Interview with Allison Ulan on Ayurveda and Cooking

I'm so lucky. Here's an interview I did with the founder of Ashtanga Yoga Montreal, who invited me to her house to test recipes for an Autumn Yoga retreat she's offering. It's not all yoga. Actually, it's all about Ayurveda, but yoga's a part of that. So is great food. This is not "healthy", diet food, though Allison did subsist on ghee, mung beans and steamed vegetables for a few days as part of a cleanse...

Download my interview with Allison Ulan

Then I wrote an article about it for Midnight Poutine. It's copied below so you can see all the delicious pictures as you listen to the interview. The interview has a bit more info about Ayurveda and the article has a bit more about the food, so try both and tell me which you like more...kind of like the dinner party itself with analyzing two soups and two salads. I loved them all differently, each one a little more than the last, like children, right?

A Meal of Blueberries and Ayurveda

Allison Ulan, the founder of Ashtanga Yoga Montreal was kind enough to shatter my presumptions about Ayurvedic food by inviting me to a practice dinner for an Ayurvedic Retreat she will be offering next month. The last thing I thought it would be was seven courses of bread, fish, chicken, maple syrup, peaches, rice, apples, and blueberries.
The Menu:
Quebec goat cheese on Le Fromentier organic walnut bread with maple-caramelized onions, blueberry-maple broiled trout or grilled tofu, and blueberry chutney. It was composed in an assemble-you-own-appetizer kind of way:You could die happy after eating a meal of just this appetizer...
Then, the two soups: Blueberry gazpacho and blueberry cashew soup with mint and yogurtThe two salads: Organic greens with blueberry vinaigrette and carrot salad with dried blueberries (they were separate salads but I think they work well together too)The main course: Blueberry-marinated cajun chicken breasts with blueberry cherry tomato salsa, basmati rice, and green beans with lemonAnd, finally, dessert: Purple Thai maple-coconut rice with blueberry-maple sauce on blueberry honey-cooked peachesDo you sense a theme? Do you also sense that this is very much not vegetarian or Indian, two things I thought had to do with Ayurveda? Do you also think that this would fit right into the menu of one of the many good Quebec restaurants offering table d'hote tasting menus based on seasonal, local ingredients at $60 a person? I'm glad we agree on all these points. And yet, here I was in the home of a yoga instructor learning about where to find local blueberry juice (all over the place, from your neighbourhood health store to weekly farmers' markets, to the Marche des Saveurs du Quebec at marche Jean-Talon) and how to cleanse your body to do the best backbend of your life...

Allison Ulan is the founder of Ashtanga Yoga Montreal but before she taught yoga she had a 20-year dance career. In 1988, after seeing professional dancers incorporating yoga poses into their warm-ups, she figured the two could mix well. Since then she's traveled to India multiple times to study with the founder of Ashtanga, Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. Allison now teaches regularly and gives workshops on meditation and most recently, Ayurveda.

Lets get the broad definition out of the way: Ayurveda is an Indian form of traditional, natural health care that emphasizes disease prevention rather than the reduction or elimination of symptoms. It's not a quick fix, but more of a process of lifestyle adjustment, the first (and easiest) steps of which involve nutrition and exercise.

Allison credits her years of traveling as a professional dancer for making her very conscious of the healthfulness of what she puts into her body. She also credits the book "Food and Healing" by Annemarie Colbin with unintentionally exposing her to the basics of Ayurveda: "I found it intriguing how she looked at peoples' bodies from an alkaline base and from an acidic base...and she looked at different vegetarian diets, and she looked at cravings....What's intriguing are many of her bases for what she was describing about how to eat differently correlate to different doshic constitutions."

Okay, stop. What's a doshic constitution exactly?

A doshic constitution is your individual body constitution, fixed at birth, and made up of 5 elements - earth, water, fire, air and ether. Your individual constitution can fall into 1 of 3 categories, or doshas: Vata, Pitta and kapha.

"Vata is air. They're usually creative people...they usually have a tendency to be a bit more nervous. They're considered the deer, and so they have a tendency towards anxiety because they're so expansive, because they can move so easily, (but) they can also be pushed so easily. So most artists have vata in them. They usually are the extremes - people that are really tall or really short. They're like the elves or the giants.

Pitta is fire, and they're usually medium-build and quite opinionated, quite heated, they get things done....They're considered the lion of the people and they're great leaders, but they're not the best follow-through because they expect things too fast. So they're good at organizing.

Then there's Kapha, which is the elephant. They're stable - earth and water - and when they're in balance they're all about mediation and facilitation. They want people to get along and things to happen. They connect, but when they're out of balance they stagnate and they can become hedonistic."

There are more than three kinds of people in the world, though, so most often people aren't just vata, pitta or kapha. They mostly but fall somewhere between the three doshas with a strong emphasis on 1 or 2. Rarely someone is tri-doshic, an even combination of all three.

It gets a little more complicated now, since you don't stay exactly the same your whole life. Your balanced constitution fixed at birth is called Prakriti, but based on life circumstance your dosha can vary, so your current constitution, which may be unbalanced, is called your Vrikriti. You can think of the doshas as advanced personality typing, something established long before Myers-Briggs testing. You can find online tests to help determine your doshic constitution, both your Vrikriti and your Prakriti.

I was talking about a meal once. Ayurvedic food doesn't mean vegetarian, it doesn't mean without dairy, and it doesn't mean low-fat. It means eating for your individual constitution and following the seasons of the environment where you live, but it's not just about the food you eat. It's also about how you sleep, when you eat, and when you exercise, and the tenuous balance between all these factors. These are the most easily adjustable elements of Ayurveda. More unhealthy ("unbalanced" or "toxic") people may require more advanced steps and Ayurveda has solutions for those people too. There are herbs, panchakarma cleansing, acupressure massage, yoga, and vedic astrology, and these range from fun to not so fun, especially when you get into the ghee cleanses and slightly more intense detoxes.

The whole point is to restore the balance in your individual constitution based on the belief that the body is self-correcting. According to Ayurveda illness occurs when the mind gets in the way of the body by causing stress and fatigue, and neglecting proper nutrition, so if all you need to get back in balance is better nutrition and relaxation, then that's all Ayurveda will do for you. The Ayurvedic method of restoring balance starts with ensuring that the elements of fire, water, earth, air and ether are at the correct levels for each individual based on their unique constitution within the 3 doshic categories, and the first way to try to find balance is to eat foods that give you the food property you need (sweet, sour, bitter, pungent, salty or astringent) without too much of another property, since foods can fall into multiple categories.

For example, there's a problem with blueberries because they're both astringent and either sour or sweet, depending on the type of blueberry you buy. So how can a big group of people ever share the same meal if we all have slightly different constitutions and different food requirements to get ourselves back in balance?

You can adjust by adding a little of this or a little of that, so that you retain an individual food's benefit, but balance it within a dish. Sour, for instance, is good for Kaphic types but not so great for Vata, but that's why Allison adds sweetness from the maple syrup and honey in the appetizer. In the first soup she adds freshly juiced apples (and cinnamon, cumin for their digestive properties, and turmeric for astringency) and maple comes back at the end to sweeten up dessert as well. The carrots in the salad had a natural sweetness, and the dried blueberries on the other mixed green salad were sweeter from the concentration of sugars in the drying process.

Allison also insisted that everyone at the practice dinner had more similarities than differences because we're all living in the same environment. "Right now we're in what's called a Pitta and very Kapha world in Quebec, where it's very moist but it gets very hot and the two together mean that we need to dry out and cool off. It makes common sense." She suggests leafy greens for their astringency. If they're raw, they'll have the greatest drying effect, and if they're cooked, less so. If you add water to steam or stew them you're kind of limiting the whole drying effect. You might as well go take a hot shower.

"How you're cooking changes how your foods will influence your body", says Allison. Someone who's Pitta or Kapha should be having lots of fresh vegetables, but not Vata. All three doshic constitutions should be having natural sweets to cool off, and that's where fresh fruits, especially blueberries, come into play.

"They're high in antioxidants, that deep, deep colour is a sign of they're astringent quality, and they're sweet. So they're actually the perfect food right now for people to have."
So that's how can a big group of people like Allison's practice dinner party could share the same meal to get ourselves back in balance. I mean, the appetizer alone had about 7 things in it, so surely some of those things were better for some than for others, but it was all local, in season, and had tons of astringent, drying, sweet and sour blueberries. Something for everyone, like an all-inclusive resort...but more delicious.
Not everything was local. The basmati rice with the main course, the Thai purple rice with dessert, and the tofu in the vegetarian option were not grown in our great Quebec rice paddies or soybean farms. AND there goes my original "In Ayurveda it's better to be vegetarian" theory. Allison insists that some people need meat because of their individual constitutions. In Annemarie Colbin's book she talked about her husband at the time who was vegetarian, but he kept getting more anemic. Plenty of vegetarians don't have this problem, but according to Ayurveda Coleman's husband was Pitta-Vata, which means that "when he got out of balance he became dried out, anemic, emaciated, frustrated...and for him to have meat makes total sense for that constitution because it grounds." So Ayurveda isn't saying no one should be vegetarian or everyone should be vegetarian. It's also not saying that we should all have the same diet. It's saying find out what your constitution is, what environment you live in, and use those two main factors to figure out how you should eat.

This was not your average dinner party. We were guinea pigs. Happy, happy guinea pigs. Through Ashtanga Yoga Studio Montreal, Allison organizes Ayurvedic weekend retreats throughout the year, offering participants the chance to experience yoga practice in nature with nutritious food and good company. "Getting Back to Nature - Healing Harvest Weekend" is Allison's upcoming 3-day workshop in the Eastern Townships. From September 24th-26th Allison will instruct participants on how to cook what's right for your own body in Autumn, combined with 2 yoga sessions daily (all levels welcome), meditation, and free time to walk in the woods, jump into the pool or sauna, and generally unwind.

Allison chose blueberries for the theme, but other foods with astringent, drying qualities include cranberries (big in the harvest season - think Thanksgiving), mace (again, harvest season, since it's often used in pumpkin pie), basil, and parsley, in addition to those fresh greens for summer salads. Basically autumn is the easy season because so much produce is in season. You can expect the winter retreat to be a little less bountiful in terms of fresh fruits and summer vegetables, but the richness of Quebec food traditions seems to provide plenty of inspiration - pickled and canned goods, dried fruit, winter vegetables, and hot and rich stews and soups. Actually, following local food traditions is the simplest way to eat by the season. You wouldn't always follow the traditions of India if you live in Montreal, because they have three growing seasons there, very different foods are available at different times of the year from what we get here, and your body would be reacting to a very different environment. Allison did emphasize the amazing powers of fresh coconut, but we just don't get a lot of that here. Quebec apples can't really replace human blood plasma like natural, fresh coconut water, apparently.

A 3 day retreat in the Eastern Townships doesn't seem like a lot of time to allow your body to detox, but from Allison's description of the effects on some participants in the last workshop she gave, apparently even three days of yoga, meditation, a good environment, and proper nutrition is enough to trigger some effects. In the Spring some people got headaches and felt a little sick. "Yeah, that's your liver detoxing," Allison told them. They'd talked about it in advance as something that could happen, but by the third day the negative side affects had passed and, they were feeling like they could go another day on their Ayurvedic diets. Besides, there's a lake and a sauna. It's not yoga and Ayurvedic cleansing bootcamp. You saw the menu.

3 days is also enough time to teach some recipes for good health here in central Canada in the autumn - how to eat according to our environment. At the end of the retreat you get to keep the weekend manual with all the recipes and Ayurvedic guidelines to help integrate what you learned into your everyday life.

Ayurveda won't turn you into a good cook. Allison is already one of those, but you don't have to be one yourself to enjoy the retreat. The workshop may appeal to someone who wants to learn to make Allison's recipes just as much as someone who wants to simply enjoy the results and reap the benefits, and practice a little yoga and meditation while they're at it. You can certainly also go if you're much more into yoga than into cooking. This is high quality yoga instruction for all levels, not just meal after healthy meal. Maybe most importantly, you get out of the city into the Eastern Townships at their most beautiful time of year.

If that doesn't convince you, I'll go back to describing the meal: The blueberry soup was so sweet from the apple juice but dense enough to make a refreshing start to the meal post-appetizer. Then the cashew soup took the same concept of puréed blueberries and added some nutty depth and richness to a thick broth. A little bit of mint and yogurt on top held the same cooling properties of leafy greens and complemented the toasted warmth of the soup.

The sweetness of the balsamic and blueberry honey dressing added a sinful sweetness to the Ayurvedically "bitter" leafy green salad section of the meal. The dried blueberries in the carrot salad were kind of like currents in a couscous salad, but instead of couscous in the salad there was rice with the main course to dilute the sweetness of the soups and salads.

The savoury Louisiana chicken couldn't have come at a better time. If you don't like heat, you're going to have to skip the cayenne in this recipe. A spice rub of black pepper, salt, paprika, cumin, basil, thyme, turmeric, dried mustard and a lot of cayenne completely changed the focus of the meal. Suddenly there was a world of spice. You couldn't really taste the blueberry juice, garlic and dijon marinade but the chicken was more tender for it. Even without the rub the chicken would have been more than content to lie under the blueberry and cherry tomato salsa, a mild chopped salsa that could be eaten with a spoon. By skipping the spices on the chicken, however, you'd lose out on all the medicinal properties. There's a reason Indian cooking is so full of spice. Many have preservative qualities, a necessity for making food last longer in a hot, humid climate, but spices play a large role in doshic balancing independent of where you live.

Then dessert. If I'd ever imagined that peaches sautéed with a little honey could make the perfect base for coconut-milk sweetened sticky rice, I would be a much bigger believer in fusion cuisine. Often fruit desserts seem too light and don't really satisfy, even after such a large (though generally light) meal, but the chewiness and creaminess of the pile of sweetened rice was enough to fill out any empty places in the belly. There's a great book called "Sweetness In The Belly" and if you could get Thai rice in Ethiopia this recipe would fit right in.

If nothing else, after Allison's "Healing Harvest Yoga and Ayurveda Weekend" you'll be a little healthier, a little more self-aware...and a little more full.

Healing Harvest Yoga and Ayurveda Weekend with Allison Ulan
September 24, 25 and 26 at L'Arc-en-Ciel in the Eastern townships.
$130 for the weekend without accommodation, $230 with accommodation
For more information and to register you can contact Allison Ulan at allisonulan@yahoo.ca

Ashtanga Yoga Montreal
Allison Ulan

Parisa

●●●●●●●●○○
8 out of 10
4123 rue de Verdun

Montreal, QC

This is a secret that should get out:

Pomegranate should replace balsamic and lemon goes with everything, but just enough, not too much.

The real secret that should get out is that Parisa is a Persian restaurant in Verdun with a young Iranian Chef in the kitchen with good tastebuds and stellar interpretations of traditional recipes. It's a nicely sized menu of appetizers, grilled and braised meats, grouped as "traditional", "Healthy", or "Chef's Recommendations", carefully seasoned and carefully paired with much more than a heap of white rice. Actually, the rice was the biggest surprise of the meal. I'm not going to write an entire review about rice, but I am going to be pretty enthusiastic.

I would never have thought that rice with dill, thyme, shredded carrots, and lima beans could be as fluffy as air but still have a real flavour. It's all about getting the highest quality rice, says Chef Payam. He has to get it from Toronto, since the imported Basmati isn't available isn't available in Montreal. It also about washing it thoroughly to remove the polish (this also keeps the rice kernels apart), soaking, and boiling and then steaming it (I think that's what he said...) to inject it with air. You can still taste the little bit of olive oil used to keep the rice from sticking to the bottom of the boiling pot, but the most flavour comes from the rice itself. This is rice you just want to keep eating and eating. It came with a braised lamb shank as part of the Baghalie Polo Mahicke ($17.95) in a slightly lemony gravy that was a bit over-salted and not wonderfully tender. I'd order it again just to get the dilled rice.

Simple saffron (real saffron, not turmeric, the cheap substitute) basmati rice comes with grilled chicken chunks in walnut and pomegranate sauce ("Fessenjoun" - $14.95). It was supposed to be with chicken thighs but all that were available were breasts, so the results weren't as tender as they would have been normally. When your restaurant is a secret it's hard to get the turnover you need to keep everything stocked and prepped. The sauce was the highlight here. At first it seemed sweet and sour, and then the bitterness of the walnuts kicked in at the end.

All these main dishes came with a side salad - a standard handful of mixed greens with what I assumed to be a balsamic vinaigrette. Nope, wrong. Tamarind was the souring agent and maybe some pomegranate for sweet, and of course, lemon. Take that ubiquitous balsamic.

Barberrie rice, an un-dilled but saffron-infused rice, comes with the Jujeh chicken breast skewer ($12.95). This chicken had marinated long enough, and had a light lemon flavour...actually most dishes had a lemon flavour. It was never overpowering, but it was always balanced with the rest of the herbs, spices (my guess is sumac and thyme) and meats. It was also never the only flavour. That would have made the food boring. Persian food is not boring, it's just rarely as well done as it is at Parisa. Barberrie is kind of like a currant. It's a small, sour fruit sprinkled on the rice. The other highlight of this rice was the grilled tomato that gets squeezed on top. What a great idea for seasoning rice. You need a flavourful tomato for this to work, but Quebec is full of good tomatoes. One that's a little sour is even idea, because the sweetness would get lost in the starch.

The only time the acid was overwhelming was in the mushroom appetizer. I kind of liked it, though. This one was not so traditional. I don't think there are a whole lot of mushroom dishes in Iran, but I could be wrong. It used lime instead of lemon. A whole lot of lime. The whole button mushrooms absorbed a ton of oil and were incredibly juicy. The pomegranate reduction was hard to identify since the lime was so strong, but the whole thing worked really well with the mild sweetness of the finely chopped deep-fried garlic on top.

You can start with a soup, Ghorme sabzi, for $3.95 for a small or $5.95 for a large, but you get it for just $1 with the purchase of any of the above mentioned mains. It would be more than enough for a lunch, though, since it's loaded with rich broth, oil, leek, spinach and dill. It also had noodles, which I found a bit odd, but apparently that's acceptable. It just kind of makes the thing harder to eat and a bit more like something you eat at home, not something at a gourmet-ish restaurant. I say "gourmet-ish" because the olive oil was artfully drizzled and the soup was garnished with parsley and spiced walnuts. The walnuts weren't as crunchy as they could have been...a little time in a skillet or an oven would have helped, but they weren't overly sweetened (which would have been a disaster) or too salty. So all in all, a nice touch.

One of my favourite things was the Mirsza Ghasemi, a roasted eggplant dish ($4.95). This is not babaganoush. Why does everyone think every eggplant dip ever created is babaganoush? There's no tahini in this. There's a slightly smoky flavour of the eggplant and little tomato combined with a slight pucker of lemon. With warm, thin pita bread, it was perfect. There was a whole lot of oil in there, since eggplant sucks that stuff up like a sponge. but oh was it good. The texture is left slightly chunky to create a thickness that you need to chew and enjoy before swallowing. On this menu, "healthy" means healthy fats, not low-fat or low-calorie.

You can also get the home-made yogurt or the Fizzy Yogurt imported carbonated beverage. It's just carbonated water, milk and yogurt culture, but it's about the best carbonated anything you have, full of healthy bacteria in yogurt, the Middle Eastern/European and now North American super-food. Get on the food trend bandwagon, or go to Parisa where it was a practical tradition long before it was the cool, healthy thing to eat.

Really, just go for the rice. Chef Payam tried to convince me it had fewer calories than other rice, but I think that's hooey. I think the only way I can believe this is if what he really meant was that because the rice was fluffy there was more air in it, so you eat less per portion. A denser rice would have more actual rice per serving. BUT you add the oil in this rice and you up the calories and fat anyway. It's still so good for you, and come on, it's rice. There's nothing unnatural about it. It's the highest quality, most naturally-flavourful rice in Montreal, I'm convinced. That's a completely ungrounded statement, by the way, but I believe it. Oh, you also go here for the beef. The ground beef is incredibly tender and rich. Fat is flavour and ground meat has flavour. Where the lamb failed, the beef succeeds. This Chef knows his seasoned meats, his rice, and his herbs and spices. Wait, he also knows his fruit...hmm...maybe lets just say he knows a thing or two about Persian cooking.

Expect To Pay: $20-$30 per person including tax and tip (no wine cost since it's BYOB)
When: lunch and dinner, I think everyday but Sunday but call for reservations so they know someone's coming and can braise things and marinade things in preparation for your arrival.
4123 rue de Verdun
514-768-7777

Gulf of Mexico Seafood In Canada

Gulf of Mexico Seafood Report

I've been really surprised there hasn't been more local coverage of concerns with the import of seafood from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada. It's as if people don't care or don't know...in the US they certainly care. Here in Montreal and in the rest of Canada gulf shrimp and fish do show up on all sorts of restaurant menus and in stores.

You can click on the link above to download a report I did for CKUT radio 90.3FM on the safety concerns of fish and seafood coming from the Gulf of Mexico, and the impact on Canadian fish and seafood markets on a local level, featuring the Poisonnerie Atwaer, Poissonerie Waldman and Chef Jean-Paul Giroux from Cuisine et Dépendence restaurant in Montreal.

Mini-Contest: Be My Radio Restaurant Guest

I'm about to undertake another throwdown, but I'm just one person, a rather small person, and I need some help...

I'm heading to Le Petit Alep on Jean-Talon, right across from the Jean-Talon market, for a lunch of mezes and kebabs and other delicious Middle Eastern delicacies. I want to get through as many of the house specialties as possible, and that's more easily done with more stomachs. I'm simultaneously going to be recording the meal to edit into a radio feature for CKUT, to be played on the Friday Morning After show as an on-site restaurant review, like I did with Indian Maison Curry House a few months back.

So if you ever wanted to be on radio, or if you ever thought it would be fun to accompany a restaurant reviewer to work (it won't be as sneaky as usual, since I'll have the audio recorder out on the table...), or you've got some insight into Syrian food, now's your chance!

How to Win:

Leave a comment below telling me one of the following:
a) your favourite Middle Eastern dish (why, where, when)
b) berating me for being culturally unaware by grouping all Middle Eastern food together instead of separating by country

Top marks go to dish descriptions and offers to pay for the meal...Just kidding. Unfortunately I can't cover your meal costs, but I can offer you radio air-time and your name in print.

Rules:
You must live in Montreal, be free in the next two weeks for lunch or dinner, like Middle Eastern food and be willing to share, let me take pictures of dishes before you dive in, accept that leftovers are inevitable and not stuff yourself silly because you hate taking them, try to enjoy yourself,and most importantly:
You must critique. "It's fine" is not a critique, unless justified. You don't have to be a poet, but I like to hear another opinion. Agree, disagree - both are fine, but if you think something about the food, then a reader or a radio listener might too, and they deserve, and probably want, to know.

Sourdough Grilled Cheeses at the Mile End Market

I have one more favourite stall at the Mile End Market. I don't even know the name of the stall, but what I do know is they take their fresh sourdough bread (the only bread they make) and some incredible cheese and make very simple grilled cheese sandwiches in front of you.

Okay, so a lot of places are touting the simple grilled cheese, the gourmet cheese, the classic, the modern, etc these days. Comfort food. There are whole restaurants devoted to grilled cheese, and I don't even eat grilled cheese(!), but I love this stall. I've chatted with the woman who tells me that it's her husband (I'm pretty sure it was husband) who has spent the last year or something ridiculous like that honing his sourdough bread craft. He inherited sourdough starter from a former roommate of some sort and kept it going. All he makes is sourdough bread, and the lady bakes other things, but at the market her job is to grill this bread with some organic cheese. There is absolutely nothing fancy to this, but I love this couple.

Across the way a woman sells pickled asparagus and honey-dijon vinaigrette. Now honey dijon vinaigrette is about the easiest thing in the world to make, but this is from a very high-quality honey from her farm. I don't know how you would possibly get through all this vinaigrette without it going bad, since there are really no preservatives in it and it couldn't last more than a few weeks max after opening, but good luck.

Pickled asparagus are something I never would buy for myself, but house guests bought them after sampling them and left the bottle at my house. I do not throw out organic local products, no matter how much I dislike refined sugar. Basically the pickling mixture is vinegar, sugar and salt. I ended up loving these things, though. They're the dessert of vegetables - not sour or hot like kimchi or bitter or chewy like pickles. If pickles were this good I think I would like them. I do love asparagus, however, and the natural sweetness makes this a refreshing topping on a salad. It's basically a roasted asparagus salad pre-made and without the oily dressing; you don't even need to add anything to it. You can snack on them as they are, or combine them with something else, like lettuce or carrots, which actually helps to dilute the intensely sweet brine.

She also makes some tasty-looking muffins. I never buy them because I never want 6, but did you ever think of rhubarb and almond in a muffin? I didn't. She did. Her blueberries and wild blackberries also look plump and ripe in their muffin homes, as well as the more traditional strawberry-rhubarb option. Flavours change every week, so Thursday 4:30-8:30 at Parc Lahaie (St-Laurent and St-Joseph) is your chance to be surprised.