Spring has come late to Montreal this year. Less than two weeks ago, I could look out my window and see flurries of snow. Not long before that, a blizzard erased all the dirt and grime of spring snow-melt, painting the mountain a brilliant, blinding white. But now it is indisputably spring, and well worth [...]
Breakfast is a strange beast, sometimes. On hurried mornings I used to compose variations on toast. Toast, almond butter, and banana. Toast and jam with yogurt. Toast with eggs—poached, scrambled, fried. Toast with avocado and soy sauce. Once, to my roommates’ collective horror, sardines and pickled carrots on toast. Now that toast is off the [...]
A new year. Does it keep getting faster? Sometimes I worry I’ll wake up in what I think is a week or two and discover that it’s 2082, that a lifetime has sped by in the blink of an eye. But for a heartbeat, at least, it’s 2013. I’m an inveterate list-maker, so New Year’s [...]
December is always an odd point in the year. It’s an in-between time, especially for those of us in school. Classes have ended, disrupting three months of routine. The exam-time panic starts to seep out of the library as more and more people leave for the holidays. There is a lot more silence, a lot [...]
When my sister and I were small, we would often sing a song: when we all do eat sweet potatoes sweet potatoes sweet potatoes when we all do eat sweet potatoes, eat ‘em right straight up! Given that neither of us would touch sweet potatoes with a bargepole, our passion for this song both amused [...]
My mother once told me a story about one of her friends’ Thanksgiving traditions. (Perhaps it was a friend of her friend, or completely fictional—I can’t remember now.) Every year, the family would saw the legs off of the turkey before putting it into the oven, baking them separately in their own dish. Year after [...]
I like to joke that people can tell I’m Dutch because I live mostly on kale and cheese. It isn’t too far from the truth. Three or four of my meals each week seem to consist of a large bowl of kale with whatever I have on hand mixed in. Quite often I’ll make kale [...]
I have been told on several occasions that I eat Weird Breakfasts. From a certain perspective, I am guilty as charged. Leftover noodles, tomato soup, dal on toast—these are not what one could call typical items on the average North American breakfast table. I prefer to look at it as reclaiming an space in which [...]
After an unseasonably warm March and early April, the local weather gods of Montreal have woken up and decided to reassert their authority. There was snow on Mount Royal yesterday morning, and a tracing of ice on my balcony. It’s been blustering steadily for days, with on-again, off-again rain. But it is only now that [...]
When I hear the word tortilla, I think about California. I think about watching the tortilla maker shape golden dough into paper-thin disks and baking them. I think about Diego Rivera, and burritos, and the way my sister always seems to make quesadillas when it’s her turn to cook dinner. I definitely don’t think about [...]
