Before I go into the recipe, I just wanted to let everyone know about an awesome restaurant I went to the other day here in Calgary. Shiraz has some spectacular Persian food, and can do gluten free! I had the lamb-shank pizza on a gluten-free crust, and really enjoyed it. Here is a photo of the regular version for you!

Probably one of the best pizza’s I’ve had in a restaurant since finding out I could not tolerate gluten, and I look forward to trying more of their dishes.

The other morning I was looking in the fridge, and wanted to make myself something fast before heading to work. This is what I came up with, and it can definitely be edited to have many other flavours. Next time I make this, I’m hoping I have lettuce in the house as it would be much better with the crunch – now I know why it’s in Salad rolls!

Ingredients:
Rice ( cold)
Egg
Onion
Garlic
Carrot
home made Kimchi
SoySauce ( kikoman gluten free)
Rice-Wraps
mushrooms

As you can see, I have cut the carrot into sticks, and sliced up everything else.

These are the rice wraps I use.

ok lets get started!

First I cracked my eggs into a small bowl and added a tablespoon of water, salt, pepper, dash of soy sauce and a few drops of the liquid from my kimchi. I used a fork to beat it until it was frothy:

Then I heated up a skillet with some butter in it on medium heat. Once the butter was melted, in goes the egg! Once it starts too bubble up and set, I put the sliced mushrooms and kimchi in it, then flipped one end over.

Keeping all the ingredients to one side really makes it easier on you when you go to fold the omelette. I wait for it to set, then slide it out onto a cutting board and slice it up.

This was set to the side while I used the same skillet to prepare the onions and carrots. I want them really soft and tasty so they were cooked until JUST before they caramelized fully on me, I wanted them to have a sweet developed flavour but not TOO sweet. (alright, I’m crazy. I could have caramelized them fully but hey, maybe I was hungry and wanted to eat faster :p )

That’s pretty much all the cooking that is involved in this dish. It’s freaking easy. At this point I set out a large bowl with water, and followed the instructions for hydrating the rice wraps. I REALLY need practice at this part, it was a major pain in my rear! I’ll be asking some friends for advice on how to do these properly, as the wraps tend to fold in on themselves and become a sticky mess while I’m doing it. The instructions had me soak them in water for 5-10 seconds, then dry off and fill/roll. I’m thinking there HAS to be a better way, and at least one person has confirmed that there is. (steaming, hotwater/cold water baths etc). Once you’ve fumbled through rehydrating your rice wrap and have one out, we can continue.

For these wraps I started with a bit of rice, some omellete, and the onion/carrot mixture. Put them on the rice wrap closer to one side, fold the bottom over, the sides in, and roll it up. Same basic technique as a burrito.

Here we are, with minimal work we have created some breakfast wraps. Definitely adding lettuce next time, and maybe more hot sauce.

Hopefully this gives you some more idea’s of what you can do in the kitchen, for now, I’m out to enjoy another week. I’m going on vacation to the cabin in BC soon, and really looking forward to it as things certainly have NOT been easy on this side of the keyboard. Found out this week that I need to go in for some thyroid surgery to have some bits removed, and there has been some stress related to that. Nothing much to worry about as I am in good hands, and I’m going to try my hardest not to let it get in the way of updating my recipes on here- I love doing these blogs and look forward to it every week. I WILL try to bring my camera with me to the cabin though, because I have a few things that I definitely want to try blogging here! (mmmm… whole fish baked in a firepit)

till next week,

Sean

There is a local Italian market I go to frequently named Soffrito’s, on Canyon Meadow’s drive. I go there frequently, they sell a lot of goods including gluten-free pasta, italian import goods, specialty salts, cheese, sausage, and herbs. Recently, they’ve started offering a wide variety of olive oils and vinegars that they allow you to sample- Labeled with where they came from (most are from BC), how they are made, and what level of phenols and other associated chemicals that they have.

Last time I was there I picked up a 1L tin of whole canned Roma tomatoes, and a bunch of fresh basil.

I love these Riga tomatoes actually – they have a TON of flavour! If I can’t get my hands on enough fresh tomatoes or local jarred ones from the farm these are my go-to.

It was decided that I would be making a pasta sauce with the tomatoes and basil so I picked up a bunch of ground beef and pork while I was at it. No sense sticking to one type of meat when there is so much variety out there! I also got myself some more tomato puree and some tomato paste.

Tomato paste helps everything thicken up without having to add flour.

First I cut up my vegetables. Sometimes I do this while the beef is browning, but I wanted to add a little bit of my vegetables in with it to help spice up the meat. I used Onion, Garlic, Carrot, Celery, fresh Basil, and mushroom. I also added in some bay leaf, thyme, oregano, and a small dash of chilli powder.

It’s important to make sure your vegetables are a uniform size. This helps them all cook at the same rate of time, while making your end product more impressive.

I need work on that part….

now, to the cooking!

First: Brown your beef. I add in some of my onion and garlic, and some of the dried herbs. browning the beef first seems to give it a much better texture, and we can get the flavours of the beef going a lot better this way. It also gives me a chance to drain out the fat that cooks out of the beef – we don’t need that.

as usual, if you have more beef than pan do this in batches. It cooks faster and tastes better than if you do it all at once. Once your beef has browned up, let it drain while you start to saute the veg in the same pan. I add more olive oil, and then a dash of wine or water to help get all the brown bits from the beef off the bottom and all over the veg.

Here you can see that everything has softened and gotten a delicious caramel colour to it:

The basil and mushrooms have not been added yet. We’ll get to them, hold your horses! At this point I opened up the big tin of tomatoes and got them in the pot, stirring everything up. They take a while to break down and cook out, but it’s well worth it! This gets you a lot more flavour and texture than if you used a can of tomato sauce.

Don’t be afraid to moosh and mash at the tomatoes with your wooden spoon! It’s part of the fun, and it’ll help them break down a lot better. You want your tomatoes to simmer for quite a bit before adding in the tomato paste, tomato puree, and ground beef. If you add in the beef too early, you’ll destroy the texture of it. This is why I cook it before hand,and reserve it.

add in the ground meat, the tomato puree and tomato paste. Cook it down for a bit to get things thickened. Once I have a fairly thick flavour and consistency, I’ll add in the chopped mushrooms and basil. I can then cook that up for about an hour after adjusting salt and spices, or add in some water and cook it for much longer for a more developed finish.

That’s pretty much all there is to it! At this point I put on some gluten-free pasta (the corn Pasta Soffrito sells VERY delicious. My roommates actually prefer it to wheat pasta when I’m willing to share it!

I toss my pasta with a bit of fresh olive oil before service as the stuff I have is high quality as well as delicious. If I don’t have it around I just use butter

Hopefully at this point you’re able to make a delicious pasta sauce for yourself, it really isn’t that hard… I’m thankful for having access to a wide variety of gluten free goods, so that I can continue having pasta as part of my food-kit. Though, this sauce goes great on it’s own – but is better with a carrier even if it’s just bread.

Until next week,
Sean

So recently I came to realize something: In all my culinary adventures, I’d missed trying fondue. Not sure how this happened, it’s just something my friends and I never got around to doing. This had to be rectified, as my current roommates LOVE fondue!

I recommend getting an electric fondue pot for this. It’s significantly easier than dealing with one that uses Sterno (those buffet fire gels) or a double boiler – but it is possible to have fondue without. We run an extension cord to the table so that we can all sit around the fondue pot, and have a blast chatting while dipping various breads and vegetables in the molten cheese. (yum!)

Prep:
Grate cheese. We use a mixture of Gruyere, Emmenthal, old white cheddar, and a single laughing cow cream cheese. The laughing cow for some reason just makes everything smooth and delicious- even if it’s in the minority.

here’s the cheeses we used:

and after grated them:

Once you have your cheese done, it’s time to make up some things to dip into it after you have it melted. We used gluten free bread, broccoli, Apple slices, pepperoni, and some boiled baby potatoes (salted). It doesn’t take long to prep these, but you do need to make sure they are large enough to stay on your forks; while being able to fit in your mouth in one bite. I keep cutting my bread too small when I do this, but it’s a work in progress.

if you toss the apple slices with a small amount of lemon or lime juice, they will keep from browning:

our bread and broccoli:

The prep is what takes the longest here. It’s best to do it all up in advance, keeping the dippable items in the fridge until you are ready for them.

now, on to the main event : the cheese fondue. This time we did it a little differently, adding some flavours in to the cheese itself. I was a fan of this particular fondue – however some people did not enjoy the tomato.

Melt butter in the fondue pot, add in shallots and garlic. Saute. Once they had started to sweat, we added some chopped tomato and let it simmer until they had softened up.

At this point comes a bit of a “secret” ingredient. A lot of people add white wine to a fondue, but we go one step further- and add kirsch too! the combination of white wine and kirsch gives the fondue a really good feel and it just seems to work better for us.

This is allowed to simmer and come up to heat again before we proceed. While this happening, we add a bit of cornstarch in with the cheese as it helps everything remain thick. Add the cheese in slowly bit by bit, allowing small batches to melt before you add more. This helps the consistency of the cheese remain smooth – trust me, it’s kinda gross if you get a real gritty fondue.

delicious melty cheese!

Once it has all been added and melted down we finished it with a few chopped tomatoes for colour.

The fondue pot was placed in the middle of the dining room table, friends gathered around, we had wine, cider, long pokey forks, and a hell of a good time dipping our food in cheese and eating it. Seriously. How the hell can anyone be sad when there is copious amounts of cheese to be had? *apologies to the lactose intolerent, please understand, seriously I love cheese*

Now that you’ve had a chance to make my Home made kimchi , here’s a recipe you can use it in!

The kimchi that I used in this recipe was a Chipotle version. It was easy to make and change the flavours up, I used Napa Cabbage, dried chipotle powder, onion and garlic in it. Innoculating with some of my lettuce kimchi made it ferment faster, and stronger.

Lets get started:
ingredients:
Onion, shallot, carrot, garlic, orange pepper, kimchi, canned whole tomatos (from the farm), stewing beef chunks.

Put stewing beef in a bowl with flour ( i used gluten free all purpose), salt, pepper, chilli powder, garlic powder. Toss to coat.

Brown your beef in the bottom of your stock pot, making sure you have an even layer. Do this in batches if you cannot, as not having contact withthe bottom makes them take longer to cook, and they do not get the carmalization we wish to contribute to the dish.

Once the beef is browned, reserve to the side with any liquid that is in the bottom. You will be adding this in later. I deglaze and add any brown bits to my beef aswell.

as you can see, they looked delicious!

at this point I crush up my spices while letting the vegetables start sauteing in the bottom of the pot. Here’s the spices I added, can you name them?

mmmmm they smelled quite delicious!

Once they are ground and I am content that the vegetables have sweated out, I add the spices in:

I also added my orange pepper, and let it saute for a bit. Then, comes the spicy part. Kimchi! I added 3 tablespoons and it was enough for a giant pot of soup! If you chop it a bit it will be easier to eat, as otherwise you’ll get giant cabbage pieces in your bowl.

once this was all mixed together, cooking away happily, I added in my can of tomato’s from the farm:

Now you’re done all the difficult work! seriously! It’s all waiting from now on. First,add the beef back in and reduce down the liquid until its thickened and delicious. here’s a shot of what my soup looked like after reducing:

once you are comfortable with classifying your reduction as “lovely” (or good enough… cough cough), it’s time to add liquid. You can add plain water if you want, there is a lot of flavour in here – but you will get the best results by using a stock. Beef stock preferred as it’s a beef soup, but I used chicken stock with mine and had no issues. It’s what I had in the freezer. With any of my recipes, substitution is usually not the end of the world.

Here you can see my soup simmering away, it will foam up just like a stock, and you WILL get a clearer more delicious soup if you skim off the foam that builds up.

and, after a few brief moments ( it will NOT take long due to the reduction and amount of work we put into the vegetables – everything should be cooked by that point), you’ll have a delicious kimchi soup to serve up. This does not take long at all, it’s one of the fastest soups i’ve been able to make. I really, really liked it – normally we end up with a lot of leftover soup in the freezer, but this pot was gone in DAYS.

Here is my end product. As always, I hope you at least manage to discover a new flavour- even if you are not comfortable making the recipe yourself.

Eat well, and I’ll talk to you next week!

This week I decided to do something different. When I was at my mom’s house, she was preparing a mussel dish that I’ve had before and really love – and I wanted to share this experience with you.

Here is a photo journey through my mom’s creation of our supper:

This recipe is from a cookbook my Mother picked up at Santiago’s in Victoria, BC. She has had nothing but good things to say about her experience at the restaurent; and we have had much success with the cookbook that they sell. If you are in the area, I would recommend popping by.

Chipotle Cream Mussels

Saute Onion,Sundried Tomato,some Chipotle Peppers (not the liquid yet), and Garlic.

Deglaze with vinegar, add the liquid from the chipotle and reduce it a bit.

Add cream to the mixture.

Reduce until thick. You’ll know it’s ready when you can make a trench with a spatula and it doesn’t flow in right away.

Add a healthy dose of white wine,

Now the mussels go in,

Cover the mussels.

Mussels will open up when they are cooked. If they do not open, they have gone bad and you do NOT want to eat them.

All our mussels opened up for us!

We shared the wine that was left over.

It was really good served on rice, with a gluten free bread we picked up. Udi’s is my favourite brand, they’ve managed to make a line of exceptional gluten free breads, and other products.

Thank you Santiago’s for a great recipe, and the good time that I had with my Mother creating delicious food and a time well spent.