Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic

One of our favourite cookbooks is Barefoot in Paris by Ina Garten, and although every recipe in it we've tried has been wonderful, our favourite is Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic.

To paraphrase Ina, it may seem that three heads of garlic is a lot, but they do mellow out a lot during the cooking process.

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Pretzels

Who hasn't spent a few lovely hours in O'Hare International Airport, outside Chicago, "Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation," as immortalized by the great Carl Sandburg? Even after countless connections through this very busy airport, including an unscheduled Christmas Eve snowed-in stayover, we can still unearth hidden treasures.

Auntie Anne's Pretzels beckoned to us from across the hectic terminal. After buying our what-were-we-thinking-only one pretzel, we arrived home barely satiated, yearning for more....

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Peppermint Chocolate Bark

Simple and special, this chocolate bark with crushed candy canes on top will make you spontaneously sing Christmas carols. At least it did for me....

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Gingerbread Cookies

Somehow, I have it in my head that anything that has molasses as an ingredient is automatically healthy. Regretfully, I don't think that these gingerbread cookies qualify, but they've got to better than regular sugar cookies, no?

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Brûlée Rice Pudding

Who likes rice pudding? This is our adaptation from Anna Olson's Sugar cookbook.

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Black Bean Salad

Way back in 1997, when we had a subscription to Bon Appétit, we found a great recipe for a Caribbean Black Bean and Rice Salad by the unfailing duo, Jinx and Jefferson Morgan. That was a great recipe, and we enjoyed making it for years.

Fast forward to 2005. We were in Stong's when we saw a black bean salad that looked appetizing. We took it home and loved it so much, we knew we had to reverse engineer the recipe from the ingredient list.

As much as we liked the black bean and rice salad, we thought it would be healthier to replace the white rice with brown rice, or leave it out altogether.

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Homemade Pizza

A tradition in our family is to make homemade pizza. We've refined our methods over the years, and we finally think we have a crust that's as good as, or better than, most pizza places in town. If we had a wood-fired or even just a commercial oven, we might get even better results.

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Vegan Pumpkin Whoopie Pies

This time of year, it seems that pumpkins are inescapable, from pumpkin pies to jack o' lanterns. We have no problems jumping on the bandwagon, at least when it comes to pumpkins, since we're happy to bake with pumpkins throughout the year.

When I saw these on Camilla Salsbury's Enlightened Cooking blog, I knew I had to make them.

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Mulled Cranberry Sauce

Ever since we found this recipe in a 1999 issue of Bon Appetit, we have not roasted a turkey without also making this sauce.

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Chocolate Covered Bananas with Rainbow Sprinkles

Those who have been following our blog know that we like sweets. No, we really, really like sweets. So we have some nicely ripe bananas ready to be eaten. What was our first thought? If you guessed "drizzle them with honey and sprinkle with toasted wheat germ," you would be right. Our second thought, though, was "coat them with melted chocolate and roll them in sprinkles."

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Garlic Croutons

We like these croutons because they are pretty easy to make, and they are an easy sell to our kids.

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Summer Fruit Crumble

Ever since we started blogging, I've been paying more attention to all the wonderful food bloggers out there. Just today, inspired by a fellow food blogger, I threw together a berry crumble this afternoon. Stuffed with peaches.

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Granola Bars

A long family outing through Pacific Spirit Park out to UBC led to a serendipitous discovery. I was feeling a mite faint from the heat and exertion, and I needed a little sustenance to tide me over until lunch.

Seeing a selection of granola bars on display at the coffee shop we stopped by, I was inspired to make a homemade granola bar that was tailor-made for my family. Later in the day, when I returned home, I rummaged through the pantry, hauling out random ingredients that I thought would create a balanced mélange of flavours.

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NYC Black and White Cookies

Thank goodness for vegans! Not only are they animal friendly, keeping their bodies healthy and saving the planet, but they are also creating superb cookie recipes for our egg-and-dairy-allergic kids.

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Doughnuts: Vegan no less!

I am always on the hunt for good egg- and dairy-free baking recipes for my children, who have food allergies.  As I stood in my local library, flipping through The Food Allergy Mama's Baking Book: Great Dairy, Egg, and Nut Free Treats for the Whole Family by Kelly Rudnicki, I started to excited. I rushed home with the book, ready to try one of the many appealing recipes.

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Strawberry Jam

June means a lot of different things to different people, but to strawberry lovers (at least in the northern hemisphere) it means fresh, ripe strawberries! We are lucky to live close to the fertile Fraser Valley, with its abundance of farms, including Emma Lea Farms on Westham Island in Ladner.

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Go-to Marinade

This seafood marinade was devised by Frank Pabst, currently the executive chef at Vancouver's Blue Water Cafe + Raw Bar, who recently won Vancouver Magazine's Chef of the Year.

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Chao Ga (Vietnamese Rice Porridge)

After reading a tweet about Vietnamese rice porridge, I searched for a recipe and found one that I adapted. It ended up being so yummy that I want to run out to buy nuoc mam (fish sauce) and make it again.

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Healthy Hostess Cupcakes from BabyCakes

On a recent trip to New York City, a visit to the famous BabyCakes bakery was on the itinerary, but we just ran out of time. Their first cookbook is BabyCakes: Vegan, (Mostly) Gluten-Free, and (Mostly) Sugar-Free Recipes from New York's Most Talked-About Bakery. Erin McKenna has figured out how to bake, and bake fabulously, without our most common baking building blocks. Her positive attitude is a relief and an inspiration to those of us working through our own food restrictions.

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DOW: Soy Smoothie

A nice way to slip in some fruit, protein and calcium on a Sunday...

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