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It turns out that my friend Graham's brother's in-laws are Italian and they own the beautiful Villa di Riboia just outside of Tuscany! Not only that, the villa is used by the International Kitchen cooking school as part of their Walking and Cooking in Tuscany tour!!!!

Hmm we may have to reconsider our decision to go to Umberto's school! Regardless, this Villa di Riboia looks like a great place to stay.

For Shaun's birthday party on Saturday night, we bought a St. Honoré Cake.

For those of you who don't know what a St. Honoré cake is, it is a delightful cream puff cake with a filling of chantilly cream or chiboust cream (pastry cream mixed with Italian Meringue and flavoured with rum, coffee or kirsh) topped with vanilla cream and chocolate cream. There are many variations of this traditional Italian cake; here is a recipe from rec.food.recipes.

Happy Ukrainian Christmas! Apparently it's tomorrow! We will be celebrating it tonight with our friends Sarah, Shaun and the swing dancing gang. Hopefully we will have some of the meat free Ukrainian holiday traditions (check out some of the recipes that I found from a Google search on L. Hodges's Prodigy site and from the Toronto Vegetarian Association).

Among the many fabulous Christmas gifts that I received this year was Umberto's Tuscana Mia Cookbook. If all goes well, Barb and will I be going to Umberto's cooking school in Tuscany this October! In the meantime maybe we will review one of his Vancouver or Whistler restaurants.

Barb and I will be taking a break until January the 2nd, 2001 so there won't be regular updates until then.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Holidays to all our readers and members and their families! Thanks for making the first six months of VanEats a success!

My favourite brands of peanut butter are the all natural Adams and President's Choice Chunky. I guess I have turned into a snob but I can no longer eat the sugar laden, partially hydrogenated with unhealthy trans fats major brand peanut butter.

I love peanut butter! I could quite happily live on peanut butter and banana sandwhiches and noodles in peanut sauce (OK not totally but with some Italian dishes without peanuts thrown in occassionally).

That's why I loved the peanubutterlovers.com website that I learned about on Andrea's weblog. They have recipes and lots of great info about peanut butter. So many recipes so little time!

We want to thank everyone for the generous food bank donations...we received over 100 items!! We will be forwarding the donations to the Vancouver Food Bank and the food program of the Youth Clinic at the Surrey Memorial Hospital. Your thoughtfulness will touch many people!!

If you would like to make a monetary donation to your local food bank, you can contact the Food Bank.

The party was fun! Plenty of good food, people and lots of donations for the food bank.

This is a sample of the pictures from our Winter Warmup party (the rest of the pictures are here):

It's winter and it's chilly out... Time to warm up with some tasty snacks and beverages. Here's what we're serving at our open house:
Spicy Marinated Olives
Spicy Almonds
Cheddar Cornmeal Crackers
Parmesan Rosemary Crackers

Dahl Dip with Naan wedges
Hot Artichoke Dip
Brie with Tapenade
Cheese Platter
Assorted Breads and Crackers

Italian Cold Cut Sandwich Ring
Grilled Vegetable Sandwich Ring