Chili paste adds dash of heat to caramel cookies

On the Night Table: Sean Burns

Sean Burns

Musician, songwriter and host of Boots and Saddle on CKUW 95.9 FM

I’m reading Jimmy McDonough’s Gary Stewart: I Am From the Honky-Tonks again. Any chance I can talk about this book, I’ll take it. (Stewart) should be in the Country Music Hall of Fame; he sort of rejected the machine so hard that they kind of let him sink himself. But he was a fantastic performer. He was just so passionate about playing, he didn’t care about the other stuff — to his detriment. It’s sad. The fellow who wrote the book was a superfan who chased (Stewart) down and just showed up at his place and really got to know him. The context, from when Gary was a young child to the very end, and the details are incredible. You get a really good sense of who he was as a person. I learned some stuff about how the music business operated that I never knew.

Sean Burns & Lost Country release their album Better Off In Time & Other Songs For the Dance Floor on Friday at Sidestage (700 Osborne St.). For an interview with Burns, see Friday’s Free Press.

Chili paste adds dash of heat to caramel cookies

Chewy and balanced with a dash of lingering heat thanks to the inclusion of gochujang (fermented red chili paste), these treats would make a memorable addition to any cookie tray.

Today’s Homemade Holidays recipe comes from Free Press Arts and Life editor Jill Wilson and is adapted from Eric Kim’s New York Times Cooking recipe.

eva.wasney@winnipegfreepress.com

Socialite dying to die can’t find a killer

Agnes Maurer wants to die. And she wants someone to do that for her.

Agnes Lives!, the debut novel of screenwriter Hallie Elizabeth Newton — her first screenplay credit, At Any Price, screened at TIFF in 2013 — covers 24 hours in socialite Agnes’s life as she seeks someone to murder her.

Would it be her boss, editor of the anti-fashion magazine Whorl, where Agnes, a former model, is listed as “cultural council”? The editor has a very attractive knife Agnes thinks could do the job, but editor Justine does not use it. Agnes takes the knife, full of hope she will find someone else to use it.

Will that be Agnes’s famous writer-director boyfriend? No, it won’t. The murderer won’t be the gun dealer she finds on Craigslist, nor the operator of a gun club who insists Agnes watch a video on gun safety. Nor is it the old politician from a previous life, nor a security guard who watches Agnes pee in an alley, nor the apparent Chinatown thugs she tries to buy a gun from, nor is it the famous director, nor the avant-garde artist.

Is ‘tornado alley’ moving north?

There’s a famous fictional story in which a ruby-slippered, tornado-tossed traveller takes a wide-eyed look around and declares, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

There are probably some residents of south River Heights, on the other hand, who looked out their windows last Sunday and felt as if Kansas — the U.S. state that lies smack-dab in the middle of meteorological maps outlining the area known as “tornado alley” — was exactly where they’d somehow ended up.

There is now confirmation of a tornado touching down within Winnipeg, after several residents reported seeing funnel-shaped clouds during the intense thunderstorm, and the magnitude and extremely localized nature of the damage — including felled trees, snapped hydro poles, scattered fences and the deposit of a random automobile on one resident’s front lawn — certainly shows forces more formidable than strong wind gusts were at play.

As Manitoba Hydro and City of Winnipeg crews continued the days-long effort to clean up the mess and restore power to thousands of homes affected by the long-weekend weather blast, some of the conversation related to the storm focused on how extreme events such as this have become more commonplace in a region where tornadoes were long considered a rarity.