Bean there, done that
Food: Recipe - Ucceletto Beans
If you're looking for some long lead cooking that can help you stay healthy, the ever-humble bean is one of the best options
By Louise Crosby
I know busy people who spend Sunday afternoons in the kitchen making food to last well into the week. Stews, spaghetti sauce, soups, casseroles. This is the time for relaxed cooking, letting things simmer long and slow. Then come Monday or Tuesday night, after a long day at work, dinner is just a matter of heating things up, boiling some pasta or making a salad. Food is on the table in no time and you thank yourself for making the effort in advance.
When I take a long look at meals, I often cook a pot of beans. Not the sweet pork and beans of our youth, although they can be very good, but chick peas or black beans, brown pintos or white Great Northerns, soaked overnight, then simmered for an hour or two with some aromatics for flavour – a quartered onion, some chopped carrot and celery, a head of garlic. ...
Father, motherland, Rossif Sutherland
People: Interview - Rossif Sutherland
The Sutherland with the curious accent makes a dark turn in River before preparing for a new Catastrophe on French-Canadian television
By Katherine Monk
As far as Sutherlands go, he’s the tall one. You could see it when he appeared on stage next to his legendary father, Donald, at the recent Canadian Screen Awards. Rossif’s thick brown hair stood just a shade taller than his father’s flattening white pate.
Career-wise, however, there’s still a ways to go before he reaches the same stature as the Sutherland who appeared in M*A*S*H and Ordinary People. Or even that of his half-brother Kiefer. Not that he really cares.
“I don't care much about what people think about me. If they don’t like me, they don’t like me. You can be the nicest person in the room… it doesn’t matter…. And I’ve never been very strategic with my choices, and maybe my career has suffered for it,” says Vancouver-born Rossif Sutherland from ...
Close encounters on the third base line
Sports: Jays' Spring Training in Dunedin
Whether you're sponging up the baseball, sponging off the spilled beer, or buying a sponge in a seaside tourist shop, catching Blue Jays spring training in Dunedin is a ball fan's beery version of Valhalla
By Jay Stone
DUNEDIN, Fla. — On my first day in Dunedin this year, I went to a spring training baseball game and saw a pitcher named Pat Venditte, who can throw with either arm. He has a special six-finger glove with a thumb at each end, and he can put it on whichever hand he wants and throw with the other arm.
Venditte, who is in the Toronto Blue Jays camp, has been in the league for a while — he was with the Yankees two years ago and Oakland last year — and there’s even a rule named after him. It says that he has to declare which arm he’s going to throw with against a switch-hitter. This keeps baseball, which is kind of a leisurely sport anyway, from becoming an endless game of chicken, with Venditte moving his glove from ...
Handing out Canadian Candy
News: The Canadian Screen Awards 2016
Room cleans up with nine wins in the film category, including best picture, while Schitt's Creek, Book of Negroes and Orphan Black dominate the TV side of Canada's annual awards show... now called The Candys?
By Katherine Monk
It was pretty good, eh? They had a big stage. A band. Gold statuettes. A host that wasn't William Shatner. And people in the audience -- some of whom were even recognizable. More importantly, this year's Canadian Screen Awards also included a few titles with proven international appeal, such as the TV show Orphan Black and the film Room, the Oscar-nominated drama that cleaned up with nine wins at Sunday night's gala, including best picture, best director, best actress, best actor, best supporting actress and best adapted screenplay for Emma Donoghue.
For an awards broadcast that's struggled with audience ambivalence and stumping films with no box-office visibility, this year's show, hosted by Norm Macdonald and ...
Trump Stumbles Right On
Politics: Feeling Blue in a Red State
As Republican rallies descend into racist violence and rhetorical chaos, right-wing talk-radio's angry baby of anti-government sentiment comes of age carrying a verbal assault weapon and a whole lot of attitude
By Carla McClain
OK, boys and girls, time to cut to the chase. Time to figure out why a once-functional nation like the United States of America is about to nominate for its President -- arguably the most powerful political office in the world -- a bloviating birther braggadocio blowhard, aka Donald J. Trump. How did we get here? What in the name of God has happened to us?
That’s not hard to figure out....
Welcome to the fruits of twenty-five years of the highly effective brainwashing of a good chunk of the American people -- OK, let’s say it, the weak-minded sheeple among us, and there are lots of those throughout the human species -- by right-wing talk-radio.
I happen to know how this got done because I -- unlike ...
Preparing for Parenthood
The Daddy Diary Part 1 – The NeverEnding Story
A veteran journalist tackles his hardest assignment yet: parenthood. A long-time fatherhood fence sitter, he takes his inspiration from a family of storytellers - not to mention the adventures of a boy and his dragon.
The Little Prince gets a little lost
Movie review: The Little Prince
An uneven effort with plenty of good intentions, Mark Osborne's adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's kid-lit classic gains a new dimension but loses some depth
Feeling all pains and needles
The Sick Days: Part 22
After toughing out the chronic pain of inflamed joints and fever flashes, a young reporter hits the wall and lands in the hospital where hiding the truth about her illness is no longer an option
By Shelley Page
An ‘X’ was drawn on my back to mark the spot where the biopsy needle was to be plunged. That’s when the nephrologist executed the bait and switch.
“Ok, how about you do it?”
“The biopsy? Me?”
Hovering over me — face down, backside up— the attending nephrologist discussed the procedure with the resident, who’d been at his side since I met them the previous afternoon. (It was a teaching hospital).
“Yes, you’ve watched enough of these. You’re ready.”
“It’s a straight shot?”
“More or less.”
One of them touched my shoulder. “How are you feeling?”
Uh.
I lifted my head, twisted my neck to look them both in the eyes. I’d read somewhere that you’re supposed to make eye contact with ...
After a life in news, one last plea
People: Tribute to Ron Rose (1919-2015)
A veteran newspaper man files a final message to readers: "Do what you can to stem the unedited and often unsourced outpourings in the flood of social media."
By Rod Mickleburgh
We said farewell late last month to a good man. Part of the great generation that survived the Depression, World War Two, the tinderbox of the Cold War and Liberace, Ron Rose was part of this crazy world for nearly a century, falling just four years short of the big One Zero Zero. But that’s not why so many of us gathered to pay our respects. We were there because Ron Rose, besides being the most gracious and generous of individuals, was a newspaper man. It was a gathering of the clans, a celebration of someone whose working life as a knight of the keyboard stretched back to the Depression. Ron Rose was history. When he started at the Vancouver Sun as a copy boy in 1938, he reported for work in the celebrated Sun Tower, then topped by the paper’s majestic neon ...
