Reviews of the Happy Nun Cafe

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	High praises to the Happy Nun Lizz Bottrell The Observer Don and Shannon Shakotko run the Happy Nun Cafe in Forget. Carlyle Observer, January 14, 2011 Lizz Bottrell The Observer You'll leave happy from the Happy Nun. And, after a fabulous meal, punctuated with intriguing conversation at a quaint little table, surrounded by pleasant decor, who wouldn't leave happy. Driving into Forget at night while the snow is blowing something fierce, it's a good idea to know where you are going. The community may be small, but its many gravel roads wind throughout the village. The blowing snow on this particular evening left parts of the roads covered in large drifts. If one didn't know better, it would have felt like driving into a desolate place. But, Forget is anything but desolate. Stepping outside the car into the cold, harsh wind, soft folk-style music is heard. It's coming from a speaker outside on the snow-covered deck. During the summer months, patrons can enjoy a meal beneath the warm sun, but on this night, there was a table next to the fireplace calling our name. Once inside the Happy Nun, a serene young woman greeted us. Sitting at the table, heat radiating from the aforementioned fireplace, warmed our body and soul. Our wonderful server – a woman named Heidi – took our drink order and left us to take in our new surroundings. The cafe is filled with repurposed items. During a previous visit, Shannon Shakotko, one of the owners, showed me around the Happy Nun while giving me a history of the building and many of its furnishings. Recalling her words, I shared the history with my significant other who joined me for the night out. The bar countertop is wood from a neighbour's barn; the baseboards, which adorn the bottom two feet of the some walls, is wood found in Forget. Shannon and her husband Don sanded, stained and rejuvenated the wood to use in the Happy Nun. Other artifacts from the community subtly tell a story of the old days of Forget. The Shakotko's take a great deal of pride in restoring and preserving these little bits of history. The old steel post office boxes sit to the left of the stage, where many musicians have sat and played since they turned the formerly deserted town hall into a cafe, performance space and second-hand bookstore. The walls are lined with literally thousands of old books, adding to the historical feeling of the building. Pictures of happy nuns and paintings by local artists embellish the upper walls. Shannon and Don believe in the future of rural Saskatchewan, and displaying local art work and providing musicians with a performance space is their way of ensuring its future. A late lunch forced us to pass on ordering an appetizer, though the platter looked delightful. Instead, we enjoyed a plate of organic greens with honey mustard vinaigrette with a rosemary bun. Shannon and Don were busy in the kitchen, giving each meal careful attention, as they worked away rather quietly. The food is served on aesthetically-pleasing stone dishes made from deep inside Gerald Morton's kiln, located at Moose Mountain Pottery on the edge of the provincial park. A common gesture to their patrons, Shannon and Don brought our meals out themselves, thanking us for coming. Their smiles were infectious. The winter stew we each ordered gave off a compelling aroma, and the first bite was heavenly – one of those moments when you close your eyes and enjoy ever flavour to its fullest. Clearly, the Happy Nun Cafe is for people who love food – real food. Prepared, as much as possible, with local and seasonal ingredients, the meals are meant to be savoured. And, savour we did. Every. Last. Bite. Regrettably, we passed on dessert, as we were stuffed after the delicious winter stew. Next time we'll go just for dessert.
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Would you like to write your own review?? Send it on a postcard from your hometown to: Happy Nun Cafe P.O. Box 120 Forget, SK S0C 0X0	Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Finding Forget Submitted by Neil Johnston on Saturday, 4 October 2008 The sign for Saskatchewan is a harbinger of prosperity. Pump-jacks line the roadside fellating like 50’s cartoon mosquitoes pulling congealed crude from the earth. David & David’s “Welcome to Boomtown” drifts through my mind. If there is a place to let your mind roam while riding, this is it, a wide openness painted in blue and gold and measured by a latitude-straight highway. Unmoored, my mind wanders through the big questions. How do I bring meaning to what I do? Where is my career taking me? Do I even have a career? My current path is tied to a sensual act of riding wonderful, irreverent machines. Yet, I hold a hope of leaving some good mark on the world. Rather I find myself more frequently struggling to add value to reviewing motorcycles. The problem is reviewing is an insular form. You can fight to introduce history, engineering, science and politics, but it’s an ill fit. Occasionally you place a motorcycle into greater social context, stumbling onto an electric bike, a Chinese brand whose mere price point grabs general attention, or legal technicalities to rail against, and produce actual journalistic pieces. Essentially though, motorcycle reviews are a self contained world of technical details, infinitesimal increments of top speed, and new models built on a two year cycle as if to meet the waning attention span of both press and public. There is a story, but its scope begins and ends with a bike. A perfectly executed corner, the drag of a knee-puck, the basso-perfecto bellow of a v-twin, these are sublime things enjoyed like a fine wine. Yet, after 100 reviews I’m digging hard for a new description of twisting the throttle. As sole focus, the review doesn’t feed the soul. Meet my existential crisis, personally I’d settle for a mid-life one. Out of the corner of my eye I spot a hand-painted sign, the word “Forget” prominent… Recalling a CBC interview with the re-founders of Forget (pronounced FOR-jhay), Saskatchewan, I take the turn. The Multistrada grumbles its way up the gravel road, and I pull up to a the Happy Nun, on Forget’s ghost of a Main Street. On the restaurant’s deck, eight of the village’s thirty-eight population are sitting basking in the late afternoon light and enjoying the last late fall warmth. Between my earplugs and helmet, I barely hear someone call out, “We’re closed.” “Oh, I’m sorry, I heard about Forget on the CBC and thought I’d stop in and take a look around.” Barriers collapse and I’m offered a bottle of sparkling water, tortilla chips and humus, and a seat on the deck. Orchestrated by the proprietor of the Happy Nun, Shannon Shakotko, introductions are made, conversation flows easily back and forth and I’m visiting with friends I’ve not seen in ages, despite never having met a one before. In 2000, Shannon (a music teacher) and her husband Don (a school principal) bought Forget’s 1904 Catholic rectory, the former home of 13 priests who used it as a base to proselytize across Saskatchewan’s southeast. Shannon and Don reformed the rectory into the Ananda Arthouse, with a non-profit vision of supporting the arts in southeast Saskatchewan and providing a place for artists to perform and purvey. Then to rebuild Forget itself. “What made you want to be here?”, I ask. “It was the name,” responds Shannon, “Forget, before I learned it was the French pronunciation.” Shannon shows me around the Happy Nun, like the rest of Forget, it’s something transformed. Everywhere you look you see found items repurposed, the bar countertop is found wood from a neighbour’s barn, patterned tin roof from the kitchen has become wall decoration, the baseboard found wood from the town, sanded, stained and rejuvenated… There is a resonance that comes with the reuse. Forget itself is based on artifacts and memories reworked, not forgotten. It could be the biggest bad pun on the prairies, but it is anything but. “The old timers remember the dances here, and the fights out front, and swinging off the chandelier”, says Shannon of the old community hall, “they love that this place is back.” Formerly a derelict town hall, the Happy Nun now serves as a café, second-hand bookstore and performance space. History and dreams mix here within the warm dark tones, walls lined with thousands of books and pictures of Happy Nuns; nuns skiing, nuns on trams and, well, many happy nuns. A visitor from the city and a local could walk into the Happy Nun and feel comfortable… “Except for the couscous,” says Shannon, “there was a lot of reeducation around the couscous. See, this is what happens when you send grain to the middle east. It comes back as couscous.” The Happy Nun’s menu is delightfully urban with as many local and seasonal ingredients as possible, except for the couscous of course. Open Friday thru Monday, I regret arriving Thursday. The thought of a proper healthy meal on the road almost has me salivating even as I take to the highway. The evening breeze recalls the last minutes of hot-dry Cariboo summers in BC’s interior where I was raised. Step into a hay field and clouds of grasshoppers jump-launch ahead of you, a macro-god striding their micro-world. I didn’t think the prairies would appeal, but every coffee stop reveals worn men and women chatting in with a familiar ranch earthiness and grounded sensibility. Their glances at the outsider are neither perfunctorily friendly or exclusionist, just a worn, weathered curiosity. Overheard conversations are threaded with wry, terse, cowboy humour – even the women. There is irony, kindness, and affection here, core values that answers why this province was the progenitor of public health care. Long winters, hot dry summers, homes spaced by kilo-hectares agricultural grid-squares, and a common ranching history that demands cooperation for success — all build a careful, cautious caring. Saskatchewan is Canada’s heart laid bare, a surface exposed below thin-cropped rolling wheat. Clouding the view is a young, brash and moneyed dust, kicked up by pickups with dual axles, a welding rig or toolboxes in the back, and a fully depressed throttle. These Rig Rockets race down straight side roads in a mad, grab as much as you can oil-boom dash, with no care beyond the cardboard box hotel room, the bar, and another day pulling crude from the ground. Riding under low evening sun and half-sphere sky, the moment hinges. My mind slips languidly between possible lives, blurring and focusing on potentials. High-school enrichment programs, nights listening to CBC ideas on a ghetto-blaster growing up, storyboarding, an interest in film, the urge to travel and writing… always writing. These are the found things I have to work with, the potential is to shed the jaundiced eye of critique and see the world in a better way. It’s not spiritual. It’s not an epiphany. I don’t do those things. But, a culmination of efforts catalyze and I’m suffuse with reassuring clarity – a slippery commodity that I vow to hold onto. I am doing exactly what I should be, traveling, finding the poetry in rare sparse places, championing a sport I love and sharing the experience. What would it be like to see still rebuilding New Orleans? Ride Alaska, visiting lakes that are disappearing into melting permafrost? Explore Africa simply to see what so few North Americans do? See Iceland, a bare exposed land with an economy to match? What do you want to be when you grow up? On the prairies I’ve found my own Forget, I want to travel and share the found stories – travel writer, correspondent from here and away, videographer… these are all narrow. In the twilight I settle on Motorcycle Adventurist.

Ducati: Many Roads of Canada – Finding Forget

Submitted by Neil Johnston on Saturday, 4 October 2008

The sign for Saskatchewan is a harbinger of prosperity. Pump-jacks line the roadside fellating like 50’s cartoon mosquitoes pulling congealed crude from the earth. David & David’s “Welcome to Boomtown” drifts through my mind. If there is a place to let your mind roam while riding, this is it, a wide openness painted in blue and gold and measured by a latitude-straight highway.

Unmoored, my mind wanders through the big questions. How do I bring meaning to what I do? Where is my career taking me? Do I even have a career?

My current path is tied to a sensual act of riding wonderful, irreverent machines. Yet, I hold a hope of leaving some good mark on the world. Rather I find myself more frequently struggling to add value to reviewing motorcycles. The problem is reviewing is an insular form.

You can fight to introduce history, engineering, science and politics, but it’s an ill fit. Occasionally you place a motorcycle into greater social context, stumbling onto an electric bike, a Chinese brand whose mere price point grabs general attention, or legal technicalities to rail against, and produce actual journalistic pieces. Essentially though, motorcycle reviews are a self contained world of technical details, infinitesimal increments of top speed, and new models built on a two year cycle as if to meet the waning attention span of both press and public. There is a story, but its scope begins and ends with a bike.

A perfectly executed corner, the drag of a knee-puck, the basso-perfecto bellow of a v-twin, these are sublime things enjoyed like a fine wine. Yet, after 100 reviews I’m digging hard for a new description of twisting the throttle. As sole focus, the review doesn’t feed the soul. Meet my existential crisis, personally I’d settle for a mid-life one.

Out of the corner of my eye I spot a hand-painted sign, the word “Forget” prominent… Recalling a CBC interview with the re-founders of Forget (pronounced FOR-jhay), Saskatchewan, I take the turn.

The Multistrada grumbles its way up the gravel road, and I pull up to a the Happy Nun, on Forget’s ghost of a Main Street.

On the restaurant’s deck, eight of the village’s thirty-eight population are sitting basking in the late afternoon light and enjoying the last late fall warmth.

Between my earplugs and helmet, I barely hear someone call out, “We’re closed.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I heard about Forget on the CBC and thought I’d stop in and take a look around.”

Barriers collapse and I’m offered a bottle of sparkling water, tortilla chips and humus, and a seat on the deck. Orchestrated by the proprietor of the Happy Nun, Shannon Shakotko, introductions are made, conversation flows easily back and forth and I’m visiting with friends I’ve not seen in ages, despite never having met a one before.

In 2000, Shannon (a music teacher) and her husband Don (a school principal) bought Forget’s 1904 Catholic rectory, the former home of 13 priests who used it as a base to proselytize across Saskatchewan’s southeast. Shannon and Don reformed the rectory into the Ananda Arthouse, with a non-profit vision of supporting the arts in southeast Saskatchewan and providing a place for artists to perform and purvey. Then to rebuild Forget itself.

“What made you want to be here?”, I ask.

“It was the name,” responds Shannon, “Forget, before I learned it was the French pronunciation.”

Shannon shows me around the Happy Nun, like the rest of Forget, it’s something transformed.

Everywhere you look you see found items repurposed, the bar countertop is found wood from a neighbour’s barn, patterned tin roof from the kitchen has become wall decoration, the baseboard found wood from the town, sanded, stained and rejuvenated… There is a resonance that comes with the reuse. Forget itself is based on artifacts and memories reworked, not forgotten. It could be the biggest bad pun on the prairies, but it is anything but.

“The old timers remember the dances here, and the fights out front, and swinging off the chandelier”, says Shannon of the old community hall, “they love that this place is back.”

Formerly a derelict town hall, the Happy Nun now serves as a café, second-hand bookstore and performance space. History and dreams mix here within the warm dark tones, walls lined with thousands of books and pictures of Happy Nuns; nuns skiing, nuns on trams and, well, many happy nuns.

A visitor from the city and a local could walk into the Happy Nun and feel comfortable…
“Except for the couscous,” says Shannon, “there was a lot of reeducation around the couscous. See, this is what happens when you send grain to the middle east. It comes back as couscous.”

The Happy Nun’s menu is delightfully urban with as many local and seasonal ingredients as possible, except for the couscous of course. Open Friday thru Monday, I regret arriving Thursday. The thought of a proper healthy meal on the road almost has me salivating even as I take to the highway.

The evening breeze recalls the last minutes of hot-dry Cariboo summers in BC’s interior where I was raised. Step into a hay field and clouds of grasshoppers jump-launch ahead of you, a macro-god striding their micro-world.

I didn’t think the prairies would appeal, but every coffee stop reveals worn men and women chatting in with a familiar ranch earthiness and grounded sensibility. Their glances at the outsider are neither perfunctorily friendly or exclusionist, just a worn, weathered curiosity.

Overheard conversations are threaded with wry, terse, cowboy humour – even the women. There is irony, kindness, and affection here, core values that answers why this province was the progenitor of public health care.

Long winters, hot dry summers, homes spaced by kilo-hectares agricultural grid-squares, and a common ranching history that demands cooperation for success — all build a careful, cautious caring. Saskatchewan is Canada’s heart laid bare, a surface exposed below thin-cropped rolling wheat.

Clouding the view is a young, brash and moneyed dust, kicked up by pickups with dual axles, a welding rig or toolboxes in the back, and a fully depressed throttle. These Rig Rockets race down straight side roads in a mad, grab as much as you can oil-boom dash, with no care beyond the cardboard box hotel room, the bar, and another day pulling crude from the ground.

Riding under low evening sun and half-sphere sky, the moment hinges. My mind slips languidly between possible lives, blurring and focusing on potentials. High-school enrichment programs, nights listening to CBC ideas on a ghetto-blaster growing up, storyboarding, an interest in film, the urge to travel and writing… always writing. These are the found things I have to work with, the potential is to shed the jaundiced eye of critique and see the world in a better way.

It’s not spiritual. It’s not an epiphany. I don’t do those things. But, a culmination of efforts catalyze and I’m suffuse with reassuring clarity – a slippery commodity that I vow to hold onto.

I am doing exactly what I should be, traveling, finding the poetry in rare sparse places, championing a sport I love and sharing the experience. What would it be like to see still rebuilding New Orleans? Ride Alaska, visiting lakes that are disappearing into melting permafrost? Explore Africa simply to see what so few North Americans do? See Iceland, a bare exposed land with an economy to match? What do you want to be when you grow up?

On the prairies I’ve found my own Forget, I want to travel and share the found stories – travel writer, correspondent from here and away, videographer… these are all narrow. In the twilight I settle on Motorcycle Adventurist.