The lives I've imagined - the other me's

A piece of me lives on the Oregon coast
A piece of me lives across an ocean
A piece of me plays the cello and piano
A piece of me has no fear
A piece of me lives in wide open space
A piece of me grows food in California
A piece of me looks at the world askance from a distance
A piece of me sees myself in everyone
A piece of me is learning about the shadows
A piece of me loves pink
A piece of me loves college football
A piece of me sings like a funk diva
A piece of me dances in rhyme with nature
A piece of me knows me through and through
A piece of me cooks for others
A piece of me has a big table
A piece of me has three kids
A piece of me is overrun with cats and dogs and horses
A piece of me has a house with a yard
A piece of me can afford to look after our parents
A piece of me lives on the ocean
A piece of me loves winter
A piece of me speaks six languages
A piece of me makes jam
A piece of me bakes bread
A piece of me climbs mountains
A piece of me explores…

life cycle

Fall is here. In breathtaking strokes of colour, streaked by a sun that is harsh as it lowers itself in the sky. The haze that burns the sky white in summer is blown out. The blue through to space is clean and pure and ready for winter.

I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the fall but Canada.

It was the mark of fall – the rocky outcrop, Lake Rosseau, the Muskoka chairs, the wine, the beer, the caesars, the snacks and handful of women who trek up to the cottage the weekend after Thanksgiving every year to laugh, drink, laugh, eat, and laugh. And eat.

The cottage itself is a testament to another time. It sits on stilts over the water, blending the land and lake. Its glory is fading. The porch off the living room faces east. In the morning, we were sitting nursing cups of coffee in the cold, the water looked like a basket weaver’s work – diagonal lines crossing through each other in perfect sequence. Looking to the east, as the sun was pulling up over the tree line, the water let go its heat and mist rose…and I'm not kidding, a loon cried out far away. Slowly the other women followed the light and pulled chairs into the sun and our day was begun.

We have been going up there every year of this decade at least…and it marks our lives each year. Our host and her former husband had wild parties up there but after their break up the weekend became a way to connect with her women friends.

We come from all walks of life. There are a few tv people, a couple of teachers, a medical administrator, an adventure company owner, an executive with a non profit, an outdoor educator/guide, and we’re deep into or on the cusp of middle age. We are smart and funny - even without the wine.

Most of us only see each other for this weekend – and every year there’s something new – a marriage, a baby, a career change, travel, illness, recovery, discovery.

However, the price of admission - apart from closing up the cottage for the owners on the Sunday - is our host makes us set goals for the coming year. And we have to answer for them next year.

The goals are as varied as we are in personality. One of my favourites this year was K who wants to find her inner princess. To treat herself well…so some are about self improvement, others want to play the ukulele, one woman wants to find a way to help homeless animals, and one of us is registered for the Ironman Canada triathlon for her 50th birthday, and one wants her hair back.

She looked at me saying, “I want my hair to look like that. It’s not fair,” she said. I flinched inside – it hurt. And it’s true. My hair is back in full swing and gradually growing down to my shoulders and there’s no way to change the fairness of that. Whatever the future holds.

We talked about our year – we toasted our friend who wants her hair back…she is battling recurrent cancer with everything she’s got. And holding her own thank you very much. We toasted her for just being here, when at the beginning of the year we all wondered what 2009 held for her. One woman lost an employee/friend in a horrific accident while he was on the job. It was also unfair. She sobbed through the telling with such genuine affection and guilt for what happened - and she said that he lived by his own rules, he knew who he was…all that at 26. So many live so long never able to say that. Living by your own rules, your own standards…that is quite an achievement in a young life. Another jumped back into the freelance world after her job collapsed from under her and she’s stitching together her living – single, mortgage holder, making it work. These are strong, remarkable women.

I personally hate goal setting. I’ve always resisted it – I don’t like the set up for disappointment. I’ve done it over and over and over, and don’t get any better at it. I’m already pretty good at beating myself up so I don’t need another missed goal to point out my flaws.

Actually, to be honest, on these cottage weekends, I have always achieved my goals – but that’s because I’ve managed to set my goal posts so wide I couldn’t miss (well couldn’t miss anything other than the point of the exercise of course).

Although the gods have a sense of humour: six years ago I set my goal low – as always – it was to have a date. One. In the next year. The following October the women’s weekend was two weeks after my wedding. Total overachiever. Total. Yes.

So last year I went practical. I set the goal of writing up the collection of recipes that we have cooked over the years. Because the food has been remarkable. And of course I didn’t get it done. I put out an APB to the women a few weeks ago asking them to at least help me remember all the dishes – and many came to my rescue…but it wasn’t done.

The morning we drove up I came up with a perfect roundtable logic of success…while I had set my goal to create the cookbook, my actual clandestine goal was to fail at the goal…since I always achieve my goal, I wanted to see what this failure thing was all about…or so went my explanation that night. The goal keeper looked back at her notes from last year and said, “No you didn’t fail. You said you’d start collecting the recipes. And you've started.” So I failed at failing. Or something.

We were fourteen at table on Saturday night. It was cold – even for this normally cold weekend, the thermometer couldn’t really rouse itself into double digits. So the fireplace in the big, old dining room was lit, the huge table set (it can sit 14 comfortably).

Wendy and I got to work in the kitchen. This seems to be the year to try a Julia Child recipe. So that's what we did. Coq au vin – and browning enough chicken for 14 does not make for a happy smoke detector. That picture of us is just after we smoked out the entire kitchen.

But Julia is a classic for a reason - that chicken stew was pretty damned delicious. We served it with salad and boiled new potatoes in parsley butter.

Now I found the recipe in a book I am totally enjoying, American Food Writing, by Molly O’Neill. It has everything – essays on food by Thomas Jefferson to Walt Whitman to David Sedaris. And recipes for the likes of ketchup, peach leather (from 1867), or cranberry sauce (from 1901), even Thomas Jefferson's ice cream. And of course at the end of a piece by Julia Child about the making of her tv show, Molly reproduced the Julia’s Coq au Vin recipe.

It was perfect. The weekend and the food - warming to the soul, deep and personal. That’s goal enough I think.


Coq au Vin – a la Julia Child -

We doubled these amounts to serve 14, browning the chicken in two pans, much to the consternation of the smoke detector.

3-4 oz chunk of lean bacon
2 tb butter
2 ½ to 3 lbs. cut up frying chicken (we used boneless thighs, but I've made it before with bone in and most people swear by the extra flavour the bones impart)
½ tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. pepper

¼ cup cognac

3 cups young, full-bodied red wine (burgundy, Beaujolais, chianti)
1-2 cups brown chicken stock
½ tbsp tomato paste
2 cloves mashed garlic
¼ tsp thyme
1 bay leaf

12 to 24 brown-braised onions
½ lb. sautéed mushrooms

3 tb flour
2 tb softened butter
a saucer
a rubber spatula
a wire whip

Remove the rind and cut the bacon into lardons (rectangles ¼ inch and 1 inch long). Simmer for 10 minutes in 2 quarts of water. Rinse in cold water. Dry.

Sauté the bacon slowly in hot butter until it is very lightly browned. Remove to a side dish.

Dry the chicken thoroughly. Brown it in the hot fat.

Season the chicken with salt and pepper. Return the bacon to the casserole with the chicken. Cover and cook slowly for 10 minutes, turning the chicken once.

Uncover, and pour in the cognac. Ignite the cognac with a match. Shake the casserole back and forth for several seconds until the flames subside.

Pour the wine into the casserole. Add just enough stock to cover the chicken. Stir in the tomato paste, garlic, and herbs. Bring to the simmer. Cover and simmer slowly for 25 to 30 minutes, or until the chicken is tender and its juices run a clear yellow when the meat is pricked with a fork. Remove the chicken to a side dish.

While the chicken is cooking, prepare the onions and mushrooms.

Simmer the chicken cooking liquid in the casserole for a minute or two, skimming off fat. Then raise heat and boil rapidly, reducing the liquid to about 2 ¼ cups. Correct seasoning. Remove from heat, and discard bay leaf.

Blend the butter and flour together into a smooth paste (beurre manie). Beat the paste into the hot liquid with a wire whip. Bring to the simmer, stirring, and simmer for a minute or two. The sauce should be thick enough to coat a spoon lightly.

Arrange the chicken in the casserole, place the mushrooms and onions around it, and baste with the sauce. If the dish is not to be served immediately, film the top of the sauce with stock or dot with small pieces of butter. Set aside uncovered. It can wait indefinitely.

Shortly before serving, bring to the simmer, basting the chicken with the sauce. Cover and simmer slowly for 4 to 5 minutes, until the chicken is hot through.

Serve from the casserole, or arrange on a hot platter. Decorate with sprigs of parsley.

an era fades

Conde Nast announced it will end almost 70 years of food history. Gourmet magazine the oldest food publication in the U.S. has folded...and even in this era of fading print...I'm still stunned that we're losing such an institution.

how far we've come

Progress.

Here is a recipe from The United States of Arugula by David Kamp. I finally indulged in a paperback copy. And I love the cover.

I read the book a couple of years ago (I got it from the library) and since then I've remembered this salad recipe he quotes from the Chicago Tribune of 1937...I doubt you're ready for this...it's kind of like food trauma.

The Lacy Valentine Salad: "marshmallows, apricots, maraschino cherries, dates, celery and canned grapefruit suspended in gelatin and garnished with curly endive and mayonnaise piping..."

Progress...

sausage, the link to earth

I tripped over a thought last night while eating dinner - dinner that Steve cooked and I inhaled after a work week of billowing stress - I'm removed from the food.

What I mean is, I ate my bowl of chili, crunched my nacho chips, drank my drink, put it down and said thanks.

But I didn't make the dinner. I didn't put any of the tastes and textures together. I haven't made dinner all week. I felt no synergy - no connection to the meal that was greater than the sum of the ingredients. I just consumed. I was removed from the love of it.

And it was unsatisfying. Eating by rote. And it bothered me to my core.

I felt disconnected from the earth.

So I fixed it. I was dissecting the fridge of leftovers this evening and found some smoked Mennonite sausage that needed to be used up.

I was drawn back to Jamie Oliver's book Jamie at Home - who else would know how to gussy up a sausage?

On a cool September night, after a gorgeous, intensely sunny day at the Brick Works farmer's market, this hit the spot.

Adapted from "Sweet cherry tomato and sausage bake", Jamie at Home, I've cut the recipe to serve two

6 small red potatoes, quartered, Jamie doesn't use potatoes at all
1 lb cherry tomatoes, I used a slightly larger version
sprigs of rosemary, thyme and bay leaf, I also used fresh sage
1/2 tbsp dried oregano
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
2-4 sausages, the full portion of the recipe calls for 12
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Toss the potatoes in olive oil, and place on one side of a roasting pan. Put a sprig or two of the rosemary and thyme among the potatoes.
Toss the tomatoes in oil as well and place them on the other side of the roasting pan. Place the herbs, including the bay leaf, amongst them as well.
Sprinkle the garlic over all.
Place the sausages on top of the tomatoes. Drizzle everything with olive oil and balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper it all.
Bake in the oven for about 3o minutes. Turn the sausages to the other side and put back in oven for another 15-20 minutes. I made this with already cooked, leftover sausage and some caramelized onion which I threw in the pan as well for the last half hour. Check out how it's all doing and leave for another 10 minutes if you need to.

I plated the potatoes, topped it with a few of the roasted tomatoes, sliced up the sausage (which was leftover remember), and mixed in the caramelized onions. The sweetness of the roasted tomatoes is so beautiful, I almost teared up...and felt very much back on earth...

Now if you like, Jamie says you can take out the sausages once they're done (and the potatoes in this case) and put the roasting pan on top of the stove, cook down the tomato juices a little bit and thicken them. I didn't do that, but I'll bet it's fantastic.

the new portuguese table

Look what was waiting for me when I got home...Ola baby...Como esta...and all that. I'm digging into it now...it looks beautiful...as David wrote/commanded in the front cozinha bem!

Speaking of Ice Cream

Before summer runs away...

There is a creamery to the east of us called St. Clair Ice Cream – that sells the biggest, humungousest, gargantuan balls of ice cream. Steve remembers going there as a kid and getting a head-sized orb on a cone. A frozen planet. He said it was absolutely ridiculous. So we headed east. We lumbered back to the car under the weight of two "small" ice cream cones. We were gob smacked at the size, the weight, the mass, volume, density, gravitational pull these things had.
On the sidewalk were two young kids – about 8 and 10 – car door open, Mum in the driver’s seat, warning them away from the car, holding stacks of napkins. I could see why. The young boy was giggling uncontrollably looking at his arm, knowing he was fighting the good fight, but he had lost. He was solidly coated from the fingers up to the elbow in mint green. It looked like a glove that was dripping onto the sidewalk - which made him laugh all the more, which gave the ice cream time to melt more. His older sister saw us coming along with our ice creams and said, “Are they CRAZY?” bending under the weight of her cone. “We ordered a SMALL.”

Their universes collided – they got something they wanted and couldn’t handle it or make any sense of it. I don't remember the ice cream itself, but that was the most joyful ice cream moment I’ve ever had…

Summer and the Spit

Labour Day weekend is always tinged with sadness. When you’re saying goodbye to summer it takes some work not to feel a grief creeping toward you. The sun has swept southward in the sky and now comes fully in the window, bathing our sofa in rays during the morning – much to our old cat’s delight. Three trees in the Don Valley have decided to try on red. It’s still hot in the sun, but you need sleeves in the shade. We turn the lights on so much earlier.

Toronto got the Labour Day weekend of all Labour Day weekends weather wise. It was gorgeous. And we earned it.

We headed down to what’s called the Leslie St. spit this morning – as we’ve done many times over the summer. In its weekday life, dump trucks trundle down the paved road that heads off shore, to add to the re-bar and bricks and concrete and old granite that had a life and now are the foundation of new land.

Nature is working as partner in this. The trees have taken over, the marshes, the grasses all filling in what we don’t want to use anymore.

The spit, in its weekend and holiday life, becomes a park. Five kilometers from the entrance to the lighthouse at the end – five kilometers of growth…and cyclists and rollerbladers, runners and walkers.

The wind was coming off the lake today in powerful, cool gusts. The boats were conservative in their sails. The monarch butterflies hunkered down on all the purple flowers they could find, the thistles, the cornflowers. The golden rod was at its beautiful height and everywhere. The cormorants are so happy on the spit it’s one of the biggest nesting colonies in North America.

We’ve seen snakes and rodents and great blue herons hunting, and even a beaver in the inlet pond. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a beaver in the wild before…if he climbs out of his stick house and looks to the north he’d see the skyline of Canada’s largest city right there. But I don’t think he cares.

This year with the moderate temperatures and loads and loads of rain, everything looks lush and beautiful and at its prime of life. In a place that is a hopeful place.

And this weekend was definitely a summer looking for the weather Oscar.

It was a perfect end to summer - a 10-kilometre walk, on a perfect day, through a construction site that nature is cleaning up…So when it came to dinner I went up to the corner vegetable market to see what they had. I picked up local radishes, green beans, some lemons, some tomatoes, green onions and headed home. Oh, and salted cashews…to go with the bottle of wine I intended to open while preparing the summer daze dinner.

Steve marinated a piece of flank steak I had bought at Fresh from the Farm on Saturday. He consulted the Cook’s Illustrated marinating article, which had been marinating under the coffee table for a while. He poured molasses, soy sauce, garlic, water, olive oil, a dash of sesame oil and chives from the garden into a plastic bag, stabbed the meat liberally with a knife, then put the steak in the bag for a lovely bath. For an hour …90 mins max. Then he barbequed it on the grill.

Meanwhile, glass of wine in hand, and bowl of cashews on the table (I love cashews), I made a salad of the tomatoes. I chopped them into small chunks, added some chopped scallions, red pepper and lots of fresh basil from my pot outside – I doused it all in good olive oil (brought directly from Italy by my dear grace Naomi).

I roasted the red potatoes I had in fresh rosemary, crunchy salt, and black pepper. I sliced an onion and caramelized it in a skillet. Then I trimmed and steamed the green beans for only a minute or two and plunged them in ice water to hold their gorgeous green (and I stared into them - because the colour makes me think of what Ireland must look like). Once the potatoes were nicely roasted I pulled them out, threw them into the pan with the onions and added the beans, which I’d cut in half. Once it was all cooled down, I threw over a little balsamic vinegar and finished it off with a little more olive oil.

The radishes were large. And that has meant only one thing to me lately – crunch and no taste. No peppery shake of the head, no holding my forehead as the radish does its thing. Just crunch. So I decided to make a Vietnamese dressing for them. I sliced the radishes thinly, and poured over them a dressing I made with fish sauce, cider vinegar, lemon (should be lime, but the lemons were cheap), garlic, sugar, and shredded carrot. And I let them bathe together while everything else was cooking…They were fantastic.

It was our Summer Daze dinner. And while September moves us on toward autumn, and I love September more than any other month, this Labour Day weekend will be in the books as a great beauty, bringing summer to its full height. The summer of 09 went out leaving them wanting more…

*Pic is from here and here's more on the Leslie Street spit - if you need it!

Then there are those you never meet...

The linguine did it for me. Dripping with fresh tomatoes, basil and brie...then the fruit-stuffed loin of pork drizzled with a mixture of madeira and molasses...then the famous chicken marbella gussied up with olives and capers and garlic...and the stuffing for Thanksgiving.

Sheila Lukins has been in my kitchen in many times - channeled through The Silver Palate Cookbook. As I've noted before, the spine is now broken in a few places, it's stained on many pages, the signs of a classic...

Sheila's recipes have become part of my home, nestled in the kitchen, helping to feed my favourite people and make them happy...I think she'd be glad to know we ate well by her. I'm grateful.

Rest in peace.

Kindness

I remember reading in The Female Brain a few years ago about neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine's patient who had a small daughter. The mother had always, always, always fought the gender stereotypes. The little girl didn't get dolls, she got trucks. No fairies, no princesses, no cinderella...and one day her mother walked in her room to find her daughter holding her favourite fire truck. She had it wrapped in a blanket and was cradling it like a baby. And she was saying, "poor truckie." Truckie was sick.

Sometimes you can't beat your way past nature and the need to nurture.

I was reminded of that at work today when my friend Karen told me about her son's adventure a couple of years ago while walking along the street. They had stopped to watch a digger - there is a universal law that boys shall be mesmerized by anything that moves tons of earth: diggers, dump trucks, steam shovels...all power, all the time.

The little one was in his stroller and he caught the digger operator's eye. He called out to Karen to ask if her son loves diggers...and when she said oh yeah, big time, he pulled something out from beside him and threw it in the hole. Then he manoeuvered the big shovel, cradled the object in the shovel's bucket, and brought it up to the surface. He carefully placed it in front of Karen's boy. Then using the shovel's back side, nudged it toward him. To top it all off, an actual policeman came over to pick it up and give it to the little one. It was a boxed Bob the Builder digger- new, wrapped. As Karen said, 'that man has no idea what he did that day.' Her son was over the moon. He ate all his dinner with his Bob the Builder digger and slept that night with it on his chest.

One construction worker beating up nature with his own nurturing.

Go Michael Go...

routine - comfortable or boring?

Having a routine has such a smelly reputation. People who used to be attached to their routines were pegged as reliable, dependable, predictable and it was a good thing. People who follow their routines now get pegged as boring, unimaginative, and gasp, predictable. No, actually they go further than that, they get pegged as crazy, nuttier than a shithouse rat. Inevitably when the words will whisper out: OCD – obsessive/compulsive disorder…

I’ve noticed over the last few years we make things either catastrophic (I hate that soup, I could kill that guy, it’s a disaster) or pathological (he must have xxx syndrome, yyy disorder, zzz genetics). We have no in between and we’re thankful when our lives careen somewhere in the middle.

It kind of pisses me off frankly. Why can’t people have their routines? It brings comfort to some.
I have a friend or two who like their routines – or have their thing. And they have to be quiet about it. One eats the same salad everyday, from the same place. They recognize her voice on the phone now when she calls to pre-order it. Another crosses the street only at crosswalks – no jaywalking – now it seems quite sensible given that she was hit as a child running out into the street…but no matter how quiet the street, she’ll wander the extra way up the sidewalk to get to the other side. And me…I run home from work and I run home the same way every time. It may seem boring, routine, but I time it. And then I can see if I’m getting stronger and faster or older and slower. You may guess which way I’m starting to lean on that one…

My sudden defense of routine behaviour is also a sign of age - another step on the path to old fartedness, along with my sudden fascination with birdwatching and lack of interest in bars and nightclubs - and it's also just pure defensiveness. I noticed during my staycation this summer that I have my places, my things, my ways. I have two cups of tea with breakfast and it’s not over til I do. By 11am my brain and stomach are working in league to push me to the coffee maker. And it has to be the same kind (Kicking Horse coffee – the Kick Ass strong blend and no I don’t get paid anything to say that). Steve and I will wander on a hot afternoon (although this July we’ve been waiting for a hot afternoon) up to the Dairy Queen about 20 minutes up the road from our place (which is complete justification especially with the return trip) and we’ll sit and watch the world pass by on the sloping road down into the valley that overlooks the city. Not the best ice cream, but I’ve had worse. And the setting isn’t bad.

Twenty years ago my gang of friends went to a middle eastern restaurant in the middle east of Toronto (east, but not as far east as the city now wanders – a friend’s friend said that once) – we went there a lot. Okay we went there so much we’re fairly sure we paid for the family to move to the other end of the droopy strip mall and expand two store widths. We spent all our time there. We were university students and the coffee was good and the food was even better. And the family that owned the joint came to know us all by name.

The restaurant is still there – though the family has moved on (I believe they sold it to a couple of their cooks), and so has the old gang of friends. I don’t see them anymore. And I stopped going there until a few years ago. The family must have given the cooks all the recipes – the hummus, the baba ghanoush, the tabouleh, the labaneh, all from scratch, all still killer good.

My Mum, who can never remember the names of the dips always sits down, looks at me with excitement and says, “so, are we going to have all the bits in the middle?” And I don’t know why but we order all the bits in the middle (the dips), then we order chicken kabob sandwiches, or the lovely lamb kabob sandwich – even though their beef shawarma looks fantastic. And we don't stop eating until we're hurting...the tahini and onions and tomatoes and parsley all melding together with the meat…the pita soft, warm and fresh...all wrapped in a foil diaper. The diaper I learned very early in my middle eastern eating career, should never, ever be removed without putting one on the outside of your pants. Or you’ll be sorry. I’ve warned and wagged my finger at newbies and watched them get drenched in a combo of tahini, meat juice and tomatoes.

They even have mahalabia – which I don’t eat often, I just love saying it. Ma – ha – la – bia…

So that was our routine – Two three four times a week we’d all pull up in our assorted cars and chow down. So now you know why I have to run.

Now here’s the best part. We’d grab a table – we’d order our bits in the middle and the waitress would bring divine crunchiness on a plate: pickled turnips and hot peppers. We’d dive in and have to ask for more – in fact they just started bringing us two plates.

We went to the restaurant a few weeks ago – Mum, Steve and I – during a shopping day. And it had been so long that I actually forgot about the turnips. And when they showed up – I grinned and said…oh…yeah. And we chomped down. Crunchy, tart, beautiful. I had to figure out how these were made – so when we got home I dug online and into some books here (my cookbooks now have their own home on bookshelves in the bedroom – not my favourite place but better than on top of our cupboards where they got both greasy and threatened to collapse the hardwood cupboards) I morphed a few recipes into one. And it was very, very close...

It was easy and quick. And so was the eating a week later. Steve kept going to the fridge and forking a few down. They’re gone now. But I’m definitely going to make them again. And again. And again. Like a routine - comforting and rooting us to our joys...

Pickled Turnips – adapted from a few sources

2 lbs turnips
1 raw beet
½ lemon
1 ½ heaped tbsp salt
6 cups water

Wash the turnips and the beet. Don’t peel. Slice the turnips and the beetroot about ¼ “ thick. Sprinkle the beet slices with the juice from the lemon and then lay them in the bottom of a jar (I sterilized the jar). Put the turnip in on top of the beet and pack them in. Add the salt to the water and stir then fill the jar. Seal and keep cool for about four or five days.

The beets slowly colour the turnips a beautiful pink.
The recipes call for waiting a week – but we found them a little on the soggy side by waiting that long. And I put them in the fridge once we’d opened them.

What summer feels like in this house

I put the duvet away. We’ve turned the ceiling fan on in the bedroom. The bay windows in the kitchen stay open all the time to catch the breeze in the alley. The bay window overlooks a brick wall, but lets in light. The old doors all stick a little. Dampness rises from the old floor boards. There is thermal lag here – the bricks hold on to their winter cold for a long time and this year into July, but slowly it’s warming up in here. The house plants have escaped to the deck full time. The earth has tilted enough to take the sun’s rays out of our living room. They’ll fill the room come December when the earth tilts back. The basement bathroom is now earning its nickname: the swamp. I washed the tile floor about an hour ago, it might be dry by the end of the week. And I fight an ongoing battle with moldy grout.

Many years ago my friend’s little daughter was in the bathroom, on the toilet, deep in thought. This was her first visit to this house.

It was built in her great grandmother’s era, when flappers were the rage, when the world was living the heady champagne daze before economic collapse, actually in the same years my mother was born. It has triple brick walls, made in the valley just to the west of us. It has old casement windows that complain with the age of many winters, and old oak floors – narrow bands of wood so worn you can see the basement light in some sections. But it feels safe and solid and like home – even though we rent. We love this place.

As she did her business, Kayla considered everything around her. She made her pronouncement: “Mummy? I ike (no l’s yet) Auntie Nicky’s cottage.”

Kayla went outside to play. Her Mum told me what she’d said. A cottage? How cool is that? Little ones like that don’t lie (she soon told me my teeth were yellow). But while she was in my good books, I glowed, because this is like a cottage - it has the spirit of peace that a cottage has.

And in the cool, slow rise from spring, the poppies and peonies have exploded in their beauty and wildness, the roses quickly coming in to take their place, the astounding clematis has crawled up the deck again covering it in purple, and the marshmallows have flowered like a bright laugh. And when I hear the trees rustle with wind and I sit here sipping my morning coffee at the desk by the door looking out over the deck, and I see so many colours of green rising in their lushness, cushioning our presence in a big city, I feel pretty lucky. Grout be damned.

Peony picture from wikipedia.

Stunned

So you're standing at the stove. Cooking for your kids. Cleaning the house. Keeping the career going. Running them to t-ball. Writing quarterly reports. Helping with their homework. Loving them to bits...and feeling just a little off...like a dream that lost focus...like milk just on the date of expiry...and that question that you don't want to let in hovers there...how did I get here?

Here's a shout out for my friend Karen Bridson's new book - Stunned

toasted tweet

I jumped into the twitterenzy a couple of weeks ago and yesterday started following Ruth Reichl on twitter. This morning when I got to work she sent out a tweet to say she was in Toronto - she was in the car on her way in from the airport and she wrote it seemed like a good place to live and eat. Which is particularly generous given she was on the road from the airport, maybe she was looking down at her briefing notes.

Anyway, you can reply to these things you know. And when Ruth Reichl tweets in your town the day after you start following her, it feels personal.

So i hit reply.

140 characters of welcome and wit. I typed. I erased. I typed. I erased. I caved.

Some are masters at it. Sir Ken Robinson is a good follow on twitter. He wrote the other day, also while on his way from an airport, this one in Vancouver , "Driving to Whistler. Asked driver if he is collecting me tomorrow. He said it will be him or someone else. An exact summary of the options."

Clearly I have to sharpen the knife edge of my wit to plunge into this.

Later Ruth tweeted that her lunch was good. phew. Toronto has its talents and I think food is one of them.

I'm tweeted out...

yum?

Annie added to the natural partners, perfect pairings, fred and ginger list:

potatoes and vinegar

and another from a family friend: peanut butter and onion - red onion apparently...anyone? anyone?

And I thought of another two during my run home - no coincidence...pizza with pineapple, and french fries and mayo...

Perfect Partners

And another thing - that's Fred and Gingery:
Roast beef and horseradish

And another while we're on the roast thing:
Roasted potatoes with rosemary

And the poetry:
Strawberries with thick, whipped cream

fred and ginger

Today Toronto is soggy. Most rain in one day for the last 60 years. Which of course is the day I took off to burn some overtime. Which means the bathroom got cleaned, the laundry got done, the kitchen counters were finally cleared, and the cats got more attention...and snacks.

I had a quick lunch, pickies...a carrot or two, a boiled egg, some cheese, some little grape tomatoes, some spring onion...and as I munched I noticed just how good some things are together. Like some couples...not others...but some.

So I thought I'd think of some food pairings that are as natural as Fred and Ginger. Now my list is certainly geocentric, so I'd love you guys to add some too...especially some you'd never think of...

1) old cheddar cheese and spring onion
2) spring onion and hard boiled eggs
3) egg salad and dill pickles
4) dill pickles and smoked meat sandwiches
5) tomatoes and basil
6) fresh figs and blue cheese
7) cookies and cold, cold milk
8) fries and mayo
9) smoked salmon and creamed cheese
10) garlic and anything (that's for jo)


pics from
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain
*http://www.ovationtv.com/files/large_image_videos/0000/0110/fred_and_ginger_372x495.jpg

A start

I think this all started with cookbooks. I didn’t cook. Well, not much. And not much well. But I found myself wandering through the cookbook section of a local bookstore making new friends in print – and staying there - for about 15 years now.

Mollie Katzen was one of the first to come home with me. I was enchanted by her drawings and the printing and then the recipes in The Enchanted Broccoli Forest. I knew nothing of the Moosewood gang. I didn’t even notice the book didn’t have a single piece of flesh in it. It was filled with vegetarian dishes.

I made pesto for the first time because of her. Without a food processor. And for that matter without a mortar and pestle. I improvised with the bottom of a glass and a shallow bowl. And after that, I bought a food processor. And pesto took seconds, not hours...

(Which, come to think of it, I also lost in the “custody battle” to someone who doesn’t know a food processor from a wooden spoon – and who thought a kitchen was wherever the microwave was.)

But the sense of wonder in putting those ingredients together, like alchemy, was powerful. And the perfume of the basil…it was good.

It all came together in Lasagna al Pesto. I made it over and over. And then I moved on to try other things – a roast…then a turkey…was there no end to this magic called cooking? And the lasagna, like all new trends, faded from my consciousness.

Last fall we headed to Calypso again – a group of women who come together once a year at a friend’s cottage. Many of us only see each other that weekend. And apart from catching up with each other’s lives, and our host’s penchant for making us set goals, and uncorking many bottles, we eat.

Our friend Wendy was thinking of lasagna for the Friday night arrival dinner. And somewhere from the back of my addled mind came “The Enchanted Broccoli Forest”. So I shared it with her…and she shared the lasagna with us. And brought it back to life for me. It was a good weekend.

My self-assigned goal by the way, was to collect the recipes from our years of dinners at Calypso…this is my start.

Lasagna al Pesto – adapted from The Enchanted Broccoli Forest

1 lb. fresh spinach
1 cup minced onion
3 tbs. olive oil
salt and pepper
½ cup grated paremesan
1 cup of pesto
2 lbs (4 cups) ricotta cheese
¼ cup toasted sunflower seeds
20-24 green lasagna noodles (I have used plain and green, and mixed them too)
1 lb mozzarella cheese, in thin slices

Clean and stem the spinach. Chop it finely.
Saute the onions in 2 tbsp of the olive oil in a heavy skillet until they’re soft not brown. Add salt and pepper. Remove from heat.

Stir the spinach into the onions. Transfer to a large bowl.

Add half the grated parmesan, the pesto, the ricotta, and the sunflower seeds. Grind in some black pepper. Mix.

If you are using dried noodles, boil them about 2 minutes, then rinse them under cold water, and drizzle them with the remaining 1 tbsp olive oil.

Place a layer of noodles in the bottom of an oiled 9x13 inch pan. Spread 1/3 of the filling onto the noodles. Place 1/3 of the mozzarella over that. another layer of noodles, another 1/3 of filling, another 1/3 of the mozzarella, more noodles, the remaining filling, remaining mozzarella, and one final layer of noodles, the remaining parmesan. And then drizzle the top with olive oil.

Cover with foil and bake for 35-40 minutes.

Simple and Rich

The classic things are the most simple, right? Not simplistic, simple. Clean. Thought through. Simplicity arrived at through complexity, until it's clear. Concentrated, a reduction of ideas to their essence.

I've been watching the new TED talks at ted.com - including Elizabeth Gilbert's struggle with her craft. And the soaring optimism of Jose Abreu, and El Sistema which puts a musical instrument in the hands of every Venezuelan child over the last 25 years, and has created a whole nation of music. And then a friend loaned me her copy of David Sedaris' "When You are Engulfed in Flames", whom I love and mostly because he makes complex observations so simply. And through me runs this quote that I've quoted before and can't get away from..."Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things." Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor and a leader in modernist sculpture.

I have a theory. And I came to this theory wandering through the Tate Modern in London. My appreciation of art (and I am completely untrained in art), my opinion of it, is inversely proportional to the explanation next to it. In other words, the longer the text has to be to tell me what the artist "means" to "say", the longer my eye roll. I usually walk away completely irritated, whispering to the muse that helped that artist, "get over yourself." As Elizabeth Gilbert says in her TED talk, some people can have muses that are, frankly, lame.

Cooking can give you the same blast of poetry or frustration - and I most admire the food that delivers beautiful taste, balance with as little fuss as possible.

Last night, as the snow and the temperature fell again, and as we gathered round our table to pull together the warmth and humour and stories of our companions, I made something simple. Tomato sauce. It is so simple. So rich. And it doesn't take hours to simmer. Probably the best tomato sauce I have ever made...and I have made tomato sauce every week for the last number of years. I am sold on this one.

It comes from Cook's Illustrated - which I adore for their addiction to the how and why of cooking - oh, and their beautiful cover art. It comes from their 2006 issue, but I found it online when I watched them make it on their video series. I gave it a try and it was great. Then I made it again yesterday for our friends. I watched them get up from the table and get seconds, and the pot was empty when we started washing the dishes. So much for leftovers to get through this recession.

Marinara Sauce - adapted from Cook's Illustrated

2 - 28oz cans of whole tomatoes, with juice
2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped finely
2 medium garlic cloves, minced finely
1/2 tsp dried oregano (I used a tad more)
1/3 cup of dry red wine (I used a merlot we had kicking around)
3 tbsp fresh basil chopped
salt, pepper and sugar to taste (add this toward the end, once you've determined what the tomatoes need)

Pour the tomatoes into a strainer over a large bowl. Let drain for five minutes or so. Using your hands, pull out the stem and core of the tomatoes. Set aside 3/4 cup of the tomatoes. Also set aside 2 1/2 cups of the liquid.

Heat olive oil in a skillet until shimmering and cook the onion until brown on the edges - about 6-8 mins. Then add the garlic and oregano and cook for about 30 seconds - until the garlic is hitting your nose.

Add the strained tomatoes and cook over medium high until all the liquid has disappeared and the tomatoes are creating a fond, sticking to the bottom of the pan slightly. This is the core of the issue here...the concentration of these tomatoes is unbelievable. This takes about 10-12 mins. Keep an eye, and keep stirring every so often.

Add the wine and stir while it thickens for about a minute, scraping up the bits off the bottom. Then add the tomato juice you reserved earlier. Bring it to a simmer and let cook for about 8-10 minutes. I turned off the sauce at this point to wait for our friends to arrive.

The recipe calls for pulling out the food processor. But when I was getting ready to serve and had the pasta boiling away, I reheated the sauce, added the fresh tomatoes I had reserved from before and just mashed them in with my trusty manual potato masher. The fresh tomatoes add a lovely texture and lightness. Add the fresh basil (nice as a garnish on top as well).

This is the time to test for salt, pepper and sugar.

Serve over pasta - we grated a little fresh parmesan on top...and whammo...it all disappeared.

Bonbons Terre

Steve grilled the flank steak, roasted the vegetables and steamed the broccoli. I sipped a glass of wine and was noodling on a blog. As one does.

A news story caught my eye, then my ear. I thought it was a joke - but this was PBS. The correspondent was in Haiti - in Cite Soleil, one of the poorest cities in the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

The women there are making bonbons terre. The kids were gobbling them down. Special cookies - the batter is spooned out into patties to dry in the sun. Their ingredients: water, vegetable shortening, salt, and…dirt.…They’re dirt cookies. Seriously. It's got to be a joke.

One woman said she’s ashamed of making them and selling them but they’re hungry. “It makes us sick but not like anyone who’s not used to eating it.” Suppliers sell a bag of dirt to these women for $5 a sack. Many of them are convinced it’s full of minerals and vitamins. And some of the women will buy the dirt on credit if necessary. Kids were eating them at least while the camera was around. Check it out here.

The way to my heart

I think it was the shrimp. Or the homemade curry powder. Or maybe the champagne. Then again, it could have been the homemade naan. Well, maybe the champagne and the wine. Actually it was the whole nine yards (metres for my Canadians)…the whole effort. Steve got an A – and a wife out of that dinner. Food and wine and love…

It’s that time of year that imposes romance on us. But the only people I know who feel Valentine’s Day are those who are single – it’s like a fork in the eye – an entire industry that earns billions of dollars making a segment of our population feel excluded. I know that’s how I felt about it when I was single. I was indignant.

Now that I’m turning into an old married woman – deeply and lucky in love – I think of Valentine’s and it becomes about food. Food has been a serious part of this very serious relationship I’m in – which has me laughing everyday…sickening really.

Steve is an adventurous cook/experimenter. He has needed to try making many different things since we’ve been together – potato chips, various breads, baguettes and most infamously pretzels…and now that his intestines have revolted against wheat, he has mastered the art of the gluten-free chocolate chip cookie. There’s a bowl of them in the kitchen tempting me…

But I knew life had shifted – the ground had cracked open and I was on the other side of a new life – when Steve drove up on his BMW motorbike with dinner packed in the panniers on the back. It takes some thought to have a dinner that can be transported in briefcase-looking boxes.

We were friends. He was making me dinner for my birthday. It was simply two friends getting together on a Friday night after work. Oh, and we’d been flirting for the past couple of weeks on email. I’ve written about the lost email before.

I thought I’d share the recipes that were part of bringing us together…Steve made the dinner because I had travelled through India not long before. A couple of days later, we went over to his apartment. It looked like a flour bomb had been accidentally set off, not just in the kitchen but everywhere. And on the dining room table was a book called Complete Indian Cooking. He’d bought it to make my birthday dinner. And he didn’t and still doesn’t like Indian food (I’m sorry to say). But he did end up liking me pretty good - we were engaged five weeks later.

Talk about a way to a girl’s heart…it always comes down to bread.


Naan – recipes adapted from the utilitarian-ly named Complete Indian Cooking – and all this without a tandoor…




3 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 ½ tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
½ tsp baking soda
½ oz. fresh yeast
5/8 cup warm milk
5/8 cup plain yogurt
ghee or vegetable oil for greasing
½ cup butter
2 tbsp poppy seeds

Sift the flour into a large bowl and stir in the sugar, salt, and baking soda. Dissolve the yeast in the milk and stir in the yogurt. Mix thoroughly with the flour to form a dough.

Knead the dough until it is smooth, and then place in a bowl covered with a clean cloth and leave it to rise in a warm place for about four hours.

Divide the risen dough into 12 equal-sized portions and roll them into balls. On a lightly floured surface, flatten the balls into oblong shapes, using both hands and slapping the naan from one hand to the other. Now that sounds like fun.

Grease a griddle or heavy-bottom skillet lightly with ghee or vegetable oil and heat it until it is very hot. Cook the naan on one side only, a few at a time. Remove and spread the raw side with butter and poppy seeds. Cook under a preheated hot broiler until browned. Serve hot.


Shrimp and Spinach Rice

2 cups basmati rice
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp turmeric
4 tbsp butter
2 tbsp oil
2 onions sliced
3 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 tbsp grated fresh ginger
1-2 tsp chili powder
2 tsp ground coriander
2 lbs spinach, washed, trimmed, and chopped
1 lb cooked, peeled shrimp

Wash the basmati rice thoroughly. (I love washing rice - I run my fingers through it and around it while the water runs and it always feels like a quiet, important thing to do) Cook according to the directions. I usually put the rice in a pot, add water until it's about 1" above the rice and put it on to boil. Once boiling, I immediately turn the heat to low. Leave for 15 minutes. Turn off heat then without lifting lid and let sit on the stove for at least five minutes.

Stir in butter.

Heat the oil in a large saucepan and add the onions, garlic and ginger. Fry for five minutes until golden. Stir in the chili powder, coriander, and the remaining 1 tsp of salt, and fry for a few seconds.

Add the spinach and cook, stirring constantly, until softened. Stir in the shrimp and remove from heat.

Layer the spinach mixture with the buttered rice in an ovenproof casserole dish beginning and ending with the spinach. Cover tightly with a lid and then cook in a preheated oven at 350 degrees F (175 C) for 30 minutes. Serve immediately. Unless you're on a motorbike.

Now of course you need the Raita. I make this for all sorts of dishes - and eat the leftovers with a big spoon.

3 1/2 oz of thinly sliced cucumber
1/ 1/2 cups plain yogurt
6 green onions, thinly sliced
1 fresh green chili, seeded and finely chopped

Put the cucumber in a colander, sprinkle with salt and let it drain for 30 mins. Pat dry.

I know raita is traditionally pretty runny, but I prefer to thicken the yogurt first. It's simple (and if you're stuck without sour cream for something, this works in a pinch). Line a sieve or colander with cheesecloth. Use paper towel if you don't keep cheesecloth handy. Pour the yogurt into the sieve and allow to drain for a while. Pour away the liquid. And when you're happy with the thickness of the yogurt, pour it back into bowl and mix with the cucumber, green onions and chile (optional). Keep it in the fridge until you need it. You can vary what you put in it...I love it with finely chopped garlic...but the longer you let it sit, the more you'd better love garlic.

The picture of the tandoor oven and naan bread above comes from wikipedia

My cooking chops

I’m normal. Favourite word. Bar none. Ever.
Not normal as in boring, flat, suburban. I’m normal - In the medical sense. It's a good thing.

Hello again.

I feel kind of slow-roasted. That feeling where I've slowed down (some of that is mental), eased back, tenderized myself, allowed myself to caramelize and brought out the sweetness...slow roasted the best in myself.

I've got myself back. I've held it together and now look back at my adventure through chemo and radiation (which, I must admit, is not so much like being slow roasted, as it is like being zapped in a microwave)...and realize how shit scary it was.

So now when they check me out and get bored and start talking about the disaster to their stock portfolio, I grin and go along for the ride...I'm so boring, I'm normal! Best word in the English language.

So life reasserts itself. I work. I run again. I eat. And I talk about food a lot. Hence I run.
Unless the windchill is crushing us senseless. Winter is professional this year. Snow and bitter cold. Our mothers have both had to have professionals come and clear ice and snow from their rooftops. And Steve is intently figuring out how to spend the winters in a place where windchill is a problem only in the beer fridge.

I have been finding my cooking chops again.

At the back of the freezer the other day I excavated a lamb leg. It was clearly on the edge of extinction. And I thought about a recipe I saw Jamie Oliver do on "Jamie at Home" that cooked the lamb (it was a shoulder in that case) for four hours – and it looked so incredible when it came out, I needed a napkin.

Now in the case of the lamb leg in my freezer, it wasn’t destined to inspire poetry. It looked like something prehistoric found by archeologists in the Andes. I was dealing with a sorry looking piece of meat – what else could I do but cook the hell out of it? And then perhaps it too would regain a sense of normality or at least at the risk of inspiring poetry - fulfill its destiny.

I had to try and remember the recipe – because I just haven’t the guts to spend the 40 bucks on Jamie's book yet, but I will. What I did have was the four hours it takes to bake it in the oven…I thought.

That day Steve had kindly taken to cleaning our oven – which we consider our civic duty to our local fire department. The oven is small and our organic chickens we roast in there weekly are particularly adept at spitting all over it until there’s more smoke than air in the apartment. So, I came up with this recipe at 5pm and Steve stepped up his rinsing and wiping…which was at 5:30pm…We ate...late.

However, a couple of hours of bad Saturday night television later (and if you grew up in the 70s, the lamb would have been done in the middle of Love Boat and before Fantasy Island yuk) when it came out of the oven, it was everything I could do not to eat it with my hands right off the bone, probably like one of those prehistoric frozen beings found in the Andes…it was a glorious end for a piece of meat that was otherwise doomed to freezer burn.

So here goes a sort-of slow-roasted lamb rescue. Adapted from the James...

1 lamb leg or shoulder (mine was about 2lbs bone in)

1 bunch fresh rosemary

1 head of garlic

olive oil

crunchy salt

freshly-ground pepper

The key here is to get the oven as hot as you can to start. So, 500 degrees F.

While that’s heating up, score the fat on the roast into a diamond pattern (run your knife through diagonally in one direction and then turn it and run your knife in the opposite direction).

Pour some olive oil in the bottom of a roasting pan and then pile a layer of fresh rosemary– I used what I had on the counter that had been living its last glory days.

Throw half to ¾ of the garlic cloves unpeeled on the bottom of the pan.

Place the roast, fat side up, on the rosemary and garlic.

Pour olive oil on the roast and rub it into the crevices of the fat and meat.

Sprinkle the roast with the salt and pepper.

Top with the remaining rosemary and garlic bulbs.

Wrap the whole thing tightly in tin foil…I used a couple of layers to make sure it was sealed.

Place in the middle of the oven.

Turn the heat down to 325 degrees F.

Leave for four hours.

Now when it comes out you’ll be able to pull the meat off the bone with a fork. I’m not kidding. It’s just beautiful.

Pull the meat off and set aside on a platter that you can keep warm.

Remove the rosemary spears and discard. Take out the garlic and set aside.

Pour off the fat from the roasting pan, all but one tablespoon. Don’t lose any of the good brown bits that are chock full of flavour. Squeeze the garlic from the garlic bulbs and mash them into the pan.

Put the roasting pan on the stove, if you can, and add 1 tbsp of flour. Stir the flour and oil together to thicken – let cook a little to lose the flour flavour, then add 1 cup of chicken stock. Stir with a wooden spoon and let it boil for about five minutes or so. Add a bunch of fresh mint that you’ve finely chopped (leaves only) and about 2 tbsp of red wine vinegar. Bring back to a boil briefly.

When ready to serve you can pour it directly over your platter, or place in a warm jug and let people help themselves. Bringing lamb back from oblivion to its normal destiny...Good to be back...Enjoy.

Mad Max

We used to say you had to leave newspapers out for Max. Not to pee on. He needed to keep up on current events. He was that smart.

I remember walking him along with his less intellectual housemate, Jake, on a beach one morning. Jake lagged behind, his leash dragging in the sand while he snuffled around the corpse of a fish. Max, as usual, was ever alert...and he ran up to me to see how I was doing.

I asked him, "where's Jake? What's Jake doing? Go...go get Jake."

He took off, round the small cove, up to Jake, picked up his leash on his mouth and tugged. Jake started ambling along behind him.

My jaw dropped. That dog wasn't just smart, he spoke English.

Max wasn't mine. My friends let me look after him when they were away.

Max died this week. I know how much his humans loved him. And how much he loved them. I hope he knew how much he meant to me - the walks, the playing, the laughing, the running in the morning...thanks Max...rest...just rest.

bubble wrap

If you're waiting for a pot to boil...freaked out by your souffle in the oven...can't think of what to feed the boss for dinner...try this...

simply simple

I feel I’ve entered my indulgence era. So I indulge. In the last few weeks I’ve succumbed to whims I’ve never had before – my eyebrows have been waxed…I bought new makeup…and last week I skipped out of work during lunch for a quick mani/pedi…this just isn’t me, or wasn’t. And I enjoyed every indulgent second as others worked on me like a beautification project – cleaning up the ragged edges that winter and disease had done to me. And like spring rain and its partner warm sunshine, I was cleaned from the inside out.

On a beautiful, soft night we had dear friends over, who were happy to be fed. And I set myself the challenge for how simply I could feed them and yet still feel the full force of full flavour.

I came up with burgers and 3 salads. Okay not so simple in the aggregate, but as individuals? Stellar examples of their kind. The classic: Potato Salad, the comfort: Roasted Beet Salad, the tart: Arugula and Baby Spinach with lemon dressing

Steve picked up grass-fed ground beef from our favourite food store that supports the Mennonite and Amish farmers to the southwest of us. We say, “thank you cow” after the first bite, because it is not your basic ground meat. It has turned me back into a burger biter after many years of hiatus.

So how to complement that?

Bbq’d burgers need, demand, lust for, partnership with potato salad.

And having scoured my books, I suddenly remembered that Cook’s Illustrated had an article on the perfect potato salad. The All-American Potato Salad is part of their Summer Grilling & Entertaining special edition – but also from their 2004 collection. Rebecca Hays performed a heroic duty and dug through all the ugly versions of potato salad.

And there I was last week, on the subway, riveted by her inner musings and debates: russet versus Yukon gold, including garlic or not, pickles, dry mustard or prepared - now if science had been about potato salad in high school, I might have taken a different path…and I realized I’m a food geek. Almost missed my stop because someone in a test kitchen somewhere was writing about one of my favourite foods and dissecting and rebuilding it into a classic – yeah…food geek.

So I used her journey as my guide. This served four and we have leftovers for dinner tonight.

Cross Border Classic Potato Salad
3 russet potatoes, peeled and cubed
2 tbsp white vinegar
½ cup celery, finely chopped
2 tbsp red onion, finely chopped
2 tbsp sweet pickle relish (this is a new one on me…the recipe calls for 3 tbsp, but I found it too much - I would normally use dill pickles and a little pickle juice)
½ cup mayonnaise (use the real thing, not salad dressing)
¾ tsp dry mustard
¾ tsp celery seed (she swears this makes all the difference, but I couldn’t find any in three stores…and I thought Toronto was cosmopolitan even in its approach to suburban fare like potato salad!)
2 tbsp minced parsley
¼ tsp black pepper
(I didn’t go for the optional two hard-boiled eggs)
2 tbsp chopped fresh dill (not part of the recipe, but I had it on the counter)

Put the potatoes in a saucepan and cover with cold water by an inch (2cm). Bring them to a gentle boil and then simmer until tender. Strain them, carefully put them in a bowl, and drizzle the vinegar over them. Let them cool.

Meanwhile, combine the other ingredients for the dressing.

Once the potatoes are cool, spoon the dressing onto the potatoes and carefully mix together (don’t be rough, the potatoes might not like it). Spoon it one at a time until you’ve reached the right balance of dressing to potato for you. I didn’t use all the dressing I made.

Roasted beet and mint salad

3-4 beets
2 tbsp fresh mint, finely chopped
1 tbsp fresh parsley, finely chopped
½ red onion, diced
dressing, recipe to follow

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Scrub the beets clean.

Cut off the greens from the beets – leaving about 1 inch (2cm) of stems off the top. If you have the leaves, you can cook them in the same way you would use swiss chard, if you don't leave them on the counter for a week, like I did.

Wrap each beet in foil. Place on a cookie sheet and roast in the oven for one hour.

Pull them out (if you’re not sure if they’re done, stick a sharp knife into one to see if it’s tender.)

Once cool, peel them and cut them into whatever size, shape you’d like.

Toss with the mint, parsley and onion.

We debated what kind of dressing to put on this…and I wanted the taste to be simple. So I mixed some apple cider vinegar, a little dry mustard, and whisked in some olive oil. Dip a piece of beet into the dressing to see if you like the combo. Pour over the salad and allow to sit for a while.

Arugula and Baby Spinach

Carefully clean the arugula and spinach leaves.
Combine with spring onion, small tomatoes (like Campari), red pepper, and cucumber.
Dressing – Juice two lemons into a bowl, watch for seeds. Zest a little of the lemon into the bowl. Add about ½ tsp of sugar. Stir to combine. Slowly drizzle in olive oil as you whisk with the other hand. Grab a piece of arugula and dip it in the dressing – it should bite a bit but feel very fresh, without being too tart.

And how did we close the circle? End the feast? The first of the local strawberry harvest are hitting our markets now…so I washed the strawberries, put them in one bowl. Then I whipped some cream, and put that in a matching bowl. Take your fingers, grad a berry, dip…Simple.

a privileged voice

The fear of failure and a lack of imagination - especially in cooking, is all it takes to burn a meal. Cooking and nourishing is the engine of life. And like everything there is wisdom in the charred bits of life. The benefits of failure and an imagination wide enough to be open to others' suffering - these are powerful forces. Although I don't think JK Rowling had cooking in mind during her commencement address to the graduates of Harvard University.

Enjoy.

peaks at the past

I bought mascara the other day. It was a peak experience.
My eyes, the brow above, and the billiard ball above that, have been hair challenged - and have won the fight. My head is now filled with a new kind of hair - soft and fine like a newborn's.
And so I am, in a way.

Sometimes life shows you what's what.

In a moment of doubt, in a moment when life shakes off your yellowing veneer, you look back on the path you've been on and see it more clearly than you thought possible.

The stuff you'd rather not remember, the parts of you you're not so crazy about, the parts that warm you through with light and love too - no one's immune from that spectrum - it's in all of us.

When your face is held to the prism of your life you really do hope for the best don't you? You don't want to say the line Shirley Valentine gulped out to the camera, "I've led such a little life." - I saw that movie just when I should - as I entered adulthood - and it scared the shit out of me. I remember turning thirty and clinking glasses with a friend daring each other to make it the best decade of our lives so far...

and it was...

and I plan to beat it.

I traveled. And traveled.

I stood on mountains, and under oceans, in jungles and in deserts.

I gave in to my need to write and fell in love with the writer.

I forgave myself my faults – and continue to everyday.

I fell in love. And listened to my instinct, my rock, when it said firmly and quietly, “Yes.”

Which means I married him.

And I’m now in the legion of people who have survived cancer. So far.

Talk about your peak experiences.

In my moments of doubt, when the concept of cancer being in my body at the age of 44 scares me blind, I look back at what I’ve done. And I smile with relief. It’s been hard and amazing and I’m not done yet. I’d be so depressed if what I looked back on was so little…although maybe it would kick me right in the ambition.

I’m more sensitive to beauty, peace, and wanting to do what I want to do. My ambitions have changed. I’m not going to climb Everest – but I’m going to try and convince Steve we have to stand at Everest base camp. I’ve been to Annapurna’s base camp – and it was a peak experience. And so…I’m not done yet.

That said, my perceptions are alive to now. I couldn’t be happier than to be through this valley as spring gushes up around us. And this week we had local asparagus. Life is sweet.

a leap to march

If you've ever been tempted to celebrate leap year - and given the weather here right now, this is a long, long February to celebrate the end of - I wish you even half the energy and creativity of one of my new friends. She sent me this last week. I loved it and wanted to share it with you...it starts with food...Happy Leap Day - off toward March and spring...

If you are feeling social Friday Night – the 29th of February – Leap Year, come party with us.
Leap year comes only once every four years – let’s leap, jump and jive.

As usual there is a suggested schedule of events starting with the traditional cutting of the cucumber sandwich ritual at 8pm sharp.

Schedule:

8.00 Cutting of the Cucumber Sandwich Ritual
8.15 Short performance by host on piano
8.30 Question Period - guest volunteers to be questioned by those present, topics include but not limited to: Allergies, hobbies, travel, phobias, religious views
8.45 Board games and card games begin under the loft
9.00 Newest 45 records donated by Nick spun on turntable
9.30 First rotation of the disco ball
10.00 Mystery guest arrives, whispers in ear, leaves
10.15 Mayhem, absolute mayhem.
10.20 Leap! Leap!
10.30 Piano playing for 15 minutes only, no flugelhorns, bongos or bagpipes please. Singers sing, players play.
10.45 Connie Frances Twist Album
11.00 OK, bagpipes
11.00 Parade of the wind up toys (Unfinished business from last party when host couldn’t find them)
Exchange of business cards near battery operated yapping little white dog
11.30 dancing
12.00 spiders discussed
12.30 dancing
1.00 ghost stories
1.30 bed time stories, flannel
2.00 host crashes (sings in synagogue next morning at 8.30 am)

RSVP If you are coming, feel free to bring a friend especially if they are of fine character.
BYOB or whatever, there’ll certainly be some wine if you are just passing through so no need to fret. Oh, fret. I forgot to put that in the schedule.

Culin-oscar-py's 2008

Ladies and Gentlemen.

Welcome to this year's red carpet. Yeah baby, it's shag.

Time to showcase the foods that deserve recognition, endorsements and Winston's gems.

Last year I asked for the all time greatest acceptance speeches for the food you're most grateful for.

This year...Imagine - which star, alive or dead, is sitting at your dining room table - sipping champagne - come on, I said imagine...who would it be? And what would you be making them for dinner?

A pulled pork sandwich for...?
A fruitcake for....?
A bottle of water and lettuce for...?

I dare ya...and keep it clean babes.

off the mark

I tripped on a show about interior design today.

The host was exploring minimalism.

In the next segment I saw a rotating shot of a statue of Buddha. Sitting. Cross legged. In meditation.

She said Buddha is a symbol of enlightenment. It is a symbol of zen.

And as a result it was a feature of today's segment: Gotta Have It.

I changed the channel.

a little giverny

Playing in Claude Monet's garden at Giverny outside Paris - is being in a painting - the lily ponds, the arched bridges, the willow trees are famous - and the controlled gardens outside the house itself are beautiful, even in the rain.

We were there last July, a quick visit, a beautiful diversion, before my journey to the riverbank.



We fled into the house itself to escape the rain - and I found myself in a kitchen and dining room that are, well, quite something.



I had no idea that Monet was such a food freak.






When I got home our landlady lent me a book called Monet's Table - The Cooking Journals of Claude Monet by Claire Joyes.


She wrote, "It was only at Giverny, which he discovered in 1883, that Monet was able to establish the lifestyle that really suited him..."

Monet had shared another house with a couple who had once been his patrons but who had lost all their money. Monet's first wife, Camille was dying. The other couple had separated and Alice Hoschede and her six children moved in with the Monet's, "living as one" once Camille had died in 1879...by 1892 when Alice's estranged husband had died, she and Monet married.

"Their sole culinary ambition," Joyes wrote, "was to serve beautifully prepared dishes using whatever the kitchen-garden or the farmyard could supply. This was their food, homemade but often making use of recipes invented by the great restaurants they patronized, or even dishes created by their friends, who included writers, art collectors, painters and actors."

And I'm sure they knew a few of those.

At the back is a raft of recipes, including the salt cod bouillabaisse, which comes from Paul Cezanne. And Tarte Tatin, which they managed to convince the actual Tatin sisters to give to them.

Here is the salt cod soup, in the interest of interesting history:

1lb large piece of salt cod
2 cups olive oil
1/2 cup flour
6 potatoes, sliced
4 leeks, white parts only, sliced crosswise
1/2 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp ground cloves
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 tbsp chopped parsley
1/8 tsp saffron
1 bayleaf

Soak the salt cod for 24 hours. Use a colander, put the fish skin side up and change the water occasionally. (This part takes me back to Portugal and Portuguese Christmas)...Drain well and pat dry. Heat the olive oil in a skillet. When it's smoking, dust the salt cod with some of the flour and fry it until it's cooked through, but not brown. Remove, drain and put it aside. Use the same skillet to saute the potatoes for about 10 minutes, until almost cooked through.

Pour a little of the frying old into a deep cast-iron pot. Add the leeks and saute tem on low heat. Slowly add the pepper, cloves, garlic, parsley, saffron, bayleaf, and the rest of the flour, which will brown in the oil. Add 6 cups hot water, and boil, covered, over high heat for 10-15 minutes. Slide the cod and potatoes into the pot.

Serves 6.

a+b=boybandsong

Okay. Enjoy...a post-valentine antidote.

The Title of the Song...

from me to you...happy February 15th.

tasha

Tasha died tonight.
She is one of the animals I have been lucky to love in my life.
She owned two of my dearest friends, and she spent her whole life smiling, wagging, sniffing, living and, I swear, laughing with them.
She was a reflection of their hearts.
They loved her well, so she lived well.
I will miss her.

on the moon in winter

My body is one treatment away from the end of chemo. This weekend marks the precarious bridge between the treatment a week ago and the final one on Valentines Day. This weekend my immune system will be at its ebb – the neutrophils fighting to come back, any germs that harbour in me, fighting to take possession of their host, me.

It’s my reality - a surreal balancing act.

I can’t feel it – I just know it’s happening. I’ve lived in a bubble since the last treatment, staying far from humans and our parasites and germs which hitch rides on us all. That too is surreal – staying in contact through the web – feeling like I’m on the moon.

The race between my plummeting white blood cells and the germs has shown itself a little. I have thrush for example. It’s a yeast infection of the tongue – how delightful. It is also ironic. The fungus coats your tongue in a blanket – putting an insulation layer between you and food. Between you and flavour. That’s not just ironic. That’s just cruel.

Living without flavour is something I would hate. Now that I’m doing it and know it’s temporary – it’s a little bit bearable.

But something’s happened. I find myself more aware of taste – hunting carefully for it with every bite. Attuning my senses as I can.

Just last week I saw a science program about taste – and they told the story of a wine taster here in Canada who fell, bumped her noggin while curling, went to a wine tasting two days later only to discover after the first swig that there was nothing there. She couldn’t taste it. With rising panic she tasted a second red. Nothing. That was 7 years ago or so…She never got it back. She was lost.

I feel myself hitting back. In defiance I reach out for the strongest tastes I can muster. At a restaurant two weeks ago I pulled back the waiter as he was leaving with our order to add anchovies to my Caesar salad. Anchovies! Anchovies? Me? Me, who would walk around the block as a kid to avoid the smell of a fishmonger’s? And I could taste them. I may never do it again, but they kicked ass.

I made one of our favourite side dishes last week – basmati rice with caramelized onions and greens folded in, fresh ginger and garlic, red pepper, a little shaved carrot - I salted it. Then I salted it. By the time we forked it in our mouths, our kidneys were begging for relief and a bucket of water.

But I could taste it. Even I could tell I’d used a backhoe’s worth of salt. It kicked ass - and not in a good way.

And what’s saving my soul right now? My precious nose – while my tongue is subjugated to the tyranny of this white, furry blanket – my nose is in hyperdrive. Ever on the hunt for the most expressive smell it can find that’s beautiful.

It dives for every pot – we made stock on the weekend – I spray myself liberally with my perfume and drink in the smell like I’m dehydrated sensually – I absent-mindedly bought a bar of soap near the cash at the drug store the other night, olive oil soap with lavender…the smell of lavender…while at other times reminds me of lace and grandma’s, has come to smell of beauty and the earth, and sweetness mixed with spice – I found myself in the bathroom yesterday, grabbing at the pretty block of plain brown paper and just inhaling the essence of wild fields and sun and warmth.

Just standing in my bathroom, in the basement of this old house, at the end of Canadian January, transported sensually to France. To windblown fields, where lavender grows defiantly where it likes, where my hand tugs gently up the stem as I walk along in the sun, and flies to my nose to gulp down the essence quickly before it evaporates.

Existentialism in the bathroom. I think that's where most people find it, isn't it?

And in the kitchen.

My eyes are part of the conspiracy – I ache for beauty – at a time when my own feels so buried, a field of fuzz on my head, not enough eyelash to hit with a mascara wand, eyebrows once so defiantly bold that now look like a smudge – at a time of year when tree limbs are asleep and unconscious of the wind and the windchill, when the soil is rocked solid by ice, where the beautiful grays and browns and purples are the sum of the spectrum – the time of year when I start dreaming of magnolia and daffodils, crocuses and those first winter snowdrops that will poke above the soil not long from now – I look for beauty in people’s eyes and smiles, in red sofas, in fur hats, in dappled sunlight, in caramelized onions.

And I stare.

My meals need colour…this isn’t an appetite issue (I’ve gained five kilos and am over-sufficiently spongy). This is my sensual appetite struggling through this winter to supersede biology.

It’s a gift. Seeing, tasting and smelling like I’m parched. It’s a gift.

another graceful offering

As Karen is to being alive, Carol is our spiritual hunter - ever in search of peace of mind. She's methodical, organized (actually most of the graces in my life are highly organized, I've learned lots from them), fiercely loyal, caring and huggy.

She organized the cooking night that pulled together five women who would put oodles of food in my freezer.

She not only invited the graces to bring recipes, but she made one of her own and served us dinner, all on a Tuesday night.

My job was to sit in a chair, scoff appetizers, throw wine down my gullet and offer pithy critiques of the whole jumbled process. They said that's what I do best....hmmm.

Carol's dinner choice was interesting. It was Chicken Sausage with White Beans and Rosemary, from a book called On Rice by Rick Rodgers (wasn't he a country singer? he shoulda been...maybe that's where the bean recipe comes from, home on the range).

Rodgers writes in his book that this is a Tuscan version of the worldwide pairing of beans and rice - I have a limit to my beans and rice intake, since my various trips to Central and South America. I have done my fair share...

This recipe sounded pretty white - and pretty bland. But it was incredibly comforting. So I share it here - although I might raise the octane on some of the flavourings at will - and don't skimp on the salt. Taste carefully at the end.

Chicken Sausage with White Beans and Rosemary, from On Rice

1 lb hot or sweet chicken sausage or turkey Italian sausage
1 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 medium red pepper, seeded and chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 cup chicken broth
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary or 1-1/2 tsp dried rosemary
2 cans (15 ounces each) white kidney beans
1/4 tsp of salt (I'd add and taste...because I suspect this might be low for some people)
1/4 tsp of freshly ground black pepper

Pierce the sausage with a fork. Place in a medium saucepan and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil then reduce to a simmer. Simmer uncovered, until the sausage is firm, about 8 minutes. Transfer to a plate to cool. Slice the sausage into 1/2" rounds and set aside. (I might grill these next time, to see if that offers a different hit of flavour.)

In a flame proof casserole or Dutch oven heat the oil. Add the onion, garlic and red pepper. Cook for about 4 minutes, stirring often.

Stir in the broth, wine and rosemary. Bring to a simmer for five minutes, uncovered. Add beans and sausage rounds, simmer for 10 minutes until beans are hot. Add salt and pepper.

Serve with rice. Place rice in bottom of bowl and spoon meat and beans over top, and serve.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

insulation essentials

Karen finds grace everywhere. Of all the graces in my life, Karen lives by the ethos of experience - try it, push it, live it. She wants to travel everywhere - she wants to try every food - she wants to live every experience she can. She is the most alive of us.

Even her hair is long and wild and crazy. We traveled briefly together in Nepal and the Nepalese loved to touch her hair. They called it happy hair - and that happiness permeates her.

And she finds grace in kitsch - before she went through her paring down phase, she had the coolest collection of snowglobes. She now lives out of town unfortunately - she teaches some unwittingly lucky students at a college up north.

She's donated recipes before to foodnut - her stellar magic nuts which are now a classic in my kitchen - and her less than helpful recipe for homemade cheez whiz that was meant for her recipe cheesy broccoli casserole meant to be eaten with tongue firmly in cheek.

She came into town to help in the cooking marathon to feed my freezer. Here is what she donated to the cause:

"This Mac & Cheese recipe comes from the Best of Bridge books, both "Grand Slam" and "The Best of the Best". Voila...Karenxo"

Gourmet Macaroni & Cheese

2 1/2 cups macaroni (625 ml)
1/4 cup butter (60 ml)
1/4 cup flour (60 ml)
2 cups milk (500 ml)
1 tsp. salt (5 ml)
1 tsp. sugar (5 ml)
1/2 lb. processed cheese, cubed (250 g)
(Velveeta works... yes Nicky there is processed cheese in it... it's good though right?)
2/3 cup sour cream (150 ml)(fat free
is fine)
1 1/3 cups cottage cheese (325 ml)
2 cups grated old cheddar cheese (500 ml)
1 1/2 cups soft breadcrumbs (375 ml)
2 Tbsp. butter (30 ml)
paprika

Instructions:
Cook and drain macaroni and place in a 2 1/2 quart (2.5 L) greased casserole. Melt butter over medium heat; stir in flour; mix well. Add milk and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until sauce thickens. Add salt, sugar and cheese. Mix well. Mix sour cream and cottage cheese into sauce. Pour over macaroni. Mix well. Sprinkle cheddar cheese and crumbs over top. Dot with butter and sprinkle with paprika. May be frozen at this point. Bake at 350F (180C) for 45-50 minutes. Serves 6.

spanish chicken in my kitchen

There are moments in life that stop you cold - not including January in Canada.
Moments when grace fills your life, and if you're lucky you can feel it.
I'm surrounded by grace - women and men whose spirits anchor me in place - whose support cradles me - whose generosity inspires me.

When Charlie Rose asked Ruth Reichl what elevates a good cook into a great cook - you could sense he was looking for an answer like technique, experience, the love of risk. She said generosity.

And I was thrilled - because that is what cooking is to me - a place to let my heart out and let it nourish others. I felt if we ever met, I'd be understood.

The graces in my life got together and cooked for me a while ago. Five women, one kitchen, five recipes, one freezer.

Nic worked on one counter making her famous mushroom soup. Jain slaved at the stove over shepherd's pie. Karen got to the oven early to bake macaroni and cheese. Carol, being the host, had already made vegetarian chili. And the recipe I'll share today came with Naomi - who has made chicken marbella many times - and a few times for Steve and I.

It is a classic that comes from, once again, the Silver Palate Cookbook - it was in fact the first entree they offered their customers.

When Naomi wrote me the recipe she added, "I just wing-ed it (as it were) because instead of 4 chickens, I used 6 legs-plus-thighs.. Also, I deleted the olives (for the sake of Sir Steve)... And I didn’t puree the garlic, I used one of those hardware-grater thingees..."

It seems a versatile dish - with sweetness and saltiness in balance. It can be an appetizer or main - and while they recommend you serve it at room temperature, there are some climates and times when hot is where it's at. And having just put the plastic over the bedroom window to cut the draft - I know it's January again. We froze the chicken in individual portions (in the freezer, not on the window sill, if you're wondering), thawed it carefully and warmed it in the oven.

For you, with grace - Chicken Marbella, adapted from The Silver Palate Cookbook.

1⁄2 cup olive oil
1⁄2 cup red wine vinegar
1 cup pitted prunes
1⁄2 cup pitted Spanish green olives
1⁄2 cup capers with a bit of juice
6 bay leaves
1 head of garlic, peeled and finely puréed
1⁄4 cup dried oregano
Coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
4 chickens (2 1⁄2 pounds each), quartered
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup dry white wine
1⁄4 cup fresh Italian (flat-leaf) parsley or fresh cilantro, finely chopped

1. Combine the olive oil, vinegar, prunes, olives, capers and juice, bay leaves, garlic, oregano, and salt and pepper in a large bowl. Add the chicken and stir to coat. Cover the bowl and refrigerate overnight. (The marinating is essential, don't skimp on the time.)

2. Preheat the oven to 350°F.

3. Arrange the chicken in a single layer in one or two large, shallow baking pans and spoon the marinade over it evenly. Sprinkle the chicken pieces with the brown sugar and pour the white wine around them.

4. Bake, basting frequently with the pan juices, until the thigh pieces yield clear yellow (rather than pink) juice when pricked with a fork, 50 minutes to 1 hour.

5. With a slotted spoon, transfer the chicken, prunes, olives, and capers to a serving platter. Moisten with a few spoonfuls of the pan juices and sprinkle generously with the parsley or cilantro. Pass the remaining pan juices in a sauceboat.

16 pieces, 10 or more portions

Note from Silver Palate: "To serve Chicken Marbella cold, cool to room temperature in the cooking juices before transferring the pieces to a serving platter. If the chicken has been covered and refrigerated, reheat it in the juices, then allow it to come to room temperature before serving. Spoon some of the reserved juice over the chicken."

umm, not so much

In this month's Saveur there is a very cool article by Laura Shapiro called "Taste of the Nation" about a fascinating project from the 30s to collect together a massive book of recipes that they wanted to call "America Eats".

It was part of Roosevelt's New Deal program to put writers to work. Unfortunately it was never finished - although some people are working on projects to get it out of the archive dungeon and into the light of day. It sounds amazing and I hope we see more of it.

The disturbing part is that apparently the Roosevelt White House used to hold their dinners and "sometimes sat down to a salad of pineapple 'sticks' rolled in crushed peppermints."

oh...my...

Now the most disturbing word in that sentence?

"Sometimes..."

…Does Ms. Shapiro mean to say they served this more than once? Was it to Stalin? Because peppermint rolled pineapple sticks is for evil doers.

techie tea

So I was reading Kate's blog on tea at Accidental Hedonist as I'm wont to do. And one of the comments included this website for Macheads, your very own desktop Tea Timer

And given my ritualistic zen thing about tea - which some might call just tight-assed - when I saw the tea timer download...I just HAD to share...

Go in peace...And put the kettle on.

Code Red - food emergency

When the cover came off the plate, I realized it wasn’t there to enhance anticipation. It was to prevent retching.

It’s been a long time since I was forced to eat institutionalized food – so these words came out before I’d picked up my knife and fork:

It’s a slice of Alpo. Warmed up.

Waxed in gravy that had separated in brown globs inside diluted, gelatinous corn starch.

A blob of fake mashed potato.

And four spears of broccoli that seemed offended.

They called it meatloaf.

And I ate it….

Life gets smaller when you’re sick.

Have you noticed that? If you have the flu and you’re curled up in bed in a fetal position, your life shrink wraps around you. The farther away the news, the people, events, the less important. Your obsessions change from say, the currency market in Hong Kong, or women’s rights in Afghanistan, to orange juice.

Not from concentrate.

I noticed that on Saturday. For the second time in my life I had to go to emergency…the first time I was four, enjoying my favourite post-grocery shopping treat of the week: french fries and Coke with my bof. (Okay we didn’t shop for food as much as spin ourselves sick on the railings of the grocery cart corral.) She and I started wrassling and I twisted my arm in the back of the chair, screamed, then whimpered heroically all the way to the hospital – where they made us wait so long, I was fine by the time they x-rayed it. I remember coming home bummed because I was castless. Casts on the arm were cool…they indicated adventure. To a four year old.

This time the emergency room and I got intimate because I developed a fever – and on chemo (I’m 2/3 of the way through) – that’s a no-no. I didn’t want to be a patient. I’ll tolerate outpatient. Not patient. I think it makes me feel too vulnerable. I hate feeling vulnerable. No wait. I hate being out of control – think of the back of the gown alone – it just screams: here is a specimen.

So, chemo attacks any rapidly-dividing cells – unfortunately including my white blood cells which fight infection. They become what Rumsfeld or Cheney would call medical collateral damage. Doing harm to do good.

They had pounded into me that if my temperature hit 38 degrees Celsius (100 F) I wasn’t to call or wait or anything. Just get to ER. So we did. And there I stayed – four days until my immune system showed it could behave itself.

I may have dreaded the idea, but I was grateful to be there.

But what gives hospitals the right to twist that gratitude by admitting you and then serving you Alpo and calling it meatloaf?

Or chicken noodle casserole? Sunday night.

Or pork goulash? Monday night (I ordered the vegetables alone).

All meals whose ingredients have more in common with a lab than the soil.

Food that's beyond life support. That gave up trying. That never had a chance.

We joked about it in our room. There were three of us.

While I was there one of my penmates heard that she had won a bed at the particular palliative care centre she wanted to die in. She almost cried with joy. Life had shrink-wrapped around her tight.

She looked a little older than I. Not much. After two rounds of chemo, she told them to stop. Her skin was just starting to tinge yellow – that stealthy, creeping sign.

She obsessed about the tiniest, molecular-sized things. Her clock was angled incorrectly. She stopped a nurse to have him turn the waste basket the other way. Her bed pads were wrong. The curtain was too far along. Her light had to be on. She didn't read. She didn't have a tv. And she stayed awake all night, like an owl. Waiting.

She had been there since before fall had turned to winter.

Her friends and family visited every day, bringing her what she wanted – a submarine sandwich one night (the night I had the Alpo, which was just unfair) – a cheeseburger and onion rings from their teenaged hangout joint the next night.

I laid there listening from behind the curtain that I shrouded around myself trying not to let in what this third-floor ward meant. Steve and I walked around one morning only to come across a priest, holding his book in front, leaning on the wall, looking at the floor, his sacrament collar dangling, as he waited to deliver last rites. And even over the incredible din of the overwhelmed nurses' station, you could hear the weeping from somewhere. We turned back. Down another hall, another family with young kids gathered around another bed, the husband saying it was going from hour to hour. His wife is, if she still is, 43.

That, my dears, is too close. I like the world of denial much better. We walked over to the cardiology floor…

So, knowing I was escaping to come home, knowing I’d be able to sink and drown the smell of the hospital in a perfumed bath, knowing that I’d feel the weight and security of my down duvet, and knowing that I could make my own dinner with ingredients that were loved and respected, not institutionalized/brutalized and processed into the “shape” of short back ribs, no bones! (yes, my first night there)…I found myself wandering through my cookbook collection and free-floating recipes to find the most fundamental recipe I could offer – that represents love, respect, comfort and life.

Here it is – for you.

My Mum’s Yorkshire Puddings

vegetable oil
2 eggs
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups milk (Mum uses 1 or 2%)

Heat the oven to 400 degrees F.
Take a 12- cup muffin tin and pour enough vegetable oil (canola is my Mum's preference) into each cup to coat the bottom (she uses about 1 tsp per)
Put the tin in the oven to heat up.

Meanwhile, whip together the eggs. Then add the flour, salt and milk. Beat until smooth.

Carefully remove the tin from the oven and again, carefully pour the mixture into each cup filling about 1/2 to 2/3 full. If the oil doesn't sizzle, it's not hot enough.

Put them back in the oven for approximately 15-25 minutes. They should puff up and turn a beautiful golden colour.

Remove from oven and put into a serving dish - and take to your table groaning with roast beef and horseradish and vegetables and gravy.

Do what we always did as kids, when you get one or two or three on your plate, pour gravy into the well that formed in the centre. And devour.

If there are any left over, and if you like cold leftovers, these are beautiful with jam the next morning.

Yorkshire puddings - fundamental. From my Mum's big, loving (and non-shrink wrapped) heart to yours.

cranberry bog - down

I'm heading for the store. Apparently there is a cranberry shortage - not enough farmers, too cool a summer, too much demand.

Not enough cranberries!

And according to the buyer I heard on cbc radio - it ain't getting any better soon. He advised everyone to buy and freeze.

So if you're hoping for fresh cranberry sauce in a few weeks - it's time to get strategic.

no gain, no pain

I started walking home from work again. Or at least an hour of the way home. For exercise, you understand. I'm no martyr.

I'm almost halfway through chemo now, sitting here with my laptop and mug of tea, and able to tell you, that, apart from getting used to the weirdness of having a head more akin to a billiard ball, than a head, so far so good. I'm working full time, and once I'm through the first few days, after the first few waves of nausea are beaten back by drugs, after the Sunday I spend sleeping on the couch, I'm back on track.

So here's the kicker - the week after chemo I feel like I'm eating for Canada. It's not hard for me to have two breakfasts, two sandwiches for lunch, potato chips on demand, fruit, carrot sticks to balance the front part out, sweets, chocolate, double helpings for dinner...

...and so, until this week I was avoiding the subway in fear of germs, but now...I gotta tell you I'm in more fear of cellulite.

Surprised the hell out of me. Lordy - I'd do a logger proud at the table. Or I'd scare him back to the woods.

So some of my graces - you know I always thought I had three graces in my life, but I've discovered my life is full of graces - got together on Tuesday night and we drank wine, we ate dinner, and they cooked freezable meals for me. I'm going to share their recipes if they let me...one of them you'd already know - Wild Mushroom Soup

I now have piles of macaroni & cheese, shepherd's pie, vegetarian chile, and chicken marbella sitting in the freezer, in individual containers - ready to be thawed, heated and consumed...now if I could only remember that order while in my ravenous state.

The other kicker is how strong flavours really entice me - none of this bland, wishy washy stuff - give me flavour. Not heat. Flavour. Heat, bad on the mouth and stomach now. Flavour good on the tongue and palate now.

In this state it's not hard to live in cookbooks. I read them, devour them, live through them.

And having indulged in a beautiful cookbook called Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet by two Canadians who live to travel, cook, then write about it -

huh...note to self...interesting dream job where the kitchen reno would be a write-off...

I was transfixed by the possibility of learning how to make cold spring rolls - the Vietnamese ones. I remember eating them for the first time in a Vietnamese restaurant in Montreal - I was with a group of friends the day after a wedding, the small kitchen restaurant kept rolling these rolls out the door, and I just kept rolling them down my gullet. I was intrigued by the texture of the wrapper, the blend of the vegetables and the fresh kick of the fresh mint. Oh and the dipping sauce.

So when Alford and Duguid wrote that it was entirely within my power to make them in my own small kitchen - I was up at the corner grocer in a flash.

They take some practice. So don't try these as your guests are walking in the door. Unless you're prepared to order pizza.

Rice Paper Roll-Ups with Shrimp and Herbs
- adapted from Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's Hot Sour Salty Sweet

I think the key to these is to prep everything, have it ready to assemble and then go...the other key is what the authors suggest: do it with friends.

12 medium shrimp - I made these with only vegetables, and I imagine you could use anything you fancy...pork strips? chicken?
3-4 oz dried rice vermicelli, soak in warm water for 20 mins and drain
15 rice papers (about 8" in diameter - I used 5" - Use 8", better)
1 1/2 cups bean sprouts, blanched in boiling water for 3o seconds and drained
3/4 cup of grated carrot tossed with 1 tbsp of rice vinegar and 1 tsp sugar
1/2 cup of mint leaves
30 chives, or the greens from scallions that you've cut thinly into slivers
1/2 cup coriander leaves, but I substituted parsley, because there is little I don't like in the fine world of herbs, but coriander is it.

Boil water in a large saucepan. Cook the shrimp until firm to the touch, 1-3 minutes. Lift out immediately and cool on a plate. Shell and devein them and split them lengthwise.

Use the same boiling water to cook the vermicelli, just for two minutes until they're soft. Drain and rinse with cold water.

Place a bowl of warm water nearby - large enough to hold the diameter of the rice wrappers. Wet a tea towel and lay it on the counter or workspace you'll be using. Pull all your ingredients in front of you.

Start by putting one rice paper in the bowl of warm water for 30 seconds until soft. Lift it out gently and lay it on the wet tea towel.

The recipe calls for 1 tbsp of the noodles to be laid on the bottom one third of the wrapper, then the same of the bean sprouts.

I then laid the carrot mixture and herbs on that, then the mint, and started rolling, I added slivers of red pepper since I wasn't using shrimp, and the parsley. Once you have it rolled over once or twice, fold over each edge toward the middle and then keep rolling up. Moisten the edge with water.

Place seam side down on a platter which you keep covered with a second moistened tea towel.

You should really serve these immediately, but apparently they'll keep under the towel and plastic wrap for a couple of hours. We didn't give them the chance.

I love how they suggest serving them: "To eat, place a leaf of lettuce in your palm and lay a roll-up on it. Wrap the lettuce leaf round one end of the roll-up as if you were wrapping a cone in a napkin. Use a small spoon to drizzle on the sauce as you eat, mouthful by mouthful."

Speaking of which, I made up their recipe of "Vietnamese Must-Have Table Sauce" which is wicked easy and delicious. It's a combo of lime juice, fish sauce, water, rice vinegar, sugar, garlic and bird chile...

I'm anxious to dig into some more of these recipes - in fact we're starting to plan our new year's eve annual tasting dinner and this book is a great contender as the anchor of that dinner...upon which our transition into a new year, with new hope, rests...No pressure.

standing up for your fruitcake

It's December and the smells of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg start drifting through me by habit. I think it's what coils around my DNA actually. Maybe it's a seasonal chromosome, maybe red and green, flaring once a year like a beacon to my nose - triggering a longing for mincemeat tarts, Christmas pudding, and yes...believe it...fruitcake.

No one I know likes fruitcake. I feel alone.

Laurie Colwin in Home Cooking quoted Abe Lincoln: "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."

And that sums up the very clearly delineated world of fruitcake.

But that world has its own cracks. And to the left here is where I think fruitcake world cleaves itself. Where it goes terribly, terribly wrong. This is the fruitcake that lives up to the Johnny Carson joke: that there really is only one fruitcake in the world and it's just regifted year after year.

Candied peel. Piled and glistening and drowning the cake underneath. Wrong.

I'm not alone, as it turns out. Since I first posted this, fruitcakers have crept forward to declare their fruitcakeness. It started when a friend came up to me last week to talk about Christmas pudding - she talked wistfully about how her mother-in-law made it when she was well and able. She hasn't had it in years. She also loves mincemeat tarts - which means she loves that combo of deep spice and sweetness, that is distinctly British. And fruitcake. A kindred spirit.

Last year I brought you a recipe for homemade mincemeat. As I look forward to my first tarts of the season - and to Mum's Christmas puddings, which she made and doused in brandy long ago...(hmmm for which I have no recipe yet, and I'm not sure if she's ever written down after decades of puds and brandy) - I bring you this time, for those who will admit to needing one, a fantastic recipe for...The Fruitcake.

What I love about this family recipe below is that it's full of what I do love: raisins, sultanas, currants...and while it calls for some candied peel, we replace it with dried cranberries, or dried cherries.

This recipe comes from my aunt and an ancient magazine recipe from deep inside her recipe box. Years ago I transcribed it to paper. Mum tried to read it to me last night on the phone. The paper is frayed and broken and smudged and stained.

It isn't just for Christmas at Auntie Mag's, fruitcake, complete with royal icing, is everyone's birthday cake - and Mum made me one for my wedding, also dressed in royal icing and flowers - which I'm happy to say I ate all myself since Steve would prefer to have nothing to do with the fruitcake chromosome. So birthdays, weddings, family holidays - a celebration of life -

Serve yourself a chunk with a big mug of tea - turn your back to the naysayers and be smug about it. And it'll last six months in a proper cake tin wrapped up, so you can indulge.

Our family fruitcake

14 oz (400g) sultanas
9 oz (250g) raisins
9 oz (250g) currants
4 oz (100g) stoned prunes, chopped
5 oz (125g) mixed chopped peel (substitute dried cherries or cranberries if you prefer, and I do)
4 oz (115 ml) sherry
1 orange, both rind and juice
1 lemon, both rind and juice
5 oz (125g) glaced cherries, quartered
12 oz (350g) softened butter
10 oz (275g) dark, soft brown sugar
14 oz (400g) plain flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
pinch salt
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp mixed spice - distinctly British - it's a combo of 1 small cinnamon stick and 1 tablespoon each cloves, mace, ground nutmeg, coriander seeds, and allspice berries
1/4 tsp nutmeg, grated
6 medium eggs
2 tbsp apricot jam
2 tbsp black treacle, aka molasses

Wash and dry dried fruit and put in large pan with prunes and peel. Add sherry rind and juice of lemon and orange stir fruit mixture over moderate heat until steaming for five minutes. Turn into a bowl and make sure no juice is wasted. Cool, cover and leave overnight.

The next day, add cherries and nuts to mixture.

The first time I tried this in a standing mixture, I thought I'd gone to heaven. You can do it without the machine, and you'll earn enough muscles to grant yourself an extra slice of cake when it's done.

Preheat your oven to 275 degrees F.
In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until fluffy.
Sieve all dry ingredients together and add 4 tbsp to creamed mixture. Beat eggs. Gradually add to creamed mixture, beating well, add a little from measured quantity if it curdles.
Beat in jam and treacle, fold in remaining dry ingredients and mix well. Mix in fruits with wooden spoon or spatula (or standing mixer, with a strong motor).
Turn cake mixture into greased and lined tin and smooth top.
Bake for 4 ½ hours – in the lower half of the oven.
Test cake by inserting skewer.
Remove cake from oven, cool in the tin. Leaving 24 hours.

To store: remove from tin, wrap in greaseproof paper and then foil. Keep in a round cake tin.

And enjoy with much glee as people make jokes about how criminal it is to propagate the one fruitcake in the world, yadda, yadda, yadda.

lives and forks

I was having lunch with two new, and increasingly good friends of mine today. We were all devouring exquisite butter chicken, salad and raita - and lubricating it all with mango juice.

And we were inevitably talking about food - because that's how we're becoming friends...our work lives descend (I think I mean ascend) into discussions on how to cook curry, where to find any good Mexican food, what's the best way to stop onions from incinerating...

And we were talking about Alice Waters - because I had read the article in Salon.com about her and was trying to quote some the things she said, which resonated with me - like the smell of onions and garlic - like home.

"When we're eating fast food, we're not just eating the food, we're eating a set of values that comes with the food. And it's telling us that food should be cheap. It's telling us that food should be the same no matter where we are on the planet. It's telling us that advertising confers value. That it's OK to eat 24 hours a day. That there are unlimited resources. It's telling us that the work of the people who grow or raise the food is unimportant -- in fact we don't even need to know. And all of those values are informing what's happening in the world around us."

Later on she said instead of thinking of a meal as something to get over as quickly as possible..."get out of that mind-set and tell yourself cooking is a meditation. I like to do it. It's relaxing for me to come home -- it truly is! -- and wash the salad. I love to see the salad in the sink. To spin the salad. I like to dry it. I like to pound to make a vinaigrette with my mortar and pestle. I enjoy grinding coffee and putting it in the filter and warming up the milk. It's part of a ritual that gives my life meaning and beauty."

So, of course, I ordered her new book.

So I was telling my friends this. Both these women are mothers.

And the mum who has three kids, said she met her neighbour at a party last night. Her neighbour also has three kids, her oldest just a year older than my friend's. So they share a lot of the same insights and overscheduledness, and concerns as their kids transition through their teen years, and sit on the cusp of adulthood. The Mums sit, and with crossed fingers, hope they've raised them as best as can be...

So the neighbour's eldest has gone off to university this year. And my friend said her neighbour misses him. She said there's a hole in the house where he isn't. And when does he pass through her the most? When is his presence missed? It's when she's cooking. When she's making something she knows he loves and he's not there to smell it, to savour it, not there to be enriched by it. And of course there's an echo at the table where he was. The eating without him - the meals are where the echoes of him are the loudest - that makes her realize life's progress...

I just thought that was beautiful - that she had found mindfulness in that.

Have a great weekend.

cocktail party for one

Nausea is not for the faint of heart.
And sometimes I really think my heart is faint, I mean quite wussie.

I am just about one week out from my first infusion of chemo cocktail (I'm taking to calling these cocktail parties - and there are six of them in total - the last of which is on St. Valentine's Day).

These last days have been a mixture of feeling sick, but not sick enough to, you know - feeling sprightly and able to vacuum (what evolutionary principle is at work there?) - and spending the entire day under a quilt, on the couch, waking up only long enough to see Barefoot Contessa bbq'ing pizza in the Hamptons, then suddenly Giada slivering up zucchini before her night at the symphony, while I shift the cats' bodies aside to see the screen.

Steve likes to call my tv viewing preferences the Stirrin' and Nailin' Channels - which is entirely true. But I don't care I keep saying, I'm sick. The ultimate argument topper. I get the remote whenever I want.

But something started happening yesterday - I started feeling almost normal again.

I roasted vegetables.

Steve said he'd pick up vegetables on his way home, to have with our leftover roast chicken. But I couldn't wait. I felt good enough after making it through five hours of a workday, so I dug through our baskets, our crispers, to see what lurked there - out came potatoes, carrots and some leeks.

They were tired, grasping for their last bit of glory, their balance of life tipping closer to the compost bin than the roasting pan. But for all their faded colour and limpness, they were headed for as much glory as I could impart.

I sharpened my knife, smiled a grin for me, and started carving. I felt so at home again.

By the time Steve came in to shelter himself from the dark and the wind and the threatening blowing snowflakes, the house was filled with the deliciousness, warmth, security.

Sure. Cook with love. You know I believe that. But it's sorely tested by nausea.

The nose knows and is linked by a superhighway of senses to the stomach. I can't stand the smell of frying bacon right now (and it's the one smell that vegetarians have told me could convert them into omnivores). On the other hand, I love the taste of smoked anything - cheese, sausage. I also lusted through two oranges the other day, and then devoured pasta that I smothered in fried garlic, olive oil and fresh parsley.

In this world of nausea that teases me, the way through it is lust for food. I eat. That is glorious.

tired of waiting for the publisher to call?

Who needs a stinkin' publisher anyway? For those of us in the mood to write a cookbook, here's our chance...easy peasy, lemon squeezy. I came across this on the weekend. Tastebook.com will pull together a personalized cookbook for you - you choose the graphics, you can choose from recipes on Epicurious (they have partnered up) or your own, you choose the sections, you choose the title...deadlines, schmedlines.

Huh.

What do you think? Anyone tried it yet? Or does it strike you as a tad anal?

freezer loading

I have a weekend at hand that some would find tiresome - but not a foodblogger - and not at this time of the year.

I'm cooking.

And piling up stuff in the freezer. Simple, flavorful, single portion meals.

It all started with two basics: a pot of chicken stock that has slowly perfumed the house with comfort and security - then with tomato sauce that added spark and garlic to the room.

And these recipes both start the right way.

I had to chop an onion. I love the ritual of chopping onions. It anchors me - to that moment - to something good - to health - to providing - to pleasure.

I love how onions look at the bottom of the pot as they sweat out their essence, right before they start browning. And the sound of a wooden spoon thudding against a metal pot. Heaven.

Then the celery. One of the most underrated vegetables - essential to stock, and well, to just crunching on. My Mum will cook celery and make a white pepper sauce for it. No, really, it's good.

And carrots. If you've got that, onions, celery, carrots...you've got the essence of stock.

I've discovered one secret for me about stock - not to let it boil. Mark Bittman writes about that in How to Cook Everything - to bring it just to the boil, and then let it simmer with a bubble or three breaking the surface.

So far...so good.

Today I bring together the soup, now that the chicken stock is sitting in the fridge, layered in a blanket of fat, ready to be skimmed. With fingers crossed, I'll dig in to see if we've achieved that jelly-type stock. I feel accomplished when it glops into a pot.

Today will send my nose into ecstasy. Soup 1: Butternut squash, carrot and ginger....Soup 2: Onions, garlic, sweet potato, zucchini, red pepper, and whatever else I find in the fridge, magically pureed with a hand blender and then finished off with sprinklings of mile-long leeks I found at the grocer's yesterday.

How can life not be wonderful?

I upped the ante yesterday and spiked the nose after the stock was bubbling on its own, by cooking up some smoked sausage created by the good Mennonites of southwestern Ontario. And I teamed it with a homemade tomato sauce, that's slightly sweet and rich. They meet, compete, then settle into something more than their separate parts.

I'll try some other stuff too - I've found some recipes for single-serving frittatas (isn't that a great idea?), banana bread, vanilla cupcakes, lemon loaf - all of this meant to be freezable in single servings. Easy to grab and heat and eat.

I will not succumb to microwaveable, boxed food...nope.

If you have any suggestions for easy, freezer stuff, please let me know.

Here is the recipe for the chicken stock - the basics. Followed by the tomato sauce. If you have these in your repertoire, and your freezer - you can't be surprised by anyone for dins...you're ready.


- Chicken Stock -
adapted from Mark Bittman, How to Cook Everything

"Is stock essential for every soup? No. Will it improve almost any soup? Yes," - the Bittman.

3-4 pounds chicken parts, rinsed and patted dry - I bought a bag of chicken legs and wings from my favourite organic meat seller
1 cup roughly chopped onion - I don't peel it, the skin adds colour to the stock
1 cup roughly chopped carrot
1/2 cup roughly chopped celery - um...I mean this...celery:essential...seriously
1 sprig of fresh thyme - or pinch of dried thyme
1/2 bay leaf
several sprigs of fresh parsley
1tsp salt - he says more if necessary, I added a little more - and bear in mind you're still better off than with those boxed or canned stocks, salt wise. Check out a soup can next time you're in the grocery store - look at the sodium content...it will knock you over.
About 4 quarts water - I used a little less, I top the water to just cover everything.

So here are the instructions -
Put all that in a pot.

Easy huh?

Okay here are the rules:

Bring just about to a boil, then partially cover and adjust the heat so the mixture sends up a few bubbles at a time. Cook until the meat falls from the bones. Start this early enough that you can leave it on the stove to do its thing at least 3-4 hours.

The recipe says 2 hours minimum, but I think the crucial part is the meat falling off the bones, and if you can, break the bones, because by then they will have softened enough to surrender their gelatinous features to the stock.

Strain the whole mess into a big bowl. Press on the vegetables and chicken to get as much of the juice as you can. Then refrigerate it (so make sure you have room for the bowl in the fridge - and make room before you pick up the bowl - learn from my mistakes...). When the fat has solidified on the top, spoon it off. You can strain it at this point through cheesecloth, or paper towel. Then put it into individual containers and freeze if you like. It freezes very well.


Tomato Sauce - by me, honed over the years

Olive oil - enough for the bottom of the pan to get the onions started
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped (I could use more, you can use one if you're garlic shy)
1 carrot, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1/2 can tomato paste
1 28 oz can of tomatoes (I've found one company that doesn't add salt to their toms)
1 tsp or more dried basil (in this case dried is better than fresh, but you could add chopped fresh basil at the end before you serve it - it really kicks it up)
salt and pepper to taste
1 tbsp sugar

In a pot, with some olive oil, add the chopped onion over medium heat. Stir and cover with a lid. Check on them, don't let the onions brown. Using the lid and building up steam in there will slow down any browning process, as long as you don't have the burner on meltdown. Let them cook until they get translucent and creamy looking.

Add the garlic.

As soon as the garlic looks like it's starting to cook, add the other vegetables. Let them cook for a few minutes.

Add the tomato paste. Stir it into the vegetables. (You can freeze the remaining paste, don't let it get furry in the can, in the fridge, like I've done countless times)

Add the tomatoes. Break them up with a knife or wooden spoon (but step back before the tomatoes get the ultimate revenge and blow seeds all over your nice, white shirt - again learn from my mistakes).

Add the basil, salt, pepper, and sugar.

Bring to a boil and then lower the heat and let it reduce for at least 20 minutes. Taste at this point and see if you need any more salt or sugar. Then you can simmer it for a while. This is one of those sauces that definitely works the next day.

I cooked some sausage while the sauce simmered and added it in small slices at the end just before I served it. Because it was smoked, the sausage just boosted a new flavour into the whole thing - but if you don't like the taste of smoked stuff, just use whatever sausage you like.

I've put the remainder into small containers to freeze.


If you try these recipes, let me know if these work for you. Suggestions are welcome for sure...

Off to make the soup now - and fill the house with love.

Best of the day. Peace.

Nic

What more can I say?

My intrepid cousin Joff.
His penny farthing.
And the north face of Everest - the Tibetan side.

Joff's website

That's Joff on my new blog banner at the top, enjoying his fish and chips on the seafront in Southend circa 1971, with our Nan.

power

We raised $26.5 million.

Well, okay we weren't alone.

And we weren't all human.

But we all got what it was about...

Thanks to everyone who gave.

And you still can if you want to - just click on the run for the cure link in the sidebar.

pause...

My father Bob died last week. He had been fighting cancer for a couple of years. He was 77.

He was cremated wearing trousers, his bowling shirt from his winter life, and his golf shoes from his summer life - complete with tufts of grass in the cleats from his last round.

His memorial service will be at his golf club in eastern Quebec on Friday.

He and I had a complicated, fragile relationship, rusted by neglect, watered sporadically like a weed, blossoming occasionally.

I will be taking up my 3-wood - and blasting a ball off the tee for him - well, blasting as far as my arm movement right now will allow. Plus he never saw me hit a ball anyway - so if I shank it...it'll be okay.

Dad was one of the most optimistic people I've ever met.
And he loved a laugh more than anything.
And he had the most love for the worst, bawdiest, dirtiest jokes I've ever heard.
And every meal he ate at our table he loved, and seemed to mean it.

He loved music - swing, jazz, reggae and of course classical - and requested it during his last days of lucidity. He was probably Oscar Peterson's biggest fan - and loved to recount how he bought the great Canadian pianist a drink one night in Montreal.

My very first grown-up album - an LP, a record, a vinyl disc - was from Dad. The London Symphony Orchestra playing Beethoven's 9th Symphony...alle menschen werden bruder...ode to joy. When Cindy told me he was requesting music, I wanted to send my now-CD version of the symphony...but it was too late.

I remember one night at our kitchen table Dad cried when I played Nessun dorma for him, sung by the one, Pavarotti, who raced him to the grave.

It was Pavarotti's signature.

He sang it at his final performance last year. And the final words, of the final performance, of the final song that Pavarotti performed, say:

Vanish, O night! Set, stars! Set, stars!

At dawn, I will win!

I will win! I will win!

Dad - March 20, 1930 - September 17, 2007

...and that's it.

So, I pause here. I'll be back next week - drenched by the saying, when it rains, it pours.


the top photo you have seen in a previous post about my Mum - is of my parents on the summer night they met, in 1949. They were married 3 months later. When she sees this photo she still gushes...about the dress...she loved that dress.

the bottom photo is the first photo I ever remember having of me with both my parents - it was four years ago - I cooked them dinner. The picture was the idea of, and taken by, Dad's wonderful wife, Cindy.

kick it in the butt

I just registered for the Run for the Cure on September 30th, so here's a shameless request for support...

Help transform me from a breast cancer patient into a breast cancer survivor.

It's perfect. I'll have recovered enough from the surgery to do it. And I won't have started chemo yet.

So for all my foodblogging friends out there - let's show them what we're made of.

You can click here above and follow the donate to a participant...in this case meeeeee: Nicola Pulling, for the Toronto run...

There's plenty of information on the website about where the money goes - it funds researchers, like my surgeon...

Come...let's kick this bastard in the ass.

my talisman

I've been home 7 days today.

I have flowers and emails and visits and care and love in abundance - and you never know where it's going to come from. Today it came in a tiny package in the mail.

The kindness of strangers overwhelms me.

A few weeks ago, my aunt and uncle picked up John and his wife Violet, and off they went to France for the weekend. Actually they went to Dieppe.

They went because August 19th was the 65th Anniversary of the Battle of Dieppe, also known as a catastrophe.

Of the 6,000 troops that landed at Dieppe, almost 5,000 of them were Canadian.

It was a ferocious battle that went wrong from the start. And by the time they made landfall, later than they expected, in full daylight at dawn, the Germans were waiting for them. It lasted ten hours.

The official death count was 1,380. 913 of them were Canadians. Two thousand more of them were taken prisoner. And only 60 Canadians made it back to England.

Two years later, the Canadians landed at Juno Beach on June 6th, 1944. And on September 1st, it was the Canadians who liberated Dieppe.

John, who was in 3 Commando of the British forces, was at Dieppe.

A few years ago I stopped over in Paris on my way home from my trip through Asia. I made my way up to Normandy because my Aunt and Uncle were there - and I met John then. My family was with him to commemorate D-Day - because, as you might have guessed, he was a survivor of those battles as well.

Well into his 80s now, he wanted to be in Dieppe this year to honor the 17 remaining Canadian commandos who had made it back to the site of that battle.

They stood as tall as they could in their 4-score years - at attention - some slightly bent - medals on their chests - hands at their brow in salute, still living the memory.



A few days later, after they were home, my Aunt took round some photos of their trip.

They were talking about Dieppe and Canada - and John asked about my Aunt's connection to Canada. She explained that my Mum and I have lived in Canada for a long time.

And she told him I was battling my own battle against breast cancer at the moment.

He asked her if I was English. She explained I was born in Kent and moved to Canada as a baby (not alone of course, my sense of independence kicked in long after the boat landed).

He nodded.

He got up and formally presented to my Aunt a small case. Inside was a pin in the form of a tiny stiletto.

He told her he was presenting it to me.

It is the Commando Badge of Courage.

It arrived safely on Canadian shores today.

And I am wearing it where my left breast used to be.

My first battle is over - a clean, straight, knife line - no pain meds - one night in hospital.

The thing about crossing to the other riverbank is that you miss the journey. September 5th I slept my way there. It's a journey my surgeon knows too well. She ferried four of us over that day.

So, this is the other side of the river, where my doctor promised me a whole lot more life. This side is still forested. I do see a path. I just can't see the end of it - although I suppose none of us can.

For sure, this was the easy part. This was no Dieppe - in fact I'd prefer to think of it as D-Day, but I don't know how the battle will fare now.

They say a talisman is something you hold to be a charm that will avert evil and bring good fortune - I've never really had one before.

I do now. I'm averting evil, embracing fortune with all my might.

A tiny stiletto - touched by a commando who survived those bloody beaches of Dieppe and D-Day - touched by a human who knows fear and has shared his courage with me...

A talisman of kindness.

The top photo is from the wiki page on Dieppe.
The Calgary tank is from here.

with even mind

I reached a new state last week - one I've never known, it's colourful, it's peaceful - it's aware of fear but is more aware of joy - mostly it's a place of certainty, although I'm not sure of what.

I've reached the state of equanimity.

Getting hit with a diagnosis of breast cancer was like being thrust through a portal to a place I didn't want to know, never wanted to visit, let alone live.

As those first few days passed, I found myself begging and pleading to know how to get through the fear and anxiety. If I could conquer it, control it, I would be helping myself, no, in fact I'd be leading myself beyond this frontier of diagnosis. I couldn't go back. Life wasn't that way anymore. There was no way back. I had to move forward - but I didn't know where.

So bearing the dent of the two-by-four that the diagnosis slammed into my forehead - like a passport - I felt my way forward. No path, no directions, no map.

Strangely, bits and pieces of the path dropped in front of me. Just when I thought I was stepping off into mid-air, there would be another piece.

This is my path.

First piece - my Steve.

Then there's my friends and family.

~

So in the beginning, I felt what I felt when I felt it.

People layered me in survival stories - the grandmother who had advanced breast cancer in her 40s and lived to 93, the mother of three who had stage III, lymph-node-positive cancer who is thriving now.

Of course others just told me stories of whole families felled by death. I learned to look at them dumb with wonder. And then found myself bursting with laughter when I re-told the stories later. There's a whole blog to come about the stupidest things people said to me.

One colleague told me her aunt had it and lost six years of her life. She didn't remember anything - not even her niece's wedding. And yet she has beaten it (she made it through the crucial five year mark). My jaw dropped.

I went home, grabbed Steve by the arms, looked into his eyes like my life depended on it and told him, "There is no way this is going to own me. This isn't all of me. It's a small part. I can't live with the feeling of being hunted for the next five years. I am not going to give up feeling what's going on right now. I am not going to lose the present. Don't let me lose sight of that."

"I promise," Steve said.

The next day I bought a charm bracelet in support of the Run for the Cure.

~

Over the years I've dabbled in meditation. I have never taken a course. I only ever taught myself about quietness of mind - and like everyone I'd sit, close my eyes and my mind would start up a full discussion about how great it was to be in a quiet mind...and how not quiet my mind was...and then I'd sigh, forgive myself, and start over.

I did it now.

I even bought books - Meditation for Beginners - and found Meditation for Dummies, I'm not kidding, at the library.

It's working.

~

I have been seeing a psychotherapist for a few months, by chance, dealing with anxiety stuff, trying to understand where it comes from, trying to gain some balance between my heart and mind and soul about what I want in life and how I got here. Jan helped me look through childhood wounds (as first my Dad left, then my brother ran away, then died in a car accident) to see how I've coped since and how I haven't.

She asked one day what I saw inside - what the pain looked like. And I described a slit, ragged, stony, and through it I could see blindingly bright flowing lava. It moved so fast it took my breath away. I told her the lava wasn't the problem...that lava was the core of me, the essence of me, the truest part of me. But the slit...she asked...it's a wound I said.

And to the edge of the wound, on her knees looking in was a little girl. Me...of course, the girl of those years. When Jan asked me what I would say to that little girl if I could - I blurted out without hesitation, "Oh little one. You're fine. You're wonderful. And I love you so much. Unconditionally." And I cried.

Jan buys big, big tissue boxes.

That was a few months back.

I still, not exactly talk to the little girl, but am "present" with her - reassuring her, helping her feel safer. There is such love in that and forgiveness.

During that first week of coming to grips, I went to bed one night. I rolled on my side and said to her through the air, "Hey little one." She looked up at me. "You were so resilient through all that stuff. I need you now. I need your strength. I need you to help me."

She held out her hand - without hesitation. I grabbed it. She smiled and came to me. She just walked into my arms for a hug - and has been near me ever since. She plays, she dances, she reads, she sleeps, she sits in my lap and lets me hold my arms around her.

We, she and I, seem to have come full circle.

~

My Mum has been wondrous. She's been here. She survived colon cancer at 46. She's 80. So she gets my irritation at people's fear. My irritation at their bone-headed observations. She gets my need to laugh. As always her core of iron inspires me.

~

Two weeks after my diagnosis to the day - a friend went for her own biopsy. It came back positive. We're now cancer patients together. I was unnerved. I felt icky. Her cancer is larger and more aggressive. I couldn't put my finger on it - but I felt guilty for being luckier. It was hard to take. They have whipped her into the system. She will be through her surgery this week, while I'm about to go in and talk about my surgical plan.

I brought it up with Steve. He said, "You have been given the gift of perspective. And you have someone who truly understands what you're going through."

I felt a great weight lift.

~

The same day I heard about my friend I had results back from my MRI and ultrasound tests - my other breast is behaving itself. And the MRI didn't show up any surprises. The twinges of aches, the thought that with every passing minute the cancer is getting a tougher and tougher grip on the rest of my body - my doctor told me is totally normal to feel - but I'm fine. There is no sign of it outside the breast.

I felt another great weight lift.

~

Everywhere I turn, people tell me how lucky I am to have the surgeon I have. Even my co-diagnosed friend, who ironically works in the breast cancer field, told me during her diagnosis process she called her favourite contacts to find out who she should see here - and one name came back at her, my surgeon. Another colleague of mine had her. A nurse who didn't work for her, but respects her enormously, told me how lucky I was...and the surgeon's senior fellow told me how she's been through thousands of operations with her, and she's unbelievable.

I'm in good hands. Another weight...gone.

~

Now...the knowledge. I couldn't face the research. And yet, I'm a researcher/producer by trade. My day job is to find and research stories - and I've spent years digging passionately into science and medicine. But my body and brain went on strike when I went near the books my surgeon gave me. My stomach tightened. I turned the books over so I couldn't see them, then buried them under home decorating and food magazines.

Out of sight...out of mind...Not so much.

Steve was going to read up on it for me - a need-to-know basis only.

Then last week I dug into Wellspring's website - a cancer care support centre. Then I went to the Dragons Abreast team website. Then to the Canadian Cancer Society's website. Then the National Cancer Institute's website - both the patient's info and then the health professionals' info. Then onward to the primary research articles and by midnight I was perusing the journals on PubMed to see what they're finding out about various chemo treatments.

I was on the couch, laptopped and square eyed, and I laughed as I said to Steve, "I'm back."

He asked me what I meant. I told him I was researching. He smiled at me, with his whole face, eyes twinkling. "I'm glad. That's what I've been waiting to hear."

It was instinctive not to research until I was ready. And something just told me I was ready.

I tore through another book this weekend - The Breast Cancer Survivor Manual.

~

Then I found out last week - my friends are harnessing their energy and creating a team for the Run for the Cure on September 30th. How can I repay their love?

~

My place of joy has rooted itself. I have love, inside and out. I'm happy. By the end of the third week I gripped Steve's arm again and said, "Is it right that I feel normal again? Am I denying something? Do I have my head in the sand? I feel normal."

And he reassured me that all this emotional work is paying off in huge dividends, bigger than I knew possible.

Any news, good or bad will be what it is.

And I know I'm feeling normal, my black humour is in full swing.

~

These are the disparate pieces that led me here. As I said, I wanted to reach a state of equanimity. And after a few days I thought I'd better look it up to be sure it means what I think it means.

Main Entry: equa·nim·i·ty Pronunciation: "E-kw&-'ni-m&-tE, "e-kw&- Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Etymology: Latin aequanimitas, from aequo animo with even mind
1 : evenness of mind especially under stress

Hahm Sah - I am That.

And I'm here.

Now if I could only trust that that's what this is.

happy 1st birthday foodnut

Thanks to everyone who has ever spent part of their day reading Foodnut. Here's to the future.

the spoon in my champagne

So...tomorrow my little blog, my little foodnut turns 1!

One year ago I wrote about life stuff in my kitchen - and in one year, I gotta tell you, life hasn't pulled any punches.

I've evolved the philosophy over the last 10 years that whenever you can create a ritual that marks life - you just do it.

You know what that means? Champagne.

I was thinking about champagne this morning on the subway, on my way to work. I wasn't meaning to, and I don't usually, but I'm reading What Einstein Told His Cook 2 and he brought it up.

Not Einstein actually, Robert L. Wolke - who is a professor emeritus of chemistry and a columnist emeritus with the Washington Post, where he wrote Food 101. He wrote What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science Explained a few years ago, and then realized there were more questions from his readers and there was just more to say - and he got to say it with his wife, food writer and cook Marlene Parrish who contributed the recipes in the book.

I found the book in the remainder pile in our local independent book store and had to buy it when I read the dedication: I dedicate this book, as I have my life, to my wife, companion, motivator, and most loving critic, Marlene Parrish, who characterizes herself as Einstein's Cook.

I am such a suck. Now that kind of love calls for champagne.

Not long ago my friend Carol asked me to get an open bottle of champagne out of her fridge. And sticking out the top was a spoon. "Um, Carol? Middle age setting in? Or is this a new spiritual ritual?"

She has known me long enough to ignore me, for the most part - you know like sisters do, I hear.

"Isn't that neat?," she said. A friend had told her that putting a spoon, handle first into an open bottle of bubbly will keep it bubbly a lot longer. "Huh," I said - a little skeptically as I looked at the open space around the spoon. I'd lived 44 years without hearing that one. A sheltered life.

So I was delighted to squeeze myself into a seat on the train this morning, open my daily indulgence with Professor Wolke and dig into the "Something to Drink?" chapter.

I've been entertained and then fascinated by the answers to his readers' queries: how to clear up cloudy iced tea, when it's best to put the cream in your coffee, how hot the water should be for tea (something you know I have almost religious feelings about) - not perhaps as important as the questions of saving the people of Darfur, or the subprime mortgage financial disaster, or the disappearing icebergs - but hell, I'm fascinated.

And sure enough, I turned the page, and there was the wacky question of whether to stick a spoon in your champagne bottle.

The reader asked if a fork would work as well. Prof. Wolke wrote: "Yes, a fork would work just as well. So would a railroad spike. Or a magic wand, for that matter, because the spoon did absolutely nothing. The spoon dodge is pure bunk."

Now how can you not love a man like that?

It turns out champagne just doesn't go stale as fast as other bubbly drinks. The key, he wrote, is to make sure you put it back in the fridge. Carbon dioxide, dissolves and stays that way better in cold liquids.

So his recommendation is to throw the unfinished bottle (okay that's the first challenge in testing this: not finishing the bottle) in the fridge and then, he says, to put a stopper in it (not apparently cutlery).

The other reason I love him is because he's adamant that you don't buy one of those fancy-assed bottle stoppers that look like NASA was involved early on in the project, just use a regular stopper - the bottle has already released its pressure that required the fancy cork and metal wire cage.

Of course the shame of not finishing the bottle can be rectified with mimosas in the morning - because let's face it, as Wolke wrote, "you never know when you'll have even more to celebrate in the morning."

Morning can be a metaphor of course. It reminds me of a beautiful line from the great, but dark, Sarah McLachlan: Cast me gently into morning, for the night has been unkind...

I have two bottles of Moet & Chandon I picked up at Heathrow last month (on sale). I was going to open them through the summer - but as life hasn't pulled any punches this year - they're safely stored in the cupboard near the fridge until Steve and I get through the next six months - and maybe come spring, they'll be just right to celebrate with...by then I'll be just waiting to burst like a cork - with life, with victory, with new, deeper, even more valued rituals of love.

I love this blog - I love who this blog represents. And I love all the people who have taken it into their hearts. Here's to more of it - Happy Anniversary foodnut...

reaching the roof of the world

My cousin Joff built this penny farthing, got on it on May 1st of last year, and headed east. He hasn't stopped. And he's 18,000 kilometres along now.

This is his third try - his knees have betrayed him a couple of times before this. But not this time. He's on the roof of the world now.

We hadn't heard from him in a month - and his mother - my aunt who loves to indulge in mussels - was a bit frantic. I, in fact, was getting concerned and checked out the phone number for the UK consulate closest to Tibet - just in case.

I sent Joff one last email on Thursday, with an urgent mark, asking him to make contact if he's not lying at the bottom of a gorge. And by chance on Friday, he finally rolled into Lhasa.

I asked him for this shot...a dream of his, and a dream of mine to see for myself.

He's rolling for charity, if anyone cares to help, check out his website. He's posted some beautiful photos of the Litang Horse Festival...where he met some of the beautiful Tibetan kids...

in consideration of my assets

My boobs are bigger than I thought.

Actually, than anyone thought.

I'm tall, thin - well thinnish. I'm sure my bum isn't as big as my mind has perversely convinced me it is. I was a girl who kept waiting for those bumps of pre-puberty to come to fruition, who never needed a "training" bra. And I was the last girl in my grade 8 class to get one. When puberty launched me into womanhood, and it was all done, I said, "whatever."

My boobs never entered my psyche as one of my "features" - never made it to the mythical billboard advertising "Me".

Me did not equal Boobs.

I remember being off on a research trip in Cleveland a long time ago - I was forced to spend the weekend in the racing pit of Jacques Villeneuve's IndyCar team - it was pretty fucking cool. (That was when Paul Newman said hello to me...like, totally, that kind of cool). They had all these chicks delivering car parts along pit row - I say chicks because they wore short shorts, high heels, teeny tiny t-shirts that showed that these girls knew their billboards were real, not mythical, except for any lowly grease monkey who dreamed of finding out.

Anyway, after inhaling four days of ethanol fuel, testosterone and words like torque, shaft, and cockpit, with a few hours to kill before my flight, I needed a strong antidote - an extreme version of femininity - so I tracked down a Victoria's Secret.

Now being of the non busty-variety I tended to feel somewhat alien in there. Whenever I found myself in a lingerie dressing room, being handed something lacy, padded, underwired, and squished together - I bent over double laughing - which always worried the salesgirls. But really. I mean come on. Once I was strapped into it, I looked like I was trying too hard.

I've never, ever been able to pull off sexy if I was aware that I was trying to pull off sexy. Sexy, like goodness, is innate, and if you put it on, it goes rancid in its falseness.

So off I went to Victoria's Secret. Which is a treat because we don't have them here in Toronto.

We have Sophia, of Sophia's Lingerie on the Danforth. She's an institution. She carries all those little thingies that you hold like vapour that cost $350 - but they're from Europe. And Sophia, the institution herself, flies into your dressing room to feel you up and see how the whole thing is coming together. It's kind of like being sexed up and lingeried by your mother. That said, she knows of what she speaks. And I dis a cultural lingerie icon at my peril. But again, I didn't feel quite like I had enough to offer poor Sophia. And I didn't really care.

Back in Cleveland, the V.S. salesgirl offered to measure me. I'd heard the stat - 80 billion women in North America alone are suffering life in the wrong bra size. I chuckled and stepped into the change room. "I'm a 34B. Have always been a 34B. Will always be a 34B," I swaggered a little I think as I said it (probably some lingering gas fumes from race day).

She got the tape. She pulled it round. I looked off to the distance, kind of aware I was drawing my posture skyward, filling my lungs - kind of like those Soviet memorials to the brave women who harvest the wheat with a scythe, looking off to the future, confident that Stalin wouldn't let them starve. Kinda like that...

"Well I've got good news and bad news," I seem to remember her saying. "You're a 36, not a 34. But you're an A cup, not B cup."

So I was wider in the back and smaller in the boobs than I thought. Huh.

I could get a job harvesting wheat.

I bought a pullover bra and panty set from the girl anyway - for lighting my life with humility. I became a convert to matching underwear - that, I thought, was sexy.

So, I stopped thinking about my boobs - only went to Sophia's with my girlfriends who had assets Sophia could appreciate.

Now, I think my boobs are beautiful, and a lovely part of me. Now that I have to consider losing one, and maybe two - they have asserted their place in my mind, heart and soul. Breasts are fraught with meaning - they're sexual, they feed and nourish, they make halter tops look good.

I have to, as in, I must, consider them existentially. I'm in this unusual, totally unexpected place of trying to place what my breasts mean to me, so I can handle their potential loss and the grief that will come with that.

They are not my identity, any more than the breast cancer has turned me into only a cancer patient. I am more.

My doctor wasn't kidding when she said this challenge will make me stronger - it's like vinegar on grease - you can see so much better, the measure of things.

And Steve has to figure out what life will be like to have bigger boobs and better cleavage, than I.

We laugh about it now. I'll keep you posted for how long.

*The photo is from my wedding - Auntie Joan is my second Mum.

fries don't have calories if you eat them with mussels and family in Paris

July in Paris.
It meant rain and sun, moules et frites, baguettes et croissants, cafe creme et wine in small jugs.










I was with my aunt, uncle and my Mum. And you know the expression - an army travels on its stomach? I come by it honestly. Here my aunt muscles a mussel.

This was moments before the clouds rolled in and trapped us under the awnings in Place du Tetre, near Sacre Coeur






And this is how much my Mum hates thunderstorms, especially outside, under a tent, on the highest point in Paris.










Look at how they display their local produce - they're just so French. This was at a supermarket in Normandy, on our way back to England.

look out for thwacks

I have felt mortal twice in my life.
And both times I've had to be convinced.

Once was a couple of weeks ago as you may be tired of reading - but it did put me in mind of the other. Five years and a bus ride ago.

I know that for those who freeclimb (without ropes), BASE jump, skydive, eat organ meat, or raw milk cheese, to feel mortality only twice in four decades is frankly disappointing.

But I am risk averse. Yes I've dived on shipwrecks, yes I've been near a Zairean soldier as he fired his automatic rifle, yes I've flown with an aerobatic team, yes I've eaten canned potato chips - but no, I've never been on a grown-up roller coaster, no I have never seen a horror film (okay Alien, but it took two weeks of convincing), and no I have never made a souffle.

I think what risk junkies crave is the thwack of mortality. They like that knife edge that feeds their senses. It doesn't envelope you like a philosophical blanket with a snifter of warmed brandy, easing you into mortal epiphany - no. Both times for me it's just been a thwack to the head with a big stick - after which the heart and soul argue about who will have to pick up the pieces.

I was in Pokhara, Nepal. And I wanted to be in India. Not fond of flying, I bought a bus ticket - one way to the Indian border. This was a tourist bus - meant for touring - hence the name. This was not a local bus, many of which littered the bottom of gorges, many of which you got to see as you careened around switchbacks.

Which probably accounts for the typo in the billboard I came across for local whisky - it probably wasn't a typo.

I had been in Nepal for over a month and it was time to move. That morning I was happy to throw my pack on the roof, climb aboard, and settle in by the door. It was cramped and the driver and conductor kept trying to get people to sit more to the back. The bus was over two hours late, the dawn bus had never showed, so we climbed on this one.

Off we went heading out into the valleys, twisting our way to India. I made friends on the bus, one guy on his way home to England pulled out his collection of gurkha knives to show us, John, a Kiwi, and I were heading in the same direction and made plans to meet up in Rajasthan, and I had just organized a group of us to hire a jeep taxi to take us to the birthplace of Buddha.

The bus driver pulled out to pass a car.

And the world went into slow motion. He couldn't pull the bus back into our lane and suddenly there was no road in front of us, just a palm tree through the front windshield. I said out loud, but very quietly, "oh no".

We were falling. We were rolling. My eyes closed (which my mind later confused with being nighttime). My fingers were pinched above my head in something (it was the conductor's folding seat in front of me as we rolled). My eyes opened only briefly enough to see shattered glass fly past me on the left. And then there was a splash. The world stopped turning. And all I could hear was the bus engine, still in gear, grinding away.

By this point I had been tossed to the other side of the bus. The bus was on its side and it was half full of water. I was on my back looking up at the sky through the open side door. I bent my arms. Yup working. My legs. Ditto. And then my head screamed at me on the inside, "Get out!" And I started scrambling, clawing toward the sky above me.

Tony, the Spaniard who is the first man I have ever come across who oozed sexuality from every pore, yelled, "DO NOT PANIC. Everyone calm down."

And we did.

We got a human chain going - those who weren't hurt helped those who were. Others climbed down into the river and pulled all the backpacks off the now vertical roof. Another guy dove under the water to pull the keys out of the ignition so the back wheel would stop spinning as we guided people along the now top, formerly side, of the bus. I pulled my first aid kit out of my day pack and started cleaning bloody, river-soaked wounds. Locals came to help pull us all up the steep embankment to the road. And the ambulances started arriving.

Nine people went to hospital. A few with broken bones, the most serious with a ruptured spleen. We got everyone bundled into the ambulances including Tony and John who both had bruised ribs, and yet had stood on the riverbank as I handed them more passengers. I stayed behind - I had an unreasonable, unfathomable sense of responsibility for making sure everyone was okay. I couldn't stomach the thought that any of those people who were now in the hands of the Australian medical team at the clinic in Pokhara would die. I couldn't take it.

My head had a couple of goose eggs, a couple of scrapes, but that was it. I was hugging people, almost euphorically, telling them we had just survived the stereotypical Asian story - a bus accident. We were alive.

Someone said it was incredible - his life had actually flashed before his eyes. He said, "I thought we were dead."

I was appalled at him. How could he let that thought in? I couldn't die that way. I just couldn't. My brother was killed in a car accident 30 years before. There was NO WAY my Mum was going to lose both her children in a road accident. NO WAY.

And then I felt mortal.

I grabbed a ride with a couple who stopped to see what the commotion was about. They were headed for Kathmandu. I had lost my taste for buses and had regained some courage for flying to India instead - so I bargained that if he drove carefully and slowly I would take the ride back to the capital. On the way they shared their packed lunch with me on the side of the road, near a waterfall. I'd love to say I remember what it was - but I was still a bit stunned.

And that's how I met the General and his wife, Sita. On the way they invited me to their country house to stay for a few days. They knew I held a British passport and they had lived in England while he studied at Sandhurst - she argued in favour of tea, he argued in favour of brandy...so I got both. I don't like brandy - I drank it.

And the sense of mortality passed. I stayed with these kind, generous people for a couple of days and then headed back into Kathmandu. And there on my first evening I ran into Tony in a bookstore. We hugged like old friends and he caught me up with all the injured - they were all going to be fine. He was having dinner with John that night, so I joined them. And John and I confirmed our plan to meet in Jaipur, Rajasthan a few weeks later.

Thwack. I headed on with my journey, feeling blessed - because as I think Carrie Fisher wrote (and I've said before) - bad reality...great anecdote. I'll hang on to that idea over the next few months.

I.D. Please

My brain came back online late last week.

I felt various pieces of software click back on. I noticed the weather. I noticed problems in the house. I noticed the unmade bed, the dust, the cat hair.

I can cope. And then I can't. And then I can. And when I can't, Steve is there. And my Mum. And my beautiful, beautiful friends.

I noticed I can float.

I'm starting to believe that books come into your life at certain times. I finished reading Eat, Pray, Love about a week before my diagnosis of breast cancer.

I got to the end. I started over again. I salivated over Gilbert's description of pizza in Naples, yoga in her Indian ashram, and fulfillment of her search in Indonesia. The hair rose on my arms as she talked about the voice deep inside her that protects her. I cried (on the subway) when I read what the voice said to her. I jumped at her description of yoga. And my soul rested when I read what a friend told her about our soulmates...

I spent last week thinking a lot. And talking with Steve. And letting him hold me, and holding him. I thought about how I grieve the sudden loss of the part of my life where nothing more was wrong than traffic, rain, and what to have for dinner - life without a sense of mortality. Without the sad lesson that I must love this minute now, this day.

I ate a peach. A locally grown peach at its height of beauty and taste rested in my palm. My first bite dripped, the peach melted in my mouth. It grabbed my senses. I was completely present in the moment. I'm me.

And yet...

I went to the hospital for another ultrasound. I was laying on the bed, arm above my head, as they spread the goo and the wand and magically looked through the tissues on my healthy breast...I was thinking there are more pictures of my breasts floating around the medical world in the last few weeks than of Paris Hilton from her whole adventurous, young adult life.

A young resident did the test. He complained about the discomfort in his shoulder. I said, "yeah, I can't imagine. Care to trade places?" Oh he said...oh your shoulder hurts too? Oh, yeah...oblivious.

Later, when we were chatting he called me a cancer patient.

I jolted inside.

He's the first person to put the cancer first in my identity. Yeah, I guess I am. But NO I am not. I most certainly am not a cancer patient first . He couldn't see me. I'm me.

Through the last week - my brain, stomach and heart found their equlibrium again - no, more than that, they found their truth in me. It became clear that my love, inside and out, is the engine. That's me.

I finished Eat, Pray, Love again. And I stared at the cover and couldn't help but smile. For the last week that's all I've been directing myself to do: eat, pray, love.

And as Gilbert said of the favourite mantra she discovered on her journey, Hahm Sah....
I am That.

the riverbank

Where am I?

What state is this?

How did I get here without going anywhere?

My appetite is being put to the supreme test – the ultimate test.

That’s as close as I’ll get to food in this post.

Yesterday I got the word – I have breast cancer.

I just shook my hands off the keyboard as I wrote that.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

They assure me it’s treatable – they assure me I’ll be fine – they assure me I have lots of life ahead of me. And what choice do I have but to believe them?

A deep voice, deep inside me is roaring that this is just not right – the voice is indignant, outraged, and powerful.

It hurts more to tell people I love than to absorb the news myself – I think…but it’s more likely I just haven’t absorbed it myself.

I kept waking up last night as if trying to emerge above water, out of a nightmare – only to realize the feeling didn’t go away when my brain came online – it’s here…all around me.

So here we go…a new adventure, not by choice, more an invasion.

I had decided earlier this year to rededicate myself to growing my hair out (after chopping it off in February) – but ha…I will head back to my fabulous hair cutter Sunil, and have him chop it – a pre-emptive strike, back to my Buddhist monk look. My graces and I are debating now on the wild colour – what the hell?

Speaking of hell, bring it on…my new and not-so-brave world of words: oncologists, surgeons, chemo, radiation, risks, benefits, survivor rates…guess I’d better go get a pink ribbon for my bumper -

I’m 44. I’m three years into a beautiful, breathtaking marriage. I’m surrounded in love and beauty by good people.

So how did I get here?

I went for a baseline mammogram after my physical this year…I went because I hadn’t been for one before.

Then I went back for another one, and an ultrasound…and then another mammogram, and another ultrasound combined with a needle biopsy (not as bad as it sounds, actually quite fascinating if it’s anyone else), then a week later: the word.

I told my surgeon that the image that runs through me is of slipping into a hole. She said a hole is only one way. I’m actually on a riverbank she said, “and we’re going to get you through to the other side of the river, and there’s a whole lot of life there.”

That’s how I got here. On the riverbank.

At the top is a photo taken from my incredible hotel room in Varanasi, India - it is a boat crossing the Ganges at sunrise.

The lemons in my belly - revised recipe

Lemonade is in my belly.

On its way there it speeded down my throat, through my heart and soul and soothed my fretful mind.

I try to banish winter. Spring creeps slowly and tentatively. My mood sours.

The crocuses are up and bracing themselves against the wind that has been gusting and tearing at them from the north. They are holding their own. The magnolia trees thought about budding, but have halted their progress. The cats know the sun has passed the equator - and should be doing a better job on the back deck. So they take it out on each other, fighting over space at the window, and then shed on the sofa.

And, Steve and I, sit despondently, and wait for the word windchill to disappear from the cheerful lingo on the perky weather channel.

The whole city filled with people, cats, dogs, raccoons, skunks and squirrels, trees, flowers and weeds braced...sitting...waiting...life ready to burst at the seams.

The tonic for our pains - is in the fridge. A blue pitcher dosed with 100% homemade lemonade. For all that ails you. Steve snapped one snowy day and looked up a bunch of lemonade recipes.

It was so easy we were a tad annoyed with ourselves for not trying this sooner. Enjoy.

Spring Tonic Lemonade - with future possibilities as lemon freezies, when such things matter.

2 cups freshly squeezed lemon juice (depending on the size of the lemons get 10 -12)
1 cup of sugar
2 cups of water
1 1/2 tbsp. lemon zest

Combine the water, sugar and lemon zest in a pan and heat to boiling. Stir and allow heat to dissolve sugar. Remove from heat. Allow to cool (we put ours in the fridge). The zest turns the water a beautiful hopeful shade of yellow.

Once cooled, mix in the lemon juice.

Add more water until the lemonade is as thin or thick as you would like...bear in mind the more water you add the more you dilute the sweetness...so do this carefully and depend on trial and error the first couple of times.

It hasn't lasted long here. It is a classic...if two tries qualifies...I keep thinking it might be lovely with vodka or gin...Enjoy...let me know if it works for you.

Come on sun...come on...

Drawing above by these kids.

Sybil the Survivor

My mother just turned 80.

And I’m incensed.

Mums are frozen in time – they’re just Mums – they’re born as Mums…well not really born, they just appear. Because as their children we have no concept of them inside their skins – no idea who the child was, the teenager, the woman they were…before us.

Time swirls around them without us noticing, because they’re just there, doing Mum things…a tree rooted to the ground while we careen around them, being girls, being boys, banging into things, needing hugs, turning into teens, getting into trouble, playing with risk, becoming women and men, breaking hearts, being broken, growing up.

I am dumbfounded and slightly irritated to think how she got to 80 without me really, really noticing.

Plans are more about now than later. My chest tightens, my breath shortens. I choke on the idea.

My picture of my Mum in my heart is a feeling of love and nurturing. It’s a collage of her - at the counter making sure, deft handiwork of pastry, the smells of Sunday roast dinners, apple crumble, homemade warm custard, buttered bread, jam tarts and cups of tea. The warmth of an oven filling the kitchen, warming my heart.

My picture in my head is of her laughter – her crunched up face, hunched up shoulders, tear stained cheeks, bright wide smile, and absolute silence as she twigs on to the ridiculous…

She bursts out with laughter and then it tumbles inside…her eyes squeeze shut, her head rolls back, then her shoulders hunch up and she curls into a ball and jiggles with laughter on the inside…the lack of volume being made up for in tears squeaking out the sides of her eyes. She loves to laugh.

My Mum is a great connoisseur of the ridiculous…the more ridiculous the better the jiggle.

My Mum is through and through a Mum. There is no other role that fits her skin, her spirit so well. She loves loving. She loves being needed. She’ll martyr herself to a fault.

Even my friends recognize it. She’s a surrogate shoulder and a bearer of adolescent angst.

You wouldn't know she’s a bulwark against loss…She lost her own Mum at seven. She was ferried back and forth between relatives while her father tried to figure out what to do. He remarried two years later, and when they had a newborn, Mum’s life turned south into the unstable world of emotional abuse and neglect as her stepmother wished her away. Mum forgave later.

But she left home then.

I have pictures of her before she was a Mum. Even then, she was functioning as a Mum…She was a nurse, trained at the end of WWII in England. She cared for babies orphaned or abandoned in the war. She spoke of living at the hospitals (converted mansions), her love of the regimented routine, her ability to work nightshifts and calm the uncalmable, traumatized youngsters, comforting little ones who had lost everything, who knew what it felt like more than what it really meant. She loved teaching the babies and toddlers about play and joy, although she couldn’t give them much security as they went into the orphanage system at five – which broke her heart.

She escaped to the dancehall every Friday. She danced every weekend – was even scouted for a potential professional career. She loved dancing. She loved dating.

She met my father one night at a dance hall. She was, of course, laughing…Dad caught sight of her in the kaleidoscopic vision through the bottom of his beer glass. It was summer 1949. They were married October 1949…three months later. This picture on the right is of the night they actually met.

Her marriage careened through good times and hellish crises and back again. They travelled half way round the world, on the backs of the Royal Navy, and back again. They produced two children. It succumbed in the late 60s to a final and fatal infidelity.

Mum survived. She survived the loss of her husband, the runaway son who escaped into the 1960s communes and drugs…she found a job packing boxes in a warehouse and was promoted to purchasing officer. She strained the edge of reason when her son was killed in a car accident (just as he’d beaten his way through drug addiction)…and she survived her 40s when the doctor said it was, in fact, cancer – but that she would survive.

Sybil the Survivor.

She and I moved to Toronto in the late 70s, as the separatists took hold of Quebec in the election and the banks and mainstream institutions fled like refugees down highway 401 to the enclave of whitebread and prim propriety that was Toronto of the time.

And she survived raising a teenage daughter, to boot.

I became the first member of my family to graduate from university – so I did it twice. And she supported me the whole way, didn’t flag, didn’t despair.

And for all that tragedy and survival, my distilled memory, my image of record is of her laughter - her absolute passion for a great joke. My husband, Steve, can make her laugh so hard she crumples up.

So, how can she be anything but a survivor, and a hero to me? A quiet, self-deprecating, self-flagellating, iron-willed survivor. Who loves the ridiculous.

For her 80^th…she didn’t want too much. We booked a night at Quince, a local restaurant, our go to for special occasions. She begged us not to spend the money. She said she really would prefer fish and chips.

We smirked.

We went to pick her up to take her to the restaurant. And we had a cup of tea at her place because we were early.

At 7pm a man named Jay knocked at the door. Behind him idled a 17-foot long Cadillac limousine. Courtesy of Lauren, a friend Mum considers a surrogate daughter. Lauren is now in LA, but she wanted to be part of the day.

‘Oh god’, Mum said when she came to the door. And immediately had to pee.

When we climbed into the car, I crawled to the front to see how long it was. Steve climbed in after me, and way in the rear, Mum got into the back seat, embedded in leather seat cushions – and she started.

“Imagine if we were going for fish and chips,” she said and lost herself in mirth. The thought of showing up in this monstrosity of a land yacht – complete with red LED lighting and mirrored ceiling and a bar of crystal decanters and champagne flutes. She burst, she crumpled, she jiggled, tears came down her cheeks.

It was the moment I was waiting for. Because when she starts, I can’t help but laugh at her laughing until I’m crying too. The two pictures above of her laughing are from her 70th and 75th birthday dinners.

We pulled up outside of Quince and headed in. Jennifer and Michael, I’ve written about before because they created our wedding dinner at their previous kitchen haunt, Stork on the Roof.

This night Mum perused the menu while sipping on her martini. Steve and I downed glasses of champagne and we slid into perfectly seared scallops in a cauliflower puree and tomato coulis on arugula, ravioli of butternut squash and mascarpone with truffles shaved atop…Steve and I had the day’s special: ribeye steak with mushrooms, shallots and garlic with frites…Mum ordered the whole sea bass done in the wood oven, stuffed with fennel, lemon and watercress. And on the side? A big friendly bowl of frites…

It was simple, delightful and just right. Jay drew up in the land yacht to take us home at 9:45pm as he promised. And, I realized…Mum had had fish and chips after all.

Culin-oscar-pys - I'm grateful...

I am grateful to cheese.
It's easy I know. But how could I pass over something I eat at least once a day?
Something that comes in so many ways, to be used in so many ways to soothe the soul. So...

Thank you cheese.

To squeaky cheese when we were kids. To grated cheddar on grilled cheese, dipped in ketchup. To pizza's stringy mozzarella. To cream cheese on Montreal bagels. To cheese fondue. To lots of practice making New York cheesecake. To ricotta cheese pancakes with lemon. To swiss cheese on a reuben. To my first warmed, runny brie. To gorgonzola on rare filet mignon.

Who could have guessed bacteria could be so clever?

Much has been written on the supporting cast of bread and wine - but I appreciate them none the less.

GK Chesterton said, "Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

The light is blinking and the music is swelling to drown me out...

And to my Mum. For being the first cheese expert in my life. She has loved cheese her whole life as much as her hips have hated it her whole life.

...and to my future cardiologist. I'll bring the baguette.


There's always time to thank food...if you feel the need, click on the culinoscarpy's link in the right sidebar and add your speech there. Thanks to everyone who's written in...

*Oscar quiz site here
* Swiss cheese shot from here.

4pm Tea&Me Update

I have a gig! What joy! What a week! What, a paycheck?

I am working as a web producer - learning new stuff, working with a great team - and just as they're towing the baby website to the launch pad. Very cool. Indeed.

And this is a place I've worked at before, quite a bit. This is the place that has the deli downstairs - where Nancy threw on the tea kettle for me in the afternoon so it would be dancing water, not just warm water.

So I went down for tea. It was delightful. The whole gang was there. Nancy came out from behind the counter to hug me. Complained that I was getting taller. I told her no, I'd had my hair cut, which was true. Cut right off. Buzzed. But it was like being a prodigal daughter and going home. It was great.

Until I went for the tea. If you remember, back in October, I went on (and on) about the virtues of tea (my way) a little while ago. And one virtue is boiling water. It must be boiling, bubbling, dancing, merry.

I looked at the counter today...no dancing water... they'd "progressed"...it was canned...boxed...trapped in a steal, not-so-boiling container with a red lever thingy...which can mean only one thing: it's hot...not boiling.

Time to bring in my own kettle. Damn.

Flakes

I come by my love of sweets, my version of sanity, honestly.

If you grow up in a British household -
- It means every car ride starts with a bribe, I mean offer, of a hard sweet to suck on, or a polo mint. Only one goal in mind, keep the kids quiet for as long as the journey takes.
- It means that in every dinner second course wasn't the meat following the fish course, it was dessert: pie, cake, bread pudding, trifle, plums and custard.
- It means that with every cuppa comes a biscuit, a scone, a toasted crumpet, a bit of fruitcake, a jam tart (and if you were lucky you got to spoon the jam into the pastry shell), a bit of battenburg cake with its pretty colours, or a raisin filled to busting eccles cake. My favourite cookbook to look at when I was little was Mum's good housekeeping compendium...and the cakes section with all the eye popping ways to ice them. If we can do that, no wonder we made it to the moon.

I don't eat dessert often anymore - I like to think of it as evolution, but I think it's more puritanical than that.

But then there's the British sweet shop. Holy Dinah.

Smarties.
Cadbury's fruit & nut.
Cadbury's whole nut....whole hazelnuts encased in milk chocolate.
Wine gums.
Fruit pastilles.
And something we used to call squirrel gums...does anyone know what they are?

And then there were chocolate Flakes...logs of flaky chocolate that would break all over you. And if you refrigerated them and made them crunchier...heaven is a chocolate flake.

Why I even have teeth is beyond me and my dentist.

I was put into this state of diabetic reverie by my dear Aunt. My mother's sister - who has been an antique dealer, a medieval caterer (the food was contemporary and the recipes ancient - I'm pretty sure that's how it worked), made sandwiches and tea in the back of a van in the 60s as the chief cook for my uncle's band that travelled around Germany, then in the back of a van again when my uncle took up racing vintage cars at racecourses all over England, then at 60 graduated from university with an honours degree for her passion in Tudor history...never go to the Tower of London without her.

Her oldest son, the lovely Andrew and his equally lovely partner Sonia are off in South Africa, windsurfing off Cape Town. Her youngest son, my beloved cousin Joff, is riding around the world on his homemade penny farthing bicycle...He's in Tasmania now and left England almost a year ago. And she's off to Paris she writes, "and yes, we are going to the newly opened and refurbished Orangerie to see the waterlilies as they were meant to be seen when Monet painted them."

She's been reading my blog and is questioning the genetics of my sanity. It should be obvious now, if this is insanity, bring it on. I come by all this honestly.

Anyway, she wanted to contribute - naturally she contributed something with chocolate, cream and other stuff....but the chocolate and cream seem the most important bits to me. So this is from my dear Auntie Mags to you.

Chocolate Crunchie

4 tbsp cocoa
4 tbsp granulated sugar
1 tbsp instant coffee (i.e. coffee granules made up with a little water)
4 oz bread crumbs (yes! breadcrumbs)
4 oz brown sugar
1 pint whipped cream

Mix together everything except the cream and you will end up with a bowl of dryish brown crunchie crumbs.
Layer them into a glass bowl with the cream (needs a bit of skill with a butter knife and a spatula otherwise you can lose the layers) finishing with a top layer of cream.
Grate a bit of chocolate over the top, wrap it in plastic wrap and leave it in the fridge overnight.
It will, like magic, turn itself into a lovely moist, squashy, chocolaty sort of thing and the amazing thing is, nobody seems to recognize the breadcrumbs. (Well, perhaps a Michelin
star chef might, but who needs them!)

The sum of the parts

The Irish have stew.
The French have boeuf bourguignon.
The Italians have spaghetti bolognese.
The Americans have cioppino.
Louisiana gets its own- jambalaya.
The Portuguese have cataplana.
And the Spanish? Have paella.*

Which I love. And love to say them too. Jambalaya, Cataplana, and Paaaaiiiiyaaaaayyaaa.

These are foods you make up as you go along. The stuff that honors bits and pieces. Brings dignity to the leftovers and the lowly. Proof that what works better in nature - cooperation, as opposed to competition - also works better in the pot.

An expression of human ingenuity.

I made paella on Saturday for the first time.

Ole...as they say.

Chicken, chorizo, shrimp, mussels...land and sea blending here on a big platter, in a Toronto kitchen, on a cold February night.

We scraped that platter clean. No leftovers...shucks.

This recipe and picture comes from Cook's Illustrated, via David Leite's Culinaria.

*Canadian cooking struggles to identify itself sometimes. Usually it means that if you add a dash of maple syrup or moose meat a dish ascends to Canadianism. I found chorizo sausage at my local meat vendor made from elk meat! So maybe I did Canuck this up a bit...I'll call this Paella-eh. Enjoy.

7 Days

"This isn't like I imagined it would be in the bathtub."
Dianne Wiest, on winning best actress Oscar for Bullets Over Broadway

7 days until the celebrity bling-blingeing festival of the year.

Who would you thank?

If you've ever felt the need to be grateful to food, and to flirt with the sharp, knife edge of celebrity - then write out your ode to the food you're most grateful for and if there's anyone who introduced it to you, who ranks on your life's A list...then let us know...at the Culin-oscar-pys.

Pithy, witty, gracious, charming, tearful, bileful...we'll take it all...

If you're short on ideas, here's a speech generator I just found...

Update...

SusieJ won the best entry for I Am From...

I am from...

If you need a beautiful read, check this out from SusieJ. This is her entry in the I Am From...contest...

Why are we making ethanol for cars - from grain?

The amount of grain needed to fill one SUV tank with ethanol, will feed one person for one year.

And who said that humans are a curious race - we'll do the right thing once we've exhausted all other possibilities?

Love Apples

How did the French conclude the tomato was the pomme d'amour?

It smacks of more artfulness than scienceness.

How would a Frenchman tease apart the tomato's aphrodisiac tendencies? How would the French know it was the tomato? And not, say, good lighting, copious wine, runny cheese? Or even their reputedly ever ready hormones?

Of course the delectable, sensuous tomato was an ornamental plant for centuries since everyone was sure it was poisonous...

...and the leaves are - as your nose will tell you.

On September 26, 1820, Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson of Salem, N.J., had had it with the tomato as human killer.

Although no one is sure if this is legend, fact or if Johnson was the best publicist ever.

He is said to have marched to the steps of the Salem County court house at 12:15 (he was 15 minutes late) carrying a basketful of tomatoes - or - Lycopersicon Esculentum, wolf peaches (beautiful on the outside, deadly like a wolf on the inside).

He vowed to eat them...and live to make pasta sauce.

His doctor is said to have said, "The foolish colonel will foam and froth at the mouth and double over with appendicitis. All that oxalic acid, in one dose, and you're dead. If the Wolf Peach is too ripe and warmed by the sun, he'll be exposing himself to brain fever. Should he, by some unlikely chance, survive, I must warn him that the skin...will stick to his stomach and cause cancer."

Times don't change. Two thousand came to see it. The fireman's band came to play (a dirge apparently).

He told the crowd of the tomato's illustrious history and held one up to the crowd.

"The time will come when this luscious golden tomato, rich in nutrition, a delight to the eye, a joy to the palate whether fried, baked, broiled or even eaten raw will form the foundation of a great garden industry”.

"To help dispel the tall tales, the fantastic fables that you have been hearing...And to prove to you that it is not poisonous I am going to eat one right now."

And he did. In fact he ate the whole basket.

There's no evidence this event took place...it got embroidered over the years...but here's what I know. If it were true, it had to be September, certainly not mid-February.

Could you imagine if he'd had to eat a basket of tomatoes in the middle of a New Jersey winter? They'd still be stuck in the corner of a room - ornamenting it, rather than a saucepan or salad.

Nothing would say love today more than a beautifully grown, healthy, ripe tomato. Especially in mid February. My tomato buying days are at low ebb right now.

But imagine...a tomato on the vine, warmed in the sun, plucked and offered as a token of love on this Valentine's Day? Who wouldn't hitch a ride on that wagon?

But as in love, how do you know the tomato is what it says it is? It's from where it says it's from? That it doesn't have its roots in different soil/or hydroponic growing material?

There was a story by Karen Platt yesterday in The Tyee, a fascinating online paper from B.C.

That's British Columbia for those of you far away, the western coast of Canada, known also as the wet coast and the left coast...a story about BC Hot House Tomatoes.

It turns out the tomatoes from BC Hot House, which are grown hydroponically and pesticide free (for the most part) are not from B.C. at all - at least not at this time of year. They're grown in affiliated greenhouses in Mexico and imported. Turns out BC Hot House doesn't mean B.C. hot house...it's just a brand name, not a geography name. Not that they ever claim on their packaging that it means B.C.

As Platt suggested, I went to the website and sure enough in the BC Hot House Company FAQ's there's a section that says:

Why are there occasionally products from Mexico or the USA in the grocery store?
In the winter months it is extremely difficult to grow produce due to the lack of light. Light is the biggest component in producing fruits and vegetables (photosynthesis). Additionally, colder growing conditions mean high heating expenses which drastically increase the cost of the product to the consumer.

During this time, BC Hot House aligns itself with quality greenhouse growers in Mexico and the United States. These growers produce product for our customers to our exact standards (grade standards, quality control, food safety, etc.), keeping the product offering consistent with what we produce locally during our growing season. This is done so our customers receive product that is of the highest level on a consistent year round basis.

Our organization is 100% BC Grower owned, all located in the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island. Ownership of the company remains with our BC based growers / shareholders.

I think they mean well. I just think it's a long way to travel (as in mining their website) to find out where your toms are coming from.

Like love, something's wrong if you feel the need to dig for clarity...

Seems appropriate...Valentine's is a big day in the world of private investigators...

Enjoy...hope you get to eat with someone you love today...

Miss Nicky No Happy

My camel's name was Bapu.

He was smaller than the other two standing nearby. And I was taller than both my travelling companions - John, a Kiwi friend whom I met on a bus that ended up in a crash a few weeks before, and Ramdan, our intrepid guide into the desert. But you don't go there as a fashionista.

I was in Rajasthan, India - and further, I was in Jaisalmer on the far western border of India, maybe 50 km from the Pakistan border. What one does in Jaisalmer, apart from dreaming you're in a fairy tale, is go on a camel safari. That's what one does.

So that's how I found myself early on a Monday morning standing between the jeep that got me to the edge of the desert and Bapu. We were driving our own camels, so with a quick lesson they plopped me up in the saddle, and the three of us headed off...into the desert...overnight...with two men...one I barely knew (who had temper tantrums merely buying Indian train tickets), the other I didn't know at all but relied on for everything...did I really do that?

Yes. I enjoyed it.

For the first hour.

Then my conditioning in the car culture set in. That back and forth sway of my dear Bapu, while interesting for women (not so much for men according to John), wears quickly on the lazy, coddled, Western spinal column.

We stopped for lunch under a tree in a small oasis...and hid from the heat of the day with naps on the ground. Camels too.

When we set off we saw women heading our way with water vessels on their heads...wearing the astounding saris they're known for in this region - a region of flat greyness, desert desolation. The women's saris are a defiant contrast - fuschia, saffron, neon pink...astounding.

They were coming from a village of low level flat huts a few kilometers away - getting water for the evening. They refused to look at us.

I lived a life, and they lived another. We were women...but not related by anything but gender.

We entered the dunes near sunset. Ramdan led us to a spot where a lone bush huddled against the western breeze that had whipped up and threw a veil of sand at us, usually when one of us opened our mouths to say something.

He told us to go look at the sunset. And he made us tea. Chai. A tiny fire (with wood he'd brought), a small pot and in went milk, cardamom pods, tea, cloves, cinnamon, ginger, sugar, boiled and served in tin cups.

I walked my tea over to the highest dune and looked at the sun. It was masked by sand in the atmosphere, kind of greenish yellow in the sky. Food and place karma matched once again.

John and I played on the dunes. I did front flips off the steep edges, and landed at the bottom - it was like playing in snow.

Eventually we headed back to Ramdan who had made us a simple dinner of rice and spinach and curry something...don't know, don't care...it was delicious.

Then he fed our camels and bedded them down.

He also laid down a thin blanket of foam under us to lay on. I had brought my sleeping bag liner - it wouldn't get very cold overnight - and sat next to John as the day turned to grey, pink dusk.

That's when I noticed a beetle. I picked it up and threw it away from me. It was about an inch long, lots of legs...you know. Then there was another. And another. And another. And soon there were hundreds...heading, it seemed, toward any body heat they could find. It was like they'd taken elevators up through the sand to the surface as soon as the sun had been beaten for the day.

All of them scurrying toward us.

"I don't suppose this is a good time to tell you I have arachnophobia," said John in a slightly squeaky voice.

"No, John, it isn't," I said while my brain raced for a solution. There simply wasn't one. I was here. There was nothing for miles.

"We're going to have to figure out a way to accept that these things ARE GOING TO CRAWL ON US overnight." I was trying to convince myself more than him.

Ramdan thought we were babies, I'm sure. He leapt over to our side and picked a few beetles off our sleeping bags and hurled them an unimpressive distance (unimpressive to the beetles for sure, 'cause they just got back in the traffic jam heading toward us).

I think it was Carrie Fisher who wrote: Bad reality. Great anecdote.

It was dark now.

I was just sitting there. In my sleeping bag. Knees up to my chin. Willing my eyes to open wider and see further.

Suddenly I felt someone jump. Ramdan yelled for a flashlight. I handed mine over.

A beam of light slashed around where we were sitting.

John jumped up and away from me too. I don't know which direction he'd gone, it was that dark. But he was near Ramdan. They were yelling. At the same time.

Which got me nervous.

I stood up. On the mattress. Not sure what to do.

I was only catching words here and there...but prominent among them was the word snake.

Ah...snakes.

Perfect. This was just going swimmingly.

I said something to the effect, "JohnJohnJohnJohnJohnJohnJohnJohnJohnJohnJohnJohn," and when he noticed, he stopped yammering long enough to say, "Yeah?"

"It's a snake?"

"Yeah."

"John?"

"Yeah?"

"WHERE is the snake?"

Just then the flashlight's beam caught a flash of silvery gray on the sand, heading under the bush behind me. And I tripped ever so speed of lightly toward the two men about 10 feet away.

Ramdan took charge now, grabbing a branch and beating the poor beast to death.

I was so upset. Even though it was definitely poisonous (we found out when we got back the next day). I went and had a closer look. I had had no intention of leaving such a huge footprint on this trip.

Ramdan had felt the snake climbing inside his wrap that he slept in.

I was now standing in the desert. I couldn't sit down, let alone lay down. And all before midnight.

"Miss Nicky no happy?" Ramdan asked.

"No Ramdan. Miss Nicky no happy."

"We move?"

"Yes Ramdan. We move."

We helped him gather stuff up. We climbed back onto our beasts of burden which Ramdan had tethered together, and he led us out of the dunes to the edge of what now felt like civilization.

We recamped. This time I noticed I had the camels at my feet, Ramdan to my left, John to my right and our luggage I lined up along our heads...the snakes were going to have to work their way through the camels and the two men to get to me. Ha.

We settled down. We saw three more camel trains soon after, decamping from the dunes. Away from the snakes and wind and biting sand.

I laid down uneasily. And just looked up to the sky. To the east it brightened. This is what I'd come for. A full moon was rising.

The camels snorted and shifted on their bellies, the wind calmed. And I drifted off...smiling.
Bad reality I kept saying...great anecdote...

A Dinner Guest with taste

"There is no love sincerer than the love of food."

George Bernard Shaw -

Today's Thought du Jour in the Globe and Mail

GBS. One of my peeps...as in - one of the guests I'd invite to the dinner party of all time.

...GBS and Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker (would I have enough booze in the house?)...among others.

Although I guess if the food were good enough, he probably wouldn't contribute a word...

Photo of GBS from here.

A Deeper Shade of Soul

40

The moment I let go of it,
was the moment I got more than I could handle.
The moment I jumped off of it,
was the moment I touched down.
- thank u - alanis morissette

A delightful, intelligent friend, Rebecca, whom I met through one of my three graces (Karen), turns forty this weekend.

And as I passed the fridge today, this clipped quote from the newspaper fluttered in the breeze, begging for attention -

"Forty - sombre anniversary to the hedonist - in seekers after truth like Buddha, Mohammed, Mencius, St. Ignatius, the turning point of their lives."

Cyril Connolly

Our Cyril was a man of letters apparently (I had to look him up - being not a woman of letters so much as a woman of um, verbiage - I just looked it up to be sure it was the right verbiage, and find I'm bridging definitions 1 and 2).

I guess that means Cyril, amongst other things, quipped professionally...

I see him in his leather (apparently left)wing back chair at the club for liberals, oxblood of course, sucking back morosely on a cigar and looking off into the distance the way men of letters do.

The clipping itself I'm sad to say is looking fairly aged - it's lived on my fridge door since I crossed the bridge to invisibility - aka turning 40 - (yes Rebecca, there is a 40-year-old invisibility cloak...most of us who wear it are only visible to each other - no one under 20 can hear or see us, or apparently wants to).

Which brings me back to my least favourite lesson of becoming an adult- which I only hinted at before - learning to suck it up.

This is a lesson that has fought me my whole life. I wanted my parents together as a kid. I wanted my brother to be alive as we grew into adulthood. I wanted nieces and nephews and a big family. I thought I wanted this love, then this love...

And it has taken me this long to maybe get it. Maybe I've got it, maybe I don't. If feels fragile.

It's about learning what you can change, but more importantly learning to live with what you can't.

That feeling that makes my soul itch and twitch.

This is not the same thing as giving up. Not by a long shot.

I think what I mean is that I want what I want - and sometimes life just won't cooperate. And learning to take that with grace is a sign of growing up.

For me, somewhere, I learned to stop pushing back against that feeling of inner frustration. The last time I felt grief, I pushed back against it - determined to just go on and fight it. But at some point, just when I thought I couldn't take the pain anymore, I heard myself say, "Okay that's it. I give. I'm not pushing against it anymore."

And I felt better. My chest eased. I found it effortless to smile.

It was like a turning point - not long before my 40th.

Sometimes you swim against the current, and sometimes you enjoy the float downstream.

I think that's how my simplicity quote came to mean so much to me - the one I posted last week: "Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things."

I wasn't seeking truth as Cyril suggests - at least I didn't think so. But I think as I was turning 40, it found me, a piece of my truth, anyway.

It was a sort of turning point, a definite passage into my "fuck you" years, and a place that got more honest, more compassionate and simpler...and far more beautiful, more loving, and fun.

Steve and I got married when we were both 41. He got the best of me...

So. Happy, happy birthday Rebecca.

My friend Karen, who introduced me to the fortyturningrebecca, turned 40 herself last birthday. We all went to a restaurant that has a private kitchen and dining room at the back - and Karen selected roast lamb...

So here is a recipe I've made a couple of times which is a beautiful rendition of roast lamb, but faster, with clean, simple ingredients that will resuscitate the retired hedonist in anyone (over 40 or not).

Balsamic Lamb Salad - adapted from Donna Hay

650g (21 oz) boneless lamb loin or fillet

1/2 cup (4 fl oz) balsamic vinegar

1/2 cup (4 fl oz) orange juice

2 tbsp sugar

2 tbsp oregano leaves

8 small, waxy potatoes, halved

125 g (4 oz) salad leaves - my favourite combo here is arugula with a few fresh mint leaves.

Trim the lamb and place in a shallow dish.

Combine the balsamic vinegar, orange juice, sugar and oregano and pour over the lamb. Allow the lamb to marinate for 10 minutes on each side.

While the lamb is marinating, boil or steam the potatoes until soft, then rinse under cold water to cool. (Now when I've made this, I've parboiled new potatoes for a few minutes, then put them in a skillet in melted butter on medium high heat. I allowed them to brown on one side, flipped them over, turned the heat to low and allow them to sit there - covered, until dinner was ready. It's like having roasted potatoes without having to fire up the oven - this is an idea courtesy of my friend Andrew.)

Heat a frying pan over high heat. remove the lamb from the marinade and cook the meat in the pan for 3-4 minutes on each side. Place on a plate and cover to keep warm. Add the marinade to the pan and cook for two minutes.

To serve, place the salad greens and potatoes on serving plates. Slice the lamb, place on the salad and spoon over the warm pan juices.

Serves 4.

Aging Cranberries and Older Nuts?

If your cupboard is bearing down, weighted with leftover nuts from the holiday season, this recipe might help you out...it's a sacrifice on your part of course, it means you have to use them in a nut pie and mix in those frozen leftover cranberries in the freezer and create a luscious, sweet, comforting pie that oozez onto your plate and requires sopping up with some fine vanilla ice cream...You are so selfless, a hero...

Mum and I discovered this recipe about 16 years ago in Bon Appetit and have adapted it here and there with varying amounts and types of nuts and with the type of pastry crust.

Its official name is Three-Nut Pie with Cranberries (okay that's kind of utilitarian...how about February Freedom Pie? Winter Walnut Wacation?)

• 1 pie crust (they call for a buttermilk pie crust)
  
• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnuts
  
• 1/2 cup coarsely chopped pecans
  
• 1/2 cup sliced almonds
  
• 3/4 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
  
• 1/2 cup light corn syrup
  
• 1/4 cup plus
  
• 2 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, melted, room temperature
  
• 3 large eggs
  
• 2 tablespoons unsulfured (light) molasses
  
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
  
• 1-1/2 cups cranberries (about 6 ounces)

Preheat oven to 400°F.

Roll out pie crust disk on lightly floured surface to 13-inch-diameter round (about 1/8 inch thick). Roll up dough on rolling pin and transfer to 9-inch-diameter glass pie plate. Gently press into place.

Trim edges of crust, leaving 3/4-inch overhang. Fold overhang under crust so that crust is flush with edge of pie pan. Crimp edges to make decorative border.

Freeze crust until firm, about 15 minutes.

Line pie crust with foil, leaving 3-inch overhang. Fill foil with beans or pie weights. Fold extra foil gently over crust edges.

Bake until crust is set, about 15 minutes. Remove foil and beans and continue baking until crust just begins to color, piercing with toothpick if crust bubbles, about 10 minutes. Cool. Maintain oven temperature.

Meanwhile, combine chopped walnuts, pecans and almonds on cookie sheet. Toast nuts until just golden, about 10 minutes. Cool.

Whisk brown sugar, light corn syrup, butter, eggs, molasses, vanilla extract and salt to blend in bowl. Stir in toasted nuts and cranberries. Pour filling into prepared crust. Bake until center of filling is set, about 45 minutes.

Cool pie completely. Serves 8, but can be enjoyed alone...if necessary...might be necessary.

Organic Roots

In case you missed today's The Ethicurean...here's a story on You Tube about kids creating an organic garden in New Orleans...it's called Small Axe Garden...

It goes on to talk about Edible Schoolyard in New Orleans too...a program started out west of course...but spreading like beautifully composted soil...

Burning $100 Bills

Back at the turn of the 20th century there is the legend of the stock brokers eating their weight in food and then leaning back and lighting their cigars with $100 bills.

The history of excess...thank god those days of arrogance are gone...or not...

In The Guardian today there's a story on a dinner atop a Bangkok hotel this weekend for 15 guests, who aren't so keen to be made public. They paid 1 million Thai Baht, or almost $30,000 USD each, to eat a meal prepared by 6 chefs from around the world, as the Guardian reported, with 18 Michelin stars between them.

These are the days when I'm sure we're not going to make it.

Here's the menu

Crème brûlée of foie gras with Tonga beans by Alain Soliveres (chef) served with 1990 Louis Roederer Cristal

Tartar of Kobe beef with Imperial Beluga caviar and Belons oyster by Antoine Westermann with 1995 Krug Clos du Mesnil

Mousseline of pattes rouges crayfish with morel mushroom infusion by Alain Soliveres with 2000 Corton-Charlemagne, Domaine Jean François Coche-Dury

Tarte Fine with scallops and black truffle by Antoine Westermann with 1996 Le Montrachet, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti

Lobster Osso Buczco by Jean-Michel Lorain with 1985 Romanée-Conti, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti

Ravioli with guinea fowl and burrata cheese, veal reduction by Annie Feolde with 1961 Château Palmer

Saddle of lamb "Léonel" by Marc Meneau with 1959 Château Mouton Rothschild

Sorbet "Dom Pérignon"

Supreme of pigeon en croute with cèpes mushroom sauce and cipollotti by Heinz Winkler with 1961 Château Haut-Brion

Veal cheeks with Périgord truffles by Heinz Winkler with 1955 Château Latour

Imperial gingerbread pyramid with caramel and salted butter ice-cream by Jean-Michel Lorain with 1967 Château d'Yquem

The West Guest

My oft-mentioned friend Lauren wrote me this weekend from the Pacific coast and offered up her own version of a blog and recipe...I thought it was worthy of guest room.

- Also an opportunity to show you again the genius of my sister in law Barb - this is her painting of an apple..

So Foodnut readers, please say hello to Lauren, our first West Guest...

I was reading your blog today and thot I should give you a little something that will undoubtedly soothe your savage (or frozen) breast while stuck in the frigid depths of a Toronto winter. (She's right...windchill today is -26...).

I’ve never really been much for baked apples, but I’ve become a passionate convert. This recipe is smooth, decadent heaven. Funny little story behind this discovery…. As you know, we had a serious cold snap in Vancouver recently with temperatures below zero (what, no sympathy?) and we actually had flocks of robins huddled on lawns and in trees, desperate for food.

I had a Christmas arrangement outside the front door with evergreen bows and holly berries and on the second morning of the cold spell we went outside to walk Max & Coco, we saw that the berry branches had been stripped clean. Robins were clustered in the bushes nearby chirping madly. The local wild birdfeed store suggested I buy apples, not seed, ‘cause robins are into fruit.

So I bought a dozen apples, chopped some up and spread ‘em out on our patio table. "Feast away," I said to the huddled masses.


Well, the only thing that actually feasted was a giant rat which I discovered later that night while reading in bed. I heard a rustling of the metal pan that the apples were in and looked out to find a very plump, very satisfied rat in the middle of the apples, gorging itself (gggggleeck). Needless to say, I let Maxie outside, who happily roused the rat from its gluttony.

So this is what you do with apples when the birds won’t bite and you aren’t into feeding the rats. You scour your cupboards, combine various recipes and pray for divine inspiration.




This is Max...Rat hunter, sailing expert, and biscuit connoisseur. He is one of the smartest dogs I've ever met - I love him to bits. (Nicola)



Goat Cheese-Stuffed Baked Apples

1/3 cup Calvados
½ cup dried cherries
4 ounces French goat cheese, at room temperature
2 tablespoons honey
1/2 teaspoon finely grated lemon peel
4 of your favourite baking apples
3/4 cup organic apple cider
1 tablespoon brown sugar
Finely chopped toasted walnuts
Powdered sugar, garnish

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Gently heat the Calvados over medium heat. Place the dried cherries in a bowl and cover with the warm Calvados. Let sit until plumped – 10 mins or so. Drain, reserving the liquid.

Combine the goat cheese, honey, lemon peel, and 2 teaspoons of the reserved Calvados until smooth. Add the cherries and mix until well blended. Refrigerate until slightly firm, (about 15-20 minutes).

Gently scoop out the stems, cores, and seeds from the apples, leaving the bottoms intact.
Peel the skin from the top inch of the apple. Stand in a baking dish.

Divide the goat cheese mixture into 4 equal portions and stuff into the apples.

In a bowl, whisk together the cider and sugar, and the remaining reserved Calvados, (about 1/4 cup) if desired. Pour over the apples. Bake uncovered until the apples are tender, 45 to 40 minutes, basting every 10 to 15 minutes.

While the apples are baking, toast the walnuts, watching carefully that they don’t burn.

Remove the apples from the oven and let sit for 5 minutes.

Place the apples on plates and spoon the pan juices over them. Sprinkle with the toasted walnuts and powdered sugar and serve immediately.

Note: the walnuts are not optional (okay okay, if you’re allergic, don’t eat ‘em). There is nothing like toasted, chopped walnuts on this dish! Outstanding.

The Culin-Oscar-py

This is one night I wish I smoked and drank.
- Grace Kelly, 1954 Academy Awards









We've belittled, criticized, scoffed at, and been sickened by the excess of celebrity - Our first Oscar party was about foods you're ashamed of, but eat anyway - so now I've thought a twist would be useful...and maybe even inspirational to us all...the foods you're most grateful for and who introduced them to you...

This year I'm turning the Oscar party into the Culinary Oscar Party - now known as the Culinoscarpies 07. (I know that sounds like an unpleasant medical exam...but this is the country where two political parties, the conservatives and the reform party merged and no one caught their new name before it was made public...no one...caught this: the Conservative Reform Alliance Party - I'm not kidding...they pulled it within a day...)

So I'm going to invite any food blogger and reader and friend who wishes to...to write an acceptance speech - thanking whoever they like for the foods they're most grateful for. Recipes encouraged of course.

Steve has already added the first in the race for the best:

"I ate these chocolate chip cookies because, they like me...they really, really like me."

The Oscars are February 25th...

I'm tagging a few favourite people to get started, and some people I think would salivate at the thought of an acceptance speech about food: Annie, Kristen, Julie, Matt, Adam, Melissa (the first meme I replied to as a neophyte blogger), Shauna, of course Kate, and Meg (although she's on holiday this week)...You're all my daily bread (gluten free, of course, Shauna).

*The picture at the top is actually Grace Kelly in a champagne ad...how perfect! It's from here.

Of Lemon Dreams & Groundhog Days

I've been saving this recipe for a while...hoping to make hope work - as in spring arrive...So on the eve of Groundhog Day this is meant as an offering to the gods...

Now for the afficionados out there...I do realize that this picture is of a prairie dog...not a groundhog...but it's worth the diversion..in the name of art...

This was taken by my friend Karen at the stuffed prairie dog museum in Alberta - It is only one of many dioramas they've developed for what I presume they think is their surplus prairie dog population. This was my favourite...but there was one of prairie dogs at the hair salon...Anyway...moving on.

I notice a couple of people this week (like Becks & Posh, and the New York Times) have decided it's time to dream of lemons. And I couldn't agree with them more.

This became a dish we devoured last spring when the local asparagus arrived (Mum found it) and it turned out every single time. Now it hovers near extinction in our house since Steve is now a lacto-gluten free freak. I'm working my way around it...

Lemon Asparagus Fettucine with Shrimp

12 large shrimp peeled and deveined
1 lb asparagus
1 lemon
1 lb fettucine
6 green onions, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup whipping cream
1/3 cup fresh chopped chives
butter
salt & pepper

Consider grilling the shrimp...but also consider not grilling the shrimp...decide what kind of balance you'd like the dish to have...

The recipe calls for slicing the shrimp lengthwise...but I cooked them whole.

Take the woody ends off the asparagus. Peel the stalks, if they're at all tough, but don't if they're young and fresh. Blanch the asparagus for 3-5 minutes. Keep the asparagus water. Put the slightly cooked asparagus in a bowl of ice water then drain them well.

Cut them into 2" lengths. Set them aside.

Grate the rind of one lemon into nice strips and juice it. Set aside.

Cook the fettucine in the asparagus water, add more if you need to. About 8 minutes. Reserve 1/2 cup of the water and drain the fettucine.

In a skillet, melt 2 tbsp of butter over medium heat. Add the green onions, the garlic and salt and pepper. Cook until soft - about 1 minute.

Stir in the cream, the lemon rind and 2tbsp of lemon juice. Bring to a boil.

Add the shrimp and asparagus until shrimp cook through - about 3 minutes.

Toss with the fettucine. Add cooking water if it's too dry.

Stir in the chives.

Enjoy a taste of spring...

Political Wisdom

My friend Lauren just emailed me this. She knows me. She's flown with me. A lot. She's seen my palms sprout fountains as we approach runways.

I happen to think any 8 year old who curries favour with the pilot of any plane she's on has a stellar political future.

Wish I'd thought of that.

hope & optimism

Another flutter from the fridge door:

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

- Vaclav Havel

Tell me the poet/politician/former president of Czechoslovakia wasn't up to his elbows in pastry when he thought of this.

In the fragile world of hope and optimism, my friend Carol shines a beacon. She is a bulwark against my occasionally cynical, always skeptical mind. If you put out positive stuff, positive stuff happens. And it seems to. For her.

I am not so convinced. I am more convinced that the Earth is neutral. That we live. That we die. Fate? Meant to be? Cosmic energy? Reincarnation?

Nope. I doubt it...Let's say I'm open to conversion, because I like the idea of it, the story of it, the potential.

Carol and I usually drown our disagreement in more wine, and get down to eating.

And in this discontent of winter, I can't think of a better recipe to represent hope and optimism and Carol's energy...than her recipe for mac & cheese.

Carol's Mac & Cheese

1 lb. elbow macaroni

1 tbsp butter

1 jalapeno pepper, minced

2 tbsp all-purpose flour

1 cup milk

1 tbsp coarse-grained mustard

1/2 lb. extra-sharp cheddar cheese, grated (and supermarket varieties tend to be too mild, it might be worth heading to your favourite cheese shop)

1/4 cup, parmesan, grated

Cook the macaroni. Drain well. Return to pot and set aside.

In medium saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Saute the jalapeno for 1 minute, then add the flour. Cook for another 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Whisk in the milk and heat to boiling.

Add the mustard and cheeses and stir until smooth.

Pour the cheese sauce over the macaroni and toss.

That should serve 6...

Namaste...

p.s.

My fate met a vacuum hose this morning.

Not five minutes after I posted my inspiration for the day, I sucked it up to the oblivion of a disposable dust bag inside a Dirt Devil...

Adds new meaning to the adult philosophy of "suck it up"...the worst lesson I've had to learn as an adult...

A quote to get me going this week...

This now lives tucked onto a corner of my fridge door - wedged behind the factory decal - I cut it out of the paper a few years ago and occasionally it flutters to the floor and gets retucked behind a bunch of others. It fluttered just the other day...I think I'll post it here...'cause who knows, it might relate it to food.

Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things.

- Constantin Brancusi

Cumin, Sage and Windchill...

I'm in the mood for risotto.
Because it takes patience.
And because it's January.
And this is the month that tries the nerves.
Worse than that, it's a month that is merely a rehearsal for the interminable one that follows it.
These are the days when I sit staring at the weather network's website for Florida, California, the Caribbean...somewhere, anywhere I can fly direct (because I hate flying, so no extra, unnecessary, even-if-they're-scheduled, especially-if-they're-not, landings, thank you)...
Which leads me to expedia and all the seat sales and last minute deals...
Sigh.
But, no deal.

Steve does the baking - and has mastered the art of the gluten-free chocolate chip cookie - and while I indulge, I have been looking for comfort in savoury dishes. To paraphrase Ms. Reichl, comfort me with squash. I console myself that in payment for my tolerance, in transferring my tension to the kitchen, I am bestowed a steaming plate of this perfumey, lovely risotto.

I have this feeling, like a radar ping, that the food world is tired of risotto...that's it's so yesterday's butternut squashable, it's so pomegranate passe, so over-cilantro'd, but...I still admire its subtle texture and tastes. It's like a blanket. So there.

I searched around for risotto recipes and discovered this - Roasted Butternut Squash Risotto on the Gourmet site. It's from 2001. As you may know, I love b/sq...it's in the great vegetable pantheon (even if just the thought of it makes a dear friend heave) or actually vegetable-like fruit pantheon, one of the Three Sisters.

And in this recipe the squash ups its reputation with roasting and then gets a huge kick in the ass from that wonderful partner cumin and also fresh sage. And it's pretty.

I don't cook enough with cumin...

I made this last year for the first time (in fact the first time I had made risotto at all - at new year's, for 8 people, yikes...must have had lots of champagne by then, because risotto had intimidated the hell out of me). I think I was getting cocky because I'd made my own chicken stock and it was clear. Meaning I was fortified, unstoppable: with enough champagne in me and enough clear stock in the vat, I could accomplish anything.

Here's to making it through January and onward...


Roasted Butternut Squash Risotto

3 lb butternut squash
6 cups chicken broth
1 medium onion, chopped
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
1 1/2 cups Arborio rice (9 oz)
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
5 tablespoons finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano (1/2 oz)
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons chopped fresh sage
4 oz arugula or baby spinach (6 cups), stems discarded and leaves very coarsely chopped

Preheat oven to 450°F.

Halve squash lengthwise and seed, then cut crosswise into 1 1/2-inch-wide slices and season with salt. Roast slices, skin side down, in a shallow baking pan in middle of oven until tender and golden, about 50 minutes.
Set aside 6 crescent-shaped squash slices for serving and keep warm. Cut flesh from remaining slices into 1/2-inch pieces, discarding skin.

Start risotto after squash has been roasting 40 minutes...

Bring broth to a simmer and keep at a bare simmer, covered.

Cook onion in butter in a 4-quart heavy pot over moderate heat, stirring, until softened, about 6 minutes. Add rice, garlic, and cumin and cook, stirring, 3 minutes.

Stir in 1/2 cup simmering broth and cook at a strong simmer, stirring frequently, until broth is absorbed. Continue simmering and adding broth 1/2 cup at a time, stirring constantly and letting each addition be absorbed before adding the next, until rice is creamy-looking but still al dente (it should be the consistency of thick soup), about 18 minutes total. (There will be leftover broth.)

Stir in squash pieces, then stir in cheese, salt, sage, and arugula and simmer, stirring, 1 minute. (If necessary, thin risotto with some leftover broth.)

Serve risotto immediately, spooned over reserved squash slices.

Birds & Fungus

We were determined to conquer all the hiking trails of the Monteverde Cloudforest in Costa Rica.

It was our second day and we found ourselves running on the trail – with a bunch of young women all well armed with cameras and binoculars. All you could hear was whispering, rustling clothing, pounding feet on the dirt trail, then the incessant buzzing, like an insect, of autodrives as zoom lenses popped in and out frantically finding the focal length to photograph one of the most sought after birds in birdwatching world: The resplendent quetzal…and here...which I call the whaleshark of the bird watching world.

Now resplendent…okay seems a little egotistical, a little hi falutin’, a little breathy, a little over the top for just a bird. Until you earn the honor of seeing one.

And then you suck in your breath – and your heart beats - and your eyes pierce through the trees like the predatory land mammal you are, and you pull your eyes away from the lens to catch the eyes of someone near you because of that human need to share the spark of discovery, of wonder, of, well, of resplendence.

Do you have any idea how much work it is to be resplendent…all the time?

Neither do I. I’ll bet the black-faced solitaires hate them – considering the song of the solitaire made me stop still every time it echoed through the trees – think of someone caressing the edge of a crystal glass with their wet finger. Resplendence for the ear, not the eye.

We saw a number of quetzals over two days – including a pair making a nest. We were in awe.

These student birdwatchers, almost all female, were in their early 20s and on their "reading week."

What happened to getting your first credit card, flying to a beach, scoping guys at nightclubs, getting hammered on tequila and puking outside while your best friend holds your hair back? Isn't that reading week?

These girls were serious and giddy at the same time. Bearing backpacks filled with all they could want in life:

• the official, weighty, 2” thick bird bible of Costa Rica - check
• another on South America if necessary - check
• and of course, a guide to Migratory Pathway birds too who might be wintering here from North America - check
• cameras, lenses, binocs, mononocs, a raincoat and an energy bar…and notebooks and pencils in order to furiously scribble down the count… check, check, check, check, check check, check and check.

This is not a hobby that will get you laid.

I said when I came back that I’m in serious danger of becoming one of them - a birder…and I fit the cartoon profile: I’m white, I’m female, I have Anglo DNA, I find nightclubs annoying, I don’t care about fashion, I listen to public radio…

...and I could have stayed there for days.

I’m doomed to hunting soon for the finer points and best prices of binoculars and buying a Tilley hat…Okay, I already love Tilley hats.

All this burst like a dam through my mind because I was actually looking up mushrooms.

And the entry in wikiland said mushrooming was like birdwatching. It’s that simple. And they’re probably right.

The only mushroomer I’ve met in the flesh was a cameraman I worked with a couple of times in NYC named Jeff. And I liked him very much. Which put mushrooms in good stead with me – not that they weren’t, I’ve always liked mushrooms - but he opened my eyes to what else is out there – the varieties.

Jeff is calm, erudite, well read, a gourmand, and (gasp) a liberal who sent me an email the first time G.W. Bush was elected, apologizing for what Bush was about to do to the world – he was joking, but it wasn’t so funny after a while…

And he told me about heading up to his weekend place with his family – and going into the woods for a good mushroom scavenge. He loved it. He talked about it with the bloodlust of a hunter…and how you have to be careful or the mushroom can get its own back in the potentially lethal game of hunting or hunted?

So about a month ago, on Christmas Eve I had a soup that reminded me of Jeff's passion…We were enjoying our annual dinner with our wonderful friends Nicole and Jean Paul. Who became even dearer when they installed a fireplace in their living room a couple of years ago.

Note to self: cultivate friendships with people who have fireplaces and pools and maybe summer cottages with wild mushrooms in the nearby woods.

The wild mushroom soup was good. No I mean great. Smooth, creamy, and looked gorgeous with speckles of mushrooms throughout. Oh I just can’t do it justice.

I know it was good because I slurped it back in seconds at a table filled with people who were in awe (or fear) of my gullet’s power…

It’s a nasty habit I have.

If I like your food, I’ll absorb it with focus, silently, like a machine, with my ears closed, and my eyes, mouth and nose completely on overdrive. And I eat with a speed that makes people back away from me carefully, making no sudden moves.

My mum laughed out loud watching a holiday video of me once. I was on a dive boat, eating lunch. The chef on the boat was a recent grad from the CIA and he had made a delicious meal – can’t remember what it was, I was probably hypothermic from the morning dives and working on pure animal instinct.

There I am on the video, in a chair, in the corner, plate on my lap, biting into something, staying inside myself and just nodding. And then biting again. And nodding.

Mum told me I do that all the time. She was wiping tears from her eyes. I had no idea. I’m not so sure it’s that funny. I think it pushes me beyond food lover, certainly bypasses any gourmand status I aspire to, and straight down into the glutton territory.

I am embarrassed by it…when I think about it…when I’m finished what’s on my plate.

I try to eat more slowly. I do.

Fortunately the lights were low at Nic and JP’s table that night so no one could see my cheeks and ears burning bright pink (again my Anglo DNA surges forth).

Nic tells me the Wild Mushroom Soup is from, will wonders never cease, The Silver Palate Cookbook – the cookbook that’s garnered me a couple of favourites that I’ve written about, but which often overwhelms me at the research stage with a tsunami of ingredients until, at the risk of drowning, I just put the book back on the shelf.

But there are gems in there.

My friend Nicole – we both call ourselves Nic – is a smart woman with a good heart, and a wonderful cook, another in my pantheon of instinctive cooks, who makes it all look easy…so if you haven’t tried this concoction and you’re feeling Januaryitis kicking in, get out to the corner vegetable market and root through the mushroom section…and give this a try…it will warm your soul…and, possibly, make you feel resplendent.

Enjoy…

Wild Mushroom Soup
From The Silver Palate Cookbook, p.173
6 to 8 portions

2 ounces dried cepes, morels or chanterelles
¾ cup Madeira wine
8 tbsp (1 stick) sweet butter
2 cups finely chopped yellow onions
2 pounds fresh mushrooms
salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
4 cups chicken stock
1 pint heavy cream (it says optional…har har har)

Rinse the dried mushrooms well in a sieve under cold running water and soak them in the Madeira for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.

Melt the butter in a soup pot. Add the onions and cook, covered, over low heat until they are tender and lightly coloured, about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Trim stems from the fresh mushrooms and save for another use. Wipe caps with a damp cloth and slice thin. Add caps to the soup pot, season to taste with salt and pepper, and cook over low heat, uncovered, stirring frequently, for 15 minutes.

Carefully lift mushrooms from bowl with slotted spoon and transfer to soup pot. Let Madeira settle a moment and then pour carefully into the soup pot, leaving sediment behind.

Add the chicken stock and bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 45 minutes, or until dried mushrooms are very tender.

Strain the soup and transfer the solids to the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Add 1 cup of the liquid and puree until very smooth.

Return puree to the soup pot along with remaining liquid and set over medium heat. Taste, correct seasoning, and thin the soup slightly with heavy cream if it seems too thick. Heat until steaming and serve immediately.

The Mongolian stamp is from this website: http://www.birdtheme.org/thumbnails/thumbnails.php?coid=193

Fascinating Project

I saw a link to this documentary on the 'net - Manny Crisostomo of the Sacramento Bee followed these teenagers for a year through a boarding school for weight loss. If you run your cursor over the photos on the front page, you'll see the before and after...

Not all calories are equal

Wisegeek has posted a comparison of foods at 200 calories...kinda interesting...




thanks to al's morning meeting again for this tip...

Portion Distortion

Found this website thanks to Al's Morning Meeting at the Poynter Institute...

If you can't get the birth rate to climb so as to create more consumers, just increase the portion size and get people to eat more...profits up on all sides: mega food corporations, health organizations, drug companies...they all win...food, yum, the opiate of the masses.

My cynical side. Monday morning. January. Canada.

Deprivation is good for you.

Few nowadays would understand the word: doing without, holding back from indulgence, earning something. I think we all need a dose of deprivation to make us take our world a little less for granted.

You wouldn’t know it today from people’s grocery carts, restaurant bills, credit cards and mortgages. They keep their smiles plastered on, faithful to the destructive path of owning more with less. You can buy happiness, on credit. Nothing down. Pay later.

Even George Bush exhorted us to keep shopping after 911, so the terrorists wouldn’t win.

I try to hang on to those moments when I was doing without – with no choice in the matter – either because of location, or poverty, or by actual choice.

And of course, now I’ve married into a partnership which considers monthly credit card balances the ultimate sin, well, maybe penultimate. (Okay that’s one of those words that people almost always use incorrectly. Along with factoid.)

Before Steve and I got married we spent days talking about finances and budget, coming clean on everything…including my credit line (known to freelancers as unemployment insurance.)

Anyway, he won’t give the bank a dime. He won’t even use their ATM machine because they charge him. He goes to the bank. He deals with a teller. He refuses to add to their bottom line.

When I look at their bottom line I squirm with discomfort. Partly because my mutual funds are filled with bank stocks, so their good bottom line might do my bottom line some good…anyway…
I try to hang on to that feeling of doing without – because it puts in relief all the little things that are good – life has more colour than normal – I get a little giddy – I find myself smiling in my sleep.

Travelling cheap does it. In spades.

Coming up on almost five years ago, I trekked up to the Annapurna Sanctuary in Nepal. Ten days there and back. You can walk up as far as the base camp for the assaults on Annapurna I, which starts at almost 13,345 feet (4095 m). On the way you stay in hostels, eat local food (and after a certain point you pass a stupa which guards the mountains – and no meat is to be eaten from that point on). So dhal baht…all the way, ad nauseum.