Lucia Frangione

The Algerians find a few things very strange about Canadian food: mint jelly on lamb, peanut butter, pumpkin pie and most other things that have been ground into something akin to baby poo. Asparagus lying flat and naked on a plate with nothing but lemon and butter…so plain. So strange!   But when I showed them the long neck on my hard chicken, they were very pleased. “Look just like in Algeria!” Sousou took the first bite of a leg that looked like it belonged to a very tiny, very tanned, eighty year old marathon runner, and said, “Hard to…

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I am going to tell you something heavy. Since going on a strict elimination diet for allergies last week, I have baked two chocolate cakes, two pies, two cheesecakes, four loaves of bread and 25 calzones. Most certainly I am dealing with my restricted diet by watching others consume all the things I can’t. I got real cocky too. I told my Mom, “Nothing can stop me. I have no temptations whatsoever. Now that I’m through “the crazies”, and I’ve settled into my own home, I can tackle anything”. …except making my favourite cheesecake. You know how it goes. I…

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Oh, ho, it’s Halloween. Despite all the shrieking spectres, the growling zombies and the lascivious bloody vampires, the most terrified creature in the room is Tartuffe. He’s our old boy husky mutt. He’s coming on fourteen. He’s quite blind. He stays entirely still, his little blue eyes darting around, then BANG – POP! WHIIIIIIZZZZZ another firecracker- and he bolts head first right into a wall. Terrible. I know. But also…a little bit funny. So we have to keep him on a short leash so he doesn’t brain himself. “Comedy is tragedy plus time”, sayeth Carol Burnett. This event reminds me…

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I think we all know the rains have come for earnest. The poor huddle low. All hunched back, no face. Spotted cardboard swells and sleeping bags are bundled up off the floor. Vancouver feels the weather in its joints: Main and Hastings, Union and Prior, Pender and Jackson. All these bender parts that have borne the most strain and worked the longest days. The streets that can say they’ve been trampled by horses. Spitter sputter on my windshield as I dodge jay walkers recklessly taking cover or taking their next hit. Their next hit might be me if they’re not…

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The butcher pulls out what he calls a “hard chicken”. Bristles of half feathers down its back all punky Mohawk. Gnarled yellow feet. And the longest neck I have ever seen this side of a giraffe. He was so pleased that someone actually wanted to purchase it. He grinned, “You must be from a farm, like me! We know what tastes the best! You just have to cook it slowly! And better still: $2.35 a pound, eh Sister?”   The butcher calls me sister. Well, I have to buy it now. I see why he doesn’t display it in the…

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While my little girl plays in the playground after school, Raven, a very charming playground dad, flashes me the whites of his Oreo cookie, cheekily. “Don’t worry” he smiles, “you can’t be allergic to these, there’s nothing real in them.”   He’s teasing me because I’ve started a strict elimination diet to figure out what the heck I’m allergic to.   http://www.precisionnutrition.com/elimination-diet   Never in my life have I been allergic to anything. I am as healthy as a horse. All of a sudden, one day, I’m chronically itchy all over my body. It’s lasted for three years. Even my…

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