Melora Koepke

By the time I’m at the foot of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, I haven’t slept in five days and I’m running on bocadillos and adrenalin. The circadian rhythms of touring like a musician are new to me; when you’re travelling on this kind of schedule, your experience of time and space becomes intensified, amplified, distorted. Travel at the speed of music is, for lack of a better word, trippy.

“It’s an interesting state to be in,” says Régine Chassagne, the front woman of Arcade Fire. “You have to embrace it, stop worrying about when you’re going to eat, when you’re going to go to bed and when you’re going to wake up because it’s all irrelevant. When you wake up, it doesn’t matter what time you think it’s going to be; it’s just whatever time it is. This is your life.”

The first time I went downstairs to find the facilities at Le Comptoir charcuteries et vins, chef Ségué Lepage’s wine bar in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood, I opened the wrong door and ran straight into that week’s pig. He was hanging out (or rather hanging up) in a cold room. Across the hall – still not the loo – was Lepage’s cutting room and charcuterie lab, full of gleaming stainless-steel instruments, a fermenter, an oversize sausage stuffer and a water-circulating oven for cooking sous-vide. It all looked more like a surgery than a kitchen, nicely framed by a large museum vitrine. Clearly, at this address, the basement is where the action is.

From the olive oil amphorae stored in the Arcadian hills of ancient Greece to Arcadia, Iowa, where my grandmother stored bread-and-butter pickles in her farmhouse basement, a cook’s stockpile of the year’s yield has always belonged in a cool, dry place – in the cellar, among the roots. But since cook-to-order menus and open kitchens have become the norm, the preparation of dishes has transformed into a spectator sport. Chefs everywhere are turning to their subterranean quarters for a little privacy. Read article

Hanadi Sleiman’s tastefully decorated office at McGill University’s Department of Chemistry is dominated by a large picture window revealing the spires and rooftops of the 190-year-old Montreal insti- tution. Displayed on the windowsill are several DNA knick-knacks:

Francis Crick and James Watson bobble head dolls and a model of the iconic double helix. “This model of DNA is accurate down to the structure of nucleotides and bases,” Sleiman says, contemplating the intricate model.

DNA — its mystery, its still-untapped potential for scientific innovation — has long fascinated Sleiman who, as a post-doctoral student, studied under French chemist Jean-Marie Lehn, winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in supramolecular chemistry. Sleiman and her research team, which works out of a bright, airy new laboratory in McGill’s Otto Maass Chemistry Building, is expanding upon Lehn’s work, focusing on the supramolecular chemistry of DNA. Backed by a number of funding agencies, including NSERC, the Sleiman Research Group uses the unique chemistry of DNA to design new nanomaterials for drug delivery, diag- nostic tools and anti-tumour therapeutics. “It’s not just the molecule of life — now wecan do something with it. It’s the difference between studying what’s there and making your own versions of it,” Sleiman says. Read article

It’s almost like the farms and markets have been waiting all year to give us the meal we’ve been waiting for. There’s so much bounty in the harvest here, that a great meal can be made from fall in Montreal every day…

Us Montrealers are busy pickling the bejeezus out of the fall harvest—recipes for dills, pickled beets, picalilli, tomato sauce, and a local specialties, ketchup vert, are being traded around. Ketchup vert is especially close to our hearts—it’s the relish, made with green tomatoes and spices, that goes with our winter meat-pies that are called Tourtieres. Young chefs like Ségué Lepage of Le Comptoir Charcuteries et Vins was talking about making his own batch for service this fall.

But if you’re just visiting and you don’t have your own larder, don’t worry—it’s just as easy, and possibly more delightful, to get your harvest on at various restaurants around town. Below, I’ve made an ideal fall meal from my wanderings: Each one of these places is good for a whole meal, of course, but let’s pretend. Read article

Eating an oyster from the waters around Vancouver Island is a way to taste the mysteries of the Pacific Ocean in a single bite. Oysters owe much of their particular qualities – flavor, size, colour, shell shape – to the salinity level and depth of the water in which they are raised. Interestingly, though each of the 12 varieties of oyster from Vancouver Island has its own very distinct qualities, they all originate from the same seed, further underlining the importance of water depth and salinity in their flavor profile.

Consider the Kusshi. Named after the Japanese word for “ultimate” or “precious,” this perfect bivalve is now one of the most sought-after oysters in the world. Raised by only one shellfish grower, Keith Reid of Stellar Bay Shellfish in Vancouver Island’s Comox Valley region, this small (just over five cm) oyster is raised in deep trays, and an aggressive tumbling process after harvest smooths any frills off the unusually deep cup of its midnight-purple shell, making it easy to shuck without any breakage. The taste? A perfect balance of ultra-clean brackishness and a fresh, almost floral flavor, with a meaty mouthfeel due to the slight stress tumbling. Read article

Locals know that a summer stroll around Montreal’s markets is not only a chance to connect local farms to your table, it’s also a chance for us to check each other out in the long-awaited sunshine…

Though Marché Jean-Talon is Montreal’s go-to Farmer’s Market all year round, I always look forward to summer as the season when the market, like the city itself, fully busts into bloom. Certainly, producers who have been labouring in greenhouses to get ready to sell plantables and hanging-baskets of multicoloured floral tangles of joy are happy to see the warm sun in order to bring out their wares. But it’s also time to start buying—and cooking—the local bounty of seasonal fruits and vegetables and other delicacies from agricultural producers around Montreal who all gather in the hub of the Market to bust out the green.Read post

There are two kinds of audiences who adored The Hangover, and they will love the sequel just as much. First, there are those for whom the whole idea of waking up in a state of sweaty- eye-balled shame like the one depicted in the first movie is inconceivable—so for them, it’s pure schadenfreude. And then there’s the rest of us, whose own misspent nights- before and morning-s after, like those depicted in the film, contain many elements of a classic whodunit: we wake up in a state of confusion only to realize, slowly and terribly, what we did.

The film broke box -office records and ended up being the bestselling R- rated movie in history. It may also be the first movie ever to ensure that everyone in the audience stays in their seat until the very last credit has rolled: it’s a well- known fact that the photo sequence over the credits contains debauched acts never before depicted in a Hollywood studio movie. According to director Todd Phillips (Old School, Due Date and the first Hangover), the secret to The Hangover’s success is in these photos and what they represent. “I think it’s a lot to do with the unapologetic nature of this comedy,” he says. “I think a lot of American comedies tend to apologize for their bad behaviour in the last 10 minutes of the movie, and The Hangover just doesn’t do that. It doesn’t apologize. It’s like ‘fuck it, it’s over, just leave.’ “That was the original title, actually,” he jokes. “Fuck It, It’s Over, Just Leave. But you know what I mean—it’s this unapologetic tone that I think people responded to, because we’re used to a certain way of these stories being told.” Read article

Swine and Dine: Our writer hams it up at a Charcuterie course in France.

“Squeeze the sausage tightly so that the meat cures evenly,” says cook and food writer Kate Hill, showing me how to churn the manual meat grinder with one hand while managing the growing coil of saucisse de Toulouse with the other. We’re using a rich red shoulder of pork we purchased from a farm this morning, seasoning only with salt and pepper. There are no modern twists on the ancient cycle of sow to sausage here.

I’m in Gascony, or “France’s larder,” as the region has been dubbed because of the local abundance of duck, prunes, strawberries, Armagnac and, fittingly, pig. This intensive course in French artisan charcuterie is hosted by Hill, an American who discovered Camont, her 18th-century farmhouse, 25 years ago when she was looking for a spot to moor her barge (yes, you read that right). She’s since turned it into the culinary retreat where I’m learning how to salt, cure, cook and case meat. Read article

Montreal filmmaker Denis Villeneuve brings the Polytechnique massacre to the screen

Twenty years ago this December, as they finished up their last week of classes before the Christmas break, fourteen young women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique were killed by twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine, who entered the school with a semi-automatic machine gun sheathed in a garbage bag, and went on a nineteen-minute shooting spree before turning his weapon on himself.

Our shared memories of December 6, 1989, are mostly related to the crime scene as it was shown on the evening news: the ambulances and police vehicles parked on the snowy bank beside the school, sirens flashing; the sobbing parents as they arrived on the scene; and the terrified students as they exited the building, shivering in their T-shirts. But our knowledge of what happened that day has always been limited, as though the locked doors of the institution, sealed with crime scene tape, served not only to hide the bodies from view, but to shield us from the traumatic realities of Lépine’s murderous rage. Read article

Nighthawk in the light of day: Tom Waits gets Real Gone on latest album and leaves the piano at home

“Hi, I’m calling from Tom Waits’ office,” says the pleasant publicist voice on the other end of the line. “I’ll put Tom through now. Are you ready?”

Tom Waits has an office? It strikes me as weird to be on the phone business-style, waiting to talk with a man who has written so many deeply moving love songs involving telephones. “Hello, hello, there is this Martha/ this is old Tom Frost,” I think to myself, quoting from the love ballad fromClosing Time (1973). “I am calling long distance/ don’t worry ’bout the cost.” Then there’s “I got a telephone call from Istanbul, my baby’s coming home today” from Frank’s Wild Years (1987). There’s Please Call Me, Baby from The Early Years Vol. II, and so on.

Telephones are in the Tom Waits idiom like whiskey, rain, red shoes, automobiles, bars, barns, coffee shops, Illinois, tango, female hitchhikers, the movies, glass eyes and peg legs, Jesus, shotguns and the circus. Good things every last one, and ample fodder for Waits’ 24-odd albums, movie soundtracks, musical plays, road shows and collaborations, which have influenced the American songbook like no other. His songs have been covered by Springsteen, The Eagles, Johnny Cash and, yes, Rod Stewart, to name a few. He’s gotta do business. So a telephone, sure. But an office?

“Hello there, where you calling from?” a voice on the other end of the line interrupts my reverie. Tom Waits sounds conversational, relaxed and slightly bored, but it’s Tom Waits nevertheless. For some reason I kind of expected him to be growling or hollering through a bullhorn. Read article