Blog Archives - Page 5 of 6 - start with a bowl

start with a bowl

My Bûche de Noël – Adventures in holiday baking

One day my brother came home from school with an assignment. My mother had to make a Yule Log. There was some class party and all the mothers had to make something. My mother had never made one before. I don’t remember her making it. I don’t even remember seeing it. What I do remember…

Eating my way through Vancouver – Part 3: Meat and Bread

The mighty sandwich. As a kid I didn’t like sandwiches. That might be a direct result of how my mom made sandwiches. Mom’s recipe: Take two slices of very soft white bread. Spread butter liberally on both slices. The butter should be thick enough you can see teeth marks. Place one slice of cooked ham…

Eating my way through Vancouver – Part 2: Shizen Ya

While my Japadog experience was overall awesome, I made one crucial error. I ate it at 3pm Vancouver time. I continue to blame Air Canada for this. At 6pm it was time to go for dinner and I was feeling pretty stuffed, but I took one for the team and went in search of sushi. …

Eating my way through Vancouver – Part 1: Japadog

One of the best parts of travelling is eating. If you dine in local eateries and avoid the chains you can experience a new point of view and different ingredients than you might be used to. Recently I traveled to Vancouver for some corporate work. I took advantage of this opportunity to explore the culinary…

Starting from Scratch – Writing Recipes

Beginning my culinary journey as a baker, I have always kept recipes close at hand. A recipe tells you what ingredients to include, in which proportion, and how to effectively blend them together. You can make dozens of very different cakes with the exact same ingredients by changing either the proportions, or how you blend…

Plum Cake Lady

They call me…”The Plum Cake Lady” I love to bake with plums. I love to make plum crumble, plum cake, plum pie…once when I was doing a cleanse (no sugar, no wheat, no wine, no dairy, yadda, yadda, yadda…) I discovered that I could oven roast plums with lemon juice, cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger until…

The right tool for the job

From scratch. What does that really mean? Of course it means that you make something from ingredients rather than pre-assembled components. Yes, I get that, but somewhere along the way I built into that definition that it means using your hands – and that tools are cheating. I think this crazy notion began when I…

Caramel Apple and Caramel Apple Cranberry Pies

Thanksgiving: Context and Cooking

When Thanksgiving rolls around, most people start thinking about family. I start thinking about cooking and baking. The farmer’s markets are bursting with colour and flavour. I get excited about trying to reinvent the traditional turkey and trimmings and at the same time know that I have to make a few family favourites (herbed garlic…

Put an egg on it!

The first time I went to Paris was in 1999. It was a life altering trip in more ways than I can say. One of the many things about Paris that blew my mind was the food. Standing on the street trying not to get strawberry jam all over my face while eating a…