Earlier this year I was asked to bake six pies (of the blueberry and apple varieties) for Select Nova Scotia’s winter television commercial campaign to help promote the use of locally grown food and produce within the province. And so began piepalooza at our house. This challenge got me over any residual trepidation I might have had about working with pastry and gave me a newfound respect for the humble, unassuming pie.

Okay, so it has occurred to me that these (and a few other posts I’ve added) are neither sweet, nor baked. And that was kind of the whole idea behind this blog when I launched it almost five years ago. But, hey, it’s my hobby, and woman, man, and family cannot live on sweets alone.

Hungry for something sweet, rich, and maybe even a little bit flaky, Huffington Post contributor Julie Thomson wrangled a round-up of the best breakfast pastries for the online publication’s Taste section on Friday. And guess who she contacted as one of 23 bakers/bloggers to include in the feature? Yours truly! What an honour!

Last night, determined not to go to one of our regular “go-to” meals, and inspired by a Youtube video of Jamie Oliver I’d seen the night before where he had prepped  an entire gourmet meal using a food processor, I decided to concoct a new dish. The seed of inspiration for escaping our well-worn dinner rut was a cute little crustacean called: shrimp. What?? No chicken or pasta? Blasphemy.

Is it awful that for Mother’s Day this year all I wanted was a few hours completely to myself in which to bake delicious morsels and madly snap photographs of my sweet creations? It’s not that I don’t fully enjoy a rollicking day with the family, but (in my view) Mother’s Day should be the one day a year that mamas get to do whatever they want: sleep until the sun is high in the sky, relish in a total lack of distraction… and focus on nurturing yourself, just for one day.

It has been brought to my attention that my children are shamefully hard-done-by: most weekday mornings they must suffer through the burden of torturous breakfasts consisting of cereal, granola, porridge, toast, French toast, eggs, bacon, and occasionally, even English muffins. Oh, the horror! 

Hey folks. Sorry for the unseemly lack of posts; since I last posted I’ve stopped teaching fitness classes and started back to work full time (outside the home) and have been swamped with a daily routine of schlepping my eldest to school with the twins in tow, picking up the hubby each morning after he finishes teaching an early morning anatomy class, catapulting myself to the office, and then racing back home for dinner time, and collapsing after extracting my remaining drops of energy while kicking and punching my way through an hour of my mom’s Turbo Jam DVDs (love it!!).