Cheesy Cauliflower Soup

Ah the life of a food blogger. I must have taken three different sets of photos for this soup, to finally settle on this photo which needed more than a little Photoshopping (and yes, that’s a recognized verb in my browser) in the end. It looks okay… yet somehow I feel like I’m in a photography slump lately, and perhaps that’s the reason for the infrequent postings this last month or so. Work has been quiet and I’ve had more than enough daylight to take those lovely window-lit photos mid-afternoon that other food bloggers rave about… and yet I look at my plating and composition and feel thoroughly unsatisfied. Argh!

Some exciting news however is that I found a great eBay deal on a Canon Speedlite 430ex external flash for my lil’ Rebel—and while it has not revolutionized my photography literally overnight, sigh—I do look forward to having a bit more flexibility in the kitchen. There’s a lot to learn and I’m looking forward to it!

Anyway, this cheesy cauliflower soup is a Jamie Oliver-inspired dish from his Ministry of Food cookbook. It’s a brilliant thing! The average foodie might pick it up and see all the basic recipes and go, “What do I need this for?” but it’s just darn useful. A few of my favourite recipes have come from it—check out my basic steamed rice, meatballs, and carrot feta salad, all of which were inspired by Ministry of Food.

The bragging rights for this soup are a bit special for me. Our roommate Tom—a chronic carnivore and unfoodie—isn’t a fan of soups and is only borderline on stews. The poor boy has been at home the last couple weeks sick with mono—with a slight silver lining being that his throat has swollen so that he can eat nothing but soup! It’s hardly a pleasing situation, but at least I had an excuse to perfect some recipes.

Upon serving up a dish of this soup, he immediately turned to me and went, “This is bloody good!” …so there you go. A soup to please even the most discerning of soup skeptics. Enjoy! (more…)

Edited: August 7th, 2011

Roasted Vegetable Crepe Cake

Let’s talk about crepes again, shall we? My love affair for crepes continues—and this roasted vegetable crepe “cake” is just one of the various recipes I’m sure I’ll be posting on the blog. This is actually quite a similar recipe and process to the roasted vegetable tortilla stack, another great vegetarian option for dinner. The versatility of this kind of recipe is something to be appreciated, since you can use any blend of vegetables to your liking… and let’s be honest, anything held together primarily by cheese has got to be good. Right? Right. It’s certainly my cooking philosophy!

You’ll need to have made a batch or two of crepes before making this cake, and they will all need to be roughly the same size and shape. When making your crepes, consider what size they’d need to be to fit comfortably into a round baking dish, too—they should fit snugly, without too much of a gap and without having to curl up too much on the sides. You could probably bake this free-standing if you had to, but I certainly recommend spending the $10 on a simple springform pan since it’ll make your life a lot easier!

On another note, I’m sad (and you probably are too, right?) that I haven’t been posting more recently. Life has just been busy—darn life!—and combined with Easter holidays, time seems to be whipping by without me getting a chance to write things up. Horrible! But hopefully I’ll be back posting more regularly again now that things have calmed down a bit. There’s a bit of good news too—our new roommate is gluten intolerant, so you coeliacs will be getting a whole lot more attention! Turns out that cooking gluten free isn’t as hard as I thought it would be; you just have to be mindful of ingredients that might have wheat products in them that you might not realize (like soy sauce, or stock powder, who knew, right?). Anyway—on with the recipe!

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Edited: April 26th, 2011

The Four Cheeses Macaroni

You know, for all this blog’s name is the “Three Cheeses,” I really don’t post enough recipes with three cheeses in them. Considering how much I, and those I cook for, love cheese, this is a bit amazing. What’s even more amazing is that we now live next to a Harris Farm, which means that getting great local / artisan / quality cheeses is incredibly easy. One would argue too easy. So, in a quest to remedy the blog’s lack of cheesiness (har har), I went and invested in a variety of cheeses with this amazing classic in mind. And you even get a bonus cheese!

The result? A beautifully, mouth-wateringly, cheesy dish. And it was so easy to make. I realize that so many other people would have made some sort of Haloumi-in-cheese-fondue gourmet extravaganza (and that may yet still happen!), but seriously, why mess with a good thing? Macaroni & cheese is just about one of the best things in life. The only thing better is cold mac & cheese, but that might just be a throwback to my kitchen raid at summer camp days.

So the next time you need a comfort food pick-me-up, keep this classic in mind!

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Edited: January 30th, 2011

Roasted Walnut Balls

I have to admit a guilty pleasure—buying second hand cookbooks online. They’re just such beauties. I recently ordered Looneyspoons and The Vegetarian Epicure. The Epicure, a 1970s cookbook by Anna Thomas, was exactly as I remembered it from my mum’s collection—a bit tattered around the edges, smoothed corners from plenty of use, yellowing pages, and a spine which seems to crack every time you open it but somehow all the pages are still intact. Even better, whoever had owned it before me had taped in various other useful recipes (“90 minute beer bread,” “Zucchini breakfast cake,” “German mustard”) and there are even a few notes in margins (including “yum yum” over the recipe for Cheese & Scallion Quiche). I love books with character like this. I feel like I’m peeking into someone else’s warm kitchen every time I open this book.

This recipe is just one of many delicious ones I plan on sharing from The Vegetarian Epicure. My mum has both the first and the second volumes, and I grew up peering with interest at the beautifully type-set pages (Optima in all its glory! can you tell I’m a typophile at heart?) and whimsical drawings. Anna Thomas wrote the first volume while in university, and it was snapped up by Vintage Press straight away. (I’m so jealous; why didn’t I think of writing a cookbook while in university?) She wrote volume two while in grad school. I absolutely love how she describes learning to cook, as it was “In self defense! I needed to eat, and who could afford to go out?” Oh Anna, I hear you loud and clear! I recommend taking a look at her website which has a sampling of other recipes and excerpts from her other (also vegetarian) cookbooks. I’ve included the Amazon link at the bottom of this post so you can get your very own copy!

These roasted walnut balls are (surprise, surprise) nutty, smooth, and entirely satisfying. They are vegetarian and delicious, and even being a meat eater, I crave these on occasion instead of meatballs! These go great as a vegetarian option for a holiday meal, or really any other time you feel like something a bit different.

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Edited: August 17th, 2010