culture
Autumn is Oyster Season in Canada
10/18/2012
Do you like seafood? Are oysters common where you live?
In Canada, peak oyster season happens in the fall. Last weekend, we saw some boxes of fresh oysters in the grocery store and decided to try preparing them for ourselves! Before that, I’d only ever eaten oysters at a restaurant. There’s a popular restaurant in Montreal called The Oyster Shack that serves all kinds of oysters, but this time we wanted to test our own kitchen skills! My fiancé also practiced his photography skills by taking some great pictures of our little oyster adventure.
Our box of oysters
One of the best ways to eat oysters (at least in my opinion) is raw. First you have to carefully pry the oyster open (this is called shucking the oyster). We used a butter knife, but professional chefs have special tools designed just for this purpose. Then, add a little lemon juice and hot sauce (or some other kind of seasoning if you prefer) and you’ve got yourself a delicious appetizer!
Shucking an oyster
A shucked oyster
Add some seasonings
We had lots of oysters to work with, so we also decided to bake a dish called Oysters Rockefeller, which is made up of oysters that have been shucked and topped with other yummy ingredients (like cheese, garlic, and bread crumbs), then baked in the oven.
Our Oysters Rockefeller
Oysters Rockefeller was invented in 1899 by a chef in New Orleans in the US, and was named after John D. Rockefeller, the richest American at the time, because the sauce was so “rich” (that is, creamy and full of flavour).
Have you ever tried preparing oysters? Have you eaten them raw?
Thanks to Ryan King for the photos!
Sugar Shack (Cabane à Sucre)
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- Maple sap straight from the tree
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- Part of the maple syrup process
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- Enjoying the hot maple syrup on snow
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- Hot maple syrup
Since moving east to the province of Quebec a couple of years ago, I’ve learned a lot more about maple syrup and tasted some amazing samples. I’m not an expert on how maple syrup is made, so I won’t explain it in too much detail, but basically it requires a lot of boiling and heating to remove the water from the sap, until it becomes maple syrup. I’ve tasted the sap that comes directly from the tree and it tastes like water with just a bit of sweetness.
Although sugar shack is the English name for the place where sap is collected and made into maple syrup, most people in Quebec, whether they’re speaking French or English, refer to these places by the French name: cabane à sucre. Many of my Quebecois friends have told me stories of their memories of going to a sugar shack in the spring with all of their family and eating a lot of traditional food, almost all of it with a bit of maple syrup. It’s traditional to visit sugar shacks in the early spring because this is when the sap is flowing and can most easily be made into maple syrup.
This year, I visited a sugar shack for the very first time! I was really lucky because I went to a very traditional sugar shack with a Quebecois friend. It’s the same place his family has been going to for the last 35 years! It was a wonderful experience, as I got to eat a lot of delicious food and also practice my French (most of my friend’s family only speaks French).
I’ve included some pictures here of the visit, taken by my friend Adrian. As you can see, he’s a wonderful photographer. Adrian and his wife are both originally from Romania (they moved to Canada last year) and not only was this their first visit to a sugar shack, but their first time ever trying maple syrup! They loved it.
Harp
Culips ESL Podcast
Montreal’s Famous Bagels
Lots of places—whether cities, provinces, states, countries, or regions—have a food or foods that they’re famous for. Sometimes those foods are famous worldwide, like Japan’s sushi or Italy’s pasta. Sometimes they’re just famous within the country or region itself.
To give you just a few examples, Canada is known for its maple syrup production; the province of Quebec is known for a delicious blend of French fries, gravy, and cheese curds called poutine; and Montreal is famous for bagels (and smoked meat too, but I’ll save that for another blog post).
Whenever I visit my family in the province of Ontario, they always ask me to bring some Montreal bagels with me for us to eat for breakfast. You can buy bagels pretty much anywhere across Canada, but Montreal-style bagels are somehow just better! They must be made differently than the bagels you can buy at the supermarket in other parts of the country, because they’re softer, chewier, fresher, and have a different texture.
In Montreal, there are a lot of bagel stores. In these shops, you can buy different flavours of bagels, as well as other things such as cream cheeses to spread on your bagels, deli meats and cheeses, sandwiches, pastries, and other snacks.
 The R.E.A.L Bagel shop near my apartment |
 Cream cheeses and other goodies |
One of the special things about Montreal-style bagels is that they’re handmade and then cooked in big wood-fired ovens. At the bagel shop near my apartment, they move the bagels in and out of the oven using a long, wooden paddle and then drop them into a metal bin to be packed up and sold. I love buying a dozen fresh-from-the-oven bagels on a chilly day and then hugging the warm, delicious-smelling bag close on my walk home!
 Rolling some bagels into their traditional ring shape |
 Removing bagels from the wood-fired oven |
The bagel shop near my apartment is called R.E.A.L Bagel. The current owners bought the shop 10 years ago, but the store itself has been around for about 35 years. My neighbourhood’s very multicultural, so the employees at R.E.A.L Bagel have come to Montreal from all over the world, including Haiti, Turkey, Trinidad, the Philippines, and Pakistan.
The owner of R.E.A.L Bagel told me that sesame seed is by far the most popular flavour of bagel that they sell, but they have other flavours too, like whole wheat, pumpernickel, multigrain, poppy seed, flax seed, cinnamon raisin, onion, garlic, all-dressed, blueberry, plain, and oatmeal raisin. She said that her personal favourite is all-dressed with cream cheese and salmon. It’s really hard to choose, but I think my favourite is the traditional sesame seed, with lots of cream cheese!
Is there a famous food (or foods) where you’re from? Have you ever tried a bagel? Tell us about it in the comments section below!
Thanks to Ryan King for the great photos.
-Jessie
Culips Free ESL Podcast
Culips Team Holiday Party – Bowling
2010 was a busy year at Culips. We’ve been working hard at making the best ESL podcasts to help you, our listeners, learn English—improving your English listening comprehension and giving you tons of idioms to help you sound more natural when you speak English.
After all this hard work throughout the year, we decided that it was time to relax and enjoy a fun team activity, so we decided to go bowling!
Bowling is a simple game, you just have to roll a big heavy ball down the long bowling lane and knock over as many club-shaped wooden bowling pins as you can. If you can roll the ball down the very centre of the lane and knock over all ten of the pins on your first try, you get a strike! Unlike in baseball, where a strike is a bad thing, a strike is worth lots of points in bowling. But if the ball rolls out of the lane into one of the grooves on the side (the gutter) and you don’t hit any of the pins, it’s called a gutter ball, and you don’t get any points.
During our holiday party, we bowled a few strikes and some gutter balls too! It was a great night and I think it’s safe to say that we all had a blast relaxing, hanging out, and teasing each other about our bowling skills. We even took some silly pictures of us enjoying the game.
Now that the new year has begun, we’re all looking forward to putting out some amazing Culips ESL podcasts in 2011. And we’d love to hear your suggestions! Send us an email or leave a comment on the website if you have an idea for a topic that you’d like us to discuss in one of our future episodes.
Take care everyone,
Harp
Culips ESL Podcast
 Ready for some serious bowling! |
 Yoshi and Jessie |
 Goofing around! |
 I tried my hardest to beat Yoshi but he was too good! |
Where do you listen to Culips???
11/24/2010
Do you remember the time before portable music? Only being able to listen to music while inside?
Portable Cassette Player
Well, I still remember my first portable cassette tape player; it was a hand-me-down from my older sister. It was amazing to me to be able to listen to the radio and music while walking around outside. Then I remember getting a portable CD player. I felt so fancy and modern.
The last time I went to visit my parents, I saw my old CD player and it looked so big and bulky. After this, I moved on to (much smaller) MP3 players, and now I listen to music and podcasts on my cell phone; everything in one small device!
Portable CD Player
It still amazes me that now, with such small devices, we can listen to music and podcasts wherever we want. At the last Culips meeting, we were discussing an email from a listener. She mentioned that she listens to our free Culips ESL podcasts while she’s out walking her dog. We got an email from another listener who listens on the train to work.
Where do you listen to Culips? We’re going to make a short video using photographs of Culips listeners listening to Culips all over the world in all kinds of places. If you’d like your photo to be a part of the video, send us a picture of yourself listening to Culips anywhere, whether it’s the place you normally listen, or the craziest place you can think of!
Here’s a picture of me listening to Culips last weekend while enjoying the warmth of the fire at my friend’s cabin. We’ll be adding more pictures to our Facebook page soon!
Harp listening to Culips
