This blog is in honour of my Nana and back in July I was really happy to share my first recipe of her’s, Nana’s Date Squares. When I eat at restaurants, bakeries, friends, or even other members of my family’s, I always love to see people serving their family recipes. I feel that it’s a great way of keeping our loved ones with us, and brings out a sense of pride about oneself and the dish. This recipe comes from my family friend Sharon’s mother and it’s delicious, hope you enjoy! Continue reading
Nana
Nana’s Date Squares
This is a special recipe, it is the first recipe of my Nana’s that I am posting on My Nana’s Kitchen. Since I had been baking with her for so long, at one point she wrote down a bunch of her recipes for me, some from even her grandmother. As you can see in the image below, it’s hand written on a cue card in her unique handwriting, and is a recipe that I will always cherish. Continue reading
Lessons From a Food Blog
I’ve been working on My Nana’s Kitchen for just over a year and a half now, and there are a lot of lessons I’ve learned from it. These lessons come up in conversation enough that I realized that you might want to know about them too, so here they are: Continue reading
Auntie Pedie’s Peanut Cookies
My great-aunt Pedie is my Nana’s sister and a great baker. I call her Auntie Pedie because I grew up with my mother calling her that, so that’s what I called her and it stuck. Recently, my mom had a craving for a specific peanut cookie and knew it was homemade but couldn’t figure out who made it or what the recipe was. It finally hit her that she had had them as a kid and they were made by my great-aunt, who she called right away to ask for the recipe. After my aunt found the right box that had the recipe (she has 16 boxes of filed recipes!), she called my mom back and we made them. Here’s the result and hope you enjoy! Continue reading
Zebra Fudge Cookies
It’s a big week for me: it’s my birthday, I got a new job (soon to be a Brand Coordinator for Lifetime and Food Network!), and I’m a guest blogger for FoodStory – this great startup that provides information on Toronto’s farmers markets and even has delivery if you can’t make it (or can and just can’t carry it all home). I wrote about my why for starting this blog, my love of markets Continue reading
Chewy Chocolate Toffee Cookies
Apparently I’m on a caramel-y kick, which is fine with me because my Nana loved the stuff (as I mentioned in the Werther’s cookies recipe) so it’s got a special place in my heart/stomach. This is a great simple recipe which spreads out during baking creating a chewy yet thin, chocolatey, toffee-y, cookie goodness. Continue reading
Wonderful Werther’s Caramel Cookies
My Papa (grandfather) was given a package of Werther’s Original Hard Candies as a gift from his neighbour, but he gave them to me because it was his wife, my Nana, who loved the decadent candies – a taste she passed on to my mother, who has in turn (fortunately, and unfortunately) passed on to me. Since I had this big package, I decided to get creative Continue reading
Veggie Cooking Cheat Sheets
For some reason, I can never remember what temperature to cook something at and for how long, so I always called my Nana for the answer, she was my kitchen Google – a resource I miss dearly (for emotional and practical reasons). I stumbled upon the second image, and, while searching for a better quality one to post here, I found the first image. While the second cheat sheet is prettier, the first has the all-important baking/roasting option Continue reading
Knitter Not-So-Anonymous
After writing this blog for a couple months, I have come to the realization that my posts are definitely mainly going to consist of recipes over ‘everything else grandmother’s teach you’, which I don’t think people will mind. That being said, I’ve got to talk about my rediscovered love of knitting, because it’s awesome, not just to add one to the ‘everything else’ category. Continue reading
Why
I lost my grandmother a couple years ago to cancer, and my life hasn’t really been the same since. She was one of my best friends, someone full of eternal wisdom for every one of my questions and problems (ranging from ‘how to bake salmon’ to ‘how to get this stain out of that fabric’ to advice when I would fight with my mom). She instilled a love of baking in me at a very young age, along with an infatuation for jewellery, a weakness for anything antique, and an inclination towards things that are, as she would say, “funky”. Continue reading
My Nana's Kitchen 