Limestone
Often when we talk about how food invokes memories we speak very generally, without specific items and stories in mind. But do you ever find that some dishes and drinks impart a physical nostalgia so strong it takes you right back to that place – much like certain songs cause us to replay past events almost tangibly?
Today I tucked a box of Canada’s own Mighty Leaf Vanilla Bean into my shopping bag. Have you had these teas? They’re really splendid. The vanilla in particular has such a gentle and sweet nose – just like a freshly scraped bean! It’s not cloying and fake like most vanilla teas I’ve steeped.
(As an aside: I’m resolving this new year to walk into a Whole Foods without buying tea. It’s become 2009’s psychological impossibility. Worse addictions exist, but really! I lack restraint around leafy aromatic things.)
Through fourth year university, I almost-lived in a little tea shop on campus called The Tea Room. It was run by our engineers and was a cozy little space that was diligent about keeping a small environmental impact – from completely biodegradable products, to sortable waste receptacles, to a vermi-composter and energy monitor in the shop. They exclusively served Mighty Leaf tea and I drank so much Vanilla Bean that winter.
This afternoon, I returned to the office after lunch and brewed a cup from my new treasure box, and lo – one entire winter right under my skin. It was palpable: the bone-chilling walk from my Princess Street home, the slushy underpath to the limestone building, how nice it felt to strip off layers of parka and mittens and sink into a mug of goodness alongside a hefty dose of theory. Tea Room had the nicest mugs – giant like latte bowls with a sturdy handle, but made of glass so you could perfectly steep the tea. The early-morning shift behind the counter would always gift me a hot water top-up as I extended my mug for just one more hour of reading.
I ached a little, today, remembering those long mornings, afternoons, nights. We romanticize things and forget the long hours of slogging away, writing just one more paper, trying – failing – to figure out what on earth a certain philosopher was trying to say. The weeks of choosing pretty much any activity over sleep, sometimes not by choice. Student life isn’t glamorous and I did my share of sobbing into my mom’s ear over four years.
But so much about that time was right. The flexible schedule and sun-drenched naps. The easy library shifts where I’d help book-seekers find material for papers soon due. The hummus-cucumber-tomato-sprout-on-pumpernickel sandwiches (not toasted, please) that fueled me through eight exam seasons. The overwhelming feeling of promise of a 6:30pm walk to campus, counting my fortune that I would for three hours sit around a table to discuss the finer points of things that happen only in the clouds.
There’s something magical in these forgotten places and what they become in our minds. And I ruminate on this very moment - how I might find it one day, over a cup of tea.
[photo via]
Belly and heart
Someone balked a few days back at my admission that I don’t much care for Rice Krispie Squares. What kind of solemn upbringing did I have, that I find these neat squares of sticky white airy goodness all a bit lacklustre?
My mom made them from time to time in her burgundy plastic bowl, microwaving the butter and marshmallow into a strange-scented congealed heap. She’d add a capful of vanilla and dump in the puffed rice. Stir with her wooden spoon, then smear the mess into a Pyrex dish. Cool. Cut into squares. Stack neatly.
People and recipes are a lot alike. We have our favourites, and what makes one perfect for me might turn you off completely. Some are good, some better, some ho-hum. Now and again, one is so amazing that we cheer in delight and fall off our chairs and triumphantly proclaim that in the history of friends and recipes, none has been better and none will be better, until the very end of time.
Despite good intentions, failures in execution often have more to do with the cook than the ingredients. They’re so subjective, these recipes and friendships. Everything left to temperature and proper salting and distance the ingredients travel. Are today’s tomatoes sweet? Did the pan heat evenly? Have I done enough and been enough for someone whom I love?
Tastes and people change, and what may be the most beautiful dish today becomes another recipe tucked to the back of the mind. As someone who photographs many meals I have a catalogue of past favourites: some long-lived in my repertoire, some fleeting. The entire fall term of my senior year I had a pot of split-pea soup on the stove. I haven’t made it since.
Sometimes, years later, we pick up the phone and call to say hello – but mostly we move on and have new go-tos and standbys and reliable concoctions.
In matters of belly and heart, I figure my steady palate has served me well. When I find things I like, I keep them around. They’re good in a way that I can’t possibly ever let go. People and dishes that offer strange comfort after a dreadful day and reassurance that this friendship, this recipe, this method – it’s failsafe.
So many ways to make Rice Krispie Squares and keep someone’s heart. Lucky enough, we might find a favourite for keeps.
[photo via]
Elastic
“What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.”
- Virginia Woolf
P.S. – Aren’t carnations pretty? They get such a bum rap as the-flower-bought-by-inexperienced-highschool-boyfriends-on-awkward-dates, and it’s a shame. My mom would fill vases upon vases of carnations when I was little, and maybe that’s why I’m soft for them. Gosh, carnations, full of life.
[photo via]
It’s simple
The more I cook, I realize that I like simple flavours and few ingredients best. It occurred to me the other night as I stirred a Greek peasant soup that’s nothing more than some chickpeas and lemon simmered in broth. This weekend visiting Sameer, it was sweet butter lettuce, pomegranate arils and thin apple slices with a wisp of dressing. Most of what I eat is a few things, lovingly combined.
I’ve been cooking for a long time – and when I was younger, I reveled in complexity. I devoured molecular gastronomy and made multi-step brioches and attempted salmon sous-vide in my university kitchen (a very bad idea: salmon is not meant to be sous vide, as it goes). My salmon excepted, this cooking is often beautiful. I wouldn’t be so enamoured with Grant Achatz and Ferran Adrià if I didn’t appreciate complicated food. But in my own kitchen, more and more it’s less and less.
Anyway, tonight I pulled together dinner. A blended soup of broccoli, celery stalks, vegetable broth and black pepper finished with a swirly glug of olive oil. And I’m afraid that’s it. It tasted so good: a little sweet, creamy, warm and with an unusual depth considering its five ingredients and no aromatic base. I wanted to share it right away so you could make it, too. But a recipe for boiled broccoli seems unnecessary, given all the gorgeous and complex things out there to make and eat.
Instead I leave you with this: next time you see a most beautiful head of broccoli, buy it – for me. Slice it up (stems and all) with a stalk or two of celery and cover it with good vegetable stock. Simmer for 10 minutes or so. Test for salt and pepper. Blend. Slurp with some olive oil from a big white mug – and feel the kind of contentedness only soup brings.
As I know it
When Eleni and I were little, we liked the leaves.
All kids like the leaves, I guess, but for two mildly obsessive-compulsive sorts, as sisters come, I find it funny now. That mom and dad would haul rakes to Jackson Park, and we’d rake and rake and rake and jump with abandon into the great piles of leaves (piles taller than us) – and heaven knows what else. We’d keep going, jumping and re-heaping and squealing for Baba to rake faster, to maximize our dwindling minutes. My mom would have her big black camcorder stuck to her eyeball documenting each leap. We’d do this a couple times in the season. Fall brought nothing nicer than the raking and the jumping on repeat.
There’s something about the smell of fallen leaves, right? All that rot and acridity and dampness, but in the nicest way imaginable. And then laying flat, placid for a moment, staring at the sky and its clear grey cast that makes everything prettier, more saturated, incredibly fall-like. Atop my crunchy-soft bed, and I’d tuck away the prettiest unblemished crimson leaves to take home (which, looking on my desk at the neat stack of drying maple leaves, I still do).
Inevitably, little hands became cold, and we’d trudge home weary and wasted and hair full of leaf-crumbs. Sometimes (most of the time) mom would have a thermos of hot chocolate for the walk. I suspect this is what began my affinity for cocoa-based drinks, that sweet-but-not-too-sweet sludge down my throat that tasted so good straight from the slender container.
In my twenty-three years, I’ve seen many hot chocolates. The Carnation variety in packets with little dehydrated marshmallows that melt into the hot liquid; chocolate syrup stirred into warm whole milk; my Papou’s ascetic version – just a spoonful of the best raw cacao in boiled water; and demitasses of drinking chocolate made of melted bars and heavy cream.
But there’s one recipe that I keep around, the kind I sip from a big white mug in the window as the wind blusters the leaves, and take in sitting on a bench in the dog park, something with enough sass and panache that friends declare it the best hot cocoa they’ve ever had. It’s a riff on those thermoses of cocoa and walks home from the park, reminds me of times sprawled in the leaves with my sister.
Childhood as I know it: bundling up and building paper mountains and diving into them without reservation. Knowing there’s someone to carry me home, and someone else to bring warmth and a little sweetness on the way.
Hot cocoa
(makes one big mug)
This takes just a few moments to stir in a mug, but for a really special frothy version, give the mixture a whirl in the blender for about 30 seconds, taking care to let the steam escape.
2Tbsp your best cocoa (see this post for favourites)
1Tbsp brown sugar
2Tbsp plus 1c boiling water
1/4c your favourite milk, warmed (I use almond milk)
wee pinch cayenne pepper (optional)
In a warm mug, stir together well the cocoa, sugar, cayenne and 2Tbsp of water to make a paste. Slowly add the hot water, then top off with warmed milk. Put on mittens and a sturdy coat and meander through these last days of fall, cocoa in hand.
Yes
“I cannot overstate how much a generous spirit contributes to luck. Look at the luckiest people around you, the ones you envy, the ones who seem to have destiny falling habitually into their laps. What are they doing that singles them out? It isn’t dumb luck if it happens repeatedly. If they’re anything like the fortunate people I know, they’re prepared, they’re always working at their craft, they’re alert, they involve their friends in their work, and they tend to make others feel lucky to be around them.”
- Twyla Tharp
Yes, yes, yes.
We all know someone who fits the above, no? Who lives generously, honestly, intentionally. I spend an awful lot of time thinking on manifestos, and the way I want to live this life, how to be gracious and kind and useful. And these words just make sense.
It resonates because it’s a way to think about being my best self that I hadn’t yet considered. To be as lucky as I can not through dumb force, but through preparation and care; through generosity and purposefulness; and sharing in it with others who make me better by their own self-betterment, their so-called luck.
Habitual
Here I go generalizing, but as I see it we humans fall pretty nicely into two groups. There are the thrill-seekers, those go-as-they-please vagabonds of earth, who like change, adventure, newness. Others are content with routine and find comfort in habit – making the bed, the walk to work, eating the same bowl of salad 6 nights running - because it’s delicious (the salad, life) so why change?
I’m one of those boring habitual people. Unsurprisingly, as I came here today to declare my love for brussels sprouts, I realized I had already done so last winter, as I probably do every year. The story goes that brussels sprouts usually appear first at Thanksgiving dinner, boiled on my Gran’s table. She without fail overcooks them, and they turn a distinctive shade of puce (but are delicious nonetheless). They keep appearing, stowaways in my grocery basket, until mid-December or so when their season ends. Boiling is just fine, and I’ve made Molly’s cream-braised variety to a collective sigh of appreciation, but most of the time, habitually, I roast. You’ll find me tucked into the couch, bowl in my lap, munching happily.
And that’s the thing.
One of my most-loved poets, Mary Oliver, wrote my most-loved poem, The Summer Day. I find myself reciting her lines over in my head lately, again and again. I’ve always liked the poem, how it vaults the everyday to the extraordinary, how she writes of being idle and blessed and without answers. And at the end, how she asks me what I will do, with my wild and precious life.
It’s nice to romanticize my faults and poke gentle fun, couch shortcomings in pretty words, but the truth is: sometimes I worry. I worry that my aversion to change, my love of stability and this simple, contended life holds me back from everything else. In introspective times, I wonder if years of gentle contentedness lead to great unhappiness. I see people glaze-eyed and anywhere-but-here in the streets, and I fear the day that I don’t greet the squirrels and breath sweet air deep and feel joy in the constant, my ordinary life.
Then I think that I might jump. Higher, toward something else. And what then?
[photo via]
Marigold
Confession: my sister has been dating an Indian fellow for some time now, and I can’t help but hope they marry for (among other reasons!) the dazzling marigold garlands that will engulf their celebration. (Eleni, yes?)
This in mind because my breath caught in my throat at the sight of this Big Picture image from the recent Diwali Festival. The most beautiful moment: a schoolgirl lost in a sunshine field. I think if exuberance and joy have a colour, it must be marigold orange.
[Images Just right
This has been an unusual start to fall. My mind should be full of warm thoughts of braising, stirring and roasting – at long last in this chilly weather. But all I can think about is my next bowl of salad.
Funny, isn’t it, how our bodies ask for nourishment? I had a summer of excess, plain and simple. Between vacation, work lunches, dinners out, family barbeques (and frequent stops for ice cream along the way) my mostly plant-based eating was replaced with butter free-flowing through my veins.
And so I keep eating salad. It’s surely not a concerted effort on my part. My head wants to braise leeks and roast sweet potatoes and stir gigantic pots of soup. But when I reach for the kale – with every intent of simmering it gently – it ends up in thin ribbons in the salad bowl. Stewed cranberries are made into a tangy vinaigrette. Apples never find their way into crumbles. My shopping basket teems with frilly heads of lettuce.
Which is how this salad came to be. It’s – I dare say – the perfect mid-fall meal. Sweet orange segments, creamy avocado and thinly sliced macintosh apples get lightly dressed in a salt-and-pepper lime vinaigrette. It’s hearty, refreshing, savoury-sweet and just right for lunch when soup seems depressing.
Mid-fall salad
(lunch for one)
People find the idea of supreming a piece of citrus fruit to be so daunting. Likely this is a reaction to the intimidating French name, because it’s a snap. The key tool is a really sharp knife (I’d say paring knife, but I actually I love my santoku for this job.) The left-over bits and baubles around the supremes can be used for juice, or even eaten as-is.
Ingredients
1/2 soft, ripe avocado, sliced
1 medium orange, supremed
1/2 macintosh apple, thinly sliced
juice of half a lime
sea salt, cracked pepper
Gently combine all ingredients except salt and pepper. Add seasonings a pinch at a time and taste, until desire level of sweet-salty contrast is reached.
Alice
I’m a glossy cookbook kind of gal. Partly because I’m the sort of cook who never follows recipes, and partly because I’m a five-year-old at heart who won’t give up her picture books. I see cookbooks as stories told through pretty photos, better still if said photos are interspersed with thoughtful prose and solid recipes, something Tessa Kiros does so very well.
Alice Waters’ The Art of Simple Food (2007, Clarkson Potter) was not a cookbook I ever intended to bring home, pictureless and manual-like it is, with only the occasional illustration. But it sat waiting at the library having been placed in queue at some point, probably after I was lured in by its calm buttercup exterior. It waited, wedged on my bookshelf between this and this - each infinitely more exciting with their photos and styling and stories.
On a lark, I picked up Waters one night before bed, winding down with some tea, and flipped haphazardly to the ‘Broth and Soup’ section. To be honest: I didn’t expect much at all. But a couple pages later, Alice had me with her simple instructive chapters and intelligently-crafted recipes. I finished off soups, flipped ahead to ‘Pasta and Polenta’ and ultimately just started from the beginning of her story.
I want to linger some on her recipes. They really are smart. After years of compulsive cookbook reading, I’ve become quite picky about what makes an excellent recipe. From ingredients to method, a good recipe is infused with its author, be it through quirky prose, a friendly tone, or neat precision. A good recipe doesn’t skimp on details, but it doesn’t read like a technical guide. It’s been tested until it’s perfect (seems obvious, but so many cookbooks publish these days with unrefined, half-formed recipes and methods). It tells a story. Waters does an especially wonderful job, helping the reader understand how and why ingredients work together to make good things.
When I spotted two bunches of delicate creamy-orange carrots at the market, Alice’s carrot soup came to mind. I’d long since returned the cookbook to the library, but I didn’t need a recipe: a quick meld of butter, carrots, onion, and salt would do. No homemade stock or fancy pots, just a knife, cutting board and autumn’s best carrots. Thirty minutes of methodical chopping and stirring later, I had a sweet-scented apartment and warm meal fit for a chilly night.
Carrot Soup
(adapted from Alice Waters, makes two dinner-size bowls)
This soup can be pureed to a velvety consistency, but there’s something special and simple about the whole carrot pieces, swimming in broth, sinking like silk under the teeth. The carrots really are the shining star here, so make sure they’re just-picked, with bright green tops and vibrant orange flesh.
Ingredients
4Tbsp unsalted butter
2 cooking onions, thinly sliced
6-8c fresh-as-can-be carrots, thinly sliced (it’s okay to leave the skin on if the carrots are tender and mild – taste one!)
6c vegetable broth (I use Whole Foods’ 365 Organic), warmed
sea or kosher salt to taste
optional mix-ins, to serve: chives, cilantro, Greek yogurt
In a heavy-bottom saucepan over medium-low heat, gently melt the butter. Add the sliced onions and cook until tender and translucent, about 10 minutes. Add the sliced carrots and season liberally with salt. Cook for about 5 minutes then add the vegetable broth. Increase heat to high and boil for a couple minutes, then reduce the heat to medium-low. Simmer for about 30 minutes. The carrots should be meltingly tender. Taste for salt and ladle into warmed bowls. (You may choose to puree the soup at this point for a more refined bowl.)
Serve with a crack of black pepper, or garnish with chives or cilantro or a dollop of Greek yogurt.
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