Sam's given quite a thorough and amazing summary of the events surrounding his, and Leen's, visit with Dave and me in Montreal. I thoroughly appreciate, and am humbled by the travails which he both went through, in getting up here and home again -- I thank Him that you are both safe and whole -- and at the same time I am at odds with trying to figure out "What th' heck?" happened on the way back! (That Quebec road rage misadventure certainly is nothing like I've ever heard, or seen, reported by my friends and family living in Canada.) I should say that, upon meeting them, one of things that immediately struck me about Sam and Leen is their incredible warmth and openness. They are immediate and genuine persons who made me feel right at home with them in my own home :-) It is a gift. So I think it's reasonable for someone as courteous as Sam to expect some common-sense courtesy on the road, as well as towards his person; but sadly this was not and is not always the case. I really hope Sam doesn't mean it when he says they both "never wants to go back to Canada" in the Peter-Sellers sense of the phrase. Abrupt differences in the perceptual mindsets between Quebec and New England (and for that matter between driving in Quebec, and the island of Montreal, and the rest of Canada) probably disguised the overall impact of culture shock (i.e. that Sam ran into "les nègres blancs d'Amerique".)

But I'm not sure anyone would care for a lecture on the Two-Turning-to-Three Solitudes right now, so I'll just skip along and comment on some of Sam's comments regarding my hometown, my family, my house, my cat... It's always cool seeing the world through someone else's eyes. :-) For example, as he noticed, the "pictionary-style" road signs in Quebec follow the International pictographic protocol which handily circumvent most language barriers; and the red/yellow/green traffic signals are lit in square/diamond/circle shapes, to aid folks with red-green colour blindness (more people have that problem than we generally realize). Frankly, I never noticed before that these traffic lights are a Canadian convention... Interesting. And Sam is right that Dave and I calmed down right after our meeting them (Sam and Leen). Like I said, the Stoddards have a gift for putting one's heart at ease.

And what else? Oh yes...

> ... their home is beautifully but not overly lavishly decorated. The furniture is all classy and elegant, and there are some truly interesting plants, including a woven umbrella tree, that add color and atmosphere. (Our home consists of boxy furniture, except for the conspicuously scattered elegant items we've received as presents over the years. And there's not a plant to be found, because we tend to kill them.) At some point we met Pixel, the self-appointed queen of the household.

Sam, you didn't tell them about my boxed-up boxy basement! Heh. And I forgot to give you some of my "guaranteed practically unkillable" baby-umbrella plants to fix your brown thumb streak. :-) After all, Pixel enjoyed snacking on the tree and it's still going, isn't it? I know she must have also enjoyed *Sam* to want to snack on his toes, hehee.


> ... I picked up the "correct" editions of the other Harry Potter books, including the new one that went on sale just that day.

Yeah, I just started reading the first one -- addictive enough that I didn't see your "Adventures with Sam" post on RinkWorks until much later. "The Philosopher's Stone" is great!!!!!!!! Now I crave a copy of the "Sorceror's Stone" to see in live action whether Scholastic changed perfectly good Briticisms like "shan'ts" to boring "won'ts"...


> ... So when Wolf gave us a tour of her cupboards and refrigerator, and the only thing we recognized was a jar of mayonnaise -- when, in fact, the mayonnaise was one of a minority of items that was labeled with words made up of the 26 letters western civilization knows and loves -- well, if you can figure out what emotion includes both "enticed" and "scared" at the same time, that's the one that would describe our anticipation of the impending meal.

LOL. You make it sound like I was serving you your Last Meal before the execution ^_^. Anyway you're right -- Hellman's mayo absolutely RULES. (Pssst... You forgot to mention the presence of evil CHEEZ WHIZ in the fridge.)


> Come to find out, the meal was amazingly wonderfully amazing and wonderful. Pork ribs cooked in some kind of delicious juice sauce stuff (maybe Wolf can fill in the details, because I never did catch what was in it), duck, curried rice (spicy to us, not at all to them), Shanghai cabbage, red peppers. And salad, which, now that I think about it, I forgot to take some of, and now I'm really mad, because, dang, that salad looked *awesome*. Shoot. Gah.

The pork ribs were cooked in... erm... hoisin sauce, dark soya, 5-spices powder (cloves, fennel, cassia bark, aniseed), fermented tofu in red bean paste, star anise crushed by mortar and pestle, and honey and crushed garlic. Yep: wasn't nary a drop of ketchup in there at all. Dave finished it off with a crispy pork coating by char-broiling the ribs in his flamin' gas bar-b, of course. Oh yeah, he'll also be happy to fax you some of his salad if you want.


> The Shanghai cabbage was cool ... I think I insulted Wolf by comparing the taste to spinach.

To be fair, I guess the closest comparison for the delicate flavour of Shanghai bok choy would indeed be with spinach/celery. It's actually more similar to pale endive leaves minus the bitterness. And yeah, IRON CHEF totally floored me by featuring the exact same theme vegetable that I'd fed you at supper. And, if you'll forgive me for mentioning this particular quirk... The other thing that astonished me about Sam is how he watched part of the TV show upside down, lying on the floor. But that's exactly what *I* do many a times with Dave! You don't know just how natural, and utterly relaxed it seemed to me, for Sam to be doing this; and I'm sorry if I seemed surprised in pointing it out.


> In the morning, after the usual morning rituals, I stepped into the kitchen, and Wolf was already there, and she was wearing this really cool...uh...thing.

It was... a thong bikini! *evil grin* No, surely your powers of description are better than that. One of my friends has called it her "Mou-mou" and "Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat". The latter sounds like a pretty fair description...


> I started cutting up some ham for the Canadian bacon and mixing some eggs, milk, and fresh grated Romano for the scrambled eggs. And started cooking. Now, the thing about breakfast is, try as I might to do otherwise, I appear to be only capable of cooking bacon the way I like it -- nice and crispy. ... So the bacon and the Canadian bacon both came out cooked to a turn the way I like it, but I suspect it was too well done for everybody else. They were polite about it.

I've never had ham in that fashion, but it's true: I *did* like it done that way. It was great, Sam.


> Oh, also, not thinking, I used a knife to transfer a slice of bacon from the cast iron to the teflon pan, and I think I gave Wolf a heart attack. She was polite about that, too. Sorry about that, Wolf -- I think the knife only hit the teflon once, and it just kind of poked it. Erm. If I ruined it, I'll send you an official RinkWorks teflon pan in the mail or something. Uh.

Criticism? You're actually scoping for criticism of your cooking??? Uh. Well, I guess you could have used the cast iron for the scrambled eggs (which Dave really loved, even the next day, because of the cheese btw) and the teflon pan for the ham and bacon, instead of vice versa. And never fear. There's only one (1) 2-inch knife scratch in the Dupont pan, so it's not like the coating's about to immediately disintegrate with a bang and destroy the ozone layer. 'Course, if it does do so anytime soon, I'll be sure to send you the $266 billion dollar bill for the cleanup job :-)

And I'm kicking myself for not offering you some of the chocolate-coated orange peel specially candied according to Minamoon's recipe. Ack. It's really too bad your visit was so transitory. It was great to find out that Leen was quite the birder and that the Biodome offered such exotic specimens (half of which I wouldn't have seen without Leen's keen eyes; thanks). Afterwards Dave and I decided those stationary alligators really must have been stuffed because they weren't even breathing. And I know for all your generosity and kindness, you guys were -- nevertheless -- all set up to cunningly poison my precious tender bod with MOXIE but I sure foxed you! Ha hahahahahaha! I had my revenge: Leen is now a confirmed cat lover, hehe. And I think Moxie's fine. Its can color even matches well with B-G's Jaffas.

Wolf "Food funny: did you ever get to sample the Poutine at Lafleur's?" spirit