The pasta attachment for my stand mixer has to be the neatest toy in my kitchen.  I can make fresh pasta so fast and so easy it’s mind boggling.  Tonight I made fresh ravioli pasta and stuffed them with ricotta cheese.  Then I layered the plump little morsels in a casserole dish, covered them with my home canned pasta sauce, some nice mozzarella cheese and baked until it was nice and bubbly and browning.  A whole lot of major yum-ness.

…and, what better way to follow up this then with a home made bread pudding.  Yes, we are satiated to say the least.   A great cooking day….along with another batch of chicken broth started.  Click the pics!

This is my Refrigerator Soup or my ‘Everything Soup’.  It’s never made the exact same way twice.  I love this soup as every spoonful is different.  This is an excellent way to clean up ketchup bottles, bbq sauce bottles, veggies that have started to wilt, meat that needs to be used …any kind, absolutely any kind, nothing is ‘wrong’. 

This time I even threw in a hand full of frozen perogies!  I am over run with perogies right now as I had bought some and then one evening made a boat load.  This also has about 13 different kinds of beans (quick presoak method), spinach, grated cabbage, carrots, onions, chopped celery…and on an on it goes. 

We took the girls (our fur babies) for a nice winter walk and it’s a lazy Sunday.  How nice it was coming home to this simmering on the stove.  A hunk of bread, a bit of butter and there’s supper.  SOUP’S ON!  Come on over….

Yes, you heard me right.  Chocolate wine.  I bought this bottle as a novelty about a month before Christmas.  It was a great conversation piece, but I never opened it as I had already planned the ‘real wine’ for each meal and I was sure I would not like it. 

So, today, just to make the day different, I decided, why not?  Give it a try.  Okay, I have to say that…..IT IS FABULOUS!  Really, really good.  The chocolate taste is rich and bold, but you can still get a hint of the red wine base.  It hits the pallet in all the right ways and the slight aftertaste is wonderful. 

It is called:  Chocolate Shop, crème de cocoa The Chocolate Lover’s Wine.  So, if you have someone who loves wine and chocolate this Valentine’s day….you gotta get some!  I found it at the LCBO.

I made these Friday night, just for fun.  This is one of those things where you really can’t eat just one!  I made the filling from lean ground steak and lean turkey.  I went easy on the spice as I wanted the meaty taste to come through.  I used one egg white, a teaspoon of ground garlic, half a teaspoon of powered onion, half a teaspoon of salt, a good dash of black pepper and made the 1.5 inch patties, fried them until done (don’t over cook but use a thermometer for safety), melted a bit of cheese on each, put on a yellow tomato and small pieces of onion.  I toasted the buns under my broiler….. with a side of fries this was the perfect way to say hello to the weekend.

I pulled the main idea from this salad from one of those chefs on the Food Channel.  This salad is absolutely delicious and such a nice break from the regular fair.  This salad will serve four people and requires two large heads of Ontario grown Belgian Endive.  Just trim the bottom as it will allow you to remove the leaves, rinse and spin dry.  Arrange the whole leaves in a salad bowl or even better yet, a rectangle or square plate.  Shave some fresh Havarti cheese and let it fall randomly on the leaves.  Sprinkle some honey baked praline nuts, about one for every two leaves.  Take a lemon or line and squeeze out the juice over the salad making sure you hit every leaf.  Next, drizzle some honey over the salad, again getting some on every leaf, but don’t over do it.  Enjoy!  The flavour will surprise you and you will love it.

This morning I have started my two day chicken broth.  The aroma throughout the house is making us all think we are starving to death.  I really have to get my son-in-law Kevin to build an app that will allow you to smell so of these wonderful smells.  Perhaps you can plug something into your laptop and some websites that are all about cooking can trigger it to release the corresponding aroma.  Wouldn’t that be awesome? 

Anyway, I am now making all of our broth.  Some goes to my baby grandson Sam for a nice organic salt free broth and the rest is the base for a lot of my cooking.  It will simmer all day, cool over night in the fridge, in the morning I will remove the fat from the top (excellent to fry with!) and continue reducing for a few hours.  Then I will strain it, get our my pressure canner and start canning.  I will also use this broth to can for Sam, chicken meat with a few carrots and celery.

Bon Appetite!  Sam.