Montreal
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!
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
Graffiti
Graffiti or Art?
I’ve noticed recently there seems to be more and more graffiti on buildings around downtown Montreal. Some people consider graffiti to be street art and think it adds color and life to a city, making it more interesting. But other people don’t like it at all and think it makes city buildings look ugly and should be painted over. Maybe it depends on what’s painted and where it’s been painted? Or maybe even who painted it?
The anime style image painted on the side of this buiding definitely creates attention
There is a difference between projects by a group of artists with permission from the city to paint something on a specific space, and a person that illegally paints their name anywhere they feel like. Is there a lot of graffiti where you’re from? What do youthink about it?
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! |
Dragon’s Beard Candy in Chinatown
Hi everybody!
It’s summertime in the Northern Hemisphere and in Montreal that means that it’s time for all kinds of festivals and outdoor events like sidewalk sales. A sidewalk sale is a special event where all the stores and restaurants on a certain street or in a certain area move outside and sell their things in front of their stores, on the sidewalk.
I had a neat cultural experience this afternoon in Montreal’s Chinatown (an area where many Chinese and East Asian immigrants and families live). There was a big sidewalk sale happening in Chinatown, so my boyfriend and I went to explore the neighbourhood a little and to see what interesting things we could discover.
One of the most interesting things we saw was a little shop selling a special kind of candy called dragon’s beard candy. It’s called “dragon’s beard” candy because the sugary candy is pulled and stretched again and again until it’s thin and wispy like the hairs of a long white beard. Then the thin strands are wrapped around a yummy mixture of peanuts, sesame seeds, chocolate, and coconut.
Photo by Ryan King
Photo by Ryan King
The owner of the shop and his assistants make the candy right there in front of you, so in addition to getting to eat some really interesting, delicious candy, you also get to see how it’s made, which is really entertaining!
If you’d like to read more about dragon’s beard candy, here’s an article about the shop we visited in Montreal’s Chinatown: Dragon Beard Candy in Montreal and around the World.
Photo by Ryan King
What kinds of festivals and events happen in your town in the summer? We’d love to hear about them!
Jessie
