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It’s such a universal truth that it has become a cliché: cold, winter temperatures make one yearn for comforting dishes. As much as I love delicate salads, they are definitely not what I need to fuel up on after shoveling show for over an hour.
Last weekend, as I was getting my workout shoveling said snow, a family dish popped into my head: I wanted make a bouilli ("boiled", literally), just like my mom used to make when I was a kid. Bouilli is a classic Québécois dish which is a close cousin to the French pot-au-feu. It is usually made with low-cost cuts of beef and winter vegetables like potatoes, carrots, turnip and cabbage, all of which are slowly cooked in a broth flavored with herbs.
Shoveling makes me hungry for hearty comfort food! After a snowstorm last week:
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Continue reading A Classic Québécois Dish: Beef and Winter Vegetables “Bouilli”
Last Thursday was Montreal’s third Dîner en blanc (Dinner in White), and it was the first time I had attended this impressive event. A couple of months ago, friends from Montreal invited E and me to take part in Le Dîner, and we accepted quickly, thinking it looked fun and a great excuse to dress up. A tradition started about 20 years ago in Paris, it’s a huge outdoor picnic held in a public (and picturesque) place in the city where thousands of people, dressed in white from head to toe, gather to eat, drink and be merry. Every year, the exact location of the event is kept secret until the very last minute, and the responsibility of gathering everyone at the same spot in an orderly manner falls into the hands of a hundred volunteers who have been trained and kept in the loop by the Dîner’s management.
Sounds fun?
Continue reading Dîner en blanc in Montreal
In Quebec City right now, the leaves have fallen and temperatures have already dropped to zero degrees Celsius (that’s in the low 30s for those speaking Farenheight!). Over the weekend, E and I were joining my parents to their cottage in a little village called St-Férréol-les-Neiges, which is located about 45 minutes out of the city. My parents have owned this charming little haven of peace for 10 years now but we have just recently become co-owners, after a couple of their friends, which were the previous co-owners, decided to sell their half. Because my parents have been taking such meticulous care of the place, and because it is ideally located (for us snowboard lovers!) less than 15 minutes away from Quebec’s most important ski resort (the Mont-Ste-Anne), we jumped at the opportunity to make this place our own. We didn’t celebrate this happy event with my parents yet and
Continue reading An Apple Lunch Menu Featuring a Tartare of Marinated Trout and Smoked Salmon – And a Book Giveaway
This past weekend, E and I took off on a little roadtrip, drove about 3 hours South of Quebec City and ended up in the Cantons de l’Est (the Eastern Townships). This area is well known for its scenery and mountains, but maybe even more so for its agrotourism activities. Imagine what you would do in Provence: visit wineries, taste delicious fruit and honey-based products, walk through lavender fields… Turns out you can do all that right here in Quebec.
This large region is impossible to cover in a long weekend so we chose to plan our stay around the Wine Route, in the Brome-Missisquoi region, right along the Vermont border. Yes, there are wineries in Quebec too! It’s a rather young industry (the oldest wineries are 35 to 40 years old) but its producers are making a wide variety of white, rosé, reds and, of course, ice wines and ciders.
I’ve
Continue reading Roadtrip to the Eastern Townships: Wine and Cider Tastings
One could say Quebec is a city of extremes: we have both very hot and humid summers (like the 30°C / 70% humidity average we’ve had since the end of June) and snowy and really cold winters (it can easily drop to -30°C in January). Two winters ago, we beat all records by getting more than 500 cm of snow in one winter – that’s 16.5 ft! E and I were able to walk to the roof of our house without using a ladder…! Although this is exceptional, we still average around 350 cm every winter. We are far from being the northern city in the province of Quebec, but experts say we are “perfectly positioned” to get the greatest accumulations. If it was any warmer, we’d get more rain (like in Montreal), if it was colder, we’d get less snow.
Recently, I was given a beautiful book about seasonal cooking.
Continue reading Cooking Seasonally in a Northern City
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