Summer seems to be the perfect time for grilling - cook the food outdoors, keep the heat out of the kitchen and enjoy the great barbecued taste! This summer, Sobeys is featuring many cool new grilling recipes in their magazine,
Inspired. The recipes showcase many great Compliments-brand products. As well, Sobeys is running a Summer Grilling Blogger Program, and asked me to take part! :) YEAH! We love to grill, and this was the perfect chance to try out some new things!
I was given a choice of 2 out of 4 recipes, so I picked the 2 I thought our family would like the most. Seeing how well everyone, including the kids, ate the meal, I think I picked the right ones! :) We had guests that night too, and normally I'm not brave enough to try a new recipe for guests, but the instructions were so clear we thought we'd give it a go, and everything worked out just like it said in the recipe! In fact, everything got eaten so quickly, it was all gone before I had a chance to take a picture! :-)
Our main dish was
Maple-Planked Salmon With Carrot Slaw. We like fish, and salmon is one of our favourites, but it can turn out a bit dry on the barbecue. I wasn't sure how the salmon would go with barbecue sauce, but this is certainly a hit! We didn't even have any leftovers! The maple barbecue sauce is great on the salmon, and the fish was moist and flavourful. Plus, cooking it on the plank kept the grill a bit cleaner too! We've cooked on a plank before, and it was sort of a smoky affair that ended in very charred planks on fire, which was a bit too much excitement on our patio. So this time, I soaked the planks in the sink all afternoon, weighting them down with a heavy plate to be sure they stayed under water. The recipe calls for Maple Grilling Planks, in keeping with the Canadiana theme, but I couldn't find them in our local Sobeys so we used Cedar Grilling Planks instead. Next time we make this salmon we'd love to use the Maple wood and compare the taste, but I think it would be hard to improve on what we had! Richard was the grilling expert that evening (as he mostly is) and he followed the recipe times exactly, and the fish turned out PERFECT! Just when he was thinking the fish was done, by feel and look, it was the same time as specified in the recipe, so if you're not certain about grilling fish, you can certainly rely on the recipe to give you a great meal.
For the Carrot Slaw, I picked up 2 bags of match-stick carrots to save myself some prep time. We liked the salad, but I think next time I would grate the carrots to make them a bit finer. The taste was good, and you can't get an easier slaw recipe, I don't think! We served our meal buffet-style, so we didn't serve the salmon on the slaw as suggested in the recipe, but you certainly could if you wanted!
For dessert we enjoyed
Glazed Mochachino Ice Cream Cake. YUM! Everyone here loves ice cream and chocolate, so it was no surprise everyone asked for seconds! You could vary the ice cream flavours in the cake easily to your family's preferences, but I thought I'd try it exactly as written and we really liked it. There are some things I would do differently next time, just to make it a bit easier to cut and serve though: instead of cookie crumbs with fudge sauce for the crust, I think I'd just use either graham cracker crumbs or chocolate wafer crumbs and melted butter. It was tricky to cut through the crust as it got so hard when frozen. And, with all that ice cream and chocolate sauce, I don't think we'd notice less sugar in the crust at all! :) One recipe tip is to refreeze the cake in between layers, and I think that would have made the assembly a bit easier, but the kids were busy while I was putting this together, so I thought I'd just keep going! I made my own fudge sauce using Compliments-brand chocolate chips and whipping cream, and you have to work really quickly when spreading the sauce on the ice cream cake as it thickens up very fast.
All in all, it was a very successful meal! Our guests and kids raved about the food, and I will definitely be making these recipes again! Check out
Sobeys website and their
Compliments-brand website for great ideas and recipes! Look for the current
Inspired magazine in your
local Sobeys, or sign up
online to receive it by mail or email! There are some great burger ideas that I'd like to try, as well as a lot of "keep cool" summer recipes and ideas!
As a small but important aside, shopping in Sobeys is always a pleasure, as the staff is so friendly and helpful. I couldn't find all the ingredients I needed this time, and with 2 kids in the card I didn't feel like spending time looking, so I found a store employee, who then led us around the store finding the things for us!
Disclaimer: I was given a Sobeys gift card to cover the cost of the ingredients to make these recipes. The opinions expressed in this post are those of the writer and have not been influenced in any way. Please see our full Terms of use.
We've all seen those gorgeous crochet baby beanies right? The ones with the huge flowers attached to them. I've always admired them, and thought it would be fun to have one for my girls. The only problem is that sometimes, you just don't want that huge flower. How about a smaller flower, or maybe a fish or just a different color of flower? Should I buy a whole bunch of beanies?
This is where the beanies from Petal Babies General Store are unique. The flowers are completely detachable, and interchangeable! I was sent a pink beanie, with a whole handful of different flowers to attach to it. I've had fun changing them and Bria also thinks it's awesome. The beanie is Emery's, but Bria loves to dress her up!
