Honey Miso Marinated Chicken Wings

It feels really good to cook as often as I can. Even though I love to cook, I would often go for fast food or eating at restaurants to avoid the grocery shopping and the cleaning up associated with preparing food at home. After I went to culinary school, I realized that cooking (and the shopping and cleaning up part) doesn't have to be so complicated. You can make great things from few ingredients! Like Honey Miso Marinated Chicken Wings.



Miso is a paste made from fermented soybeans. It’s most commonly found in miso soup, which gets offered to you at Japanese restaurants before you chow down on sushi. It has an intense salty and savoury flavour which they call umami. Other umamiingredients include parmesan cheese and mushrooms, so I like to think of it as that extra oomph taste. Miso comes in a pretty big package, so I’ll be working on more miso recipes in the coming weeks to make the most of the stuff.

Caramelized Onion, Garlic and Ginger Soup with Poached Eggs

Normally, summer is a time for cold soup. Sometimes, though, it gets wet and chilly outside and you find yourself curled up in bed wishing for a soup to cure your cold. Well, I've been sick the past couple of days and I decided to create my ultimate remedy for all this dreariness and sniffling.

When I'm sick, I crave a few things: comfort, nourishment, and strong flavours to treat my runny nose and sore throat. I set out to make a soup with potent ingredients to relieve my symptoms which also would require little prep time and ingredients I had available in the kitchen. This soup was inspired by the cold-fighting qualities of garlic and ginger, combined with the more subtle and sweet flavour of French onion soup. I decided to combine the onion technique from that recipe with the Provencal cure-all dish, garlic soup with eggs. The ginger was then added for kicks, literally.

Spinach, Cheese and Mushroom Cakes with Roasted Garlic Sauce

I love those tried-and-true ingredient combinations. The ones that, when you see them listed together in a restaurant menu, you order that item right away because you know it’s going to taste good. If I like how certain toppings taste in an omelette, I would most definitely try them on a pizza. This recipe was inspired by a mouth-wateringly good spinach, cheese and mushroom crepe with garlic sauce. Yes, it was a crepe – now it’s cakes. Let me explain.

These particular crepes are only available once a week on Saturday mornings at the Brickworks Farmer’s Market, from a man named Clément. He has a table covered with various savoury and sweet crepe fillings, a large tub of batter and two large crepe machines. You won’t know where his stall is until you get close to it, because it is almost entirely obscured by a long line snaking around the table. The wait is long because your crepe is made fresh, on the spot, in front of you. His creations are incredibly flavourful down to the crepes themselves, which are made with buckwheat and Red Fife, a Canadian heritage variety of wheat with a robust, nutty taste.