One of my rituals when I come home for the holidays is to look through my mother’s cookbook collection. It’s a marvelous one, and I am unabashedly envious. About five feet of countertop are lined with cookbooks of all kinds, cuisines, and degrees of dilapidation. Overflow volumes are stacked in drifts on top, and there are [...]
One evening last week as I was making dinner one of my roommates burst into the kitchen, proudly brandishing the largest pomegranate I had ever seen. It was, he declared, on sale, and destined for consumption in one of his family’s most excellent recipes: pomegranate and pine nut salad with a maple vinaigrette. I was, [...]
For the summer I’m down to one roommate (from my usual four or five), the pair of us crammed into a 2 1/2 sublet with a small fridge and a postage-stamp sized kitchen. We’ve been making a virtue of necessity by experimenting with communal cooking. Instead of getting in one another’s way cooking two meals [...]
One of my goals for the summer is to improve my French. After a few years of living in Montreal, I’ve learned quite a lot: I came to the city after studying French on my own for a little over a week, and now I can function reasonably well. But most of what I know [...]
Today I remembered the waffle iron. Oh, somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I had it. My dad is the waffle guru of our family, and very generously gave me his old waffle iron when he got a new one. I’ve no idea how old it is; it’s been a fixture of [...]
Have you ever had vanilla ice cream with walnuts and a drizzle of maple syrup? Precisely. Heaven. For whatever reason, I’ve been craving the combination for a few weeks. Daffodils are blooming, birds are singing, everyone’s outside, and my subconscious has decided it is summer. Now. With ice cream, thank you very much. My subconscious [...]
It’s been a very bad year for maple syrup. Temperatures across the northeast have been mild, diminishing the sap flow of maple trees and therefore syrup production. In Montreal, we’ve been pretending not to notice. The stands at the market are still there with their towering stacks of syrup in cans, offering tire d’erable sur [...]
