I was making pastry when I heard the smack. My hands were deep in the shaggy stage, when the butter has combined with the flour and is dampened just enough by the icy water to hang raggedly from my fingers. I know from my mother and her mother...
"I feed off the event for months." My words last week before heading to New York for Cherry Bombe Jubilee, an annual women in food conference. I was referring to the wisdom from the speakers and the conversations I have throughout the day, from the bathroom to...
I'm on my way to Cherry Bombe Jubilee, a one day women in food conference in Brooklyn that I consider mandatory continuing education. Last year my recap included a heated #METOO panel discussion with Toronto restauranteur Jen Agg, one that artist Jessie Kanelos Weiner captured perfectly...
A photographer I once worked with told me that his first kiss was behind the Maldon Sea Salt factory in Essex, England. Maldon sea salt is worthy of such a memory; it’s also a food stylist’s dream. Each crystal is textured with just the right...
The south sun streams through our kitchen windows mid-morning and casts long strips of sharp light across the counter, the cupboards and the floorboards. Yesterday it shone through the tulips, turning the dark purple leaves an iridescent mauve. The beams of light are architectural, with...
When I sit down to write and nothing flows, I use food as a writing prompt. Things like...
I worked at a frozen yogurt shop the summer I was sixteen. I remember bicycling to work, the wind lifting my pony-tail as I coasted straight down steep Sackville Street all the way to the waterfront. We served soft serve yogurt milkshakes, yogurt sundaes covered in...
This morning I stepped outside the back door into a glazed wonderland. It was as if everything - the steps, the frozen ground, the tiniest branches - had been candied in sugar syrup. My car even looked like a giant marron glacé; I had to crack it...
I’ve been collecting mentors my whole life. Friendship mentors, dating mentors, cooking mentors, writing mentors and parenting mentors. Cathy is my 'mother of boys' mentor. The other day she was in town and we visited over coffee, I hung on her every word. Cathy and her family...
“Dad," I asked over the phone the other night, “did you like Jell-O as a kid?” I know we didn’t eat it when I was young, neither the proper English, homemade kind, or the industrial Jell-O from a package. I had a vague memory of...
Social media feeds are a-buzz with discussions on January diets, detoxes, dry January and veganuary. Guess what? I’m in on it too. I’ve been following cookbook author Anna Jones’s seven day ‘reset’ since Sunday. But unlike a diet or a cleanse, it’s just a week...
I called my parents today on speaker phone as I took down the Christmas tree. It was nice to have their company; I missed being with them after a Christmas of togetherness. Their house is quiet now that we've all vacated. Food is still coming from...
When life gives you lemons I’m sitting in my kitchen, Sarah McLachlan’ Song for a Winter’s Night is filling the room. In my hand is a cup of hot lemon - that concoction of lemon, honey and ginger that is both soothing and nostalgic. My mother used...
Love after Love In the wake of last week's 'tundra' trifle, I bring you an easy chocolate mousse for your holiday dessert needs. I've chosen mousse because it's both magically light and dense, rich and creamy, but also because it's a make-ahead dessert. Yes, trifle is as well, but...
I didn’t grow up eating trifle. We lived in the South when I was little, so my mom folded southern classics into our holiday repertoire: pecan pie, lemon chess pie, chocolate chess pie… and they became our traditions. For me, a trifle was something my...