GREATNESS BY ACCIDENT

Sometimes cooking something new doesn't go as planned.  Especially when you use your experiences from previous recipes and try coming up with your own creation.

A recipe that you followed and turned out excellent will inspire you to use similar methods to try making something different.  If it worked then, if should work now, right?  Not always.  And sometimes when things don't go as we thought it would, our natural reaction a lot of the time is to throw in the towel.

But just because your original idea didn't work, it doesn't mean that you were not on to something.

Sure, there are times when you substituted an ingredient for something similar and it turned out to be a disaster.  In the early stages of when I started taking my cooking a lot more seriously, I had made a homemade pasta sauce from a recipe I found and it turned out great.  It turned out so great that the following week I decided to make it again.  Unfortunately, none of the supermarkets near me had fresh basil, which the recipe called for.  So I turned to dried basil that you get in your typical spice aisle.  BIG mistake!  The sauce was ruined.

But there are also times when a dish is still salvageable.  You just need to change the game plan.

Previously made Pesto Pasta.  Perfection.

Last year, I had an idea to make a pesto dish using broccoli and cauliflower instead of pasta.  A pesto pasta recipe I made a few months prior turned out great and I figured replacing the pasta with broccoli and cauliflower would be simple enough.

I went back to the pasta recipe to remind myself of the ingredients I needed to make the pesto sauce and the basic instructions to make it.  The sauce called for cashews soaked for a few hours, some basil, garlic, lemon juice, grated Parmesan and extra virgin olive oil.

I bought the ingredients and started with soaking the cashews first.  I used more cashews than the pasta recipe called for, thinking I was going to make a large batch of pesto broccoli and cauliflower and therefore needed lots of sauce.

Once the cashews had soaked for a few hours to soften them up, It was time to put them in my food processor and periodically add everything else.  Unfortunately, the mixture was not creating any kind of smooth consistency.  It was becoming more like a ball of dough than anything else.  Adding a little extra olive oil wasn't helping.  I had made the mistake of using too many cashews, and if I wanted to get the mixture smooth, it would have meant adding a lot more olive oil which I didn't want to do.

When my attempt at a Pesto sauce for a Broccoli & Cauliflower dish didn't work, I came up
with Plan B: Operation Salvage.

I stopped the food processor and looked for a minute at what I had.  It looked more like a stuffing you would have with turkey than any kind of sauce.  I decided to give it a taste and it tasted excellent!

I decided that I needed to change my game plan as I had stumbled on to something.  I still had the broccoli and cauliflower, but I also had some grape tomatoes, half a brick of mozzarella and an extra red pepper leftover from the previous days' creation.

I roasted the red pepper, cut the grape tomatoes in half and grated the mozzarella.  I kept some grated mozzarella to the side and put everything else into a large bowl with the cauliflower, broccoli and cashew mixture.  Mixed it all up, put it in a baking tray, topped with the remaining mozzarella and some pepper.  Baked at about 400 degrees for 15 minutes and out came my Cheesy Baked Cauliflower and Broccoli with Pesto Stuffing!

Greatness by accident!

CHEESY BAKED CAULIFLOWER & BROCCOLI with PESTO STUFFING

INGREDIENTS

4 cups of raw natural cashews.

1/4 cup fresh chopped basil.

3-4 cloves of garlic, chopped.

1 Tbsp fresh lemon juice.

2 Tbsp grated parmesan.

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil.

4 cups broccoli florets.

4 cups cauliflower florets.

1 pint grape/cherry tomatoes (about 20 of them), sliced in half.

1 red bell pepper, roasted and chopped.

4 cups grated mozzarella.  Put aside 1 cup for topping.

1 tsp ground black pepper.

INSTRUCTIONS

1.  Soak cashews in water for about 3 hours.

2.  Preheat oven to 400 degrees after the cashews are done soaking.

3.  Mix cashews, basil, chopped garlic, lemon juice and parmesan in a food proccessor while slowly adding the olive oil during the mixing process.  Continue mixing until it has a stuffing texture throughout.  Process will take close to 10 minutes depending on how powerful your proccessor is.

4.  Put stuffing mixture in a large mixing bowl and add the broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes, roasted red pepper, only THREE cups of the mozzarella and the ground pepper.  Mix and combine in the bowl.

5.  Put the entire mixture into a baking pan line with non-stick cooking spray.  Top with the remaining mozzarella.  Bake for 15 minutes.  Serve.

Chef Nairby

THE MIGHTY TOMATO

Based on my own experiences, most people seem to dislike tomatoes.  They are fine with ketchup.  They have no problem with basic pasta sauce.  But for a lot of people, and I used to be the same way for many years, they will completely stay clear from tomatoes in general or only eat them if they're buried in a burger of submarine sandwich with sauces, lettuce, meats and bread.

"What About Bob?"-Courtesy of Touchstone Pictures

I was one of those people who would only eat tomatoes when they were buried with other ingredients in a burger or sub.  I would remove them from my salads.  I would not even touch tomato soup or tomato juice.  I had some smart-alick tomato fan every now and then ask me why I liked ketchup but not tomatoes.  Ketchup is just tomatoes, after all, right?  I would reply they the next time they want ketchup they should just toss a tomato in a blender.  That pretty much shut them up.

I was very anti-tomato.  They had this flat taste that just didn't seem right.  I even remember a time when I was a kid and I was given a grape tomato which I believed was a gumball.  I put it in my mouth, but down, it exploded with juices in my mouth and I immediately spit it all out.  I only knew of your basic tennis ball sized tomatoes back then, so little baby grape tomatoes were foreign to me.

You can't beat locally grown produce!  The colors and flavors!  Mwah!!

That was my opinion on tomatoes until the beginning of 2014.

On January 2nd, 2014, after a crazy incident happened in my life that sunk my world the prior December, I started on a journey to get in shape.  This obviously meant eating healthier.  Everything I needed for a better diet was at the supermarket across the street from me.  Eating better, of course, meant more veggies.  Salads.  And that meant sucking it up and giving the mighty tomato a fair shot.

I started by putting sliced grape tomatoes in my daily salads but making sure I covered them in dressing.  In no time at all, I became accustomed to the grape tomato with it tangy flavor.  So I bought more and more for my salads, and it didn't hurt that the market was selling pints of locally grown grape tomatoes for very cheap.

Perfect looking Cherry Tomatoes I found, Imported from Italy.
Sometimes it's worth buying imported!  Superb!

As I kept to my workout and diet routine, I quickly eliminated breads and other no-so-good food from my options.  I started getting more serious about improving my culinary skills and would eventually look up recipe ideas using healthy ingredients like the tomato, cauliflower, broccoli and more.

I started making my own pasta sauce using lots of tomatoes for the base, and I can honestly say that what you buy in a jar or can cannot compare to making a fresh homemade tomato sauce.  And contrary to popular opinion, the pre-made stuff is NOT cheaper than going fresh and making it yourself.  I got into that more, or WILL get into that more in my Blog about making your own pasta sauce (as of this word right *HERE*, that Blog and several more are already written and ready to go, it's just a matter of deciding when to post them and how frequently).

Tomato halves, topped with grated Mozzarella, Cheddar, Mushrooms and more, ready for the oven!
Better, cheaper and healthier than any pizza!

I will never speak badly of the glorious tomato again!  And I encourage any Tomater-haters to give them a shot.  They are worth it.  Heck, I even eat tomato soup and drink tomato juice now!

Give them a chance and stay tuned for more Tomato Tuesday's posted bi-weekly.  Buy local if you can.  The redder, the better.  They are inexpensive in the long run and can yield a large amount of MMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!

Baked Tomatoes with Cheese ready to eat.  The choice
of toppings is only limited to your imagination!

CHEESY BAKED TOMATOES

INGREDIENTS

4 tomatoes, sliced in half.

4 Tsp Extra virgin olive oil.

2 cups grated cheddar.

2 cups grated mozzarella.

½ cup chopped oregano.

½ cup chopped green onion.

1 cup sliced mushrooms

1 Tbsp garlic powder.

Ground black pepper to taste.

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Preheat oven to 450 F.

2. Place tomatoes cut-side up on baking sheet lined with aluminum foil and sprayed with non-stick cooking spray.

3. Top each tomato with mozzarella, cheddar, onion and mushrooms.  Sprinkle with black pepper and garlic powder.  Drizzle with olive oil.

4. Bake until tomatoes are tender, about 10 minutes.  Serve.

Goat Cheese, chopped Dill and pepper!

Experiment with toppings.  Use goat cheese, fresh chopped dill, basil, green pepper…whatever you can think of!  Cheesy baked tomatoes are a tasty and healthy alternative to pizza!

Chef Nairby

FOOTBALL FOOD

It's Super Bowl time!  And that means Tailgating and Super Bowl parties!  And THAT means FOOTBALL FOOD!

It's odd how there are countries that have their own unique style of cuisine, but there are also occasions we celebrate where you can't just have your basic meat and potatoes or simple hamburgers and hot dogs if you want to do it right.  Christmas and Thanksgiving have turkey.  Birthdays have cake and ice cream.  Super Bowl parties, or in my case as a Canadian, Grey Cup parties (GO ARGOS!), and just football tailgating in general are in their own league!

Grey Cup 2007 week.  Many many pounds ago!  Partying with Saskatchewan Roughrider fans at Riderville.

Lenny Kravitz performs the Halftime show!

We have all seen them on TV.  Most of us have not been lucky enough to attend a REAL tailgate party.  Here in Toronto, we have the Canadian Football League and the Toronto Argos.  Unfortunately, our Argos don't usually have much of a pregame tailgate party going on except those put on by corporate sponsored vendors where the beers are $14 a can and the hot dogs are your basic sized hot dogs stuffed in a standard bun with an option to top with whatever sauce company is sponsoring the zone you are in.  It is not the real deal.  It is not like what you see from our neighbors to the South.

The Super Bowl, NCAA Championship game, and yes, even the Grey Cup but to a lesser extent are not just events, they are a celebration.  And one things for sure...they are also a celebration of food!

Full house at the SkyDome (aka Rogers Centre) for the championship game  Roughriders vs Blue Bombers.

Final score.  The Saskatchewan Roughriders win the 2007 Grey Cup, as we all expected.

One of the things on my bucket list is to attend an NFL game and an NCAA football game as well as a real pregame tailgate party.  The crazy thing is that, up until 2004, I hated football with a passion.  I was a hockey guy.  But then the NHL lockout of 2004 occurred and I needed a sport to fill the void.  That became football after stumbling across a Boise State Broncos home game on TV.  The insane atmosphere of the crowd was one thing, but the blue field is what got me hooked instantly and I suddenly remembered that we not only have a professional league in Canada, my city has a team which at that time had just won the Grey Cup!  I ordered season tickets for the following year and my football fandom journey began!

A few years ago, we held the NCAA International Bowl here in Toronto.  I attended two of them, but much like the Argo home games, the tailgating was not the real thing like what we see on TV.  I want to experience the slow cooked pulled pork!  The jumbo hotdogs, ribs and burgers!  And that is just the tip of the iceberg.  Much like Christmas and Thanksgiving, Super Bowl Sunday is a day where millions of people throw whatever diet they might be on out the window.  Everything becomes super-sized!  I like super-sized every now and then.

Ingredients for Slow cooked Mozzarella Stuffed Italian Meatballs.

I like meat!  And on special occasions, I like fatty meat!  And lots of it!  And I like my slow cooker!  I like beef, sausage, fresh spices and cheese!  I like meatballs!  I like meatballs stuffed with cheese and spices!  And Super Bowl means super-sized!

This giant mozzarella stuffed Italian meatballs recipe is perfect for the big game!  Granted, they’re not as mind blowing as a lot of the tailgate items people come up with, but they do the job!  And they make the house smell awesome!

Meatballs stuffed and ready to spend a few hours in the slow cooker!

I got this recipe from Buzzfeed and I highly recommend trying them out!  I wasn't able to find ground Italian sausage, but I did find linked hot Italian sausage and it was as simple as removing the meat from the casing.  Give them a try.  (Insert football cliche here!)

Here is a link to a video quickly detailing the process:

Mozzarella Stuffed Italian Meatballs

Done!

Touchdown!!!

INGREDIENTS

1 lb Ground Beef

1 lb Hot Italian Sausage

1/2 tsp Garlic Powder

2 tsp Salt

1 tsp Black Pepper

1 cup Bread Crumbs

1/4 cup Parmesan

2 eggs

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup Parsley

1 Jar Traditional Pasta Sauce

1 Brick Mozzarella Cheese, Cut into squares the size of one die (or dice, however you want to pronounce it).

INSTRUCTIONS

1.  Place all ingredients, EXCEPT PASTA SAUCE and MOZZARELLA, in a large bowl and combine.

2.  Take a handful of the mixture and roll into a ball, slightly smaller than a tennis ball.

3.  Place a mozzarella square into the middle of the meatball, cover and roll into a ball.  Place in slow cooker.  Repeat until you have used all of the meatball mixture.  It's ok if the meatballs are stacked.

4.  Cover all meatballs with the pasta sauce.

5.  Cook on HIGH for 2-2.5 hours (I cooked on high for about 2h 45m).  Mozzarella will most likely escape from some meatballs as they cook.  This is normal.

6.  Scarf 'em down and enjoy!

Chef Nairby

Rebuilding: Wake Your Body And Your Taste Buds

This is the first in a series of stories about how I have been rebuilding my life.

I spent the majority of my life being overweight and in terrible physical shape.  I would live in constant physical pain.  I would spend my day at work sitting and doing very little and then go home, sit and do nothing.

At one point, I was in such bad shape that I weighed well over 300 pounds.  I don't know exactly how much over since my scale only went up to 300.

At a family BBQ in 2009.  This isn't even me at my worst which was to come.

I didn't care about anything.  I was content with just living through the constant back and knee pain.  I bought sized 3XL shirts and hated the way I looked.  I looked like a huge freaking bell.  Many times, I would tell myself, "that's it!  Starting tomorrow, it's time to start getting in shape!"  That was usually while I was on my way to work and then the motivation would completely disappear at the end of the day.

My diet consisted of crap.  Junk.  Because it was cheap and made me feel relaxed at the end of, what I thought was a tough day.  But seriously, what is so physically hard about a job where you literally sit on your butt all day?

My awful diet, if you can even call it that, got so out of hand that when I was at my absolute worst, I would order a pizza meal for dinner that was supposed to feed a family of four.  And I would order this thing at least twice a week since I had a pizza place that was a quick 2 minute walk away from me.

Twice a week!  A large pizza with 3 toppings, 10 fried chicken nuggets, two dipping sauces and 4 cans of soda.  TWICE A WEEK!  Add that to the crap I was eating on the other days.  Burgers, triple-decker sandwiches, chocolate bars, doughnuts....pure garbage!  That was my life for so long.

Then in December 2013, something happened in my life that completely made me hit rock bottom.  One of those situations where you realize who your true friends are, and in this case, are NOT.  Only days after this went down, we got hit with an ice storm here in Toronto that took out the power of a lot of residents, myself included.

I was in a very bad place.  And now I had no electricity which the city was saying could take up to a week to restore.  To make things worse, My annual holidays started at the same time.  So it was me in the dark with nothing to do but think.  And with where my head was at, it was a very rough situation.

(May, 2014) Day 50 of my rebuilding process.

I had to get out of the house, so I walked to my local mall to see if there was anything going on there.  There was electricity but very little.  Most of the stores were closed but there were people EVERYWHERE.  And it was one of the most depressing sights I had ever seen.  Hordes of people lined up at every electrical outlet available to the public.  People camped out to charge their devices so they could watch movies and shows on their iPads, iPods and laptops.  Most of these people were in fine shape and there they were throwing their lives away.  Slaves to technology.  I found a place to sit in the mall and fought tears as I could not believe what I was seeing.  I left the mall and walked back home.

My power was restored after two days and my head was a complete mess.  I spent Christmas with family and it did very little to help.  I spent New Years alone.  Then on January 2nd, 2014, still feeling depressed and with another week or so left in my holidays, I said, "screw it!"  I grabbed a yoga mat that I had bought 5 months earlier and started my rebuilding process.

Day 274.  October 2nd, 2014

I laid the yoga mat out on my living room floor, and for the next 10 minutes, I did the most basic yoga poses you can think of while I put 'The Soprano's' on via DVD.  Ten minutes was all I was able to do.  The next day, I was in crazy pain.  My body had been in a coma for so long that it was just waking up.  Despite the pain, I did another ten minutes of basic yoga and watched more 'Soprano's'.

The pain quickly went away as I kept at it.  My body was waking up.  But this journey meant more than just working on my body.  It meant changing what I eat.  I completely dropped the pizza and junk and took advantage of the supermarket across the street and canvassed the fresh produce section on a daily basis.  I came to realize that not only was my body asleep for years, so were my taste buds.

The junk I was eating on a daily basis killed my sense of taste.  When I took that first taste of a fresh clementine, the flavors exploded in my mouth!  And I wanted more!  As time went on and I became more disciplined with my eating habits, I was getting hungry less, and therefore, SPENDING less on food.

When we consume garbage food, it does nothing good for our body because it contains ingredients the body does not use.  Thus, we eliminate it through our poops (that's right!  I said poops!) and become hungry again sooner.  The ingredients in the garbage foods, like sugar, that our body keeps gets turned into fat.  Eating garbage food is cheap because it does very little to satisfy our hunger, therefore we end up buying more and more of it.  Meanwhile, eating healthier foods means more ingredients, vitamins and minerals that our body uses to keep our energy up.  And as our body gets stronger, we end up craving food a lot less and end up spending less on food as a result.  So in the long run, healthy food is actually CHEAPER than junk.  And that is why healthy food is more expensive then junk.

November 4, 2014 (and still going strong!)

Healthy food is more expensive because it is an investment in your health that pays off very quickly.  Junk is simply a temporary solution to fulfill a craving.  I'm not saying that we should all become vegetables or starve ourselves.  I will eat some guilty pleasures every now and then because I know that I will work it off.  The key is that I needed to wake my body up after depriving it for so long.  I built up my metabolism by eating better in the beginning, and once I knew that I had the discipline to work the junk off, I knew it was safe to indulge every once in a while.  But after waking up my taste buds to the awesomeness of healthier foods, a lot of the time I will pass up the junk.  Not because it's junk, but because the good stuff just tastes better.

It is now February 3rd, 2016.  Day 763 of rebuilding.  Working out every day, not because I feel like I have to, but because it has become a regular part of my life.  The first step was waking up my body and taste buds and to not get discouraged at the pain in the beginning.  What should you expect from the first few workouts after a life of immobility?  This pain is what ends up discouraging most people from continuing.  But it goes away quickly.

I was in terrible shape.  Got no exercise.  Weighed well over 300 pounds.  Now I am in the best shape of my life.  Workout every day.  Weigh 240 pounds, last time I checked, building muscle and still going.

There is something that I like to say that I will stick to until I'm dead in the face....Don't tell ME that YOU can't do it!

The first step is to wake up your body and your taste buds.  Start investing in your health.  It's worth it.

Chef Nairby

Welcome!

Meeting renowned Indian Chef, Sanjeev Kapoor

Welcome to my Blog page!

My name is Brian, aka Chef Nairby from Toronto, Canada, and I have been a lover of making food since I was a kid and I put grape juice in my Froot Loops because we ran out of milk.  It tasted awful, surprise surprise, but it got the ball rolling as I would fantasize about putting different ingredients together and imagine what would come out. Surely ingredients that taste good on their own should taste good when mixed together, right?  Five words.....Froot Loops and grape juice!

Two years ago, I started taking my health a lot more seriously, and began improving my culinary skills by spending hours in front of my computer, browsing recipe ideas and creating them in my own kitchen.

Chef Nairby's "Feel It!" Pasta

I like to use proper ingredients, as little premade as possible, and I have grown to love even the prep work that goes into cooking something great!

My love of cooking has become such an obsession over the last two years that I own seasons 1-13 of Hell's Kitchen and put them on as I do my workouts in my living room!  Sometimes I wonder if I would secretly thrown reward challenges just so I could stay behind and do prep work!  For real!

Homemade Butter Chicken.  Made the real way.

Over the last two years, I have cooked close to 200 different dishes, some from recipes I followed and some I came up with from my own noggin.  You can check them out and follow me on Instagram @IamNairby, and feel free to offer any tips and suggestions.  If there is a recipe or idea you are curious about, lay it on me and I will give it a go for you.

Thank you for checking out my page.  Stay tuned for more pictures, some recipes, rambling and videos in real world and cartoon form (I animate in my spare time, too.  Boopsy Creations on Facebook and Youtube.).

Chef Nairby