I’m the first to admit that there are some things I am and some things I am not. If you are reading this, you already know that I am not a baker. Which doesn’t mean I don’t like baking. Au contraire. I love baking. It’s just, as I have explained over many pages, that I don’t really know much about baking. Because of that, I simply take the authors of all those recipes I use at their word. I trust they know what, when and how stuff goes together and, with only a few exceptions, they have been mostly right. For this I am quite grateful as it lets me do pretty well what I don’t really know how t ..read more

I have to be honest. Lately I’ve been having some trouble figuring out what day it is. From what I can tell, yesterday was Bakingday, today is Cleaningday, or to be more precise, Kitchencleaningday and tomorrow could be Gardeningday but I can’t say for sure. This is the best I can do at the moment and I’m guessing that many of you are feeling the same way. Especially those of you who, like me, have retired from the “daily grind” as we were wont to call it, even when some of us really liked what we were grinding. Let’s face it, this pandemic of ours, (that would be the royal “our”), has screwed ..read more

It’s true, I haven’t been here for quite some time. But unlike my absence from the shallow blog (in case you don’t know) where I made the case that it is, in fact, difficult to be shallow during a pandemic, I can’t use that excuse for this one. Au contraire. We know by now that the pandemic, beyond everything else it has done, has turned all of us (pretty much) into expert home bakers. So it would be foolish of me to even try to use the pandemic as an explanation for my tardiness. Leaving me with the only plausible reason I can give you for seeming to have abandoned this blog. My freezer. It’s ..read more

As I look back on what has become a somewhat longish life, there are adventures I’ve had with predictable endings from the get go and others that brought a few surprises. Those of you who know me well know that I didn’t always live in the frigid north-west of this vast country of ours. Nope. I started out in the “big city” and, to tell you the truth, was perfectly content there until it became apparent that, after much hard work and study, there was going to be little demand for someone with degrees in sociology and english (who would have thought!) in what could only be described as a challen ..read more

Wondering where I’ve been? No worries. I’m exactly where I was last time we spoke. Which now that I think about it was quite some time ago. Here’s the thing. If you’ve ever lived through a pandemic you know that the concept of time has entered a whole new paradigm. Days feel like months, months like days. Remember last March when we all figured we’d be in the house for a couple of weeks while we waited for this whole thing to blow over? At first it seemed like a long time. Stuck in the house all day with nothing to do but source out lysol wipes and toilet paper. But then we realized it was jus ..read more

For those of you who don’t know, I’m originally from Toronto. Now, in and of itself, that’s neither here nor there. What I can tell you is that the big city wasn’t quite so big when I was there. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t a village, although I did live in one for a while. But it was definitely a small big city and quite possibly a kinder, gentler place than it is now. “Toronto the Good” was a place where a gaggle of twelve year old girls could take the subway downtown to do a little shopping and the only thing the Moms and Dads really had to worry about was how much money they might spend ..read more

If you are anything like me, and I’m not suggesting you are, you know that no matter what you do, sometimes things go right and sometimes they go wrong. The thing is, from the get go you never know exactly how it’s all going to end up. Hopefully for all of us, we have more “rights” than “wrongs”, “goods” than “bads”, but it’s my experience that the best laid plans, as they say, can most certainly go awry. Of course no one starts out thinking that whatever it is they are doing or making might turn out to be a disaster. Most of us embark on our projects with a modicum of optimism and at least so ..read more

It has occurred to me lately that I might be in a bit of a rut. Even before this pandemic. Now I realize that those of you who only read this blog and not my “other” one don’t know all that much about me. So let me start by telling you that, while I don’t consider myself a creature of habit, I do have a few. Like breakfast. I eat yogurt for breakfast. Have been doing so for longer than I can remember. But it’s not like I eat the same yogurt everyday. I like lots of different flavours. And fruit. Sometimes I add fruit. Lately I’ve taken to making parfaits. Yogurt, fruit, a little granola, a bit ..read more

Quite some time ago I decided it would be a good idea for me to learn to bake bread. I certainly wasn’t a baker back then so can’t say I know why. Seems to me, the last time I looked there was plenty of the stuff on the shelves of my local grocer. Besides, nothing compares to walking into your local patisserie and getting accosted by the heavenly aromas of freshly baked bread wafting through the air. Hearty whole wheats, delectable sourdoughs, crusty baguettes and chewy ryes. The biggest problem is choosing which one to take home. Knowing all of this didn’t prevent me however, from enrolling ..read more

It’s just the way it is. There are times, no matter how hard you try, or think you might like to try, when you really have very little choice about what you can do. Like now. How many of us would like to be doing whatever it was we were doing around the beginning of March? I mean who doesn’t want to go outside? Or have a little dinner party with a few close friends. Or never again have to hear “it’s the new normal” when you weren’t aware there was an “old normal”? But right now for the sake of all of us, we simply have no choice but to stay in, eat on our own, and resign ourselves to the disti ..read more