Our own Food Revolution

32. Make dinner from the Jamie Oliver cookbook every night for a week five times

I gave Alex Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution cookbook for his birthday (or maybe Father's Day?) a couple of years ago and it has become one of the cookbooks I turn to weekly to make dinner. Even with meal planning, I realized that eating from one cookbook for a week was going to be super tricky, especially when leftover were factored into the equation. So this challenge was changed to using Food Revolution to cook dinner five times. Much more manageable and allowed for more recipes (pretty much every single one of these dinner had at least one day's leftovers for our little family)

First there were pork chops and cauliflower bake. Yummy!

Then we had the best ever salmon cakes. J asks for them all the time.

Alex really wanted burgers one night, so out came Food Revolution and we had the Cracking Burgers.

Some of the best comfort food we had last winter was the Pot-Roast Meatloaf. Oh my goodness. The pictures do not do it justice.

The bacon adds a lovely flavour to this, but also means that we don't eat it very often. Once, possibly twice, all winter. And when we make it next winter, it will be when we have company so that there are no tempting leftovers the next day.

Is it wrong that I love meatloaf? It's such an underrated food, even more so when you make it the Food Revolution way!

The last Food Revolution meal was a regular on our menu rotation. Delicious tomato soup. So good.

I am not a tomato soup fan, but for a few weeks I made a pot of this soup every few days. We were taking it for lunch and having it as a starter with dinner. Even J loved it! (Oh, and I'm not a big cream soup fan and this soup is perfectly creamy with no dairy products added. YUM!)

Just because they were so good, some Baked French Potatoes.

This cookbook might be the best cookbook investment we've made!

Cracking Cracklin' Dinner

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Burgers are tasty, but I'm a bit scared of them. My dad makes awesome burgers, but he doesn't really use a recipe. He has a recipe in his head that includes eggs and dashes of this and that, but it's not written down anywhere. And I've had some yucky homemade burgers before, so I'm much happier to leave burgers for our visits to Kelowna in the summer.

Except that sometime we want burgers and we're not in Kelowna and we don't want to go out to eat.

Enter my new best friend, Jamie Oliver. I bought Alex Jamie's Food Revolution for his birthday (Father's Day?) a few years ago because I figured if Jamie Oliver could motivate and teach people who had no skills with food to cook, he could teach Alex, who was a prep cook eons ago, to cook. Except that I use the cookbook far more often than Alex. Oh well, we're married. We can share.

Now, we made this in the winter, so a salad didn't seem right as an accompaniment to Jamie's Cracking Burgers and oven roasted potatoes. After some thought and some consultation with the chief menu planner at our house, we settled on roasted cauliflower à la Mama Pea. I discovered this recipe after Kath at Kath Eats made it one night and talked about how expensive (!) cauliflower is - I don't know where she buys her cauliflower but at a few dollars for an entire head of cauliflower, it's a pretty good deal if you ask me. Anyway, I'd never had the Whole Foods version and we were out of curry powder, so I mixed up some cumin and coriander (at about a 1:3 ratio) and left out the stevia and cilantro. It was delicious. Alex and J both loved it. You can just barely see it just to the right of the burger.

We made that cauliflower over and over and over again all winter. I quickly figured out that the peas should be added closer to the end unless you want really crunchy peas, but yum! Everyone we fed this to loved it!

Oh, and the burgers? They're scrumptious and if my dad's not around to make me burgers, well, now I know I'm fully capable of making my own burgers and they will taste good too!

Salmon cakes

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If you’ve been following my menu planning, you might have noticed that Salmon Cakes keep showing up. But one way or another they just haven’t actually made it to our plates. Until tonight.

I had trouble finding a recipe that didn’t have mayonnaise or mustard in it, but I finally ended up finding two (I’m sure there are more, but at that point I stopped looking). One is from Canadian Living and uses canned salmon, the other from Jamie’s Food Revolution and calls for fresh salmon. They’re similar recipes and we decided to try the fresh salmon recipe first (nothing against canned, we just happened to pick up some very lovely, very fresh salmon at the Granville Island Market yesterday).

They turned out wonderfully! Even though, again, I forgot parsley and had to substitute basil. Oh well, I love basil.

The recipe suggested these were easy to freeze, so instead of eight cakes, I made ten and froze half. Now we have dinner in the freezer for another night. These ones are fried (the Canadian Living ones are baked) and I might try baking them the next time…

Dinner was so good. We’re at the tail end of asparagus season and I’ll be so sad to see it go. It’s one of my absolute favourite vegetables!

Pork Chops and other beige foods

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I don’t particularly like pork. So I don’t cook it. But I discovered that I was wrong last summer when my dad made yummy pork burgers. I like pork. What I don’t like is tough, dried out pork.

So I decided it was time for me to learn how to cook pork.

Easier said than done…

I picked up some boneless pork chops on special at the grocery store. I figured that if they were a disaster then at least it would be an inexpensive disaster. But once they were home I realized that boneless pork chops were probably not the best place to start. I asked the various cooks I know (in particular my mom and dad) how NOT to overcook pork chops and got some tips. The most prevalent tip was “FIND A RECIPE.” So I did. I broke out Alex’s copy of Jamie's Food Revolution, figuring if Jamie Oliver didn’t have a boneless pork chop recipe, then I was out of luck.


So, the end result might be a bit beige and brown, but these were so good. And so easy. And not tough. And didn’t overcook them. And J ate an entire one. And some of us had more than one. And some of us had random non-alcoholic German beer too.


While I was cooking them, I realized that I hadn’t really thought beyond the pork chops and the mashed potatoes Alex requested. And because it was the day before grocery day, we were out of salad and most other vegetables. But I had a head of cauliflower. So, I decided to go with a second Jamie Oliver recipe: Cauliflower Cheese. I didn’t have quite all the ingredients (missing some bacon for sure, maybe some whole milk or cream or something) but it turned out anyway. I think the next time I’d follow the directions more closely (the bacon would make it divine!), but my alterations were fine too. Cauliflower Cheese is remarkably like macaroni and cheese…I haven’t had it since I lived in London. I love that Jamie Oliver has you add a “glug” of oil to the bread when you make bread crumbs and they’re delightfully crispy when the casserole is cooked.

YUMMY! I can’t wait to try more of his recipes!!