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Nana’s Tea Biscuits
Nana's Tea Biscuits - My Nana Cynthia's recipe, as transcribed by one of my sisters when they were small. Delicious and easy!
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Simple Spaghetti with Sausage
Simple Spaghetti with Sausage - An easy, delicious, and filling spaghetti sauce. Great for a group, or to have extras for leftover lunch.
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Solo in Morocco
I spent a month Solo in Morocco in November, 2010, and prior to travelling, I did a fair amount of research on the country. So many people were so helpful in answering my questions; I owe a lot to the Thorn Tree Travel forum, my Rough Guide, and WikiTravel, as well as individual bloggers. Here I’ve brought together some of my experiences and observations, in the hope that they’ll be as helpful to other travellers. I wrote it right after I returned, to give back to the community on Thorntree that had been so helpful to me, but recently a lot of people have been talking to me about Morocco, so I thought…
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White Pizza: Caramelized onions, mushrooms, and roasted garlic
White Pizza - a recipe that I came up with on the fly one night, and that - to my surprise - everyone in my family loves.
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Jalapeno-Cheese Dip
A delicious, spicy, cheesy indulgence! My sisters and I made this Jalapeno-Cheese Dip for the first time last February, when I’d just moved to Toronto for a new job and was feeling quite lonely in the big city. They came up to visit, and we made and ate this while mostly-ignoring the Super Bowl in my big, weird empty condo sublet. It’s definitely comfort food, definitely not an everyday dish, but a good warming appetizer for special occasions (like sister nights!). 2 8-oz packages of cream cheese 1 cup of mayonnaise 4-6 jalapenos, chopped and deseeded 1 cup of cheddar cheese, shredded 1/2 cup of mozzarella cheese, shredded 1/4 cup diced green…
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2014: Shining like a National Guitar
In my year-end wrap-up for 2012, I wrote the following: I’ve cut my commitments down to almost nothing in preparation for – well, I don’t know exactly. But if something comes along and I need to leap, I’ve got nothing tying me to where I am. I could go tomorrow. And I want to. Less than a month later, I was scrambling to find somewhere to live in Toronto, and scrambling to wrap up my remaining commitments in Peterborough, as I leapt into a new job and a new life in a new city. Despite my belief that I was ready to go, I wasn’t – it was hard. Leaving…
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Mini Doughnuts
Mini Doughnuts - delicious, easy-to-make, mini doughnuts. Everyone loves them, and you can never make enough.
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Buttermilk Pancakes
When I bake my favourite Chocolate Cupcake recipe, I’m always left with a huge amount of leftover buttermilk and no real idea what to do with it. Often enough, it would end up going to waste, until I started making this recipe. I always think of pancakes as being heavy, boring, and a bit of a hassle to make, but these Buttermilk Pancakes are quick, easy, and fluffy, and pretty good even without maple syrup. I bet they’d be great with honey, too, or with a little lemon juice and icing sugar, like Nana’s Crepes. Ingredients 2 eggs 2 cups all-purpose flour 2 tablespoons sugar 2 teaspoons baking powder 1…
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Chocolate Cupcakes
I swear, these chocolate cupcakes are the easiest thing in the whole world. You mix it all in one bowl. Â It takes less than 15 minutes, and then you pop them in the oven. Â Easy-peasy. Like many a child of the 80s, I grew up with cupcakes and cakes made from boxed cake mixes. Â Once I started baking and realized that making cakes from scratch required very little extra work, and resulted in a vastly superior flavour, I was kind-of confused as to why anyone thought that those boxed cake mixes were a good idea. To me, they always end up tasting like stale vegetable oil and sugar, even more…
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Ugly Soup
This is a recipe from my good friend and longtime co-conspirator Ashley, who is a great cook and sometimes posts recipes here. Some years ago when I was feeling pretty under-the-weather, she shared with me this recipe for a soup that she created. This is totally comfort food, for me, when the cold weather hits; it’s essentially a Chicken Noodle Soup, if Chicken Noodle Soup wasn’t salty, bland, and disgusting and was instead somewhat heavenly and delicious. Anyway, now you know where I stand on Chicken Noodle Soup. This recipe will do all of the things you want from said grotty soup, but will do them with vim, vigour, and…
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Three Big Ideas for Peterborough
I’ve had three big ideas for Peterborough for a while – industries that I think could & should be pursued by my hometown, the city with the highest unemployment rate in Canada. Below, I briefly outline why I think they’d fit our town, and what one issue I think needs to be overcome before they can move forward. Film With the film industry a powerful part of Toronto’s economy, Peterborough has already been host to several film crews, and has lots to offer: friendly, cheap, and close to Toronto, we’ve got well-preserved heritage neighbourhoods which could fairly easily be dressed to look like many different eras. We’ve got all the…
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Lentils with Fennel and Sausage
My sister Cassie and I visited Paris last Spring, and by the time we’d gotten from Charles de Gaulle to our hotel in Montmartre and thrown our bags in our room, we were starving. We struck out looking for someplace that would satisfy both me and my vegetarian sister, and found this little corner restaurant with arborite tables and a friendly atmosphere and some vegetarian options on the menu. The waiters were super-nice (as was almost everyone in Paris), complimenting my pathetic attempts at speaking French, and my meal of lentils with fennel and sausage completely floored me. I love lentils in just about every way they can be served,…
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How I got into this mess in the first place
As a kid growing up in a village of about 500 people, pre-Internet, I was a dedicated patriot with a great faith in Canada but almost no exposure to Canadian ideas. Sure, there was CBC, and maybe TVO, but when you’re 13, you want to watch The Fresh Prince of Bell Air, not Adrienne Clarkson Presents. ((I applaud the CBC’s attempt, at the time, to give us more Canadian arts, but I’m sorry to say that they went about it the wrong way, in my opinion.)) I wished that there were Canadian artists to like, but as far as I knew, there weren’t. We, as a nation, had a smattering…
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Lucky 2013
Oh 2012, you pretty little thing. You haven’t been good to many people I know, but you’ve been pretty good to me, with a few notable exceptions. Sad things In fact, 2012 started off pretty badly. My sassy, flirty, funny Nana Cynthia died in January. I’ve been trying to write about it in all of the intervening months, and haven’t been able to get anything meaningful down, but it’s a loss that our whole family is feeling, still, very deeply. Mum’s spent a lot of this year scanning Nana’s WWII diaries and posting them, with photos and transcripts, on her website, which are really interesting reading. Nothing in the early…
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On Audacity and Possibility.
I do a lot of things, and I’m not the best at any of them. I can usually think of scads of people who are better at pretty much everything I do; from performance to organization, being a decent friend or a good videographer, I am well aware of how I think I stack up against other people. Which isn’t to say I’m bad at what I do, nor that I’m not proud of my accomplishments. I’m pretty good at a bunch of things, and very good at a few. But still, still not the best at anything. But while you can arguably say that Usain Bolt is the best…
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Garlic-Cheddar Biscuits
These are so good, the first time I made them there were none leftover that evening, and I’ve been making them as a apres-ski snack or as an accompaniment to my Hearty Ham and Bean Soup. They’re super-quick and super-easy! Ingredients 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 5 tablespoons butter 1 cup milk 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese 1/4 cup butter, melted 1 clove garlic, minced Directions Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. In a large bowl, sift together flour, salt and baking powder. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Make a well in the center of flour mixture. Add the milk…
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Quinoa and Corn Salad Recipe
We’ve been interested in picnicking for a few years now; something about packing up a lunch and going somewhere green and lovely to eat it on a blanket on the grass feels so special and nice. We’ve got one of those picnic knapsacks, with all of the cutlery and everything, which we’ve been using as our camp kitchen for years, and we’re building a list of excellent and easily-portable recipes. In the midst of an unexpectedly sweltering May day, we decided to make a few salads and bicycle down to the Trent-Severn Canal, on the bank of Little Lake, to have our first picnic of the year. This recipe, one…
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Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie
I always associate rhubarb with Summers at my Nana and Papa’s; they’d pick a fresh stalk of rhubarb and hand it to me with a small dish of sugar to dip the end in. Nana would make what she called ‘Rubarberry,’ a sauce of strawberries, rhubarb, and sugar that she and Papa loved to have on toast. And Papa tried his hand at Rhubarb wine, along with his other wine-making experiments (his mainstay was the sweet red wine that bubbled in demijohns in his basement throughout the Autumn). Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie has always been a favourite of mine, but somehow I never did get around to making it until this Spring,…
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Spiced Pickled Beets
There’s a restaurant in Peterborough called St. Veronus, where I was first introduced to the deliciousness of the spiced pickled beets. My sister Sammi found this recipe a few years ago, and while it’s not exactly the same as the beets they serve at St. Veronus, I might believe that these beets are better. I think I’ve said before that I’m not a proponent of specialty gadgets and tools for cooking, but some things I do endorse. A kitchen scale is excellent, and if you’re canning, a wide-mouthed funnel is really helpful. As well, if you’re doing the hot-water method of canning, a set of hot-jar-grabbing tongs is completely useful.…
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Canoe Journey Through Waterways and Lifeways
This article first appeared in the Winter 2012 edition of The Newcomer Bulletin. So much of the history of Canada is the history of the newcomer; because few written records exist of the Indigenous peoples in this country before the Europeans arrived, our impressions of our nation are almost always seen through the eyes of people experiencing each other’s culture for the first time.  No where is that more clear than at the Canadian Canoe Museum, which chronicles the individual struggles and  triumphs of people making their way through the land with little in common besides their mode of transport – the canoe. Â
