Recipes

One of the best ways to fill Half Your Plate (and all of your soup bowl) is with a simple pureed soup. They’re a time-honoured and super-simple way to get a whole lot of vegetable flavour on the table in a hurry – maybe even hide vegetables from finicky eaters. This one was custom created by MP Celina Caesar-Chavannes with Chef Michael Smith’s coaching!

Leeks are the easiest-to-get-along-with members of the onion family. They’re deliciously sweet, mildly pungent and simple to prepare. In this recipe they’re paired with apples and thyme. They easily fill Half Your Plate with flavour so you can fill the other half with any simple pork, chicken or fish dish!

There are many ways to bake a memorable chocolate chip cookie, but this version emphasizes chewiness. If you prefer your cookies with lots of chewy texture without much crispy brittleness, then you'll love these deeply flavoured and tantalizingly textured treats.

Sweet potatoes are a superfood. They’ve earned this title by being so packed with nutrients, ounce for ounce, that they’re just plain nutritionally dense. Quite simply, they’re one of the single healthiest foods you can bring to your table. Tasty and easy too. Especially with the bright flavours of curry and ease of canned chickpeas. For this recipe simply toss everything together, toss into the oven, then sit back and wait for the compliments!

It's fun to try new ideas and it's always fun to freestyle cook. And it's particularly fun to stir every form of chocolate into one bread pudding. I admit sometimes I feel the need to go overboard a little bit and even push some limits, but the kitchen is a really safe place to do that, and a fun place too. Once you know the bread pudding rules, you can break them all day long. Who knows? You might just end up with Five Chocolate Bread Pudding with Chocolate Whipped Cream.

The year 2016 has been declared the International Year of Pulses by the United Nations to celebrate one of the world’s most important foods: the edible seeds of the legume family.

Beans, peas, chickpeas, and lentils are packed with fibre, protein, nutrients, and flavour. Their nutritional intensity, inexpensive accessibility, and ease of cooking have made them indispensible staples to cooks all over the globe.

Wherever we live, we all do our best to make healthy choices at home but it’s a lot easier when those choices are delicious. These meatless tacos are stuffed with so much sunny southwestern flavour that no one will notice anything missing. What a great way for your family to join families around the world in a global celebration of flavour and nutrition!

You can easily make your own homemade chocolate treats. It's deliciously easy to stir a variety of crispy, crunchy bits into a warm pool of melted chocolate, cool and harden the works, then start snapping off homemade candy!

I will admit that I was not a big fan of brussels sprouts as a kid but now that I’ve discovered pan-roasting I’m seriously hooked on them. This easy method is by far my favourite way to cook them. They’re so durable that you can easily caramelize them as they cook through. In this recipe they’re deliciously joined by bright orange and crunchy cashews.

This is one of the great beef stews of the world. It's a uniquely Hungarian dish that's half way between a soup and a stew. While in Hungary, I learned a couple of things. First, that every cook has a different version of this recipe and second, that everyone believes their version is the most authentic. So to me, that means all versions are authentic as long as they contain Hungarian flavours.

This recipe is dedicated to the memory of Ann Szemba, my Hungarian friend who traveled with me to Hungary and taught me this dish.

All root vegetables are perfect for making soup because they're all full of hearty flavour and soften easily as they simmer. One of my favourites is celery root, which isn't actually the root of the celery you see in the store. This variety is bred specifically for its roots instead of the stalks, making them sweet and distinct, with an earthy flavour not unlike celery.

You can enjoy the bright red flavours and intense nutritional density of these two harvest ingredients brought together in one distinctive dish. In this recipe they serve both as a delicious side dish and a tasty condiment. Red Cabbage has an amazing ability to absorb other flavours while retaining its texture. Cranberry and the traditional flavours of cranberry sauce make this the perfect side dish for holiday turkey or everyday chicken or pork!

Sometimes it’s just as easy to make a lot as a little. Here’s how to stew and transform one pork shoulder into two different flavoured meals. You can spend time to save time and avoid the dreaded “same old thing” blues by splitting the works into two meals!