A week on Sunday no. 38

Welcome to a regular edition of the random things that comprise a week… outings with friends, errands, and other dailyness…

Cinnamoon - a new bakery downtown

A friend and I went to the newly opened Cinnamoon bakery on Albert street… the street with old Exchange District charm at one end, and graffitied dereliction at the other. People huddled on a stoop as the forecast fulfilled rain; others walked with brazen nonchalance, gaze up, hair down. The pale mauve colour inside matched storm cloud greys. The decor was ordered and still as leafy-green elms swung their branches around outside and the new awnings crisply fluttered. I wasn’t the ideal customer, looking for free wifi to pay for parking, and maybe wanting the trompe-l’oeil egg-on-toast to surpass what it was meant to fake was asking for too much. There were better, more ideal customers… young people who came in little lanyard-wearing troops, with smiles on their faces, excited to collectively buy pastries that shimmered with dewey cake-sweat under glass. Loose-leaf tea is listed for 7$. On the socials, everything at Cinnamoon is 10 out of 10. 

For fun

A friend suggested lunch at the Lily Stone Café in Rosenort. It’s a small town directly West of Aubigny that was a regular destination for farm-related errands for my father-in-law. Lily Stone Café is one of three businesses including The Rolly Stone restaurant and Lily Stone Gardens. A nice discovery! (Website here)

This is Enzo when his upper lip gets caught on his teeth. My daughter and I think it’s so cute!

Can you spot Christian prepping the garage fascia for paint? 

Baking

With the maintenance of sourdough starter, comes an accumulation of discard, and incorporating into rotation recipes that make delicious use of it has been a fun exercise. This week, besides crackers, I made these Sourdough Discard Cookies (recipe here) which feel like an indulgence given their use of cocoa and chips and the recent prices for chocolate. The cookies have a nice soft texture and brownie-like flavour.

Enjoying

• Just another argument supporting a love of reading:  “The Golden Rule for Becoming a Better Writer” by T. R. Napper (Here, via) 

• Since Stitcher ceased to exist in 2023, I’d been using the default podcast app from Apple. With only one redeeming quality - the transcription - for its otherwise frustrating user-experience, I’ve been happy to find an alternative called Castro (website here https://castro.fm/ ). Using Castro has been like getting to a beach-side destination, throwing open the windows and realizing it is only a short walk till you can feel waves lapping at your feet. 

• I recently went to Toad Hall downtown for gifts and came across this book, titled The Right Word. Decorated with awards, I was nonetheless drawn in by the collage-style illustrations that told the (true!) story alongside the text. (A peek at the book here.) It was the kind of book I felt I would appreciate more than my young recipients, so after sitting and reading through, I left it behind in search of other fun things. Melissa Sweet, the illustrator, has a really nice website. I liked the Q&A page here.  

• Sometimes it’s nice to clap on a set of noise-cancelling headphones and get lost in a bit of music. Most recently, most dreamily, Haruomi Hosono’s Yours Sincerely. 

• I like it when The Daily takes a detour into art and culture, as it did for the Bayeux Tapestry. To complement it, I liked watching Deep Down History’s overview of the story on Youtube (here).

Walking the dog

This dying season has its spots of beauty… red berries, droplets collected on long stems of grass…

And wooly bears! Normally, I find them on the ground and avoid stepping on them, but this one was nicely posed on a weed…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday no. 37

The week, in summary

There was a storm last Sunday and I like the picture I took of us, cozy inside, peering out as so much rain made a stream on our front lawn, a waterfall off the bark of our linden tree, and a mini geyser over the manhole cover in the street. 

We visited Princess Auto’s new location on Monday for fun. It was a grey day. It’s an unfamiliar store. We took note of their inventory and brought home a catalogue, tested their coffee and bought a few things…

Tuesday I ran school-related errands with the kids and did not take a single picture of anything. Instead there’s an account of our mall visit in receipts: eight stores in two hours. On Wednesday there were meetings with teachers, as is customary before the school year starts. It’s a common topic of conversation… the fact that there are parent-teacher meetings and that they occur before the start of school. My husband has repeated it often: meeting with students before classes is a good thing! It makes the first day of school less nerve-wracking! I saw this dead golden moth on the freshly-waxed hallway floor and thought it was pretty. 

Thursday was a first day for high school students, and Enzo missed our daughter. I’d try to catch him moping, but he’d feign alertness…. 

I sat beside him long enough, pretending to scroll, till he finally rested, just a bit.

Then it was Friday and everyone went to school. 

I walked the dog and came home to discover a power outage. So I left home and went to the library downtown to look at books. I spent time in the cookbook section (some covers are so pretty!)…

… before finding a window seat a getting some reading done. My view included preparations for the Winnipeg Biz’s Food Truck Wars (here). Then home!

Enjoying

1. Listening to the “How to Be a Better Human” podcast, I liked what guest Hrikishesh Hirway said about creative pursuits:
   “I talked myself out of doing the thing that I loved for many, many years, and I guess at a certain point, I just felt like that was one kind of unhappiness - not making stuff - and I preferred the unhappiness of making stuff. It was a matter of recognizing how much of myself was missing at a certain point. I felt like to be complete, I needed to be engaged with the part of myself that wrote songs, that made music, that was personal, and that I could really pour all of myself into.” (Here)

2. An informative website about the war in Ukraine is not enjoyment, but I found it very enlightening. Up until now the idea of drone warfare has been very abstract. (Here, via)

3. This video by Elle Cordova was a delight to watch (and re-watch)!

Cooking

Saturday morning, I plan the week’s menu. Yesterday, the dog wanted to bark at cars stopping for an open house. And there was a cookbook I brought home from Friday… so part of menu planning looked like this:

The cookbook is Milk Street Backroads Italy: Finding Italy’s Forgotten Recipes (published in 2025, see here). Flipping through the pages, I read this section titled “The pope’s pasta carbonara”:

We’re talking about pasta alla papalina, which roughly translates as pasta for the pope. Now almost 100 years old, it has become a classic - if little known - Roman pasta. As the story goes, during the early 1930s then Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli asked Ceseretto Simmi, a restaurateur with several eateries near the Vatican, if he could prepare a lighter, more sophisticated version of the traditional Roman carbonara.

Carbonara - rich with guanciale and sharp pecorino Romano cheese - was considered a brash dish. “So my grandfather went to my grandmother and said, ‘Make carbonara, but use prosciutto instead of guanciale and Parmesan instead of pecorino,” said Simmi’s granddaughter, Elizabetta Simmi, who now has her own restaurant near the Vatican. And yes, pasta alla papalina is on the menu. “The cardinal suggested it and my grandfather created it, a softer carbonara.”

It worked because both the cheese and meat were lighter, more nuanced options, which toned down the intensity of the carbonara. (P 162-3)

This little story provides a neat, almost folkloric, distinction between the kinds of carbonara we’ve eaten… the gentler, parmesan-bacon kind I tend to make (with Kenji Lopez-Alt’s blessing, here on Youtube) versus the authentic, almost fiery, guanciale-pecorino we got to try. 

If there is a meal that universally unites the family, it is definitely pasta-based. Last Sunday I made Joshua McFadden’s “Lamb Ragu with Carrots and Green Garlic” (but with regular garlic… recipe here) and Christian, not finding ground lamb at the usual places he shops, stopped in at Alsham Food Market (Instagram) where the butcher ground it on demand. The quality of this one ingredient made this an outstanding ragù…

Walking the dog

This week, I was back to dog-walking duty since the school year began. The kids showed me the mushrooms they found on walks with Christian…

Catching those amber beads took a minute or two… time enough for a brief nap…

They found a monarch butterfly chrysalis too.

By myself, I try to capture the seasonal change…

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday no. 36

A generous spirit

Somehow, this apartment tour, titled “An Artist’s Collected Home Brimming with New York Character” appeared on my Youtube homepage, and it proved to be the perfect viewing antidote to a restless Monday morning. I watched a handful more videos from the Homeworthy channel, but Thomas McKean’s felt heartwarming. I’ve tried to put my finger on why it was… His collaboration with poet Ruth Pitter? His family history? His sense of humour? The fact that he made a piece of art from the cards and envelopes he received and called it a “grateful collage”? Or is it his storytelling? I’m not sure, but perhaps its the quality of generosity that stands out. He says, for example that what “makes a New Yorker, [is] somebody who’s ideally here to share the space, appreciate the history, and maybe contribute to it.”  

It reminds me of having really liked an episode from the six-part documentary series on Netflix titled “My Love: Six Stories of True Love.” Among others, it featured Kinuko and Haruhei in Japan. Kinuko, who cared for Haruhei “ever since they met at the facility where he was treated for leprosy” - eventually marrying and having three children together - talks to the producer at one point, full of admiration for her husband: “In that type of difficult environment, he was a really unique individual. […] He had a very kind face. No matter what people said, he never got angry, even when the staff verbally abused him. He really talks up a storm, but he has the warmest heart.” […] “…ordinarily, a person with a severe illness like his could easily become disheartened and bitter, but he strived to do his best. He’s an impressive man. I believe that.” It’s an attitude and a relationship that has stayed in my mind ever since having watched it in 2021 (mentioned here).  

Enjoying

• There are still some warm afternoons for enjoying a book lounging on a chair in the backyard. Partly because I wanted to enjoy the weather, and partly because I liked the book so much, I finished The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead quickly, considering I started July 11th, and that it is over 500 pages. It has been my favourite from the reading list so far. I dedicated a blog post (here) to the book in appreciation.

• Listening to the short podcast series “The Gaza Chef” (here, via) I felt momentarily disoriented… Which region again? Which war? These tragedies pile up. But the journalism dedicated to the individuals and the nuances is so worthwhile.

• The kids are about to go back to school. I drive them to the store, then take sneaky pictures while they pick out school supplies. We even helped a mannequin who had lost his pants…

Eating

One rainy afternoon this week, I made Julia Turschen’s version of “Rascal House Stuffed Cabbage” with a Taiwanese cabbage so large, I had to steam it in sections. It’s our favourite version of cabbage roll, but the recipe isn’t available online. It’s from her 2021 cookbook titled Simply Julia (her website). Cabbage roll photos are not very aesthetic…

It’s a bit of a project (the kitchen looks more like an artist’s studio space…) but I’ve often found Nigella Lawson’s observations to be true. Years ago, while listening to the short-lived “Simple Pleasures” podcast (six episodes aired in 2018, link here) hosted by Yotam Ottolenghi, Lawson, who was a guest once, said: “People as a general rule confuse two things. They confuse time-consuming with difficult. It’s whether you’ve got the time and whether you feel like doing something like that.” (4:00) And: “The daily cooking: often I just feel, ugh, you know, exhausted, I can’t do that. But the minute I start cooking, I feel better.” (16:15) And: “The shopping can be harder than the cooking. Because unless you get your shopping organized, you can’t actually cook and cooking is relatively straightforward and simple, once you do it.” (17:47)  

This time of year, when produce is abundant, I get a little disconcerted because it’s almost better to make a meal plan after visiting the market, rather than before.

Walking

This thistle has seed heads like tassels

This branch, severed from the trunk, is drying out with the prettiest shades of yellow.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday 23/52

Welcome to another edition of a weekly roundup of things I’m thinking about, enjoying and doing around my house, in bright, sunny, quite-hot-right-now, city of Winnipeg.

Drawing how-to book advice

I recently finished Drawing Outdoors by Henry C. Pitz published in MCMLXV. (How fancy! A year in Roman numerals… I remember seeing this in movie credits, like a frustrating code. Apparently, this is intentional. It is “associated with prestige and enduring value”.)Whatever the publisher’s intention for putting 1965 into Roman numerals, I really like Pitz’s book. It ends with this section, titled “Benefitting from Discouragement”, with advice that sounds like it shouldn’t be limited to learning to draw:

All this is part of the artist’s life and although the core of his life is always the work at drawing board or easel, the peripheral activities support and feed his experience. Once committed to a serious program of picture-making, you need to work out certain strategies to sustain enthusiasm, to strengthen resolve, and to circumvent discouragement. Each artist is faced with the facts of his own temperament and must adjust his tactics accordingly.

A last suggestions may be helpful: discouragement is usually intermittent but inescapable. Discouragement loses some of its terror when you realize it is often an encouraging sign; it indicates dissatisfaction with and rebellion against your present level. It is a growing pain. It can be a message that you are beginning to reach out for something better. Discouragement can be an important interlude in your practice and growth. (P 141)

Enjoying

1. The Uppercase Magazine newsletter recently featured an artist whose craft is so unique, I spent some time just admiring her pieces… Her name is Susanna Bauer and she combines lace crochet and natural leaves. The intricacy and end product are stunning.

2. One link lead to another, and I ended up watching this documentary on the opening of the very first Disneyland in 1955. Workplace safety wasn’t in practice then, and I actually thought I might see a man get squashed by scraper. What is curiously heartwarming is seeing the variety in age of the male workers, the humour, and the artistry. 

3. A recent episode titled “The Photograph” from the This is Love podcast made me tear up! A really beautiful story!

4. I really liked this wine label and wanted to save the illustration for using in collages. This tutorial on removing wine labels was a perfect how-to!  

5. Finally… my starter is taking off! This stage took far longer to get to than the method I followed suggested. But that’s fine. I’m happy I didn’t give up! I followed Hailee Catalano’s method in her cookbook titled By Heart. This week, I’ll attempt a first loaf. Expectations for the success of this first loaf are reasonably low… But I’m interested in adding to my small bread-making experience and using natural leaven has felt like a good next step.

Cooking

I really like Ottolenghi’s “Beyond Potato Salad” (pictured here). It is mixed with greek yogurt and a bit of mayonnaise. It is topped with toasted cardamom seeds, sesame seeds and nigella seeds and a nice tarragon-and-pickle mixture. Unfortunately, no one else in my little family likes it as much as I do.  

What we all like is Jane Rodmell’s version of Jambalaya from Best Summer Weekends. I think prep and cooking takes about two hours, especially if you take the time to brown ingredients as directed, and it yields a generous six portions. 

Chicken and Sausage Jambalaya

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 cup smoked ham, diced
½ cup spicy smoked sausage, diced
2 cups boneless chicken breast, diced
2 large onions, finely chopped
4 stalks celery, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon cayenne
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon thyme
1 teaspoon filé (optional)
2 cups long-grain converted rice
1 cup tomatoes (fresh or canned, San Marzano), chopped
3 cups chicken stock

Heat oil in a large heavy pot, add ham and sausage, and brown lightly. Lift out and set aside.

Add chicken pieces and brown, then remove and set aside.

Add half the onions, celery, and pepper to the pot, cooking until soft and well browned. Toss in the rest of the vegetables and the garlic, and cook over moderate heat until softened.

Return meats to pot with all the seasonings and cook for 5 minutes. Add rice and stir for a few minutes, then add tomatoes and stock. Bring mixture to a boil, lower heat, cover pot, and leave to cook gently for 20-25 minutes more until liquid is absorbed and rice is tender yet still has texture. Toss gently, remove from heat, cover, and leave to rest for 5 minutes. Serve hot.

Tips: It you want to prepare part of the jambalaya ahead, cook the meats and vegetables as described above and add the tomatoes and stock, but do not add the rice. Refrigerate or freeze. When you are ready to serve, bring the mixture to a boil, add rice, and cook for 20-25 minutes as described above.

Jambalaya often includes seafood, such as shrimp and/or fresh oysters; add them during the last 5 minutes of cooking. Add some hot sauce if you like things spicier.

Walking the Dog

Here’s Enzo, paw daintily lifted, as if the dandelion fluff were a little too much to endure…

Indeed, there are dainty flowers everywhere, and I grab a shot of my favourites here and there…

Then there are the dandelions after a storm. I think they look pretty like this too…

And here’s milkweed. It has pretty long oval-shaped leaves that stretch upwards at the tip, but spread out in pairs as the plant grows.

Here’s another mushroom to add to the collection (here, here).

A mallard on the river…

And Enzo again, looking like a dignified dog.

Wishing you a great week ahead!

A week on Sunday 18/52

Intro

A little while ago, in an e-mail to my brother, I declared “The blog helps me to confront, weekly, two struggles: 1) clarifying my thoughts and 2) handling topics that expose opinions I feel vulnerable about.” For the longest time, I thought it was much safer not to have opinions about things and I think that can be felt in the stiffness of earlier writing. Taking a plunge - life is a river in this metaphor - distilling a cup at a time, paddling on; all that is a more vigorous way of living… And so, this week, more reading, more listening, and just a little more opinion.

Finished reading

I’m happy there are so many books on the subject of writing… I can go on in life continuing to find them and take in their little doses of inspiration. Lately I finished a classic; John McPhee’s Draft No. 4. Of the dozen pages bearing a sticky note, I’ll transcribe two quotes that are in fact pieces of advice. The first:

No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. (p 82)

And the second:

Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way. (p 180)

Podcastland

Part of being a fan of the Freakonomics podcast, with host Stephen Dubner, is admiring how he manages to find not just interesting topics (horses!) but also interesting people. Recently he interviewed Judy Faulkner, shining a light on how a company can be run differently than the maximizing profits model I feel trained to accept as normal. It felt like a refreshing point of view.  

The other, less-fun part of being a fan of a podcast and its host, is accepting that they, like you, are paddling a river and can influence you to like and accept something that later, you realize, wasn’t all that great. A case in point is a recent episode of If Books Could Kill. Titled “Grit”, I was reluctant to listen. Grit is Angela Duckworth’s word for a quality associated with success, and I’d been won over by her voice on Steven Levitt’s People I (Mostly) Admire. But here, Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri were going to apply their show’s tagline: “the airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds”. 

Is it embarrassing to have to revise a previously favourable opinion of something? I used to think so. I used to think that you had to be categorical about things, about people. It’s both harder and more liberating to accept that people are more like fellow travellers than sovereigns; that ideas can be more ephemera than doctrine. 

Collecting

Adding to a previous picture of a bar code I liked, this one, featured on a bag of Pop Corners:

A French audiobook

I liked listening to Veiller sur elle by Jean-Baptiste Andrea. This description of the protagonist’s feat of sculpting a saint, as if he was alive, made me laugh when I heard it:

Il examina le saint François dans mon atelier tandis que Francesco et moi, comme autrefois, attendions  son verdict. J’avais bien travaillé. […] J’avais sculpté François la main levé près de sa joue, un oiseau perché sur l’index. Jusque là, rien d’anormal. Mais l’on devinait par une audace insensé de ma part, que l’aile de l’oiseau avait dû frôler son cou dans la seconde d’avant, le chatouiller, car le saint souriait. On n’avait jamais vu un saint chatouilleux, encore moins souriant, en tout cas, pas en statuaire, où tout les saints arboraient en générale des mines de fonctionnaires divins, harcelés de demandes d’intercession.

In interviews around this book’s winning the Prix Goncourt, (such as here and here) Andrea talks about his love of writing and the priority he gives to a story’s structure. 

A birthday

Enzo, our velvety drapes-for-ears beagle, turned 6 this week, so we gave him some gifts to unwrap.

Baking

Occasionally I’ll get a really specific dessert request, and this week, is was for something simple. Something that didn’t have any hidden “health” to it. No sneaking in some fancy flour, like buckwheat. No fruit and nut-filled batters. I complied and made vanilla cupcakes with chocolate buttercream frosting, thanks to a recipe for both from Smitten Kitchen Every Day. In the quest for interesting flavours and unusual ideas, I sometimes forget that basic can be perfect.

Walking the dog

This week, what caught my eye was texture… more golden grass, more sticks, more curly bark, and hey! Check out the chickadee that landed there!

Sun-drenched texture… from pine tree branches to pussy willows.

And in the forest, where last week we spotted a frog, this week, there was a box.

Do you know what was in the box?

Nothing!

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (no. 23)

A week in pictures

It’s often the case that when a week fills the photos app with colour, my desk has been conversely empty of desky activity. So, I’ve bravely dusted off my keyboard to show you some of the week here…

There was MH’s birthday which occasioned an outing at The Leaf; and aren’t they pretty, the smiling family seen through a water fall? This butterfly agreed to pose.

Then it was Canada Day and we joined a crowd of people at Assiniboia Downs. A thunderstorm broke shortly after we arrived, delaying the horse racing until it was cancelled. But we got to watch the clouds and lightning from our seats in the stand, sheltered from the rain and cooled by the breeze.

The fireworks, begun just before 10:30 were impressive: close, loud, and choreographed to last 20 minutes. Far quieter, but just as pretty, the rose a friend cut for us:

And one of the linden trees in our front yard bloomed this year. It smells so nice!

We went strawberry picking yesterday…

So many summers in a row, it’s a tradition now.

Four baskets were transformed into 19 and 3/4 jars of freezer jam, a quart of strawberry lemonade, a strawberry summer cake and strawberry-rhubarb popsicles, with more strawberries leftover for a strawberry milkshake for the kids, and maybe… a daiquiri for the adults. (But I’ve written about strawberries before… more than once!) So here… let’s end on a furry note.

Listening

Advertised on another podcast, I started listening to Outlaw Ocean, beginning with S2, episode 4: “The Repo Man” then went back and listened to everything available from the series. Episodes like “Waves of Extraction” and “The Magic Pipe” from Season 1 recall Toms River (mentioned a few weeks ago in No. 18) for our world’s continuing problem with pollution. And the latest episode in Season 2, “The Shrimp Factory Whistleblower” makes me think of themes in Behind the Beautiful Forevers. I really appreciated the more personal take on this work by Ian Urbina himself, in Season 1, Episode 7: “The Spell of the Sea”. All in all, a podcast series that I both learned so much from and enjoyed listening to, even if some of its topics were especially heavy.

Postcard

A quick phone capture of a meadow spied on a Friday night bike ride with Christian.

Happy Sunday!

A week on Sunday (No. 16)

The scene is joyfully warm…

Outings, food, Enzo’s birthday… the week is a celebration in pictures! The crocuses in our front yard are blooming…

Enzo turned 5 in human years, but is significantly more mature in dog years. He’s pretty good… we’re happy to have him around. He got a big dog cookie shaped like a cake, and a toy and some treats he had to unwrap. He’s good at unwrapping…

I made falafel this week and fried it perfectly golden, a success in my non-expert frying experience. And were it not for the “shaping into balls and frying” bit, which is slightly effortful, I consider falafel to be an almost perfect meal… satisfying, vegetarian, interesting, customizable… Here, on our sun-drenched table, it is served with cucumbers, tomatoes, mango and pita, and (not-pictured) tahini sauce. Recipe here.

Thursday’s outing with my mother-in-law was a chance to document The Bay’s closing.

A friend and I visited the greenhouses for her garden. Such pretty places in spring!

This geranium caught my eye… It’s called “Starry Pure White” and I went back later and bought a few for our flower bed. Its petals are serrated instead of smooth and round.

Reading

Larger questions around childhood education usually piques my interest, and this week, Austin Kleon’s newsletter lead to the appraisal of a list of books,  which lead to Josh Brake disputing a comment by Harari (“Today, nobody has any idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in twenty years.”) with “Education is not primarily about the acquisition of skills like learning how to code, designing an engineering system, analyzing a business plan, or critiquing an essay. It's about learning to think, to ask questions, and to foster virtue.” (“Foster virtue”! A noble ideal it seems almost strange to admit…) which lead to his link to John Warner’s substack “What is the Purpose of Education?” refuting marketing around Sal Kahn’s upcoming book (titled Brave New Word) and Warner’s writing “I think education should be a process through which individuals become their best selves, which definitely includes finding their way to an economically productive life that provides material security, but is also much more than that.” All of which I found interesting.

Wobble

Sohla El-Waylly revealed her spring must-have items on Instagram, which included something that looks like these wedges, because “you don’t want to sit at a wobbly table when you eat out.” And I thought “clearly, I don’t eat out enough.” But it made me smile because my dad was always keen to fix wobbly tables with whatever cardboard or paper was at hand. Then my friend and I ate out at lunch on Friday and…

Postcard

This week a view toward the river, from beside a great big poplar and its buds. The green is just beginning to show!

Happy Sunday!