Tasty Tangents

Summer abundance is in full force, and the number of zucchini in my parents’ backyard is the proof. You can serve them dozens of different ways, but we decided to try to turn them into the main course.
It seems you can take just about any lasagna-like recipe you love and subsitute the zucchini for the [...]

I’m one of those people who gets cravings. I’m definitely not pregnant, but every now and then I get a hankering for something in particular. It can be salty or sweet, chocolate or ice cream, but I generally have to do something about it before it will go away.
This time it was some kind of [...]

I had a craving, which is what usually leads to me making far more complicated recipes than I would usually attempt.
The craving was for this cool corkscrew shaped pasta, which I thought would go perfectly with a cheesy baked pasta recipe.
So I went on the hunt for a classic Macaroni and Cheese recipe and found [...]

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a big fan of Iron Chef America. Two chefs get an hour to prepare five dishes that showcase the day’s secret ingredient…then they are judged.
And other competitive cooking shows, think Throwdown with Bobby Flay, Chopped and Top Chef to name a few, can be very entertaining.
But apparently there’s a new [...]

So there was a big bowl of leftover chocolate icing in the fridge from a cake my sister made that was just screaming out to be used.
I decided I needed to find something cupcake-like to go with the yummy frosting, and after rifling through about half a dozen cookbooks, I struck on this super simple [...]

For a book that begins with “Dear Homemaker,” the recipes in the old Pillsbury’s Bake Off Breads Cook Book are actually fairly quick in terms of labour, though the resting periods for the bread mean you can’t be off anywhere for a few hours.
Even though my recipe didn’t turn out perfectly, it was still delicious, [...]

So this is the second time I try this recipe from the Giada De Laurentiis cookbook ‘Everyday Italian,’ and it was completely different and just as delicious.
The first time I tried the Torta di Pasta, which is essentially a pasta omelette, I substituted pre-made sun dried tomato pesto for whole sun dried tomatoes, and asiago [...]

I was completely intrigued when I stumbled on this recipe, through foodgawker.com, thinking it would be a fantastic alternative to the deep fried delicacy you’d usually pick up at the corner coffee shop.
If you’ve ever had sugar or cinnamon-sugar donuts fresh from a truck at the local fair or at an amusement park, then [...]

Celery root or celeriac is a really strange looking root vegetable at the grocery store that’s all gnarled and brown and ugly. But if you’ve never picked one up, don’t be afraid! I hadn’t tried one until this past Thanksgiving. It has a wonderful, mild celery flavour that makes a mean soup or puree, among [...]

In my eternal hunt to find ways to finish orphan ingredients, I set out on a quest to find a way to use almost a full can of pumpkin puree. (It was left over from Thanksgiving’s pumpkin brownies.) I was hoping for something not dessert related, which is also a remnant of the Thanksgiving/Halloween aftermath.
I [...]