The Yum Yum Factor

I have a confession to make: I really like the texture of canned fruit, especially peaches.

If you are not lucky enough to have a nonna of your very own, you can soothe your inner Italian soul with Per La Famiglia, Memories and Recipes of Southern Italian Home Kitchen, the newest cookbook by Emily Richards. Part cookbook, part scrapbook, the book is full of photos, memories and family stories and as soon as my complimentary copy showed up on my doorstep, I read the whole thing, cover to cover. I remember Emily Richards from the Canadian Living Test Kitchen back when I was a new mom and spent hours on end watching the food network. Alongside Elizabeth Baird, she injected a youthful enthusiasm for food that helped to inspire me to get out of bed and back into the kitchen again. Fast forward to today and Emily is still inspiring Canadians to get into the kitchen and cook delicious, whole foods as part of the Canadian Living Test Kitchen, regular daytime tv guest spots, cooking classes and cookbooks. The stories reflect the immigrant story for many, ma...

Once again, a box of frozen puff pastry solved all of my problems. I wanted to bring a nice app to an summer poolside party but although it had to be pretty and delicious, it also had to be kind of quick and easy. Since, as always, I had a box of my favourite pre rolled puff pastry from PC in the freezer and a container of ricotta, it was obvious that I would make a little tart. A quick trip up to the Magical Asian produce store provided some nice yellow cocktail tomatoes, red cherry tomatoes and some Ontario asparagus. You can mix it up and use whatever bit of vegetable you have - it would be just as delicious with freshly shucked peas or leftover roasted vegetables, for instance. You can mix the ricotta hours ahead of time and if you can't find z'atar you can just sprinkle a bit of fresh thyme over the top but do try to find the z'atar because z'atar makes everything better. Tomato, Asparagus and Ricotta Tart makes 24 app servings or 12 large piece...

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.

So, recently, I finally made  Marcella Hazan's buttery tomato sauce and, unlike the other 98% of the food world, I didn't totally fall in love with it. I found it a bit too rich and buttery (if that can even happen) and missed the olive oil taste in my marinara. I didn't dislike it, I just didn't love it beyond all other sauces. What I did like was the silky texture the butter gave it and the ease of preparation and I wanted to try it again with less butter and some olive oil replacing the lost butter, finally settling on a ratio of 2 tbls butter/3 tbls of olive oil. This mix gave me the rich, silky texture but the olive oil flavour I was missing so much. Shack woke up on Sunday morning with a craving for cabbage rolls but, unfortunately, he didn't share that with me until early afternoon. Cabbage rolls are not something you can just whip on on a whim. My mom, who was famous in our family for a couple of dishes, made a mean cabbage roll and I miss them treme...

This post is short on recipe, but long on story. For Shrove Tuesday, I made those incredible Browned Butter Ricotta Pancakes  which served two purposes. Yes, they were crazy delicious and it was the first time I had ever made such a thing and that is all good.  Whatever. Most importantly, it used up half of the container of ricotta that was sitting in my fridge, silently judging me every time I opened the door for buying something that I never use and would most likely end up throwing out 2 months after the expiration date. THAT was a major accomplishment for a procrastinator like myself. Nice work Carole. The only problem that remained was the lingering ricotta in the container. It's far too soon to make the pancakes again and it's just sitting in there, making me feel guilty before I have even thrown it out. Cut to yesterday - our tiny school's annual bakesale to raise money for Free the Children  and I volunteered to make the raffle cake. I made thi...

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".