Pasta, pasta, PASTA!!!

I have a passion for pasta. Maybe it comes fromt the fact that I stopped eating pasta when I was young because of my wheat intolerance. Maybe it is because in Vancouver we have so many different types of pasta and GOOD Pasta. There are the Chinese noodles, the Italian noodles. Greek pasta dishes, Thai pasta salads, Japanese Udon, and then there are the stuffed pastas; ravioli, pyrogies, egg rolls.

Today I saw these machines that will make the pasta and now I am thinking about all the fun I could have making pasta and lucky for all the customers we have at the bakery, I KNOW I will make way too much for just us. So there are four different attachments, one for lasagna, one for rigatoni, one for spaghetti and one for fettucine. We can do spinach pasta, beet pasta, add herbs and spices. All sorts.

There is also a machine for ravioli and you can make different sizes. However, since the first machine will make lasagna, I can use it to roll the sheets out and then hand make the stuffed pasta. Now to decide what to stuff it with!!!

I love pasta!

I love to teach!

I am so excited about the new workshops that we are going to have at the Bakery. I have actually been showing people how to bake with Spelt for years and now I will be doing it when that is all I have to do. Check it out!!

Grief!

A subject that often arises for all of us, Spelties or not. Loss comes in so many different ways. Whether it is a member of our family, a close friend, a beloved pet, a business, a job, a child, a parent, a sibling, a partner, a loss of yourself, or your dreams. Even when it is not directly one of those for us, sometimes it is for someone we care about. Grief comes in many different ways and each person will react differently.

My grandmother died almost a year ago. She was the last of her generation in my immediate family. I became a grandmother four months later. Sometimes loss can also come in feeling like you are losing a sense of yourself. Regardless of why you are grieving, there are some basics about grief.

There are different degrees to how you will feel the grief depending on many different things. You need to grieve your way and you will need support from those around you. How each person feels support is different. I remember when my first daughter was stillborn and I was looking after a few children ages 7 to 9. One nine year old girl asked me why I talked about my stillborn daughter. I thought and answered quite quickly. My explanation to her was that when someone close to you dies, the grief is too big for you to deal with alone. So by talking about the person you share some of your grief. It is kind of like grief is a big ball and each time you talk about your loss you pass a little piece of that ball on to someone else. They are able to take that little piece and move on, helping you with your grief. I also told her that it was why grief often takes at least a year.

The other part of it is that in that year, you will find yourself doing things that you did the year before your loss and how you perceive those things is quite different. It either brings back memories or makes you think about how it would be had you not lost what was so precious to you.

There are many people in my life who have been touched by grief this past year and I am sure there are many more. My thoughts are often with them. Grief has also touched my life in the past year and for me, it brings to the forefront to be grateful for those in my life still.

Grief is not something you get over, it is something you can get through and I will go through it again and again because I care and I feel grateful that I am able to.

Dinner parties!

I love Dinner Parties. When we plan a dinner party, we discuss the menu, usually in the car on the way to the bakery and try and figure out what we will have for our dinner. We each have our specialities, I cook Indian style curries, English food, most of the baked products and almost all the desserts. Christine does Thai style curries, barbeque and pasta dishes. We both love to look at our latest issue of Bon Appetit and see what other ideas we can come up with. In fact I have issues of Bon Appetit from the 80's and all of at least the last ten years.

So, with the menu plan written down and in hand the next step is which dishes to use. What are we going to have with it. We like fusion, but there has to be some compatibility in flavours and in the tast of the people attending. It is definitely easier to feed one or two people than a crowd. Having someone over who has allergies actually makes me feel more excited than someone who can eat anything. I think one of the reasons why I ended up starting the Spelt Bakery was because I so enjoyed the challenge of feeding someone who thought that they were too much trouble with their big list of things they could not eat. While it is a challenge it is one I thrive on.

Christine and I have an e-mail list to send to people who invite us over. I have to say that the first time Christine invited me for dinner, she got my list and accommodated it beautifully. I was so impressed and then I got her list and understood that with her culinary expertise, a list like mine was not that big a deal. In fact she was more like me in that she was able to see a list of "Foods Not For Me!" and create a menu to fit. I have to say that as a baker, marrying a chef is so perfect!

September!!!

Have you ever noticed how busy it feels at the beginning of September? The craziness of getting in the last good long weekend camping trip, the rush to buy all the school supplies and back to school clothes. It starts to get cooler and all of a sudden the mad dash to get all the food we need, the clothes and the rest of what we need to make it through a cold winter. Sometimes I think that we just have some typical actions that come from when we used to need to store food through the winter and stay in our caves/cabins/homes for several months each year.

I have always behaved this way and each September I start to make food. It's a good thing that I own a bakery, because without it, I would not know enough people for all the food that I make. This year we are working on frozen pizzas and it actually took about 6 hours to do all the prep work. Tomorrow we make the pizzas and then we can see how many we get. It's quite exciting really. I have always loved insta-food, however I hate to sacrifice quality and taste for convenience. I am addicted to these new pizzas and I am so thrilled to be able to just take them from the freezer and put them straight in the oven. I am now after enough summer heat, looking forward to the cool fall air and the start of sitting in front of the fire with a nice thick stew and a hot toddy.

Even though we don't often get alot of snow here in Vancouver, The seasons are still distinctive and fun in their own ways. So take a deep breath and enjoy the transition between summer and fall, the labour day holiday weekend that starts off another beautiful season.