Since receiving a waffle maker from Santa-Nate last Christmas, I’ve experimented with a lot of waffle recipes. In particular, I’ve been looking for a really great overnight yeasted waffle recipe, one where you mix up an enriched yeast batter, let it rise and develop flavour overnight, then add eggs and baking soda (for extra leavening power and a light, airy texture) in the morning before cooking the waffles. I made one recipe that came with the waffle maker, which was pretty good, and twice I tried the famous recipe from Marion Cunningham’s Breakfast Book, via Smitten Kitchen, with middling success. The first time I made it I intended to serve waffles to our breakfast guests, but the batter seemed to have given up the ghost and died during its overnight rest*, so I tossed it and had to whip up a quick non-yeasted recipe instead. I tried it again a second time (because the recipe has such great reviews), this time tweaking a few things, for a much better result. But still not quite the overnight yeasted waffles of my dreams (although, thanks to those glowing reviews, I will probably try again to capture the magic).
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The Canadian Food Experience Project
Oh, hi. I’ve been kind of absent in these parts this week – I’m back at work full-time (did I mention I had four months off over the summer? Yeah, tough life!) and being out of the house for almost 10 hours a day while still trying to indulge in my blogging habit is taking some getting used to (I know, I know, suck it up Korena!). I just haven’t found the time or energy to finish a post, even though I have a backlog of recipes waiting to be posted. Oh well. 
Several weeks back, my Mum and I did an informal little “Cowichan Valley food tour”: we stopped by 
Aparna of 
Mangoes have been absolutely amazing this summer. I keep buying them with the intent to make chutney or something similar, but I never get further than eating them straight or throwing them in the blender to make a mango lassi – essentially a thick yogurt smoothie, it is one of my favorite discoveries this summer.
Since I was about 7 or 8, my Mum has had food sensitivities to wheat and dairy. This was over 20 years ago, before being gluten-free and drinking soy or almond milk were “mainstream” like they are today, and food choices back then for pretty much everything were extremely limited. At some point, we started to refer to anything wheat-free and dairy-free as a “why bother?” because most often, without both wheat and dairy, whatever you were eating was barely worth it – especially when it came to dessert.
Blackberries are a sure sign of summer to me. I usually go berry picking towards the end of August, but all the sunny hot weather we had in July means that the earliest berries are ripe, so over the weekend I was out with my bucket, lurking in the neighbourhood ditches, picking blackberries. The berries right now are still quite small, with a good tart pucker to go with their sweetness, and if the unripe berries on the bushes are anything to go by, it’s going to be a great blackberry year.
Once upon a time, my good friend and fellow tea partier Lynette was also my roommate. Being a tidy sort, one of her cardinal housekeeping rules was Everything Shall Have Its Own Place in The Fridge. This comes to mind frequently when surveying the inside of my own over-stuffed, disorganized and messy fridge, so last week I finally did something about it. During the subsequent clearing-out and re-organizing, I discovered two things: 1) I have neglected my poor sourdough starter at the back of the fridge for too long (luckily, nothing a good feeding couldn’t fix), and 2) I have a very large collection of half-empty jars of jam. These two things added up to one obvious solution: time to bake bread!
