Supperstruck Primer

Supperstruck is not just a recipe site, but a food site. My tagline, “meal ideas and more” is intentionally vague. I focus on meal ideas, particularly those that use “found” items in your freezer or cupboards, but I also venture off in other directions, all related to food and cooking and all outlined below. The Supperstruck aesthetic is more vintage cookbook than Instagram-perfect, emphasizing writing over images. While the content will be wide ranging, there are three main ideas supporting it:

• Supper (and other meals) should not be stressful. Like a lot of parents–women in particular–I used to pressure myself to make freshly cooked meals every night, trying new recipes regularly so things didn’t get boring. I’ve since learned how to make more of what I have, creating different meals using similar ingredients. And that includes convenience foods from the freezer. I have come to accept that supper can’t always be a cooked-from-scratch affair, and that is okay.
• Innovation with less effort. It’s hard to reinvent the wheel and keep things interesting at mealtime. So I don’t, at least not all the time. I like to take an existing recipe and change things up with a new spice mix or sauce, or even a different presentation e.g. in a bun instead of on rice. I refer to it as fusion and elevating.
• Practicality. I’m not aiming for perfection here. My goal is to keep meal ideas and recipes as accessible as possible, in terms of ingredients and workload. And most of my recipes and meal ideas are “to taste,” leaving you room to experiment and adjust the ingredients to your preference. 

The Recipes and Meal Ideas

The name Supperstruck comes from the notion of being stumped about supper, but this site includes recipes and ideas for all meals, snacks, and dessert. Here are some of the basics about the recipes on this site: 

• I think a lot in terms of fusion on this site, not in the traditional restaurant sense of combining different types of food to make a meal–although that does come up–but in selecting elements from different recipes to make something new. For example, using a spice mixture from one recipe to change up another, as I did in my Baked Curry Chicken Fingers. Fusion, as I define it, allows for more variety in meals with less thinking. It also allows you to jazz up old standbys with new flavours.
• I also think in terms of elevating basic ingredients to create something more interesting. By basic, I mean things like frozen meatballs, chicken fingers, or tofu. By adding something as simple as a flavourful sauce or dip to a prepared protein, you can have a delicious meal ready in minutes. And if you have a few sauces and dips in your arsenal, mealtime will be a lot less boring. (See Baked Chicken Nuggets Made Better as an example of both fusion and elevating.)
• I love the idea of layering flavours as well, particularly in my baked goods. In my maple scones, I use maple flakes and extract in the batter, followed by a maple icing and garnish of maple flakes. It sounds intense, but it’s balanced to add more depth of flavour without being overwhelming. I’ve also used this approach in savoury dishes, like my triple ranch chicken.
• Recipes are broken down into basic categories in the Recipes menu, with tags for the main ingredients accessible in the tag cloud on the home page.  
• When I find a recipe I like, I love to share it. Supperstruck Selects provides links to recipes I’ve tried and returned to time and again because they are so good. I include notes on each with suggested tweaks and adjustments based on my experience preparing those recipes. My hope here is to save you time searching and direct you to the very best among the thousands of recipes out there. Supperstruck Selects will also encompass recommendations for food and kitchen tools.

Food For Thought

“Food for Thought” is my catch-all for non-recipe content, like culinary history, my own musings about food and legacy, and a couple of additional categories:

• Bookmarks is a weekly-ish compendium of interesting food-related articles, TV programs, films, or podcasts I’ve come across.
• I am a former documentation writer so instruction is something I do out of habit. In my Fundamentals section you’ll find primers that provide tips for cooking certain foods or stocking your pantry or freezer.

What Else Do You Need to Know About Supperstruck?

• I am Canadian, so some of the products or terms I use might be unique to this country.  I try to be consistent with measurements, although our country is remarkably inconsistent in this area. So you may see both imperial and metric measurements used in the unusual, hybrid way that Canadians tend to employ them.
• I take my own photos, usually with my iPhone, so some look a little, shall we say, rustic. I am working to provide more and better images of the finished product in recipe posts. As part of my vintage cookbook vibe, I use black & white sketches as featured images on each post.
• I do not currently write sponsored posts or use affiliate links. If that changes, I will post a notification on any post that includes either of those things. 

Image by Crystal Smith.