comfort food – Jam and Idleness

Farewell, farewell! We’ll never meet again, this side of 2014

It feels a little odd doing a year-end wrap-up of a mostly silent blog year, but I think I can handle it; in fact, I’m going to enjoy this opportunity to run off at the mouf a bit. Anyway, the usual, hey? Highlights, a few lowlights, and some mush about what’ll go down in 2015 (because I…

The importance of eating pancake(s)

When I was a kid, one of my most yearned after life events was a trip to Smitty’s (a local pancake hut/chain, similar to Golden Griddle here in Ontario or IHOP in the USA). Smitty’s pancakes, as I recall, were giant, perfect (to a 7-year old who’d never seen an orange that didn’t come out…

Youth, beauty, and cereal for dinner

It’s almost April, and I have read only ten books this year. If you find me wandering around looking distressed and slightly disheveled, it’s because I’m wondering how this could have happened. I’m on track to read 40 books this year, if I’m lucky, when once I used to boast of 100 or more! I…

Surviving Farch

Friends, it’s almost here–the longest, cruellest month of the year: Farch. (Sorry, Eliot, it’s not April. April is when we remember that we once didn’t loathe existence as either a theory or a practice.) Farch: known more popularly as the nigh endless period of time spanning February 1st to March 31st. You know what I’m…

Peanut butter toast

The first meal I ever made myself was peanut butter toast. Likely, it was some shitty white bread, and likely it was that sugary slop that contains peanuts and is called, by some, peanut butter but isn’t actually peanut butter. Also, there was lots of butter beneath the “peanut butter.” An inauspicious beginning to my…

Pie

“Productive” will not be the word of the day on this lovely first Monday in December, my friends. No. I am laid low by my first winter illness in almost two years; I have been so obnoxiously healthy in the face of everyone else’s flus and colds and pukes for so long, I was beginning…

The comforts of Fall

Most of my friends feel most like themselves in deepest, steamiest summertime. Fellow Torontonian Drake comes alive in the nighttime–as does my giant bunny, Sophie, who was busted in the middle of the night last night, jumping up and down in pure joy on the sofa, in the dark. I, however, feel most entirely present…

If you don’t love bulgher, onions, chickpeas, lemon, and tahini, this isn’t the post for you

On Sunday, I bustled about in the sort of cozy housewifely satisfaction that can only be accurately described by certain Victorian novelists (NOT, I think, George Gissing) and Ellis Peters; I was preparing to make a yummy dinner. My plan: Mexican split pea soup, fresh local corn on the cob (grilled, of course), and a…