Third savoury recipe post in a row – this might be some sort of record! I promise I will be back with the sugar-and-butter-laden baking posts soon – there’s a lot of Christmas baking going on these days, plus there was a birthday cake last weekend…
In addition to being THE time for eating cookies and chocolate, Christmas is quite often THE time for entertaining. A platter of crunchy lavash and flavourful olive tapenade will go a long way to making your entertainees happy, plus you can play the super-host/hostess card by letting it slip that you made it all from scratch. Just don’t tell anyone how easy any of it was!
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One side benefit of cooking a turkey is that you can get some great stock out of the deal. Our Thanksgiving turkey was big enough that I divided the bones for stock between my slow cooker and Dutch oven, and I managed to get 3 liters of beautiful, thick stock out of it. And where there’s stock, there’s soup.
This has been a busy month for me, so here I am, a day late for 
This past Thanksgiving weekend was full of turkey and family and more turkey. We had a wonderful dinner at our house on Sunday night with Nate’s parents, my parents, and my Aunt, who is visiting from California. Our families had never met before but they got along like a house on fire. There was lots of laughter, much of it due to Nate’s Dad’s hilarious stories. I cooked the turkey, and I now I know that a fresh turkey takes a considerably longer time to cook than a previously-frozen one. I am thankful for my mother’s expertly-honed turkey-cooking skills and advice, thankful for the dinner guests who did not mind waiting an extra two hours for the turkey to be done, and thankful that somehow, the turkey was still moist and delicious (the secret is bacon!).
Sweet corn has got to be one of the best things about late summer. I could eat it every day straight off the cob, but sometimes it’s fun to do other things with it – like putting it in a creamy chowder with smoked salmon. Recipe on the 
Our July 2012 Daring Bakers’ Host was Dana McFarland and she challenged us to make homemade crackers! Dana showed us some techniques for making crackers and encouraged to use our creativity to make each cracker our own by using ingredients we love.
Sometimes the weirdest-sounding combinations turn out to be much better than expected. I once had a pizza topped with cilantro pesto, apples, pecans, and smoked mozzarella, which I thought would be totally weird, but was actually very very good. The other day I happened to have corn tortillas, cheese, and cilantro in the fridge, an apple in the fruit bowl, and pecans in the baking cupboard, and I figured that a quesadilla is sort of like a Mexican pizza, right?…
I know we’re still a few months away from tomato season, but I couldn’t resist. Which is odd because I don’t actually like raw tomatoes very much: I really want to, but there’s something about the texture and sometimes watery taste (I think?) that puts me off. However, roasting magically changes both of those things and turns them into super flavourful little tomato bombs….
