Short & Sweet Sunday - Spice Rubbed Pork Chops

Happy Sunday! Spring has sprung around here and the weather is very warm and sunny! In honour of that, lets have a quicky grilling recipe.

I like to get these large Frenched rib pork chops. They're great with a nice spice rub. I make the rub in a good quantity and keep it on hand. Here's what you need:

2 tbsp chili powder

2 tsp brown sugar

2 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp cayenne pepper

1/2 tsp salt

Mix it all together and sprinkle about a tablespoon over pork or chicken before grilling. 

I served the chops with leftover rice pilaf and grilled asparagus.  Yum!

Miso Glazed Cod

I am not a big fan of fish. I love deep fried fish and chips, and I love to eat halibut in restaurants, but I am just a little wary of the fish we get around here, in the centre of the country, and I don't always love the texture and flavour of frozen fish. 


But it is so healthy, I try to work it into our diet as regularly as possible. Now that I've tried it with a miso glaze, I think we'll have it more often. A delicious, easy preparation with very flavourful results.  

Miso paste is made from fermented soybeans. It gives a rich, earthy, umami flavour to this dish.

One of my biggest challenges in cooking is to always be conscious of the balance in a dish. Often I'll taste something I've made and know something's missing but I just can't put my finger on it. This dish is a perfect example of balanced ingredients. The miso adds that earthy, rich umami flavour as does soy sauce, sugar adds sweetness and rice vinegar ads acid.  Plus a dash of cayenne pepper for spice.  

Combine all the marinade ingredients, plus oil in a blender or food processor and blend until smooth.

Place the fish on foil because the sugar in the marinade will get toasty and a little burnt to be honest.

Brush the marinade onto the fish and place in a 400 degree oven for 10 minutes, then broil just until the top begins to brown.

I served this with a basmati and wild rice mixture and squash with kale. 

Short & Sweet Sunday - Turkey Soup

This is a very short, sweet post and the last of the turkey leftovers.  I love that dark, rich turkey stock so much and it makes delicious soup.

I saute a diced onion, carrot and two celery stocks for just a couple of minutes in a medium sized pot.  Add a few cups of turkey stock.  When it is warm, add diced leftover cooked turkey and frozen corn.  


Meanwhile, boil egg noodles in a separate pot.  Once cooked, fill your bowl with noodles and top with the hot soup.  Serve with crusty rolls or baguette.  

Turkey Pot Pie

As I've grown up my tastes have matured somewhat. Many things I hated as a child, I now tolerate or even like. I don't think I'll ever eat raw tomatoes or red bell peppers, but I've started to give mushrooms a chance.

One of the grossest foods of my childhood were hot lunch meat pies. I believe you can still buy these atrocities frozen. Greasy pastry filled with fatty beef and brown gravy, generally served mushy and smelling like vomit. I refused to eat them and it turned me off any type of savory pie for a good long time.

I never much cared for gravy or pie crust but I think I was eating the wrong ones. Now that I can make gravy myself, I make sure it is flavourful, not floury.  So I thought I'd give pot pies a try with all my leftover turkey.

I chopped onions, carrots and celery and sauteed them in some oil for a few minutes.

I added mushrooms...

... and cooked them down for a few minutes.

Then I sprinkled the vegetables with flour and cooked for a few more minutes before adding turkey stock.

Let the stock bubble until it thickens.

Chop the leftover cooked turkey.

And add to the gravy mixture along with some frozen peas and corn and just warm through.

Instead of making my own pie crust (which I've never done! Future project alert!), I purchased this great all butter puff pastry to top my pies.

I defrosted a sheet in the refrigerator overnight and rolled it out a little thinner.

I put the turkey filling into single serving casserole dishes.  You could use ramekins, french onion soup bowls or whatever you have that's oven safe.

Top the casseroles with the puff pastry, dabbing egg wash around the edges. 

Cut slits in the top of the pastry to allow steam to escape and brush the top with egg wash as well.  I actually found it easier to cut the slits before placing the pastry on the pie.  

Bake at 350 for about 15 or 20 minutes until the pastry is golden brown and the filling is hot and bubbling.

Delicious use for leftovers!

Turkey Stock

Roasting a turkey results in many delicious leftovers, but none so delicious as the deep, brown turkey stock that results from cooking down the turkey bones with aromatics.


When I was a kid we used to call this "bone soup". Turkey stock is much more flavourful than chicken stock I find. The soup it makes is delicious.  


I use my slow cooker to make stock. This lets me slowly simmer the ingredients for days rather than hours. The house smells incredible during this time.

Add your cooked turkey carcass to the crock pot. I usually leave the meat on the wings for this but the rest is just bones.  

Add some onions and carrots (no need to peel them), and some celery. I also used parsley stems and some thyme and a bay leaf.


Fill the crock pot with cold water and plug it in. Then let it simmer on low for at least 24 hours. Here it is at that point.

I like to leave it for 36 hours. When it will look like this:

Now it is a little messy to drain the liquid through a fine mesh strainer.

Press the liquid out of the bones and vegetables then dispose of them. They've done their job.

This is nice and dark and delicious but full of fat. Put it in the fridge overnight and the fat will rise to the top and harden to be easily scraped off.

Use this stock to make soup, gravy, or in place of chicken stock when you want lots of flavour. 

Roast Turkey

Living in a 2 person household doesn’t usually hold me back much in terms of my cooking. To be brutally and embarrassingly honest, most recipes for 4 serve the two of us just fine, with leftovers for my lunch the next day – maybe.

So instead of doing math, I often just make a full box of pasta or an 8 person serving of stew and freeze or reuse the leftovers somehow.  I don’t mind eating the same thing twice in a row.

But sometimes you make one meal and it serves you for a whole week!  That’s what happens when I cook a turkey.

I do this every couple of months or so. I see a good deal on turkey and cook one up for just the two of us. Sometimes I can get one that’s just the size of a large chicken, but this time it was about 11 pounds and it literally fed us for a week!

I really like turkey and I like that it is easy, flavourful and healthy. But the caveat is that the side dishes I like with turkey are so bad for you, so the opposite of what is healthy to eat, that it ends up cancelling out the healthy lean protein. I might as well be eating brisket. 

I come by this honestly. I come from a family that takes Thanksgiving (and Christmas) very seriously. I’m 3^rd generation Canadian with distant roots in Scotland and Ireland, but my eldest aunt married a Ukrainian man over 40 years ago and brought his food traditions into our family. I love having an inherited food tradition, even if it has nothing to do with my actual heritage. At Thanksgiving we have turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, rolls... and pierogies, cabbage rolls and meat sticks (fried pork skewers which I hope to explain another time).

So all this turkey and starch makes for a mighty white plate at Thanksgiving (and Christmas). Honestly, I can take or leave mashed potatoes, but turkey without pierogies seems like sacrilege to me. And I’m finally starting to warm up to gravy after years of avoiding it. And the rolls of choice at Thanksgiving (and Christmas) (and my turkey dinners) are brown-n-serve white gluten bombs that I would normally avoid like the plague but taste so good with turkey dinner and even better as turkey sandwich lunch.

All this is a very long-winded introduction and explanation to why I love roasting a turkey. I’ve tried many, many different methods – brining, low & slow, high heat roasting, and I always love the results.  Plus, turkey can be had so cheaply most of the time and makes so much, it is easy to experiment.  The only thing I haven’t tried is a heritage or organic bird, which I’m sure would be tasty, but if I’m spending $60 to $120 for a turkey instead of $8 to $18, I’ll probably be a little less relaxed about the prep and serving and have more than one guest at the table. 

This roast turkey dinner was high heat roasting. My 11lb turkey roasted for 2 hours at 450 degrees and rested for 30 minutes while I made the gravy, potatoes and Brussels sprouts. It didn’t take much more prep than a small roast beef or a roast chicken. The difference is, I got lunch and dinner for a week out of the leftovers.

The only thing that does take some planning is thawing the turkey. If you can thaw it in the fridge for 4 to 6 days, that’s ideal. I decided to do this somewhat last minute so had to put the turkey in a cold water bath to thaw for several hours. After that, I just rinsed the turkey and removed the innards. Honestly I don’t know what comes in the little sack (kidney & liver?) and I usually just throw it out, but I do use the neck.

Once the turkey is rinsed, put it on a rack in a large roasting pan. With this method, limited seasoning seems to be the trend. 

I added salt and pepper and some dry sage and thyme and no oil. I did put a cup of water into the bottom of the pan and toss the neck in as well. You can throw a cut onion or lemon inside the turkey but I used nothing this time. 

If I don’t have any leftover turkey stock in the freezer to make gravy, I might use the neck, an onion, carrot and celery stalk to boil a quick turkey stock on the stove while the turkey roasts. But this time I had lots of stock so I just threw the neck into the roasting pan to flavour the drippings.

To my husband’s eternal chagrin I am an enemy of stuffing and dressing. I think wet bread is disgusting. So he only gets stuffing at Thanksgiving (and Christmas) and I don’t have to deal with the hassle. That lets me rest and relax while the turkey roasts and just prep the potatoes and veggies to start cooking once the turkey comes out of the oven.

This time I boiled about 6 medium, peeled, Yukon gold potatoes and sliced Brussels sprouts, tossing them with oil, garlic powder and salt and pepper.

For the gravy I warmed turkey stock, then added it with a bit of wine to the pan drippings. I strained it and then added a flour & water slurry to thicken it then let it boil for 20 minutes or so to thicken up.

Meanwhile I drained the potatoes and added them back to the heat to dry out, then poured in warm milk and butter and salt and pepper into the pot and had my husband use a hand beater to whip the potatoes.

The turkey was sitting under foil all this time. Once the potatoes were ready and the gravy was done, I started to carve it with an electric knife that is a miracle for carving beef and poultry into nice thin slices. I sliced the breast but kinda tore the thighs apart and gave us each a little white and dark meat, potatoes, gravy and Brussels sprouts.

Leftover creations:

Meal two – turkey, pierogies, gravy, rolls, broccoli

Meal  three – lunchtime turkey sandwiches

Meal four – turkey pot pie

Meal five – turkey soup

Short & Sweet Sunday - Rice Salad

Here's a colourful and tasty grain salad to serve at a potluck or as a side dish. 

The recipe comes from an unlikely source: Disney.

Basically just mix cooked rice with black beans and corn, plus tomatoes, onions and peppers, including a jalapeno pepper.

Make a simple dressing of lime juice, olive oil, salt and pepper and mix it with the hot rice, then add beans and corn and toss to combine. Once it is at room temperature, add the vegetables and some cilantro or parsley and mix together.

Simple!