Category Archives: Food - Page 2

Póg mo thóin!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Do you have any Irish in you? I’ve got some – my great-grandfather, Leslie Griffin, was Irish! He was a Home Child – orphaned as a wee lad and sent to England by his uncle to live in a Bernardo Home, and later shipped to Canada as an indentured farm labourer.

Now this year, I am still recuperating from a nasty bout of influenza, so I doubt I’ll be drinking any green beer tonight. However, I am thinking of recreating a delicious pseudo-Irish meal that I first prepared three years ago: Guinness Fondue!

Cheese and Guinness Fondue
Serves 6-8. Recipe Source: Food.com

Ingredients:

2 lbs cheddar cheese, grated

1/2 pint Guinness stout

6 -8 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

salt & pepper, to taste

cayenne pepper, to taste

1 tablespoon cornstarch

bread, chunks for dipping

Directions:

Well, the directions in the REAL recipe say you should melt the cheese first and add the rest ofthe ingredients after, but that sounded dumb to me, so I made up my own rules, because that’s how I roll.

I guess I could have used any old beer, but Saint Patrick himself spoke to me in a dream and said, “Hey stupid! Use Guinness!” So I did:

Yummmmmm Beer.

I heated the beer, Worcestershire and spices to a simmer, then added this lovely Kerrygold Dubliner Irish Cheddar:

You haven't lived until you've had Dubliner cheese.

I heated and stirred until the fondue thickened slightly.

I still wear that same ring on that same thumb!

That’s pretty much it! If you’re fancy enough (or enough of a HIPPIE) to actually have a fondue set in your house, you could put it in that and do it the real way, but I’m ghetto so I just used some bowls and a platter.

The recipe said to serve with bread, but that sounded boring, so I prepared ALL SORTS OF STUFF to go with our Cheese and Guinness fondue:

Potatoes, brocolli, kielbasa, mushrooms, carrots and apples.

There you have it, folks! An Irish twist on a Swiss classic.

Éirinn go Brách!

Blueberry Almond Muffins For The Carb Conscious

Posted by gwenstyles on January 16, 2011 2 comments

So check it out. Ten pounds in two weeks is no fluke. I am workin’ on my fitness (again LOL) and as always, my weapon of choice is a low carb diet combined with mega awesome exercise. But we’re not going to talk about the exercise part today because I have a cold and it’s Saturday so that would be lame.

There are a lot of reasons I like low carb: you get to eat lots of red meat, eggs, cheese, butter, seafood, vegetables, nuts, olives, and peanut butter. You’re allowed mayo, salad dressings, olive oil, bacon (mmmmmmm bacon), and avocados. Lunch and dinner are easy.

But breakfast is kinda hard.

Sure, you can have all the bacon and eggs you want, but I don’t always have time to do a big fry-up on weekday mornings, and buying a full breakfast at the cafe in my office building can get expensive. So I need something healthy, loaded with protein, and portable.

Enter these low carb blueberry muffins.

I basically Googled a recipe and tweaked it like a tweaker, which is my standard Modus Operandi. I used some unflavoured protein powder I had in the cupboard from back when I was a gym rat (which was a short-lived lifestyle that I quickly abandoned the day I was able to squeeze my wedding gown up over my thunder thighs) and my lovely French Vanilla Sugar Free Da Vinci syrup, which is calorie, fat and carb free, and is sweetened with Splenda, not aspartame! (Wish I could get used to the taste of Stevia but that shit’s nasty, sorry.)

I really enjoyed these. They were small and dense, and didn’t rise too too much, but they were just the right sweetness and two of them filled my belly up nicely. These will make a wonderful weekday breakfast. I might experiment with future batches by adding hemp hearts, flax seeds, and maybe taking out the berries, adding pecans and replacing the 1/2 cup of vanilla syrup listed below with a combination of cold strong coffee and Kaluha-flavoured Da Vinci syrup. Mmmm.

Blueberry Almond Muffins For The Carb Conscious
Per muffin: 77 calories, 4g fat, 2g digestible (net) carbs, 8g protein

3/4 cup protein powder (2.5 scoops)
1/2 cup ground almonds (almond meal)
1 packet Splenda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 egg
2 tbsp cream
1/2 cup Da Vinci syrup
2 tbsp melted butter
1/2 container blueberries (3oz)
1/3 cup slivered almonds

Mix it all up, sprinkle with slivered almonds, pour into greased muffin tin, bake at 400° for 15 minutes. DEVOUR OM NOM NOM

White Bean and Spinach Soup

Posted by gwenstyles on December 30, 2010 3 comments

om nom nom

A while back, I got a real craving for white bean and spinach soup. Not sure why – I’d never even had white beans before.

My purchase of a can of white beans coincided with the purchase of my new iPhone and I thought, let’s take this thing out for a spin. And so, may I present: white bean and spinach soup. My soup is loosely based on a yummy-looking recipe over at Aggie’s Kitchen. Thanks for the inspiration, Aggie! Read more »

In Which Gwen Drinks For Free in Jerusalem

Posted by gwenstyles on November 28, 2010 No comments

One night earlier this year, my ex and I went to dinner at Jerusalem Restaurant. It’s one of my favourite restaurants – it’s a Mediterranean buffet. The food is incredible. Several different kinds of chicken and lamb, tabbouleh, seafood, grilled veggies as far as the eye can see (asparagus, zucchini, eggplant, cauliflower), saffron rice, salads, roasted garlic, lentil soups, Warak Enab, hummus and baba ghanoush, falafel, hot freshly-baked pita bread, and more!

Yum! The food here's so good.

Even better, they feature belly dancers every night of the week! We love watching the belly dancing.

Gorgeous! I love belly dancing

So we were just sitting down to our first plate of food. Our table was in the aisle that had a direct path from the kitchen to the bar. A busboy was coming from the kitchen with a dolly, and the dolly was stacked with five crates of clean water and wine glasses. The stack was about four feet high. Suddenly, the wheel of the dolly caught on the rug right in front of our table and all of the crates tipped forward, crashing into Stuart and I with a booming sound that almost shattered my eardrums! The plastic crates smashed into my left knee and Stu’s right foot and over a hundred glasses broke all over us! I was literally ankle-deep in broken glass, and couldn’t even move because of the sea of jagged glass around me.

So scary! Thought I was going to be hurt!

The manager of the restaurant comes rushing over yelling “Oh my god are you okay? Oh my god oh my god!” She was snapping her fingers for staff to clean up the glass, calling the head waiter over to move us to another table, promising to bring us replacement drinks (we were just drinking Coke) and apologizing profusely.

The indicent scared and embarrassed me. Not only was everyone in the restaurant was looking at us, but it happened so fast that I thought I was going to be hurt! I had no time to move out of the way. For several minutes afterwards my heart was beating a mile a minute and I had a mild panic attack on the way home. Imagine if we’d been cut by a falling shard of glass, or if my knee had actually been hurt by the plastic crate that hit it!

So we were moved to a new table (a MUCH better table, might I add) and were offered free unlimited wine for the evening to make up for the incident (would have been better to offer us our meal on the house, but I am NOT one to pass up free booze!). The rest of the evening passed very pleasantly, the highlight being towards the end when we watched the belly dancer coax an old grandpa up to dance with her. The guy looked just like Frank Barone from Everybody Loves Raymond. This guy gets up and starts dancing with the belly dancer, and he’s better than she is! He even taught her some sexy moves! It was fucking hilarious.

What’s the scariest or most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you in a restaurant?