Curried chicken chowder

Chowder. It’s not quite soup and not quite stew. So what is it?

Enter the Oxford Companion to Food, which tells me that in fact, chowder is thought to be named after the iron cooking pot, the chaudière, brought to the east coast of Canada by early French settlers. The Micmac peoples introduced these settlers to clams, which ...
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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 day of ...
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Saffron risotto with sundried tomatoes, mushrooms, and spinach

A dearth of actual sunlight?

It’s the only plausible explanation I have for the sudden and intense fixation with saffron that overtook my otherwise ordinary Tuesday last week. Everything I laid eyes on throughout the day — the pages of the magazine I read on the bus, the sheets of manuscript I pored over at ...
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