Guess what I’m blogging? (A: the Celebrity Chefs of Canada event!)

March 2, 2012March 1, 2012 ~ Hilary ~ 5 Comments

I am terribly excited for March 25.

Fun! Food! Laughter! A shot from last year's Celebrity Chefs of Canada event. (Courtesy of the NAC)

Why? Well I’m an awful spoilsport and the title of this blog post probably gave me away. But let me explain more. Promise to act surprised, okay?

I’m going to be blogging for the Celebrity Chefs of Canada event taking place at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa! Here’s what the NAC website says about this gastronomical day of fun:

Launched by NAC Chef Michael Blackie in 2011, Celebrity Chefs of Canada is an exciting partnership between Ottawa’s talented local chefs and the national superstars changing Canada’s culinary landscape. All of them will converge on the National Arts Centre stage on March 25 for an unforgettable gastronomic experience!

Events like this normally elude budget-conscious students like myself, so I was particularly excited to be asked to write about it. Not only will I get to be in the presence of some of the most talented local and national chefs, but as a blogger I will get to hover about at their preparation stations as they prepare the day’s plates. I will not blink for an entire day for fear that I will miss a mere second of the culinary mastery.

Here’s how it works for us bloggers: Each of us has been assigned a team, which is made up of one local and one national chef. So who is on my quote on quote “dream team?” Well, I am happy and incredibly excited to be covering Atelier owner and chef, Marc Lepine and Chef Quang Dang, the executive chef of West Restaurant in Vancouver. Just in case you dropped off the face of the earth last month, Chef Lepine is the newly minted champion of the Canadian Culinary Championships! A huge win and, to put it in technical food terms, pretty damn awesome.

In anticipation of March 25’s event, I will be writing several blog posts over the next two weeks so you can better get to know both Chef Lepine and Chef Dang and find out what dish they’re preparing for your soon-to-be spoiled palettes.

In the meantime, you can find out more about the Celebrity Chefs of Canada by visiting the information page on the National Arts Centre website, by following us on Twitter or by liking us on Facebook.

Oh, and get your tickets before they sell out! Say hello if you see me – I’ll be the one looking overly excited near the front. I might also be drooling. Don’t judge, okay?

Want to see the full press release for the event? That’s past the jump (click see more!)

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Martha Stewart’s outrageous chocolate cookies

February 2, 2012January 29, 2012 ~ Hilary ~ Leave a comment

I warned you that this was going to be a Martha Stewart week.

These cookies have become a bit of a tradition among my group of friends. To understand the tradition, you must first understand my friend Amanda, for whom I made these cookies. Amanda loves her birthday. Loves it. More than a small child loves puppies and more than I love cheese. She always has a week’s worth of birthday festivities, appropriately called “Amandapalooza.”

Amanda and I on one of her birthday nights

It is my job, as old roommate and friend, to bake something for her. Last year I made these white chocolate Macadamia nut cookies for the first time. This year she had another cookie request. These.

Photo 2012-01-25 10 17 03 AM — Cookies + Instagram = Love

As far as I know, Amanda’s love for these cookies started on her birthday last year, when our old roommate Brittany (SHE IS IN PARIS NOW, GO LOOK AT HER BLOG!!) made her a batch. They are actually the perfect cookie – slightly crunchy on the outside and chewy and soft on the inside (so long as you don’t over bake them which I accidentally did with a batch of these…). They’re like a tiny brownie cookie, but better. A recipe like this obviously uses up a lot of chocolate, so it’s certainly a good thing that I always have an absurd amount on hand.

Since this was the second year in a row that the cookies were made, I declare it a tradition.

A tradition which I may whip up and eat solo in my bedroom once in awhile.

Heh.

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Chocolate cherry cupcakes with a Smarties cream cheese icing (Happy Birthday Ariel!)

January 10, 2012 ~ Hilary ~ 6 Comments

What a flavour combination, huh?

Don’t give me that look because you think I’m crazy for combining cherries and Smarties. I know the look. It’s something like this:

Okay, let’s be real. I just wanted an excuse to post this picture. I’m sure you guys aren’t ACTUALLY making a face at me. Right? RIIIIGHT?

Well whatever. They were good. I’ll admit, I never thought the three things would ever be combined. That all changed, however, once I took a trip (well several trips, actually. About once a week for all of second and third year…) to my friendly neighbourhood Dairy Queen with my good friend Ariel.

Here’s the backstory: As one of her several high school jobs, Ariel had a stint serving ice cream at DQ. When you’re a teenager and left fairly unattended in a large, ice cream shop, what choice do you have but try different flavour combinations? Read: LETS THROW EVERYTHING INTO THE BLIZZARD MAKER, GUYS. I had a similar experience when I worked at Starbucks in grade 12 and we made a lemon poppy seed loaf frappuccino…

But anyways, this post is not about getting Ariel and I indicted for the mischievous things we did with industrial powered mixers in high school. Nope, this post is about belatedly celebrating Ariel’s birthday, which she was not in Ottawa for.

And what better way to celebrate then to transform her favourite kind of blizzard into cupcake form?

I was very wary as to how these would turn out. I’ve never used/bought/eaten cherry pie filling before, and was concerned as to how it would affect the batter. To play things safe, I strained the actual cherries into a bowl and the result underneath was a giant goop of something that looked like cough syrup mixed with zombie blood.

Cherry juice — There was about a cup of this liquid-y goo

Though these cupcakes didn’t rise to become mountainous domes, they were moist and had scattering of cherry. My other old roommate Alex said they were good enough to be a wedding cake! The Smarties cream cheese icing reminded me of Smarties ice cream and was the perfect topping to these rich, chocolatey cupcakes. Blizzard transformation: complete.

Please pardon the lack of photos – I was in a rush to get to the actual birthday party!

Smarties — Pulverization is best served by the pounding of a meat cleaver

PS: a third-year journalism student at Carleton swung by my baking session to interview me for her multimedia class. I posed awkwardly with my hand mixer which I described as the “love of my life” way too many times.

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What I’ve been up to instead of blogging…

November 22, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ 3 Comments

Hi.

Since I’ve been incredibly, insanely bad with keeping up my blog this month, I decided to write a post sharing with you some of the other things I’ve been doing. I’ve been keeping busy. Very busy, in fact. Back in October I was yearning for November. November would be a breeze, I told myself. I have so few assignments due in November.

October Hilary was naïve. She was half right when it came to the school-related aspect – she only had one thing due weekly for awhile and now has a culmination of three things due today and tomorrow – but what she failed to consider was all the outside of school writing she’d be doing. What stuff? Here, see for yourself. (also: third-person narrative is underrated fun).

I was asked to be the new, bi-weekly restaurant critic for the arts and entertainment weekly, Ottawa XPress (it just got a new website, which is wicked cool). I will now be using my undercover research skills (seriously, I used a fake name! How cool and spy-like is that?) to write about the city’s food scene. My first review was of The Manx, a pub-turned-brunch-destination that was voted the best in Ottawa in the paper’s annual survey. You can click on the photo below (which was taken by the very talented Ben Welland of Byfield Pitman Photography) to access the review. If you’re in Ottawa, you can check the paper for my next review this Thursday!

Next up, I’ve also been doing a lot of work for Local Tourist Ottawa, the fun, live-like-a-tourist-in-your-own-city blog that I help edit. I’ve written four posts this month, all of which, I hope, show off the amazing city and people that are all around me.

The first post was about a unique Movember fundraiser that one local chocolatier started. Jen Winter is the owner of koko chocolates. She developed a line of “manly” flavoured chocolate flavours and is selling boxes for $18 a pop, with proceeds going to raise money for prostate cancer research. The flavours are – get ready to drool – double smoked bacon, espresso, scotch and “the koko” – a 75 per cent Venezuelan dark chocolate ganache. Read more about this delicious fundraiser by clicking the photo below.

The other post I’ll link to is a multimedia-driven small business profile that I created about Chinatown’s newest shop, Purple Urchin soap. This is part of a series of profiles I’m hoping to do over the next several months, creating a montage of stories highlighting the city’s hard-working entrepreneurs. The owners, Sarah and Rebecca, were kind enough to let me chat with them several times and even showed me how to make a bar of soap (spoiler: I took pictures/recorded audio, so you can find out too). Click the picture below to read about their soapy success story.

The third post on Local Tourist has to do with the Ottawa Foodie Challenge – a city-wide photo scavenger hunt that my roommate Britt and I WON! The event raised $1,500 for the Ottawa Food Bank, and put our food knowledge to the test. The post goes more into detail, but I will say that it was an amazing day of silly photo taking and fun adventures. Plus, we were the only team to do the challenge on our bikes. Biking > driving, any day, any time. We won some amazing gift certificates (not to mention quite a bit of wine…) for local restaurants, and will be doing our best to use them before Britt leaves for Paris in the winter. #Sadface. Click the photo below to access the LT Ottawa post, or go directly to my flickr album to see the hilarious things we got up to.

FINALLY (see, I have been busy!), I’ve been doing a bit of writing for the Ottawa Citizen lately. I wrote a piece for the business section about the city’s first incubator kitchen – a business model that gives small food businesses the space and resources they need to grow their product line and company. I talk quite a bit about how much I love the Ottawa food community, and this is just a unique look into why. Everyone is so friendly and willing to help each other grow. The four businesses mentioned in this story are run by some of the most talented people I know. Keep an eye out for them. Once again, the story is linked through a photo click.

5734781.bin — Photo by Bruno Schlumberger for the Ottawa Citizen

And there you have it – my November in out-of-school writing. Once again, sorry I’ve been so neglectful. As soon as I’m home for more than two seconds I’ll start cooking and blogging again.

Also, it’s almost December, and who am I to resist Christmas baking?

A very belated Thanksgiving post (in which I do not make turkey, but obviously dessert)

October 23, 2011December 31, 2011 ~ Hilary ~ 3 Comments

Woah, October 23 already? Yeah, I know, we’re now almost closer to American Thanksgiving than we are Canadian. Shame on me.

It has been exactly two weeks since I made these pumpkin toffee tarts with my mom. In fact, it was probably about two weeks ago at this exact time that we were making them – my mom crushing up the Skor bars, me mixing the pumpkin filling and less-than-sleuthly stealing large masses of said chocolate.

The pre-purchased mini pie crusts. That's right, we cheated.

But before I talk about the pumpkin toffee tarts, lets talk Thanksgiving. That was, after all, why I was at home.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel home every year for Thanksgiving since starting university. The past few trips have become much more family-oriented, which is to say that I let my parents spoil me, play more frisbee with my brother and watch more episodes of Criminal Minds with my mom.

This time around, I also gave in to their life long request of daily exercise. My parents have always been (and rightly so, I suppose) huge proponents of daily outdoor time. This made me miserable as a child. Temper tantrums accompanied trips to the cross country ski trails, whining would ensue while hiking,… you get the picture. Child Hilary was probably the exact opposite of child Brittany.

But now that I’m old, wise and mature (read: 21, still naive and more than occasionally a child), I decided a change of attitude was in order. The nagging of outdoor time has become less of a nagging and more of a necessity in my everyday life. I’ve started night jogging again, which is always nice. And I still bike places. Even in the rain (see: embarrassing skunk stripe of wet up my butt as I bike in the downpour).

There was lots of daily outdoor time this Thanksgiving, thanks to Mother Nature who made the entire weekend a beautiful 25°C. It was seriously hot. All the fashionable fall clothing I brought home was laid aside. In its place, my mom’s stretchy workout shorts. Hell yeah.

On Saturday my mom, dad and I went hiking at Onaping Falls, a trail just a short distance out of Sudbury.

Monday was another beautiful day, so we went kayaking as a family on Ramsey Lake. It was beautiful and I only pouted a little bit. I wrapped my iPhone in a plastic ziploc bag and tried to take some artistic shots on the water.