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I make chicken and rice a lot and this is an easy and delicious way to use leftovers. You can of course prepare rice and chicken fresh just for this dish, but I don’t think that I have ever done that.

This is a basic stir fry and pretty much every ingredient is modifiable. You can use many different vegetables and even other kinds of meat and you will still have an awesome meal. I do not think that I have ever made this dish the same way twice. The point of stir fry is ease and to use up the last bits of this and that. That said, I went ahead and measured out each ingredient that I used today, and I feel that the result was a very well balanced dish in flavour and texture, but please do not get caught up in trying to mimic this recipe exactly! Just think of this recipe as a guideline on how to make one version of fried rice.

If you follow this recipe to the letter you will yield about four servings of chicken fried rice.

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Chicken Florentine simply means chicken with spinach (not a direct translation). Therefor just about any dish that  includes chicken and spinach can be called chicken Florentine. I learned this fact after ordering chicken Florentine a few times at different places and sometimes getting something other than what I expected. There was always spinach though! For most of my life when something was “Florentine” (Chicken Florentine, eggs Florentine, fish Florentine, etc) it meant that it was prepared with spinach and Hollandaise sauce. I now know that Hollandaise sauce is not part of the critical equation, but in my own personal food encyclopedia, Florentine = Spinach + Hollandaise Sauce. That is just the way it is going to be around here. Anyway, this is one of the classic ways to prepare it and I like it because it is simple and elegant as well as totally scrumptious.

When I make chicken Florentine I typically serve it over a bed of brown rice, but it is often served with pasta or a salad. Garlic bread is a very nice accompaniment as well. The rice is not part of this recipe, just the main course, so serve it however you like.

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Lasagna is one of those dishes with almost limitless possible variations. You can have eggplant lasagna, cheese lasagna, white lasagna, the list goes on and on. This recipe is, what I personally consider, basic, default, lasagna. Any other lasagna recipe that I may post in the future will require some other word to describe it, as illustrated previously, but when I think of simply “lasagna”, this is it. While just about any style of lasagna can be absolutely delicious, this recipe is my favourite version. This lasagna tastes like home.

This, like so many of my other recipes, is a variation of my mother’s recipe. The main differences with my version, all of which are optional, are that I make my own lasagna pasta, I use Bison meat instead of ground beef, and I often mix some soft unripened goat cheese in with the ricotta cheese, though I did not do so for this tutorial, since it is not that important and I think that most people will not choose to add it. You can buy your lasagna noodles and use ground beef or turkey or whatever your heart desires, and you will still have a great lasagna! I urge you, however, if you have the time and can access all of the ingredients necessary, try making it my way. While substitutions in this kind of recipe are totally acceptable and don’t necessarily ruin the dish, there is a reason why I made the choices that I have made. Short of discovering new ingredients, this recipe, in my opinion is as good as it gets, and when I am forced to compromise it due to time restrictions or lack of a certain ingredient, I find that it is just slightly less than perfect.

This recipe will yield about 8 servings of lasagna.