Wow. Just. Wow. Almost a year and a half again.
Here is the good news: we’re on a healthy kick and I’m thirsty for healthy recipes. I have found great websites to help us on our ‘healthier us’ journey, and as our son starts junior kindergarten next week, I’m also on the look out for quick, healthy and easy lunch ideas.
Stay tuned!
Ok I mean it this time…
Right, yes, fine. It’s been a few years. But I have a good reason. Husband and I had a baby… A real flesh-and-drool baby boy. He’s just a little over 2 years old now, and what better way to renew my blog than to post what I feed not only my husband, but my toddler.
So here I am, posting for the first time in a few years, but determined to make this work!
My next post will be about one thing and one thing only: Farmboy. You have been warned. 🙂
Peter, Peter Pumpkin Hoarder
I bid you all a nice autumn! The brisk weather, the leaves turning, sweaters and pants back in style! I am loving it! I am also loving the fact that pie pumpkins are everywhere (mostly) to be found! And so cheap!! why buy canned pumpkin flesh when you can make your own? I have purchased no less than 5 pie pumpkins and together they cost me less than $10! Yes, you have to roast it yourself, but that is the fun of it! Look forward to pumpkin chilli recipes, pumpkin muffins with cream cheese icing, and pumpkin chocolate chip brownies. I am SO excited!!
If you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. What happens when you give him bacon?
Husband and I visited Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market on Saturday, and it was a great day! He had never been there, and I hadn’t been since my Toronto contract had ended. I used to make twice-monthly pilgrimages to the place on my way home from work on Fridays. The good thing about going on a Friday at 5pm is that there are very few people there, as compared to Saturdays. The bad thing about going on a Friday evening is that you don’t always get what you want. If there’s nothing left, you go home empty handed. That said, it has never happened to me before!
Saturday mornings are quite the experience. The first thing to note is that it opens at 5am. 5. AM. We were not that dedicated, and arrived at 10. Already teeming with eager foodies and perhaps hungry buskers (Buskerfest is on at present… as is Fan Expo, but those people don’t eat. They spend all their money on their costumes!!), we set about our menu for dinner. Deciding on steak (Black Angus AAA Striploin for him, tenderloin for me) with grilled asparagus and a baked potato, we also purchased a few cheeses (Whiskey Cheddar and St-Julien) and some chocolate (Valhrona. I have not the words.)
I also bought candycane beets, but they lose all their glorious colour when cooked, so I might have to experiment with thinly sliced raw beets to showcase their true beauty.
But the epitome of the trip was the bacon. Not any bacon. Thick-cut Black Forest bacon. We don’t know what it means, or how it’s different than other bacon, but Husband is in love. It has more the texture of “real” raw meat than bacon, and renders very little fat. Teamed up with some breakfast burritos, it was a mega-hit. And bonus points? No heart burn for husband afterwards.
I didn’t get a chance to take a picture of the bacon after cooking. It was despatched quite efficiently. Maybe next time I’ll get a picture before it disappears!
Let him eat cake!
In a recent post, I lauded the praises of my new not-so-secret cooking crush Rose Levy Beranbaum. This weekend, I thought I would try out one of her recipes and turn them into cupcakes. Below are the beginnings of her Banana Citrus Refrigerator Care with Dreamy White Chocolate Icing, as well as the finished product.
You may notice that the bananas look a bit scary in the picture opposite, and that is because they are frozen. What’s that, you say? Frozen bananas? Yes indeed! I found out something rather funny about Husband when we moved in together; the man will not eat ripe bananas. It’s not that he doesn’t like them brown, or even with a spot of brown. The man won’t eat them when they’re yellow. I have to buy them green, or he will not eat them. I used to buy a whole hand of bananas (5 or 6) and they would go bad before I had a chance to eat them. If I have a smoothie in the morning, it uses up a third of a banana, so if I buy two bananas, I am set for the week. Throw in a third one for him to eat post workout and we’re good to go.. but what to do with the rest? Chuck them in the freezer!
Now, I cannot say that your thawed bananas would be good to eat alone in say, a banana split or on your cereal, but they are the BEST for baking. You barely have to mash them, and they are the sweetest they are going to be.
You might roll your eyes at me and say “just buy fewer bananas then!” and I do… most of the time… when the stocking person isn’t looking straight at me, I will crack a few bananas off the bunch… and go through self-checkout so they can’t tell I’m only buying two.
Leather Anniversary?
Today Husband and I celebrated our third anniversary. As he is on the road, and it is a Wednesday, we have decided to celebrate it officially this weekend, and we will be making an excursion to the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, where we will shop around for inspiration and ingredients for a fabulous dinner!
I look forward to the challenge of cooking with no thinking ahead!
In the meantime, here is a picture of our wedding cake. It was created by a co-worker of mine, and it was a thing of beauty! It fit right in with our masquerade theme.
Where rosemary grows… and really very little else.
Husband always makes fun of me that I have the ability to “make thyme, but not keep it” because I can never, ever plant thyme, from seed or seedling, or indeed full plant, and keep it alive.
I can,however, probably grow a rosemary bush the size of a Christmas tree… so there is that.
Here is my attempt at populating my herb “garden” I have flat-leaf parsley, thyme, oregano and basil allegedly growing in there.
If it’s good enough for Justice, it’s good enough for me!!
There are a few items in my kitchen I could not live without. My Henckels knives, my All Clad pots and pans and my digital kitchen scale. The last two years have been transformative for me, culminating in a weight loss of 90 pounds. I owe a LOT of that to my scale. It’s amazing when you weigh everything you eat just how conscious it makes you of how little (or indeed how much) certain measurements are. I would openly guffaw at the thought of putting one teaspoon of mayonnaise in my tuna salad, and yet after measuring it out (5mL!) I was shocked to find that it was quite enough. And just how much is 4 ounces of meat for a burger? More than you think!
Of course, I didn’t buy my scale in order to help myself lose weight. I bought it years ago to help me make sense of cookbooks! Predominantly, British cookbooks (Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, I’m lookin’ at you!), but also very precise cookbooks I’ve collected over the years.(Alton Brown and… no, no, really only Alton Brown there)
I could go on and on about how much better it is to cook by weight than by volume, and that a cup is not always a cup, and sifted flour is different, and blah blah blah, but really, in the end, the reason I love my scale is because I can plunk a bowl on it (“plunk” is the technical term, before you ask) and pour out all the dry ingredients together using the ZERO function on the scale. It’s fast, painless, and only dirties one thing! Then another bowl for the wet ingredients, and voila! No measuring cup in which you’ve placed sticky stuff (molasses, peanut butter, you know who you are) or oily stuff that just won’t come out. It’s all in the bowl!
And don’t even get me STARTED on how easy it is to but my blender cup on the scale to weigh the ingredients of my morning smoothie!
Alright, rant over, I can see I’ve converted you already. And if I haven’t, know that the shiny (though admittedly well-used) model you see below didn’t cost me more than $40, and it wasn’t even on sale!
My newest obsession
I have to start with a confession. I think I am a little bit in love with Rose Levy Beranbaum. Some of you may know her as the author of The Cake Bible, but I know her as the incredible woman that has written the book pictures below: Roses’ Heavenly Cakes. It’s such a simplistic title, and yet WHAT. A. BOOK. Any person who considers themselves a serious baker HAS to buy a copy of this book.
Mine was given to me by a fellow baker with whom I used to bake during the holidays. We actually had a little “side” business we called Sweet Surrender where we offered our baking services to the people at work who didn’t want to do all their own baking. It worked really well, but it got to the point where we were actually spending money, rather than making some or even breaking even.
Anyway, I made the apple-cinnamon crumb coffee cake the weekend I received it, and it blew my mind. A banana-citrus refrigerator cake was next (any banana-lemon pairing doubters would be shamed with one bite of this amazing cake!) and I have my eyes on the Spice Cake with Peanut Buttercream next.
If you get a chance to beg/borrow/steal/purchase this book, DO IT.
Inspiration
Julia Child would have been one hundred years old this week. Funny enough, I didn’t need Google’s image of the day to tell me, I actually somehow knew that. It has been over a year since I have posted on here, and I will do my best to remedy that in the coming weeks and months. As fall approaches and the weather cools, my oven beckons. New cookbooks have been gifted and purchased, filling me with inspiration.
Also, the daunting task of Husband’s Family Christmas Dinner, which is to feed anywhere between 60 and 80 people, is mine for the planning. As I fill my kitchen notebook with ideas, I will share them here. Complete with pictures and epiphanies!
Stay tuned!