The Hungry Squid

My parents have a tradition of growing huge zucchinis. Like really huge. 4 kg huge. And more of them that we can use without becoming zucchinified – especially since my teenage brother has sworn off zucchini bread (I believe, on principle at this point). However, after finding and creating as many dinner recipes has she could, a couple of year ago, my mother came across one recipe that seemed like the perfect disguise for these beautiful monstrosities: zucchini bread. Zucchini bread is very similar to carrot bread in texture – both are grated finely and mixed in with the usual yeast-free bread ingredients, and both add a moistness to the bread similar to that added by bananas, but without the sweetness. Zucchinis have the added bonus of lacing the bread with strings of dark green zucchini, threaded throughout the earthy brown loaves like fine capillaries. My mom’s go-to recipes for zucchini bread involve adding ingredients such a pineapple, raisins, pecans and chocola...

The combination of sweet and salty is something that I was brought up with. For as long as I can remember, my mother has made variations of a sweet, aromatic chai that I love, milky black tea with strong notes of green cardamom and cinnamon. Some weekends, taking a break from the hundred-and-one errands that inevitably pile up during the all-too-busy week, she and my father would sit at the kitchen table and pause, drinking large, piping hot mugs of chai and snacking on a salty treat known to us kids simply as the “mixture”   - puffed rice, flattened rice, dried bay leaves, peanuts, bits of fried chickpea dough and dried coconut slivers, tossed in a melange of a hundred different spices, roasted and then studded with dried raisins. A strange mix of ingredients, maybe, but dangerously addictive . The sweetness of the tea, combined with the crunch and spice of the “mixture”, brought out the spice in the cardamom and the cinnamon, gave the sweetness dimension, added de...

On a blustery, miserable, dark, cold, rainy Sunday, I did not want to leave the house. Oh yes, I know that I extolled the virtues of fall a little while ago, declaring it to be my favorite season. And it still is….well, the sunny days are. Rainy days in the fall are a whole other story. Holed up in my apartment, drinking tea under a warm blanket and struggling with writer’s block, I couldn’t help but crave a teeny, tiny bit of sunshine. So I did what any normal person would do: I made lemon squares. H is the queen of lemon squares – in our tiny Kingston apartment she would whip up those bad boys like there was nothing to it; her lemon squares were a delight, and would inevitably disappear before the night was over. But in light of her great skill, I had never tried my had at lemon squares, so on that blustery, miserable, dark, cold and rainy Sunday, I thought, why not now? This recipe for lemon squares is exquisitely simple and the results are divine. The cru...