Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.
The Selkirk Grace
attributed to Robert Burns
It was Robert Burn’s Day, a couple of weeks ago.
Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796) (also known as Robbie Burns, Rabbie Burns, Scotland’s favourite son, the Ploughman Poet, Robden of Solway Firth, the Bard of Ayrshire and in Scotland as The Bard) was a Scottish poet and lyricist. [Read more…]
I am making a rainbow flag – in jelly.
It’s Pride Week in Vancouver, culminating in the huge, colourful, float and fun filled Pride Parade on August 4th, through Vancouver’s West End, which is now sporting the world’s first permanent Rainbow Crosswalk, at Davie and Bute Street.
There are rainbows everywhere, including the one I saw this morning – after our first day of rain in over 31 days (nearly a record for Vancouver).
And because it’s fun, colourful and relatively easy to do in this hot weather, I am going to make six different flavours and colours of pâte de fruits, using the bounty of fresh fruit now in season. [Read more…]
I love Easter Chocolate. As a kid, I always remember it tasting so much better than the bargain stuff collected at Hallowe’en. While less in quantity, it still had the appeal of being “all yours’, to be squirrelled away and eaten sparingly in the weeks to come, or if you were a kid like me, devoured in a couple of days, not a box of chocolates doled out sparingly at the behest of an adult.
… except for the year our family dog jumped up on my bed and devoured my Cadbury’s chocolate hollow egg. [Read more…]
When my kids were in elementary school, I used to look forward to Hanukkah, even though I am not Jewish.
But we are fortunate to have dear friends from Isreal whose kids are the same age as ours, and every year, the wonderful Havi would go into the kids’ classrooms to tell them the Hanukkah story (she didn’t pull any punches – they got the whole story of Mattathias and the Maccabees) and to prepare a feast of potato latkes, and the most delicious jelly doughnuts I’ve ever tasted, that Hanukkah special – Sufganiyot. [Read more…]
It is December 1st. The cats woke me up early, even though this is a Saturday, and I would have liked nothing better than to sleep in, since this is a two-show day ( I am currently performing in the Arts Club Theatre’s production of It’s A Wonderful Life), and I am doing everything I can to recover from a nasty bout of laryngitis.
But, since they did manage to get me up at a dark 6:45am, once I had fed and watered them, and given them their required stroking attention, it seemed fruitless to go back to bed, only to have them meowing at the door in indignation. [Read more…]