Mother’s Kitchen

The most succulent memories often emerge from a mother’s kitchen. Well at least mine do! Have you ever picked out friends simply because their mom was an amazing cook? I am guilty of that for sure!!! Always hoping to get invited for dinner somewhere… Especially if the family was having its own traditional, French Canadian version of spaghetti with meat sauce. When I was growing up, every family ate «spaghetti italien» as it was called at least once a week. And every family had the best sauce ever, or so they claimed! Seems I was on a mission to discover who actually the holder of that title was hahaha! But really, I was always looking for food, even at a very young age! Truth be told, my mother’s cooking was the best and so was her sauce! And my mother’s kitchen was the «awesomenest» kitchen I knew of! It is where I invariably would end up being when she was cooking, under her nose and in her way! I wanted to see how she did things and what she was creating, always fascinated and always salivating! I was quite young (compared with today’s standards) when I started to pull my weight around, becoming mommy’s little helper! I enjoyed peeling root vegetables and was charmed with the vegetable peeler. Root vegetables underwent under such a fabulous transformation: from dirty, muddy tuberous plants into something absolutely divine. Oh, the magic!

I remember the enveloping smells of mom’s pot roast braising slowly on a cold and wet winter Sunday. Mom would often make her pot roasts on a Sunday. Stemmed in tradition, her own mother had herself always done Sunday roast beef dinner and my mother, wanting to recreate that special childhood memory, would almost always roast a piece of meat on Sundays. Pot roasts were frequent because the cut of meat was affordable in a time when single income households were the norm and grocery budgets were careful planned out. What a different time we now live in…

Nevertheless, cheap meat or not, pot roast dinners were always prized meals in our house! There is something extraordinary about peeking under the lid of a pot of rich hardy stew simmering slowly. Something like looking at hot red lava bubbling at the top of a crater: bubbles thick and heavy, struggling to break the surface, finally pushing through, releasing rich aromas and splatter of tiny flavour infused droplets. Served with a decadent mashed root vegetable purée, fresh bread and butter (to soak up all the sinful gravy), a pot roast can be elevated to become the king of meats!!! Oh the lure of that smell…I think I may just have to submit to the call of The Braise… It is now officially autumn after all!