I just came back from visiting my friends and family in Montreal. A trip like that is never relaxing since everyone wants a piece of you and you have a limited number of days available. So, before I left I made two lists, one for everyone I wanted to absolutely see and one for what I absolutely wanted to eat.

I organized a lunch with my dad, a lunch with my mom, a dinner with my sister and a dinner at a restaurant with every friend that could make it. It was a great visit because I managed to get to see all the important people in my life.

One day I had a rotisserie chicken meal at St-Hubert which is now a staple in Quebec. I grew up eating there, so it was fitting for me to go back and order a memory plate. Half a chicken with fries, gravy, coleslaw and a bun to dip in your gravy. You know it is still a pretty good meal although a bit salty.

The next day I managed to eat half a sugar pie and a poutine at “Cher Gerard”, a local greasy spoon where I used to bike and buy the best French fries in town. They have been open for 31 years, the daughter of the owner now operates the place - now that is a successful business. For all of you who have never heard of poutine, here it is French fries that have been blanched (pre-cooked once), re-fried crispy to order, topped with lots of fresh cheese curds that squeak between your teeth when you eat them...and then covered with gravy. Not your diet kind of meal, but once in while after skiing, after a hockey game, right before taking a plane back home or for the young crowd you can still do that. It is perfect for your late nights, an after-the-dance-club kind of meal.

I could not resist a trip to my favorite “cabane a sucre”, a maple farm Famille Constantin, to have “tire sur la neige”, which is regular maple syrup that is cooked to 238F until it gets nice and sticky, poured over snow and eaten with a wooden spoon or a Popsicle stick until your teeth hurt. It’s the best way to find out if you have cavities.

I did get a chance to eat some tourtiere (traditional meat pie) and I still love it. On my last day I had brunch with my aunt and uncle and she sent me home with a box full of “Sucre a la Crème” - English people would call it fudge, which is pretty close and another great way to test your teeth.

All in all a great trip, lots of laughs with friends, lots of sugary and fatty food that I wouldn’t normally eat all in the same week and plenty of recalled stories from the old days of all the stupid things you did wrong and try to forget. That’s what Spring Break is all about, right?

I attended a foodie event this week that unfortunately, due to contract obligations, I cannot share the details of, but suffice it to say it inspired me to write about how much fun it is to share a passion with like-minded souls.

Have you ever loved something so much that you thought: “this must be abnormal, everyone must think I am weird” or similar such comments?? For me, that something is being a foodie, or as it was once referred to, a gourmet (that word now has a bit of a stuffy connotation, I find). I looked up the definition so that I can be sure to paint you a clear picture, and I found this:

Foodie (also epicure, gastronome, bon vivant): a person devoted to refined sensuous enjoyment (especially good food and drink).

It’s true, that’s me. I am not snobbish about what I eat – a good donut is as sensuous an experience as a good piece of foie gras – but I enjoy eating as a pastime and certainly not as a necessity. I enjoy it for the sensual nature – rich flavours, intense aromas, varying textures, brilliant colours, funky textures. I love the camaraderie it creates many of my favourite memories revolve around a kitchen or a dining room table somewhere, shared with friends, family or even new acquaintances.

The event this week was something that I had been meaning to do for a long time, and finally doing it made me remember how much I loved those moments of revelation. It is the bliss you feel upon trying something new and sharing that delight with someone equally as thrilled. This event also gave me a chance to see people I knew in a new light, and I discovered I liked them even more! I was so busy enjoying the experience I even forgot to give myself a kick at having taken so long to get there…

But of course by this point you are wondering if I have any purpose this week besides self-indulgence. I do appreciate you humouring me, but I am here mostly to tell you, “Get off your chair and do something you’ve been meaning to do!” Start spring cleaning the cobwebs in the corner of your brain that stores your dreams and desires, and sign up for a class or cook that recipe posted on the fridge or throw a ball with your kid, or whatever it is that you keep putting off. I would love to think I can inspire you to be inspired about food, to share my delight at say, how exquisite a delightful raspberry Bavarian cream can be with the right wine but if you are inspired at all I know that will do my heart and yours a great deal of good. We will both live longer and smile more, and that is the most important thing.

That’s all I have for this week. Like I said, I wish I could share more, but perhaps someday soon we can share a meal or even maybe compare the tastes of fresh fruit bought at the local stand. Till then, as the ultimate foodie, Julia Child, used to say in salute: “Bon Appetit!”

As we all sit down to cheer on the last of the competitors in these thrilling Olympic games, how shall we show our patriotism in what we eat? What is considered a quintessential Canadian food? I thought I should make sure we all know so we can properly celebrate to the full extent as we rake in a few more gold medals this weekend!

I looked on the web to see what articles had been posted about Canadian food at the Olympics, and I found out the Chef Michael Smith featured wild blueberry ice cream from the Maritimes. There was a blogger who put up a recipe for maple walnut scones that got great reviews (how can you not love something with maple syrup in it, after all?) Then there was the article about McDonalds and their efforts to promote their healthy food menu good enough for athletes. (Did that writer forget that McDonald’s is an American company? In Vancouver if you wanted local fast food, you used to choose Nat Bailey’s White Spot.) And of course, I knew it would come up somewhere, but I was interested to find again that it was an American who mentioned Timmy’s as a Canadian food institution. Tim Hortons is the place for coffee here, not Starbucks, and more often than not people I know would recognize a Timbit before they named a low-fat cranberry scone.

So then I scanned my bookcase of cookbooks. I do have quite a collection of Canadian titles, including a booklet from the Leif Eiriksson Icelandic Club, “Out of Old Nova Scotia Kitchens”, and my Mom’s dog-eared copy of “The Chatelaine Cookbook”. I even have “The Best of the Best” from those lovely bridge ladies who taught us the Christmas Morning Wifesaver brunch dish and many others. All of these volumes contain cherished traditional recipes I know and love, but nothing in any of them spoke of national identity. Even something more current is tricky famous Canadian foodie and cookbook author, Anita Stewart, would only commit to regional foods as a distinction in her book, “The Flavours of Canada”. Maybe that is part of the mystery that makes this great nation, I thought – perhaps we are impossible to define in one brush stroke or spread of the knife…

So I guess you have to perpetuate your own Canadian food traditions. Martin will be back east having poutine and sugar pie as this gets posted, while I will be home having pancakes with maple syrup for Sunday breakfast. We love to have lobster mushroom linguine, the mushrooms picked from our secret location in the Rockies. We are spoiled here with Okanagan fruits, and on the coast there is that wonderful salmon. I suppose just being proud of the bounty we enjoy and wanting to share it is something that we could call Canadian. I did read that we export about 45 per cent of the food we produce, to 195 countries. Those exports account for nearly $43-billion worth of trade.

I am very proud to see us all excited about being Canadian, and not worried about the rest of the world seeing us wave flags and cheer. We have much to offer. Here’s to us!

Kristin

Kristin and I just came back from holiday. New York was it for us this year and we had a great time. We had so many unique food experiences…

After a 10 hour trek from plane to plane to plane, we were starving and looking to finish the day with a good meal to get us ready for the next day. We found a sushi/Japanese restaurant two steps from our hotel. A buffet 95 feet long and I took the time to count 140 different dishes from cold to hot. Many salads, sushi rolls, sushi cones made to order, sashimi everything, grilled meats, grilled seafood, whole fishes I had never tasted, crispy soft shell crabs, king crab legs, crab cakes, rice dishes, noodle dishes, and so much more… we finished our enormous meal at the ice cream and crepes station… wow I love New York!

A couple days later, we stopped to grab a slice at a famous pizza joint… all of them are actually famous according to locals. Great flavours, great selection and almost no place to sit and eat. The tables were so packed in that restaurant that I could kiss my wife without stretching at all. I love New York!

Our next stop was a very cozy wine and cheese bar in the Soho district. The kitchen was smaller than most house kitchens and to go get supplies you had to go outside the building, open a steel door on the sidewalk and go down a set of extremely narrow stairs. The food was really good and we tasted a few great wines too. I love New York!

One morning we took three subways across town and walked six blocks in the driving wind just to go taste a few donuts. This was a really fun shop we had heard about a year ago watching our CBS Sunday Morning TV show. Not disappointing at all, peanut butter and jelly glaze and the coconut filled and covered with a coconut fondant that was to die for. That night we went to see the Knicks play basketball at the Madison Square Garden and they actually won just for us! I love New York!

It was not the most relaxing holiday, but an extremely brain stimulating kind of holiday. So much to see in a place where the word big does not even begin to explain the size and magnitude of everything.

I will have more about our holiday and my work day(stage) at an amazing restaurant next week.

I love New York!