Plum jam with cinnamon and star anise

Here is one more canning recipe ! This was done for Christmas 2009, to give to the guests attending our annual Christmas meeting. I can't remember exactly what triggered me on the path of canning, but I know it happened totally unplanned, an evening I was cooking some cranberry sauce. I suddenly felt the urge to can the recipe, and got around to improvise some canning equipment.

I found old mason jars, got water boiling, sterilized everything and followed instructions for hot water bath canning that I had in one of my books. I didn't have a safe pair of grips to lift the jars out of the water, so Guyuk proposed that we use a small rope around the rim of the jar, to lift them out, and we kept the other end out of the cauldron.

 

 Chopped plums, cinnamon sticks and star anise

Spiced pears chocolate cake

I'm so excited ! This Friday, I'll be going with my mother-in-law to the Canard du Lac Brome (Lake Brome's duck) to buy whole ducks directly from the producer. What are we going to do with all those ducks ? They're going to be slowly and patiently transformed into canard confit ! I'm SO excited !

Duck confit eaten at Guyuk's birthday 

Bread pudding

What's better than have a sweet bowl of steaming dessert in your hands, when the weather gets colder ?

Maybe knowing that this bowl is made with love AND stale bread that you forgot about on your counter. No spoilage !

Winter is there already !

Gosh, I feel like time goes by so fast ! Just yesterday, I think I remember that the top of one particular tree around where I worked just had started to be yellow-ish... then BOOM ! snow came, with the sub-zero temperatures, along with the end of the year festivities. It has been an awful lot on me. Since I changed departments at my job, I knew christmas would be a busy time, but I never realized it would be THAT busy. I litterally came home some days, and never got around to eat before I crashed and slept until the next day.

We had a birthday to celebrate (Guyuk's uncle), for which I made an almond paste cake, along with some honey-pear icecream. Also, we had a wonderful christmas eve supper with my dad and my in-laws, where I cooked a lamb leg, that we had with fresh diner rolls, roasted winter vegetables and some cranberry sauce I had canned earlier. I got compliments from my mother-in-law about the lamb... wow, was I proud !

The christmas eve table

Cream of celery and leek

For those of you who have read my previous post, you know that I had a little tantrum on the food bloging scene and so on. Despite the not soo good start, I still like to write about food and I decided it would be a waste and that I would regret if I just stopped. Anyway, I can't just stop because it's a bit hard, right ? I gotta persever, and learn from my mistakes.

Other news which will make possible more blogging, is that I just got myself a new camera. It broke my budget, but I'll just stop telling myself each time I cook something that it's a shame I can't photograph and share it here.

So, today's post is gonna be about perseverance (and soup !).

On Hiatus

Hey there everyone. Again, on a streak with lack of updates. There are a few reasons for that:

• I'm currently working on a website project that is very dear to me. Therefore, little time is currently left to update this blog.
• Weird work schedules. For some reason, we receive messed up schedules at work, which constantly change (this week, I started at 7, then 8, then 9:45, then 10:30 and tomorrow I'm back at 8:30)
• Rethinking of the purpose of this blog. I started the blog because I wanted to be read and share some knowledge. However, since I started, only one comment or what-so-ever. Half the people I heard of complained it was in english, the other half apprently know the blog exists, but I don't hear about it.
• The food / foodie scene got me angry. As most people in the foodie department, you most likely know that if you want traffic on your blog, you have to submit your posts either to FoodGawker or TasteSpotting. FoodGawker has been a total pain in the ass to deal with, which lead to more than 40 submissions, all rejected. I understand the importance of good photography, so I spent time reading and learning about photo, tricks, how to do a good arrangement, ligthing, a small bit of editing... But I'm trying to be a food blogger here and I'm unfortunatly not a professionnal photograph along with a professionnal graphist. Often, I had the feeling that no matter what I submitted, they just would never accept it (I have had the same picture submitted several times, and each time it came back with a different rejection reason... I mean it can't be THAT bad... I've seen pictures on their websites that are really horrible (bad colors, too dark, or just plain uninterresting, no efforts put in decorating or the like)) and each time I see that, I can't help but be depressed about the fact that no matter if the recipes are good or not, all that matters if that you make it look good with fake spot lights, heavy computer editing and a lot of blurring from the camera.
• Camera. Speaking of which, my camera is out of order at this point. I think I hit it or something, but it means I don't get to photograph anything until I get it either repaired, or that I upgrade to another one.

So, when the blog will resume, I don't know. It may be in french or in english. I have to think about it, and what is important for me.