Chicken Marbella is, as I recently learned, is a somewhat of classic dish; one I had never heard of before. After reading several glowing reviews in magazines I decided I should try this dish out for myself. Recipes online tend to stick very close to the 1982 original from The Silver Palate Cookbook. For ours, I went a bit off script to get something closer to my all-time favourite, coq au vin.
Our preparation for the Super Bowl continues with a bar food classic, chicken wings. These wings are dressed down a bit from the breaded, sauce-coated flats and drumettes of your local sports bar. Rather than breading and saucing them up, we took advantage of a brief stop in the rain to cook them on the barbecue instead! The result is a wing that’s got just the right balance of crisp skin, moist inside, and delicious flavour.
Élizabeth and my relationship dates back to Super Bowl 50, when she cheered as the Broncos beat my childhood favourites the Carolina Panthers. Since then we’ve been on opposite sides of just about every major sporting event - and her team wins every time! Of course, the real competition isn’t on the field (or rink, or track, or court…), but in the kitchen! We do a lot of special meals to eat watching sports, but the Super Bowl/our anniversary is the big one. In lead up to it, we’re trying out some new recipes to see if they have what it takes to make it in the big leagues.
Bowls are all the rage, and for good reason. They’re easy to make, endlessly versatile, and extremely tasty. Plus, it’s much easier to say you’re eating a mushroom noodle bowl than to list all the things that are in it. With that in mind, we gave in to the trend and made ourselves a good one!
I grew up eating the same breakfast for years at a time! I think I got this from my dad. When I was very young, my dad and I ate an english muffin with cheeze whiz every morning. My dad eventually moved on from this delicacy to a giant wheat cereal which looked pretty gross to my 10 year old brain so I switched to toast and OJ! To my credit, I did vary between peanut butter-honey, peanut butter-jam and nutella! I kept this up for probably close to 10 years and I still sometimes reach for an english muffin with peanut butter (cheeze whiz is so 1990s… haha) and a banana but I need variety now that I am a sophisticated adult (or pretending to be anyways).
The holidays are officially over! I have been back home in Vancouver for about a week now and after spending a week eating all my mom’s delicious food, I was happy and relaxed but felt slightly sluggish! After an extended period of unhealthy eating I never feel hungry and never know what to cook so Jeff was in charge of the menu and the cooking last week! These fish tacos left me feeling satisfied and were definitely refreshing after the meat heavy meals of the holidays!
The holidays are starting verrrryyyy soon! Some of us are already on vacation and can write a bunch of blog posts (me) and some of us are still hard at work until the 22nd (Jeff)! Preparing for the holidays is stressful especially if you are hosting. If you have family or friends staying with you during this time and want to impress them with a fancy looking brunch, this quiche is the solution to all your problems!! It is super easy to make and ohhhh so good! I’m not kidding, I made twice in two weeks and I usually don’t like to eat the same things more than 3 times in week! It’s that good! It tastes MUCH better than it looks too haha!
Pâté Chinois is a typical Québec recipe. Although the direct translation of Pâté Chinois is Chinese pie this recipe is neither Chinese nor is it a pie. This recipe is fairly close to what the rest of Canada would call a Shepard’s pie but it’s not the same at all (Jeff says it is, I think English Canada Shepard’s pie is gross). The internet says it was named after the Chinese railway workers who would prepare it in the late 19th century! This dish is firmly ingrained in Québec’s culture and you don’t mess with the three ingredients: ground beef, corn and potatoes! A little bit of Québec trivia, when I was extremely young, there was this show on TV called La Petite Vie. It ran for 6 years and it made no sense, it was just the simple life of this weird family, the mom was actually played by a male actor dressed up as a women and the parents slept in an upright bed. One of the show’s recurring joke was that the daughter in law could never remember the recipe for Pâté Chinois and how to assemble it so the mom would always repeat: STEAK-BLÉ D’INDE-PATATE (french for ground beef-corn-potatoes). Here’s a picture of the cast in character just in case you are curious (source: http://www.lapresse.ca/arts/television/200912/19/01-932642-la-petite-vie-en-telerealite.php)!
Gingerbread men are a holiday tradition in the Trudel family and this recipe comes from a friend of the family! The cookies are usually baked and decorated by my sister, Dominique, and I usually just swoop in at the end and eat a couple of them! As I’m not going to be home for Christmas this year, I thought I would continue the tradition and make these cookies for Jeff and I! They were all gone in a few days!!
In the winter of 2017, a controversy around Hawaiian pizza erupted online and many people weighed in on whether or not pineapple should be a pizza topping (you know this is a serious matter when the Canadian Prime Minister weighs in on the subject). Jeff and I are definitely on #TeamPineapple! Whenever we order Domino’s (which is more often than we’d like of admit), an Hawaiian pizza is always part of the order, it’s just so good! We often make it at home too and today we share with you this delicious recipe! We challenge you to try this pizza at least once before you side with the President of Iceland in his quest to ban pineapple as a pizza topping!