Obsessed with Brunch

I, like most other Torontonians am obsessed with brunch. I don't just mean brunch food -- I mean that act of going out or making brunch and enjoying it with people you love. We've had celebration brunch parties, cozy brunches at home with French-press coffee and goodies just purchased at the farmer's market, and we've had intimate, just-you-and-me best-friend hangouts over strong coffee, egg dishes and toast. Brunch is so much more than a meal -- it's a whole social event.

What was one of the first things I did when I got back to Toronto? Have brunch. And what was one of the first meals we had out when we started our Vancouver vacation? Yup. Brunch. We had cleverly arranged our Vancouver trip so that we'd be there at the same time as my best friend, who was there for a conference. And of course we had to have brunch. And there was no question as to where. We had both agreed when doing Vancouver brunch research, that it had to be the Wallflower, recommended by a very trusted source. And of course it was perfect. Nice, strong coffee, a friendly, chatty server, lots of good conversation and of course, awesome food.

My partner loves classic bacon-egg-hash-brown breakfasts (this one had the addition of a waffle!), and my best friend is partial to eggs Benedict (spiked with smoked salmon and cream cheese), but me, I'm usually a granola and yogurt kind of bruncher. Granola being absent from the menu, I tried their tofu hash special -- potatoes, peppers, onions, mushrooms, spinach and tofu, all messed up together into the one happy plate, served with toast. It was great, and I didn't miss granola at all.

After the heat wave passed and I could safely turn my oven on here in Toronto, I set about to re-create this beautiful breakfast hash -- for dinner!  The way I made it was super simple -- roast the veggies, quickly saute the tofu and spinach with a hit of ginger, and mix it all together. Yum! I don't have mushrooms in my version because I forgot to pick them up, but they would be lovely -- just slice and saute with the spinach and tofu. I also used beautiful purple potatoes which made this meal that much more special. Oh, and you can totally skip the ginger if that's not your thing, and use garlic instead.

Super simple, delicious, and memory-invoking .. ;) You could totally make this for brunch .. TODAY!

Tofu Veggie Hash
inspired by the Wallflower

I'm not putting measurements on this recipe, because, really, it's up to you when you're making hash. The dish that I was served at Wallflower was heavy on potatoes, and while I love potatoes, I chose to balance it out more when I made it at home. But it's totally up to you. Go for it!

red, yellow and orange peppers, cut into strips
new potatoes, cut into eighths (depending on the size of your potato .. make them the same size as the peppers)
onion, sliced thinly
firm tofu (mine was flavoured with herbs)
baby spinach
mushrooms, sliced thinly
ginger, minced
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil
chopped herbs, whatever you like -- I used green and red basil and parsley from my garden

1. First -- roast the veggies. Put the peppers, potatoes and onions in a large bowl. Add a sprinkling of salt, a few good grinds of pepper and about a tablespoon or so of olive oil. Toss to coat. Lay the veggies out on a baking sheet and put them in the oven on broil. Cook for about 25-30 minutes, tossing every once in a while.

2. When the veggies are almost done, heat some olive oil in pan. Add the ginger and cook for a minute or so, until it gets really fragrant and toasty. Add the tofu and mushrooms and season with salt and pepper. Cook for about 3 minutes, or until the tofu starts to get a bit brown.

3. Add the spinach and toss to wilt. You may need a little splash of water to help it. Once the spinach is wilted, you're done!

4. Take some of your roasted veggies and mix them in a bowl with the tofu, spinach and mushrooms. Sprinkle liberally with fresh herbs. Enjoy!

Rainy Day Weekend Treat

I cherish weekends during the school year. On hard weeks (especially around report card time), I actually count the hours. There's something about working all week and coming home on Friday and knowing that there will be no morning routine the next day, and that extra hour of sleep that I craved on Thursday morning can actually happen. It's always a time to refresh and re-energize. I know I've had a great weekend if I look forward to Monday, and believe it or not, that actually happens sometimes.

But weekends kind of lose their meaning in the summer. All the days kind of blend into each other, and the weekends just become like any other days. It's been fun. But it's back to the grind soon. In fact, I have to go into work today to start preparing. School starts in about a week and getting into that familiar weekday routine before I actually have to, helps a lot when I have to suddenly jump from afternoon naps, mornings spent in cafes and bike trips to 6:45am streetcar rides, too much marking and 150 children demanding my attention -- not to mention teaching a little French in between. Weekends will start meaning a lot more in about a week.

I'm looking at the forecast, and it calls for rain all day. If it were a weekend, it would be a perfect one to spend inside on a baking or cooking project, watching an old, favourite movie, or having a long lazy weekend brunch. And what better brunch food than pancakes, especially when I've just brought back a litre of beautiful amber maple syrup from the nation's capital. We've tried a few pancake recipes -- some vegan ones, some with hearty whole wheat flour and other grains (that was a supper pancake!) and they were all great. Only once, did we make a pancake that wasn't too great; it was the Michael Smith pancake recipe from the BlogAid recipe book, and while it produced a stick-to-your-ribs, hearty pancake, they weren't the least bit fluffy, and they actually turned out a little tough. Did we mess up, or was this pancake just not supposed to be fluffy?

Is there a secret to fluffy pancakes? I'm not sure. Is it beating egg whites separately? Is it just the right amount of leavening? Is it using buttermilk, or a splash of vinegar? Or is it all in how you mix the batter? Have you encountered a perfect pancake recipe? I think I have, and it's not surprise that it's a Joy the Baker recipe. It's actually a sexier pancake than we made: the original recipe calls for the addition of meyer lemon zest and fresh berries. But we wanted a nice, plain pancake to savour our last-of-the-season strawberries and maple syrup with , so we nixed the additions. The result was a super fluffy, perfect pancake; no really. It's perfection. I confess that I'm not usually a pancake person, especially in the morning, but these little fluffers had me hooked.  And they're just as good cold if you happen to have left overs ..

We pretty much used the original recipe without the lemon and berries. The only small change we made was replacing the 1 cup of buttermilk with 2/3 cup of plain skim yogurt and 1/3 cup of almond milk. And letting the batter sit for about 10 minutes really makes them super fluffy and sky-high. It's a rainy Monday -- not really pancake day, but it's perfect pancake weather. Break your weekday routine and make these. Go on...

A year ago, blogging woes, and getting over it ...

Last summer, something very special happened. Ok .. not so special, but something very relevant to "Leslie Caradmom" happened. I was sitting at home, bored and surfing the internet. I was looking for a project to do, something to make to while away the long dusty hours in late July. I stumbled across this post about buttermilk cherry sherbet at this blog: Everybody Likes Sandwiches. I thought to myself as I read the post: wow .. I never thought making anything ice cream-like would sound so easy. I was intrigued, and glued to that website for about an hour, looking through previous posts, drooling over the gorgeous photos and pretending that I had my own kitchen so that I could re-create some of the healthy and delicious looking recipes.

Then I remembered something: I had bought a whole bag of cherries and they were sitting inside my partner's fridge in his apartment. OMG, I was going to make ice cream. An hour later, I was staring at a beautiful, deep magenta pool of deliciousness. It was the most delicious ice cream I had ever tasted and I didn't even need all those calories from from heavy cream, OR an ice cream maker. I was totally hooked, and I went on to make another sherbet with lemons and limes, and yet another one with peaches and strawberries. Kickpleat's blog not only inspired me to cook, but also to write. I remembered making her carrot spice loaf but not having any eggs. Instead, I used a vegan trick I had learned in university: a handful of oatmeal, a teaspoon of cornstarch and a squeeze of lemon. The loaf turned out so perfectly that I wanted to take a picture of it and write about it.


Fast forward to March break of 2010 when I made my very first post. I was hesitant because I didn't want to be judged or made of fun of, so picked a handle, stayed fairly anonymous and wrote and cooked my way through to the summer. This summer, I tried a recipe that I've wanted to try since I read the post: tomato and corn biscuit pie. It's everything brunch should be: tangy, filling, hearty and healthy. I never thought I'd ever make any sort of pie, but there I was, rolling our biscuit dough and decobbing corn and zesting lemon. I made on a Saturday morning when I was having my best friend over for brunch, and it was definitely a hit. I followed it with this delicious, thick, creamy orange yogurt served on top of citrus fruits and the first cherries of the season.


It was like a milestone. I left so free to cook and write .. I hadn't written anything in ages, and hadn't shown my writing to anyone since university. I loved the privacy of anonymity; it gave me the freedom I needed to just relax and share my ideas with whoever was reading, without people around me knowing what I was doing. Apart from a few people, I told no one that I had started a blog. I wanted it to be a different part of my life, a little secret that I only shared with a few others. I loved that people actually read my writing, and was thrilled when other bloggers started commenting. It was free from the judgments and mockery of daily life.


Mais, récemment, j’ai perdu cette intimité. C’était comme une sévère invasion dans ma vie privée, comme j’étais exposée, forcée de partager une partie de ma vie que j’ai essayé si fort à tenir et cacher. J’ai pensé quitter à blogger, mais enfin je continue et j’en suis bien contente. Je continue à cuisiner et écrire, et partager mes histoires avec ceux qui veulent prendre le temps de le lire; c’est en fait ce que j’ai admiré de plus chez les autres blogs que je lis : le fait qu’il y a des personnes ordinaires qui tiennent le courage d’expérimenter et de partager leurs résultats, qu’ils soient des succès ou des échecs, avec le monde. Peut-être pour moi, c’est comme un petit signal inconscient: je dois écrire en français plus souvent pour maintenir de temps en temps la liberté et l’intimité dont j’ai désespérément envie. Alors, c’est un assez longue poste, mais ça me fait du bien: merci pour votre patience. Je vous laisse avec une petite recette pour la crème glacée – modifiée bien sur de ce poste original de kickpleat. J’ai utilisé des mûres au lieu des cerises, et j’ai ajouté le jus de lime et de citron. C’est bien rafraichissant, pas très sucrée, bien acidulée et parfaite pour savourer quand le monde vous fait du mal. Essayez-la, je vous en prie. Ça vaut la peine.


Blackberry Yogurt Ice Cream
adapted from Everybody Likes Sandwiches

1 cup of blackberries
3 tablespoons of water
3 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon of sugar
juice and zest of 1 lemon and 1 lime
1 tablespoon of creme de cassis or a liquor of your choice
1/2 cup of skim milk yogurt

1. Put the blackberries, citrus zest, water and 1 teaspoon of sugar in a small pot. Bring to boil, then turn down the heat and let it simmer for about 15-20 minutes, until the berries have broken down and the liquid has reduced and become slightly syrupy.

2. Let the mixture cool a bit. Add the rest of the sugar and let it cool completely. Add the citrus juice, alcohol and yogurt stir until combined.

3. Pour into the glass bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Put it in the freezer and whisk the mixture every 30-40 minutes until the mixture has set (about 4 hours). Remove and store in an airtight container in the fridge.

***I found that no matter what I did, the mixture still froze solid come morning time. Oh well. It takes about 15 minutes at room temperature to become scoopable. Worth the wait, I would say!