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.
Maybe it's part of my master plan to get really shiny hair, or maybe it's just because avocados are deliciously full of nutrients; either way, I cannot seem to get enough of that creamy green superfood these days. This avocado pasta salad has just the right amount of zing from the lemon and rich flavour from the tomatoes, not to mention the wonderful creaminess from the avocado! Oh, avocados, how I love you.
Here's the situation—it's 11:55 and you're hungry. Starving, even. You cannot stop thinking about lunch. Temptations abound; the takeout place around the corner is calling out its siren song of french fries and pizza by the slice.
It all started, many years ago, with an obsession with Tim Hortons' cranberry blueberry bran muffins. My soon-to-be husband and I were cross country skiing and we stopped in Canmore to refuel and get lunch; I looked at all the baskets of baked goods and chose a cranberry blueberry bran muffin, not knowing that one bite later I would be hopelessly hooked. I thought about that muffin for days, and after that I would go out of my way to obtain another. I would stop at nothing, it seemed, to get my muffin fix.
I don't know about you, but right now I'm at that point where I cannot remember what it was like to leave the house without donning several layers of clothing, I cannot remember what my yard looks like without two feet of snow in it, and I cannot remember what it was like to feel "too warm." Winter, it seems, has been going on forever and will go on forever, spring is never going to come, and I will be cleaning salt stains off my snow boots for the rest of my life.
Hands up if you’ve been pilfering from your kids’ Halloween bags. Hands up if you “accidentally” bought too much candy and now you have a plethora of Rockets and Hershey’s bars in the house. Hands up if you’re feeling like all those fun-sized treats are not so fun when it comes to your pant size.
A few weeks ago I was at the BlissDom Canada conference, and one of the lunches was sponsored by Canadian Lentils. I feel that lentils do not get the attention that they deserve. They don’t have the sexiest reputation; you say lentils and people conjure up images of macramé owls and orange wallpaper and some kind of vile concoction bubbling on the goldenrod coloured stove in the corner. IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THAT WAY.
The answer, these days, is food colouring, although when the cake was originally created the colour came from a chemical reaction between vinegar and buttermilk, which allowed the red anthocyanin of the cocoa to show through. Nowadays most cocoa is Dutch-processed and more alkaline, and so the colour change from the chemical reaction is negligible, which explains the use of food colouring to enhance the cake’s appearance.
Everything you ever wanted to know about red velvet cupcakes, but were afraid to ask!
