I hope those of you who celebrate Christmas had the most wonderful weekend with your families. Neil and I are currently in El Fuerte, Mexico, at the start of our trip into the Copper Canyon. We spent Christmas eve aboard the California Star travelling from Pichilingue to Topolobampo, eating possibly the worst meal of our [...]

Mulled wine poached pears

Kitchen Bootcamp 7: Hors d’oeuvres
For this month’s Kitchen Bootcamp, Jen challenged us to get creative with hors d’oeuvres. It’s a perfect time of the year to experiment with new hors d’oeuvres recipes – there’s always some gathering or other to bring food to! This month, I have chosen to share the recipe I used for one of my Project [...]

Les Petits Chefs bake for the holidays
As a special treat for the last Petits Chefs session for the term, we baked mini-cupcakes. I found a recipe I really liked the look of on the California Walnut website and adapted it slightly using almonds instead of walnuts due to some allergies. It’s a pretty easy recipe and didn’t really involve much prep [...]

French Fridays with Dorie: Go-to beef daube
For this week’s French Fridays with Dorie, I chose to post her “go-to” beef daube (pp 244-245) from the list of recipes we are making in December. Dorie explains that her daube might not be a daube-proper (a beef stew cooked in wine in a deep casserole dish or a daubière) for some French people [...]

Daring Cooks December: Poached eggs
Blog-checking lines: Jenn and Jill have challenged The Daring Cooks to learn to perfect the technique of poaching an egg. I am a little embarrassed to admit that I have never poached an egg. Oh, sure, I have one of those microwave egg poachers but that’s not the real deal, right? Neil is the expert [...]

International holiday cookie recipe exchange!
I love a good cookie exchange but since I don’t exactly need tons more sweets in the house, I was thrilled to happen upon the International Holiday Cookie Exchange, organised by Adrienne of Gastroanthropology and Lori of Fake Food Free. Participating bloggers were assigned a partner who sent them a recipe to make and post [...]








