Yesssss, I managed to get another podcast out and into the world! Food writer Claire Tansey was in town to promote her new cookbook, Uncomplicated, and since she has many years of experience running the Chatelaine test kitchen, we decided to sit down and answer a few common questions we get about cooking, ingredients and other culinary curiosities. We also talked about what makes a solid recipe, how you know it’s going to work, and ate some jelly doughnuts. Have a listen!

A few weeks ago, Jann Arden invited me over for lunch – she made Beyond Meat burgers, and we chatted about life and food and how she’s navigating being vegan, and I recorded it all and whittled it down into a podcast. It was my first time recording one on my own – no one was standing by with headphones, watching the levels on the laptop… it was just Jann and I and a single hand-held mic with a really long cord – almost long enough to reach around her 8×10 foot kitchen island. (If I was to be stranded on an island, it would be that one.) Give it a listen… huge thanks to Jann for taking the time to make me lunch, for letting me use one of her songs, and just generally being an amazing human and positive influence on the world.

Hey guys! I can’t believe I forgot to share here that the second episode of Crispy Bits (the podcast!) is out – this time I sat down with self-published cookbook author Greta Podleski and we chatted about how she has managed to sell 2 1/2 million cookbooks on her own, without the support of a major publisher. How she managed to be the #1 best selling cookbook in Canada all last year, even though her latest book came out in October of 2017. It’s truly an amazing story.

Remember this photo of W taking a picture (with an old camera that didn’t actually work) of his omelet? Sigh. It was my blog header of my blog for a long time – although the omelet was cut off and a lot of people couldn’t tell what the black box was. Anyway. I needed a photo here because you gotta have a photo, right? And it relates to taking pictures and writing recipes and the stuff I do around here. Sometimes (oftentimes), people pay me to write stuff. Or to photograph stuff, come up with recipes, or make food look pretty so that other people can take pictures of it. This is a good thing, because I’m a professional food writer and the goal of any professional anything is to make a living doing that thing. Sometimes I get paid by magazine or newspaper editors (who get paid by advertisers) and sometimes I get paid cookbook royalties based on book sales and sometimes marketing boardsContinue reading

There’s a very good reason I haven’t updated you on the kitchen situation in a very long time: it’s moving at glacial speed. It’s mostly my fault – every time an obstacle pops up, shooting gallery-style, I employ my ignore it and it will go away tactic, and it hardly ever does. Sometimes, these obstacles cause the process to actually move backwards, like that time I took a random handful of paint chips in various shades of white down to my oven, which is still in the showroom, to match the colour, and picked the one that was closest, which it turns out was not remotely the same, and so when they sprayed the cabinet drawers and installed them, they were a shade of beige silly putty. Who knew there were so many shades of white? I mean I thought I knew, but I didn’t really. And even when you do manage to choose a shade of polar bear/snowstorm/mashed potato that suits, once we getContinue reading

Those of you who have been hanging around awhile may remember when we acquired a weeks-old black dog with white socks and a star on his chest – Lou, who we adore, even when he gets skunked and even though he hasn’t always been a good dog. (Fortunately he has outgrown puppyhood.) (Cuteness in puppies must be a means of self-preservation.) These days, Lou likes to wait until we’re asleep, then climb up into bed and stretch out the length of the bed, nestled into the pillow with his paws up over his head. Or sneak into my side of the bed when we go out, leaving fur and muddy evidence on my pillow. Living with him + the squirrel in the tree in our back yard is like living with Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. This spring, Lou was hard at work testing recipes for In the Dog Kitchen, which just arrived from the printer! (!!!) It’s so pretty. It’s making its wayContinue reading