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Crockpot Shredded Beef

This recipe could almost be called "What to do with Another simmering roast", but I decided to stick with the more descriptive Crockpot Shredded Beef. This is a sweet and tangy shredded barbeque beef recipe that I mostly came up with on my own. While I looked through many, many crockpot barbeque beef recipes I found that I either didn't have all the ingredients or I didn't like some of the ingredients. So I blended a few of the recipes together and came up with this one, and it turned out great. We ate this on warmed Kaiser rolls, leftovers from my father-in-law's 60th birthday party, but this could be served just as is or in a wrap or taco. Crockpot shredded beef reheats really well in the microwave, or you can drain off the juices and give a quick reheating fry in a hot skillet, which changes the texture in a really neat way.  

French Toast with cinnamon

I thought French Toast was just an easy breakfast staple that was in everyone's recipe box. That was until I was discussing it, and a friend told me she never actually had cooked it, she just bought the French Toast sticks at the grocery store. So, for anyone else who thinks French Toast is too hard, here is my recipe for it. Obviously since the grocery store actually stocks french toast in the freezer I have to assume it's not really something that everyone knows how to cook (or actually wants to cook!). One little thing that I do slightly differently is to sprinkle my slice of bread with cinnamon BEFORE dipping in the beaten eggs. I've just found that doing this makes sure each piece gets some cinnamon on it.

Pasta Salad with Salmon

Pasta salad with Salmon is one of my favourite summer salads. The salmon flavour is not overpowering, but is well balanced with the other ingredients. There are a few 'tricks of the trade', or 'tricks of the mother' that I use with this salad. One of these is a bit of olive oil added either before or after cooling the pasta, and the other is to boil some of the onions with the pasta. The oil helps keep the pasta in this salad from absorbing all the mayo in the recipe, and boiling the onions softens both the flavour and texture of them.

Chicken in Cherry Sauce

For all that the photo 'shoot' of this recipe made me crazy, the Chicken itself was excellent. Chicken in Cherry Sauce came about because I invited myself to pick cherries this year at my friends' house. It was a lovely day, a great visit (some really great potato salad), and a boat load of sour cherries. I pitted and preserved about 8 litres of them, and sent the rest (about 5 litres) off to my mother to be made into sour cherry jelly. Aside from the usual cherry pie or cherry tarts, I wanted to find a main dish recipe to make using up some of the preserved cherries. The cherries I used are pie cherries, preserved in a 50/50 sugar syrup, very similar to the type you would buy in the grocery store freezer section, not pie filling. A unique recipe, Chicken in Cherry Sauce is almost a sweet and sour chicken, but then not quite. It wasn't like any other chicken dish I have tried, at least not in recent memory, and the cherries gave it a little something else. This recipe is hard to define, but it turned out really good.

Lemon-Coconut Angel Cake

This is a very easy, very tastey 4 ingredient cake from the Company's Coming 4-Ingredient Recipes cookbook. It goes together quickly and makes a great picnic dessert. Of course, the original Lemon Coconut Angel Cake recipe has been tweaked. I am my mother's child, after all, and neither of us can leave well enough alone. I'm posting our version, which has very slight differences to the original. The pie filling in the recipe can be either homemade, from a box or even a can if you would like. I like lemon, so if you do too then try adding some extra lemon juice to your pie filling recipe, about 2 Tbsp to 1/4 cup instead of the same amount of water. It makes a perfect tart balance to the sweetened whipped cream.

Pinery Grill - What to do with another Round Steak, part2

The Pinery Grill is actually a London Broil, except that purists (aka Mr. Whats-Cooking) will tell you that a London Broil is never grilled. So, being that I grilled the London Broil at the Pinery Provincial Park, I have decided to call it the Pinery Grill. It is a variation on a true london broil, mostly because I have some tarragon I need to use up. London Broil is a cooking technique, not a cut of meat. You can probably buy a cut called 'london broil' at the grocery store, but in all likelihood you are paying more money for a run of the mill flank steak. The steak is marinated in a solution of vinegar and oil, then pan fried to a rare or medium rare. Just a note: if you like your steak well-done, then this may not be a recipe for you. London Broil or Pinery Grill needs to be well seared on the outside but still pretty rare on the inside, or you will feel like you are chewing an old shoe. If all you have ever eaten is well done steak, than this may seem like the norm, but a round steak can be a little extra chewy if you're not careful. This steak does need to marinate overnight for flavour - it probably won't tenderize the meat too much, as it's a bit of an old wive's tale that marinating will fix a tough cut of meat. The picture below doesn't do the steak much justice, since I couldnt' get the small tabletop grill hot enough to sear the outside as dark as I would like it.