The Hunger Struck - Confessions of a Food Fanatic.

I’ve gone a little tomato crazy this year. I’m finding myself literally surrounded by tomatoes of all varieties and I only have myself to blame for it. As I may have mentioned before we receive more than we can eat in tomatoes each week from my mother-in-law and with many failed attempts at refusing her generous offers, because she really gives us way more than we could possibly eat, we gave up.

You would think that this constant supply of free tomatoes would extinguish any temptation to buy other available varieties in the market.

Nope, unlike most people who find themselves in an over abundance of any one thing, I don’t seem to know when to stop. You see, its tomato season in Vancouver and we have all kinds of amazing otherwise unavailable varieties like heirlooms and Okanagan Field tomatoes (still a few more weeks for these but I’m anticipating!). I wait all year for good Okanagan tomatoes I still think they’re the best in the world. How would it be possible for me to pass these up?

In a moment of panic, upon realization of my dilemma, I have come to the conclusion that we will be eating a lot of tomato based meals in the near future, at least until the Okanagan tomatoes are through. I’m OK with that for now. I promise I will exercise some restraint and not post exclusively tomato recipes for the rest of the summer.

Its almost like I have an unconscious wish to get really really fat. I’ll spend hours at the gym the weekend baking and eating and still find myself a bit confused when my jeans fit tight on Monday morning. The best part is that by some miracle I am able to ignore this and use absolutely no common sense when I see recipes like Brown Butter Ice Cream. Obviously ice cream base on its own isn’t rich enough so lets add a stick of butter to it. Sounds good to me!

In all seriousness, am I the only one that sees the genius of this? Brown butter on its own is magic and can add so much to a dish. I routinely use it when I make rice.

This is another recipe from Chez Pim and I have to say I was instantly attracted to it. It just made perfect sense to me. Brown butter, sugar, cream could there be a better combination out there? Seriously email me asap if you you know of one. This was one of the recipes that I knew would be amazing the second I laid eyes on it and I was right.

I love to bake and have always longed to be one of those bakers who can produce perfect aesthetically magnificent creations. This is a bit strange because in other ways I’m not exactly what you would call a perfectionist. This desire for baking perfection may stem from the fact that baking is something I was very comfortable with at a young age. I worked in a bakery for a while after high school and prior to that spend many days in the kitchen baking cookies, pies, tarts etc. Baking came to me easily, I only struggled with the aesthetic.

It doesn’t seem to matter how much time I spend calculating circumference or carefully cutting sides of puff pastry, somehow it always comes out looking a bit rough. I know there is appeal in a rustic looking free form tart, but sometimes, maybe even just once, I would like to make something that looks as amazing as it tastes, something refined.

I have been the laziest cook lately. For the last few weeks as this blog will attest I have had minimal time in the kitchen. Actually it hasn’t been intentional at all, I’ve just been so busy lately. We are desperately trying to find a house right now as we’ve out grown our one room apartment, so all of my free time has been spent doing this. Any of you Vancouverites who have been through this process recently will know how frustrating it is. I wont get started on the housing prices in Vancouver, they make me want to pull my hair out.

But hopefully we will find something soon because I’m sick of this and need more time to do the things I love again. AND my kitchen misses me. AND i just got a new set of amazing pots and pans. AND figs are in season!

I don’t know about you guys but I’m absolutely obsessed with figs. I wait not so patiently all year until its fig season. Once they start showing up we go absolutely fig crazy. Seriously we eat them on a daily basis. I thought I would share this extremely no brainer recipe quickly, its the first thing we do with figs each year and it may change the way you look at bruschetta forever.

I over bought at the farmers market a few weeks back. Does that ever happen to you? I find it so hard to control my purchases at this time of the year, it seems I have to constantly remind myself that with work and everything else I just don’t have time to plan what I’m going to do with 10 pounds of berries on a Sunday night. This is a really upsetting realization for me. I have always thought I could be such a great candidate for a stay at home wife position. Not out of laziness or not wanting to work, but simply because my favorite thing in the whole wide world is cooking and spending time in my kitchen. I knew I should have married rich. Or maybe become a farmer instead of choosing a career in advertising?

Fortunately I was able to have a bit of control this week when I saw the little bushels of black currants. Of course what I wanted to do was just buy up the whole lot, I love currents, but seriously what are 2 people going to do with 10 pounds of currents? In the long run I’m glad I had the strength to limit myself because as it turns out the currents on top, the ones I tasted, were pretty sweet but the ones underneath that first layer were really tart almost sour. If I was a suspicious person I would call the farmer I bought them from sneaky, but I’m not and honestly it gave me an excuse to make this pretty awesome black current jam.