Monday, February 25, 2013

Tour de Blogosphere: Food and foodies

Photo courtesty of blurasis from the apt613 flickr group

The following post first appeared on Apartment 613 on February 16.

The kitchen is arguably the most important room in a home. True, you may have more fun in the bedroom, and the living room is often the entertainment hub, but it’s in the kitchen where delicious magic is created to soothe the stomach and caress one’s taste buds.Numerous Ottawa bloggers agree that cooking is a wonderful thing to do, which is why this week’s round-up of local blogs focuses on recipes and the city’s culinary scene.

To start things off, Barrhaven Bites offers an ode to the pistachio that contains an interesting history of this tasty nut, along with recipes for salmon and baklava. The fine folks at Foodie Prints also provide online instructions for numerous interesting dishes, with their most recent suggestions being milk chocolate almond nutella mousse with a touch of banana, a Chinese happy meal, and Vietnamese beef stew. For her part, Kelly from The Gouda Life can teach you how to make Chorizo and White Bean Stew, which serves two to four people, as well as beef shoulder and black bean chili stuffed baked potatoes, which you can make for a dinner party with four to six guests.

If you are looking for something simpler, Andrea from a peek inside the fishbowl offers her recipe for a BLT sandwich, as well as providing a link to a recipe for candied bacon. Elsewhere on her blog you can find directions for preparing caramelized onion mac and cheese, as well as meatballs. Completing our recipe list is the site If Music be the Food of Love, Play On, which explains how to boil quail eggs.

Turning to non-recipe but still foodie news, new Ottawa Citizen food critic Peter Hum notes on his blog that a casting call has gone out for a new TV show called Chopped Canada. In each episode of the show, which is still in development, four chefs will, “turn baskets of mystery ingredients into an extraordinary three-course meal. Course by course, the chefs will be ‘chopped” from the competition until only one remains and takes home the prize of $10,000.” Will an Ottawa chef take the big prize? Elsewhere on his blog, Hum’s most recent restaurant review is of Annie & Clyde’s at 895 Bank St., which serves Mexican and southern BBQ, while his previous review is of Golden Restaurant at 1-130 Riocan Ave. in Barrhaven.

Readers of 365 Days of Ottawa Food will be happy to know that the site is back, after taking almost a year hiatus. The latest post offers a great review of what has happened in the Ottawa restaurant scene in the past year. Jodi Lariviere at the excellent foodie blog Simply Fresh, meanwhile, defines seven culinary words, while blogger Dennis Van Staalduinen reports on the strangest (or is it the raddest?) one-man coffee shop that made a recent appearance at Tunney’s Pasture OC Transpo bus station.

Do you read any local foodie blogs that are not listed above? Let us know in the comments section below.

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