The new Calgary Farmers' Market was all abuzz this weekend with eager shoppers foraging for fresh fruit and veg, all manner of meats, sweet things, baking, crafts, coffee, bagels, seafood and many varieties of prepared foods. It is quite the scene, busy and bustling, bursting at the seams, much like it was in its previous location. After a stroll and survey of goods, I came upon some basil sellers with jars of pesto lined up on a display shelf which, of course, prompted a little voice in my head to say: "I can do that!". Home I went with a fragrant bag of neon green organic basil which said one thing and one thing only to me: pesto.

Making pesto is like sending your nose on a vacation, yielding a deeply aromatic bright green paste that is most magnificent tossed with some really toothsome Italian pasta. The pungency of fresh basil suspended in an emulsion of peppery extra-virgin olive oil, garlic, gently toasted pine nuts and freshly grated Parmesan cheese is the finest example of olfactory overload.

Italian purists in Genoa will tell you the best pesto is pounded up in a mortar and pestle, but my food processor works just fine. Wash the basil and separate the leaves from the stems. Don't worry too much about completely drying the leaves. Some water on the basil actually assists with the blending process.

Pesto

4 cups packed fresh basil leaves; 1/2 cup pine nuts, toasted until golden (these burn quickly, so watch them closely); 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese; 2 large cloves garlic; 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil.

Puree all the ingredients together in a food processor. Season with salt and pepper to taste, as well as with a pinch or two of peperoncino if you like. You will have a thick paste. Thin paste with a little bit of pasta cooking water to loosen slightly, enough to coat pasta easily. Best the day it is made but can keep, covered, in the fridge, for a couple of days. Freezes well.

This recipe makes enough pesto for a 1 pound box of pasta. Fusili lends itself very well to this sauce, as its little grooves trap all the flecks and flavour of the pesto. Fettucine is another good pasta choice, as are little shells. You will love the vibrant green tone and intense flavour of this hard-working condiment. It is also excellent stirred into minestrone soups.

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Cippolini onions are not often seen in stores, so a sighting is a significant event for me. Cippolinis are delicate and sweet, small and savoury, lending themselves to caramelization in the oven and a bath in a bold sweet/sour agrodolce syrup. A large bag of cippolinis I just picked up at Costco was soon swimming in a fragrant pool of balsamic vinegar, olive oil and honey, augmented with chopped garlic and some perky peperoncino. Soon enough, the onions shrink down and the loose dressing boils down to fit a little more tightly around each orb, coating the onions with a thick, luscious glaze spiked with complex notes of acidic vinegar and vegetal sweetness. The aromas are absolutely intoxicating as this dish perfumes your kitchen with its heady scent.

I love to serve these onions hot from the oven with roasted meat or strewn alongside some hearty spaghetti Bolognese. The leftovers, cold from the fridge, are excellent in sandwiches of cold meat and cheese, or eaten on a plate with some dense country bread, dill pickles and an assortment of pates.

The first task is to peel the cippolinis. You can try your hand at doing this with the raw bulbs or give them a quick dip in a pot of boiling water to loosen the skins. Top and tail the onions and place them in a roasting pan that holds them snugly. Drizzle in a glug or two of extra-virgin olive oil, 2 or 3 glugs of balsamic vinegar and a couple of tablespoons of runny honey. Chop as much garlic as you like. I used about 6 large cloves for about 4 cups of onions. Season with salt and pepper to taste as well as a couple of large pinches of peperoncino. Toss everything together well and roast uncovered for about 45 minutes, turning every 12 minutes or so for even browning. If the mixture starts to look dry, add a couple of spoonfuls of water to the pan to prevent scorching. Final product: meltingly tender, golden knobs of sweet/sour/hot/salty onions, glazed and glistening in a thick, hot syrup. Serve hot, warm, cold or anything in between. These are fantastic any way you offer them. They keep very well in the fridge for at least a week.

Roasting is like magic. In goes something ordinary and out comes something extraordinary. Try your hand at more kitchen alchemy:

With a new book comes new ideas. Salad For Supper. Patricia Wells, inspirational cooking teacher and author, tantalizes with her new cookbook Salad As A Meal, a concept that speaks of ease, freshness, light meals, casual concoctions. Don't approach this with notions of a messy hodgepodge thrown into a salad bowl. No no no. Here we have lovely, gentle tossings of elegantly simple elements that work together to build a sum greater than its parts.

Then, there are the things that go with salad for supper, some gentle soups, homemade crackers, the wines we may like to enjoy. Salad As A Meal takes us by the hand and invites us inside Patricia Wells' charmed life in the south of France, enabling our participation in the creation of sun-drenched foods and easy living. Cookbooks like this promote the fullfillment of a fantasy, a portal to a kinder, gentler world where people sip wine and eat canapes under the canopy of an oak tree. While some elements of our own lives may differ, we can adapt the themes and menus to our own circumstances and get one step closer to creating our own happy retreats within our own homes.

So, which salad should I tell you about? Thai Beef? Potato Salad With Capers, Spring Onions and Mint? Pear, Blue Cheese, Fennnel, Endive and Salted Almond? Vietnamese Chicken and Green Papaya? Marinated Shrimp? You may have noticed that some of these creations are not particularly French, as are many of Patricia Wells' notable recpes. No matter. They are inspired and fresh, trademarks of Wells' casual, elegant style. The more I browse Salad As A Meal, the more enthralled I am with this book. Here is a salad that calls out to me:

Crab, Avocado and Quinoa Salad With Technicolour Tomatoes

3 cups water or stock; 1/2 tsp. kosher salt; 1 cup quinoa, well rinsed and drained; 2 bay leaves; 1 pound (2 cups) lump crabmeat, cooked; 1/4 cup minced fresh tarragon or Italian parsley; 1/2 cup minced fresh mint leaves; 1 large rip avocado, halved, pitted, peeled and cubed; 2 cups mixed red, yellow and green cherry or pear tomatoes, halved.

In a large saucepan, bring water or stock to a boil. Add salt, quinoa and bay leaves. Bring back to a boil and then reduce heat to low, cover the pan and simmer until the quinoa is tender and translucent, about 15 minutes. Drain and return quinoa to pan. Cover with a clean dish towel, replace the lid and let it sit for 10 minutes. Discard bay leaves and let quinoa cool.

Place cooled quinoa in a large, shallow bowl. Add crabmeat, tarragon, mint and avocado. Toss with a dressing of your choice. Patricia likes this Yogurt and Lemon Dressing:

Combine 1 tbsp. lemon zest and 1 tbsp. fine sea salt in a spice grinder and grind to a fine powder. Take 1/4 tsp. of this lemon salt and combine it with 1/2 cup plain low-fat yogurt and 2 tbsp. of fresh lemon juice. Shake well to blend. Adjust seasoning and add pepper if you like. Serve with quinoa salad.

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Every family birthday at my house precipitates the question "What will we have for dessert?". The birthday meal itself is not really debated, as family members are quite satisfied with my varied offerings of salads, grilled grub, pastas and the different permutations and combinations they have come to expect from me. But dessert is another matter altogether, with lots of suggestions and opinions about what we should indulge in. One thing I know for sure: no one quibbles about chocolate cupcakes, especially moist, fudgey ones with a thick, luscious, bittersweet ganache topping.

Which brings me to what I baked for my daughter Claire's birthday this weekend. Easy to prepare and a total delight to indulge in after a lasagna dinner and a few games of pool at our home. Cupcakes offer us the complete satisfaction of having our very own decadent dessert to eat any way we like, from fist to mouth, cut into dainty quarters, taking little forkfuls of icing alternately with morsels of cake. A cupcake is all yours to do what you please with.

You can buy cupcakes at specialty shops for over $3.00 a pop but why would you when you can whip up these from scratch in almost no time at all? Birthday or not, a fabulous chocolate cupcake is a classic crowd pleaser that you can count on to boost the mood of any event on your agenda. The Fine Cooking website takes the credit for this simple but delicious recipe that helped make Claire's birthday meal special, memorable and festive:

Chocolate Cupcakes with Ganache
adapted from www.finecooking.com

1+1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour; 3/4 tsp. baking soda; 1/2 tsp. kosher salt; 2 cups granulated sugar; 1 cup strong brewed coffee, warm or cold; 1/2 cup sour cream; 1/2 cup canola oil; 2 large eggs; 4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, melted and cooled.

My ganache - 2 cups heavy cream; 12 ounces semisweet chocolate, coarsely chopped; 4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, coarsely chopped; 2 tbsp. granulated sugar; pinch of salt. Place chopped chocolates in a large bowl. Heat cream, sugar and pinch of salt in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Stir to dissolve the sugar. Do not let the mixture boil. Pour hot cream over chopped chocolate and whisk until smooth. Set ganache aside and let cool until thick enough to spread without dribbling. Ganache can be refrigerated and then brought to room temperature for spreading.

For cupcakes, heat the oven to 350 F. Line 16 muffin tins with liners or grease the cups with butter. Sift flour, baking soda, salt and sugar into a medium bowl. In a large bowl, whisk coffee, melted chocolate, sour cream, oil and eggs. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and whisk until there are no lumps. Pour the batter into prepared muffin tins, dividing the batter evenly into all 16 cups. Bake in the middle of the oven for about 20 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the centre of a cupcake comes out clean. Let cupcakes cool for 15 minutes and then remove them from the pan to cool further. Top generously with ganache.

Those of you who like to use pastry bags may wish to swirl icing or ganache overtop your cupcakes in a graceful swoosh. I just took a pallet knife in hand and got to work building a sweet layer of truffle-like smoothness onto each graceful cake. A little easier, and prettily annointed with a chocolate coffee bean.

Cupcakes are a bit of a craze right now which begs the questions, did they ever really go out of style? Aren't they always a good idea? Some food trends come and go (foam? architectural food styling? raw food?) but cupcakes deserve a permanent place on the party table.

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What would you say to a frosty, fruity drink thick enough to eat with a spoon, but even more fun slurped up through a big fat colourful straw? And, freckled with chewy and chubby tapioca pearls, this concoction also has a whole lot of texture to tickle your palate. Loosely labeled Bubble Tea, my version is based on the fun drinks found at Asian eateries. After some inspection and questioning, I discovered that the Bubble Tea purveyors often use questionable sucrose syrups as liquid, heavily laden with artificial colorants, inspiring me to go home and do better.

I throw this together in a blender with all fruit and no tea, using combinations of fruits and fruit juices for maximum nutrition and taste. Any liquid will do, so cold green tea or herbal tea is a fine idea too. As for the bubbles, Asian grocers sell a product that seems to be a tapioca derivative, starchy globs of pleasantly gummy balls that alternatively float and sink throughout the drink. All the writing on the package is foreign to me, so I am not entirely sure what these bubbles are. Cooking time is also a mystery, but a couple of minutes of boiling seem to soften them up enough to make them palatable. These tapioca pearls firm up quickly once cooked and drained, so they sometimes benefit from a quick rinse in cold water to bring them back to their cute chewiness. Of course, you may forgo them altogether, if experimentation with nameless carbohydrates doesn't appeal to you. I find the bubbles add lots of personality and charm to what is essentially a smoothie, and I like to drink my own version of Bubble Tea with a light lunch, spicy supper, or, simply, as breakfast.

You will need a blender and some frozen fruit. Lots of mixing and matching is possible, but I like to use colour as my guide. For an almost neon orange hue and brilliantly fresh flavour, buzz some frozen mango and peach chunks with orange juice and a few drops of pure vanilla extract. A spoonful of plain yogurt is a nice touch here. Sweeten according to your taste. I like to use orange or apple juice concentrate to sweeten my smoothies. Honey or agave syrup are lovely options. Proportions of fruit to liquid are difficult to measure. Add enough liquid to the frozen fruit in the blender to enable the blades to swirl freely and easily. As a guideline, here are some tips:

Use any frozen fruit you like, as long as the pieces are smallish and easily blendable, no larger than 1-inch thick. Flash freeze your own fruit on a waxpaper-lined baking sheet and then store the pieces in zip-style freezer bags. The fruit will remain individually frozen and you can take from the freezer the amount you need. I always include a banana in my smoothies because it yields a thick velvety quality and tropical taste. To make enough smoothies for 4 people, I use about 4 cups of frozen fruit, 1 banana, about 3 - 4 cups of fruit juice, 2 tbsp. of plain yogurt and 2-3 tbsp. of frozen pure orange or apple juice concentrate. Juice concentrate is a natural, unsweetened product in an intense format, adding deep flavour and sweetness without the need for refined sugar.

Exploit the innate redness of strawberries by blending them with cranberry juice. Blend grape juice with frozen blueberries for a dazzling violet smoothie loaded with antioxidants. You do not have to limit yourself to frozen fruit. Fresh blended fruit is also perfectly acceptable as the basis for a smoothie, though frozen fruit will buzz into a frothier, icier finished product. Make your smoothies as thick or as thin as you like. There is no right or wrong here, just your own preferences.

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