Simi Sara spends a lot of time in the studio kitchen as the host of Citytv CityCooks (Monday to Friday at 6 p.m.). Yet the kitchen is also where you’ll find her at home, baking cakes, cookies, and muffins. “It’s my hobby,” she says. “It’s the only way I relax.” The cohost of Breakfast Television (Monday to Friday, 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.) lives on an acreage in Ladner with her husband, 11-year-old daughter, eight-year-old son, and chocolate lab, Cocoa.

Make that long-distance relationship last with a pair of Hug Shirts, which enable you to send a squeeze to someone far away. It’s a mobile accessory that links to your phone using Bluetooth technology. When you want your loved one to know you care, applying pressure to certain areas of your shirt is replicated in the shirt worn by the other person. Hug pressure and duration, and even skin temperature, are among the details that can be transferred from shirt to shirt.

With relatively easy access to clean and potable water, British Columbians are still far too wasteful with this natural resource.

Frank Lee has just convinced me to move out of my apartment and into a house just so I can have my own washer and dryer.

My black couch set is no longer black. The sofa and love seat, secondhand loans from my brother-in-law, weren’t about to win a Better Homes and Gardens prize to begin with. But two years ago, you could sit on them with guests, and not feel sick.

Since it’s more cool to be Miss Fix-it than Miss Helpless, one company is designing tools by and for women, including circular saws, garden implements, and mini air compressors. So get hammering, girls.

Fed up with noisy kids or loud music? Jon Azpiri finds ways to enjoy the sound of silence.

David Wong's house is painted red, but the designer has turned it ecogreen, inside and out.

Photos by Tracey Kusiewicz

For the beachcomber Unless you own a hot-dog stand, wheeling a full-size barbecue to the beach is serious nerdsville. Instead, tote the Char-Broil tabletop portable barbecue. It’s small enough to transport by bus, but will still fire up a mean sausage, and is the next best thing in the absence of bylaws allowing campfires. S’more it up with tin foil on the grill, and watch the sun set over the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Canada hasn’t really contributed much to the art of barbecue, unless you count maple-syrup glaze or the wonderful Native method of cooking salmon on a cedar frame by an open fire. We’ve adopted a combination of methods and ingredients that reflect the distinct regional styles of barbecue in the United States, where the word barbecue, depending on where it is used, often refers to just the meat being cooked, usually pork of some type.

Southern barbecue may take its sweet time to cook, but that just means you have to kick back with friends and family before savouring its secrets.

We asked a few of our favourite local mixologists to give us suggestions for drinks that would cool us down when the temperature begins to rise.

There's a growing number of homeowners and rebel landscapers turning to green mowing tools to shave their grass—a backlash against the pollution belched out by gas-powered mowers.

From Snow White’s evil stepmother to Alice in Wonderland, there’s something about mirrors that captures our imaginations. And with the wide selection of looking glasses out there nowadays, there’s a style of mirror to match just about every personality, from loft-dwelling creatives to traditional-minded Shaughnessy residents.