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I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of making my own vinegar. In fact, the first copy I ever bought of The Art of Eating, now one of my favourite food journals, was issue 68, which I ordered specifically for its excellent article on homemade wine vinegar. What’s held me back until now, though, is [...]

Peanut butter is a staple on my breakfast table, but I’ve long been frustrated by the standard array of options. Specifically, there seem to be two types of peanut butter that exist: processed (which is a complex blend of peanuts, oils from various sources, sugar, salt, and stabilizers) and all-natural (which contains nothing but peanuts, [...]

In Anglo-Saxon culture, chestnuts are strongly associated with winter, especially Christmas, but in Japanese cuisine, they’re harbingers of fall. Many Japanese ingredients that are considered to be evocative of a specific season are featured in a simple rice dish, and chestnuts – kuri, in Japanese – are no exception. (Ayu, sweetfish, is a similar ingredient [...]

Although we’ve been living in our house for a little over two years now, this was the first summer we’ve had a dedicated vegetable patch, thanks to my husband’s efforts. One of the things we decided to grow was zucchini, despite their reputation for taking over first your garden, then your kitchen. I’ve found that [...]

While my tomato plants may have been a write-off this year, the chilli plants really took up the slack: lately they’ve been producing ripe fruit much faster than we can eat Thai basil chicken, our favourite application for fresh chillis. This weekend, I finally admitted defeat, and decided that I had to take action to [...]

Thanks to some local friends whose garden was starting to look a little overgrown, I managed to lay my hands on some tomato leaves to cook with. I figured the best way to experiment with them was in a dish that already included tomatoes. My favourite go-to pasta sauce is amatriciana, which uses bacon and [...]

This picture shows the tomato plants in my garden back when they were still healthy. Unfortunately, they’ve since succumbed to a fungal infection (fusarium wilt has been implicated) so we had to pull them all out. Which is sad not just because it means I don’t get to eat the tomatoes, but also because I’d [...]

If the tomato is everyone’s favourite vegetable-that’s-really-a-fruit, rhubarb should be everyone’s favourite fruit-that’s-really-a-vegetable. Especially in spring, when there are precious few other fruits available. We inherited a small rhubarb patch with our house, but the key word is small. Shaded by several trees, and suffering frequent insect attacks, it produces enough for only one small [...]

Cherry season is approaching again in the Niagara region. A Manhattan served to me recently by a friend with some very good homemade cocktail cherries (Me: “What kind of booze did you preserve them in?” Her: “I don’t remember!”) made me realize that I need to start planning my own batch of cocktail cherries for [...]

This evening, about three weeks after the seeds were planted, I harvested the first French breakfast radish from our newly-dug vegetable patch. After taking this photo, I ate it the only way you can eat the first radish of the season: sliced in half, with a sprinkle of salt. It was delicious! But there are [...]