Mount Everest Bread

As a Christmas gift, my family was gifted with a bread maker this year. I love this for many reasons! As someone with a soy allergy, it is hard to find bread from the stores that are not processed with it. I would rely on fresh bread from bakeries or make it from scratch when we needed it. Therefore, this is really a wonderful gift idea. It saves money and time. I find that if I am around the house and want to make a loaf, it is about 3 hours from start to finish and you can be as original and creative as you want to be. After we got it, we tried to make a basic white loaf and we kept getting a fairly dry loaf and we couldn’t figure out why. Interesting enough, we talked with my Mother-in-law and she explained trying something with the flour that we had not thought of. She mentioned spooning in the flour into the cup as opposed to putting the cup scoop into the flour and levelling it off. I guess by placing the cup in we were actually adding more flour, hence the dryness. The reason this mattered is because we live at a higher altitude here in the mountains and for bread in particular, it cooks faster in the bread maker because of it. This is a wonderful trick and changed our bread and I hope it will for you too, if you decide to as well.

This got me thinking, what else is affected in cooking from high altitude Apparently quite a bit, including eggs! I had no idea! Anyways, I am going to try a raisin and a dill bread (as I used to love this when I was a kid) as my next bread experiments. What kind of bread would you like to see me make? What kind of breads are you making at home?

Hope you are staying healthy and safe.

-Deb

Fly Me into Christmas

I have had a lot of people ask me how to make these in the last little while so I thought I would share how to do this and a little about why I make these holiday ornaments.

When I was a child, we spent many Christmas holidays making candy cane airplanes. Most people have never heard of these, as I think it was something my family had done for many years as a tradition. It started as a fun way to decorate our tree every holiday in memory of my Grandfather Gordon Latham who passed away too young. My mother would speak fondly of him and we would reflect on his achievements and his character as we made these in memory of him. He was a bush pilot who had a significant impact on the North, especially in Yellowknife. He loved people and had a tremendous heart and people loved him, so much so that an island, Latham Island was named in his honour. My Grandfather unfortunately passed away before I was born but I was lucky enough to visit Latham Island a couple times and hope to one day show my children it.

I want to share with you how we make these Christmas airplanes and making these has even more significance these days as my Mom is no longer with us and I will continue this tradition in the family. I hope that if you feel inclined to make these, you can enjoy the joy that my family and I get from making these every year.

I’d love to see your candy cane airplanes, so please share or tag me with photos. If not, no worries but I hope you have some type of tradition you do as a family and I would love to hear about it. For me, this time is special to connect with my family and to reflect on these special people in my life.

THE PROCESS

You Need: Circle candies (I use Lifesavers)
Elastics
Candy canes
Stick gum (I use Juicy Fruit)

Making these is quite simple actually. You need a thin stretchy elastic (not too long) and you put it through the two lifesavers.

Next, you put one piece of stick gum through the elastic on top of the lifesavers.

Finally, you put the candy cane through the hole remaining under the gum and above the lifesavers. Just like that you have yourself a candy cane airplane.

The most important step is to place it on your Christmas tree or like my kids like to do as well, eat it!

Hope you have fun making these and it is a great and easy project to do with the kids. :)

Dairy-Free Cast Iron “Heavenly” Lasagna

For those of you that don’t know me, my husband I met 18 years ago in the process of my food cooking journey and overtime he has became quite the cook himself. He likes to experiment with recipes as well and to try new things and sometimes some are more successful than others. He had this wild idea one day that we should attempt to make a dairy-free lasagna. I thought how is this possible? I have seen recipes involving cashew cream and other alternative cheeses but I never found that they sounded compelling enough to try. My husband convinced me to try a cast-iron recipe with no cheese or cheese alternatives at all. So we did it and we attempted it a few times until we got it to where we felt it was super delicious.

This lasagna was made on a cast-iron skillet with fresh pasta placed on each layer (we make the pasta from scratch due to my durum wheat allergy, but you can use store-bought pasta, as well). This recipe is pretty much the same as most lasagna recipes except it is done in a skillet pan (covered with tin foil for baking when in the oven) until the very end when the tin foil is removed to crisp up the top. The top layer also consists of bread crumbs for that “special crunch”.

This recipe is really easy for those days when you need to make something quickly for your children or for those with dietary needs and I can tell you, my children who are picky eaters loved this version of lasagna as well.

If you want to make this lasagna for the cheese lovers in your life too, you can make this exact lasagna but just remove the bread crumbs and put cheese layers back in. I hope you try it and enjoy it as much as I do!

-Deb

Can’t Stop The Eat

WELCOME

I have never written a blog before (but have been in the writing industry for over 10 years), so this is all new to me, but this is a space where I’d like to share a part of what makes me happy and what makes me, me. On that note, what does one decide to write about and begin this journey? I am not sure, but I wanted to start a food blog to cover a variety of topics about all the things I love including: food, cooking, baking, food styling and food photography. This idea has been in the works for some time for me but I wasn’t sure where to start so I just decided today I’d give it a go.

I want to start by sharing a little about myself and who I am. I am Deborah, I was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. I was born the youngest of 6 kids and I have one older sister and four older brothers who prepared me for anything in life (believe me I have heard and seen it all). I grew up with the same few meals for lunches and dinners, as we didn’t have a lot of variety on food choices as kids due to there being so many of us and not a lot of money to put on fresh ingredients on the table. Needless to say all of our plates were always cleared at the end of a meal and nothing was wasted. My Mom (who I will be writing about in later blogs), used a lot of coupons and had a very strict budget she would adhere to at the grocery store. My siblings and I would bake with my Mom over the years and cook as well. This was something I always enjoyed doing with her.

Many years later, I started to get an allergy to dairy and this allergy had stuck with me for most of my life and now I haven’t had dairy in almost 20 years! Between my dairy allergy and an antibiotic that I was given when I was a child for pneumonia, I had to rapidly change my eating habits and choices quickly. While many other kids would be able to have pop, I would have to stir mine to remove the carbonation, and I would not be able to have many sugary snacks because they contained dairy (dark chocolate was my go-to). Over the years, I realized that all the processed food I had been eating as a kid was not as delicious as the food that came from the source. I grew a new appreciation for this and this became more and more part of the food journey I was on.

Moving ahead to another few years down the road in my life, I was in Greece on travels and got a parasite there and was like anyone very sick from it. When I eventually got back to Canada, I was seen by many specialists to correct my gut that was no longer functioning properly. I was labelled to have different conditions and I was put on very strict diets and was told my gut may never recover. I decided to not take this for an answer and decided to go back to a very basic diet to help my gut recover, the best way I knew how and it did eventually. This diet contained fish, chicken, natural vegetables and fruits and breads. I cut out all processed foods, acidic foods, and many others. I started cooking very clean and healthy food and this changed everything for me. I started to learn new recipes from scratch, new ways to cook and I would host meals for my friends. This part of me never stopped, even to this day.

This has been a big part of my food journey and even after all that (gut health, dairy allergy), I had other obstacles get in my way. I found out in the more recent years, some times after I got married and had my two kids (who I will also get more into this in other blogs), was allergic to durum wheat, and soy. So again, I had to find new and innovative ways to cook around this and I have! Even with all that happening, I wouldn’t change anything. I have really learned to appreciate food for what it is, love eating it, love experimenting, and love finding better and easier ways to cook without these ingredients. I believe it has made me healthier and a better cook.

I know this seems like a long story and it is, but it is mine and it is all of these parts that have lead me here. I want to share more in each of my posts about all the components of food and food photography I love. With that said, I want to share a dairy-free lasagna (see the next blog). This is something I had told my husband I hadn’t had in so many years because it was loaded with cheeses. He helped me to find a way to feed this dairy-free lasagna desire I was having and I must say this recipe is so delicious and does just that!

Thanks for reading and being part of my food blog journey!

-Deb