Ottawa is anything but boring, and An Insider’s Guide to Canada’s Capital is the proof. Produced by a group of about 30 millennials led by multimedia co. Wingd‘s Zainab Muse, the book highlights the people, places and organizations that make the city an exciting, diverse and Instagram-worthy place to visit and live. Take a peek at the book trailer and tell me you don’t want to see more.
It’s been a fantastic year for cookbooks, and out just in time for holiday baking (and giving!) is The Sprinkles Baking Book: 100 Secret Recipes from Candace’s Kitchen by Candace Nelson. It’s the first cookbook from the investment baker turned pastry chef and founder of America’s first cupcakes-only bakery, Sprinkles. Inside are 50 cupcake recipes including customer favourites and new ones created for the book, as well as 50 other desserts (brownies and bars, pies and tarts, loaves and puddings and more). I want to try them all! But I started with two.
As I write, North Carolina chef, restaurateur and television personality, Vivian Howard, is ambling toward Atlanta, Georgia in a food truck, two and a half weeks into a nine-week book tour that will take her to more than 20 towns and cities across the southeast United States. Together with a small team, she’s serving up stories and dishes from her new (and first) cookbook, Deep Run Roots: Stories and Recipes from My Corner of the South. The book is a comprehensive record of modern Southern cooking that explores the history of North Carolina cuisine, catalogued by the ingredients that residents have cooked around for generations.
The best recipes are made with a whole lot of love, and you can tell Ayesha Curry puts her heart into everything she makes. In her first cookbook, The Seasoned Life: Food, Family, Faith, and the Joy of Eating Well (released just this week), the 27-year-old self-taught cook of Jamaican-Chinese-Polish-African American heritage shares family favourites from her childhood in Toronto and North Carolina, along with new dishes inspired by restaurants in California where she and hubby NBA MVP Stephen Curry now live with their two young children. “Everything warm, everything delightful, and everything that is loved in my life somehow involves (and revolves around) food,” Ayesha writes. “I light up every time I get the blend of favours in a recipe just right, or when I achieve a perfect sear on a steak, or smell a batch of cookies baking. I always enjoy watching the faces of family and friends as they take that first bite.” I took a bite out of her book and mes amis, it was delicious!
My kids may be well past the napping stage, but until we send them off with a suitcase and a bus ticket on their 18th birthdays, I’ll be relishing those pockets of time when they’re busy doing something on their own so I can get things done. Like get supper on the table. (Preferably something everyone will like.) Enter my new go-to: The I Heart Naptime Cookbook: More Than 100 Easy and Delicious Recipes to Make in Less Than One Hour by Jamielyn Nye. It just came out this week but I received an advance copy to try and every recipe I’ve made has been such a hit! I think you’re going to love it.
