Daily Unadventures in Cooking

I am addicted to winter squash but I need to figure out a safer and easier way to peel it! The peel is so hard that it is even challenging to use a vegetable peeler. Usually I just struggle through with a peeler, but the squash soup from last week broke my peeler. [...]

Homemade croutons taste so much better then store bought and are very easy to make. They keep pretty well in the fridge too, so make a batch and keep then in the fridge for a few days to add to salads and soups.

Chia seeds and water will form a gel which has culinary uses and can be used to create texture for a pudding or substitute for fat.

Fresh homemade pasta is such a treat! You might as well make twice as much and freeze the fresh pasta.

Homemade pasta is like nothing else. Have you made your own pasta yet? If you haven’t you are totally missing out. It is more work for certain but it is an entirely different creature then the packaged stuff. Yes, even the fresh packaged stuff.

Ever had a 9″ springform when the recipe called for an 8″ square? Check out this conversion chart from allrecipes, so helpful.

Because potatoes take awhile to cook it is sometimes useful to give them a bit of a head start, and that is where parboiling comes in. Once they have parboiled they have many uses. I put them in salads, fry them up for hash browns or cut them in thin slices and put them [...]

I have this theory that eating fish makes you smart. Anyone who knows me knows that at any given time I have some theory on the go about eating or drinking. For example in college there was the shots theory (if sugar is what makes you hungover then vodka shots are the way [...]

I love épis de blé. I love the crunchy baguette-exterior plus the fun of being able to break off a piece and have your own section. It’s one of those silly things that I have been wanting to make since I have started making my own bread. Though this is my first attempt [...]

A delicious recipe for Jamaican patties from scratch. A satisfying homemade snack from the freezer.

This is a neat tip I saw on an episode of the Rachael Ray show from the other day. Eventually garbage disposal ’sget gross and smelly and here is an easy way to get in there to clean it without using crazy chemicals. She also alluded to being able to un-jam your disposal this [...]

We have had a great time so far on Saltspring this weekend. We arrived at about midnight to a freezing cold cabin. It was so cold that everything in the fridge was frozen and the olive oil was no longer a liquid. So after hours and hours of stoking the fire – and [...]

This recipe is all thanks to Helen from Beyond Salmon, you can check out her post here. The picture of her pierogis completely inspired me to try and make them again. Well, I must say that though it did take a few hours it was totally worth it! I made the [...]

Cleaning a spice grinder or coffee grinder is easy once you know how. Put a handful of rice in your grinder and give it a few pulses. The rice should absorb whatever is left in your grinder. Discard the rice and your grinder is clean!
See now, if only I had known this a [...]

If you want to use lemongrass in a soup or curry it is really quite easy. Lemongrass comes in stalks about a foot or so long. Lemongrass stalks shouldn’t be brown but rather pale yellow turning into green as you get towards the end. Strip away the dry outer leaves, cut away the [...]

My philosophy on this is that it should be easy, or I won’t bother. That means it can’t take 3-4 hours, I will use whatever I have and I do not make a real bouqet garni. If you don’t have garlic or tomato omit it, you can use shallots rather [...]

I just read a great post on what causes garlic and onions to sometimes go green based on the way they are cooked. This was posted by Harold McGee who has a blog News for Curious Cooks. McGee is a well known food writer you may have heard of his On Food and [...]

My boyfriend and I don’t have a patio big enough for a BBQ in our current apartment so we are big fans of our cast iron grill pan. The only problem with this pan is that you have to treat it properly and through misuse we were ready to give up on ours today. [...]

I have never actually had orecchiette but every picture I have ever seen of it made it look really appealing. Attempting to make a dish where the flavours and the textures are unknown to you is like trying to play a song from a musical genre you have never heard – it might be sound [...]

Since our move we haven’t found a really great breakfast place – all the really good ones in town have line-ups and I can’t bring myself to go to De Dutch or Denny’s for eggs benny. Lucky for me I got a lesson in how to make Hollandaise in my cooking class which I [...]