The leaves are beautiful colours and the sky is blue, but there is a definite chill in the air. Fall is such a pretty time of the year, but I spend most of it acclimatizing to the frosty mornings and brisk winds. "Put on another sweater," is my mantra, but on these chilly days, I like to have something that warms me from the inside out. That's right, I'm talking about soup!
When my husband and I were still in the "courting" stage of our relationship, he took me to his hometown to meet his parents. His mother had made a glorious Caesar salad, complete with homemade croutons. Since it was our first meeting, I very politely ate a normal amount of salad, and I did not sneak back in the kitchen later to surreptitiously snack on handfuls of those homemade croutons, the way I would after we were engaged and they were stuck with me.
We are entering the festive season, and you know what that means: parties, parties, parties! It seems like there is something going on every weekend leading up to Christmas: open houses, dinners, and let us not forget the social whirl that comes with children's activities.
I don't know about you, but I hate arriving at a party empty-handed. A bottle of wine is always an acceptable (and loved!) hostess gift, but that can get expensive at this busy time of year. Why not try a homemade gift from your kitchen instead?
I am back from my annual vacation at my in-laws', and I am experiencing my annual "all my pants seem to have shrunk" phenomenon. Let's just say that averaging four drinks a day is not great for one's waistline, and leave it at that.
I love Greek food. I love the flavours, I love how Mediterranean food is among the healthiest in the world, and I love how eating it transports me back to 1992, when I was almost seventeen and on a school trip to the Greek islands. I know! How lucky was I?
Remember when you were a child, and your parents took you to Dairy Queen, and you were allowed to get a dipped cone, and you would watch with fascination as the teenaged Dairy Queen employee took that swirl of soft serve and dipped it into the vat of chocolate, and then you felt like you just witnessed something completely magical as that chocolate hardened into a perfect, scrump-dilly-umptious treat?
I've always loved pears—they are a sweet, juicy harbinger of Fall. My whole family races to eat them when they become ripe. Speaking of which, have you ever noticed that pears, like avocados, seem to follow a certain pattern: not ready, not ready, not ready, THEY ARE ALL PERFECTLY RIPE, oops, now they are overripe. That window of perfect ripeness is only a couple of days long, hence the race to eat them all.
Oh, zucchinis. They are amazing vegetables, really they are. They are low calorie, high fibre, and full of vital nutrients, such as folate, potassium, and Vitamins A and C. In addition, as any gardener can tell you, they are easy plants to grow, with prolific yields and a habit of going from "not quite ready to pick" to "OMG this zucchini is gigantic" in 24 hours or less.
Here we are, mid-summer, and I feel like I've reached the "kitchen fatigue" point. It seems as soon as I clean up the kitchen from one meal, the children are raiding the refrigerator or rummaging through the cupboards looking for snacks. Chalk it up to extra activities and growth spurts, I suppose.
Here's a confession: I am terrified of the barbeque. I'm terrified that I am going to set myself on fire or blow up the house, and so I tend to eye that grill from a safe distance, usually with a glass of wine in my hand, while my husband does the dirty work.
