I joined bakers from around the globe making sweet doughs and breads this weekend. Baking Sukkar Bi Tahin, Beirut Tahini Swirls, is a pleasure. I added orange zest and Fiori di Sicilia to the tahini filling for the first time. Sometimes I just open the bottle of that essence and inhale. This pastry is insanely good with a strong cup of tea or coffee. The dough is rolled and folded and develops flakiness. I have made them so often I’ve personalized the process.
 
***
 
The missions, shelters, and foodbanks are sharing images of the elderly. It reflects their users. Covid and the cost of living have made life precarious for seniors living on a public pension. This is not a new problem; I remember a neighbourhood senior man from my days working in kitchens in Stratford — a WWII veteran. We helped him how and when we could.
 
This is a municipal, provincial, and federal issue. Meaning, it’s all of our problem. I’m all for building housing for families and improving transportation and infrastructure, but where do insecure and homeless seniors fit into the scheme? You can't imagine how many women are among them. Sidelining anyone is a moral issue. Feeling loved and cared for is as simple as a cooked meal or a bag of groceries.

***
 
I’ve been wearing my grandmother Theo’s maple leaf pin on my jacket. It feels right for so many reasons. 
 
The willows along the Humber River had a chartreuse aura on Thursday morning. Fleeting, impossible to photograph, but easy to stop and admire.

Saturday evening dishes and Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth.
 
***
 
Sometimes two songs together sound like a close dance.

The era my professional cooking is grounded in:
 
I put a chef jacket on for the first time in 1985. I was an apprentice in a French restaurant with a chef-owner from Lausanne, Switzerland. Fortunately for me, André Donnet looked toward Europe. I was free to dream of staging in France and eight years later it happened.
 
I matured through the 90s during the New York and British invasion (that’s what it felt like to me in my mid-20s to 30s) and I was influenced by a young Jean Georges Vongerichten at the Lafayette and JoJo, Joel Robuchon at Jamin, Lydia Shire at Biba in Boston, St. John, Sally Clarke, The Quilted Giraffe, Mark Miller, Alastair Little…
 
Some of the chefs I admire:
 
Eugénie Brazier, I hope soon you’ll know all the reasons why. Fernand Point for his joie de vivre, abundant spirit, and his respect and admiration for women. This is something I wrote about them a few months before going to writing school.
 
Deborah Madison. Who can forget Greens? I was a vegetarian for a long stretch of time in my teens and it was formative. My favourite station to work in a restaurant kitchen is entremetier.
 
Joyce Goldstein...Judy Rodgers…Peggy Smith…Lindsey Remolif Shere…Barbara Tropp
  
Professional cookbooks that are precious to me:
 
River Cafe Blue Book. I have a British edition full of memorabilia. As soon as I got it I knew I would stage there and five years later I was getting off the Tube at Hammersmith station. That spring morning walk along the Thames to the restaurant is a tattoo on my memory and spirit.
 
Chez Panisse Cooking. Paul Bertolli with Alice Waters. the Gail Skoff edition. Again, crammed full of love with pages falling out from how much I have cooked from it. Also, a former student gifted me a copy of Patricia Curtains, Menus from Chez Panisse (signed for me) and it is a book that I sometimes fall into visually.
 
The Natural Cuisine of Georges Blanc. Extraordinary and revolutionary. It vividly expresses a love of family and place.
 
White Heat. I have a first British edition bought in 1990. Shook is how I felt at the time — in the first year of cooking school.
 
La Varenne Pratique by Anne Willan. It should still be in print. My bible for most basics. It was the companion text to Escoffier at chef school.
 
Food writing that changed me:
 
Elizabeth David’s An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. Christmas 1991 was alive and magic because of it. I read a chapter in it for research this past week.
 
The Unprejudiced Palate by Angelo Pellegrini. A charming and wise voice for immigrant Italian culture and cooking in the Pacific Northwest.
 
Kermit Lynch’s Adventures on the Wine Route. Read it as a first-year student on the urging of a wine instructor. Many of us have made the pilgrimage to his shop in Berkeley.
 
Jeffrey Steingarten in Vogue. I shared so many of his articles with my Larder students.
 
What do I cook now?
 
Vegetable and vegetarian side dishes. I like having a few things in the fridge that improve with time. Dishes that I can shape shift with other ingredients over a day or two. I made the carrot and chickpea curry above last week with a watercress, mint, and coriander salad. It was vegan and a tight-budget pleaser.
 
Funky dinner salads with canned, fresh, or smoked fish and shaved vegetables and crispy rice — thank you for the inspiration Daniela Galarza.
 
Anything I can marinate in Shio koji — chicken is *swoon.*
 
Fisherman’s Sauce made with too much garlic and anchovies.
 
I love to bake and will forever be grateful for the quality of my professional pastry training. It set me apart from a lot of cooks.
 
What is my ideal season?
 
I could not do without all four Canadian season. But as a proficient canner and jam maker, I’m built for May to October. What tastes better than raspberries, apricots, black currants, Brandywine tomatoes, asparagus, flat green pole beans, Lacinato kale, and Hubbard squash. The pleasure of opening a jar of something special on a February day when I’ve stopped believing in everything.
 
What historical figures would I like to cook for me?
 
Myrtle Allen, Alain Chapel, Robert Carrier, Penelope Casas.

***
 
My mom had a Cricut machine and made a scrapbook for me. I was going to crop the congratulations out and then I realized it’s perfect. That’s me in grade seven accepting a prize for an essay I wrote for the Maitland Valley Conservation Authority. It’s wild how long I’ve thought I wasn’t a writer. *laughs*
 
Slow Down.
 
***
 
I needed love this week.
 
I’ll listen to any song with a horn section and a woman in a leotard and leggings. Snoh Allegra is this generations Roberta Flack — a sublime voice and a seductive tempo.

​I saw this video on Instagram from film production talent in Hollywood. The billionaires behind the big studios have bet everything on AI. People who write, edit, and work in production are no longer needed. Trained individuals with a wealth of experience 20 or more years deep, in their 40s and 50s at career peak, have been made redundant with little notice. For greater shareholder value and to brutalize unions.

Look at their faces when they tell you what they could lose. They are the tip of an iceberg.

Now, think of your favorite movie and the long screen roll you sometimes sit through at the end because you’re so shook and need to recover from a moving or challenging experience. Most of that talent was told to take the yellow brick road to the private sector, like it’s the Wizard of Oz. Meanwhile, Covid and the cost of living have stripped many people of their financial buffers. 

Going to the movies is high up on my list of good things. What is better than being embraced by a good story with a room full of people? At a showing of the newly remastered Thelma and Louise at TIFF not long ago, we laughed, cheered, and groaned every time Darryl appeared. Who can forget the shot of the note hanging in the door of an open microwave, back lit by the tiny light in the dark kitchen, with a beer in the shadows, sometime after midnight, while the phone rings. The fury you feel for Thelma. That scene started as words on a page. Callie Khouri wrote it.  

I want the people who make movies and television to have good lives. I want the same thing for people who write books, features, and newsletters that I enjoy. To have enough for themselves, and their families. To earn from a talent seems like a reasonable expectation. Why can we believe in billionaires and not this? 

***
 
My friend Voula took me to a concert on Thursday night with her daughter, Maxine, and niece, Emily. The talk across generations before the show was a pleasure and we danced ourselves into a sweat along with a crowd of people and Zaho de Sagazan who left the stage a couple of times to step into the crowd and dance and sing with us — a brilliant intimacy. I associate the colors in the picture on the left with the energy of the night and people. I was surrounded by French conversation on the 29C Dufferin bus going north after the show. 
 
It’s ice cream and a walk season. 

I laughed real good a few times listening to this Seth Rogan interview. It’s also a story of community. Sam Fragosa is a master.

***
 
I went looking for a love song for Canada this week. We need it. Radiohead came in soon after and fit like a glove.

This nostalgia came out of a friend’s collection. 

I fall into the first double spread on page two and three — the chartreuse tablecloth, Faience crockery, imagining the weight of the silver in hand, the jar of macerating cherries on the lunch sideboard alongside two tourtes and a platter of steak with bone marrow, a glazed terra cotta urn topped with a basket of oranges, paint puddles of yellow and white light through the June Plane tree. Dining in a lovingly restored Provençal windmill.

An OG of Entertaining books and a snapshot of 1980’s French Riviera. If I see it in your collection I like you more. Roger Vergé looks like he had fun. The son of a blacksmith, he was raised in a culture of craft. The words Le Moulin de Mougins taste like chilled rosé. So many other French chefs from that region and time leap to mind. I staged with one. I can see Richard Olney and Lulu Peyraud in it. 

The book’s production is Flammarion, and the design team is five people deep besides Vergé. It reads like they enjoyed working together. I could write at length about the people and the art in it. 

Learning the book was picked up in America by Stewart, Tabori, and Chang made me smile. Immediately I thought of Martha Stewart’s Entertaining. The two books are iconic-symbiotic — Stewart published in 1982 and Vergé in 1986. Both are lush with the spirit of the times. I imagine Martha looking like a star on the patio at Le Moulin de Mougins. 

***

​I walked on the shoulder of a hilly winding road up to his restaurant. I could not afford to eat. It was my first trip to France. This is part of how I spent my one day off during the Festival de Cannes. I don’t know why I wasn’t on a local bus that day, maybe I was thinking exercise. I’m sure there’s an easier route than the one I took. I don’t recall having a water bottle. 

I bought Le Moulin de Mougins Calisson in the gift shop and I’m still glad I did that. I was an early international stagiaire and had enough for a six-week stay. I was cared for, but I wasn’t eating at a hit parade of 3-star restaurants. I did the same thing with Louis Outhier, walked east on the Promenade de la Croisette, the Mediterranean rolling in to my left, a good long way toward L’Oasis. I have made other pilgrimages on subsequent visits. Eating is ideal, but sometimes you can’t do it for an arm’s-length number of reasons. Then, I was on a pan bagnat budget. Everything was still ridiculously delicious.

I made those journeys because I wanted to be near the chefs and restaurants I’d read about. As a young woman, I came into restaurant kitchens full of hope and dreams. André, Mark and I talked for hours about chefs we admired and meals we wanted to eat. One of the many gifts of the early years.   

***

Jeni Glasgow has joie de vivre and a thoroughly unique and seductive way with food and hospitality. She chefs at a writers’ retreat in the Luberon at La Gonette. It’s on my bucket list. I can hear my friends say, ‘Inshallah,’ in unison.

***

New music week.  

On Friday night, I was invited to a Whole Animal Dinner at Beast. Nathan and I have been friends for a while, and we share a love of French food. He wanted me to taste his quenelle de brochet à la Lyonnaise, a fish mousse made from pickerel, shaped into a large quenelle, poached and served with sauce américaine and in this case, on a thin layer of savory mushroom custard. It was tender and rich, and If I closed my eyes I was in a bouchon in Lyon. 

Half of his kitchen team are women — their white button-up shirts are spotless. Thanh is from Bà Ria-Vũng a southeast coastal province in Vietnam. The City of Sagamihara in the prefecture of Kanagawa near Tokyo, Japan is Yuri’s home. Two dishes carried the imprint of their spirit and talent. They brought them out to me, leaving the kitchen for the first time, and explaining in detail the ingredients.

Lobster and American cheese were some of the ingredients in Thanh’s spring rolls and were so good I ate it before I got a photo. *laughs* The wrapper is from her family in Vietnam and was the thickness of a butterfly’s wing. I have never tasted a brighter nuoc cham — a crystalline pool of fish sauce, chilies, palm sugar, and acid.

And then there was shrimp sausage the precise texture of boudin blanc. Nathan likes the French chef technicians. He has gone through many of their recipes mastering the sausage’s texture. It was sliced and set on a pool of beurre blanc. Yuri came out with a small pot of something dark and mysterious, a fermented Amazake spicy sauce, that included sansho pepper, ginger, garlic, konbu, and star anise, and put a dollop in the tart beurre blanc. The three elements of the dish had the same harmony as the three cooks in the kitchen. 

Thanh and Yuri are full participants in an environment where they can shine. Learning and practicing are core kitchen values, and the team is playful with ideas and execution. Nathan doesn’t take himself too seriously. He has never underestimated me. I can’t tell you how refreshing that is.

Thank you Mel for entertaining my Ken Watanabe obsession. And to Jan, Brandon, Stew, and Scott. The hospitality was outstanding. My autograph is on the wall twice. Between two visits, someone drew a strand of flowers beside it.

***
 
This week there was news that Georges Blanc lost a star. The response from the family expresses savoir-faire:
 
“We'll make do with the two stars... maybe we'll be less elitist and a little more accessible.”

The Blanc legacy began with Elisa, who taught her daughter Paulette, who taught her son Georges. A family métier passing through three generations over almost one hundred years. All the twinkling stars in an indigo night sky are not enough. A restaurant that endures is spéciale.
 
Elisa Blanc was among a small group of women awarded stars from Michelin in 1933 — 2-stars for her cooking at the inn at Vonnas. Then and now, there’s poetry in the ratings symmetry. Some of my most memorable meals in France have been in Michelin 2-star restaurants. 
 
***
 
I am working on an interesting project and after I hit send, usually on Thursday, I still want to write. I switch into ‘today’ mode. I wrote the piece above on the Bathurst streetcar in my Notes app heading south toward Beast. A young woman offered me her seat on a busy Friday night. I embrace all that comes with grey hair. It felt like a good omen for the evening. 
 
***
 
Imagine you’re in a French nightclub.

Cellar Rat

Most people who do others dirty don’t bank on their victims landing a book deal. But that’s how it played out for Hannah Selinger. Cellar Rat, her first book, recounts in vivid detail a period in her twenties when she worked in several storied New York restaurants as a sommelier. Restaurant work is the filling in a sandwich—a period between completing an MFA in writing from Columbia University and eventually pursuing a career as a writer. 

The story has the cadence of a well-orchestrated Friday night dinner service. Selinger writes with candor and humor about events most people want to forget and has the backbone to put name tags on everyone present. Some details will rattle even well-seasoned restaurant employees. Her commitment to self-interrogation messes with the view that this is revenge-porn. 

Selinger demonstrates how her experience of childhood domestic abuse laid the groundwork for her attraction to restaurant culture. A business where there is no shortage of entitled men is alluring. As a young woman, the imprint of early abuse by her stepfather leaves her with weak boundaries, an inability to see red flags, and an attraction to predators. The pressures she writes about in the chapter, Theft, are heartbreaking. It’s hard not to burst into flames reading Fourplay and Chef Fucker. She uses a wide-angle lens to bring the enablers into focus. Among the many loathsome characters, this threesome is remarkable: 

“I imagined Tosi, Chang, Salmon, a rat pack of outright and internalized misogyny, gossiping about my dalliance with Johnny, aching to make some ill-timed joke at my expense. If the point was to cut me down so that I would know my place in the managerial hierarchy, the trick had worked.”

Cellar Rat is a forthright and progressive examination of addiction and restaurant culture. There are bottoms Selinger has to crawl out of. It’s a messy and emotional journey. “I began to understand that restaurant work might be hurting me,” she writes. 

Terrible events are eventually transformed by humility into instructive lessons. Selinger wakes up to all the ways restaurant culture denies women their appetites and agency. You will cheer when she retrieves what the Momofuku team tries to erase of her. You might wish she was putting the last nail in the coffin of celebrity chef culture, but as she writes, “Restaurants remain broken.”

In the end, Selinger grows up, takes the necessary steps to realize her dreams, and lays claim to her story. 

If you have the means, buy it for yourself in a local bookstore. A writer still gets dollars if you take it out of the library. It’s a book to put in the hands of young servers and cooks. 

***
 
Good peppers are often on the discount rack. Friday night, I roasted them with anchovies, garlic, rosemary, capers, olive oil, and seasoning as prep for Sunday night pasta. Then, I made a messy and delicious trout, crispy rice, watercress, carrot, and pickled beet salad with a ginger-sesame dressing. It was fresh and tasted like double happiness. 
 
A friend sent me a Beast Pizza gift certificate for my birthday—that was Saturday dinner sorted.
 
***
 
I had trouble settling on music, but these two songs fit the sentiment of this week. On Your Side came to me on Saturday from someone I follow on Bluesky. It’s lovely. 

The Catalpas in winter look like morel mushrooms. I stare out the window a lot.

Tree Writing by Aaron Walker.

***

Rebecca Solnit writing about Orwell’s retreat from London from An Inventory of Pleasures in Orwell’s Roses:

“Some called his migration to this remote location suicidal or masochistic, and many who have written about him seem to consider living in London an eminently reasonable thing to do and living out on a Scottish island unreasonable. They seem to assume that reasonability meant eking out as long a life as possible rather than living it as fully as possible. Orwell all along had tended to choose the latter over the former. And the air of London, filthy with coal smoke, was itself deadly in ways rarely acknowledged in his lifetime, particularly for someone with his underlying pulmonary conditions.”

“As the Rose-Hip to the Rose” is more beautiful writing.

***

This is how I describe what I’m doing right now. I spend most of my days sifting through the municipal-sized dump that is the internet, searching for small shards — photos, quotes, death notices, anything adjacent. Here’s what I’ve learned from sifting:

1.  The tech collaborators have turned Google into an Amazon mall.
2.  Image search is a vast wasteland, thanks to Pinterest and Alamy. 
3.  The app quenching my bibliography thirst is Zotero. 

That I have access to so much is a miracle. Tech is good up to the point of hyperbole. Those bros know how to write a press release. 

I’m grateful for what I can find online, but increasingly, it has limits. There is more out there beyond the reach of wireless. Who doesn’t like a library or archive? Or visiting a spot you’ve read about to add a geographic and cultural layer to your knowledge?  

The tip of the iceberg poking out of the water is the writing after. There are many days when I think I’m not doing any of it right. Sometimes for good reason. Still sifting for shards and my true voice. 

​***

I’m in my broccoli, pea shoots, oyster mushroom, sushi rice, and eggs phase of life, There’s an occasional can of tuna or sardines in olive oil and lemon from Spain with a side of Finnish crackers and a now-and-then bowl of pasta. I make Hooni Kim’s Chojang with extra garlic and ginger. It is capital F fresh. You want his cookbook. I’ve made enough from it to recognize a labour of love. I’m sure that has a great deal to do with the collaboration with Aki Kamozawa. 

It’s a healthy practice to purchase books and cookbooks through a local bookstore. Or test-drive it through a library. 
Step outside and go for a stroll. The first smell of spring is on the far-off horizon — still a few more storms to come.

​***

Nathaniel Rateliff and Gregory Alan Isakov sang me full of hope on Wednesday night — more roses. 
​
Thinking about American farmers and the Gulf of Mexico. A young John Cougar Mellencamp in what we call up here a Canadian tuxedo kicking around a butterweed field with a good band backing him. 

This week, a bunch of parsley root (Hamburg Root Parsley) at my local market was the starting point for soup. It looks like a parsnip but tastes less pungent, milder, and sweeter like celeriac. They’re sold with a shaggy head of greenery, maybe to distinguish the two roots. At the Polish deli, I bought a piece of smoked pork trim, and poking around in the back, I found a bag of white beans called Piekny Jas -- handsome johnny beans — and was seduced by the name. 
 
Besides the parsley root, pork, and beans, I added onion, carrot, celery, a heap of garlic, smoked paprika, canned tomatoes, bay leaf, and a bundle of herbs tied with string. When the beans were creamy-tender and savoury, I added half a bunch of Lacinato Kale cut in a chiffonade and a small handful of flat greens beans. I like to cut the vegetables into smaller pieces. When I taught young cooks, I told them the goal was to get a mixture of ingredients in every spoon. The golden ratio for a soup like this is mostly vegetables and a little meat. I served it with sour cream leftover from baking. Happiness is a few containers in the freezer. 
 
***
 
After posting “today” in the early hours of Sunday morning to catch readers waking up in Europe and the night owls in Canada, I sit for a bit with the real-time view open in analytics. Blue dots appear on a map and grow in size according to the number of people who open it in places like Toronto or Washington. I try to imagine who is up at 1 a.m. near Golden Lake, Ontario, or in Ashburn, Virginia. Last week, a point lit up in the far north in a place I’d never heard of, and at the same time, someone was reading it in Ireland. I’m a woman at a keyboard practicing. Connection is a gift I never expected. 

***
 
M.F.K. Fisher sitting in a chair that’s been attacked by her Siamese cats and living like the rest of us. 
 
Deb Freeman and friends cook and pay tribute to the American chef Edna Lewis. 
 
Another reason to visit Chicago. 
 
“Being urban is a participatory sport.” Yes to all of this by Rebecca Solnit.
 
***
 
Sweet songs of love by women are a prescription for the insanity of this week. I’ve been gorging on If I Told You for a few days. Roberta Flack singing a song from the Bee Gees — the organ trails her voice like a velvet ribbon.  

I woke up feisty on Wednesday, ready for a rumble. I did good work through to Friday and then took myself out for a minor celebration on Saturday night to Beast, a place where the people know my name and the pizza’s a dream. I sat at the bar and had a house salad for the pickled yellow pepperoncini and the Crust Monsieur — grainy mustard bechamel, Swiss cheese, ham, and chives — Stew Gots can top a pie. The crust is Nathan's masterpiece.
 
***
 
I want you to play a small game for a whole day this week from when you wake up until you sleep. Count every fifteen people you meet — family, strangers, colleagues, and friends — and then imagine the sixteenth person standing in a food bank line. It might hurt if it’s your mom or best friend. The population of Ontario in 2023 was 15,623,207, and over one million of us used food banks. Is there anyone in this province who doesn’t know someone struggling to have enough to eat? One in sixteen people in Ontario are hungry.
 
Something to think about when you get that $200 cheque from the Ontario Progressive Conservatives. I wish I could believe any government was that brilliant with money. It takes me back to 1991 when Bob Rae was premier and sent us $75. The budget looked like an art gallery catalogue.

***
 
“To live and work online now is to exist in this rolling disaster/gladiatorial arena in which it’s increasingly impossible to tell the difference between amateur 4-Chan style griefing, inept political destabilizing campaigns, and just a bunch of randos who imprinted on being horrible.”
Erin Kissane beautifully distills the vitality of community building.
 
“The water was already knee-high on the ground floor of the hotel where Aitana Puchal had taken refuge when she received a text alert from the regional government of Valencia at 8 pm on Oct. 29 warning people to shelter in place from severe flash floods."
"Leaders” who choose ignorance and self interest over caring for the people they represent are a global epidemic.  
 
Something beautiful on Instagram.
 
***
 
I love hearing an audience lavish a woman with love, respect, and admiration like Florence and the Machine. The second song has the wavy gravy sound of the sixties, Sgt. Pepper-style. The last song is for the family I ate Portuguese Coconut Ring with this week, and the person who sent me a note with my name in 40 point all caps followed by a lot of exclamation marks, and the person who sent a beautiful card and invitation, and the friends who checked in on Wednesday. 

June 1963 on the E. B. Barber. My grandfather Harry was chief engineer and worked on the Great Lakes his whole life. I was five months old when the photo of him was taken. I also love the picture below of him wearing a black beret and standing in front of a broken boom. It happened unloading cargo, and you can almost hear the deck crew saying ‘fuck’ in unison — looking at a horizon of overtime. There were probably a few laughs later below deck. Most people who work on the water can turn a temporary tragedy into crackin' entertainment at some point. 
 
One of the many things I liked about being with Harry was his ease with people. He was happy as a clam in the middle of a conversation — even better if it was in a bakery or butcher shop. I have an enduring image of him at home in Welland, drying dishes in the kitchen and visiting with us after dinner. He always wanted to know what was up with me. Male curiosity is delicious. So is a man who listens.
 
Recently, while I was out on a walkabout on Roncesvalles, I struck up a conversation with an employee in a store who told me about a Caribbean restaurant, Kish’s, in Mississauga. She had me when she turned her eyes toward the sky while talking about their roti. Because the action is intuitive, it’s a 3-star equivalent in my books. We were both transported into the ethereal realm of imaginary eating — a pleasure that runs a close second to the act. Now I need a race car to take me there.
 
Talking to strangers when I’m out is following in the footsteps of a man I adored.
 
***
 
Harry didn’t drink in the last fifteen years of his life owing to diabetes. I don’t remember him having a breakdown about it, either. He took care of himself. After his funeral, I kept thinking about that while everyone raised a glass of scotch in his memory. I was ten months sober in September 1995 and still felt like an alien in social situations.
 
I’m grateful to have the chance to work on me alongside others in the engine room of life and to understand it’s never done.
 
Harry was home on winter layover in February when I was born. This week, my mom told me a sweet story about him and me from that time. You know where I tucked it. Thirty years have passed since I last saw him. Love to the man who sent me three new photos.

***

“His car isn’t built for chases, but neither is Katagiri.”
 
With the speed of a bullet train, a new car drove into my heart this week. I’ve been watching Tokyo Vice on Kanopy using my Toronto Public Library card. The city as the backdrop is seductive. Then there is the character of Detective Hiroto Katagiri, who drives a Nissan Fairlady Z S130. Is there a word for swoon in Japanese that fits the man and the car? Here it is in my favourite colour. It will require a cover for half the year unless you live in California. Imagine the thrill of the first spring drive.
 
 Wally Dion's art is stunning.
 
***
 
Patrick Watson is a gorgeous fit here.
 
I’d be playing the KEXP performance by Gregory Alan Isakov in that car. He loves food and farming and talks about it at the end.