All hail to the scotch egg
Thanks to thisiswhyyourefat.com for this one. I am a huge fan of the scotch egg, and it reminded me of the upcoming Toronto FC season, since it is one of the specialty foods available there.
For those who don’t know what a scotch egg is, see below:
-hard boiled egg
-covered in ground sausage
-breaded
-deep fried
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Not my kind of Pizza.
Credit to Joanne for this picture.
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Bacon Cheese Pizza Burger
This looks so good and so disgusting all at the same time. No matter how disgusting you think it is though, I would like to see somebody turn down at least a taste of this creation. You know curiosity would get the best of you, and you would have to try it if it were in front of you. I grabbed this pic from a pretty cool site thisiswhyyourefat.com and the description for this amazing culinary marvel is: “Giant burger between two large meat pizzas, eggs, bacon, colby and pepper jack cheese.”
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Butter Chicken in a box = fail
While shopping on the weekend, we came across the Gourmantra brand Butter Chicken meal kit. I love Indian food and butter chicken especially, so I was intrigued. My first instinct should have been to put it down and run away, but I decided I would give it a try. If any kind of intelligence had kicked it, I would have deduced that the only meal kit that is actually worth eating is tacos. Sadly, that was not the case.
The kit comes with basmati rice, a garlic/ginger puree, a tomato puree and a packet of “butter chicken spice blend”. I started out heating butter and the garlic/ginger puree, and I also added some chopped green chili’s to spice it up a bit. After that was all mixed together I added some cubes of chicken breast, it started to soak up the butter and puree and was starting to smell nice. After the chicken had cooked and was no longer pink the tomato puree and water was added to the mix to cook for another few minutes. This was really starting to smell more like an Italian dish than an Indian one, with the garlic and tomato being the predominant aromas. Now it was time to add the “butter chicken spice blend”, and this is when things took a bit of a turn. I’ve had my share of butter chicken, and this really didn’t smell like anything I had ever experienced. It wasn’t bad, but it just didn’t match my memory of what the dish should smell like. Having not mixed it in yet, I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, the smell didn’t really change much. The entire mixture took the aroma of this spice blend. It had a pungent and sweet aroma, that just wasn’t right. To be completely honest, it wasn’t bad, it just didn’t seem to fit. After the final mixture including some half and half cream cooked for a bit longer, I plated a bed of basmati rice and got ready to add the butter chicken on top. I thought the cream and dry spices would have thickened the sauce up a bit, but it really didn’t. I ended up having to drain the liquid as I was scooping out the chicken or I would have drowned the rice.
The final plate looked alright, but still had the same smell as that dry spice blend. I ended up eating it, and it was filling but not terribly tasty. The basmati rice was probably the highlight of the dish, and that is pretty hard to screw up. I guess next time I should actually try a real recipe and do the spices from scratch. Or, leave my consumption of Indian cuisine to the hands of a capable, authentic Indian restaurant.
The rest of the pics of the meal in progress are here
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Sunday Dinner
To borrow a page from dahil.ca, I have my own Sunday Dinner post. You can read his post (which arguably has more pictures and might have been tastier than mine) here.
It started last weekend, when I decided to renew my Costco membersheip and revisit all they had to offer. We weren’t really in the mood to cook a massive meal that night so we just picked up a few things including some chicken and salmon. All week we were salivating over some of the steaks we had seen, and decided to BBQ up some sides of beef this weekend.
So we made another trip out to Costco and wandered around for a bit. I had to exercise some serious self control in almost every department I was in, especially the electronics section. I was a bit disappointed in the selection of free samples this weekend though. Last weekend I was able to fill myself with a lunches worth of free samples, today I only had 3 samples and one of them was a piece of gum. Anyway, we found our perfect rib-eye steaks, picked up a few other things and left the store. I also grabbed a $1.99 hot dog on the way out.. This place is just rolling with deals, like this 20L tub of mayo. These can’t be for home consumption, can they? Maybe in Quebec?
Once the steaks were home, they were prepared in my special marinade. (Sorry not giving that one away) Which they soaked in all afternoon. Here is a pic I took of them soaking up the marinade:
Sadly, I didn’t get a pic of them when they were done but they looked great. The steak had homemade Italian sausage, caesar salad, rapini as sidekicks. I’m so full, I can barely type anymore. So I won’t. Next time I will get a few more pics, but I was so hungry by the time everything came off the BBQ, I couldn’t wait.
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Smoked Meat
Just ate at Dunn’s in Montreal. Had a Reuben with some amazing smoked meat:
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Happy new year!
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Mike’s Christmas Latte
After trying a Starbucks Eggnog Latte, I was sadly disappointed. It just seemed like a cup of warm, watery eggnog. It didn’t taste like coffee at all, even though I am assured it did have a shot of espresso in it.
I couldn’t help but think that I could do it better, and decided to give it a try. I used two shots of espresso, heated up some eggnog for 30 seconds in the microwave, frothed it with steam, then whipped it with an electric whisk. I put the two shots of espresso in the mug first, poured in the frothed eggnog, then spooned the frothed eggnog foam on top. I topped the foam with some cinnamon, and it was done. I have to admit, it turned out amazing.
Here is a picture of it, sadly it doesn’t capture the taste:
Gilead Cafe
Just came back from a very intersting lunch at Gilead Cafe, in the King St. East area of Toronto. Â It is owned by Jamie Kennedy and has a lot of freshly made lunch offerings, including fresh baked goods. The one item none of us could turn down was the Oxtail Poutine. It had a rather light taste for a poutine, but everything was fresh. The place is a bit far from the downtown core, but worth the trip for a good lunch. Â Here is a pic of my poutine:
