Making Love in the Kitchen

It all started with this gorgalicious ceramic dish with a lid that I picked up at my absolute favourite-if-it-didin’t-exist-I’d-be-naked-store Anthropologie. I saw it and immediately thought, TAGINE central. I don’t know why. Just something about being able to open that lid, have the steam burst out and my getting to announce a fine tah-dah to my dining companion.

The thing is, I am pretty sure I have never actually had a tagine before that I liked. They most often had lamb in them and I am just not that in to eating laaa-aaaa-aaamb. But when fall rolls in, something in the abundance of root veggies at the market, combined with my desire to eat cozy food and not have to work that hard for it, made this one bought adventure a must.

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You know those people who go on those re-donk-you-lus cleanses that essentially sound like they’re spending a week, crash course style living the way you’ve been living for the last five years, only to go back at the end of it and start eating like the slothy fatty McFatter standard North American processed diet full of wheat, cheese, booze and sugar?

Wait a second! You’re not one of them too are you?

Here’s the thing most people have to learn about detox. It’s not a diet. A detox should not be a crash anything. It’s not something you can do twice a year where for 1 week you drink epsom salts, consume only lemonade and enema your poopershnickle out the hooha. The best of the best way to detox is to make 80% of what most people would consider a cleanse, your everyday way of living. Make sense?

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When some people don’t want to consume hot dogs (and meat in general for that matter), they often turn to the vegetarian options. And what might these be? Veggie dogs! There are also veggie burgers, veggie deli meat, veggie turkey, veggie ground beef, veggie chicken pieces and the list goes on and on. From the looks of it, it seems that vegetarians have no problem replacing meat since there are so many options readily available for them. They can have some faux bacon for breakfast, followed by a mock salami sandwich for lunch, rounding things off with a chicken-less “chicken” stir fry for dinner. Oh, and don’t forget about soy pudding for dessert!

How easy was that? By consuming these fake meat items, vegans and vegetarians can pick up right where they left off with the real stuff. Can you tell yet that I’m joking?

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A few weeks ago, we posed the question on Twitter asking what everyone’s fave comfort food was that they wish could be healthified. It sounded a lot like what I have created here for you.

Why do we all love mac and cheese? The answer is simple. We were raised on it. It was the go to convenience food of our childhood and likely landed itself as a staple in our cupboards when we first moved out on our own.

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How it makes my heart sing when I can go to a regular restaurant and order my lover of a food, tempeh. Now, when I say regular restaurant, I’m not talking about nonsense places with names like “Wings and Things”, or “Deep Fry It So You’ll Try It”. I mean restaurants where their overall values- eat organic, local, seasonal etc.- make sweet love with my own.

So wasn’t I over the rainbow excited to see a veg menu with tempeh on it. And this wasn’t the kind of tempeh you might find at most veg/vegan restaurants where it’s kind of just cooked to a crisp and served over a bowl of rice. This tempeh was prepared as if it were the leanest cut of gold labeled cow (do cows come with with gold labels?).

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Holy tempeh testicles, my fair weather lovers! How is August looking into its last sweet half? I don’t know about you (and feel free to tell me), but I feel like suddenly I have to summer it up to the tittles. And in that spirit, I’ve been spending as many minutes of the day outside as possible. I am not back and ready to rock it on my bicycle just yet (still in accident recovery mode), but walks are sweet, as are evenings on our porch, eating, laughing and just plain old loving the loveliness.

As we do spend many an evening on the porch, with the sites and smells of our neighbourhood wafting over, meat seems to be the scent of choice most often. Even as a non BBQ meat eater (hi cancer, you’re not invited to play with me), I do still get cravings.

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s I may have mentioned before, we don’t have running water up here so we always do our very best to make our food using as few pots and pans as possible. This lends a whole new level of creativity to the cooking process. We like to use up what we have leftover and then build upon to make the best ever dinner there ever was.

This pasta is one of my absolute favourite go-to dinners or lunches.

I always stress the importance in my classes of using up the ingredients that you have on hand- the best whatever to use being the one in your fridge, on your shelf, in your freezer etc. You picking up what I’m putting down.

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There are two common questions we get when summer time rolls around:

1. What’s the best camping food and trail mix?

2. What’s a great veg friendly summer BBQ recipe?

The camping/trail mix thing I’ll share with you next week, but the BBQ thing- I have an answer for you right here and now and wozers is it delicious.

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Like the burrito last week, there is something amazingly fun and freeing about creating a recipe for a food that you know very little about. Anything involving chili peppers, I know very little about.

When I was 11 or 12 years old, on holidays with my family in Jamaica, we were visiting friends who were staying in a villa nearby. Out in their back yard was a tree with the cutest little red peppers I had ever seen. What did I do? Of course- I plucked it from the tree and took a bite, than scratched my face, maybe rubbed my eye in the process- next thing I knew, I was in tears begging to have my head removed from my body as I was sure it was on the verge of complete explosion. I had never felt such a searing discomfort before in my life.

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According to Wikepedia a quiche is defined as follows:

A quiche is an oven-baked dish made with eggs and milk or cream in a pastry crust. Usually, the pastry shell is blind-baked before the other ingredients are added. Other ingredients such as cooked chopped meat, vegetables, or cheese are often added to the egg mixture before the quiche is baked. Quiche is generally an open pie (i.e. it does not include a pastry covering), but may include an arrangement of tomato slices or pastry off-cuts for a decorative finish. Quiche may be eaten for breakfast, lunch, or dinner, depending on local customs and personal tastes.

Some of you just weren’t buying my last attempt at a quiche- or what I was calling a quin-iche which was really quinoa mixed with some egg and cooked veggies and baked in a muffin cup. Whatever to all you hatas!!!

But you got me thinking. And you got me thinking as to why I was so resistant to the idea of a real quiche (as defined above). Now lets leave out the cream and cooked meat bits for a moment and I will tell you a brief story with a diarrhea ending.

As many of you know, I have never really taken cooking lessons before I started teaching them (Don’t tell my Marilyn Denis producer that okay?) I took about 12 hours of cooking classes while in nutrition school- but that was more along the lines of making beet kvas and how to sprout rye to run it through a meat grinder to bake into sprouted buns on a ceramic tile that faced the north with the wind blowing from the south and to be eaten while balancing on one foot staring at the sun. Basically- we learned very traditional cooking but that still didn’t help me to know what I should eat for breakfast.

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Did you catch my segment on the show? And? Did you love it like I love raw chocolate and coconut kefir?

Ms. Marilyn and I were chatting it up about how to lighten the load in Spring. My best advice is always to start loading up on more veggies, mixing in a healthy dose of raw along with the cooked as we transition to lighter brighter weather.

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Oh my goodness was this the best “Leftovers For Lunch” lunch that I’ve ever had! Remember that barley salad I shared last week?

Well this is what I did with the leftovers. Given that I write a food blog and am forever trying to think of new, inventive and easy ways to re-purpose recipes and leftover- mainly because it cuts down on my workload, I tend to only eat things once, then have to find a new and exciting way to enjoy them.

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Oh. My. Greatness.

I made sweet potato gnocchi from scratch I did. I did, I did! I have been thinking about these little nuggets of greatness ever since my super fantab friend and web mistress Marie told me about hers. I waited for her to send me the recipe and I must say- thank goodness she builds websites for a living as opposed to sending me recipes. She never sent it. So, as all great things, this recipe came from a sweet little cocktail of desperation, creativity and a craving.

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Soooo? Did you see the show? And?

The theme of the show was detox- kicking our bods into high gear post holidays and when it came to the cooking- we wanted to focus on what goodies were going to help us to shake a little of that junk from the trunk but still keep to the season, keep it whole, nourishing, warming, filling and of course my faves- beautiful and delicious.

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Now on to the recipe. I want so very bad to post my brand new sweet potato barley brownie recipe but feel like it might be a little too soon post holiday to start throwing sweet treats at you- so I’ll save them until tomorrow. Enough time right?

Instead I have the most amazing whole grain salad ever and this fits in perfectly with our goal for Day 7 of the 21 Days To Health Program: Brown Bagging It.

As I so eloquently explain in the guide,this is one of the easiest and most fun changes to make. It’s easy because all you are doing is bringing food with you to work/school/wherever. It’s fun because you get to be your own little take out restaurant – you can pack it in cute containers and pretend you’re on a picnic.

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