Heave and smile
I didn’t want to write anything about this at all and I’ve deleted the entry twice now. It feels a bit false and voyeuristic to mourn celebrity.
This morning, I read a piece by Penelope Trunk where she writes of her fascination with suicide. I am not fascinated with suicide. I say, perhaps simply, that we should live until we don’t and not go at our own hands. But Trunk writes poignantly and straightforwardly, she almost convinces me:
It’s true. I am fascinated by suicide: Why don’t more people kill themselves? Life is very hard. And there is no sane reason to believe it will, at some point, get easier. So why do we keep going? I don’t know. This fascinates me.
This morning, Alexander McQueen killed himself.
McQueen was my first encounter with couture – with fashion, really. His art had whimsy and it was curious. It was maniacal and fantastic and kind of strange, but never just because. His clothes made me heave and smile in one go. At his best he took me somewhere else to think and stare at my too-plain shoes.
I’m not fascinated, but I want to understand. Maybe they’re the same thing, in the end.
[all images via]
Wooden spoons
Lately I’ve been thinking about why I love to cook.
One week ago, I was waiting for a streetcar on Dundas West on what was surely the coldest and windiest Toronto night this winter. Meredith and I had enjoyed dinner at Cafe 668. She said seemingly out of nowhere, I want to come over and watch you cook one of these days. At the time I thought it was just the funniest statement I’d ever heard. We agreed to a Saturday in the kitchen sometime soon.
But lately I’ve been thinking about why I love to cook. And what Mere said actually makes a lot of sense in this context. We each hold the same wooden spoon differently. Cooking teaches other people things besides how we form or follow a recipe – about who we are, and also about who they are.
I’m one of those funny personalities who is seduced equally by the tangible and the ephemeral, the scientific and the creative, reality and the clouds. Really: I don’t see these as dichotomies at all. Cooking, more than most things, brings my world of contrast-but-not-really to one safe place. There’s a line I like by British author Jeanette Winterson: Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough. The basic, sturdy comfort of a knife shifts my mind out from reality ever-so-slightly as I methodically slice. There are moments: facing an intimidating green wall of lettuces and kale-bunches, rinsing carrots and hearing the whoosh of my knife through their spines, ladling soup into a sturdy bowl. These pull my pin.
Cooking also uses a part of my mind that yanked me – quite suddenly – from science to political theory. 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. While it takes an analytical bent and well-used palate to figure out why certain things taste good together, ultimately food is grounded in fundamentals: how do sweet, salty, bitter and sour relate in a dish? Then we layer on other questions. Should textures complement one-another or contrast? Hot or cold, satiating or refreshing? Weight, size, shape, texture, aroma, mouth-feel. The variables at play in a dish – before we even include taste buds – can make the head swim, if I bring them to the front of my mind.
But I don’t break out a matrix and calculator to make multiple permutations of pasta sauce. Mostly I just think about what I want to cook, what I have to work with, and I gather some ingredients and a rough method in my head. I stir and taste and add and stir some more until the dish in my mind and the dish in front of me match up. Everything in the previous paragraph is at work, subconsciously, in cooking, though I rarely entertain it.
I can’t discount the emotional and subjective parts of cooking and eating and feeding one-another that make it so right. To prepare a meal for someone is to care for that person. There’s no better feeling than contented sighs of pleasure from someone you’ve fed, of being asked to please pass the salt. I say it so often: I find community in breaking bread and sharing my table. One day (not today, but one day) I’ll tell you the story of why I became a vegetarian. I’ll tell you about how it splintered a narrative that has little to do with food and everything to do with history and family and has changed many stories along the way. Saying I will not eat this has initiated some difficult conversations about far more than consumption.
Why I love to cook is all these things. The theory but the tangibleness, the figuring out of up-in-my-head things by proxy of sight, taste, smell. The stories it welcomes. In my mind, when I hand each of you a pan, a wooden spoon, a tomato and some salt, the experiences and results are wild and varied. Cooking lets us see these things.
[photo, with thanks, via]
Intentional
Intentional is my favourite word. Not terribly sexy or exciting, I’m afraid. But for a long time now, I’ve relished it. How it sounds and how it looks and how it’s a word used – fittingly – with certain purposefulness.
In 2009, Sameer and a few others picked a word for their year. I quite liked this idea, of choosing some term of reference for a fresh slate of days. Years (and time for that matter) are a curious thing for me – the notion of crossing one 365-day threshold to a next. It’s a concept that I’ve never really been able to wrap my in-the-clouds head around.
As years go, my 2009 was a bit of a blur. Of my own making, and I am gradually working that out. I told a good friend today that I don’t really remember March through June of last year, and I’m still so unsettled at the thought. But as I try to figure out why, I understand that losing my intentionality was part of my self-centred morose. As a rule, I am a quietly contented sort of person. I believe we play a hand in this little world we create on our little piece of planet, for better and worse. Sadness and confusion are not intentional. They are not something with which I’d try to paint my days.
Many years ago, I pulled a Dorothy Parker quote from a Real Simple issue as I sat on the long train to Windsor from Kingston – It’s not the tragedies that kill us, it’s the messes. (The editors were referring to ironing, not life, but what have you.) Life throws some really crappy things at us, some unexpected things. But the tragedies, I realize more and more, are not the instances in which we lose ourselves. It’s the creep, over time, the unintended complacency. The little messes that we haphazardly clean up and leave to sort out tomorrow. That’s what Dorothy had in mind, I imagine, as opposed to Real Simple’s untidy laundry closet.
My 2010 will be intentional.
In my actions, toward my family and friends, with my career, when I write and cook and create – and mainly in this deep-seated yearning I’ve always had to learn and explore and find a constant place of contentedness. A struggle to be meaningful and present sweeps me away sometimes. I worry I don’t have it in me to be at peace with me, whoever she is, if that makes any sense at all. I don’t think the need to be better will ever get easier, but I hope with each year I more willingly embrace this elemental shell I’ve inherited.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s languageAnd next year’s words await another voice.And to make an end is to make a beginning.
With this new year – this end and this beginning – I regain my intentionality: something, I’m afraid, that I unconsciously swept away without realizing at all.
2009
When people find this little corner, often they say after a cursory read “oh, I didn’t know you keep a food blog!” And yes, I have what has morphed into a food blog of sorts.
That is to say, I like to remember things and so many of my memories in mind and heart are about food, or at least I translate them that way. I grew up in a restaurant with a family that shares stories through meals and by feeding one-another. And I live a life that centres around my stove and recipes and others who share their worlds through kitchen tables. There’s joy and sanctity in breaking bread as there is with no other activity.
Mostly, I write a blog about life – and often food creeps in – as I try to figure out this day, this perfect day, the only day I know.
Thanks for reading along.
Twelve things I wrote in 2009
And these photographs keep us alive (January)
The last line, though, is the most interesting; that the pain of leaving is appeased by the beautiful. And it gets me to thinking about human beings as gatherers: of places and things and people.
Reconciliation with the angels (February)
There isn’t any reason for me to even wrestle with this. I will heal, as we humans do – I will placate the screaming angel on my shoulder.
A stranger and airport sounds and stranger things have happened (February)
But to destroy the notion of you, an ocean away, slipping in and out of my thoughts? I’ve always been one to romanticize things.
Oregano and olive trees (March)
It comes as a surprise that my heart can be so heavy for my vacation home, that I am able to smell the thyme and salt-water midnight air waiting for the ferry – that I conjure up the welcome death-dry Athenian heat in my bones.
Twenty-three (March)
I anticipate that I will find his words tired or trite, but still they stir me: “With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world…”
But the rhubarb (June)
There she was, propped up in her flowery pink bed, ubiquitous crochet needles alternating in her shaky arthritic hands with the equally ubiquitous chain of cigarettes and china tea cup rattling on its saucer.
Being alone (July)
I like to see movies alone, and lunch as one in a pretty dress, and sit in the park on a blanket making up love stories for the squirrels. I’m a lot like my little self, actually, who went about things deliberately and quietly and alone.
Spinning (August)
The night is alive and I am alive and my heart is filled and it is so beautiful.
Licorice scented (September)
The details are blurred, but I eventually sweet talked a shot out of my Papou an drank it down like an especially potent juice…
Habitual (October)
Here I go generalizing, but as I see it we humans fall pretty nicely into two groups.
As I know it (November)
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.
Belly and heart (December)
We 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…
Twelve things I read in 2009
The Price of Tomatoes by Barry Estabrook, Gourmet (March)
The kitchen consisted of a table, four plastic chairs, an apartment-size stove, a sink with a dripping faucet, and a rusty refrigerator whose door wouldn’t close.
Release and The Return by Sameer Vasta, I Tell Stories (April & August)
I came home from work last night to find a small UPS package waiting for me at my apartment. In it, a plush toy and a two-page letter.
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Stuart McMillen (May)
In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
The Scandal of Food Waste by Tristram Stuart, Financial Times (July)
If the fruits rotted, or the venison putrefied, before he could spend it, he offended against the common law of nature, and was liable to be punished …
Memories of a French Summer by Béa Peltre, La Tartine Gourmande (August)
I told her about where our food comes from. When I took her to the village, I showed her the cows and sheep and chicken and rooster and rabbits. I pointed at eggs nested at one corner of the hen house.
Set it on Fire, Part II by Francis Lam, Gourmet (September)
She had a sweetness to her, and I suddenly felt like I was disappointing my grandmother, only my grandmother is an awful human being and this woman seemed like a perfectly lovely one.
The End of Gourmet (And Why I’m So Bummed) by Sarma Melngailis (October)
All the food world would be there, dressed in dark clothes, and easels everywhere with giant cover images. Then everyone would drink really really good wine, and eat lots of beautiful food, and feel the comfort of communal mourning.
Raising a Glass by Molly Kath, Les Cadeaux (October)
There is no minimum occupancy for a home: if you live somewhere, you have a home. And you should be comfortable in it, whatever that means.
Leap and the Net Will Appear by Luisa Weiss, The Wednesday Chef (October)
You’ve got to listen, really listen, in order to hear what the universe is trying to tell you. And move mountains, then, when you finally know what you want.
The Vanish Project by Evan Ratliff, WIRED (November)
People fret about privacy, but what are the consequences of giving it all up, I wondered. What can investigators glean from all the digital fingerprints we leave behind? You can be anybody you want online, sure, but can you reinvent yourself in real life?
Extremely Dead and Incredibly Gross by Kiera Butler, Mother Jones (November)
People often set up these false choices, these false dichotomies, and it’s not like we have to do either of them.
Dealt a Bad Hand in Life by Ashley Ambirge, The Middle Finger Project (December)
A circumstance is a condition, and sometimes when you’re suddenly hit with an unfortunate set of your very own, they can quickly morph from being what would normally be a temporary setback into something closely resembling a big, gloomy, threatening cumulonimbus cloud sure to make any respectable weatherman rush to fetch his brightest yellow slicker on the double.
And we leap into a new year, a new decade. Onward to 2010.
What happens
Try to say nothing negative about anybody for three days, for forty-five days, for three months. See what happens to your life.
- Today, from @yokoono
This resonates. Holidays are here, I’m heading home, there will inevitably be gossip around the kitchen table: words said that aren’t so nice or just plain frivolous. This season, I’m not going to partake.
Will you join me?
[photo via]
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.
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