As predicted, winter has been long and bleak. My lovely neighbour put out her recycling (above), and it is more organized than anything in my house. Yikes, you don’t even want to see her bathroom.

It turns out that Canadians are troopers when it comes to snow, but freezing rain is another story entirely. We have now had two days of school cancellations because the roads and sidewalks were frozen. One day was so bad that we couldn’t even go for a walk. This makes for a very stir crazy winter. I am looking forward to a big thaw.

I try not to share stories that make the wonderful Canadian healthcare system look bad, on the one hand. But on the other, my personal and professional experience suggest that it is as prone to human error as any other system. For example, one can go to one’s local emergency department and be placed in a room and forgotten for 7 hours. And then when a resident comes to examine one, he might announce loudly, “I’m looking for Lisa? She has a pericardial effusion?” before introducing himself to the patient in the next room. Don’t worry, I’m fine. Seriously, my heart is functioning normally, and I was just dehydrated.  But that really sucked for my husband and the lovely friend R who sat with me in emerg.

One thing that I have collected is interesting stories about how people have handled grief. I really appreciated this story from Liz Gilbert about her partner’s death from cancer. Also, if there is one thing that I dislike, it’s stage theories that tell you that there is one right way to go about something. Therefore, this essay was right up my alley. The five stages of grief? They are not intended to go in order, according to their author Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. A friend suggested reading her, and I was a bit concerned that having a book about grief out in the open would freak my family out, so I ordered it from Amazon. Turns out that the answer is to leave it on the stairs, and they will just ignore it like any other piece of mail that I put there.

One thing that I have been meaning to write about for a long time is my relationship with religion. I am currently reading Why Religion? by Elaine Pagels and will report back. For me, and for most people, religion is less about what you believe and more about what you do.

Every Friday we observe the shabbat with the lighting of the candles and a few short blessings of the children, wine or grape juice, and challah. Our prayer book reminds us, “More than Jews have kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the Jews.” Sitting together around candles has come to be a touchstone, it’s something that reminds us that the week is over. It’s a chance to look at each other in candlelight, literally shake off the week, and give thanks that we are together. At some point in the past I tried to implement a longer, more faithful and less abbreviated blessing, but no one else was having it.

This means that every Friday, I frantically try to find challah in our small, non-Jewish city. I can tell you that there are three bakeries that reliably have challot on Fridays. (For those of you keeping score, they are Remark, Angelo’s, and the International Bakery at Covent Market, and any or all of these may sell out.) Only one of these is within walking distance, which matters because my radiation oncologist said I cannot drive, and if they have any at all they will get 4 loaves in on Friday. If I call before they sell out, they will hold a loaf for me, and they know me by name. Susan at the bakery will worry if I don’t come in on Friday to buy my egg bread. Also, I have to request “egg bread,” because if I call it “challah,” they don’t know what I am talking about.

But the loaves are braided and faintly sweet and large enough to make awesome French toast over the weekend. Years ago I observed that if I gave French toast to the kids, they would experience a blood sugar crash in about two hours that resulted in tantrums, so now I give it to them right before Sunday school. Kind of like pouring the gasoline, lighting the match, and then walking away.

I also try to have some kind of nice dessert available on Friday. Last week I tried a chocolate olive oil cake from Smitten Kitchen. It was okay, but my sloppiness meant that there were streaks of chocolate in our sour cream that confused everyone on Taco Tuesday. It did not come out as well as the date squares that I also made, but that probably has more to do with me as a cook than with the recipe itself.

When it comes to recipes, I like simple and easy. For some reason, I often fail at supposedly no-fail food. Cases in point, most recipes for rice pudding and macaroni and cheese fail me.  This week La Neige’s friend’s dad was kind enough to send me his mac n cheese recipe. The secret ingredient is cream cheese. You can’t just make a roux and add milk and fancy cheese and call it a day. Also, I’m going to stop messing around with rice pudding recipes and just make this one, which comes out great but makes more rice pudding than I should have around. I suspect that there is no great dairy-free rice pudding recipe for me, so I’ll just have to take a Kirkland lactaid and maybe eat less of it. Sigh.

This week I ran out of cooking inspiration, so I requested Chrissy Teigen’s cookbooks from the library after reading about them in a Food52 essay. OMG, her writing is hysterical.  Here is a random sample:

Despite never knowing they’re “BrusselSSSSS” sprouts, I have been a lover of them since I grew teeth. And John is one Brussels sprouts-loving SOB. So in order to keep our Brussels sprouts sex life spicy, I am constantly trying to find new ways to doll them up. But sometimes things are just easy. He loves salad. He loves sprouts. He loves grapes. He loves nuts. So he loves this salad. Men. Don’t overthink it.

The book is full of pictures of her and her husband enjoying food and vamping it up. Do yourself a favour and read this book.