“You’ll have to teach me to bake gluten free.” My younger sister is the unchallenged baking genius of the family, at least when it comes to desserts. She’s received multiple marriage proposals for her molasses cookies, and can give advice on piping. Piping. That is, in my books, the height of baking sophistication. So when she asked [...]
Life rule #1: when your life feels hectic, make sure you have good snacks on hand. Life rule #2: when your life feels hectic, take time each day to read poetry. Yeats is on my mind this week: I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of [...]
I’ve just gotten home from my first day of class. (Most of the time, I may add, I don’t write my posts at six in the morning. Most of the time.) It was an odd-feeling day. Partly it had the flavour such days always have. The excitement of seeing everyone after an eternity of two weeks apart, [...]
One of my rituals when I come home for the holidays is to look through my mother’s cookbook collection. It’s a marvelous one, and I am unabashedly envious. About five feet of countertop are lined with cookbooks of all kinds, cuisines, and degrees of dilapidation. Overflow volumes are stacked in drifts on top, and there are [...]
A great joy over the past few months has been how ready everyone has been, not just to accomodate new-found food intolerances, but to help me find my feet in a gluten-free world. Before an event, whether a small gathering at a friend’s house or some larger function for the department at school, I’ll be [...]
Even though I found out I was gluten intolerant way back in August, I haven’t put up a lot of gluten-free baking recipes yet. Partly this is because I made a 2kg batch of whole grain gluten-free flour mix and promptly forgot how many grams of which flour I put in. Partly it’s because I [...]
Behold, I show you a mystery: someone may, even if she desire it greatly, dwell for two months in the same house as a food processor, and realize it not. Yea, the depth of my obliviousness passeth all understanding. Great was my rejoicing when I found the thing hidden, cunningly, in a bag beneath a [...]
This has been my view a good deal of the time recently. Yes, the dreary weather has finally reached Montreal. I’ve been surprised at how little I’ve minded. But there are far too many things to be happy about right now to let a little wet weather—or even the nasty cold that’s been decimating the [...]
For weeks now, big baskets of Ontario peaches have been appearing in our kitchen, sometimes more than one at a time. The peaches are nested carefully in little paper wrappers so that they won’t be damaged, and the weight of the top layer is distributed over a piece of cardboard cut to fit the basket [...]
Popcorn is one of those things that pretty much everyone has a childhood memory of. I regularly shock people by what I missed during my odd and incredible upbringing (“You’ve never had a Klondike bar? You’ve never played a video game? You’ve never heard of Bruce Springsteen?!?”), but popcorn is definitely not one of those [...]
