Bake with abandon!
Go to your bookshelf. Pull out your most dog-eared, battered, and beloved cookbooks. Who wrote them? If you’re Canadian, chances are at least one of them is by Elizabeth Baird and her intrepid team at the Canadian Living Test Kitchen. How many bear her name? …
When I was a child, my mother had a vegetable garden in the side yard. She grew runner beans and radishes, beets and Swiss chard. I remember neat rows of fancy-topped chives whose pungent smell drove me away, and giant bunches of rhubarb that whispered …
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 …
My Cherished Canadian Recipe Everyone in my immediate family uses the same shortbread recipe. We got it from my mother, who got it from her mother, who got it from a rather odd neighbour. My grandmother wanted the recipe so badly she dutifully wrote out …
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. …