Life in the Lower Mainland (BC, Canada)

Fooling around with deep fried bread again. The result comes out lightly crunchy on the outside, puffy and airy on the inside, and much lighter than a donut. Best eaten fresh and fast. You're probably good to go with any basic bread dough but the recipe/process I used is very simple: 2 cups water 1 tablespoon yeast 1 tablespoon sugar Once the yeast has foamed a bit, mix it into: 5 cups all purpose flour 2 teaspoons salt -- this is a cautious amount and your dough will come out on the blander side 1/4 cup oil Mix it, knead it, let it rise. Once it's risen once and maybe doubled in volume at least, you're ready to prep it for frying. You can keep portions of it in the fridge/freezer for later as well. For my first batch, I tried just cutting a portion of the dough then, without kneading at all, just cut small chunks and put it into the oil for frying. This produced good puffy results, but not as many units (slides 1-2). The the second batch, I used about the same amount of d...

I saw this easy recipe for Vegan Chickpea Fries  but didn't want to commit to a whole bag of chickpea flour. I did have some dry chickpeas on hand however (which I use for various other things, such as tossing a few into a curry or what not) and figured they'd go fine into a food processor. Didn't come out quite so straightforward but worked out well nevertheless. Ingredients - Chickpea Batter 1½ cups Chickpeas Water Tapioca Flour (or Corn Starch or other thickening agent) For the seasoning you can really do anything you want. Here's a very simple mix: Ingredients ½ teaspoon black pepper ½ teaspoon chili powder ¾ teaspoon salt 2 cloves garlic (great if you actually don't like the taste of chickpeas but want to go gluten free since the flavour is so poweful) Rehydrate the chickpeas. Once the chickpeas are no longer rock-hard and hydrated enough that you can bite into it, throw only the chickpeas into the food processor first. It is not necessary to she...

Every season I get a recipe book (FREE) from All You Need Is Cheese , and this simple  Fig and Bacon Jam Recipe  is from the Winter 2014 issue. It's so easy even a kitchen noob like myself could do it. Noob Tips: If you read the recipe carefully, you will notice that just for the jam, you do NOT need blue cheese or crackers. Those are a serving suggestion. After step 3 (bring to a boil), leave the heat as is -- just remove the cover to simmer. Otherwise it takes forever. I found it lacking in bacon-y goodness afterwards despite three strips of the stuff. If you insist on clear bacon flavour, you might want to use more strips.