Tidings Magazine

My mother started making this dish when we were small. Imagine four little kids sitting around a dinner table with palates so refined that we scarfed up Chicken Marsala like other kids eat Kraft Dinner. Of course, we threw chicken at each other when our parents weren’t looking, so we weren’t totally refined. I use sweet Marsala Fine for a great tasting sauce.

Go back to the future with a retro White Castle sensibility — petite hamburgers for the chi-chi crowd, designed to down in a bite or two, pinkies raised. These little wonders can be embellished with blue cheese, roasted tomato, grilled onions, minced and sautéed Portobello mushrooms, hot peppers and the fantabulous “Secret Sauce.” Vary this recipe according to your taste with ground veal, pork or sausage and your own mix of spices and seasonings.

Vancouver food guru Lesley Stowe, who devotes much of her life these days to manufacturing and distributing her beyond-delicious Raincoast Crisps (www.lesleystowe.com ) shares a favourite recipe: It’s an “easy mid-week dinner, or leisurely weekend lunch that’s healthy, sexy and spicy.” Everything you want, says Lesley, in a quick-and-easy pasta dish. This dish screams for a Pinot Grigio from Alto Adige. Say that ten times fast.

A delicious crunchy coating covers tender tilapia; no one will guess the coating is made with instant mashed-potato flakes.

A Portuguese-inspired dish from Goa, Vindaloo is one of my favourite curries. Not only is it flexible, versatile and easy to prepare but it delivers precisely the sort of soul-searing heat I crave. Though traditionally hotter than the ninth ring of hell, feel free to accommodate or challenge your own personal threshold. This is an adaptation of Madhur Jaffrey’s Pork Vindaloo (ironically from a book called Quick and Easy Indian Cuisine). Her trick of using grainy mustard rather than mustard seeds and vinegar saves both time and fuss. Like the mulligatawny, this is the sort of recipe wherein once you’ve got it going, you can walk away and do as you please for an hour or so. I’ve used pork shoulder or lamb and both have been delicious. This would, however, work equally well with duck, chicken, beef, venison … anything you can kill really. So long as you’ve got two pounds of it. You’ll definitely want to serve this with mountains of rice so if you don’t have a rice cooker, I’m afraid you’ll just have to make some the old-fashioned way.