recipes

I Found It!!

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After twenty-seven years of marriage, I finally decided that being the ideal European wife (born in Canada) to my European counterpart husband (also born in Canada), was no longer a feasible option in my life. My role as the European stay at home wife / mother didn’t really apply since I HAVE A FULL TIME JOB. It was time for change and I was not backing down. Communication. Open and honest communication is what was needed. Right?

I will provide an instant replay of our conversation:

ME: I think you can start making dinner on days when you aren’t working. (We Europeans don’t call it supper).

HIM: Fine…fine…fine. I will quit my job and then I can make dinner every night.

ME: Uh…that’s not how it works. I have a full time job AND I make dinner every night.

HIM:

ME: You aren’t working tomorrow. I have a fantastic recipe here for beef ribs. They are slow cooked in the oven. Follow the recipe. Make a side of potatoes or rice or whatever else you feel like making.

HIM: Sure. No problem. I can do that. #snarky

ME: #doubtful

Fast forward to next day

(cell phone rings) It’s my husband. I look anxiously at my watch. I have my weekly group meeting at 10am and he is calling me at 9:52am? Do I have time to answer? #regret

ME: Hello?

HIM: Ok, I was going over the recipe you gave. I have to get these ribs in the oven by 10 o’clock a.m. so we have eight minutes.

ME: (loud and almost symphonic sound of “Carmina Burana”)

HIM: Hello?

ME: I have my meeting in 8 minutes. What’s up?

HIM: Ok, so the recipe says I need barbecue sauce.

ME: Ok.

HIM: Where is the barbecue sauce?

ME: It’s in the fridge. On the door. Right side. Round bottle. Black lid.

HIM: I don’t see it.

ME: It’s there. On the door. Bottom shelf or one shelf up.

HIM: I don’t see it. pause. Oh, wait. Nope, that says “pickles”.

ME: (hangs up. It is 9:54am. Makes FaceTime call.)

HIM: (answers FaceTime call) – Why did you hang up on me?

ME: I don’t have time for this! I have a meeting at 10am!

HIM: Don’t yell at me. I have to get these ribs…

ME: (Rudely interrupting him) Let me see the shelf!

HIM: What? (looking at me intently)

ME: Turn your phone around so I can see the fridge door!

HIM: How do I do that?

ME: Don’t worry about the flip part, just physically turn your phone around so I can see the fridge. Put your phone on speaker.

HIM: (put phone on speaker): Can you hear me?

ME: (time: 9:55) YES! Move the phone down.

HIM: (picks up a jar) – this has a black lid…

ME: Those are olives. It says olives!

HIM: Yeah. That’s not barbecue sauce.

ME: (eyes roll so loudly it sounds like bowling balls). MOVE YOUR PHONE DOWN!!

HIM: Don’t yell at me!

ME: THERE!!! Right there! That black lid!!!

HIM: That’s mayonnaise! (pointing to the super white squeeze bottle)

ME: NOOOOO! Right beside it!

HIM: (finally picks up the right bottle) That’s not barbecue sauce. It says Stubb’s….(pause). Oh…(more reading). Ah… there it is. Bar-B-Que sauce.

ME: deep breathing to restore calmness. Also observing my colleagues with fists in mouths and bent over laughing. Then I hear this whispered from the gang: “THIS SHOULD BE A TIK TOK VIDEO!” (Back to spouse): Ok, so you’re good?

HIM: Yes.

ME: (exhales)

HIM: No….wait. Recipe says we need smoked salt. We don’t have that.

ME: Yes we do. (#IDIOT! why did I tell the truth?). If you look in the pantry you will see a cylindrical container with a black lid. (oh noooooooooo…..black lid! Just like the barbecue sauce fiasco). It’s in the pantry that is to the left of the fridge. Second pull out drawer from the bottom or third one from the top. It’s stuck so don’t try to pull it out! There is an olive oil bottle and vegetable oil bottle in there and it should be behind those.

HIM: (Bends down [he is 6’4″ after all] and pulls out a cylindrical container with a black lid. (reading, slowly annunciating) Faaaaaaaaarm Boooooooy – Himaaaaaalaaaaayaaaaaan Piiiiiiink Salt.

ME: You’re close! It is the exact same container but the label will say “Smoked Salt”. (me looking at watch). It’s 9:58. I gotta go. Text me when you’ve found it. (disconnect)

Now that my phone conversation has dramatically ended, I can now focus on the raucous laughter that has been playing in the background of my ever-so-urgent conversation with my husband.

One minute until meeting time so we rush to share in this quasi-dysfunctional experience of my life.

RANDOM COMMENTS:

  • OMG! That is a Tik-Tok video. (raucous laughter)
  • You should have a podcast! That’s hilarious!
  • Does he do this all the time ?
  • Put him on speaker next time !

BING! 10:00am – meeting time

Earbuds in. Click on join meeting. Good to go.

I am 10 minutes into the meeting when I hear the PING or my personal phone. It’s a text message from my significant other. I quickly grab my cell phone worried about what new life dilemma has occurred only to find a photo of the ever elusive smoked salt and an upbeat comment of “found it”. Life goes on.

Please note that although this particular spice drawer is locked in place the items on it live in a drawer that is 2 feet by 2 feet. Not a lot of space that needs to covered, yet it took my humble hubby 12 minutes to discover the special container.

I am sure there are some who will believe that my glorious husband went above and beyond his call of duty to ensure that we had the most exotic and flavourful meal. He followed that recipe as if it was a treasure map and would not be dissuaded from finding all the necessary ingredients.

And I would like to thank Mark Bland and his Helpdesk for Men. This is what my day felt like. https://www.tiktok.com/@mark_bland/video/7261624424481393966?lang=en

@mark_bland

Wait time is currently 3 hours… #marriagehumor #marriedlife #marriagecomedy #married #wivesoftiktok #husbandsoftiktok

♬ original sound – Mark Bland

What’s For Supper?

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Remember me? I am the one who is constantly thinking of food. A trip to the grocery store is torturous for some, yet I relish in wandering the aisles and seeing what’s new on the food scene. This will eventually lead to me googling recipes that will include my new ingredient. This is my happy place. My world of wonder. That is, until my husband, Wiseguy, calls me at 10am at work and asks, “What’s for supper?” I am not sure what sort of trigger that phrase is for me, but my heart starts palpitating, my blood pressure goes up, and I feel like She Hulk ready to SMASH! I will try and explain.

We have been married for almost three decades (I could have said twenty-seven years, but decades definitely makes it sound longer). The first few years were filled with my desire to create a loving home with delicious home cooked meals. Growing up in a European household, with a stay at home mom, did not provide me with the fortuitous education of any culinary skills. Even when asked to assist my maternal unit, it was to circularly stir something in a pot and I, apparently, did it wrong every time. So, learning to cook for my new husband and stepchildren was at the top of the To Do list. It went so well! Kind of.

Wiseguy actually could cook. So imagine when, I meticulously imitated my mother’s way of making sunnyside up eggs. I poured an inch of oil into the pan, turned the heat on high, cracked the egg over the pan and was immediately assaulted with hot spits of oil upon my person. OUCH! My husband came over to assess the situation and asked two very good questions:

  1. Why did you pour all that oil in?
  2. You do know there is a dial on the stove so you can put the temperature higher or lower?

Hmmmm, lessons learned. For eggs I started using a pat of butter, and most of my cooking was now done on lower heat. That fixed the breakfast portion of my culinary life.

Supper. At my childhood home it was always called dinner. Apparently, the term dinner is for fancy meals. Regular, everyday persons, call it supper, but I digress. My first attempt at roast beef was extraordinary! It was sooooooo good! The pizza, that is. My beef was hard as a rock and you could easily shingle a roof with it. Lesson learned. I would not make roast beef again for another twenty years. Now that’s trauma for you.

Fast forward to today. The children are grown and living on their own. When special occasions occur, I will still go out of my way to make the most wonderful food and spoil my loved ones. With life encompassing just me and my Wiseguy, I have sort of become disinterested and fatigued in the daily need to create creative meals. It appears that after decades of blissful marriage, the only thing left to discuss is: “What’s for supper?” Everyday. And then you die. Right? Does anyone else feel that way?

Again, being brought up in the European standards, we don’t get the luxury of, say, having a bowl of cereal for dinner. That is not an option. The European ethos states: For all dinners (American translation: supper) thou shalt char meat, accompanied by a hot carbohydrate (potatoes / pasta) or rice. Thou shalt attempt to have vegetables of the green variety, cruciferous, if desired by your husband. If not skip the veg and enjoy your meal. Done. My favorite meal if my husband isn’t home? I grab a slice of salami, layer a slice of cheese upon it, and add a pickle. Roll it up. Eat it. Dinner done and there is no clean up! But noooooooo…we are recreating the lives of our ancestors on a nightly basis.

I believe that my creative juices for cooking have gone to the wayside. I have fried, boiled, broiled, grilled, baked for almost thirty years. Add to that working forty five hours a week and then coming home, not to relax after a long day, but to happily prepare a delicious meal in forty-five minutes. (Truth be told, it takes an hour. Still working on that ultimate time goal.) Saturdays used to be my happy-go-hunting day for exciting new foodstuff or newly introduced condiments, to be prepped and ready to surprise my Wiseguy with an exhilarating and adventurous new recipe. Now I prefer to step outside our front door and enjoy life outside the home which would include restaurant lunch dates where SOMEONE ELSE does the cooking for me. No planning. No cooking. No clean up.

Maybe, I’m just in a stagnant cooking funk. This might miraculously lift soon and I’ll be back to pouring over cook books and searching out new meal ideas and then BAM! Back to being gloriously excited about meal making again.

It’s 10:00am. My cell phone will be ringing soon. Oh, there it goes. Hubby is calling me. Wonder what he’s going to ask?

Chef…a culinary experiment

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I love to cook.  I love to buy colourful foods (vegetables and fruits) and figure out what to make with them.  I love to research (basically “Google” recipes) and try out new things.  I have now expanded my culinary skills to actually NOT following a recipe.  Does that mean I’m a chef?  Well, that is a definition I actually looked up.  Chef means that you cook meals for people.  Yes I do that!  It mentions something about restaurants too…ok, I don’t have a restaurant, but anyone eating at my home and people I work with think I should open one. Very complimentary, but I don’t think I’m quite at that level.  Anyway, in my mind “chef” has a different meaning.  CHEF – Can Have Experimental Food!  Yes, anyone eating my food is my chosen guinea pig to test new things.  Welcome to my thoughts and dissertations on food.

Food.  I could say it’s a love/hate relationship but I would be lying.  I LOVE FOOD!  I love experimenting with new recipes.  I love prepping it.  I love cooking it.  I love eating it.  Notice…there is a lot of love here.  The hate part is…I LOVE FOOD!  Let me explain my absolute food weaknesses…McDonald’s french fries.  I swear those are like crack-cocaine to me.  I don’t do drugs, but these hot little sticklettes make me weak in the knees.  After that or almost neck and neck is pizza.  What kind of pizza?   Hmmmm…thin crust, thick crust, tomato sauce style, white garlic/oil style.  Mozzarella or goat cheese.  Pepperoni or roasted eggplant and zucchini with balsamic drizzle.  To add to my super cholesterol heart-stopping food fest…CHICKEN WINGS!!!!  I am a Wing-nut!!  (In many ways…)  Those are my favourite, unhealthy indulgences.  Do I have an unhealthy relationship with food?  Perhaps…but what relationship is perfect?   Am I right?

History lesson:  when cooking as a child with my mother I got to lick the spinny-things from the hand mixer.  I got to mix the tomato sauce for pasta.  I got to eat pizza dough (oops…that was never supposed to be revealed).  My cooking lessons were as follows:

Mama:  NE TAKO!  (translation:  NOT LIKE THAT!)

Mama:  Sporije!  (translation:  slower!)

Mama:  Ovako.. (translation:  like this…)

Mama:  NE TAKO!  (translation:  NOT LIKE THAT!)

Mama:  Ovako mjesaj  (translation:  Mix like this)

Mama:  NE TAKO! (translation:  NOT LIKE THAT!)

So…there you have my basic cooking lessons.

Oh wait!  There are two more phrases my mother always used:

Mama:  Na umjerenoj vatri (translation:  bake at 350…she actually had to explain what middle heat meant and then I finally realized it was always 350 degrees)

And last but not least:

Mama:  Otprilike (about or approximately).  Yes most recipes had that included.  Any seasonings you were to use like salt or pepper, you were basically guessing how much was needed.  For a newbie learning how to cook that never helped.

So, when I started sharing my knowledge with others I improved the lessons I had received.  I liked to train by smell.  I also did not use measurements (bad teacher), but I would have the meat in a bowl, and then I would cover the tops of the meat with salt or pepper or paprika.  We would mix the meat and then I would ask my “student” to smell.  Yes…you can actually smell salt and pepper and paprika and you could know if there was too much.  Seriously!  Again, for beginners we would start with a few shakes because you can always start with less and add more but you can’t take away if you have added too much.  There.  That is my greatest cooking advice.

Am I a chef?  Yes, in my mind I totally am.  I cook food for people.  I love cooking!  I am practising baking (not quite perfect yet, but it’s all in the learning).  I have the best kitchen with my Wolf Subzero Stove.   I think that people who have tasted my creations can vouch for me.

To summarize…I LOVE COOKING!  I love filling my house with family (approx 20+ people) and cooking and enjoying their reactions to my recipes.  Nervous?  Absolutely!  I want everyone to love it!  Yes…there goes that “love” word again.  Why?   I truly believe that feeding people with food is nourishing, but I also believe that the love that I put into making my food transmits into internal happiness for those who consume it.  Food isn’t just about livelihood, it’s about sharing and caring.

My newest adventure is with old fashioned European foods (lately Italian), and putting my own educated spin on it.  Check out this lovely plain recipe full of flavoured layers and many “oh my this is good” in between bites!  My latest heartfelt and enjoyable culinary experiment.

RECIPE:

1 half baguette

1 large garlic clove

4 tbsp buratta (I think…approximately)

4 tbsp balsamic drizzle (basically balsamic vinegar and honey boiled down for 30 minutes until thickened…”google” for an actual recipe…otherwise…meh…approximately what you think will work)

THERE!  Authentic European recipe.  MANGIA!  (That’s amore…I mean Italian!)

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Toasted french stick bread, rubbed with fresh garlic. Buratta spread on top and drizzled with homemade balsamic drizzle

 

Mmmm … savory tarts

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I believe I had mentioned before that I love to cook.  My favorite meal:  the appetizer.   I love going out to dinner with Monkey Breath…a.k.a. my niece.  (One day I will explain my obsession with giving people bizarro nicknames…lol)  For now I will just tell you about our dinner dates.

Our meal outings involve us turning to the first page of the menu.  Yes, appetizers.  I can forgo any main meal and just enjoy nibbling and noshing on a variety of treats.  Well MB is the same.   Once we order our variety of nibblers, we suddenly have no room for our plates since every appetizer comes out on a large plate all prettily decorated.  But who cares right?  We will have garlic bread with cheese (always cheese…you recall that obsession of mine).  We will have sticky, chicken wings.  We will order mozzarella sticks.  We will order an oriental salad.  On other days, we will have nachos with cheese and bruschetta (Monkey Breath’s all time favourite).  Quesadillas are wonderful too.  We LOVE the appetizer dishes. Sadly, our great need for diversity has us clutching our stomachs because we just have to try everything and our bellies just don’t have that much expansion room.  So, we are extremely grateful to have those lovely little take away containers given to us so that we can enjoy our meal again the next day.  Hopefully we will have made some room in our stomachs by then.  Mmmmm, sooooo good.

Now, I told you that story so that I could tell you this one. 

While grocery shopping (at a leisurely pace) this past weekend, I came to the cheese counter to find out what yummy cheeses were on sale this week.  Mozzarella was on sale so that was good as I was running low and my cheese-aholics would surely be craving some soon.  I wandered around some more and saw that all the Greek cheeses were on sale.  That was nice.  I love making a salad for my lunches comprised of tomatoes and cucumbers and feta.  No salad dressing needed as the feta has a nice, salty taste to it and the juice from the tomatoes mixes nicely with the cheese to make a sort of salad dressing all on its own.  I was just about to leave the Greek display when I saw it.  OMG!  It was halloumi.  Yes yes…real halloumi cheese!  

Now, you may be asking yourself, what the heck is halloumi?  Short description:  It’s a brined cheese made of goats and sheep milk.  The longer description is that it has a higher melting point than other cheeses (i.e. mozzarella) so you can fry it, grill it, bake it.  Really neat right?

So, about two years ago, in the local newspaper, there was a recipe for halloumi tarts.  Wiseguy read it and said, “We should make this.”  Hmmm, what the heck was halloumi?  So, we went to our favourite grocery store and asked for this bizarre sounding cheese and yup…they actually had it.  We brought it home.  Opened up the plastic packaging and cut off a taster piece.  Hmmm, kind of salty, cheese.  Kind of like mozzarella, but firmer.  Then we took our recipe and began creating.  After baking, it was time to taste.  Mmmmm.  Just one more tart.  Mmmmmmm.  Ok, this is the last one.   Mmmmmm.  Ok, all gone…we have to bake some more.  Well, for the last 2 years I could not find this cheese again.  So, imagine my surprise and overwhelming joy at seeing that it’s back!

Let me tell you, this is definitely one recipe that you will love to make again and again. So easy and quick and your guests will love it.  Especially when it’s hot out of the oven.  Opa!

Welcome to my World of Appetizers!  (I will surely be posting many, many more for you to enjoy)

Halloumi Tarts

Ingredients:

  • 36 cherry tomatoes (quartered)
  • 5 oz. (about 1 ¼ cups) halloumi cheese (cut into ¼  inch cubes)
  • 2 tbsp fresh thyme, chopped
  • 36 mini pie tarts
  1.  Preheat oven to 375 °F
  2. Place pie tarts (unbaked) on cookie sheet
  3. Place 4 tomato quarters in each pie tart. 
  4. Wedge about 3 -4 pieces of halloumi cheese between the them
  5. Season with chopped thyme
  6. Bake for about 15-30 minutes or until the pastry and the cheese is a bit browned
  7. Allow to cool a bit before serving

 Serves 12 people (approximately 3 each)

There was some assembly required,
but now ready for the oven

All baked and ready to enjoy.
OPA!

Hello world!

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This is it!

I have finally decided that I should enter the exciting blogosphere world!

I myself am an avid googler and searcher of all things exciting and popular and fun and educational.

My life, like everyone else’s, is full of so many interesting people, places, and things.  I am hoping to share my joys and my sorrows (which I am hoping are few and far far between). Life is a wonderful adventure and with my husband (a.k.a. wiseguy) of 21 years, he has been the one that makes me laugh and has always been the one that could bring me out of a slump or make me laugh until my stomach ached.  I’m a lucky girl for that.

I have happily become the proud stepmom or 3 grown children and 5 grandchildren.  Being part of their lives has also been an experience in and unto itself.  Love you guys!

So, this is it!

Welcome to my blog and to my life.  I am happy to be able to share with you the interesting view I have of life and my opinions on it as well. Agree or disagree with me, it makes for an interesting read.

I welcome myself to the Land of Blogs and am really excited about my new journey into the realm of the unknown.  Computer illiterate…yes, that would be me.  I welcome anyone willing to spend any minute amount of time actually wondering what has gotten into my head on a daily basis.   (We’ll work through the cobwebs and the derailed trains of thought together.)

Looking forward to newfound friends and intriguing commentaries.  Enjoy because…this is it!