I would like to present a pictorial essay titled “A Call To Apricots”. I love apricots. They’re easily one of my favourite fruits and I don’t commit to that sort of prioritisation lightly. I love how little they are, I love their nubbly soft skin, and I love the easy way they surrender from their [...]
Also tagged awesomeI like green, I like brown. I like brown a lot. Here’s some brown: just a quickie. Brown cake! Okay, I admit brown cake doesn’t photograph so well here. But the photo on the recipe page (linked below) should tell you volumes. Cardamom coffee zucchini cake. Holy shredded panty tassels, dudes, this cake is the bomb. [...]
Also tagged awesomeWhen initially explained, the construction of homemade doughnuts seems like a basic step on the path of yeasty delights. Providing, of course, that you have resolved the doughnut vs. donut spelling conundrum in a mature fashion. As someone who likes as many letters in her words as possible, I favour the d-o-u-g-h-n-u-t spelling. But let’s [...]
Also tagged adventures in cookingToday is the glorious anniversary of my Dadini’s birth! My Dadini rocks. He can fix anything (his current recreational project is the disassembly-and-restoration-and-reassembly of a vintage bulldozer) and solves all my car and house problems with a clarity and efficiency of thought that I can only dream of emulating. Unlike me, he has never cried [...]
Also tagged adventures in cooking, awesomeThere was a lot of cooking going on Chez Spoonfully last night, and, not coincidentally, a lot of AWESOME. M wanted to find out if he could make apple danishes, I wanted muffins. (M’s recipe follows at the end.) There’s no denying that M’s venture was the more aesthetically satisfying. Here’s the apple and sultana [...]
Also tagged adventures in cookingHow can it be that I am fundamentally an impatient person and yet still have an ingrained, Pavlovian passion for things that, by definition, require time and plenty of it? Is this some sort of unconscious self-punishment? Knitting, playing music, writing: all demand the slow tick tick tick of patient, tiny steps that make progress [...]
Also tagged adventures in cooking, awesome, banging onBut anyway, back to bread. I’ve been refining my skillz0rs lately, since M just got his expert bread-making mitts on Richard Bertinet’s Crust. I’ve watched videos of Bertinet online and did a little research on The Fresh Loaf and other websites, and reached the conclusion that (a) the dough I was using could be drier; [...]
Also tagged breadYou know what’s cool? Sponges. Your typical sea sponge barely qualifies as an animal, but its soft, spongy skeletal remains are hugely useful — so useful that we had to find a way of producing synthetic substitutes because naturally occurring sponges can’t keep up with demand. When you squeeze a sponge (I mean a synthetic [...]
Also tagged adventures in cooking, awesomeI don’t know what’s happened lately — maybe I had some sort of culinary-specific stroke — but I am really on a string of duds at the moment. I’m staying philosophical for the time being: I scowl at the duds as they come out of the oven, then murmur something like “Nothing ventured, nothing gained”, [...]
Also tagged adventures in cookingI think I’ve mentioned before that I’m not a cakey person. Nor am I a fluffy sweet snack person. So when the urge to bake racked my head, heart and right-hand pinky today, I decided some wholesome breakfast loaf bakery was in order. I had my heart set on a spicy, moist carrot and zucchini [...]
Also tagged adventures in cooking