Rose's Cantina

I was driving down Hawthorne Road in search of a farm stall selling corn, when I spied this incredible sight -- an all-night A&W stuck in the middle of nowhere. Man, that brings me back. Growing up in St. Catharines, there wasn't a lot to do if you didn't play hockey or row for your high school. But you could take your fake I.D. and get into a heavy metal bar to watch a band like Thor and the Imps, pictured below with me in their clutches. Hey! I was interviewing them! Anyways, after the bar, a bunch of us would cruise down to A&W for chili dogs, Papa Teen Burgers and some very frosty root beer. We'd crank up the tunes, slide our car windows down and scarf down the best fast food in town. I don't remember girls on roller skates, but I'm told our A&W had them. There were lots of other fast food joints, of course. There was Tim Horton's -- the original Timmies, which was close to the spot on the Queen Elizabeth where Tim Horton met his...

When I was a little kid, I grew up on a fruit farm in St. Catharines where I ate my snacks off various trees or plucked them from the ground. Each summer, there were baskets of second grade peaches, cherries and strawberries that my grandfather couldn’t take to the station, the same fruits that I now have to pay six bucks for at the grocery store. In the winter, we ate jarred fruit put up by my granny over the summer. If we wanted another kind of snack, grandpa would climb down the rickety wooden stairs and toss a basket of popcorn – kernels he grew himself – into the furnace and let it fluff up. I rarely got a store bought snack, unless it was a holiday. My mum bought pop, but we were allowed only one can a week, not because she wanted to limit our sugar but because she was poor and couldn’t afford to buy us more than that. It was only when I went to my Auntie Aylwyn’s – every Friday night – that I was able to take advantage of the snacks that modern technology had cr...

In a tale reminiscent of the McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit, moms in the U.S. brought a class-action case against Nutella maker Ferrero, claiming it misled them by portraying the chocolate spread as “an example of a tasty yet balanced breakfast.” Seriously, moms? You thought that crap was good for you? You're probably the kind of mom who buys food for your kids that says made with "real fruit juice" or "real cheese". Read your labels, people! Here are the ingredients in Nutella, according to Wikipedia: According to the product label, the main ingredients of Nutella are sugar and vegetable oils (mostly palm oil [ 5 ] ), followed by hazelnut , cocoa solids , and skimmed milk . In the United States, Nutella contains soy products. [ 6 ] Nutella is marketed as "hazelnut cream" in many countries. Under Italian law, it cannot be labeled as a chocolate cream, as it does not meet minimum cocoa solids concentration criteria. About half of the...