The simplest recipes are so often my favourites. Maybe it’s because there is added delight in throwing just a few things together to produce pure, uncomplicated deliciousness. Like this simple salad we made this week thanks to Chef’s Plate.
This one’s definitely a keeper!
The recipe made two large dinner-sized salads for us. Modify for your needs. Add a cob of corn on the side and make it vegetarian.
Field Tomato and Sirloin Steak Salad with Croutons
Preheat the oven to 400°
Ingredients:
Make some croutons: toss the cubed bread with the summer savoury, salt and pepper and a tbsp. of olive oil in a medium bowl. Spread on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and bake for 10 minutes, tossing halfway through.
In the same bowl, add a tbsp. of red wine vinegar, the parsley and a tbsp. of olive oil. Season with salt and pepper. Mix well and set aside.
Grill or pan fry the steak 4-5 minutes a side for medium rare, or how you like it, and set aside.
In the bowl with the dressing, add both tomatoes and red onion and toss well. Add the croutons, toss again. Plate with a portion of the steak.
Every bite tastes like a specially delicious toasted tomato sandwich.
We started using Chef’s Plate service a few months ago, and we love it. We choose three meals a week, and the portioned ingredients and a recipe card are delivered to our door every Monday. We’re always happy with the quality of the food, and the ease recipes. For people like us, who often work long hours and get home late, this is a much cheaper and healthier option than simply going out. If you live in Ontario, enjoy trying new recipes, give them a try. It’s completely risk free, and there’s no commitment. And they’ll even give you two free meals for trying! Click here to read more.
This is not a sponsored post.
After a week of travelling and eating in restaurants, a simple salad at home is exactly what I needed. I just love these power bowls. They’re so nutritious and filling, and easy to make. This one with mixed greens, cucumbers, carrots, grape tomatoes, chickpeas, avocado, cucumber, hemp seeds, pepita seeds green onion, hummus and yogurt dressing with dill, honey and lemon juice. It’s a good way to clean out the fridge, no?
Up until a few weeks ago, I never made a good chicken soup. I am generally a really good soup maker. It’s always been my best thing. But all of my attempts at chicken soup could best be described as LAME. BLAH. HO HUM. This winter I’ve had a seemingly endless craving for the stuff and I’ve been buying some pretty good chicken soup from the “soup ladies” downstairs in my office building. I say “pretty good” simply because the broth is delicious, but it’s low on veg and high on macaroni, and macaroni and my waistline do not get along. So I decided to just get down to it and learn how to make a proper chicken soup of my own.
All it took was for me to think of the basic tenet to good broth: roast the ingredients first. So once week I’ve been doing this:
And I’ll be darned, at 53 years old I can finally make really delicious, nutritious and soul warming chicken soup. It’s a little labour intensive, preparing a roast chicken, then picking off the meat and adding the bones to the stock pot to make the stock, and then cutting up the veg and meat to make the soup. But for the simple pleasure of creating this…
…it’s time well spent on a cold weekend afternoon.
I’m sitting here looking out at the millions of diamonds floating on the harbour and I’m filled with contentedness. I don’t know what that has to do with this post, but it seemed like a good way to start it. We’ve just finished our weekly brunch of frittata – this time with purple kale, asparagus and tomato and accompanied by couple of slices of nitrate-free bacon. I don’t know what that has to do with this post either, but it certainly reflects my rather limited perspective of the last month and a half. Cooking, was, I suppose, my way of coping; it felt productive and healthy and financially responsible. Back when I was a single mother going to university, I could stretch a grocery budget like nobody’s business.
One would think that when one is suddenly laid off from her job, she’d find all kinds of time to go to the gym, write a first draft of a novel, while away hours creating dolls and collaging and all the other things that stimulate her creative self. Most certainly she’d find time to blog. What really happened was she went into some sort of shock.
Not that it was a surprise. Most of my office had been laid off in the months before I was. My company’s industry had gone into a holding pattern and one by one, engineers began to go and then supporting staff. And then the business development group was dismantled too. One by one, ending with, I’ve heard, my boss, its director. I guess things are pretty bad when business development isn’t seen as useful anymore. It’s a giant company – our industry was a small part of it and they’d focus their pursuits in more profitable areas. Fortunately for me, my career isn’t centred on any one industry; I can write proposals for any kind of company and I have done so in a number of realms.
So the shock that wasn’t really a shock sent me into finding employment mode. I didn’t want to talk about it. I just wanted to find another job. And I did. Lucky me – proposal writers are needed everywhere these days. I started with a new company last week and the fit seems great.
But for five weeks my alarm clock was retired and I wore yoga pants every day and I revised my resume. And I tried new recipes. Food was comfort and my creative output. Likely it was a way to divert from the shock of the sudden retreat from the work world. North of that harbour I see from the vantage point of my sofa, the work world went on without me. Suits hopped off streetcars, blank faces filled the subway cars, couriers delivered packages and crews tore apart roads. I made soup.
Food might also have something to do with the other big change in the wind. After I was laid off, Ceri and I talked and it seemed like a good time to go forward with us and move in together. It occurred to me that I haven’t shared a home with a man in more than twenty years. But that’s not entirely true. Ceri and I have lived together, either at my place or his, every weekend for almost a year and a half. We have dinner together every Wednesday. It’s time. There is no need to be paying for two residences. Or be apart. Before Ceri I never knew a relationship could be so consistently pleasant and uncomplicated. Cooking for us and our family is an extension of our relationship.
I haven’t moved over to his place yet, that comes next month. We’re really excited about the challenge of merging stuff and making a home together. The Co-Habitation Project has given me new ideas about my blog space too, and I expect its documentation will be part of some needed change here.
In the meantime I am adjusting to the big changes. I love change – in many ways I have always lived for it. But as I discovered during the last time of major change in my life - when I sold my home and quit my job and took a big trip then relocated to another part of the province – big change causes system shock. But today as I look out at the diamonds floating on the lake and contemplate a different beautiful view out a different window, I feel grateful that the shock is giving way to living back in the world. And knowing that I have the capacity to keep putting one foot in front of the other, having trust in that the road that unfolds beneath them is the right one.
It's one of those little gifts life hands you every once in awhile: a rainy Sunday morning. That which invites you to have coffee in bed, to loaf around in your pyjamas and to think of things to cook. Tomorrow I'm heading out of town for the week for work, so I've got some things in the refrigerator to use up, like a red pepper and some zucchini. I had recently noted this recipe in my Pinterest recipe collection which I'd saved from my favourite foodie blog, Skinnytaste.com, and decide to make it, modified to incorporate some not-so-skinny pancetta, also sitting there in the refrigerator. More thumbs-up from both sides of the table.
Tonight we meet up with my girls and some of their people for a drink before going out to dinner at a nearby bistro on a gift certificate I got for my birthday back in (the MUCH MORE TEMPERATE) April from those same devoted girls.
We really enjoy the food, both indulging in the place's specialty, steak frites, and the casual ambiance of the place. I like that our mildly snobby but very attentive server is wearing low-top Converse runners with her skirt and blouse. Sitting near us is an elderly and elegant couple out on what seems to be a regular date. I wonder aloud if Ceri and I might still be going out for meal dates 30 years on. (We seem to concur – yes.)
On the walk home I admire the beauty of the city, looking east toward it on Wellington. My photo doesn't come close to capturing how it sparkles; but then it's a photo-a-day project (in spirit) and this is the one photo I got. You'll have to take my word for it.
I think egg strata is one of the best inventions; any combination of whatever's in the fridge can turn into the most satisfying brunch and provides for nutritious leftovers for lunch in the work week. Most recipes will tell you to assemble it the night before to let the egg and bread become one. I never think that far in advance.
This dish makes my main man very happy and that enhances the pleasure of putting the lovely thing together on a lazy weekend morn.
Walking to Mia's from the station for what will be, as always, a luscious meal. It's a little hard to walk out – rainy and blustery is real good at inviting you to stay in and, say, do laundry. Going out finds images like this and thus all kinds of opportuinity to play with my new PhotoShop software that I got with my new computer. Bear with me as I play – and work out a style!
Later, I get off the streetcar and walk down Spadina home. It's still raining, and that makes it quite pretty. It's almost November friends. I expect a lot of my photos will be night shots again. And so another year comes around.