In another life, I spent a summer waitressing at a crepe restaurant in cottage country. This was a year or so after a crepe restaurant would open up on a very busy intersection in the city I grew up in, and a few years before I would move to a city where yet another crepe …
Category Archives: mutterings
winter survival.
Things to help get through long winter days: hot chocolate, a couple of good books (one of which has to be about food), knitting, and a goofy-looking owl.
heart to heart.
Hey lookie! I bought a set of heart-shaped cookie cutters. Yay! While I generally prefer drop cookies over cookies that need to be rolled and cut, I can’t resist a heart – especially if it is made of chocolate biscuit, which I’m planning to do for a particular date in February, no big deal. I also …
self-actualization and bread.
We live in an old, creaky apartment with cracks that crawl up the walls, lumpy hardwood floors, and crooked charm. The harbinger of winter is the sound of the radiators coming on, first with slow grumbling and hisses, building up to rattling like a tin kettle boiling over. Occasionally it sounds like a troll is …
the M word.
Sometimes I like to go to McDonald’s and challenge my ideas about purity.
Oh for palate’s sake
It’ll be Christmas soon, and that means one thing is certain: potlucks. I know we haven’t quite leapfrogged over Halloween yet, but I already see Christmas decorations for sale in the shops, so there. I’ve always wondered why no one brings a giant bowl of plain white rice to a potluck. I suppose it’s because …
Mood and food
(I like rhymes. I like words with “oo”s.) Most of the professional bakers I have met are really relaxed people: never in a rush, they always pull things out of the oven at just the right time. They don’t fiddle anxiously with the lemon curd in mortal fear of it curdling or hover over the …
A story
The other day I went to the drugstore. While I was waiting in line at the register the lady in front of me was debating out loud with herself whether to get the package of pudding that was all chocolate flavour or half chocolate and vanilla. She chose all chocolate because apparently her granddaughter likes …
Tot-oro
The street outside our building is a crunchy carpet of acorns, a harbinger of colder months up ahead. You know what I think about when I see acorns? Totoro. I grew up watching the movie, “My Neighbor Totoro,” which is about two girls who move to rural Japan and discover a big furry creature …
sweet sounds.
For a long time my favourite sound has been ice gently and casually clinking in a glass, but the other day I happened across a new favourite: the sound of fruit juice sizzling as it smacks the baking sheet, because the peach and apple filling is leaking out of the pie crust while baking.