The Hunger Struck - Confessions of a Food Fanatic.

I know it’s officially fall but I couldn’t resist one last summer dessert before moving on to all the fall favorites. I’m absolutely dieing to make apple pie this year and have a new recipe I have extremely high hopes for. It’s funny because I have been dieing to make pie of any kind for the last 2 weeks but have been holding out until closer to thanksgiving as I have a tendency to over do it right at the beginning of the season. Well at least according to my husband. Personally, I’m not one to have too much of anything. Is there even such a thing where pie is concerned?

There have been an abundance of berries this year and though the season is really over and perhaps it would be more appropriate to be making things like pie, I thought one last summer tart would be just the distraction I need from from certain things made with apples, pumpkins or squash. Though I will admit I couldn’t resist baking my favorite Harvest Butternut Squash Loaf over the weekend.

Well I’m officially back in my kitchen and couldn’t be happier about it. I really hope to forgo such long blogging breaks in the future. In my defence, it was however quite an unglamorous and difficult summer I endured, one where the maintenance a food blog proved impossible. They really don’t warn you about these things, or maybe they do and I just didn’t listen. Either way I hold myself accountable for thinking that the transition into such major change would be smooth, uncomplicated and altogether enjoying. As it stands all of those ideas of what I thought these months would bring couldn’t have been more off base. This was extremely frustrating at the time but of course now that I am on the other side I feel that it was all worth it.

What am I hinting at? Well after almost 4 miserable months we are officially delighted to tell you that in early March we are expecting a brand new addition to our family of 3 and we couldn’t be more excited and terrified about it. Excited for all of the obvious reasons and terrified because this will be our first non fur baby and we are starting to wake up to the responsibilities that that entails. But we are delighted by the challenges that it will bring and are in a bit of a panic searching for new digs that will accommodate our new addition.

It feels so strange to acknowledge this but until Saturday I hadn’t set foot in my kitchen in over a month. A MONTH. That has got to be a new record. It has been a crazy summer full of unexpected surprises that have been literally making it impossible to even think about cooking. I’ve heard other equally enthusiastic cooks describe similar situations but I never thought it would be possible that anything could affect me in this way. Oh boy was I wrong. And I’m not out of the woods yet so I apologize for the light posts which may continue for just a few more weeks while I process this ciaos, everything should be back to normal though by September. Fingers crossed.

So to mark this strange month of no cooking I decided I needed to bake a cake. Not a fancy cake either but a cake that can be eaten for breakfast lunch and dinner for as long as it can last in our current home cooking deprived house. This ended up to be 2 days which was one day more than I expected. In situations like this I do not have time to mess around looking through recipes as I normally would so I did the only natural thing and turned to Dorie Greenspan. Lets be honest here, if you’re looking for a no fail recipe, one that whether you’ve made it before or not you know it will not disappoint, Dorie Greenspan’s Baking From My Home To Yours is the best possible reference.

This apple cake is so easy and really amazing. It’s the perfect kind of coffee cake, not too heavy and extremely moist which also makes it an idea breakfast, if cake for breakfast is you thing. The combination of apple butter and grated apple gives it an incredibly deep apple flavor, so if you can try not to substitute then apple butter for just regular apple sauce, I don’t think you would achieve the same result.

This is the easiest recipe in the world and I feel somewhat ridiculous even posting it. It’s really a no brainer but so perfect that you absolutely have to try it. We recently got into the habit of trying out all of the varieties of zucchini available at this time of year, which is a bit out of character for me because usually unless its baked with lots of sugar and chocolate (I’ll eat anything in loaf form!) I’m not the biggest zucchini fan. Well maybe I’m coming around to it a bit more in my old age, I’ve recently had my eye on a certain zucchini fritters recipe and baked zucchini sticks are one of my favourites, but as a kid I really couldn’t stand the stuff.

I’ve gone a little tomato crazy this year. I’m finding myself literally surrounded by tomatoes of all varieties and I only have myself to blame for it. As I may have mentioned before we receive more than we can eat in tomatoes each week from my mother-in-law and with many failed attempts at refusing her generous offers, because she really gives us way more than we could possibly eat, we gave up.

You would think that this constant supply of free tomatoes would extinguish any temptation to buy other available varieties in the market.

Nope, unlike most people who find themselves in an over abundance of any one thing, I don’t seem to know when to stop. You see, its tomato season in Vancouver and we have all kinds of amazing otherwise unavailable varieties like heirlooms and Okanagan Field tomatoes (still a few more weeks for these but I’m anticipating!). I wait all year for good Okanagan tomatoes I still think they’re the best in the world. How would it be possible for me to pass these up?

In a moment of panic, upon realization of my dilemma, I have come to the conclusion that we will be eating a lot of tomato based meals in the near future, at least until the Okanagan tomatoes are through. I’m OK with that for now. I promise I will exercise some restraint and not post exclusively tomato recipes for the rest of the summer.

Its almost like I have an unconscious wish to get really really fat. I’ll spend hours at the gym the weekend baking and eating and still find myself a bit confused when my jeans fit tight on Monday morning. The best part is that by some miracle I am able to ignore this and use absolutely no common sense when I see recipes like Brown Butter Ice Cream. Obviously ice cream base on its own isn’t rich enough so lets add a stick of butter to it. Sounds good to me!

In all seriousness, am I the only one that sees the genius of this? Brown butter on its own is magic and can add so much to a dish. I routinely use it when I make rice.

This is another recipe from Chez Pim and I have to say I was instantly attracted to it. It just made perfect sense to me. Brown butter, sugar, cream could there be a better combination out there? Seriously email me asap if you you know of one. This was one of the recipes that I knew would be amazing the second I laid eyes on it and I was right.

I love to bake and have always longed to be one of those bakers who can produce perfect aesthetically magnificent creations. This is a bit strange because in other ways I’m not exactly what you would call a perfectionist. This desire for baking perfection may stem from the fact that baking is something I was very comfortable with at a young age. I worked in a bakery for a while after high school and prior to that spend many days in the kitchen baking cookies, pies, tarts etc. Baking came to me easily, I only struggled with the aesthetic.

It doesn’t seem to matter how much time I spend calculating circumference or carefully cutting sides of puff pastry, somehow it always comes out looking a bit rough. I know there is appeal in a rustic looking free form tart, but sometimes, maybe even just once, I would like to make something that looks as amazing as it tastes, something refined.

I have been the laziest cook lately. For the last few weeks as this blog will attest I have had minimal time in the kitchen. Actually it hasn’t been intentional at all, I’ve just been so busy lately. We are desperately trying to find a house right now as we’ve out grown our one room apartment, so all of my free time has been spent doing this. Any of you Vancouverites who have been through this process recently will know how frustrating it is. I wont get started on the housing prices in Vancouver, they make me want to pull my hair out.

But hopefully we will find something soon because I’m sick of this and need more time to do the things I love again. AND my kitchen misses me. AND i just got a new set of amazing pots and pans. AND figs are in season!

I don’t know about you guys but I’m absolutely obsessed with figs. I wait not so patiently all year until its fig season. Once they start showing up we go absolutely fig crazy. Seriously we eat them on a daily basis. I thought I would share this extremely no brainer recipe quickly, its the first thing we do with figs each year and it may change the way you look at bruschetta forever.

I over bought at the farmers market a few weeks back. Does that ever happen to you? I find it so hard to control my purchases at this time of the year, it seems I have to constantly remind myself that with work and everything else I just don’t have time to plan what I’m going to do with 10 pounds of berries on a Sunday night. This is a really upsetting realization for me. I have always thought I could be such a great candidate for a stay at home wife position. Not out of laziness or not wanting to work, but simply because my favorite thing in the whole wide world is cooking and spending time in my kitchen. I knew I should have married rich. Or maybe become a farmer instead of choosing a career in advertising?

Fortunately I was able to have a bit of control this week when I saw the little bushels of black currants. Of course what I wanted to do was just buy up the whole lot, I love currents, but seriously what are 2 people going to do with 10 pounds of currents? In the long run I’m glad I had the strength to limit myself because as it turns out the currents on top, the ones I tasted, were pretty sweet but the ones underneath that first layer were really tart almost sour. If I was a suspicious person I would call the farmer I bought them from sneaky, but I’m not and honestly it gave me an excuse to make this pretty awesome black current jam.

Saturday lunch during the spring and summer months is my favorite meal of the week. It rivals even the prized boozy Sunday night dinners at my parents place. Though arguably lighter and without the wine parings these lunches are always pretty fantastic and inspired by the farmers market. They are also extremely simple, usually no more than just a few ingredients.

I had been meaning to write up one of these for some time now so I’m glad I’m finally getting to it. It might become a tradition, well see. This week, like most, I was drawn to the greens and decided to whip up a salad from a mix of pea shoots, pepper crest and another delicate green that I think was called something like Cresh. I’ll confirm that next week. Regardless though the result was pure perfection. The sweetness of the greens with the salt of the anchovies was amazing and surprisingly these greens though delicate were not overpowered by the anchovies. I was pretty happy with myself about that.