Breakfast today: Homemade whole wheat bread (freshly baked yesterday), coffee, Casa Giulia blueberry preserve & cheese tarragon omelette. I was also happy to receive my Anthropologie catalogue in the mail this morning. Like a magazine subscription, Anthropologie mails out a new catalogue each month with great photography, locations and styling. It’s incredible to think they’re essentially producing 12 different lookbooks with 12 different themes each year. That’s a lot of imagery/creative to produce. And it’s all top quality. Having produced a few photoshoots and lookbooks in our day, we really respect the effort and imagination put into these monthly catalogues. We’ve kept every issue we’ve received neatly stored in our library. It’s a nice monthly visual treat and it’s free to subscribe.

These days, I’m all about simple and quick breakfasts but…it has to be delicious, too. Today’s breakfast consisted of: homemade whole wheat bread with flax & sunflower seeds, hard boiled eggs, coffee and Casa Giulia blueberry preserve from Italy. Peter’s Note: If you can’t get enough of breakfast photos visit Jennifer Causey’s Simply Breakfast blog. If anyone is keeping track, Simply Breakfast is, hands-down, the number one breakfast blog. Jennifer has documented 507 breakfasts (and counting) over the last 3 years. Simply awesome!

Last night we borrowed Nerissa’s parents’ electric raclette grilll and had Jonathan & Anita over for raclette. Wikipedia describes raclette as “both a type of cheese and, informally, a dish featuring this cheese“. I’d describe the dining experience similar to a fondue but with the cheese and accompaniments grilled instead of boiled. While there’s one or two places where you might be able to order a savory fondue, it’s really hard to find a restaurant that has raclette on the menu. The only one, in Western Canada, that we’ve seen is the Grizzle House in Banff which is fitting because the dish has an old school Swiss alpine feel.

The cheese is grilled in tiny pans and served over bite sized potatoes along with sweet pearl onions, cornichons and sausages. It doesn’t sound like much but the flavor combination is really delicious. Raclette’s fun because you eat at a casual pace and the table has a communal feel fueled with conversation. Jonathan & Anita also brought over prosciutto, melon, pâté and manchego cheese. As an experiment, we melted the manchego in the raclette pans and grilled the pearl onions. Pretty yummy, actually. Those were probably one of the many raclette etiquette rules we broke last night but that was part of the fun; it was interactive and a new adventure for all.

Last night was filled with great food & wine at Doni & Gen’s place. These days, gathering with friends at each others’ homes makes for a perfect weekend. We indulged in fresh oysters, cheese, cured meats, paté, Portugese sardines, apples, strawberries, cornichons and some artisan rolls. We ended the evening with some lovely dessert wine and chocolates. Thanks Doni & Gen for another wonderful get together!

I was going through our photo files and I found these. I had almost forgotten what life was like before Luna. These photos were taken probably a year and half ago. The image above was taken from one of our weekend breakfast. I always make it a point to have something special for breakfast as it makes it a good start of the weekend. I still try to do that until now but with less effort and less time to eat.

The second image shows our favourite thing to do on a rainy Saturday night. It’s something we get excited about. We grab a good film, open up a nice bottle of french or spanish wine and eat all of our favourite food as we watch our chosen film. It’s like our own version of a tv dinner. We usually end up drinking a whole bottle of wine and eat up all the food too. If I remember right, I think we were watching the classic french film Mon Oncle while devouring all this food.

Great film + great food = happy people.