The Hunger Struck - Confessions of a Food Fanatic.

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 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.

I love gooseberries. It seems like only two years ago they were a rarity in Vancouver. I remember seeing tiny little baskets of them, with their fragile paper leaves priced outrageously and wondering if they would ever become economical enough to really consider using as I would other berries, for things like tarts, galettes and pies which require larger quantities.

They have come down a bit in price, though they are still quite expensive. You can now buy them locally in Vancouver in larger bushels, without their paper leaves, which I personally don’t care for as I think it takes away some of their charm even if it does save me sometime. But they aren’t for everyday, though I desperately wish they could be. I splurged a bit on these as I was in the market for something special for a dessert on mothers day.

The list of seasonal fruits and vegetables that are highly anticipated and enthusiastically discussed in our household are endless. We spend many an hour discussing what we are excited to make with certain ingredients throughout the year that when they finally show up in our farmers market we can hardly wait to get back home and bring all of those daydreams into reality.

A few weeks ago we found some beautiful first pick rhubarb at the market. The stalks were thick, a shiny dark red and I just knew that they would require very little to produce something amazing. But against my better judgment, after several months of anticipation I had my mind set on a rhubarb cake that I’d worked out in great detail and that’s what I was going the make, the end.

I truly wish I had been able to slow down for a moment or two to take a picture of this rhubarb because you really need to see it to understand the tragedy that followed. But alas, in that moment I couldn’t seem to find a second to pick up my camera and to tell you the truth I’m not great with process pictures. I was in the rhubarb cake zone and nothing was going to stop me. It’s taken me several weeks to get over this indecent enough to put these words down, and it’s not even the way the cake turned out that truly eats me inside, but the fact that I knew ( I KNEW!) this was not the rhubarb to use in such a high risk baking experiment.

Ugh, must everyday be a lesson in stubbornness for me?