Welcome to the weekend at the cottage! Here are a few things that have been happening around here lately. Grab a cup of coffee or tea, or maybe treat yourself to a hot chocolate or a glass of wine (it’s five o’clock somewhere!), and settle in for some reading and browsing.

Woah, I just realized that I haven’t published an Urban Cottage Weekend post since Thanksgiving. That’s six months. Six! What the what?

It’s not like there haven’t been weekends around here — there’s still one at the end of every week. There have even been seasons.

Like fall.

And winter.

Followed by spring, if you can call it that yet. The day after I took this photo of sunshine and fog earlier this week, the ground was covered with snow. That’s an Ontario spring for you. April showers bring snowstorms, the temperature fluctuates madly, and then, suddenly, you wake up one day in May and it’s summer. Unless it snows on the May long weekend, which I’ve seen too. I say just take the days as they come and glory in each one (or stay inside and ignore some of them).

Anyway, now that we’re all caught up (those six months went by pretty fast!) maybe there’ll be more Urban Cottage Weekend posts in the future. Once in a while, at least.

Fave Food Photo of 2016

This just may have been my favourite food photo of last year (or could it be that I simply can’t remember the rest?). At any rate, I wanted to share it with you here. It’s a Christmas morning parfait that I made with a pomegranate chia seed pudding (I must post that one of these days, as the recipe’s a bit different than usual), pomegranate arils and my pomegranate pistachio granola. Festive, no?

In the runner-up category, the first thing that comes to mind are the photos of homemade jam in my review of The Canning Kitchen. Go on, check them out!

Urban Cottage Decor

As you can see, my new home doesn’t have the charming cottage vibe of the original Urban Cottage. But I still channel the Urban Cottage spirit of modern scratch living here, so let’s just ignore all those porcelain tiles, shall we?

For quite some time, I’ve wanted to try my hand at arranging books by colour instead of category and author. Now, I have a LOT of books, so I limited this experiment to just my cookbooks. And not all my cookbooks, either. This bookshelf is in the hall beside the kitchen. I’m super pleased with how it turned out. The colours pop, and what was a practical feature before is now a design element. And I do like a good pop of colour here and there to keep life bright and cheery!

Love Apples? (Who Doesn’t!)

You may know that I work as a freelance editor when I’m not blogging or taking pictures of trees. I had the chance to work on a great project recently: an Ontario Apple Growers e-book of 30 apple recipes that were created by 10 different food bloggers. So much amazing creativity went into these recipes! I have to say, it was a fun challenge to retain all those unique voices while ensuring the material was consistently presented.

And the good news for you?

Ontario Apple Growers is providing this e-book absolutely free, no strings or apple peelings attached, over on their website! You can read it there, or even download it. You won’t believe some of the things you can do with apples — check it out! I’m an apple lover; if you’re not yet, you will be!

Around the Web

Here are a few things that caught my eye out there on the internet recently. Why not put your feet up and check them out?

I don’t have any cooking-with-grandmother memories, but I enjoyed reading this one by my friend who wrote the book I said you all need in your kitchen!

This gluten-free carrot cake with pineapple and coconut caught my eye big time, and it’s by my roomie at the Food Bloggers of Canada conference last year; unfortunately she didn’t bring any with her.

I’m speed-reading my way through this yet-to-be launched cookbook right now, and it’s wonderful!

Is cooking all day without making a mess even a thing? Apparently it can be done. Who knew?

Recap

I may not have been blogging as much as usual lately, but I think it would be a bit much to share six months’ worth of recipes here! So why not head over to my home page and see what I’ve been up to. Here are a few pretty pictures from 2017 alone to tempt you to look them up.

Chocolate Cake with Red Current Swiss Meringue Buttercream by Nana