Aloo Gobi is a Punjabi classic made with potatoes (aloo) and cauliflower (gobi). These humble vegetables may not sound like much, but they happen to be the perfect cavas to paint on the vibrant flavours of ginger, garlic, onions and cumin. The turmeric does it’s part by imparting a golden saffron hue that makes this dish a real head turner.

After going through a phase of steaks, roasts and confits, I was feeling my inner herbivore crying out for some love. These primal urges come and go, especially in winter when there just aren’t many appealing veggies in the markets. It’s probably my body’s way of telling me that I need less protein and more fiber. That said, I’m a carnivore at heart and the thought of having something as prosaic as a salad for dinner puts a real kibosh my appetite. My solution is to turn to the food of my South Asian brothers (and sisters).

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This doesn’t happen often, but I’ve been at a total loss as to what to name this dish. It’s not quite a salad, not quite a ceviche, and not quite a terrine. Sure, I could have just stretched the definition a bit to fit the dish, but it always irks me when people go naming things loosey goosey after dishes that have a long illustrious tradition. It’s a kind of cultural defilement that’s akin to calling street graffiti art.

Salad’s are typically an assortment of chopped vegetables covered in dressing, neither of which holds true for this dish. A ceviche is a citrus cured seafood dish originating in Peru. While this dish is definitely citrusy and tangy, the uni never sits in the citrus juice, and the last time I checked, Asian Pear and Grapefruit weren’t exactly native Andean crops. These ingredients are all quite Asian (grapefruit is a descendant of the South East Asian fruit Pomelo), but the preparation is definitively un-Asian. A real enigma indeed!

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This past week I joined Cathy Erway in her Week of Eating In. When I first accepted the challenge, I figured it would be a piece of cake, since eating in is what I do best. What I hadn’t counted on was a work week from hell, and two full-day photo shoots, not to mention my usual bevy of extra-curricular gigs.

There were a few nights, where I nearly threw in the towel in favor of take-out, but I persevered and as a result I ate very well all week and saved myself a boatload of money. When life get’s crazy (when isn’t it?) it’s easy to compromise on quality, budget, and nutrition, but being a part of this challenge made me realize that it doesn’t have to be that way.

But enough chit-chat, here’s the daily play-by-play.

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As some of you may know, I’m participating in the week of eating in challenge this week, which means I’m supposed to eat in for 7 straight days. Simple right? Well, if you have a job with unpredictably long hours and an evening schedule filled with freelance writing and photography gigs, it’s actually more challenging than it sounds.

I had one of those days at work today that was gobbled up by time hungry meetings. The last one was a four hour humdinger, which left me feeling drained, and delayed my arrival home by nearly two hours. This wouldn’t normally be much of an issue, except I’d planned on making a roast tonight. I’m sure you’re falling out of your seat laughing at me for planning such an ambitious meal on a weeknight, but I had a defrosted lamb roast in the fridge which bah’ed “coohook meehee” every time I opened the door.

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While Bi Bim Bap and Kalbi are the staples of Korean food here in the US, they’re just a sliver of all the tasty foods that are available in the second largest metropolitan area in the world. This week on TabletTalk, I write about some of my favourite eats in Seoul, but be forewarned, the very fresh seafood towards the end is not for the feint of heart.

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On Valentine’s Day, I woke up in a panic, realizing that I hadn’t planned anything for breakfast! Thankfully, I was the first one up, and quietly tip-toed out of bed, and around the squeaky floorboard to the kitchen. Still a bit groggy from a late night, I opened the fridge and welcomed the blast of sleep chasing cold air as it entered my lungs. I poked my head into the overcrowded ice-box and took not of the buttermilk, eggs, and cheese. “All the makings for muffins” I thought, but but then quickly dismissed this because it just didn’t seem very special. Shifting leftovers and jars around like a epicurean Rubik’s cube, I unearthed a tiny bottle filled with a few ounces of black gold, (no, not crude oil, the other black gold) and I knew I’d found my special ingredient.

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Humans have been migrating all over the world for tens of thousands of years, first on foot, then by caravan, and eventually across vast oceans on ships. This was at a time when much of the world was unknown and most couldn’t comprehend what lie more than a day’s travel from their homes. Migrations were reserved for the most dire of situations and could take years, or even generations to make. The slow pace of travel resulted in many insular groups of humans developing their own culture and traditions with little to no influence from the outside world.

With each progressive step forward in transportation technology such as the steamship, the automobile and the jet plane, humans have able to move around en mass, cheaper and faster than ever before. Ironically, in a time when we can reach the opposite end of the world in less than a day, there’s been an accelerating trend towards homogenization. Tea drinking cultures are increasingly becoming coffee drinkers, cuisines with a historical reliance on the sustainable bounty of the ocean are turning to hamburgers, and ancient family recipes are being lost with the passing of a generation.

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One of my goals with NoRecipes is to show you how to make restaurant quality meals that a person who works full time can make. This means taking shortcuts where it won’t be noticed while taking the “scenic route” where it counts. When it comes to stocks, I reserve homemade stock for dishes like clear soups, where the stock is the centerpiece. For other dishes, like this Beef Bourguignon, most people wouldn’t notice the difference between a homemade stock and pre-made alternative.

When Goodbite.com and Campbellskitchen.com asked me to come up with a “Sunday Supper” idea using one of their soups, Beef Bourguignon seemed like the perfect dish. Traditionally considered complicated and time consuming, I use a few shortcuts that cut your prep time down to about 30 minutes, and the rest of the work is done by your oven.

There are four other very talented bloggers who have come up with their own recipes with Campbell’s Condensed Good for Cooking Soups, and we’re vying for a $1,000 donation to our chosen food charity. If I win, I’m going to give my donation to The World Food Progam’s Haiti relief efforts. They were one of the first aid organizations with staff on the ground in Haiti and they’ve helped well over 1 million people there so far and they’ve committed to provide ongoing aid to help the country rebuild in the coming months.

Check out the video and please cast your vote here

One of the great things about cooking without recipes is it leaves you free to add different ingredients and experiment, this keeps an old favourite new and interesting even after you’ve had it for the umpteenth time. Some might call this inconsistency, but for me there’s no such thing as a “best recipe”, because my tastes shift with the seasons and my mood.

Curry rice is Japan’s quintessential comfort food, much like mac & cheese is here in the States. While it’s not native to Japanese cuisine, it’s been ruminating in the bowels of Japan’s gastronomic landscape for the better part of the past century and it’s become one of the most popular foods there. It’s become so ubiquitous, people don’t find anything usual about a softdrink company releasing a curry flavoured soda.

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In our household, when I’m feeling lazy, or the refrigerator is running low on fresh ingredients, we invariably turn to pasta to ease our minds and fill our bellies. There’s nothing fancy about pasta, but it provides a blank canvas onto which you can unleash your creativity and pantry staples. As a matter of fact, one of the first things I learned to make without a recipe was pasta.

These slinky strands of carbs need little to dress them up beyond a generous dose of oil, some aromatics and a source of umami. My oil of choice is usually olive oil, but this could be anything from butter to duck fat. On the aromatic front, you have your choice of hundreds of vegetables and spices such as garlic, shallots, lemon zest or thyme. Basically, if it smells good, there’s a good chance it will taste good in your pasta.

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What began a project to make this website load faster ended up turning into a weekend project to totally redo the framework this website is built on. I ended up scrapping my custom theme and buying a copy of Thesis, which I’d recommend to anyone looking for a highly customizable Wordpress Theme. I’ve also added some new features like thumbnails for all the archive pages, a recipes index with a list of all the recipes on this site organized by cuisine, and our comments are now powered by Disqus. What this means for you is that you can now use your Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, or Disqus account to leave comments, and you won’t have to type in your info every time.

I’ve also decided that rather than post a bunch of short mentions of all my scribbles around the interwebs, I’m just going to wrap up my week of writing in a single. This week, my first post for Tablet Hotels went up. Those of you that have been long time readers know I have an affinity (well more like an obsession) with the history of food. Not history as in boring textbook dates and figures, but the epic journey that the foods we eat have taken, before winding up on our tables. They’re stories about war, conquest and mass migration and if you go back far enough, it challenges your notions about what “authentic” really means. In my first post, I’ve written about the journey of a couple of foods, but stay tuned for more posts on the intersection between travel and food.

Over at ReadyMade this week, I discover the wonders of packaged food knock-offs, and during a moment of deep introspection, I discover the zen of peeling mangos.

Check out the articles, poke around the new site, and have a great week!. I’d also love to hear your feedback on the site changes, so please leave a comment and let me know what you think:-)

Like a collection of gaudy heirlooms and brik-a-brak from a by-gone era, I have a hidden stash of yellowed and food speckled scraps of paper with recipes scrawled on them. Many of the recipes are tied to specific memories from my formative years, and though the aromas and flavors have long faded from my leaky memory, I still can’t quite bring myself to toss them out.

This Kedgeree recipe is an exception in that I’m frantically rummaging through the bookshelf at least once a year to find it. I’ve memorized the recipe and all my alterations to it, but there’s something unique about this photo-copied Australian magazine clipping that gives it a special place in my heart.

Its warm yellow and brown patina, imbued by over a decade of ketchup, curry, and oil, is a reminder of the first time I laid a fork into this beautiful pile of smoked fish and pillowy spiced rice. My heart beats a little faster when I hear the name “Kedgeree”, and the recipe contained on this tattered piece of paper left an indelible mark on my taste memory. I guess you could say it was one of my first true loves.

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I’m often asked why this blog is called No Recipes, when I post recipes to almost everything I make. In case you were wondering the same thing, the title refers to my predilection to just wing it, using ingredients that I have in the fridge. Still, it’s always been my intention to help you break free of the oppressive rules of most cookbooks, enabling you to navigate the kitchen with your senses instead.

Cooking is about trusting your eyes, ears, tastebuds and nose. I try to go into the specifics about techniques and the thought process I put into creating a dish, to help bring some of the process to light. But fitting all this sensory information into a few photos and words is like folding egg whites into a delicate batter with a backhoe.

That’s why I’ve decided to kick my nerdy introversion to the curb and stick a bunch of lights and camera in front of my face, so you, my dear readers, can get a more complete picture… While I’m being ambitious, I’m also going to figure out how to transfer tastes and aromas over the Internet so you can enjoy the whole experience. Well… okay you may be waiting around for a while for that one, but I have you covered on the sight and sound for now.

For the first episode, I had a gorgeous piece of pork belly a nice man from Fleisher’s Grass-Fed & Organic Meats gave me for free. There was no name dropping, no puffery about unique visitors or link-backs. I was just some random guy off the street that was asking if they had any bigger pieces of pork belly left and he said “No… but you can have this one, on us”. That made me be happy… but not as happy as I was after my first bite of this perfectly marbled slab of meat after it had been braising for a few hours.

I could tell you more here, but that would spoil the video, so hit the jump and check it out for yourself.

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After nearly 3 years of monogamy to No Recipes, I’ve started posting around… on two other blogs. One of them, is ReadyMade, one of my favourite blogs. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re a bi-monthly magazine, brimming with useful craft, culinary and decor projects that anyone can do. The other, is with a travel website I can’t yet name, but you’ll be the first to know when my posts start going up.

Oh don’t act so shocked! Here are some answers to questions I expect you’ll have:

Does this mean you’re of loose moral character?
Maybe… If you consider getting paid to blog a sin.

Will you be posting less here?
No, in fact, I’ll be posting more frequently since I’ll be linking to my philandering scribbles elsewhere.

What’s next, a fling with YouTube?
Uhhh… fling… what fling?

Hop on over to ReadyMade to check out my first post on How to Peel a Kiwi, just the first of many I’ll be doing with tips to make your life in the kitchen just a little bit easier.

Photo: Marco Dormino/ The United Nations

By now, you’ve all seen the scenes of chaos following the earthquake in Haiti earlier this week. Some of you may have even given a donation already to one of the many great organizations providing aid.

I will be donating 100% of ad revenue this month to the World Food Program’s Haiti relief efforts. Since the ad revenue is based on the number of pages viewed, you can help. If you’ve ever been curious about my past posts, now is the time to go back through the archives and check them out.

If you’re a blogger and want to donate your ad revenue too, check out the Help Haiti campaign over at Blog Away Hunger

If you want to make a more direct contribution, donate here and make sure you select “Haiti Disaster” under Donor Designations.