Melora Koepke

Eating an oyster from the waters around Vancouver Island is a way to taste the mysteries of the Pacific Ocean in a single bite. Oysters owe much of their particular qualities – flavor, size, colour, shell shape – to the salinity level and depth of the water in which they are raised. Interestingly, though each of the 12 varieties of oyster from Vancouver Island has its own very distinct qualities, they all originate from the same seed, further underlining the importance of water depth and salinity in their flavor profile.

Consider the Kusshi. Named after the Japanese word for “ultimate” or “precious,” this perfect bivalve is now one of the most sought-after oysters in the world. Raised by only one shellfish grower, Keith Reid of Stellar Bay Shellfish in Vancouver Island’s Comox Valley region, this small (just over five cm) oyster is raised in deep trays, and an aggressive tumbling process after harvest smooths any frills off the unusually deep cup of its midnight-purple shell, making it easy to shuck without any breakage. The taste? A perfect balance of ultra-clean brackishness and a fresh, almost floral flavor, with a meaty mouthfeel due to the slight stress tumbling. Read article

Locals know that a summer stroll around Montreal’s markets is not only a chance to connect local farms to your table, it’s also a chance for us to check each other out in the long-awaited sunshine…

Though Marché Jean-Talon is Montreal’s go-to Farmer’s Market all year round, I always look forward to summer as the season when the market, like the city itself, fully busts into bloom. Certainly, producers who have been labouring in greenhouses to get ready to sell plantables and hanging-baskets of multicoloured floral tangles of joy are happy to see the warm sun in order to bring out their wares. But it’s also time to start buying—and cooking—the local bounty of seasonal fruits and vegetables and other delicacies from agricultural producers around Montreal who all gather in the hub of the Market to bust out the green.Read post

It is, as they say, a good day to fly. Thirty minutes into my first private flip session with House of Air co-owner Dave Schaeffer and I’m flying higher than ever. I’m at the Presidio, the storied military base at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge – now the home of a state-of-the-art trampoline facility that deals in “air awareness.”

I came to House of Air to work on my skiing, because as anyone who’s ever run moguls knows, skiers can spend a lot of time aloft. “Air awareness can’t help you glide down a mountain faster, but it can help you to situate yourself in the air and in relation to the ground,” Schaeffer explains. “And, most importantly, it can teach you how to fall safely.”

While dot-comers come here to play trampoline dodge ball or do the fitness class aptly called Air Conditioning, the place is also popular with skiers and boarders who show up off-season. Because the trampolines here are serious. The Matrix is made up of 42 conjoined trampolines – including wall-mounted ones and a unique double-bowl modelled after a skate park – and is bigger than a regulation basketball court. The Training Ground, nearby, is the perfect place to practice off-axis aerial manoeuvres with little risk of injury, like d-spins, rodeos, corks and the dinner roll – a 720-degree off-axis rotation invented by Olympic gold-medal-winning freestyle skier Jonny Moseley, who also happens to be the “ambassadair.” (That’s him in the safety video.) Read article

There are two kinds of audiences who adored The Hangover, and they will love the sequel just as much. First, there are those for whom the whole idea of waking up in a state of sweaty- eye-balled shame like the one depicted in the first movie is inconceivable—so for them, it’s pure schadenfreude. And then there’s the rest of us, whose own misspent nights- before and morning-s after, like those depicted in the film, contain many elements of a classic whodunit: we wake up in a state of confusion only to realize, slowly and terribly, what we did.

The film broke box -office records and ended up being the bestselling R- rated movie in history. It may also be the first movie ever to ensure that everyone in the audience stays in their seat until the very last credit has rolled: it’s a well- known fact that the photo sequence over the credits contains debauched acts never before depicted in a Hollywood studio movie. According to director Todd Phillips (Old School, Due Date and the first Hangover), the secret to The Hangover’s success is in these photos and what they represent. “I think it’s a lot to do with the unapologetic nature of this comedy,” he says. “I think a lot of American comedies tend to apologize for their bad behaviour in the last 10 minutes of the movie, and The Hangover just doesn’t do that. It doesn’t apologize. It’s like ‘fuck it, it’s over, just leave.’ “That was the original title, actually,” he jokes. “Fuck It, It’s Over, Just Leave. But you know what I mean—it’s this unapologetic tone that I think people responded to, because we’re used to a certain way of these stories being told.” Read article

Swine and Dine: Our writer hams it up at a Charcuterie course in France.

“Squeeze the sausage tightly so that the meat cures evenly,” says cook and food writer Kate Hill, showing me how to churn the manual meat grinder with one hand while managing the growing coil of saucisse de Toulouse with the other. We’re using a rich red shoulder of pork we purchased from a farm this morning, seasoning only with salt and pepper. There are no modern twists on the ancient cycle of sow to sausage here.

I’m in Gascony, or “France’s larder,” as the region has been dubbed because of the local abundance of duck, prunes, strawberries, Armagnac and, fittingly, pig. This intensive course in French artisan charcuterie is hosted by Hill, an American who discovered Camont, her 18th-century farmhouse, 25 years ago when she was looking for a spot to moor her barge (yes, you read that right). She’s since turned it into the culinary retreat where I’m learning how to salt, cure, cook and case meat. Read article

Montreal filmmaker Denis Villeneuve brings the Polytechnique massacre to the screen

Twenty years ago this December, as they finished up their last week of classes before the Christmas break, fourteen young women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique were killed by twenty-five-year-old Marc Lépine, who entered the school with a semi-automatic machine gun sheathed in a garbage bag, and went on a nineteen-minute shooting spree before turning his weapon on himself.

Our shared memories of December 6, 1989, are mostly related to the crime scene as it was shown on the evening news: the ambulances and police vehicles parked on the snowy bank beside the school, sirens flashing; the sobbing parents as they arrived on the scene; and the terrified students as they exited the building, shivering in their T-shirts. But our knowledge of what happened that day has always been limited, as though the locked doors of the institution, sealed with crime scene tape, served not only to hide the bodies from view, but to shield us from the traumatic realities of Lépine’s murderous rage. Read article

Nighthawk in the light of day: Tom Waits gets Real Gone on latest album and leaves the piano at home

“Hi, I’m calling from Tom Waits’ office,” says the pleasant publicist voice on the other end of the line. “I’ll put Tom through now. Are you ready?”

Tom Waits has an office? It strikes me as weird to be on the phone business-style, waiting to talk with a man who has written so many deeply moving love songs involving telephones. “Hello, hello, there is this Martha/ this is old Tom Frost,” I think to myself, quoting from the love ballad fromClosing Time (1973). “I am calling long distance/ don’t worry ’bout the cost.” Then there’s “I got a telephone call from Istanbul, my baby’s coming home today” from Frank’s Wild Years (1987). There’s Please Call Me, Baby from The Early Years Vol. II, and so on.

Telephones are in the Tom Waits idiom like whiskey, rain, red shoes, automobiles, bars, barns, coffee shops, Illinois, tango, female hitchhikers, the movies, glass eyes and peg legs, Jesus, shotguns and the circus. Good things every last one, and ample fodder for Waits’ 24-odd albums, movie soundtracks, musical plays, road shows and collaborations, which have influenced the American songbook like no other. His songs have been covered by Springsteen, The Eagles, Johnny Cash and, yes, Rod Stewart, to name a few. He’s gotta do business. So a telephone, sure. But an office?

“Hello there, where you calling from?” a voice on the other end of the line interrupts my reverie. Tom Waits sounds conversational, relaxed and slightly bored, but it’s Tom Waits nevertheless. For some reason I kind of expected him to be growling or hollering through a bullhorn. Read article

Everybody knows that Montreal is the place with the most beautiful women and the best foie gras this side of the Atlantic, but we excel in the vegetable department as well. Let it be known, from this point on, that Montreal has the best beets on the planet…

Technically, the many varieties of red, yellow and candy-cane beets are grown in the farmland outside of town. But it’s the restaurants that perform the alchemy of transforming them into the innovative and delicious dishes described below. Read post

Here in Quebec, our growing season is relatively short, but there are certain vegetables, tubers mostly, that can survive and even thrive in the root cellar. Greatest among these is the mighty beet, a.k.a beta vulgaris, aka awesome. Beets are not only grown for their leafy goodness and as an industrial food-colouring (beet powder puts the red in traditional red-velvet cake recipes), but also as a source of sugar. We love them so much, in fact, that we almost believe they might beat (or “beet”) winter: in 2010, a pilot project was launched to see if pre-wetting road salt with beet juice would help reduce the salt’s harmful effect on the water table. Turns out, it works really well!

But the main reason we grow beets is because we like to eat them. Sometimes nothing beats a good old beet, walnut and feta salad, but Montreal chefs are also inspired to get really creative with them. Below, a rundown of the city’s best beet eats…Read post

A comprehensive online guide to Montreal written for National Geographic Traveller’s Places of a Lifetime franchise:

“Je me souviens” (I remember) is Quebec’s provincial motto, and history is present everywhere in Montreal, a city teeming with architecture and culture from the past three centuries. Canada’s second largest, third oldest, and most cosmopolitan city is also a hub for technological innovation and avant-garde art — there’s an ultramodern, global sensibility here that coexists with a sense of the past. Similarly, French and English, once considered the “two solitudes,” have intermingled to make a culture of easy bilingualism that is now a fait accompli for most Montrealers. Visit the site

Almost Grown: Paul Merrick, whose firm is one of several designing Vancouver’s Olympic Village, thinks his beloved city is finally outgrowing its architectural adolescence.

If cities are like human bodies, as Paul Merrick says, then West Vancouver is the city’s long left arm thrown out into Burrard Inlet. Marine Drive, the road that hugs much of West Van’s coast, is the ticklish inner arm, and I’m driving it into the city’s heart. The Lions Gate Bridge, recently widened, is like a glittering stent in a subclavian vein — the Stanley Park Causeway — that pumps in traffic, and I am stuck in that traffic. By the time I pick Merrick up at the Harbour Air seaplane terminal, deep in the garage guts of the brand new Vancouver Convention Centre, it has taken me longer to drive the sixteen kilometres from the North Shore into downtown than it took Merrick to get here across the Strait of Georgia from Vancouver Island — a fact that greatly amuses him. “They’ve been talking about a bridge to the Island for as long as I can remember,” he chuckles, as he climbs into my car. “But there are lots of people who don’t want the Island connected to the mainland. I’m one of ’em.” Read Article