Sweet corn soup shooters

Here’s the scene: People are arriving at your cocktail party on an icy January evening. The biting wind has driven the temperature down to a frigid –20°C. Guests unwind scarves from their necks, shake out their hair from the confines of toques, and sling their bulky long coats over the entryway banister before entering the dining area ...
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Creamed chicken and cornmeal porridge (Ciulama de pui si mămăligă)

I’m trying not to take offence.

I realize that the dish my mother’s people are famous for is commonly referred to as “gruel” (a cornmeal gruel, in fact, made simply with meal, water, and a flick of salt), which is not exactly a glamorous calling card. Still, it is rather disheartening to ...
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Lime tart with fresh raspberries

I know. I know! It’s yet another dessert post.

I’m just as surprised as you are, as I’ll gladly side with savoury over sweet every single time. But what can I say? There are worse things in which to revel than sweets, and revelling in them I have been indeed if my recent food ...
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Coffee blondies

I would make a terrible Got Milk? poster girl.

It wasn’t always this way. For most of my adult life I bought, and consumed, at least a litre of milk every week: I was a dunker of all manner of cookies, a lover of cereal well soaked, a tippler of tall cold ones. But then something happened. I moved in ...
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Pizza with spring toppings and fontina

I choose to view the last year and eight months as a lesson in simplicity, in determining life’s essentials from its frills. As it happens, having a full-sized oven is a frill, but oh — how much sweeter culinary life is when you have one at your disposal.

You might remember that back in March I ...
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Lemon loaf

I can tell you precisely when I started to cook — not just help in the kitchen, but do full-fledged home cheffing pretty much on my own. It was Summer 1990, as recorded in Candles and Parsley, a entertaining record book I got as a gift and starting filling in with meticulously detailed dinner-party notes not long after receiving ...
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An old friend: lemon meringue pie

Lemon meringue pie and I go way back.

I have filmy, fragile memories of my mom making it in the kitchen of the house I lived in until I was eight. In those days there was Tenderflake lard for the crust, Shirriff mix for the filling, and after being amazed every single time that clear, viscous ...
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Cheater’s granola with cranberries, cherries, almonds, and pecans

There comes the occasional time in the kitchen when a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. And in those times, I am not above cheating and shortcutting my way to a decent meal.

When I’m pressed for time or sanity — and sometimes both — it is not unusual to find the ...
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Gingerbread cupcakes with lemon cream-cheese frosting

Today’s my birthday, and I’m turning thirty-six. I’m now closer to being forty than I am to being thirty. How did that happen?

Cake is good on birthdays, and I plan to have some at one of the little cafés on main street in Peterborough, where Michael and I are heading for a ...
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Frozen strawberry-vanilla swirl

Hope you saved room for dessert.

It’s been a while since I’ve featured something sweet here in the food category, and considering that we are in the most difficult part of winter — snowbanks are dirty and grey; sidewalks are minefields laid with dense, glacial ice; temperatures hang immovably below zero — I thought it particularly ...
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