Baked Spanish Rice

Baked Spanish Rice is a hearty, healthy meal in a bowl perfect for the winter blahs when hot, but is also delicious cold as a Summer salad! Brown rice is mixed with onion, garlic, red peppers, artichokes and carrots before being doused in a tomato-meat sauce with a heady dose of paprika. An hour and a half of hands off cook time and voila! Dinner is served.

Despite the fact that it can be up to 40 degrees Celsius outside with the humidity, I have been drawn to the kitchen and specifically the oven. Part of this is that I do tend to batch-cook for the week ahead, not just that night's dinner, so I am able to prep food later in the evening when it's cooled off a bit. Another is that I've been spending a decent portion of my summer out of town, so I need to be able to make meals that travel and hold well too. This baked rice, like so many of my recipes, came out of the fact that I had containers of chicken broth and meat sauce sitting in my freezer from back in the school year that I really needed to use up, if only for the reason that I needed freezer space (hello Summer fruit season!). Being a bona fide Spanish rice lover, I wanted to make a version of it that I could throw together and more or less let cook while I gardened and did laundry, and baked rice fit the bill perfectly.

Of course, I was not content with simply making "pure" Spanish rice, the kind that's basically tomatoes and white rice. Nope, I wanted a meal in a bowl, full of flavour, protein and veggies, but light on the oil. We always have artichoke hearts on hand (mom loves them), and onions, peppers and carrots are mainstays in the house too. The crowning spice (and one of my personal favourites) was paprika, and I was not shy with it (dial it to your own tastes though). After an hour and a half - where I literally did nothing - I had a huge pot of food that was excellent warm and cold. While it was a meal in itself, it didn't stop mom from pairing it with some grilled trout for dinner (which honestly looked delicious too!). I will definitely be making this again when school starts back up, maybe with a vegan "meat" sauce for variety as well.

What do you tend to eat in the Summer? Is it no-cook or are you like me and baking up a storm? Let me know in the comments!

Spinach and Artichoke Pasta Bake

Spinach Artichoke Pasta Bake is a gluten free (thanks to Barilla Pasta) and vegan comfort food casserole for tonight or freezing for later!

The abundance of traditionally "spring" veggies in my Canadian summer garden makes me long for the days of sunny ripe tomatoes fresh off the vine. All my greens are lush and a mainstay of my lunches - spinach, heirloom lettuce and mustard greens to be exact - but the tomatoes are a mid-August crop. Luckily, I do have a stock of canned tomato products at my disposal, and while I was contemplating dinners I spotted a can of artichoke hearts next to them. Inspiration struck, combining the flash-frozen garden spinach with the various canned tomatoes and artichokes to create a hearty yet light on the stomach pasta meal. For protein, I whipped up one of my favourite things to make with silken tofu - a faux "ricotta" that lent the coveted creamy texture to the "spinach-artichoke dip" feel of the recipe and added a hint of cheesy saltiness as well. While mom is not gluten free (I've mentioned several times how much she adores bread) I had some delicious gluten free penne to cook up anyways so I used it here too.

The first forkful definitely captured the feeling of Summer produce for me, especially the sun-dried tomatoes I found in the back of my pantry from last year! Their sweet, almost raisiny goodness brought a delightful taste and texture into play that worked with the brightness of the tomatoes and the slight salty tang of the tofu.

Here's the thing - I love dried tomatoes, and I do make my own at the end of the summer when our grape tomatoes come due for picking. However, the cost of them in the grocery stores (and even in the bulk bin) can be prohibitive. Nate Teague writes for a number of cooking related websites, including Cuisinevault – a site that helps home chefs learn about cutting techniques, ingredients, recipes and much more. In one of his posts, he provides a handy list of options for when you don't have (or can't / don't want to procure) sun-dried tomatoes. Obviously, not every option will work seamlessly, and his article admits that, but gives you a variety of options for almost every application I can think of!

Homemade Fermented Chili-Garlic Sauce

Homemade Fermented Chili-Garlic Sauce (aka homemade Sriracha). A little sweet, definitely spicy and with a little texture from the pureed peppers, this sauce has the perfect tang and "funk" from fermentation too.

It's no secret that I am a hot sauce queen (or is it freak?). At any given time I have at least 4 bottles of hot sauce (different types, obviously) in my fridge and tons of pickled peppers too. Wasabi may as well be ketchup for how much I use it! However, I have limited experience with making hot sauces myself, but with a garden full of various scorching hot peppers I figured it was time! Serious Eats had a fantastic recipe for making a version of Sriracha that intrigued me for a few reasons - one, it used up a whole load of the peppers (yay!) and two, it used fermentation, rather than cooking, to break down the peppers and create the most delicious and complex mixture of flavours.

Now, fermentation is easy - in the sense that you basically do none of the work. I chopped up the peppers in my food processor (for the fact that they didn't need to be uniform size and I also avoided touching them!) and scooped the whole mess into the jar, where it sat for just over a week. All I had to do was stir it once a day and watch the bubbles. Once fermentation was more or less complete, the vinegar and heat are applied and the works is pureed. The result was an absolutely perfect condiment, better than storebought and spicier too (which was definitely dependent on the peppers I used). I canned a few small jars and stuck what I would use immediately into a tiny glass bottle. As far as I can tell, the fermentation stopped after the heat and vinegar were applied, but then again the bottle disappeared in under a week!

Unfortunately, last year I did not have quite the stock (or heat) of peppers we usually do, and this year is likely going to be the same thanks to all the rain. Fingers crossed I'm back to spice world next year!

Creme Filled Chocolate Cupcakes

Creme Filled Chocolate Cupcakes are vegan and super easy to whip up! Filled with a light frosting, its a less preservative-filled way to embrace your inner child!

I am a total kid at heart. In a way, its a definite asset - after all, I'm a teacher (and a Home Ec one at that!). I can't really say my palate has ever been stereotypically "childlike" though - I would gladly order off the "grownup" menu when we went out to eat and saved the fries for fast food runs. That said, during our summer road trips, I longed for those truck stops where my parents would give my sister and I two dollars each and send us to the convenience store for sustenance. While my sister would often go for the chips (she's a Pringles girl) or boxes of Smarties (the Canadian ones), I would always find my way to the baked goods section and load up on whatever looked good and chocolatey.

The jackpot, as I'm sure most of you readers will agree, was finding those cream filled chocolate cupcakes. For $2, I could score four of them, and boy did I hoard them from stop to stop! Looking back, I'm actually surprised I liked them as much as I did - they were very sweet, and probably full of all sorts of "fun" stuff, but like Jos Louis they were irresistible! They actually held such a soft spot in my heart that they came up during a late night conversation with N (my fiance, and yes we're teenage girls at a sleepover some days). I knew I had to try my hand at making some from scratch, and since I had control of the ingredients, I was sure I could find a way to have them turn out better than I remembered. I found a vegan version of the coveted cupcakes by Chloe Coscarelli and set about tweaking it for my needs.

The first batch of cupcakes was a hit - such a hit, in fact, that N brought them to work and one of his coworkers fell in love with it too! When N asked me if it was possible for me to make some for his coworker as a thank you for picking up shifts (and generally being a great guy - Hi A!) I told him absolutely! Luckily if you can make muffins, these cupcakes will be a breeze! A note on the tools - if you don't have / can't find a Bismark tip to fill them, a round tip will work if you poke a preliminary hole with a chopstick.

I love baking for others, and these cupcakes will be on heavy rotation I'm sure - between 82 school kids, a fiance who loves my treats, and all the assorted friends and family there will never be a dull moment!

Chocolate Protein Brownies

These Chocolate Protein Brownies are decadent and moist with only 97 calories a piece! The secret? Whey powder and adzuki beans for protein, fibre and a fudgy texture.

When I was on Weight Watchers in my teens, chocolate was one of my biggest cravings. Since I was a "very busy" highschooler at the time, I got to indulge my craving with low fat brownies from a mix. They were good, I have to say - chewy and fudgy, with a crinkled top like "normal" brownies.It's been years since those brownies were in my fridge, but since I have a few friends on the weight loss journey (and doing darn well!) who are also chocoholics, I thought it might be worth a shot to try my hand at a healthy, yet still decadent option.

Bean brownies are nothing new, but they have longevity for good reason! Instead of chickpeas (like the recipe I used as my jumping-off point) or black beans (like this equally good recipe), I turned my attention to a bean that is more traditionally used in Japanese desserts - adzuki. These small, dark red beans have an awesome sweet starchiness about them, which worked incredibly well mixed with the bitter cocoa and coffee. To up the protein a bit more, I used a generous helping of chocolate flavoured Optimum Nutrition Protein Energy, a protein powder I keep on hand for baking and adding to oatmeal (I still prefer Nuzest for drinking straight). Without eggs (or sugar), getting the coveted crackly top would be tough. However, a sprinkling of fine sugar over the batter worked wonders! Once the bars were sliced, it was clear that they embodied the rich fudginess I remembered from my youth. They also freeze exceptionally well, and wrapped individually make exceptional lunchbox treats for camp, school or work! By the way, if you are making these for kids, use hot chocolate or even milk for the coffee and use a plain protein powder to minimize the caffeine.