I’m not a vegetarian! I’m a dessertarian!

Calvin and Hobbes

Over the last few months I’ve gotten away from indoor photography since the weather has been so ideal for outdoor shooting.

And as we’ve travelled to a few new places like West Virginia and the Northwest Territories, I’ve found myself focusing more on landscapes and nature and even a bit of wildlife.

But now as November rolls in and the view outside becomes a bit more desolate in this part of the world, my mind turns more toward food, and so does my lens.

My favourite things to prepare are vegetables and desserts. I mostly leave fish and meat to others…

Sometimes I even try try to find desserts with healthy ingredients (said with tongue firmly planted in cheek). This tart has heart-healthy walnuts and high-fibre raspberries, along with the other bad stuff like sugar.

And if not low calorie, this tart is delicious, festive looking, and very easy to make. All in all a great combo for this time of year. The crust is a shortbread-cookie type crust so it’s quite foolproof and simple to throw together.

If you’d like to try it, you can find the recipe here.

To balance things out, here is a bonus recipe — for healthy salmon. It’s called horseradish grill-roasted salmon, and can be done on the BBQ, although we used the oven.

We were introduced to this recipe by my sister and brother-in-law and they learned of it from their chef friends Anna and Michael Olson, who have some gorgeous cookbooks out. It tickled our taste buds and left us feeling satisfied but not overly stuffed. (And quite happy to be getting our Omega 3s!) This is a great dish for company and the guests we served it to the other night were hugely enthusiastic.

The topping — we used panko — has flavour and crunch and keeps the salmon underneath very moist. It can be prepared very quickly and takes only about 10 to 15 minutes in the oven. If you don’t like horseradish you can scale it back or omit it completely.

Here’s the fish chef in our household just before taking the meal to table. You can find the salmon recipe here. I also made four veggie dishes to accompany the salmon (beet and apple slaw, butternut squash soufflé, smashed roasted baby potatoes and green beans with garlic and ginger), which were all tasty and colourful, but I was too busy coordinating them all to take pics. Another time…

What are you cooking these days?