Saviolo
Saviolo's JournalThai Ajaad - Spicy Cucumber Relish Recipe (video)
Sorry I missed last week! Things got away from us while I was recovering from the flu! Fun times! But we did have a big Thai feast recently, and we made some videos about it. This week we did a video on the delicious spicy relish that is typically served with satay: ajaad. It's super easy and actually quite a versatile condiment with some big flavours that will enhance many dishes.
The shallots we used in this recipe may have actually been small red onions passed off as shallots! It's not super easy to tell, but they seemed a lot darker in colour than typical shallots. Regardless, shallots are ideal for this recipe, but you could definitely use red onion if that's what you have on hand. Also, we used some quite spicy home-grown serrano peppers from our garden, but you can control the heat by using milder or hotter peppers in this recipe if you like. Thai birdseye chiles are more traditional, but make this recipe at the heat level you like. We didn't find it particularly spicy the following day, but there was definitely a pleasant building heat.
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Homemade Arrabiata Spicy Italian Tomato Sauce Recipe (video)
We grew a couple of different hot peppers in our balcony container garden this year; Padron peppers, serrano peppers, and Ho Chi Minh cayenne peppers. For this recipe, we used some of our ripe red padron peppers and roasted them to make hot and spicy arrabiata sauce! This is a super simple sauce that includes tomato, hot peppers, onion, garlic, fresh herbs, and olive oil. We used it on some beautiful locally produced cheese ravioli, but you can use arrabiata on pizza, or any number of other pastas that will hold a tomato sauce well.
Ours came out quite spicy. Padrons are supposed to be about as hot or maybe a tiny bit hotter than jalapenos, but we find that ours are a little hotter than that. If you want to make sure it's less spicy, you can use a lower Scoville pepper like Hatch or Shepherd peppers, or some "suntanned" red poblano peppers. Alternately, if you want to go the other way and make it really hot and spicy, you can add serrano peppers, or even habanero, scorpion, or ghost peppers! Careful, though: that is going to be a *very* spicy sauce.
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Hearty Mushroom Cream Pesto Pasta Sauce Recipe (video)
This week we got our hands on some really excellent mushrooms. There were some amazing chanterelles, cinnamon cap, and pioppino mushrooms available, so we thought we'd make a mushroom cream sauce with them! Don't be afraid to really cook your mushrooms, you want to cook as much of the moisture out of them as you can! For some of these kinds of mushrooms, you really do need to wash them, because they do get a lot of soil and growing medium stuck in the caps and between the stems, but because we'll be cooking them for so long, that little bit of extra moisture isn't going to harm them,
You could make this without the pesto, but we felt like it added a really bright fresh aroma to the dish, and it was delicious. We also thought that it might be nice to add some nuts, though we didn't here. Pine nuts, chopped walnuts or pecans, or even toasted almond slices would all be great additions to this sauce for a little bit of textural variety, especially if you don't have a variety of mushrooms to work with. You can totally make this recipe with just white button or cremini mushrooms, but it will have less textural variety, so you may want to toss some toasted nuts in for that.
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Easy Roasted Tomatillo Salsa Verde Recipe (video)
A super easy and delicious recipe this week. We got our hands on some local fresh tomatillos, and decided to make some salsa verde! There are few ingredients, and the only specialized equipment you need is the food processor, though you could also use a stick blender for this. The flavours are bright and fresh, and roasting all of the ingredients really brings out the natural sweetness. If you're going to use garlic (as we did), we definitely recommend roasting it very well, because the sharpness of raw garlic will really overtake a lot of the other excellent flavours and aromas.
Like so many things, this dish is better the second day after the flavours have had a chance to come together. We also find that this recipe is better served at room temp or a little above, so if you're pulling this out of the fridge to serve, you might want to pop it into the microwave for a few seconds before serving!
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Refreshing and Simple Cheese and Peach Dessert Recipe (video)
This recipe is based on a dessert we had in a local Italian restaurant. It's coming to the end of peach season here in Ontario, but there are still some stunning peaches at the markets, so we want to eat as many of them as we can while they're in season. The flavour combination of the sweetened fresh cheese, the super sweet peaches, the slightly resinous basil, and the tart blackberries is amazing. You could also replace the basil with some fresh mint if you wanted. If you can't get your hands on fresh, we don't recommend using dried herbs for this, because that fresh green aroma is really what makes it. Our basil grew like crazy this year, so we've got it to spare.
The cheese we used was a sheep ricotta, and it was much drier than we were expecting. We added a little bit of yogurt to help cream everything up a little, and you could also use some heavy cream if you had to. You may have better luck using something like mascarpone, burrata, or stracciatella cheese (which is how it was served to us in a restaurant). You might even be able to do this with cream cheese, though you may wish to whip it a little or use some cream or milk to make it a bit lighter.
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Simple and Delicious Garlic Chutney Recipe (in the style of Toum) (video)
This sauce is so basic that it pops up just about everywhere in the old world. In Western Europe it might be known as aioli, while in the Levant it is known as toum, a transliteration of the Arabic word for garlic. Toum is typically just garlic with oil and juice; the version presented here was inspired by a hot sauce we encountered at a Somali restaurant in Toronto and also contains cilantro and fresh, green hot peppers, something like a cross between toum and basbaas.
There is no purer expression of garlic flavour than this. The type of garlic you use will definitely change the flavour, so make sure you like the garlic you're using! The hot pepper is completely optional, but it does add a very pleasant heat that complements the garlic heat very nicely. You could also make this hotter with a hotter pepper. We have fresh serranos in the garden, but you could really amp it up with a fresh scotch bonnet or habanero.
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Hearty Red Lentil Soup Recipe - Based on Shurbat Cadas (video)
This amazing red lentil soup is based on a Somali recipe called Surbat Cadas. We've made a couple of substitutions just based on what we can easily acquire, but this delicious hearty soup is basically the same thing. One thing to note about red lentils: Like quinoa, they have a chemical compound on them called saponins, which are a bitter, soapy compound. Make sure you rinse your red lentils well until the water stops being sudsy. It will improve the flavour of the dish!
Once it's been blended, it may not look like much, but it is full of flavour and is surprisingly filling! We used ghee (clarified butter) to sweat the veggies at the beginning of this recipe, but if you use a neutral oil (or coconut oil or peanut oil) this recipe is completely vegan. Even that garlic sauce we garnish with at the end is vegan (and will be next week's recipe)! The blend of spices is one of those things that changes a lot regionally for the recipe, but figure out what works for you. Toss in some cardamom or coriander seed if you like. Allspice or mace might make nice additions, too. A bit of grated dry ginger wouldn't go amiss.
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Hearty Tuscan White Bean Soup Recipe - Vegan! (video)
We made a couple of replacements on this recipe based on what we had on hand. The white bean that is more common in this soup is the cannellini bean, but we used navy beans. Also, the greens we had on hand were some fresh tatsoi from the garden, though spinach or kale would be more traditional. You could also use mustard greens, beet greens, or radish greens for this.
This recipe is complete vegan. Instead of chicken or beef stock we used the boiling liquid from the beans (aquafaba), and we sweated the veggies in olive oil instead of butter. This is still an incredibly hearty and delicious soup that is incredibly satisfying. If you wanted to, you could garnish this with a little bit of feta cheese if you really feel like you're missing the dairy, or some toasted pepitas would be a great addition.
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Fresh Lemon Pesto Caprese Salad Recipe (video)
We are in the heart of tomato season, so we've got a bunch of fresh tomatoes out on the balcony, and they are delicious. We thought this would be a great opportunity for a nice fresh caprese salad! Now, of course, the simplest expression of the caprese salad is slices of tomato and cheese with some basil leaves and a drizzle of excellent olive oil, and that is a great way to do it. We took it a little further and made a quick dressing out of some pesto we had made (also from basil from our garden), and lemon juice.
The cheese we used here is extremely soft and kind of clumped together. You could also do this with those little bocconcini cut in half, or a less soft fresh mozzarella. This one was so soft it was halfway to a burrata. It tasted amazing, but it lost some points on looks. Of course you can do this recipe without the dressing, and just drizzle some good olive oil in there, but loved that little extra flavour boost from the lemon juice and pesto, doubling down on the basil.
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Korean Pork Bone Soup Recipe (video)
This is a classic Korean pork bone soup with a couple of replacements of the harder-to-find ingredients with some slightly easier-to-find versions. The result is still an excellent rich hot and spicy soup filled with veggies and aromatics. This is a perfect soup for the incoming cool fall weather. It has a few steps, but it's worth it. The bean sprout side dish we did last week is an excellent accompaniment to this gorgeous soup.
Some of the replacements we did: We did not use ground perilla seeds, and replaced them with toasted sesame seeds. We replaced the doenjang with a combination of white miso and gochujang, which are a little easier to find. You can also easily control the heat on this one, with more or less gochujang, and more or fewer (or no!) dried hot peppers.
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Profile Information
Gender: MaleHometown: Ottawa, Ontario
Home country: Canada
Current location: Toronto, Ontario
Member since: Wed Oct 29, 2008, 04:34 PM
Number of posts: 3,280
