2010
Recipes for a life take many forms, concocted from the stories we share with the people we love. I’m lucky in this life that I am able to share my stories and to read yours. 2010 was filled with so many good ones, wasn’t it? Below I’ve collected some of the best from 2010 – in my estimation – of my own and as told by others.
Thank you for reading along another year.
Twelve things I wrote in 2010
Giants (January)
But in this place, this moment – they are just right. The breeze is powerful and salty and full of clay-earth. It blows the curtains like great flowery sails above my head. I stare at the ceiling, listening to the clock that accompanies me through each siesta.
Wooden Spoons (February)
Theorists discuss lofty things in abstract terms, but most arguments root in a few key themes: the good, justice, fairness, equality. Call my comparison a stretch, but I think cooking does the same basic thing.
Genes (March)
Dad visits me in Toronto for the day and lets himself into the apartment to leave a three-litre jar of olives on the counter. He always has an array of garlicky Greek spreads waiting when I get off the train, be damned if it’s two in the morning. One memorable evening, he traveled the entire city of Windsor on a midnight fudge run.
Pools (April)
My hair is in the half-wet state that happens when the sun is so hot it evaporates everything but laughter and the quiet in-between. He clicks and the camera’s aperture whooshes. And I take in his pale skin, and then the blindingly bright turquoise water, and then the dangling grey camera string and I push it aside out of the next shot – one of many in the mental stack of photos I flip through.
Others (April)
Here’s what time has taught me: introversion is a selfish excuse for solitude. Being alone is okay. But it’s not okay for me to use a tidy label to hide from others.
Ritual (May)
Mom carefully unwrapped her flowers, trimmed the ends. Carnations are hardy, so she’d pick through last week’s vases. She’d keep what was good, add the new blooms, stir together fresh water and food. All into the same vases on the same shelves and side tables. It was a sourdough starter that she fed each Friday, of pink and red and white and purple-flecked flowers.
Tart (August)
Real Simple is like that friend whose perfectly edited life you’d love to hate, but can’t – because she really is just that fabulous. And don’t we all crop the messy bits from our photographs? Still, reading this magazine always leads to a loaded internal dialogue about how we frame our lives for one-another.
Seasons (August)
Both arrive and leave before you have chance to notice. You never imagine that all this is going to change soon. Day by day it’s the same, and then you wake and it’s all gone and different and some pieces look familiar, but mostly not.
Water (September)
I made sense of this last night, finally, as I listened. “Cooking is easy!” I say. But I’m wrong. To someone who has never turned on a burner, or bought fresh produce, or learned the basics of storing food, or honed proper knife skills – cooking is hard.
Mantras (October)
I eat these little fish and I think of all the wonderful things – people, places, foods, experiences – that we never get to know because they are gross, or not our type, or out of the norm. As I am remembering anchovies, I am remembering joys that are gained through an open heart and willingness to be less dogmatic about who I am and what I like.
Staples (October)
Was it hypocrisy that my only-from-scratch mom made boxed potatoes – with a Wonderbread crouton topping, no less? It might have been. I wasn’t complaining. It was one of my favourite things to eat, though the dehydrated science-project potatoes were off-putting in theory.
Self-help (December)
No doubt I learn many things in my literary travels, but it’s odd to treat self improvement and cooking as bedside table fiction. I only learn so much by reading, making the occasional note and filing away the good parts. The space in my brain and black notebook that hosts tips for meaningful mornings and ways to cook fish has become awfully crowded.
Twelve things I read in 2010
Why are you so terribly disappointing? by Mark Morford, SFGate
Maybe this, then, is the ultimate upshot of our endless, self-wrought swirl of sour disappointment, of never having our impossible needs fully met, of constantly being thwarted in our desire to have the world revolve around our exact set of specifications and desires.
Here, There and Back Again by Luisa Weiss, The Wednesday Chef
One day I saw a big, beautiful family eating a simple lunch by the beach. I used to be too shy to do anything but stare sort of secretively at this kind of family, hoping no one would notice me looking at them. Now I think life is too fleeting to keep things like that to myself, so I told them how lovely they were and they broke into delighted laughter, all of them. I wish you could have heard it. I wish I could hear it again.
Roger Ebert: the Essential Man by Chris Jones, Esquire
His last food was probably nothing special, except that it was: hot soup in a brown plastic bowl; maybe some oatmeal; perhaps a saltine or some canned peaches. His last drink? Water, most likely, but maybe juice, again slurped out of plastic with the tinfoil lid peeled back. The last thing he said? Ebert thinks about it for a few moments, and then his eyes go wide behind his glasses, and he looks out into space in case the answer is floating in the air somewhere. It isn’t.
The Art of Lardee by Inhae, My Milk Toof
“Lardee, that’s not how you paint a fish.”
Is food the new sex? by Mary Eberstadt, Hoover Institution at Stanford
Now imagine one possible counterpart to Betty today, her 30-year-old granddaughter Jennifer. Jennifer has almost no cans or jars in her cupboard. She has no children or husband or live-in boyfriend either, which is why her kitchen table on most nights features a laptop and goes unset. Yet interestingly enough, despite the lack of ceremony at the table, Jennifer pays far more attention to food, and feels far more strongly in her convictions about it, than anyone she knows from Betty’s time.
There is Enough by Sarah McColl, Pink of Perfection
The and that’s okay part was what I needed to hear. There’s room for all of us. There’s enough success, money, and love to go around. There is no scarcity, really, unless we choose to look at life through that lens. One person’s success doesn’t take away from our own; someone else’s triumph doesn’t mean less triumph for us. There’s enough for everybody.
The New York Diet: Jeffrey Steingarten Cooks Goat Sous-Vide, Disdains Brooklyn Boosterism edited by Helen Rosner
So you get to the Greenmarket, and if you haven’t ordered ahead of time, people are sold out? That’s wrong! I happen not to be a morning person, but I deserve to eat as much as a morning person deserves to eat. When you prick us, do we not bleed? Seriously.
What Grant Achatz Saw at El Bulli by Grant Achatz, The New York Times’ Diner’s Journal
People often ask me if the style of cooking he pioneered is a trend, fad or flash in the pan. My belief is that every 15 to 20 years, with an obvious bell curve of energy, most professions change. Technology, fine arts, design and yes, cooking, follow the same predictable pattern. A visionary creates the framework for a new genre, others follow and execute, and the residual effects remain, embedded in the cloth of the craft.
In Her Defense, I’m Sure the Moose had it Coming by Aaron Sorkin, The Huffington Post
And you didn’t just do it for fun and you didn’t just do it for money. That was the first moose ever murdered for political gain. You knew there’d be a protest from PETA and you knew that would be an opportunity to hate on some people, you witless bully. What a uniter you’d be — bringing the right together with the far right.
Learning Who You Are Through What You Eat by Michele Kayal, NPR’s Kitchen Window
When she’s not looking, I do surreptitious quality control, re-rolling her grape leaves the way my grandmother used to re-roll mine, until my fingers became so deft, so full of memory that I could no longer recall ever learning it. She rolls, I re-roll, the Arabic weaves in and out of the accented English.
What Biggie Smalls’ Lyrics Taught Me About Food by Francis Lam, Salon
He was bragging about being harder than you, tougher than you, even when he was a child in school. But he was still a child. He loved his chocolate milk. He remembers the flavor of his favorite cookies. The Notorious B.I.G., this spinner of murder rhymes and playboy fantasies, made himself vulnerable.
There is a Horse in the Apple Store by Frank Chimero, frankchimero.com
THERE IS A LITTLE PONY IN THE APPLE STORE. What the hell? A beautiful little pony, with a flowing mane, the likes of which my sister would have killed to get for Christmas when she was 7 or 8. And, NOONE is looking at this thing.
Already, impossibly, almost 2011. The happiest of new years to you.
Previous years-in-review on anthimeria.com
Self-help
I spend a lot of time in the self-help section of my local bookstore.
I’d rather tell you I spend that time in the cooking section. But that’s a lie, because I thumb through many more self-help hardcovers than I do cookbooks – and I read a lot of cookbooks. I’m just a self-improvement junkie.
Or rather, I’m a reading-about-self-improvement junkie.
In my purse is a black leather-bound notebook lined with little passages and tips for a better me that I’ve transcribed. Current selections: find a prominent place to display aspirational images, catnap on weekends, connect with an old friend for coffee each month, professionally sharpen my knives with the seasons, eat only the very best bread.
Likewise, I keep a thick folio of recipes that I’ve meticulously cut from magazines and categorized by type over the years. These are only the very best recipes, I tell myself, the ones I know I will make. Ask me how many I’ve tried. (None.) But I do feel accomplished as I file and index new additions each month.
There’s a pattern. Doesn’t matter if it’s a self-help book or a cookbook or classical literature. I’m an equal-opportunity reader. I treat all of my books like a good piece of fiction. Just as I’m not putting Anna Karenina into action (er, wisely?) I’m not starting my own Happiness Project or cooking up the Moroccan-spiced cod on page 73.
No doubt I learn many things in my literary travels, but it’s odd to treat self improvement and cooking as bedside table fiction. I only learn so much by reading, making the occasional note and filing away the good parts. The space in my brain and black notebook that hosts tips for meaningful mornings and ways to cook fish has become awfully crowded.
So this morning I yanked from my bookshelf an old favourite cookbook-as-novel: Tessa Kiros’ Apples for Jam. Kiros is also my favourite cookbook author. I ordered her beautiful book the day it came out, back in June 2006. When it arrived, I bookmarked a single recipe – a shortbread-based jam sandwich cookie that jumped from the page. It is baked in one great slab, pieces sliced off as needed for snacking. It was then and still is now, my platonic cookie. The version I’ve created is sweet, buttery, dotted with walnuts, scented with orange zest and crammed full of homemade cranberry-raspberry jam. The stuff of great fiction.
Four years later, I’ve used a cookbook as intended: as a book from which to cook. I can’t promise I’ll stop roaming the self-help aisle anytime soon, but if these cookies are any indication, maybe I should put more ideas-filed-away-for-later into regular rotation.
Jam slice cookies
Ingredients
100g (3.5oz) unsalted butter, softened
100g (3.5oz) white sugar
1tsp finely grated orange zest
200g (7oz, 1 -2/3 c) all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 medium egg, lightly beaten
40g (scant 1/3 c) finely chopped walnuts
200g (7oz, 2/3c) jam of your choice – I used homemade cranberry-raspberry – recipe follows
Equipment
1 12×16 inch (30x40cm) baking tray
parchment paper
large bowl
Method
In bowl, work together softened butter and sugar with a fork to an even consistency. Incorporate orange zest. Add flour and baking powder by mashing in with fork until an even, mealy texture is achieved. The mixture won’t stick together at this point. Incorporate the egg with your fork until the texture feels like and resembles soft, damp sand. Add the walnuts, stirring just to combine. Press together with your hands into a compact, smooth ball. This is really easy-to-handle dough – it should come together with little fuss and with none sticking to your hands or the bowl. If it does stick, the dough is too damp. Add flour by half-tablespoons until dough is no longer sticky. Divide into two equal-sized balls, wrap in cling film and refrigerate at least 30 minutes until firm enough to roll.
30 minutes before you start rolling the dough, preheat oven to 325 degrees F (170 degrees C). Line your baking pan with parchment paper.
Right on the parchment-lined pan, roll out the first dough round until it’s roughly rectangular in shape and 2-3mm thick. Use flour as needed so the dough doesn’t stick. Try to ensure an even thickness – the middle will tend to be thicker than the sides, which you can easily fix by pressing out the centre of the dough with your fingertips, then continuing to roll. Note that the dough rectangle will not quite be as large as your pan (see photo).
Spread the jam over the dough right to the edges, as you would on a piece of toast. On a second piece of parchment, roll the other half of the dough, using the method above. When this piece is about the same size and shape as the first, roll loosely over your rolling pin and gently unfold over the jam-spread dough. If it doesn’t line up exactly, not to worry. Just cut away excess pieces and patchwork assemble until the jam is mostly covered. The cookies’ taste will not suffer!
Bake slab for about 15 minutes, until the edges just start to go golden. Since it’s a shorbread, you don’t want it too much darker. Remove from the oven and cool until just warm to the touch. Lift from the tray to a cutting board. At this point, you can cut into shapes with a cookie cutter or slice into squares with a sharp knife. I prefered to just leave the slab intact, and slice off pieces as needed (i.e. bits shaved secretly as I walk to and from the kitchen…)
These will keep in a biscuit tin in a cool place for about five days.
(Adapted from Tessa Kiros’ Jam Shortbread, makes one 8×10 inch slab.)
Christmas jam (raspberry-cranberry jam)
I love this jam because it’s like a bite of Christmas and is made even better paired with the walnuts and orange in the shortbread base. I keep the seeds in, but if you prefer a smooth jam, pass the warm (not hot) mixture through a fine sieve.
Ingredients
1c red raspberries
1c cranberries, picked over
5 Tbsp (125g) white sugar
1 Tbsp (15mL) water
Equipment
1 medium saucepan, preferably one with high sides to prevent splattering
1 spatula
Method
In saucepan, combine cranberries, sugar and water. Cook over high heat, stirring frequently and scraping down sides, for about 10 minutes, until mostly cooked down and glossy. Reduce heat to medium and add raspberries. Continue to cook, stirring frequently, until the raspberries break down, about 5 minutes. When it’s ready to remove from the heat, the mixture should be a very loose jam consistency. It will firm up as it cools. If using the same day for shortbread filling, let sit at room temperature until ready to assemble. If using as jam, store using a sterile canning or freezing method.
Makes two-thirds of a cup.
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