Last Week's Food.

G had her bike stolen fairly recently. The police have recently made a couple of arrests, and found over 3,000 stolen bikes, putting them in a giant warehouse for people to come in and claim their missing bikes. We were hopeful that G's would be among them.

But alas. No. G's bike was nowhere to be seen.

We had plans to make dinner that night, having bought some corn at the farmer's market over the past weekend. But blech. The corn was rank, and our spirits were low after not finding her bike, so off we went to Sneaky Dee's for some half-price fajita goodness! For those of you who read this blog, or know me at all, you know the Sneaky's is a favorite brunch place of mine. But half-price fajitas pretty much rule, too.

Just look at G's fajitas...


And you get all the fixin's, as well. Guac, sour cream, salsa. It's really pretty outrageous.

Where are my fajitas, you may be asking? Well, once I sat down and looked at the menu, I was drawn to the chicken burrito.

Yum. Yum Did I mention... YUM! Sneaky Dee's reminds me of the college town I lived in during school, and this just hit the spot totally. Lovely pieces of chicken, wrapped in a tortilla with beans, covered in red sauce and cheese and baked. Served with rice and a little salad. Oh boy. Sneaky Dee's is good, but it's not fancy.

There is a Chinese takeaway near my office that I eat at sometimes. I am in the middle of watching the first (and sadly only) season of JPod on my iPod, and I went over to get some takeaway and relax for about twenty minutes of JPod viewing. I ventured out of my roast pork and rice comfort zone and got food that, in retrospect, is oddly orange...


(I really mokeyed with the exposure on this one so as not to scare away any children who might read this blog.)

I had chicken terriyaki and meatballs. Meatballs. Weird. It was actually quite the leap of faith to try them, but they were fairly tasty. I always get steamed rice and just a tasting of noodles. I enjoyed this lunch, and laughed my way through JPod. I have to say, the person who plays John Doe is toooo cute for words.

We also revisited Vegetarian Night last week with our friends P and D from upstairs. It was our turn to cook, and since I knew that P has been training for a marathon, I thought I better make it carb heavy.

First up: Skilled Pizza from BBC Good Food Vegetarian Summer magazine.


This is a great and simple recipe! Do the following:

Mix 8oz of self-raising flour with 1 tsp of cayenne papper. Stir in about 2 oz of cheese. Add 3 tbsp of olive oil and 6-8 tbsp of water to form a soft dough. Roll out to the size of your large frying pan. Heat 1tbsp of oil in the frying pan, and add the dough circle, cooking slowly for about 5 minutes to let the base get golden. Flip it out onto a plate, and put it back in the pan so it can cook on the other side. While it's cooking, add some tomato sauce, cheese, and toppings to taste. (I added a little bit of dry packed sun-dried tomatoes.) Put under the broiler for a couple of minutes to brown the cheese and eat!

This was great and P & D seemed to really enjoy it!

I also made a made-up version of pasta fagioli soup.

I browned one onion with some garlic for a couple of minutes. I added the stock and some rosemary, bay leaf, and salt and pepper. I let that heat up and then I added some canned red kidney beans. After letting all of that meld together for about 10 minutes, I took out the rosemary stalks, lightly pureed some of the mixture so that it would thicken up, and dumped in a package of fresh cheese tortellini. Once it was all cooked, I served it up.

It looked like this:


Again, everyone seemed to enjoy it. It's really quite light despite the beans and pasta. Little did I know, but D loves tortellini, so he was quite pleased!

I also ventured into a wheat-free meal last week. I decided to make a bolognese type sauce with polenta.


This turned out remarkably well. We had gotten some ground meat at the market that was really amazingly tender. I added mushrooms, onion, garlic and shredded carrot, canned tomato sauce and a can of Italian cherry tomatoes. Cooked it all together with the browned meat for a bit, added a couple of swigs of Belazu balsamic, and we were ready for dinner! (The polenta was an instant polenta with parmesan cheese added.)

G really liked this dinner, and it gave us a nice wheat free alternative. I quite enjoyed it and will definitely be making it again down the road.

All in all, it was a good food week last week. With the long weekend upon us, we took off for an evening to the Kitchener Waterloo area, equipped with my new iPhone and a dream. More on that later....