Our beautiful backyard

This year we planted a garden in our backyard.

It's kind of funny that last year in the same section, we planted grass. Before that there was just a big pile of dirt in that section of our yard. We made three levels of beautiful lawn going down to the edge of the garage for our wedding on June 21st, 2009. Christine and I have now been married for just over a year and on our first anniversary, Horizon Distributors launched our Breakfast Cookie as a new product. It was a very exciting day for us and we celebrated by going to Vij's for dinner.

Anyway back to the garden. Our tenants, Jeff and Flo have helped enormously. We already had raspberries, black currants and saskatoon berries along the side of the fence and a cherry tree out front. Now we also have lettuce, carrots, beets (my favourite are golden beets), potatoes, leeks (for my goat cheese, leek and onion tart) tomatoes of all different size, radishes, endives, peppers, squash, eggplants, herbs and an artichoke for Christine. There is only one artichoke and maybe next year there will be more. I was so excited to find the seeds that I had to try it out and it is actually growing but apparently it is alot like asparagus. It takes a long time to get food out of it.

For quick eating gardens, I think lettuce is pretty good. I planted a seed mix and the red and green romaine that is coming out of it is gorgeous. We have been eating caesar salads with our own homemade dressing and it is amazing. We bought a chunk of Parmigiano Reggiano and are slicing it and putting thin slices of cheese in the salad with a traditional dressing with anchovies, egg, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil. If you do not eat cows milk cheeses, there are some beautiful sheep milk cheeses that are similar, like Pecorino Romano which is what we usually get for pasta dishes.

I hope you like the picture of our beautiful Garden.

Come celebrate your pride with us!

We will be at Sunset beach on the Sunday, August 1st for the Vancouver Pride Parade!!

Christine and I spent the day working on our outfits, so come by our booth to get yourself a breakfast cookie and to see what we came up with to wear to celebrate the Vancouver Pride Festival.

450 degrees

Making puff dough out of Spelt flour is one of those things that I have done many times in the past and at the previous location of the bakery (The Spelt Bakery) we used it for making cherry pinwheels and fruit filled pastries. Then I met Christine and she made this fabulous savoury strudel with my puff dough.

However, the last time we tried to make cherry pinwheels, they failed miserably. We baked them in our convection oven at the bakery at 375 degrees and the puff dough did not puff. So on Saturday night I decided to try puff dough again.

I took some little squares of puff dough that I had in the freezer at the bakery and brought them home. I folded the edges over to make a little edge and then brushed all the edges with egg wash.

Meanwhile I sautée two large leeks and a red onion in a bit of olive oil in one of my favourite cast iron frying pans. I added a touch of a rosemary/raspberry sea salt and cooked the leeks and onion until soft with a little bit of a brown edge.

With a fork, I divided the leek onion mixture between my seven little puff squares and crumbled a soft goat cheese on top. I then put some fresh ground black pepper on top and baked all of them at 450 degrees in the oven and THEY PUFFED!!!

The recipe for spelt puff dough is in my cookbook, Basic Spelt, available from the bakery.

I was so excited that I kept smiling and laughing little happy laughs. For those of you who have not met me, I like to smile and laugh like a five month old watching the dogs. (That's a reference to my granddaughter, Lilja) I like to get excited by the small things in life, like a good meal and the success of my puff dough.

Quite frankly, there are enough of all those small things to make life quite enjoyable.

I hope you like the picture of my puffy little goat cheese, leek and onion tarts. They were delicious with our tapas dinner of skewered prawns, tomatoes and red onions on the bbq and chicken wings with Christine's honey mustard sauce.

Success at 450!!

My First Post

This is my first blog and you may or may not find it interesting. I will write about whatever I want and alot of times it will probably be about food.

I love family, food and adventure. I love to feed people and I love to write, talk, discuss and hear about food.

Please feel free to take my ideas about food and recreate them at home. Eating well is so much fun.