pasta Tag

It's Shrove Tuesday and everyone's flipping pancakes and frying fritters. Me? I'm trying my hand at crostoli — a crispy, fried dough so light it's almost like you're not eating. Variations appear throughout Europe with different names and different shapes, but the distinctive blistered dough...

Some cookbooks have a way of breathing life into everyday ingredients. Some produce delicious dishes you will turn to again and again. Others peek into foreign worlds — celebrity kitchens, orchard tours, or chef-approved culinary techniques. Melt: The Art of Macaroni and Cheese by Stephanie...

For some reason, the recipe for slow-cooker vegetarian quinoa lasagna didn't attach to its post the other day. Could have been technology. Could have been me? I choose to blame technology. Either way, I had people asking for the recipe. So here it is.
Mairlyn Smith owes me a new crockpot. Sort of. She didn't actually come to my house and break mine, but because of her I learned just how bad my old one was. At her recommendation I made the slow-cooker lasagna from The Vegetarian's Complete Quinoa Cookbook (Whitecap, 2012), and a potential new entry to my Kitchen Disaster & Fixes app was born. Turns out my slow cooker was okay as long as the meal inside was liquid. Soup? Bring it on! Sloppy curry? No problem. Hot apple cider? You bet. But once that layer of protective moisture was gone, my now ex-slow cooker turned into a lean, mean charring machine. In less than the recommended cooking time, set on Low, it burned a well-defined ring around the bottom of  my lasagna. When I made the dish in my sister's fancy new, 6-litre, programmable KitchenAid slow cooker it worked perfectly. So, Mairlyn, I'll place my order for one of those. Okay?
Update: Since The Three Farmers won their bid on Dragon's Den, I have been getting a lot of questions about this oil. If you are interested in buying some, there is a list of retail outlets on the Three Farmers' site. Click here to see the list.
Is bright yellow the new olive green? These tiny mustard-coloured seeds are from the Camelina plant. Although popular in Europe since the 1940s, Camelina oil has been commercially available in Canada only since December 2010. I'm no trend spotter, but if I'm right, Camelina might be Canada's answer to imported extra virgin olive oil. 

Bet you thought I was done with the fresh tomato recipes for a while. So did I. But I was given some environmentally conscious, on-the-vine hydroponic Ontario tomatoes (say that three times fast!) at the Royal Winter Fair and I just couldn't bear to toss them in...

The deed is done. I have picked all the tomatoes, uprooted the plants and put the garden to bed. Green tomatoes outnumber the red, but who's counting. I'd like to think the tomatoes didn't want to go any more than I wanted to remove them. I...

Not bad for a first try. Gnocchi has intimidated me ever since I visited friends in Italy and returned from a day of sight seeing to find my hosts and their entire kitchen covered in flour. While I was touring the colosseum in Verona, they'd spent...