Recipe: Five Spice Tofu Lettuce Wraps

Presenting yesterday's lunch.

Also today's lunch.

Probably tomorrow's lunch, too, because it's really frickin' tasty.

My recent quest to eat lots of plants and be healthy and shit has led to me playing around with a variety of tofu recipes. I've done cutlets (with General Tao sauce wilted spinach--yum!) and stir fries (with vindaloo and pees--yum the second!), but my favourite so far is these lettuce wraps.

I love them so much that I want to share them with you. They're plant-filled, gluten-free, and vegan (as long as you buy or make a sauce without any gluten or animal products in it). Yay!

Regarding Mincemeat

A couple weeks back, I stumbled upon some half price jars of E.D. Smith’s mincemeat. I couldn’t make the stuff for that cheap, so I brought a jar home and proceeded to make a slew of delectable mince tarts using Nigella Lawson’s star-topped pastry recipe.

I used lozenges instead of stars. Whatevs.

They went over well even with the mincemeat-deniers in my family. I had to make two batches.

Which still left me with a goodly, though not exceptional, quantity of mincemeat. Desperate for a way to prevent this delicious mana from going to waste, I lit upon one of my best ideas ever: a warm mincemeat sundae.

Ice cream, mince warmed for 25 seconds, and whipped cream. HELLO.

This, too, was a big hit. Tell all your friends.

I told all mine--and discovered, to my utter surprise, that many Americans don’t know about mincemeat.

GASP.

Mincemeat (or mince, as we usually call it here in Canada¹) is chopped fruit preserved in brandy and/or fruit juices, with spices. Recipes vary, but most call for things like raisins, currents, apples, and citrus peel, candied or otherwise. Traditional mince also uses beef suet, though it’s easy to substitute another fat if you’re vegetarian. You can also exclude the brandy if necessary and switch the fruits around according to your preferences. It’s totally adaptable, this thing.

If you make your own mince (something I’ll do someday, I swear), you can eat it any time you please, but it’s traditionally a holiday thing in Canada and so is only readily available to purchase in November or December. I encourage you to throw off the yoke of holiday appropriateness, though, and enjoy some delicious mincemeat as soon as you possibly can.

It really is especially good on a sundae.

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1. This caused me no end of confusion when I first arrived in New Zealand and browsed the ample selection at a pie cafe. (Pie is huge in NZ. Huge.) They offered mince and cheese pies with ketchup--a shocking combination, until you see a picture of a cut open pie and realize mince is to kiwis what ground beef is to Canadians. Ground beef + cheese + ketchup = tasty goodness. Mincemeat + cheese + ketchup = travesty.

Recipe: Chocolate Trifle

Chocolate Trifle, with eggnog cake in the background.

It's past time I told y'all about my favourite dessert to bring to family gatherings.

Chocolate trifle is a fabulous dish for large groups because it stretches like nobody's business. I've fed 20+ people with this thing, and we're talking big eaters (albeit ones who'd just had a full supper).

It's also a great make-ahead dessert. The custard is the only thing you need to prepare within a day or two of assembly. Everything else freezes and defrosts beautifully.

My Year With Marvel: Tiny Deadpool's Taco Tour

Early this month, I headed on down to America for my birthday. The United States, unlike my part of Canada, is littered with Mexican restaurants. You can’t go very far without running into a quality purveyor of tacos, and I decided to take full advantage of this by going on as full-on a taco tour of Fargo, North Dakota as one can in two days.

I brought Tiny Deadpool, of course. Dude loves tacos. How could I even think of leaving him out?

Tiny Deadpool and I began our quest for tacos at an unlikely venue: Famous Dave’s, a barbeque joint that recently added “urban tacos” to their lunch menu. I’m a sucker for their catfish (which shows to best advantage on a po’boy, though catfish fingers are also delish), so of course I had to get the catfish tacos.

Each one contained a goodly amount of crispy baked catfish, plus greens, spicy remoulade, jalapenos, and lime. (The last time I had these, the chef put the lime wedges in the tacos, which was weird and uncalled for. Thankfully, this chef knew enough to stick ‘em on the side so I could just squeeze the juice on.) Tiny Deadpool and I both approved.

Recipe: Sour Cream Chocolate Icing

Nigella Lawson's HOW TO BE A DOMESTIC GODDESS is my favourite cookbook¹. I've been baking from it for years upon years, but I still stumbled across the occasional recipe I've overlooked. Generally, these secretive recipes are tucked away between illustrated pages, devoid of tempting photographs and equipped with only the barest of descriptions.

Such was the case with Nigella's sour cream chocolate cake, a gem I overlooked until last December. Armed with a three-pound tub of Daisy sour cream² and a desire to try something new, I whipped up a two-layer cake and stuck it in my freezer for my Christmas dessert buffet.

I ended up with so much other baking that the cake languished in the freezer³ until February, at which point I pulled it out on a whim, whipped up the complementary icing, and dug in.

Wow. The cake itself is good--moist and delicately crumbed--but the icing elevates it to another level. It reminds me very much of soft, delectable cream cheese icing, if cream cheese icing were bursting with chocolate and just a shade tarter than it actually is.

I could eat this stuff straight from the bowl without a shred of shame. It's that good.

Alas, I generally bow to convention and slather the stuff on cake. It's infinitely spreadable, and it holds a loose shape if you want to pipe it out for extra effect.

The recipe below is enough to generously ice twelve cupcakes or one two-layer cake (the recipe for which also follows). It's great with a few crumbled pecans pressed into it, if you're a nut person.

Recipe: Pineapple Iced Cake

My grandmother turned 88 on September 2nd. Accustomed as I am to giving my grandparents food presents, I asked her what kind of cake she'd like me to whip up for her.

"Something with icing," she said. Grandma is good at specifics. "Oh, and not too big."

"What about a few cupcakes?" I asked.

"How many cupcakes?"

"I dunno. Maybe ten?"

She recoiled in horror. "Ten is far too many."

You see why I made her a full-size, two-layer monstrosity.

Okay, I don't see it either.

If you're after the truth, I mostly wanted an excuse to make this delectable-sounding cake from Joyce White's BROWN SUGAR, which is and shall remain my favourite baker's cookbook. Grandma and I used to eat pineapple together when I was tiny, so I was reasonably sure she'd enjoy the flavour. And I relished the thought of baking something entirely new.

Holy crap, was it ever good! Labour intensive, but beyond delicious. It wasn't entirely smooth sailing as my pineapple icing never became thick enough to spread, but I salvaged the situation by using it as a filling/topping and edging the cake in vanilla wafers--another of Grandma's favourites. (I'd have preferred ladyfingers, but I baked it over Labour Day and had to make do with what I could get at Shoppers Drug Mart as all the grocery stores were closed.) Now I have no choice but to share the recipe with y'all, warts and all.

If you like pineapple, you're gonna go crazy over this icing. Promise.

Recipe: Cream Gravy with Kale and Bacon

Friends, I've fallen into a kale rut.

Kale is a staple of my diet in the summer, when it's cheap and fresh and oh-so easy to turn into something delicious and nutritious, but I fear I almost always prepare it the same way: braised, with bacon. Braised kale with bacon is undeniably tasty, but it's also... well, the same thing over and over again.

Last weekend I decided to branch out. I decided to experiment.

Another of my favourite dishes is cream gravy, a sauce popular in the American South. Cream gravy combines bacon or sausage drippings with milk or cream to make a thick, delectable splodge that works well atop biscuits, fried potatoes, or any old thing you'd eat with regular gravy.

I started wondering how it'd taste with kale in the mix.

Pretty durned good, as it turns out.

I know, I know; the picture above, she does not inspire confidence. This dish ain't gonna win any beauty contests, but trust me: if you like kale and cream gravy all by themselves, you're gonna love them together.

Recipe: Coconut Macaroon Ice Cream

My friend Kristina is a big ice cream eater. She's forever telling me about some great new flavour she tried, either from the grocery store or at a mall kiosk, and her descriptions never fail to make me salivate.

Unfortunately, Kristina is an American, so she's dining off of an entirely different ice cream spectrum than the one I have access to. My Canadian grocery store has tons of great stuff, yeah--shout out to President's Choice for their tasty and affordable Ice Cream Shoppe range--but it's not the same great stuff.

Thank goodness my ice cream maker frees me from the need to eat solely what I can find in the freezer aisle.

Last summer, Kristina told me about a delectable coconut macaroon ice cream. My grocery store failed to yield anything similar, but within a week I'd developed a recipe and made a batch my own self.

And y'all, it was delicious. You have to try it.

A word of warning: homemade ice cream gets quite a bit harder than the store bought variety as a general rule, and this particular ice cream freezes like nobody's business. (Coconut milk gets solid when you stick it in the freezer. Who knew?) It needs quite a bit of time on the counter before it's ready to scoop.

On the plus side, its solidity makes it the perfect choice for an ice cream cake or other moulded dessert. I'm gonna try that next time I produce a batch.

Recipe: Zuppa Pavese

I love me some soup. It's a convenient, tasty meal that either comes together quickly or can be made well in advance, making for a quick supper somewhere down the line. It's good in winter; it's good in summer. Ain't nothin' bad about a bowl of soup.

A recent trip to the library turned up THE SOUPMAKER'S KITCHEN by Aliza Green. Soup cookbooks hold a special fascination for me, so I picked it up, flipped through it, and paused at recipe for zuppa pavese. This Spanish peasant soup incorporates a poached egg and toasted bread--too tempting for anyone with a penchant for runny yolks to resist. One look at the picture and I knew I had to make it for myself.

Zuppa pavese is supposedly the result of a quick scramble to make a king's supper, so it uses only a handful of ingredients most people probably have on hand. Its simplicity in no way detracts from its flavour. This is amazing soup, y'all, even if you use cheap ingredients. The egg yolk and the cheese enrich the broth, the parsley makes it pop, and the bread absorbs all the best qualities of everything else in the bowl.

Recipe: Brown Sugar Shortbread Balls

Shortbread is one of my favourite foods, but I almost never think of it when I'm not actually eating it. I mean, shortbread is plain, right? It's just some sugar and butter and flour, all mushed together and cooked in little disks or drops or whatever.

Thing is, those little discs (or drops, or whatever) are the very definition of delicious. They crumble as soon as they meet your teeth, coat your tongue, and beg you to eat just one more of them.

Or two more. Or eight more. Really, who's counting?

I knew I had to include shortbread in my Christmas dessert buffet, so I turned to my two favourite bakers for their opinion on the subject. Nothing in Nigella Lawson's cookbooks really spoke to me, but I struck gold with the shortnin' bread cookies in Joyce White's BROWN SUGAR.

And y'all? I ate about half of them before they made it into the freezer, let alone onto the dinner table. They were that good.

Burgers I Have Known

Last June, I hobnobbed with a group of people I know mostly, if not solely, via the Internet. When you hang out with people you’ve befriended in this fashion, you discover you know all sorts of little things about them--preoccupations that crop up over and over in their online life. And they know similar things about you.

Turns out, just about everyone knows I love burgers.

This surprised me. Yeah, I do love burgers, but I didn’t think I was terribly open about it. I won’t eat any old burger; it’s gotta be quality, baby, or I’ll have none of it. I so seldom come across a specimen that meets my exacting standards that my burger-love tends to fade into the background most of the time.

When I do find a perfect burger, though--a rich mouthful of juicy goodness topped with the most delectable add-ons in all the land--I tell everyone. I go on and on and on about it, both in real life and on social media. I keep on talkin’ it up years after the fact, because there is no statute of limitations of beefy awesomeness.

And my friends cottoned on to my enthusiasm. Imagine that.

Food Is A Gift

Coffee meringues laid out for my family’s enjoyment.

In my world, food is a gift.

Sometimes it’s a conventional gift, in the sense that you give it to someone who (hopefully) enjoys eating it as much as you enjoyed making or selecting it. In other instances, it’s more about sharing an experience. Either way, I'm grateful it plays such a large role in my life.

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I’m one of those infuriating people who doesn’t want to own unnecessary things. Items like clothes and furniture and kitchen utensils are essential, and I’m happy to keep books and music that have become important to me, but I’m not interested in letting the collectibles and knickknacks pile up. I almost never keep something just for the sake of having it.

I imagine this makes me difficult to buy for.

It also makes it difficult for me to enjoy shopping for presents. I used to love selecting exactly the right gift for each person, but these days I look at the multitude of objects on the store shelves and I wonder if my family and friends really need them. Will anyone’s life improve if I give them a symbolic thingy to mark our long friendship, or if I hunt down another addition to their collection of commemorative milk jugs? The useful items I myself most like to receive--lemon zesters and flour sifters and silicone spatulas in fun colours--never seem entirely appropriate. I worry I’ll just add to everyone’s clutter.

So I’ve fallen back on food.

Recipe: Banana Macaroon Loaf

My grandparents have reached an age where material gifts aren't much good to them. They get the most enjoyment out of food, so I try to oblige whenever a gift-giving event rolls along. Last Christmas, they got a beef & bacon pie and a trip to McDonalds for breakfast; for their birthdays, they received an apple pie and a plate of banana cupcakes stuffed with chocolate ganache and topped with cream cheese icing.

This Christmas, I'm repeating the breakfast gift--they enjoy trips to fast food restaurants--and baking a loaf cake for each of them. Grandma's all set to receive a chocolate loaf, since she's big on that sort of thing, while Grandpa's getting a little something I like to call banana macroon loaf.

Recipe: Coffee Meringues

Coffee meringues are the perfect holiday dessert.

Welcome, Virtual Advent Tourists and regular readers alike! A couple of days back, I told you about some super-awesome caramel sauce. Today, I'd like to share one of the many, many recipes with which you can eat the stuff.

My mother is hosting Christmas dinner this year, and I plan to contribute an EPIC DESSERT BUFFET (caps necessary). I quickly made (and froze) all the usual suspects: shortbread, spice cookies, gingerbread, and toffee; however, I found myself in need of more gluten free options. My aunt eats GF, and I want to make sure she can scarf down just as much dessert as everyone else.

To that end, I turned to my culinary nemesis: meringues.

Recipe: Super-Awesome Caramel Sauce

I ain't saying this is the best caramel sauce in the entire world. but it's certainly the best caramel sauce I've eaten in, oh, the last few years. As is so often the case with all things sweet, I discovered it through Nigella Lawson, who cites it as an excellent topping for coffee meringues with whipped cream. I made a batch to see if the meringues might suit for Christmas dinner (they might) and found myself with a ton of leftover sauce after I'd prepared my test meringue.

This proved no hardship. The sauce is excellent as a topping for, well, pretty well everything you'd normally top with caramel: ice cream, cake, the bowl of a large spoon, etc. Blended with milk or cream and topped with fresh brewed coffee, it also makes a painfully delicious caramel latte.

I have to share it with you. The sauce leaves me no choice.

Recipe: Enchilada Peppers

Earlier this week, I found myself with a lone green pepper, some leftover chicken breast, and a craving for green enchilada sauce.

There was only one solution. I brainstormed a few ideas based on enchiladas I have known, looked at a couple of stuffed pepper recipes to make sure I understood the technique, then got down to the thrilling business of culinary invention.

The results, if I may say, were excellent. The brown rice and the chicken give the filling a satisfying weight and texture, while the cream cheese adds a wee bit of tang and the enchilada sauce brings the whole thing together.

As an added bonus, the peppers are gluten free and a great way to use leftovers rice and chicken. You can easily increase the amount to accommodate any number of diners, and I'm sure tofu or TVP would work well in place of the chicken if you fancy a vegetarian option.

Recipe: Sausage Latkes

Latkes in progress. Those nearest to the camera are sausage-free.

Now, I'd never tell you Hanukkah is the only time you can eat latkes, but it's certainly an excellent excuse to devour a large pile of the things. And since Hanukkah is well underway, the time for latkes is at hand.

Whee!

Since I can never leave well enough alone with any recipe that crosses my path, I've made a few changes to the standard latkes I discovered in Joan Zoloth's JEWISH HOLIDAY TRADITIONS. To begin with, I replaced the white onions with green; a simple enough change, and a logical one given my eternal hatred for white onions. The green onion latkes were a success, praised by all comers.

I made them several times before that fateful night when I asked myself whether I could combine my constant craving for latkes with my deep love of sausages.

I cooked up some chicken sausages, gave 'em a chop, and mixed them into my latke batter.

Best. Idea. EVER.

The Sunday Salon: Crepes

When I was a little kid, my father often made crepes late in the evening, sometimes even after I'd gone to bed. This lent them an air of mystery. I grew up thinking crepes were a nocturnal food, reserved for sundown and beyond.

In reality, my father timed his crepe-making to accommodate the batter's need for a two-hour rest. He mixed the ingredients when he got home from work, then waited the appropriate stretch before he warmed up his crepe pan and got down to it.

While I was somewhat dismayed to lose my romantic view of crepes, knowing the secret did make them more accessible to me. I realized that hey, I didn't have to wait for my father to get the late-night crepe-making urge. I could whip up a batch for myself.

Crepes have since become one of my staples, albeit a less frequent one due to the planning involved. They're great with both savory and sweet fillings, and while they can be fiddly at first, they're a lot easier than one might suspect.

I Could Eat

I used to think I disliked food.

I ate, of course, and I did enjoy some of what I ate, but it was a question of quantity. My itty bitty list of Foodstuffs I Genuinely Liked was a drop in the ocean next to the master list of Foodstuffs That Exist.

Most of the items on the first list fell into a particular category, too: sweet stuff. From where I stood, I liked sugar in specific; I didn’t like food as a whole.

I held this attitude until I joined Twitter.