Mmmmm....crêpes!  I had a love-hate relationship with crêpes.  I have very fond memories of ordering crêpes in Paris at a street side crêpe stand on the wonderful and famous Rue Cler.  Using my best French, I would order a banana and Nutella crêpe.  I would then watch intently as the older gentleman who ran the crêpe stand effortlessly poured and spread the batter....

This pizza dough recipe is courtesy of Dawn Thomas, co-founder of Rouxbe.com (the world’s leading online culinary school). Dawn titles this recipe as Basic Pizza Dough, but I’ve taken the liberty of re-titling it as “Bellissima Pizza Dough” for a very good reason.  In Italian, “bellissima” means exceptionally beautiful, and this pizza dough is exactly that…exceptionally beautiful!

I absolutely love making bread.  It’s like a kind of therapy, where you can just leave everything behind and get swept up with the aromas of the fresh flour, the beautiful way that yeast blooms (or the incredible bubbles and aromas of an active sourdough starter), and bringing the dough together into a silky smoothness.   For years, this was something I saved for a weekend, as some of the beautiful breads I would make could take as much as 3 hours or more...

Ever since I was young, pancakes have been synonymous with Saturday morning.  I took on the role of making pancakes as a school aged child, and it’s something that has stuck with me for the better part of 40 years.  

When our two boys came along, this was both an opportunity to pass on this family tradition, but was also a turning point in bringing fresh milled whole grain flour into the experience.  The one thing I noticed when using entirely white flour, was that it almost created a “carb high”, and bringing more whole grains into the recipe, seemed to regulate this better.  The nice thing about pancakes, is that it’s an easy and approachable way to try different whole grain flours, both for flavour and texture.