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Standardby Julie4 Comments

It’s the most eating-est time of year, but not just because of all the shortbread and turkey dinners and Turtles—some of our favourite December things are the weekend morning we gather around my mom’s dining room table to make crackers for Christmas dinner, the afternoon Christmas carol jam, and the night we invite everyone over to watch Elf and Christmas Vacation, and plunk down a big pot of meatballs, or my grandma’s beef carbonnade, or something easy we can all dig into, in the middle of the table. I love that there are just more people around for dinner more often these days, which means those one-pot meals that are so comforting (and genuinely satisfying to make) are pulled into service for home entertaining of the more casual sort—the ones where everyone brings their own slipper socks. Smothered chicken is an old, classic recipe. I love the idea of it. You can make it with a whole spatchcocked chicken, like Craig Claiborne wrote about inContinue reading

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Standardby Julie8 Comments

I’ve never been one to build dinner around a large meaty foundation, adding pots of starches and veggies to simmer on the side – I like things all together, not least of all because cooking everything in one big pot minimizes dishes. The thing about soups and stews and other one-pot wonders is that they’re all – stewy. Which is fine, but I firmly believe and will shout from the rooftops (does anyone ever do this?) that roasting is the best cooking method of anything ever, particularly vegetables. I can’t think of a vegetable that isn’t at its crunchy-sticky-caramelized best roasted: tomatoes? Yup. Broccoli? For sure. Squash? Obv. Cauliflower? Totally. But here’s the beauty: you can roast chicken thighs in about the same amount of time it takes to roast veggies. On the same pan. Spreading them out on a sheet rather than tucking them into a deep roasting pan allows the heat to circulate, which means they’ll roast instead of steam. And if theyContinue reading

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Standardby Julie54 Comments

I love that Thanksgiving is a celebration of sameness, that it’s so deeply grounded in tradition that no one will let the turkey dinner menu they grew up with change – ever. There could be a jellied salad jiggling on the table for decades, one that everyone refused to actually eat, and yet they’d all likely freak out a little bit if it disappeared. There’s comfort in routine. At our house, as at many, there has to be turkey. We’re lucky to have Darrel Winter and Corrine Dahm raising turkeys out in Dalemead for the past forty years – a good bird is a great start. But the challenge for most is the managing of a large turkey – the thawing of it, the stuffing, and calculating the roasting time, getting it in and out of the oven – and how between all that to avoid getting up at the crack of dawn to get the bird in. In the past I’ve streamlined things byContinue reading

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Standardby Julie18 Comments

I’m starting to go back and revisit some of my early recipes, the ones I posted in my toddler stages of blogging, with super-up-close photos (what was I thinking?) and plenty of stories of life with an actual toddler. This was one of the first, posted back in 2009, and if you look back on it, I was all HOW CAN IT POSSIBLY BE OCTOBER? Which I literally said to someone ten minutes ago about it already being almost October. It’s one of those recipes people regularly tell me has become part of their regular repertoire, and so I thought it deserved a do-over. With turkey, winter squash, tomatoes and apples, can you imagine cramming more fall into one bowl? Back in ’09 I made this in the slow cooker, but nowadays I prefer the stovetop – either will do. (You’ll need less liquid overall in the slow cooker, since it’s all contained and won’t cook off.) And while you could use any kind ofContinue reading

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Standardby Julie6 Comments

Food on a stick, right? Feels like summer. The thing I love most about satay is that it makes me feel on the ball – it provides an excuse to buy meat in a bigger (read: cheaper) package, then divvy it up, slicing half to freeze in a quick marinade that will protect it from freezer burn. It goes ahead and marinates in the freezer until you’re ready for it, and thaws quickly on account of already being in pieces. And then cooks in just a few minutes, too. Also? You can dip them in peanut sauce. I would happily dip a pencil in peanut sauce. I’m usually a thigh girl; skinless, boneless chicken breasts don’t do much for me, but they do work well here if you’re a fan. Chicken thighs have more flavour, but are trickier to work with – cut them into chunks or strips and thread them on any which way. There’s no need to keep them neat, and in factContinue reading

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Standardby Julie11 Comments

For the record, I’m not a football fan. I am, however, a fan of the gooey-cheesy-crunchy-dippy food that seems to accompany it, particularly during the playoffs. I couldn’t help but get all caught up in it. I read somewhere that we’ll collectively eat around 1.3 billion chicken wings today, and it occurred to me that a potato skin would make the perfect vehicle for buttery-peppery Buffalo chicken topped with melty cheese. So I combined the two. Potato skins are easy to make – start with smallish russets; their sturdy skins make the best vehicles for any number of fillings. (Traditionally they’d be topped with bacon, green onion and cheese, and you could go that route too.) Bake them as you normally would – baking them makes for a crisper skin than the microwave – then scoop out the flesh and load them up with leftover roasted chicken tossed in equal parts melted butter and Frank’s Red Hot sauce – the secret formula for most BuffaloContinue reading

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Standardby Julie8 Comments

When I started this place back in 2008 and posted dinner each night, it wasn’t always a recipe – because who follows an actual recipe each night? More often than not it’s a matter of shuffling through the fridge and constructing something out of what’s there – what needs to be cooked, revamped or salvaged, or what’s comfortably in your repertoire, like the scrambled eggs and brown beans my mom always fell back on when we were kids, or the eggs on toast. A lot of proper dinners don’t require a recipe – and when it’s the sort of thing that makes use of whatever scraps you have in your fridge, it’s not helpful to adhere to a strict formula.

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Standardby Julie12 Comments

Having grown up in generation Earls, I’ve always been a fan of the chicken Caesar. Even so, it’s not the sort of thing I generally make at home. But I saw a technique years ago in which chicken was roasted atop chunks of bread to produce croutons infused with chicken drippings – which is essentially those crispy bits of stuffing you pick at and eat yourself as the turkey comes out of the oven, which is the very best part of Thanksgiving dinner. And you wind up with a whole sheet of it. So in this salad, which I learned from one J.O., you roast the chicken and the croutons together, which makes sense time-wise but also makes them spectacularly delicious, then lay a few strips of bacon over the lot to up the ante, pull and chop up the lot and scatter it over a platter of crunchy romaine, then douse it all in garlicky dressing and Parmesan. A proper Caesar salad it is.Continue reading

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Standardby Julie12 Comments

This…! The computer added that exclamation mark. Really. It’s very intuitive. Did today need a pot of chicken and dumplings simmering on the stove? Mine did. It was all I could do to keep myself from devouring the lot, standing at the stove, and the only deterrent was the risk of incinerating my tongue. It may have been worth it. I tried to take pictures. I mean I did, but I could barely focus. The steam was making me ravenous, like that cartoon steam that winds out of delicious things and swirls up your nose. I snapped a few, grabbed a fork and took the bowl to the couch for some alone time. Then I came back for a rendezvous with the pot. This feels like the sort of thing I should have grown up with, but it wasn’t. My childhood never knew a dumpling. These are the deal deal – sticky dough you drop by the spoonful onto the surface of the simmering stew,Continue reading

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