Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Midlife Happiness project, where we share inspiring stories to bring some happy into your life.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: Have a pretty good day all year.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Welcome back to the Midlife Happiness project.
And today I have another wonderful guest. It is Mike. And I just am getting to know Mike now. And he's a fascinating guy, and he's got a really, really interesting sort of story to tell us about the thing that he's introduced to his life that has not only introduced happiness to his life, but it sort of led to us other interests, one thing leading to another. And it's really just very fascinating how one thing can kind of lead to other dimensions of happiness in your life. And so on that note, welcome, Mike. How are you?
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Very well, thank you, Sarah. Nice to be here.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Oh, I'm delighted. Well, Mike has a daughter and she's grown up and moved away, and him and his wife are happily married. And we have another canadian, and he's here to talk about, again, his thing, that thing that he has mindfully, consciously brought into his life that's really added some happiness to his life. And Mike, on that note, what is the thing?
[00:01:40] Speaker B: The thing, Sarah, I think that I would describe it as a culinary interest. I belong to a men's cooking group, and that's really the thing that has sort of worked for me from working life to retirement life.
So just to back up a little bit, we worked, both of us had businesses in Ottawa, in Canada, and we had the opportunity to sell those businesses early on. It was early retirement, really. It wasn't a planned thing, but I was 52, so that's quite young to sort of change tax.
But we sold the business, we sold our house. We moved from a city that we knew, and we knew a lot of people into a small town, to a condominium, into a lifestyle that was completely different in terms of a retirement type of step.
But the one constant that I did have was I belonged to a men's cooking group in Ottawa for a few years, enjoyed it. It was a good group of people. And when I moved to Niagara in the lake, actually, a few months after we moved here, I said to my wife, I think this would be a wonderful place to start up a chapter for Les Marmitants. And when I looked into it, there had actually been a chapter that had been started up by a few friends just a few months before I sort of thought of it. So somebody beat me to it.
But I quickly joined the local chapter. There are 19 chapters of this organization across Canada and in the US. So it's quite an interesting organization, and I've enjoyed it ever since we've been here almost 20 years now. And I've been president of the local Niagara chapter for the last seven years. So it's really kept me busy and interested, enjoying a different group of people, so different group of members as well as the chefs as well as the wineries that are involved in pairing up with the food and so on. So it's a great sort of consistent thing that I've been able to keep up with.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: For those of people who are watching or listening, can you tell us a bit about Les Marmitants?
[00:04:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it's something that was started in Quebec about over 30 years ago. Les Marmitants means kitchen helper in French, so that's where it comes about.
There are, as I said, 19 chapters that we now have, and we've got a few more chapters that we may add in the next year or two. Basically, what happens is there's in Niagara, we have about 30 or 40 men who are interested in cooking from all different walks of life, all different skill sets, but they're all interested in learning about cooking and enjoying eating and usually pairing it up with wine.
So we meet once a month on a Monday night, which is where most restaurants are closed.
We had a guest chef that comes in from one of the local restaurants. They volunteer their time, the chefs, and they come in and they'll create a menu, bring in the ingredients. We break up into teams. We cook for from 06:00 till 08:00 at night, and then we eat and enjoy the food and the wine pairings from 08:00 till 10:00 we're lucky here because we meet at Niagara College, which is a wonderful local college that has a tremendous culinary program, culinary hospitality. They also have a program for teaching winery, teaching brewery, teaching distillery. So we try and take advantage of all those components at the college. So it's fun. Yeah.
[00:05:38] Speaker A: There's so much to kind of take apart here because, first of all, I think what's really cool about this is my understanding that is this is just for men.
And I think that that's interesting. There might be some women listening and going, well, hey, why can't I be a part of that? But the reason I think it's interesting is women, generally speaking, are very good about getting together, forming groups, be it, you know, if they're playing cards or mahjong or book groups, or even just getting together. But sometimes I feel like. I know this is sometimes the case with my husband.
He's just sort of along for the ride and he needs something just for himself. And men. Sometimes it just seems there aren't necessarily as many opportunities. And so I kind of like this, the idea behind this, that this is men getting together and cooking. And of course, the women in their lives are benefiting from this.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: That's true. I mean, and we've certainly discussed that topic, and I'm sure down the road there may be some opportunities to create a women's only similar group or to verge a little bit.
We do have our next event, actually, in a week from now, is our final event for the season. We start up again in September, and we always have a spousal event. So the men go in in the afternoon, we cook for a few hours, and the ladies arrive at 530 for a nice reception and then a nice dinner. And we try to show them what we do.
And so it's not just going out and having fun with the boys, it's actually creating something that's quite good. The other part of it, of course, is, as my wife often mentions, I do bring home some leftovers every now and again, or I recreate the meal a week or so later, which is part of the fun as well. So that's what we're, we tend to sort of enjoy both ends.
[00:07:48] Speaker A: The other thing that I wanted to bring to everybody's attention, you may have heard Mike refer to retiring at the early age of 52. But the more I get to know Mike, and I'm listening to him talk, it occurs to me, well, he retired from his previous job, but you actually never really retired.
No sooner did you retire and move than you started something else professionally in your life. Do you want to tell us about that?
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, as I mentioned earlier, I'd taken a sommelier course, so I worked in the wine business here in Niagara. We're very fortunate. We have about 100 different wineries in the area. So it's a very big part of the culture and, and the neighborhoods and just getting to know all the wineries and all the people that are involved in that business.
When I was working at one of the wineries locally, there were a few other people that I was chatting to that were doing the same thing. They were younger than I was, but we started talking about the fact that in this area, there happened to be, as I say, a number of wineries, but no craft breweries. If you think of California, New Zealand, Australia. And so they're always a few craft breweries in the middle of all these wineries. It just always made sense somehow. In Ontario, we were a little behind that fact. And so the three of us got together and thought it would be fun to create a brewery. Obviously it took a few years to get the business plan, get some money together, find the location, go through the whole process of creating a new business, and particularly a new business that involves alcohol, production of alcohol and the sale of alcohol. There's a lot of red tape involved in that, but we were able to do it. Took us a few years. We actually opened the first microbrewery craft brewery in this area. There are now over a dozen of them, so it's fun. This was in 2012 when we opened ours.
As I mentioned, quite often I stayed on for a few years after I helped to get it up and running. The novelty of lugging the 50 liter kegs around at my age quickly became something that I wasn't as interested in. So I sold my shares back to the younger partners. But I still drink and promote the product and it's a lot of fun. It's nice to see it doing well and see the other breweries doing well, and to go into most of the restaurants and bars in the area and see that particular beer. So it's fun.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: So definitely it's not food, wine, beer. All of this is of real interest to you and obviously is what connected you with the Les Marmitants. Let me ask you, how did you discover Les marmitants?
[00:10:43] Speaker B: It was a friend of mine in Ottawa, Sarah, who was talking to me one evening, I think we were probably out for dinner someplace, and he said, by the way, I belong to a club. I just joined it. And you may be interested in coming along and seeing what it's about. And that's how we get a lot of our members, just through word of mouth. They're invited in to come as a guest and they'll come for two or three events. Once they've done three events as a guest, then they're quite often asked if they'd like to join. So that was what happened to me. And as I said, I kept it going when I moved to Niagara. But it's, it's been fun. And you're right, it does tie into a lot of. I mean, traveling for me is also a big part of our lives. We've enjoyed lucky enough to enjoy some good trips. We tend to go away for three or four months at a time. So Italy for three months or Australia for three months, coming immersed in those kinds of things. But food and wine are always part of our interest when we do travel, whenever we can. And so most of the places that we've been to.
We've been fortunate enough to enjoy good local food and the local wines and the local things that people enjoy in restaurants and bars in that area. So it's fun.
[00:12:05] Speaker A: And what's interesting about food is whether you like to cook or not. The one thing that's undeniable culturally across the board, wherever you go, is food brings people together.
It's always interesting here where we live, if you go to make plans, oh, we should get together, it never even comes up. Well, what would we do? You just automatically roll into, well, are we going to your house for dinner? Do you want to go out for dinner? It's assumed that you're getting together for a meal, and so there's that huge social part of it. And has your involvement with Les Marmitas helped you socially in your community, especially considering you had just, you moved there from somewhere else? Did it contribute to setting you up with a good group of friends?
[00:12:59] Speaker B: It absolutely did.
Part of it was the membership. So the 40 or so other members of Le Marmito, all who had the same interest. When I walked into the room, I knew right away that they at least shared an interest.
[00:13:13] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: So some of them have become very good friends. We've also met a lot of the chefs and people that. And that's an interesting group of people in this area. I've met a lot of the people that are involved in the wineries, from ownership to winemakers to people just working at the wineries. So all those groups have tied into, really, to the Marmita. It's been an interesting sort of part of our lives to create more connections and more people with similar interests, and that's really.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: And has your wife got to know some of the wives of these gentlemen? So it's bigger than just a group of guys getting to know one another.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. And we have a gala event every year in one of the different chapters this year, actually, next month we're off to New Orleans, which will be a fabulous place to be. I've never been before. Ellen has been, but I have never been.
But there are two chapters in the US that have decided to do an off site gala event. So there are 14 of us from the Niagara chapter with our spouses that are going to go to New Orleans for three or four days or five days, some of them a little longer, just to make it into a holiday. And that group, we've already had a few meetings together with the spouses to make sure that we get to know each other before we go. I think that's going to be a lot of fun and we're going to explore a new area for a lot of us, but we'll do it together and with the same kind of focus on food, which there is plenty of.
[00:14:53] Speaker A: In that particular scene, which I think everybody likes.
Maybe if you could describe for us, because I'm listening to you talk about this and it's so interesting, and I think what often people, they have an interest in something, but it's sort of intimidating. They think, I don't really know if I'm good enough to qualify for this.
Can you give us a sense of the first time you attended one of these? I don't know. Do you refer to them as meetings, gatherings, cook offs? I don't know what term you'd use, but can you describe, like, the first time you went there and sort of described the experience?
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I think to your point, as I mentioned before, a lot of these members have very, very different skill sets in the kitchen. So there may be some that have really enjoyed the chopping vegetables and just do it like a master chef, but others are just like home cooks, just chopping away. What brings us together, I mean, our tagline is friendship through gastronomy, and that's a great tagline. What we want to do is have fun, be friends, have some camaraderie in the kitchen. We also want to learn something. So if we can walk out from that evening's event and have had fun putting it together, have enjoyed the meal, but have learnt a specific skill of how to filet a fish or something like that, that's a perfect event. That, for us, is what we really enjoy.
So it's not intimidating in that there are just, we break up into teams. If you don't feel comfortable filleting a salmon, then you can work on the vegetables or the salad or the soup, and we're all there to help each other. Plus the guest chef is there to oversee and to help as well. So that's our whole idea, is to create an interest but have some fun. So it's not a pressure group at all. It's having some fun.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: I think I speak for myself. You've heard the term joiner. There are some people that just join clubs or organization, and it's easy to sort of compartmentalize people. And are you a joiner or are you not? But what I think is kind of fascinating about what you're telling me about les marmitants is it's not really a club. It seems more just like a group of friends.
And you say it's not so much intimidating as it is a really great opportunity to, sure, learn about different foods and way of preparing it, but also meeting new people without maybe the kind of the social construct that goes along with sort of joining clubs. I think we all know what that means. Sometimes there's sort of a social pressure that can go along with it. And this doesn't sound like that's what's playing here.
[00:18:06] Speaker B: No, I agree.
It's very relaxed. As I mentioned, people are welcome to bring a guest to come and join us for an evening's event, and they may decide that's not for them or they may come back and join again.
Often people will come try it out, and they'll come back. So it's interesting. I think for the most part, people are intrigued by it. And it's the same with the chefs. As I mentioned earlier, we're inviting chefs to come and dedicate an evening to having some fun in the kitchen.
And they willingly will come, and quite often they'll say, that was so much fun. I'll come back and do this again, you know, in a year from now or two years from now. So we always have a list of all the chefs that we want to invite for the first time or for the third time. So there are a number of chefs that have come to us and worked with us over the 20 or 30 years that have come back every few years. So it's fun. Fun from a lot of different walks of life.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: What I like about this conversation is I think what's going to end up happening is people who are listening. You're going to have two groups of people, men, that will start researching this, but then you'll also have our female listeners who want to sign up their husbands, because wouldn't it be nice if a man cooked?
That's a bonus.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a big part of it. I mean, I do virtually all the cooking at home. My wife loves that. She helps to clean up and she helps to prep with me.
And a lot of us are in the same boat. We tend to do most of the cooking at home, which the wives love.
It's an interesting dynamic, I think, that we've sort of created, but the bottom line is that it's something that is enjoyable, but it's creating a bit of a skill set as well. And it's something you can take home with you and learn. If you learn something that evening, you could try it again the next week.
So you talked about the offshoots from something like that we do a lot of entertaining and we tend to entertain here. When you say, let's get together with friends, quite often, we'll say, well, let's get together. We'll have dinner and we'll have dinner for six people or eight people. And I don't just do pasta. I just, you know, I'll do something three or four courses. And sometimes we go all out and feed a menu and have some wine pairings, depending on who we have over. But it's, it's, it's fun. I enjoy doing it. And that's part of what, the skill set that I've learned to be a little more relaxed in creating that even for people that have never, you know, come to my place for dinner before, I still feel comfortable enough to create something and take a shot. So it's fun. Yeah.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: Well, I think it's great. I mean, you're, you are in a fortunate position in that you've always had and known that you've had this real keen interest in food and wine. And for those people watching or listening, I think, you know, they may say, well, I guess I'd like to try that, too. And obviously, we would encourage anybody to give something like this a shot and do your research. Absolutely. But I think the other interesting takeaway is that you tried it, it worked out, and now this is a big part of your life and something that you really look forward to. And I think for people out there, it doesn't necessarily have to be cooking. It could be gardening, it could be any number of things, but it's worth trying. I mean, it certainly can't hurt you. And everybody is looking for something that they can get excited about and really sink their teeth into and learn about it. And to a certain extent, if there's things you've been doing your whole life, that's fine and well, but when we're in this unique time of our life where it's, let's try something totally different and like you say, let's just see how it goes. It works out. It doesn't. But in all likelihood, you're going to meet some people along the way, have some laughs, and there's always a pretty decent chance that it'll stick.
[00:22:43] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah. And there are a lot more places now, Sarah, that will. When you travel to most places in the world, there are opportunities to have food tours of the markets or to learn how to make a pasta dish in a little restaurant in Italy or something. Lots of those opportunities. And those are things where, if you have at all, any thought that it may be of interest. That's a great way to start off to say, look, let me try that. And if you try something like that, even on the cruise ships now, they have culinary evenings and so on, where you can go and learn how to make something in the afternoon and eat it that evening. I think it gives us more opportunity to try those things. As you pointed out, it's not for everybody, but if it's at all intriguing, those are great ways to try it and start it. And if it is of interest and something that becomes a bit of a passionate thing for you, then expand it and maybe try and find a similar type of organization to lay marmitone. There are lots of others out there, I'm sure. This is one that I've known for some time, and it seems to work for me. But there are great opportunities to pursue that interest, should you have it.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: I think this has really been very interesting, and I will tell you honestly, I will be pushing my husband to pursue something like this.
That would be lovely on many levels.
But we really appreciate having you as a guest. And interestingly enough, despite having all of these interviews, you are the first person who's discussed something culinary, which is really quite fascinating because it occurs to me whether you like to cook.
Everybody likes to eat. I mean, to the point where, and by the way, I'm included in this, I tend not to travel to places if we know the food isn't going to be any good. It's that important. Sure. So I know that a lot of people can relate to this and will be interested in sort of pursuing perhaps Les Marmitat. Or as Mike was saying, there's certainly different avenues, different ways of pursuing this in your own life.
But his story is certainly an interesting one. And I encourage you guys to, again, look into it, check it out. Who knows? Everybody likes food and wine. So, anyway, thank you, Mike. I really appreciate it.
[00:25:15] Speaker B: You're very welcome, Sarah. It's very nice to chat to you.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: Absolutely. Okay, well, thank you again for joining us on the midlife Happiness project. And I guess for some of you listening, you may want to start getting cooking. Anyway, all the best. We'll see you next time.
Well, I think Mike had a lot of interesting things to share. And like I say, he's the first guest we've had, actually, that was part of any kind of culinary group. And I think that's really interesting. And Mike's experience touches on two really interesting elements that I sort of want to dig into a little bit. So I did a little research.
And it turns out that this example of men doing the cooking at home is actually part of a larger trend.
As a matter of fact, over the last 50 years, the percentage of men cooking at home has risen significantly. In 1965, only 29% men reported they actually did any cooking at home. And now the percentage of men is around half of all men in the United States.
So that's pretty amazing. Now, obviously, it goes without saying that pretty much every woman does a whole bunch of cooking. But that said, I think it's great that men are starting this trend. I'm all for it. But the other element that Mike touched on, which we were talking briefly about, is this idea of male friendship.
And Mike had mentioned the motto of this culinary group. He's with Les Marmitants. And the motto that he was referring to is friendship through gastronomy. And research has shown that men and women, as we know, approach friendship very differently. And a recent survey asked men and women if they shared personal feelings or problems with a friend in the past week.
And not surprising to us women, 48% of women said yeah, where only 30% of men claim they did. And to me, that number even seems quite high. And according to researchers, male relationships tend to be more shared, activity focused rather than more intimate, face to face relationships that women tend to have activities like, well, Mike's cooking group, or in my personal experience, my husband, he's part of a hockey group, so he can kind of relate in that level. It gives guys the opportunity to bond with other men in a way that's low pressure but still really gratifying. And I touched on this with Mike right in that women are always meeting up for coffee or going to walk their dog or cry with each other, laugh. And that happens all the time. Men, that's not something that happens with great frequency. So if you can create an activity, be it through sports or in this case, cooking, it's a great opportunity for men to bond and create friendships.
So on that note, I'd have to say that I'm going to pour myself a glass of wine and I'm going to let my husband do the cooking tonight. Until next time, thanks for joining us for the midlife Happiness project.
