i want to take you higher.

As of recently, I'm basically out of work and thus can no longer afford groceries. Fortunately, my cupboard is stocked with all sorts of goodies so I am making a fairly epic "pantry dinner". For most, this might mean KD or Beef-a-roni or whatever that tinned shit's called..

I'm having a quick & easy multigrain linguini with pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, grilled artichokes & goat cheese.

Just sayin'.

the chicken dance.

Tonight for dinner I am making thyme-buttermilk fried chicken on a bed of sweet potato puree with crispy pan-fried shallots, homemade buttermilk onion rings & a celeraic and cabbage apple cider vinegar slaw.



The fried chicken is done in peanut oil, the only way to do fried chicken other than your own lard from scratch. The oil will be infused with fresh herbs (sage, thyme, rosemary) as well as a head of garlic, bay leaves, and my own touch: a bruleed sweet vidalia onion. Recipe courtesy of Tyler Florence of "Tyler's Ultimate".



The sweet potato puree recipe is my own, and easy peasy. The onion rings will be sweet vidalias as well, coated and "marinated" in buttermilk, fresh thyme & marjoram, and good ol' s+p, then also deep fried. The celeraic-cabbage apple cider slaw looks delicious in the cookbook and uses apple cider vineger, good quality grainy mustard, and some of my favourite dried herbs. Recipes courtesy of Anthony Sedlak of "The Main". I just love mixing recipes from my favourite babes of Food Network Canada; or, you know, the only two men under 35 with their own cooking shows.




This is what the end result is supposed to look like. For now, I gotta go spread the legs of my bird & de-bone that baby & brine it all day in sea salt & water & fresh herbs. I'm so excited. Last night I facebook-chatted with a classmate from my program at George Brown for an hour about the pros/cons of deep-frying in lard vs. vegetable oil, duck confit & the differant ways to prepare it, and our favourite reducing, basting, marinating and de-glazing methods. She was almost as excited as I was for me to debone my first (raw) organic, free-run chicken all on my own. Just me & my boning knife.

For all you vegetarians & meat-haters out there, sorry dudes, I just couldn't resist posting pictures. I fucking love this shit.

if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

There are few things I detest more than when a perfectly good food blogg(er) goes to waste, has a baby, and replaces their recipes for galettes, terrines, and their famous featherdrop biscuits with babies, babies, babies. Now, I can perfectly appreciate that you are overjoyed by your little bundle of joy (Hell, I hope to have a couple of them myself one day!) but I wish you'd appreciate that, for now, I don't care to watch videos of your newborn shoveling yoghurt down it's throat when all I'm looking for is a good recipe for homemade hot & sour soup. Food blogs, fashion blogs, Lindsay Lohan's Myspace blog... A quick google let me be aware that there are, yes, over five MILLION blogs for proud mamas such as yourself.

If Cory can have both a food blog & a politics blog, then you can two too. And somehow, the genuis behind The Garden Apartment finds a way to involve children into her blog without bothering me, or my gag reflex.

For a girl that's more about Top Chef than Top Model, I understand that not everyone gets as excited about a good meal as I do. I've had a couple great ones since I moved here; the lamb stew at Oddfellow's, the yukon gold frites with lemon mayonnaise at Jamie Kennedy's Wine Bar, and the thin crust at Terroni... A good meal, or even one good dish, really fills my (artichoke) heart. Thanks to my all-of-a-sudden-unavailability to work as much as I'd like to at my friendly chi-chi neighborhood kitchenware shoppe, I have been forced to cook more out of my own home & I couldn't be more happy about it. As well as being good practice for my up and coming culinary career (in one way or another), I'm sure my friends couldn't be more happy about it either. Last week, I made an assortment of panini for dinner with a friend. French brie & bartlett pear on a buttery baguette for him, balsamic marinated & roasted plum tomatoes and red peppers with pesto & herbed goat cheese on Italian sourdough for me. I served them with oven fries I made; yukon golds I tossed & baked with garlic, cayenne, grated parmesan and sunflower oil and served them with $16 Roasted Garlic Aoili from Williams-Sonoma (minus my discount).

It was delicious.

This weekend, I'm making a thyme & buttermilk brined fried chicken dinner and I couldn't be more excited, and not only because I don't have to supply the wine.

In a big city with a little kitchen, it turns my stomach to see such a good food blog go to waste. Almost as much as it turned my stomach to see your youngest with creamy white yoghurt dripping all over it's chin.