Teri Everitt

I think you might have gone on a date with Elmer Fudd........you should have asked him to say "Be vewwy quiet....I'm hunting wabbit." I almost needed the Heimlich while reading about your hellish date...maybe I shoudn't have been reading it so soon after dinner..........

LIME Crush! In glass bottles........I miss those glass bottles. As for your article, I don't quite get it. If feeding any of my 3 kids had depended on me stumbling down to the kitchen to mix formula or heat bottles, they'd all have starved! Bottle feeding is much, much more work. I can't believe you were brave enough to taste test baby formula!

LCS..............I agree with you about butter and cream, but do you have any really good vegan dessert recipes? I don't want to eat that stuff, but I happen to have a mad crush on a guy who is vegan, and it wouldn't hurt to have a couple of recipes that might get me some, umm, appreciation

Not a restaurant exactly........but if you go to the Mercado Latino on Montreal road there is a small kitchen in the back. Weekend mornings they have tacos and tamales I think. GO EARLY. Last time I stopped in at about 10:30 am and they had stopped serving food in the back already. I'm not sure who is doing the cooking now, they used to have an older lady who kicked ass! The few times I've eaten the food there, it was homestyle cooking, not restaurant food.

I used to read cookbooks as a child also. My mom wasn't very interested in baking so I made all the cookies, muffins etc in our house. I also had to cook dinner from about the age of 10 but I didn't usually have a choice in what to make, mom always left a note with very detailed instructions. My favorite childhood treat....I would bring home puffballs for my mom to fry in butter for me. Mushrooms of any kind are still my favorite food. I also really loved freshly caught fish panfried in butter (even though I'm the only one in my WHOLE family that doesn't like to fish). Summers in Peterborough, my sisters preferred to stay with my Grandpa, but I always went to Grandma's place. She was the worst cook ever, she was always on some weird diet that she had read about in the National Enquirer so her kitchen was full of strange stuff like Brewer's Yeast and horrible skim milk, but she would let me drink as much coffee or tea as I wanted, would take me shopping for proper food when I stayed with her, and would let me order whatever I wanted when she took me out for dinner, regardless of the price. This woman.........who lived on dark rum, cigarettes and coffee despite her "diet of the week" and who showed no signs of enjoying preparing OR eating food, bought me my first cappucino at the tender age of eleven.

You must smell like the Avon lady after! Ewwwwwwwwwww.

Ditto that! Baby food in a crust.........strangely, I like the taste of pumpkin okay, and will eat it in cheesecake, pound cake etc. , but never EVER in pie form!

So I have to confess.........I don't really like chocolate except as an accent flavour. I will eat it with nuts, coconut, peanut butter but I'll never eat one of those stupidly named "Chocolate Insanity" this or "Death by Chocolate" that. I don't strongly dislike the flavour of chocolate so much, I just find that I'm pretty much done after 2 bites. I also loathe meringues and marshmallows and although I have made creme caramel from several recipes at several restaurants, I've never tasted one that I didn't find disgustingly eggy. I love creme brulee though. How about you.....what do you make that you don't even want to taste?

I am completely at a loss for words............what a horrible experience for you. Makes me feel a little guilty for having all of next week off. Hope that NEVER happens to you again. We had a co-op student named Bruno who did the same thing with the jaconde cake and some orange curd. I came in and the jaconde was really thin and firm and just looked "wrong" so I tasted it, then I had to go and taste everything made that day, just in case. The orange curd was grainy (large quantities of salt don't dissolve the way sugar does) but I had to taste it anyway just to be sure........one of the most disgusting things I have ever had in my mouth So you had a very BRUNO experience .......

I piped heart shaped ones for last Valentine's Day......what a pain. Thanks for the demo Nicole.

DO NOT look at this thread when you're hungry!!!! It's my ex-husband's week with the kids so I am away from home and I will not attempt serious cooking in the tiny kitchen where I am staying. I have been living on bread and cheese all week

Nicole, how much water do you use to make the sugar syrup? We make our macarons at work with beaten egg whites rather than meringue and they are REALLY unreliable, so I'd like to give these ones a try.

bread is scary! i think i want to start with something simpler than that! ← Bread is not scary...and once you get used to mixing and handling dough you can make almost any kind......go for it. If bread scares you, here's a pizza dough recipe even a child could make. Pizza dough 500 g flour (bread flour or all purpose) 20 g instant dry yeast 20 g salt 40 g oil (olive is nice, but corn or veg works fine too) 325 g water (cool but not cold) Weigh out dry ingredients and put in your mixer bowl, pour in oil and water. Start mixing with dough hook on first speed until ingredients start to come together, once dough begins to mass boot mixer up to second speed and mix until dough begins to look smooth and leaves the sides of the bowl clean. Put a little bit of oil in the bowl and turn the dough around to coat with oil....this will prevent the dough from crusting. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap ( I use an bread/milk bag cut up one side and tie it tightly over the bowl). At this point you can: Let rise 40 to 45 minutes and use immediately OR put it immediately into the fridge and let it proof cold all day when you are at work (I do this ALL the time) Divide your dough in half, round it into a ball.........let it rest about 10 minutes, shape and top, bake at 400F for about 10 minutes or so. Makes 2 medium pizzas. You can add herbs/garlic whatever to the dough as well. I bake mine on pizza pans sprinkled with a small handful of cormeal or semolina. Really easy, and when I mix a batch of dough in the morning I can come home from work and have dinner ready for the kids in 30 minutes or so.

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I think for cooks, Mother's Day has to be the most hellish shift of the year. For retail bakeries, the week preceding Christmas seems to be worst, but Valentine's Day is also not much fun if it happens to coincide with Winterlude here.

I work for a small business and we are closed for Christmas AND Boxing Day and my boss is very family friendly. I also don't get too many weird requests most of the time, but this is only my second year there, before that I worked the previous Christmas at a hotel (crippling volume to deal with but NO contact with customers) and in wholesale supplying restaurants for the 3 years before that (NO contact with the public at all). I'm still trying to wrap my head around the concept of paying $280,000 for anything.........or even HAVING $280,000! Hope you had a good Christmas Pastrymama! I knew there had to be other people around here with frazzed nerves and sore feet!

Wow......I wasn't actually hoping anyone had a worse day than me, really. Feel free to share even if you don't work in a restaurant/hotel/bakery etc. Lots of businesses are crazy this time of year. It was really more absurd than bad, and we were all laughing about it........even the bomb scare thing (although it was nervous laughter). Best part of yesterday: One of my co-workers got tired of the radio station on in the front which was playing the Gypsy Kings seemingly forever....so he changed the station and the radio was just randomly playing Christmas in New York by the Pogues. Worst part of yesterday: Having the front staff ask me if there are brazil nuts in the fruit cakes (there are) and hearing the customer say "Oh, well they look lovely...I'll just buy one and see if I have a reaction." I didn't realize these nut allergy people liked to live on the edge like that!

It's a tiring time of year to be pastry bitch! It's crazy busy at work, cranky co-workers, rude customers......phone ringing off the hook, people calling up and not getting the concept that Christmas ordering was cut off Monday at closing time and that they will have to come in and choose from what's in the front case since they didn't bother to order their buche de noel earlier and NO we won't put one aside for them............. Oh, and the day started off with the building next door being evacuated because of a "suspicious" package. We just kept on working with the street closed off by the police and all the workers from the evacuated building in the bakery and bistro for lunch, coffee, croissants etc. Enough about me..........how was YOUR day?

My stepdad always made tourtiere for Christmas. He always cooked it himself and spent half the day making the filling (Mom made the pastry for him). He grew up in a family of 7 kids with a single parent so their version was very bluecollar (not like the ones at my work which have venison etc)......his version was equal parts ground pork and ground beef, a very large yellow onion, some savory, salt and pepper and a tiny bit of sage and thyme. Sounds uncomplicated but because there are so few seasonings it is quite difficult to get them exactly right. He died at age 41 unexpectedly of an aneurism and never gave out the recipe, so I had to figure it out myself. This year I get to go "back to the drawing board" now that my oldest daughter is a vegetarian. Our other family Christmas tradition: my mom's ceramic moose gravy boat ---apparently the best part of holiday dinners during my childhood was having the "gravy moose" barf on your mashed potatoes!

I have tried Warheads, but as much as I like sour candy, I've never cared for hard candy (I always end up biting and chewing them...very hard on the teeth) I definitely haven't eaten enough of them in one sitting to enjoy the "aftereffect". I'll just have to take your word on that one!

Usually drinking saps my appetite so I try to eat BEFORE, but I used to make myself something to eat at 3am when I still lived at home with my parents....the most unusual thing had to be the lasagne sandwich which was just a big slab of my mom's lasagne in between slices of white supermarket bread. A couple of years ago I had the pizza with gravy at House of Georgie here in Ottawa.......it wasn't as bad as it sounds but I definitely wouldn't eat it sober! If you haven't experienced pizza with gravy it is just a slice of pepperoni pizza with a ladle of gravy poured over (beef? pork? chicken? I have no idea)

SOUR CANDY! I anticipate someday needing reconstructive surgery to my teeth and jaws.........but I just love them. Sour Patch Kids (these are nicely sour, but they will make your gums ache) Sour Skittles (when you've eaten enough of these at once you can actually get a welt on the inside of your cheek...eat a few more after this point and you will get a slight "shock" along the welt with each one ....similar to the effect you get if you bite down on a foil gum wrapper with a tooth that has a filling) Hands down my favorite! Jelly Belly Sassy Sours (good, some flavours are better than others) Sour Starburst (barely sour.....don't go there) I also love Almond Joy, so much so that I buy one whenever I see them for sale (they don't seem to be around much in Canada)

Roasted Banana, Hazelnut and Cinnamon Espresso and Caramel (especially for ice cream) Earl Grey Tea and Dark Chocolate White Chocolate and Cranberry with either pistachio or almonds Toffee Chocolate and Almond Coconut & just about anything sweet! On the savoury side....duck foie mousse with carmelised apples and onions.

Wendy....do you ever bake cheescakes in square or rectangular pans? I wanted to make a large cheesecake to cut into diamond shapes for banquets but I was unsure about getting them out of the pans. I have done cheesecakes in round silpat molds to make a "deconstructed" cheesecake with the cheesecake circle placed onto a cinnamon almond sable and topped with carmelised apples. I got them out of the molds but it was a pain and 3 of them broke. Any advice you could give me on making non-round cheesecake shapes? Thanks, Teri