Breaking a Pregnancy Taboo (oh and a baby announcement) I don’t know how to talk about this so most of the time I keep very quiet. You see, I’m breaking a very serious rule about pregnancy. The rule is that you are supposed to be so happy to be pregnant. There are permissible modifiers to this rule and they include: you can be unhappy or even miserable (but only in a physical sense) because of terrible pregnancy symptoms and you are allowed to be worried about the well-being of the baby. What you can’t be is thrown into a serious […]
Cheese Cappelletti Updated
I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations lately. I don’t mean societal expectations on a grand scale, what I have been thinking about are the expectations that I have of myself. These expectations fall short of my reality and I am shockingly unkind to myself about it. I don’t aspire to be June Cleaver keeping a perfect home but I am picky about meals. I also only really want to cook when I’m in a good mood which doesn’t happen very often. My son rejoices when I pull out the box of chicken fingers from the freezer or, better yet, […]
Zucchini and Summer Squash Ribbons on Pasta with Creamy Goat Cheese Sauce
I think I will be saying, “Please excuse the mess, we just moved in,” for the next two years. The amount of junk we have is overwhelming as are the thousand small projects there are still to do to get the house up to snuff. The stress of moving seemed to have sucked all my creativity and energy from me. I didn’t want to cook, I just wanted to clean, unpack, paint, and clean some more. The previous owners of this house left it in a bit of state. At one point I thought that I was losing it because […]
Creamy Pasta with Kale, Mushrooms & Pancetta
You know those days when you really don’t feel like cooking anything but you also don’t want to spend $30 on some shitty take-out dinner that the kid won’t eat anyway because he actually just wanted Honey Nut Cheerios? Yeah. That. I was very tempted to have cereal for dinner too the first night I made this but I was feeling pretty guilty about letting food go to waste in the fridge. I remembered that I had kale from Bailey’s Local Foods. I also had some Enoki mushrooms that I’d bought to use for a different recipe that was […]
Spaghetti Sauce and Buying Half a Cow
The perils of buying half a steer from an organic farmer, such as Vibrant Farms, are few but the main ones are an inordinate amount of freezer space required and the need for some really good recipes for ground beef. With a small child who has varying degrees of pickyeateritis, which is hereditary, getting the optimal amount of vegetables into the little one is also a concern of ours. This recipe for good old fashion Spaghetti Sauce is perfect for two out of three issue; using a lot of ground beef and getting several servings of vegetables into a picky kid. I […]
Pasta with Pesto, Peas, Pancetta and Grilled Chicken
This is a meal I crave in the early weeks of summer but is great any time of year if you have had the forethought to freeze pesto or just use store-bought. The thought of the flavour packed pesto combined with the hit of fresh sweet peas, salty bite of pancetta and little bits of mellow mozzarella are making my mouth water as I write this. I make the pesto in a fairly typical way – lots of basil. a clove of garlic, toasted pine nuts, fresh grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, pinch of salt and pepper and lots of olive oil. No great […]
Macaroni and Cheese with Cauliflower and Peas (sauce is Gluten-Free)
It has been quite a while since I have had time to sit down and write a blog post. It has been a very busy few months at my house – I started a new job, George has had another health crisis (x2), and Christmas was thrown in there. As for our Georgie; he is doing much better. He had a tumor removed from his bladder and the diagnosis before it was tested was that he only had a couple months to live. Thankfully, the surgeon who did his surgery back in October for the massive lung infection and subsequent […]