Cheese, pickle and Triscuits
May I recommend:
Cheese and pickle and Triscuits. This salty, crunchy sweet treat is the platonic ideal of the post-work snack. Take four Triscuits - five is too many, three is not enough.
Take four, like I told you.
Make sure you’re using regular Triscuits and not accidentally employing the rosemary flavour or that black olive and sea salt. It won’t work with those. Reduced sodium is fine, though.
Slice some cheese. Not too thick, not too thin. Get it right. Use the oldest cheddar you can find and afford.
Ideally you’re using a homemade sweet and sour pickle, but I don’t know your life, so a Yum Yums or similar is fine. The pickle must be bread and butter, however. Nothing else will work.
The proper stacking order is Triscuit, cheese and pickle. Put them together and devour.
When your four Triscuits are over you will want to make four more, because that’s how delicious they are. Don’t do it right away, though. Wait a beat or two, because sometimes you think you are still hungry, but you aren’t and then you will spoil your supper. I have fallen into this trap too many times to count. Learn from my mistake.
After a minute, if you’re still hungry, then get in there and make some more.
I’m a firm believer in this advice
It was simply a short respite from video meetings, pandemic news coverage, and a boisterous bungalow with our two teenage daughters home from school. Yet my knees and back loosened up and the churn in my brain settled. I felt gratitude, energy, optimism—“a state in which the mind, the body and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together,” Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust, “three notes suddenly making a chord.”
The Madman’s Library: A World of Extraordinary Books
Look, I know that enticing you into watching a one hour British Library video with three white British men talking about a book about books is a hard sell, but trust me, put this on in the background as you’re working on your puzzle, or cleaning your kitchen and you will be well-rewarded. The stories the author, Edward Brooke Hitching, recounts are funny and interesting and the you get the added bonus of feeling smarter and more cultured at the end of it.
The interview starts off strong, with the interviewer, John Lloyd, mentioning an Italian poet who had his books printed on rubber,
… So he could read them in the enormous sunken bath he shared with his goldfish.
Delighted that my critiquing buddy and friend, Wayne Ng, made this list. There are a ton of other good books on this, too.
58 Canadian Works of Fiction Coming Out in Spring
Letters from Johnny is the story of 11-year-old Johnny Wong, who is living in Toronto in the 1970s on the brink of the FLQ crisis. Johnny lives with his mother, a Chinese immigrant, and develops a fatherly relationship with a local draft dodger. But when the children's services come, questioning Johnny's mother, and a neighbour is found murdered, Johnny begins to think that his little family is threatened — and it's up to him to protect them.
When you can read it: April 1, 2021
Wayne Ng is a novelist, travel writer and social worker from Toronto, who now lives in Ottawa. He is also the author of the novel Finding the Way: A Novel of Lao Tzu.
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I am tentatively starting to announce my book deal more publicly, but I’m nervous and slow to do so. Not sure why… There is something about everyone KNOWING about it that is a bit freaky. Anyway, I did announce it on Twitter the other day, so baby steps.
