We’ve Wooden Spoon Wandered to Bhutan and Togo, Dominica and Norway, but now Eric and I are undertaking our biggest wander ever…we are leaving the big city behind for the green forests and cold lakes of rural Ontario. Tomorrow morning, we are loading up a van and setting out to a town of 600 people,…
Category: Extras
The Quarantine Bakery: A Step-by-Step Guide for Flour Hoarders
Someone’s grocery list consisted of a jumbo can of instant coffee, 72 rolls of double-ply toilet paper, 36 brown eggs, and four 10-kilogram bags of all purpose flour…or so I guessed, while staring into the yawning chasm of an empty flour shelf. While ramen and baked beans are go-to items in this time of isolation…
Almost Knead-less Bread (Recipe)
After deciding to stop buying bread earlier this year and start baking it instead, I’ve done a lot of experimenting with different recipes, flours, hydration percentages, proofing methods, and more. I’ve developed this recipe that suits my cool-ish Toronto kitchen and requires almost no kneading. A wrist injury in the summer left me unable to…
Wheat Belly
In the spring of 2019, I decided to stop buying bread. I felt that we could eat better bread for less money and with less packaging, and the only thing it would take was a few hours each week, most of which would be time spent waiting for the bread to rise. I didn’t know…
The Wooden Spoon Wanderer Showcase Dinner
On the Wednesday night before the Showcase, Eric and I stayed up late, sitting side by side, carefully cutting the pith off orange peels to make narancini, candied orange peels in the Croatian style. We talked as we did so, about the work itself, about the relationship that comes from a shared task, about the…
Little Green Garden
The blog has just been reactivated after a short pause, during which I escaped to a friend’s farm on Ontario’s spectacular Bruce Peninsula. The Peninsula is itself just waking up after a long winter, and the trees are still bare. The fields were green, though, and my eyes enjoyed that much-missed colour that I crave…
This Stop, Afghanistan; Next Stop, Zimbabwe: Ingredient Hunting in Toronto
We split our time pretty evenly between eating out on the town, eating ordinary stay-in meals (salad, veggie dogs, fish and rice, frozen curries), and tackling more ambitious recipes in our own kitchen. If we cooked every day like we do for Wooden Spoon Wanderer (WSW), we’d be exhausted; if we ate out every night,…
The Slippery Slope of Disordered Eating
For the past five months, I have been dealing with digestive issues that make me feel sick after most every meal. Often I wake up with nausea and cramping and it continues throughout the day, peaking after eating. In an effort to reduce my discomfort, I have chosen to eat less. I have also undertaken…
8 Things I Don’t Think I Could Kitchen Without
Okay, I could kitchen without some of these things. I know this because I kitchened before I owned a slow cooker, and I will continue to kitchen after I drop it while moving it from the sink to the cupboard, breaking it into ten thousand pieces. But these are items that make kitchening extra enjoyable,…
Wooden Spoon Wanderer 