First of the Season: Rhubarb

Although the weather has been cold and damp here, we are actually well into spring because I used the first of my rhubarb!  I love rhubarb in the spring when there is no other fruit available (ok, technically it is a vegetable), but as the season progresses I find it harder and harder to use up.  So a few years ago I bought a small cookbook entirely devoted to rhubarb recipes (at Value Village, naturally). 
On the weekend I decided that I would randomly open the book and make whatever recipe happened to be on that page.

Behold. Royal Rhubarb Dessert!

This recipe for Royal Rhubarb Dessert was a little off-putting because it required dry strawberry jello! And I couldn't quite figure out how it all went together until I started making it.

First I pushed a pie-crust type base into a pan.

I thought it fitting to use my pyrex bowl to contain the
Rhubarb in this likely mid-century recipe.

Then, onto the piece-de-resistance: sprinkling the jello onto the rhubarb layer!

Eww! 

And here it is with the top layer on, ready to go into the oven.

After 30 minutes it was done.

The jello soaked up the moisture from the rhubarb, and as the dessert cooled the rhubarb layer became firmer.

And here is a cooled slice.  It cut and stayed together surprisingly well.  But besides being day glow pink, you wouldn't even know that it had jello in it.  The pie crust-like base contrasted nicely with the other softer layers.  I enjoyed it, but am not sure if I would make it again.  First, because I rarely have jello on hand.  Second, because there are so many other recipes to try out!  What are your favourite ways to use rhubarb?

leftovers + creativity = delish lunch!

I stumbled into making a great 5-ingredient salad with leftovers from the fridge.  
We had some basmati rice left over from Indian takeaway, and a rapidly aging cauliflower. As I was holding both scanning the fridge for inspiration, I remembered this Jamie Oliver recipe for Salmon Tikka that my sister introduced me to (which I highly recommend).  I thought that if salmon smeared with curry paste tasted so good, so would cauliflower. 

Dished into lunch containers the next day

It was great!  We ate it for lunch for two days, and then the following weekend I made it for a potluck.  Everyone wanted the recipe, so I've come up with one:


2-3 cups cooked white or basmati rice
1 head cauliflower, broken into small florets
2 Tbsp Patak's mild curry paste*
2 tsp vegetable oil
2-3 Tbsp chopped cilantro (or more!)
3/4 cup defrosted frozen peas


Smear the cauliflower with curry paste and drizzle with oil.  Spread on pan and roast in a preheated 400 degree oven until soft and browned, around 25 minutes.  When cooled mix with rice, peas and cilantro.  Enjoy!


*I have no affiliation with Patak's, but would take freebies if they wanted to send me some!

Friday's Freebies: Mushroom and Pears

Autumn is a great time of year for food.  Since we had such a wet summer in coastal BC the wild mushrooms are abundant.  One of our friends who loves to search for wild edibles found a humongous Cauliflower mushroom for us in the woods behind our house!

I had no idea what to do with it, so made up my own recipe called "Oven-fried Panko Mushroom."  I ripped the mushroom up into bite-sized pieces, dredged the pieces in egg, salt, pepper and sage, rolled them in Panko crumbs and baked them on high heat for about 20 minutes.  I served it with a garlic dipping sauce.  Yum!  Sorry there is no 'after' picture.


We also received a bag of pears from a friend's tree.  They were already soft in the middle, so I needed to slice off the good, outside, bits.  I wanted to make a pear and blue cheese tart, so I modelled it loosely on this one from myrecipes.com.  I had never worked with puff pastry before, so it was a fun experience, and I thought the end result looked (and tasted) delicious.

The original recipe called for onions, but I'm not a real onion fan.  So I added pecan pieces and a balsamic-maple syrup drizzle half-way through cooking instead.  Free produce is great!

Friday's Freebies: Kale

Friends of ours just went on holidays, so they gave us some farmer's market kale that had to be used up.  I love kale when other people make it, but am a little inexperienced with it myself.  So I thought the easiest thing would be to make kale chips, which involves tossing bite-size pieces of kale in some olive oil and salt and baking for about 15 minutes until you have dry and crunchy 'chips.'  They are actually quite crispy, but obviously not as heavy as potato chips.

In the Oven

Crispy Snack from the Bowl

 If you make them, I would recommend brushing (or at least checking) your teeth afterwards.  Hus and I were laughing at the dark green flecks left on our front teeth after eating them!  At least it showed we were eating our greens!

 

Gravlax Experiment

Another thing I did while in England was attend the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.  Hands down this was the best conference I ever attended!  I went for academic interests, but came away with a new appreciation of cuisine and the importance of celebrating and preparing local foods.  

When we got back home, we were lucky enough to be given a fresh sockeye salmon by a friend.  I have wanted to make gravlax, so I thought I would give it a try.  Gravlax is a refrigerator-cured salmon using salt, sugar and lots and lots of dill.  I used this recipe from the How to Cook Meat blog, except I also added Vodka.  And here is the finished product...

The hardest part was to fillet the whole salmon, especially since my fillet knife is a dull cheapie.  Luckily you slice the cured salmon off the skin, so no one had to see the ragged, ripped-up salmon skin.  Otherwise, you just have to flip the salmon every twelve hours for three days and weigh it down.  Some recipes even skip this part and only cure it for 24 hours.  It was really good, and we ate several lunches from it, as well as taking it to a potluck where it was complemented.  

Homemade Granola Bars

I've made granola bars over the last few weekends to add to work lunches.  I've used this recipe for Playground Granola Bars with great success.  

The recipe is very forgiving since you can make additions and substitutions.  I've added coconut and nuts and chocolate chips at times, and it takes relatively little time to make a batch.  This is about the only baking I've been doing lately!

Feeling Crabby this Spring

It really is spring!  Today I bought some freshly-caught and cooked Dungeness Crab from Haida Gwaii.  I already had half of one for lunch today and will have the other half tomorrow.  The rest are destined for the freezer for now, since Hus (luckily) doesn't like crab.