Snails for Sale
Our rosemary hedge is being visited by helix aspera. Snails. Escargots. Petit-gris, the elegant mollusk beloved of Frenchmen who walk around with garlic butter dribbled on their shirts. In this climate, rosemary grows into a massive shrub, and ours is two metres high. Snail heaven. Not far south of here, a farming family produces free-range [...]
I’m Dreaming of a Retro Christmas
On the verge of celebrating our first Canadian Christmas in eight years, I’m making up for lost meals. I won’t be contributing my usual potato salad to Christmas-on-the-beach. This year, let there be winter food. Turkey. It’s the only bird that matters. Forget roast beast (apologies to the Grinch), nor will I be cooking a [...]
Gram and Thanksgiving
“To everything there is a season,” my maternal grandma used to say as September rolled around. “Today, it’s pickles.” Gram had once been a practicing Nazarene, and could quote the Good Book backwards. She lived upstairs, made daily forays to the kitchen, and had a biblical reference to cover every eventuality, from hellfire and damnation [...]
The boss dogs of summer
Americans, always quick off the mark, have declared July to be their official hot dog month. Hiss, boo. In my kitchen, hot dogs are the boss dogs of summer, and they rate a two-month season: July and August. I figure that’s why we call those months “The dog days of summer.” Apparently the dog days [...]
Self Improvement
-Judy Schultz- There’s something about New Year’s resolutions that gives me an appetite for all things illegal, immoral or fattening. Well, most things anyway. I’m just not good at self improvement. Fact: whatever resolutions I make on New Year’s Eve, I’ll blow off within months, if not weeks. Still, I try. Here are my top [...]
It’ll be a blue Christmas
So here we are on our sandbar in the Tasman Sea, and I’m dreaming of snow. It’s true. After seven sub-tropical Christmases, I still get homesick for winter. Before the festivities are over, I‘ll drape an armload of rosemary twigs with aluminum icicles and a string of electric ice cubes. Then I’ll hit it with [...]
Flying high, with lamb
This column usually reflects on food, either here in Alberta or in New Zealand, where I live and work part of the year. But today’s food was neither here nor there, but somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, en route to Canada. It was a Murphy’s Law kind of day. At the airport, my request for [...]
