In case you’re in the mood for lasagne, and up for something different, try this Eggplant and Chard Lasagne. Yes, it’s vegetarian and it’s incredibly good in a Wow-That’s-Vegetarian?! kind of way. I served it to a group of carnivores who whined (a little) before tasting it. They shut up after the first bite. Then, the rest of the lasagna was history…gone with the skeptic wind.

I really, really wish you could taste this right now!

Eating what I consider a “balanced” diet

I do love my chocolates, high-fat Irish butter, desserts and everything sweet, so I try to balance them out with oatmeal or 2% greek yogurt in the mornings, and vegetable/fruit-rich dishes the rest of the day [Keep in mind: I try, but it doesn't always happen.]. Having said that, I also don’t see the point of dreading a lackluster meal only to make myself feel better with too much dessert. And let’s face it–it’s way easier to keep eating dessert…so very easy. I want to eat with a good diet in mind, but I don’t want to eat like I’m missing out. I’m with the camp who believes that eating healthier shouldn’t mean resigning to eating food that taste like crap.

After having cooked several recipes from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone, I couldn’t recommend it enough for anyone thinking of putting more vegetable dishes on their tables. Remember the split pea soup? Yum! This lasagne? Oh my. It’s another winning combination, and I can’t believe I’ve never used chard and eggplant together like this, it’s so deviously simple.

I wasn’t quite sure how it would taste from the recipe, to be honest, but knowing that my fellow food blogging pal Dana made it before was the extra assurance I needed to feel at ease making this for the first time and serving it to hungry non-vegetarian bellies.

And you know what? It was a smashing success of a pasta dish. If you taste this, you won’t say: “This tastes good for vegetarian…” It is awesome. Period. No need to label it as “vegetarian” as an excuse for its taste. I know what it’s like. I used to wince whenever someone said the V-word. I die a little each time then, if I want to be dramatic about it. But this. Oh, I love it! I’ve no qualms about serving it to anyone. I plan to serve this at my next birthday party, and it won’t need the usual introduction of, “That’s vegetarian, FYI.”

Dig in.

It tastes like lasagne (in case you’re wondering). It’s not too leafy, not too rich. It’s filling, but it won’t weigh you down–y’know that feeling with pasta that’s bloated you can barely look at it before thinking there’s just no way I could eat that? I was quite surprised at how good eggplant was in between sheets of pasta, and really being good friends with wilted chard. Mmmm…mmm!

So the question is: would I pick this over the conventional lasagne if I had the choice? YES! Oh, heck, YES!

Truly, I love the dish as is, but something’s missing. With the beginning of spring, I can’t help but think of how it could be better with garden-fresh eggplants and chard. Yeah, I’m going to go all oogly-vegetably on you now.

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, a-gardening we go!

I won’t lie. I don’t have a green thumb (although he says there is no such thing) and gardening became obliterated from my thinking process before I reached my teens. Gardening wha’? Before that, I enjoyed mostly third-party gardening. I was perfectly content with watering the plants and removing/cutting the occasional dried stem or leaf. The major dig-ins, I just watch while others do it. My forte was harvesting and eating the fruits/vegetables, or cutting flowers and leaves to put in vases for our rooms. Very nice.

This year, I want to overcome my fear of soil–of earthworms, in particular–and start a small garden in the backyard. I used to live in a building complex where the yard consisted of rocks and manicured lawns and trees tended on an almost-daily basis by gardeners. You can’t plant. Not that it mattered at the time. Now that I’m back in the ‘burbs of Vancouver, there is actually a yard to play with.

Gulp.

I fear the yard. All it looks to me is more work when I could be tweeting instead! I’m so inspired by Kristina and Kristina‘s gardens. [Hah! Did I confuse you? Raise your hand if your name is Kristina and you garden. I see a pattern here.] I hope I’m not setting myself up for failure. We’ll see. I’ll try.

I mean…really, I will. Just thinking of having fresh produce from my own garden makes me happy. And I know that sounds like the geekiest food-related thing I’ve said. Help.

Do you have any tips for a newbie gardener like me? Can you share links/resources or books/primers to read?

I want to have a vegetable garden and eat the fruits of my labor. Hopefully, we can get soil this weekend. And no, I have not read a single book on gardening. Can gardening knowledge be–hold your breath–organic? :D

Get the recipe for Eggplant and Chard Lasagne (includes PDF)

I like a good challenge and whenever I see those lovely food blogs with results from the Daring Bakers Challenge, I’m in awe and envy. When I finally got around to joining the group, I froze when I saw my first challenge for March 2009: Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna (Lasagne Verdi Al Forno). I was expecting to make dessert or bake cakes — something for my insatiable sweet tooth…something easier. But no, it turns out my “initiation” into the Daring Bakers would be a very laborious one. I was as scared as I was decades ago when the swimming instructor asked us to jump into the pool at the 6″ feet mark on our first class. Are you serious? What did I get myself into?!

THIS, dear readers:

YUMMMMMMM. As with life’s big challenges, this challenge has great rewards. This lasagna melts in your mouth. There’s homemade lasagne, and then there’s memorable homemade gourmet lasagne. I could not believe how delicious it was! I can still remember the taste of the ragu, the nice tenderness of homemade pasta, the rich bechamel sauce.

This lasagne marks a few firsts for me:

1) Very first lasagne. You read that right: I’ve never made lasagne in my entire life. It just looked like it was too much work. Yeah, look what I ended up doing! Haha.

2) Bechamel sauce.

3) Handmade pasta and without the aid of a machine, too. Oh, dear, this is a biggie. The whole thing was a workout.

4) Ragu sauce. I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than two hours to make a pasta sauce. No sir.

Woohoo!

Would I make it again? YES! But not without a pasta machine. ;-) The challenge did not require us to buy one, but god, I wish I had. Oh well, that’s done. I can now say that the very first lasagne I made entailed a back-breaking 2-hour manual pasta rolling ordeal. No wonder I put it off for more than a week! I had to muster enough courage and strength to get the ball rolling. Literally. This started out as a dough ball that you flatten with your rolling pin if you do it by hand. It has a gorgeous green color because of the spinach.  I used frozen chopped spinach and this is an egg pasta.

I dried it as cut sheets for 24 hours before cooking. I dared not to take photos of the transformation of our dining room into a pasta drying area with the sheets hanging on freshly cleaned table cloth-covered chairs.

It’s more delicate than store-bought pasta, understandably. I had some tears here and there. It looked very pretty as I assembled the dish. This is how one layer looks like, beginning with the spinach lasagna sheet overlapping each other:

Rich and creamy bechamel sauce:

The MMMMM-inducing ragu sauce:

More bechamel on top of the ragu sauce.

Topped with grated parmigiano reggiano cheese:

And this is the topmost layer of my lasagne, with a generous amount of bechamel and grated parmigiano reggiano cheese:

Our kitchen smelled amazing while it was cooking:

Here, the fruit of my labor:

I started making this 4pm (for the pasta sheets) and we ate this at 11pm the next day. It’s no walk in the park, but I’m glad I did it! WHEW!!!!!!

I will post a PDF recipe tonight. :)

The March 2009 challenge is hosted by Mary of Beans and Caviar, Melinda of Melbourne Larder and Enza of Io Da Grande. They have chosen Lasagne of Emilia-Romagna from The Splendid Table by Lynne Rossetto Kasper as the challenge.

Ever since I’ve finished reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food [I'll talk more about the book later, it's a real gem.], I can’t help but think of ways to eat organic and local. I’ve been doing my best to eat organic food for years now, but didn’t pay much attention to where they came from. By eating locally farmed food, not only do we get really fresh food, but it traveled less so the nutrients are more intact compared to (fresh food) that braved thousands of miles to get to our grocery stores. That’s one of the things I remember reading.

I actually picked up Pollan’s book when I got here in Vancouver. Was it such a coincidence that my frequent weekly stops — my friend’s spa and my chiropractor — are within the same vicinity as the Granville Island public market? It’s meant. :-) Last week, after having a facial that made my skin very happy and getting one of my last few therapies for my back, I headed down to the public market to shop for dinner. I picked some beautiful fresh sea scallops, fresh spinach linguine, rye sourdough bread [not in photos], pancetta [what a deal for $2.29 for 100 grams!], and rosemary.

And voila, dinner:

The scallops were to die for. They were so unbelievably fresh, sweet, and did I mention they were huge? I seared them on the same pan and oil where the pancetta was fried. I cooked the ‘sauce’ on that pan as well, so it had all the nice flavors to go with the tomatoes, onions, and garlic. The scallops cooked darker than usual because of the whole wheat flour it was rolled in, but you can use white flour if you prefer. I placed the crispy pancetta one on top of another, then a little stem of rosemary (you’ll be using just one rosemary sprig divided into three for this recipe), and the hot scallop going on top. The heat brought out the nice aroma of the rosemary.

I’m still trying to learn to sear scallops. It looked so easy during our cooking class but alas, I couldn’t replicate them. Ugh. Here I go again, being the perfectionist. I hope it’s not going to be an obsession like those Cinnamon Rolls.

Without further ado, here’s the recipe [and almost step-by-step photos]:

Continue Reading

Pause. Breathe deep. And behold a remarkably rich and creamy mac n’ cheese that’ll have you smitten:

And the good thing is, we didn’t even have to lift a finger in preparing it! Dan’s mom, Mary Anne, baked it as part of Easter dinner at their house, and we took some home. Woohoo! What can I say — she spoils the family good. :-)

The recipe she used was from one of the finalists on Emeril’s Best Mac ‘n’ Cheese Ever Challenge, Princess Thompson, who described this as — ‘…the right mixture of love and cheese and once you taste you’ll want to Smack Yo Mamma and say, “Why didn’t you ever make macaroni and cheese like this?“‘

It was awesome. I still remember taking my first mouthful. Wow.

Go make ‘em before you get a smackin’ from your friends and family! Here’s the recipe: Continue Reading

The trend here in Casa de Gourmeted as of late is that the no-thought-to-it experimental recipes get the higher thumbs up from the other half. Could it be because the flavors are kept simple and there is no chance to overdo it?Hmmm.

I quickly put this together for lunch last week and had one serving left after I finished my big plate of it. Dan brought it to work the next day. That afternoon I got this message — “Your pasta was AWESOME.” You’re welcome, hon.

One of the benefits of keeping a food/cooking blog is that you get in the habit of keeping notes of what you make in the kitchen . If I hadn’t typed down the recipe last week, I probably wouldn’t be able to replicate this. The photos help me remember the procedure, too:

And here’s the recipe. Enjoy! Continue Reading

In case you missed anything the past week, I’m here to tell you what we had here:

• Chocolate Dipped Marshmallow Cake Cones – Ice cream cones filled with homemade strawberry marshmallow, topped with devil’s food cake and dipped in Callebaut milk chocolate
• Sedona Sights — photos of pretty Sedona, AZ from our weekend trip
• Boiled Beef Soup — mommy’s Filipino recipe of her childhood favorite comfort food called “Nilagang Baka”. Made with beef soup bones, beef brisket, cabbage and spinach. Great for the cold winter days.
• Chocolate Covered Craving — We asked YOU what kind of chocolate you want. So far the Dark Chocolate camp has the majority of votes. You can still vote here.
• In Defense of Milk Chocolate – Milk chocolate has been neglected and have been dissed by chocolate purists for years, but it’s now making a comeback.
• Rotelli with Shrimp in Creamy Drunken Tomato Sauce – Pasta in tomato sauce with creme fraiche and a kick of white wine.

Here’s a peek at what we’ll be featuring this week:

• Bittersweet Chocolate Pudding Pie
• Comfort Beef Stew
• Linguine with Beef and Mushroom Cream Sauce

Next week we are also going to have a weekly roundup of recipes and articles we like from other websites.

Are you having an Oscar’s Party tonight? What are you going to eat?! What’s a-cookin’ in your kitchen? We are going to make cinnamon rolls! Yipee!

How’s everyone this weekend? We hope you’re all having a good one and eating well. It’s sunny here, but still cool. I apologize for those who might be jealous looking at the picture. For someone who has suffered through years of Vancouver winters, it’s a nice change to see sunshine peering through the blinds in the middle of February. If you’re freezing out in the snow or counting the days until spring or summer, I’m bringing the sunshine to you.

We hit some hundred golf balls yesterday morning [again, don't hate us...hehe] and don’t you follow my example because I didn’t wear a glove. I was left with blisters on both hands and when we got back home for lunch, I was sore, cranky and the last thing my brain and body wanted to do was exert any more effort than the required minimum. As much as I’d like to stick to our new year’s goal of providing step-by-step visual guides for our recipes, it just didn’t work out yesterday. I initially thought that this What-would-you-like-to-eat-for-lunch-honey? -Oh-okay-I’ll-see-what-I-can-come-up-with-in-20-minutes dish won’t make it to the site so I didn’t bother taking photos while cooking.

Surprises of surprises, we both finished two platefuls of it and I was this-close to licking my plate clean. I mean…Wow. Loved it! How can I not share the recipe (as much as I can remember of it) after that?

I wanted a creamy sauce but we didn’t have heavy cream like we usually do, and honestly I am not going to make a supermarket run just for that. Instead, we had leftover crème fraîche that we bought for Dan’s Chocolate Pudding Pie [I made him promise to post about that soon!]. I’ve never used creme fraiche for a dish, but it’s still cream so it should work right? I chose my favorite go-to pasta tomato sauce base, Muir Glen Tomato Basil which doesn’t have any overpowering flavor that you can easily transform it into whatever you like, really. I had the last minute idea to add lemon juice along with the parsley at the end, which gave it a light refreshing kick. The overall result was more than I’ve ever hoped for — it was smooth and creamy, but not too much that you can’t eat a lot of it, and all the flavors just blended together so wonderfully. I hope you try it.

So without further ado, here’s the recipe: Continue Reading

I’ve never had a Valentine’s day Cook-In before, but rest assured this will not be the last. Dinner was wonderful. And instead of roses, Dan gave me lilies which I adore.

Recipes are coming soon, including chocolate dipped strawberry marshmallow cones and boiled beef soup (a Filipino dish). I tried to recreate my childhood favorite (junk) food, the mallow cones, which turned out into a whole different food project. I’ll tell you more about that this weekend. But for now, we’re off to Sedona.

Wish you all a great weekend! And you US government employees, you lucky chaps with your long weekend, enjoy! [You know who you are...you Vegas-bound peeps. :p]

I have a taste for seafood these days and it all began with the tuna stuffed portobellos. Yesterday, armed with leftover canned tuna, I made a tuna salad pasta. I know, it neither sounds enticing nor is it that pretty in the picture, but it was worth a try and something I’d make again.

I only used a few ingredients because I try to adhere to my holy trinity of lunch cooking: quick, tasty, and filling. I think the wine really cut down a lot of the ‘fishiness’. The celery added a nice crunch to each semi-mushy and firm bite of the creamy tuna with pasta. Yummy!

I thought I made just enough pasta for me, but I was so full after eating half of what I made…leaving me with more leftovers.

While we’re on the subject of Leftovers, I was checking mails and my numerous RSS reads this morning, and found someone participating in the Project Foodie site’s “Leftover Tuesdays” project:

Leftover Tuesdays is a great blogging event that recycles leftovers into wonderful and amazing new dishes.

Coincidence? Hah. I love the concept. I was raised with the Asian waste-not thinking. When it comes to food, we grew up being told: Finish your food. You are lucky to be eating and enjoying delicious meals…Don’t throw that away, shame on you…Think about the less fortunate! You’d be surprised at how many lives a dish can have. Haha.

Back to the pasta…here’s the recipe:

Continue Reading

I was inspired to make this from Patricia’s Spaghetti with Garlic and Spinach post. Queen of substitutions that I am, I loosely followed the recipe that she found on delicious. magazine [A very good magazine, by the way, but I digress.] and made my own version with pancetta and linguine. Here’s the visual step-by-step guide:

I just fried 3 thinly sliced pancetta with a drizzle of olive oil till it’s almost crispy, added chopped garlic and cooked it for a minute or two until the garlic turns golden brown. Took out the pancetta, and splash and fizzle goes the dash of wine (ok, it was probably 1/8 cup) and reduced it to half. Tossed in the linguine, spinach and pancetta. Ground some fresh pepper and sprinkled salt. Tossed. Took out of the heat and served with grated parmesan cheese on top. Now this is where I followed the recipe: I served/ate it with lots of parmesan cheese. So simple. So delicious. It couldn’t get any easier than that.