I’ve been learning a lot about za’atar recently, which is appropriate given the title of this website! I first learned of it through a visit to my local middle…
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about comfort food. The term often gets invoked in various, and even competing, contexts – so what, exactly, do we mean by the…
Lahmajoun sometimes gets called ‘Armenian pizza’ or ‘Turkish pizza’ or ‘Lebanese pizza’ or ‘Syrian pizza’ or ‘Arab pizza’, Wikipedia tells me. But, it’s really not pizza. Pizza is a…
Hey Tony, We never had the chance to meet and even when you were alive I never followed your work very closely. This was mostly my fault; I have…
I’m from Canada, where ‘grits’ aren’t really a thing, except as the nickname for one of our political parties. But, in the United States, it is a thing, especially in…
Necessity is the mother of creativity. I’ve always been someone who works better under firm deadlines, due dates and commitment – it forces me to get things done that…
Scarborough. The wide expanses and lack of familiar landmarks often disorient me: I’m here often but I’m not from here. I wait, only to unintentionally hop on a bus…
There are lots of things in life that I dream about doing. I’ve fought the label at times – because it sometimes gets used to deride those who never…
There are days that are an absolute grind. Social media doesn’t normally show those; or, I don’t normally show those on my social media. It’s not that I’m trying…
I remember what it felt like, riding the school bus between towns (our town was too small to have its own school), the starkness of the prairie landscape rolling…
Cooking is a protest against specialization. At least that’s the argument that writer Michael Pollan puts forward in his Netflix show Cooked (and, I imagine, in the book of…
Our histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover that those…