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!
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