Recipes

This recipe for banana almond chocolate muffins from Scott in Germany looks great! I wonder if there will be any adjustment necessary since the general purpose flour in Germany in my experience is slightly different from Canadian and American general purpose flour.

One of us will try this recipe and post a follow up!

Coq au Vin made with White wine is a nice variation on a French classic (via Struggle in a Bungalow Kitchen).

On the weekend we cooked a Mexican meal to celebrate Kerrie's birthday. I made tortilla soup, chicken mole, jicama sprinkled with lime juice and a chile-lime seasoning we bought in Mexico, an orange, onion, avocado salad and rice. For dessert we had tres leches cake.

For Chinese New Year I want to make a few traditional Chinese desserts. Out of the blue I remembered this split pea coconut pudding my mum used to make. When I was a kid, I used to pick out all the yellow split peas and just eat the creamy coconut pudding!!

On the weekend we had our friends David and Jeanne over for appetizers. I made these simple chicken sage bundles. Sage and pancetta are classic Tuscan flavours that give this dish a hearty, earthy tone. As the pancetta cooks, it turns translucent, revealing the beautiful sage leaf.

If you don't like sage, you can substitute it with tender sprigs of rosemary. Also, when seasoning the chicken, check the saltiness of the pancetta first: use less salt if the pancetta tastes salty.

Here's a photo:

Our friend Gloria is in town and I wanted to make a non-baked dessert for our afternoon tea. I also wanted to use ingredients I already have around the house.

I decided to make crepes filled with bananas, nutella and toasted pecans. The dessert reminded me of some of the crepes we've had at new creperies that are popping up around town. The crepes were a hit for the adults as well as Glo's 14 month old baby, Ezra!

"RecipeSource is the new home of SOAR: The Searchable Online Archive of Recipes and your source for recipes on the Internet".

An excellently organized and comprehensive archive of recipes. Check it!

Bo bay mon, a tradional seven course Vietnamese Beef dinner (including beef congee, beef salad and a marinated beef main course), looks like fun for beef lovers! Ordeal by beef (via the new New York blog, Gawker) makes it sound gruesome but I bet that it could be good if done right! If you have tried it, let us know what you think and where we can order this in Vancouver!

For our Winter Warm-up, we usually expect up to 50 people. This year's menu included some old favourites like smoky caramelized onion bites, brown sugar shortbread, and ginger apricot pound cake. As well as new dishes such as warm goat cheese spread and hot spinach artichoke dip.

This recipe for Caramel French Toast from the Blue Max Inn in Maryland, USA sounds absolutely decadent! (Found via Backup Brain)