Life in the key of E flat minor

East-facing façade of the Royal Ontario Museum, built in 1933, courtesy of Wikipedia It’s months shy of a decade since first I visited the ROM, the Royal Ontario Museum , in Toronto. Back then, the ROM was an example of Italianate Neo-Romanesque architecture – a beautiful building commanding Bloor Street. During my stay in 2002, I had heard about the new plans for the ROM and this talk about an addition that would look like a chrysalis. The vision of something so radically incongruous coming out of an original traditional structure always piques my fancy. Now, with my recently-expedited renewed passport, I will be heading back to YYZ for work and I have taken an extra day to get there on my dime to return to this fantastic museum, which is Canada's largest museum of world culture and natural history and one of the largest museums in North America, in general. It’s no Bata Shoe Museum , but that’s okay. While I am excited to see the dinosaur specimens and exhibits focus...

Building the bredie in the slow cooker My exposure to tomato bredie came after I chose the 1999 Man Booker Prize for Fiction winner, Disgrace , by J. M. Coetzee for bookclub . I googled South African cuisines to help develop the theme for the bookclub meal. In my search, I found this: the Congo Cookbook , a collection of African recipes, which features excerpts from historic texts and rare recipes. One fine highlight was passages from Recipes: African Cooking (Foods of the World), a companion volume to Foods of the World: African Cooking by Laurens van der Post . Van der Post mused on one of the South African dishes that come from the Cape Malay, bredie : "Almost every country in the Western world has its meat stew. The Irish, of course, have Irish stew; the English, Lancashire hotpot; the Dutch, hutspot ; the Germans, Eintopf ; and the Hungarians, goulash . But only in South Africa is the dish of Oriental origin. The very word bredie is significant: it is a Malagasy ...

I was in Boston last weekend for the Marathon.  I was planning on watching my cousin run; yet due to the heat conditions, he was able to defer until 2013.  In the meantime, we took our other cousin who had never been to Beantown on a bit of a tourist run. During our stop in Faneuil Hall, I snapped a shot of the staircase.

At 0.02 acres, this building is America's smallest National Park. It is the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial , at 301 Pine Street in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A Polish patriot and a hero of the American Revolution, Kościuszko returned to America to a hero's welcome after his wounding, capture, imprisonment, and banishment from his native Poland occupied by Russia, in 1796.  He lived in America for a year before returning to Europe, living life as a Polish émigré.  On October 15, 1817 Kościuszko died in Solothurn, Switzerland. In 1818 Kościuszko's body was transferred to Kraków, Poland; the Émigré was repatriated. Today the building serves as a Memorial to Kościuszko's life and work. The displays focus on his work as a brilliant military engineer who designed successful fortifications during the American Revolution.

Today I’m bringing you another recipe that you can prep and cook overnight so you can refrigerate while at work to have ready for dinner. The Welsh Leek on a £1 Silver Proof Coin with 24k Gold Plating, courtesy of the London Coin Company . In anticipation of a trip to Wales and Scotland via England, I have been doing my research of all things Welsh and Scottish.  We all know that I got the whisky thing down right, even dropping the "e" when talking Scotch. Yet outside of a haggis, whisky (Scotland) and leeks (Wales), I do know what else to expect. (Scotch eggs might not even be Scottish; London department store Fortnum & Mason claims to have invented them in 1738. For more of a tie in, if you go to the Fortnum & Mason site for the week of April 1, the second photo is of the Queen and the two Duchesses taken on March 1st, St. David's Day, the Welsh nation holiday; Duchess Catherine is wearing a daffodil, the Welsh flower.) Cawl is recognized as Wales’ na...