Why let the heat escape?

If you order a hearty stew on a chilly day while sitting on a patio, you most certainly want it to be piping hot. Matter of fact, even on a boiling day I bet you want it hot. If you don't, you should! It's stew and it's supposed to be served hot.

So why serve this good beefy version in a shallow unheated dish that fails to retain the heat? It may be more visually pleasing, but it's not doing it's job if it's not warming me up. No knocks on the recipe (thought it required s&p.)

Good enough stew, no lack of giant tender chunks of beef, and you can find it at Heart & Crown. I might have it again!

Best Petite Bread Award

I was out for a friend's birthday a while ago and we stopped by Maxwell's Bistro on Elgin where he was bound to bump into other friends. Half a beer and a couple conversations later, my friend asks "Hey, you hungry? Want some bread?" I'm not one to refuse food, but I hesitated just long enough for them to explain that his friend here Johnny Scratch is the chef, has quite the skills, and that I must try his bread.

I clung onto every word while the history of the bread was explained and ten seconds later a bun dropped into my outstretched hand. I was now holding the heaviest little piece of bread I'd ever seen. It looked like it was designed to soak up mean steak juices. I snapped a quick bad flash-lit pic and promptly ate.

I'll have you know, I can be far too enthusiastic when I talk about food (?), but it's not often that I get emotional about it. This did the trick, Johnny's Sweet Pepper Bread. It was dense yet retained the flaky flavorful honest to goodness quality of bread; it melted in my mouth and my taste-buds were instantly fist pumping each other. I almost cried! "That's a day old. You should try it when it's fresh."

I can remember the last time food affected me in such a way, (begin dream sequence) it was at Mary Mac's Tea Room in Atlanta after my first soul food experience, in April 2006.

So there is no actual award for the Best Petite Bread, but if there was it would be in the shape of a beating heart and it would go to Johnny's Sweet Pepper Bread.

"Does your whole family cook like that?"

Yes. ..
From what I can remember of my early childhood, my parents were a little granola in their eating habits. Carob chip cookies were a regular occurrence and my first recollection of white sugar was when my grandma Thériault added it to my rice krispies & homogenized milk somewhere around the age of three. I loved going to both my grandparents, their traditional meals always ended in a confectionery sugar induced coma.


My father later remarried and suddenly we were six kids instead of three. We enlisted a daytime nanny for the better part of my youth, and she prepared dinner most nights and made fresh bread every Tuesday. She would usually make slow-cooker fare or root vegetables & meat, sometimes corned beef, all of which were seasoned well and tasted good, but when my dad prepared dinner the kitchen became an experimental culinary lab of unusual and tasty sorts. When I went to my mom's, her style was still very healthy, fresh grilled things tossed into a thin crepe, ending with gooey fruity desserts.


An endless story shortened, we had a very eclectic foodie background. (I tried meatloaf for the first time in my twenties, it was superb!) So this one's an ode to my extended family; my brothers and I definitely picked up on your cooking habits.


Here's what one of my brothers made for the family on Easter weekend, after we moved him and his gf into their new apartment.



Three hours of prep almost always yield a-m-a-z-i-n-g results. Glazed Easter bunny carbonara, and Macadamia nut crusted mahi-mahi over sauteed mushrooms and red peppers. The hunk of pasta on the left is the carbonara, which I'd be hard pressed to describe as anything but sublime.


The fish was perfect, but I was partial to the Easter bunny because it's slightly blasphemous and more so because I willingly ate those leftovers for three days. It had everything I shouldn't be eating, sour cream, cheese, sausage, blasphemous bunny, and more sour cream and cheese.


Next day he made spinach stuffed portabello mushrooms with Gruyère, fiddleheads my dad brought up from the Maritimes...




... and more bunny.





I didn't do much in the kitchen that weekend other than unpacking, prepping and hiding in the empty space where the dishwasher should be under the counter, then jumping out as soon as someone would dirty a glass. (That's my brother's joke, except in his version I was bone thin and had a bucket of fish heads to mow down.)





Even if I found Maple Cotton Candy at the grocery store while in Quebec City that weekend, my parting thoughts are all about the bunny.. you will not be forgotten roasty-bunny!