The Blork Blog

Tonight being Hallowe’en and all, I thought I’d do something easy when it came time to make dinner. After all, the doorbell was ringing every three minutes (in the end, we had about 85 kids drop by).
It started with the onions. One big Spanish onion, cut in fairly thin slices (less than 1/4 inch). They […]

I’m walking on Ste. Catherine Street, heading east towards McGill-College Avenue. I’m almost at the corner when I hear the siren screaming two blocks away. I turn and squint into the sun. A red fire truck is barrelling towards me on Ste. Catherine Street, lights flashing and siren wailing. Its horn goes graa-boooonnnk as it […]

Chef Nick was so traumatized by his Kobe Beef experiments that it knocked him right off his steak blog. I thought of him last weekend when I was at a butcher shop in Brossard and my eyes fell upon several fat packages of the overpriced phoney Japanese cow meat.

I say it’s phoney because, as Chef […]

The very resourceful town of Fort Myers Beach, Florida, has just emerged from a crisis. The problem began a few weeks ago when some townsfolk complained about the banners that went up for the town’s annual Turkey Testicle Festival.
That’s right. Every year, Fort Myers holds a festival in which people flock to the town in […]

A week or so ago I mentioned autumnal recipes, including ones I found in this month’s Châtelaine magazine. Tonight, after Martine’s carrot, apple, and curry soup, followed by some roasted haddock on a bed of leeks and fennel, I made the “apple tart with old cheddar and rosemary” recipe from the magazine.
Oh my!
What a crazy […]

I’m reading The Bug, a novel by U.S. writer and computer programmer Ellen Ullman. It’s a geek read, full of 1980s-era programming lore and with a steady undercurrent of the tension between human linguistics and computer processing. But you don’t have to be a geek or a programmer to appreciate the humour and the pathos […]

In many of the discussions about the conflict in Lebanon last summer, a few important facts seem to get left out. These are not unknown or unreported facts – indeed, they have been fairly widely reported – yet the ongoing rhetorical discussions and pissing matches about the events seem to make little reference to them.
As […]