spiced pumpkin holiday granola

One of the things I love about baking is the scent it leaves behind in your home. As I write this entry, I am filled with the swirling aroma of cinnamon, nutmeg and fragrant orange. It's a perfect smell for this time of year when it's cold outside, but so warm and cozy inside.

These jars of granola (from my first batch) will be carted across the country in a very large suitcase by my cousin who is lucky enough to being going home for the holidays. They make great gifts - they're made with love, and they don't go stale! They don't last long enough to go stale, that is.

I adapted this from the recipe on Winnie Abramson's Healthy Green Kitchen (one of my new favourite blogs). I decided to add orange zest because I'm a big fan of orange spice tea, and we already know that pumpkin and orange is a thing. Or do we? I think I'm actually thinking of my mom's baked yams. Nevermind. It works.

orange-scented apple blackberry crisp

You might think it's difficult to find a use for 20 lbs of apples. Don't worry, I'll find one - even if I end up munching through the whole bag myself. See, I'm an apple-a-day kind of girl. I bring one to work every day with my lunch (unless I fail it up at the food court). Unfortunately, I seem to enjoy a crisp apple a little too much. I've recently become aware that when I eat apples, it's not pleasant. It's noisy and unladylike. This new development is the subject of much hilarity in our household.

One way to keep yourself from French-Bulldogging-it with an apple is to cook it. Everyone will appreciate your efforts, especially if you bake your apples in this orange scented apple blackberry crisp. I really love the blackberry orange combination. Apples and blackberries are also a match made in heaven. I know they say that apples and oranges are, well, apples and oranges... but I dare say that this delectable dessert blows that expression out of the water.

moose shaped owl cookies (happy belated canada day!)

 

These were supposed to be posted yesterday for the holiday, but we had a bit of a crisis in squirrel land over the past couple of days and needless to say, the cookies didn't get posted. They also didn't get eaten, even though I made them on Wednesday night. They taste awesome though, believe me!

You may be wondering why I call these "owl cookies" even though they appear to have nothing to do with owls. I'm up to my old tricks of recreating food in my kitchen that no longer exists to buy. For the longest time, there was this little bakery by the corner of 10th and Sasamat in Vancouver. They sold these huge owl cookies. They were sugar cookies made with oatmeal and whole wheat flour, rolled out and cut out with an owl-shaped cookie cutter. I was a relatively picky eater and not excited about whole wheat anything at the time, so it's a pretty big statement to say that I not only ate them, but I loved them. So many of those owl cookies made it into my happy little belly.

almond strawberry crisp

 

I have never quite understood the difference between a cobbler, a crumble and a crisp. A quick google search tells me that I am not alone. My humble understanding has always been that the difference is in the topping. A cobbler is fruit baked with layer of biscuits on top; a crumble is a combination of butter, brown sugar and flour crumbled over fruit and baked; and a crisp, as seen above (and, in my opinion, the hands down winner of all three) is similar to a crumble, but with the addition of oats to give the topping more texture. I have no real history or facts to base this on, and it is most certainly wrong. It's just that my mom always made "crisp" and it always had oats in it. Does anybody have the definitive answer, or is it just one of those things that nobody really knows the answer to, like the chicken and the egg?

baked oatmeal

 

The first thing people say when you move from Vancouver to Montreal is "enjoy the weather!" (often followed by a snicker). My response was always, "I will!" Nothing makes me cranky and lazy quicker than a dreary, drizzly morning. Enduring a Vancouver winter entails months upon months of solid, unrelenting rain and a sky so dark and grey that you just want to crawl back into bed. Not so here. The winters may be long and very cold, but at least they are bright and sunny.

Today, however, we are having Vancouver winter weather. Behold the healing powers of oatmeal!