Last night I made chiles rellenos and documented the whole thing, here are the instructions step by step.

Get 2 chiles poblanos per person. Wash, pat dry, spray with oil and broil for about 12 minutes turning once.

Take blackened chilies and put in plastic bag. Close and let them cool off.

While chilies are cooling off, prepare filling and sauce. I used the typical tomato sauce used for a lot of Mexican food: in blender put fresh tomatoes, onion, garlic, cilantro, veggie bouillon. Blend until liquified.

Cook sauce in 2 tbsp vegetable oil, for about 10 minutes. Salt to taste and season with bay leaf, oregano, garlic powder, cumin and pepper while it’s cooking. Let boil to thicken a bit.

For refried beans: finely chop onion, cilantro, jalapenos and garlic. Use one can of black beans.

Heat oil in pot, saute chopped ingredients for 4 minutes. Add the undrained can of beans. After about 8 minutes, mash beans with masher.

Chilies are now cooled. Peel skin off, make a side slit and take the seeds off as well as any veins.

Once peeled, seeded and deveined, fill chilies with refried beans. Careful, the flesh is very soft and delicate.

Serve sauce on top of chilies, with a side of rice and fried plantains. The sweetness of the plantains goes very well with the flavour of the poblano chilies.

Enjoy!

This recipe has been cross-posted with Garlicster.

How to make a creamy soup when no milk or cream is to be added? I found a few recipes but they all said to mix everything with the blender, but then the leeks would not be visible. I wanted the soup to be creamy but the leeks to be recognizable within the soup. To make this recipes you need to prepare the leeks and the potatoes in separate pots, this will allow to puree the potatoes and leave the chopped leeks to add chunky texture to the soup.

I used:
4 cups potatoes, peeled and chopped
2 large leeks, chopped (there are 3 in the picture but I only used 2)
3 cloves of garlic, chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 cups vegetable broth or water (or more depending on how thick it is and/or how liquid you like it
1 teaspoon curry powder
1 teaspoon chopped ginger
salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:
In a large pot brown the garlic in the olive oil, add the potatoes and sautee until lightly browned. Add the broth to the potatoes and boil until softened.

In a separate pot, sautee the leeks in the olive oil for 2 minutes.

When the potatoes are cooked in the broth, puree with the hand blender, the texture will be that of a vichyssoise. Add the leeks and simmer for 2 minutes for flavour.

Add the chopped ginger and the curry powder to the soup. This will make the soup look a bit yellow, not the usual white, but will give it a distinctive flavour of deliciousness. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve and enjoy!

Yesterday I tried this delicious recipe and a totally new thing for me, I knew that the dish existed because I saw it once on the Food Network, but I had never thought of trying it. I was trying to come up with original veggie ideas for grilling and that’s when I remembered the lettuce. I did not follow the recipe on the Food Network, but I followed the technique and main idea.

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons sesame oil
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon minced ginger
4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon honey
3 heads of romaine lettuce

Instructions:
To make dressing, combine all ingredients in a bowl and mix well.

Slice each head of lettuce in two, lengthwise.

Brush the lettuce with the dressing.

Grill the lettuce on both sides for 5 minutes total. Brush with the dressing when turning around. You don’t want to grill it for too long or it will wilt. You want it to be warm and grilled, but not soggy and wilted.

Here is the grilled lettuce. The picture is not very good, but I can assure you it was crunchy and soft at the same time, and it had nicely absorbed the delicious Asian-inspired dressing. Each person ate a whole half of lettuce and other veggies as well.

Today we biked all the way to the east part of beaches, via Little India and back to the west side through the Lakeshore. All in all it was approximately 21 km, so a good distance for training for our possible bike trip to Kingston later this summer. We’ll see if we actually can do the trip.
We had dinner at Udupi Palace, and it was super delicious. The restaurant is all vegetarian and they do vegan anything (except panner/cheese, of course).
We had a good Wednesday afternoon.

This recipe is super garlicky and not for the faint of heart. To make it a bit friendlier decrease the amount of garlic in the pesto.

Ingredients:
2 cups tightly pressed fresh basil
2 heads of garlic
1 pint cherry tomatoes
Olive oil
3 cups assorted mushrooms (I used shitake and cremini, but you can use portobello, white, oyster, etc.)
Fresh long pasta (I used fetuccine from St. Lawrence Market)
Salt and pepper to taste
Dehydrated garlic to taste
1 oz cooking sherry

Instructions:
There are 2 parts to this recipe, the pesto, which is raw, and the pasta with mushrooms.

To make the pesto:
Finely chop the tomatoes or chop them in the food processor. Add some salt and leave them in a strainer to get rid of the excess water.

After about 10 minutes, the tomatoes will be rid of their excess water. Put them back in the food processor along with the basil and the peeled cloves of one head of garlic. You can also add about one teaspoon of dehydrated garlic if you want. Chop finely.

When all the ingredients are finely chopped in the food processor, add about 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil. This will give the pesto its saucy consistency. Add salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

To make the pasta and mushrooms:
Chop the mushrooms and the cloves of 1 head of garlic.

Stir fry the chopped garlic in about 2 tablespoons of olive oil, when the garlic is softened, add the mushrooms and keep stir frying. Add salt and pepper to taste. When mushrooms are cooked (about 4 minutes) add one shot of sherry. Cover and let boil for about 1 minute.
Meanwhile, cook the pasta in lots of salted water according to instructions. The fresh pasta from St. Lawrence Market takes about 4 minutes to be al dente.
When pasta is ready, toss it into the warm soupy mushrooms (my pasta looks red because I got tomato pasta).

Let the pasta absorb the mushroom juices for about 1 minute.
Serve in a big spaghetti bowl. Add the pesto on top.

Enjoy, and be careful with all that garlic. No, seriously, I was kind of crying at the end of my dinner. But it was goood!

Tonight I’m planning on making lentil soup in my pressure cooker. Not the Mexican style lentil soup that I posted recently. This time I’m planning on making “normal” style, with carrots, celery and spinach.
The past week I haven’t cooked much at home, I was planning on doing so yesterday, but it was so cold in Toronto it reached -24 or something. I just couldn’t find the will to go to the supermarket to get the ingredients. I have some rice at home and that’s what I was going to make for dinner, but James suggested going to The Richmond Rogue for dinner and it was so much better. We still froze on our way there and back, though, even if it’s like 300 metres from our building.
The funny thing is that I had been to the Rogue the previous evening as well, this time with Wendy, we went for a nice dinner and drinks after work. Ah well, I had different things for dinner both nights.

On weekends, we usually make the time for bigger breakfasts, almost brunch I should say.
I usually make everything from scratch, except for the tortillas, I buy those in St. Lawrence Market.
Last week we had chilaquiles.

I made the sauce with pasilla chiles (dry chiles, I bought those in St. Lawrence Market as well), tomatoes, onion, garlic and cilantro. The chips were Que Pasa unsalted tortilla chips. We ate them with a side of sunny-side-up fried eggs and pinto beans.

This morning we had enchiladas.

The enchiladas had tomatillo sauce (with green chile, onion, garlic and cilantro), they were filled with corn nibblets and served with fried eggs, avocado and refried beans.

These are all vegetarian and they would be even better with sour cream and crumbled cheese (NOT cheddar, there is no cheddar in Mexican food), but when you’re allergic to dairy you have to make some sacrifices. Ah well.

This is a vegan take on Mexican style lentil soup, people usually add sausage, or bacon, or ham or all of the above. My mom did not use to put any meat in lentil soup but she used plantain. I forgot to get it today but it may also work out with this recipe.
I went to St. Lawrence Market and got a jar of “nopalitos” (tender cactus).

I also used 2 cups dry green lentils, I soaked them for about 6 hours beforehand.
5 medium tomatoes (I used tomatoes in the vine)
4 green chilies (or to taste)
1 small onion
Half a cup chopped cilantro
2 garlic cloves
2 teaspoons Knorr vegetable bouillon powder
3 tablespoons cooking oil (I used canola)

Cook the lentils making sure they don’t go mushy, I cooked them for 7 minutes in the pressure cooker (after soaking). Use no salt for cooking them.
Chop tender cactus into small (about 1 inch) strips.
Combine the onion, garlic, tomatoes, chilies and cilantro in the food processor. Chop finely.

Heat the cooking oil and fry the salsa in it. When it’s cooked, add the chopped nopalitos and cook for about 1 minute.

Add the cooked lentils and the vegetable bouillon powder. Let boil for about 8 minutes.

Serve as a soup.

Delicious!

There’s a new post on Garlicster. It’s the delicious recipe for a caprese-inspired salad, that happens to be vegan.

It’s delicious. Here’s the link: vegan caprese salad

Cross-posted with Garlicster.
OK, so this recipe has no garlic, but is delicious anyway, and has lots of onion. It is also vegan.
I wanted to make an “ensalda de alubias” like the one I had a long time ago in an Argentinian restaurant called La Taba in Mexico City.

I was looking for alubias, the white beans that is used in Spain to make fabada, apparently they are called fabes in English, but I couldn’t find them anywhere. Even at St. Lawrence Market, where there is a guy who has every bean and rice imaginable, when I asked for fabes they wanted to give me fava beans, which are not the same. And when I looked up fabes on the internet it always took me to a generic beans page, so I tried to look for substitutes. I ended up buying baby lima beans. They were good enough.

I soaked 1.5 cups of dry baby lima beans overnight in the fridge.
Then I cooked them in the pressure cooker for 10 minutes with the heart of one celery, 2 teaspoons of vegetable oil, half an onion, 2 cloves of garlic slightly crushed and 3 bay leaves. I let the pressure cooker cool naturally and then I opened it.

Meanwhile I chopped about 3/4 red onion and covered it with the juice of 2 lemons and about 1 teaspoon of sea salt. I did this to marinade the onion and make it less strong for eating.

When the beans were cooked, I removed the celery, the garlic, the bay leaves and the onion and drained the beans keeping about 1/4 cup of the cooking water. I let the beans totally cool (or you can rinse them in cold water as well, but they are delicate and may peel if you do that, I recommend just letting them cool down). I then added the cooking water and beans to the lemon+onion concoction. I then used 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil and (here’s the secret ingredient) 1 teaspoon powdered dry oregano. Mix everything and add salt and pepper to taste.

The salad was delicious!