A la prochaine Chef Chuck

Sigh.  I just clicked the cancel button for my dinner reservation at Le Bremner Restaurant in Montreal.  Feel free to take it – 6pm Friday May 10.  It is supposed to be “ahhhhmaaazing”.  Here at home, we love Chef Chuck Hughes.  We watch his show.  We cook from his book.  We may even have a celebrity crush on him.  And by we, I am referring to my girls.  (And myself.) 

I’m fortunate in that my girls will pretty much try anything.  R is acting a bit more like a typical kid due to the influence of her peers (why, oh, why didn’t I homeschool?!) by having an exaggerated reaction to things she doesn’t like.  But R’s version of an exaggerated reaction is probably quite subdued compared to most.  And there is very little she doesn’t like in terms of food.  In fact, all three girls are growing quite adventurous in their tastes.  Add to that, the excitement of being in Chuck’s restaurant, being in Montreal, getting all-fancy…the evening holds the promise of fabulous memory-making!

The reality is, while our recent dinner at Chef Lynn Crawford’s Ruby WatchCo was a huge success in terms of a family dining experience – my girls dressed up, they were excited, they stayed put, they loved the food, they got to meet the chef!! – it was a long night for the littlest one.  Baby C, who will continue to be referred to as such until she actually stands up and starts walking which should be any day now, loves food but is really not a fan of being constrained in a highchair with only a spoon to play with.  I completely dropped the ball by not packing anything else for her to play with.  While this did save Mark from having to play a 90 minute game of  “Uh oh I dropped that.  Will you please pick it up Daddy?”.  It also resulted in her becoming bored.  Thankfully, she allowed Mark to distract her with people watching, And with a bedtime of 7pm but a dinner reservation of 6pm we were racing the clock as it was.  Except.  It’s kinda hard to race a clock in a busy restaurant serving three courses.  Three delicious, melt in your mouth, divine courses.  Three courses that they happily served up free to my children and as soon as they came off the line.  The last course being a scrumptious butterscotch pudding they put a candle in L’s birthday. 

I’m fairly certain, a multi-course meal at Le Bremner is going to take more than an hour.  Add to that, the fact that we will have been wandering around the old city all day, I doubt very much Baby C will take kindly to being strapped into a high chair after being strapped into a stroller (again – learn to walk!). I don’t want to race through a meal at Le Bremner.  I don’t want to watch Mark stalk off with Baby C under his arm, telling me “It’s fine.” When it really isn’t, as he has to abandon his meal and go back to our hotel in Montreal.  That would not be such a fabulous memory. 

So instead, we will lower our dining standards, not to accommodate their palate or but rather the temperament of our youngest because no one wants to drop serious coin on a meal they have to rush through.  Or, one I spill all over myself as not so little Baby C breastfeeds at the table.  On the other hand, Mark thinks maybe we'd get to meet the chef once word got around that I was flashing serious boob. 

A la prochaine Chef Chuck! 

Three Girls and a Budget

Last week Mark had a co-worker do a complete double-take when he found out that we have three kids and Mark has two older kids as well.  “Wow!  And your partner doesn’t work?  My wife and I can barely afford our one child.  She’s an investment banker and I pull in three figures.  But you, wow, five kids!?!?! ”  I’m paraphrasing here as I obviously wasn’t at the conversation; his wife could very well be a teacher not an investment banker and he might barely make over 100K.  Either way, they make more money than we do.  Which is important for my point here:  it’s all about the lifestyle decisions.

But before we get started, let's quickly cover two glaring issues. One, I do work, as a mama at home full time, as a student midwife, and as a consultant whenever I can.  Two, obviously, if all five of the kids lived in the same house it would be cheaper, and I'd have a much happier Mark.  And I could - and probably will - write about both things at some point.  But back to our budget choices:


We moved out of the sketchy part of a cool neighbourhood in downtown Toronto to buy a house in the suburbs.  Not a big house.  Not even a real house according to Annette Benning’s character in American Beauty, as well as my mother-in-law and Mark’s aunt.  But the price tag on the house was about half of a place in our old ‘hood.  Do we miss being able to walk to St.Lawrence Market, a movie theatres, brunch spots, work, university…you know, everywhere?  Sure.  Do we lament that our mortgage is the same as most people’s rent?  Not so much.  Or, at all.

We buy our furniture from Ikea.  Sure, unique pieces, or you know, furniture we don’t have to assemble and then tighten bi-annually with an allen key, would be fabulous.

We have a Wii Fit (courtesy of Optimum points), a front yard, a pool (came with the house), two parks in the ‘hood, bikes, jump ropes, hula hoops, and second hand skates.  And we walk to and from school.  By this I mean, our girls aren’t registered for multiple teams and lessons to get their 60 minutes of activity a day.  Yes, I’d love for R to play soccer and L to take gymnastics but it really wasn’t in the budget this year.  And at three, L has no idea what she’s missing out on.  R feels it a little bit, for about five minutes whenever a classmate mentions their soccer team.  But that’s five minutes a week so she’ll live.

I believe the saying is “Go big or go home.”  So we do just that for birthdays.  R just had a birthday and we spent about $50 on food (homemade sliders, homemade chocolate cupcakes, watermelon and lemonade), decorations, and craft supplies.  Her friends ran around the yard playing tag, drew on the sidewalk, painted pots, and planted seeds.  Mark’s aforementioned coworker spend 10x that much on his child’s party.

We don’t take vacations.  At least not very often. Mark had stipulated that I had to pay for any vacations we took.  So I basically drank and cooked my way Montreal as the tickets were purchased using Air Miles earned primarily at the LCBO and less so at Metro.  Our hotel was on the last of our Aeroplan and was not a boutique hotel.  We didn’t pay the upgrade to first class.  We didn’t go for three-course fondue which our girls would have loved.  We didn’t take the carriage ride through Vieux Montreal.  We didn’t eat at Garde Manger which broke all of our hearts.  We didn’t get room service, or movies (that’s what the laptop was for). We didn’t even get the cute Canadiens jersey in pink (And by we, I mean, “me” on this one.).

We don’t buy organic and I can’t support the little guy.  This is probably the most contentious thing I’m saying.  And I’m not suggesting that the health of my girls is worth less than anything else.  Their physical and emotional well-being is our number one priority.  But organic milk is more than twice the price of regular milk.  Organic beef, lamb, or chicken is triple the cost.  And the research, the actual academic research, does not support the need for me to spend exorbitant amounts of money on small amounts of food that isn’t regulated to the high standards it needs to be.  So we buy our groceries from No Frills and Costco. 

We are not solid examples of how to budget well, we try, but we have some weak spots :

I turn the air conditioning on as soon as the thermostat hits 30 outside.  It’s an indulgence but it keeps me from acting crazy so win-win.

My girls and I spend a portion of our grocery budget at the farmers’ market twice a month from May to October.  Doesn’t seem harmful except we normally eat everything we bought by Monday morning.  Hence, we only go every other week, or our food bill would double.

We buy R brand name, sturdy kids shoes because they have to get through two other sets of feet.  But all three girls generally sport the latest in Joe Fresh, Old Navy, and whatever brand Costco is carrying because we don’t buy very many pieces and after weekly washing, and given different body types(not style/fashion) not all of the clothes are going to survive the duration.

We have cable and Netflix.  I am the first to agree that cable is extremely hard to justify EXCEPT that I negotiated with the provider and our cable bill is – wait for it - $10/month.  When that deal expires so does our cable.  And in the interim, our girls still don’t know we have cable and therefore watch very little actual TV.  Food shows, Justice League, and Avengers excepted of course.  Netflix, personally I think is a bit of a waste of coin in my opinion but as Mark points out we don’t go to the cinema, or concerts, or shows, or the bar so…yeah.

You get the point.  Money is tight.  But you make your choices.  We like food so we spend a bit more money on groceries.  We like to spend time with our friends so we invite them over for food, we cook and they bring the wine.  Also, we accept gifts of wine or any hard spirit for random occasions such as Simcoe Day, Labour Day, the day after any family get together…

What do you “give up” to save money and where do you “spurlge”?

A Mama’s Cooking Challenge

Right now, I’m in the process of reading Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain.  In it, he has a chapter  where he postulates that every kid should be taught basic cooking skills and he’s not talking KD or hotdogs.  Rather, there is a list of kitchen skills he feels everyone should be able to do, most of which you should be able to accomplish by the time you are 18 and headed out of the nest:  chop an onion and generally possess basic knife skills including how to sharpen a knife; grill a steak properly; cook a roast to perfect temperature without a thermometer; roast a chicken perfectly; survey, buy, and prepare in season vegetables (having successfully distinguished raw from ripe from rotten); make the perfect omelette; filet a fish; cook a lobster or a pot of mussels; make a pot of rice.

I couldn’t do any of these things by the time I was 18.  I spent a lot of time in my parents’ kitchen, doing homework, or hanging out with my dad while he ate dinner.  But I didn’t do more than bake cookies or banana bread until I was 18 and then was only to make variations on pasta primavera when my mother wasn’t home.  My mother didn’t believe in shopping for a particular meal.  She only had two or three cookbooks that were 20 years old before I was 20.  You had to cook what was in the house and there was an overlying threat of “finishing it all” because even if it was a failure or tasted amazing you’d “wasted” food by cooking something different. But my mother didn’t enjoy cooking, she despised grocery shopping, and food was functional.

As a mama, my goal is to guarantee that my girls can do all of the skills Bourdain lists and hopefully more, enthusiastically.  I’m fairly certain they will enjoy cooking for more than a means of survival.  Already, one or both of R and L will with regularity ask if they can help me in the kitchen – and not just when I’m making chocolate cake.  They peel garlic, shred herbs, dip thin slices of aubergine into cornstarch/flour, eggs, and breadcrumbs.  They mix masa into tortilla dough and ground meat into hamburger patties.  They can, without any prompting pull out all of the ingredients for a basic cake. From the age of two, R would flip through my cookbooks, and list off ingredients she could see in a photo.  I would tell her what we had, and she would then tell me what we could make from it.  L’s approach is to tell me we need to go grocery shopping to buy the items she needs to make whatever food she happens to be craving.  Grocery shopping is a family field trip and can only be improved by the opening of the farmers markets in the spring.  R has been known to fake being sick on Friday mornings only to magically recover in time to go buy lunch at the local farmers market.  She’s in kindergarten so I let it slide.  Mark suggests that given my love of food, I’d let it slide anyway.

When  I mentioned the list to my girls, they asked me to read it to them and wanted to know what they could start practicing. So I figure we are already half-way there.  Frankly, I can’t wait until they are old enough to pass on some of the more menial prep cook tasks to!  For now, they are spending hours pouring over the cooking class schedule from Loblaws and Whole Foods.  Personally, I’m thinking I need to just conduct these classes out of my own kitchen for some extra cash.  What do you think?  Mini goddess cooking classes, my place, this summer?

The cooking show

Yesterday, L hollers from the living room where baby C is lying beside her, “Mama, come quick!”  I dash into the living room assuming a minor baby sister vs.little big sister crisis “What’s up?” I ask.  “Chuck is on! Sit down with me! Ummm, yumm, he’s making creamed spinach, I like spinach!”  That’d be Chuck Hughes, from Chuck’s Day Off, and a Montreal restaurant we tried to go to last spring but it was closed much to the heartbreak of my five year old.  So if Chuck ever reads this, perhaps, he can give us a call, and let us know what the hours are so I can bring my escargot eating, French-rack of lamb-requesting, gianduja cake-making children for dinner.  When I relayed this anecdote to my partner, he wasn't particularly surprised; nor was he surprised when I told him R had also watched Chuck and now wants me to make her a tempura runny egg.

This situation is not unusual in our house.  My girls and I are constantly watching one or the other of our favourite food shows and then recreating the meals.  It's been this way since I was pregnant with R and had a few weeks off work before I gave birth.  I’d watch cooking shows, walk to the market and buy the ingredient for one or more dishes I’d just seen made and go home and cook.  Rather than stop, this “habit” grew when I became a mama. Because all of a sudden, I didn’t just have a hungry audience (Mark) , I had a rapt audience member (R).  I recently confessed to my girls that I often pretend I’m hosting a cooking show while I’m cooking.  And as a mama of girls that love to help me cook or bake and enjoy food as much as I do, they completely understand. Well, that, and they are 3 and almost 6, so pretending to cook for a panel of judges or an audience, comes naturally to them.  But, I digress. 

So, yes, I have a running narrative mostly in my head but often out loud, as I prep and cook.  I rarely cook anything fancy anymore and based on my presentation alone never mind my rule breaking) I would definitely be told to “please pack my knives and go.”  But, here, in my home, I am a top chef mama.  My girls will try anything once.  Often more than once.  They have been my prep cooks since they could pull the leaves off a sprig of rosemary.  They are highly opinionated on what should be eaten with what; they live for the farmer’s market and grocery shopping in general, and have been known to eat a lunch of artisan bread dipped in olive oil, aged balsamic vinegar and a hunk of stinky cheese just as easily as they slurp up pasta puntanesca, dig into tongue curry, lentils, and basmati rice, or chow down on lamb burgers with a boursin centre topped with a tomato confit.  Don’t get me wrong, there are days they start randomly picking carmelized onions out of their dish, and take grimacing sips of roasted red pepper-tomato soup.  But unlike a top chef, I don’t have to take the criticism, and here at home, the judges can pack their plates and starve or hunker down and eat it.

Who do you cook for?