What's for dinner

Roasted and grilled vegetable lasagne, roasted peppers: yellow, green and red (although roasted green peppers don’t seem to add much), grilled egg plant and zucchini along with homemade tomato sauce and whole wheat noodles.

We traveled to St. Jacobs today, just north of Waterloo. Having been there before we had a good idea of what we wanted and where to get it. Here are a few snaps from the day…

It was a bumper crop for peppers this year, according to the farmers.

ahhhh cheese.This is what a quarter bushel of Roma tomatoes looks like, I’ll be sharpening the knife tomorrow and doing a lot of dicing. Tomato sauce here I come…

And finally the money shot:

We had a good day and the vegetables taste amazing.

I rehabbed my BBQ, replacing the burners and adding heavy (40lbs) stainless steel grates which hold their heat much better than the old Weber grates. As you can see the grill lines are strong and clean and adds to a creating a great crust. The strips were served with simple boiled potatoes and sautéed summer squash in birch tree syrup and sherry.

A roasted capon stuffed with wild rice and served with roasted potatoes and sautéed green beans, I cheated with the capon and picked up already stuffed from Bruno’s.

Thin crust pizza with green peppers, cremini mushrooms, pepperoni and half of the pizza also has pickled banana peppers. The crust came from Whole Foods.

A very simple toad in the hole with bread from Epi Breads, the bread is made with 5 year old cheddar cheese, I finished the eggs under the broiler and topped with a little medium cheddar. Great on a sunny morning.

This was a multi-course dinner featuring quail eggs and my wife’s favourite “Veal Chops” fortunately it was warm enough to fire up the BBQ.

1. Cream of a asparagus soup with a poached quail egg in a champagne flute
2. Stuffed cremini mushroom caps, the filling was ground chicken with minced mushroom and topped with Jarlsberg cheese
3. Arugula Salad with light lemon and olive oil dressing topped with a hard boiled quail egg
4. Grilled veal chop, simple boiled PEI potatoes and heirloom carrots
5. Finally Crème brûlée made with quail eggs, there was a lot of cracking going on to get enough yolks and a generous amount of swearing.

A great way to ring in the New Year.

These also came from St. Jacobs, not the normal beat you find at your local market (unless it’s a farmer’s market)

For a Halloween party I made Lady Bird Candy Apples the apples are quite small and I avoided using food dye for the caramel. This was a big hit with all the kids and those who are kids at heart. The ever present reference “The Joy of Cooking” is in the background.