Blueberries from the farm, tarts from a local bakery and rosemary from the garden. It’s blueberry season and we’ve been stocking up on these the past weeks. We buy our blueberries straight from the farmers around where we live and they are so cheap & so delicious! My mom usually buys a lot and she vacuum packs them and are kept in the freezer. That way, she has blueberries all year round & they stay fresh. Not a bad idea.

We found this cute little Korean snack bar, in Burquitlam, over the weekend and they had the simplest menu. The choices are steamed dumplings, large dumplings, kimchi dumplings, fish cakes in broth soup, ddeokbokki (sliced rice cakes) & some korean style sushi. So that made ordering for us pretty easy. Not bad for a simple lunch.

Breakfast this morning – Steel cut oats with mangoes, coconut milk & granola with cranberries. In fact, this has been my breakfast every morning this week. I’m so loving it – can you tell? I’ve never been an oats fan as the only oats I knew about are those instant ones filled with sugar that you see in your local grocery store. I always found them too sweet & too mushy for my liking. Until I recently discovered the goodness of steel cut oats!

I’m currently working on a project that has to do with steel cut oats so I’ve been learning so much about it’s nutritional benefits. Yes, it does take 20 min to make but I make a small pot full which usually lasts for 3 days.

This mango and coconut recipe is the first one I experimented with but would like to try cooking it with apples too and other fruits. Does anyone have an amazing steel cut oats recipe they would like to share?

Before I bought my bread machine, I really had to think about as I didn’t want to get another small appliance in the kitchen that will be forgotten in a corner collecting dust. So, after thinking about it for a long time, I finally took the plunge and bought ourselves a breadmaker. And, I don’t regret it at all – it’s one of the most used small appliance in our kitchen. I can’t imagine not having it!

Since we’ve had it, I haven’t bought a loaf of bread from the grocery store. All the bread we eat at home are all homemade. I make a loaf or 2 every week and freeze them. So this is what I do to keep them fresh (I think I read this from Martha Stewart): Once it’s done baking in the oven, I let it sit for an hour. Then, I slice them by hand into individual pieces. Once all sliced, I wrap the whole loaf (sliced) in saran wrap and store them in the freezer to keep them fresh. Whenever I need a slice of bread, I just take a couple pieces of the frozen slices and pop them in the toaster oven. Easy!

The first image just came straight out of the oven. It’s whole wheat with flax seeds. Second image are slices of frozen rosemary bread made last week.