This year the city’s shipping in Euro-crazies for the summer, doing a mayoral throw-down, plus all the other usual seasonal stuff that’s supposed to happen. It’s all a bit overwhelming.

One day at a time.

And by the way, if you’re ever eating Fiddleheads, steam or boil those suckers first. I won’t go into detail but two of us spent many hours ejecting vile green masses and bile from our retching stomachs. Otherwise the baby ferns tasted quite pleasant. They’re in season for only about a week; they say three in the fridge but they start to unfurl in there and get all leafy and bitter — blech – straight into the trash.

Early risers like strawberries and asparagus should start showing up soon if fern isn’t to your liking. After that we should start seeing beans and potatoes, then tomatoes herbs and squashes, and finally apples, pears, peaches, and other fruits. I probably also missed a couple or dozen fruits and vegetables in there. When they’re in season, they really are much better.

Okay, you got me, I spent the day booting around St. Lawrence Market replenishing some much-needed stock. It was dark and grayny today so there wasn’t much else to do – the city felt a bit like a ghost town. One of those days when staying under the covers isn’t such a bad idea, you know? Did I ever suggest that statutory holidays be based on the weather? The first mayoral candidate to take that and run with it automatically gets my vote.

Probably won’t be Rob Ford though. That guy just got a one-two sucker punch; first some comments he made a few years ago about gay people are thrown at his face by Furious George (I believe I did mention how both George’s bulldogged qualities and his homosexuality would be to his advantage), then Rob gets publicly scolded by the integrity commissioner for revealing how much the city was planning to pay for some house.

I suspect this won’t deter him, though – he’ll just have to get his shit together for the next salvo. Whoever’s running the campaign might want to start maybe talking to Rob and get to know him; find out a little more about the candidate. It seems obvious to me but maybe that’s just the nature of municipal politics. Maybe meat just likes to get roasted.

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*cough*

*hack*

Doctor says I might be able to get back to it tomorrow. And if experience has taught us anything, professional advice should never be questioned. Thanks for dropping by, dear reader, and be sure to grab some hand sanitizer on the way out. (Haha! like it’s gonna help.)

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I mean, what if that were my own potbellied pig out there?

Okay, so pig is the wrong word; let’s say gourmand. — Would I be able to eat him?

Look, have no illusions here; I’m fairly certain that Oliver would be feasting on my bloated corpse the moment I breathed my last. He might do so sadly, with a tear in his eye, but still manage to splatter bits of my entrails all over the kitchen floor. He is, after all, a meat eater. A very messy one. He’s just built that way.

So are we…kind of. We can do quite well on a non-meat diet and people have been proving that for quite some time. Let’s face it: meat eaters, of which I am one, really have no good excuse except maybe to say that it’s tasty.

I can’t rightly say don’t eat meat, just maybe not so much. And even less baby animals; that just doesn’t seem right, does it? While we’re at it, why not choose meat from an animal that has had a decent life? Of course you pay more for that, and that’s because it really should be a premium: Eat it less and savour it more. Veggies are, pound for pound, dirt cheap anyway, even if you buy organic which simply means your food’s been exposed to less crap. Save money, potentially more healthy, and happier creatures. I fail to see the downside.

Those who will tell you free-run, organic whatever tastes better are, for the most part, sadly deluded. The non-organic fruit tastes as good as the organic, the free-run don’t run on the butter better than the no-free-run — now three times fast.

There is this one milk that, to me, seems less gamey and more creamy than other local brands, but aside from that I wouldn’t recommend buying these things for improved flavour. Some, like fruit, will actually go bad quicker than the non-organic versions, but that’s probably because bacteria aren’t repelled by it.

Ultimately, it seems like it’s not a bad thing to be a bit more mindful of where our food comes from, even if just for ourselves. Making food more precious makes it taste better somehow, despite what I’ve just stated in the previous paragraph. It’s the difference between a single orange and a crate-full. You’ll never eat the whole crate before they rot so you can, nay must, be wasteful. You could fling armfulls at people for fun and still have a glass of freshly squeezed. A single orange, though, would be peeled so much more carefully, coquettishly even. And long after the orange was gone, the rending peel would remind your of the golden days of yesteryear, when you still had your orange.

I was going to start this paragraph with “But I digest…“, but after some reflection I came to the conclusion that I can’t stomach that kind of humour. I’ll just end by reminding you of that orange. Remember that orange? How it looked up at you with those sad, teary eyes? Remember?!

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