Restaurant Review, Regina: Simmer Leaves me Cold.

Having recently returned from Asia and having spent six months living in Little Asia (Vancouver), I was excited to see a hot pot place open up in Regina. We may be a small town kind of city, but in my opinion the level of a city’s awesome often correlates to the diversity of food. Don’t get me wrong – I like Earls from time to time too, but the option of going for Japanese, Indian, Afghani, or Caribbean food is a testament to the growth and dynamism of our little city. 

Hot pot cuisine is a bit of a mixed bag (or pot). From Northern China to Japan to Thailand –this style of creative eating has a long history. Claimed to originate from Northern China, hot pots are often enjoyed communally over a lengthy, lengthy meal. A wide variety of meats, veggies and condiments can be added to the broth, although some regions have their own ‘classic’ ingredients - such as the Sichuan pepper, from guess where?

Best Ever Vegetarian Chili



Homemade vegetarian chili. Somewhere under there.
All you can see is cheeeese.

I've been laying pretty low the last few weeks as I've been struggling to get on track with work, adjust to being back in Canada, working most saturdays, and reconfiguring general life goals. It's been busy.

I know I've been cooking but I haven't been feeling too experimental. I've been eating a lot of comfort food and boring things like fish and rice. I've never really found a chili recipe that clicked for me - but I love the idea of chili. It's like north american curry. Vegetables, tomatoes, lentils and spices. All things good.

Peanut Drizzle

There is nothing fancy or secret about this. It is just a damn good, quick and dirty peanut sauce to drizzle all over everything. I have another peanut sauce on this blog. Whereas the other best ever peanut sauce is more of an actual sauce to have in a stirfry or something - this is almost a dressing, albeit a very thick peanutty dressing. I drizzle this on top of shrimp, fish, satays, and the occasional cold noodle salad. It takes 4 minutes to make (really) and doesn't require anything too out of the ordinary.

ingredients:

1 tsp oil

1 inch of fresh ginger, grated

1 clove of garlic, grated/minced

3 tbsp peanut butter - I go chunky all the way

3 tsp soy sauce

3-4 shakes of fish sauce

3-4 shakes of hot sauce

1/8 cup of water

other things you will need:

something to dice/grate with

a pot

a spoon

1. Over medium high, heat your oil. Add your garlic and ginger and cook for a minute - don't allow it to brown.
2. After it has cooked for a minute or so, add your peanut butter. I said 3 tbsp but really you can eyeball it - just a big ol' whack of pb. Stir.
3. Add your soy sauce, fish sauce, and hot sauce and stir until it's all combined. You'll notice that your peanut butter-mix is a darker and kind of glossier brown than the peanut butter. This is good!
4. Add your water and stir - the sauce will thin and lighten. Add more water if necessary to achieve desired consistency - the longer you cook this the thicker it will get. If you need to thin it just add a dash more water. You can keep this in your fridge for up to a week although you will need to heat it to get it liquid-y again.
5. Drizzle all over things!

Kimchi Perogies



Right around the time this photo was taken I realized something: perogies =
dumplings. FUSION power!

Perogies? Yes please. Korean perogies? Say, what now?  Yes. Korean perogies.

So. Now that my younger brother has moved to Regina, he is a weekly guest at our house to watch Game of Thrones.  He is working as a roofer and as such he is often dirty and always hungry. I normally end up making perogies - which I buy in giant frozen bags from the store and pan fry with butter and caramelized onions.

I have a life long love of perogies which dates back to my younger and funner years in Montreal. Our token 3 AM food was perogies which I made best. Or at least I'll claim I made best. No one's here to stop me. I've only made my own perogies from scratch once as it took about 3.5 hours and a lot of arm strength as we did not have a pasta machine to roll out the dough. This was not fun and made me generally glad that I wasn't an 18th century Ukrainian lady.

Herb Seared Rack of Elk (with Red Wine Glaze!)

beautiful, beautiful elk. Tell me that doesn't look a million times healthier
than vacuum sealed chicken breasts in styrofoam.

One of the wonderful things about buying local vs. buying from Sobeys is that you can find wonderful things like rack of elk.
Now I didn't actually find this myself, rather RooferBoy came home and sheepishly said, "So I bought a bunch of elk. And elk is more expensive than I thought. About 50$ more expensive". However, I could say nothing as I had just purchased a 20$ piece of fish (stay tuned). It's good I have student loans and stuff. Really good.

Now elk is obviously game, and obviously a kind of 'Canadian' type of food. I like the idea of 'Canadian cuisine'. I also like the idea of cooking game. Game seems like a much more ethical kind of meat, although I'm sure the elk would disagree.

Sweet and Spicy Tomato Soup

Yeah I'm in a mason jar. So I'm hip AND delicious, what's it to you?

So apparently the gods have decided to mock my choice to live in Saskatchewan by making it snow every other weekend. Remember how we had 22 degree sunshine a few weeks ago? Yeah me too. Last weekend it snowed about half a foot, which promptly melted and flooded everywhere. Then on Saturday, I worked all day despite the 18 degree beautiful sunshiney goodness. And then today it of course decided to snow. CURSE YOU DEMETER!
Being proactive and planning out my garden weeks in advance has come to naught! Naught I say! All of my glorious plans for tomato plants and herb gardens will have to wait another week or two. In the meantime I get to stay inside, glower at the weather, and make soup.