
Dinner in Gaza: A meal for one, split among seven

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CTV News
an hour ago
- CTV News
More aid getting into Gaza but it's ‘not nearly enough': UNICEF
Watch UNICEF spokesperson Salim Owels describes the situation on the ground as more aid is getting into Gaza with many challenges.


Globe and Mail
20 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
Growing up, I never realized that our food obsession was really about food insecurity
First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at Food – the foraging, gathering, saving and consumption of – has always been a THING in my family. Growing up, I thought all normal people had a food bunker in their basement. After all, we certainly did. Our bunker was known as the 'Cold Room', and it had been constructed with the thoroughness and attention to detail that my dad applied to every project that he ever took on. The Cold Room was a kind of mini masterpiece. It housed one of those giant chest freezers and shelving precisely measured to fit pint- and quart-sized mason jars, with their sturdy glass lids and red rubber seals. The ginormous freezer was usually filled with a side of beef, a whole pig, occasional roasting chickens and well-priced turkeys. The Christmas baking, too, of course. But the pièce de résistance in the Cold Room was the bespoke vegetable bins used to store root vegetables (potatoes, carrots, beets, onions) for the long, long winter. In a less-than-enlightened moment, my dad chose to store his fall stash in bulk dry Zonolite, a toxic precursor to today's benign vermiculite. Although I'm still a citizen of this planet, I often wonder how much asbestos dust I inhaled when I was forced to dumpster-dive for the last veggie stragglers found at the bottom of the bins in the spring. August was typically the pinnacle of the year, when the garden produced its annual bounty. Seeds were maintained year to year for radishes, scallions, peas, carrots, beets, green beans, wax beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce (two crops). As the oldest child, I despised and hated August as it was predetermined that not one item from the garden would be left to compost. I was always dreaming up ways to escape from the endless picking and prepping. There was always something to blanch, scrub or shuck. It was totally relentless and didn't stop with the vegetables. Somebody was always going to the Okanagan on vacation and would be contracted to bring back cases of peaches, pears and plums to fill those vintage mason jars. Travelling 30 times a year, I've learned how to buy healthy groceries at home and abroad Then there were the endless savories. Another job to avoid – dill pickles. First you had to brush-scrub all those prickly pickling cucumbers and then stuff quart jars with fresh dill and as many cucumbers as possible. Fortunately, we were then a no-garlic family, or there would have been endless garlic to peel, too. Other pickles included mustard beans, sweet mixed as well as 'bread and butter' pickles. Lotta, lotta! As a child and teenager, I just assumed everybody lived like this. Didn't everyone take their children potato-picking after the first frost? Or into the prairie bush for Saskatoons? In hindsight, I have finally been able to realize that this whole 'food' obsession was really about food insecurity. My dad had known childhood hunger. He'd been raised in utter poverty. Children were sent to the butcher to beg for bones. Supper was too frequently pancakes. My dad was determined that his own family would never face the hunger he had experienced. It must have been his worst fear. A few summers ago, while I was preparing a prawn fry for prairie guests, a visitor asked me, 'Do you always have that much food in your fridge?' I was somewhat taken aback at the question. But there was no doubt about my answer – 'Yes, always!' It's August and (as usual) my fridge and freezer are full of fresh local produce. I'm collecting the first of my grape tomatoes. We were able to purchase early peaches-and-cream corn at a favourite farmstand. The Red Russian garlic is gorgeous and plump. There were sweet yellow plums for breakfast and the local raspberries and strawberries are mouthwatering. Blueberries are for sale at $2/lb. A big bag of gift apples was turned into two pies for the freezer and there's rhubarb for compote. The blackberries are almost ready for jam. I will be daydreaming about all these fruits and vegetables come the bleak days of January. In reflecting on the state of my fridge and pantry I have to conclude I've obviously absorbed a lot of life lessons – and that the acorn has indeed not fallen far from the family tree. In fact, it has probably sprouted a few roots. Anne Letain lives in Ladysmith, B.C.


CBC
a day ago
- CBC
H.A. Cody, one of New Brunswick's first literary sensations
In 2025, Codys is known as a quiet rural community about 30 kilometres northwest of Sussex in southern New Brunswick. It's named for the Cody family, United Empire Loyalists who opened several businesses in what became for a while a booming community with its own railway station. Most of the family's accomplishments have been lost over time, but one Cody stands out above the rest. Hiram Alfred Cody, known as H.A. Cody, wrote 25 novels, some of the most popular Canadian fiction at the time. Cody was born in Codys in 1872, some 90 years after his ancestors fled the American Revolution for New Brunswick. While he would eventually become a man of letters, his early years at school were unsettled. He did not like school and preferred the great outdoors to more indoor scholarly pursuits. "Cody did not really have an interest in school as a younger person," said James Upham, a popular historian and contributor to CBC's Roadside History. "[He] tried to leave school. His family just kind of railroaded him back into it." Long gone to the Yukon After his formal education, Cody was ordained as an Anglican minister. According to the Anglican Church of Canada archives, his career as a minister would take him through New Brunswick, from small churches in Doaktown and Ludlow, to Fredericton's Christ Church Cathedral and the former St. James Church in Saint John. But it was Cody's posting in 1904 that probably piqued the interest of the adventurous young minister. He was sent to Dawson City to preach in the middle of the Klondike Gold Rush. The departing minister told Cody he would be expected to spread the gospel, not just within city limits but throughout the Yukon territory. "You're going to be canoeing and you're going to be dog sledding and you're going to be snowshoeing," Upham said. "You just kind of imagine Cody sitting there pinching himself, going like, 'Have I died and gone to heaven?" So Cody, along with his pregnant wife, Jess, moved north. "Not totally sure that she was enjoying it quite as much as he was, but he seems to have really enjoyed himself up there," Upham said. While he was in the territory, he hobnobbed with a giant of early Canadian literature, Robert Service, eventually establishing a friendly rivalry. "He and Robert Service were actually pretty good buddies in the Yukon," Upham said. "Cody seems to have had it in mind that he was going to like, civilize this youngster and sort of show him what's what. To the degree that Cody's book of poetry is … called Songs of a Blue Nose as a direct response to [Service's] Songs of a Sourdough." 'God, king and country' Upham said Cody's work was in keeping with the times, featuring many archetypal characters popular in early English Canadian literature. "They're the kind of stories that your grandma would buy if she was a member of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire and wanted you to grow up in a particular God, king and country kind of a way," Upham said. Examples include the RCMP constable Norman Grey in The Long Patrol d escribed as a man who "fears neither man nor devil." In a similar vein, Cody created Keith Steadman, a "hardy northman and trailsman" in The Frontiersman, who befriends a dog by giving it scraps from his supper of "bacon, a few beans, a taste of sourdough bread, with some black tea for a relish." While Cody did write stories about the Yukon, he also wrote plenty of stories about his home province. "There's one particular book called the The Unknown Wrestler, which takes place in a mythological community called Rookston, which is definitely not Rexton, even though it is obviously Rexton," Upham said. Cody returned to New Brunswick after a coupe of years and lived much of his life in Saint John. He continued to write until the end of his adventurous life in 1948. "Kid grew up on a farm, didn't really want to go to school, liked being in the woods," Upham said.