Are the Maritimes ignored? (March 30)

DIARY

Update on my cooking disaster

                        by Robert LaFrance

            I do some cooking (in spite of the lies I wrote here two weeks ago) and often experiment with new recipes. Indeed, I often create new recipes and they are often triumphs, like Blended Whipped Cream and Dill Pickles with a chocolate sauce.

            However, this report is not about one of my successes. The following is meant as a warning to those who, like me, tend to experiment with new recipes. My advice: don’t try this at home.

            I was standing around the kitchen Monday morning and thinking what I should make for breakfast – something tasty and nutritious. I must have discarded those two notions and decided to make scrambled eggs with some new kind of flavour, one I hadn’t tried before.

            I scrambled a couple of eggs in a bowl, added a bit of shredded cheddar, put in a little skim milk, pepper (I don’t add salt to much), and then spied some chip or cracker dip in the fridge.

            It was labelled Hummus with Red Peppers. It first I thought it said ‘humus’, which is part of garden topsoil (decayed compost), but then saw the other ‘m’. Two teaspoons of that would spice up those eggs, I reasoned.

            Spiced it up all right. I should have added humus. I don’t think I ever tasted anything so absolutely vile, putrid and gross. It will be weeks before I dare to experiment again.                                                               **************************

            We as Eastern Canada folk often have our area overlooked by the powers that be (Ottawa, Toronto) and it does get a little tiresome all right.

            Listening to the CBC Radio morning show ‘Q’ last week, I was impressed by how easy it is to make a whole area disappear, even one as big as the four Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.

            The host Shad was talking to a Vancouver musician who was saying he and his group had decided to play a gig in every night club along the highway “across Canada from Vancouver all the way to the other side – Toronto”. Shad didn’t point out the fact that several people live between Toronto and the Atlantic coast.

            A show of hands – do you ever get tired of hearing about places like Thunder Bay, Calgary, Winnipeg and Mississauga and finding the Maritimes pretty much ignored? I say we owe blues singer-guitarist Matt Andersen a big thank-you for putting us back on the map. He’s great.

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            My ‘electronic device’ problems continue even as my cooking skills deteriorate. Late last year I bought a smartphone – as long-suffering readers of this column will know – and a few months later I bought a larger version of a smartphone. They called it a tablet.

            It is said that Moses wrote the Ten Commandments on a tablet, but I think I am safe in saying that Moe would have still been struggling if his tablet worked like mine. It’s a Samsung something-or-other and there’s a problem with this Android device.

            Some people are oversensitive, but this blasted device is about six degrees beyond that, maybe ultra-over-sensitive. I blink my eye from across the room and it changes to another show. It has a nice big screen and, if it would only work right, I could watch Johnny Carson reruns as if I were sitting in front of a TV. Come to think of it though, after all these years of televisions getting bigger and bigger – Flug owns a 99” flat-screen one – doesn’t it seem a little odd that people like me, as if there were such an animal, are now watching shows on screens the size of TV screens in the 1950s?

            Before I leave the subject, I must report that Apple has put three new generations of iPhones on the market in the past nine hours.

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            This is not exactly local news, but most have now heard that former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford died on March 22. That news was probably sad for his family and friends – and he had lots – but I marvel at the hypocrisy of various politicians and others who spoke about his passing. For a while there, I thought the discoverers of insulin were the ones being described, or perhaps Moses himself.

            While Ford was mayor and sucking back the crack and imbibing all sorts of other materials, not one person in ten had a good word to say about him. Once he left office, most breathed sighs of relief and he disappeared from the news until a desperate Stephen Harper decided to have Rob Ford at a rally in Harper’s honour.

            I suppose we all should be used to hypocrisy; we hear it every day.
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