The Yum Yum Factor

Last week I hosted my monthly Supper Club at The Kingston Social, here in Toronto and the dinner was a Middle Eastern Feast with a touch of Jamaican thrown in for good measure. Each time I host, I like to try one new dish that isn't always mine but that I am dying to try out and this time, I really wanted to make this Moroccan Orange Cake  on the blog, Kitchen Confidante. I found the recipe so intriguing - using fresh bread crumbs in place of flour, the idea of soaking it in an orange syrup afterwards so it would almost like a cakey baklava was screaming YAAAAASSSSSSS. So, on the day, I realized that I only had an 8" spring form pan but the recipe called for normal cake pan so I borrowed one of those. I buttered and floured the pan and I made the cake only to discover that it WOULD NOT COME OUT! I had to, basically, dig the cake out of the pan as it stuck to the bottom and I found myself with three chunks of cake and a whack of crumbs on a day where I was going to have to...

What do you do with a free case of Persimon© Persimmons? Well, aside from eating them straight out of the case, I made a persimmon chutney to serve with some sous vide pork and then I played around a bit with the rest. Out of everything else I made, this tarte tartin was my very favourite. I have been making an eggplant tarte tartin in cooking classes this year and it's a huge hit every time. The eggplant cooks down in the gooey caramel until it is reminiscent of stewed figs and the hit of freshly cracked black pepper in the caramel is almost as unexpected as the fact that you are actually eating eggplant for dessert. If it's fabulous with eggplant, it's kind of a no brainer to assume it's going to be even better with persimmons. I threw in a bit of cardamom and some pecans for good measure and I can now say, in my best FogHorn LegHorn voice, all puffed up chest and with a full air of confidence, that this is going to be my go to holiday dessert thi...

The minute I saw this recipe for Rock 'N' Rye Peach Jam , I knew I would make either this recipe or a variation of it as soon as we hit peach season. Once we brought back our delicious Niagara peaches, I kept thinking that the cardamom was screaming ARAK to me and not rye. Only a Canadian will remember using the purple, velvet Crown Royal bag as a pencil case in grade school, but suffice it to say, Rye is as Canadian as it gets. Cardamom, on the other hand, reminds me of the flavours of the Middle East while rye bellows East Coast Canada at 2am on a Saturday after gorging on smores made with a stale Aero bar and the marshmallows that I found in the back of a cupboard in my aunt's trailer. Then I thought that cardamom required an alcohol that comes from the same part of the world and I just happen to have a bottle of Arak that I brought back from Jordan. This Levantine booze is an anise flavoured, colourless alcohol similar to Greece's Ouzo, France'...

It's that time again, time for   Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap    ! Do you have any idea how much pressure it is to bake cookies for three other food bloggers? When you are baking for your kid's teacher, your mom, your neighbour's and your mailman, you can make simple, delicious cookies. You can whip up ginger snaps, shortbread and sugar cookies and everyone is thrilled. You can't send a delicious, simple shortbread to three other food bloggers though because they can do that themselves. That would be like making strawberry freezer jam for Martha Stewart. It is certainly tasty but it just won't do.  I spent the week thinking I was going to make Cardamom spiced palmiers until I realized that those are not the best cookies to be mailing out. They really are best eaten in the first couple of days so what would happen if the package was lost or delayed? What if the palmiers showed up all stale and horrible? I am already in trouble over the whole Marcella Haza...

Today was The Kid's 14th birthday. If you are a mom with older kids, you understand how surreal this new era is and if you are a mom with little kids, you have no idea, but your time will come.  My adorable, chubby little baby now towers over me, wears his father's shoes on his hairy hobbit feet, has to shave his dirty stache and his mile long legs are covered with black man hair. He is still young enough to tell me he loves in his best Issac Hayes' voice every day but old enough that he has a job and does his own laundry.

I have been staring at a container of ricotta in my fridge for weeks now. We bought it for Shack's lasagna but then he thought he needed more and bought a bigger container of the stuff from Costco and used that instead. I don't use ricotta all that much and I didn't know what to do with it but I knew that I didn't want to end up throwing it out. I spent a couple of days toying with the idea of doing muffins so I read recipes, looked at tastespotting, read more recipes and nothing spoke to me. The easy way out was to make stuffed pasta but Shack is away and I am trying to not eat pasta while he is gone because when he is home, we eat it way too often. Then, last week a little voice in my head started to whisper "ricotta pancakes would be nice".

 I was so excited to sign on to participate in  The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap  because it meant I could connect with three other bloggers (most likely Canadian as shipping food across borders gets squicky in a post 9-11 world where xmas cookies are now eyed suspiciously ). It also meant that I would receive a dozen cookies from three of my fellow bloggers and that is always a great thing. I love eating other people's baked goods. My favourite and most requested cookie is a really spicy, crispy ginger snap but I have written about that on my blog and we were instructed to make something that we have never blogged about so that meant I either had to make something completely different or change up my standard ginger snap. I have been pretty obsessed with cardamom for the last few months so I started searching out a yummy sounding cookie with cardamom but all I was seeing were sugar cookies with cardamom added to the dough and that didn't interest me...