Recipes

I'm planning to do more canning this weekend. Okanagan peaches are at their peak right now, so I'm going to make my very favourite canned goody--peach rum sauce. This sauce captures all the sweetness and fresh flavour of Okanagan peaches. It's great served over pancakes, ice cream or sponge cake

If you don't want to can the sauce, you can make 1/2 the recipe and store it in the refrigerator for up to 1 week.

My mum, Betty, is a fabulous cook. For dinner the other night, she cooked salmon steaks. She often cooks fish in a somewhat unconventional way...she steams it in the microwave and the results are just as good as the old fashioned way of steaming. Much quicker and less hassle and mess!

Handy tips from Betty: fish cooked in the microwave turns out moist and flaky as long as you add a bit of water, cover the fish, move it around (if you don't have a turntable), and don't overcook.

In yesterday's ViewFromTheHeart, Al posts a link to a site with lots of cool sauces including the six "mother" sauces aka "Basic French Sauces" which he says are like the "musical scales of cooking". Check it out!

Tonight, Barb and I had Chinese Noodle Salad at Kits Beach for a mini picnic supper. Yummy!

Afterwards, we went to Frogurts at 1925 Cornwall (they don't have a website) for a strawberry frozen yogurt in one of their delicious "made on the premises" waffle cones and walked back to my place.

This is a fun website for all sorts of recipes and many categories. When Barb first became familiar with it, they only had CookieRecipe.com and now they've expanded to include a huge range of categories including a culinary store and holiday recipes.

Barb particularly likes the cute icons!

Barb loves my Mom's rice cake which is called Kalamay in Filipino. In her own inimitable way, she reverse-engineered the recipe and made it her own. Check out Barb's delicious version of Sofia's Kalamay!

Wait, there's more!

I love blueberries! It's another one of those foods I hoard while in season and use later in the year. I especially love homemade blueberry pies (as posted a couple of days ago) as the whole experience of baking and eating them evokes fond childhood memories of my cousins coming by with buckets of berries and baking fresh pies.

I also love fresh blueberry pie. Since most of the berries are uncooked, the flavour of this pie is lighter and fresher.

It's blueberry season and tonight is the Illuminares Festival. We're celebrating with Barb's bodacious blueberry pie.

When we were in Toronto, we visited some great Greek grocery stores on the Danforth. I was intrigued by a variety of huge white lima beans. So, I brought some home (not thinking I could get them here!) and soaked and cooked them.

On those hot summer days, a cool drink like a Ginger Lemon Spritzer sure goes down well!