Pastry can be a tricky beast, so here are a couple of suggestions to make the roll-out go smoothly. 1. Heat is your enemy. Keep that in mind, and that it’s everywhere in the kitchen, especially on your hands. So once you have your pastry dough made, don’t handle it too much. – If you [...]

When people tell me that they are afraid of cooking and especially baking, I always reassure them that anyone – I do mean anyone – can cook. In fact, if you put your mind to it, you can learn to do everything a kitchen pro can. Consider this: if you did the cooking task that [...]

I learned to bake from my mother. She’d get me to retrieve the heavy bag of white flour and heave it up on the counter. Then I watched her mix that flour with butter and sugar, milk and baking powder, into cookies or pies. As I grew older, I became the baker. The flour flew [...]

Remember when a peanut allergy was The Peanut Allergy? When it was so nouveau, so under-understood, we’d speak about it like it was The Plague or some dreadful affliction that only happens in other people’s families? When my older son Lucas was first diagnosed with multiple food allergies (including The Peanut) six years ago, we [...]

With celiac disease, I thought I’d never eat pie again. Now, I’m sharing my carefully weighed, gluten-free pie crust recipe. We just never know what sweet things life will bring. Makes one double-crust 9-inch pie (or two single-crust pies) Ingredients 5 oz (142 g) almond flour (not almond meal) 2 oz (57 g) gluten-free oat [...]

Samantha Yaffe’s frank take on motherhood with allergies Our allergic journey is anything but predictable. But until last week, I was relatively confident with my system for allergy management, and the second nature of my vigilance. As it goes, every person who looks after Lucas gets my thorough EpiPen tutorial and a line-by-line explanation of [...]

Samantha Yaffe’s frank take on motherhood with allergies Last year, out of nowhere, Lucas started to complain about wearing his EpiPen to school. Until that point he’d been pretty cooperative about it, choosing instead to grumble about bedtime, mealtime, Wii time, his little brother, the fact that our living room is not a basketball court [...]

Samantha Yaffe’s frank take on motherhood with allergies When Lucas was about 3, I had him enrolled two afternoons a week in this cute little neighbourhood program. On account of his allergies, the kind people in charge declared the space peanut- and nut-free, directly informing each parent (or nanny) to send only nut-free snacks for [...]

Samantha Yaffe’s frank take on motherhood with allergies  So, it’s Grade 2, not Grade 1, not kindergarten – just a not-so remarkable year in Lucas’ continuing grade-school education and our family’s life-long allergic journey, which regardless of the grade seldom goes without drama and extra-special attention. Last year, when Lucas was entering Grade 1, there was [...]

Samantha Yaffe’s frank take on motherhood with allergies. A few years back, we found ourselves between allergists. Our first one died a year after Lucas was diagnosed with peanut, tree nut and egg, and the second one was, well – to put it mildly – not a good fit. After pulling a few strings, Lucas, [...]