Last week at B&M Restaurant on St-Viateur two esteemed butchers armed with nothing but cutting boards and, well, knives, faced off against each other and two whole lambs. Their goal: to break them down into the nicely tied shoulders, legs, neck, chops, filet, loin, ribs, rack and all the odd bits we see - or don't see - in butcher shops. They took two giant slabs of cleaned meat and raced for 30 minutes to see who could do the best job.

Now I know Nouveau Palais was written about on this fine blog a few years back, but not like this. While we do love their night menu, events and connection to the Grumman' 78 taco truck, this Mile End classic also has something else that Midnight Poutine loves: brunch.

The sun is starting to shine, the days are longer and the terraces are opening. We are getting closer and closer to Summer, which means that soon it will be time to adjust our eating habits to brighter days. Gone will be the days where the contemplation of a warm comfort plate is needed to keep us motivated until dinner time. For a few months, we can wave goodbye to the need to keep warm with casseroles and hearty soups. But how does one go from a favourite Winter dish to a lighter Summer one? In this series, I will focus on exploring how we can make those changes and still stick to flavours that we enjoy and that makes us smile.

In this introductory post, I suggest how to go from a wintery green pea and mint soup to a fresher version for the Summer. This inexpensive and quick meal only requires a few ingredients and you can easily adjust the flavours to your personal taste. This versatile soup is a perfect example of how we can adjust a delightful Winter dish into a cooler one that uses the same delightful ingredients. All the products used here are quite healthy and once mixed together they become a vivid green colour; which in itself is a nice depiction of a fresh dish. This is a vegetarian soup, if you like a more consistent and meaty soup you can be creative and add pieces of smoked ham to it.

While a fast food empire reigns four floors below in Montreal's underground maze of shopping malls, way up on the fifth floor of the Eaton Centre is a new bistro and wax museum, the North American outpost of the Parisian museum and similarly decorated restaurant of the same name. Beaux Arts this ain't, but the lunch fare by Montreal's Restaurant Europea, the "through the looking glass" Imax-style intro by Moment Factory and the uncannily realistic portrayal of Quebecois, Canadian and international celebrities in wax (Jacques Cartier's eyes don't follow you, but Trudeau is a bit shifty) makes the Grevin Wax Museum a strangely enticing new downtown attraction.

If you've been hankering for some buttery, rich croissants, get ready: Montreal's second annual f�te du croissant is this weekend!

"There was no brunch during World War II, or when we built the railroads, or when we went to the moon. People got up in the morning, had a breakfast, and then did things."

I remember reading this humourously misanthropic diatribe by a New York Daily reporter against the apparently over-indulgent weekend dining ritual, surprised to see that there are those who believe that the indolent semi-meal of brunch should be abolished. They complain about these happy lingerers, sipping on the dregs of bloody Ceasars long after polite conversation has already worn thin, waiting to foot the bill for their expensive eggs, and trying to delay the dawning march of the imminent work week for just a little longer.

But what a wholly inaccurate picture of what brunch could, and should be!