Panaderia Canadiense

Ecuadorian Lay's Sour-Cream and Bacon. They are epically good. The sour-cream and chive flavour is subtle enough to not be cloying, and the smokey bacon-ness kind of builds on you until you realize you've eaten the entire bag and now require another. I'll be very sad if they get phased out.

Oh dear lord! $8 a head?!?!?! I pay $0.33 and scream when it goes up to $0.50. I can't even fathom….

I got a brand spanking new shiny charcoal parilla for Difuntos, so I'm thinking that NYE I'm going to fire that up and grill a ton of the really excellent beef smokies my butcher has been making lately, and maybe a spiral or two of chorizo Ambateño. Also, there's real bourbon in country now, so many cheerful libations of such. NYD is probably me searching, hung-overedly, in the fridge for what looks vaguely edible. So…. fruit salad and cold cuts?

Looking fondant pro to me, sister! Did you carve the cake underneath into shape, or is there a dump truck pan out there in the universe that I have yet to encounter?

Double the egg whites in my waffle recipe, just because I have too many egg whites and want to use 'em up. The first waffles off the iron were OK in terms of cookedness, but had a weird flavour and texture; the second waffles never came off the iron at all. I had to pry the lid open with a butterknife, and I've got a neat bakelite-contoured burn on my thumb from the handle. Oh, did I mention my waffle iron is closing in on 100 years old?

That opens a whole can of worms…. For my 2 cents, there are two "best" ways to cook a rabbit. One is to lightly brown the pieces in a pan then slow-roast it in the oven in a white wine and wild mushroom cream sauce. The other is to spit the whole beast and turn it over hot coals, basting it frequently with chimichurri, until the outside has crisped nicely.

What about hot buttered rum? Done right, there's a lot of cinnamon and honey going on there, but no citrus (at least, not in the ones my family makes). Ditto to hot ginger and rum toddies.

There's also no reason you can't now use that bunny as a side dish - if it's not the main meat star of the evening, one will most definitely feed three people as an appetizer.

Ricotta and quinua gnocchi (shout-out to @SobaAddict70 for the base recipe) in a sauce of ground beef, wild mushrooms, and red wine. Oh, and asparagus. It doesn't look the most delectable, but it tasted insanely good.

You don't have a laundry sink? Or a big laundry-basins complex construction? I will have to wash my tamalero tonight (once the whole pumpkin I crammed in there is cooked), and there's no way it fits in my sink as it barely fits on my stove, so it's going to my laundry stand which is more than big enough for it.

Maybe I'm late to the party, but I'm fairly reliable when it comes to picking oranges that aren't flavourless, dry, ugly-inside balls of yuck…. Heavy for its size has been mentioned, but nobody yet has talked about scoring the rinds lightly with your thumbnail (Smithy comes close to this with the sniff test, but this takes it to another level.) Oranges that are past their prime don't have as much oil in their skins as nice, fresh, tasty ones do - so the smell will be less or absent entirely and it will lack the sparkle of a really good, really fresh orange. If you're scoring right, you should be able to see a little spray of orange oil depart the rind; those are the good ones - and the bonus is that the scoring test defeats any wax that might have been added at the shipping house. I'll also jump on the "try Valencia" bandwagon - they're not all that seedy (and besides, if you're peeling and cutting to accommodate the blender you'll be able to seed them quite easily) and the flavour is far, far superior to Navels or Washingtons. If you were down here, I'd also force you to try something called Naranja Hielo, which seem to be made for the express purpose of making Orange Juleps.

My clients' awesomeness level is currently set to "Epic." Matías turns 11 today. Also, Christmas cookies! From left to right, they're Mocha White Chocolate Chip, Old-Fashioned Gingersnaps, and Vanilla Dark Chocolate Chip.

He's deliberately misleading you, Darienne. They're tapir footprints, and the cocoa in question is gran cru fino de aroma criollo from Sto. Domingo, Ecuador.

I oil my scoops for cookie-making when it's the kind of batter that will be really heinous to try and dig out (I'm looking at you, chocobolitas!). However, what I've found is that an old-fashioned ice-cream scoop with the thumb-release mechanism on it works better than any of those things. Happily, a company here has those in sizes ranging from melon ball to mega gigantic….

I've only got the good stuff in my cupboards, so by default I use the good stuff.

And I was just thinking of you, too! I need to bother you a bit about what you use to stick granola bars together - altitude plays heck with my caramel.

Well, all you have to do is visit Ecuador…. Not a terrible idea, in the dead of the northern winter. It's a glorious summer day today, and I'm making gingersnaps!

I buy them at my local baker's supply shop; they're made in Guayaquil, so they don't have to travel too far and they're actually available year-round (although the shop generally only stocks them around Christmas and Easter). I pay $5.50/100 for the personal-sized ones, and $7.50/100 for the larger ones. They're lightly waxed banana-kraft paper.

My goodness, I've been away too long. So much yumminess here…. So, Arturo (he of last year's highly celebrated Smaug the Dragon cake) has discovered JK Rowling. In keeping with this, that runic inscription around the cake reads "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good." Also, Doña Olga, one of my city's last old-guard wood-fired oven bakers, turned 90 and insisted that I be the one to make her cake. The three tiers are coconut chiffon, orange spice, and carrot. And then for Hallowe'en, I ended up making a zillion spider pies. Then, of course, before I knew it, it was Panettone season. I'm also making chocolate and walnut ones this year.

Well, the Rat Coffins made me think of Tortures and Nasties - perhaps better known as Tourtieres and (Cornish) Pasties, although I didn't realize this until I was almost 20 because they were only ever referred to as Tortures and Nasties in my house.

Which volcano? Cotopaxi, which has made international news, is 100 km north of me; Tungurahua, which usually doesn't make the international news, is 25 km southeast. Both are currently spewing ash. The city I'm in is one of the safest zones in the country - it's where they evacuate the sector between us and Cotopaxi *to* when it blows. Nobody here does volcano cakes - I'll have to suggest it.

It's what's left over after the butter is taken off - didn't you grandparents ever make you work a churn, when you were disobedient?

I'd be very tempted to make an entire recipe of oatmeal chocolate-chip cookie up as a bar. That would break well in hand, has good cohesion, and will stand up to being passed. Also pairs well with grape.

I don't have atrocities, at least not from *my* point of view - the crap I pulled on my friends, though, might convince you otherwise. My mom is a tremendous cook, and I regularly took heat-up leftovers with me to school for lunch. My friends, though, were often quite horrified by the contents of my lunch kit. Highlights include Easter leftovers - rabbit long-stewed in cream sauce, over wild rice (a family tradition). They thought this smelled tremendous, and would line up to try a bit; then I'd inform them of what it was exactly they were eating - the Easter Bunny - and watch them turn green. Stepdad also made award-winning deep dish pizzas stuffed with things like shredded crab meat, langoustines, etc. I'd tell people this was tofu and sea-bug pizza just to keep them away. Keep your meaty-hooks off my pizza, dangit! And for some reason, everybody but I and my friend Miriam, who had recently emigrated from Iran, was utterly horrified at the concept of a cold meatloaf sandwich.

CANadian Oilseed Low Acid, actually. I'm violently allergic to eggs, and as a kid I figured that Eggplant was just some evil way the vegetable kingdom had devised of trying to murder me over dinner - like, not only are chickens out to get me, but now there's this plant that lays eggs? Nope, nope, nope, that's not going within a mile of my mouth. Mom solved this by calling the various dishes she fed me "Berenjena, Basque Style," "Ratatouille" and "Aubergene Casserole" - she never ever mentioned the English name of the vegetable she was serving me. I should mention that I absolutely *adore* eggplant in all its myriad presentations, probably because Mom fooled me into eating it while young.