Friends!! I’ve been working on a sort of experimental project. It’s been super fun. It’s Hip to be Square is my first digital recipe download! It’s a collection of a bakers’ dozen (13!) of my favourite recipes for squares (and a few bars!), from Nanaimo bars to butter tart squares to Sweet Maureens, to download and/or print for your holiday – or year-round – baking pleasure. Cookies get all the attention at this time of year, but a pan of squares is perfect for packaging up to do door drops.

Yesssss, I managed to get another podcast out and into the world! Food writer Claire Tansey was in town to promote her new cookbook, Uncomplicated, and since she has many years of experience running the Chatelaine test kitchen, we decided to sit down and answer a few common questions we get about cooking, ingredients and other culinary curiosities. We also talked about what makes a solid recipe, how you know it’s going to work, and ate some jelly doughnuts. Have a listen!

A few weeks ago, Jann Arden invited me over for lunch – she made Beyond Meat burgers, and we chatted about life and food and how she’s navigating being vegan, and I recorded it all and whittled it down into a podcast. It was my first time recording one on my own – no one was standing by with headphones, watching the levels on the laptop… it was just Jann and I and a single hand-held mic with a really long cord – almost long enough to reach around her 8×10 foot kitchen island. (If I was to be stranded on an island, it would be that one.) Give it a listen… huge thanks to Jann for taking the time to make me lunch, for letting me use one of her songs, and just generally being an amazing human and positive influence on the world.

Hey guys! I can’t believe I forgot to share here that the second episode of Crispy Bits (the podcast!) is out – this time I sat down with self-published cookbook author Greta Podleski and we chatted about how she has managed to sell 2 1/2 million cookbooks on her own, without the support of a major publisher. How she managed to be the #1 best selling cookbook in Canada all last year, even though her latest book came out in October of 2017. It’s truly an amazing story.

Remember this photo of W taking a picture (with an old camera that didn’t actually work) of his omelet? Sigh. It was my blog header of my blog for a long time – although the omelet was cut off and a lot of people couldn’t tell what the black box was. Anyway. I needed a photo here because you gotta have a photo, right? And it relates to taking pictures and writing recipes and the stuff I do around here. Sometimes (oftentimes), people pay me to write stuff. Or to photograph stuff, come up with recipes, or make food look pretty so that other people can take pictures of it. This is a good thing, because I’m a professional food writer and the goal of any professional anything is to make a living doing that thing. Sometimes I get paid by magazine or newspaper editors (who get paid by advertisers) and sometimes I get paid cookbook royalties based on book sales and sometimes marketing boardsContinue reading