Banana Bread

I have a weird relationship with bananas. I like to eat them when they're still green, just past the starchy stage, so that they're nice and tart. Once they start ripening and turn sweet, I can't eat them. The aroma of ripening bananas turn my stomach.

And yet, I love bananas baked in goods, so I allow the bananas to overripe and become super sweet. I then freeze them for future baking projects or add them mashed to a warm bowl of oats.

I realize that I have a really small opening to eat a banana as is. But think of all the banana breads I can make!

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Everything but the Kitchen Sink Cookies

Can I be honest with you? The best part about dragon boat (aside from the exercise, being on the water and the gorgeous view) is the potluck my team puts together at our races. We each take turns bringing a food item, all delicious.


There was a member on our team who made the best cookies. Without a doubt, Jimmy brought cookies to every race because Jimmy cookies were high in demand. Unfortunately for us, he decided to quit dragon boat. The horror, the tears – no more Jimmy cookies!

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Butternut Squash, Red Lentil & Coconut Soup

I don't want to start another post in disbelief that, once again, time has passed much too quickly for my liking. But really, how is it almost November already?



The family and I went apple picking for the Thanksgiving weekend, an outing that is turning into a yearly tradition. We picked Galas and Honeycrisps and Mutsus and Jonagolds, plus Fujis and Golden Delicious and Ambrosias, oh my. All twenty pounds of apples have been baked, cooked and consumed. I made six jars of applesauce and it was, bias aside, the best tasting applesauce of my life. Every time I eat a spoonful, I actually take A Moment to enjoy the apple goodness and pray to the cooking gods that I can recreate this perfection next year.



A pie was baked. I am slowly getting the hang of pie crust (I'm quite proud of the edges). The smell of freshly baked apple pie was too tempting and the pie was sliced into before it had the chance to cool, which resulted in major juice leakage. I'm assuming this is the norm and I have learned my lesson for next time.

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Crunchy Granola

Ah, spring. Thank you for your belated arrival. Last week was the first week where the temperature stayed in the double digits and it was definitely most welcomed. However, it seems that I have developed an allergic reaction to pollen. My eyes were itchy and watery and I kept sneezing at random, but even this bizarre development (and the rainy weather this week) has not dampened my enthusiasm for warmer weather.



Do you know who else was enjoying the warm Toronto weather last week? Mark Bittman. I am a huge Mark Bittman fan and I let out a surprising but gleeful, "What?!" when I found out through twitter that he was in town to check out some of the wonderful food programming we have in the city. (Yes, I reluctantly joined the twitter world, mostly because I needed a way to get around New York Times' monthly article limit by following their twitter feed. I don't think I'll be sharing my account with you anytime soon as I have yet to do my first tweet.) For years, a weekly highlight was to see what recipe he was going to post for his now-defunct Minimalist column. The most mind-blowing revelation to date is savoury oatmeal. Who knew that adding soy sauce and scallions to oatmeal would taste like congee? These days, I look forward to his entries on food sustainability.



When I saw his How to Cook Everything at my favourite used bookstore (the one where I can never leave without buying something), I snatched it up without a second thought. It is the first thing I reach for whenever I have a cooking related question. Skills his cookbook has taught me: how to skin the overabundance of tomatoes growing in my backyard last summer to make oven-dried tomatoes, how to shape a baguette, how to roast a juicy chicken and how to make granola.

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