The Hungry Squid

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!