Category Archives: Food and lifestyle

Challenging food: how to use Swiss chard in recipes

Swiss chard is one pretty vegetable, with bright green leaves and stalks that grow in various shades of white, red, pink, orange or yellow.

Prior to setting sight on one of these multicolored bouquets, I’d never felt compelled to try to cook Swiss Chard because they had never been easily available to me.

When we got some at the small market where I work, I immediately bought one bunch and decided to challenge myself in finding a way to use it in a recipe.

Here are two delicious and nutritious recipes that came out of it:

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Untapped Cities: Montreal Bagels

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In my latest article for Untapped Cities, I waxed poetic about the one and only Montreal bagel. I was walking on thin ice, writing about bagels on a blog that is based in New York. So far, the debate on Facebook has fallen in the Big apple’s favor, but only because the Untapped readers hailing from the 5 boroughs vastly outnumber those from my town. Obviously, they have never tasted a proper warm Montreal bagel in all it’s sweet and gooey yet crispy glory.
If you’d like to read it and weigh in, follow this link.

Pictures of beautiful food: Blood oranges + recipe Fennel and blood orange salad

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These gorgeous (and delicious) blood oranges don’t seem to know if they want to be red or orange.

(See below for the blood orange and fennel recipe. Voir plus bas pour la recette de salade au fenouil et orange sanguine)

When I finally mustered the will to cut these pretty things, I made the following recipe with them:

Fennel, blood orange and walnut salad

Ingredients for the salad: (serves 2)

1/2 bulb of fennel, cut into julienne slices

Handful of walnuts

100g Mesclun salad

2 blood oranges, each slice cut in half

1 Ryvita sesame rye cracker, broken into small bits

Ingredients for the dressing:

2 tablespoons Olive Oil (choose your favorite but lighter tasting is better in this case)

1 tablespoon Honey Dijon mustard

1/2 tablespoon Sherry vinegar

Salt and pepper

How to serve it:

You can mix all the elements together in no particular order, or you can dip the cracker bits in the dressing for a few minutes, then put them and the remaining sauce into the salad.

Salade de fenouil, orange sanguine et noix de grenoble:

Ingrédients pour la salade (pour 2 personnes)

/2 bulbe de fenouil, coupé en juliennes

Une poignée de noix de grenobles

100g de salade Mesclun

2 oranges sanguines, chaque tranche coupée en 2

1 craquelin au sésame et seigle Ryvita, cassé en morceaux de petite taille
Ingrédients pour la vinaigrette:

2 cuillères à table d’Huile d’olive (choississez votre préférée, mais une huile plus douce complémentera mieux le goût des oranges sanguines)

1 cuillère à table Moutarde de Dijon

1/2 cuillère à table Vinaigre de Xéres

Sel et poivre

Comment la préparer:

Vous pouvez mélanger les éléments sans ordre particulier, ou vous pouvez tremper les morceaux de craquelin dans la vinaigrette pendant quelques minutes, puis les mettre avec le restant de la sauce avec la salade.

8 time tested tips for an easier wake up, early in the morning

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For some reason, I always end up having a job where I am required to wake up really, really early in the morning. It’s been like that pretty much constantly for the last 6 years, when I started working at a bakery.

I’ve had to set my alarm as early as 4h45 AM to go to work. Even in the peak days of sunlight duration, it’ still way dark out at that hour.

Getting up and ready isn’t always an easy task, so people are often asking how I do it.

Over the years, I’ve managed to create a routine that works well for me. I’m well aware that not everyone is built the same way and that it may not work for all people, but I still think that some of these ideas could be useful for people who are trying, but having a hard time in becoming morning people (growing into adulthood kind of forces most of us to become that way!). Here are 8 tips to help you wake up early in the morning and have enough energy to get through the day:

1: Have more than one alarm set. This helps so you can wake up a bit more slowly. The first alarm will wake you up, then you can relax a little bit more until the next one sets off (5 or ten minutes later). I usually set 7 different alarms. I’m crazy, I know, but I rarely let them all ring. It’s just a safety so that I don’t sleep right on through and open my eyes 1 hour later, when I should be arriving at work. Knowing that all these alarms will make sure I get up helps me calm down and have a better night’s sleep.