Any discussion of a writer’s voice will surely evoke allusions to Virginia Woolf’s emancipating book, A Room of One’s Own. Writing with her own strong voice, she breaks barriers and all but seizes a voice that she proclaims her own … and in the process she creates an anthem for women writers the world over….
Herbs — A Gateway to Freedom and Abundance
As a child, I hated the family garden. It represented work. It represented indentured servitude. It represented poverty. There isn’t more evidence in my life of the difference perspective can make. Growing into a man, my perspective changed when my attitude changed — when I stopped working a garden for others and started working it…
All Things Home ~ All Things Ottawa
We are so much defined by place that we define the place we live by naming it … home. And if “home” is only where you’re born, then I guess I offer this observation as person who has been homeless more years than at home. The irony is that in having lived so many places,…
My Canadian Love Affair
Food is an extension of my heart. It is not only a part of my physical being, it is how I celebrate and express love. I’ve been in love with food for a very long time. And, for almost as long, I’ve been an incurable romantic. It seems fitting, then, that my personal passion for…
Inspired by Tradition but Proudly Ourself: A Canadian Resolution
I love problems … love finding solutions to impossible predicaments. Challenges beget curiosity and creativity and they fill me with resolve…. Each New Year doesn’t in-and-of-itself present a problems to me: it provides a 365¼ day tableau on which to create life. And, other than when I’m actually writing, there is nothing I love doing…
An Untraditional Canadian Christmas: Vegetarian Tourtière
I believe in Christmas and I believe in the power of tradition. For me, the power of Christmas, and the true spirit of it, is beautifully wrapped up in O. Henry’s masterful short-story “The Gift of Magi.” In this story first published more than a century ago, O. Henry beautifully shows the power of giving…
Harvesting an Identity
Long has the harvest been an important part of my life and long has it been associated with fall, bountiful cornucopias of food, and Thanksgiving. Growing up in the Okanagan Valley, the fall harvest meant picking the last of the fruit and stripping our garden of its remaining plenty before tilling the vegetation back into…
Maple-Apple Jelly
At its most fundamental level, cooking is pure chemistry and physics. At its most profound, it is art, tradition, culture, identity and love. Nothing arguably combines both as purely as making preserves. Thus when I took up the most recent challenge in The Canadian Food Experience Project chose to make it personal, I found myself with the challenge…
Preserving: Our Canadian Tradition
I grew up among trees. Indeed, trees define a huge part of our national identity – and our food – in this country. Speak to any foreigner about their image of Canada and it will almost universally be of “wilderness” and the wide expanse of mountains, water, open spaces, and trees. Growing up, everywhere I…
My Cherished Canadian Recipe … My Grandma’s Soup
My Grandma nourished me. When she passed away seven years ago, she left a hole in my world; and much like the hole left in Haida Gwaii’s Cathedral Forest when its giant Golden Spruce was tragically removed, a space nonetheless remains even while on its verges new growth finds space. I have survived, even thrived,…