Grilled Vegetable Salad & Eggplant Chips

Grilled veggie salad

Skewer your favourite sliced veggies, or grill whole drizzled with some olive oil until charred and slice afterwards.

I like to do all colours of peppers, red onion and tomato. Those are the basics.

Today I did zucchini and garlic cloves too. Keep a close eye on everything so it doesn't burn.

The dressing: In a bowl add some salt, black pepper, grated garlic, olive oil and a splash of balsamic vinegar (or lemon juice)  If you're using white wine or regular vinegar add some honey because balsamic already has some sweetness.

For the eggplant (which I do not like roasting the same way)  I cut into even rounds and salted until the moisture came out and squeezed/drained after 15 minutes. Preheat oven to 400 and toss the eggplant with olive oil (no salt because it should still taste salty) And let them roast flat on a baking sheet lined with parchment, flip them from time to time as they brown.  They'll end up like eggplant "chips" Super yummy and used to garnish the salad.

Toss it all together and enjoy, it can be served warm or can even sit for a while.

Grilled Cheddar Sandwich

With the Red Leicester CheddarI purchased from the SLM on friday  .. I made a grilled cheese this morning :)

To make 2 sandwiches

4 slices of Rye or Marble Rye bread (pumpernickel works too or any bread you like!) 

4 slices of cheddar (using Leicester Cheddar here, check out that COLOUR!) 

2 small knobs of butter (butter the outsides of each sandwich, both sides) 

1 frying pan set on medium heat, add a drop of oil if you're worried about the butter burning. 

Assemble sandwiches and place in the pan until browned on one side.  Flip over to the other side and brown, at this point the cheese should melt inside. 

Slice and serve with celery! 

Enjoy! 

Ghormeh Sabzi (Persian herb stew)

Today I felt "Adventuress" and decided to finally make this Persian/Iranian herb stew recipe that has been sitting on my browser for over a week! Thanks to the lovely Persian food blog Turmeric and Saffron I didn't feel too intimidated to give it a try, I'm a huge fan of the blog and even though you won't see a lot of Persian recipes here I do browse her blog A LOT to familiarize myself with recipes.

As you all probably know that I love to cook Kurdish/Iraqi food (my culture from my father's side of the family) but I always find Iranian food to be a whole different world, and a fascinating one. We share some similarities and  a;though the two countries are side by side the cuisine is still quite different.

I tried my best to make this stew, following both the blog recipe from Turmeric and Saffron as well as watching this very educational youtube video by Persian Chef KShar.

Along with the stew I made a plain rice. The rice was soaked for a few hours before hand then boiled in lots of salted water (and a drop of oil), strained (kind of like when I make biryani or an Afghan rice) but then steamed in a new (smaller) pot for an hour. (I put potatoes at the bottom so it doesn't burn)
Very different than the normal Arabic method where it all cooks in one pot with water and some oil/salt on low heat for 20 mins maximum time.


To make the stew you need fresh or dry herbs on hand, there seem to be a lot of recipes out there but instead of getting overwhelmed I'd suggest going with the recipe here to begin with because it is really quite easy to follow.  I've added a handful of spinach to it as well but pretty much followed it exactly.

It was awesome being able to use up those dry limes that have been kicking around here for the last year or more, if you remember I bought keylimes a while back and didn't know what to do with the rest so I dried them and now they've found their purpose :D

Some ingredients to source and buy (from a Persian/Arabic and Indian store) before attempting the recipe:

- Dry limes (limu omani) - Persian or Arabic store

- Fenugreek (fresh or dry) Persian or Indian/Pakistani store (sometimes called "methi" dry leaves or fresh leaves, NOT seeds!) 

Regular supermarket items: 

- Stewing beef

- Dry kidney beans

- Turmeric

Once you've got all your ingredients it's pretty easy, just a few steps and once you've got it going you can step away and let it do it's thing for a couple of hours!  Maybe try a crockpot?

Just make sure to soak the beans the night before!

..Thanks to my sister Dessert was taken care of.

Friday - St.Lawrence Market

My day started early in beautiful Toronto! I had a warm tea at starbucks and spent the early hours strolling through the St.Lawrence market discovering all the interesting food finds, I picked up some things and by noon headed towards Whole Foods in Oakville... the day ended with my sisters and I making an ooey gooey Croque Monsieur casserole, so much fun!