All loaves were made with the same dough, but shaped differently. 
Left to right: Cross-grained, machine-shaped and hand-shaped.

Reporter’s Notebook: From combine to customer

A trip to the Cigi course on export grains is teaching Lisa Guenther the fine details

I’m writing this column after my second day at the Combine to Customer tour, the crash course in the wheat supply chain organized by the Canadian International Grains Institute (Cigi) in Winnipeg. It’s one of those info-rich events where I have more material than I know what I can do with so watch for more […] Read more

The scoop on making cookies

The scoop on making cookies

First We Eat: What kind of fat is best? What kind of sweetener? Does it really matter?

I started baking at six, the same age I first climbed onto a horse. I was too short to mount a tall gelding unaided, and in the kitchen, I didn’t realize that what I wanted to make first — cookies — were among the most challenging of any sweet. But at my first gymkhana, when […] Read more



flapper pie

Grandma’s prize-winning flapper pie

Prairie Palate: Flapper Pie recipe

[Updated May 9, 2017] I’ve been going through a box of my grandma’s souvenirs and so I can tell you that, in 1957, she won first prize for her flapper pie at the Saskatoon fair. She also won red ribbons for her saskatoon pie, cherry pie with lattice crust, toffee, chocolate cake (layer), four fruit […] Read more


Fondest food memories

Fondest food memories

Prairie Palate: So many good memories of my mom involved food

I lost my mom this spring. She had Alzheimer’s disease so, in a way, we had lost a great part of her already. It was incredibly sad. I was assigned the task of writing her obituary for the local newspapers. As I scanned the fondest memories of my mom, it seemed so many of them […] Read more

We find the taste of dehydrated tomatoes batter than canned ones.

Storing food for the winter — here’s what works for us

Our preferred methods are dehydrating the tomatoes and freezing the spaghetti squash

This past summer was definitely busy. We had the pleasure of hosting a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old boy from Alberta, and they helped watch our year-old grandson while his mom ran the post office. As I don’t like to use the water canner with young children underfoot, I used our dehydrator for the tomatoes. Really […] Read more


Lentil cookies

Long legacy of lentils in cooking

Prairie Palate: A favourite food of ancient Greece finds new flavours in Canada

There’s an old adage in Greece about not adding “myrrh to the lentil soup” because myrrh is too fancy for a humble bowl of lentils. A culinary overkill. Ancient Greeks preferred more simple flavourings such as vinegar and sumac (which grew wild) or olive oil and salt. They boiled the lentils until they were soft […] Read more