Pumpkin, bacon, Parmesan soup

A few years ago, I made my first pumpkin and bacon soup. You don't have to do much to make it tasty. And you don't have to use pumpkin (one of the tougher squashes to find out of season). My favourite is hubbard, which is also great for dishes like warm squash salad where you don't want much moisture. 

Squash, onions, garlic, bacon, thyme. I ended up complicating it only a bit by enriching the broth with Parmesan, but it's really that simple.

Vegan walnut lettuce wraps

Readers and friends will know that I don't often go the vegan route. I'm more likely to serve a part of an animal you've never thought about eating than imitation meat. But when I saw a recipe for walnut lettuce wraps with jicama slaw and avocado cream, I was intrigued enough to try.

It turns out it's delicious. Prepared this way the walnuts are a much better stand-in for meat than TVP, the avocado sauce is better than soy-based sour cream, and put together the wraps were light and fresh tasting. They'd be good with some quesa fresca, but they were also good on their own.

I'd make two changes to the recipe: drain the jicama before you add it to the other slaw ingredients, and add a bit of cold water to the blender if your avocado cream is too thick.

Watercress and Mahimahi soup

Greetings, friends! It's been a while.

Some time last year I tried making a watercress and leek soup. It was okay, but missing something when hot, even though it was quite tasty cold.

Tonight I decided to give it another go, but with some changes to deal with the fact that I didn't have a few ingredients for the original recipe and wanted to incorporate some protein. The results were much tastier, but still healthy. Rejoice! Then make soup.

Ugly Pizzas

My friend Vanessa may have created a monster by introducing me to the 101 Tastes of Ottawa List from Ottawa Magazine. I don't plan to try the whole list (I'm not going to pay for a whole meal at The Whalesbone Oyster House on the off-chance that they will serve browned butter, which I can make at home.) and a lot of it is stupid (Kale?!) but it's a handy guide for narrowing down a lot of things to those worth trying.

Meanwhile, my friend Lucia recently gifted me some smoked ricotta that her parents brought back from Italy.

Sooooo delicious.

Number 92 on the 101 Tastes list is Pingue's Prosciutto (not from Ottawa, but whatever) that can be purchased at a great deli/butcher/grocer/baker called The Piggy Market in Westboro.

I don't know about you, but to me ingredients as delicious as these scream "Pizza!"

Tri tip with chimichurri

I was feeling like a little something fancy on Friday night and decided Argentinian-inspired was the name of the game when I saw a tri tip steak at the butcher. I've had steak with chimichurri in the back of my mind as a possibility for a while now.

I couldn't find a recipe that worked for me, so I took what I know about Argentinian flavours (I know some but not all of the things) and went with it. I made a rub for the meat from garlic, salt, thyme, cumin, pepper, and oregano and my own rendition of chimichurri to top it.

Apple & Cranberry Breakfast Quinoa

Since the weather's gotten colder I've been digging hot breakfast. This happens every year.

Last year I was all about the cream wheat, but since I found pantry moths in mine a few weeks back I've sort of lost my appetite for it. I love oatmeal, but I love oatmeal buried in brown sugar and milk - great as a treat but not the healthiest way to start the day. Enter: quinoa.

Mexican corn

Corn season has wrapped up, but the off-season stuff has gotten a lot better in the past few years, and darnit, I'm not ready to stop using the barbecue yet.

I've had a recipe like this one kicking around for a while and had been meaning to try it, but I like to use corn as a healthy starch with summery meals, and slathering mayo, sour cream, and cheese all over corn does not seem like the healthiest way to serve it. And is it really Mexican? I don't actually know.

What it is for sure is really, really good.