The Seasonal Gourmet

Hello!  My name is Trish Coleman and I’ve created The Seasonal Gourmet to share my love of cooking and food.  I now live in Toronto with my husband Allan but I grew up in Quispamsis, New Brunswick, Canada in a food loving family.   My mother and grandmother were excellent home cooks (my dad used to call my mom “a wizard with food”) and we had a large vegetable garden in the field beside our house.   We would pick berries in the summer, apples in the fall and my mom would make pickles and jams every year to see us through the winter.  Everything we ate was fresh and delicious and we rarely ate processed or junk food.

I moved to Montreal when I was 18 and discovered that despite my love of food, I didn’t actually know how to cook anything for myself.   I once tried to make a spaghetti dinner by throwing all of the noodles into a cold pot of water and bringing it to a boil.  Unfortunately, this did not produce a delicious pasta dinner but rather a clumpy, inedible mess!  It was time to learn how to cook.  I started to read magazines and cookbooks and watched chefs working their magic on tv.  Slowly, I started to produce some decent meals.  I began to collect cookbooks and started searching the internet for recipes, tips and tricks.  Fast forward fifteen years or so and now I can make homemade pasta from nothing more than eggs, flour and water and have started developing my own recipes.

The goal of The Seasonal Gourmet is to feature the best of our seasons without resorting to a lot of convenience (ie. processed) foods or hard-to-find, expensive ingredients.  And you won’t need a degree in culinary arts – after all, if I can do it, so can you!

When I’m not testing my own recipes, I also do volunteer recipe testing for Cook’s Illustrated magazine and I’m a member of Slow Food Canada and the Women’s Culinary Network.  You can check out more recipes and articles I’ve written at Suite 101.com.

You can read more about my approach and philosophy here: Philosophy

Bon Appetit and Enjoy!