On their own, the super foods are fighting a losing battle against refined crappy crap. But when they join forces their powers combined make an unstoppable health benefit for fighting the evil toxins in our intoxicated bodies. Combine the colourful forces of these classic and trendy superfoods to make a bright, light salad that is full of goodness and great taste. It’s loaded up to make a complete and balanced meal.

Mega morphing salad 

Black

1 bunch of black kale, leaves finely shredded 

Red

1 cup water

1/2 cup red quinoa ( you can also use red or regular)

pinch of salt

Pink

1 pink grapefruit

300g Cunningham smoked trout

Yellow 

Juice of 1 lemon

¼ cup Highwood Crossing organic canola oil

½ cup Tbsp olive oil

1 Tbsp honey

1 Tbsp yellow mustard

1 Tbsp fresh grated ginger

salt to taste

Green

3 cups (approximately) of mixed greens 

To make the vinaigrette. Put all the ingredients into a large glass jar with a lid. Close the lid up tight and give everything a really good shake. Set vinaigrette aside to get happy for a little while.

To cook the Quinoa. Bring water to a boil. Stir in the quinoa and reduce heat to low. Cover and cook for 15 minutes. Remove lid and cook until the water evaporates. Pour the cooked quinoa out of the pot onto a large plate or baking dish and spread it out while fluffing it with a fork. Let the quinoa dry out a bit and cool to room temperature while you prepare the rest of the ingredients.

Cut off the top and bottom of the grapefruit. Place a flat side down and use a knife to cut away the peel. Once all the pink skin and white pith are cut away, you can start to remove the pieces of grapefruit supreme by cutting wedges out as close to the thin connected membrane as you can manage. The technique is called ‘supreme’. For detailed instructions on how to ‘citrus supreme’ check out swervecalgary.com and search “Citrus Supreme” for a how-to video.

To shred the black kale, remove the tough stem by cutting down each side. Save the stems for a stir-fry. Collect all the leaves into a neat and tidy pile and hyper-thinly slice until you’ve got a springy pile ready to get dressed.

Get dressed. Dress each item individually to ensure everything is distributed evenly.

Start with the mixed greens and kale together. Dressing sparingly and to your personal taste with the vinaigrette and use your clean hands to toss the leaves. Divide into two bowls.

Now toss the grapefruit supremes in vinaigrette until nicely coated. Arrange the grapefruits into and around the nest of greens.

Now dress the quinoa with vinaigrette. Be sure it doesn’t end up getting too sloppy. Scatter the quinoa on and around the mixed greens. Carefully arrange pieces of smoked trout on the salad.

Any left over vinaigrette can be saved for future salads.

Serve forth and prosper.

Trim out the beef and enjoy some Prime cut, Grade-A Calgary without having a cow.

Calgary Rarebit

1 Tbsp butter

1 Tbsp flour

1 cup of any Wild Rose beer or Milk

½ cup grated Sylvan Star Gouda

1 Tbsp Brassica grainy mustard (Prairie Caviar)

1 free-range local egg

8 thick slices of Aviv’s bread

8 grape tomatoes, halved

Preheat the oven to 450°F.

Place the bread on a parchment lined baking sheet. Toast the bread on one side until the top is crispy and lightly toasted.

Get a pot on medium-high heat. Drop in the butter right away and sprinkle in the flour. Now use a whisk to mix the melting butter and the flour. They will bunch up pretty quick, which is cool. Keep whisking and pour in a splash of beer. Holy crap, it looks like gross goo, that’s cool, keep stirring. Pour in some more beer. Holy crap, still gross, it’s cool, keep stirring and make sure it stays smooth. Go a little more on the beer and keep stirring . . . Still looks like pus, but that’s fine as long as it’s smooth. Now you can dump in the rest of the beer and keep stirring until it comes to a boil.

When it boils, turn off the heat and switch to a wooden a spoon. Stir in the cheese until it’s smooth. Then plus it with the mustard. It should be cool enough to add the egg. But make sure you stir it in quickly before it starts to cook.

Pour or spoon the gooey cheese sauce over the pieces of bread. Blap the whole mess into the oven until the top puffs up a bit and gets nicely golden and bubbly. Watch it carefully, it can go from nice and toasty to burnt in the blink of an eye.

Serve it with nice juicy tomatoes on top. And look there’s some beer left in that bottle.

Beer

Wild Rose Brewery has seasonal beers, tap room tours and party pigs. You don’t need a Golden Ticket to get into the Beer Brewery and enjoy the flowing pints of happiness.

Bldg AF23, #2 – 4580 Quesnay Wood Drive SW, in Currie Barracks. wildrosebrewery.com, 403-720-2733

Cheese

Award winning full flavoured old Grizzly Gouda is so good it makes other cheeses seem cheesey. Pick up a slab at any Calgary cheese monger Janice Beaton Fine Cheese, Springbank Cheese Company and Say Cheese Fromagerie.

Sylvanstarcheesefarm.ca

Mustard

Get some whole grain prairie caviar from Brassica in a variety of flavours. Find all kinds at The Cookbook Co., Savour Fine Foods & Kitchenwares and Community Natural Foods.

brassicamustard.com

Bread

Genius baker Aviv makes the best bread in town. Grab a loaf at his bakery (5524 1 A St SW) Friday, Saturday from 10am-2pm or around town at Market 17, Fresh Kitchen and Sunnyside Market.

sidewalkcitizenbakery.com

The Charcut ad design is simply evolving.The original ads for Charcut Roast House were quite simple, photo + copy. But as the restaurant evolved they decide to evolve their design along with it. They asked me to come on as a designer/illustrator and come something to work with their existing branding.

Keeping with the mantra of evolving simple ingredients we worked with some of their favourite features and prized posessions: The Pig, their vintage red hand-crank meat slicer and their always changing hanging meat display window (or Meat Curtains, as they prefer me not to call it).

John Jackson, co-chef at Charcut Roast House and I have been working on a new ad design for the fall. Continuing with the Charcut mantra of Evolving Simple Ingredients, we have come up with a clever new design inspired by Connie’s end-of-summer tomato canning adventures. Look for it in Avenue Magazine and City Palate.

City Rat is constantly food-blogging about trending ingredients he orders online, bristling at the latest TV food battles and going to eat at restaurants with yearlong waiting lists. Country Rat enjoys the aesthetics of leisurely reading a cookbook in a comfy chair, ambling through farmer’s markets to pick food by smell and sharing his food with friends. City Rat wants Country Rat’s ratatouille recipe so he can blog it.

Slow roasted country ratatouille

INGREDIENTS

3 vine-ripened tomatoes, quartered

2 sweet bell peppers, seeded

4 small zucchini

2 small eggplants

2 onions, quartered

6 cloves of garlic, peeled

1 Tbsp dried herbes de Provence

Or 2 Tbsp of assorted fresh herbs like basil, oregano and parsley

½ cup of really good olive oil

sauce

1-398 ml can of tomato purée

½ cup assorted pitted olives

olive brine to taste (salty liquid the olives are kept in)

Preheat your oven to 375˚ F.

Get a large metal baking dish.

Use the size of your quartered tomatoes as a guide. Cut the sweet pepper, zucchinis and eggplant into large chunks the size of the quartered tomatoes.  Quarter the onions and place everything into a large metal baking dish in one even layer.

Drizzle on the olive oil, scatter on the herbs and whole cloves of garlic.

Toss to make sure everything has a little oil and a little of the herb sprinkling on it.

Blap it all in the oven and roast for 1 hour, tossing it all once half way through roasting.

Remove from the oven and pour on the tomato purée and the pitted olives. Mix it all up to make sure the ratatouille is nicely covered.

Crank the oven heat up to 450˚F and bake for another 15-20 minutes until the sauce thickens and the flavours all get together and love one another.

Serve in a large ceramic bowl with a wooden spoon along with pretty much anything.

It’s the 11th Annual Empty Bowl Benefit Auction!

Check out the “Choose Your Weapon!” Kitchen Scraps ‘bowl’. It comes with a signed copy of Kitchen Scraps. This is as close as you’re going to get to Kitchen Scraps Merch!

With a record number of celebrity painters this year, there’s bound to be something for everyone. Winning bidders will be contacted during the week of May 9, at which time we will tell you where and when you can pick up your fabulous new piece of art!

The proceeds of this wildly popular annual event help the Food Bank provide healthy, nutritionally-balanced food hampers to struggling Calgarians.

I didn’t put on a berret for nothing!

Here is a sneak peak of some of the art you can expect to see in the Alice Eats: A Wonderland Cookbook.

This animation shows how the illustrations progress from a pencil sketch to a line drawing which gets scanned into Photoshop. Rendering is done using an extensive collected library of brushes, splatters and textures. Finally the rendered image is placed in the layout and adjusted for sizing.

Still trying to reach someone at Chronicle Books to get this project published. So if anybody knows someody…

Cupid is far from the adorable little curly-topped chubby love-bug we know from Valentine cards. He is the love child of Venus, the goddess of love and Mars, the god of war. His singular reason for being is to fight the never-ending war on love. He knows all too well that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, so he is armed to the teeth with a bow and quiver of love inducing arrows to help the opposites attract. But even a natural born thriller like Cupid has his back to the wall around Valentine’s day, so arm yourself with these love inducing flaming skewered hearts with sweet and hot honey mustard glaze.

All’s fair in love and war, so skip the predictable rose and bring home a dozen chicken hearts from Sunworks at Currie Barracks for Valentine’s day. Sweeten the deal with some Mead, the drink of the gods, which does double duty as a drink and is part of the glaze.

Share your heart with someone this Valentines.

INGREDIENTS 

12 chicken hearts*

HONEY MUSTARD GLAZE

1/2 cup grainy mustard

¼ cup honey

¼ cup Mead**, or beer

6 small red potatoes

handful of green beans

3 Tbsp butter

salt and pepper

PROCEDURE 

Fire up the barbecue to get it nice and hot.

Get the potatoes in a pot of cold water over high heat on the stove.

Whisk the mustard and honey in a medium bowl. Whisk in the mead to thin out the glaze. The rest of the mead is for drinking.

Set aside the glaze while you skewer the hearts. Metal skewers are ideal, but wooden skewers are fine and always benefit from a 20 minute soak.

Line up three chicken hearts on the end of each skewer with a centimeter between each heart to allow proper heat circulation.

Place them on a plate and season with salt and pepper. Grab your honey mustard glaze, a basting brush, your hearts and do a sexy sashay over to the barbecue.

Quickly give the hearts a little brush of the honey mustard glaze just before you toss them on the grill. Place the hearts on the grill with the handles sticking off the side, so they stay out of the line of fire to make flipping easy. Flip them every 3-4 minutes and apply a good slathering of glaze before each flip. Total cooking time might take up to 20-25 minutes. Pinch them for doneness, they should be firm, but not hard. No one wants a heart of stone. It’s okay if the outside gets charred, it adds a great flavour.

When the potatoes are tender (poke them with a skewer and if there is no resistance in the middle, they are done) toss in the green beans for one minute and drain the whole mess into a colander.

Serve two heart skewers with boiled potatoes and sautéed green beans with butter and loads of salt and pepper. Don’t forget to pour two brimming mugs of mead.

It’s a hearty dinner for two.

* Get a bag of about a dozen organic chicken hearts from Sunworks Farms in the Calgary Farmer’s market at Currie Barracks. www.sunworksfarm.com

** Mead is any alcohol made from fermented honey and can vary tremendously. I used Maxwell Mead, a sweet carbonated mead with 12.5% alc/vol. from these two Calgary CO-OP Liquor Stores: Midtown Market 
1110, 11th Ave S.W. or South Trail at #50- 4307 130^th Ave, S.E.. A Big Rock Honey Brown is an appropriate substitution. 

Avocados are popping up all over the place. These precocious little greenies are naturally drawn towards large sporting events like the Superbowl. Your only hope to cope with these funky fruits is the bash out a big batch of guacamole and enjoy with tortillas. If you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em … to a pulp!

INGREDIENTS

4 avocados, beaten or mushed

1 lime

4 Tbsp coriander, rough chopped

4 Tbsp red onion, finely chopped

4 cherry tomatoes, chopped

big pinch chili powder to taste

big pinch salt to taste

serve with tortilla chips

PROCEDURE

Basically you need to mash up the avocado and add all the flavourings, then stir it all up, plop it in a bowl and serve with tortilla chips or cheesey baked nachos. To mash up the avocado, here are three perfectly enjoyable techniques.

Beaten: Put the avocado in a sealable baggie and suck out all the air before you close it up. Then just batter the poor trapped little avocado into submission with a blunt opbject. It’s really fun, but you will have to sort through the mess once the bag is opened and you’ll need to pick out the skin.

Mushed: Holding the avocado in both hands with thumbs on top and gently work the meat until the whole thing feels like jelly. If you can apply the right amount of force you will end up with a gooshy sack of avocado mush as long as the skin stays intact. Then you can cut a hole in the bottom and squeeze out all the mushed up avocado.

Mix all the flavourings in with the mushed avocado. Leave the pit in the mix because rumour has it the pit will prevent the guac from going brown. If you’re storing it in the fridge you can prevent browning from oxidation by wrapping the finished guacamole tightly with plastic wrap so the plastic is touching the surface.

To really prevent oxidation, just eat it right away.

Ripe on

If you avocados are rock hard you can expedite the ripening process by tossing them in a brown paper bag with an apple or tomato and leaving them on the counter at room temperature for a day. No paper bag? Wrap it all in some of that newspaper right there… the sports section would be an appropriate choice.

Are you worried about your muffin top? Don’t skip breakfast or you’ll be heading towards the vending machine for a gnarly sugar bomb when the hunger pangs start. Instead eat a healthy and delicious energy packed muffin with vitamin packed zucchini and crazy-energy loaded goji berries…. and chocolate chips because you’re awesome.

Dry ingredients

2 cups all-purpose flour

2 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp ground ginger

½ tsp cinnamon

½ tsp ground cloves

Dry Muffinhancers

½ cup goji berries

½ cup chocolate chips

Wet ingredients

1 cup plain %3.5 yogurt

1/4 cup melted butter (or vegetable oil)

1 cup white sugar

1 egg, beaten

pinch of  salt

1 tsp vanilla extract

Wet Muffinhancers

1 cup grated zucchini

½ cup grated apple

PROCEDURE

Preheat oven to 375˚F.

Grease a muffin tin (12 count) with grease spray or butter.

Get two big bowls. In the first bowl combine the dry ingredients (except the dry muffinhancers). Instead of sifting the ingredients you can simply run a whisk through a couple times to break up any dry lumps.

In the other bowl combine yogurt, sugar, melted butter, egg and extract. Mix it all up until it’s good and smooth. Now mix in both the wet and dry Muffinhancers and stir to distribute.

Make sure your oven is set and the muffin tin is greased up before you combine the wet and dry. It’ll need to happen pretty quickly.

Pour the dry mix into the wet bowl and fold gently with a spatula while you count slowly to 15. The result should be a very lumpy batter, with frequent dry floury spots. It’s better if it’s not a smooth batter.

Now use an ice-cream scoop with a trigger release (really good for even distribution) or just a big spoon to fill the muffin tray evenly. Fill it up to the top of the tray, but try not to go much higher or you will end up with a muffin eruption. 

Blap the muffin tray into the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes. Check the muffins at 20 minutes and test them for doneness.

To make sure the muffins are done, simply stick a toothpick in the center and if it comes out clean the muffins are done, but if it’s covered in batter, bake them for 3 minute increments until the toothpick comes out clean.

When they are done, make a wish that they will all pop out of the muffin tray, then turn it over onto a clean tea towel to let them cool.

Makes 12 muffins.

If you plan to freeze your muffins, just make sure they are nice and cool, then place them in sealable plastic bags and remove as much air as possible then pop them in the freezer.

Leave a comment or send an email to tell me what all these books have in common. Being creative with your answer will only win you points… 

On November 15 one lucky contestant will win a copy of Kitchen Scraps: a humorous illustrated cookbook.