Stratford, Ontario with its old-world culture and charm has long been on our “must-visit” list.  As we have family and good friends in Toronto, we are often in the area and yet had never set aside a couple of extra days to head to this gorgeous destination.

We arrived a bit too early for lunch so headed to Revel Café.  After getting our bearings, we visited our first of many fabulous places to grab a bite.  We took our Grub-to-Go packages (recommended by our B&B hosts) and walked through the Shakepearean Gardens until we found a picnic table to plunk down at.  The gardens are adjacent to the Avon river and opened in 1936 and are filled with the many plant varieties mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays. Violets are cited 18 times!  The original roses in the garden were provided by Queen Mary who also did so for the Stratford on Avon garden in England.

Our B&B dubbed Breaking Bread is perfectly located to stroll the quaint downtown area and many green spaces or if you are more adventurous, even make the trek to the Festival Theatre on foot.

I swear the bed which we shared in the Birmingham Room was the most comfortable one I have ever slept in.  We have a double at home and this was an oversized King (actually two twins attached together).  The high thread count sheets and duvet covering felt luxurious.  The en suite bathroom was sparkling clean and very conveniently located just steps from the bed.  In fact, the entire space at Breaking Bread glistens with freshness.  We understand that B&B owner and host Doug is responsible for the impeccable house cleaning.

The main floor entrance was always equipped with bottles of water to set by the bed or take out for a walk.  The living and dining space is wide open and light floods the space from early morning.  Perfectly brewed coffee (D prefers a stronger, dark roast that I can’t stand) is served as of 7 am and after my one allocated cup, I switched to Scottish Breakfast tea.

Breakfasts were an absolute delight.  The first morning we enjoyed a parfait of Greek yoghurt with peaches and almonds and

then an apple pancake and thick cuts of pea meal back bacon. Host Holly has sent me her coveted apple pancake recipe.  If you are interested in my posting it, leave a comment and I will do so in a future post.

The following morning started with a warm banana muffin and fruit salad and then we tucked into a crustless quiche and the most perfectly cooked thick-sliced bacon that I have ever enjoyed.

This was accompanied by toast from the local bakery and home made strawberry preserves.

Holly is the other half of the husband and wife B&B team and is the creative genius behind the menu and in the kitchen.  She also handles the reservations and general correspondence for their home.  Best of all though, she is a Shakespearean expert and avid Stratford Theatre attendee for decades.  Ask her anything, she will either have the answer or know where she can find it.

We enjoyed the easy banter that Holly and Doug promote around their breakfast table.  We got a big kick out of the dynamics between the two of them as husband and wife and business partners.  Their passion for the Festival and the community of Stratford is so apparent.  They love to share suggestions about their favourite places to dine and shop and every tip was bang on, in our estimation.

I am sure that there are many B&B options in Stratford so why would Breaking Bread get your booking?  If your priorities are convenient location, cleanliness, warm hospitality, luxurious beds and delicious, carefully prepared breakfasts, Breaking Bread is for you.

Kath’s quote:  “When he therefore was come up again, and had broken bread, and eaten, and talked a long while, even till break of day, so he departed.”-Acts20-11.

Love-that is all.

My Mom is Queen of Cabbage Rolls.  Her recipe took years to perfect: getting the right proportions of ground beef and bacon, the correctly matured cabbage leaves, using tomato juice instead of sauce so that the acid in the juice would permeate the cabbage and add to its tenderness.  She has instructed me in all of these nuances but I have actually never made her cabbage rolls.  That is because, I will confess, I am a lazy cook.  My favourite dishes are big platters of delicious ingredients that you just kind of throw together at the end, stroll it into the dining room and have the family go-ahh!

So I am a “lazy” cook, but I am also a frugal one.  We have had beautiful cabbage in our garden share boxes this summer and I have made a couple of slaws to have as a salad or as a topping for pork sliders but I have not been able to keep up to the quantity.  So a couple of weeks ago, I took two complete cabbage heads and blanched them as I have seen my Mom do.  When they were tender, I cooled them and carefully removed the cabbage core, and placed the intact leaves between paper towel and placed them in the freezer for future use.

This week, now that my fall routine of teaching an evening class is upon me, I made up a couple of casseroles in the morning.  I say a “couple” because I find that these kind of meals are just as easy to cook up a double batch and then freeze one or drop it off at the home of a new Mom or elderly neighbour.  In this case, I delivered one to a family who has recently arrived from Great Britain.  I thought that they would get a kick out of tasting stick-to-your-ribs prairie food.

But because I am always trying to find ways to increase fibre and reduce fat in our meals, I modified the more traditional ingredients a bit by using brown rice instead of white, sliced lean ham instead of bacon and replaced the salt with extra garlic.  I think that the experiment was a success.

Sorry, I didn’t get a photo of the finished product because, when I got home that evening, it was gone.  Must have been a hit!

Kath’s quote: “Cabbage as a food has problems. It is easy to grow, a useful source of greenery for much of the year. Yet as a vegetable it has original sin, and needs improvement. It can smell foul in the pot, linger through the house with pertinacity, and ruin a meal with its wet flab. Cabbage also has a nasty history of being good for you.”-Jane Grigson

Love-that is all.

I hate wasting food.  This is one of the times when allow myself to use the word “hate”.  The five second rule has a long extension in our house.  My heart breaks when I open that mystery tupperware in the back of the fridge to discover that a special leftover that I was coveting for my lunch, has grown a fuzzy sweater and has to be put out of its misery.

Turns out that a couple of these veggies were not squash but a cucumber like veggie that I had not tasted before.  So after this photo, I replaced them with more squash.  I then used my new favourite veggie in a rustic Greek salad to accompany the pasta.

I love the abundance of this time of year and we are delighted with our garden share basket every week but I am very careful to set aside hearty veggies like carrots, beets and potatoes to enjoy in a week or so and focus on the more perishable items.  Recently I blanched and froze cabbage leaves to make cabbage rolls in the future and I have been grilling and freezing our squash varieties to try to keep up.

Last evening though I concocted a new use for zucchini and sunburst squash.  The family loved it including an intern from out-of-town who is living with us until Christmas.

The quantities in this recipe are approximate for two reasons: a) by the time I get to test the recipe again, the urgency of the season may have past and 2) less stock or more vegetables will only change the consistency, not the taste.

A great deal of the marvelous flavour comes from the bacon and renderings, so if I were to convert the dish to a vegetarian recipe I would delete the bacon, use a vegetable oil and add more onion and garlic to punch up the flavour.

Kath’s quote: “The first zucchini I ever saw I killed it with a hoe.”John Gould

Love-that is all.

Recently, I had the opportunity to work alongside a lovely woman by the name of Linda Whitworth who is on a multi-city tour promoting the health benefits of cooking with barley.  The grain which is commonly (and lovingly, in our house) associated with beer making has been recognized with the health claim that barley fibre can positively contribute to your wellness by reducing your cholesterol level.   I look at this as a bonus because cooking with barley, simply tastes good!

There are many ingredients that I might not ever cook with, were it not for my work as a food stylist.  Barley is a good case in point. I keep barley in our pantry for a single family recipe Hamburger Soup.  But now that I know the difference between pearl and pot barley (the former is “polished” longer than the latter), and have had the pleasure of baking with barley flour, barley and barley flour will always have a place on my shelf.

First up were Yoghurt Barley Fruit Scones.  I made mine with raisins but I would love to try them with blueberries next time.  I tucked one away for D to try with his supper.  He asked me to please, please make these all the time.

I had to make another substitution as I could not find rhubarb around at this time of year so I made the Rhubarb Pecan Muffins with tart cranberries instead.  The topping on these muffins was amazing (and another cholesterol reducer too with the inclusion of quick oats).  I plan to mix up a bag of this crumble topping to keep on hand in the freezer to put onto a variety of muffins.  I am making banana muffins this afternoon.  I often call my muffins “cupcakes” and serve them for dessert.

The recipe that Linda made on set was this gorgeous Black Bean and Barley Salad.  It was so simple, so healthy and so delicious-win, win, win!

But my favourite of the day was the Barley Jambalaya.  It was so good, that I literally can’t stop thinking about it and just talked myself into making it for mandatory Sunday supper this weekend.

The recipe links here are from the newly launched website that Linda was in town to promote: http://gobarley.com/.  Be sure to bookmark it as it is chock full of amazing recipes.

Kath’s quote:

Keep open house, let fidlers play.
A fig for cold, sing care away;
And may they who thereat repine,
On brown bread and on small beer dine.”
from the 1766 ‘Virginia Almanack’

Love-that is all.

My family was shocked to find out that I love soggy French fries.  My favourite fry is typically accomplished when a potato is freshly cut and not allowed too much time in the frying pie.  If it is floppy when you spear it with your fork, I am a happy camper.  When not cooked to crispy, I think that the sweetness and fleshiness of the potato shines through.

They were appropriately surprised because most other foods that I eat, I like crunchy.  If there is cheese or sauce stuck to the bottom of a casserole dish, I am in heaven by scraping it off with a spatula and popping it right into my mouth.  I think that this comes from being one of six kids when I was growing up.  I was the oldest daughter, so I was often in charge of dishes and scraping these little treats up while doing dishes, was my “consolation” prize, as it were.

I think that this is why I love a pan-seared steak.  I know that grilling is the healthiest way to cook a steak so that the fat runs away from the meat but let’s face it; fat is what makes a steak taste good!  I would rather give up a creamy sweet than pass on a juicy steak.  My Dad taught me how to perfectly sear a steak.  I bet that I was no more than nine or ten at the time.

His technique was exactly like the one in the attached video by Canada Beef with one exception: he would always sear a steak in butter and not oil.  He declared that the nutty saltiness of the butter was the perfect enhancement to the hearty taste of the steak. And,if you serve the pan-seared steak on a piece of garlic toast, you have an even easier time of capturing all of the crispy bits and juices to savour and enjoy.

Canada Beef has all kinds of recipes and references on their beef info website.   So if you have never learned to perfectly pan-sear a steak, you can learn right on their site.  And, in order to make food video watching super easy in the kitchen, Canada Beef is giving away 5 Ipads!  Click here to enter their contest (closes March 31, 2014).

Kath’s quote: “The only time to eat diet food is while you are waiting for the steak to cook.”-Julia Child

Love-that is all.