There’s no taste like home Classic cookbook foundation of new Mennonite restaurant By: Eva Wasney Posted: 4:48 PM CST Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2024

Closure of Nomads field massive upset for North End

The North Winnipeg Nomads have a flag on the field.

The long-standing minor football club was recently informed that its field is unfit to host games and that it would need to find a new home for its five youth and adult teams until repairs are made to the playing surface.

“Our board has made every effort to address the condition of our home field,” the club wrote in a statement. “Unfortunately, following a professional assessment, the field has been determined to be unsafe and unstable for our athletes.”

All five of the club’s teams will play their 2026 season at Frank Whyte Field, part of the Northwood Community Centre, with no confirmed date for when they can play on their home field again.

Retired sportscaster Scott Oake determined as fundraising for women's addictions treatment facility enters home stretch

For now, the patch of land just east of the Victoria Hospital doesn’t look like much: just a field of rocks, mounded dirt, and concrete piles driven into the earth. Yet when Scott Oake looks over the site, he can already imagine how it will look in just over a year’s time, when the new Anne Oake Family Recovery Centre is expected to open.

It’s easier to picture this time around. In 2020, when the recently-retired CBC sportscaster and his late wife, Anne, were building their first labour of intermingled grief and love, the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre for men, it was hard for him to wrap his mind around how a raw construction site could transform into a welcoming addictions treatment facility.

When that centre opened in 2021, Oake found it looked “almost identical” to the architect’s renderings. So it’s easy to hope the Anne Oake Centre will be the same. It will be the first facility of its kind, its founders believe, not only in Canada but in North America: a place where 50 to 70 women can pursue sobriety while staying with their children.

“At Bruce Oake there’s a culture of love, and most of all a culture of hope,” Oake said, speaking at the site Thursday after a media conference to announce the final push of the centre’s fundraising campaign. “I can feel it every time I walk into that building. And I know it will be the same here.”

Classic cookbook foundation of new Mennonite restaurant

Josh Penner isn’t a religious man, but he does follow the guidance of a revered tome. The Mennonite Treasury of Recipes, a coil-bound community cookbook, has been a primary source of inspiration while developing recipes for his new Portage Avenue takeout and catering company, Faspa. Penner, 41, is a Red Seal chef with decades of experience running local and international chain kitchens. MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Josh Penner, the chef and owner of Faspa Catering & Food Market, with a plate of vareniki and farmer sausage at the new Mennonite takeout and catering business When faced with the […]

Citizen reports help highlight connectivity issues across southwest Manitoba

A southwestern Manitoba man has created a map to document cell service blackout spots in an effort to push for better access in rural areas.

Mark Custance compiled more than 300 citizen reports over the last few months to document where service in southwest Manitoba is strong, spotty or doesn’t exist at all.

“I’ve heard people complain and say, ‘cell service sucks’ or ‘this is not working.’ But what does the data actually say?” Custance said from his office in Melita, where he has installed a cell-service booster to maintain connectivity with the rest of the world.

Analyzing where service is good and poor, he cross-references it with the location of cellphone towers across the region.

Sex assault charges against basketball referee stayed

A Winnipeg basketball referee accused of sexual offences involving three men has had criminal charges against him stayed.

Michael Shane Maryk, 45, had been set to stand trial July 20 on five counts of sexual assault and two counts of committing an indecent act, but instead agreed to a one-year peace bond prohibiting him from having any contact with the three men.

Maryk was employed by the Manitoba Association of Basketball Officials at the time the offences were alleged to have occurred.

The peace bond requires that Maryk not come within 200 metres of the men’s homes, schools or places of worship and have no contact with their families.

Goodness alive, well in N.L.-set musical

I first saw Come From Away — the true-story musical about the incredible efforts of the residents of Gander, N.L. on Sept. 11, 2001, who welcomed nearly 7,000 travellers diverted to their remote town after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — in 2022, when Broadway Across Canada brought it to the Centennial Concert Hall.

I went in cold, but with blunted expectations; it seemed, on premise alone, like it could tilt too far into shmaltzy sentimentality, that it would be too earnest in its goodness.

So, when I wept until my face was as wet and salty as though it had been slapped by the waves of the North Atlantic, I was pleasantly surprised. I loved it. It’s emotional, yes. It’s sentimental, yes. But you can’t help but feel both buoyed — and, dare I say, patriotic — by the end of it.

Written by Canadians Irene Sankoff and David Hein, Come From Away seemed an unlikely hit when it opened on Broadway in 2017. But there was, by then, an appetite for it.