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The healthy slow-cooker recipe of the week - now running about every-other week - has hit a snag: lentil soup. I love lentil soup, but my own is turning out just OK, not really delicious. After the first try was too bland, Stephanie suggested using allspice and more bay leaves. Excellent idea! I upped the bay leaves from three to six, and added allspice. Result: big improvement, but still not great. If you make delicious lentil soup, can you share your secrets? (And if the secret is homemade stock, then I'm out of luck.) More below. * * * * I'm still using the hell out of my slow-cooker. I usually cook with it twice a week - once for food for the weekend, and once for my meals at work, one batch for the week. I'm still collecting meal ideas , if you have any favourites to share. I notice that recipes I find online tend to be exceedingly bland. With the exception of foods that are supposed to be hot-spicy (which I avoid), the recipes I see are shy of seasoning. Lentil soup,

Will you take a moment to answer one question? I may use it for something I write. Click here to take the survey. Please use net (take-home) income, and housing costs only, not utilities. (These questions were asked on Facebook.) Thanks in advance.

If you live in New York City, you have an opportunity to stand beside working people in their struggle for a better life and healthier communities. 84% of New York fast food workers reported experiencing wage theft at some point in the past year and the New York Attorney General and New York City Council have taken note of the rampant wage theft in the industry. McDonald’s workers, forced to work in a hot kitchen without air conditioning in the middle of a heat wave, walked off the job until their safety was ensured. And on top of all of this, living on $7.25 in New York City isn’t getting any easier. The Economic Policy Institute recently release a family budget calculator that demonstrated a single parent with one child needs to make $67,153 a year to make it in New York City--far more than the $10,000 to $18,000 average annual salary of fast food workers. On July 24th, fast food workers from across New York City bravely announced that they are going on strike for the third time and

I am in the middle of reading The Fault In Our Stars by John Green, a book almost too painful to read but impossible to put down. It's achingly funny, profoundly insightful, and utterly heartbreaking, all at the same time. The Fault In Our Stars is supposedly a youth novel, but please don't let that stop you from reading it. It is simply a wonderful book. Hazel has cancer, and her life expectancy is short. Augustus is a cancer survivor, and has the prosthetic leg to prove it. Hazel and Augustus, two smart, funny, and otherwise ordinary teenagers, fall in love. How do you cope with cancer as a teenager? How do you cope with love when you have cancer? How do we humans love when we know that our loved one will one day die? Why are we so helpless when our loved ones are in pain? Hazel and Augustus live through all the universal questions of love and loss, and all the universal questions of adolesence, all at once, and with a pronounced urgency. If that sounds sad, it is. But it&#

When is an employee not an employee? The answer to this riddle is rapidly becoming the true face of employment in the North America today. In her brilliant investigative book Bait and Switch , Barbara Ehrenreich writes about "jobs" that require scare quotes. These "jobs" provide no salary, no benefits, and no workplace. In most cases, the "employee" finances the most basic tools of the trade out of their own pockets. Real estate agents, insurance salespeople, and cosmetic salespeople often fall under this category. You might be surprised to learn that many truckers do, too. From Change To Win They are called "port truckers," and they haul freight from ports to stores like Wal-Mart and Starbucks. Since the deregulation of the trucking industry - under President Carter, a Democrat - port truckers have been classified as independent contractors. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters says that the majority of port truckers (more than 80%) are wr

This articulate and courageous 14-year-old girl says she wants to be a science teacher when she grows up. I hope she will also be a writer, because this is one of the best personal essays I have read. I'm a 14-year-old girl who has lived in Austin, Texas, my whole life. I like art, music and talking on the phone with my friends. When I grow up, I'd like to become a science teacher. I also believe in the right to choose and the separation of church and state. Or to put it another way -- to put it the way I wrote it when I was protesting at the Capitol last week: "Jesus isn't a dick so keep him out of my vagina." Yes, that's my sign. I came up with it last week when my friend and I were trying to think of ideas for what would get people's attention to protest the scary restrictions that are happening in my state trying to take away a woman's right to safe and accessible abortions. It worked. When my friend and I took turns holding the sign, one of the p

Part 1: McDonald's version of company scrip (Part 2 below) Any minute now we'll see the return of company scrip . In the bad old days before labour unions forced reforms, companies - especially in industries where workers were isolated, like mines, lumber, and farming - would pay their workers in scrip. Scrip was a credit that was only accepted at the company's store - a store that charged wildly inflated prices. What a great deal for the owners, eh? They paid meagre wages, then recovered every penny, while ensuring they retained a steady supply of labourers who were (literally) hungry to work at any wage. Now, in a digital-age capitalist remix, McDonald's, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and other high-profit, low-wage corporations are forcing or coercing employees to receive wages paid on Big Bank debit cards. And - what a surprise - the debit cards are riddled with fees - fees for purchases, fees for cash withdrawals, even fees for card inactivity. It's not quite company

Here's a chance to preserve Canadian history - the real history, not the government-approved kind - and to preserve art and creativity and alternative media, all at the same time. Please consider giving $7.00 - or any amount - and sharing this excellent campaign with your friends and on social media. More info: Hi! My name is Nicole Marie Guiniling and I’m the founder of Ad Astra Comix . Ad Astra is a website that promotes political and historical comic books, and has recently stepped, albeit with shakey legs, into production, distribution, and publishing. Over the next 40 days, I'm here on IndieGoGo to promote the re-mastering of "100 Year Rip-Off: The Real History of British Columbia." It’s a graphic history of the province that was first published in 1971. That makes it the oldest "Graphic History" on record in Canada. 100 Year Rip-Off In July 1971, 100 Year Rip-Off was printed as an 8-page tabloid-sized insert in the counter-culture newspaper, Socialis

Sadly, this will not embed. So please click . You won't be sorry. Go click now! Thanks to Stephanie!

A journalist, a pioneer, a feminist. An asker of questions. New York Times obituary here.

Brandon Toy, writing in Common Dreams. I hereby resign in protest effective immediately. I have served the post-911 Military Industrial complex for 10 years, first as a soldier in Baghdad, and now as a defense contractor. At the time of my enlistment, I believed in the cause. I was ignorant, naïve, and misled. The narrative, professed by the state, and echoed by the mainstream press, has proven false and criminal. We have become what I thought we were fighting against. Recent revelations by fearless journalists of war crimes including counterinsurgency "dirty" wars, drone terrorism, the suspension of due process, torture, mass surveillance, and widespread regulatory capture have shed light on the true nature of the current US Government. I encourage you to read more about these topics at the links I have provided below . Some will say that I am being irresponsible, impractical, and irrational. Others will insist that I am crazy. I have come to believe that the true insanity i

There is so much truly excellent youth fiction out these days, and it's not all vampires and zombies. Here are two wonderful teen novels in two totally different veins. There Is No Dog , Meg Rossoff, 2011 Like many excellent novels, Meg Rosoff's There Is No Dog defies easy classification. It's a comedy, but it's heartbreaking. It's a fantasy involving gods and goddesses with power over life and fate, but it pokes holes in the peculiar fiction known as religion. It's about the mysteries of falling in love, and also about the mystery of being alive. There Is No Dog imagines God as a teenage boy. Like many teenagers, God is self-centered, forgetful, narcissistic, lazy, unfocused, and impulsive. Unfortunately, he is also incredibly powerful. If God runs a bath then forgets to turn off the tap, hundreds of thousands of people perish in a flood. When God scowls and pouts because he can't convince a young mortal to have sex with him, fierce storms and unexplained

After a week of looking at houses for rent, we found something we love and put down a deposit. My dread of moving has been mostly replaced with a mixture of resignation and excitement, as this will be a definite upgrade in our standard of living. Life is full of the unexpected. We're very fortunate in many ways - it could be way worse - and I don't want to lose that perspective. This experience continues to be educational! In addition to the rental scams I saw on Craigslist , the basement disaster and our impending move have provided a refresher course (as if I needed one!) in knowing your rights and asserting them. Know what you're entitled to Last week, I emailed our insurance agent with a question, and was told that our claim would be disallowed - none of our losses covered - because we are not covered for flood. I was horrified. Sick to my stomach. What about our sewer backup rider? Our damage was from sewer backup, and we bought an extra rider expressly for that. The

Looking for rental houses on Craigslist, I've discovered a scam that I was previously unaware of. I replied to an ad for a place that sounded wonderful, with unusually low rent. I was keeping in mind the old maxim "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is," but at the same time, it's only an email. It can't hurt to ask. Everything I wanted to know about the property was answered in the affirmative. Then the supposed owner told me that I should fill out a rental application and, if approved, I could see the place. Hmm. It's been six years since we looked for a place to live, but I'm pretty sure you don't fill out an application before you even see a property, unless you're working with a real estate agent. That would be a colossal waste of time. And why would I send personal information to a person I haven't even met, for a house I might not even want? I tried to arrange a time to see the house, saying I would bring the completed applica

In the aftermath of the flood and with our impending move, when I'm not dealing with those events, all I want to do is read and blog. If you enjoy my "what i'm reading" posts, you'll be happy. If not... * * * * I've long wanted to read The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. Now that Martin Scorsese has adapted it into the movie "Hugo," I wanted to make sure I read it before seeing the film. The Invention of Hugo Cabret is a wonderfully inventive and engaging book. It combines elements of picture books, graphic novels, and even flip books within the "chapter book" format for older children. It's a big, fat book - which itself has appeal for many readers - but roughly half the pages are filled with black-and-white pencil illustrations. These are pencil drawings, also by Selznick. Typically, a group of illustrations form a sequence of images, first seen from a distance, then zooming in closer, and still closer. Because of this t

When it comes to soups and stews, there is a seemingly endless number of variables that can be changed to create new variations of any given dish. If you like chicken stew, for example, you could experiment with different combinations of vegetables, different seasonings, better (or quicker) stocks, fresh herbs - and then with various combinations of all of those. Since buying my slow-cooker some months ago, I've made lots of different chicken stews, all of them easy, tasty, and healthy. This one is my current favourite combo. A note about these stews. To make a proper stew, most people use some sort of thickener. You can dredge the meat in flour, or add corn starch, flour, tapioca, bread crumbs, or even oatmeal to the liquid. I don't do this. For me, thick means gloppy; I don't like it. Plus, I prefer not to add gluten or additional calories to any dish. If you prefer a thick stew, you'll want to thicken any of my recipes. Or you could try one of the three ways I serve

Dear liberal public, The internet tells me you are shocked - shocked and outraged - about the verdict in the George Zimmerman case. Seriously? You are shocked? You have lived in the United States or Canada all your life, and you are shocked that a white man who killed a black child in the state of Florida has walked free? I can only scratch my head in wonder. There is nothing shocking about this not-guilty verdict. Indeed, it was the most expected and the most typical outcome possible. I would have been shocked if the verdict had been any different.  That's the problem. What's that you say, you thought things had changed, because a black man lives in the White House? Because the corporate media told you that a black man being elected to the highest office in the land proves that the United States has moved beyond racism? That is very sad. Perhaps this verdict will move you to become more informed about the world around you, to rely less on public relations and on blind faith,

I'm always amazed how when personal upheaval strikes, whether tragedy or happy Big Life Change, your world shrinks down to a tiny little circle. We moved to Canada the day Hurricane Katrina struck, and days later, we were struggling to take in all we had missed. Since the flood four nights ago, the outside world has barely registered on my radar. So, what has happened to the Laura and Allan Family since I posted those lovely sewage-filled photos ? The aftermath The flood was Monday night. The Greater Toronto Area received a month's worth of rainfall in the span of a few hours. Water and sewage rushed in through the toilet in our basement, then rushed out again, leaving behind a disgusting mess. We lost many items stashed in the basement, like suitcases, a vacuum, painting supplies, and whatever else. But much more importantly, Allan's office is in the basement. He salvaged many things... and lost many things. We will get an insurance settlement, but many things are irreplac

Our basement. Last night. Looks like some Stephen King floating around. That wood was once a piece of floorboard. Now a raft. Toilet opening and shutting itself. Last night more than a foot of water and sewage came gushing through the basement toilet. The basement is Allan's office. And I was useless with my broken foot. And the basement was completely dark from a power outage. After our first flood in 2009, our landlord put in a completely new basement and washroom. That mess was trifling compared to this. Today Allan has been moving all his books to the spare bedroom on the second floor - a lot of books up a lot of stairs - as they were beginning to warp from the damp. Insurance claims have been filed all around. Who knows when clean-up crews will arrive. We are not alone! Check out these amazing pics of the flooded Greater Toronto Area . And naturally this pales compared to Alberta. But please spare me the one-upmanship. It all sucks.

Summer is the busiest time of year in the Central Children's Library. Actually, we are wildly busy any time school is out; the summer is just the most sustained period of busy-ness. Many of my colleagues have been preparing for summer programming since the end of March Break. All through July and August, in libraries throughout Canada, kids will be participating in Summer Reading Club . The program uses incentives, activities, and fun programs to keep kids reading over the summer, which has been shown to improve their performance in school. It's fun, and it's free. All Canadian libraries receive the same materials, which is really nice - kids can participate while they're visiting relatives or at a cottage with their family. But libraries plan their own programming, so we can be as creative as we want and can afford. (The official name is "TD Summer Reading Club". It's designed through a partnership among Library and Archives Canada, Toronto Public Library