being not doing

Things, as we know, don’t always go as planned. The big news around these parts is that I’m pregnant, expecting a baby in October. That’s not the unplanned element; the unplanned part was the way in which this situation (and all the accompanying ailments, small and large) coincided with a terribly hot spring that has [...]

So far, I have only a couple of cooking goals for the year. One, I want to learn to cook dried beans in my slow cooker. Two, I want to learn to make pizzas. Neither of these will seem like major challenges to most of you, I’m sure, but they are things that I’ve had [...]

The first pie before it went into the oven (after which it didn’t last long enough for more pictures!). In preparation for hosting our family Christmas this year, I baked and froze two tourtières for Christmas Eve. Although the pies are the traditional French-Canadian Christmas Eve meal, and I am in fact French-Canadian, I mostly [...]

I don’t have a picture to share, because I am too lazy to pull all the jars out of the cupboard and clear off the dining room table to take one, but I have even more canning to report! Once the Granny Smith apples came into season, I was able to make the traditional brandied [...]

Lemon garlic pickles, spicy bread and butter pickles, brandied peaches, sour cherry-walnut conserve, cherry sauce (with rum), and canned cherries, with pickled summer squash in front. Now is as good a time as any to report on the canning I did this summer. I had big plans to make cherry jam, or even cherry preserves, [...]