Tidings Magazine

This dish is sometimes called Involtini or Roulades, but my family has always referred to it as Braciole after the cut of beef used. This is my mother’s signature dish and it is my absolute favourite food in the whole wide world.

A mixed bag of boiled meats infused with tons of Italian flavours.

An easy-to-make beef braised in Barolo.

The secret to this dish lies in choosing a Cajun seasoning that is not too salty, with just the right balance of sweet spice and heat. I use Paul Prudhomme’s “Seafood Magic,” a great Cajun blend from the famous New Orleans chef, but you can experiment with other brands or make your own. If you have frozen shrimp on hand, you can whip up this recipe for unexpected guests in no time. Enjoy an apéritif while the shrimp roast in the oven.

A sweet Canadian twist on a Cuban staple.

Executive Chef Jason Lloyd of the revitalized Terminal City Club in Vancouver served this dish at a recent winemakers’ dinner. It was delicious. Caramelized onions, with fresh thyme, butter and a touch of Noble Sour — a sippable vinegar of very low acidity — were layered on a puff-pastry shell with grilled pear slices. This was served with a small salad of baby greens tossed in a wild-mushroom vinaigrette, garnished with a quenelle of Devon cream and a drizzle of fresh chive oil, and paired well with Crowsnest Vineyard’s Chardonnay Stahltank 2004 Family Reserve.

This is a family recipe that has been passed down through the ages. This is not one of those crisp-tender veggie dishes — you cook the cauliflower until it’s soft and well-steeped with wine. If purple cauliflower isn’t your thing, try it with dry white wine. My older brother Allen prefers this dish made with red-wine vinegar and sugar rather than with regular vino. Try it all three ways and see what you think.

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.

The flavour of the dish will change depending on the type of curry you use, so pick the curry flavour you like best and run with it, paste or powder. I buy chicken breast fillets when they’re on sale and keep them in the freezer for quick no-fuss meals.

Somewhere in the back of your cupboard you have a can of crabmeat. Tonight’s the night. Lemon wedges and hot pepper sauce are the ideal condiments, with steamed green beans and potato salad to round out the meal. Or whatever you have. 

There’s a difference of opinion on this one: some of my tasters preferred a sharp wedge of Gorgonzola with the salad, others favoured the milder Brie. You decide what’s best for you. To make this a dinner salad, add grilled chicken and a baguette.

I’m not going to lie to you — there is some work upfront on this dish. A mandoline helps to slice the potatoes uniformly and it speeds up the process. Once the potatoes are in the oven, you’re home-free until dinnertime. This dish works with the Beef Tenderloin in taste, oven temperature and cooking time. Leftovers are fabulous and will make you the envy of the company lunchroom.

Skip takeout and start making easy-breezy sandwiches at home. This steak wrap couldn’t be simpler and comes with way less attitude than the teenager rolling up your sub sandwich at the strip mall.

My friend John Ash, a great writer who founded his own restaurant twenty-four years ago in California’s Sonoma County, says that one of the simplest and best ways to cook asparagus is to give it a light coating of olive oil and grill it. Grilling, says John, brings out the sweetness and more of the “vegetal” notes. It may also diminish that other unmentionable asparagus attribute! Add some good olives, thinly sliced prosciutto and maybe a sprinkling of fried capers for a delicious antipasti course. Wine? I’m sure that John would suggest a Russian River Sauvignon Blanc.

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.

This has been a mainstay at any number of restaurants for years, a dive-in dip that can be made ahead of time and heated for the appetizer moment. Invite one of your guests to pour the Champagne, while you uncork a big red for later. (And remember, the trick with Champagne: after you’re unwired the cork, covered it with a napkin and pointed the bottle in an innocent direction, hold the cork and twist the bottle.)

So you didn’t need that mountain of rice. Suffice it to say that rice pudding is not only the perfect way to round off an Indian meal, it is also the quintessential comfort food. Though cooking it can be a tricky and often long process, this particular version is fairly quick and unintimidating. Regardless, rice pudding isn’t the sort of thing you can leave unattended. You must work the whole twenty minutes or so it’s going to take and for that I cannot apologize. I assure you the results are well worth it. Though I am, at times, loath to disrupt the beautiful blandness of rice pudding with spices, the addition of cardamom is truly only an enhancement. If you don’t have cardamom, however, you could always substitute with cinnamon. For a plainer, equally lovely pudding, just add a teaspoon of vanilla or rosewater. The crumbled nuts are a must. But almond slivers would do just as well as pistachio.

Yes, my invention from the early 1960s. Who knew Italian cooking would become so popular over the years?

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.

Traditionally, soup has not been a significant part of Indian gastronomy. Mulligatawny, spawned by the Anglo-Indian community, is a gorgeous exception. With its orange hue, its creamy base, its use of apple and spice, this soup screams for a cold autumn night, a glass of wine and so-bad-it’s-good television. It’s simple as pie to make. Simpler, in fact. After plunking the ingredients in the pot, you are pretty much free to putter about for a half hour or so, drinking and/or scowling at the fastly darkening sky. A great way too to use up leftover cooked chicken. If you have none handy, you can cook the chicken in the soup. I’ve also found (don’t judge me) that canned chicken works quite well. If you do not have coconut milk, feel free to use heavy cream. This soup is relatively mild in terms of heat, so I like to add a bit of cayenne. Obviously you don’t have to. The addition of cooked rice at the end makes this a meal, but if you don’t feel up to making rice (if you have a rice cooker, you have no excuse), you could always serve this with bread.

My BFFs are a wonderful group of women who meet regularly to eat, drink, talk and laugh together. One of the gang, Nancy B, is a vegetarian and an amazing cook. She makes cooking look effortless, especially when she whipped up a delicious frittata for us at our after-Christmas party. Nancy added sautéed zucchini and goat cheese to the frittata. This is my version — use whatever you have on hand to make your own!

I serve this at room temperature on an antipasto tray. You can also serve it as Eggplant Parmesan by adding a bit of sauce and a slice of mozzarella to the top of each and baking until the cheese melts. I skip frying this in oil to save a few calories and because I’m too lazy to stand over a hot stove frying eggplant. This is a real family recipe. There are no exact measurements. It all depends on the size of the eggplant and the size of the crowd you’re feeding. Even eggplant-haters will like eggplant prepared this way.

The secret is in the anchovies — many recipes call for just a few anchovies, but I think Puttanesca is best when the contents of an entire tin are used.

Figs are the most underrated fruit of all time, and I will continue to be their greatest fan. They are a good source of potassium, calcium, iron and dietary fibre. Reputed to be Cleopatra’s favourite fruit, figs were also enjoyed daily by the petulant Persian king Xerxes who ate the fruit to remind himself he no longer controlled Greece, the land where figs grew abundantly. The ancient Romans revered the fig tree as sacred and offered the first fruits of the season to the god Bacchus who is often depicted as wearing a crown of fig leaves. Somewhere in time, we lost our connection to this noble fruit. Forget the Newtons and all the other ways in which you’ve grown to hate figs. Try them in a dish with gorgonzola cheese and walnuts. Then fall on your knees: you’ve been converted.

This classic French dessert was created in the 1870s, inspired by the “belle Hélène,” the handsome title character of an opera by Jacques Offenbach — the original composer of French cancan music. While poaching fruit may seem like something you’d reserve for newborns and nursing homes, you’ll be singing (and possibly cancanning) when you see the result, as delicious as it is visually stunning. This recipe is adapted from a beautiful and elegant book, The Seven Sins of Chocolate.

A chocolate sauce for meat may seem out of place, but so do most things bordering on the divine. A bit of the bittersweet adds wonderful depth to this sauce. It also makes great dinner conversation. If you’re involved in a game of culinary one-upmanship with your friends or siblings, serving this unique combination of flavours will vault you to first place. I found out it also works well with beef tenderloin and with cayenne added to the sauce for those who like heat.

Vancouver-based Iron Chef Rob Feenie combines French cuisine with Canadian influences. To say he does it successfully is an understatement. His restaurants, Lumière and Feenie’s, are internationally recognized and hugely popular with West Coast locals. This is his recipe.

Tins of plum tomatoes and sliced mushrooms are the basics for this delicious dish. Good-quality Parmigiana Reggiano lasts a long time — keep some in your fridge for garnishing this and other dishes. You might also want to warm a loaf of garlic bread from the freezer to serve alongside the pasta.

A delicious Old World dish. There is some preparation upfront, but most of the work is done by your oven. This is a great dish for potluck dinners.

As always, recipes are often a case of personal taste. And while this recipe may not exactly match the classic, it more or less matches many that produce this always-comforting meal. I sometimes make this with scratch pastry, but not always. You’ll be excused if you purchase puff pastry from the supermarket.

There is a restaurant near me that serves a delicious rosemary-flavoured steak. I tried making it several times at home — it wasn’t until I marinated the steak after grilling it, that I finally hit on the yummy secret.

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.