When you marry into a Portuguese family you learn a thing or two about family. You learn you have to visit. Spontaneously. You don’t wait for a specific invitation on a specific day, at a specific time. You visit without notice. You visit often. Sundays are preferred.

If you don’t visit often you are reminded of that immediately. Portuguese family are masters of guilt. But they’re right. It’s true. You don’t visit enough and when you visit you never stay long enough. Sometimes you visit and you don’t bring the kids. Bad.

One missing Sunday turns into two and the next thing you know it’s been months and months or maybe even more. You have failed, yet again. You’ve been afraid of the reprisals, the condemnation, so you’ve stay away even longer.

When you arrive after a long spell of not visiting, you invent creative stories. You tell your relatives you’ve been studying, traveling and renovating. You say you’ve had Ebola and swine flu or maybe Mad Cow. You mention volunteer work in war-torn countries and a sojourn in the Himalayas as a monk. But none of this matters. It has been too long between visits. Continue Reading…

When Jessie Moniz Hardy from The Royal Gazette emails you to set up an interview about your blog you’re thrilled and respond with a resounding “yes.” You click the enter button and then reality hits you. She’s coming to your house. She wants to take pictures.

You quickly begin a diet with the goal of losing twenty pounds in two days, but you eventually decide on a more realistic goal of ten. You throw some vegetables in a blender and hope for the best.

You tell your husband that he needs to take the next two days off to repaint the house. When your pleas fall on deaf ears, you come to a mutual agreement that the least he can do is wash the dog.

In the meantime, you take a toothbrush to your kitchen floor.  You scour the sinks and wash the windows. You try to jam your half-dead Christmas tree up the chimney (you fail.)

The night before the  interview, you’ve gained two pounds and your knuckles are bare. The only saving grace is that you’ve managed to get an appointment with Ellen at Salon Twenty-seven, so your hair looks great.

But then it hits you. It’s not a home improvement blog or a beauty blog, it’s a food blog! Continue Reading…

When you marry into a Portuguese family there are things you learn about food. You learn that anything pre-packaged is not really food, and you learn that the kitchen isn’t a place to make food. That is why you need to have two kitchens, one for show and one to cook.

You learn that everything requires cleaning and  marinating and more marinating and spice and that nothing ever goes to waste.

You learn that the few things you thought you knew how to cook are actually pretty bland, and you learn that your mother-in-law believes whole heartedly in telling the truth. If she “no like” you need to be told, because “you have to learn.” Gone are the days of pleasantries. You discover you have unwittingly entered a rigorous school of Portuguese cooking not unlike what you see in Hell’s Kitchen.

Most importantly, you learn about Chourico. Chourico in the Portuguese home is sacred. Not in the, “we can’t eat it way,” the way cows are to Hindus, but in a “this must be used in every dish” kind of way.

At first it frightens you. Chourico is dark, firm, full of mysterious flavours your palette is unaccustomed to. It appears unexpectedly; in the bottom of the turkey roaster, in the pot of pea soup, in pizza, spagetti, eggs, potatoes, and ribs. It’s ground into macaroni and cheese. You balk, you secretly complain to your husband and store pieces in your shoe.

But one day the light goes on, and your palette moves toward the light! This shiz tastes crazy good!!

You suddenly understand why rich kids tried to buy your husband’s lunches at school; why their crustless cucumber sandwiches paled in comparison to his succulent chourico and chicken stuffed Portuguese bun. Continue Reading…

Open 4 cans of whole water chestnuts. Drain the water.

Pour into a small bowl and marinate in one bottle of La Choy Teriyaki sauce (it has to be La Choy because everything else tastes like crap) over night or for as long as you have. Often neighbours request this dish without adequate notice, so you must be flexible with the marination time. Other times you forget you said you’d bring them and you have to send your husband out at the last minute to find the ingredients.

When he comes back with sliced water chestnuts instead of the whole ones, you’ll get angry and remind him how luck he is to have such good neighbours, and tell him that he really learns to read labels because he’s messing with your marination time. (At this point you send him back to the store.)

The only saving grace in all of this is that usually the neighbours have had too much to drink by the time you serve these tasty delights, so they don’t notice that you didn’t really marinate them long enough, nor do they notice that you and your husband have had a huge fight. Continue Reading…

First of all, Nova Scotia lobster is nothing like Bermuda lobster. It has claws. It’s very much like Maine lobster, but with a lot more personality and without the funny accent.

It doesn’t have the snob appeal of it’s spiny cousin, but that makes it a more accessible, friendly meal. In fact, Nova Scotia lobsters prefer to be eaten in large groups surrounded by cold beer. Nova Scotia lobsters don’t require fancy tools or sauces and they are best eaten on a bed of newspapers.

In the ideal world you buy them straight from the fishermen in Main-a-dieu and you haul back gallons of seawater.

Once home, you  fill up an old oil drum (cleaned of course) with your sea water and fire it with propane to a boiling point.

Meanwhile, thirty or forty of your closest friends and relatives arrive and help you set up  plywood on sawhorses, so that you have a few banquet tables. You spread some old copies of The Cape Breton Post over the plywood, just to fancy things up and then you lay out hammers and knives as big as machetes. For the fussy few, you’d offer the nutcrackers used for Christmas walnuts nobody ate. Continue Reading…

The Secret

(You’ll have to destroy your computer after you read this- sorry)

4-8 cloves of garlic

1/2 cup of Hellman’s Lite Mayonaise

1/2 cup vegetable oil

1/3 cup of finely grated or powdered parmesan cheese

1 egg white

1 tsp Dijon mustard

1-2 tsp Pick-a Peppa Sauce

1-2 tsp worchester sauce

1 -2tablespoon vinegar

1 -2 tablespoon lemon or lime juice

2 teaspoons fish sauce

1 tablespoon honey

1 tsp of pepper

1-2 tablespoons of anything else you think might be good

Method:

Take a little food processor and chop the garlic first. Don’t be a whimp with the number of cloves. Garlic is good. It’ll make you grow hair and a wooden leg.

Dump everything else in the processor and blend the crap out of it  until it’s smooth and looks like dressing. Stick your finger in and taste it. If you like it more tart, add more lemon or vinegar. If you like it more sweet add a bit more honey. If you like it more anchovy-ish, add more fish sauce.

Stick a different finger in to taste it again. Continue Reading…