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In a Canadian winter, it’s sometimes fun to mix up a tropical concoction to briefly ease the pain of these dark, snowy months. Few things transport you from white snowdrifts to white sandy beaches as quickly as a glass filled with fruit juice and rum. And sometimes the name even fits the condition, as is [...]

I’ve wanted to make veal stock for a long time. I’ve probably wanted to make veal stock ever since I first read The French Laundry Cookbook. I definitely wanted to make it after reading some of Michael Ruhlman’s writings on it. And, recently, reading the Eleven Madison Park cookbook and seeing some of the recipes [...]

One last dispatch from the “I love my new blender” files for now. Last week, I made these pork-and-potato tacos with guajillo chilli sauce. Like many Mexican recipes, it starts with you soaking dried chillis in hot water, then pureeing them with other ingredients (in this case, tomatoes and garlic), then “frying” the resulting puree. [...]

As a fairly indifferent bread-baker, I never really got on the no-knead bandwagon, a trend that’s been around for a while now. Usually when I bake bread, it’s one loaf at a time, and I knead it in my stand mixer. No-knead recipes were a solution to a problem I just didn’t have. This isn’t [...]

It’s a well-known adage that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So naturally, ever since getting my new Vitamix high-speed blender, I’ve been looking for excuses to puree things. One of the benefits of a blender like the Vitamix is the size of the container: no more “transfer to [...]

Whether your cooking is devoutly traditional or boldly avant-garde, a blender is a vital piece of kitchen equipment. (Unless, that is, your cooking is so traditional that you use a food mill for everything.) Obviously, its main use is to puree soft foods and soups, but it can also be used to grind brittle foods, [...]

Every culture has its New Year’s Eve dishes that are traditional for bringing luck in the coming year: in my family it was mincemeat, in Italian culture it’s cotechino and lentils, and in Japanese culture it’s toshikoshi (“year-crossing”) soba noodles. Although they have a special name, there is no specific recipe for toshikoshi soba; you [...]