Marie Cookpad

  For as long as I can remember and beyond Saturday night suppers back home in Nova Scotia and indeed all down the Eastern part of Canada and the US, Saturday night baked bean suppers have been the tradition.   In fact, during non-covid days, Baked Bean Suppers have always been huge fund raisers for local communities, volunteer fire departments, schools, etc.  People have always loved them.   Back where I come from Baked Beans are not humble, they are precious and speak of family, tradition and community spirit. Baked Bean Suppers, with home baked beans, ham or hotdogs, scalloped potatoes and steamed brown bread, or sometimes molasses oatmeal bread, or baking powder biscuits, or even corn bread.  These are knit into very the fibre of every maritimer.   Brown Bread is probably the most basic traditional bread served with baked beans.  Back home you can buy it in cans, baked and ready to re-heat by steaming.  Or you can make your own, which is very ...

  One of the places I missed from back home when I moved over here to the UK was Tim Hortons.  I actually used to work at Timmie's before I moved over here.  I understand that it has changed a lot over the past 20 years and not always for the better.   When I worked there they had bakers right in shop and they would work basically all night making the doughnuts, cakes, etc.  From what I understand everything is made in a central place now, bought in frozen and then thawed.  Not quite the same I don't think.   One of the doughnuts that they had which was my favourite was their Sour Cream Doughnuts.  A type of cake doughnut as opposed to a yeast raised doughnut.  I have always preferred cake doughnuts to yeast raised.   A favourite treat when I was a child was when my mom would bring a bag of cake doughnuts home for us from the bakery.  She would reheat them in a low oven in a paper bag.  They were quite simply lovely.  I al...

  I'm still using my sourdough starter, feeding it and discarding the excess on a daily basis.  I have managed to dry some of the discard starter as shards which I have stored in the dark recesses of my kitchen cupboard ready to reconstitute and I have made sourdough crumbs as well, again waiting in a jar in my cupboard ready to be reconstituted at a future date.  We will see how that goes! You can see my complete tutorial on how to create a Sour Dough starter here .  Why not learn something new!   At this time when there is such a shortage of flour and new flour is hard to come by I cannot bring myself to actually discard any of the starter, not into the bin, or the compost pile, or down the drain.   It seems like such a waste, so I have been religiously researching ways that I can use it besides pancakes and brownies.   I was looking on Pinterest for Biscuits that I could make.  Many of them looking spurious at best, like they had stolen s...