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Lentils with Fennel and Sausage
My sister Cassie and I visited Paris last Spring, and by the time we’d gotten from Charles de Gaulle to our hotel in Montmartre and thrown our bags in our room, we were starving. We struck out looking for someplace that would satisfy both me and my vegetarian sister, and found this little corner restaurant with arborite tables and a friendly atmosphere and some vegetarian options on the menu. The waiters were super-nice (as was almost everyone in Paris), complimenting my pathetic attempts at speaking French, and my meal of lentils with fennel and sausage completely floored me. I love lentils in just about every way they can be served,…
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How I got into this mess in the first place
As a kid growing up in a village of about 500 people, pre-Internet, I was a dedicated patriot with a great faith in Canada but almost no exposure to Canadian ideas. Sure, there was CBC, and maybe TVO, but when you’re 13, you want to watch The Fresh Prince of Bell Air, not Adrienne Clarkson Presents. ((I applaud the CBC’s attempt, at the time, to give us more Canadian arts, but I’m sorry to say that they went about it the wrong way, in my opinion.)) I wished that there were Canadian artists to like, but as far as I knew, there weren’t. We, as a nation, had a smattering…
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Lucky 2013
Oh 2012, you pretty little thing. You haven’t been good to many people I know, but you’ve been pretty good to me, with a few notable exceptions. Sad things In fact, 2012 started off pretty badly. My sassy, flirty, funny Nana Cynthia died in January. I’ve been trying to write about it in all of the intervening months, and haven’t been able to get anything meaningful down, but it’s a loss that our whole family is feeling, still, very deeply. Mum’s spent a lot of this year scanning Nana’s WWII diaries and posting them, with photos and transcripts, on her website, which are really interesting reading. Nothing in the early…
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On Audacity and Possibility.
I do a lot of things, and I’m not the best at any of them. I can usually think of scads of people who are better at pretty much everything I do; from performance to organization, being a decent friend or a good videographer, I am well aware of how I think I stack up against other people. Which isn’t to say I’m bad at what I do, nor that I’m not proud of my accomplishments. I’m pretty good at a bunch of things, and very good at a few. But still, still not the best at anything. But while you can arguably say that Usain Bolt is the best…
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Garlic-Cheddar Biscuits
These are so good, the first time I made them there were none leftover that evening, and I’ve been making them as a apres-ski snack or as an accompaniment to my Hearty Ham and Bean Soup. They’re super-quick and super-easy! Ingredients 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon baking powder 5 tablespoons butter 1 cup milk 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese 1/4 cup butter, melted 1 clove garlic, minced Directions Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. In a large bowl, sift together flour, salt and baking powder. Cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Make a well in the center of flour mixture. Add the milk…
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Quinoa and Corn Salad Recipe
We’ve been interested in picnicking for a few years now; something about packing up a lunch and going somewhere green and lovely to eat it on a blanket on the grass feels so special and nice. We’ve got one of those picnic knapsacks, with all of the cutlery and everything, which we’ve been using as our camp kitchen for years, and we’re building a list of excellent and easily-portable recipes. In the midst of an unexpectedly sweltering May day, we decided to make a few salads and bicycle down to the Trent-Severn Canal, on the bank of Little Lake, to have our first picnic of the year. This recipe, one…
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Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie
I always associate rhubarb with Summers at my Nana and Papa’s; they’d pick a fresh stalk of rhubarb and hand it to me with a small dish of sugar to dip the end in. Nana would make what she called ‘Rubarberry,’ a sauce of strawberries, rhubarb, and sugar that she and Papa loved to have on toast. And Papa tried his hand at Rhubarb wine, along with his other wine-making experiments (his mainstay was the sweet red wine that bubbled in demijohns in his basement throughout the Autumn). Strawberry-Rhubarb Pie has always been a favourite of mine, but somehow I never did get around to making it until this Spring,…
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Spiced Pickled Beets
There’s a restaurant in Peterborough called St. Veronus, where I was first introduced to the deliciousness of the spiced pickled beets. Beets on their own, boiled and served with butter, are terrific, and pickled beets are fine, but spiced pickled beets are something else altogether. My sister Sammi found this recipe a few years ago, and while it’s not exactly the same as the beets they serve at St. Veronus, I might believe that these beets are better. I think I’ve said before that I’m not a proponent of specialty gadgets and tools for cooking, but some things I do endorse. A kitchen scale is excellent, and if you’re canning,…
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Canoe Journey Through Waterways and Lifeways
This article first appeared in the Winter 2012 edition of The Newcomer Bulletin. So much of the history of Canada is the history of the newcomer; because few written records exist of the Indigenous peoples in this country before the Europeans arrived, our impressions of our nation are almost always seen through the eyes of people experiencing each other’s culture for the first time.  No where is that more clear than at the Canadian Canoe Museum, which chronicles the individual struggles and  triumphs of people making their way through the land with little in common besides their mode of transport – the canoe. Â
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Je suis fou a Paris
Paris: a city that’s , surprisingly, pretty much as good as people say it is. My sister Cassie and I got a last-minute deal on air and hotel for seven days in Paris at the end of March, and we jumped on it. While we were there, the sun shone every day in a picture-perfect blue sky, the temperature stayed steadily around the 18C mark, the flowers were blooming and the grass was green. We walked or took the Metro everywhere, saw most of the things we wanted to see, and really packed our days full of some of the best things that the city has to offer visitors. I…
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Butter Chicken
This Butter Chicken recipe is a wonder. The perfect mix of salty-sweet and spice, I’d recommend upping any spice that you like. I often put twice as much of just about everything, and it works out just fine. I like to say that this recipe is better than your mom’s Butter Chicken, but considering that 70% of the people I know are of Irish descent, that’s not much of a challenge (bless their hearts, but the Irish aren’t known for their deft use of spices). Let’s just go with the idea that this is pretty damn good, and that all of the people I’ve made it for ask for the…
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Lift up your heart and let out your voice: Peterborough Needs PCVS
When I started high school in 1991, I was nervous and excited, like a lot of kids going into Grade 9. Â Coming from a very small rural elementary school at the edge of the village of Keene, walking through the doors of this 160-year-old urban high school was like a dream. Â One of 50 students accepted into the Integrated Arts Program that year, I knew only two other people at PCVS, and I couldn’t have been happier about it. Elementary school had been, for me, completely brutal. Â Our family moved to the village when I was in kindergarten, and in a place where many families could trace their roots back…
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Beauty On, 2012
It’s become a tradition of sorts for me to write something here on December 31, a sort of summing-up and looking forward I would have scoffed at myself for doing a few years ago. But, as arbitrary as it is to do this on a particular date, it feels useful for me to say to myself ‘this is what I’ve accomplished, and this is what I hope to do now.’ This has easily been one of the busiest years of my life, and I’m thankful to have come through it with relative equanimity. A busy year at the museum meant that I’ve run more discrete events this year than I’ve…
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Concord Grape Pie
From the time I was little and well into my teens, my Papa would drive to the Niagara Region every Autumn to buy bushels of concord grapes so that he could make his yearly supply of of sweet red wine. Â Sometimes I would help out with the press, but mostly I was just eager to steal some concord grapes for myself, that incredible sweet-tart burst of flavour a treat that came with my favourite season. Â In the following months, the demijohns would bubble away in the basement, filling the whole room with the smell of wine. As an adult, I’ve often bought concord grapes at the market and been instantly…
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Vegan-Friendly Lemon Herb Dip
Normally I shun pre-mixed spices, but oddly, Montreal steak seasoning is awesome in this dip.  I may or may not have noted before my recent obsession with thyme in my food, but it may spring from having a front yard full of creeping thyme.  When I make this, it usually goes pretty fast, and since a can of white beans holds about 2 cups, you might as well double it. I’m also not a fan of requiring special kitchen tools for recipes, but coffee grinders are great for all kinds of things, and I’m sure ingenious non-coffee-grinder-owners will find some way to mill your nuts. As dips go, this one is actually pretty…
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Chickens in the sewing room
I got a call from the Co-op on April 5 saying that my chicks would be in the next morning between 9am and 10am. I made my final adjustments to the brooding pen, putting in the feed and the waterer, and adding a teaspoon of sugar to the water, which I'd been told to do the first time to pep them up after the trip. I popped over at lunch on April 6 and picked up the smallest of a pile of cheeping boxes, stopping quickly on my way to the car to take a look. When I got them home, I turned on the heat lamp, and grabbed each…
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Hearty Ham and Bean Soup
Coming home from an afternoon of cross-country skiing, I was ravenous and craving something hearty and piping hot. Thinking over the things I had in my fridge (some leftover ham, a cup or so of navy beans, some vegetable stock, half a bottle of rose, I decided to try making a soup. The result was this beauty, a soup so delicious I’m glad I don’t have to share it with my vegetarian sisters (sorry, dudes!).
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Movin’ on Up: C’mon lucky 11!
I’m always kind-of at a loss when it comes to these year-end things; do I make lists? Do I look back, or forward? It’s hard to strike the right note. There’s a lot on my mind these days. Architecture. Â Cholera. The way cities disintegrate and rejuvenate, like fields cycling through harvest years and fallow years. How to be in the right place in the right time. I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which was a great read and chock-full of fascinating ideas. I’ll probably write more about it in the future.
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My First Hammam
My trip through Morocco has been terrific so far, with many serendipitous encounters and lots (and lots, and lots) of interesting, friendly new people. Last night at my Fez guest house, Pension Dar Bou Inania, I met an American woman who’s also traveling solo. Melissa joined myself and some other Canucks for breakfast at Cafe Clock (my home-away-from-home in Fez), and asked me over pancakes and fresh-squeezed orange juice if I’d be interested in joining her at the Hammam this afternoon. I’d tried to get to a hammam with some other travel friends in Meknes, but had missed the appointment, so I was happy to find a companion for our first…
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Backpacking in the Maghreb: going to Morocco!
In ten days, I’ll be travelling to Morocco via Air France. I’ve always wanted to travel, to be one of those people who somehow manages to pick up and leave, has the money and the leisure to go, doesn’t have a thousand pressing commitments back home keeping them tied down. I’m not one of those people, but I’ve managed to make a space for myself somehow anyway. I didn’t need to take any extraordinary measures; I just decided I was going, and everything worked out around it. For two years I’ve been idly watching Travelzoo for flights to Morocco, and finally in June, I saw a deal I couldn’t resist.…
