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This weekend, in honour of Monika’s birthday, a group of us went out to a cabane à sucre – a.k.a. a maple shack, a.k.a. a treasure trove of syrupy goodness. The cabane à sucre was just north of St-Eustache, where I used to work. We ate in a huge dining hall that, in peak season (soon approaching) can accommodate 500 people at the same time. There, people who do not fear heart attacks or morbid obesity can dine on sausages, ham, eggs, pancakes, sugar tarts, and these weird pork crackling things that look like a pig’s ear fried in a pan. Everything can be doused in maple syrup, if you wish.
Afterwards, we met up with this jolly fellow:
He knows what he's doing.
He showed us how to drill into a maple tree and extract its sweet sap. In order for the syrup to flow, the overnight temperature needs to be below zero centigrade, and the daytime temperature needs to between five and ten. It has not been that warm in the Montréal area until recently, so the sweet sap was not yet flowing. Nevertheless, it was a fantastic day out, capped off by twirling a stick through a layer of syrup on snow to make a maple syrup popsicle.
I will definitely be back at a cabane à sucre again.
The fetishization of property ownership has been a scourge on our society for the last decade. We should pay our mortgages because we want a home, not because we think our plot of land has some kind of future value. In this article from Maclean’s magazine, we learn of the freefall in prices, specifically in Vancouver. I believe that the property prices freefall neatly encapsulates what has been going wrong with the North American (and European) economy overall: a total disconnect between real value and speculative value. How else to explain how thousands of expert economists, and real estate gurus, have suddenly had their predictions collapse like a house of cards?
For a thorough-going analysis of the current crisis, this interview with Robert Brenner from UCLA can’t be beat. He puts it all into historical context, arguing that capitalism has struggled with an increasingly low return on investment since the 1970s.
To understand the current collapse, you have to demonstrate the connection between the weakness of the real economy and the financial meltdown. The main link is the economy’s ever increasing dependence on borrowing to keep it turning over and the governments‘ ever greater reliance on asset price run-ups to allow that borrowing to continue.
If anyone persists in the belief that this is a cyclical downturn like any other, or that Obama is going to rapidly save us, just read the damn interview!
This is the easiest recipe ever, but you can get very creative and elaborate with it. Disclaimer: there is a Cheat in it. I use a product called Better Than Bouillon, which is a gloopy mixture in a jar, composed of vegetably goodness.
Vegetable Soup Ingredients
butter
onion
fresh parsley
fresh dill
clove garlic
zucchini (half a big one)
red pepper
yellow pepper
–other veggies that tickle your fancy
Mode d’emploi
Sizzle chopped onions in butter. Add some parsley and dill. Also add some garlic, chopped finely. Do a little more sizzlin’. Add your diced veggies. Then add about 5 cups of water. Stir in your Better Than Bouillon product — a teaspoon will do. Let me know if you find Better than Bouillon! I found it in darkest Edmonton, and brought it home with me to Montréal. Now it’s a dependable flavour-provider for me almost every week.
