The Yum Yum Factor

I love a good frittata but, for some reason, I never make them. There are only so many meals in a day and when you cook for a living, you are always making something new and that can mean that tried and true old favourites are forgotten until you are forced to make one and then you remember how much you miss them.

In today's admission of food snobbery,  I had convinced myself that I hated the idea of a make ahead breakfast casserole type dish. Monkey bread could go take a hike and if you thought I was going to eat soggy white bread french toast in a casserole dish, you had another thing coming but when it was time to whip up a few brunch dishes at the request of a friend's husband that I could drop off the night before, it kept creeping into my brain. I made a frittata, which is always good the next day but everything I thought I wanted to make that would be more on the sweet side of things worked best made on the day. I was pretty sure my friend would love a french toast bake though and since it was her birthday brunch, not mine, I set out to make one that would make me happy as well. I used croissants in place of bread and, trust me, this is the one time that those doughy, bread like grocery store croissants work better than a really well made, flaky croissant, so get those. They...

The view from the 1st floor of the Eiffel Tower is stunning, even on a rainy, overcast day I lived in Paris for a time over 30 years ago, as a fresh faced, 20 year old Canadian girl on her first trip abroad, dreaming of a career as a high fashion makeup artist. Back then, you could truly live on a $10/day budget that included a bottle of wine and a little wheel of brie so, even if you felt lonely and isolated in a huge, foreign city, enduring rudeness that bordered on performance art , at least you could be spend the day pleasantly buzzed! The Eiffel Tower, lit up, will never stop being magnificent After a few months, being poor in this beautiful city started to weigh on me, I got sick of living off of bread and cart crepes, window shopping and eating pickled beets, so I moved on to Munich where I worked a lot more, made enough money to fund a nice life with new friends with ample left over for continued travel. Paris was not an easy city for a naive, young girl on he...