Harvest Apple and Almond Tart

November 11, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 11 Comments

The Canadian Food Experience Project began June 7, 2013. As we share our collective stories through our regional food experiences, we hope to bring global clarity to our Canadian culinary identity. Visit Valerie’s blog, A Canadian Foodie, on the 15th for a round-up of this month’s posts.

As usual, I’m a few days late with this month’s Canadian Food Experience Project post… but it’s because I wanted to get this recipe right before sharing it. This month, Valerie has asked us to talk about the Canadian harvest and what it means in our lives. For me, the harvest means apples. For as long as I can remember, autumn has brought with it falling leaves and a large box of apples sitting in one corner of the kitchen, perfuming the house with their sweet-tart scent, until either my Mum finally got around to making apple sauce or apple crisps, or I baked them into pies. When I was young, the apples came from my grandparents’ trees, and in more recent years they came from friends of my parents. This year, I scored some truly gigantic Bramley apples from a co-worker’s trees.

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Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies and my new grain mill!

November 9, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 13 Comments

Back in the summer when I wasn’t working full time and was actively looking for ways to fill my time, I applied to join the Grain Mill Wagon challenge. Basically, the WonderMill Grain Mill company sends you a grain mill (for free!) and in return you write three recipe posts for their blog within two months, and the grain mill is yours to keep. This is a pretty sweet deal and I was definitely interested in getting my hands on a grain mill ever since reading about Kate of Venison for Dinner milling her own flour. Talk about “from scratch”!

I didn’t hear back from the company for a few months and figured that I didn’t get chosen – but after I’d gone back to work in September, I got an email inviting me to the challenge. I was no longer in the market for a new hobby, but I also wasn’t going to turn down a free appliance! I got the grain mill at the beginning of October, and since then it’s been sitting in its box in a corner of the dining room, waiting for me to get around to reading the instructions. Seeing as it’s now November and I’m half-way to my two-month deadline, I figured I should get my butt in gear. So I made cookies. Whole wheat chocolate chip cookies made with freshly milled flour, to be exact. Head over to my post on the Grain Mill Wagon blog to hear all about them. 🙂

Full disclosure: I was compensated for my time and provided with a WonderMill Grain Mill free of charge in exchange for this post, but my thoughts and opinions are my own. 🙂

A Trio of Chocolate Cakes

November 5, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 9 Comments

The past few months have contained a lot of cakes – chocolate cakes, to be specific. And not for me, but for other people, which is almost more fun because I get to bake my heart out without worrying about who will eat it all. 😉

Back in August, my lovely friend Tanya asked me to make some chocolate cupcakes for a baby shower, the theme for which was the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, so I did what I could to turn the cupcakes into teacups without resorting to fiddly fondant or store-bought teacup paper liners.

I baked the Cook’s Illustrated Ultimate Chocolate Cupcakes in some pretty floral cupcake papers to simulate china cups, filled the cakes with chocolate ganache, and frosted them with the rebar chocolate cream cheese frosting.

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Daring Bakers: Thanksgiving Turkey Pot Pie

October 27, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 13 Comments

Hannah of Rise and Shine was our October 2013 Daring Bakers’ hostess and she challenged us to bake our own double crusted savory pot pies. Using any from-scratch crust and filling we choose, we were allowed to get completely creative with our recipe, showing off the savory flavors and fillings from our own home or region.

A few days after Thanksgiving, I found myself with an abundance of two things in the kitchen: leftover turkey and green tomatoes, salvaged from my weather-beaten-and-dying tomato plants. I kicked off Operation Leftover Turkey with a batch of turkey enchiladas with green tomato salsa (I used this recipe, doubling the salsa and subbing the tomatillos for green tomatoes – it was extremely delicious), but I still had more turkey to use up. Thanksgiving: the meal that keeps on giving.

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Cranberry Orange White Chocolate {Sourdough} Loaf

October 21, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 40 Comments

I have become recently obsessed with The Great British Bake Off. As in, I spent most of Sunday watching episodes on the internet and searching through my cookbooks for the recipes that I would make if I was on the show. I know, get a hobby, right? (Wait, this is my hobby…) In the words of one Season 3 contestant whenever things got heated, oh my giddy aunt! I just love it – great baking combined with the typical British stiff upper lip and self-deprecating attitude, which is such a refreshing difference from the ridiculously ego-driven and sob-story-laden world of North American “reality” TV.

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A New Kind of Thanksgiving Turkey

October 18, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 22 Comments

Last weekend was Canadian Thanksgiving, which meant turkey, turkey, turkey (I finally froze the leftovers because I just couldn’t face them any more!). We hosted my parents for dinner and again, I cooked the turkey… but not just any turkey. This year, I took the opportunity cross an item off The List by de-boning*, stuffing, and rolling the turkey. The results were amazing!

While the prep for a de-boned, stuffed, and rolled turkey is a little more time consuming than a regular stuffed bird (it took me forty-five minutes to de-bone it, and another thirty minutes to stuff, roll, and truss it), it pays off in ease of cooking. No estimating cooking times based on weight/stuffed/unstuffed/previously frozen/fresh, etc – just two to two-and-a-half hours! No basting! No specialty gigantic unwieldy roasting pan!

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Pumpkin Cheesecake Brownies

October 13, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 12 Comments

The first weekend of October was another epic Girls’ Weekend on Salt Spring Island with my best ladies. This time, along with talking, stuffing our faces, and drinking a lot of sangria, we also visited Salt Spring Vineyards for a winery tour and wine tasting.

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Blackberry Basil Corn Salad

October 11, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 5 Comments

My friend Jenni of The Gingered Whisk – fellow Daring Baker, Sourdough Surpriser, and all around awesome lady – just recently had a baby girl, and back in the summer she asked me to write a guest post for her while she takes some time off from blogging to settle into life as a momma of two. I was honoured to be asked, and sent her a summery recipe for a salad made with blackberries, basil, and corn (if you think that’s a weird combination, just trust me on this one!). If I’d been thinking ahead, I would have written about something a little more fall-oriented (given that the baby wasn’t born until September) rather than something celebrating the wonders of late summer produce, because now that the recipe is live on Jenni’s blog, corn and basil and blackberries are – sadly – just a sweet summer memory. But this is a salad that you MUST make, so please, bookmark the recipe for next summer – it’s a killer flavour combination! Head over to The Gingered Whisk for my guest post and the full recipe and to congratulate Jenni on the bun that was nine months in the baking! 🙂

The Canadian Food Experience Project: Experimental Lacto-Fermented Dill Pickles

October 9, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 13 Comments

The Canadian Food Experience Project began June 7, 2013. As we share our collective stories through our regional food experiences, we hope to bring global clarity to our Canadian culinary identity.

This month’s topic for the Canadian Food Experience Project is “Preserving: Our Canadian Food Tradition”. One preserving memory from my childhood is the smell of sun-warmed dill growing in my Mum’s garden every summer, destined for dill pickles. The dill plants would spring up randomly all over the garden, waving their frilly fronds in the breeze, until their yellow flowers started to get heavy with seeds and they would be stuffed into glass jars along with dozens and dozens of tiny lumpy pickling cucumbers. These days I love making jam and and canning fruit, but I’d not yet ventured into the pickling arena.

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Chanterelles and Power Outages

October 2, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 9 Comments

On Saturday I went to the Duncan Farmers Market with $20 and came home with this:

That’s $10 worth of fresh, locally-grown veggies and $10 worth of wild chanterelle mushrooms. Yes, a bit of a splurge at a dollar per ounce for the mushrooms, but when you get an entire tree of brussels sprouts for $2.50, you can be spendy in other categories! (The brussels sprouts have already gone into this pasta with bacon and feta and will undoubtedly be skillet roasted as well.)

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