Dessert By Candy

Buckwheat Oats Date Square

Ingredients

• 225g Medjool dates, pitted and torn in half
• finely grated zest from 1 tangelo
• juice from 1 tangelo topped with enough water to make 190mL (3/4 cup)
• 50g (1/4 cup) raw Muscovado sugar, optional
• 3/4 cup rolled oats (quick cooking or old fashioned)
• 3/4 cup buckwheat flour
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 125mL (1/2 cup) melted coconut oil

Method

1. Preheat oven to 400F. Line a 8-inch square baking pan with parchment paper.
2. In a small sauce pan, simmer dates, tangelo zest, juice, and water over low heat until soft, about 10 minutes. Mash with spoon or spatula to a paste. Set aside.
3. In the bowl of a food processor, combine sugar, oats, buckwheat flour, cinnamon, cardamom, baking soda, and salt in 5 pulses. Drizzle in coconut oil and pulse until mixture turn into wet crumbs.
4. Divide 3/4 of the crumbs into prepared pan and press with fingers to form the crust. Dollop date paste on top of crust and spread with offset spatula into an even thin layer. Sprinkle on remaining crumbs evenly on top and lightly pressed with fingers.
5. Bake for 25-30 minutes until top is brown and feels sturdy. Cool in pan.
6. To make neat cuts, chill pan in refrigerator for 60 minutes before slicing into 9 or 12 pieces with serrated knife.

Hello 2016!

Happy New Year! A fresh start means taking a hard look at some of the bad habits I developed over the past few months. I am embarrassed to admit that my previously healthy eating habit has slipped a few notches. My work schedule does not play well with preparing meals from scratch everyday so I resort to eating whatever’s in the fridge and pantry the minute I walk in the door. This usually means cheese, deli meat, bread, and lots of junk food. I am long overdue for a change.

For the month of January, I will give week-long meal prep a try. On less busy days, I plan to prepare homemade easy meals that I can enjoy over a few days. The focus is on more vegetable in different varieties, lean protein, and complex carbohydrates. I am not picky on whether the items fit well within the breakfast/lunch/dinner concept. Since I tend to eat multiple meals throughout the day, it is more important that the portions are controlled and I get a variety of macronutrients in each item.

I spent the first day of January stocking my fridge with the following:

Rotisserie Chicken Wraps

Sausage Kale Frittata

Fig Almond Breakfast Quick Bread

Shrimp & Pork Chive Dumplings

Spontaneity

I have been on the road for a week now. Those who follow my Instagram feed have probably already seen my voyage from Toronto, Ontario to Houston, Texas. The idea of a cross-country road trip came to me entirely unexpectedly. With all the free time in my hand, it suddenly dawned on me last week that I could leisurely road trip my way to Texas for an inline skating race hosted by my teammate. I barely had any time to plan in detail before I loaded everything imaginable into my car and hit the road.

Based on my previous shorter car travel experiences, my strategy is really quite simple.

• No more than 9 hours of driving everyday (any longer and it doesn’t feel like fun anymore)
• Visit friends as often as possible (I need a sense of purpose)
• Indulge in local delicacies (obviously)
• Detour if I see something interesting! (that’s the whole point of road tripping, right?)

When friends ask me what I plan to do at each of my stops, I just shrug my shoulders and cheerfully reply “I don’t know!”. Most of my friends I met through skating so it only makes sense that we skate together if weather permits. But there are so much more to traveling than simply enjoying new cities on my skates. Let me show you some highlights.

End Of An Unintentional Hiatus

Since I started working at the cafe at the beginning of 2015, blogging took a backseat. I missed writing dearly but fatigue kept me away from doing many things I love. I could barely stay awake between work duties and my athletic endeavours. I rarely cooked any meals for myself and survived on ready-to-eat things like yogurt, cheese, raw vegetable, and fruit. I felt malnourished both physically and mentally.

My foray into the day-to-day operation of a coffee shop wrapped up last week. I learned a lot in the past 10 months and now it is time to regroup. I have some thinking to do to figure out where to go from here. I also have a lot of free time to attend some long-overdue chores and do things that I love. For the first time in my adult life, I am almost entirely free of commitments. This sense of freedom is both liberating and scary at the same time.

Kimchi Bun

We kicked off gelato season at the cafe a couple of weeks ago and my mind is occupied by developing recipes for gelato, sorbet, and ice-cream since. Inspiration comes to me non-stop and I can barely keep up with turning these ideas into frozen treats to enjoy. It is hard to pick favourites but I am partial to a few: miso caramel, matcha with caramelized white chocolate, cinnamon with fig compote & candied walnuts, lemon meringue, black sesame, and espresso with espresso caramel are my current top picks.

With the heavy emphasis on sweets in my professional life, I crave savoury food more than ever on my time off. It doesn’t help that I am not so keen on spending long hours at my home kitchen either. I often find myself stare longingly at bags of chips in supermarket. Oooh, not good. Not good at all. I need to find some quick savoury snacks to make at home that would not result in hours of guilt.

I love the deeply satisfying spicy kick of kimchi but I have a low tolerance for heat. If I could, I would totally snack on bowls of kimchi with nothing else on the side. Rice is of course the default accompaniment but I rarely feel the craving for a bowl of rice. But I do love bread!