Cookbook Club Cooks British Columbia

1 month ago

The Cookbook Club chose this month to honour BC Day by making recipes created only by local BC chefs. BC Day is celebrated in British Columbia on the first Monday of August, so we decided that a Cookbook Club date of August 11 was close enough. Another theme that emerged as we sampled our dishes was Local Products and Local Produce. A great many of the ingredients used in our dishes this month were sourced locally, sometimes super locally as in our […]

Cookbook Club Whitewater Cooks!

June 6, 2018

The Bowen Island Cookbook Club took a ride on the wild side with recipes from the wonderful Whitewater Cooks series by Shelly Adams in Nelson, BC.  We were down to just four members our of our usual seven, but that didn’t stop us having an amazing meal–soup, salad, tart, and dessert. Who needs a main course with food so good? We met at Helen’s lovely home in the middle of the Island and immediately assembled in her stunning back garden complete with […]

The Cookbook Club Spends An Evening with Vij

April 19, 2018

Our  Cookbook Club get together on April 14 brought all seven of us back together at Mariana’s beautiful home overlooking a stunning view of water and mountains on the west side of Bowen Island. We could chose recipes from two Vij cookbooks – Vij’s at Home or Elegant & Inspired Vij’s. Vancouver residents are very familiar with the gourmet Indian cooking of Vikram Vij. His restaurants are almost always packed — and for good reason. Here’s an excerpt from Vij’s website describing […]

Cookbook Club: Plenty by Ottolenghi

March 16, 2018

Becky’s lovely home on the southeast corner of Bowen Island overlooking Howe Sound and the city of Vancouver beyond was the setting for our third Cookbook Club evening featuring Plenty: Vibrant Vegetable Recipes from London’s Ottolenghi. We started with a French 75 cocktail, so named after the French 75 millimeter field gun used in World War I. Apparently, that’s a thing! The cocktail itself consists of 3/4 ounce of lemon juice mixed with 1 1/2 ounces of Hendrick’s gin bought by Becky […]

The Cookbook Club: My New Roots Cookbook

March 8, 2018

For the second meeting of the Bowen Island Cookbook Club, we chose My New Roots Cookbook by Sarah Britton — and are we ever glad we did! The dishes and the evening were a huge success. We met at Kate’s lovely cosy house a few minutes’ walk through the forest from Snug Cove, the hub of Bowen Island and the location of the ferry dock. The evening threatened snow, but we immediately warmed up with a cocktail that Kate created especially for […]

The Cookbook Club – Thug Kitchen

January 22, 2018

A few weeks before Christmas, I received an email from a friend asking me if I’d like to take part in the Cookbook Club scheme he was cooking up (pun intended) for his partner’s Christmas present. The words ‘cookbook,’ ‘cooking,’ ‘dinner’ and ‘friends’ were all present and accounted for in his email. “Sign me up,” I replied. The idea was that every month, we’d pick a cookbook, make a selection of dishes from it, and then get together to eat and critique […]

Chasing the Middle Ages

January 2, 2018

Following is a piece that will be included in “Pastel and Pen,” a collection of my writing paired with selected pastel drawings by Gregg Simpson. “Pastel and Pen: Two Ways of Seeing” will be published by New Arcadia Publishing in Spring, 2018. This piece is accompanied by Gregg Simpson’s pastel entitled San Gimignano shown below. I alternate travel writing about modern San Gimignano with a fanciful journey seven hundred years into the past. The hill town of San Gimignano is famous worldwide as the […]

Bella Roma

April 30, 2017

We are spending nine nights in Rome in April of 2017 during an exhibition of Gregg Simpson’s paintings at the Arte Borgo […]