WHEN it comes to French cooking, roast chicken is one of the most celebrated dishes out there.  Roast chicken is one of Mardi’s favourite “fast food” options in France– you can find it in any…

Mardi Michels teaches French at a small school for boys in Toronto, and she also writes the blog eat. live. travel. write.  As part of her teaching job, Mardi runs cooking classes twice per week for boys aged 7 to 14.  Mardi loves France (where she lived for five years before moving to Toronto) and on this episode, she makes a French classic: roast chicken.  I also visited Mardi and her students at cooking club while they made meatballs and tomato sauce in under an hour.  It was totally inspiring.  Mardi and her partner, Neil, own a historic home in southwest France which they operate as a vacation rental property.  Check it out here: neracvacationrental.com

 

** Photo by Kelly Brisson of The Gouda Life

 

 

 

Chef Charlotte Langley is a Pierogi making expert.  She messed around with a recipe that she learned from a friend’s mom in high school, and the results are delicious.  Classic comfort food, Charlotte’s recipe is…

Come into Chef Charlotte Langley’s kitchen and listen to her making cheese and potato pierogi.  A classic dish, and one of her favourite Sunday comfort foods.  She also talks about rocking culinary school, her home province of PEI, and why she moved away from cooking in fine-dining restaurants.  She’s feisty, passionate and lives most of her life in the Land of Po.  Press play to find out what that means!

Check out Charlotte’s website for links to many of the fabulous things she does!  chefcharlottelangley.com

And follow her on IG (@chefcharlottelangley) and Twitter (@ChefCharLangley) for the latest info and updates on current projects.

 

Feist’s latest album PLEASURE was recorded in Stinson Beach, California; Upstate New York; and Paris, and for that California session, Adrienne Amato came to cook for the musicians and crew.  The recording studio and the kitchen were separated by a thin wall, which meant that Adrienne cooked very quietly.  The experience in Stinson Beach led to the creation of a cookbook, PLEASURES: THE MEALS OF AN ALBUM, and all profits from the sale of the book go to Community Foods Centres Canada, an umbrella network that funds food security and food justice programs all over the country.

Come hang out with us in Adrienne’s kitchen as Feist and Ade make South African Seed Bread and Ariel Engle’s Halloumi Soup, both recipes from the book.  We ended up sitting there all afternoon, talking about family meals, Adrienne’s vinyl-listening room in her childhood home in Zimbabwe, algorithms, butter tarts, Feist’s favourite restaurant on earth, if she has a listener in mind when she writes, and music they listen to when they cook.  This is a wonderfully intimate conversation, and it’s full of surprises and insights.

 

Adrienne has worked in mental health for over 25 years and is currently a psychotherapist in private practice. She has also made several arts/culturally based documentary films, and is a regular curator of musical events. Her films have won numerous awards, screening at prestigious festivals such as Rotterdam, Clermont-Ferrand, and Doc Leipzig, as well as being broadcast on TVO and CBC. Her filmography includes Forgotten Mother (1989), A Brief Life (1992), First Break (1997, National Film Board), National Anthem of Nowhere (2007), Side Girl, (2012) and To the End of Poverty, (2013) which was made for TVO as part of the international Why Poverty? Series.  She is currently completing a feature length documentary film, Mbira Talks, in collaboration with Fifth Town Films.

 

Other goodness:

The Heat: A Kitchen (R)evolution, a documentary film by Maya Gallus

Arts and Crafts

Contramar

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second half of the school year is right around the corner, and Laura Keogh and Ceri Marsh (authors of HOW TO FEED A FAMILY and THE SCHOOL YEAR SURVIVAL COOKBOOK) have some tips for how to make busy weeks a little less fraught. They started their blog Sweet Potato Chronicles- The Never-Ending Story of the Well-Fed Family while they were on maternity leave from FASHION magazine.  Their evenings of glitzy cocktail parties turned into night feedings and research on how to feed kids.  And they decided to share their hard-earned strategies with the world.  Listen as they make Sweet Potato Shepherd’s Pie (two pies, actually, one for dinner and one for the freezer to be pulled out on a Wednesday when you need an easy meal).  There’s a pretty great strategy right there!
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