La Maison Grisou began as a kitchen I invented for a series of mysteries and then had to keep honest. A novel can get away with a pot of something fragrant on the stove. A recipe cannot, and the week I started actually cooking what the books claimed was being cooked, half of it turned out wrong in the ways a reader from St-Boniface catches in one sentence.
So the cooking published here is tested, and where it comes from is not decorative: Franco-Manitoban, Ukrainian-Canadian, prairie, out of a two-dollar recipe box from an estate sale and a family that never wrote anything down properly.
The other shelf comes from the mysteries, which are an education in evidence whether you wanted one or not. A recipe card is a witness — present, sincere, and missing the four things it assumed you already knew. A cooking video is a performance of a result. Fifty episodes about one case can be one police statement read aloud with music. None of that makes them worthless. It makes them sources, and a source has a limit somebody should be willing to name.
I cook in a small kitchen, I am from here, and I am wrong about roughly one thing a week. The pieces filed under Distinctions are mostly me working out which week.