I go to the Redpath Museum

Still the pancake chat continues (look to the comments for all sorts of top pancake tips - it is extraordinary, as are my readers and/or fans), and spring comes to Canada, like it does to other countries in world.

On Sunday afternoons, my 'husband' and I sometimes walk about the place (i.e. Montreal) looking at things; as the snows melt, whole buildings are revealed. For example, on the campus of McGill University* is the Redpath Museum. It is a tiny, tiny natural history museum with, for e.g., one cabinet for the Egyptians next to some cases full of rocks opposite one of those formica diagrams of the geographical strata of Quebec (the ones that are only good if they light up or have a button). It smells of beards and eyewash, and small children run about it squeaking; except they do not run far, and they do not squeak for long because it is so very, very tiny.

But in the corner of the Redpath Museum lurks taxidermic genius. I do not know who stuffed the animals that I share below, but if he (or she!) were alive today, I would shake him (or her) by the hand.




































































If this woodchuck were alive, I would shake him by the hand also whilst asking him - as I believe we all would - how much wood he thinks he could chuck, assuming (as one would) that he could chuck wood.














*If I was from here I would have gone to McGill. I know it. I know it in my bones. I would have read history and smoked "pot", as I believe the young people call it!!!

I make pancakes (American stylee)

When I lived in England and North Americans (i.e. Americans from the U.S.A. AND Canadians) chatted about 'pancakes', the only thing I could see in front of my eyes were 3ft high piles of what looked like Scotch pancakes (but bigger), lurching skywards in front of gigantic people in check shirts holding a gigantic pot of maple-flavoured syrup in one hand and a gigantic fork in the other. Certain head-pictures also involved bacon sticking out of the pile and endless cups of burnt pisswater masquerading as coffee, served either black or with cream, poured into a too-thick china mug whilst John Cougar Mellencamp (American version) or early Bryan Adams (English Canada) or Roch Voisine* (French Canada) played in the background.

Then I moved to Canada and still the pancakes kept coming. Canadians would talk about them a lot like they were really great, and say things like "I would like a big pile of pancakes right now!"; I would go out for "brunch" with Canadians (including my husband) and they would eat them and say things like, Oh man that's awesome, wow, just what I needed. I did not understand, because when I tried these pancakes of which they spoke they were heavy and tiring, and after one I wanted a little lie down and a cold piece of toast and Marmite.

But now I am applying for my permanent residency, and in September I will start to apply for Canadian citizenship (after which I will be British AND Canadian). I have got used to many North American/Canadian cooking things so far, including the notion of frosting (at its best, just whipped ganache - do NOT get me started; it is quite delicious) and the extraordinary simplicity of cooking with cup and spoon measures. At the beginning I was very sneery about this and thought it was over-simple and whatnot, but in fact is it just, well, easier, and I find baking 100 times more straightforward with cups and spoons than I do with scales. (Incidentally does anyone know where cup measures came from? Was it just Americans realising that cocking about with scales was unnecessarily complicated?)

But I digress: the point is that if I am going to live here for a while, be married to a Canadian, spend time with Canadians (including at breakfast and/or brunch), it is a good idea to get used to some of their food things (although I draw the line at Kraft dinner). A secret and private project recently has therefore been to get very good at (American) pancakes. (For Canadian readers: if you ask for a pancake in England you will get a crêpe.)

So far I have been bloody rubbish at it. Pan too hot, strange recipes, forgetting am not making English pancakes, etc etc. But I have persevered and can now tell you that I have found what I think is a truly excellent recipe: authentic (i.e., American), foolproof, and best of all not awful and heavy. It is from Cook's Illustrated - which is I suppose a posher version of the Good Housekeeping Institute but for cooking stuff only - in that they test recipes to destruction. It is absolutely brilliant for all those things that I think of as 'American' food (cupcakes, cookies, BBQ stuff, blah blah) and worth every penny of the $34-odd subscription I pay for the online archive. Anyway that huge big-up allows me to not feel guilty about copying their recipe for pancakes, which I reproduce word-for-word here (and the lemon thing deffo works and is ace):

Cook's Illustrated Light and Fluffy Pancakes

This batter serves four perfectly for a light weekday breakfast. You may want to double the recipe for weekend pancake making, when appetites are larger. If you happen to be using salted butter or buttermilk, you may want to cut back a bit on the salt. If you don’t have any buttermilk, mix three-quarters cup of room temperature milk with one tablespoon of lemon juice and let it stand for five minutes. Substitute this “clabbered milk” for the three-quarters cup of buttermilk and one-quarter cup of milk in this recipe. Since this milk mixture is not as thick as buttermilk, the batter and resulting pancakes will not be as thick.

Ingredients
1 cup unbleached all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon table salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 cup buttermilk
1/4 cup milk (plus an extra tablespoon or so if batter is too thick)
1 large egg , separated
2 tablespoons unsalted butter , melted
vegetable oil (for brushing griddle)

Instructions

1. Mix dry ingredients in medium bowl. Pour buttermilk and milk into 2-cup Pyrex measuring cup. Whisk in egg white; mix yolk with melted butter, then stir into milk mixture. Dump wet ingredients into dry ingredients all at once; whisk until just mixed.

2. Meanwhile, heat griddle or large skillet over strong medium-high heat. Brush griddle generously with oil. When water splashed on surface confidently sizzles, pour batter, about 1/4 cup at a time, onto griddle, making sure not to overcrowd. When pancake bottoms are brown and top surface starts to bubble, 2 to 3 minutes, flip cakes and cook until remaining side has browned, 1 to 2 minutes longer. Re-oil the skillet and repeat for the next batch of pancakes.

Pathologist pancake-cooking tips: "Here is what I do. I heat the pan to a medium heat, like 5, with the butter or oil and then wipe it out so there is only a little bit left. Then I turn down the heat to 1 or 2 and make the first pancake. It is always a disaster so expect to throw it away, but after that it is always perfect."

I watch him eat pancakes like David Attenborough watching the feeding habits of the cercopithecinae, and he treats them like he would toast (puts jam, honey, peanut butter, cheese on them) but also does that thing that English people expect North Americans to do, i.e. puts maple syrup on them. Not maple flavoured syrup; real maple syrup - the stuff you make by tapping maple sap and boiling it and boiling it until it is syrup. And here I am going to go off on one again: I hated what I thought was maple syrup, but was in fact maple-flavoured corn syrup. The real stuff is ace and now I know about it a bit more I use it all the time where you might use brown sugar or honey: salad dressings, cakes, on pancakes, with yoghurt, in porridge, etc etc. They use it a lot at Ottolenghi (like in this recipe, which is fucking amazing and was one of our wedding cakes), which to me is like a Royal Warrant, but from someone who I think is good.

Anyway. That's quite enough of that. I was going to start on chocolate chips, but all this talk of pancakes and syrup has made me remember that I was supposed to be at the gym 3 hours ago, so off I go.

Oh, and if anyone wants some real maple syrup, chosen for you by a genuine French-Canadian, born in the place where 75% of the world's maple syrup is produced, owner of maple trees and enthusiastic consumer himself, tell me what you would do with it if we sent it to you. If we like your reason, we will send you some.

Pip "and STRETCH one-two-three" pip

NWM


*"Moi! je le trouve sexy avec sa chemise de bûcheron, car moi-même j'en suis une bûcheronne et moi j'aime Roch Voisine", says one of the comments on YouTube ("Me! I find him sexy in his lumberjack shirt, because I myself am a lady lumberjack and me, I love Roch Voisine").

As I was watching the clip my 'husband', the French-Canadian veterinary research histopathologist, sang along in a comedy style, interspersed with cries of "look at his smug smile!", topped off with a reminder that we once saw Roch Voisine (who is very small) at Bureau En Gros in Boisbriand buying paperclips.

I have had a little facelift

Yes it is true. Last night, I thought it necessary to go to Wordpress to be able to spread myself more generously across the page, but what is this? Thanks to the advice of 'Anonymous'*, "Minima" has become "Minima Left Stretch", so although some of my photographs (all of them of near-Avedon brilliance) may be a bit wonky, on the whole I am pleased.

But it is you I am caring about !!! Do you like it, or did you like it more before? Would you rather it was stretched out, but with the sidebar on the right? It is possible to have a timed demonstration, so let me know and I will react accordingly.

As Cara Elizabeth Berk once so very rightly said: why IS everything so awesome on the internet?







**Update**: It was 'Left Stretch', but after having listened to you, my loyal and adoring readers, we are back to just 'Stretch', i.e. sidebar on t'right. You may think this is boring; I hope not, and trust that even if you have been 'put off' by recent template-chat, you will nevertheless return day after day to see what new loveliness is spurting out of my talented little monkey fingers.

*The best and worst comments are often anonymous, which tells me that those that remain anonymous are either cowards of the highest order OR full of kindness and humility

I would like to migrate

Not like geese etc but like a bloggy platform disloyalist (if that word exists): Blogger, you are too squeezy for me, too narrow; your columns on the only template I like (this one) are too broad and too narrow at the same time. I am dreaming of a place where it is wide and broad and the bad writing and out-of-focus pictures can spread like cheap dough to the very edges of the page.

I think the place exists and is called Wordpress, but I am scared (so very scared) of 'migrating' it all, even though I know that there will probably be a copy kept somewhere on the internets by Blogger, who will claim to be my friend even after I leave and then 'accidentally' lose all my posts about how much I hate Sting. I am alarmed at the idea of it all becoming upside down and having to wade through four (4) years of mediocre content just to tidy it up again. I am afraid that the only record in existence (and with that I include my very own brain) over the last four years may disappear into thin ice like this: pifffff!

So, friends, here are some questions that I would be very grateful for your ADVICE on/about:

1. Is it safe and easy and can I do it even though I am still not really sure what html is?
2. Is Wordpress the right place to go?
3. Will it bollocks everything up in a way that is amusing to fix in front of the TV, or in a way that will wish you had never even started the whole stupid thing?
4. Should I just stay here?
5. Does anyone actually give a monkey's arse?

I love you all, each and every one.

NWM

I do some science

It is no 'new news' for you, my adoring readers, that I a) live in Montreal; and b) like to drink a sherbet or two now and then. But what happens when I am in a bar with some other people (I will not specify the number, for it is not important, but what I will tell you is that none of us are from Montreal), some strong local beer, some paper and a pen?

I will tell you what: we start working out (by means of lists) whether Montreal is a good place to live or not. Conclusion: yes it is (mainly) but if you are from a big city (e.g. London, Paris, Swindon), you will have to adjust a bit, both up and down.

If you are considering moving to another country (and if Montreal is on your list), here is our analysis, reproduced via the means of the computer for your reading ease*. (After many beers, our various writings were not legible and the paper was stained with dark beer):




















* Not all of these are mine. Far from it. I will award a prize if you can guess correctly three that ARE mine,