Written by Duncan Holmes | 09 March 2011

When my daughter returned from her first trip to Hawaii a couple of weeks back, I asked: “Apart from the weather, the sunsets, palm trees, coconuts, pineapples, black sand beaches and terrifying rivers of molten volcanic lava sliding by your feet and hissing into the sea, what really blew your mind?”

“Sushi,” she said. “We ate sushi made with SPAM!” (And yes, I believe she actually made the point in capital letters, something that I understand manufacturer Hormel Foods really like us to do when SPAM gets a mention.)

“You must be kidding?” I said, immediately visualizing chunky jelly in alarming shades of pink. “You had sushi made with SPAM?”

Like many foods that come from cans, SPAM has had an on-and-off bad rap over the last 60-plus years — Something Posing As Meat was one cruel degustation of the acronym — even if many of us, from time to time, have fried up a slice or two to accompany a couple of farm-fresh eggs for breakfast. But learning that this staple of K-rations had ended up in that now-universal package of edible elegance blew my mind. No offence to SPAM’s ongoing meaty magic, but it simply didn’t seem to juxtapose well with slices of albacore, nori, wasabi and soy.

Written by Tony Aspler | 02 March 2011

The gods of fishing are fickle. One day you can catch a dozen, including a 22-pound lake trout, and the next you’re skunked. The only constant on our annual fishing trip is the wine.

For 13 years now I have been fishing somewhere in northern Canada  (barbless hooks, catch and release) with five guys — Steve, Sam, Art, Harold and Larry, who stood in for the late, lamented Leo. Every year it was Leo who showed me the Palomar knot to attach a swivel to the line; and every year in the interim I would forget how to tie it. Leo died in February and without his tutelage I tied it. He must have been guiding my fingers — wherever he is.

This year our trip took us to Peterson’s Point Lake Lodge, a 90-minute floatplane ride due north of Yellowknife and 50 miles below the Arctic Circle. They say about the North West Territories that if you put all the mosquitoes on one end of a balance and all the caribou on the other, the mosquitoes will outweigh the caribou. Battalions of them, along with black flies and horse flies lie in ambush for you if you don’t spray yourself and wear a bug jacket.