Recipes and Reviews

A nice hot sandwich that goes great with a crisp green salad and a big slice of watermelon.

A simple teriyaki sauce that can also be reduced further to work as a glaze or a dipping sauce.

A nice side dish to go with early season corn on the cob.

Just one more delicious thing to do with rhubarb - which we got a goodly amount of from our CSA shares.

The beef short ribs looked really good in the store last weekend and I came up with this interesting little recipe after looking through the pantry and refrigerator.

I was playing with a few different types of sugars this weekend and made these three minor variations of oatmeal cookies. The base recipe came from the back of an old Quaker oat box but I weighed all of the ingredients and timed the mixing of the ingredients so I could make several identical batches of cookies to compare how the different sugars reacted - and of course tasted.

This recipe is modeled after a sweet potato pancake appetizer that we used to get at one of our favourite little local restaurants - The Compass in SE Portland. Unfortunately the restaurant closed after several years and I have had to make due by recreating some of our favourite dishes that we have not found in other restaurants.

Definitely take the time to make the pear chutney. It is not much more work and it really makes the dish stand out.

These muffins started out as the Hana Banana-Nut Loaf recipe from "Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Breads Revised and Expanded", which I will have to review some time, but I like more crust on my banana breads, plus a bit more spice, so I adjusted the recipe a bit to make these muffins.

These muffins also freeze and thaw very well and are a great way to use up a couple of brown bananas when you do not have any ice creame in the house for banana milkshakes.

I love my wife, she gets up early, sometimes several hours before I do, and goes to bed early, again sometimes several hours before I do. This works out well for us since we each get a little alone time each day and one of the things I like to do in my alone time is play in the kitchen. Sometimes I work on knife technique, or a bit of pastry work, or make up a few items for dinners later in the week, and every now and then I get to clean out some really nice leftovers from the refrigerator. So after a quick look-see in the refrigerator I determined that tonight was clean out the refrigerator night. I really love my late night snacks... and my wife.

I have shared leftover fried rice and lemon leftover chicken recipes with you already, but those are more like real meals. Clean out the refrigerator w/ eggs is serious snack food. So, on to the recipe...

I really like good french fries but my wife picks on me about the amount and quality of oil used so I decided to make a really good oven baked "fry".

In this case I was not after one of the big fluffy potato wedges that are more liked baked potatoes than fries. What I wanted was a thin 1/4" to 3/8" fry with a crispy skin and a dry fluffy interior.

This is a simple stewed beef (or lamb or buffalo) dish that I worked up for my first dutch oven gathering (DOG). The spices remind me of a "mild" beef dish called "alicha wat" that I get at my favourite Ethiopian restaurant.

This is a simple Ethiopian vegatable dish. If you enjoyed the coconut curry potato wrap, then you will most likely like this easy to make, but quite tasty, vegetable dish.

After finding this pie recipe I do not even bother with the "traditional" heavy custard pumpkin pies. The flavour and texture are just amazing.

Serve this simple side dish over a bed of crisp greens with a light vinagrette in place of your regular dinner salad.

This is a simple corn bread recipe that I like to use for corn bread stuffings or a corn bread side dish with a spicy chili or beef stew.

Brining cuts of beef and pork go way back in my family dinners but I did not start doing birds until the first time I watched it being done by Alton Brown on Good Eats. Strange how somethings are obvious after you have it explained to you by someone else.

The exact origins of this cranberry chutney are unknown. It was brought as a side dish to Thanksgiving dinners by a friend of my wife's first husband's family and it has become a required part of our Thanksgiving dinners. Besides eating it with the turkey - try it over a bowl of plain yogurt.

I had a little bit of buttermilk left in the carton this morning so I decided to play with a few ingredients and the result was these tasty little treats. You will need a kitchen scale for this recipe since most of the measurements are based on the weight of a large egg.

If an ingredient is listed as "1 x something", then add one times the weight of the egg(s) that you used in the recipe. If an ingredient is listed as "1 x 1/4 t. something", then add one quarter teaspoon for each egg used in the recipe. If you use small or medium eggs, you will have to reduce flavouring and rising agents a little bit.

While not quite as satisfying as a corned beef hash, this hash made with sweet potatoes and the extra ham off of a smoked ham hock comes close.