gimme five, on the side...

Alright, more like 3 on the side.

You know, there actually has been quite a bit of cooking going on, and several items I make that are
good haven't made it into the blog.  Right now I'm going to share a few recipes for side dishes that
were easy, tasty, and overall enjoyable.

RECIPE 1:
PASTA SIDE SALAD (made over!)
This is from Kraft Canada, this is great pasta salad.  If you've ever seen the Simpson's episode where
Homer is having a BBQ and Lisa is a new vegetarian and she suggested veggies to eat and Homer and
Bart sing "you don't make friends with sal-ad! you don't make friends with sal-ad!" well, you WILL
make friends with THIS salad.  I guarantee it.  I have :) LOL.  It's a salad you can use what you
want for pasta (small is best, like mini penne, shells, ditali) and veg, I've done corn, celery,
green pep, blanched broccoli, whatever.

Original Recipe here:http://www.kraftcanada.com/en/recipes/pasta-side-salad-makeover-92145.aspx

Goes great with pork chops and
grilled veg

What I did:
INGREDIENTS:
1 cup elbow macaroni, uncooked
1/3 cup Miracle Whip Calorie-Wise Dressing
2T cup Kraft Calorie-Wise Zesty Italian Dressing, 2T roasted red pepper Parmesan dressing
80 g of old cheddar, cut in tiny little squares
3/4 cup matchstick-cut carrots (julienne)
1/2 cup chopped fresh snow peas
1/2 cup of julienne celery
1/2 medium red pepper fine chopped
2T of cilantro finely chopped
Salt and pepper to taste.

Curry me turkey

First things first:

A few moments of silence for my bike that got stolen yesterday (theivery is unfortunate and very sad) 

Alright, moment's over. This is like the ANTITHESIS of shepherd's pie!  But it's VERY good!  I made this Monday eve, and it's actually a suitable weeknight meal for those who have 20-25 minutes for prep (it's blitz prep, not the take your time and let your mind wander into space prep)

Finished product - orangey goodness

I've mentioned before that I love things with curry.  The turmeric in curry powder is an anti- inflammatory - which is good for all sorts of things!  I even put turmeric in my smoothies sometimes and even my porridge on occasion (you can hardly taste it).  

Enough about the wonder spice.  The original recipe is for 2 casseroles, I made one casserole with some changes.   This took less than 25 minute total prep (more like 20) and a half hour of cook time as you can do all of the steps concurrently (except the cooking part).  The original is here:

http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/recipefinder/curried-sweet-potato-shepherds-pie-ghk0308

CURRIED SWEET POTATO TURKEY SHEPHERDS PIE

INGREDIENTS:
3 medium (approx 2lbs total) sweet potatoes
1T veg oil
1 LB ground turkey

I can cannelloni, can you?

Out and about grocery shopping the other day I saw for a decent price fresh lasagne sheets, whole

grain ones from Olivieri - I thought 'why not?' I'll make lasagna, I am not a lasagna dynamo by any stretch, I'm actually really hit and miss with the lasagna craft (and most Italian style cooking to be honest), but whenever I use fresh sheets it's always tastier.

The finished product!

But then I had a brainwave.  What about using the sheets to make ravioli?  I did some research and it seems that most commercial fresh lasagne sheets are too thick for this application and rolling them

out evenly and thinly enough, well, I almost may as well make my own dough but then something else came to me.

A light bulb - cannelloni - of course! I've read it in a chatelaine or canadianliving or something like that some time in the last 3 months to 3 years so I went researching and yes, infact, it's common practice to make cannelloni using lasagne sheets and it is FAN freaking tastic.

If you've made cannelloni or manicotti before you've tried to stuff those tube shells.  Now, you could just pipe into the shells  which is often good esp for cheese mixes, but if you have no suitable piping bags (ziploc will do in a pinch), or even warm filling the piping idea might not work out so well, which makes rolling your cannelloni a desirable option - and one I'll do over again for certain.

I sort of based it on this recipe, many of my methods/ingredients are the same: http://www.canadianliving.com/food/veal_and_spinach_cannelloni.php



VEAL RICOTTA CANNELLONI

serves 8 (or if you're hungry, a bit less :))

Kookoo for Kiko!

I'll start it off this way:

The food was good.  No, it was great.  The food was great which is exactly the reason why I'll come back here. If you like Japanese food or even just something different with quality and care,  this is a place you need to explore.   My pictures do no justice (I forgot to put my flash on my phone camera)

I'm talking about Kiko restaurant, you'll find it on Preston street in the same plaza as the heart and crown.  Little Italy has sort of branched out into housing restaurants with less-than-Italian fare in recent years and you know what? It's excellent location and as long as the restaurants are high calibre, I say bring it on!

When we walked in it was a bit dark, but nicely decorated and modern looking, a far cry from alot of Asian restaurants (Siam kitchen your Thai is wonderful but 1970 is gone...)

Hawaiian roll, must be as good
as other 'hawaiian' foods :)

The service was slow, painfully slow.  We were starving.  But the service was also very friendly.

You see we had a livingsocial coupon which was expiring in a few days and so did about 90% of the other patrons who were in the restaurant.  The chefs and wait staff were working tirelessly to keep up with the demand.  We kept that in mind and I thought you know, cut them some slack.  It's Wednesday with a Friday night crowd. 

Adam's not a sushi man, and actually he's never had sushi so far as I know.  Since I'm a sushi fan but not a connoisseur by any means, I decided it would be best to try a simple roll (instead of ordering a boat of sushi or something) and we could get other entrees, this worked out really well!