Category Jenn’s Blog
Swap Recipe: Jenn’s Zucchini Summer Salad with Lemon, Mint and Walnuts
Raw food veganism, you got me this time. As many of you know, July in Toronto was frequently the equivalent of living in a steam oven. Attempting to be an optimistic opportunist, I thought about how it would have been cool to bake bread and see that yeast kick into action, making dough rise in […]
Community Building (Quite Literally): Meet the Faces Behind OpenStreetMap at Mappy Hour
DREAM COME TRUE: I am starting 2013 at a new job where I get to reignite my geo-nerdery by indulging in mapmaking. I am in the midst of developing a series of interactive maps for various projects, assignments which required researching a number of online mapping applications and plug-ins. One of the main issues that […]
Lentil & Brown Rice Vegan ‘Meat’-ball Recipe
It’s holiday party time, a.k.a. potluck season, at least when you work in food-focused groups as I do. This week, I had a mighty successful cookie swap at my culinary centre job, and last night I was at the potluck party for the shared office space of Sustain Ontario (where I intern), Not Far […]
Crowdfunding Causes: Help Cultivate Toronto Set Up Gardens in Regent Park
Is it just me or do you also find yourself looking at a lot more crowdfunding projects than you used to? I don’t have the hard numbers to back it up, but I know that online fundraising has become dominated by platforms such as Kickstarter, RocketHub, and many others. They aren’t just for charity drives […]
Vanilla Pudding with Thyme Syrup Recipes
I don’t want to come out of the gate making excuses, but what a week. I’m not complaining – it’s been ‘the good kind of busy’ with visits from out-of-town friends, menu planning meetings, cat care-giving, dropping in on the Preserve Swap, a cooking class at Calphalon, a friend’s gallery show opening, and a good […]
Your Packed Social Calendar: Preserve Swap at The Handlebar (+Bonus Dance Party!)
This past Saturday night, I visited The Handlebar in Kensington Market for the first time to hear my friend Edmund Stay rock-opera-out as he reprised the songs from his musical The Wolf, which debuted in the spring. I missed the full show back in April so this concert was my first chance to hear the […]
Adventures with CSAs: Fresh City Farms
At the end of September, I finally signed up for my first personal Community Shared Agriculture program. I had considered joining a CSA in years past as it seemed like an ideal way to source food from local farmers, but the large upfront cost and time commitment required by many programs scared me off. I […]
Provencal Leek and Lavender Stew with Heirloom Carrots
This hearty aromatic stew is roughly modeled on the Leek and Bean Cassoulet with Biscuits recipe from Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s infamous Veganomicon. I had been considering the cassoulet recipe for a while as a fall dish for Harvest Noon, a cooperatively-run cafe for which I test recipes. However, another member mentioned that they had tried […]
Autumn Latkes: Vegan, Gluten-Free, AND Baked?!
As I mentioned in my previous post, I am part of the menu-planning group at Harvest Noon Cafe. We modify and test the recipes we dig up to meet the cafe’s mandate: affordable vegan lunches produced with local, organic ingredients. We try to make our mains gluten-free as well. We are at that time of […]
Recipe Testing for Harvest Noon Cafe
If you couldn’t tell, one of my hobbies is to cook. The inherent creativity and gratification of a hands-on process makes it an invaluable part of my sanity/life. I’ve found that being presented with an out-of-the-norm challenge is often what gets the creative juices really going. The base criteria helps guide your mental search. I’ve […]
Divide & Savour 