This quick-cooking TOMATO PRAWN WAFU PASTA is a Japanese-style pasta recipe that marries a simple Italian fresh tomato sauce and elements of distinctly Japanese flavours in the use of soy sauce, dashi powder (optional but easy to use — read recipe note), fresh shiso leaves and shredded nori for garnish. The best of both worlds!

This 20 MINUTE ONE-POT SCALLION NOODLE SOUP is an easy noodle meal with a tasty pork topping in a rich, peanut butter scallion soup that will have you slurping away in 20 minutes. It is basically an amalgamation of my dad’s scallion soup noodles and Dan Dan Mein. Or, two of my favourite noodle dishes in one! 

My family loves these Beef Rolls with Enoki and Veggies. Since there is protein, veggies and mushrooms all bundled together, it is the perfect standalone, well-rounded meal which makes me love it even more. They are soo good — with all that sauce — served on rice! Once the bundles are prepared, they cook in a matter of minutes right in the pan along with the sauce. Faster than the time it takes to cook the rice. Dinner is served!

This deeply satisfying JAPANESE CURRY UDON (Kare Udon) features a mild, slightly sweet Japanese-style curry sauce that is dialled perfectly — with a viscosity somewhere between sauce and broth — to enrobe each chewy udon strand for the perfectly tasty bite.

This 10-MINUTE CREAM CORN CHICKEN RICE is my take of a popular homestyle Cantonese dish (粟米雞粒飯) and my version takes only 10 minutes to make! You also won't be needing a knife or chopping board, either. Sound good? GOOD.

This EASY ONE-POT CHINESE NOODLE SOUP is the answer when you need a nourishing and soul-soothing meal that requires hardly any cooking and is done in 20 minutes. Literally, the only skill needed is the ability to throw everything into a pot and boil them!

Shrimp in Lobster Sauce features succulent shrimp and ground pork coated in a silky and flavourful sauce that is SO perfect for serving on steamed rice! After the shrimp is prepped, the dish comes together in less than 15 minutes, all in one cooking vessel. Yasss.

This SHANGHAI STIR-FRIED NOODLES recipe features bouncy, thick noodles stir-fried with shrimp, shiitake mushrooms, cabbage, carrots and scallions in a very slurpable, savoury sauce. It’s a 20-minute meal that everyone should have in their weeknight repertoire.

This MUSHROOM AND EGG “GYUDON” JAPANESE RICE BOWL is an easy, healthy 30-minute meal perfect for weeknights. King mushrooms are an amazing swap-in for meat because of its inherent “meaty” texture and ability to soak in loads of flavour. My favourite way to prepare king mushrooms is hand-shredding into strips and sautéing them with a little bit of oil in a searing hot pan until they’re nice and brown on the edges. This technique brings out their flavour and make them satisfyingly “meaty”. If you haven’t tried this, you MUST. I highly recommend it 🤌

This Spaghetti with Clams and Shishito Peppers with a Pancetta-Hazelnut Topping is one of those dishes you can make rather quickly on any given night for your family but also elevated enough for your most important dinner guests. And everyone will assume you slaved over it all afternoon too 😉

Are you Team White Sauce or Team Red Sauce? Honestly, I have been Team Red all the way, all my life. BUT, this dreamy creamy Springtime White Lasagna almost made me second guess my lifelong allegiance. Plus, I tricked my whole family into eating THREE whole different kinds of green vegetables in ONE meal because of this luscious, roasted garlic cream sauce. I said roasted garlic cream sauce. I just wanted to make sure you read that. 😉 Can you even imagine??! It’s definitely kinda magical.

This amazing Creamy Avocado Pesto Pasta with King Crab (or Shrimp) is a luxurious, creamy pasta dish fit for royalty but is also pretty perfect for a quick meal because it involves minimal cooking and is ready in less than 30 minutes. There is a reason why king crab meat is so beloved by seafood lovers all over the world. Nothing compares to their succulence and sweetness. If you haven’t yet tried, you should find a good excuse to splurge on it to taste for yourself. But for an everyday, less bougie yet still delicious version, shrimp is the way to go in this pasta. The recipe for either option is nearly identical (and I walk you through both in the recipe).

All it took was a delicious cookie. The kind that is hearty and chunky with all my favourite things like seeds and cacao nibs and cranberries and goji berries and tahini (aka my favourite butter of all time until infinity). The kind that promises to be hearty, healthy AND delicious, and actually delivers on that promise. It’s no wonder that I fell in love with it and have made the recipe more than half a dozen times. And in falling in love with the cookie, I discovered and also fell a little bit in love (not in a creepy stalker way … in a respectful admiration type of way) with its creators, Sarah Grossman and Tamara Green, the duo behind Living Kitchen Wellness blog and now their debut cookbook, The Living Kitchen Cookbook, Healing Recipes to Support Your During Cancer Treatment and Recovery.

Slurp-worthy rice noodles in a creamy, flavourful broth, this easy THAI RED CURRY NOODLE SOUP WITH SHRIMP BALLS is the kind of tasty and nutritious meal to put into your recipe rotation immediately.

Any morel lovers out there?! I am so pleased to partner with Green Peace Canada on this blog post to raise awareness about the Boreal forest by way of this wildly delicious Cauliflower Gnocchi with Morel Mushrooms recipe! Easy to make two-ingredient cauliflower gnocchi are tossed simply with sauteed morels, shallots and garlic, and finished with chives and a wee drizzle of nice balsamic vinegar to brighten everything up. This is an elevated dish fit for royalty! Or at least your most favorite dinner guests. The ones who bring very nice wine! ;)

Autumn seems to be everybody’s favorite season, doesn’t it? We have long Winters here and some of the allure of Autumn, for me anyways, is how fleeting it is before it gives way to the bitter cold. Ugh, I hate the cold. Apart from that, there is something almost ineffable about the beauty of Autumn. The cool, crisp air. The scent of earthiness and wood-burning fires. Leaves in the most splendid array of rich, vibrant colors. ASMR-inducing crunch-crunch-crunch of fallen, dry leaves underfoot. And as for taste, we crave the return of comfort foods after a summer of lighter fare. Foods that feel like a cozy hug for a hungry tummy, like this Lobster and Truffle Oil Mac + Cheese with Crunchy Chickpea Crumbs.

'Tis the season for winter squashes!  I love the variety of pumpkins and squashes in the markets now - my favorites being pumpkin pie pumpkins (those small round guys), buttercup pumpkin and when lucky enough to find them, kabocha squash aka Japanese pumpkin.  Good ol' butternut squash is excellent all year 'round too and is particularly loved by my girls.  All of these squash varieties can be used in this recipe.  Choose your favorite and the flavor of it will shine through in this simple yet delicious sauce. 

Toronto weather can be pretty bipolar.  We just had a sudden 10-degree (or 50f) swing from near 30c (86f) back down to more seasonal temperatures.  I guess Summer wanted a last hurrah.  I was okay with that! 

Now that it is Fall, for real, it's time to embrace all the upsides it brings including pumpkin things, crisp air fragranced by wood-burning fires, over-the-knee boots and cozy meals exactly like this Chicken Stew with Almond Flour Biscuits. 

Cauliflower has been having quite a moment in the sun.

Have you seen all the clever and creative uses of cauliflower lately?   The popular ones that spring to mind are cauliflower steak, cauliflower pizza crust, cauliflower buffalo 'wings', cauliflower tater tots and even using cauliflower as a smoothie ingredient to provide bulk without the added sugars of bananas and other fruits (can't say I'm sold on that one ... yet).  

So despite it's pale and unexciting appearance, turns out this cruciferous veggie kinda has superpowers!  And cauliflower RICE, for me, is the most super-y-est of them all because of it's ease of preparation (including how much faster it is to cook versus rice), superior nutritional value over rice, it's versatility and above all, how satisfyingly well it stands in for rice.

Does the internet really need another 'spaghetti sauce' recipe? For a year and half since I started this blog, the answer to myself was consistently NO. Yet here it is.

Instead of seeing it as too pedestrian to be blog-worthy, I now see it as invariably delicious, nourishing and actually an excellent representation of what we eat hence what I like to bring to the blog. A ragù (an Italian term) is a sauce made with ground meat and vegetables usually used for pasta. This is my take on the ubiquitous dish. It is uncomplicated yet deliberate in ingredients to maximize both taste and nutrition. It is beloved in my universe (my family). It is tried, test and true.