breakfast blogger

During the holidays, our friend Kate suggested that we make Pannetone french toast, so we did.

We used fresh farm eggs that we got from our CSA farm, which is why these eggs are all different colours and sizes.

We also made home fries. We baked these, not only to make them less unhealthy, but to not have to stir them and/or tend to them constantly. It also frees up more real estate on the stove. We simply threw cubes of potato into a big bowl and tossed them with some oil (olive and veg), salt, pepper, and whatever herbs or spices were handy - oregano and rosemary this time. After about 20 minutes we mixed them around, trying to flip as many pieces as possible.

Here they are in the oven:

We also made an apple compote to eat on the french toast.

Here is some cheese we had with our meal. There was a Comte from France and a Manchego from Spain. We invited a few people for this brunch, and they didn’t show up empty-handed, so there was an assortment of fruit and cheese and other goodies to enjoy before, during and after the Pannetone french toast.

The Pannetone french toast:

Yummy!

For dinner that evening, the lady and I made Pannetone french toast peanut butter banana sandwiches, with maple syrup.

Decadent.

Almost every Christmas Eve I can remember was spent with my family, and we always had dinner at a Chinese restaurant and then saw a movie. I missed a few years, in my late teens and early twenties, when most people rebel against their families and other institutions. During these years I usually ‘rebelled’ by being temporarily adopted by a Christian family and sometimes even attending midnight mass at a church. What a crazy kid I was.

This year was no different. My girlfriend, my brother, my grandmother and her caregiver (who is a Jehovah’s witness and therefore did not celebrate Christmas or take the evening off) went for Chinese food. Afterwards, my girlfriend, my brother and I went to see “The Golden Compass”, a fittingly anti-Christian film.

The next day, Christmas Day, I went to Kam Fung for Dim Sum.
Some of you may recall that I wrote about the Kam Fung Dim Sum experience last year, but if you compare the two, we ordered a variety of different dishes each time.

This time I was accompanied by four lovely women, and we chatted, ate lots of dumplings and drank copious amounts of tea. Below is a list of most of what we ate.

Fried calmari
Always one of my favorites.

Spicy fried tofu
One the tastiest but unhealthiest ways to prepare tofu.

Mushroom/pork/shrimp meatballs
Strange, but satisfying. slimy mushroom acts as a container for seasoned ground pork.

Tripe
yech.

Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce
Healthy and delicious.

Fried taro.
I don’t know how this ended up on the table, but it was fine.

Shrimp spring rolls.
Once again, we must have been having some really good discussions, as we cannot remember who said ‘yes’ to these, but they were good nonetheless. The pile of mayo was overkill.

Sesame balls with lotus paste
Classic. Almost sweet like dessert, but still savory enough to keep ordering more food…if we’re still hungry…

Deep fried shrimp dumplings
We all thought we were getting steamed shrimp dumplings. Oh well.

Steamed shrimp dumplings
YES!

There were some that i missed opportunities to get photos of, but that is all part of the mystery of Dim Sum.

For dessert, some coconut and mango jelly pudding
The coconut was slightly mild, but the mango was spot on.

The battlefield:

Afterwards, we walked towards home and stopped for Christmas coffees at Café Olympico.

The best Christmas ever!

I cannot believe I didn’t have my camera with me.

This morning I ate at THE Montreal Breakfast LEGEND!

The Lady and I had some free time this morning, so we cruised westward to NDG and hit Cosmos. I had recently written a small piece on Cosmos for Hour Magazine and I figured I owed them another visit - this time to show my Toronto-born ladyfriend what a Montreal breakfast is all about.

I walked in and was instantly greeted by Tony’s son, who remembers just about every face that sits at his counter, although it helped that I’ve been eating there since the late 80s. I wish I could remember his name but all those years of eating all those greasy potatoes have robbed my memory of his name. I was also very glad to see Tony at the flat-top. There were rumors that Tony had retired, but there he was, silently minding the flat-top, which was weighted down by a very large mound of Cosmos famous potatoes.

Since it was my Very Special Ladyfriend’s first time there, I wanted to order everything on the menu, but settled on a “creation” on challah and a salami/cheese omelet. The “Creation” is one of the best breakfast sandwiches you will ever come across. This super-sandwich is made on your choice of bread (some eggsellent examples would be a bagel, black bread or marble) and is stuffed with fried egg, grilled salami, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and mayo. I was so overwhelmed that I can’t remember if it also contained bacon, but either way - this was a fabulous experience. The omelet was exactly what you would expect - grilled salami folded inside some eggs and melted cheese.

I guess we’ll have the “mishmash” next time, and I promise to remember my camera.

One of my old favourites recently got a face lift. Time for a follow-up from the breakfast doctor (that would be me, of course).

The outside didn’t change much.

New Claudette vs. Old

It’s weird that they would make these changes and not erase the old look. You can still see where the old vertical sign used to be because they didn’t bother to repaint the metal siding. The exterior doesn’t look any better, it just looks a little different. I wonder who their designer was?

I’m not exactly sure why they renovated. Usually it means that the new owners want to make more money so they slap on some paint, throw in a few new light fixtures, and jack-up the menu prices. This does not seem to be the case.

It seems that the ownership may not have actually changed hands, as the staff was the same, and the food - as good as ever - tasted exactly the same, so the cooks must have survived this strange unnecessary make-over. Miraculously, the prices did not go up. The old look was a hodge-podge of red and white checkered tablecloths and unmatched furniture, appropriate for the type of restaurant that is Chez Claudette. The new look seems to be going for the imported, assembled restaurant furniture picked out of a catalog look, which they have achieved. The interior is a little classier than it used to be, but lacks any character.

If you look closely, you can see that the red brick wall is actually some sort of glued-on plastic sheeting that looks like bricks. Very classy.

The poster on the wall is a replica of The Last Supper, but Jesus and the apostles must have missed their reservation and have been replaced by Elvis, Marylin, Bogey, and other Hollywood stars.

The place will look perfect in 15 years or so, once the new look ages a bit.

The Lady had big eyes and ordered the “Brunch”, two over-easy eggs, sausages, home-fries, brown toast, and…

…a side of french toast ($8.95). Whoa, la - dats a lot of food.

I ordered the “mini choice of meat”, which is just one egg (over-easy) with bacon, and brown toast…

…and opted to “Quebec’ my breakfast and morph my home-fries into a home-fries-poutine ($6.50).

Dynomite!

The makers of the world’s absolute best bagels turns 50 today!! If you live in Montreal, I encourage you to drop by for visit today as all proceeds will be donated to the Foundation for research into children’s diseases.

Félicitations St-Viateur Bagel!

Last week was my birthday. My Very Special Ladyfriend cooked me breakfast, and it was delicious!

I had heard about Allan Benton’s bacon from Tennessee, and then both Gourmet and Saveur magazine ran pieces on his operation, so I decided to order some before it was too late.

I was glad I had ordered my bacon a few weeks ago, because they are so backed up with orders that they have posted a warning about delays on their website. I am worried that Allan Benton may soon expand his business to keep up with demand, which of course may ultimately decrease the quality of his products.Just look at that bacon!

Hopefully Allan’s ethics will persist and decided to limit his orders to a capacity that he can keep up with. Alternatively, he should get together with other artisanal pork producers and refer customers to bacon suppliers closer to where they live. I am pretty certain that there must exist some phenomenal bacon producers closer to Montreal. I will start my search and let you know how it progresses, along with updates on my waistline and cholesterol levels.

I almost forgot to mention that they do not ship to Canada, so I actually had my bacon delivered to me while I was on vacation in the USA.
Back to breakfast. We had scrambled eggs with dill, cherry tomatoes that were grown in Quebec greenhouses, and a whole-wheat baguette from Capucine & Tournesol, a great bakery right on our corner that makes a lot of no-yeast breads and other healthy fare like date squares (using no added sugar) and kamut bread and even some savoury pies that I have yet to try.

We also had that great bacon, which was good, but very strong. We found it too salty to eat alone, but made the best BLT’s we’ve ever had later in the afternoon. I think I will only use the bacon in sandwiches and also to cook with.
The Ladyfriend was so quick with the dishes I missed the proper the money shot, but suffice it to say - we licked our plates clean!

ps: For my birthday dinner we went to Pied de cochon. Yum!

I apologize - if anyone has even noticed - that I have been negligent in regards to my Breakfast Blogging commitment. You don’t have to tell me: Breakfast is THE MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY!

Shall I rattle off some petty excuses? For one thing, my parents confiscated my camera (okay, it’s actually their camera) to take their grandchildren (my neice and nephew) to Disney World. Also, I have started writing for another blog whose subject matter is important to me. It is called the Ethicurean and you can read it here. I write about food that is “good”. I almost typed “healthy, but then decided to type “local” or “sustainable” or “clean”, but all those words will soon be trademarks owned by McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. I think you get the point . . .

Just so you’ll know, I haven’t been skipping breakfast. In fact, I’ve eaten quite a few very good breakfasts that I should have written about but felt I could not do them justice without a photo or two. Many have been things that I have already blogged about, like the bagelettes we made last week and the Tropicanas we also enjoyed, plus the multitude of scrambles and over-easy’s and smoothies and sometimes just a small bowl of cottage cheese with banana slices in it. I even went for Dim Sum on the south shore, which I will post about very soon . . . once I download the photos taken by a friend who has his own camera.

A few days ago we had cereal, with blackberries that were leftover from a dinner party we had the night before. I usually only buy berries in the summer, and then I freeze a lot of them, but this week they looked so good and we were having friends over and I just grabbed them and threw them into my little basket, wishing at the same time that my Eastern European great granparents immigrated to a warmer climate where berries are grown locally all year round. This is what we Jews do: complain.

The cereal was blend of 2 Kashi cereals. Kashi is a company that makes organic breakfast products that seem to be healthy as well. I have been scouring the shelves of grocery stores for the lasy few years for cereals where sugars are not listed in the first 3 ingredients, and especially where there are not too many types of sugars in my cereal. If there are sugars in my cereal, they should be natutral sugars and not derived from genetically-modified corn.

Then we found Kashi.

These cereals are amazing! The ingredient list isn’t full of words from a level-3 university chemistry class - they are actually foods. The only weird thing with Kashi cereals are their names. What marketing genius came up with “GO LEAN Crunch!”? It sounds like it was named by the same group of people who translate Japanese snack food names into English.

Then we found “Good Friends” cereal, aslo by Kashi, but not as easy to find. The name isn’t so bad, but the photos on the box and the “Good Friends” story is so horribly sacharine that it actually makes up for the lack of sugar in the product.

As a note, I am almost sure that Kashi has since changed the name of “Good friends” to something like “trio of Flakes, Twigs and Granola”. I am not certain, because their website still calls it “Good Friends” but the boxes we saw in the grocery store have changed. Either way, we love these cereals.

We’ll be in Florida for the next week or so and I will definitely report on my sun-baked breakfast from down south. I may even have brunch with a fellow food-blogger…

We made some soft-boiled eggs a while back . . . I had almost forgotten how good they can be.

I don’t think I had my first soft-boiled egg until I was well into my twenties, but it was definitely worth the wait. I grew up in a traditonal Jewish Montreal home with some finicky parents, who were not boring, but they were set in their ways. Even though we had no soft-boiled eggs, no poached eggs, or even any real omelets, we had some great scrambles - salami and eggs being my all-time childhood favourite. I am now glad my parents were such finicky eaters, because it has left me such a wide range of foods to discover in my adulthood.

We get our eggs from a farm just outside of Montreal, as I try not to buy industrially produced eggs anymore: Chickens are animals - not machines. When I am out of eggs before farm day, I will go to the Jean-Talon market and buy eggs from an old guy who says he has “organic” eggs which are not certified - I haven’t yet fully investigated his claims, but I plan to. If I am too lazy to go al the way to the market, I often pick up some Burnbrae Farms “Free run” eggs at our neighbourhod grocery store.

Whenever I make soft-boiled eggs, I always use my ‘egg timer’, which I never really trust. It’s a fiberglass dome, shaped like half-an-egg, and you are supposed put it into the water when it is still cold and then start cooking your eggs. When the red color fades to the desired level of doneness, you take the eggs out. I don’t normally use these types of gadgets, but this one was a gift, so I use it, with a certain amount of distrust.

I always take my eggs out of the refrigerator as far in advance as possible, which is usually once we have decided that we want soft-boiled eggs. This is hopefully about 30 minutes before cooking, as I don’t want to shock the eggs and have them crack in the hot water. I fill a pot with water, add the eggs and the egg-timer, and then put it on the stove set to “high”.

Once a boil has been reached, I immediately turn down the heat to medium-high to keep the boil as gentle as possible, and wait about 3 minutes. In my opinion, the size, quality, and age of the eggs are all factors which may affect the cooking time. How can this little plastic dome know anything about my eggs? It can’t!

This said, I usually cook my eggs about 3 minutes. I have a 75% success rate, but I am satisfied with my margin of error because I am usually cooking for my lady and myself, and I will gladly eat any undercooked eggs while my lady will happily eat any overcooked ones. This is one of the reaosn I love her.

The best part about soft-boiled eggs is this little egg circumsizer I got as a Christmas gift a few years back, from the same people who gave me the egg-timer. I found this a funny gift seeing as I am Jewish and I got an egg-moyle to celebrate the birth of baby Jesus.

We enjoyed these with kamut toast points and some hunks of cheese.

Yummy.

My Very Special Ladyfriend and I are on DAY 5 of a ten day cleanse where we will not eat any solid food. You can read more about it here. Two days before this questionable experiment began, we attended a lovely housewarming pancake breakfast at our friend Kate’s new pad.

I don’t like parties, especially loud ones where the guests outnumber the chairs. If I’m invited to a party that involves food, I always make my way to the kitchen to help out, thus avoiding long stretches of social contact with other humans. Especially ones who don’t obsess over food.

Kate and I got straight to work making batter - we had two types: buttermilk and buckwheat blueberry. Naturally, we used organic eggs and the best ingredients we could find. I ran three pans on Kate’s antique stove while she and some other friends prepared the toppings table. We had a great array of fresh fruits and other goodies, including maple syrup, honey, jam, ground almonds, yogurt, hazelnut spread, chestnut spread (my favourite), butter, etc . . .

We kept a couple of warming trays in the oven until we had a decent batch going and then we served ‘em up!

Here are some shots of people plates:

After sitting in the living room digesting all those pancakes, I thought I would stroll over to the kitchen and get a great money shot. I envisioned stacks of syrup-laden empty plates piling up near the sink, but was saddened to see that my Very Special Ladyfriend had washed and put away almost all the dishes! Durn it!

Dim Sum is a numbers game. Two people can’t really accomplish anything, and nine people can’t fit at one table. Most Dim Sum dishes are comprised of 4 items - usually dumplings - which would make a party of five an awkward experience. A part of four is a delicate situation and would only succeed if all four members were to eat the same meal, which works against the real purpose of the Dim Sum experience. I suppose the ideal number might be somewhere between 6 and 8.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, because I’ve been trying to get people together to go for Dim Sum. I’ve been slowly scouting out my friends, and even friends of my friends, to see who would be up for a Sunday Dim Sum excursion. It was pretty slow going at the start, but the momentum seemed to have caught fire last week when all of a sudden I had enough people interested. I set the date for the next Sunday and put the word on the street. Before I could decide between Ruby Rouge and Kam Fung, I had about nine people interested. Uh oh . . . too many. Will even more rsvp? Will we have to split into two tables? Will I get stuck at the mostly vegetarian unadventurous table? This can’t be happening…not to me…

I decided to just relax and ride it out, and sure enough, by the time Sunday rolled around we had enough cancellations, hangovers, illnesses, and dental surgery victims to narrow the party down to six - the magic number. We all met at 11:30am at Kam Fung, which has moved into the 2nd floor of a mostly Asian shopping center in Chinatown. I say “mostly Asian” because there is one non-Asian space in the mall: the Romanian consulate. I wonder if Romanians have a thing for Chinese food, or maybe it’s just a coincidence and those Romanian delegates are sick of Asian food. Food for thought, literally.

Our party was comprised of myself, my Very Special Ladyfriend, the brothers Bertrand (an architect and a film sound editor), a friend who was a welcome last-minute addition to the party, and a surprise re-entry: the dental surgery victim. We had to wait approximately 15 minutes, with about 50 other people, until our number was called. The hostess, a middle-aged Asian woman, would bark out the numbers as the tables became available - on an extremely loud sound system, which is not what you want to hear on a Sunday morning. Here is what it looked like from the hallway:

Because of the ear-shattering volume of the sound system and the thick Cantonese accent of the hostess, it was almost impossible to hear exactly what numbers she was calling. Luckily, the brothers Bertrand had lately been reaching themselves Cantonese, but even they had trouble hearing the numbers. To be honest, because the speakers were of questionable quality and the volume so high, the sound was so badly distorted that it was difficult to tell if the numbers were being called in English or Cantonese.

Here is what we had:

Vegetarian spring roll
Shrimp/pork dumpling and Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce
Sticky rice
Shrimp, pork & Chinese chive dumpling
Pork, nappa and ginger juice dumpling
Seaweed roll with shrimp and crab
Seafood dumpling with mayonnaise
Vegetarian treasure bowl
Rice noodle roll with shrimp
Crab claw stuffed with shrimp
Fried squid

It went unspoken, but at this point I am pretty sure we all had had enough. That egg tart up there symbolized, in my mind, that this meal was over. In fact, I’m pretty sure the words “Dim Sum” translate as little morsels or light snack - but we had crossed that line a while ago.

Although I should admit that I, and quite possibly the brothers Bertrand, may have been trying to decide if the meal was over, or were we just taking a break? That’s when we decided to finish off what was left on the table. And that is also when, mysteriously, more plates of food were suddenly appearing. I don’t know who ordered them, but there they were.

Hot water chestnut squares
I have no ideaSesame balls with lotus pasteCoconut pudding

Here is the aftermath

And the money shot:

There were so many dishes that whizzed by so quickly that looked so delicious, or so weird, that I think Dim Sum will become a long-term commitment. I will try to have a Dim Sum Excursion once a month, and I will try to find more Dim Sum locations in Montreal. I already know about Kam Fund and Ruby Rouge, and I have heard talk of a large Dim Sum place on the south shore, which may be my next pick - if I can convince 4 other people to pile into my car and roam up and down Taschereau blvd looking for Dim Sum.

On our way home, which my VSL and I decided would best be accomplished by walking, we were saddened to see that the big Chinese grocery store on the northwest corner of St- Lawrence and de la Gauchetiere had burned down the previous day - it was still steaming. I used to shop there, picking up barbecued pork, duck, bok choy, frozen dumplings, and sweet packs of Pocky chocolate-covered pretzel sticks that I will sorely miss.

I hope they rebuild.