taste, it was by all accounts very good.

At the end of the day, our bill with two drinks, an appetizer, and two entrees came to just under forty dollars before tip, and I have no serious complaints. The only let down were the fries, and if they were able to spare the man hours to make fresh fries on site, their fries and gravy would be the stuff of legend. I say the Cattlemens Restaurant at O’Keefe Ranch is definitely worth a visit, is good value for the money, and we’ll probably get married there.

I hate corn silk.

In the history of mankind, perhaps the universe, I don’t believe that there is any more substance that has evolved on our planet more irritating than corn silk. Don’t try to lead me astray with your lies, either. Removing it under running water, slicing around the bottom, just removing the stuff by hand, even using (gasp) a microwave. I’ve tried them all, and they are LIES. The stuff can never be completely removed.

With that out of the way, I present my triumphant return to food blogging! Both of my readers have missed my sporadic updates terribly, and I do enjoy writing about my attempts to cook. Today, I present a grilled chicken sandwich with aioli, along with a grilled corn salad!

Grilled chicken sandwich:

Some soft buns
Chicken breasts
Whatever marinade strikes your fancy (I was lazy and used some bottled salad dressing)
A delightful plethora of whatever vegetables you have on hand (tomatoes, button mushrooms, iceberg lettuce)
Garlic aioli (recipe below)
Sammich cheese (I used edam, but whatever pulls your goalie)
And some sort of sauce for the chicken I should have used, but didn’t

I am of a strong opinion that chicken breasts are the most overrated cut of meat on earth. They are usually cooked until bone dry, have very little flavour, and are twice as expensive as the rest of the bird. Give me thighs to work with any day. However, I accede that breasts are ideal for sandwiches, and I found five of them for nine bucks.

Sandwichy Aioli:

One Egg yolk
Three cloves of garlic
Small handful of parsley
Oil (I used corn oil since I didn’t want to exhaust Judy’s supply of olive oil, but I would have preferred to use the olive oil)
Around three tablespoons lemon juice

Aioli is something I’ve never actually had, so this is a new adventure for me. Chicken sandwiches love mayo, so an aioli seems a logical way to add some flavour to the dish. Parsley is not a typical ingredient in aioli, but I had a bunch of it on hand. Why not?

Corn salad:

Four cobs of corn
Chili powder
One yellow pepper
One red pepper
An avocado
A couple of limes
Olive oil
Couple teaspoons of honey
Handful of parsley

I roughly ripped off a recipe from Rob Rainford. It seems like a great summer salad, and a welcome departure from the usual three salads that feature at Tracy’s place. (Although Judy makes a kick ass potato salad, I will admit).

Here’s a shot of a bunch of the ingredients I’m using:

The theme for tonight’s dinner is NOT USING THE OVEN. Why? Because when I showed up it was around 38 degree Celsius. For my imaginary American readers, that’s around 100 Fahrenheit. Luckily, as the day went on it got a little cooler. So we arrive, armed with an ass-load of groceries (for loading into a very LARGE ass, bearing in mind) and after a while of chatting with everyone, I get fidgety and decide to work on the aioli.

For the uninitiated, aioli is effectively a garlic mayonnaise, although I tend to see it used more as a sauce than as a sandwich spread in what I’ve read. I’ve also never actually eaten the stuff, I just know it looks good, and have successfully created mayonnaise at least once before.

So the trick with mayonnaise, and thus aioli is to start with an egg yolk (whole eggs work as well), and while beating it like I do jokes into the ground, followed by adding oil drop by drop by drop until your arm hurts and you have finally gone mad. This is known as emulsifying – combining two ingredients which do not normally mix. A true cook; being one of talent, consistency, and a desire to execute every recipe with utmost perfection would be using a hand whisk in order to get the luxurious, almost fluffy texture from good mayonnaise.

I used a food processor, which will produce a tasty paste.

Here’s me looking attractive and, I think, trying to exorcize the food processor.

In go the egg yolk and the tasty bits, being the raw garlic and parsley. I get the processor going, plant my feet, and geeeently lean the bottle of oil towards the processor. At home I use a squeeze bottle for this so I can actually do drop by drop. Here, I manage a thin stream. This goes on for God knows how long, with the entire ordeal turning a pleasing shade of green. Lemon juice is introduced midway through, and finally I get a texture that’s a LITTLE runnier than typical mayo, but it’ll serve as a sandwich spread.

It should be noted that it should not be consumed by the spoonful. Being a dutiful cook, I took a big taste, and nearly killed everyone around me. LOTS of garlic.

Moving swiftly along, I then set to prepping the grill with some advice from Gary, sage grill master. Apparently grills left on high heat will explode! I didn’t need a high heat anyway, and as it was heating up, I set to the corn. First, I mixed up my dressing of olive oil and lime juice for the salad, pulled down the corn husks, spent EIGHTY BILLION YEARS getting rid of the silk, and then brushed the corn with the dressing before sprinkling it with chili powder and pulling back up the husks.

So dressed, the corn went off to the grill. Six minutes or so a side, and half that for the chicken. Pretty easy to time. The corn went on, and I proceeded to dice up my peppers, growing progressively lazy. First half of a yellow pepper was perfect little cubes, second half was a little worse. By the time I was on the avocado every slice was a beautiful, unique snowflake with a distinct personality. I then sloppily diced up the parsley, threw that in, bolted out to flip the corn, ran back in, and madly chopped up veggies for the sandwich.

Here’s the grilling corn:

Grabbing the chicken and wiping off what marinade I could, I ran out, took the corn off the grill, put the chicken on, and then back in to finish everything up!

There was still some damn corn silk, even after being on the grill, but apparently the shit is healthy for you. Cures syphilis or something. Corn gets diced, thrown in the salad along with the dressing, and salad is DONE!

Here’s a shot of me dicing corn:

And here’s a shot of the completed product.

My time spent at an Irish pub as a line cook had me cook a zillion chicken breasts, so I have a good idea of when they’re done, whisk them off of the grill to protect their tasty juices. Gary wanted his breast cooked a little more, so I did that while I toasted the buns. The chicken was done perfectly by the end of it, maximum juiciness and not a hint of pink. Go me!

Finally back in, I slice the chicken breasts halfway through to ‘butterfly them before building the sadnwiches. The sandwiches are assembled with some margarine and aioli, stacks of veggies, and a big helping of corn salad.

Finito! Please don’t judge the poorly cut cheese.

The Verdict:

Chicken Sammich:

The portions of vegetables, flavour of the aioli, and texture of the chicken breast were all perfect. Unfortunately, the marinade made little dent into the flavour of the chicken, and the vegetables were extremely bland. My fault for using the blandest forms of lettuce and mushroom, but even the tomatoes were flavourless! It could have used just a little more flavour – so next time I’m adding a sauce to the chicken on top of the aioli. This wasn’t bad so much as failed my expectations, but I’d make this again with a switch in the ingredients.

Corn Salad:

This was a massive hit with everyone who tried it, and I was extremely pleased. The corn could have been done longer, but it was still sweet, crunchy, and juicy – with the lime dressing adding an extra dimension of awesome. I may skip on the avocados, and provided I can ever get Tracy to like the stuff, add some cilantro or arugula. Unlikely on both fronts, but I can hope!

I bought a roast on the weekend with the purpose of making beef stew. I was looking for an excuse to use the slow cooker. We found this one at Coopers for seven dollars. There are a couple of great butchers in the area, but with gas prices being in the $1.40 range, it’s hard to justify travelling all over the city. This, apparently, is a sirloin tip oven roast. A name like that screams “chop me up for stew!”

With the cats hungrily waiting for anything to drop, I chop up the roast and pile it neatly on the cutting board. The cats, thwarted, walk away sadly and perch in the living room window. I toss some flour on a plate and mix in some kosher salt and some freshly ground pepper, then get to the messy job of rolling the meat in the flour mixture. It coats my fingers. I shake my fist at Dave, who suggested the flour in the first place.

As I’m frying the meat, I remember asking my mom what she did for stew, since I couldn’t remember her ever using beef broth. Mom’s trick was to fry the meat and add some water to what was left afterward, then use that for the base. I didn’t get any meat drippings, which I’m going to assume is the fault of the flour. No worries, we have plenty of beef broth in the fridge.

After the first round of beef is fried, I take a moment to sample some. Maybe Dave is on to something with this coat-meat-with-flour-then-fry stuff. After I finish frying all of the beef, I toss it in the slow cooker and add the beef broth.

I’m sure if anyone who knew what they were doing watched my crude, almost prehistoric, method to chopping vegetables, they’d probably have a coronary. I’m not as bad as I once was – Dave has been able to teach me a thing or two. Regardless, I believe my favourite part of this whole endeavour is chopping the onions and smashing the garlic. And once it’s all in the pan, it’s probably my favourite smell too.

I get the onions and garlic in the pot with the beef and tackle the next step: potatoes. Dave has a peeler he uses. It’s faster than using a knife, but I’m not as comfortable with it. I decide to use the peeler anyway. There must be some progress. The last time I used it, I flung no less than three-quarters of the potatoes into the sink trying to peel them. This time, only one of the five hit the sink.

If you study the chopped potatoes closely, you’ll see the sizes vary. I got halfway though and decided I was cutting them too small. I’m sure they’ll all taste fine when we sit down to eat.

After chopping up three stalks of celery, I realised I should have put them in with the garlic and onions. So back to the frying pan, heat ‘em up a bit so they’re not as crunchy, and into the pot. Next up, the carrots. Chop one, eat one. Cooking is fun!

I let everything sit in the beef broth for a while before adding some more water, on the off-chance it might give it some more flavour. About 45 minutes later, I add water. Planning on adding barley to the stew, I throw in a little extra. After the water, I toss in some fresh thyme from Dave’s window herbs.

I rifle through the fridge to see what else we can throw in. Zucchini! After that, there’s barley, and now the entire thing is stewing away, waiting for Dave to get home from work.