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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, ...

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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...