Throughout the academic year, Melinda Giampietro, Options Founder/President, will share some of her favourite things in her monthly Founder’s Feature. Melinda loves reading, data, research, and following academic and adolescent news around the world.
November’s Cookbook of the Month:
I have always appreciated Daphne Oz’s straightforward and simple-to-follow recipes. She is an excellent recipe writer with clear, concise, and logical directions. The Happy Cook, her 2016 cookbook, is one of my most used. I was very excited for her new book: Eat Your Heart Out. The recipes are free from gluten and refined sugar. She creates a natural sugar substitute with her Date Syrup. Some of my favourite recipes include Frisee with Delicata Squash and Green Goddess Dressing (this is the perfect fall combination), Middle Eastern Egg Salad, Chipotle Chicken Meatball Burrito Bowl, and Oatmeal Cookie Balls.
November’s Featured Podcast:
I first listened to Gangster Capitalism after its feature on the Varsity Blues Scandal in 2019, but Season Three is a jaw-dropper. It follows the many, many scandals at Liberty University, the world’s largest Christian University in Lynchburg, West Virginia, and with its former President Jerry Falwell Jr., it explores the origins, rise, and legacy of the institution. It looks at the Falwell family and their quest for power, self-destructing in their own hypocrisy and greed.
November’s Remembrance:
I lived in Telluride, CO for all my twenties. It is a culture where success is measured in mental toughness and vertical feet. There were so many inspiring women there; many of them breaking records and boundaries, but none more so than Hilaree Nelson. Hilaree existed at the top of the mountaineering world, and her gender didn’t matter. She was respected by all. As a Captain of the North Face athlete team and a National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, she was an inspiration, especially for girls who wanted to play in the outdoors. She is so missed by so many.
November’s Vancouver Favourite Find:
I find it hard to eat healthily in September, October, and November. It is deadline season! Tractor at Home is a lifesaver. I can customize my order each week. My go-to order is the Power Breakfast Parfait, Kale Caesar Salad (with a side of halloumi), and the Chicken Verde Tacos. I also have an Apricot Power Cookie almost every day at 1 PM with my afternoon tea. Tractor is owned and operated by Vancouverites. It feels great to support our neighbours.
November’s Featured Book:
I don’t know how I missed Still Life by Sarah Winman when it was released in 2021, but oh, what a gem. I fell in love with this quirky historical fiction novel. It is truly a mash-up of human, genuine, and stick-with-you characters; it features a parrot, a little girl, a young soldier, and a lesbian art lover. It is beautifully written, and I’ve stayed up way past my bedtime reading it. Heartbreaking at times and laugh aloud funny at others, I can’t remember when I have enjoyed a book so thoroughly. Much of it is set in Florence, Italy one of my favourite cities. Its accurate and warm descriptions of daily life there gave me a serious case of wanderlust.
November’s Featured Article
Those of you who have been following along know that I’ll read anything by David Brooks. I loved The Road to Character. In this book, Brooks encourages us to reframe our values around kindness, bravery, honesty, and faithfulness, building humility and moral depth. His latest article for the NYTimes is “The Crisis of Men and Boys”. The article is framed around and shares select findings from Richard V. Reeves’s new book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. I just picked up the book to learn more. This quote from the article has haunted me for three weeks:
They are struggling in the classroom. American girls are 14 percentage points more likely to be “school ready” than boys at age 5, controlling for parental characteristics. By high school, two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class, ranked by G.P.A., are girls, while roughly two-thirds of the students at the lowest decile are boys. In 2020, at the 16 top American law schools, not a single one of the flagship law reviews had a man as editor-in-chief.
Read last month’s Founder’s Feature here!
