When it comes to Thanksgiving dinner, it seems like turkey gets all of the attention. For me, though, Thanksgiving is all about the side dishes.
Don't get me wrong. I love me some turkey. It’s an essential (and delicious!) part of the Thanksgiving meal, but it’s the side dishes that elevate the meal from everyday dinner to a full-on holiday feast....
Mayonnaise belongs in many things. It's perfectly delicious squiggled onto Mexican street corn, stirred into deviled eggs, mixed into tuna salad, spruced up into tartar sauce for my fish and chips, or in a little cup beside a big basket of crispy golden fries.
But mayonnaise in a potato salad? Not so much....
This is the time of year when our little vegetable patch goes into overdrive, leaving me with enough freshly-picked vegetables to feed a small army (or perhaps just a hungry couple of gardeners).
We slacked off a little this year, having planted just a handful of things much later than usual - just beans, tomatoes, peppers and basil for us, seeing as the big planting day we usually have in late May had to be deferred to late June, post-wedding and honeymoon....
For January's Kitchen Play event, bloggers were asked to feature California Endive in their recipes. They came up with all sorts of great ways to serve up this underappreciated vegetable, including this intriguing appetizer by Winnie at Healthy Green Kitchen, in which she braised endive halves in white wine and then topped them with a bright green gremolata.
Since I'm always on the lookout for interesting vegetable dishes, I decided to pick up a few endives at the store and try it out for myself.
As an introduction to endives, this dish is ideal - it takes all of five minutes to get the ingredients into a baking dish, and then the endives and braising liquid are left to their own devices while the rest of the meal comes together. Easy and low-maintenance... just the way I like it.
As it turns out, I didn't braise my endives quite long enough, because I was reading too quickly and didn't realise that the endives go back into the oven after the first 30 minutes. That's why my dish looks slightly anemic if you compare to Winnie's photos.
Despite my little boo-boo, I was really happy with the end results. Just as Winnie promised, the braising mellows out the endives' bitter edge, leaving them sweet and savoury and with just the slightest hint of bitter.
The texture was also quite pleasant, since the endives don't completely wilt into submission as they braise, but rather keep a slight bite that's reminiscent of cooked bok choy.
My one worry was that the endives would be too bland all by their lonesome, but they were quite flavourful even before getting a boost of bright colour and flavour from the gremolata.
And speaking of gremolata, I added a little chopped fresh marjoram just for the heck of it, which added a nice little je-ne-sais-quoi to the party. I also added a dab of butter to enrich the braising liquid, and halved the recipe since I was only serving two (and even so, I had enough left over for lunch).
The final verdict? Delicious. It's easy enough for a simple weeknight supper of grilled Italian sausages and a pile of lumpy smashed potatoes, but elegant enough to serve up for a fancier dinner of roast chicken or pork.
It's definitely a grown-up sort of dish, but I think it'll be a great addition to my repertoire of interesting dishes for adventurous eaters.
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It all started with leftover mashed sweet potatoes.
Not just any mashed sweet potatoes, either. I'm talking about The Boy's signature side dish of sweet potatoes spiked with maple syrup and cardamom, which we'd originally made for our Christmas dinner of roast goose with all the trimmings.
It was The Boy's french toast that won my heart, but I'm pretty sure that these mashed potatoes sealed the deal.
It's a great way to dress up sweet potatoes for a special occasion - the maple syrup brings out the natural sweetness of the yams without being cloyingly sweet (a trait I find it all too common in sweet potato dishes), while the cardamom infuses each bite with its subtle yet unmistakeable warm, exotic spice....
For the past few days, Toronto the Good has been sitting in one of those awkward in-between stages where the weather can't quite decide what season we're in.
It's not quite winter, but not quite spring. We've yo-yoed from -15C to +17C to -4C over less than a week, and from sunshine to rain to clouds to rain to snow to that strange combo of snow/sleet/rain that the weather channel oh-so-charmingly calls "variable precipitation". (I prefer to call it "wet crap falling from the sky".)
My biggest frustration with this time of year, aside from trying to pick out what to wear on any given day, is the lack of good seasonal vegetables.
Aside from greens and roots, there's really not much left that's worth eating, unless you're willing to pay a small fortune for a pear flown in from Argentina... and it'll be another month or two before it warms up enough to see the first of the spring vegetables.
So I guess it's a good thing I can never get enough of squash, huh?...
