I like Pete Wells; I like to read his reviews of restaurants in the New York Times. He can be tough and snarky, but at least he is also witty and right. A Pete Wells classic from his review of Per Se: “I don’t know what could have saved limp, dispiriting yam dumplings, but it […]
Dan recently had the opportunity to return to the Arctic circle in Nunavut on the Northwest Passage, to stay with a family we have known and worked with for a number of years, the Webers, a family driven by a passion for the north, for the stark landscape and conservation efforts of a seldom understood […]
“I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow that house down….” As a man with two small kids, I think a lot about the big bad wolf – he and his cronies crop up a lot in the bedtime stories I’ve been reading every night for the last decade. Sometimes I’m surprised at how much […]
The Post Office Essays There is a particular magic we humans get to do. We can have an idea then translate it into a series of symbols which others, years later, can read, so that the idea enters into their mind. We can write and create books and essays and letters, and mark down our […]
It’s a rather obvious point to make, but the last 2 years have been a bit shitty. As we sat hunkered down at home for months on end watching the news, it was as if the sense of physical and mental oppression caused by Covid was being exacerbated by the relentless fire-hose of human-caused catastrophe […]
The world is forever moving towards complexity, leaving us to face down bigger and bigger questions with every trip around the sun. The world of travel is no exception, and the inter-connected complexities of over-tourism, climate change and now COVID make planning decisions more complicated than ever. Questions abound, and for the more philosophical among […]
You are called papa not ‘patata’, you were not born Castillian: you are dark like our skin, we are Americans, potato, we are Indians. – Pablo Neruda, Ode to the Potato Similar to other fuels on a grand scale, the quest to harness sources of consumable energy has been the cause of migrations, the root of […]
“On most spare weekends for the past seven years, Mrs. Fowke has loaded a portable tape recorder and a bottle of whisky (an essential ice-breaker) into her battered Peugeot and driven through the farmlands of southern and central Ontario hunting for old singers and older songs. She’s found plenty. Since 1957 she’s taped about a […]
Everyone at Trufflepig has some kind of connection to Canada, whether they were born here, moved here, or just visit the HQ every other winter and discover that what passes for an overcoat in other countries doesn’t really cut it in an Ontario blizzard. Below is a very short list of books that have informed […]
If I had to choose a word to describe Canada’s West Coast, it could easily be crinkly. Shaped and scoured by massive glaciers, raging rivers and wild Pacific weather for millennia, the BC coast is one of the more spectacular pieces of wilderness I have ever laid eyes on. This crinkliness has shaped a unique […]
I spent a lot of time in China in the early 2000’s, trying to make up for an overly euro-centric upbringing. I knew there was a world I’d overlooked, and hadn’t been taught about in school, a missing hemisphere. I’d read books like Ernst Gombrich’s History of Art which ignored the “East” side of the […]
Fans of fermentation know that, undisturbed and with the right food and environmental conditions, wild yeast will thrive and create magic. Through history one could say that humans have behaved in a similar fashion. Geomancers and lovers of ley lines can surmise why a particular time and place gives rise to cultural richness to rival […]
I once paddled a canoe 1000 miles in 7 days, 15 hours, and 50 minutes. Let me explain. A few years ago a good friend called me up and asked me if I would like to paddle the Yukon River with him. My friend Jon works in human rights advocacy and wanted to raise some […]
[This article was originally published 27 November 2019] As I sit here writing this, winter has just begun to take hold in Southern Ontario. Meanwhile, on Somerset Island, 3400 kilometres as the crow flies from where I sit, the tundra and the northwest passage have been in winter’s grip for months. Way up in Northern Nunavut, perched […]
On our honeymoon, my husband and I drove 13,000km across Canada. It was then that we dubbed Ontario ‘the province that never ends’. Three times the size of my native Germany (with a fraction of the population), it literally takes 24 hours to drive our home province end-to-end. And that’s in fair weather, I might […]
Holidays are lurking and with it, more Coronavirus cases and renewed lockdowns. It’s all been enough for anyone to reach for the bottle. As we hunker down for the winter, we asked around our planning team to see who’s got the bartending chops in the Trufflepig farm. Below are some road-tested recipes that came back […]