Dandelion and Mandarin Salad

This comes from a recipe book called 100 Top Foods for a Younger You. This is an unusual salad, the greens in it are dandelion rather than lettuce. Dandelion greens are good for your body, or so I've found out. They act as a diuretic and detoxifier, stimulate the gallbladder, improve your digestive system, is good for your liver and blood, could help you lose weight and control acne, is a rich source of beta carotene, and is a high source of Vitamin A. All in all, a good health source that can be found in most supermarkets these days. They don't taste too bitter, and the mandarin in this recipe help to offset that bitterness. Cider vinegar, if you choose that, is also a good choice for your health, an energizer and tonic. This is an interesting, healthful and tasty salad.

Dandelion and Mandarin Salad
3 Tbsp olive oil
3 tsp lemon juice or cider vinegar
3/4 cup sliced scallions
about 2 cups dandelion leaves, cleaned, stems removed and sliced into small pieces
6 hard-boiled eggs, sliced
1-1/2 cups mandarin segments, canned or fresh (or tangerine or clementine)
dandelion flowers (optional)
sprinkle cayenne pepper or paprika, to taste

Clean, then remove stems of dandelion leaves, and slice thinly. Slice scallions thinly. Slice hard-boiled eggs with slicer or a knife. If using canned mandarin, drain segments of syrup; otherwise, remove peel, pith and seeds from individual segments of mandarin.

Whisk together olive oil and lemon juice or cider vinegar to make a dressing. Add scallions and whisk again.

Arrange dandelion leaves on plate. Drizzle with dressing. Sprinkle with cayenne pepper or paprika. Arrange egg slices and mandarin segments on top of dandelion leaves.

Hardbite Rock Salt and Vinegar

When we first were introduced to these Canadian-made potato chips from Hardbite, one of them we tried was their Rock Salt and Vinegar. Salt and Vinegar chips are a flavour I enjoy. Some of their other chips have Himalayan salt, an unusual ingredient, but there is no indication that this flavour uses the Himalayan rock salt. These are artisan-made kettle-cooked; this bag was made by Christine. It's a good tasting salt and vinegar chip, quite salty and vinegary (though it uses vinegar powder, however that works); otherwise, the ingredients look pretty good. These were $2 per bag, but I have seen them costing $3.

Spry Fresh Fruit Xylitol Gum 100 Pack

I found a pack of 100 pieces of Spry xylitol gum at Essence of Life in Kensington Market. They also had Spry's Green Tea and Spearmint flavours. A far better deal than buying individual packs of 10 pieces, at $10 (I've seen the individual packs from $1.29 to about $2). Less convenient for carrying around, but for stashing in your desk drawer, it's great.

Pink and Yellow Oyster Mushrooms

We picked these up from a fellow at the north end of the Sunday Square One Farmer's Market (he might only come on Sundays). He grows them organically in a place five minutes from Shelburne, Ontario, east of Toronto. He also had blue and regular oyster mushrooms, these looked the most interesting. They tasted good later, in a vegetable-mushroom-spaghetti sauce.

Guylian Belgian Chocolate Quatro

I find the name of these mini egg chocolates from the Belgian chocolatier Guylian very odd. Given that quatro is Latin for four, there are only three flavours of mini eggs (White Chocolate Rice Crisp; Milk Chocolate Orange; and Dark Chocolate Truffle). Perhaps it's meant to mean something else, or they just like the name. Or, maybe there is a missing fourth flavour!!

The cacao content of these mini eggs are as follows: white chocolate 27%; milk chocolate 34% and dark chocolate 53%. The ingredient listing is long, mostly sugar and vegetable fat, with cocoa butter, whole milk powder, cocoa mass, rice flour, wheat gluten, malt, natural flavouring, maltodextrin, concentrated lemon and orange juice, soya lecithin as an emulsifier, vanillin, salt and citric acid.

I liked the dark chocolate truffle the best, though I found the chocolate to taste a little plastic-y, like it was American. The milk chocolate orange was okay, though the orange was different than other chocolate-orange combinations I had tasted before, perhaps because of the lemon concentrate. The white chocolate rice crisp was my least favourite, the crisps were too crunchy, rather than crispy. I know Guylian from their good-tastng seashell chocolates you can find in most stores at Christmastime, I don't think that this is a good alternative to those.

Hardbite Potato Chips - Wild Onion and Yogurt

Hardbite is a new line of artisan potato chips from a Canadian company, from British Columbia, Naturally Homegrown Foods Ltd.. They are artisan as they are handmade, kettle cooked in small batches, this bag was created by Christina. The other interesting feature, is that they use Himalayan crystal salt; I have a Himalayan crystal salt lamp, but have never really seen salt products for eating. This one is wild onion and yogurt flavour, there is natural yogurt powder and sour cream powder among the ingredients; the onion comes in the form of onion powder. I also noticed there is a fair bit of cane sugar, but the chips do taste very salty. This is a premium product, we got it for $2 for the 150 g bag, but it could easily sell for $3 or even more in places. They were tasty chips, with good flavour, and I like the kettle cooked chip, but I think I would only buy these again on sale.

Guiltless Gourmet Blue Corn Tortilla Chips

I can't really recommend these, other than that they are interesting, in that they use blue corn (rather than yellow corn, or the sometimes white corn), organic, no less. They are also baked, not fried, so have less fat. They taste okay, and go good with any dip. Try them if you want something different at a party.

Mo Tod Gatheam Prik Thai - Fried Garlic Pepper Pork

This is a simple recipe, with only a few ingredients. This also isn't strictly a Thai recipe, it is more a Chinese-influenced Thai recipe, as they don't normally use cooking wine in recipes, rather they would use oyster sauce and fish sauce. Regardless, this comes out very tasty, albeit I found it a little salty; you could use the more expensive less salt version of soya sauce instead. It is important to slice the pork thinly, it cooks fairly fast then. We used a butterflied pork chop for this, but you could use any cut of good pork for this. To find cilantro roots, you have to buy cilantro at an Asian store, where they don't cut them off already. This might also seem like a lot of garlic, but, one, I like garlic, and two, it doesn't make the pork taste only like garlic.

Mo Tod Gatheam Prik Thai
500 g pork, sliced very thinly
2 whole heads garlic
8 coriander roots
1-1/2 tsp ground white pepper
1/8 cup light soya sauce
1/8 cup Chinese cooking wine
Accompaniments:
cilantro, chopped
cucumber chunks

Remove the skin from the garlic cloves. Clean and scrape the cilantro roots. Slice the pork very thinly and place in a medium bowl.

Add one of the whole garlic heads with the cilantro roots and the pepper to a mortar and pestle. Pound the garlic and cilantro roots until they are a coarse paste.

Add the garlic-cilantro root-pepper paste to the pork. Pour the soya sauce and the cooking wine over the pork. Stir the pork slices to cover well with the marinade. Allow pork to marinate for at least one hour and up to three hours covered in the refrigerator.

Add the other whole garlic head to the mortar and pound the cloves until very coarse.

Fry pork slices in a frying pan heated to medium heat, until well cooked, about 7-8 minutes. Add the smashed garlic in the last minute of frying, stirring to coat with the oil and cook.

Serve with chopped cilantro, chunks of cucumber and brown rice.

Fuze Orange Mango

This product from Fuze is a fruit juice (with orange juice concentrate, mango puree and passion fruit juice) with the addition of Vitamin A, C and E, Potassium, Calcium and Magnesium. Similar to the Blackberry Grape flavour in terms of its vitamin compliment, I actually liked this one much better; it didn't taste chalky and had a pleasant orange flavour. There would be no way that I would drink this on a regular basis, it's expensive vitamin juice, but not bad occasionally.

Nestle Noir Mini Eggs

Sometimes, you get things in a bunch, and this chocolate mini egg from Nestle, like the Lu Noir Extreme Cocoa Beans, has cocoa beans in its filling. This is a dark chocolate mini egg, with 51% cacao content (as such, it just meets the requirements of being "dark"). There are also hazelnuts and almonds in the filling.

The mini egg was still sweet despite being dark chocolate, though much better tasting than a milk chocolate version, and the caramelized cocoa beans and hazelnuts and almonds give it a little crunch as you eat them. I don't think that I would buy these again, though I am glad that Nestle is moving towards dark chocolate.