Stock is one of those things that seemed magical before I made it. I had purchased a few cooking books, and many recipes said to use 'vegetable stock', 'chicken stock', 'beef stock', or 'fish stock'. At that time I was used to buying bouillon cubes to take the place of stock, but decided at some point to try making a homemade stock. Not only is making stock at home easy, but it's a simple way to use up leftover pieces of vegetables and bones. I've grown accustomed now to making a chicken dinner on the weekend, and immediately afterwards putting the left over pieces into the pressure cooker to ...

Anyone who likes to cook can appreciate the challenge of making food without a nice selection of herbs and spices. When I'm back at home, I have a pretty full spice cabinet with probably about 30 different containers ranging from saffron to gran masala to coriander. But unfortunately when I travel finding some of the herbs and spices that I'm used to can be a challenge in many parts of the world, and basically impossible in other parts. A good example of that is chilli powder - it's basically available in every supermarket in Canada, but I couldn't find it anywhere when I was in Brazil. Since ...

One of the hardest parts of traveling to remote countries is that it is not always easy to find some of the foods you enjoy the most back home. That in itself presents a great opportunity for exploring new foods, but let's face it: sometimes it's nice to have some tried and true comfort food. Homemade Salsa A good example of that for me is mexican food. It's probably my favourite cuisine, and it was pretty rare that we didn't have tacos at least weekly in my household growing up. Unfortunately in many parts of the world I've been in, finding mexican salsa can be a real pain. Even if you can find ...

One of the hardest parts of traveling to remote countries is that it is not always easy to find some of the foods you enjoy the most back home. That in itself presents a great opportunity for exploring new foods, but let's face it: sometimes it's nice to have some tried and true comfort food. Homemade Salsa A good example of that for me is mexican food. It's probably my favourite cuisine, and it was pretty rare that we didn't have tacos at least weekly in my household growing up. Unfortunately in many parts of the world I've been in, finding mexican salsa can be a real pain. Even if you can find ...

For many software developers, grabbing a can of soda is far more natural than grabbing a glass of water. At several companies I've worked at previously the employers even stocked the fridges with free soda. So when given a choice between grabbing a can from the fridge or getting a glass and going to the water cooler, often soda was chosen, especially in my case. When I was younger I never gave much thought to how much soda I consumed, but definitely in the last few years I've been more conscious of just how many bottles of diet soda I go through. I remember a period of time where I would show ...

My previous beer, a Milk Stout, was pretty much a total failure. So I decided I would make another attempt at a stout, this time without lactose though (for arbitrary reasons). A beer I've always quite enjoyed is Howe Sound Brewery's Oatmeal Stout, so I thought I would try my hand at making an oatmeal stout. An oatmeal stout, as the name implies, uses oatmeal as part of its grain bill. While the oats don't really add a dominant taste, they do impart a particular body to the beer as well as some complexity. Recipe The local home brew supply shop I normally use was pretty much out of every English ...

About a week after I brewed my first beer I decided I would get another one in the queue so I would have one more to taste when they became ready. I decided to try my hand at a milk stout, another type of beer I thoroughly enjoy. I spent some time looking at other milk stout recipes and ultimately crafted something in BeerSmith2 that I thought would taste pretty good (based on a theoretical imagination in my head of what each of these base malts taste like). Unfortunately I missed my FG on this one by a huge amount (like 15 pts). I finally tracked it down to an improper estimate of mash efficiency ...

Very recently I decided I would try making an American India Pale Ale (IPA). My main reason with choosing this type of beer is that it's one of my favourite styles, and I have a lot of great memories sitting around drinking a really hoppy beer amongst friends. I decided when I was in Europe that the first method for all-grain brewing I would attempt when I returned back home would be Brew In A Bag (BIAB). Basically you use a big-ass nylon bag to hold all your grains and have your brew kettle do double-duty as a mash tun as well. This method was apparently started by Australian home-brewers as ...

Many people have heard the phrase low-carb before - basically a low-carb food implies food with a minimal amount of carbohydrates in it. I would say that any particular low-carb meal should probably have less than 10 grams of digestible carbs in it if it is be classified as a low-carb meal. The motivation for doing so is to limit the amount of insulin that gets produced after the meal. Since insulin directly influences the accumulation of fat, a low-carb diet/meal minimizes the amount of fat that can be stored after a meal, and often leads to more stable blood sugar. A slow-carb meal on the other ...

I've been itching lately to try cooking some Indian cuisine, and have devoured a few cookbooks on the subject. The cookbook that appeals to me the most includes recipes that entail slow cooking most of the popular Indian dishes, so that's what I've decided to start with. The name of the book (if anyone is interested) is The Indian Slow Cooker: 50 Healthy, Easy, Authentic Recipes. Why Indian? That's a good question. Probably the best answer is that I really have no idea how to make any of the dishes, so it seems like a fun venture for a few weeks. I also recently spent three months in Argentina ...

So last night I was really craving a kick ass steak dinner. I generally eat pretty healthy during the week, which means I look forward to indulging a bit more on the weekends. I did a quick Google search and ended up deciding that I wanted to visit La Cabrera, which is a very well known steak house and also the #3 restaurant (out of about 770 or so) in all of Buenos Aires on TripAdvisor. So I was definitely looking forward to it. Jump ahead about 15 minutes and I found myself outside of the restaurant, just south of Plaza Serrano. It looks like a nice enough place, and there are a few people ...

As the title says, I've been in Buenos Aires now for 37 days. After next week, I will have officially crossed the half-way mark here, at which point I'll be winding down and starting to get in my last sight seeing before leaving. I still have almost seven weeks here though, which is still quite a bit of time. This last week was mostly uneventful, other than a very late night out at the pub last Saturday night. Unlike North America, most people don't even go out on the weekends here until midnight, and often later. I was in a little pub at around 5am and they were still serving drinks to a packed ...

I've managed to do a weekly update on the past two Fridays of the month, so I think going forward that's going to by my goal for the rest of the trip. First off, I've been here a little over two weeks now. The total length of my time in Buenos Aires is about 12 weeks, so that means I have around 10 left I think. My first week here was a bit challenging, mostly for the language barrier. I spent a bit of time brushing up on my spanish, and week 2 definitely was a bit easier. Spanish This week I finally found a private spanish teacher and have been meeting her for two hours a night on Monday, Wednesday ...

Given that I'm hitting the open skies in a matter of months, I've been trying to spend more time with the family. For easter of this year I went out and bought a pretty nice organic turkey from JD Farms in Langley, but never got around to cooking it. Since I've always been an eater of turkey and never a cooker of it, I offered to do thanksgiving dinner for my mom's side of the family this year. I have to say, I can cook a pretty mean chicken these days. So I'm hoping I can pull off a turkey. If anyone has any suggestions, then by all means, drop them here. I'm hoping to turn the awesome knob up ...

The last time I was down in the Caribbean, I took a real shine to eating guacamole. Truthfully, I had always sort of stayed away from it because I thought I wouldn't like the avocados in it. But really good guacamole is addictive, and I was eating it like it was going out of style in the Caribbean. In fact, I was putting it on hamburgers, hot dogs, chips -- you name it. I've made about ten batches of guacamole in the last year, each time refining it a bit. It's actually getting to be pretty good, as evidenced by the number of people who want me to keep making it. So, I thought I'd do up a little ...

For those people that know me, I'm pretty serious about nachos. I'm the only person I know with a complete lack of a sweet tooth. Chocolate, pies, cakes, candy, gummy bears, sugar -- you could starve me for a week and put that stuff in front of me and I wouldn't crave it at all. But put a plate of gooey, cheesy nachos in front of me and that's a different story. I've slowly honed my nacho-making ability over the years to the point where I'm pretty much a nacho snob now. When I was down in Portland I went out of my way to find some nachos, only to be served a batch where the cheese was microwaved. ...

A while ago I was approached by a Vancouver public relations company and asked if I wanted to be a guest of the Delta Grand Okanagan hotel in Kelowna for a weekend. The offer came right at a period of time where I was feeling a bit burnt out, so I gladly accepted and started packing my bags. The route from Chilliwack to Kelowna involves taking a highway through the mountains. Depending on the weather conditions, often you'll find snowy conditions near the summit. Just in case I encountered those types of conditions I packed my chains for the car and also left early in the afternoon so I'd pass ...

I bought a new BBQ a few weeks ago, and have pretty much used it everyday since. My favourite food to cook on the BBQ are peppers roasted in a bit of olive oil. Second favourite thing would be a good steak. I don't eat a lot of potatoes, but I'm thinking about doing up some nice little potatoes in some type of dill sauce or something. Anyways, I'm looking for awesome new BBQ recipes. So, please drop a comment with your favourite thing to cook on the BBQ, and possible include some information on how to make it! Thanks. ...

When I moved back to Chilliwack, one of the first things that changed was my diet. I typically worked long hours in Vancouver, and that naturally led to me eating a lot of restaurant food. I'd normally want to sleep in as long as possible in the mornings, so I usually skipped breakfast in exchange for a few more minutes of zzzz's. Lunch was normally something I'd eat down in the Food Court in the Bentall Center. There weren't a lot of food options, but I'd typically switch between Subway or sushi. Dinners were a bit more varied -- a lot of times I went out with friends after work, and other times ...

One of the major initiatives I've taken upon myself since moving back home is to actually eat at home for all of my meals. The last time I think I consistently ate three meals a day that I actually made for myself was probably back in high school. Since moving out here, I'm happy to say that I've been fairly successful eating at home. It does take a lot of effort though, and I find I have to hit a grocery store every second day or so just to top up produce and what-not. The nice thing about being out here though is that it's easy to bounce between various specialty stores in the same trip. In ...