Admittedly, late winter is not prime jam-making time, but it is the ideal window for making marmalade.

Armed with a basket of citrus from everywhere but the U.S., I set out to improve my marmalade making skills. Bitter, assertive, astringent and containing few ingredients, marmalade is surprisingly complicated to make. I have never quite reached my mother-in-law’s stellar results: a slightly-caramelized-burnt-but-bitter Seville marmalade. I’ve tried many techniques and all kinds of citrus. Seville oranges are increasingly rare where I live, so I use Cara Cara tangelos, tangerines, grapefruit, navel and blood oranges, and Meyer lemons.

Today’s experiment originated with the complex flavour blends from Sophie Kaftal and Bobby Zielinski’s cookbook, Kitten and the Bear: Recipes for Small Batch Preserves, Scones, and Sweets from the Beloved Shop. This collection received gold in the single-subject category at the 2025 Taste Canada Book Awards. The recipe mix is a smart pairing: if you make jam, you need something to serve it on.

Kitten and the Bear is sure to be appreciated by meticulous cooks and bakers who like a little science on the side of their jams and scones. Science and method show up early in the book’s discourse on jam making: sugar concentrations, techniques to control outcomes, main ingredients (sugar, fruit, acid), flavourings, and then a step-by-step how-to guide.

The art of preserving takes up two-thirds of the pages, and baked goods and beverages round out the book. Recipes are subdivided by fruit types: berries, stone fruit, tree fruit, citrus, tropical, vine and other. Each is thorough, detailed and slow-moving; don’t expect to dash through the recipes without a cup of tea or glass of port at your elbow. I can report that the orange-whisky marmalade is top-tier, and the scones are impressive, too.

The pink grapefruit and raspberry “jamalade” requires dextrous knifework, time and patience. I stripped the coloured rind, or zest, off three grapefruits, then removed the pith and finely julienned the zest.

Next, I cut out the segments, called supremes (a reference to the French practice of removing the “tender” or “supreme” of a chicken breast for separate cooking), then squeezed and reserved any juices left in the membranes. The zest soaked in water while the supremes and juice macerated in sugar.

I then triple-blanched the zest before combining it with the supremes, raspberries and sugar to cook into “jamalade.” The result is more jam than marmalade, the grapefruit’s brassiness toned down to background mystery.

I’ve flagged dozens of preserves to make this summer. Really, just how many jars of plain red berry jam do I want to consume in my lifetime? I’ll be making dark cherry, plum and cocoa jam for sure when cherries are in season and the Okanagan fruit truck arrives at the farmers market.

Flavours beyond fruit add jazz to these jams. Herbs such as rosemary and lemon thyme; spices such as vanilla, cardamom, cinnamon, garam masala and chai blends; plus flowers (elder blossoms, roses, lavender, violets); spirits (Scotch, cassis, crème de violette, crème de cacao, amaretto); and the unexpected (tea, cocoa) create sophisticated flavours that offer a change from the ordinary.

The scones require deep chilling in the freezer and are baked from frozen, which doubly justifies their labour as a “ready when you are” pantry stocker.

Observe measurements and methods closely. I decided — prematurely and wrongly — that the signature buttermilk scone dough was too dry, so I upped the buttermilk, then I added white chocolate frozen raspberries and decided to not chill the dough. Wrong, wrong.

The apple fritter scones with maple glaze are simply delicious but too big, so I cut the raw dough into 16 rectangles instead of nine.

The rest of the tea-party-worthy baking is interesting: a tropical take on Victoria sponge, persimmon pull-apart bread, spelt digestive cookies, clotted cream and potato quiche, and galette filled with shallots, figs and blue cheese. Riches, riches. This is a book worthy of your “active and in use” shelf.

First, we cook, then we trade notes on failed versions of marmalade.

In an online interview with broadcaster Lee C. Camp in March 2025, chef and author Jacques Pépin said food is the great equalizer that unites people.

Food is at the heart of Pépin’s life and has filtered into his avocation as a painter as well, with chickens serving as a favourite subject. He has painted hundreds of whimsical watercolours of chickens — chickens with leek legs, eggplant bellies, nasturtium-leaf bellies, artichoke bodies. They’re utterly charming and featured in his latest book, an autobiography titled Art of the Chicken: A Master Chef’s Paintings, Stories, and Recipes of the Humble Bird.

Pépin has been a legendary figure in North America’s culinary history for seven decades, as a chef, writer, educator and TV personality. He began his professional apprenticeship at 13 after years of informal apprenticeship in his mother’s small-town, bare-bones bistro, Le Pelican, in Bourg-en-Bresse in eastern France. He ended up cooking for three French heads of state, including Charles de Gaulle, before he was 25. In 1959, he came to America and was hired at Le Pavilion, New York City’s French culinary temple.

Pépin famously declined the job of White House chef for President John F. Kennedy in 1961. Instead, he went into R&D at Howard Johnson’s highway pit-stop restaurant chain, where he learned the importance of methodology and kitchen science as he developed large-scale recipes for the company’s line cooks in over 1,000 restaurants.

He put that knowledge to use at Le Potagerie, a soup-kitchen prix fixe cafeteria in Manhattan from 1970-75, Pépin’s only self-owned restaurant. He went on to consult for numerous prestigious restaurants. In 1974, Pépin survived a near-fatal car accident that ended his restaurant career.

Pépin’s first books, La Téchnique and La Méthode, were published in 1976 and 1979 and made his talented hands famous, appearing in hundreds of photographs of how to execute kitchen skills. He hit TV airwaves on PBS in 1982 and created countless cookbooks to keep pace with his burgeoning career as a TV chef.

I met Pépin in Calgary in 1986. I’d completed my apprenticeship and was working as an assistant to visiting chefs at a Calgary cooking school. Pépin was touring North American culinary shops for thirty weeks of the year, giving classes crammed with tricks of the trade and practical advice. His latest book at the time, A French Chef Cooks at Home, was an approachable take on la vie française. My dog-eared copy has scribbled notes beside peasant dishes that were new to me at the time but have since become favourites, among them cassoulet, tarte Tatin and soufflé.

Beyond being a master technician, Pépin fit the “charming French demi-god” model to the eyebrow. Oh, my goodness, I fell in love while I peeled carrots and made pastry. His inscription in my well-thumbed copy of French Chef reads, “Thanks so much! I couldn’t have done it without you!” Of course he could have managed. He’s a superman.

Relying on the affective memory — the memory of the senses — is how Pépin learned to cook and how he rekindles his recollections of childhood. Nowadays, walking in the Connecticut woods with his dog, the scent of trees and fungus remind him of foraging with his father. This visceral approach to memory has informed how he interacts with his granddaughter, Storey, taking her to the garden to smell tarragon or parsley, sitting together at the counter to make a salad.

Over the years he made Emmy-Award-winning TV cooking shows — with Julia Child, his daughter Claudine and with Storey. He also became a respected dean and educator at the French Culinary Institute and, with Child, is one of the co-founders of what has become a master’s program in gastronomy at Boston University.

Now 91, Pépin is still painting, still writing. Still cooking. He’s still visible on YouTube: a notable clip was recorded in 2022 when he appeared on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show as PR for his Chicken book. The consummate TV star, he was unflappable as he made a French omelet: while whisking, stirring and folding, he showed Fallon and the show’s drummer, Questlove, how to make omelets, too. But they simply couldn’t keep up with the master and their finished omelets looked pretty sad. His was perfect, of course.

While painting, Pépin says, the work takes hold and he rarely knows where it’s going. Like life. Ain’t it so. Salut, Chef.

First, we eat, then, perhaps, we paint.

Chicken Pot Pie

In his decade-long tenure as director of R&D at Howard Johnson, Pépin learned about American cooking. Not much is more North American than chicken pot pie. Here’s a scaled-down version. Serves 6-8.

• 1 chicken, poached or roasted
• 1 pastry recipe of your choice
• 4 tbsp. butter
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 onion
• 4 carrots, diced
• 4 stalks celery, minced
• salt and Aleppo chili flakes to taste
• 3 tbsp. all-purpose flour
• ½ c. white wine
• bay leaf
• ½ tsp. dried thyme
• 4 c. chicken stock, heated
• ½ c. + 2 tbsp. whipping cream, divided
• 1 c. peas
• 1 egg yolk
• a handful of parsley, minced

Preheat oven to 375°F. Remove meat from chicken carcass, then chop and chill meat. Reserve bones for stock.

Roll pastry to 3/8” thickness, in size that corresponds to your baking dish with a 1” overlap all around, fluting pastry edges to match the dish’s dimensions. Cut several slashes in the pastry, then cover and chill.

Melt butter in a heavy-bottomed pan. Add garlic, onion, carrots, celery, salt and chili flakes. Sauté over medium-high heat, then reduce heat, cover snugly and sweat until tender. Add flour, mix well and cook for several minutes until it acquires a sandy texture.

Stir in wine and herbs, mix well, and slowly add stock, mixing with each addition. Bring to a boil, whisking thoroughly. Add ½ c. cream and peas; adjust seasoning. Stir in chicken meat and simmer until hot.

Transfer to casserole and cover with pastry. Whisk reserved cream with yolk, then brush over pastry. Bake for 30-45 minutes, until golden brown. Let rest before serving.

Like our Hutterite grandfather, who’d farmed the land where I now reside, my brother was a private man, spare with his words, leaning into facial expressions and sideways inflections as conveyances of meaning.

As a self-employed artist, his interactions with the bureaucracies that govern most North American existences had been equally spare, as I already knew, but when I examined my brother’s bank account, I realized just how spare. He had no auto-debits, no auto-deposits, no mortgage, no loans, no life insurance. No outstanding debt on his one credit card. Simple.

But nothing prepared me for dealing with the bank. “Probate is required,” the banker said at our initial meeting. “Talk to your lawyer.”

Expect lunch, I emailed my lawyer the evening before our home-based appointment. Nothing fancy, as my grandmother liked to say.

Then I headed into the kitchen to cook.

Cooking in our home has never been a matter of simply fueling up. I can’t eat when I’m upset, but I still go to the butcher block and pick up a knife. The rhythm of mincing an onion and dicing a couple of carrots soothes my agitated brain and body. In the galaxy of space and time created by doing something my hands know so intimately, my soul has space to mend.

I hadn’t eaten all day, but my hands made short work of the vegetables I pulled out of the fridge. When I emerged from my trance and set down my knife, my butcher block was covered with a mosaic of coloured dice — carrots, celery, turnips, cabbage, onions, mushrooms, garlic, cauliflower, spuds, broccoli. I studied the assortment for a minute, debating the variety of dishes I could create.

“What do you want for supper?” I called into the adjoining room, where my husband, Dave, sat facing his computer keyboard and screen, swearing under his breath at another glitch.

“How about sausages and oven fries?”

“Not a chance,” I said, sounding just a wee bit sniffy. “I’ve got all this stuff on my block.”

He came round and took a look. “Well, you better decide,” he said diplomatically.

Maybe pasta sauce. A rice bowl. Quesadillas. Quiche. A chopped salad over wilted cabbage. Or maybe grill some garlicky focaccia for deconstructed chicken hero sandwiches. Or I could make biscuits or pastry and convert the entire shebang into a lush pot pie. I muttered something undiplomatic, and decided to decide later, after everything was roasted.

Some chicken drumsticks went onto one tray, and the mosaic of vegetables went onto a second. I laced everything with olive oil, herbs and seasoning, and consigned both trays to the oven. After a moment’s thought, I scooped out half the garlic, spuds and onions, tumbling them into a pan on top of the stove, hit it with extra oil and got things re-started.

While things simmered and roasted, I liberated a tub of chicken stock from the freezer, then returned to sorting my brother’s papers, cursing bankers under my breath.

By the time the chicken and vegetables were roasted, the panful on the stove looked and tasted like supper. My appetite surfaced in a rush of fragrant garlic and rosemary, and I dipped my tablespoon into the potatoes and onions repeatedly. Yum.

I gave Dave a scoop of potatoes and onions with a drumstick, poured some wine and sat down with him. The problem of what to do with trays of roasted vegetables and drumsticks no longer seemed monumental. The probate problem receded as well.

I chopped the remaining chicken and added it and the vegetables to the onions and garlic and made a robust stew that I served to our lawyer a day later.

Sometimes it takes time for an idea to coalesce into something that suits the moment. Sometimes simple works just fine. In either case, eating helps.

First, we eat, then we solve probate.

Deconstructed roast chicken stew with rosemary

My brother’s appetite dwindled as the cancer spread. In his final months, he liked warm shots of robust homemade beef stock, high in protein and minerals, or spoonfuls of flavourful liquid from a pot of stew or soup. It reminded me of the importance of good stock.

Add a splash of whipping cream or sour cream at the end of cooking if your stock is not top-notch. Top this thick stew with filo, pastry or biscuits and bake for 30 minutes if you feel the need to dress it up. Serves 6.

• 4-6 cups diced vegetables (onions, carrots, cabbage, celery, potato, cauliflower)
• 6 cloves garlic, minced
• a sprig of fresh rosemary
• ½ tsp. dried basil and/or oregano
• 6-8 chicken drumsticks
• olive oil for the pan
• salt and pepper to taste
• ½ c. white wine
• 1 L chicken stock
• 1 tbsp. pomegranate molasses
• 1 tbsp. Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce

Preheat oven to 400F. Spread the vegetables and chicken on two baking sheets lined with parchment. Drizzle with oil and season to taste. Roast uncovered until tender, and the chicken is cooked through, about 30-45 minutes. (Serve as is or proceed to making stew.)

Chop up the chicken off the bone, saving the bones for stock. Toss the chicken and vegetables into a heavy-bottomed pot. Add a splash of wine, let it reduce, then add remaining ingredients and simmer until friendly.

Serve with good sourdough bread.