All posts by Rebecca Esther

About Rebecca Esther

Disabled traveller and writer based in Toronto, ON. I love parrots, road trips and blogging at sunrise.

5 Must-Taste Regional Foods

Travel, ,

tarte au sucre

There’s just something special about digging in to a dish you know you can’t get anywhere else.

These are 5 of my favourite regional foods. Share yours in the comment below!

1. Tarte au sucre. Also known as sugar pie (pictured), this Quebecois dessert is a single crust pie with a filling of maple syrup, butter and cream. It is very sweet and unbelievably rich!

2. Garlic fingers. Atlantic Canada’s ultimate comfort food. Garlic fingers start out pizza-shaped and are sliced into ‘fingers’; rectangles of garlicky, cheese-covered goodness. Apparently these are also popular in Wisconsin!

3. New York cheesecake. Sure, you can get New York-style cheesecake for $12 in the frozen section of a Loblaws near you (and it is pretty good!) but the real thing, “pure, unadulterated cheesecake with no fancy ingredients added either to the cheesecake or placed on top of it” is a different dessert entirely. Who needs fancy when ‘plain’ tastes this good?! The cake practically melts in your mouth. Bet you’ll ask for seconds!

4. Butter tarts. You can’t visit Ontario without tasting a butter tart (or two, or three…). Similar to pecan pie, but with a runnier consistency and a hint of maple, butter tarts sometimes contain pecans, walnuts or raisins, but they’re amazing au naturel, too. This dessert was common in pioneer cooking and has definitely stood the test of time. Now you can find butter tarts in packs of 6 at national grocery chains like Metro, but the best ones are found at local bakeries in Ontario. Any time a friend from out of province visits, I’m quick to suggest a trip to a bakery so they can taste this deliciousness.

5. Fried chicken. The American deep south’s gift to the world. No description needed!

What’s your favourite regional dish?

SAD: Winter Blues, Times a Thousand

Mental Health, Mental Illness,

Every year, as soon as Halloween has come and gone, an icy sense of impending dread fills me. Winter is coming, and I have Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). What am I going to do?!

Seasonal Affective Disorder is a form of clinical depression which is affected by seasons’ change and lack of sunlight. The disorder causes low serotonin levels, thereby causing low moods, too. Think of SAD as a bad case of the winter blues, times a thousand.

As a spoonie, I often have days when I question how capable I am of functioning like a healthy person. In winter, when SAD is the ringmaster, I feel like an elephant trying to balance on a tightrope; I’m clumsy and unsure of myself and I know I’m going to fall into a deep pit of depression. It’s just a matter of time. SAD and all my year-round symptoms together? That’s almost too much to bear.

Thanks to my disability worsening in the past year, I’m under-employed. So I don’t have the funds to escape to a warmer climate or to hire someone to help me with my business and around the house. I know that going out and catching some rays helps a lot, but when I can’t leave the house at the best of times, what am I to do in winter?

I’ve had SAD almost all my life, and have been a spoonie (though I didn’t know it until I was 21) since my late teenage years, and I always manage to survive winter. I’m definitely more resilient than I give myself credit for. But when winter creeps closer and closer, I panic. Every single year.

Do you have SAD? How do you cope?

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Feel the dread and do it anyway!

Uncategorized
Today I did something I had been dreading for weeks.

I was really tempted to avoid it completely. I made up excuses in my head: My cat is sitting on the supplies I’ll need and I don’t want to wake her up. Something good is on TV. I’m out of town. I don’t feel well. That last one was totally true. But would avoiding this really make me feel better? No.

So I braced myself. I took some deep breaths. I did it.

And it sucked just as much as I thought it would.

And I felt like crap after. Just like I thought I would.

But I did it. And that’s what matters.

As a spoonie, I pride myself on perseverance. Spoonies put up with a lot more than the average person: Our lives are unpredictable, because our symptoms are unpredictable. We spend more time in pharmacies and doctors’ offices than we do at our friends’ homes. We work and travel and simply exist, even when our own immune systems are attacking us and our bodies feel like they’re falling apart.

Thinking of this, I pushed myself to do what I was dreading. And I did it

And then I celebrated with pizza. Hooray for small victories!

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What They Don’t Understand [As Told By Superstars in Gifs]

Being a Digital Nomad, Being a Spoonie

It takes hard work, just to stay afloat.

Running a business is hard. Having a disability is hard. Travelling while working or having a serious illness is hard. Doing all of the above at once? Nearly unheard of.

And yet, some of us do it.

It’s not always Instagram-worthy. But we trudge through the bad pain days, the emotionally and physically exhausting days knowing that the freedom of being a digital nomad and the satisfaction of fighting our illnesses is so worth it.

In the end, maybe the people who don’t understand (or don’t care to understand), the naysayers, the ableists and the haters don’t matter. Seeing the world and doing what you love? That’s what counts.

Toronto’s West Queen West: Second-Coolest Neighbourhood In the World

Travel, , ,

I’m proud to be from Toronto, ON, Canada. There are more reasons than I could possibly count (the food, the multiculturalism, the arts…). But here’s one more:

Vogue Magazine ranked Toronto’s West Queen West the second coolest neighbourhood in the world.

On days when I was too anxious (thanks, Panic Disorder!) to get to high school, I’d often take the Bathurst bus and streetcar all the way down to Queen (I lived and went to school in North York) and then the Queen Streetcar across to West Queen West, where I’d people watch, drink lots of coffee and work on my writing or schoolwork.

So I’ve known the neighbourhood’s charm for years, and so have many locals. It’s about time it’s getting worldwide recognition, and from Vogue, no less.

I have to agree with Post City Toronto: “Ultimately, Vogue’s call is another feather in the cap for a city that, for all the incredible things we pump into the world ranging from art to music to fashion to commerce, tends to underestimate itself. Yes, Toronto, we’re the world’s barometer of everything from big ideas to high-end fashion, and now Vogue knows it, too”.

What’s your favourite Toronto neighbourhood?

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