Wolfgang Puck is famous for a lot of great food, but if you had to choose the one item for which he would be most well known, it would be his pizzas.  This is his signature pizza dough recipe.

Once you have the dough made, check out his recipes for spicy chicken pizza, and pizza with smoked salmon and caviar.

Update: Fixed the broken link to the spicy chicken pizza.

Margy at Powell River Books has posted a great looking Mushroom and Crab Casserole Recipe that I need to try out.  It looks fantastic.  BTW, if you have some time, check out her blog which is about life on a floating cabin on the Powell River in British Columbia.

This comes from a cookbook that belongs to my son Mark and is based on the movie Ratatouille.

Ingredients

• 3 eggs
• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons flour
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1/4 salt
• 2 tablespoons butter

Directions

1. Put all the ingredients in a blender in the order listed and blend until smooth.  Remove the lid and scrape down the sides with a rubber spatula.  Briefly blend the mixture again.  Set the covered blender in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes or even overnight.
2. When it is time to cook the crepes, use a paper town to spread about 1 teaspoon of butter or vegetable oil in the bottom of a 8 or 9 inch shallow frying pan and place over medium heat. Blend the batter again to smooth in.
3. For the first crepe, pour 1/4 to 1/3 cup of batter into a measuring cup to gauge how much to use.  For the rest of the crepes, pour approximately that much batter right from the blender.  Cook each crepe.
4. Pour the batter into your heated pan, well to one side.  Immediately tilt and swirl the pan to evenly coat the bottom.  This should take about 5 seconds.
5. Cook the crepe on the first side for about 45 seconds, the quickly  flip it with a spatula and cool the other side for about half as long.
6. Swiftly invert the pan so the cooked crepe will fall into a large plate.  Rub a little butter or cooking spray on the pan before cooking the next crepe.

The cookbook has been a favourite of Mark’s for years and was a great introduction of him to cooking with a minimum of intervention and help from me.  If you can find a used copy and have younger kids, I would pick up a copy.

Jordon was complaining about my Quesadillas being soggy the other day and he had a good point.  I looked around and saw how to make them crispy.  Several other sites said that I can get a similar effect by baking them in the over and brushing them down with oil and baking them at 450 degrees F. until they are slightly brown.

I had never heard of potato borscht until earlier this year when a friend told me about it.  Instead of beets it uses potatoes and is a Russian favourite.

Ingredients

• 1 onion, sliced
• 1 head cabbage, shredded
• 1 quart. water
• 4 or 5 potatoes, diced
• 4 or 5 carrots, sliced
• 1 quart. water
• 1 pint. sour cream
• 2 teaspoon. dried dill weed
• Salt & fresh ground pepper

Directions

1. Slice onion and shred cabbage. In a large cooking pot, cook onion and cabbage until tender in 1 quart water. Salt and pepper as desired.
2. In another pot, cook carrots and potatoes in 1 quart salted and peppered water. When tender, drain this cooking water into the cabbage/onion pot.
3. Mash potatoes and carrots with sour cream and dill weed. Add sour cream mixture to cabbage/onion broth slowly, stirring well. Correct seasonings to taste.

Over at Serious Eats, Kenji Lopez-Alt shows how you can cut your onion caramelization time from 45 minutes to about 15 or 20 minutes.

Before we can figure out how to improve our end results, it's important to understand exactly what's going on when an onion browns. First, the onions begin by sweating. As they slowly heat up, moisture from their interior (they are roughly 75% water by weight) begins to evaporate, forcing its way out of the onion's cells, and causing them to rupture in the process. This breakdown of the cells is what causes onions to soften during the initial stages of cooking.

Of course the end result of all of this is an onion dip recipe that you can be proud to serve on Super Bowl Sunday.

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A gentleman’s agreement between him and a friend kept him out of Ontario.

They crossed the line and put a restaurant in Calgary, so the agreement went dead. They broke the line first, so we felt we could come into the East. And they’re friends of mine. But there wasn’t really anything stopping us before. [When the agreement was made] it was sort of an over-two-cocktails decision.

Now, I think we’ll be moving into other markets like Ottawa and London. I hope within the next two years we’re going to try something in Quebec too because Quebec is a very good market.