Twenty-three year old Amanda Garbutt is serious about her love of food. As a child, Amanda was a notoriously picky eater. It was a fateful day when, at age 10, Amanda’s mum handed her an oyster adorned with Tabasco and lemon and it was love at first bite. From there Amanda created one kitchen nightmare after another. Together with the help of her mum, Amanda learned the methodology to a recipe and the romance behind food. At McGill University, Amanda found refuge in her tiny student kitchen. With hungry students always stopping by there was no lack of taste testers and encouragement when April asked her to step behind the camera.

Three years, two business awards and over twenty-five episodes later Amanda is now pursuing her passion to inspire culinary confidence full time. When she is not working on The Hot Plate, Amanda is in the kitchen developing recipes, food styling and photographing for Tier 1 brands like Kraft Canada and Barilla Whole Grain Pasta. There are only three things that can coax Amanda out of the kitchen and they are: a full bodied glass of wine, ping pong or an adrenaline pumping offshore sailing adventure. What do these things all have in common? They all help work up an appetite!

1. Where did you learn how to cook?

At first cooking wasn’t something that came naturally to me. Not because I didn’t love flavour and food, but because a key trait of being a “Garbutt” is blatant disregard for directions. As you can imagine, as a 10-year-old kid in the kitchen with no direction I made a few kitchen nightmares of my own. Luckily, I had my mum, probably one of the most methodical cooks I know. She taught me how to follow the flow of a recipe and prep ingredients before starting to cook to make sure I’m set up for success. So the long, and short is my mum - our relationship (especially during the grouchy teen years) was a great way to develop our relationship, and my passion for cooking!

2. When developing recipes, do you stick with the latest trends or do you find inspiration from foods you’ve tried?

It is definitely a combination of latest trends and previous experience. I think that trends help guide my creativity. When it comes to food I’ve already tried, I would say that it is more about the experience and less about the actual food. The smells, the company, the energy around you are all key players in how I interpret them into recipes.

3. What is the biggest challenge when it comes to creating a new recipe?

Without a doubt the biggest challenge is reigning in my “enthusiasm.” When I cook for my friends and family it is all about that moment and using ingredients I have on hand. However, when I create a recipe it is all about helping home cooks and creating a recipe for that their friends and family will love. The goal is to set the framework for a great experience and help cooks build confidence in the kitchen. So creating a recipe for others is all about precision. Funny, it’s more like a science experiment because for a recipe to be “good” it has to be able to be recreated again and again by other cooks.

4. What do you enjoy the most about creating recipes?

Creating recipes has been a passion of mine since I was fourteen-years-old. I love being able to share my recipes and hear about my friends and fellow Food Lovers making them at home. Creating recipes and cooking videos is the reason I started The Hot Plate (www.thehotplate.com) back in 2009! I love inspiring culinary confidence and launching an online Community where Food Lovers can learn and share new recipes. The reward of hearing someone making one of your recipes is worth the hours, days, and sometimes weeks it takes to develop a single recipe.

5. What are some of the best chicken recipes you ever have created?

My top three are:

My signature Goat’s cheese stuffed chicken breasts, which I think is the best starter recipe for new cooks looking to develop confidence in the kitchen.

Fried chicken with my signature rosemary wildflower honey (I don’t think that recipe needs much explanation since well, its fried chicken!)

An Ultra simple roast chicken with little lemon and a little butter is a dish that every cook should know how to make. It is a great Sunday meal and leaves you with delicious leftovers for sandwiches during the week!

6. Which do you prefer, white meat or dark meat and why?

Contrary to many cooks I’m a white meat lady. I love the flavors and richness of dark meat, but when I’m carving a bird it is always white meat. Now, I’m not taking about tough dry chicken breasts. A perfectly cooked chicken breast should be juicy, plump and ultra tender. If you aren’t comfortable cooking by touch then go out and buy a meat thermometer. A thermometer takes the guesswork out of cooking meat and means you don’t have to cut into it to check for doneness.

Well, where do you start when you have been asked to write about something you have been enjoying for most of your life?  Naturally, you start at the beginning.   My family immigrated to Canada in 1970 when I was four years old.  Food memories didn’t really start for me until the mid-70’s, and when they did I distinctly remember smelling and then tasting Jerk Chicken.  As a Jamaican native, chicken is something you’ll eat almost every week of your life.

Chicken is a staple in most homes across Canada.  I’ve witnessed the ingenious ways people cook with chicken.  From Fricassee to Jerk to Cordon Bleu, chicken is incredibly versatile.  Mature chickens generally can grow from 2-5 kgs easily feeding a family of four.  I like the fact that there are two distinct types of meat in one bird; the breast is the white meat and the dark meat comes from the legs and thighs.  For best results roast chicken with its skin on and use simple seasonings such as salt and pepper.  It is so delicious, full of flavour and an ideal way to eat healthy.  If you want to be more adventurous, butterfly the breast and stuff it with sundried tomatoes and a bloomy rind cheese such as Brie. The traditional time honoured classic is Chicken Cordon Bleu filled with ham and Emmental cheese.  Dark meat tends to be easier to cook with despite being an underrated cut and often not the first option.  I’m a big fan of using dark meat for JerkChicken.  It tastes great especially when you try it with my special jerk marinade.

When I began working professionally in a kitchen I was expected to hone my culinary skills with poultry preparation.  This may seem like a fairly benign action to take but not in the traditional culinary world.  I started cooking in the 1990s and to become a serious professional chef it was expected to learn the classics like Coq Au Vin (which of course I did).  That being said I also made time to fiddle with recipes from my childhood and yes that did include attempts at KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken).  My grandmother was a force to be reckoned with setting some pretty high standards and fortunately her influence helped me along.  Every chance I had I would experiment and would test on my fellow chef friends.  Believe me when I say this, I made some great friends with that fried chicken. 

It was in 1988 when I fell for another part of the chicken - the wings.  There aren’t many people who wouldn’t devour 20-30 of those bad boys (I know many people who also wouldn't necessarily admit to that).  I would often find myself frequenting this relatively well-known hot spot for wings in mid-town Toronto.  I even took my wife there on one of our first dates (don’t tell her this but it was a bit of a test; if she didn’t like wings we weren’t going to get married).  Well, maybe that was a bit of a stretch, but needless to say she enjoyed them as much as I did and I’m happy to say we’re going into our 14^th year of marriage.  This just goes to show you that from gastronomic Haute Cuisine to casual pub dining to a Sunday family dinner, chicken is a staple and is something that will be on menus as long as Canadian farmers and farms continue to raise them.

Outside of wings and fried chicken, my wife and girls absolutely love whole roasted chicken, especially on chilly Fall or winter Sundays.  My favourite stuffing includes a mirepoix (mixture of onions, carrots and celery), half a head of garlic and lemon rub; the skin rubbed with a little olive oil, and sprinkled with kosher salt, black pepper, rosemary and thyme;  and roasted in a 350°F ( 177°C) oven.  My girls adore roasted potatoes and asparagus to accompany Dad’s chicken.  It’s quick and easy and we get to do that thing we love most: bonding as a family over Sunday dinner.   And that, like chicken, is a wonderful thing.

Grilling in the Fall and Winter?  You bet!

Guess who’s coming to chicken for a while? Rob Rainford, Food Network celebrity, chef and cooking instructor with a world-renowned reputation, has joined with Chicken Farmers of Canada (CFC) to share his cooking secrets, thoughts, insights and some new flavours for the meat that he loves working with the most.

Over the next few months on www.chicken.ca, Chef Rainford will create 10 tasty new chicken recipes, write sensational chicken blogs, and participate in a series of interviews that will give chicken lovers across the country a glimpse into the man behind the “Q”.

Throughout the rest of this year, Chef Rainford will be featuring recipes like Peri-Peri Chicken and BBQ Chicken Calzones; he’ll also be adding extra-special seasonal recipes, too, like Christmas Truffle Chicken, New Year’s Foie Gras Chicken and Scary Chicken Cordon Bleu Fingers for Halloween.

With his natural charisma, Chef Rainford’s over 20 years of experience with grilling, teaching and working as a television personality have shown Canadians and people around the world to create dishes with flair and to add their own, unique twists to traditional dishes.

We can’t wait to show you what it’s all about!

Stay tuned!

About Rob Rainford:

Who knows where talent comes from? Is it nature or nurture, innate or learned? For Rob Rainford it just feels as though he was Born 2 Grill™. He has always loved cooking and the mysteries that unravel when working with various foods and cultural themes; his one consistent theme has always been his love of the grill and his passion for BBQ.

Rob Rainford is a Canadian chef with a world renowned reputation. Born in Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica November 30, 1966, he moved to Canada with his family when he was three. Rainford enrolled in culinary school at George Brown College in 1994 and after completing his formal training, began his professional career.

After hosting Licence to Grill seen on Food Network Canada, Discovery Home in the U.S., Asian Food Channel across Asia and now in syndication, Rainford has spent the last two years quietly perfecting his signature style The Rainford Method and is now preparing to unveil his new brand to the world.

With a new television show in the works and cookbook Born 2 Grill™ being released across North America in spring 2012 the future looks bright for this talented Chef. “I have a lot of exciting projects lined up for 2012 which I am working on right now…it’s all moving along very well,” says Rainford.

Don’t be mistaken by Rainford’s success. Even though he’s seen on television around the world on Licence to Grill and has cooked in some of the finest establishments, he feels that as a chef he’s “always on a perpetual learning curve”, and is humbled by the talent around him. Now an instructor at his Alma Mater George Brown College, he is sharing his knowledge as a world class Chef with the chefs of tomorrow, Rainford is beginning to hit his stride and is very thankful for the opportunity to continually explore the mystery that is food.

Today we are featuring one of CFC’s staff members, Eric Braff.  Eric is not only our expert Market Analyst here at CFC but an avid hockey player who puts much effort into keeping fit for the love of the sport. 

1.     At what age did you start playing hockey?

I started playing hockey at age 5. Growing up in Cole Harbour, NS we would play street hockey every day after school no matter what. It was almost like I was forced to play because everyone else played.

2.     How did you get into hockey?

My career took me from minor hockey in Cumberland, to Kingston in the OHL, to St. Francis Xavier University in the CIS, to Pensacola, Florida in the ECHL, then to four years in Europe (between London, Eng and Italy). I also tried out in the NHL for the LA Kings!  Currently I just play (twice a week) in the recreational leagues around Ottawa.   

3.     Which foods do you fuel up on before a game?

As a professional on every game day, I would start with a bowl of cereal around 9am, 3 scrambled eggs and toast around 11am, my main meal around 1:30pm would be some sort of pasta and chicken. (I would usually cut up a boneless skinless breast and mix it in with my pasta). Then I would take a nap from 230-4pm. At 4pm I would have a yogurt and an apple then head to the arena at 5pm. Game time is 7pm and I would eat a banana before warm up and then another banana after the second the period. That was my routine that never changed for the last 5 years of my career!!   

4.     Do you enjoy a cold pint and a few chicken wings with your teammates after a game?

After the game would vary, in Italy it would be pizza and a beer. But nowadays in the recreational league, I enjoy chicken wings and beer, before and after a game!

Judy Scott Welden is a consumer advocate, nutritionist, and media spokesperson. She is passionate about bringing nutritious foods to Canadian families. 

Judy will be writing regular blogs for Chickenfeeds, with a focus on nutrition, healthy eating and more.

We’re glad to welcome Judy to our blogging crew and we took the opportunity to ask her a few questions – by way of introduction to you!

1. What is the most rewarding part of your job?

I have spent 20 years in the nutrition business doing demonstrations and television shows, spreading the word about healthy food choices, talking to consumers about their challenges and sharing their wonderful discoveries in the kitchen for feeding their own families. My career has been fantastic, as I’ve travelled around, meeting all kinds of interesting families.

2. What advice would you give to someone thinking of becoming a Nutritionist?

Times have changed – 20 years ago people didn’t talk about antioxidants and no one had heard of the Internet – but it’s always been about finding tasty recipes to share. Today, I try not to look shocked when someone says they don’t know how to peel a potato. Kids don’t take home economics classes anymore and many don’t belong to their local 4H communities,  so they’re missing those skills.

Society forgot that cooking is a life skill but I think we’re coming back to that. Like balancing a chequebook or budgeting money, knowledge about nutrition and food preparation is a skill everybody should have. Remember we don’t eat nutrients, we eat food and eating food together is pleasurable.

3. If you could only make chicken in two ways for the rest of your life, how would you do it?

If I could only eat two recipes for the rest of my life , one would have to be my husband’s baked chicken with his special crumb coating and seasonings baked in the toaster oven and served with bruschetta or salsa. I could eat it twice a week and I probably do – I love it when my husband cooks. For my other choice it would be BBQ chicken; baked or barbecued, I’m happy.

Craig Williams is a novice gardener who lives in Ottawa, Ontario. Craig enjoys the great outdoors, cooking, and brewing his own beer.  His various domestic adventures are shared at dubyasgarden.blogspot.com

1.       When did you start gardening and why?

I started in May 2008.  We had a patch of lawn that got lots of sun but wasn't really used for anything, and I was getting tired of mowing it.  So I ordered a load of topsoil, built some boxes for raised beds, and just followed the directions on the back of the seed packages. The experiment went pretty well so I decided to keep going.

I started the garden blog just over a year ago, just to keep track of things for myself really - transplanting dates, what was going well and what wasn't, and a few pictures to go along with it.  Since I was already jotting all this stuff down, it was easy to put it on the web and share with my family and friends, just for a laugh really.

2.       What types of herbs and vegetables do you grow and how do you use them in your everyday cooking?

Nothing too fancy - peas, yellow beans, tomatoes, some pretty standard herbs like basil, thyme and oregano. We were overrun by zucchini last year and had to come up with some creative ways to use it up - my favourite was a rich chocolate cake.  I also planted asparagus from seed; I'm curious to see how it comes along this year and trying to be patient - it takes 3 years before it's ready for first harvest.  Each year I try a few new things - this year it's beets, shallots and rainbow chard.  I mostly enjoy the simple things like fresh lettuce for sandwiches and salads, making fresh pesto with the basil, and of course we have to have the occasional mojito just to keep the mint under control.

3.       Do you have any tips for our readers on how to dry herbs?

From what I've read, it depends on the herb - some you're better off drying, which we did by stringing them up in the basement for a few weeks, while others are best preserved by freezing them just after harvesting and washing.  So with the oregano we dried, crumbled and jarred it, while with the basil we made a simple pesto and tossed it in the freezer.  Both worked out pretty well.

4.       Being from Ottawa, you must go stir crazy not being able to garden in the winter.  Do you do any indoor gardening?

Not yet, although I'm debating getting into sprouts.  They look fairly easy to work with, and they're a good sandwich filler.  This winter I kept myself occupied with other things like obedience classes with our new dog, Angus.  Once the snow starts melting the garden fever really hits me though, and I do go a little crazy waiting for the soil to warm up.

5.       Okay, totally unrelated to gardening, but I just have to know; what is your favourite chicken dish?

That's a tough one!  If it's a meal on the go, it has to be chicken shawarma, especially here in Ottawa - I think I could eat that 7 days a week.  A close second would be chicken korma with naan bread and a cold pint.  Both are hard to beat!

Today we are featuring one of CFC’s staff members, Maria Baisas who was born in the Philippines and migrated to Canada 13 years ago.  Maria, who is a busy Mom of three kids, says her family migrated to Canada because they soooo love our long winters (I’m detecting some sarcasm here....)

1.        Who does most of the cooking in your household and why?

My husband, he is the king of our Kitchen… he loves to cook, it’s his passion…. And I am really lucky!

2.       When preparing dishes from the Philippines, do you find it hard to adapt traditional recipes to local available products, or can you stay fairly authentic with what is available to you?

Not really, we can get most of our ingredients in a local grocery store nowadays; if it’s not available we usually go to China town.

3.       What is your favourite chicken dish?

Our native dish – “Tinola” (soup with ginger, unripe papaya and bokchoy) and “Afritada” (Philippine style Chicken stew), it’s really appetizing.

4.        If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life what would it be?

Grilled fish, fresh from the ocean and seasoned with lemon, rosemary and fish sauce; Yum!

Each month, we get to know another Canadian food blogger and post our interview with them here.  But this month we’ll be featuring more than one food blogger.  In fact, here’s our second interview this month with Vancouver based Emily Wight of well fed, flat broke.

1. What made you decide to start blogging about food?

Well, I was two months out of school with a Creative Writing degree and a job that had few opportunities for creativity, and I had just roasted a really fabulous chicken and had had too much to drink. I have my best ideas over roasted meats and too much bourbon. I love cooking, and I no longer had the workshop setting for writing, so I decided to start a food blog. I've pretty much only written about food since then.

2. Who taught you how to cook?

Various relatives, television, and books. I love cookbooks. When I was in high school I worked at a little produce market and would bring home weird ingredients and look them up in cookbooks and try to make something of them. I was not good at following recipes, and as a result my parents endured many a disgusting meal until I figured out the basics. There was nothing I thought wouldn't benefit from the addition of curry powder. Like, nothing. It got a little weird there for awhile, but my parents' desire to not have to cook was strong so I was able to persevere. Every day after school I would watch the Urban Peasant, I think that was the start of it. 

3. How does cooking influence your everyday life?

Apparently I am really annoying because everything relates to food. I'm like those obnoxious people who make everything about them, but instead of everything being about me it's food. My husband was recently diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes (at age, like, 30), and so my current really awesome obsession is how much fibre is in everything. We'll be eating dinner and I'll prattle on extensively about the carbohydrate content of what we're eating and how much of that is fibre. I wouldn't want to live with me. Fortunately, most of that stays out of the blog; the blog is a cleaned up version of our lives, where I hardly ever talk about how much or how little any given meal will make Spouse poop.

4. What’s the one ingredient you simply couldn’t live without?

Grainy Dijon. And fresh rosemary. And white wine. And butter. BUTTER. Do I have to pick just one thing? I suppose butter would be number one, but I need wine to cook. So maybe that's less an ingredient and more a culinary lubricant. Hee hee hee.

5. Do you have a favourite chicken recipe?

Yes. I do. Well, a couple. I can never pick just one thing. A good roast chicken will make me happier than almost any other meal - I adapted Ina Garten's roast chicken recipe and it pretty much changes peoples' lives, or, at the very least, their previously ambivalent feelings about roast chicken. When I found Spouse he wanted nothing to do with roast chicken; he said roast chicken was boring. Ina's recipe changed everything. The other is a recipe for something like butter chicken (I blogged it, here: http://emvandee.wordpress.com/2009/10/29/tomato-curry/) which I make with chicken thighs from the freezer and pantry staples when it's cold out and going to the market is so daunting I could cry, which happens a lot between November and March and which would be less embarrassing if I didn't live in Vancouver, which barely gets winter, and if the market wasn't literally two blocks away. Anyway. It tastes like butter chicken, but it's even easier than take-out. You can't really lose. 

Each month, we get to know another Canadian food blogger and post our interview with them here.  This month, we feature Montreal based, Julia Batal of www.alajulia.com.  Julia is a graphic/web designer who designed her own beautiful web site where you’ll find some great recipe!

In this photo, Julia is enjoying a “Lebanese Tabbouleh” (the recipe can be found on her blog).

1. Who taught you how to cook?

I’ve always had a passion for food and since I was a kid, I used to help mom in the kitchen. I also enjoy watching various cooking shows and acquire from them some special techniques. After I got married, the trial and error experimentation started My husband’s reactions to every successful recipe gave me full motivation to learn more.

2. How does cooking influence your everyday life?

Cooking is an art: It helps me express my feelings into food. At the end of the day, what's better than enjoying a hot meal with a glass of wine! Sharing my hobby of cooking with my husband's hobby of photography produces my blog's every weekend post.

3. What is your favourite thing to make for friends and family?

I've been influenced by Japanese cuisine, that's why my favourite recipe to prepare for my friends and family is definitely sushi: It's colourful, fun to prepare and very flexible!

4. What’s the one ingredient you simply couldn’t live without?

"Butter" simply. A basic ingredient of most desserts, butter also gives a special taste treatment to almost any other recipe! Knowing that, I always make sure to use it wisely. Butter is absolutely the ingredient I cannot live without.

Jae is our Senior Financial Officer and was born in Toronto but luckily her Korean parents moved to Montreal before she could become a Leafs fan. Her passion for food has brought her to work in the food industry first, for a chocolate company and now, Chicken Farmers of Canada. She secretly wishes to become a chef someday and expose the world to Korean food. Her greatest sadness is that her husband’s averse in spiciness prevents her from overindulging all her meals in red pepper.

1. Who taught you how to cook?

My mom is the best cook I know however, when she teaches, she is not able to give exact proportions so I end up doing a lot of trial and error using my husband as a guinea pig.

2. When preparing Korean dishes, do you find it hard to adapt traditional recipes to local available products, or can you stay fairly authentic with what is available to you?

There are about 8 base ingredients with which you can make most traditional Korean recipes and Asian grocery stores carry most of these ingredients. Otherwise, my parents supply me with Toronto kimchi and other produce.

3. What is your favourite chicken dish?

I think we have St-Hubert on speed dial for delicious roasted chicken!

4. If you were to open a Korean restaurant one day, what would you call it and why?

Good question! Probably something boring like Jae’s.

5. If you could only eat one food for the rest of your life what would it be?

Red bean ice cream. Don’t judge.