The early days of spring can mean many things to many different people: Warmer weather, maybe, or flowers on all the trees; perhaps a promise of the long, languid summer days to come, or… the arrival of rhubarb in the grocery store.

Yes, rhubarb. The first official day of spring might have whizzed by weeks ago in a flurry of rain and windstorms, but I refused to believe that the season had truly arrived until I spotted the first shipment of rhubarb gracing the shelves of the produce section. Rhubarb is one of my absolute favourite foods. It’s healthy, it’s cheap, and it makes a better dessert than almost anything else – including chocolate. There are approximately a million different ways to prepare and eat rhubarb, ranging from the rustic rhubarb pie to the exotic concoctions popping up on restaurant menus, but sometimes the best way is also the most simple: Chop it up, dump it into a pot with some sugar and a tiny splash of water, then slowly simmer it until it transforms itself into a bright pink, unfathomably delicious fruit compote.

I’ve been known to eat it directly from the pot, standing guiltily over the still-warm stove with a wooden spoon in my hand. It tastes wonderful that way, in the way that anything does when you spoon it directly from the pot that it’s been cooked in. But sometimes you’re looking for a slightly more sophisticated way to consume your rhubarb. After all, you can’t plunk a pot and a handful of spoons down at the centre of your table during a dinner party. Cake is an obvious choice – something flavourful, but not overpowering or cloyingly sweet.

Enter the maple yogurt cake. It’s like a pound cake, but without the vast amounts of butter or the overwhelming heaviness. It’s springy, tangy and delicately sweet, with the kind of depth of flavour that comes from the maple syrup. I like to use the darkest grade of syrup that I can find (usually grade C or #3 dark), since the maple flavour intensifies as you move along the grade scale.

Yes, the rhubarb compote is actually naturally that bright pink colour. I know. I find it amazing too.

My neighbour, the one who moved in recently and was spotted hauling an entire collection of guitars out of the back of a U-Haul van, seems to be of the “jobless aspiring musician” type. I’ve only ever spotted the scrawny, dark-haired guy in thick-rimmed glasses disappearing into his apartment on a handful of occasions, but the facts – the strains of guitar strumming filtering through the walls at all hours of the day, the smell of Kraft Dinner (which I imagine to be a staple food for the jobless aspiring musician type) filtering out from under his door at dinner time – seem to paint an accurate enough picture of his life. I’ve never really paid much attention to him though, because the scent of the Kraft Dinner never wafted from the hallway into my apartment (or, if it did, the smell of homemade bread drifting out from my own kitchen more than overpowered it), and the guitar strumming, while audible through the wall, was often almost enjoyable, and certainly constrained to normal waking hours.

But 3:30 AM is not generally considered a “normal waking hour”, and the noises making their way through the wall last night were of what sounded like not one, not two, but maybe five or six angrily wailing electric guitars accompanied by the kind of screeching voices that would make the average karaoke singer sound like a polished professional. And I lay there in bed, staring up at the dark ceiling, feeling disoriented at first (what time was it? Where was that noise coming from? Who in their right mind holds a band rehearsal or jam session that late on a Sunday night?) then irate, and then full-on furious.

I had made the mistake of glancing at the clock, and as soon as I realized that I’d need to be awake an all-too-short three hours later, the rest of the night was a write-off. I tossed. I turned. I stared into the blackness around me. And every time I came close to falling back asleep, I’d start to hear those guitars in my dreams and jolt fully awake again.

In the morning, I was a sleep-deprived zombie. I was so tired that I forgot to drink my morning coffee, which obviously did not help matters at all. I yawned my way through the afternoon. In the evening, as I sleepily hauled grocery bags down my building’s hallway, I spotted my neighbour, guitar slung casually over his shoulder, making his way into his apartment. And of course he didn’t look even the slightest bit sleepy.

“I can start a fitting room for you,” she chirped, whipping the shirt away from me and barely waiting for a confirming nod before she rushed off towards the back of the store. A few short seconds later she was back by my side, empty-handed now and very much ready to launch into an overzealous attempt to outfit me from head to toe.

As I worked my way through the store, she followed a few paces behind me, ready to whisk an item of clothing off to the fitting room if my gaze so much as lingered on it for longer than a fraction of a second. And because I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’d vastly prefer to browse without the retail world’s equivalent of an attention-starved puppy following me around and nipping at my heels, by the time I actually made my way into the fitting room it had been filled to the brim with an assortment of styles that I would never choose for myself in colours that I’d never consider wearing.

Now, I’m all for efficient, helpful service while I’m shopping, but the key words here are efficient and helpful, and this experience fell into neither of those two categories. As far as I’m concerned, the line between helpful and overbearing is a very fine one, and this girl hadn’t just stepped over it – she had leapt over it and landed squarely in the outer reaches of the service spectrum, stopping just short of following me into the fitting room and dressing me herself.

I made the mistake of stepping out of the fitting room wearing one of the items – a gauzy little dress – so that I could conduct a critical analysis of it from all possible angles in the three-way mirror (and also because I was convinced that the fitting room lights were making my sun-starved skin look even more pale than usual), and there she was, instantly at my side once again, this time chirping about how the dress would look “so much better when accessorized” and clutching an assortment of thick leather belts.

“I don’t think that’s really my style,” I said, staring down at the two-inch-thick band of elastic and complicated buckles now bisecting my body. This, of course, was code for, “that belt is hideous and I would not be caught dead wearing it; in fact, I’m not so sure that this dress needs to be accessorized at all”.

“Oh. Okay, well, try this one then,” she said, brandishing a strip of leather that looked like it would be more at home as part of a rodeo ensemble than as the perfect accent to a whisper-thin silk spring sundress. I declined. She pouted. Perhaps I’m not the most adventurous person on the planet when it comes to choosing bold accessories, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to comfortably venture out into public while wearing that belt. It was the type of belt that demanded – screamed for – attention. I’m the type of girl who feels awkward and self-conscious at the very thought of multiple pairs of eyes fixing themselves directly on my waist. It just wouldn’t work.

In the end, nearly fifteen minutes and countless pointless clothing changes later, I emerged once again from the fitting room with the exact three items that I had come to the store for in the first place. And in my wake I left behind a mountain of shirts, sweaters, and skirts that had somehow ended up in there with me; the carnage, I thought as I glanced behind me and spotted a crumpled, particularly ugly orange and grey sweater, of a misguided sales attempt gone wrong.

Of course, when I say “the great outdoors”, you should keep in mind that I am, at heart, a true city girl, and therefore my version of the great outdoors is one which is easily packaged up and consumed in small, carefully measured quantities. I love walks. I love lounging in parks or on beaches. I find day trips or short weekend getaways to remote, nature-intensive places to be fascinating, albeit in a way that does some serious stretching to my comfort zone (my comfort zone is stretched whenever I go somewhere that requires me to wear shoes more functional than a pair of ballet flats). And I mostly like hikes, as long as they’re relatively short and convenient enough that I can bookend them with an energizing latte beforehand and a relaxing shower shortly afterwards. They don’t have to be easy (I have no problems with steep uphill climbs), just convenient.

On Sunday morning, I was sitting at my usual table in my usual coffee shop, and I was feeling restless, tired of sitting, and tired of being inside. Because it’s at moments like this that I start to crave a dose of the great outdoors, I opened up Facebook and typed, “who can I coerce into going hiking with me?”. I was fairly certain nobody would respond and I’d therefore end up inside breathing in the sweat fumes at the gym rather than outside breathing in the smell of moss and pine trees and damp earth – but then a friend responded, plans were made, and before I knew it we were pulling into the parking lot at the base of a mountain.

For a city tucked onto the tip of an island, there are a lot of mountains around Victoria. If I’m being completely truthful, I’d have to tell you that as far as mountains go, almost all of these are barely more than a pimple on the earth’s surface. They’re a far cry from the serious, jagged, snow-capped type that probably springs to mind right away. In fact, two of them are basically oversized hills with the letters “Mt.” tacked in front of their names in an effort to make their disturbance in the suburban sprawl seem a little bit more legitimate. But a couple of them are slightly more worthy of their mountain status, and we chose Mt. Finlayson, with one edge firmly in the fringes of suburbia and the other edge poking into the tree-blanketed psudo-wilderness beyond; the tallest and most legitimate mountain around.

When I hike, I do so with a sort of blithe carelessness for proper preparation (checking the conditions beforehand) or proper accessories (water bottles) – instead, I just start marching my way up the mountain at my typical break-neck speed, wearing the exact same clothes and shoes that I’d wear to the gym. And when those clothes involve cropped yoga pants and the temperature starts to drop as the wind hits the exposed top half of the mountain, or when those shoes involve sparklingly new runners and then I’m confronted with a lake of mud or a small stream flowing down the middle of the trail, it occurs to me that truly outdoorsy people take the time to actually consider the conditions (early spring in Victoria? The mud will be plentiful and it will never be as warm as it looks) and plan accordingly.

Also, there’s the tendency to block out the part of the hike that I hate and then rediscover it all over again each time I tackle this mountain: Towards the top, the trail – which up until this point has been a legitimate path, steeply and steadily inclining but very manageable – suddenly ceases to exist and is replaced instead with little reflective orange markers and arrows stuck tauntingly to a cliff face which hikers are then forced to scale, scrabbling up slick boulders and shimmying along next to decidedly intimidating drop-offs en route to the summit. My problem with this part of the hike isn’t so much the physical challenge that it presents – after all, I go rock climbing on a regular basis, and surely all that time on the Stairmaster must have counted for something – but I’d be lying if I said that my own klutzy tendencies didn’t cause at least a hint of worry. After all, there are no ropes to catch me if I fall here, just a row of jagged boulders a few dozen metres below. And if going up is difficult, the descent is nerve-wracking bordering on terrifying.

Still, back in the parking lot, back in the comfort of the car where we’re free to laugh at the smudges of mud on our hands and legs, there’s the sense that it was all worth it. Worth it because it was a workout packaged up as an adventure, because it was a couple of hours spent surrounded by trees, streams and the sky, and because it was a small portion of the week that wasn’t spent in front of a computer screen. But honestly? Ultimately, hiking up the mountain – getting that dose of nature – was worth it because I could then spend the evening lounging guiltlessly on my couch, full of sanctimoniousness over having communed with, and conquered, the great outdoors.

Photos taken with my iPhone, because yes, I do bring my phone with me while hiking. You never know when you might need to check Facebook.

Wednesday evening, Union Square:

The hotel is only a few blocks away from Union Square, so I choose to tow my suitcase up Powell Street, through a curtain of misty rain, just so that I can relish the feeling of being in a large city. It’s midnight, midweek, but the streets are still very much alive and bustling – this instantly sets San Francisco apart from Victoria, whose sedate downtown streets would be dark and sleepy by now, and it makes for a somewhat dramatic arrival. There’s the swish of tires against wet streets, a swirl of voices, the blast of music from a busker, then the rattle of a cable car as it heads up the hill into the fog: an urban cacophony.

Thursday morning, Blue Bottle Café:

Everyone here looks alike and talks alike, which sounds like a bad thing but actually isn’t, at least not when I feel like I’ve discovered one of the few places where I’m surrounded by my people: Fellow designers, entrepreneurs, creatives, people with iPhones glued to their hands and MacBook Airs tucked into their bags, people gearing up for another day in front of a computer screen.

Thursday evening, Le Colonial:

I could write about how good all of the food was, or how I felt oh-so-slightly intimidated by the hovering black-clad waiters and that little plaque on the door demanding smart attire, but instead I’ll write about the brussels sprouts, which were life-changing. Envision a little white platter stacked full of sprouts that appear to have been roasted to buttery softness, then charred on a searing hot grill and mixed with crispy shallot pieces before being glazed with some kind of explosively flavourful, delicately sweet sauce: These were not the same brussels sprouts that you turned your nose up at as a child. These were addictive. Perfection. The show-stoppers of the night; the dish that took the spotlight away from all the meat dishes, all the elaborate plating, the nice glasses of wine, and yes, even the dessert.

Friday morning, Blue Bottle Café:

Window seat, Kindle propped up in front of me while eavesdropping on conversations about one web startup or another, a latte in my hand and an order of poached pears in yogurt headed in my direction: This is how I fuel up for another day of meetings.

Friday evening, somewhere in the Mission:

I’ve set out on a search for a specific pizzeria that I kept reading about in books, on blogs, and in magazines, but that search has turned into something slightly more than I bargained on when I take a wrong turn after emerging from the BART station and slog through the rain for ten minutes while heading in the wrong direction, one that leads me into a neighbourhood full of graffiti, rows of nearly identical taco shops, and groups of hooded guys congregating under dripping convenience store awnings. Eventually I realize my mistake, turn around, and slog back up the opposite side of the street. It’s somewhere around this point – water sloshing around in my shoes, skirt clinging to my legs, hair damp and frizzed up angrily around my face – that I question whether a pizza, even if it’s a very famous pizza, is actually worthy of this much trouble.

Saturday morning, Ferry Building:

If a city has a farmers’ market, I will find out about it, seek it out, and spend a blissful morning eating my way through it. The farmers’ market at the Ferry Building is a favourite, partly for its picturesque location (Oceanside? check. Bridge view? check) and partly because it’s got enough variety that I’m able to arrive first thing in the morning, fuel up with a latte from the Blue Bottle kiosk (by this point it should be clear that I have a slight obsession with Blue Bottle), and then eat everything from fresh fruit to doughnuts.

Saturday afternoon, North Beach, Nob Hill, Chinatown, all over the place:

I’m very good at wandering aimlessly over long distances until I suddenly realize that I’ve made my way from one end of the city to another. This is what I did for most of Saturday (with a break in the middle when I met up with Jamie for an over-the-top decadent French toast extravaganza at my personal brunch mecca, Olea). I took a few photos while I was wandering, but mostly I just looked: I will never get tired of the way it feels to come to the top of one of those iconic hills and look down at the way the city sprawls out all around me. And to be honest, I’ll also never get tired of watching drivers trying to wedge their cars into tight parallel-parking spaces all along those iconic hills.

Saturday night, Union Square to Maven and back again:

I learn three things in rapid succession as I’m making my way to the wine bar: 1) The busses in San Francisco wait for nobody, not even the girl sprinting down the sidewalk like a madwoman, 2) Sprinting down the sidewalk like a madwoman is almost always a precursor to sprawling out on that sidewalk in the most ungraceful way possible, and 3) Scoring a taxi in Union Square on St. Patrick’s Day is like winning the lottery – and I’ve always been unlucky. Fortunately, the trip back to the hotel – on foot – is uneventful, with the evening’s two glasses of wine giving the walk a pleasant haze.

Sunday morning and afternoon, Olea, Fort Mason, and all over Nob Hill:

Out of San Francisco’s wealth of brunch options, I’m drawn back to Olea like the place is magnetic. This time, I zero in on the eggs, with the previous day’s French toast still causing its complete carbohydrate overload. The eggs turn out to be a good choice, as they fuel a trek over Nob Hill and down to Fort Mason to view an art exhibition, then back over Nob Hill and back to the hotel to pack up the suitcase before heading to the airport.

First there’s the sound of rain pinging violently against the bedroom window as I wake up, a dark omen for a day of travel. The sky is flat, steely grey and deceptively smooth, and the tree outside my window is swaying ominously, shuddering every few seconds as another gust of wind hits it. I’m nearly swept away as I head to the coffee shop for my morning dose of caffeine – in fact, I’m tempted to stay at home, call off the trip, call off work, and bury under a mountain of blankets on the couch while pretending the outside world doesn’t exist.

Unfortunately, that’s not an option.

Next, there’s the bad news: My flight has been cancelled. This is the point where every traveller’s stomach gives an uncomfortable lurch accompanied by a swoop of irrationally intense disappointment. This is the point where panicked phone calls are placed to the airline, where a tinny-sounding pop song is played repeatedly, to the point of near-insanity and certain rage, into one ear while on hold for a seemingly infinite period of time.

The flight is rescheduled. I call a taxi. Two minutes into the ride, the driver makes eye contact with me in the rear-view mirror and somehow, inexplicably, launches into a complete and unabridged history of his life and family tree. I nod and make mm-hmm sounds at appropriate intervals while contemplating how, out of all of Victoria’s speed-hungry taxi drivers, I managed to get the one who drives well under the speed limit but compensates by talking at a mile a minute. At one point, he cranks up the radio, which is tuned into some kind of comedy talk program, and begins to laugh loudly at every point the speaker makes, whether funny or not.

At the airport, the girl behind the check-in counter informs me with a flip of her hair that once again, my flight has been cancelled. Apparently there is excessive fog in San Francisco, or some kind of unusually menacing low-hanging cloud that’s wreaking havoc with air traffic. She reschedules me on yet another flight but tells me, with another flip of her hair, that I should expect this one to be cancelled as well. I feel a sense of frustration – or maybe it’s hopelessness – settling into the pit of my stomach.

The next several hours are dedicated to obsessively and compulsively checking flight statuses and airline notifications. Somewhere during that period I take the first flight, the tiny and turbulent puddle-jumper between Victoria and Vancouver, and then I reposition myself at a table in an airport Starbucks and continue my neurotic status-checking. The chaos of airport life is swirling around me: A woman a few tables away is yelling into her phone, the hand cupped around her mouth doing nothing to hide the angry tones. A pilot saunters up to the counter and orders a quad-shot caramel latte, swapping jokes with the baristas about how his flights are powered purely by caffeine. A couple of kids are driving a remote-control car in dizzying loops around a fountain until a frazzled-looking parent swoops in and takes charge of the situation. And I’m sitting there, sipping an unimpressive airport latte, poking at a caesar salad sprinkled with limp strips of chicken that look as though they’ve been cooked until they’ve mutated into an alternate form, stabbing the tines of a plastic fork into a cup of tired fruit, and reloading, reloading, reloading the flight status website.

It’s time to go to the gate. The flight is delayed, but not cancelled. There’s a feeling of anticipation in the air. The flight boards, slowly and methodically. I want to push people forward onto the plane, to urge them to take their seats faster as though their slowness will cause the flight to be cancelled. From seat 16A I watch a row of suitcases inch their way into the belly of the plane, then inch their way back out (I am convinced, momentarily, that they have decided to cancel the flight), then back in again. Finally the door is snapped shut with a satisfying thud, and after an endless taxi (during which I joke that the pilot has decided to drive all the way down to San Francisco – the lady next to me, somehow, doesn’t find this as funny as I do) we’re airborne. A day in the airport, two hours in the air.

Several weeks ago, while roaming around the grocery store without a shopping list, I spontaneously bought a sizeable bag of blood oranges. I’m not quite sure why I decided to buy so many at once, given that I’d never even tasted a blood orange before, but as I hefted the bag onto my kitchen counter I chalked the slightly irrational purchase up to the perils of entering the grocery store without a specific, detailed list in hand. Enter with nothing; exit with an oversized bag of exotic oranges, a block of white chocolate, and enough assorted vegetables to pull together some kind of half-hearted attempt at dinner that night.

The oranges sat on my counter for a few days before I decided to put some of them to use in a cake. Last year I had baked a cake in which the batter was made up almost entirely of ground nuts and whole oranges, and I assumed the blood oranges would be an appropriate substitute here. The resulting cake, unfortunately, was something of a let-down. I had tried to over-compensate for the sharp tang of the blood oranges by upping the amount of sugar in the cake – and the cake somehow ended up being simultaneously sickeningly sweet and bitingly bitter, with a rather unpleasant gooey texture. Needless to say, this is not the cake that I had been envisioning.

But as much as the cake was an undeniable failure, it also got me thinking about how I could make a blood orange cake that actually tasted appealing. Because there was something addictive about those oranges – deceptively normal-looking on the outside and then brilliantly, unexpectedly red inside with an unusual flavour intensity to match – and I was sure that eventually I’d hit on the perfect cake recipe to compliment them.

Last weekend, as I was flipping through David Tanis’s wonderfully inspiring A Platter of Figs while hunting for dinner ideas, I came across his recipe for hazelnut sponge cake. Like the original recipe I attempted, this one was also based on ground nuts and included a citrus component (lemons, in this case), but with only a quarter cup of sugar in total and a batter made almost entirely from eggs, it promised to be neither excessively sweet nor unappealingly gooey. I rushed to the grocery store, shopping list firmly in hand this time, and bought a few more blood oranges and a giant bag of hazelnuts.

The cake came together quickly and easily; other than swapping the lemon out for a blood orange, I decided to use dark brown demerara sugar instead of regular white sugar (the heavy, molasses-like flavour of demerara would be a pleasant compliment to the brightness of the citrus) and threw in some vanilla extract on a whim (I’m a firm believer in the ability of vanilla to enhance almost every dessert recipe in existence). And since the cake itself – with only the juice and zest of one orange – wouldn’t have an overpowering citrus flavour, I decided to slice up several blood oranges into thick rounds and arrange them over the top of the cake. The end result was exactly what I was hoping for: The cake is nutty and rich but surprisingly light thanks to all those egg whites, and it’s laced with a delicately sweet orange flavour. The orange slices on top of the cake add a hit of pure, bold flavour with every bite – intense, but not at all overwhelming. With a cup of black tea and a spoonful of lightly whipped, vanilla-spiked cream, this cake was the perfect mid-afternoon snack I had been hoping for.

(Adapted from the recipe for hazelnut sponge cake in David Tanis’s A Platter of Figs)

It’s the middle of the week and the middle of what’s typically one of the more grey and gloomy winter months, and I’ve been relying on a steady stream of upbeat, catchy songs to propel me through each day. I’ve put together a short playlist with a handful of the tracks I’ve had on heavy rotation lately – hopefully you’ll enjoy them as much as I’ve been.

There was a time when I was intimidated by the idea of making my own croissants. Not just intimidated, but downright scared; croissants, with their impressive French pedigree and their multitudes of flakey, buttery layers coiled into neat crescent shapes, were the type of pastry I envisioned master chefs with years of formal training carefully preparing in vast stainless steel kitchens. Then there was me, the girl with no training at all and a minuscule apartment kitchen with less counter space than the average person’s coffee table. And I was going to attempt to bake my own croissants?

Well, yes, actually.

The first attempt was a certifiable disaster, complete with airborne chunks of butter and a mixer sacrificed to the gods of flour and butter. The things that emerged from the oven weren’t so much true pastries as they were logs of dense dough – hardly anything worth eating, let alone attempting to bake again. And yet, I tend to be somewhat stubborn. By my second attempt, the croissants were undeniably edible, and no kitchen equipment was damaged in the process. And on the third attempt, something happened, some kind of magical interaction between butter and flour, and when I opened the oven door after twelve nerve-wracking minutes, there they were: Croissants, true croissants, neatly coiled and deeply golden with the kind of tantalizing aroma that normally belongs inside a French patisserie and a flavour so good it nearly demanded that I reached for a second, and then a third…

As it turned out, croissants weren’t so difficult to master after all. They just required patience, some time, and a little attention to detail. And because I think you might enjoy baking croissants too – after all, the world’s tastiest pastry is all the more enjoyable when it’s just emerged from your own oven – I’ve put together a short video taking you through the croissant-making process.

I find Sicilian food to be fascinating. The sun-baked island may be thoroughly Italian, but its cuisine takes subtle cues from classic North African flavour combinations (saffron, cinnamon, couscous and raisins all make appearances in the region’s foods) as a result of Arab domination in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The result? Sicilian dishes are packed with bright flavours and interesting sweet-tart combinations, and they’re definitely different than most people’s perceptions of “classic” Italian cuisine. One of the region’s specialties is caponata, a mixture of fried eggplant, onions, tomatoes, sweet raisins, briny capers, and, yes, even a little bit of chocolate. It’s traditionally served on slices of bread as an appetizer, but I decided to bump this particular caponata up a notch: It would be starring as the main course, topping a slice of buttery baked halibut and accented with a brightly flavourful tomato coriander sauce. The recipe is fairly long on ingredients, but the preparation is simple and the recipe yields a lot of caponata – keep some in the fridge and spread it on crusty bread for a quick, healthy lunch the next day.