When it comes to delicious but deceptively easy meals, this has to be one of my favorites.

It’s simple, but it’s so full of flavor that it seems like it seems like a much more complicated dish. I don’t believe I’ve ever had saltimbocca any other way, but I believe it is commonly made using veal and can get much more complicated (with breading, cheese, stuffing, etc.) so I make no claims this is authentic, just that it tastes great.

I made this tonight with a few changes to make it edible by my visiting mother-in-law, which I’ll note as I go in italicized parenthesis, because really, I can’t bear the thought of anyone thinking they need to use Smart Balance instead of butter.

But I digress.

Hey look, I’m doing another Foodie Friday! Yay! It’s been far too long.

This week I thought I would share with you a fairly basic version of a dish that is in honor of my own Canadian heritage, tourtière.

Tourtière, since you ask, is a traditional French-Canadian meat pie, that is most often served on Christmas or New Years Eve but can be eaten any time.

Now, my family isn’t actually Francophone, but somehow tourtière (usually rather poor, store-bought tourtière) worked it’s way into our annual Christmas Eve smörgåsbord, along with a mish-mash selection of other things like pizza, sushi, Chinese finger-foods, and my mom’s homemade eggnog. How we came to have such a strange tradition is a long story for another time.

But suffice to say, as a Canadian living in America, learning to make good tourtière was something of an attempt to retain some of my roots as my wife and I build traditions of our own for our family. After scouring the internet for recipes, I found they were all incredibly different, so I came up with this one that includes the addition of potatoes as in the famous version from the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec.

While this recipe uses beef/pork/veal (available in many supermarkets as “meatloaf mix”) you can actually traditionally make tourtière with whatever meats you have available, be it salmon, rabbit, pigeon or moose.

Also, for the purposes of this recipe I’m not specifying anything about making the actual pastry dough. Feel free to use store-bought dough, but if you have a favorite pie-crust recipe I encourage you to use it.

Enjoy!

Even recognizing that wherever there is an Olive Garden there is probably a better, more authentic Italian restaurant (perhaps several) within a short distance, Olive Garden seems like one of those places everyone loves… even if they’re afraid to admit it.

Yes, the food isn’t The Best, but it’s still usually very good, and the “authenticity” of the food is not something anyone is arguing is their big selling point.

There is something comforting about the consistency.

If you love and always order the Steak Gorgonzola Alfredo, for instance, you can rest easy knowing it will be pretty much the same whether you order it in Pennsylvania or in Oregon, y’know?

Dining at Olive Garden is like getting a degree in popular culture, rather than literature.  But everyone needs a bit of popular culture once in awhile, right?

~ Someone Smart

Beyond that, I think a huge part of the love so many people have for The O.G. (that’s what the kids are calling it these days, I like to tell myself) comes down to three simple words.

Soup.

Salad.

Breadsticks.

I love lettuce wraps.

I also love Thai food, so this recipe from Cooks Illustrated was a no-brainer the minute I saw it and knew I had a pork tenderloin crying out for me to be used.

This is a great way to introduce your kids to healthy Asian food, and some new flavors to their palette. Just tell them they’re having Thai lettuce tacos or something.

Oh, and feel free to omit the pepper flakes if you’re worried about spiciness. I didn’t find this to be overly hot, but your mileage (or that of your kids) may vary. You could also try using chicken or turkey if you’d like, but I’d still recommend using the same process of grinding it yourself, and be careful not to overcook and dry out the meat.

NOTE: If you’re not familiar with fish sauce (or don’t like fish) don’t give in to the temptation to leave it out. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, but if you enjoy good Thai food, fish sauce is part of the unique flavor — and you’ve already had it and just didn’t know it! Also, don’t skip the toasted rice either!  It’s important to the texture and flavor of the dish. Any style of white rice can be used.

It’s probably no secret that I watch a lot of Food Network, so it probably also comes as no surprise that my wife and I were among the people tuning in to (by which I mean “letting the TiVo record”) this most recent season of The Next Food Network Star.

We really liked several of the contestants a lot, but our favorite as time went on became Aarti Sequeira, the former CNN producer whose unique Indian heritage and childhood in Dubai led her to a passion for making Indian food more accessible. In the end, she won (YAY!) and her new show started last week, but she’s not exactly new to hosting a cooking show. Eager to try her hand at it, she and her husband started making their own cooking show and posting it online.

Incidentally, Tucker fell in love with her instantly. She’s second only to Elmo now, and if he recognizes the Food Network is on he’ll shout “AWTEE! AWTEE!”  It’s pretty dang cute.

All of that is to say that in reading through her website, I found this amazing looking recipe for baked samosas.