The Yum Yum Factor

my go to room service lunch at the Shangri La puts other hotel food to shame, I tell you I had to work for a couple of days this week and the day started at 5:45am so that means I basically lived at the Shangri La for those days. Luckily, that hotel is beautiful, the service is impeccable and the food is delicious, even the room service. That curried coconut soup up there is my current lunch of choice and I would almost check into the hotel just so I could eat it again.

I have participated in the Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap since it's inception so, seeing that this is the fourth annual swap, this is my fourth time baking for three fellow food bloggers. This is always a bit stressful because cooking for other people who blog about cooking is a bit of pressure. What if my cookies are terrible? What if they got lost in the mail and sit on a shelf at some post office in Kapuskasing  for a month and get all stale and hard? What if the recipient thinks they taste like dust and cobwebs, dipped in chalk?

Earlier this week, I whipped up The King's Crashed Potatoes  using a bag of Blushing Belles, little yellow fleshed, pink skinned creamers from The Little Potato Company . We ended up eating those little crashed potatoes all week - with dinner, with breakfast and as a snack.

I was given the task of coming up with a simple recipe using these McEwan Riesling Apples that I could share with you for the holiday season.I wanted something easy enough to do ahead and have on hand for an impromptu dessert but fancy enough that it would still be special. I am all about the shock and awe when it comes to desserts.

This is not really a recipe in the traditional sense as much as it a suggestion of a recipe. My mother loved egg salad and I grew up eating it made with Miracle Whip, French's yellow mustard and a generous heaping of Bick's sweet green relish on squishy, white sandwich bread. It never occurred to me that people ate it any other way, to be perfectly honest and I was surprised when I grew up and made egg salad for other people, to find them kind of shocked by the addition of the mustard and relish. People are weird. Everyone knows that egg salad requires more than just a dallop of mayonnaise. It's perfectly acceptable to add some minced scallion, red onion or shallot too. Hard boiled eggs with nothing but mayonnaise is like peanut butter toast without buttering the toast, right?

CC Lounge is bringing the Prohibition Glamour back

I am going to be really honest about something here. When Shack first called me to tell me that he agreed to work on a movie on location, I was thrilled because when he takes an away job, it means that we get to go and visit unless, of course, it's a February shoot in New Liskeard Ontario. Then we kiss him goodbye, tell him to bundle up, that we will miss him and anxiously await his return. Where would it be this time? Brazil? Prague? Thailand? He said "I am not sure if it's good news or bad news. It's in Jordan" You mean Jordan, right next to Israel and Syria Jordan or is there another Jordan that is right beside the Italian Alps that I am unaware of? He said "No, Jordan right next to Israel and south of Syria Jordan" We stopped on the road into Petra and this is officially the highest we had ever been when NOT in an airplane At first I reacted much like most people I know reacted when I told them where he would be spending the month...

When I got home from Jordan, there was a big box waiting for me and inside that box I found four bags of beautiful potatoes from The Little Potato Company . As you might have guessed, they sell a variety of little potatoes in the class called "creamers". Commercial potatoes are divided into 4 categories : Large, medium, small and creamers, all based on size and this company only grows creamers, which means that every potato is is between 3/4" and 1 5/8" and they are as adorable as they are delicious. To work with, I had some pink skinned, Blushing Belles that were first bred in Germany and two bags of Something Blues in there. My job was to play around with these little babies and come up with a recipe or two that would showcase their considerable attribute. The Little Potato Company has two facilities, one in Edmonton and one in PEI and they work with potato breeders from Holland to South America to produce real their various types of tater. WHAT? ...

I will really miss the strong, cardamom laced Turkish coffee The Kid and I are back from our two week adventure in Jordan and, boy, are we tired. Our travel day to come home ended up taking 24 hours door to door, starting with a drive from Aqaba to the airport in Amman. Shack hired one of his guys to drive us to the airport on the morning of our 11am flight and this dear man, Ahmed, could not have been kinder.  Because Mr Shack has endeared himself to the locals so strongly, the fact that he was transporting precious cargo aka Mr Shack's family, also meant that this sweet man drove about 80km an hour the entire way, even stopping at a place that appeared to have no name to buy us delicious breakfast lamb kabobs and Turkish coffee despite the fact that we were in grave danger of missing our flight.

The Indian Lentil Burger is refreshingly free of soy and tastes like a good, Indian curry on a bun Monday night was my first media dinner in weeks and I will be honest, the last thing I wanted to do was drag my tired, jet lagged body out of the house and into the wet, snowy, cold night to hop on the bus and make my way to Eglinton and Mount Pleasant to  Wild Burger . All I really wanted to do was eat a bag of chips while lying on the couch, surrounded by fluffy pillows and blankets and watch tv but I arose, I got bundled up and I left the house. Because I am nuts, I realized, too late, that it is winter here, it was snowing and I wasn't wearing socks - WELCOME BACK TO CANADA IN DECEMBER YOU IDIOT!