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Standardby Julie7 Comments

BC cherries are in! Which means a) summer is here, and b) we must celebrate this fact by eating as many cherries as possible. I know food in jars is so three years ago – unless you’re my sister, who came up with the brilliant idea one September that she could tackle two surpluses at once, and send the kids to school with lunch in a jar, tucked into a spare sock. (Don’t worry, she didn’t actually.) I find a myriad of uses for those small half cup jars – I shake up dressings and dips in them, and melt butter to chill and clarify, and make crème brûlée (OK, I’ve only done this once) and little cheesecakes in jars, which can be sealed and tossed into your picnic basket or work bag. Cherries braised with sugar and their own juiciness is classic, but inspiration will present itself all summer – stewed rhubarb, strawberries, blueberries, peaches, saskatoons. It’s all good. And there’s no need toContinue reading

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Standardby Julie4 Comments

This would be pretty for Canada Day, don’t you think? (I knew better than to attempt to arrange a maple leaf out of raspberries.) It looks pretty enough that people asked me where I bought it, but in reality if you can stand a raspberry upright, you can cover a cheesecake with them. The truth is, here they’re covering a gaping chasm of a crack in the top – something so common in cheesecakes it’s traditional to cover the plain ones with a sour cream topping to conceal any flaws. Cheesecake was my dessert of choice back in the 90s – it was Mike’s birthday cake of choice for decades – and yet I never think to make them these days. They’re pretty low-maintenance, as far as desserts go – once baked, it needs to sit in the fridge to firm up, so it may as well just hang out in there until you’re ready for it. A plain cheesecake like this – a classicContinue reading

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Standardby Julie6 Comments

When you’re a kid, having sisters is not that exciting. They borrow your clothes and pretend they’re you when a boy calls. But when you’re a grown-up, having sisters that live in the same city is pretty grand, especially when they’re good cooks. I may have mentioned before that my youngest sister is a fantastic cook. (Not the one who lives across the street – although she has fed me well, it’s not as much her thing.) She always brings stunningly delicious things to family dinners, and this time it was her first attempt at a no-bake cheesecake. (A great idea, I think, when the oven is full of a turkey.) I admit to some cheesecake snobbery – I generally dismiss no-bake cheesecakes, but this one was not set with gelatin, but was a soft mixture of cream cheese, whipping cream and pure maple syrup, with thinly sliced roasted pears on top. (I love her use of red-skinned pears here.) She used a Martha StewartContinue reading

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