Show and tell Friday

Another Day Dawns Over Hilo Bay

It's Friday (OK... it is really Saturday, I am late)! The day I go on a gallup through some great foodie sites and take you with me. I am starting with one of my very favorite blogs, Cream Puffs in Venice. It is written by a woman named Ivonne who lives in Toronto (nice city ... I love it!). She was inspired to cook at her Italian Grandmother's side as a child and was encouraged to explore food and life by a wonderful mother. She spent summers growing up in Italy and still makes regular vigils back to the mother country of her family. Venice you ask? Ivonne read the book A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena De Blasi and from then on she has been a blogger. Ivonne belongs to a lot of cooking groups which issue challenges and so she participates several days a week or monthly with those challenges. It's fun to see what she is creating (mostly B-E-A-U-T-F-U-L things) and how she photographs them. After her recent return from Summer in Italy she joined a new group following Marcella Hazzan's book, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. I adore Marcella Hazzan and will be following what Ivonne does with her classic Italian style. Here is a picture of some mac and cheese she just whipped up:

It is a natural segue to leap from Cream Puffs In Venice to Angela Robert's Spinach Tiger. Angela created the Italian Cooking group that Ivonne belongs to. Angela's rather interesting tag line is, "Cooking food a woman will love and a man will marry you for... " A Faux painter by trade, Italian American living somewhere in California (land of my birth!) She has such amazing topics as of course "Cooking Italy" and Spicy Maple Roasted Apple Soup this month. She does not post every day, not many of us can actually do that full time, it takes much longer than people can imagine to create, cook and photograph food, then edit the photos and write about it, but she comes close with a post every fewdays. Those challenges and groups like Cooking Italy keep us on our toes! Here she features Peach Clafoutis, a Different Kind of Peaches and Cream:

So, who do we discover after Spinach Tiger? Cannelle Et Vanille by blogger Aran, a Basque ex-pat living in the US since 1998, Cannelle Et Vanille, is her baby, her blank canvas for creating anything and everything sweet that comes out of her heart. Her blog has been cited by UK Times Online, BBC's Olive Magazine (one of my personal favorite food magazines), Saveur.com and Real Simple.com. Here she features some individual pear, raspberry and ginger pies for Project Wedding.

Canelle has a LOT of links... probably close to 100, so I had to open a lot of pages before I found one that really talked to me. It was at 101 Cookbooks. I guess that sort of rings a bell to me because before we moved to Hawaii I had to trim my cookbook collection down to about 100 or so of my favorites. I may have a few more than that, but in the end the trimming left me with a lot special cookbooks. In 101 Cookbooks, Heidi Swanson has a recipe journal. She writes and photographs recipes that intersect her life. This particular post interested me because it was Green Soup with Ginger and I have been playing with all kinds of ways to use ginger, which is abundant here. Here is a picture of the Soup for our last link for today's blog adventure.