It was hotter than you would ever imagine it could get in a Canadian mountain ski resort, so we retreated from the village to the lake to cool off with a nice swim. Crystal clear green-blue water, with snow capped Whisler and Blackcomb mountains towering impressively in the backdrop – it was truly breathtaking. And I’m not just talking about the view! To swim in that lake was to have your breath quite literally taken away. The water was so cold that it felt like your lungs were being stabbed with a million knives.

After entertaining ourselves at length watching tough guys try to impress their girlfriends with their bravery only to squeal like girls when their… erm… boys… reached the frigid icy water, we were eventually led to seek out alternate means of refreshment. Enter Mojitos.

Mojitos are simple, fresh, and absolutely delicious. Nothing but mint muddled with sugar and lime, rum and soda water. In a cold glass filled with ice, nothing could be more refreshing after a hot day in the sun. We prettied ours up with a handful of raspberries from the back yard.

Muddling, for those who aren’t familiar, is just fancy bartender speak for smooshing ingredients in the bottom of a glass with a stick (a muddler) to release the juice and flavours. The wrong end of a wooden spoon does the job just fine.

I didn’t use a recipe, I just eyeballed the ingredients. Although they were delicious, eyeballing rum runs the risk of turning a party rowdier than intended. Or in our case, the opposite happened. After two each, it was naptime. I blame the hot sun. But maybe you should use a recipe, just in case.

I had such a moment of dizzy overexcitement at the market this Sunday, which resulted in me coming home with enough BC raspberries and strawberries to give a lesser woman a stomach ache to be nursed in the fetal position. But to my dismay, and despite my very best efforts, I couldn’t eat them fast enough! (Must be something to do with my technique; too much breathing between swallows?)

This morning I woke up to admire my berry bounty when I discovered brown spots disgracing my beautiful strawberries. Noooo!

Once I recovered from the initial panic, I took several deep breaths, and asked myself: Jenn, what do you do do when life gives you blemished berries?

You make jam!

I didn’t use a recipe, which is why I don’t have one to share with you. I used the no-pectin, cook for a long time method which involves cooking berries (or any fruit) over low heat for enough time that the natural pectin they contain causes them to thicken up and gel without adding anything else but sugar. I only had about 2 cups of strawberries, to which I added about 3 teaspoons of sugar. You can add much more, if you like - I have seen recipes call for up to 1 cup of sugar per cup of berries. Blech, is my response to that. You can always add more sugar to taste, but you can never take it away.

My beautiful blemished berries, reincarnated as fresh strawberry jam. The jam must be refrigerated if not canned in sterilized jars, and could last for about 2 weeks (but won’t, I promise).

Pals.

To celebrate, I spent the day at the beach with my adorable furry bottomed friend. I put in some time working on my freckles, examining seashells, doing some neurons-not-required reading, and savouring the first of the local cherries. And despite all of that exhausting labour, I found time to cook! It was the perfect day.

This couscous salad is perfect summer food; delicious, light, cool, and full of bright flavours like herbs, lemon, and fresh garlic. It is perfect picnic food. Perfect potluck food. Perfect side dish to grilled chicken or steak. It is a warm weather staple in my kitchen.

Adarsh insists that I make sure everyone knows this couscous salad is his favourite food. I’m skeptical, because he tosses out words like “favourite”, and “best ever”, and “we should eat this every day” so often (about three times a day, to be specific, and generally coinciding with meals) that these exuberant exclamations kinda lose their substance. However, today when I made this for lunch, his enthusiasm convinced me that maybe he really does like it that much. He asked me to make it for his birthday. I personally thought he’d shoot a bit higher… but hey, I’m not gonna argue.

My favourite thing about summer salads is their versatility. The “add-ins” I mentioned are just a smattering of things I had on hand today. This is a great opportunity to experiment! It would be delicious with dried cranberries instead of raisins, toasted almonds instead of walnuts, and/or some diced celery. Also, you can use more or less of the herbs - or switch them up. Sometimes I leave out the mint if I don’t have it on hand.

Did you know that couscous is just a teeny, tiny pasta?

Okay, here’s the scoop. I was an intern. In a hospital. Me no likey. I’m a fainter. ‘Nuff said. But it had to be done, and I learned a heckuvalot whilst working my rather distressed hiney off.

And really, all that matters now is that I made it out the other end alive (if slightly worse for the wear and a bit shell-shocked), and got a few pretty letters tacked onto my name in the process. Not to mention I have a very clear picture of what I don’t want to do with my life (which I think is a very important first step in making career decisions). Hoorah!

Now lets pick up where we left off, which was, I believe, celebrating life and summer and delicious food!

I thought a humble pie would be a very symbolic, tail-between-legs way for me to reappear on the blogosphere. Then I found out what humble pie was. Blech. You’ll be very happy I am making you Cinnamon Bun Biscuits instead, and I think you will be much more likely to forgive my absence having spared you the deer innards.

These delightful breakfast treats are based on an old family recipe. I think they are fairly common in the Maritimes, where I grew up. They are flakey and buttery and delicious. A simple glaze or cream cheese frosting take them to another world, but they are also perfect as is, unrolled like a scroll and dunked in coffee. The best part? They are quick and easy enough to be made on a Tuesday morning. And what a perfect way to bridge the time gap - they use the same biscuit recipe as those strawberry shortcakes, right where we left off.

It’s Summer! It’s Summer! And I’m still here! Except now my brain is in a beachy-happy-place instead of in a library cubicle, my nose deeply planted in an Agatha Christie mystery instead of in a Nutrition and Disease textbook. Hooray! Although sunkissed and befreckled, I’m also a little shame-faced about my total, unexplained hiatus from the blogosphere… It is amazing how fast a week turns into two, turns into three, turns into several. Do you want the Coles Notes version? Okay, here goes:

Mid to late April: Exams! Last ones ever!! Eek! This gives me a strange happy-sad-frightened feeling.

Early May: MEXICO!! Girls getaway. All-inclusive. Endless beaches. Endless tequila. A trip we affectionately refer to as “Swine Oh-Nine”. (But don’t worry, *oink*, no symptoms, *oink*).

May, immediately post Swine-09: Full-time summer course + lots of visiting family = a bustling, happy house… and a very busy (but happy!) Jenn.

Beginning of June - present: Happiness, in the form of: a sister, a bouncy dog, endless sunshine, a whole lotta ice cream, buckets of Corona, a secret beach, a bicycle, a bikini (or ten), strawberries, and freedom.

So that’s where I’m at right now. At any given moment that you might be reading this, I am surely doing something that involves some lovely combination of the above. But for the sake of priorities, lets focus on the strawberries. Because summer isn’t summer without bright, local berries and a pile of pillowy whipped cream - preferably in combination with a fresh, flaky biscuit. Talk about a fast-track back to the best bits of childhood summertime.

For the shortcake base, I used a basic baking soda biscuit. This recipe consistently produces the fluffiest, flakiest, most delicious biscuits in the whole wide world. My devotion to this recipe is evidenced by the worn-down, butter-smeared, flour-speckled page it lives on in my cooking lab manual. Try them - they are practically foolproof. Just keep the butter cold, don’t over-work them, and get them into the pre-heated oven as quick as you can.

But life’s about balance, right? So I am taking lots of study breaks: strolling with Oliver through the streets lined with cherry trees snowing their blossoms onto the cars parked beneath them; running on the beach at low tide to capture a few moments of warm, salty air; ransacking the market on my walk home from the 24-hour coffee house (thus continuing the walk home with 30 pounds of books on my back, and 5 pounds of rhubarb under each arm); and then baking the afore-mentioned rhubarb into a delicious, summery pie.

Because writing this, too, constitutes a study break, I have to keep it short and sweet - balance, right? So I’ll cut right to the chase and share with you the recipe for one of my most favorite fragments of Spring - Strawberry Rhubarb pie. The pie crust recipe is my go-to favorite, apart from a family recipe for a press-in crust that I will share with you at another time. When I make it, I usually double the recipe, and toss a disk or two of dough into the freezer for spontaneous quiches, pot-pies, samosas, or the materialization of some irresistible fruit at the market.

A couple tips for making pie crust - keep the ingredients as cold as possible. To have a light, flaky pastry it is crucial to prevent the butter from melting into the dough before it hits the hot oven. So handle it minimally, and start with cold ingredients. Another important part not to skip is letting the dough rest. Letting it sit before rolling it out allows the gluten (wheat protein) to relax - if you don’t rest it, the dough will be much more difficult to handle, and will shrink in the oven.

But, I reasoned with myself - it is exam period, and I will probably have a perfectly legitimate excuse not to cook on any given day over the next two weeks. And I have a crisper drawer in my fridge groaning under the weight of luscious, fresh vegetation. So, I reluctantly re-stuck the partially unwrapped foil on my delectable creme filled chocolate treat, and whipped out my apron along with some leafy greens. And I decided I should tell you about how to make greens taste grand. Yes, grand. Not just edible, but delicious.

I really love any edible leaf, but I didn’t always. Nothing is worse than a plate full of soggy, bitter, marsh-hued greens. The first time I had kale that I liked, it was a revelation. This was me: Whaaaaaaaaa….?! That can taste like this?? And now I fill my basket (and meals) with some variation of arugula, spinach, kale, chard, curly endive, beet greens, gai lan, rapini, etc. every week.


Let me divulge a few vegetab-ular tricks:

For dinner tonight, I started with sauteed shallots and garlic, added kale and curly endive, and flavoured them with crushed chili, soy sauce, rice vinegar, honey, sesame oil, green onions and toasted sesame seeds.

The pan I used to cook the greens doubled as a panini press for some delicious grilled sandwiches! Dessert, of course, was a Cadbury Creme Egg. Oliver’s dessert was the wrapper… oops.

So, I decided to share with you my favorite blogs so you can nibble your way over there and get your fill, while I am missing in action. I wake up an extra half-hour early so that I can keep up with my blog-drooling. Here’s a taste of what is currently making me salivate on my keyboard. I’m sure you already know some of them, but maybe there’s a new gem in there for you to discover!

Joy the Baker
101 Cookbooks
King Arthur Flour Blog
Closet Cooking by Kevin
A Dash of Sass
The Food Geek
Not Without Salt
Use Real Butter
Culinary Concoctions by Peabody
Creampuffs in Venice
Sticky Gooey Creamy Chewy

I’ll be back soon, with yummy things like Lamb Popsicles in Tamarind Cream Curry. I promise! In the meantime, follow up real-time updates on twitter.

To make the dough, you mix everything in a bowl. That’s it. The initial rise takes two or more hours. But this rise doesn’t need to be babysat, as you let it grow until it collapses in on itself. Then you take the resulting gloriously yeasty, puffy pile of dough, stick it in a tub, pop it in the fridge, and saw off a hunk whenever you have a hankering for fresh, warm bread. Nothing to it.

The longer the bread stays in your fridge (up to about two weeks), the more flavourful it becomes and the larger the air holes will be. Others have said that it improves greatly by keeping it in the fridge for just 24 hours, and that the longer it is in there, the better it will be. I personally thought it was scrumptious the very first day, and with my patience deficiency, there was no way in heck it was going to last more than a few days.

The “five minutes a day” thing really only refers to the active time once the dough is prepared (i.e. cutting off a chunk, flouring it, and slashing it). It takes a bit more than five to mix up the initial batch - maybe five-and-a-half, six minutes? Then on the day you bake it, it needs to rest for at least 40 minutes once it is shaped. Plus about a half-hour in the oven. But no time will be spent grunting and fretting as you might do when making bread the traditional way…. which you may never do again, once you try making it this way!

The thing that irks me about publications like this, is that it totally freaks people out using dumbed-down, dramatic phrases such as “those who ate the most red meat were most likely to die”. I wonder how many people are giving the poor cow the heave-ho based on research that is obviously lacking for controls? For example, are those whose meat consumption is greatest eating meat at the exclusion of things like grains and vegetables? Are they getting the meat in the form of daily slabs of fast-food hamburger meat, with a ginormous side of fries and a litre of coke? Are the people who eat more meat eating more of everything in general? Are the people who eat less meat more health-conscious in general? Don’t forget the “French paradox” where people eat plenty of red meat, usually with a side of butter, and have much lower rates of cardiovascular disease than in North America.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not gonna be throwing out my steak knives any time soon. Pfft. This kind of journalism really gets my goat. Mmmm… meaty goat….