The Cookbook Story

If you're reading this you've experienced what a fresh extra virgin olive oil does to a dish. Or what a seriously aged balsamic does for a steak, a casserole or a salad. This cookbook is for you, and it's our way of saying thank you.

The story begins more than a decade ago, around the time our first store opened in Kingston. Like many people discovering fresh EVOOs and aged balsamics for the first time, we started simply. A dressing. Bread dipping. A drizzle on a pork chop.

But then our imagination flourished.

What does Garlic EVOO do to a roast chicken? How can Fig balsamic make a dish better when there is no call for figs. What happens when you drizzle a dark balsamic over ice cream?

The ideas kept coming, and the solutions kept turning into dinner.

Over the years we collected ideas from cooks, chefs, food writers and customers. We borrowed, adapted, tested and shared. Sometimes the change was small, Garlic EVOO where a recipe called a garlic clove or Rosemary EVOO instead of a fresh sprig.

And the recipes kept coming.

Mediterranean vegetables. Korean dishes. French comfort food. British pies. Backyard burgers. Weeknight dinners. Canadian favourites. Somewhere in there, the best chocolate cake we know. None of it fussy. All of it meant for a kitchen a lot like yours. While we were never professional recipe developers, we do know how you can make wonderful food for friends and family. And what began as a handful of ideas eventually grew into more than 500 recipes.

That number still amazes us. And those recipes are now part of how many of you cook. You made them for weeknight dinners, backyard barbecues, family celebrations and quiet evenings at home. You remembered them. You asked for them. You went looking for them.

And that's where we faced a new challenge. The recipes were all there. Every one of them. But finding the one you wanted on our website wasn't always easy. You'd search for a recipe title or ingredient and you'd end up wandering through products and education materials instead. So we built this dedicated cookbook, a tool designed to help you find exactly what you're looking for.

Think about how you use a hardcover cookbook. Chicken in the fridge? You turn to the index. Scan the entries. Flip back and forth between pages. Compare a few possibilities. Eventually you decide. We wanted that process to be easier. Type chicken into the search box and every chicken recipe appears at once. Type Garlic if that's what you're cooking with tonight. Pasta if it's a Tuesday. Summer BBQ if friends are coming Saturday. Browse full-colour recipe cards, compare dishes at a glance, and open the one that feels right. One click brings the photo, the story, the ingredients and the directions. In many ways, it works more like Google or Airbnb than hardcover cookbooks. You tell it roughly what you're looking for, and it helps you find it.

This is your cookbook. We hope you'll open it often. We hope it helps answer the question we've all asked at five o'clock in the afternoon: "What should we make for dinner?"

And most of all, we hope it helps you keep cooking.

Shaun & Julia
Kingston Olive Oil Company