Househomekits

Shh, don't tell anyone, but there's a little song that goes off inside my head when I'm eating flowers. It's the flower eating song! I like this song… as you may have noticed from my posts on Rose Petal Coconut Semifreddo , Dandelion Marmalade , and Lilac Scones . I think it's the same song I used to sing when I was little and building elf castles in the woods. It's the song of magical things. The first time someone told me daylilies are edible, I had a mini epiphany. I remember carefully chewing on the petals, taking in their flavour and marvelling that this common flower can not only be admired for its majestic beauty, but also eaten. (Possibly imparting magical flower kingdom superpowers… just possibly.)  The petals are delicious in salads and you can eat the young shoots of the plant, and even boil the tubers like potatoes! (I haven't tried those yet.) But what I want to tell you about today are the buds… oh the buds. As delicious as asparagus, in my opi...

Are you ready for pure summer decadence? I hope so, cuz here it comes. As you may know, I'm a fan of frozen desserts that don't require an ice cream maker, as in this one , and this one . And I've been oggling homemade DIY ice cream sandwiches online for years but they just seemed like one of those Martha Stewart Pinterestey things that real people don't actually make. But seeing as we've been swimming in strawberries lately, I've been racking my brain to make every strawberry recipe I can come up with. There's been strawberry scones, balsamic strawberry thyme jam (hell yeah!), strawberry cheesecake brownies, strawberry muffins, chocolate-dipped strawberries (a nod to my sis ), and of course, strawberry shortcake (nod to my Grammy). Yes, seriously, it's been busy in this kitchen. And I'm almost sick of strawberries. Almost. But not quite. And then in the middle of all that strawberry mayhem, I had an epiphany about strawberry sorbet and how dead eas...

I will never forget the first time I ate this dish.  I was visiting my dear friend Synda in Tunisia, and her downstairs neighbour who is from the island of Djerba had offered to make us a big bowl of this rice, prepared in the authentic Djerbian way. We had barely eaten anything that day in anticipation of this meal, so by the time Khalti Baya  called us downstairs, w e were two very, very hungry girls. We sat in her tiny dark living room and she ceremoniously emerged from her kitchen with the largest bowl I'd ever seen, filled with a deep red rice flecked with dark green. The steamy fragrance emanating from the magical rice was out of this world. We each grabbed a spoon and dove in, eating straight out of the same bowl in traditional Tunisian style. Well. Our mouths began to burn, our cheeks turned bright red, and we broke into a sweat. But we couldn't slow our voracious feasting down because it was one of the most delicious things we had ever tasted in our lives. So we jus...