Chicken Stock

I had a wonderful day in the kitchen yesterday, making chicken stock. I'm still working on the three farmer raised chickens I cut up, and yesterday I boiled the chicken backs that I had previously frozen. My reward was as pot of hearty chicken vegetable soup and ten cups of stock for the freezer. Wonderful!

Homemade Tortillas

We've been making homemade tortillas for a while now, and we absolutely love them. They are cheaper than store bought (about $0.44 for 12 vs. $3.00+ for 10), and they taste amazing. Every time. Sometimes we've made them and I've rolled them too thin, and then they cooked too long, making them crispy instead of soft...and they were still amazing. Hard to roll stuff up in them, but they were great for dipping and snacking.

The recipe I use for my tortillas comes from this blog, which has a really great tutorial. I only have slight changes in my method, but otherwise pretty much the same. So happy I found it, as we make these all the time.

Ingredients:
3 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/3 cup canola oil
1 cup hot tap water

Add flour, salt, and baking powder to large bowl and combine with a whisk. I love using a whisk to combine dry ingredients as it's so efficient. For this recipe, I use a giant silver bowl my Mom gave me and it works great.

Add 1/3 cup canola oil to flour mixture.

Mix with your fingers until it becomes fine crumbs.

Add 1 cup hot tap water.

Mix with your hands and form into a ball. Knead the ball 40 times (I just knead it right in the bowl).

Cover with a tea towel, and let rest for 30 minutes. Divide the ball into 12 discs. I do this by weighing the large ball and then making each disc a 12th of the weight. I like to measure because I'm not always great at eyeballing them to be the same size.

Let the 12 discs rest for 30 minutes.

Roll each disc into a tortilla around 8 inches wide. I don't flour my surface because they don't seem to need it. Sometimes they roll out into not quite circles, but they still work as tortillas.

Cook on a hot, ungreased pan for about one minute on each side. The tortillas will have a lot of bubbles when it is time to flip them. We use an electric griddle I got from Mom that works great for cooking two at a time. We turn it up to high and it is perfect.

Serve with a variety of different meals and enjoy. These are served with spicy chick peas and tomatoes on rice, wrapped up with Sriracha, cucumber dressing, fresh spinach, and diced purple onion. Yum!

Winging Wings

I got an excellent deal on chicken wings on Monday and John quickly made them into a mouth watering meal. He works without a recipe, so I'll give you a rough idea of what he did, but mainly he just sort of winged it. (Bad puns for the win!)

First he split the wings. We had 14 full wings which made 28 split. He put them in a bowl and sprinkled them with olive oil, pepper, and Montreal steak spice (our go-to spice mix).

He spread them on a baking sheet and cooked them at a high heat (450°F) until fully cooked (about 40 minutes), flipping once. 

Once fully cooked, he added the wings to a bowl for tossing.

John made an amazing spicy BBQ sauce for them that included: prepared hickory BBQ sauce, Sriracha sauce, vinegar, chili powder, and salt + pepper. Not sure of the exact amounts of each, but it was damn good! Here are the wings right after the sauce was added. Look at them steam! It had a wonderful smell.

We snacked on wings strait from the bowl while watching the Emmys Monday night. Quite fun. The coriander seeds from the Montreal steak spice added an amazing flavour to these crispy and saucy wings.

Poutine Pizza

My friend Amanda recently posted that she made Poutine Pizza. The idea was so over the top and fun sounding that it was only a matter of time before I tried it.

For anyone who doesn't know, Poutine is the wonderful mixture of french fries, cheese curds, and gravy. Seems like an odd thing to put on a pizza, but believe me, it works. Gravy is substituted for the pizza sauce, so there is no confusion of flavours.

I used Amanda's recipe, but didn't go the authentic distance and pick up cheese curds - I just used mozzarella. We also used a poutine add-in, using some deli ham that we thought would taste great on the pizza.

Step 1. Cook up some gravy. I used a package of Poutine Gravy which made 2 cups.

Step 2. Pre-cook your french fries. We used strait cut fries from a bag.

Step 3. Press your favourite pizza dough (we used homemade) into a pizza pan. Add enough poutine gravy to cover dough (as the pizza sauce).

Step 4. Cover in shredded mozzarella. Add some chopped deli ham if desired. Bake for about 20 minutes at 425°F until dough is mostly cooked. 

Step 5. Remove pizza from oven and top with pre-cooked french fries. Spread more shredded mozzarella on top.

Step 6. Top with the rest of your poutine gravy and return to the oven for about 10 minutes (or to desired melty-ness of cheese). Broil for a few minutes to get cheese to bubble.

Poutine Pizza!!!!

This was a really fun treat night meal. It tasted like two amazing things: (1) poutine and (2) fresh rolls dipped in gravy. It was a delight! It was very filling, so we ended up with leftovers that weren't as good the next day. So this might be a great pizza for sharing.

B + B Tacos

A few weeks ago we went to Bryan and Betony's for taco night. An invitation for dinner with friends is always welcome, and if that dinner is tacos, I am all the happier. I have it bad for tacos.

An adorable thing I do while eating tacos is exclaim: "I think these are the best tacos I've ever had." The tacos are always the same, always equally good, but I just love them so much that I think every taco is the best taco I've ever had. Having said that, it is quite possible that the tacos we had at B + B's, might have actually been the best tacos I've ever had.

Here were the highlights:

• Taco beef cooked with taco seasoning, a jar of salsa, and a squirt of 1000 Islands dressing
• Hard tacos wrapped in soft tacos using refried beans as the glue
• Delicious homemade guacomole
• Thick, amazing sour cream
• Giant tacos loaded with awesomeness - I could only eat two but wanted ALL of them

Best tacos I ever had.

I thought about those tacos for days after, and then had to recreate them at home. We have re-done our meal plan to include two nights of these amazing tacos (leftovers for the win!) and we are looking into recipes to make our own refried beans. I might even have a go at soft tacos again, especially if I'm going to eat these every week...because obvioulsy I'm going to.

Here are the ones we tried at home. Forever thanks to B+B for their extensive knowledge of all that is delicious.

Refried beans on a soft taco (tortilla)

Soft tacos wrapped around hard tacos -- the best!

My filled tacos. This was day 2, so the guacamole was already all eaten

Holy crap these are so good! I want to eat them every day!

Quick Soup

Back in December I made some turkey soup stock and froze it for future use.

The stock was frozen in 2-cup portions, so I pulled a couple of them out of the freezer and made myself some soup. I brought the stock to a boil and added what I had on hand: carrots, sweet potatoes, chickpeas, corn, peas, leftover rice, and some spices. It turned out to be a very hearty and yummy soup. The best part was it made enough for three lunches.

What do you like to do with vegetable/chicken/turkey stock? We were thinking of making it the base of our next stew. What do you think?

Salmon Dinner

Something we love to eat but don't buy very often is fresh salmon. It can be more expensive than other main dishes, so if we ever do buy it, it's usually on sale and frozen. Recently we had some grocery store points saved up and decided to spend them a nice salmon dinner. We were so happy we did.

John prepared our salmon with some garlic and lemon pieces, adding an infusion of flavour.

He also added various spices (dill, chives) to make our mouths water even more.

I prepared whipped potatoes with butter and chives, and we had an explosion of awesome tastes on our plate.

Yum! Sometimes there really is nothing better than a wonderful home cooked meal.

Southern Fried Chicken and Wedges

Big jugs of oil were on sale last week, so we got one with the idea that we would plan an elaborate deep fried dinner night. Maybe do onion rings, some vegetable tempura, a heap of french fries, and have a go at southern fried chicken. Well, the oil wasn't in the house 24 hours before John got good and excited about deep fry dinner. We let go of our elaborate plans and just had impromptu southern fried chicken and french fries. We have some oil left, so at some point we'll plan it properly and do "the works".

John worked his magic in the kitchen, first seasoning the chicken thighs and legs.

Then he marinated them in a buttermilk mixture.

And then coated them in flour and various spices.

He deep fried them to get them crispy, then continued cooking them in the oven until done.

He also deep fried a whole bunch of crispy and delicious potato wedges.

Impromptu deep fried dinner was a success! I think I could have eaten ten helpings of the wedges. They were really amazing. Why does deep fry have to taste so good!?!

I Live with a Magician

Around suppertime last night, I noticed there was leftover mac and cheese, but not enough for both of us.

John said: "You have it and I'll make something later."

We've been together long enough that I know full well that the 'something' he made later would be 1000x better than the mac and cheese. By that time, I would already be full of my supper and be extremely envious of whatever he spontaneously came up with.

I told him I wanted what he was having (I trusted it would be amazing), and we agreed the mac and cheese could become a side dish or a snack for later.

John asked: "Do we have chicken?" We did. Then the words "spicy chicken" came out of his mouth and he just does what he does, which is make something truly amazing out of nowhere. He doesn't use a recipe, he doesn't measure, and I am pretty sure he doesn't know what the final result will be until he is halfway through cooking it. He definitely has mad kitchen skills.

Which allow this to happen:

Spicy curry chicken

John also took the sweet potato I was going to steam, diced and spiced it, and we had curried sweet potatoes on the side, all served over basmati rice. Take that mac and cheese leftovers!

My spontaneous curry plate

The flavour combinations were all amazing and John said: "I just wanted to have something that tasted really good." We definitely did and I get to have the leftovers for lunch today. Mmmmm...

Year in Review: Home Cooking

I love a good home cooked meal, and happily I have a partner who loves to cook them (I love to cook them too). We started meal planning this year, which led to trying some new things and eating regular favourites. 2013 was a fantastic year for food.

2013 My Adorable Small Town Life Home Cooking Round Up
**Captions link to posts**

Roast Beef

Fajitas

Roast Turkey

Mac and Cheese

Hamburgers

Scalloped Potatoes

Steak Sandwich

Newfoundland Fries

Stuffed Crust Pizza

Chili in a Bread Bowl

Taco Pizza

Taco Salad

Tacos

Pesto Pasta

Panzerottos

Turkey Club

Beef Stew

Steel Cut Oats