Cooking Escapades

Home made spring rolls! Filling: tofu, carrot, cabbage

Home made French macaroons! Time consuming but tasty. Recipe from Cooks Illustrated. Made on the same day as the cream puffs when my friend came over.

Indian steamed rice cakes – “Idli”.  Between dropping one tray and a few going mouldy in the fridge, I still ended up with a decent yield.

Heart shaped oatmeal spice muffins w/ condensed milk. Mm .. you can feast your eyes on my cappucino as well. The heart shaped muffin thing was made of silicone and broke. I’m back to round ones now.

Baby spinach / grape / fresh mozzarella salad w/ a home made dressing I learned from Suzie, my 65 year old roommate from the early Toronto days. Good mustard + balsamic vinegar + olive oil. Tasty! I use Maille Old Style mustard. Mmm. I ate it with basic spaghetti made with store bought sauce. I had some wine too. Might as well!

Cornbread. I had the urge to make this because I went to a local crepe shop and had some yummy cornbread there. Mine turned out decent but wasn’t as decadent and buttery as the other one I had. That’s probably a good thing…  Recipe from allrecipes.com

This was my “taco on a stale baguette” creation. I had I brushed the bread with olive oil and toasted it before loading it with the taco filling. Tasted good!

Home made cannellini bean soup. Recipe from Giada de Laurentis’ cooking show. I watched a couple of clips on hulu.com

Espresso. I love my cappucino machine. It only cost around a hundred bucks and was sooo worth it! The steamed milk alone!

This is the first time I bought mascarpone cheese. Here it’s on some home made muffins. Added raspberries for flavour and colour!

Chocolate ganache tarts on shortbread topped with raspberries. Crazy rich. Recipe modified from epicurious.

Home made cream puffs. Recipe from a baking class at George Brown college. I made this recipe a total of 3 times. I was only successful the first time. You can see in the photo below that the puffs were perfect – toasty and crisp on the outside but very light inside. My other attempts yielded weird mushy things :(. I made the chocolate glaze by melting chocolate chips with some butter.

Cream puffs pre-chocolate

Quinoa soup.  So easy and good!

Homemade thai curry. I’ve learned that the texture of coconut milk I use greatly affects the quality of curry. Plus the amount of green curry flavouring I add also really affects the meal. This was the 3rd or 4th time I made thai curry and it was the worst. Uggh. It was edible the first day and for lunch, but after that the veggies soaked up all the curry and it became slimy. I threw out the left overs.

I took this photo because I thought the bananas were delicious. Lately I’ve gotten into eating sliced bananas with cereal. Highly recommended!