Recipes

In the middle of winter, few dishes comforts cold hands and empty stomachs like a big bowl of steaming chili. This vibrant vegetarian version is bursting with bright flavours and stick-to-your-ribs heartiness. It's jam packed with veggies, beans and barley, which fills you up without weighing you down.

This is one of my favourite variations on a classic rice pilaf. It's spiced up with vibrant curry, colourful saffron, and succulent sweet potatoes which, ounce for ounce, are one of the most nutritionally dense vegetables readily available.

For a meal befitting of the lords and ladies in your life, pack this fragrant rice into small bowls and ramekins, then inverse onto the serving plates. Top with a sprig or two cilantro before surrounding the rice with some sautéed shrimp or steamed mussels.

Since salmon is a fatty fish, it’s often cooked quickly with high, searing heat that gives it a crispy crust. But salmon is just as delicious when it’s cooked slowly. Gentle, patient heating gives it a tender, melt-in-your-mouth texture that is truly memorable - especially when it’s brightened with a simple honey mustard glaze.

Fruit baked under a topping is delicious and so is fruit baked in the topping. Easier too. Just mix the works together into one tasty jumble. Half fruit, half crumble, all easy. Locally delicious too, especially during the seasonal sweet spot when your local strawberries line up with longer-season fresh rhubarb. Make the most of this classic good cop/bad cop duo contrasting sweet and tart personalities!

You can create this dessert with any of the season's berries. Unless you have strawberries fresh from your backyard or the local farmer’s market though, use frozen strawberries for the best flavour. Fresh from away is a waste of time. Just saying.

Can you make a butter tart taste like a pumpkin pie? Yes! These tarts evolved from basic butter tarts, but they’ve come so far that they’re really more like little mini pumpkin pies. But does it really matter where they came from? It’s where they’re heading that counts. In this case, your table!

Thrills and chills will abound when you present this chicken to your little ghouls, ghosts and goblins. You'll feel like Dr. Frankenstein putting together your very own monstrous creation, and you'll feel good fuelling your family for an evening of trick-or-treating fun with this simple roasted spider, I mean chicken.

To turn this into a full meal deal, you can roast the chicken over a bed of root vegetables. Cubes of potatoes or carrots, thick slices of onions or whole cloves of garlic are all fair game. They'll soak up the tasty juices that drip off the chicken and give you a complete meal in one pan.

This treat is so rich and deeply delicious that no one will know you took a shortcut! The secret is the custard-like texture of silken tofu.

Jump out of bed and hit the ground running with a glass full of goodness. This homemade breakfast treat is a nutritional jump-start. Feel free to vary the base and mix in whatever you have for a jolt of creativity to kick start each and every day. This smoothie tastes so good you’ll forget it’s healthy!

Searing sweet briny scallops to give them a golden brown crispy crust is an essential cooking method for any cook’s seafood repertoire. The secret is a hot pan, a high-heat, rapid cooking trick mastered by busy restaurant line cooks. A hot pan not only browns the scallops but allows you to whip up a tasty wine sauce too.

The sweetness of summer berries is incredibly delicious stuffed into a simple sour cream biscuit. This easy-to-make biscuit dough comes together in a snap because you just need to stir sour cream and milk into the works instead of laboriously cutting butter into the dough. This is an easier method than traditional recipes.

Use whichever ripe berries catch your eye while browsing your local farmer’s market, u-pick, or your backyard, or use a mix of a few different kinds. Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, even experiment with berries you’ve never heard of before, like haskap berries. Different berries have different levels of sweetness, so use your best judgment and adjust the amount of sugar to suit your taste buds.

This is how a gin and tonic is crafted at our place; our cool, cool summer sipper. My wife, Chazz, is famous for her refined version of the classic backyard cocktail. How do you improve local artisanal gin distilled passionately with aromatics and botanicals from around the world? With local aromatics and botanicals freshly muddle into this crisp new classic.

Bored with beef? Take another burger path. These patties are huge and thin raw but contract to normal juicy size on the grill. They’re fiery on the BBQ, so have a spray bottle of water ready for flare-ups. Easy to prepare and delicious in every way!