Marie Cookpad

  We have had a rather gloomy and rainy few days now. Soup days. That's what I call them.  Today I was feeling very nostalgic for home and I decided to cook us up a delicious Nova Scotia Fish Chowder.  A taste of home sweet home for me.   This recipe is not quite as rich as my other recipe for fish chowder , which contains carrots and celery and cream.  This is a really simple and basic recipe which is typically Nova Scotian and was adapted from an old cookery book of  mine entitled "Out of Old Nova Scotia Kitchens" by Marie Nightingale.   It is a treasure trove of historic Nova Scotian recipes.  My family has been in Nova Scotia before even the first settlers arrived on its shores.  I have Mi'kmaq ancestry as well as Scottish, English, Irish, German, etc.  I am a virtual melting pot of Nova Scotia peoples, as most of us are.   For this chowder I used some beautiful Haddock fillets. I get my haddock  from Seafresh quality food...

  A few weeks ago I spied a particularly delicious looking White Bean and Ham Soup on Simply Recipes .  If you are looking for mealtime inspiration and simple recipes it is a brilliant resource to draw from!   I decided to make it yesterday as I had all of the ingredients here in the house for the most part.  I did not have any herbs de province, or Italian seasoning that wasn't a garlic Italian seasoning.  I also did not want to make a full recipe as there are only two of us and we can only eat so much.   I cut the recipe in half and created my own herb mixture for the soup, drawing on inspiration from what my mother used to use when she made her delicious home-made soups.   Normally she would have used summer savoury, but I used a mix of herbs.  Dried basil, oregano, thyme, marjoram, sage and then I added some fennel seed.   These flavours worked wonderfully.  But, lets not get ahead of ourselves.   Dried beans are an excellent in...

  Oh but its a blustery, blustery day out there today.  Its not fit for man nor beast. A cold wind is blowing and there is rain in it.  This is a soup day for sure.   I had a large butternut squash that I wanted to use up, and so I decided to make a soup with it. I adore butternut squash soups.   I adore butternut squash full stop actually.  It has such a beautiful flavour . . . sweet and earthy, rich  . . .  of all the hard/winter squashes, it is my favourite one.   Most Winter Squashes lend themselves beautifully to soup.     This is a very simple soup to make.  You cut your squash in half down the middle and roast it (covered) on a baking tray along with a whole head of garlic.  Don't worry, the garlic gets all sweet and mellow when it is roasted. You won't smell, but your kitchen will smell beautiful.   At the end of that time you add some red bell pepper and red onion to the pan, drizzle them with some oil a...