Maple syrup!  I’ve done it!  I’ve made Maple Syrup with my own bare hands.  My own  Little House in the Big Woods, slightly stumpy hands. It was actually rereading the Little House series that finally convinced me to make Maple Syrup from the enormous black maple in my backyard.  At the end of every winter, [...]

I learned to cook chicken from my mother. Ergo … I cook my chicken until the pink is gone and it’s nice and moist and tender. And then I cook for about an hour more. My name is Karen, and I’m a chicken overcooker. Always. You hand me a chicken breast, and I’ll hand you [...]

  This Sunday, while you were all going about your weekend business … running errands, reading books, cleaning clothes … something very special was going on.  The Art of Doing Stuff turned 2.  2 years old.  Which in blogging years is as old as dirt.  Zsa Zsa Gabor old.  As old as Zsa Zsa Gabor’s [...]

  Let me be serious for a moment.   1. That is the number of maple trees in my backyard. 360.  THAT is the conservative estimate of how many bags of maple leaves I’ve raked up and put out to the curb since I moved into this house 10 or so years ago. 886,762,254,981.   [...]

    Yeah, I know!  They’re pretty spectacular in a Dame Edna kind of way.  These … are Rainbow Pancakes. I was Googling around the Internet last week trying to figure out something fun to do with pancakes for Shrove/Pancake/Fat Tuesday.  This is not at ALL what I was looking for and literally stumbled upon [...]

I love eating salad. Love it. I do not love making salad. Do not love it. When it’s summer I feel guilted into buying fresh red leaf lettuce and washing and drying it myself. Pain. Do not love it. So in the winter I give myself a break by buying the baby greens in a [...]

Note from Karen:  If you were having trouble downloading the Valentine Cards from yesterday’s post, I’ve converted the files to  JPG.  A common file, everyone should be able to read.     There’s a lot of debate over what’s better for you:  Homemade hamburgers or frozen.    No there isn’t.  There’s no debate at all. [...]

  I know I’m  ”professional blogger” and all (Oh my God, how dorky a thing is that to say?) and I’m not supposed to repeat any posts, but I figure … television shows are pretty professional and they go into repeats all the time. Last year one of my favourite posts was the one on [...]

I guess I should start by apologizing.  I thought I had posted this recipe ages ago.  Years ago.  But, as it turns out, I didn’t.  So I stand (sit actually) here before you to rectify that situation.  Recitfy.  Not rectum.  Sometimes I get the two words confused. Oh!  Speaking of confused … I *did* post [...]

There are a few things I haven’t made public about myself on this blog.  Things that, although impressive, are also the sort of thing you don’t want to go bragging about because people will think you’re obnoxious with all your braggy bragging.  So I really debated about whether or not to reveal this next fact [...]

  I’m not some nutjob you  know.  I do, on occasion, buy preprepared foods.   Frozen stuff.  And stuff in bottles.  That kind of thing.  We don’t eat a lot of it, mainly because I don’t like how it tastes. But there are certain things that  just aren’t worth the pain of making.  Things like [...]

The very first thing I ever learned to cook was pizza.  I started around grade 8 and spent the next 472 years trying to perfect it.  I’m about halfway there. The first big breakthrough I had was a couple of years ago when I started to BBQ my pizza.  Up until then I’d tried everything [...]