Creamy Au Gratin Potatoes
Brown-butter toffee blondies
The addition of smashed up slabs of toffee and chopped walnuts add a crunchy but oh- so-chewy texture when you bite in to each piece.
These blondie bites are one of my wife’s favourite desserts that I make about once every six months for her. I’ve also distributed these bites amongst colleagues when I have been working on-site with a client.
When you serve these toffee blondies you can either cut them larger (100mm/4″ squares) in size as an individual serving or bite-sized about 40mm square. Either way, the obligatory glass of cold milk should be included.
I find the blondies more than sweet enough as-is, but if you have a very sweet tooth, or you just like the look of the dust treats, a light dusting of confectioner’s sugar adds a nice touch.
Baby Spinach, Apple & Feta Cheese Salad Sans Dressing
I do not understand the American obsession with a) “having salad” as your meal, and b) drowning it in dressing.
It’s salad.
It’s not rocket science.
A quick salad is a work of art in its simplicity, especially when it is an accompaniment to a dish (as all salads should be) rather than the focus dish.
This baby spinach, apple and feta cheese works without any dressing having just enough moisture contributed by the juiciness of the apple and just enough saltiness contributed by the sprinkle of feta cheese.
Steak and onion sandwich
I like to serve these sandwiches on a freshly baked Ciabatta bread so that the juices from the onions and the steak pools into the large porous holes of the bread. It makes the sandwich moist without being wet and serves to contain a lot of the juice that will flow out of the meat as you bite in to it.
The complete sandwich is three separate recipes. The steak (that’s this recipe), the onions, and the bread. Only the first two are necessary to make for the meal if you already have suitable bread.
Cream cheese Wellington
Warm or cold, this cream cheese baked in puff-pastry and layered with Cremini mushrooms, bacon and shallots pairs well with a small bottle of Lambrusco and some left over ciabatta that you have toasted up.
This is one of those dishes you want to take it easy on because you aren’t fooling anyone when you say you are on a diet and then proceed to eat half of this appetizer. It is about as healthy as it sounds. My wife kids herself that this dish is healthier when I make this with “reduced fat” cream cheese.
This is a perfect appetizer spread when you have friends over and is incredibly easy to prepare. I’ve laid out the instructions so that your time actually cooking is kept to a minimum if you can chop whilst keeping an eye on a pan on the stove.
There is no Nutrition Label for this recipe yet.
Awesome Onions
Our kitchen has about six recipes for grilled onions that are our “go to” recipe for various dishes depending on whether we want sweet, smoky, earthy, and so on.
This particular onion recipe works well on steak sandwiches and grilled burgers as it has a slightly sweet flavour that makes the underlying smokiness of the meat “pop.”
Scrambled eggs with creme fraiche and chives
You’d think most scrambled egg recipes are pretty simple affairs. Eggs, a little salt, maybe a little pepper, you’re pretty much done.
I cannot stand wet scrambled eggs. It’s this runny, snotty consistency that reminds me of some of the nastier versions of “instant oatmeal.” Usually, the only way to make scrambled eggs and not have them wet and runny is to cook the hell out of the eggs until you go the other extreme; a rubbery, overcooked, dried out lump of yellow with an overpowering eggy flavour. There’s no happy middle ground.
This recipe elevates the humble scrambled eggs to a whole new level. The addition of chives, cut very small so that they cook almost instantly, adds a savouriness that you don’t normally equate with scrambled eggs, and the creme fraiche, or alternatively cream, adds a rich, creamy texture without being wet.
And there’s one more trick when cooking these eggs, and that is a way to control the cooking far beyond the control you get from the heat dial on your stove top.