Last weekend I had the opportunity to cater a day-after-the-wedding brunch for a friend’s family. I love this kind of thing because not only do I get to bake and cook to my heart’s content, but I also get to do a lot of figuring out: coming up with a menu, researching recipes, scaling them up and down, and writing out list after list. Calculating exactly how many eggs I will need to make a dozen quiche plus four dozen cinnamon brioche buns is the kind of math I can get behind. I found a great resource in Ellen’s Kitchen for estimating quantities for large gatherings, although it doesn’t say much for my math skills when my estimates, in most cases, ended up being about twice what they should have been! But it’s better to have more food than not enough, right?
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As mentioned in my 
Remember my 
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?…
Just a quick note to say that I have another guest post on the SeaChange blog: 
I have a new blog crush… which is kind of an old blog crush, actually. I discovered 
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….
This is something I’ve been meaning to do for years. I’ve made pasta before, but it was using my Mum’s pasta roller, which means I was still living with my parents, which means it was a loooong time ago. Somehow rolling pasta out by hand just seemed too daunting. But then a while back I read Greg’s post about 
One of the truly great taste combinations is mushrooms and cheese, so it is a no-brainer to put them together on a pizza. What is not a no-brainer is making mushroom pesto to put on the pizza instead of tomato sauce. That is brilliant. Another brilliant thing is to roast the mushrooms in the oven before making them into pesto. How have I never roasted mushrooms before? The smells coming out of the oven while they were roasting were just incredible….
In general, one of the draws of cooking and baking at home is that whatever you make usually ends up being less expensive than if you’d bought it at the store. Unfortunately, this mayonnaise, made with avocado oil and Meyer lemons, turned out to be exactly the opposite of that: much much more expensive than any mayonnaise I would ever buy at the store.
