What's cooking,
Good looking?



My lax food blogging in recent months makes it appear as 'though I've been doing next to nothing in the culinary arena during the summer. While nobody likes having the stove and oven running during our (admittedly pathetic, especially this particular) hot season, I find it hard not to hoard as much of the Ontario-grown produce as possible while it's in abundance.

To that effect, I've been canning like a mad-thing, producing jars of strawberry jam, wild blueberry jam, yellow plum jam and "spirited" (read: boozy) pears. I've also been trying desperately to avoid canning the figs I'm seeing in stores these days, as I still have 3 small jars left of fresh (not dried) fig jam from last year. The Ontario tomatoes are ridiculously difficult to avoid too. As summer wanes, I have to fight the urge not to can the last spoils of the season — it's murder on the hands (all that water) and the feet and legs (which I'm abusing by standing while things simmer or boil).

In other news, I've also created my second truly successful attempt at non-dairy ice cream, this time going with a simple chocolate version, which amalgamated techniques from A Vegan Ice Cream Paradise's recipe for Chocolate Candy Cane Ice Cream and The Food Network/Anna Olson's recipe for Dark Chocolate Mousse. I erred in my creation of the mousse, having too much liquid in the batch to make a real mousse, and also by folding the chocolate mixture into the meringue-ish mixture, as opposed to the other way around. Just the same, the mousse component (which I ate as mousse) was heavenly, and the ice cream component was good enough that Matt liked it (which is saying a lot).

Finally, I broke out my pots for two versions of chili for my birthday, one of which was meat-free. Both versions used an heirloom tomato sauce — my first foray into cooking with them.

In hindsight, I suppose I've not been food blogging because I've been far too busy with food preparation.