The Hungry Squid

Chocolate is the definitive holiday ingredient. I love chocolate in everything – cakes, cookies, pies, tarts, wrapped in foil or from a box – and the holidays are the perfect excuse to binge without guilt. These cookies are rich and chocolatey without being cloyingly sweet; creamy white chocolate chips and crunchy pecans add an interesting texture and make the cookies attractively cobbled and cracked. Don’t be deterred by the chili powder – just a touch of spice brings out the deepest dark chocolate flavor! Merry Christmas, and happy eating! Spicy double chocolate cookies Adapted from AK’s recipe Ingredients -        1/3 cup flour -        ¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder -        1 tsp baking powder -        ¼ tsp salt -        6 squares (6 oz) semisweet chocolate, chopped -        ½ cup of butter -        2 large eggs, room temperature -        ½ cup sugar -        1 ½ tsp vanilla -        2 cups pecans, chopped -        6 oz (

This morning, I had my first taste of winter. Big, soft dreamy flakes of snow falling from a dove-grey sky, onto cobblestones in the quiet stillness of a Sunday morning; a place of winter calm amidst the buzz of the city. Perhaps it’s the cold that’s been steadily descending into my apartment, but I have craving comfort food for the past few weeks. Deep dishes of soup, rich curries and of course, my mom’s kichri , a one-pot dish full of lentils, rice and vegetables. And cakes – warm cakes with rivers of caramel and fudge, moist cakes   studded with nuts, crumbly coffee cakes with pecans and fruit. Christmas eating can start before Christmas, right? My friend N had a potluck last night and I took the opportunity to make a cake that I’d been eyeing for a while, from a cookbook authored by the owners of a fantastic restaurant in Victoria, BC, called Rebar. The food there is mostly vegetarian or vegan, but they do incorporate some seasonal fish into their dishes

There is an amazing little restaurant in the outskirts of downtown Ottawa called The Scone Witch, which makes scones in more varieties than you can imagine.   Savory scones with ingredients such as fragrant rosemary, cheese and scallions; sweet scones in which are embedded bits of candied ginger and tiny, tangy currants. M and I ate there recently, and our exceptional lunch reminded me of how much I love the decadent and infinitely adaptable pillows of butter and cream. I have previously only attempted to make scones once – the effort, thought valiant, was somewhat subpar – but this week I decided to try my hand at it again. In browsing the web, a recipe caught my eye, from my favorite food blog, Smitten Kitchen (featured prominently in many of my posts). The recipe, though not too labor-intensive, took more time than I had anticipated, and M and I ended up indulging quite late in the night. A delicious bedtime snack, no doubt, but also the recipe for a burnt

Lately, quinoa has been doing pretty well for itself. Rising from obscurity in the early 2000s, it has established itself as  somewhat of a wonder food, and can now be found in everything from lasagna to breakfast food, shepherd’s pie to chocolate cake (albeit in flour form). It certainly deserves its newfound popularity – this complex carbohydrate is a great source of protein (a boon to vegetarians), is low in cholesterol and contains a host of vitamins such as flavonoids, which act as antioxidants. I was first introduced to quinoa by H and her deliciously addictive quinoa salad , and I have never turned back. I love the richness of quinoa – which has a slightly higher unsaturated fat content than other grains   - and it’s versatility. On our trip to Peru, A and I ate a lot of quinoa, mostly in soup form; the plant is indigenous to that region, and quinoa was an integral part of the Incan diet. Last Christmas, I receive a quinoa cookbook from my parents – th

Another post about quiche? Come on, Squid, really? But it’s true – once again, quiche is showing it’s deliciously buttery face on the Blog, and what a quiche it was. At a loss for what to cook on a Saturday night, M and I turned to one of our favorites, a weekday dinner quick fix that has made deep-dish piecrusts a staple in our respective freezers. However, we decided to make the quiche a little differently this time, using ingredients that we had never cooked with before. Fast-forward 20 minutes, and we walked out of the grocery store, bags full of fresh leeks, a giant fennel bulb, yellow onions, a healthy hunk of pancetta, fresh thyme and ingredients for a simple tomato salad. Oh, and a mega Toblerone bar. Just because. Having never cooked leek or fennel, I searched the web and came up with a few recipes and YouTube videos that described their preparation clearly and simply – I can only imagine what cooks did before the advent of the Internet. Desp

There is no better antidote to the Sunday night ritual of harried workweek prep/Monday dread than a steaming bowl of nutritious and filling soup. I planned to be extra-productive this weekend, putting the finishing touches on my thesis for final submission, and Saturday was excellent for that; however Sunday, which followed a very late night, was a total bust. Nevertheless, after lazing around all day and watching reruns of Lie to Me , I decided to try my hand at a new recipe for one of my all-time favorites, broccoli cheddar soup. Surprisingly easy to make, this broccoli cheddar soup has a mild kick to it that plays nicely off of its cheesy richness. The only major change that I made to the original recipe was the addition of extra milk and broth to thin the soup out; the original yielded a soup that was far too thick and chowder-like. I added a couple of extra dashes of Tabasco at the end just before serving as well, but then again, I add Tabasco to pretty mu

My parents have a tradition of growing huge zucchinis. Like really huge. 4 kg huge. And more of them that we can use without becoming zucchinified – especially since my teenage brother has sworn off zucchini bread (I believe, on principle at this point). However, after finding and creating as many dinner recipes has she could, a couple of year ago, my mother came across one recipe that seemed like the perfect disguise for these beautiful monstrosities: zucchini bread. Zucchini bread is very similar to carrot bread in texture – both are grated finely and mixed in with the usual yeast-free bread ingredients, and both add a moistness to the bread similar to that added by bananas, but without the sweetness. Zucchinis have the added bonus of lacing the bread with strings of dark green zucchini, threaded throughout the earthy brown loaves like fine capillaries. My mom’s go-to recipes for zucchini bread involve adding ingredients such a pineapple, raisins, pecans and chocola

The combination of sweet and salty is something that I was brought up with. For as long as I can remember, my mother has made variations of a sweet, aromatic chai that I love, milky black tea with strong notes of green cardamom and cinnamon. Some weekends, taking a break from the hundred-and-one errands that inevitably pile up during the all-too-busy week, she and my father would sit at the kitchen table and pause, drinking large, piping hot mugs of chai and snacking on a salty treat known to us kids simply as the “mixture”   - puffed rice, flattened rice, dried bay leaves, peanuts, bits of fried chickpea dough and dried coconut slivers, tossed in a melange of a hundred different spices, roasted and then studded with dried raisins. A strange mix of ingredients, maybe, but dangerously addictive . The sweetness of the tea, combined with the crunch and spice of the “mixture”, brought out the spice in the cardamom and the cinnamon, gave the sweetness dimension, added depth

On a blustery, miserable, dark, cold, rainy Sunday, I did not want to leave the house. Oh yes, I know that I extolled the virtues of fall a little while ago, declaring it to be my favorite season. And it still is….well, the sunny days are. Rainy days in the fall are a whole other story. Holed up in my apartment, drinking tea under a warm blanket and struggling with writer’s block, I couldn’t help but crave a teeny, tiny bit of sunshine. So I did what any normal person would do: I made lemon squares. H is the queen of lemon squares – in our tiny Kingston apartment she would whip up those bad boys like there was nothing to it; her lemon squares were a delight, and would inevitably disappear before the night was over. But in light of her great skill, I had never tried my had at lemon squares, so on that blustery, miserable, dark, cold and rainy Sunday, I thought, why not now? This recipe for lemon squares is exquisitely simple and the results are divine. The cru