I Like Canada, I Really Do

I like Canada. I really do. I love hockey. Give me a flag with a maple leaf on white sandwiched between two bars of red, and I’ll happily sing “Oh, Canada” until les vaches retournez chez lui. I speak enough French to make Quebequois shopkeepers happy. One of my best friends even married a Canadian. Heck, I would even try poutine if I could find some south of the Windsor-Detroit line. I basically love everything about Canada, except one thing.

Montreal Steak Seasoning.

Actually, to say that I hate Montreal Steak Seasoning isn’t quite true either. I am actually quite ambivalent about it. On one hand, I love what it does to a steak. On the other hand, I hate what it does to my head. You see, Montreal Steak Seasoning is the “One True Trigger.”

I spell out “One True Trigger” with capital letters because Montreal Steak Seasoning is the only food that I have been able to definitively identify as a trigger for my migraines. Identifying this as a trigger was a long and arduous process that started with the work cafeteria and what I lovingly referred to as “Al’s Special Burgers.”

Al’s burgers tasted great, but it seemed like every time I would eat a burger, I would wind up with a migraine either later on that day or the day following. Eat a burger get a headache—notice a pattern? It took me a while to finally figure out there was a link. Finally I asked Al what was in the burger. His answer was a revealing, “Secret spices.” Lot’s of help there, Al. It took me a couple more tries, but I finally pried a couple of the ingredients out of him, including Montreal Steak Seasoning.

A couple more months went by and I wound up having a steak with—you guessed it—Montreal Steak Seasoning on it. A headache followed, and one mystery was solved. Knowing that my wife had some of the offending spice in the pantry, I decided to see if I could narrow down what was causing the problem, so I got out the jar and looked at the ingredients on the label. Aha! “Various Spices”

What?

Various. Freaking. Spices?

Informative. There’s definitely something in there that is causing a reaction, but in their zeal to protect trade secrets, the recipe police at the spice factory have yanked that knowledge from my grasp. So for now (and pretty much forever) Montreal Steak Seasoning is on my “No Eat List” and the offending spice is still out there ready to trigger a neurochemical reaction the next time I unsuspectingly ingest it.

On a completely separate note, this past weekend was my daughter’s big first birthday party up at my in-laws farm. Overall, it went quite well without any major hitches. She got lots of presents and the grandparents all got plenty of granddaughter time. I even made it a point to eat some of my mother-in-law’s food. She made hamburgers that were really tasty. I asked her what she put in them. Oh, Canada!

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