Every September since 1995, we’ve been making a shell bean soup recipe from a cookbook by Alice Waters. Today we’re travelling back in time to when I first made this autumn bowl of Italian earthiness—a soup so good it’s usurped the event of that fateful day.
Cooking Fig-Peckers with the Duchess
The first dish cited in our Insight guide to Sicily is Sarde a beccafico. I didn’t pay much attention, not being overly fond of sardines. But when I read in that same guidebook that you could stay at Via Butera 28 in Palermo, part of Palazzo Lanza Tomasi where Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa lived while […]
Rhubarb: The Quintessential Sign of Spring
Don’t you love rhubarb? Growing up on the prairies, rhubarb signaled that winter was over: dessert bowls of mom’s dull-coloured canned rhubarb with its bracing, teeth-cleaning acidity came to an end, replaced by her fresh rhubarb pies and mini cakes: sugared rhubarb and walnuts topped with a sweet-cream biscuit dough and baked in muffin tins. […]
Another Reason we Love our Birth Province
About three-o-clock every afternoon these days when Vancouver’s grey skies darken toward charcoal and heavy rains pummel our flat roof, I need a cookie. The urge is as strong as when I was a kid getting home from school in the subzero cold of Saskatchewan and wanting mom’s warm “matrimonial cake,” gooey dates sandwiched between […]
Gazpacho Slow & Fast
“De gazpacho no hay empacho.” Translation: “You can never get too much of a good thing, like gazpacho.” We agree. With tomatoes voluptuously plumping in the sun on vines across the country, enticing us with their earthy perfume, it’s time for gazpacho.
