Hip, Hip! Pipérade!
Eggs in Pipérade
Cracking a bright yellow yolk into a fragrant tomato mélange is just one variation on an old world theme that never gets tired, is easy to prepare and always hits the spot
By Louise Crosby
My Dad was never much of a cook, but in his later years he started making Chinese stir-fries. Shrimp stir-fry was his signature dish, worthy of special family dinners. This was good; it gave my mother a break from the kitchen and it gave him a new interest in his retirement. Another dish my Dad knew his way around, because he was practically raised on it as a boy in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, was fried potatoes and bologna, with sliced bread and molasses on the side. Good, honest food, I guess. Later, after most everyone stopped eating bologna, he would make his own lunches when he was home by emptying leftovers into a fry pan (hopefully there was potato!), giving it a sizzle, and then breaking an egg over the top. He was definitely on to something. Eggs cracked over food, ...
Mob Rule: Part 17
Old money and mirrors
When the interrogation of hostile foot soldiers yields no information, Jack is asked to go undercover at the Kennedy compound in the hopes of getting actionable proof about who's behind the truce-breaking violence
By John Armstrong
It’s hard to believe that anyone actually enjoys torturing a man but by the time you reach manhood you learn that many things are true which you may not care to believe. Fortunately, we didn’t need to tie anyone to a chair and stick things under their fingernails to get what we wanted. The captured gunsels had no reason not to talk. The ones we’d brought in from Queens were all from the Lucchese Family. I sat in on one interrogation that was more like a friendly chat among guys waiting for their cars to be fixed at a muffler shop. But why shouldn’t it have been, really? They’d done their job bravely, now it was over and we harbored no real animosity to each other. People say, “Oh, they’re so cold. They can ...
Playing with the boys
The Sick Days: Part 13
How one young reporter ended up shouting at the Queen Mother from the sidelines of a horse race while dodging the pig sty theatrics of One Yonge
By Shelley Page
When I joined the Star’s downtown general assignment pool, all the reporters’ desks had been shoved into rows as they renovated the newsroom. It reminded me of a Grade 8 class at an all-boys school. Loud-talking guys in wrinkled dress shirts, loosened ties, sitting jowl-to-cheek, ego-to-ego, as they pounded out their stories on 1970s computers, in late stages of decay. I was seated, temporarily, beside a bulldog of two-way man (meaning he both wrote and took photographs), who immediately showed me the collection of girlie photos he’d amassed on the job. He’d somehow convinced numerous women to pose for photos with their shirts off, and kept a file in his desk, mixed in with pictures of his children (clothed). He showed me this collection, I guess, to see how I’d react.
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Sadness still makes her happy
People: Phyllis Smith
The veteran star of The Office says voicing the role of Sadness in Disney-Pixar's Inside Out was a joyous experience that continues to animate her life
By Katherine Monk
Finding true joy in sadness is the stuff of self-help books, but for Phyliis Smith, it’s become the defining moment of her career—and she’s still in it. Speaking over the phone, apparently from the Midwest home she grew up in with her siblings, Smith’s voice is charged with audible enthusiasm as she talks about her time working on Inside Out. Released theatrically June 19th by Disney-Pixar, the animated feature about an eleven-year-old girl named Riley remains one of the biggest hits of the year, standing at number three for the year with over $355 million in domestic receipts. Now out on home video today, Smith says the minute the movie premiered at Cannes, people told her it would be a turning point—including executive producer and member of the Pixar brain ...
Mob Rule: Part 16
War breaks out in the borough
Jack can't believe his eyes as the mattresses come out before the hail of bullets begins, but as newly appointed battle commander, he needs to hatch a strategy that will flush the bad guys from their Flushing stronghold before his men are picked off by sniper fire.
By John Armstrong
From 7th Avenue looking down 33rd towards the Luciano-Costello Building you would have thought you were on the set of a movie: cars and trucks had been parked sideways across the street at both ends, forcing any attack to come though the narrow bottlenecks they left open, a bad idea as there were gunmen stationed everywhere. And I’m only talking about the ones you could see; who knows how many more were watching from sniper posts? The driver delivered us to the front door and I mean, right to the doors themselves, up on the sidewalk with barely room to open them so that we were exposed to any enemy shooters for the shortest possible amount of time. Inside it was ...
The Sick Days: Part 12
The mantra, the mental spellcheck and a call to the show
The suburban beat suddenly gets grisly when a serial rapist starts stalking Scarborough, leaving a young reporter haunted by a narrative loop of horror that demands spiritual healing, while her body slowly tapers off high doses of prednisone
By Shelley Page
A suburban monster, he overpowered her from behind, dragging her into the backyard of her parents’ Scarborough home. There, he strangled her with an electrical cord, while viciously raping her for almost an hour. He left her tied to a fence with her own belt like a dog. The details in the press release were spare, stark. The victim was 19. I wasn’t much older. I quickly typed up the brief and filed it to the senior cop reporter based at One Yonge, Toronto Star headquarters. Reporters are observers. That is our blessing and our curse. We know we can’t help, but we’re uncertain what or how to feel, as though it were a professional liability.
Repo...
