I was poking around looking for my grandmother’s mandelbrot recipe, memorialized here, when it occurred to me to look back at my erstwhile food blog. Beyond just a very pleasant trip down the memory lane of my culinary and parenting history, it reminded me that I’d once posted very frequently about food, cooking, drinks, family life, fun projects with Miss Cake, and a whole host of enjoyable experiences I’d almost forgotten.
So maybe it’s time to rev it all up again.
So many changes, how to even summarize.
It’s now been 9 years in Vancouver. I’m a Canadian citizen. Young Master Gateau moved to Toronto in 2020 to pursue university studies in architecture. Lucas is still extremely Lucas, and is in his last year of high school. Baby Gateau is on the verge of teenhood and just started high school. I’m the artistic director of a Jewish performing arts festival and have been studying Yiddish and very much enjoying deepening my connection to the Jewish community and my roots. Mr. Gateau is steady as always, working in the major concert halls of Vancouver and eating all the avocados that enter the house.
Oh, and I became a burlesque dancer at the age of 49 and stopped caring about dieting and so forth when I realized that I’m delicious just the way I am.
Our newest development on the food front is that in June Lucas was idly scrolling around YouTube when he came across some videos about the horrors of industrial meat production and decided he couldn’t in good conscience continue to eat it. He is willing to eat sustainable fish and very occasional meat if it was procured by family friends who hunt or from small producers who use humane processes. This is all super, as Mr. Gateau and I have been looking for impetus to cut back on meat.
However, this is also my child who once threw up all over the dining table when asked to eat a single edamame bean. A vegetarian diet is not exactly an easy fit.
So we’re working on it. Meanwhile, for Rosh Hashanah, we decided to purchase a grass-fed brisket from a small local farm and do a traditional Ashkenazi meal, using my mother’s fully savoury recipe, and including kasha varnishkes, roasted acorn squash with maple, sautéed spinach, challah, and honeycrisp apples with two kinds of honey — ghost pepper-infused from the store where my niece works, and some gathered from hives on the tops of buildings in downtown Vancouver.
