eskay

Thanks a lot, I'll keep my eye out.

French toast for me today. It was going to be pancakes, but I got lazy, and french toast is easier to make than pancakes I meant to take a picture but my camera is out of juice and I don't have any charged batteries around...besides, it was getting cold I'm not really a fan of sugar or vanilla in my french toast batter, I prefer the sweetness to come from the maple syrup. (And I've had bad experiences with vanilla in breakfast foods in general...just too flowery). I just mix an egg with a bit of milk, cinnamon, and a couple scrapes of nutmeg. Small pinch of sald if the butter is unsalted. Mmmm, now I want more.

PC products are also sold at valu-mart and Zehrs around here (SW ontario). All the same loblaws family, I guess. I like a lot of the PC products, but there's some that just aren't great--I haven't had much luck with their breakfast cereals, for example (their raisin bran has too many raisins! And the copycat cheerios taste like chemicals). And I'm a compulsive label reader, so I've noticed that their products sometimes tend to have more 'not-food' ingredients than the national brands. But there's still a bunch of their products that I regularly buy: orange juice concentrate, double strength laundry detergent (the bottle is half the size! ). Oh, and I bought some of their organic green tea bags because they were on sale and I have a bad habit of buying lots of different kind of tea, and I'm pretty hooked--I think I've gone through half the box in a week. I actually saw the dulche de leche in a display this morning and almost picked some up, but decided against it. Barely. I want to try making my own first. Marlene, what is this Normandy style butter you speak of? Why haven't I noticed it. Too bad I just bought butter...I'd better get baking and use it up

Baked a couple of small 8x8 cakeish things today to restock my freezer with baked goods I made hummingbirdkiss' gingery gingerbread cake (here) and an applesauce cake that I'm especially proud of, since I didn't work from a recipe, just winged it No pictures because they're just brown squares.

Mmm, so many delicious looking photos nakji, what are the red sprinkles on your pasta? Dinner tonight was a rather rustic chicken and tomato stew, perfect for the horribly damp weather outside. I used this recipe with a couple of changes: I couldn't be bothered to roast the garlic seperately so I just chucked a couple cloves in the pot, and I added some olives because I thought they'd go well. I also omitted the wine because I didn't have any. Was delicious, and now I have several day's worth of leftovers--score! Apologies for the slightly off-kilter photo, this was the only one that came out in focus

As far as using random bags as pastry bags goes, I like using washed-out milk bags. They're the right size, and sturdy enough to stand up to being squashed around.

I made cupcakes, but packed them away before I remembered to take a picture, so just pretend this is a full dozen I made the lemon macadamia nut cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, except they're not vegan, since I used cow's milk (just lactose free). Darn tasty though. I need to get me some pastry tips, enough of this spreading with a knife nonsense. Now I have leftover lemon icing. Suggestions? Otherwise I may just start eating it with a spoon

Why do you add the pits? I checked your blog to see if it's mentioned there, but I didn't see anything; sorry if it was.

In the name of Science, I went and poked at the remains sitting in the fridge. Yes the rice gets hard.

GTO: Beautiful photo! But what's a Lincolnshire Poacher? Is that a variety of pumpkin or something? Like magic, leftover curry beef becomes dumpling filling for soup! Using up leftovers always makes me happy

Oh, I've got another one: Frozen premade sushi. I was amazed to discover that this actually exists when it appeared in our freezer one day.

I use the PC bags....I keep one in my backpack so it's around. Anything really heavy, like milk or cans, goes into my backpack though. And the sobeys/etc ones are bigger, but not as pretty

I just heard about this site. Tastebook is a service that lets users take recipes from sites (I think just epicurious at the moment) and make a cookbook, which they can then pay to get printed copies of for themselves or to share. The site says it's $35 for a book with 100 recipes. I think it's a really neat idea and while I haven't tried playing with the site yet I might find myself doing so in the future. What do you think?

My stupid fridge froze the cucumber I bought yesterday Anyone have a recipe for cucumber sorbet? Here's two recent dinners.....neither of them turned out particularly awesome though. Sunday was squash soup, which in my opinion actually tasted better just as roasted squash out of the oven. Monday I made latkes/potato pancakes. I think the pan wasn't hot enough--they were oilier than I think they should have been. But the applesauce (well, dry applesauce) was tasty. I call it: dinner by grater!

So. Prompted in part by this thread, I hauled out a notebook I'd been keeping for something special and started filling it with the recipes floating around variously as scraps of paper on my desk, bookmarks in my browser, emails to myself, etc etc. As much as the majority of my life is contained in my laptop these days ( ) I actually prefer writing with a pencil for this kind of thing...it allows me to put arrows back and forth to things and lay things out however I like. Plus I can doodle diagrams or go back and add notes with ease. Also I don't need to worry about getting flour in my keyboard Isn't it pretty? Taking a cue from lab notebooks I've used and abused, I'm numbering my pages (only about 10 at a time though, as I need to). That allows me to do this: Note how most (almost all really) of them are baking, rather than cooking, recipes. I find it really hard to follow a recipe for non-baking stuff to the letter. The majority of the time I'm just working by feel, which is nice but it means that I never ever try all the recipes I've bookmarked in cookbooks, because I'm too busy just cooking whatever And here's a couple interior pages. Yes I can read that. There's not much in the way of instructions for simple recipes, like the brownies on the left. The brackets show me how to combine the ingredients, and for basic recipes I'll just put the ingredient list and the baking time: how the ingredients are ordered tells me how to combine them: butter and sugar together at the start means to cream the butter and sugar, etc etc.

Ok, I'll bite. Here's the receipt from my trip on sunday. Couldn't get everything I wanted to, because I needed some rather heavy/bulky things and I couldn't carry it all. So I went back again on monday EDIT: note healed cut on index finger and purchase of more bandaids

Mmmmmm, grapefruit. My favourite fruit This morning's breakfast. Oatmeal with cranberry jam that I made a small amount of last night. Needed more jam.

Wait what?

I love the olive peeking out from the end of the loaf

I buy single serving yogurt.... it's the same stuff, you get 4 different kinds, and it's 5 less dishes a week that I need to wash Plus, I had a bad experience a while back with a lid on a yogurt container coming off in my backpack This sudden surge in bottled iced 'green' tea has me pretty baffled...I'm pretty sure that any antioxidant health benefits that may or may not exist are entirely offset by the tons of sugar in those things Another thing--soy lunchmeat. What the heck? A sandwich isn't exactly one of those things thats horribly ruined by taking out the meat; I can think of several different things that would work just as well and probably taste a lot better than faux chicken

I don't know, I could see myself buying bread crumbs....I never ever have stale bread around (I generally keep it in the freezer because I can't eat a whole loaf fast enough) and I don't know how I'd turn it into breadcrumbs if I did

I want to figure out the best way to proof bread overnight as a time-saver. Say I was making my dough in the evening. I am assuming that it would not rise enough (first rise) if I just stuck it in the fridge right away after I kneaded it and left it there. But would it be better to let it rise for a couple hours and then put it in the fridge for the night? Or should I put it in the fridge right away, and then take it out in the morning and leave it out until it's doubled, then punch down, rise again, etc etc?

Thanks I should mention, I used this recipe again (with a food processor this time) over the thanksgiving weekend. Still awesome.

I'll answer that one: Because pssshting it out of the can and into remarkably high mounds on top of dessert is just too much fun Who are these people who buy precooked bacon, anyway?

Me too. I'm much more likely to shop-then-plan when I go to the farmer's market. (Not looking forward to winter... ) At the grocery store I usually have a pretty good idea of what I want to get, but there's always room for flexibility.