time for a change!

Hi everyone!

You may have noticed that there hasn't been much activity on this blog in a little while - well...that's because kitchen frolic has moved! (kind of).

Some of you may already have been using "www.kitchenfrolic.ca" to get to my blog, so you would have already seen the new look, but basically, I finally got around to purchasing some web hosting so now kitchen frolic is its own website/blog and I'm not longer updating this Blogger-hosted one.

I'm still going to leave this blog up because there are lots of places that link to the old posts here, but I'd love it if you joined me on my new site and updated your bookmarks and feeds to the new one.

Thank you and see you over on www.kitchenfrolic.ca!

Stephanie

chinese new year - your favourite foods

Happy Chinese New Year! Or as we say in Cantonese Sun Leen Fai Lok (Happy New Year) and Gung Hai Fat Choi (Wishing your prosperity)!

Chinese New Year is all about family and food. Which is what any great holiday should be about. Plus, food at Chinese New Year takes on all kinds of special meanings. Long noodles for a long life. Oranges & mandarins for prosperity. Hair seaweed for riches. The list is quite long.

As my family prepares to ring in the Year of the Horse with our own Chinese New Year family feast tonight, I asked some of my friends on Twitter what their favourite Chinese New Year dish was and why and got some great responses.

bacon and egg breakfast cups

I had seen pictures of these bacon and egg "muffins" floating around the internet for a few months now and have always wanted to try them. So a few weekends ago, I decided to pull up a recipe and give them a go. They were ok, but there were a few things I didn't like, so I tweaked the recipe and tried again. 

My second attempt was pretty awesome. I'm a big fan of breakfast foods - whether eaten at actual breakfast time or some other time of the day (yep, "breakfast for dinner" is a regular thing in our kitchen!) so here's my take on bacon and egg breakfast cups!

the winter classic

So, while many of my friends were nursing hangovers on January 1, I was up at 5 am, driving from Windsor to Ann Arbor in order to freeze my buns off sitting on metal bleachers for the entire day. Why, you may ask?

The Winter Classic is (according to Wikipedia): "...an event held by the National Hockey League (NHL) on or around New Year's Day in which a regular-season hockey game is played outdoors, in an area with a resident NHL team."

That sounds pretty tame, right?

the best laid plans...

So, I had everything planned out perfectly:
Fri. Dec. 20: my last day of work before the Christmas holidays (and a two-week vacation!)
Sat. Dec. 21 & Sun. Dec. 22: Paul and I finish our Christmas shopping
Mon. Dec. 23: bake cookies for my entry in the kitchen frolic Cookie Advent Calendar
Tues. Dec. 24: spend Christmas Eve at home with my family
Wed. Dec. 25: spend Christmas Day with Paul's family

What actually happened? Our house lost power around 12:30 am Sunday (Dec. 22) morning and didn't get any power (or heat) back until early Dec. 24, nearly 56 hours later. Needless to say, almost all the food in the fridge/freezer was lost, although we did manage to give some away to those family who still had power  and we spent most of our nights staying with generous and hospitable family members. It's actually kind of scary to be sitting in a dark house, on a dark street, without power or heat and absolutely no way of communicating to the outside world (no phone lines or cell phone service!). It was eerie to say the least.

I also had to give Paul his Christmas gift early because it was being stored in the fridge! It was a monthly subscription to the Carnivore Club (more on that in a future blog post!)

Paul and I barely finished our Christmas shopping (we managed to do so by Christmas Eve) and I didn't get to do any Christmas baking at all. So, the Cookie Advent Calendar is missing Day 24, but I'm hoping to fix that sometime before I go back to work on January 6.

The ice storm and freezing weather that caused the huge power loss across southern Ontario (and parts of the northeastern US) created some beautiful photos, but seriously, you can only look at so many pictures of frozen trees before you think about the damage and inconvenience it caused, including some tragic deaths.

I'm very grateful to my family for being so generous, opening their houses to us and forgiving our hastily wrapped gifts (and my lack of baked goods this year). It's times like these that remind everyone what is really important about the holiday season - family and friends.

I didn't get much of a chance to take a lot of photos (trying to figure out how to save Christmas and stay warm is a really annoying distraction!), but here's just some of the beauty, aka destruction, in my neighbourhood.

No matter how you spent this past holiday season, I hope that it was filled with family, friends and an abundance of warmth and food!

Paul and I are heading out of town to spend New Year's Day at the Winter Classic (it's like I can't get enough of being cold or something!) so I also want to take this opportunity to with everyone a very safe and memorable New Year's Eve and Day! Here's to 2014! I can't wait to share it with all of you!

cookie calendar - day 23: rhubarb and ginger linzer cookies

Note: Sorry for the delayed posting again! Things at kitchen frolic are going to be a little off as Toronto is still dealing with the aftermath of a really bad ice storm. There are still over 210,000 people without power (us being one of them). We haven't had heat or power for almost 45 hours as I write this (and for half of that time, no cell phone service or internet access either). 

This is how much I like Stuart (aka CakeyBoi): If I ever had the opportunity, I would move to Scotland just so that we could be neighbours. Or I could figure out a way to get him to move to Toronto. Either way, the result would be that I could then partake in all his amazing baked goods. And I mean ALL OF THEM (Stuart bakes a lot)...actually, on second thought...maybe it's better there's an ocean between us - my daily caloric-intake would probably triple if we were residing in the same city.

Besides our shared love of his baked goods (LOL), Stuart makes be laugh with his funny cartoons and was the one who introduced me to the awesome Mackays marmalades, jams and curds product lines. We also have a weird need to share our McFlurry discoveries with each other.

But seriously, Stuart is an awesome blogger, baker and friend, and I hope one day, we can meet in real life, if only even just for a short visit (and a trip to McDonald's for McFlurries!).

p.s. A huge Thank You to Stuart for introducing me to some of the amazing bakers who took part in this year's Cookie Advent Calendar. I was short a few Guest Posters and Stuart was able to recommend several who were very enthusiastic about joining in and so through him, I've been able to connect with even more amazing "across the pond" bloggers/bakers.

cookie calendar - day 22: nonna's almond cookies

Note: Sorry for the delayed posting! Things at kitchen frolic are going to be a little off as Toronto is dealing with a really bad ice storm. There are over 300,000 people without power (us being one of them). We haven't had heat or power for almost 24 hours as I write this (and for half of that time, no cell phone service or internet access either). So please bear with me as the Cookie Advent Calendar may be a little behind schedule!

One of the things I love most about social media is that sometimes the most random interactions can lead to a real conversations that can are more than just passing. In the past (almost) two years that I've been blogging, I've met so many really friendly and interesting people and it's been so amazing being able to watch as some of them celebrated milestones and launched projects.

One of these was Jerry of Zeppoli's. We originally connected over Twitter. I remember exactly how we met - I was waiting for the bus and was browsing Twitter on my phone - I randomly entered a Twitter contest that Zeppoli's was running and I won. The emails and tweets exchanged after that contest have continued for over a year as I watched Jerry turn his dream of an Italian comfort-food catering company  in Niagara Falls (and one-day brick&mortar restaurant) into a reality.

This is Jerry's second year with the Cookie Advent Calendar, and he almost wasn't able to join in because this year he was WAS busier with catering orders than last year - and I hope that next year he's even more busy (perhaps because he'll be running a restaurant as well?)

Also, because of scheduling demands, Amanda and Jerry's crescent cookies are back-to-back - it wasn't planned, but that's the thing with Advent Calendars - you never know what's going to be behind that window!

You can connect with Zeppoli's by visiting:
Website: www.zeppolis.ca
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Zeppolis
Twitter: @zeppolis