My Favourite Food Finds and the Upside of the Pandemic
You don’t have to search for my favourite food finds. They are readily available.
Food is a universal connector. Therefore, this blog post is about much more than food.
The global pandemic we’re living through is a mass trauma. I’ve been up and down for the past year. I sometimes have cabin fever and feel like a captive in my own home. I have floating anxiety, sometimes bordering on panic. But there’s an upside for me to these surreal and turbulent times. In a nutshell, I have slowed down. Read more…
I Ate Up These Delicious Food Memoirs and So Will You
“The table could sometimes breed violence and it could be the backdrop to the proscribed and the forbidden and the perverse … But feeding people made them happy; it made me happy, and grounded me.” From “Treyf” by Elissa Altman
From left to right in the photo above, here are my favourite food memoirs. All of them are beautifully written (in varying degrees) and all evoke the way food played a part in the author’s life. Some contain a bonus: recipes. Read more…
My Lovely Late Mum Ruth Made a Mean Beef Stroganoff
My mother Ruth Schachter (née Nisse) in the garden of her flat in Primrose Hill, London UK, in 2014
I wrote this in 2002 when I was food editor for the Toronto Star. My dear mother, 95, died peacefully in her sleep a month ago on April 21, 2018
Today is Mother’s Day and this is a tribute to the person who first inspired my love of food and cooking – my mum. Read more…
Middle East in Montreal
Every time I visit my birthplace, Montreal, I discover some new delicious food source. Of course, I try to re-visit favourite spots (Schwartz’s and L’Express top that list, depending on my mood.
A couple of weeks ago, my brother Eric and I – he lives in the city’s Francophone, blue-collar east-end ‘nabe of Hochelaga Maisonneuve – made a return pilgrimage to wondrous Portuguese eatery Doval located at 150 Marie-Anne Est not far from the former Jewish ghetto where our dad grew up. This noisy, always-packed, inexpensive eatery with the giant portions and great prices has another attraction: it’s a block away from Leonard Cohen’s house that faces a small park not far from Bagels Etc. on Boulevard St Laurent where there have been sightings of Lenny by my trusty bro. Read more…