I used to think beets tasted like dirt. But as with many taste sensations classically vilified by children – olives, onions, mushrooms, stinky cheese – I’ve come to love these most intensely purple of vegetables, freaky as they are (some have hairy rat tails, you know).
I lived in Australia for a few years and grew [...]

Behold the Flemish Beauty.
Round these parts we call her Beauté Flamande. She’s an extremely hardy type of pear, which makes her one of the few pears that grows happily in Quebec. I’ve been buying them all fall at the market and recently decided to transform a few  into butter.
Here’s what I did: I looked over [...]

OK cran fans, we’re back talking about our flame-coloured, bog-grown friends again. In part one, I gushed enough about the lil’ ruby fruit, so let’s get down to next recipe.
It’s a little something I found in the oldy-but-awesomely-goody New York Times Cookbook edited by venerable food writer Craig Claiborne and published in 1961.  I partly [...]

First things first: Happy Halloweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen. It’s been pouring rain all morning and not showing any signs of letting up, so those cute little candy-crazy ghouls will be slipping and sliding their way along sidewalks painted with soggy yellow leaves tonight. Be careful, kids!
In other news, I’ve just whipped up a couple of crackerjack cranberry creations. [...]

Canada created the Coronation table grape, its name a nod to our dusty old royalist roots (which do not extend into Quebec), in the 70s, but they’ve only become widely available (in southern Ontario and Quebec at least) in the past five years or so. The Coronation grape is very similar to the American Concord [...]