Big Fat Ostrich

Never go grocery shopping on an empty stomach.

If you do, your stomach will make the decisions and some of those might be some bad choices.

I spotted this Presidents Choice Tandoori Chicken last week at the local Loblaws. My stomach immediately said YES but my brain was saying NO! Don’t DO IT!

Well I did it. And you know, they’re kind of gross. It’s like, weird Tandoori flavor on breaded chicken strips. And although I do love my chicken finger strips once in awhile, you probably shouldn’t mess with the traditional flavor, which is just plain breaded chicken.

I did manage to salvage them because I couldn’t find anything good to dip them in. Mustard made them extremely revolting, and mayonnaise made them taste even more disgusting. I soon realized what my problem was.

I wasn’t thinking like an Indian!

Enter…YOGURT. Of course, everybody knows that tandoori chicken craves Indian yogurt sauce, but we didn’t have any. So we improvised. With yogurt. Blackberry yogurt.

And it worked.

Why did it work? Well there’s a number of reasons. For one, I love blackberry yogurt to the point where I can eat a whole container of it in a single sitting. If you’ve never done that before, I wouldn’t recommend trying it. It’s something that you have to work your way up to. Like doing 50 push ups or something. Start small, like maybe a quarter of the container, and then work your way up to half. Before you know it, you’ll be a yogurt eating machine!

Secondly, the tandoori chicken is tangy and hot out of the oven, so every bite dipped in the cool sweetness of the yogurt became a battle for taste supremacy in my mouth. Hot versus cold and sweet versus tang and the winner was myself since I was really hungry and ended up quite satisfied.

But I don’t think I’ll be buying these again.

If you do it, here’s the “recipe”.

1 box of President’s Choice Tandoori Chicken
1 container of Liberty Blackberry Yogurt
1 spoon
1 plate
1 fork (to eat with)

Cook the chicken finger strips for 20 -30 minutes, take them out of the oven and put them on a plate. Get the spoon, and heap a few dollops of blackberry yogurt on the plate. It should come out like this. Eat.

 

 

Look at all that pasta! Look how it tilts crazily towards you! It’s mesmerizing and that’s what happens when Dan, Mike, and a bunch of food ingredients hang out.

The plan was like last time: cook dinner, and come up with a new Bobbipins storyline. And you know what? I’ll save you the goddamn suspense and just say that the plan worked, ok? Three times in a row we get together with the idea of eating and brainstorming, and all three times we came away with gold.

So yeah, if you want your dinner to look just like that delicious, succulent bowl of pasta over there, this is what you gotta put into a saucepan on medium high:

a few teaspoons of olive oil
1 diced small onion and 2 cloves of crushed garlic (when these guys are golden brown, add the following)
1 red bell pepper
some mushrooms (sliced)
half a fresh tomato
pepper (use your intuition)
salt to taste

Now about the salt…well, I don’t have any! But under the pressure, Dan grabbed a handful of salted cashews and crushed them into the mix. It was a close call, but supper was saved!

So while all this was going on, there was a big pot of fusili pasta on the boil. It’s really boring to talk about, but it happened, ok?

Now that your mix of vegetables and onions and shit are nice and cooked, here’s the best part: stir a few heaping tablespoons of quality sundried tomato pesto. The one we used was called “pesto rosso“. Yeah really. If you can’t find that specifically, just use a quality pesto and you can’t go wrong.

And you know what? You just made a sundried tomato veggie sauce that’s ready to be mixed into your fusili, which is ready now if you timed it right! Did you time it right? DID YOU?

Now eat it. It’s delicious.

This super easy salmon recipe will have you filling your face with a great nutritious meal in no time! This is really about a simple garnish for your fish, so you can choose the cut of salmon that you prefer.

Depending on your preference, Atlantic or Pacific salmon will do. Hey, mix it up if you’d like, just stick to salmon. This isn’t a trout recipe, so I can’t guarantee anything if you use something other than salmon. If you don’t use salmon and get unexpected results, we will look the other way.

Prep time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:

2 cloves of garlic (3 if you’re feeling dangerous)
2 – 3 pinches of fresh dill
3 – 4 tablespoons of olive oil (your favorite brand)
2 medium size fillets of your favorite salmon

If your fish is frozen, you should plan on letting it defrost for a few hours. I recommend letting it defrost in the fridge. If you have to resort to the microwave in a pinch, do it. Just know that I’m frowning with great disappointment.

Prep:
Pre-heat the oven to 350. Grease a medium sized shallow Pyrex dish with olive oil and place your (defrosted) salmon fillets in the tray.

Crush the garlic into a small bowl and add 3 or 4 tablespoons of olive oil. Gauge according to how much fish you have. Your goal is to lightly cover your fish, not to drown it. Next, add a few pinches of dill and mix it up good. Real good. Now pour your mix over your sexy salmons that are sitting there all hot and sexy, just asking for it.

Cover the dish with aluminum foil, or if you’re like me and you always forget to buy foil, you can improvise by covering the dish with a large metal pan.

Next you play the waiting game (30 min), but you can take a peek after 20 minutes to see how we’re doing. Now would be a good time to set the table, steam some vegetables to serve on the side, or to do the dishes for once! Seriously, I swear!

If everything looks good, get a spatula and serve!

Protip: Leaving your fish in for too long will dry it out! Be careful.

This recipe serves 1 to 2 people and is easy to adjust for larger servings.

Enjoy!

Before this site turns into “Big Fat Street Fighter Review”, I thought I’d offer you guys a present: My Awesome Chili Recipe. It’s a recipe that took me years to perfect, and if I one day have a child, it’ll probably be his only inheritance. It’s the first recipe post in what I hope will become a regular feature. Let me know if you enjoyed it, hated it, or have some suggestions to make it better. I tried to stick with pretty easy to find ingredients and none of ‘em is absolutely necessary. So here we go, time to put on your chef hats and your fake mexican moustaches!

Ingredients

- 1 lb ground veal

- 1 x 796ml can of diced tomatoes

- 1 x 398ml can of tomato sauce

- 1 x 540ml can of small red kidney beans (the bigger beans are okay too, not ideal but okay)

- 2 onions

- 1 garlic clove

- 1 tablespoon extra super virgin pro premium olive oil

- 1/2 cup of red wine

- 1/2 tsp chili powder

- 1/2 tsp crushed cayenne pepper

- a pinch of paprika

- a tiny pinch of cinnamon

- a pinch of ground cumin (giggedy)

- 1 thing of fresh coriander

- Sour cream (optional)

- Corn chips (optional)

Preparation

Put everything in a blender and mix for a good 2 minutes. Serve as a protein shake. Mmmmmm…

Seriously though, you start by chopping up the onions and the garlic. The size is entirely up to you but for some reason, in a chili, I prefer bigger onion chunks. Wash and chop the coriander, the finer the better. Open all the cans so you don’t get caught when it’s time to add their contents to the mix. Rinse the red kidney beans to get rid of the disgusting “bean slime” they’re packaged in.

That’s it, you’re all set, turn on the stove , set it to “max”, pour the olive oil in a big frying pan or a wok. Add the onions, the garlic and the veal. After 5 minutes or so, add the red wine. After another 5 minutes, add the diced tomatoes, the tomato sauce, the red kidney beans (Yes, I add them at the beginning. A lot of people will tell you to add them near the end, but they’re WRONG! I find adding the beans early gives them a smoother texture, like, it makes them melt in your mouth. Oh yeah baby, melt dem naughty naughty beans in your mouth…)

Now it’s time to reduce the fire to “medium-low”. It’s also time for the trickiest part of the recipe: the spices. I usually use half a teaspoon of chili powder, half a teaspoon of cayenne pepper, and a pinch of everything else. Especially the cinnamon; you gotta be suuuper careful with the cinnamon cuz it can totally ruin your recipe. On the other hand, you can put up to a half a teaspoon of cumin and paprika if you know what you’re doing. Using too much cumin will make your chili taste like an indian dish though.

Words of wisdom: a great recipe takes a lot of trial and error. Don’t be afraid to test the hell out of it when you’re not cooking for guests, I know that’s how I made my coolest cooking discoveries (which I’ll make sure to share with you in the future).

Back to our awesome chili. Let it simmer to reduce on “medium-low” for a good hour. Stir every 10 minutes or so. It’ll probably mess up your whole kitchen with little red drops, so be prepared.

Protip: after it’s done simmering, turn the stove off and let it rest for another hour. It makes a huge difference on the taste when you let all the ingredients cool down together for a while.

Serve in a bowl with some fresh coriander sprinkled on it, a spoonful of sour cream and corn chips.

This recipe will feed 4 normal people, or 1 single disgusting fuck.

Enjoy!