fabulous fare from a lover of food & travel
Happy New Year! One of the lovely gifts I received this Christmas was Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook from my husband. In looking through the book, both of us spotted this recipe as looking particularly delicious, so we thought that trying it on New Year’s Eve would be a wonderful way to end of the year.
One of our resolutions at the start of the year was to try our hand at making lasagne, which neither of us had ever made. Given the wealth of obscurer dishes we’ve tried, I’m not sure why it’s taken us this long to try it. We had extra ricotta cheese after making our delicious gnudi last week,…
Continuing with our French night dishes, I decided that it would be fun to try something as iconic as ratatouille. It was hard not to love the movie and Remy’s final pièce de résistance to win over the critic. It turns out that renowned chef Thomas Keller served as a consultant on the movie and designed…
Hosting a French night called for some new and interesting French recipes to try out. Gougères seemed like a perfect place to start–cheesy puffs to nibble on to get the evening started. These round little cheesy darlings originate from Burgundy and use pâte à choux, which is the same kind of dough commonly used in profiteroles…
David came across this recipe in the recipe book I gave him last Christmas and was eager to give it a try. I was particularly interested in the gnudi (pronounced [nudi]), which I discovered are a subset of gnocchi from Florence, made with predominantly ricotta and spinach. The recipe looked to be quite an endeavour, so we…
Our friends’ desire to learn how to make Thai green curry led to an impromptu Thai night, where D and I decided to get a bit ambitious and make two new Thai dishes we’d never made (in addition to the curry). Pad Thai was a particularly daunting prospect, as most of us have had our…
Our recent trip to New England was a whirlwind of culinary delights, and one of the highlights was visiting a fabulous recipe in Boston called Sportello, recommended by an old friend of David’s. Our meals were outstanding, and I particularly enjoyed my dish, which was potato gnocchi with a mushroom ragu, peas and cream. The gnocchi was…
It is well-established that David is a fan of garlic. He will often gleefully double or even triple the amount of garlic called for in a recipe. However, when I came across this recipe, which has long been ear-marked for us to try, he found that his garlic lust had met its match.
David and I have eaten our fair share of animal parts–liver, sweetbreads, ears, etc. Perhaps one of the more pleasant surprises I had in sampling something a little off-the-beaten path was roasted bone marrow. Our love for this dish arises from our favourite Vancouver restaurant, Le Crocodile, where we both had the chance to try bone…
It was to be a relatively quiet Thanksgiving, with just the two of us plus David’s brother. As such, a turkey seemed like overkill, so we decided to consider the smaller birds (e.g. cornish game hen, duck, capon), finally settling on duck. It’s been quite awhile since we’d had duck, and this seemed like the…