In the cold of winter, it’s a good moment to look for some stick-to-your ribs hearty food.

Part of my background is Polish, and I never realized how influenced you are by your taste genes until I wound up with my husband on a business trip in Mississauga. We had landed in Little Poland, and we wound up eating all of our meals in Polish restaurants and smacking our lips. We just could not get enough of the flavors.

When I returned and tried to find those kind of dishes here, I couldn’t. In Montreal, the restaurants that are Polish-like are more North Americanized for the Canadian palate. I keep pining for the tastes I found there, so I have rounded up a grocery/café that comes closest and two bakeries for some traditional desserts.

The other odd Polish connection is that I don’t bake a lot, but I have one favorite – a much admired and requested dessert recipe for New York Cheesecake. It wasn’t until I walked into Rosemont Bakery that I realized that cheesecake is a staple of a Polish bakery – my taste buds had searched for their roots and found them.

Battory Euro-Deli, 115 St.Viateur Ave. West at St. Urbain St. Phone: 514-948-2161. Hours: Tuesday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Wednesday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Thursday and Friday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. If you have a hankering for hearty Polish delicacies, head over here for the national dish of bigos, and then have some kielbasa and throw in those pierogi stuffed with meat, cheese and potato, cabbage and mushrooms or blueberry. You can buy them cooked to eat on the spot or take them home frozen by the bag. For the winter you can stoke up on some hearty soups in the café. See if you can survive tripe (cow’s stomach) soup or go for the popular Ukrainian borscht (a vegetable soup with beets), clear borsht (just beets), spinach soup or “zurek”, a sour soup with sausage. Stuffed cabbage is on the menu, so are potato pancakes and stuffed crepes – meat or mushroom with cabbage. Cold cuts can be bought too, along with groceries: Winiary dried soups, Tenczywek plum butter, Develey mustard or Kamis and Prymott gravy, Tymbark soda, dumpling mix, horseradish cream, sour cherry syrup and six kinds of sauerkraut or mustards. For dessert look at the counter for cheese, poppy and apple strudel. Prices would please starving artists.

Rosemont Bakery, 2894 Rosemont Blvd. at 6th Avenue. Phone: 514-728-7711. Hours: Tuesday and Wednesday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Thursday and Friday 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Your basic Polish bakery staples are sold by this bakery to many charcuteries and family tables around town. The trays of apple cake come in sweet or not-so-sweet, and there are trays of cheesecake (regular, chocolate on top or peach) and cherry cake. The machovietz loaf has poppy seeds and chocolate on top, and the piernik is a honey cake, while the babka comes in marble or fruit. Donuts are famous in Polish bakeries, so these paczek come with plums inside, vanilla cream or strawberry. The hearty breads are black bread, regular rye and round ryes that have no yeast. To put between the bread slices, there’s country sausage, ham sausage and Polish ham. Some staples fill the wall – Winiary and Prymat sauces, thick “beety” horseradish, candy, Placki mixes, Tymbark juices (carrot, cherry, white grape) and don’t leave without the sour pickles from the fridge.

Patisserie Danka, 15450 Pierrefonds Blvd. at Jacques Bizard. Phone: 514-620-1253. Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday and Friday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. A Polish bakery on the West Island is a find. Very traditional babkas, chocolate babkas, cheesecakes (raisins, chocolate covered or poppy seed) and apple cakes are lined up. Authentic strudels in poppy seed, chocolate, vanilla, walnut, lemon and orange are baked, and stefanka, the 7-layer cake, is here along with honey cake made with cream or plums. Roulades come in chocolate or mocha, vanilla and walnut, and you can buy meringues or rum balls. “Drajdushka” are a kind of a brioche with raisins, and those delectable plum donuts are here if you get in early enough. Some groceries (cookies, candies, jams, teas, syrups) and a few videos line the shelves.

By now the holidays are upon us, and panic has set in. If you’re the one in charge of the food preparation and want to make these days special, why not head to a real farmer’s market to scoop up all your cooking needs? Somehow the sterility of a supermarket does not evoke the nostalgia of past holidays compared to meandering through the stalls of an old-fashioned real food market.

We are fortunate in Montreal to have two big ones (Atwater and Jean Talon www.marchespublics-mtl.com) which could cover all our needs, but the Jean Talon Market is much bigger and has a special feel, with its combination of rusticity and sophistication. Jean Talon Market is like a little city square, with its four encircling sides lined up with food delectables. More food stores and other related businesses ooze out from the square as well, and the whole thing spills into Little Italy with even more eating options. Started in 1933, it sits between Jean Talon St. to the north, Belanger to the south and Casgrain Ave. and Henri Julien Ave. to the east and west.

To get you started I have chosen a fish monger, a poultry specialist and a cheese store for your basics, and then I threw in one just for fun – full of Quebec homegrown gourmet goodies. As you circle the square, you will bump into just about everything else you need – veggies, meat, by-the-pound basics, bakeries, herbs, sausages, chocolates and even a cookbook store to help with recipes.

Poissonnerie Shamrock, 7015 Casgrain Ave. at the SW corner of the market. Phone: 514-272-5612. Hours: Sunday to Wednesday 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., Thursday and Friday 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. If you sell at the Jean Talon Market, (and they have since 1959), then you had better be up to snuff, since the restaurateurs and shoppers who come here are going out of their way to get the freshest ingredients. The one way traffic down the middle of this narrow shop first passes the prepared fish dishes like tilapia marinated in orange and salmon in brandy or lemon/pepper/dill, then goes past the fresh fish, lobster tank and the showcase of sixteen kinds of caviar. There’s beluga, of course, but also tabikko for sushi making. The wall of frozen fish and seafood has advertised specials. Look for the enormous easy peel shrimp or the scampis, both four to six per lb. Some highlights: octopus or seaweed salads, smoked yellowfin tuna, lobster oil, squid ink, stuffed escargot and good old salt cod. For your holiday meals, you can serve salmon tournedos, stuffed sole or oysters Rockefeller. Other location: Marche Maisonneuve, Fillets Express.

La Fromagerie Hamel, 220 Jean Talon St. East at Casgrain Ave. Phone: 514-272-1161. Hours: Monday to Wednesday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Thursday 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Friday 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., Saturday 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. www.fromageriehamel.com This cheese shop, open since 1965, is always bustling. About five hundred cheeses are stocked from France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, Ireland, Scotland, Greece, Italy, Germany, Sweden and Hungary. Some special cheeses you can serve for the holidays might be: Stilton with port, a “winter” cheese (made only from November through March) called Vacherin Mont’or, or Cabriolet, a goat cheese from the South of France. Cheese gift baskets can be ordered too (at least two days ahead), and can have other items added, such as wine, crackers, chocolates, oil and vinegar, jam or pheasant terrines. Other locations: 2117 Mont Royal Ave. East. (514-521-3333); 9196 Sherbrooke St. East. (514-355-6657); Repentigny, 622 Notre Dame St. (450-654-3578).

Zinman Chicken Market, 7010 St. Dominique St. at Mozart St. Phone: 514-277-4302. Hours: Monday to Wednesday 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday and Friday 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Located one block outside the market and open for the last ninety years, this poultry market sells to at least three hundred local shops. They sell all the specialties you may want to serve for your holiday meal: rabbits, quail, ducks, hare, guinea hens, turkeys, pheasant, Cornish hens, partridges and pigeons. Their chickens are prized, as they are fed no mineral supplements, just old fashioned corn and grain, which might make them cost twice as much as the supermarket variety, but then they taste twice as good.

Le Marche des saveurs du Quebec, 280 Place du Marche du Nord at Henri Julien Ave. Phone: 514-271-3811. Hours: (This week only) Daily 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. until the 24^th). Regular hours: Monday to Wednesday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Thursday and Friday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. This airy bright jewel in the Jean Talon market brings you gourmet flavors, but only from Quebec. The tastes run from foie gras ravioli, to peach coulis or wild mushroom mustard. Some flavors for your holiday table might be dandelion or wild cherry wine vinegar, pheasant pate, smoked emu, rose jelly, oignon jam or carrot confit. They stock Quebec wines, and if you’re dying for some – caribou soup. This week there will be two to three tastings a day from some of their suppliers. Le Verger du Clocher will show off their apple muste products. The apple reduction is a yummy syrup good on salads, meats and fresh fruits. Nutra.fruit will showcase their cranberry treats: a cranberry confit d’oignon, sesame oil with cranberry, rosemary and garlic and a cassis and cranberry oil.

My household has really become enamored of nuts ever since we started writing our Drive I-95: Exit by Exit Info, Maps, History and Trivia book. Down the road a piece in Virginia and North and South Carolina there are family businesses selling peanuts and pecans freshly roasted in classic and also the most original flavors (wasabe peanuts, hot onion and garlic pistachios, for example). We can no longer live without butter toasted pecans in our salads or for snacks, and we have to order them online between our trips (www.goodearthpeanuts.com).

This led me to thinking about where I could find fresh nuts right here at home. We are lucky to have a handful of wholesalers who open their doors to the public as well. The variety of nuts and other stuff they sell by the pound is astonishing. Just walking through the stores is fun, since some still show their wares in barrels (when was the last time you bought that way?).

Since it is all sold by the pound, this presents an easy opportunity to buy tiny tastes of things and not have to invest a pile of money just to see if you or your family might like them. With the holiday season on the horizon, it would be a good time to stock up on all the ingredients you will need for your baking, or perhaps plan to buy some of the yummy new treats to serve as nibbles for your guests.

Basse, 9360 Charles de Latour St at Chabanel St. Phone: 514-387-8828. Hours: Monday to Wednesday and Saturday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Thursday and Friday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. This Mid-eastern family business, involving five brothers, has been oil-roasting and dry-roasting all kinds of nuts for the past fifteen years. You can choose from amongst six kinds of pistachios, almonds come in tamari, barbeque or candied, and there’s pumpkin seeds, hazelnuts and caramel pecans. Other interesting goodies abound: roasted chick peas, corn nuts, double roasted hot peppers, dried kiwi, peanut/rice crackers and roasted peas. Some mid-eastern groceries are stocked, like blossom or rose water, bags or jars of zaatar, bitter orange jam, stuffed zucchini and, if you need them, gallon jars of hot peppers. Other location: 4555 Autoroute 440 West (at the plant 450-781-1255).

Cananut,1415 Mazurette St. at De l’Acadie Blvd. Phone: 514-388-8003. Hours: Monday to Wednesday 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., Thursday and Friday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. With an astounding sixty barrels of nuts, twenty-four of beans, ten kinds of rice and eight of lentils, you can stock up on all sorts of staples here. Some exotic foods here are worth investigating: date paste, dried mango, papaya cubes, barbequed corn, wasabi peanuts, bulgur and couscous. There’s a wall of teas (like hibiscus flower), jarred and canned imported foods and some wrapped candies. Other location: 4913 St. Jean Blvd. (514-624-2324).

Delinoix, 6768 Jarry St. East at Pascal Gagnon St. Phone: 514-324-4227. Hours: Monday to Wednesday 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. (until Dec 31, Saturday 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.). This wholesaler will sell retail, so if you have a hankering for nuts, dried fruits (mango, cranberry, pear, kiwi, cantaloupe), a dozen trail mixes and lots of candies or crystallized ginger, the deals are here. In the nut department, cashews are $7.29 for 500 gr., pine nuts $6.99 for 250 gr., and then there are barbequed or maple syrup peanuts, smoked, chocolate (one with 70% chocolate on it) or yogurt almonds and macadamia nuts. Other interesting items are the dried tomatoes, rice crackers and dried peas. Sugar-free treats come in chocolate covered almonds or hard candies (coffee, strawberry, mint, etc.). Now you can buy some organic apricots, Thompson raisins, sesame sticks and flax seeds. www.delinoix.com