Foodessey 2017: Canada, London

The Odyssey of Airplane Food (brought to us by EVA Air)

First, free ginger tea, the most gingery ginger tea ever. Then, about 3 different meals and a couple beers on the flight across the Pacific. Michele and I were bloated by the time of the layover, and being indoors and jetlagged lent a sort of bodily confusion that day. But it was all sooo good.

Eggs Benedict (T-R, Quebec)

Had these for breakfast every morning for 2 weeks straight with McCormick's hollandaise sauce mix. The mix can be refrigerated and used every day so that I only had to cook the eggs daily.

Rataouille (Montreal)

I thought about putting poutine here, but this dish was more prominent this summer. This is a ratatouille vegetable stew made of garlic, onion, tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, carrots, bell pepper, and savory herb. I bought all the ingredients except onion at the Jean-Talon market for $9, and the soup lasted me for 6 days' worth of meals. The savory herb made the house smell nice and I added blue cheese and egg for protein. Complete with chocolate milk and Vitamin B12, this was my breakfast and either lunch or dinner when I wasn't eating out with friends in Montreal.

$5 gnocchi from La Drogheria (Montreal, Quebec)

The secret is in the sauce. These were a great cheap meal with lots of quantity. Positioned 2 shops away from Kem CoBa ice cream, I think they had a symbiotic partnership that had customers grab gnocchi from La Drogheria before getting ice cream at Kem CoBa. My Explore friends and I had walked 40 minutes to get to Fairmount bagel and found this place just by walking past it, and I ended up liking it more than the bagels.

Maple Syrup iced treats (Trois-Rivieres, Quebec)

These are...maple candy? They are by far the best way to consume maple syrup: on fresh snow, rolled around a stick.

Thrift shop lunch special (Montreal, QB)

Eva B thrift shop is quite unique. It's a hybrid vintage thrift clothing shop/secondhand bookstore/cafe that sells $10 combos that include a main dish, a drink, a soup or salad, and a dessert. Pictured here is my black bean burger, homemade carrot cake, and gazpacho soup. They use locally sourced ingredients and have an apiary for bees on the rooftop. One of the roommates I stayed with last year introduced me to Eva B, and I ate here again this year with friends from the Explore program.

Smoked Meat sandwich

How do they make the meat so soft? What kind of meat is it even? It was delicious in texture, my teeth sinking into the pastrami and red layers, and I don't regret choosing medium-fat out of the options. We skipped the touristy Schwartz smoked meat deli that had a line stretching out on the sidewalk and went to The Main instead. I like The Main because of the people I've shared it with. The first time I went there last year it was to have the last meal with my sister before she jumped into her first year of university life and I went back home. This time I was catching up with a friend I hadn't seen in a year, who'd let me sleep on her couch when I helped my sister move in. I brought 5 friends to this restaurant to try Montreal smoked meat and they all loved it.

Sprouts

In the Environment workshop of the French immersion program we got to plant sunflower, radish, buckwheat and cilantro sprouts for eating. These were my babies during my time in Trois-Rivieres and I ate them all.

Kem Coba ice cream (Montreal, Quebec)

The flavours tasted real and homemade and the pandan leaf flavour made me happy because some reminded me of Indonesia, Philippines and Thailand. With 2 flavours per cup, I tried pandan leaf, palm sugar, honey and blueberry sorbet, salted butter, orange & cardamom, mango and honey & orange blossom. I walked through a thunderstorm to meet my friend Linh for Kem CoBa ice cream and my feet got soaked in Montreal's mercurial weather. I also met my former virtual writing mentor in person here for the first time. Pictured is the size of the lineup to get to the shop, stretching from the entrance on the far right to around the corner of the block. I think the niche that attracts people to Kem CoBa are the Southeast Asian-inspired flavours, and what keeps the return customers is the quality.

Sugar Cabin traditional Quebecois meal (T-R, Quebec)

At Chez Dany, a traditional Sugar Cabin where maple syrup is harvested, I tried a traditional Quebecois dish of yore. Though the pictures are incomplete, it had pea soup with dried pig's ear crumbs (oreilles de porc, which sounds better in French), pork slices, meat-stuffed bread rolls, potato slices, two-inch thick fluffy omelette, beets, pancakes, and copious amounts of maple syrup. Bonus were the musical spoons and live accordion music as well as the tour of the maple harvesting and maple candy tasting.

Freshly picked strawberries (Trois-Rivieres, Quebec)

Each of my 3 roommates and I picked 3 litres of strawberries (one box's worth). A week later, I'd made mine into simple syrup and consumed it all.

Birch tree gum, bannock and biere depinette (Trois-Rivieres, Quebec)

Three other Explore French immersion students and I went to "Rendez-vous de coureurs du bois", a cultural festival translated to "Meeting of the runners of the woods". The coureurs du bois were guys who navigated the rivers and woods of the eastern half of what is now Canada in search of furs to trade for the booming fur trade in the continent that supplied the fashion needs of Europe. The coureurs du bois worked with First Nations peoples to learn how to read the land and to barter for furs with in exchange for goods from Europe like iron pots and guns. This festival had people working there dressed in full 17th century New France outfits, performance skits throughout the day of British and New France (French?) soldiers coming into confrontation with villagers, swordfighting and gun shooting demonstrations, even a tiny canon from the era that a sonic boom over the water, and BEST of all, a live reenactment of a battle on the beach between the British and New French soldiers, with the British winning. The whole festival was free, which for the amount of work and theatrical element put into it would probably not be so in BC.

The food: biere depinette was a nonalcoholic drink that tasted like cider. The spruce gum made my face pucker; it tasted like medicine, but is high in vitamin C. And the bannock was fried in a pot over a firepit dug into the ground.

Tarte a la sucre a la creme and Tortiere (T-R, Quebec)

To absorb my homemade strawberry syrup. Not pictured is Pouding chomeur, or "poor man's pudding", which is in fact very rich in cream and sugar. The sugar pie was perfect but as my friend pointed out, the tortiere tasted like it came from the frozen foods aisle- which, it had.

Rabbit, Duck Sausage, Sugar Cream Pie and French Onion Soup (Quebec City, Quebec)

Truly an indulgence and the biggest food splurge of the summer. It was nice to try rabbit but it was a bit dry. My first 5-course meal took so long to eat through I felt like I'd lived a week in the restaurant.

The pie took the cake in this ensemble. It was creamy and had enough firmness to be like a custard. The simple-looking white sauce was really complex in flavour and it was evident that a ton of stuff had been blended into it, probably icing sugar, lemon, cream, and some flowery taste.

Pub grub (London, UK)

Apparently British people like to put mint sauce in things. I don't understand why. Mushed peas and pie I do get. No matter what the condiment, it tastes better when shared with old friends.

And finally, Peruvian-inspired basa fish (Vancouver, BC)

On one of the last nights before I left for my travels that summer my boyfriend at the time and I made basa fish fillet. We fried it with panko bread crumbs and flour, seasoned in lemon and dill and served with a salsa of lime and red onion, an attempt to replicate a friend's father's Peruvian fish recipe. He added alfredo sauce. It was a delicious summer travel sendoff.