At the Immigrant's Table

Moving to Canada introduced me to plenty of new holiday traditions, but I never saw a reason to retire the dishes we ate back home.

Holiday menus can come with surprisingly strict rules about what belongs on the table, and I've never been convinced that moving countries means you have to start your food traditions from scratch.

Some familiar dishes now sha...

Halloween treats can turn a perfectly reasonable afternoon into a frosting-covered decorating marathon.

The kids want ghosts, monsters, and candy eyeballs on everything, while I'd rather not spend twenty minutes trying to make one cookie look like a spider. Thankfully, children are usually much less concerned with perfect piping than we are, especially when chocola...

This strawberry whipped ricotta toast is what I hand my kids the minute they drop their backpacks by the door. After enough strawberries went soft before anyone got to them, I learned that roasting turns the worst of them into the best part of the toast. Ten minutes of work and 20 in the oven give you an after-school snack that looks like it came from a café.

I have nothing against keeping a frozen lasagna around for emergencies, but once I start making lasagna at home, the freezer aisle suddenly looks a lot less interesting.

There's something about layering pasta, sauce, cheese, and whatever else the recipe calls for that makes dinner feel like I actually planned something, even when I didn't start thinking about it un...

I only meant to make a few fun drinks for Halloween, but apparently I got a little carried away. One had a creepy color, another was bubbling in the glass, and before long my friends were asking what kind of "potion" I was making next. Somewhere along the way, "Potion Lady" stuck, which is a slightly ridiculous nickname to earn over drinks but one I'm not exactly mad about. H...