start with a bowl

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…

How To – Lemon Lime Marmalade Shortbread

I recently developed a recipe for a Lemon Lime Clementine Marmalade Cake using Pickles Eh! Lemon Lime Marmalade. As a result, I tasted a lot of Pickles Eh! Lemon Lime Marmalade. Every time I put the spoon in my mouth I couldn’t help but think how awesome it would be with shortbread. When I made the…

How To – Roasted Tomato and Cilantro Shrimp

Whenever I see bags of frozen, uncooked shrimp on sale I buy a couple and leave them in the freezer. Shrimp are great on those days when you get home from work, you don’t have any protein ready for dinner and you want something delicious. This recipe is quick to prepare and is full of flavour. …

Cookbook Review – Schmecks Appeal by Edna Staebler

Edna Staebler taught me to bake. Sometime in the mid-eighties, I’m not sure exactly when my mother purchased the cookbook “Schmecks Appeal.” Following that she also bought Edna Staebler’s earlier books “Food that really Schmecks” and “More food that really Schmecks,” but “Schmecks Appeal” was the book in our house that started it all. My…

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…

How to – Oven Roasted Squash Recipe

I was standing in front of a display of pumpkins and squashes the other day when I heard a woman comment that she didn’t know why they were in the produce section as they were all for display. Display?! What?! She even questioned if they were real or plastic. I couldn’t help myself. I had…

Cookbook Review – My Paris Kitchen by David Lebovitz

I am a sucker for Paris. I’ve been there 3 times and dream of moving there. So, a book titled “My Paris Kitchen” will always catch my eye. As I started to flip through the pages I realized that this cookbook was unlike any cookbook I had ever read. It wasn’t just recipes, it was…

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…