Jennifer McLagan's Blog

I love the spring in Paris. It arrives much earlier than in Toronto so by mid-April I'm enjoying favas, peas, baby onions and new potatoes. I tell everyone that I come to Paris in the spring just so I can eat white asparagus. Well, I've just discovered that I may have to change my travel plans.��


This year, with in days of touching down in the city of light, I sped off on a TGV to the

Since I've been complaining about winter, I want to tell you that spring is coming, well at least in my hallway. You can see my fig tree has leaves and several figs, it is responding to the longer days.



I work hard to keep my small 1.5 metre high fig tree happy. It is in a big heavy pot, which we drag inside and down the stairs every autumn so it can stay cold and relatively dark on

I made a promise to blog every week and of course I've already broken it. But, I do have a good excuse - ��my book��Bitter: A Taste of the World's Most Dangerous Flavor, with Recipes. I am in the last stage of the book's production, which means a lot of careful reading, looking for typos, missing words and mistakes of any kind.

Cookbooks are complicated to put together, often a recipe runs a

While the weather was warmer in Louisiana it was the warmth of the people that impressed me most - friendly and unfailingly polite. The importance of good manners is often overlooked today. From the culinary students to people in the street, there was an acknowledgment that you existed - a smile, and greeting often followed by a conversation. That's something I miss in Toronto. In Paris I

The word boudin for me conjures up images of the French sausages - boudin noir and boudin blanc. The first, is a blood sausage, and the second a more delicate, finely textured sausage made from pork and chicken, often embellished with black truffles. A boudin in Louisiana is different, it is still a sausage, but.....







At first glance they look like the French sausages, but you can see

Thanks to this man,��chef John Folse, I escaped Toronto's relentless winter for a few days. I met John on his radio show - we talked about fat, then he invited me back and we talked odd bits. We hit it off and he asked me to come to Louisiana to teach a class and lecture about odd bits at his culinary college at Nicholls State University. I said yes without a moment's hesitation.

It was so

Provence is a mere memory and winter is biting hard this year in Toronto. In France it is the warmest winter in a century,��I was just in Paris and it was warm enough to have a drink on the cafe terraces (with the heaters). Here it is the coldest winter in some time. It feels like the coldest since I first arrived, but my memory for cold is very selective. One big plus is that this bone

I spent a wonderful week in Provence in October. Friends from Canada and Australia joined me as we all celebrated birthdays, and friendship. It was a perfect week - sightseeing, swimming and eating alfresco. Why am I thinking about it now? I'm desperately trying to channel some of those memories to thaw myself out. Yes, Canada can be cold in the winter, but this one has begun brutally even

With everyone talking about Christmas baking and cooking I'd like to put a word in for eating something bitter at this time of the year. Bitter has been my life over the last year or so as I've been working on a book about bitter foods to be published by Ten Speed in September 2014. I think there should be a little bitter in every holiday menu. Bitter foods spark the appetite and more

Biltong is cured, air dried meat developed in South Africa and popular in many African countries. Often compared to jerky, it is a more refined product. I knew about it but I'd never tried it until last Saturday at  Florence Meats a fabulous butcher shop in Oakville.

This family run butcher shop has a South African connection. Born in Slovenia, Mario ran a butcher shop in Johannesburg before