Daily Unadventures in Cooking

This beef stew recipe is why I love to cook. Simple, rustic and easy preparations lead to an amazing gravy full or lush flavour. Oh, how I love braised, stewy comfort food.

This time of year no one wants to fire up the grill, instead try this steak recipe.  The steaks cook in simmering red wine which turns into a delicious sauce for them.  The recipe recommends using beef tenderloin but sometimes at the cabin our selection is limited and we can’t be too picky. If you [...]

A strong beer such as a stout has such a creamy, nutty, almost coffee like flavour that it is just beautiful with short ribs in this recipe.

Remember when lamb shanks and short ribs were cheap because they were peasant food? Yeah me neither, but so I have been told. Luckily, what does work is buying the meats when they are on special, and tossing them in the freezer. I picked up this pack of short ribs for about $5, tossed them [...]

Last weekend the forecast was for beautiful weather and so I picked up a Flank Steak with the intention of a good grilling. Along with it I got a portobello mushroom, an eggplant, a red pepper and a zucchini plus a bag of romaine. The plan? Grill the veggies and add them to a salad [...]

Thank goodness I was feeling lazy yesterday! It was pouring rain by the afternoon and I went out for a big run in the morning so all I wanted to do was curl up and read my book and bake a loaf of bread. So when we saw the stew meat I gave J [...]

This is a non-recipe kind of recipe, I didn’t measure anything or time anything but it came together really well and was pretty healthy too so I thought I would post it. The goal was to make comfort food but on the lighter side so I used less pasta, less cheese and tons of [...]

Day 2 of my vacation was also good. I really wouldn’t have thought that yesterday’s dinner could top the one before it, but it did, or at least it was certainly a close call. Yesterday was raining, not just raining, but pouring almost all day long. So it was time for winter comfort food [...]

This Thai beef salad is spicy, crisp and surprising light.  This salad, also known as Yum Neua, has a  dressing made primarily of fish sauce and lemon juice which keeps it nice and fresh. Having the grilled beef in the salad makes it a full meal. Anyone have any other good dinner salad ideas? [...]

You know when you throw something together and then it turns out really well? But you didn’t.. say pay attention to what you were doing? Well that is this one. It was a major success in the slow cooker, as far as Beef Stew goes it was perfect. But I didn’t measure anything and [...]

Flank steak is a lean, inexpensive but deeply flavoured cut of beef. When cooking flank steak it is important to marinate it, make sure you cut it across the grain, and don’t cook beyond medium rare.
Flank steak is my favorite cut of meat for the grill, and this is my new favorite flank [...]

The year is going well so far, I have made a few things on my todo list that I have been meaning to try – this is one of them, the short rib! I am embarrassed to admit that initially I thought they would be short, but they are actually really big. The [...]

This Mexican meatball recipe adapted from Diana Kennedy is full of beef, pork and zucchini and simmered in a tomato and chipotle sauce.

If you have never cooked flank steak before you are missing out. It is full of flavour, adaptable to tons of cuisines and is super easy on the pocket book. Excellent for my attempts at Cheap Eats! The downside of it is that it is quite a tough piece of meat that you have [...]

Yesterday, J was having a bad day. We met for lunch and he seemed really down so I offered to make dinner and asked what he was craving. Something meaty, he said. Well, his favorite has always been my bolognese. However, since it was a weeknight I couldn’t make a real bolognese [...]

It has been rather a long while since my last post! I spent a wonderful week in beautiful Tofino hiking and kayaking and generally having a very relaxing out-of-doors time. It is amazing how different the lifestyle of a place like Tofino and a place like Vancouver are. As much as I [...]

Do you ever panic in the grocery store? You have it all planned out – you just need two things – but they’re out, so now what? About once a month I find myself blankly wandering around the grocery store, hungry after a long day and just generally overwhelmed.

Today was one of [...]