Marie Cookpad

     I think one of my favourite salad combinations has to be fresh greens tossed together with roasted beetroot (beets) and goat's cheese.  For a girl who only ever ate processed cheese slices and Velveeta cheeses (if you can even call them cheese, lol) when I was growing up, I can say that I now have a very well developed cheese palate!  That's what becoming a Chef did for me.  It truly broadened my taste horizons  . . .     Something very beautiful happens when you combine the sweetest roasted beetroot with the milky tang of goat's cheese!  Those two ingredients just bring out the best in each other.  Mind you I also adore roasted beetroot, so for me it is win/win!      Combine these two tasty ingredients with some dark salad leaves (today it was spinach) and toasted walnuts and you have an unbeatable combination  . . .  earthy sweet beetroot  . . .  tangy milky cheese,  almost metalli...

  We eat a lot of chicken in our house and I am always looking for new things to do with it so that it doesn't get boring. I don't think that I, personally, could ever get bored of it, but my husband sure could!  (Men!)  I do like to please him if I can, so I am always doing different things with it to keep him happy about eating it!   Chicken is such a versatile ingredient.  You can do so much with it and it easily adapts itself to a large variety of different flavours and textures. Today Todd brought home a rotisserie chicken from Costco for us to have for our tea.   I had seen a recipe on the TABLESPOON site for Thai Chicken Salad Wraps that ticked all of my boxes and that I was very keen to try and so I decided to adapt the recipe to what I had in the house and give them a go.   I didn't have any full size tortilla wraps, so I made do with smaller ones and made them as cones.  This worked really well for me.  I also cut the recipe in half...

  I don't think I ever had a ready made bottled salad dressing the whole time I was growing up. My mom always made her own salad dressing from scratch.   It was always the same, and never varied, but we didn't mind because we loved it.  We always had a salad on Sundays with our supper and she would begin it early in the afternoon.  She would thinly slice some onion, or cut it into small bits and put it into a bowl.   On top of that she would pour a quantity of white vinegar, adding some salt and pepper.  She would let that sit for a while . . .  the onions almost pickling in the vinegar.  Finally she would add just plain old salad oil, nothing special, and maybe a pinch of sugar.  The lettuce and other salad vegetables would be tossed into it and and then it would all be tossed together and that would be our salad!  We loved it.   A salad is only as good as its dressing.  That is a fact.  I can't believe how many time...