Bake with abandon!
Concord Grapes leave me conflicted. They fill up my senses in a way that would do John Denver proud. They also break my heart. When I see their deep blue-purple skins overflowing the baskets at the market stalls the joyful, creative part of me wants …
Growing up, my mom’s homemade grape jam appeared on the table in recycled baby food jars with a paraffin wax seal. While the jam bubbled and the jars boiled, she melted bricks of wax on the stove top in an old tomato juice can with …
Cherries, currants and raspberries arrive at such an inconvenient time. It’s hot. It’s often humid. And our old stone house holds the summer heat like a wood-fired brick oven. Once the warm weather has worked its way into the walls, I’m hesitant to fry a …
My bedroom closet houses clothes, shoes, a cat-clawed housecoat, my knitting needle collection and a food dehydrator. Too wide for our narrow pantry, this unit spends most of the year in a corner of my closet looking like an abandoned R2-D2 action figure on Boxing …
As the late-summer harvest reaches its peak, I’ve been covering the basics of homemade jams and jellies. Making delicious, well-set preserves isn’t alchemy but you do need to have a few basic pieces of equipment and understand what’s required to make jams safe. Below is …
The other day I admitted I had a great big culinary knowledge gap. Oh, I was willing to share my apricot ignorance, but I was a bit smug about peaches. I considered myself a veritable Ms Know-It-All when it came to my favourite stone fruit. …
Gold is the new red. At least for me when it comes to beets. In the past I have been more than a little vocal about my dislike of your garden variety red beets. I want to like them. Really. They have a gorgeous ruby …
Perhaps it’s the difference between European and North American sizes. Maybe our crops are bigger and our platters smaller. If shown the same mushroom, would French and Canadian eaters argue over whether it was small, medium or large? I don’t know. But I do know …
I’d officially like to apologize to apricots. For years now, I’ve been the mean team captain who always calls dibs on her friends and chooses the popular kids first, leaving the smaller classmates kicking the grass with their yet-to-be-broken-in sneakers and pretending that being picked …