The Hungry Squid

There is no good reason not to bake a cake. Or, for that matter, to eat one. Cakes are delicious. My favourite ones are moist, sweet (but not cloyingly, Aspartame-y sweet), dense and preferably with as much chocolate as I can get.  I love cakes with icing, with ganache, with cream cheese frosting; cakes with fruit fillings, custard fillings, and no fillings at all. I can eat them all the time, and have been known to pick at a piece of cake for hours, though I will only take a bit at a time – after all, I only want “half”. But after what feels like thousands hours of mind-numbing lab work, I wanted to make something that would make it all seem worth it. After all, how better to end your day than with a big, warm, chocolate-y piece of freshly caked cake? So this week, I decided to bake a cake. Perhaps as a tool for procrastination, or perhaps because I was craving something unhealthy after an oh-so-healthy week – who knows, and does it really matter? Ostensibly, this cake was for potlu

Montreal in the fall is a lovely place to be. The weather is perfect - cool enough that the temperature is perfect for sleeping, but not cool enough for down comforters in the middle of September. The morning air is crisp and bracing without being chilly, and for a long time, the rain retains a hint of warmth, a wistful reminder of a fleeting but beautiful summer. This past weekend and week have been idyllic -  a light work load interspersed with conferences, and luxurious staycation have made it almost seem like an Indian summer. But Monday always comes, and this particular Monday was accompanied by a wicked sore throat, cough and general malaise. So, what's the remedy for tiredness, weekend withdrawal and grad school blues? Soup, of course! I have always put soup recipes on the back burner (pun intended). For me, they've been an accompaniment, and being a self-professed carb aficionado, I have to be in a particular mood to appreciate them. Of course, there are exceptions , bu

Hello, my name is Squid and I have the travelling bug. I caught it earlier this year, after I came back from the West Coast, a vacation that was, as all vacations, too short. It worsened steadily, with friends travelling to exotic places, and was particularly acute when I was preparing for my thesis advisory committee meeting. Now, in the swing of things post-meeting, my condition has improved but the symptoms nonetheless linger.  So what is the best way to beat the vacay blues? Distract yourself with cooking! Ever since resurrecting this half-dead monster of a blog, I have thrown myself into cooking again, with great satisfaction. I am, after all, a hungry squid. After a (very, very) late night on Friday and a Saturday that consisted of rushing around like a wild person during my new apartment redecoration quest , I came home with 2 hours to spare before a potluck dinner in honor of a departing lab member. I wanted to make something light for the dinner, something easy to eat but stil

And with that, summer is gone. I can't believe that it's been 3 months since my last post! Unacceptable - blogging CANNOT and will not fall at the wayside, and I will be held to that. But the last 3 months have been lovely....A summer of sunshine, weddings, old friends, new friends...and of course, delicious food. I spent an amazing week on the West Coast in August and there, had the most delicious, fresh, tender seafood and sushi, the like of which I have never experienced. My standards have been irrevocably raised. Sue me.  I have to admit, summer is not the best time to get down and dirty with your stove, so my adventurous culinary spirit was quelled in favour of huevos rancheros  and a stroll to a friend's place on a beautifully cool night. But now that school has started (though I guess it  never really ended ....?), evenings of cooking experiments are back on the table...pardon the pun. I've decided to start off the cooking year with a simple recipe, for a dish t

Today, I read an article about "McWeddings" - apparently McDonald's  restaurants in Hong Kong have started to offer wedding catering and reception venues for up to 50 people(http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/foodwine/2014359941_mcweddings01.html) . For about $1300, you will get a "cake" made of McDonald's apple pies, a full McMeal, wedding invitations and even gifts for guests - what a deal!! Who can resist the aroma of burgers and fries as you revolve slowly to your first dance as husband and wife? I can't. Future husband, beware. As a child, one of my favourite foods was chicken fingers. I could eat them any time, literally, a dangerous obsession for a baby that looked like a potato. As an adult (if you can call me that), I still love chicken fingers - BUT, in a quest to be more healthy, I've been trying to make them at home, sans deep frying and with real, all-white meat chicken breast (just like McDonald's uses, of course). This past wee

Sometimes, I wonder what makes take-out food so delicious. It's not nutritious. The ingredients are  sub-par, and often not well matched to the dish. The dishes themselves are not well-made, overly greasy and far too salty. And yet...we keep going back. Regardless of the barrage of ad campaigns extolling the virtues of organic, fair-trade, non-GM, 100, locally grown etc etc, in the dead of night, alone in our apartments, we will inevitably call Super Express pizza. So last week, in my quest to find something, anything, to save me from writing my grant proposal, I stopped myself from ordering take-out and instead, sought to make a take-out style dish at home. It seems that the key to delicious take-out is a) deep-frying and b) drowning the dish in grease; however, I discovered that this was not the case. This dish was delicious served with white rice and a salad with cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, spinach, parmesan and a honey-mustard vinaigrette (courtesy of the culinarily-inclined V

This past week, we said a fond farewell to a postdoc in our lab, and, in her honor (and also just for fun), a lab member held a very delicious dinner party. Though the gracious host told us just to bring ourselves, everyone felt compelled to contribute to the feast, which consisted of treats that ranged from homemade dumplings, scrumptious salads, babba ghanoush and hummus, as well as authentic Italian lasagne the best tiramisu I have ever tasted. Oh, and there was a lot of wine, which was especially exciting, as it was a Tuesday. My contribution to the table of treats was avocado bruscetta, a lovely recipe that I found in Vegetarian Times magazine (aka Squid Daily) a few years ago. Let me first say this: overall, I don't really care for avocado. The texture and flavour turn me off of it and, in general, I will opt not to top my salad with it. I do, however, love guacamole, but I am not sure if that counts....in any case, making this recipe was a strange departure for me, but I am

KD has had it's time. For many years (i.e. during my 4 years in undergrad), it was a mainstay in my cupboard, next to the box of Oreos and the the bag of candied ginger. It was the perfect remedy to late-hunger, afternoon lunch, early dinner, normal dinner...basically appropriate on any culinary occasion. But now, as I begin the venture into adulthood (which, by the way, is a concept that is as vague to me now as it was to me 4 years ago) I have been making a conscious effort to leave the relics of my youth behind. So it is with sadness, that I say goodbye to you, KD, and move towards human food. In honor of its bastard plastic cousin, I decided to make real macaroni and cheese, the right way. This recipe, from Epicurious(a website that, I am ashamed to say, have neglected over the past couple of weeks), was surprisingly easy to make - M and I had it ready in just under 1 and a half hours, most of which was baking time. We modified the recipe by adding pancetta, substituted pimien

First of all, my apologies for the slow updates - classes and lab work are starting to pile up and home time = bedtime these days. However, I did take some time off on Friday night to hang out with M - we proceeded to very quickly finish a bottle of wine (which happens too often) and consume a delicious meal while watching a classic of modern cinema, Jaws (featuring the ever-sexy Richard Dreyfuss). What was the meal, you ask? I'll give you a few hints 1) requires 9 ingredients (5 main, the rest accessory) 2) consists of one dish 3) take 15 minutes (max) to prepare 4) is delicious. Give up? It's quiche! One of the easiest dishes you can make, and almost never goes wrong (provided you follow a few key steps and don't make a squishe). Here's recipe for Friday night's glorious dinner. Spinach and mushroom quiche 1 pie shell (I use the frozen ones kind) 1 packet of fresh spinach (16 oz) 1 package of pre-sliced cremini mushrooms (for ease) - otherwise, about 10 mushroo

Last May, I travelled to Peru with one of my dearest friends for a fantastic llama-filled adventure down the southern coast of this beautiful country. It was love at first sight. The air, the sounds, the smells, the landscape - there was something about Peru that captured my imagination, and even 10 months later (has it really been that long?) I still dream about going back. One of my favourite things about Peru, apart from the freely-roaming, mountain-dwelling llamas (A, I am looking at you), was the food. As you know, I love food, and travelling to a different continent, where different produce was indigenous and where different methods of cooking were used, was, to say the least, very exciting. I am proud to say that I tried a llama steak while in Peru, in addition to quinoa soup, ceviche, pappa rellena, manjar (a type of caramel) and delicious snack foods, in particular empanadas (again, I'm looking at you, A). Now, back in the great white North, I've found myself being dr

I am recovering from a weekend of gastronomic hedonism. Too much sushi, wine, 4 am pizza (incidentally, the best ever, even the next morning), poutine, more ethanol, maple syrupy French toast etc etc etc….so good, but 48 hours of indulgence leaves one feeling a bit….heavy. As would be expected, lethargy descended upon us on a cold and rainy spring Sunday night, and all I wanted to was to eat something filling, that was easy to make, and that was light . Because let’s face it, this squid’s diet can only take so much of a beating. So I turned to my old stand-by, Madhur Jaffrey, the queen of vegetarian and Indian, cooking. She hold a special place in my culinarily-inclined heart, ever since I discovered her classic cookbook in my mother’s cupboard a few years ago, “An Introduction to Indian Cooking”, which is unfortunately now out of print. Her’s is one of the only cookbooks that my mom has that is not annotated to death – it’s as though every recipe she writes has been tested to perfe

Coming off of yesterday's spectacular kitchen fail, I started cooking today with the intention of making something that I know works. Trust me, I was not ready to spend another 2 hours trying to make dish after dish with the meagre contents of my fridge. Yesterday, not only did I try to be creative with my dinner, I tried to be creative by making coriander pesto! I'm not insane - the Food Network told me that it was possible and delicious, but they underestimated my ambitiousness. I replaced the almonds (which I didn't have) in the recipe with pistachios (which I had), and added a bit of parsley thinking that it would bring the flavour of the pesto out. It did not. It tasted like blended grass. With bits of pistachio. So today, nothing like that. I decided to make a really simple (and bonus, nutritious!) dish, from a recipe that I got from my dear friend H, who is the queen of healthy food. She is the person who first introduced me to quinoa, and I've never looked back

Lately, my life has been filled with lemons. I recently bought a new Mac when my old (well, 2 ½ year old year) old computer died, only to the find that the hard drive needed to be replaced less than a month later. Also, thanks to someone with great taste, I have recently discovered Campari, which is excellent on the rocks with a slice of lemon in it; in a similar vein, gin with Fresca and lemon is my new drink of choice. And who can forget that lemonade season is fast approaching, which means that soon (but not soon enough), we can shed our winter coats and start getting some lemon-yellow sun! So to celebrate lemons, I decided to make a quick meal that featured – you guessed it- lemons. This recipe, courtesy of the inimitable Martha Stuart, would be even better on a grill, but was still pretty tasty baked in my stone-age oven. A few notes: if you choose to add tofu, make sure to use the extra-firm kind and to remove as much of the excess water as you can – I find that sandwiching the t

Ugh. What a week. Being out of the house 11 hrs per day is gets to be tiring, and with weekends now being spent in the lab, I have pretty much forgone any semblance of a life during daylight hours for the mesmerizing hum of -80C freezer (true story). Unfortunately, this means that my cooking life is lacking, and the relationship that I have with my kitchen is rapidly going south. Read: Kraft dinner or packaged udon noodles and frozen vegetables. BUT this week, I decided that this is no way to treat my staved student body, so I scoured my stack of recipes and found one that I've neglected for far too long: my mother's recipe for dal. Let me make one thing clear: everything that I know about cooking, and my love for it, I have gotten from my mother. She is a creative and talented cook, and has perfected cooking both traditional-style South Indian food and food from around the world. But what I find most admirable about her is her ability to incorporable all required food groups

Winter in Montreal can be quite cruel, but lately it's been mild enough to be bearable, and it seems as though spring is just around the corner. But it's always "just around the corner", and, always around this time, I really start to get tired of the cold and my energy level inevitably decreases. This is why, instead of going to the gym like a good person, I opted to cook a delicious meal and ignore the ominous stack of papers that is accumulating on my desk. Maybe I can pull a Meteor Man and just touch them for the info.... At any rate, a trip to the grocery store was well needed, and I emerged half and hour later with a bag full of groceries, with the intent of making "Crisp black bean tacos with feta and slaw". The recipe is from my favorite cooking blog ever, http://www.smittenkitchen.com, modified a bit so that a) I could make it with a few ingredients that I already had at home and b) so that it had a bit more of a kick to it (don't blame me,

Post number 1. After months of waffling over whether to start a blog or not, I've done it, and now, here we are. Musings is a student foodie's adventure on the high seas, an attempt to cook and eat well and still have some money left in my wallet. It's a record of my culinary successes and failures as well my take on the fare served at the finest (and not-so-finest) restaurants in Montreal, my current home. Recipes, reviews, tips and pictures - pretty simple recipe for a good blog time! Bon apetit!