naomi duguid

DETAILS, DETAILS: A MARKET AT CHINESE NEW YEAR

2012-01-22T20:11:00.004-05:00

A couple of days ago on Facebook, I made an entry about a visit to the weekly Haw Market in Chiang Mai, and said that I planned to write a blogpost about it, a post that would be like the New Yorker articles that consist of endless lists of things.

Well here I am at last, thinking about the Haw market and all that there was to see there, and also thinking about lists, and descriptions, and what they achieve...

As we (I at least, and I think many others, from what I hear) get increasingly impatient with dense paragraphs of description and explanation, the power of the written word to convey a scene or a set of descriptive facts dwindles, is no longer a power. Am I wrong about this? Does it mean, if I am right, that the photograph or other graphic, holds sway and displaces the written word? I don't like to think so, for photos have become so un-mysterious, so sharpened and hyper-realistic, that they may contain "factual" content but they have lost the power, usually, to move us.

So perhaps in wondering about the power of a dense long paragraph of description to reach us, I am asking the wrong question. Perhaps it's never, or rarely, about the factual content, and far more often about the emotional content. Those long "Along the Avenues" pieces written about Christmas shopping possibilties etc were then not just about listing things available but about giving an overall sense of plenty or sense of wonder? Were they reassuring? They were certainly NOT replaceable by a photograph, so perhaps it was the hypnotic accumulation of detail that charmed.

In which case, you need to jump on a plane and come to spend time in Chiang Mai, Thailand's second city the capital of the north. Burma lies not far away to the west and north, then there's Laos to the east. The ethno-cultural landscape is diverse and endlessly interesting to me, for there are not only northern Thais (Tai Koen) and central Thais, and Shan (Tai Yai) but there are also Kun Haw, Yunnanese, mostly Muslim, who came here and settled to do more trade; Pa-O; Burmese; people of South Asian descent; and more. Many of the non-Thai people get themselves to the Haw Market every week.

The Haw Market happens every Friday in a parking lot opposite the Mosque. It's alive with people from all the marginal, minority, and otherwise generally unacknowledged peoples who live in and around Chiang Mai. The faces of both sellers and buyers are very different from the crowd at Wararot Market or the large bustling wholesale market Muang Mai. Cheekbones are higher, skin often much darker, and many walk with the easy rolling gait of a hill person or farmer. Some speak Thai, others operate in Yunnanese or Mandarin or Burmese, or Shan.

And what they are selling is equally a blurring of the lines and a widening of the boundaries: celtuce, large and healthy, and spinach ditto; strawberries now in season; eggplants long or round, pale mauve or yellow; cherry tomatoes larger than small and all shades of red merging into pale green; piles of purple-red shallots and ginger and every kind of herb, from sawtooth herb and Vietnamese coriander to Thai basil and coriander and herbs I can’t name; masses of greens of all kinds, including pea tendrils and Chinese kale and other brassicas with white flowers and yellow flowers, as well as round pale cabbages and Napa cabbages, and more. There are red and pink and almost-mauve fat large radishes; squahes of yellow or orange with green speckling; long beans and sword beans; red rice and brown and black and white rices of varying qualities and prices.

The blue chickens by the Chinese woman stare across at the large plastic vats of pickles surrounded by a crowd. The seller, Chinese-speaking, is trying to get people to be orderly. But it's hard to hold back when you see deep barrels being emptied: the barrel of fermented tofu, four feet deep, was being scraped clean. The vats of pickles were also going fast.

Then there was the prepared food, being cooked right there. Women in headscarves fry beautiful little samosas and Shan tofu, others serve soup in wide white ceramic bowls or grill flattened black rice cakes, or fresh corn fritters. I bought a small bag of freshly hot black sticky-rice doughnuts, as a tip of the hat to Robyn Eckhardt and Dave Hagerman, whose favorites they are; I knew they were at the same time in a plane flying to Turkey, headed far from the delights of palm sugar syrup and rice doughnuts. I also had a generous bowl of mohinga, Burmese soup over fine fresh rice noodles, with bits of banana stem in the soup and crispy wide soy bean crackers to break up into it for crunch. Even full to bursting I couldn't resist a couple of pieces of semolina cake, a Burmese treat. I ate half one piece with my traditional Thai coffee and scarfed down the rest later in the day.

But then other temptations appeared as I kept wandering: small cubes of fried tofu; some nanpyar, Burmese style flatbreads... I resisted the air-dried strips of spiced beef, the Shan tofu, both fresh and deep-fried, the luxurious smooth Shan soup, usually my choice; as well as stacks of fresh fruit. I did buy a beautiful almost perfectly round avocado, hass -style. And to go with it I picked out a handful of small limes.

The crowd was dense and very focussed on the food. Chinese New Year meant there were more buyers and more sellers that usual. I saw several young Lisu men in New Year's finery: one had lime green draping swaying pants on; the other had shiny pale blue with silver speckles pants,very dashing and eye-catching.

Now two days later I've just eaten the avo, shared it with Fern, my friend and collaborator on immersethrough. We mashed it coarsely, added a dash of fish sauce, lots of squeezed lime juice, and some freshly pounded black pepper that my friend Allison gave me. She'd bought it in Cambodia, a place known for its peppercorns. The avo was perfect (Fern has taken the pit away to see if she can get it to germinate) and I'm feeling very well fed.

The firworks have started pop-pop-popping and bursting with a loud bang as the town revs up for Chinese New Year. We’re headed out of the year of the rabbit and into the year of the dragon, traditionally viewed as powerful and very auspicious. I’m just hoping for a year with fewer world-wide catastrophes, better outcomes in Syria and Egypt and neighbours, and continued progress in Burma’s process of opening up and democratizing. I guess I’m saying, let’s hope for some reasoned and reasonable peace in Burma and everywhere else, and for the strength to cope with grace when things don’t go our way.

Happy new year everyone….

AND A POST-SCRIPT: My Burma cookbook is now in design, so exciting, and we now have a title, for sure and final, which pleases me enormously. It's called PINCH OF TURMERIC, SQUEEZE OF LIME: Recipes and Travel tales from Burma
I can't wait to see the galleys, which are due to arrive in a week or so. Whew!

TRANSITIONS ACROSS TIME AND SPACE

2012-01-13T21:55:00.001-05:00

There’s been radio silence on this blog since the turn of the year. My apologies. My only excuse is that life got intensely busy through the holidays, busy with both work and friends. I had a short trip to New York City early in the new year, for a Beard Cookbook Awards committee meeting. That is always a pleasure, but in this case there was more. I took an extra day and went to Artisan, where I saw the first designed pages of my Burma book. So exciting. Susan Baldaserini has launched the book in a lovely direction. I can’t wait to see more.

The other treat while I was in New York was a visit to the Met to see the exhibit of African sculptures, Iconic Africans I think it’s called. It’s on until January 29, and if you have any chance to see it, rush straight there, “do not pass GO” as they they. I am still haunted by, maybe dreaming about is a better way of saying it, the wooden sculptures, especially those of the Hemba of eastern Congo, the last culture in the show. As is so often the case (the Chagall exhibit at the AGO was an exception to the rule), many of the moving and beautiful scultures were from private collections, and we are unlikely to see them again, ever. (All but a few of the pieces in the Chagall show were from the Centre Pompidou).

And now I’m sitting in a little diner on the other side of the world, in Bangkok, eating khao tom (congee) for breakfast. I got in late last night, the taxi from the airport an easy ride on the expressway until the last mile or so, when we crawled along Sukhumvit in heavy just-pre-midnight traffic, past sidewalks lively with people and streetstalls, under the elevated Skytrain tracks, the neon lights of the tall buildings flashing confidently against the dull night sky.

This is another world, for sure, and the fact that the transition from North America can happen in twenty-four hours is still amazing. I always read who-dunnits on the plane. They transport me to other places while the plane crosses ice and oceans and waves of cloud. The best paperback on this trip was a Barbara Nadel (set in Turkey, and this one mostly in the southeast in and around Mardin, intensely engaging). I am now in the middle of a fairly recent Donna Leon, in Venice with Inspector Brunetti, a book to read in the sleepless hours caused by jetlag; I get engrossed and then raise my eyes to realise with pleasure that I am already in Bangkok.

Last night I was unable to get my computer to connect to the wi-fi in the lobby of the hotel. I felt bereft, unreasonably so, since there was nothing especially important that I needed to check. It made me realise just how dependent-minded I’ve become about my connectedness, my ability to check mail or make a call. It’s lovely that I could call Tashi from Bangkok airport when I arrived to wake him (to receive a parcel we’re expecting), but it’s also reductive in some way, I find myself thinking.

And then I realise that I am locking myself into a set way of thinking that isn’t helpful. My sense of wonder about travel used to come from the fact of away-ness and cut-offness. The clear difference between where I’d come from and where I’d arrived I measured partly by my degree of cut-offness (a week or more for letters, phone calls pretty unthinkable, etc).

But the real differences between where I’ve come from and where I’ve arrived are still there. It’s just that there is now easier communication between the worlds. I realise that I mustn’t be sloppy and think that, because I can talk or write across the distance instantaneously, the distance, physical, cultural, emotional, is not there. The differentness of places, their distinctiveness, is still a fact, however much it may seem to be blurred by global business and instant communications.

Such a small proportion of the world’s people ever get on a plane. We tend to assume that everyone is us, whereas those of us who travel are the exception, we’re kind of time-travellers, while everyone else retains a stronger sense of place and an anchoredness.

All of which brings me to feel grateful that I can move between worlds, but also mindful that I should never take it for granted, and that I should be always alert to the differences, the fundamentals that make each place and each person distinctive. In fact, it brings me to the reminder that I will always be a beginner, never really knowing all that goes on, just getting glimpses of what motivates people or how a particular cultural situation can be understood.
After all, our understanding is always imperfect; even insiders only understand part of what they see. That’s why we have novels, to explore all that we glimpse but don’t truly understand, and to give us a sense of wonder at life’s complexity.

On another subject, there is cause for rejoicing on the Burma front. The government there is continuing to follow-through on its promises of loosening the repression people have lived under for years, as well as starting to negotiate with the Karen (an agreement with the KNU was just announced), Kachin, Chin, et al, and freeing political prisoners so that the country can genuinely move toward real democracy. It won’t be easy: old habits of repression die hard, and the country is short of infrestructure, lacks any kind of reasonable education system or health care etc. But people are motivated and feeling so optimistic... And the signs are good that the momentum is being maintained. Here’s hoping.

And a footnote: All the good Burma news last fall, including Hilary Clinton’s visit, meant that Burma was front and centre in the news, from the New York Times to everywhere else. That meant that suddenly people who had not given Burma a thought were planning trips, or articles in their magazines etc. I’ve had calls and requests for advice on Burma travel and Burma food, and sometimes actually paid work too.

This is how the world seems to work: some kind of news attention, and then suddenly we find the place on a map and it becomes more real to us. And so now Burma has emerged into awareness of people in the twenty-first century, about fifty years after it sank from view (in March 1962, with Ne Win’s coup). Such a long time of silence...

FLEXIBILITY & PREDICTABILITY & NEW YEAR'S WISHES

2011-12-28T14:36:00.002-05:00

The last time I wrote I was readying myself for the trip from Thailand to Toronto, and my head was still full of Burma and the optimism about change that is growing there. Now here I am a long time later (almost two weeks), and we’ve got less than three full days of the old year left. I’ve been seeing friends and eating and drinking, and loving the winter light and crisp air - and the freedom of walking with no boots on, for we’ve no snow here yet.

All the cooking and baking I’ve been doing has given me time for reflection and wondering. I’ve been thinking about patterns and behaviours... obedience, flexibility. Here’s where it’s taken me:

I so rarely want to do what I’m told, and I certainly don’t look around for people to tell me what to do (though I often ask for advice about directions etc). It follows then that I don’t make fixed plans about menu or much else in fact. It’s part of why I like making bread, because it is so flexible and allows for all kinds of imprecision, in fact welcomes it often. My usual style with cooking, and with baking too, is to feel my way, decide as I go along, and then ride it all out adjusting and adjusting, until it’s done and there are no more tweaks and decisions to be made.

All in all, from menu to travel to cooking to household tasks, a set plan tends to feel to me like a strait-jacket, a command to do onerous and uninteresting (because already predictable) work.

So why is it that it feels so restful over this holiday to be following (simple, I grant you) recipes for various cookies and tarts etc? Partly it’s because they are my recipes, published in HomeBaking, so I have confidence in them and I know I love them. And partly I think it’s a moment’s ease, a rest from making decisions. I can just let the decisions be made by the recipe instructions. How many eggs? Ah yes, it says four. Fine. And in they go.

Of course there’s often still room for improvising, a little push-back to the predictability of a recipe-directed result. That was true on the weekend when I made pate sucree and then after chilling it overnight used half of my double recipe to make a custard tart topped with some fabulous cooked damsons, and some tartlets. The other half of the dough is still sitting in the frig, waiting for a decision about what to do with it. Should I make sablees to give to friends and eat in-house? Or another tart?

I also have in the frig a simple pastry dough made with butter and one egg, so I can make a tart with that. I am imagining a shallow apple tart, sort of Alsatian-style, with slices of apple open-faced, and a guelon (lightly shisked custard liquid - one egg and some cream, and perhaps a dash of cinnamon or vanilla if wanted, and sugar ditto) poured over part way through baking, to set and hold it together and add richness. It’s a technique I learned long ago from a Swiss friend from the Jura named Monique...

Aha!

The time-travel that that reminder of Monique takes me on is a clue to why recipes are so comfortable at this time of year. They’re a way of repeating an experience, a way of getting back in touch with times past and people in the past. When I improvise and decide moment to moment, I am refusing repetition, wanting to work freshly and create in my own small way. But when I open HomeBaking to the page with Mandel Melbas (almond biscotti made only with eggs for liquid) or Greek paximadia with wine and olive oil, or Lime-Zest Macaroons, or Candied Peel, or any one of a hundred other sweet and savory pastry and cake and cookie options, I am re-engaging with past experiences of making and eating those same foods. And that link is precious, especially at this shortest-day fragile and vulnerable time of year.

In this part of the yearly cycle there are of course other links to past years: the repetition of the waning day-length, the arrival of thin winter light and hints of snow-flurries in the air. But those reminders are more instinctual and animal, rather than warmingly human and intimate. The scent of citrus peel simmering, or of spiced cookies baking, or the satisfying feel of fraisage (the wonderful method of blending butter and egg yolks into flour that is used for making pate sucree) as I smear the dough with the heel of my hand: all these are also sensory and sensual reminders and connections to the human warmth of feeding loved ones and layered memories of friends and family.

Am I going on and on about this?

I think it’s all too easy to be nostalgic or knee-jerk about Christmas (or other) holidays. But there is for sure something real, a real need and a real pleasure, to be had in making cross-connections back through time to people who are no longer with us, or places that have special resonance for us.

All of this capacity for specific memory, and also our ability to trigger memories at will (in my case by baking) is very human, something I cannot imagine animals having. We can relish our ability to create, and make new or different foods or events or environments, as I most often do with cooking; but we can also rejoice in the possibility of reconnecting with our earlier selves.

It’s the old interplay between the old and the new, the familiar and the exciting unknown, the comfortable and the uncomfortably scary, the calm of the inlet or the thrill of the open water. We need both, different things at different times, and I guess the trick is to remember that there is no magic single standard for conducting ourselves in this maze we call life and daily decision-making.

Now to get back to baking. It’s time to give the mandel melbas their second bake.

Happy new year to you all. May 2012 bring more open tolerant government in Syria and Egypt, for now so shaken by repressive acts against extraordinarily brave demonstrators, and to Yemen and Libya and Tunisia and Bahrain... It’s a long and open list. And I hope that the remarkable recent loosening of the oppressiveness of government in Burma continues, with the release of all political prisoners and a negotiated reasonable agreement with the people and opposition forces who live in the border areas. It’s time that all these populations, whether in Burma or in the so-called Middle East, have a chance to live without fear and with hope that tomorrow will be an improvement on today.

A long new year’s wish, but no less heartfelt for that.

MY BAGS ARE PACKED...

2011-12-15T01:55:00.005-05:00

But I'm not feeling ready to go. I've just settled back into Chiang Mai and have been getting work done in the gaps between preparing to leave. I'd love to have another week or two here. This moment before departure can feel fraught. It's such a turning point in every way, the moment before we launch into new places and feelings and rhythms. I feel a little like a diver hesitating at the end of the diving board. The next days will bring the plane travel and then the disorienting cotton-brain of jetlag, combined with the intensities of reurning to a wonderfully full couple of weeks over the holidays seeing friends and getting caught up on their doings.

No wonder I don't sleep very well in the nights before a trip. It's not anxiety exactly, more like adrenalin, expectation, a certain repetitive reviewing of to-do lists and worries about forgetting something vital (the money? passport? ticket? computer & power cord? checklist of the day of departure has a longer more complex predecessor list that evolves in the days leading up to departure day).

Tomorrow I fly to Bangkok in the late morning (my Toronto flight leaves early the following day). But I'm trying to push back against the usual time-wasting hours before leaving here by going for an early visit to the Haw Market tomorrow morning I'm meeting Mrs Lemur there, she who writes the "The Lemurs Are Hungry" blog, very entertaining and food-obsessed. She and Mr Lemur are in Thailand for the first time, after years of deep engagement with Thai food in their kitchen. I'm looking forward to eating Shan Soup with her tomorrow, thick and creamy textured (but no cream) over fine rice vermicelli. And then I'll pedal back to the soi, hand in my rented bicycle, come up to the apartment to grab my bags, drag them back down to the soi, and find myself a rot daeng (means red truck), the shared transport that serves as public transit here. Once I'm in the truck, I'll be like the diver whose feet have just pushed off from the diving board, launched.

This morning, feeling a little congested, I went over to the Jok woman, who makes a heavenly thick rice soup with pork balls in it, laden with fine strands of ginger. She heard my slightly thickened voice, asked if I was sick, then chopped extra ginger and added it in, along with plenty of white pepper. Food as medicine is rarely as delicious as her gorgeous soup was this morning. I guess I won't be eating that well again until I get home.

I'm not complaining, you understand, just sayin'...

POSTSCRIPT FROM BANGKOK: I have to admit I was very wrong in my prediction about food between then and home. First, on Friday morning I had a delish Shan soup over kanom jiin noodles, with the Lemurs, and tastes of other treats including semolina cake (recipe to come in RIVERS OF FLAVOR, as is the Shan soup recipe) and tart rice with shrimp "cake", a great savory. It didn't end there, my mistakenness, for last night I met a friend at a restaurant she knows here in Bangkok called Gedhwara, on Sukumvit soi 35, very close to a Skytrain station. It specialises in Northern Thai food, is intimate and does beautiful presentations. I loved the lon, made with dao jiao; the very chile punchy veg soup; the green mango salad made with fresh red prik i noo. The shrimp ep was fine, but not as terrific as it could have been. Anyway, if you are passing through BKK, or living there, do check it out.

Finally, I stayed at the Atlanta, a place with a lot of history, an odd and quirky hotel, very central (Sukumvit soi 2, convenient to the SKytrain, just a walk down the soi). It has a great pool and fan rooms for those who, like me, don't like A/C much. And the price is right: 535 baht for my fan room with large double bed, balcony, shower etc , which is about $18.

But of course who sleeps well when the wake-up call is at 4.30 in the morning? SO I'll be dozing for much of this flight, with DOnna Leon books to see me through the gaps.

LOOKING INTO FUTURE DREAMS & HOPES

2011-12-13T10:30:00.002-05:00

My last post here was from Rangoon, the day before I left the relatively easy internet connections and the noise and bustle and openness of that lively city to travel to the Inle Lake region of Shan State and then on to Kalaymyo, at the foot of the Chin Hills. IMore about those travels in a moment...

I'm back in Chiang Mia and finding the traffic very soft-sounding, as if it's purring rather than roaring. And that makes me realise how loud and invasive are the engines of the rattling and wheezing old busses and two stroke agricultural vehicles and roaring long-tail boats, and aging exhaust-spewing cars in Rangoon. You get used to the noise, the cacophany, and so it took returning here to Thailand to make me realise just how raucous Rangoon streets can be. The other thing is that people toot their horns all the time there. Here there's barely a peep, except maybe a slight blip to warn you that someone's coming through or heading into a blind corner.

But I don't really want to write about noise and traffic. No, instead I want to think about the extraordinary possibility that there could be reconciliation in Burma, a political solution to the intermittent very painful and inhuman battles that have been going on in the border areas of Burma for sixty years. How wonderful it would be to move forward from that! The human costs have been enormous, heart-breaking, not only the loss of life and the physiscal injuries, but also the loss of potential, of education and creative fulfilling lives, for the people who have been internally displaced or who find themselves living long-term in refugee camps or in internal exile along the Thai-Burma border and elsewhere.

When I was in Kalaymyo, I ran into a fair number of missionaries, from England, the USA, Canada, Korea, and from Chin State. They're all trying to convert people from buddhism, which seems wrong-headed and deeply patronising and disrespectful to me. And of course they're competing with each other for souls, which feels like some version of colonialism or business, or both. It's not an attractive picture, for sure. I was asked by one foreigner, while getting off the plane, if I was an "M". "A what?" I asked stupidly. "Oh never mind" he said. And then I realised, he was asking if I was a missionary. Good gried no! is my answer to THAT question.

The fact is that the peoples who live in the hillier parts of Burma are not Bamar and many of them are Chrsitains, converted by missionaries in the mid- and late nineteenth centuries. They include the Chin and Karen and Kachin. But the Shan (or Tai Yai as they know themselves) are mostly Buddhists. I am told by Chin people that the double strike of being Chin rather than Bamar, and Christian rather than Buddhist means that they can never advance very far in government service or even in private companies in Burma. That may well continue, of course. But what needs to die back is the opposing of Christianity to Buddhism, in any kind of good vs evil scenario. That kind of Manicheistic view does NOT help with reconciliation. And yet it's the view instilled by the Christian elements among the Karen in exile, for example.

It's hard not to demonise people and a government who have done so much damage and behaved so outrageously toward their fellow citizens for so long. But that demonising is a dead-end and not helpful.

Easy for me to say; I haven't had my village burned before my eyes and I haven't lost years in a refugee camp.

But sill, the need for a negotiated political settlement and an open Burmese society is screaming at us. The same can be said of Syria, where the government is killing and torturing its own citizens every day, trying to re-instill fear and helplessness in them.

Which brings me to the question a young Burmese student asked me when I was helping a teacher of English, the father of a young Burmese friend, to teach his afternoon class. The question came after I tried to get the students to talk by inviting them to ask me questions, any questions. At last one student asked, "what do you want to do with the rest of your life?"

It's a great question, one that I seem to have been asking myself all my life. Do we all do it? As life gets shorter, the question feels even more urgent. Not to say that it doesn't press on us when we're young. Today in a phone call from a young friend, she talked about what she'd really love to do if she were free of financial worries (if she won the lottery say). It was thrilling to hear that she knew so clearly where she wanted to aim. Because then all she has to do is aim. Yes, the question of how to earn a living while doing what she wants is there. But the vital thing is that she knows what she wants to do.

I do believe that if you engage with an idea or a project, if you grow into a clear idea of what you want to do, then you should do it, and figure out the money question later . Yes, I understand that this is a luxury and perhaps I am discussing what my kid calls "First world Problems". But I think it's important to look at these questions, be open about them and about our uncertainties. And then to forge ahead trying to do what we dream of doing.

Now to get clear about my dreams....

AN EVENING IN RANGOON, ON A DAY WHEN TWO WOMEN MET

2011-12-02T10:32:00.004-05:00

Dusk and nighttime in Rangoon are enchanting, welcoming, and full of life, especially on a Friday evening. The sky glows a faded pink, the air cools slightly, men in white walk in pairs and groups, freshly washed and wending their way to a meal or homeward after Friday prayers at the mosques.

As I walked west this evening along Mahabandoola Street headed for Chinatown, the gleam of Sule Paya, the tall golden dome that sits at Rangoon’s major downtown intersection - a reminder of the central role Buddhism plays in the life of the country - pulled me forward. I passed vendors frying snacks, small hotpot stands steaming in the dusk, with a few small plastic stools around the pot, flower sellers, shops gleaming with watches or cameras or packaged snacks, as all the while buses streamed past, their tired engines roaring and groaning, the ticket collectors shouting out the bus destinations.

Once past the huge Sule Paya roundabout, I was in India town, where most shops are South Asian, the restaurants sell pulaos, little shops with Indian sweetmeats invite the esily tempted passer-by, paratha-makers stretch and flap their springy thin gelaming-with-oil sheets of dough, then fold them with several graceful twists of the wrist and toss them onto a hot griddle, and men sit in tea shops or in the doorways of small shops and sip tea and chat and laugh now that the weight of the day is almost done. There are scents of sandalwood and fresh orange, fennel and hot oil and hints of cardamom as I walk past the small vignetted shopfront scenes.

And then, after the piles of oranges and bananas and avocadoes and pineapples at the end of tk street, Mahabandoola becomes Chinese. Suddenly the shops are selling ginseng root and strings of dark red Chinese sausage and tall tins of English style biscuits (not quite Peke Freans, not quite Cadbury or Mackintosh, but close enough to be familiar-looking), and there are small eateries along the sidestreets with trays of meat and fish waiting to be grilled, and people sitting at low tables drinking beer and having a night out. Chinatown by night is the most lively scene in Rangoon. It doesn’t last long: the fruit vendors pack up by eight. But on the sidestreets the grilling and hotpots and noodle places, and the beer halls, stay lively until ten or so.

I meet a friend on the corner of Latha and Mahabandoola, by the large Chinese Temple, and we stroll, picking our way along the bumpy lumpy sidewalks and navigating the fruit stalls and small vendors. She wants me to try the grilled stuffed fish, so we pick one out (tilapia, now being farmed not far from Rangoon), and order hand-cut Myeik noodles and a lime juice each, as well as skewers of grilled garlics, then sit at a low table streetside. The noodles are spectacular, flat rice noodles tossed in a wok with a few small beans, small fresh shrimp, slices of Chinese sausage...delish. The fish is tender and perfectly grilled. The finely minced filling seems to have saw-tooth herb and minced shallot and some minced sour fruit. My friend says it’s called a quince in Burmese; you could use green mango, mashed to a paste, or perhaps a very tart apple or plum. We sucked the fish off the bones, using hands as well as chopsticks to navigate it all, greedily and happily.

We wandered some more, had another pause for another lime juice, and then it was time to part ways. I decided to walk back the way I’d come, about 30 blocks. But now it was quite dark and shadowy in many place. The only light came from some still-open shops and the headlights of cars, as well as the occasional streetisde paan vendor with a small cnadle lighting his stand. The streets near Sule were lively with people, but most vendors had packed up or were in the middle of closing down. The headlights lit the uneven paving stones of the sidewalks, casting shadows and setting them all in relief for a moment, before vanishing and leaving me in darkness again. I ploughed on eastward, past the Immanuel Baptsis Church with its blue neon sign, and wider patches in the sidewalk where people sat at low tabes eating noodles.

Walking on rough ground, where there’s the occasional hole, steep curbs, and generally rough unpredictable terrain, is a lot slower than moving swiftly along a sidewalk in Toronto or London and takes more concentration and more effort. I was sticky an sweaty by the time I got back, even with a small pause to shoot some video of the action near 37th to 40th street, with honking buses, shouting vendors and conductors, and people walking in both directions along a sidewalk busy with small evening vendors. I’m looking forward to showing it to people at home. I realise that my few words can’t paint the scnene nearly as effectively as a short bit of video can.

And yet I always feel the urge to try to put some of all this into words. I want to convery my wonder at the life and good humour in this place, and the current surge of optimism.

Earlier today, just after dawn, Hilary Clinton was due to come and talk with her at 9.30. went out in a taxi with some friends to Aung San Suu Kyi’s house to see the media scrum. It was amazing to have a pack of journos at the gate, all waiting to get in; the State Dept person had a list, and some got in and some did not. Just over a year ago this house was a prison in which Daw SU was confined, and now here she is the focus of the world’s press, and free to meet with the world leaders.

Meantime there was endless traffic on what is normally a quiet street, as now-confident Burmese drove slowly past, smiling and waving, and craining their necks to see what they might see. Old NLD guys (the oppostition party Daw Suu heads) arrived one by one, dignified after years of jail and struggle. And then came the press corps in buses and after them the Clinton motorcade, all SUV’s, swept through the gate.

Here’s hoping that the world keeps Burma in mind, and that Burma keeps on opening up, maintaining and strengthening its openness, regaining free speach and the rule of law, and frees political prisoners, in short becomes the powerhouse and remarkable place its people deserve.

Meantime, I feel very lucky to have been here in these early optimistic times.

I am heading north to Inle Lake (where I first was over thirty years ago, on my first trip to Burma; and then again with my kids in January 1999), and after that west to a town just on the edge of Chin State called Kalaymyo. I doubt I’ll have much reliable internet access while I’m away, and in any case I’m leaving my laptop in Rangoon. The next posting here won’t be until December 11 or so. Hope you have your Christmas shopping done by then....I haven’t even started.

RANGOON NOTES: WINDS OF OPTIMISM

2011-11-29T01:28:00.000-05:00

It’s a late Tuesday morning here in Rangoon, and one of the two days that lie between the birthdays of my two lovely now-grown kids. I’m away for both their birthdays, as I have been for three years now. This year Dom turns 24 and Tashi 21, significant birthdays in different cultures: Of course in the west 21 signifies majority, and there’s still an echo of that importance, even though voting and drinking ages are both 18; while in Chinese and related cultures the zodiac has twelve creatures and twelve years, thus the birthdays that are for years divisible by twelve fall in the same sign as your birth year and always mark the start of another “cycle”. Dom is about to enter his third cycle.

As you know if youve been reading this blog for awhile, I like dates and markers of time and place generally. They’re a kind of geography and context for everything else. And so, with Dom and Tashi both born in late November, this time of year, never particularly significant until twenty-four years ago, has become full of meaning and a good memory marker, as in my question to one of my kids, where were we on your tenth birthday?

This time, this year, is marked by very public significance, the huge positive change in the political climate in Burma. With the loosening of censorship, including the unblocking of many websites, the freeing of some political prisoners (though many remain), the new rules that have permitted and even invited Daw Aung San Su Kyi to engage in the political process along with her party the NLD, and the government’s suspension of the huge Chinese dam project on the upper Irrawaddy - all of these being changes effected in the last three months - it feels as if a logjam has broken and that Burma may genuinely be moving forward into a new more positive era.

In the weekly English language paper the Myanmar Times last week there was an article about a couple of guys who are trying to talk about reconciliation. They have formed a group called Metta for that purpose. One of them was quoted as saying that until now there has been a kind of chess game between the authorities and the opposition which operated in a series of stalemates. But now each side seems to have taken some steps toward flexibility. And now, said this man, the game being played is not chess, with its possibilities for stasis and deadlock, but instead the national game, chinlon.

It’s a great image, for chinlon is a game where a loose number of players keep a woven rattan ball in the air by kicking it with their feet or butting it with their heads, no hands allowed. The goal is to keep it in the air, to keep it moving. If the ball comes to you, you try your best to hit it up and send it on. That’s the point: everyone has a responsbility, everyone is a player, and everyone tries to keep it going.

It’s a lovely metaphor. Chinlon is difficult if you have little or no experience. And we know from our own experience in the west that even with years or centuries of practice we can still make a big mess of democracy. Often we find its complications frustrating, especially when we don’t get what we want. How much more difficult is it for a place where free speech and democratic openness has been outlawed for almost exactly fifty years? Add to that the fact that many people in Burma have paid a huge price in pain and suffering, prison time, and more during these last repressive oppressive years, and it’s easy to see that reconciliation and flexibility will be difficult, and necessary too.

As these weighty and vital-for-the-future-of-Burma questions roll around in my head, and in the hearts and minds of the millions of Burmese who are feeling bouyed by these optimistic changes, we all have to hope that progress continues and doesn’t get high-jacked by conservative elements in the army.

I used the phrase “roll around in my head” just now because an hour ago my head was being pushed and turned and massaged by the knowing iron fingers of a quirky-looking young woman. A friend had told me that one of the best things to do in Rangoon is to have your hair washed in one of the many beauty parlors/hairdressing shops. I’d never tried. So in I went this morning, into a shop in the neighbourhood of my hotel here in the east end. What great advice, thank-you Kyle!

The hairwashing happens as you are lying down on your back, all comfy. After the first warm water, there’s a lathering of the hair and then the massage really starts. She put pressure hard at various points on my scalp then moved to others, then rubbed and stroked, then more pressure. It was fabulous. She also did some work on my neck and shoulders. The arm and hand work, when she pulled on fingers and then squeezed and compressed my hand left me feeling invigorated and smoothed out.

I feel newly minted. And my hair looks so much better that it’s unrecognisable. The total cost was 3000 kyat (pronounced “chat”, for the “ky” combo denotes “ch”), which at 790 to the dollar is less than four dollars. Of course I gave her more...

All this is a reminder that engaging with a place at the level of basic needs and services is a great way to learn new things. I like coming without toothpaste for example, or soap. That way I have an excuse to go into a drugstore and look for what I need, see what’s availabe (and what’s not). But the haridresser was a new idea for me, one that I’ll keep trying in other places too.

In less than two days Hilary Clinton is due in Burma to meet with the current government, and also with Aung San Su Kyi. There will be a huge number of jurnalists covering this trip, a kind of circus is how I imagine the scene. For those of us who are not journalists, we’ll know it’s going on but will only know the details from reading the papers and perhaps watching the news or YouTube. Even though I have no expectation of seeing any of it, I want to stay in Rangoon until after the visit is over. There’s something about the intensity of people’s expectations, and the apparent significance of the visit, that makes me want to stay attentive, to not miss whatever crumbs come my way.

Meantime these days in Rangoon are filled with eating. I am going back to restaurants I know from before, as well as to ones new to me that friends tell me about. There’s always more to learn. And I’m happy to have another chance to compare the recipes in Rivers of Flavor with what I'm eating here. Writing about other cultures, other people’s food, is a responsibility I worry about. I’m sure that despite my best efforts, I will get some things that people in Burma will or would disagree with. I can’t worry about that, only hope that there’s not much to quibble about.

What I do know is that the food in Burma is good, delicious, and that it’s time the rest of the world tuned in to its pleasures and its distinctiveness.

THOUGHTS ON COMPROMISE AND ACCEPTANCE

2011-11-23T10:19:00.005-05:00

It's late on a Wednesday evening here in Chang Mai. By this time tomorrow I should be in a (rather charmless) hotel room in Rangoon. I'm booked into my usual hotel, the Eastern, not far from the Botataung temple. I'm not really packed yet of course, but I think I have most of what I need assembled, including books to read, books for a friend, and my Burmese language book. Perhaps I should take a bigger bag, just to not feel squeezed? That's always the question. I like to try to get away with having just hand-carry, but it's a pretty silly objective when flying a short distance into an airport that's not big and not really busy. If these are the small things I'm wondering about, you'll say, then clearly I'm fine.

I agree.

Today I went with a friend to a talk/seminar at Chiang Mai University, CMU as it's known. It's a good bicycle ride away. In the morning rush hour it can be a slow trip in a rot daeng (shared taxi) or a car, but on bicycles, weaving in and out of the cars, we got there easily. The last part of the ride was through the leafy airy campus grounds, with a cool breeze blowing. The talk was about the Karen in the camps and other places along the Thai-Burma border, about their networks of relationship based on religion, and on how humanitarian aid is affected by and affects those networks and connections. Dry stuff you mght think, but the speaker, an academic from Germany who works in Mahidol University in Bangkok named Alex Horstman, had very interesting findings and analysis to share.

He linked his research, which is primarily with the Christian networks (his colleague is focussed on the networks and relations of the buddhist Karen), with the early conversion of Karen by missionaries in the nineteenth century. There's still very active missionary work going on amongst the Karen in Burma and in the camps, but the missionaries are Karen themselves. And much of the leadership of the KNU, the Karen army that is battling the Burmese, is also Christian. The speaker suggested that there's an increased militarisation happening amongst the Karen along the border, those who have come to believe that theirs is a struggle of good versus evil. He suggested to us all, but especially to the KNU guys who were there, that they think about changing the model, perhaps giving up their arms, and trying to work another way.

It's the old old problem of exile and the ongoing struggle of the persecuted: attitudes harden and it's hard to see another path. Meantime there's been sixty years of struggle and suffering and still there are refugees, and attacks by the Burmese army and a seemingly dead-end fruitless struggle.

All the more reason to be impressed by the willingness of the opposition in Burma to be flexible, to agree to participate in elections and engage with the current government. It's very difficult to step back from a hard-line position, even when the other side gives a little. For they never give all that one wants, just a little. Instead of holding out for the moon, Aung San Su Kyi and her party have engaged in dialogue (while asking for more openness, a stop to bloodshed, etc) rather than digging in their heels and refusing to be at all flexible.

How can we ask people who have suffered a lot to move on and compromise? Well we do ask it all the time. In South Africa the Truth and Reconciliation Commission didn't end people's pain. It did allow the victims to face the aggressors and murderers, but that's all. And for some it must have been excruciating and unfair and impossible. But they did it. And somehow that country has managed to move forward rather than staying locked in the past.

I know all this is simplistic talk in some ways. But it seems important to acknowledge how difficult, almost impossible, it can be for people to move past old pains and grievances. (Look at how divorcing couples can stay angry and bitter for years, even when it damages their children and their mental and physical health to stay so angry and stuck.) And how much more difficut to move forward when the conflict has been going on for three generations, as it has with the Karen, and when people on both sides are so committed to their version of the story?

Human beings are creative and have a great capacity for problem-solving. But when the emotions are engaged so deeply, it takes a huge effort of will, personal and political, to move forward beyond the patterns of thinking and reflexes of the past. it hasn't happened in israel-Palestine; it hasn't yet hapened in Burma; it has happened in Ireland and in South Africa.

So there is hope, at least conceptually, for us all.

And meantime, to get down to the level of basic human pleasures, I have been eating very well these last days, especially because I've been out with Eating Asia - Robyn Eckhrdt and Dave Hagerman - several times, and in between I've been frequenting some of my favorite roadside/streetside stands. Last night with Robyn and Dave I was at a small place at the edge of town that specialises in fish laap. We had that, and a brilliant village-style northern tom yum with chicken, a plate of pla som (soured fish patties that had been fried), and some pak kana, Chinese kale, stir-fried with crispy pieces of pork belly. Yum.

And now I'm headed to the land of brilliant noodles and fab lunchtiime rice meals featuring lots of condiments, as well as curries and salads, etc. I probably won't be able to post here while I'm gone, though occasionally I've been able to break through the firewalls or whatever they're called, while in Burma. If I don't find a way around, I won't be posting again until after I fly back to Chiang Mai on December 11...

Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans among you (I admit to being thrilled at not having to eat turkey at all this year). Let's hope that we all get better at compromise and at reconciling ourselves to a less than perfect relationship with our more difficult neighbours.

WATER EVERYWHERE - A SMALL REPORT

2011-11-16T20:38:00.004-05:00

They’ve been of biblical proportion, the floods in Thailand, and they’re far from over. A friend here in Chiang Mai had saved newspaper clippings for me about the floods. They start in October, more than a month ago, and give snapshots of the hardships and horrors faced by millions, not hundreds, or thousands, but millions of people in central Thailand. Although the water is receding in places around the north and east of Bangkok, on the west side of the Chao Praya River there’s no sign of relief: the land is so low that it’s still below the river’s height.

Until I got to Bangkok I hadn’t understood what the floods were. I had in my mind a swollen river breaking out. But this 2011 flood of the century is far bigger than that.

My overnight stay at a small hotel near the airport gave me a first insight into the flooding. The hotel is in a small village, a few streets that run between a canal and a busy road. All the buildings were buttressed with sandbag walls; some were encircled with low cement walls reinforced with sandbags. Near the entranceways there’d be a stepped stack of sandbags, each layer topped with a plank. They were like sandbag stiles, a place to step up and over the buttressing.

Pumps churned monotonously, pulling water from under the ground into large flexible piping and out into the canal. The canal flowed swiftly and was within an inch of the edge. Water seeped up through cement in a few places. It was those pumps, and the seeping water, that straightened out my understanding of the flooding. It’s not that the river overflowed its banks (it did in places too of course) but that everywhere there was so much water in the ground that there was no way it could drain away.

Bangkok is built on a swamp and used to be laced with canals. The pressures of the growing city, and a lack of planning, and lots of greed, led to those canals being filled in and turned into roads. Hydrologists gave warnings, but no-one paid much heed.

With all thse canals in place, the water that saturated the ground would have had a place to drain to,. Those canals might occasionally have overflowed, but they’d have done the job of draining the water out to sea. Without them, the water could only end up on top of the ground, flooding every piece of low-lying land.

And so the call as I read the newspapers about all this, apart from for more help for victims, is still for more pumps. The water is being pumped out of the gorund into waterways including the Chao Praya, anything to get it moving toward the sea.

Looking out the airplane window as we slowly ascended I could see water everywhere, blurring the edges of the human geometries, from roads to canals to fields. It was one giant grey-beige reflecting surface, with occasioanl solid-ground interruptions: rooftops, a raised highway ramp, power lines...as far as the eye could see to the north. As we crossed the Chao Praya the picture grew even more dire. You couldn’t tell where the riverbanks had been on the west side; the river water just flowed right over the land. There was stillness, not the movement of small-ant-sized cars and people down below that is the usual sight out the window as you fly over Bangkok.

The newspaper clippings give the on-the-ground and in-the-water close-up view day by day and it’s shocking in places. Yes, there are kids having fun in boats, and the army is looking friendly and helpful as it rescues people and animals, but the reality is that houses and small businesses are wrecked, many of them irreparably, and people have been exposed to unknown toxic chemicals that were washed out of factories upstream as the waters rose. The death toll is at around 600 now.

Thai manufacturing and exports have taken a hit and that will go on. A lot of the rice crop, estimates are 40%, in the central regions has been lost to the floods. (In October-November the rice crop is drying out and ripening and then gets harvested; with inundated fields the plants rot, and/or fail to ripen, and of course no machinery, and often not even human harvesters, can get on the fields to harvest what grain remains.)

The biggest hit may be to people’s mental health. When you see your home wrecked by water and are helpless, and when the situation goes on and on, drearily, and when it puts your children at risk of disease, and threatens you with financial disaster, I imagine that people crumble. Not now, in mid-crisis, but once the intense time is over. it takes energy and optimism to rebuild and move forward. Thais are resilient, they’ve ived through social and political and economic disasters and upheavals, and come to laugh about them, but this huge calamity is going to exact more pain before it’s over.

Meantime, up here in Chiang Mai, where there was some flooding near the river in September because of heavy rains, everyone is now dry and gateful to be.

As I rode along a small road near the river yesterday, I was dodging water grates every ten metres or so, and pedalling past houses built up on stilts, all a reminder that water, and flooding, and monsoon deluges, are part of life in Thailand, giving life to people and rice and this rich culture, and from time to time, as if to embody the Buddhist idea of impermanence, wreaking havoc in unimaginable ways.

PEDALLING PAST ANXIETY, AND CHIANG MAI FOOD DELIGHTS

2011-11-15T03:44:00.004-05:00

It’s the middle of November already. Yikes. I’ve been in Thailand nearly a week (I got to Chiang Mai six days ago) and already I feel settled. I’ve found a Raleigh to rent, too small for me, but so upright that my knees are nicely clear of the handlebars. The tires are good and the pedals on straight, more than I could say of the bicycle I rented last time I was here.

Today I headed north up the Ping River. It was late, after rush hour, so there was little traffic. The disadvantage of setting out after 9 am is of course that the sun is higher. But I never got really hot and sweaty, because of that lovely cyclist’s breeze that cools even as you work at pedalling in the sun. Coming back down the western bank of the river I was in shade a lot of the way, and that too was a treat.

I was remnded as I sailed along by the moat towards the end of my outing that each time I start into something new I have moments of apprehension: Will this work? or, Can I do it? or, Will I goof badly and hurt myself or someone else? The fears or doubts may take different forms, but they all spring from the same place of anxiety... And so it was this morning. I got worried because I don’t have a helmet, wondered about being too hot at the later hour, wondered if the bicycle was any good. And yet in my first minute, not more, of pedalling, all that fell away and I was truly rolling.

The same kind of thing happened with my travels in Burma. Yes, I’d been before, but still on my first trip three years ago for the cookbook I felt oppressed and a little fearful. I was under no illusions that the junta was paying me any special heed or that I mattered to them. I admit that the oppressive totalitarian-ness of the regime is enough to oppress and to create anxiety, just the mere thought of it, of course, but that wasn’t it.

I don’t think my anticipatory mild dread had much to do with those realities. Rather, it was just exactly that: anticipatory anxiety/dread/doubt/self-doubt. And once I had landed and found my way into Rangoon, it all vanished in a puff of smoke. I was there, I was still putting one foot in front of the other, and even though I was no more enlightened or clued in about what I was going to do, or how I was going to proceed to learn what I needed to learn to do the cookbook, the anxiety was gone.

Perhaps there’s a useful biological basis to anticipatory anxiety. Maybe it stops us from taking too many risks? But I think it’s just a trick, a way of making us uncomfortable, a kind of mean thing that some people suffer from way more than I do. I am lucky that mine goes away quickly, once I’m embarked. For some, every day, every dawn or perhaps every waking moment, is filled with a dread or anxiety of what comes next.

I feel for people in that state. Even the minor worry that I have felt at the start of something new, whether relatively major (Burma) or quite minor(getting back on a bicycle in Chiang Mai) can weigh on me. But it lasts only a short while. A more substantial worry is truly paralysing. People who feel that way a lot have to be brave just to get up in the morning. And they must get so exhausted pushing back the dread enough to function.

I’m not sure why I’m writing this right now. Perhaps it’s because I’ve just come through my small bicycle worry and am exhilarated to be on the other side of it, pedalling freely through the small lanes and busier roads of this complicated animated place. I don’t plan to bicycle at night, but I now feel freed up to head out in the morning for explorations in and out of town, sitting upright on my Raleigh, with my floppy sunhat on, looking somewhat ridiculous!

FOOD AFTERWARD: I’ve been eating a lot of grilled pork here in Chiang Mai, succulent and irresistable, and som tam too, and sticky rice, but I have to say that at the moment my mouth is remembering the taste of the perfectly ripe papaya I ate today. It wasn’t big, a nine- or ten-inch-long cylinder, with dark red flesh and mottled yellow skin. I cut it crosswise, then scooped out the seeds of one half, to make a deep cup. I squeezed half a juicy small lime into it and then slowly spooned out the flesh, each mouthful with a little of the lime juice from the bottom. What I was left with when I’d finished was the hollowed out cup of fine skin, thin enough that light passed through it in a stained-glass kind of way. I saved the other half for later. Yum.

LIGHTS AND LIGHT OVER WATER WITH HOPE

2011-11-11T06:19:00.004-05:00

I’m sitting in a cool breeze, the trickle of a small fountain in the background, with poppings and small bangs and muted whizings from the fireworks, rockets, roman candles and every other kind of pyrotechnic large and small being set off on this full moon night in Chiang Mai. The dark sky is dotted with floating gently moving lights, the fire-heated paper lanterns that are being set off by the hundreds here this evening. They hang in the sky, moved by small breezes, drifting and eddying, making a shifting pattern of constellations that is mesmerising and enchanting all at once.

It’s Loy Kratong in Thailand, the full moon festival in November that marks the start of dry season. Kratongs are tiny rafts, decorated with flowers and banana leaves, and lit with candles, that are set afloat in rivers and streams, sent off with a wish for the future and the job also of carrying away the bad things from the previous year as they float down towards the sea.

This year, with the flooding that afflicted not just Bangkok but much of central Thailand, and is still going on, the idea that water is everywhere and needs to be acknowledged is even more potent. To put a kratong in the water you need to kneel on the bank and reach out and place it carefully on the surface. You want it to float and be carried off by the current, so you give it a little push, and perhaps also splash the water to make waves that will carry it away from the shore.

Yesterday I went to Warorot Market to shop for kratong-making supplies. The base is round, made of a short length of banana stem, about 2 inches thick and anything from 5 to 15 inches in diameter, like a round cutting-board in shape. (People had started to use styrofoam instead of banana stem these last years, but not a concern over pollution and trashing the river has led people back to banana stem.) I also bought several large bundles of banana leaves, long folded-green and supple, as well as small pins and finishing nails to use as attachers. Then what about flowers? I bought some orchids (magenta ones and white ones) and a bag full of marigolds, large full orange ones. Then I needed sparklers and incense, a bag of small clay and wax candles, and a box of matches, and the shopping was done.

Today I sat on the floor with three friends and we figured our way into kratong decoration, starting with wrapping the whole banana stem platforms banana leaf (so the banana stem absorbs water less quickly and lasts longer). Then came the decisions about which flowers? and arranged how? Symmetrically the Thai way? or not? We each decorated two or three. Each had personality and was a reflection of the moment and of the person who made it.

Then in the late afternoon we put each in a plastic bag for easier carrying (taking care not to crush the flowers around the edge or to knock over the incense batons etc), and set off for the river. I knew the crowds would get dense and intense, so I was happy to set out just as the fat moon was rising over the trees in a limpid sky.

We headed down Thapae Road to the river, then across the bridge and north. The place I had in mind for us to float our kratongs was the riverbank at the Brasserie, best known for its bluesy jazz in the late night. We sat sipping lime juice and other easy drinks, watching the light fade, with the big blue mound of Doi Sutep against the western sky, and meantime too, a stream of flickering-lights - kratongs - was already floating down the far side of the river.

As darkness fell we carried our kratongs to the wet post-floods-smelling river bank and one by one we lit the candles, the incense sticks, the sparklers, and knelt and placed them on the water, then gave a push to encourage them out into the deeper water where the current could catch them And one by one they made it: tippy-teetery, carrying their toppings of marigolds and orchids, their spikes of incense and their flickering candles, they valiantly headed out to join their colleagues, then floated quickly off down the river.

They carried wishes with them, and hopefully carried off all the negatives and difficulties and regrets from the last twelve months, leaving us free and fresh to begin another cycle of life and hope.

Later we walked along the river banks, the dark water now alive with lit kratongs and with the reflected dots of light from the hundreds of paper lanterns floating aloft. And everywhere there were people lighting candles, holding lit paper lanterns as they waited for the hot air to build up and carry them away, eating and drinking, laughing and living in the now.

How lovely. How special.

AFTERWARD: I wrote all that last night, and now it is once again evening, and there are again firecrackers banging and popping and in the distance I can hear a marching band playing loud ly and rhythmically as it makes its way down Thapae Road. This is the third parade in as many evenings! Ah well. I kind of feel sorry for the police who vow endlessly on their whistles as they try to redirect traffic from blocked-off roads.

This morning was the Haw market, as it is every Friday here. There were custard apples, and heaps of pickles and Shan tou, and creamy Shan soup, and Burmese sweets, and dried meat, and vegetables and greens of every description, and people with faces from the hills and valleys of many parts of SOutheast Asia, as well as the odd foreigner. I had a thick creamy Shan soup and then an hour or more later a noodle soup with a meat sauce heightened by chile paste. Yum, and YUM!

Oh, and the big fat glowing full moon has just come up from behind the eastern hills...;Happy full moon day everyone.

A SECOND RUN AT THIS IDEA OF HARVEST AND THANKSGIVING AT HALLOWEEN

2011-10-31T16:45:00.002-04:00

The thing I failed to mention in the last post is that I dug up the back garden this weekend. I always have trouble doing that. It's not about the labour, it's about the loss. When I turn the soil and pull out the last herbs and tomatoes etc, I am saying good-bye to hope of renewal; it's the end, the final point of the growing season. I don't like it. And so often I have tended to avoid committing to the finality. I often leave the digging too late (which means I have a mess to deal with in the spring). (This year it's all done, and as well, I have rye seed to plant as a cover crop for over the winter. I'll let you know how it goes.)

But this year there were some great finds in the fading garden and somehow a feeling of ease about it all. I came on some heads of tender fresh garlic for example. And I pulled a number of green and growing dandelion plants. I've been harvesting those leaves all summer, since the spring, to chop up and stir-fry as part of my breakfast (rice underneath, a fried egg on top). Now pulling them out feels like a definitive good-bye.

I was due to go to Dawn the baker's and Ed's for supper the other night. So I took along some dandelion greens and garlic from my garden tidying. They had cooked merguez from Sanagan's and wanted to turn it into a form of Thai salad. So I sliced the merguez, then sliced the shallots thinly and tossed them with the merguez and some fish sauce and vinegar and lime juice, as well as some Vietnamese coriander leaves (so delicious). Then I sliced the tender young garlic cloves and fried them in a little olive oil, along with finely chopped dandelion leaves (there was a little arugula from the garden in there too). It went onto the salad as part of the dressing, both the wilted greens and cooked garlic. Wow. Something wonderful happens when you had a bitter greens to the sweetness of the lamb in the merguez.

We can safely call this fusion food, and in my view it's the best version of all: solid ingredients, meshed with some insight, and with pleasure!

All this is another piece of the Thanksgiving process that fill October, from early on all the way to Halloween. So lucky! So lovely!

APPLES, PUMPKINS, HALLOWEEN PLEASURES

2011-10-31T12:06:00.002-04:00

There’s a guy drilling cement outside the building across the street. If I find the noise penetrating from inside my office, how much of a beating are his ears taking? He doesn’t look like he’s wearing ear-protectors. The intermittent drilling aside, it’s a beautiful day, with golden leaves fluttering against a mostly-blue sky, now softening with a little cloud cover. This evening will be fairly mild for Halloween, and dry, a blessing for the small people who will be out trick-or-treating.

I associate Halloween with Thanksgiving and harvest, partly just because of the time of year, and more specifically because pumpkins and apples (remember when apples were part of Halloween?) are such a part of harvest time.

On the weekend I drove out for the day to a friend’s place north of the city. On the way I came across an honour-system pumpkin stand loaded with huge pumpkins. The sign said, $3 per pumpkin, Thank-you!” and there was a small cash box with some change in it. I had no change, so I left a twenty dollar bill, took back three dollars in change, and lifted five pumpkins into the car. When I got to my friend’s place I told her she now had two more pumpkins to do with as she wished. No choice!. ANother is going to a neighbour. That leaves two to be carved later today.

But back to the country. Once I got there and had a coffeee, we walked out to the back of the property, a rolling twenty-five acres, very beautiful, with a small river running through it. I always say it’s the largest twenty-five acre property I know, for it’s so varied and full of lovely mysteries.

We crossed the stream on flat stepping stones then climbed up out of the valley on the far side and into sunshine that warmed us into shedding our jackets. There was work to do, for a number of the trees at the edge of a field and along a wide path were encumbered with wild grape vines. They grow and twine and proliferate, eventually weighing the tree down so much that it sickens and weakens. And of course in winter the extra twining vines mean that there’s more surface for snow to rest on, and thus even more weight for the tree to bear. So we snipped and cut and broke the grape vines, then pulled them off and left tangled heaps here and there.

The last tree we did was a huge old apple tree. The apples (no I can’t tell you the variety) were crisp and beautiful and full of flavour. Their red was in fine stencilled-like strips. The windfalls that lay under the tree made a dense patterned splash of colour, and were aromatic where we stepped on them and crushed them. The deer in the forest are eating well these days, is all I can say!

We hacked away at the grape, then gathered apples off the tree and trudged on back to the house to make a late lunch.

The apples were calling out, so I cut some of them up, squeezed on lemon and lime juice, and piled them into a small oven-proof dish. I made a mixture of oatmeal, flour, sugar, and a generous amount of butter chopped into small chunks. Once the mixture was a fairly even crumbly texture I added a little water, so that it came together, nearly, as a kind of dough. The mounded apples were mixed with some sugar and cinnamon, then the streusel-pastry-ish mixture went on top and it all went into the oven.

Of course it’s hard to miss when you’re working with apples and sugar etc, but this was an especially wonderful treat, because those apples had such a complex dynamic flavour. The rest of them have just gone onto a pair of skillet cakes. Yum. And the hot oven, after the cakes came out, is now baking two small pumpkins, halved and deseeded and baking face down, lightly oiled on their cut sides. Once they come out and cool, I’ll lift off the peel and puree the flesh with a little extra water.

It makes a great soup, flavoured with olive oil in which I have cooked some garlic or shallots, whatever is to hand. You can include potato too, for even more thick unctuousness, but I find the pumpkin does well on its own.

Some friends are coming by for supper. We’ll take turns handing out treats to whatever kids come, and in between we’ll sip some wine and spoon up thick orange pumpkin soup. Not sure what the rest of the menu is; it will take shape as I forage through the frig!

Happy Halloween everyone.

POSTSCRIPT: A friend just called and will drop by with some tagine she made yesterday...and I forgot to mention the pumpkin seeds, the other wealth that pumpkins give us. Mine are toasting now...

WARMING OURSELVES WITH ART, MUSIC, FOOD, & FRIENDS

2011-10-27T11:36:00.006-04:00

We’re still in October, and the basics seem to be staying pretty constant. The main themes of life this month continue to be art, culture, and friends, all under a chilly rainy sky. We’re not drowning in floodwaters, as the people of central Thailand are, but we too have had enough rain and dampness to last us awhile. I’m ready for some sunshine!

Meantime that warmth and optimism has to come from other sources. Just yesterday I went with a friend to a free concert at the Opera House here in Toronto. There’s a kind of amphitheatre two floors up. That's where the free noontime concerts are held. This one was by the Zodiac trio - have you heard of them? I hadn’t - who are American and French: clarinet, piano, and violin. They were terrific, and so was their program. The concert title was “Music from a Silenced Nation: Soviet Composers.” I knew Shostakovitch and Stravinsky, but the other two were new to me: Edison Denisov (one movement of an amazing sonata for solo clarinet, moody and impressionistic with slides and quarter tones, completely remarkable); and Galina Ustvolskaya, whose Trio, written in 1949, was haunting, each movement tailing off into silence, a questioning suggestive absence.

Then there’s the Chagall, the AGO show on Chagall and other artists who were born in the Russian empire and worked in Russia and then mostly in France, in the first half of the twentieth century. In my ignorance I knew nothing about many of the artists in the show. Apart from Chagall paintings and drawings, there was a wonderful Lipschitz bronze and some lovely Kandinsky’s, but it was the work by the others, called collectively the Russian Avant-Garde in the show’s title, that was new to me and sometimes took my breath away. I didn’t know about Sonia Delaunay or Natalia Gontcharova, nor about Tatin, Malevitch, Rodtchenko... If you have a chance to get to Toronto’s AGO before January 10, do go. And try to make time for two visits, because ther’s a lot to absorb.

There’s often discussion in art and literature crcles, and argument, about whether knowledge of the artist or writer is important or should even be a factor in appreciating the work. At the end of the Chagall is a long (fifteen-minute, maybe twenty-minute) film made in the 1970’s I think, when he was living in the south of France (he died in 1980 at the age of 98, a beautiful looking man). Somehow, watching him talk about his work, watching him work, and hearing about his first stay in Paris (1910-12) when he met Braque and Picasso and the other painters in that then-vibrant art community, helped me get a handle on his achievement. Until then, to me the paintings were whimsical or amusing or sad or sorrowful, sometimes all at once, and their colour and vibrancy and life-force was extraordinary, but I’d never been able to get hold of them for myself. I sat on the surface, you could say, but didn’t “get” them, most of them.

After the film somehow things fell into place: the pictures aren’t disciplined workings out of a theory or a geometry, they’re pure expressions of how he was feeling. In them there are elements of the painterly schools or techniques (the newspaper seller has a cubist feel in parts, in the papers he carries, for example), but he has digested all that others were doing and remained himself. He’s always Chagall, the man from Vitebsk, not contained or constrained by theory or specific techniques.

Now to go back and look at the whole exhibition with fresh eyes. What a treat to have the show waiting for me a few blocks away.

All this Russian art and creativity, from the AGO show to the Zodiac Trio program, is a reminder of how much the world lost in the twentieth century because of anti-Semitism and the totalitarian politices of Stalin et al. Artists were persecuted, some of them managing to flee, others not surviving. (Of the artists in the Chagall show, almost all died in France; one died in 1944 in Auschwitz; I wonder about all that got buried in history, whose work we don’t know about) It’s also a reminder, as the Zodiac clarinetist said in some opening words, that human creativity is remarkably tenacious. Even in difficult circumstances, many artists manage to produce work and to keep their integrity. They’re valuable to us all, a reminder of the larger view, the bigger horizon, the potential in all of us.

That’s the warmth we find in art and music in this chilly damp weather.

Other warmth comes from the glow of the leaves, still clinging, many of them, despite the rain and winds. The huge maple out my back window, a squirrel high-rise, is a blend of red and green against the sky, wind-tattered at the edges of its generous canopy.

And then there’s Diwali, the festival of lights, which was last night. We aren’t Hindus, but we did have tiny candles lit and other lights on. It was dark and chilly outside but the house was full of welcome conversation as we talked and ate mostly leftovers with good friends in the warmth of our shared humanity.

AND AS FOR THE DETAILS: We ate well, in many stages, with a backdrop of roasted pumpkin (I was cooking small pumpkin halves to soft, to then puree them for soup), very autumnal altogether. The "menu": dal with cauliflower, reheated with some water and olive oil, and thickened with leftover rice, comfort food at its best; leftover Italian sausage from Sanagan's, sliced fairly thinly, wok-fried to reheat and tossed in the wok with leftover tubetti; multi-colourd fresh carrots cut into sticks, for crunch; and fresh rice to take care of the lovely sauce on some leftover Thai chicken curry, red curry, small pieces of chicken, and delectable. For afters I simmered chopped Grey County apples in brown sugar and a little water, then served them with a dollop of very unsweet stewed damsons and a long lick of maple syrup.

PROTECTING THE VITALITY OF MY NEIGHBOURHOOD

2011-10-20T19:27:00.004-04:00

I just got word that the City of Toronto is proposing to sell several Toronto Community Housing buildings, all the ones in my neighbourhood in fact, as a short-term money-raising scheme.

terrible idea.

I just sent a letter to the CEO and another committe member, and this is what it says...in case anyone else wants to send a letter too, opposing the idea:
Dear Sir and Madam:
I am a long-time resident of Henry Street. I moved onto the street as a tenant in 1983 and .. I have been a home-owner on Henry Street since 1984. I raised my children on the street, sent them to the local pubic school and to University Settlement House for after-school programs (and now they are at the University of Toronto), and I am a customer at many of the businesses on Baldwin Street.

All of this is to say that I am anchored in this community and I know my neighbours and my neighbourhood.

The proposal that Hydro Block and the houses on Beverley-Dundas currently operated by Toronto Community Housing be sold is expensive and short-sighted. All studies confirm my experience here, which is that mixed neighbourhoods, made up of people of many backgrounds and from many layers of the socio-economic spectrum, are healthier and cost less in all kinds of ways, than separate homogeneous enclaves of the wealthier and the less well-off.

My children went to school with kids from Hydro Block and the Beverley community, and that was good for all parties. There's a social cohesiveness to an integrated neighbourhood that produces peaceful community, reduces violence, and makes schools productive and again lower-cost.

The proposal that a one-time sale, and hence a one-time cash-in, of these properties is good for the city is, frankly, ridiculous. It will raise social tensions, as people lose their housing, and it will create ghettos where we now have integrated communities.

We know from some of the ghetto-like enclaves in the suburbs that such social isolation leads to violent crime, high drop-out rates in the schools, and much higher costs in terms of policing and other security issues. But the highest cost of all is the human cost.

People of all walks of life should continue to be entitled to live downtown, with easy access to all that is there. The handicapped
people who live on the top floor of the Hydro Block are especially in need of housing that is easily accessible to shopping and transit, but so are the families that now thrive in the Beverley-Dundas houses.

The Hydro Block, and the Beverley-Dundas houses are a model of how the city should be handling low income housing. And the neighbourhood is a model of lively safe streets, productive schools, and flourishing community.

Please vote against any proposal that includes the sale of Toronto Community Housing. It's an expensive and short-sighted measure. It may be designed to raise revenue, but it will in fact do the reverse, for it will have a huge price tag: both money costs (to be born by taxpayers) and human costs (to be born by those least able to defend themselves).

Thank-you for taking the long view, rather than grabbing at short-term band-aids.
Yours sincerely,

I'll let you know how it goes.

ART AND FOOD AND FRIENDS

2011-10-19T17:57:00.006-04:00

The leaves are drifting down in the drizzle, with pouring rain and high winds promised. Already the sidewalks near ash trees are paved with little golden leaves. But many trees will be stripped bare before their leaves have had a chance to thrill us with colour. Last year's autumn was such a spectacular one, I suppose we can't complain if this year is an off-year.

In my last post - mostly about the Mega Quarry and fabulous Foodstock - I said I'd write soon about some encounters I had in early October. The month started with Nuit Blanche, and I guess that first of October event was a preview of what my month has been since: a composite of often-chilly weather, friends old and new, and serendipitous encounters with people and art and food and new ideas.

A couple of days after Nuit Blanche I took a day flight to London on Air Canada, a huge treat, and headed into town on the Tube to stay at my cousin's flat near Victoria. There was time the next day for lots of conversation with him, and a visit to the British Museum as well as wanderings through Bloomsbury and Covent Garden and more.

The following morning I took a train to Devizes to visit a friend I'd met travelling in Burma. She took me to Stonehenge (I'd never been, so missed the hundreds of years when it was freely open; it's now visitable but only from a distance). The winds blew cold and fierce, across Salisbury Plain and the shifting sky was dramatic and beautiful, so that Stonehenge held its own, even with polite little fencing around it. There were lovely sharp shadows, intensely green rounded hills, and the wind, always.

The market in Devizes, which is on Thursday mornings, was charming, nd loaded with the best of English and Scottish fresh food, from raspberries and strawberries (yes really) to quinces; and from Whitby crab to Shetland scallops. We bought lots of scallops, still with their beautiful orange roe, and cooked them lightly with a little olive oil and garlic for supper. Not shabby at all! But even with that caliber of competition, the winner in the memorable food competition in Devizes for me was the butcher's shop Walter Rose's. It's stunning, small, beautiful, and with an astonishing selection of meats. I bought a pork pie, a deceptively simple-looking pork pie. And I have to say that the taste and texture of it haunt me still. What word to use besides delicious? succulent? perfect?

Back in London on Saturday, I headed out early to Borough Market, almost a cliche destination for food tourists. I'd been warned that it would be crowded, but early on Saturday it was anything but. The website is great, by the way. I ate fresh oysters - bracingly chilled and briny - from Mersea Island (in Essex); bought some Extra virgin olive oil from Greece, and some olives; ate a pain au chocolat, and then another; and also bought a delicious slab of Comte, aged 22 months, to take to friends.

Fortified(!) by treats I walked to the Tate Modern to see the newly opened Gerhard Richter retrospective, just dazzling and amazing, especially for someone like me who hadn't been very clued in about his work before. Here's the link to info about the show It's on until early January. And of course there's lots else to marvel at at the Tate Modern, if you have the stamina.

In the next couple of days I got to another two exhibitions, one on Degas at the Royal Academy, info here; and the other at the V&A, a huge retrospective view of the movement in art and architecture, music and design, called Post-Modernism. It was so enlightening to realise a little more about where aesthetic and design elements arose that we now take for granted. Here's a link to info about the show.

As if all that weren't enough, I had fun with food people too. One, whom I'll call Mrs Lemur, has a wonderful blog called The Lemurs are Hungry, here. I'd stumbled on it awhile ago, and made a couple of comments, so then we agreed to meet while I was in London. Have a look at the blog, which gives recipes that Mrs Lemur makes, often Thai or other Asian, always clear and interesting. Good writing generally. I met Kay Plunkett-Hogge, who is deeply knowledgeable about Thailand, having been raised there, and writes and teaches, also based in London. Her blog and website are here, lively, opnionated, wide-ranging.

I had the pleasure of a making a foraging expedition with the wonderful Anissa Helou, whose book on Offal has just been re-published. We headed north to Baldwin's, a butcher in the far north of London, north of FInsbury Park somewhere, in a largely Turkish and Kurdish area. Before the shopping we had to fortify ourselves with lachmajun, hot and delish. The butcher was very sweet, and also had a fantastic array of lamb and sheep and sausage and more... We picked up the order Anissa had phoned in, which included testicles, heads, a whole young lamb, brains, tripe, and more. Anissa needed it all to prepare a feast the following day. She wrote about the tripe in her blog Anissa, which I think all food people should bookmark.

I know, you think I've said enough about all this food and art and stuff in London. I have just a few more: I was so happy to be able to spend time with Jake Tilson, whose book about fish and seafood and a lot more besides - In at the Deep End - is now out. The writing, recipes, design, typography, art, and photographs are his - a spectacular achievement. His website is here. His partner, the amazing Jennifer Lee, is a ceramic artist, and her website is here. It's a place to marvel at her work...

Finally, I am always happy to see Richard Jung and his family. I had supper with them on my last night in London, which was extra-welcome because it was Thanksgiving Day in Canada. No, we didn't have turkey, thank heavens (not my favorite food at any time). Richard made all the wonderful natural-light studio shots for Hot Sour Salty Sweet; HomeBaking; Mangoes and Curry Leaves (where his black and white location shots also featured); and Beyond the Great Wall. I'm hoping he's available to shoot for Rivers of Flavor, my new book, about Burma. Meantime you can admire his work here.

I've come to the end of this link-littered post. Thanks for your patience: I so much enjoyed the opening out that my trip to London gave me that I wanted to pass it on.

And now I'm back in Toronto and listening to pelting rain outside. I'm happy to be snug and warm, grateful for the comforts and familiarity of home.

FEASTING & FIGHTING, IN A CAST OF THOUSANDS

2011-10-16T22:09:00.004-04:00

It’s chilly this evening, as we pass the halfway mark in October. Perhaps I’m feeling the chill a little more because I’m tired this evening. It’s been quite a day.

I woke early, at around five (because I’m still a little jetlagged), then drove out of the city headed north. Foodstock, an event designed to raise money and awareness to help stop the Mega-quarry that is being planned for a huge area of farmland north of Shelburne, in Ontario, took place today. There are many problems with the quarry, among them its scale and also the fact that the quarry is planned to be so deep that it will destroy the water table of an area that is the source of many rivers.

So this is serious. It’s a food issue, an agriculture issue, an environmental health issue. The land has been assembled on behalf of a large US company; those who sold were told the buyer was planning to farm. Now what?

Well some locals, chefs and food people and others, decided to fight the Mega-quarry, and to do that by holding a huge event. They sure succeeded. Latest estimates are that 28,000 people came out to “Foodstock”. It’s an unimaginable number, when you think that they travelled on country roads to get to muddy fields, where they parked, then walked miles in the harsh wind to a forest, where at last they found chefs stationed under trees serving all kinds of different foods, all freely available for the suggested entry fee of ten dollars. The generosity of the chefs and farmers and others is hard to comprehend. The chefs work to make a living, and so do the coffee and tea people and other purveyors who were there, and the farmers who donated produce. And all of them were donating their livelihood to the cause.

Stunning.

Now the next thing is to figure out how to stop the Mega-quarry once and for all. Definitively.

In the meantime the sight of people from near and far eating pulled pork in a freshly made tortilla; or Monforte goat cheese on an artisanal cracker from Evelyn’s Crackers, topped by saskatoon berry jam, or crabapple tkemali; or Hungarian goulash served in freshly boiled cabbage leaves; or black cod on rounds of daikon from Sakura; or buffalo prosciutto (a whole beautiful leg of it) from Buca; or the stunning rillettes from a place in Collingwood (sorry I forget the name, but dazzling, young people of the best kind); or “Ontario Salad” a mix of many ingredients, fresh and lively and local, one of my faves of the day; or chowder served in a carved out bun/roll; or fresh oysters shucked right there by guys with stamina to burn; or sunchoke soup; or warming pasta e fagioli; or Jamie Kennedy’s fries, made with potatoes grown on the farm we were on; and then lots and lots more; was just wonderful, because everyone was so pleased to be there.

In between the cooks there were musicians: singers, guitarists, drummers. It was like a medieval fair on steroids. We were in a hardwood forest, with the scent of fallen leaves perfuming the damp air, and you could see the colour and movement as the crowds walked along paths in the distance, peopling the landscape.

In the middle of all those people queueing for food and eating or serving it, there was Michael Schmidt of raw milk fame, looking a little gaunt in the face. Why? because he’s on the fifteenth day of a hunger strike (he’s on water and lemon juice only). He’s trying to get the government to shift its crazy and destructive stance on unpasteurised milk. Raw milk in Ontario is treated as toxic and dangerous (while processed meats routinely sicken people with no-one criminally charged). There does seem to be something wrong with this picture, no?

In any case, there was Michael, a non-eater surrounded by a horde of people enjoying the best the province has to offer.

Meantime in the City of Toronto the Wall Street protest continues to take shape; and today the Marathon happened, thousands more people not protesting, not out eating, but instead running their hearts out.

Maybe the whole city feels like I do tonight, a little windblown and weary! Time for a hot bath, or a nip of Scotch perhaps? I have bought a new-to-me single pot Irish whisky, 12 years old, called Redbreast. That’s what I’ll start with, followed by a bath.

And in the next few days I’ll write about what I’ve been doing in the more-than-two-weeks since I last wrote here. There are pork pies in the story, and offal, there are double-decker buses, as well as thoughts of change and evolution. At this falling-golden-leaves time of year there’s the exhilaration of colour and dramatic skies, and the pang that they signal the fact that cold weather and shorter days are upon us.

OVERCOMING FEARS, and TRAVELS IN GREEN LANDSCAPES

2011-09-29T23:28:00.005-04:00

I'm sitting in a nice corner hotel room in Glens Falls New York. It's been a long good day, following a beautiful day yesterday driving from Toronto to Charlotte, Vermont. I woke this morning at Susan Stuck's house, its beautiful old farmhouse proportions so welcoming, and felt rested and at ease. That's partly the effect of Susan's company, and the welcome embrace of her house, but also because I feel clear for now of the complications of the Burma manuscript, Rivers of Flavor. I've now reviewed the edited manuscript, made my own changes and rewrites etc, and just before I left home I got it all photocopied (in case the original gets lost along the way). Once I'm home, tomorrow night, I can package it up and FedEx it back to NYC.

Getting to this stage before I left Toronto yesterday was a huge boon. My head feels clearer and my step lighter.

I enjoy working hard at things. So why this pleasure at having finished this intensive stage of work? I think it's because I get anxious when I owe something to someone else. When I work hard at something for me, it's not so fraught. But when I owe the ms back within a certain time, it feels like a load. At the same time I think deadlines are desirable and useful things, constraints to keep me in line. But why this over-reacton to them? Why do they weigh so heavily? I suppose it is doubt, an undermining doubt that I will get done what I have undertaken, so I get impatient to be finished, impatient to be reassured that in fact I can and will come through in the way I need and want to.

And then I turn on the TV here and who is on? Aung San Suu Kyi talking to Charlie Rose, live on Skype. Amazing. Now there's a person who has come through. I'm sure she's had doubts, and fears. And yet she has delivered. She's talking now about democracy, clear-thinking, human rights...and the need to go step by step. An amazing world, this, in which a very closed-off place Burma can be linked to the rest of the world. This cross-linking feels like a powerful weapon against totalitarianism. She's talking about the need for awareness, the need for the rest of the world to follow what is going on in Burma, and to really pay attention. "We need change in the right direction that is steady and sustained." Listen to hear what the people of Burma want, and then help us get what we want: that's her request to the people of the rest of the world. "We need a better education sytem, better health care, a more open society...[in Burma]". "I had to learn not to let fear control me." "You have to get over the fear in order to get committed to your ideals."

It's a good reminder. Let go the anxiety, admit the fear and then try to shed it, in order to be free to take action, move forward, commit... Some people need a lot of courage, people like the demonstrators in Yemen and Syria, who are being shot at and tortured by their governments. But we all need some measure of courage every day, and that takes admitting that we all feel fear and anxiety from time to time. It's not shameful, just reality.

Thanks to everyone who came out this evening in Glens Falls to hear me talk about RIce and taste some rices, and ask questions. It was a lot of fun. I love engaging with people, especially about basic foods. So, as I say, many thanks, and to the Crandall Public Library too. I'm looking forward to my drive back across New York State tomorrow. The landscapes are so beautiful, the greens intense with all the recent rain, and the leaves just starting to turn. The Adirondacks frame the horizon here...and will keep me company for the first part of the drive. What a treat.

A CHANGE OF SEASONS AS WE CROSS-CONNECT ONLINE AND OFF

2011-09-20T22:44:00.006-04:00

It has been a full more-than-week since I last wrote here, not just because of the Toronto film festival (TIFF), though the five films I saw did take chunks out of my week, but more centrally because I am now working my way through the edits on my Burma book Rivers of Flavor. I should be spending my days and nighst at it. But of course there are only so many hours of high quality concentration time available in the day. The mind and body are very limited I find, when it comes to this stuff.

Anyway, as the person doing the line editing and generally overseeing this process said to me in a note: remember to take breaks and breathe and enjoy the spaces in between (or something like that). This evening the "break" was a meeting up north of the city of the Women's Culinary Network. There was a panel on social media and new media and I was one of three speakers. Those of you who know what a luddite I am will be surprised, I'm sure. I know nothing about using the internet for self-promotion, or about marketing generally. The two speakers who went after me talked about all that.

I wanted to remind all of us there that Twitter and Facebook and all the other connecting tools are a wonderful way of getting access to new ideas and fresh information about creative people, unheard of projects, etc as well as to hard news. I rely on a number of curatorial people, like @brainpicker on Twitter for example, who find and put up links to interesting sites or articles or videos. I am constantly astonished by what she has links to. I reminded the meeting that lots of links are not related to food, but are still important, and they can enlighten us and be relevant in unexpected ways. One such link I came across just today; it's about our sense of smell . Pretty interesting, and a surprise because it's not the way we've assumed smell works in humans. [NOTE: I put the link in, but somehow this time blogspot doesn't recognise it. If you want to have a look cut and paste the link in. The URL is www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128301.800-the-unsung-sense-how-smell-rules-your-life.html?full=true" - more tech incompetence here, sorry!]

And then at the other end of the spectrum is longreads.com, which gives access to in-depth articles of various kinds, real reading! Those of us who dash from item to item can soon lose the capacity to hang in for a long concentrated exposition of ideas. Longreads helps keep us tuned-up, as well as furnishing us with new ideas and concepts.

All this I mentioned, along with a list of my favorite tools and sites and Tweeters. Hope it was useful.

I also reminded myself as I was preparing for the panel, that I enjoy taking a day away from all this follwing and connecting stuff. Often it's the day I write here... A day off enables me to imagine and think about things in a longer-arc more reflective and introspective way. That's valuable, as valuable as any particular insight or piece of information that I might come upon as I explore new links online.

Sorry to go on and on about this; it's all so self-referential and suffocating after awhile, this talk of social media. I'm reminded of how often that chat sounds like people are rehearsing for life. And that's a waste, for this is it, now. We're not rehearsing for a bigger and better stage down the road once we understand things better. The whole of life is happening as we talk about it.

I think sometimes that we've been infected (or maybe just I have been infected) by the implicit and explicit message in primary school, that we'll grow and learn and improve and eventually be more able, more capable, more responsible. But in fact that message gives us less-than-useful reflexes. All of life is life. The preparation and the living out of it are all one. That's true even of our two-year-old selves. It's not a rehearsal.

And so whether it's the mundane details of social media and self-promotion, or the deeply important emotional connections we have to our nearest and dearest, it's all happening in the now, and we get the privilege of taking it on, being responsible for it, enjoying it, appreciating each breath and each moment.

Once more I'm back at this idea of balance, reasonableness, or perhaps we could call it sustainability. It's up to us to balance our screen time with our other work. And that means not being needy and greedy about tweeting and FB'ing.

Last night I had dinner at a friend's place. Her cousin was visiting from Vancouver, and that was a treat, for i met them both when I was an undergraduate at Queen's. And then a third of that band of women I knew in first year so long ago came by. I had seen her only a few times since undergrad, and the last time was nearly 25 years ago. Unbelievable! we said to each other. And yet with all those years gone by, we were each recognisable to the others, each essentially the same person, even though marked by age and scars of various kinds. How lovely, the privilege of knowing people over time, and of reconnecting with them unexpectedly at a later stage of life.

It was pouring rain last night, but I was wearing my father's wool dinner jacket, which kept me warm and dry as i walked to the subway. The chill in the air, despite today's sunshine, gave me the urge to make a skillet cake, as did the damson plums that a friend had found for me. This afternoon I made two medium-sized skillet cakes, one topped with the plums and the other with chopped apple on top. It is a sign of cold weather, this cake-baking. Another was the bread I made last week. There was some leftover white rice that was on its second day, so just starting to ferment. I added lukewarm water, covered it loosely, and left it to ferment for a couple of days. Then that water plus rice became the base for a bread dough. It included whole wheat pastry flour as well as all-purpose. NO oil. It made wonderful bread, after an overnight rise, even though there was no yeast, just the leavening of wild yeasts and the fermented rice.

We all agreed it was a treat to once again have home-made bread on hand. Now here's the question: how to make bread fairly regularly, without it becoming a chore or a burden? If I figure out the answer, I'll let you know!

PRESERVING MOMENTS AND FLAVOUR AND MORE

2011-09-11T08:37:00.005-04:00

We're been returned to summer by the weather gods these last few days. I've been out in the evenings on my bicycle under huge radiant sunset skies and luminous dusks lit by the fat moon. This is mid-autumn festival time on the lunar calendar, but really so far there's no autumn feel to it at all. The axe will fall this week I think, with rain and chillier weather. So it's a very live-in-the-moment few days.

Of course this date also reminds us of the fragility of things and that living in the moment and appreciating it fully is one of our main tasks as thinking imaginative beings. Today, brilliant with morning sunshine, clear blue sky, and still-green leaves is very like in feel and weather that day ten years ago.

A wonderfully obsessive and energetic friend spent yesterday canning tomatoes, which of course involves cooking them down and then being very careful about sterilising the jars etc. She had worked her way through one whole bushel of tomatoes by the time I got there at the end of the afternoon. Bowls and pots of them in various stages were all around, brilliant gleaming redness. We had supper, then I stayed for a little while to help with the first batch of 6 one-quart jars. They got lowered into a large pot of boiling water, then had to stay there for 45 minutes. There was a lot more to do, and from a note she sent very late last night I gather she stayed up for ages putting the rest into jars.

We labour at these things, putting food by for winter, preserving in our small way the warmth and immediacy of summer by sealing tomatoes and peaches, pickled cucumber and more, and jams too, in glass jars. They're like jewels on the shelf, as richly beautiful. They are the promise of a hit of summer sunshine and optimism when we need it most, in the dark days of winter. It takes imagination to visualise that moment of need vividly enough that it prods us to engage in the long laborious work of canning and preserving. And that's why most people no longer do it. There are tin cans of crushed tomatoes we can buy...but once you taste the homemade version, and see it in a glass jar, the tins no longer seem a good substitute for home-made.

It's a question of flavour, yes, but also something about identity and meaning and connection. Food is more than a "product" or "input". If we production-line produce food, as we might a car or a computer, the end result is not comparable to food made by hand by you or someone you know well. This point is made with far more elegance and developed over several pages, in the article that opens this issue of Lapham's Quarterly, the one on Food. I often find the collections too much of a pastiche, but the food issue has some real treasures in it, such as the description by a sufragette of her experience of being force-fed. Horrific, yes, and a process that continues to this day. For example there's the woman in India, whose story appeared recently, who has been suffering force-feeding because she has been on a politically motivated hunger strike for years. Yes, years.

On this day that marks a very public violence, it's important I think to remember that there are ongoing instances, many of them state-sanctioned, many of them occurring behind closed doors, of humankinds's cruelty to fellow human beings. ("Man's inhumanity to man" is an elegant expression, but somehow feels so incomplete; so many victims are women, and also a good number of perpetrators, let's admit.)

The Toronto International Film Festival, most often referred to as TIFF, opened this week. The downtown and uptown are abuzz not just with students returning to university, but with the news of which film is wonderful and which star or director was last spotted coming into or out of this or that bar or restaurant. I've been to one film so far, with a friend who gets pass tickets. I Have another three to look forward to. I saw the second showing (a morning screening) of the Vietnamese film Lost in Paradise. It's a love story, set in contemporary Saigon, in the milieu that is toughest: the street. The central relationship is between two young guys, one of whom is a prostitute. There are many kindnesses in the film, but also many cruelties. Beautifully shot, not as tightly edited as it needs to be, and with strong acting, it's one to look out for.

No, I have no pretensions to be a movie reviewer, I promise! But the unfreedom of the lives of many of the characters, the virtual slavery of the prostitute whose woman pimp comes round to berate her and beat her if she's not on the job, for example, was a reminder that slavery exists in many forms. It's not an institution from before, but an ongoing possibility and reality for many people, in varying degrees.

Freedom and transparency are both fragile plants. They can't just be preserved in glass jars and put on a shelf; they have to be actively defended and fought for.

Meantime, on the home front, it's time for my annual small preserving routine, time to start putting up basil in olive oil. That intensity is so welcome once the cold weather comes and the garden is fallow.

MOMENTS TO ENGAGE, MOMENTS TO DISCONNECT

2011-09-06T16:27:00.004-04:00

As we shift into the cooler days of September, the students are arriving at the University of Toronto (just up the street) and streaming around in flotillas, some bewildered-looking, others trying to be cool... There are cars pulled up to the curb by the various residences, harried or puzzled-looking parents and spacey-looking kids unloading crates and bundles of possessions, while frosh leaders in coloured T-shirts call out info and try to direct traffic.

This annual renewal of optimism and fresh-start enthusiasm is a wonderful sight to see. I feel so lucky to live near the university, so that I am immersed in it every time I step outside. The buzz will continue for three weeks, as the new students get their feet wet so to speak. Soon they'll become accustomed to it all, cool, maybe even jaded!

I've had a great transition this week, from working on last recipe tests and retests, to actually sending the re-dos in to Judith the copy editor. Now to fill the last holes in the Glossary. There's Buddhism for example, a large topic, you'll agree. I want to give a sense of what it's about, and make a place for it in the Burma context, all while trying not to sound trite or glib. hmm And then there are the technique questions: how much to put in about deep-frying? or cooking in a double-boiler? for example.

As this stage relinquishes its grip, I am trying to get ready for the next, which is the check-the-copy-edited ms crunch. It will start in about a week. I'll have three weeks or so to get it done. In the middle of that I'm heading to Glen's Fall's New York to give a talk (on September 29, at the Crandall Public Library, if any of you live nearish-by and are interested). I need to pull my talk together, as well as images, slides they'll be, and mostly about rice, that great staple and social organiser. To grow rice with irrigation requires, when there is little or no mechanisation, a strong social organisation. People have to maintain ditches and terraces and work co-operatively. Bali is a great example of rice landscape, both physical landscapes and the social landscapes that underpin it all.

I had supper with three remarkable women on Saturday night, a last-minute assembling of a visitor, a returning friend, and two of us who've been here the whole time. We sat out in the warm night air and ate and drank and talked and laughed...losing complete track of the time. And then, amazingly, another version of the same scenario happened the next afternoon. I was at lunch at a friend's place, four women again, all of us in food in some way, with long knowledge of each other but not necessarily close friendship. And again, in the humid warm air, we ate well and drank wine and were present to each other.

I love those sorts of meals that become ships or train compartments, worlds unto themselves. And now I go back to each of them in my mind's eye and do what I like to do with old perfume bottles: lift out the stopper and have a transporting sniff, or equivalent, that takes me right back.

Labour Day is for not-work, but I spent it retesting recipes; this time my success rate was 100%, a nice change! I am particularly pleased with the steamed savory rice crepes, and a tapioca pudding with coconut cream custard on top; both of them took many tries. Tashi was great about eating sample, but it was a little gruelling, even with a guinea pig taster! Neither of them is difficult to make. The problem for me is figuring out proportions and technique, and now it's done.

I kept the computer turned off all Labour Day, for a total of thirty-six hours, until this morning in fact. It was interesting to realise how much time I put in here at the screen, looking at messages and responding, looking at Tweets and clicking on the links they throw up, etc etc. It's all part of the environment these days that is so distracting; I wrote at length about it last week.

The result of my lovely long encounters with friends together with my thirty-six hours without email or other computer connection, is that I now know I want to take a computer and internet holiday once a week, at a minimum. It will help keep my head clear I think, able to work steadily at one idea. Today my Glossary task was Buddhism and also a scattering of new entries I am discovering I need in the Glossary. I love the feeling of productivity when I can sit and engage with a task unstintingly. But then that's what life is all about, that's when we feel at our most alive: when we're deeply engaged and committed.

IT'S UP TO ME TO FIGURE OUT FITNESS IN ALL WAYS

2011-08-30T08:45:00.007-04:00

A beautiful penultimate morning of August here in Toronto that makes me feel renewed. That renewal also comes because of the seems-like-very-solid-and-sensible-advice-to-me advice that I got yesterday from a therapist named Damien at Athlete Care yesterday. I'd gone in to see him (my friend Ilse had recommended him highly) about this fallen transverse arch situation I've been living with since June.

Of course the failing of a piece of my body is disturbing. So it's been an odd summer as I try to come to terms with it. I've bought Birkenstock inserts to wear in my shoes and a new cushy pair of runners. But the basic message I got at the foot clinic was that i would need to depend on those inserts, and on wearing shoes in the house and never going barefoot, from now on. Even that I swallowed (grumbling, natch! but I did accept it).

But then my ankle started to hurt, with an intermittent pain, sometimes when I used it, sometimes after. Not good. Clearly whatever adaptations i was consciously making, and my body was making on its own, were doing damage or shifting things around, in a way that seemed to be making the situation worse. Time to rethink, I decided. Was there something going on centrally that was somehow causing all this? Maybe I needed to dig deeper? Cranio-sacral perhaps could help?

But no, really, it all felt lke a functional problem that I was failing to understand. Thus Damien.

His advice? Strengthen, stregthen, work on getting the muscles in the foot and lower leg strong to support the (now weaker) ligaments. He had me stand on two feet and go up onto the balls of my feet as high as possible, then down, and again and again. Then he asked me to try it just on the one left (injured) foot. Yikes! It wobbled and was unsteady. There, he said, that's what you need to stregthen. I'm to go up and down, on two feet before a walk or before getting going in the morning, just to increase blood flow to the muscles, and then do it on the injured foot, up-down-up-down, as often as I can in the day, in reps. The other exercise is to use the foot and ankle to pull against resistance. I mean I can do ankle circles, but it's a more effective strengthener to pull against resistance. (I hook my foot under the edge of a counter and use it to pull me up into a sitting position.)

I'm feeling so energised by this. Aha, I can help myself! Yes, it's a brighter picture altogether, Damien's view (no need for orthotics, once you're stronger you'll be fine barefoot etc), but the energising aspect is that it depends on me, it's up to me, and doesn't rely on outside aids or medications or tricks or... Damien's opinion (and of course not everyone would agree, but one can pick one's advice as one picks anything else, no?) is that most problems are a result of insufficient muscle strength or else overuse, too much pounding. And as we age, we need to focus even more on maintaining muscle strength to support our decreasingly elastic tendons and ligaments.

Sounds like a plan.

Now what's the emotional or intellectual equivalent of this physical advice about sustainable fitness and freedom from injury or impediment?

If I start from the same approach, then I can frame the issue this way: as we age we lose resilience, not just of ligaments etc but also some mental elasticity. We're no longer able to multi-task as easily. If we're too overloaded with different thoughts, we start to forget names or show some other sign of slippage. It's not a pretty sight and it can be very distressing (is this Alzheimer's? is the first panicked thought when it happens).

Clearly the first step is to try to keep our heads clear of unnecessary clutter. That would be for example fruitless worrying about the future or the past or...let's just leave it as fruitless worrying. The other kind of clutter is that which comes when we let ourselves think about too many things at once. With the internet always beckoning, it's easy to slip out of a task and into checking email or looking at the latest tweets. That shifting back and forth builds up debris and clutter that stops us from thinking clearly. It turns us all into ADD sufferers, mental magpies leaping from thing to thing and unable to setttle on anything or think about any one thing in a sustained way.

And that leaves us without the ability to think things through clearly.

I'm just feeling my way here, but the advice I'm trying to give myself, and to live by, is to make a list for the day, and try hard to stick to it, to move from task to task sequentially and not to think much about the next one until this one is done. (And to not check email every half hour either!) The limited forward planning required as I make the list and (loosely) structure my day is very steadying I find.

Those of you who work freelance will probably recognise what I'm talking about. Maybe those of you with jobs that are already structured won't know what I mean. But in your off-hours you may have these distracted and unproductive patterns. Mine are for sure in need of tidying up.

Today for example, my list is a nice easy one. I have five recipes to retest today for Rivers of Flavor: two delectable sweets, a fab pork noodle dish, a salsa variant, and a steamed noodle streetfood from Kengtung. I've got my shopping lists made, and at the other end of the day there are a couple of people dropping by whom I hope to feed with the results of the testing. Getting it done is one goal, but feeding friends is a wonderful motivation for staying on task all day.

Now to jump elsewhere: I went to the Southern Ontario shape-note sing last Saturday. We hold it at the beautiful Detweiler Meeting House southwest of Waterloo, a stone building in rolling farm country that has fabulous acoustics. People came from six states and four provinces, the potluck lunch was a spectacular spread, and the singing warm and intense both. From there I headed to a friend's place north of Lindsey, set in a glade in the woods. I sang to myself as I drove the three hours. I was feeling foolish and over-ambitious, but happily anticipatory too. And it was wonderful to arrive. What an oasis of peace and generous conversation! There was no singing in my sleep, no thought, just a deep plunge.

And that's the other important ingredient to good health, mental and physical: getting rest and sleep. It's while I sleep that my foot and ankle muscles will grow and strengthen. It's when we sleep that our "brain muscles" renew themselves. We're all so ambitious about the things we want to do in the evening. It's as hard to let go sometimes as it was when we were three and were told it was bedtime. "But I'm having so much FUN!"

PLEASURE HOUSE DAWN & COLOUR EVERYWHERE

2011-08-23T22:17:00.013-04:00

Well here it is the 23rd of August, and so I have just sent a letter off to my mother's twin, my Aunt Wendy, wishing her happy birthday. She is now ninety. [The photo here was taken on her birthday, and I'm adding it a day later, on August 24; she's the one riding the pinto, on the left.] All those years ago she and my mother arrived two months early, a disaster it seemed. My grandparents had moved only recently to their one-room log cabin on a quarter section of land in the Bulkley Valley in northern British Columbia. My grandmother had no idea she was having twins; it was only after my mother was born that the neighbour who had been fetched to help realised that perhaps there was another baby in there.

Miracles do happen, and the survival of those twins, despite their puny size and early arrival, was one such. They grew up shy and tenacious and physically capable, unafraid of hard work. My mother died over thirty years ago of breast cancer. My aunt never had cancer, amazingly, for identical twins so often share that kind of thing too. She now lives with her third son and his partner on a ranch near Vernon. As she says, she loves it there for it's the kind of place she knows well, with big landscape to look out at, and animals all around, and plenty of chores large and small to keep her busy.

As we age we lose physical capacity, but I believe we don't lose our need to be useful and needed and appreciated. Living in a place where there are things to be seen to, my aunt, even at this great age, is able to be and to feel productive. I wish that kind of old age for all of us. Happy birthday Wendy!

I spent part of this afternoon picking sea buckthorn up in Grey County. Do you know it? The plant is a low tree, think lilac for size, with long thorns every so often on the branches and tips of branches. The fruit grows in dense-packed clusters of smooth shiny berries near the ends of the branches. It's a rich orange colour with a dot of maroon to red at the tip of each berry. Inside is a seed. The fruit resists being picked, so it takes time. You can't just strip a branch of its fruit in handfuls. Instead you have to pick them off one by one, the berries.

Lillian, whose trees these were, says they originated in Siberia and possibly Manchuria too. They are hardy, which is why she planted them eight to ten years ago, and the fruits are edible.

But here's the question: what to do with the fruit? How to use it? Lillian has been experimenting with it for three years, making jam, vinegar, blended jams, etc. And now she's going to try savory condiments, and also will try using it uncooked, with flavorings. The thing is, the taste is tart and a little sweet, but when it's cooked, to some of us it has a slightly unappealing odour. Well so do many things, from Limburger to durian, but it doesn't stop us eating them. And many people don't notice the odour. It may be one of those aromas that bother only some people, not everyone. The sea buckthorn berries don't have the odour when they're straight off the tree, only once they're cooked. That's why Lillian's next step is to try them in a savory uncooked condiment, like a fresh chutney. They are so beautiful, and the taste is appealing if you have a taste for wild things, not tame domesticated fruit.

It turns out that sea buckthorn is also great for the skin, both if applied externally and if eaten. It contains oils and is loaded with Vitamin C etc. When I learn more about other possible uses, I'll let you know. Meantime, I can't think of a better way of marking my mother's birthday than picking berries, for both she and my aunt took enormous pleasure in berry picking. It was like getting something for nothing, a special treat. As a kid I didn't particularly appreciate their enthusiasm, but now I feel the same way....

My trip up to Grey County started yesterday afternoon. On my way I passed a roadside stand with gladioli in buckets of water, set out beside a money box, but no person. So I picked out some glads, all colours from deep purple to violet to orange-yellow to salmon and magenta, shoved my bill in the box, and continued on down the road. I had a swim in Wilder Lake, deserted because the day was chilly, about 18 degrees (a huge contrast to the 30 degree and more temps we've had), but the lake water was warm and welcoming and I rejoiced in there. When I got to Lillian's the flowers went into two vases and lit up the room.

It was as if they had set the colour palette for my visit, for dawn the next morning had every shade in it: dark purple clouds below, brilliant cerise pink cloads above, the sun making orange-yellow reflections as it tried to emerge, and pale violets and pinks in outlying areas of the eastern sky.

It was pretty wild.

And why was I up to see it? you ask. Well I had the huge pleasure of sleeping out in a new small sleeping cabin in the forest, a perfect elegant place to go to bed by candle-light, to wake in the middle of the night to the moon beaming in (powerfully silver, despite being very much on the wane) and the stars hanging low (I swear they were), and to surface at dawn to heavy dew, mist rising, and that technicolur show to the east. The Swedes have similar small cabins in the country, with a tiny woodstove and a bed, as this one has, and call them lust-haus (sp?), or pleasure house. If you get a chance to watch My Life as a Dog, that brilliant film from twenty-five or so years ago, there is a lusthaus in it....

I'm digressing I guess, but perhaps not. For these small spaces and immediate pleasures of colour and form are stimulating, life-giving, a reminder of who we are and where we like to be.

AFTERWARD: As I send my Aunt Wendy birthday thoughts,and think about age and mortality and living in the moment, I am also thinking about Jack Layton, a remarkable guy who was a politician with ideas, intelligence, and beliefs, as well as an extraordinary optimism and confidence in people. He was Leader of the Opposition as of our May election, having led his party, the NDP, to an amazing victory, especially in Quebec, but now he's died, in full flight. This is a loss for us all, not just for his grieving family. Thanks Jack, for taking it all on with such positive energy; you've been a great example, even to those who didn't agree with you.

THE WORLD OF HITS AND MISSES AND PEACHES TOO

2011-08-18T18:22:00.008-04:00

Another hot and humid day here in Toronto. It feels very tropical. Sounds carry, as well as smells, both the lovely and the stenchy. The lovely include the haunting scent of phlox (mine are white) that drifts and eddies around the back garden and in the back door.

Speaking of eddies, I've had rivers and light and color on my mind this last while. I've been engrossed with images for Rivers of Flavor, picking final ones from a larger Burma pick. And now they are all sitting queued up (so interesting that the tech people, whom I always think of as American in their language, should have turned to "queue", a more classic English word, but I guess queuing is a clearer meaning than "lining up" or "waiting") and getting sent off one by one, as they load onto Artisan's FTP space. Words fail me: is it an FTP portal? or file? or dossier? or dock?

And as they load up and head out one by one, I'm reminded of the turtles I saw long ago on an outlying island of Sabah, north-east of the port town of Sandakan, then a sleepy-hollow place. Maybe it's bustling now. I haven't been back since 1980.
I was with a friend and we were taken out to the Turtle Island by Parks people. We spent the night there, at about this mid-August time of year, now I think of it. YIkes! That was 31 years ago.

At around one in the morning we headed out under the full moon, on the fine white sand, to wait on the beach. We were lucky that night. First one, and then another and another huge dark shape came out of the water and lumbered across the beach sand to its upper edge: turtles, come to lay their eggs. We crept close to one as she stood digging with her strong stubby legs, a hole that grew deeper and deeper. The sand flew. Then she turned her tail to the hole and began to let the eggs go. They emerged in a gleaming stream, some and then more, white and pearlescent in the moonlight. Eventually, once she was done, she used her strong legs to heave and push sand back into the hole to cover the eggs.

The parks people marked the spot with a post. Meantime the turtle, her work done, headed for the beach, leaving tracks like a tank, a continuous drag mark with evenly spaced dents too. And then into the water she slipped.

Well in a silly superficial way this moment of sending off images into the e-sphere feels a little like what happens when those eggs hatch. The little turle-lets head off to the sea, but who knows how many of them make it? It's part of nature's lottery.
And the process of sending images or letters or manuscript through the e-ther feels a little the same, a fraught and chancy thing.

Maybe I should revise my view: maybe all interaction, all sending out of messages and trusting they will be received, is just as much of a lottery or game of chance. The imperfections of communication are not just technical, not just a matter of something going physically awry (like a bird picking off a baby turtle, or the electricity cutting out in the middle of a transmission). Those are bad luck but in the end understandable. The others, the misunderstood comments or actions, are much more complicated, and more scary too. For example the response that is heard as critical or angry but wasn't meant to be; the silence that was meant to leave breathing room but is read as abandonment or uncaring; the praise that is real but is heard as ironic, all these are the truly scary slippages and losses. Sometimes it seems a miracle that we ever understand each other at all.

When I start to think about the fraughtness of human communication, I reach for consoling thoughts and ideas. After all, most often we DO seem to understand each other. Maybe we're fooling ourselves, and there are more gaps in our mutual understanding than we know or acknowledge, but we soldier on. And we do that because we WANT it to work. We want to understand others, and to be understood. And we want tolerance for (and always need to remind ourselves to BE tolerant of) mistakes and miscues.

How did I end up here, when I started with the scent of phlox in the garden? Maybe the idea of familar scents connects to childhood and memory and then leads to reflection on the larger meta-picture? I guess that's it.

For now, I need to absorb this place I've arrived at, which is the reminder to give people the benefit of the doubt when there are misunderstandings and to be tolerant when things go astray, in whatever way that happens. After all, that kind of imperfection is part of life too.

Now there's something to think about.

Meantime the peaches are in, lush sweet fabulous Ontario peaches. It's a great year for fruit here. Today at the Dufferin Grove Farmers' Market there were also huge blackberries and lots of elderberries too, so enticing. I bought two six quart baskets of peaches, organic peaches, for five dollars each. What a bargain, all that easy to eat juicy complexity for the price of a coffee and muffin. Amazing.

May the rest of August be as delicious and fruitful...

PROGRESS ON RIVERS OF FLAVOR, & BURMA TRAVEL DREAMS

2011-08-14T22:00:00.009-04:00

It's a mild Sunday night here in Toronto, the end of a great week-end. I've just come back from supper with friends, their fabulous twin boys all the entertainment a person could want, and the food delish: sticky rice and Thai beef salad, brought by other friends, and a Burmese-style roasted eggplant salad plus a nam prik num (a northern Thai salsa of grilled tomatoes, banana chiles, shallots, and garlic), made by me there. The wines were yummy, a South African white from the western Cape, and a Beaujolais with good balance, a nice surprise.

I don't expect to dine on a Sunday evening. More often it's a meal with friends here at the house, a catch-as-catch-can kind of meal. And here I am contemplating Monday on a full stomach with happy memories of good flavours in my mouth. hmm

This weekend has been a full one. I have now finished the Burma Over Time (history) section of Rivers of Flavor, and will send it in to the publisher tomorrow, together with Traveller's notes as well as the annotated Bibliography. One of the books in the bibliiography is Elephant Bill, by a Colonel Williams. I have a copy of it from my parents, the book I read as a ten or eleven year old. And I have another, from the same edition, that I bought recently from a bookseller in Chiang Mai. It's a remarkable book, for Elephant Bill started work in Burma after the first war and then became the man in charge of elephants dring the Japanese invasion in 1942 and the subsequent flight out of Burma, followed by the reconquest of Burma in 1944. In all of it he is humble, appreciative of the elephants and the people who handle them, primarily their Karen oozies, but also Burmese and Shan people. I realised a few days ago that this was probably the first book I ever read about Burma. And though it is written in a colonial context, it rises above the limitations of colonial attitudes and society.

What a great start.

Now that I am contemplating the last stages of this Burma project, I am filled with gratitude for having been able to embark on it. When I first flew into Burma in 1980, so long ago, I never dreamt that I'd be writing about food and culture some day, let alone a book about food traditions in Burma. And more recently, as I worked on other books about food and culture, I didn't think I'd be working on my own and on a book about such an intensely felt and politically and culturally complicated a subject as Burma.

There's a good chance, given the contents of the history section at the back of the book, that some bureaucrat somewhere in Burma may decide that I should not be issued a visa. The book is not due to come out until September 2012. And so I need to get at least one trip, and hopefully two, to Burma, before the axe falls...

Which brings me back to the Elephant Bill book. He talks a lot about the upper Chindwin River. And when I was in Pakkoku, up the Irrawaddy from Bagan, I met a foreigner whose friend had travelled up the Chindwin, despite government limits on where foreigners can go.

So all that means that I would love to retrace at least some of the route that Elephant Bill and his elephants took on their way to India. It's a culturally rich area that ends up in Chin State, for now off limits to foreigners. But miracles do happen, so if I can get close, maybe I'll be able to travel into Chin State...

And on other subjects: I'm still having issues with my left foot: a fallen transverse arch, new pads for my runners, and now I have started running again, but I am having pains in my ankle. As always, the compensating we do for one injury leads to other problems. I think it's time I saw a sports-medicine person. Has any one else had transverse arch problems? My new cushy running shoes, and the Birkenstock inserts I use in my shoes, have made a huge difference. So why do I still have issues running?

The hummingbirds are gone, the robins are fat, and the tomatoes and corn are ripening. I picked a ripe okra the other day, bright green and crisp, and Tashi and I ate it in mouthfuls, crunch crunch, so delicious. It was completely different, not at all the same vegetable, as the slightly rough large green ridged veg we can buy in the winter. People who don't like okra, most of them, have never tasted it at its best, at least that's my theory.

And all this talk of veg takes me back to the subject of work and my to-do list: I have some recipes to retest, and now with just the Glossary (I love doing it) and the photos to get in, I'm feeling ready to tackle these last recipes. I'll keep you posted on my progress. The steamed noodles from the Golden triangle is one I'm looking forward to; and the tapioca custard pudding is another...

Are you hungry yet?

And on the subject of recipes: There's a piece by AMy O'Connor coming out in Cooking Light magazine, the November issue (so it will be out in the third week in October), about Chiang Mai and the immersethrough session she attended last year. The magazine asked me to contribute three recipes to the piece. I sent them off ten days ago and I just heard back from them "your recipes rock!". That's always a great message to get, for any of us who write about food. But here it was especially great timing, for as this book editing starts, I find it easy to feel anxious. The reassurance of an editor's wholehearted love of some recipes (Chiang Mai and Shan food both) was a lovely uplift.

MARKING THIS DATE & TALK OF THRILL-SEEKING, PERFORMANCES, & REFLECTION

2011-08-08T23:09:00.009-04:00

Here we are on August 8 - in Chinese it's "ba-ba" the eighth of the eighth, and so it's father's day (a familiar word for father being roughly "baba"). In Burma it's a whole other thing, 8-8, for it's the anniversary of the "four-eights" or 8-8-88, when the democracy uprisings that started with the students in 1988 became full-on in Burma.

Twenty-three years later the rest of the world is watching the struggles of the Syrian people against a harsh and unjust regime, and hoping the outcome is happier and more fruitful than the result of 8-8-88 in Burma. There, the people having lost their fear and demonstrated, the crackdown by the authorities was harsh and bloody. And when elections were held two years later, the opposition, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, stunned the government by winning.

The government's solution? To refuse to hand over power.

And so we celebrate and talk about 8-8-88 outside Burma, while inside the country a date that marks an important anniversary in the history of Burma is buried in government silence and, dare I say it? fear of people-power. Maybe next time there are demonstrations, maybe tomorrow, somehow, by some magic, the government will become more reasonable, and then open discussion and consultation and disagreement will be possible. But for now freedom of speech and dissent and political discussion are luxuries enjoyed by relatively few people in the world, none of them in Burma.

[And a quick update: I'm working on a short history section, to go in the back of RIVERS OF FLAVOR. The photos are now sorted and just needing some captions and a little tidying. I'll send in about 450 I think. All these are late baby-steps in getting the manuscript turned into a book. I am so lucky to be working with Trent Duffy and Ann Bramson at Artisan.]
***

I've been out on my bicycle a couple of evenings recently in the hot humid air, soft with moisture but also laden with every smell. It's so strange, and familiar, the way humidity makes sounds carry, and smells too. I feel I can smell a french fry cooking three blocks away when the air is this heavy. And I kind of like it, as a marker of the season. No, I agree, a lot of the now-intense smells aren't pretty, or even nice as reminders, but they are for sure part of the fabric of summer, especially as we move into August.

Those bike outings are thrilling in many ways: I love the whooshing through the dark, the competitive edge I can get as I race to make a light before it turns, the hyper-alert state that is so intense with adrenalin as I pedal fast along a busy street, ringing my little jangly bell occasionally to warn pedestrians or hopefully prevent a driver from opening a car door in my path. So far so good.

This juice, this thrill-seeking, is pretty juvenile, or un-grown-up, or something, of me. Maybe it's newly possible now that my kids are grown and I don't feel so directly responsible for them? Are there other mothers reading this who have been able to move into a freer more risk-taking frame of mind once the kids are grown?

Talk about life cycles! I never expected to be "back" here in thrill-seeking territory. What a treat.

My recent evening outings have been fun, and unexpected too. I went to a short play on Friday, part of Summerfest. I Tweeted about it later, because it was so fluent and seamless and terrifically written and acted. The play is Hannah's Turn, by Richard Sanger. Do go see it if you have the chance. It demands skilled actors, and we had those too..

Another outing was to hear music, this evening, a house concert of fiddle music, some Franco-Quebecois and -Ontarian, some from down East and more celtic. The fiddler was Pierre Shryer, a master fiddler; on guitar was Andy Hillhouse; Joe Phillips played a huge resonant double bass.

We were all delighted, not just by the music but by the collegial joy and engagement we shared with the musicians. As one of them said after, it's so different from playing on a main stage at a festival, where it's hard to hear yourself, and there are time pressures and other constraints. Here the musicians could work by feel, and we were all the richer for that (though the money they took home cannot be nearly what they'd get for a big event of course, so perhaps I'm only speaking metaphorically when I speak of being all the richer? It's too easy to take an artist for granted.)

A conversation with a friend at a dancing party she gave this weekend is still resonating with me. She and I talked about reflecting on things, and the fact that as we get older, it becomes more possible, a greater pleasure, and hopefully also more fruitful. She has been writing poetry, that's where her thoughts and reflections have taken her. I end up writing here, in this blog, trying to carve my thoughts out of the strands of musing in my head, and shape them onto this virtual page.

Many thanks for your patience as I bumble along!

And to finish, a suggestion for a summer soup: My CSA delivery last week included a lot of largish patty-pans (those flattish knobby yellow and gold squashes). I chopped them coarsely into a large pot, added one chopped onion and a little water, then boiled them with the lid on until they were softened, about fifteen minutes. I was surprised at how much flavour they had, once they'd been pureed in the processor to a thick smooth potage. All it needed was some mustard seed, nigella, and fennel seed heated in olive oil (with a pinch of turmeric, now my ingrained habit since working with recipes from Burma); as well as some salt, a dash of soy sauce, and a little rice vinegar, just a touch (or you could use some wine).

Torn basil leaves, pungent and intense these days, from the back garden, were a good addition on the soup with a little more olive oil (when are they NOT a good addition). I made rice, so we poured soup over the rice and voila, a taste of summer, with no sweat. Soup is such a good way of dealing with an excess of any summer squash, from patty-pans to zucchini. And then there are the soup possibilities for all those extra leafy greens. That's for another day...

LIFE IN THE HEAT, DANCING & SWIMMING

2011-08-02T00:38:00.001-04:00

Another hot night in Toronto. We're now into the second day of August, just, as midnight has struck, yet still the air is heavy and sweat starts trickling whenever I make any physical effort.

I've got no light on in the office, to keep things cooler, and doors and windows are open to catch whatever passing breeze manages to find its way here.

Tonight I walked out to Queen's Park a couple of blocks away. I'd been hearing music all afternoon and finally felt cool enough to go out. There under the huge old trees in the park was a crowd dancing and hanging as Jamaican music live on a stage, came rocking through the hot air. Lovely. I got there in time for the last three tunes, danced and danced with the crowd, and then the music was done. The crowd hung on though, buying food from the patty stands, and from the rice and plantain and fish and salad places that had been set up all day under the trees. What a luxury it is to have free music on a hot long weekend.

I had the water on in the back garden this evening trying to cool things off. Yes everything got wetter, but no, it didn't feel any cooler. I've been thinking, as I drink huge cups of water, about all the people who are fasting for Ramadan, just started at the new moon a couple of days ago. At this time of year the dyas are long, so the tenacity and endurance required of people who fast is even greater. It's a time of coming together and mindfulness, this fasting month. But I hope that those who are vulnerable to the heat take care of themselves...

I'm just starting to get back in the groove after my time away in Skowhegan. On the long drive back from the kneading conference we stopped in to visit the mill of La Milanaise, who produce the most carefully milled commercial flour around. It's all organic, and it's of wonderful quality. The mill is very close to the crossing at the Maine-Quebec border (Woburn/Coburn Gore) and Sophie, the miller's daughter, whom we'd met at the conference, had said she'd give us a tour of the mill. Thank-you Sophie - I learned a lot!

It's awe-inspiring to look at the huge sacks of flour (900 kilos each) and then the smaller 2 and 5 kilo sacks, and think of the sequence that got them there: farmers growing organic grains, who plant and harvest with enough care that the grain comes to the mill with not more than 14% moisture and passes various other quality tests; and then the mill with its machines that grind either with granite stones (for non-white wheat flour) or metal for the unbleached white flour. The granite stones are imported from California. Every month they are re-incised, sharpened you could say, and polished a little, and every year they are replaced. It seems incredible that stone can get worn that quickly.

The grain is blended before milling not after. All wheat flour is blended, a mix of higher and lower protein wheat, so that the final product is consistent. And the details of a particular flour, its protein, and ash content, and other details besides, are printed on the side of the large bags that go out to bakeries.

When you think of the care involved, five dollars for a loaf of hand-made bread baked in a wood-fired oven seems low, way too low.

After the mill we stopped in to see some old friends of mine near Knowlton, and then it was a long drive northwest to the Gatineau. What a pleasure to swim out in the dark night in the soft waters of the Gatineau River. The sky was dotted with stars. Floating on my back I could lose track of which way was up, weightless and drifitng in a star-speckled darkness...

Early next morning I walked back down to the river and found it dreamily mist-shrouded, wisps of pale cotton floating above the water and draped over the rounded hills on the other shore. I slipped into the water, still and glassy under the mist, and swam and swam, my ripples the only disturbance in the surface as far as the eye could see.

It was like an Eden, a rebirth, a miracle.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY NEAR TWO COASTS

2011-07-29T07:47:00.005-04:00

The birds are tweeting and twittering in the forest that surrounds the clearing here where I sit. I'm in Maine, staying at a beautiful charming house outside Skowhegan. Barbara, the artist who is putting me up, along with some other visitors, makes engaging art, three dimensional painted hang-on-the-wall sculptures as well as paintings. Everywhere I look in the house there is beauty and engagement. And here outside, the woodpile is aromatic and the birds subdued but continously making themselves heard.

I'm here because of the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan. It's the fifth annual, a two day event at the Skowhegan Fairgrounds (site of the oldest coninuously operating ag fair in the USA, quite incredible). On Saturday there's a Bread Fair, when ovens are fired and bread and cheese etc etc is sold.

Yesterday, the first day, I went to a clay oven workshop. We worked all morning mixing clay and sand, making forms (working in loose teams of four or so; altogether the course made six ovens) of wet sand, packed domes. Then we built up clay-sand-mix walls around the sand form, finally enclosing it under a dome. I know I'm not being very clear, but if you find the book by the guy who taught the course, Stu Silverstein, you can learn all about it. The last steps were to cut a front hole, pull out all the sand of the form, then light a fire on the fire brick base. In a couple of hours the colour of the oven changes from damp grey to pale, dried out grey clay and hey presto! there's a working oven.

It always feels magical and empowering to build a tool, and what more amazing tool than an oven built of earth? Lovely to work with unprocessed material (as opposed to manufactured bricks etc), which I've done only once before, when I made a large tandoor oven over nine days in Udaipur about eight years ago, and learned so much. There, in Udaipur, Sangana Bai's material was clay mixed with plenty of dried horse manure and then wetted with water. It was a coarser lumpy blend. For this oven we had sand and clay, so it was smooth rather than lumpy. But I imagine that the horse manure and straw with clay would also work for these domes. hmm A woman from Arizona who was a wonderfully engaged member of the team said that adobe there is made with straw or hay and clay, and I guess some sand too.

By the way the proportions are 1 part clay to 3 parts fine sand, or two parts sand if it's coarser. The trick is to add a minimal amount of water so that the mixture is stiff rather than soft. If it feels good in your hand it's too wet, is a good way of thinking about it.

This Skowhegan junket (eleven hours in the car from Toronto, sharing the driving and conversation with the wonderful Danwthebaker) is my second trip in a week. Here I'm almost at the east coast; the Atlantic is just an hour's drive or so away. And last week I was almost at the Pacific, well, close enough...

I flew to Kelowna (or as non-townies call it Kelownifornia) and drove north past cherry orchards dripping with fruit. At Vernon I turned east and came eventually to my cousins's gorgeous piece of land high on a green hillside. His house, newly built and still needing finishing touches, is beautiful, light and airy, and off-grid. And that's where my aunt, my long-dead mother's identical twin, is now living. Her ninetieth birthday is coming up, and what better place to see out her days than a green fastness, with horses (Icelandic ponies in fact) and dogs and hummingbirds etc all around?

I was so pleased to see her happy, mobile (after a broken hip and cracked pelvis in the last year) and now able to be on horseback, her preferred mode of travel.

There's a connection between the people in these two far-apart places. They tend to be self-sufficient, physically capable, and creative problem-solvers. They live far from the large population centres and from monied communities, and prefer it that way. But here in Skowhegan they are VERY far from prosperity. And that's why this Kneading Conference got started, as a way to try to revitalise farming here. It hasn't died out, but people are struggling. Now there's a grist mill about to reopen in town and a sense of bustle and purpose. There's also some very good baking happening. So as Skowhegan and northern Maine generally bootstraps its way into new patterns and increased viability and confidence, it makes those of us at the conference aware that food issues at the producing level: the farm and the small producer and processor, whether it's a baker, a cheese-maker, or whatever, are a good solid way to generate new life.

I'm hoping to come back here next year... and if you have a chance, do try to come. I've learned a lot, about bread and farming, and I've met some remarkable people. It's a rich opportunity to connect with a culture of self-sufficiency.

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT!

2011-07-20T22:54:00.004-04:00

It's such a hot night that eveything is sticking: my forarms to the table as I type, my legs to the chair, and my brain to...I'm not sure what, but it's not an enhancer of clear thinking, for sure!

No complaints though. This house has a good cross-breeze, and anyway I like the feeling of sweating out all that's inside from time to time. It's like an ongoing sauna. The trick with the hot weather of course is the traditional wise technique of having a quick shower anytime you are feeling hot or sticky or fed-up or on edge because of the heat. Instantly you get a lovely little shiver as the wet clings to your skin when you step out of the shower. That momentary cooling from evaporation sends the heavy loggy feeling away and refreshes you. And somehow it makes everything manageable, creates an optimism, I find, so that the heat stops being oppressive and becomes just a bath of sensation to move through.

Bicycling helps too. The breeze from pedalling along is surprisingly cooling, so a bicycle rather than walking is the way to get around in the heat.

Had a question today from a friend who'd been told by a Vietnamese friend about a bitter leaf and flower that is around in the fall in Khmer parts of Vietnam, or maybe in Cambodia. I hadn't heard of it, but her question reminded me of the great spice (not herbs, not yet anyway) page by Gernot Katzer. He's exhaustive and quite meticulous. It's a great resource. Bookmark it so you can go to it any time you have a question. This link is to the SE Asia part, but you can move on from there:
http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/spice_geo.html#asia_southeast

I went to Shape Note singing this evening (it's once a month in Toronto). What a treat. There's a southern Ontario sing in late August not far from Waterloo in an old Mennonite meeting house, a fab stone building. Before that there's a huge sing in Maine on July 30. These calendars of events that different people keep track of are like different maps laid over the months with their own linkages and contour lines and internal necessities. My map right now involves catching a plane to Kelowna tomorrow so I can visit my aunt Wendy, who is my mother's identical twin. It's always a struggle to decide to go see her, for though my mother has been dead for over thirty years, there's stil a wrench when I see my aunt, a pang and thoughts of how things might be different. And then I am pulled into her present and can let the pangs go, mostly.

The other event, now the fifth annual, but this will be my first time, is the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan, in northern Maine. There are two days of conference, designed to help those who want to to learn new skills, and it's followed by the Bread Fair, on Saturday. Dawnthebaker and I are going to drive down, a lovely trip through the Eastern Townships, ten or eleven hours from Toronto in total, at least that's what Google Maps tells me. I would have guessed nine hours or so.

I posted a couple of notes on Facebook about managing the heat. One of them is to get up early, cook something in the early morning, then put it in the frig. That makes supper an easy pleasure, cooked veg dressed as a salad, over cold rice for example. That was supper today (I had new beets, fresh from my CSA delivery and spectacular. The other is the smoothie made of fruit and not much else. Tashi made a raspberry one, adding in some mango that was around. He added just ice and a little honey, no milk product at all. It was a beautiful red. But then I got home and found the red currants, needing to be eaten. SO I cleaned them of stems and blended them to a gorgeous thick puree. I mixed it fity-fifty with the end of Tashi's smoothie, then added some gin.

Now THERE'S a summer drink! wow. Summer pudding is slices of bread that line a bowl, which is then filled iwth raspberries and red currents, covered with bread slices and a weight pressed down on top overnight. It's fab. SO I figure my drink is Summer Pudding Gin. But surely there's a more elegant name waiting to be discovered?

Happy showering and slowing down, everyone!

AND A FOOTNOTE: ANn Bramson had some good ideas about ways to strenthen the Burma book. I have now done those edits and reshapings and I sent the anuscript off yesterday. I've altered the title a little. Now it's:
RIVERS OF FLAVOR: RECIPES AND TRAVEL STORIES FROM BURMA

FULL MOON BIRTHDAY THOUGHTS AND CONNECTIONS

2011-07-15T16:21:00.004-04:00

Here it is my birthday, marked on some calendars in England as St Swithin's Day (or Swithun's). He was a bishop of Winchester in the tenth century. Traditionally in England it's a day for predicting the weather, the idea being that whatever the weather on July 15 there will be 40 more days like it. hmmm We need warmth still, I mean, we want to have the rest of summer wonderful summer, but we sure could do with some rain.

The other marker today is that it's full moon. In another half-cycle, two more weeks, it will be the new moon and the start of Ramadan. Markers, markers... They're useful points, like hilltops, from which we can look back over things and ahead prospectively. I have rather selective vision at such times: I tend to want to see and notice the positive and brush away or minimise the importance of the negative. I'm sure it irritates people sometimes. But on the other hand I am grateful to be this way by temperament. It makes rolling with things, accepting the rough with the smooth, much easier. I don't have to do much battle with myself.

While I'm on the positive, a couple of stories: Last week I pedalled up to the northern part of the city, near Bayview and York Mills. It was up and down but mostly gently uphill, an easier ride than I had expected and less than fifteen kilometres each way. I visited a friend in her lush garden and then went to a potluck lunch nearby. I'd cooked some portabello mushrooms with scapes and dandelion greens from the garden, to an intensely flavoured almost-black mass. Our host had not made a plan but relied on serendipity and the dishes people brought all worked beautifully together, as most often happens.

But the story is about an encounter I had on the way up. I saw a woman walking to a bus stop and thought I recognised her, so I stopped and called her name out. Yes in fact, she was EB, the mother of the guy I went out with in my last years of undergrad, in the seventies. I hadn't seen her since then. Amazing! She is such an intelligent and interesting person and here she is, still thriving, turning 90 (ninety!!!) next spring, and alert and engaged. She now runs a summer lecture program at the University of Toronto; they're lucky to have her. She said, "I'm older of course". And I replied "So am I!"

It feels like a miracle when there can be such reconnection, over decades. And it's also reassuring. There's so much change and shifting of landscapes as we go through life, that when we run into a continuity like that it can feel like a lifeline and an affirmation.

The other story is just to tell you that last night, with the day-before-full-moon moon rising in the bright evening sky, I was sitting with a couple of friends having a cocktail on the roof of the Park Plaza. It's a place that's seen many stories unfold, and anyone who has spent time in Toronto has a story or two connected to it. And there we were, with a front row seat as the city lights and skyline sparkled, framing the fat moon. Lovely luxury, to have summer evenings with bare arms and beautiful light, and good friends to share it all with.

Tonight there's a small feast at this house with friends, but I'm just a bystander. Dawnthebaker, is doing the planning and cooking. So generous. There's a bit of a time constraint, so we're starting early, because she and I and Tashi have tickets (booked by Tashi) for a screening of the last/ latest Harry Potter movie later this evening. (I've read all the books of course, because my kids were the perfect age for them, read them aloud aloud and to myself, but I've only seen a couple of the other films, maybe three.) I'm told we should line up an hour or more ahead, so we'll send some younger people down early and then Dawn and I can stroll over a little later. I don't think I've ever gone to the movies on my birthday, let alone to a blockbuster. Ha!

I'm getting down to the wire on book edits, which feels good. It's always difficult to do what's needed, which is: cut out the excesses, delete the extra recipes, trim in various places, so that the manuscript can be tamed into a book. I save the cuts of course. The cut recipes are fine, often really good, they're just too close to duplicates or unnecessarily complicated or whatever, to fit into THIS book. But they'll come in handy sometime, somewhere, I'm sure. So RIVERS OF FLAVOR is taking shape, in its own time in its own way. Books do that. And in New York my editor Ann Bramson is mulling what size and look the book should have, chatting to wonderful Richard Jung who wants to take the photos, though the budget is horribly tight, and generally visualising the next steps. Yikes! It's starting to feel real, already.

What a nice place to be, contemplating a new book on my birthday. This time next year, with luck, the first copies will be coming off a printing press somewhere.... lovely thought!

SUMMER DAYS WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY

2011-07-10T12:51:00.008-04:00

There's a distant intermittent roar in the air: yes, you guessed it, the Formula One race or Indy something-or-other is here in Toronto. Yucko! An article in the paper the other day quoted one driver talking about the unpleasant smell and taste of the guck on his face as he drives. But he has chosen to put himself there. We, on the other hand, who live in the city, on this humid day get to breathe in the awful smell of exhaust and burning tires etc, and hear the noise, and we did NOT choose this, nor get any balancing benefit.

There, now I've ranted, we can move on to more interesting and pleasant topics.

Early this morning I bicycled over to a friend's house, via a stop at Woodlot to pick up fresh wood-fired-oven-baked bread. My friend has just closed on her house, and doesn't move in for a few days. Until then it's like a freshly born baby: its structure is visible, not covered over by furniture (or baby softness) so that it's easy for this couple of days to imagine what it will develop into. We talked about wall colours and furniture and the garden possibilities. It was such a pleasure, and I was happy to have arrived with fresh bread and a few other things as house-warming markers of welcome.

Yesterday Dom and Tashi and I drove to Niagara, just upstream of the falls, to a family reunion party. What a huge day it was. There were about forty Duguid cousins and family members, aged six months to eighty-three. We had ten hours to talk to one another, share stories, get caught up on news. We swam in the Niagara River, ate fabulously, and just breathed in the feeling of connection. Some cousins are committed christians, others of us are not, but that doesn't stop us feeling connected and familiar to one another. The whole event, with the nearly two hour drive at each end left us feeling exhilarated and exhausted all at once. I can only imagine how tired my cousin and her family were who had done all the organising and work of planning and setting up. Thank-you everyone!

And now it's time to bear down on the Burma book editing. I've done a little re-organising, and have written a few explanatory pieces that need to go in. Now I have to sit down with the printed pages and read through, cleaning out any deadwood and keeping an eye open for inelegant phrases, unnecessary longueurs, all of which need to be pruned or firmly beaten into shape. Once I've marked up the pages, I can transfer the edits onto the computer and then, hopefully have a cleaned up ms that can be printed out and sent off to Ann Bramson. I give myself a week for this, well maybe eight days. I'll report back.

Meantime on the photo front it looks as if Richard Jung will be doing some studio shooting for the book. I am thrilled and grateful. He is so good at what he does, all with natural light. And I love the process of figuring out which dishes to put on the shot-list. But first to the edits!

Last week we did a little more retesting: a simple chicken curry that's a classic in central Burma, and then deletable Shan meatballs, both beef ones and pork ones. They're killingly good. I want to suggest that people can also make them as sliders, small patties, on the grill or in the pan.

The great thing about having salad greens and garlic and chiles and herbs in the garden is that every meal, from breakfast on, has a fresh edge and bright flavour. Soon we'll have tomatoes too. I can't wait.

THE DANCE OF THE FIREFLIES

2011-07-03T22:23:00.004-04:00

A quick note on a soft summer evening... I'm just back in the city from a visit north to Grey County. All is green and growing there after the wet spring we've had, and pretty late too. The lettuce greens, the mizuna, the garlic scapes are all fresh and lush still.

Last night, after a sauna and swim in a swift cool river, we had food cooked over a fire (local sausage, scapes, chiles...) and several fresh green salads, and then we hung out eating mangoes and tasting Fifthtown Cheese, a hard aged cheese that was fabulous. But then the sky shifted from clear evening to a bank of grey and threatening clouds to the south. We worried about rain, but In the end the storm, and it was a deluge, stayed away from us. We heard the thunder and saw lightning, but the dense grey shafts that told us about pouring rain were safely south of us. Overhead the sky was a strange pale colour that gave off an eerie greenish-yellow light, but created no shadows. It made everything oddly flat, as if we were all figures standing in front of a painted backdrop. Nothing had any depth. It was disorienting and a little unsettling too. And meanwhile the backdrop to our strange light was the dramatic dark sky to the south.

Later still, after night had fallen, we walked down the hill and watched the fireflies, in a damp little valley, hundreds of them, thousands? It was hard to think of them as insects. They became magic points of light, fairies perhaps, or signals to extra-terrestrials. If a firefly is still, then its moment of brightness looks like a "dot". But if it's flying at speed while it's bright, then it looks like a momentary "dash" in the blackness. And so the dots and dashes flickered their messages to us in the magical dark. Far away to the northwest the sky had a last suggestion of brightness, the day's final adieu.

Early July magic.

A MONTH OF EDITS AND LIGHTROOM EXPLORATIONS

2011-07-01T23:57:00.004-04:00

There's a pop-pop-popping happening, sporadically close to and then farther away, as people all over Toronto set off fireworks. The annual July 1 Canada Day celebrations are almost over...and summer is just beginning. Many friends are already out of town. Half of them seem to be in Cape Breton or PEI, eastern Canada anyway.

I'm still here though, now done with my deadline and moving in the freer air of edits. Ann Bramson has, as she always does, some good ideas about how to present the Burma book, how to get people turned on and tuned in to Burma. And as always I need to find more interesting titles for the recipes (just plain "beef curry" doesn't cut it! for example). It's a treat to have the manuscript written and the chance to re-enter it and shape it further. I am amazed, as always, with how much greater my perspective is now that I've had a few weeks away from it (and the suggestions from Ann to help me take hold of it freshly).

The other work on the immediate horizon, and I wrote about this on my facebook fan page, is that I have started to try to take hold of LightRoom, the powerful and not-always-intuitively-understandable program that helps sort images and also work with them. Thanks to N, a friend of Tashi's I am feeling more confident and have a starting-to-grow understanding of how to use the program to sort and engage with my Burma images. They're all digital, most in RAW and some in JPEG. I need to pull about four hundred, so the designer has images to choose from for the book. They'll be portraits and markets and scenes of various kinds.

The first task is to find the strongest images, and then make sure there's a balanced group of picks to send. I feel a long way from slides and the physical and damage-able fragility of slides. It's always scary to send them out. But digital images are (once I get used to the basic idea of how ephemeral they are, how dependent on electricity and modern stuff like computers) less "fragile. I can send them and keep them at the same time. It would have been a hard concept for our forbears to grasp, for sure.

Good food this week, from the growing thriving herbs in the garden, and tender leaf lettuce, to garlic scapes (those curving elegant tips of young garlic, so delish lightly fried). Grilled some bavette this evening and poached asparagus, and had our first new potatoes of the year. Hurrah!

Yesterday a friend retested two different fish curries and a chutney,as well as a fish head soup, all recipes from Rivers of Flavor, the Burma book. A squeeze of lime at the end made a huge wonderful difference to the soup, pulling it all together. And the fish curries reminded Dawn to interrogate me about whether I was putting info about sustainable fish and those others we shouldn't be eating, into the Burma book.

(By the way, Jake Tilson has a fish book just out in the UK, and in the US in September, called "In at the Deep End: Cooking Fish Venice to Tokyo." It should be a wonderful resource, and beautiful, for Jake is a designer and has really made the book, not just the words and pictures. I can't wait to see it.)

In answer to Dawn's good reminder, I will put the URL of a couple of sites in the Burma book, sites that people can now consult to know whether a particular fish species is endangered, etc etc. More later, when I get the info.

Had a crisis this week, small but distracting. I had a guy named Eric come and connect the water to the garage out back, but then it turned out there was a leak somewhere. Lots of digging later (by Eric and also by me) and the solution turned out to be to replace one stretch of pipe. But meantime, apart from the blisters on my hands, I've lost leaf lettuce and mint (as dirt got piled on them, or dug up around them, or both) and also a huge amount of ivy, for we had to cut ivy roots as we dug. Most of the dirt pile is gone, and the hole/trench filled in. And now there's water and good pressure.

The digging and then refilling of the hole reminded me of how hard hard labour can be. It's really wearing. And often very low-paying. But why do we pay so much for brain work and so little for work that uses up your body? I know, it's about value, and demand etc. But it is a harsh unfair reality that guys who labour with their bodies often get worn out. And many who work in offices could not possibly do labouring work, (though many go to the gym to stay fit). The temptation to disdain what you cannot do is powerful in our culture, maybe in every culture. hmmm

Meantime I'm pleased that even though half the ivy has been stripped off the back building (I did that once it had wilted overnight after we cut the roots), the change or loss is not devastating. Instead it gives us all a chance to look freshly at how the garden is organised and how we might change things.

Once again the only "constant" is that everything is in flux and will change, so it's up to us to handle the shiftings and gains and losses on this roller-coaster of life with equilibrium, and to enjoy the ride!

DANCING FREEDOM AT MIDSUMMER

2011-06-26T08:38:00.007-04:00

This is the first sunny morning for a week I think, maybe more. The birds are singing with pleasure. I feel like June has mostly slipped away in the clouds and rain, instead of sparkling and blooming as it usually does. Egads, here it is already the 26th!

The twenty-fourth of June is "Midsummer" in English tradition and St Jean-Baptiste, the fete nationale in Quebec. It's a day for bonfires and dancing, the solstice-season celebration, just as Saturnalia-turned-Christmas was/is the date to celebrate the returning sun at winter solstice time.

That urge to make a festival and let go cares at these significant turning points in the year is deeply embedded. And so maybe that's why this year we decided to have a dancing party on the 24th. What a great thing, to be able to dance and play with the doors open to the long-bright evening sky, voices soft in the summer air, the lush green of the garden a generous backdrop, enwrapping everyone in the oasis that is our small back yard.

Some people are picky about the music they'll dance to, while others dance to whatever is on.... And it doesn't matter. In fact, when the music's on and I'm dancing, not much else matters: I'm in the bubble and high of moving and feeling free of care and any thought really. I forgot that I'd had hurt in my left foot, I let go of worries about the edits I need to do on the Burma book, and all those others nagging things that can make me bog down and lose track of the big picture. High on endorphins? High on summer?

Maybe the joy of dancing is that we retrieve our freedom. It's freedom in movement, freedom through movement. Young E, now a few months past her fifth birthday, sure felt that freedom. She danced on her own and with others on the wide open floor, and instead of tiring, seemed to get more and more composed and happy, energised in the best way.

There were summer flavours to sustain us, as well as the music. The stars were the snap peas that Brenda brought down from her CSA farm in Grey County. She'd picked them that morning. We put out a huge bowl of them, raw and brilliant green, de-stringed but otherwise as nature (and Brenda!) grew them. They vanished. Other treats were two different boxes of home-made cookies; mountains of organic grapes, red and green ones (OK not local, but a great refresher after a stint of sweaty dancing!); a brilliant hummous topped with pesto; a creamy lush guacamole; three sauces from Burma, such taste hits; and more that I can't remember. Evelyn's Crackers, and lots of sticky rice - white with a little black mixed in for texture- were the backbone that held it all together.

People drink water when they dance, and yes wine or beer, but they're not pouring it back, so the gaiety doesn't get loutish or stupid, or morose! We had six young people sleeping over on Friday night... When I headed to bed at 3.30 most of them were still up and chatting in that comfortable post-party way, reluctant to lose the intimacy of the night. But as I drifted off I heard the first birds chirping: it was already time for the pre-dawn lightening of the sky.

It reminded me of a time in northern Finland long ago when, camped by a lake, a friend and I stayed up through the night to photograph the midnight sun as it made its circuit. It dipped north in the "nighttime" hours but never went below the horizon. The sounds of the forest went on without a pause. When summer is short and winter is dark, there's not a moment to waste.

If that's a metaphor for life, then engaging with it and enjoying what we have in the way of health and friends and meaningful obligations, while we have them, is what the dance of life is all about. We don't need dancing shoes! It just takes an awareness that the music's playing and the invitation is ours to accept...

SOLSTICE THOUGHTS AND RECIPE TESTS

2011-06-22T18:50:00.004-04:00

We've crossed that huge marker, the summer solstice, so now the long days start getting shorter. I'm not ready for this! Meantime all is green and growing, from the wall of ivy out back to the clematis, now starting into rich purple bloom (a hardy jackmanii that rewards each year; I keep saying I'll plant a white one, or another more exotic, to keep this one company, and have not yet managed to).

Last weekend I travelled to New York City with friends for a weekend of no work, just play. We saw a couple of shows, something I've never done there. That part of town, Times Square/Broadway, is another world, with all of us out-of-towners and also the bridge and tunnel people, all lining up outside theaters, mostly patiently. On Friday night we were at a musical, the revival of the 1934 Cole Porter musical "Anything Goes". I hadn't really been looking forward to it, for musicals aren't my favorite thing. And how wrong i was in my dim expectations. It was wonderful, brilliant words and sharp acting and staging, a real show. The next night we saw an entirely different kind of performance, "The Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo". It was at the very cosy and old-style charming Richard Rogers Theater. I still haven't read reviews, but i'm told that some love it and some hate it. I thought the acting and the conception and staging were all terrific, until the last fifteen minutes or so, when instead of quiet thoughtfulness we got bombast from the tiger (played by Robin Williams, who otherwise did NOT overact or upstage the others). The cast was so strong, a great lesson in ensemble acting. I feel lucky to have seen it.

Apart from the shows, we also spent time walking along the newly extended High Line, so well done in design and execution. And I got back to see the McQueen exhibit at the Met, and had another visit with the Stella paint stick on linen black and white "drawings", so intense in their huge spaces and their interaction.

Coming back to the day-to-day here took some adjustment. I'm now well launched into my history section for the back of the Burma book. It's a kind of integrated bibliography and history, and so far so good. And with help from a friend I am getting to the retesting of some recipes that need another tweak, or another check and fine-tuning. This evening we're doing two with pork belly, which in Asia is generally called, in whatever language "three-layer pork", a more attractive name than pork belly, I always think. The other test is a vegetable curry alternate. The original is made with pumpkin, but I also want to check out using sweet potato instead, for it's often more available in North America than pumpkin. The pumpkin version is delish. In ten minutes I'll taste the sweet potato curry and see how it does (there's tamarind in there as a balance to the sweetness of the vegetable).

I hope you're able to be out in the long evenings these days, enjoying the lingering brightness in the sky, and dreaming of the possible and the impossible.... that's my ambition these days.

A FEW THOUGHTS AT FULL MOON

2011-06-15T00:08:00.004-04:00

It's the night before full moon, clear and cool for mid-June. I was at a fairly hot discussion about Kensington Market, then bicycled down to King Street to hear an open air free concert, part of Luminato. I caught the second act, Yemen Blues, a mixed bag of people from israel and elsewhere singing in Arabic, with some modern flash and flare and some feeling more anchored. Ran into friends there and felt lucky: music. friends, choices.

Don't know why I'm telling you this except that I just came across the little question thing put out by the OECD, where you rank the level of importance you attach to health, education etc, and it tells you which countries you want to live in.

Basically it comes down to Australia, Canada, Sweden, etc. These are underpopulated places where the environment is not yet completely degraded and there's reasonable health care and public education. It made me realise how few places there are where people can be taken care of in their hour of need or just encouraged to realise their full potential. hmm

I had a chance to talk to an old friend this evening, one of the people I ran into at Yemen Blues. (By the way, there was a nice big crowd, and some dancing and general body-happiness. I found the lead guy a bit forced and over the top, but if I listened rather than looking at him I was fine. Great percussion, and a viola and cello player as well as trumpet and trombone and various lute/guitar relatives.) One of the things she said was that she's been reading a lot of non-fiction for a number of years and has just started back into fiction.

I am the same way (apart from thrillers on airplanes etc). I wonder whether our pattern has been shaped by the publishing industry or has shaped itself independently. In any case, I am interested to watch myself go after novels. I just finished the amazing 1000 autumns of Jacob de Zoet and have started on David Mitchell's Nine Dreams or whatever it's called. He is extraordinary. I am thrilled to have the rest of his writing lying ahead, like riches in the larder before Christmas holidays. I read Camilla Gibb's first book the other day at one swallow, so amazing. Now to read her latest, set in Vietnam. More riches!

What are you reading these days? Do you find yourself with less reading time, or less attentiveness for a book, in this era of online jumping around and consuming of bits and pieces, rather than long sustained works?

Perhaps it's just as well to have books lined up, for I seem to have some kind of injury in my left foot. I'm phrasing it vaguely because the problem shifts a little and feels ephemeral, except when it most definitely feels like a serious and unavoidable problem. I will stop running for a week and also try to see a sports-medicine doc and hope I can get a handle on what it is. But in fact what I really want is to figure out how to get running again with no problem. Argh!

Every sign of aging or unwellness has to start with something, I do know that. But I can't accept that this is some kind of sudden onset arthritis in my ankle...I will keep you posted.

Meanwhile I should report to you on the delish fresh lake trout I had from Akawenzie's (they sell at Wychwood market). It was a long wide fillet, so it went over a small charcoal fire. I had put on some nutritional yeast, as recommended by Potz, and a little olive oil and salt: that's all. In ten minutes the fish was firm-textured, and the shallots I put on at the same time were done through, softened and sweet.

Food has been pretty basic around here for awhile, I admit. I do make the odd skillet cake, and my breakfast is plain leftover rice with fried dandelion greens and garlic chives, all from the back garden, together with a fried egg.

All the above was written late at night on the 14th. Now it's bright sunshine on the 15th, with the fat full moon due to rise in a few hours. There's a full eclipse of the moon in Africa and the MEditerranean, but it won't reach us here in North America we're told. And the other thing we're looking forward to this evening is the arrival of old friends whom we haven't seen for ages, a father and daughter. She is almost fourteen, and we last saw her in Kovalam near the southern tip of India, when we all danced our way into the year 2000. YEs, she was two and a half, and dancing at midnight. ANd so were DOm and TAshi. Now all of them are tall and have taken full shape as people. I love this anticipation of their arrival!

News on the foot front: I got seen by my great doc today and it looks like my arch has sagged on my left foot. Very strange. But with extremely high arches I am at risk. It does hurt, but not always. I think I'm heading into orthotics or other kinds of under-foot support. I just want to be able to run and not feel like I'm doing myself further injury.

Compared to a friend who has agonising pain from her herniated disk, this is nothing. I am grateful, even as I whine and worry, to have just this to trouble me.

Happy mid-June everyone, and enjoy the light of the generous moon tonight.

FREED FROM DEADLINE: FRESH THOUGHTS ON WRITING AND IMAGES...

2011-06-11T07:56:00.012-04:00

Surfacing from a deep sleep this morning I slowly came into the remembrance that there's a freeing-up of life that's happened. And why? Because yesterday I carried the manuscript of RIVERS OF FLAVOR, the Burma book I've been working on for two years, to the fedEx office and sent it off to New York City and Ann Bramson's desk at Artisan. I feel lightened, for sure. But I also had a slight shakiness yesterday, almost a psychological equivalent of the shaking-legs-after-a-big-effort feeling. That has now gone. And the feeling of "should" and "ought to" which is necessary for getting things done, but can be oppressive, we can all agree, has lifted for now.

It's Saturday morning. I'm in bicycling shorts and heading out to Brickworks Market on my bicycle. The day will unfold as it unfolds. And I will try not to think "I should" about anything!

On the other hand lurking in the shadows is a list of "should"s, starting with the need to take hold of my office and indeed the whole house. I'm talking about cleaning and tidying up and organising. These fits come upon us at turning points, don't you think? And there are more things to do for the book. There is some recipe retesting, but that's easy and unpressured.

Bigger things still: I have the Glossary to do. It might seem like a dictionary-writing kind of chore, but I enjoy it. It's a chance to pull threads of information together and to give the book a solid factual anchor. I also have a back section to write which I am calling Burma Over Time. It's a bit of a chronology/history that incorporates references to the writings of others: historians, memoirists, travel writers, from earlier times and from the present. I want the book to have a political and historical context, but I don't want the brilliant food culture of Burma to be burdened by the politics. That's why it's going at the back.

And the last and most fun part I have left to do is the photographs. Photos are so important to me. Why aren't there any in this blog? I can hear you wondering. Well I think they're wonderful, and give us windows into other places and people and dreams and ideas. But sometimes mixing photos and text, interrupting text with photos is what I mean, does both a disservice.

I do love photos with captions. You can get lost in the image, or read the captions, or both, but there's a balance, and they are meant to work together in a complementary way. It's rare for the same thing to work with text.

Photos are attention grabbers. The steady processing-ideas kind of attention that is needed to engage with writing is shoved aside by the immediacy of apprehension that we have when our eyes alight on a photograph. We see and feel it, and then perhaps we also start to conceptualise about it and engage with deeper more continuous reflective thought, but the first hit, if I can call it that, lies outside the steadiness of reflective thought, for sure, and pushes it aside.

I hadn't thought I'd be writing about this photogrpahy-writing connection and disconnection today. It's just arisen as I contemplate the process of organising my Burma images in a digital data base, and then pulling those that I want to submit for the book.

You might wonder about why then I think photos will work in the Burma book. Well there, as with Hot Sour Salty Sweet and the other four-colour books I've done, the text is in pieces, so text and photos work with each other, like an assemblage of colours and patterns in a quilt.

But in a longer piece of writing I do believe that photos are a disruption. The exception I think proves the rule. That exception is Sebald's work. In his books there are small un-pushy black and white images occasionally. Because they are not road-hog photos, not attention-grabbers, but instead quiet, they don't shout out in the text, and instead are there to be discovered. They're also integral to the text, a complement to what he is writing about; instead of taking us away, they take us more deeply into the thoughts and reflections he is pulling us into. He was a genius...

It would be interesting to write a book and include photos, spectacular attention-getting photos, but instead of interleaving them, to have the writing run continuously for the first half, the photos for the second. Or it could be the other way around. The order will have an impact, but it doesn't really matter I think. The important thing is that the two ways of seeing and engaging not interrupt each other. Once you've read the book, you engage with the images, or the other way around. AFter you've done both, they can reverberate with each other. hmm

Have you come across any books that have been designed this way?

The sky is overcast, the birds are singing, and it's time to have a long drink and then head out on my bicycle. After all, it's the first day of the rest of my life!

KIDNAPPED BY SLEEP ON A WARM EVENING

2011-06-05T23:15:00.004-04:00

It's Sunday night, dark and with the moon almost set. I've somehow lost a few hours. No I'm not hallucinating. We had supper, I did some rereading of my Burma travel journals, just checking this and that as I head into my final week of editing the Burma manuscript. And then sleep overcame me. Yes yes, perhaps it was the tedium of deciphering my own handwriting! Whatever!

Over two hours later I resurfaced, in that state of post-deep sleep paralysis that meant it took me another half hour to get off the sofa. Whew! I think I have to treat this as a second morning. I won't head out for a run (had a wonderful one this morning, long and easy) but I will try to knock some chores off my to-do list with my sort-of morning energy.

This weekend has already been productive. The big thing? yesterday I printed out a final draft of the Burma manuscript so a friend could read it through. This will be my last pass through and tidy up, and then off it goes... I now have a working title, by the way: RIVERS OF FLAVOR: RECIPES AND TRAVELLER'S TALES FROM BURMA

How does that look to you?

Getting that far ahead meant that I could at last do a little more in the garden. I have talked here about my plan to plant tomatoes in bags of soil, because of the blight problem in the garden soil. Now that's done, and we'll see how they do. It's not an attractive arrangement, for sure. The bags are all along the wall of the house in the side yard, so they won't get as much sun as plants do in the back, but the wall will hold in warmth and hopefully lengthen their season.; it should also give them some support. The other plants that I bought last week in Grey County are all planted: many kinds of chiles and basil and some cumin too, and after the heavy rains mid-week, they are looking better than perky and starting to grow.

Meantime on the flower side of the garden the irises are in full glorious bloom and the columbines too, lots of shade of blue and purple and all the in-betweens. Then late this afternoon the first peonies came out, creamy white edged with pink. A fab week for flowers...

Just started reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. It's quite amazing. Part of my mind's eye is living in Japan, with the motley Dutch trading community on an island off Nagasaki in 1799. Maybe that's what left me feeling dazed and needing sleep after supper. Hmm It could also be late payment for sleep deficit caused by the adrenalin of getting near the finish with the book. I have been pumped, for sure, unable to sleep more than five hours solidly each night. Not good!

I want to send a map in with the Burma manuscript. It's always good to be able to find where you are on a map, when reading about a new place. At least that's how I am. Do you feel the same way? A map makes it real somehow. Yes photos help, but the map is essential. That's next on my to-do list. It will have major rivers and cities and towns that are mentioned in the book. I'm using mostly the older names: Burma (not Myanmar) and Rangoon, not Yangon, for example.

Speaking of photos, I'm soon going to be able to (and I need to) start working on organising my digital photos, over two years' worth. I'm ashamed that I haven't done it until now, you're right. It's a big project and I knew it could side-track me, so I've left it for after I submit the manuscript. I've already got a list of some of the photos I like best, but they all need organising, using Lightbox. First I need to buy the program, then learn to use it. These transitions into new tech or new programs can be scary, of course, but since the pressure of the photos has grown so huge, I am not worried, just desperate to get started.

Meantime summer will be blooming and beautiful outside while I am insidel looking at this computer screen for hours. But at least the windows will be open, the fresh air pouring in, and the streets lively with summer ease.

Bring it on!

TIME FOR PLANTING & OTHER OPTIMISMS

2011-05-31T22:48:00.006-04:00

Writing here feels like playing hookey! I should be editing the Burma book, since I'm in the last ten days before I submit the manuscript. Well I've been doing a lot of that book-work, so it's time for a break.

Procrastination and avoidance are such interesting phenomena. How we justify them, or just fail to admit what we're doing, is a whole study in human behaviour! I have managed several great breaks in the last few days, each time telling myself that I need to clear my head. That may well be true, but I'm not sure that taking a whole day off was necessary!

I'm talking about Sunday, when Dawn-the-baker and I drove out of town at 7.30 in the morning under a grey and overcast sky, headed for Grey County, but not directly. First we had to go to Listowel to pick up some maple syrup; Dawn uses it in the granola that she makes as part of the Evelyn's Crackers line of locally made crackers and shortbread etc. And just south of Listowel are the Hoovers, who make organic syrup.

What??!? you say, how could maple syrup NOT be organic? The answer is that it depends on how the equipment is cleaned. The Hoovers use no chemical agents, just the sap itself, to clean the pans and pipes. It's an amazing operation, using sap from the trees in their bush, and wood from that bush to cook the sap. Talk about sustainable and local!

Because it was Sunday, on our way between Waterloo and Listowel on small country roads we passed Mennonites, old order Mennonites in their black horse carts, driving to Sunday service. In one yard there were over forty carts, drawn by one horse or a matched pair. The fields were such an intense green under the overcast sky, and the carts shone black against the green, the men clean-shaven in black hats, the married women all in black with a bonnet, and only the girls wearing a little colour, perhaps some purple or intense blue. We felt lucky to be out and about in Mennonite Country with eyes to see its loveliness, and time to admire it.

From Listowel we headed north to Grey County, via Ayton and Neustadt, and eventually to the small town of Elmwood. The STC, Saugeen Trading Community, which I've written about before, was having its spring Market Day. It's a chance for members to buy and sell, for trading community credit or federal dollars, or a mixture, and to catch up on news. I came away filled with news and warmed by friendship. More tangible loot included a ceramic bowl, a pair of gently worn yellow pants, some rhubarb, and a load of plants/starts: tomato and basil and chile peppers.

It really is time to plant now that the warm weather has come (as of yesterday). All the starts I bought (including some cumin plants from a small nursery) are now in the ground except the tomatoes. I came across lots of fat worms as I dug today, very encouraging. The tomato plants will go in bags of soil (to avoid the blight in my garden), perhaps tomorrow, when I take yet another break from the Burma bookwork!

And in the neighbourhood as I go for my morning run the chestnut trees are in full magnificent bloom, the irises are coming out, and the city's cyclists have now all got their bicycles on the road it seems. What a great sight, people in business clothing pedalling to work instead of driving in a car. The university of Toronto is now in full Convocation/Graduation swing, with lawns all mowed and a huge tent set up opposite Convocation Hall. Today there was a lovely crowd of happy parents and graduates out on the green grass looking delighted, and a straggle of academics in red and black and all kinds of coloured robes and hoods making thier way back to their offices from the ceremony.

I was on my bicycle threading my way through them, for I was headed to a Women's Culinary Network event late this afternoon. It was a potluck. I took some incredible wide flat crackers made by Dawn-the-baker, beautiful eight by eleven inch flats, and to go with them, a big block of old cheddar, and a jar of freshly-invented "chutney". The crackers were a hit, and the chutney and cheese too. Here's the chutney story: I had some stewed rhubarb, slightly sweet, made from the fruit I'd bought in Grey County. So I heated olive oil, added mustard seed and fennel and a little turmeric, and some dried red chiles, then tossed in chopped dandelion greens and garlic chives from the back garden. Once they'd wilted with a little salt, I added the rhubarb and cooked it all down a little. The combination of bitter and sweet and tart with some chile heat too was great, essence of springtime in one easy mouthful!

RAINY SPRING, ARAB SPRING, AND MORE

2011-05-25T21:55:00.004-04:00

More pouring and dripping rain this evening...May 2011 has now posted a record amount of rain, and there's nearly a week more of May to go (with three days of rain in the forecast).

The flowering plums and apples have come and gone, lovely for a moment, but soon faded by water and wind, leaving a confetti of pale and dark pink all over... The lilies of the valley are drunkenly aromatic in the front of the house. I half expect visitors and the mailman too to lurch as they approach the house, from the headiness of their perfume. And in the last couple of days that effect has been doubled by the blooming Japanese lilac by the front window, all soft purple and fragrance. The final piece of this talk of blooming in the rain is the wisteria, always a touchy subject for me. The vine, a Chinese (white) wisteria, has bloomed precisely twice in eighteen years, and not very generously. But last year I kept trimming it intermittently all summer and early fall. And lo and behold this spring there's a whole section of the plant that is trailing long white strands of dripping blossom. Now if I could just be sure which part of my trimming technique caused this to happen. Maybe none of it. Perhaps it's chance, or mother nature taking pity...

I'm still on deadline, and feel like I must have a raw patch on my nose where I've had it pressed to the grindstone. No, really, the Burma book is emerging from the fog of its creation and feels solid now. It just needs more editing time. Most books do!

In the last weeks, apart from the lovely blossoming of spring, there have been some wonderfully good intervals. One was the visit overnight of a young woman whom I haven't seen since she was not quite seven. At the time she was travelling in Thailand with her parents. We spent a lot of time together and had memorable days over the Lisu New Year at a Lisu village a day's walk from Pai... I've seen her mother a few times in the past five years, coming into town briefly from BC, but this is a first with the daughter. And she was a wonderful and present person as an adult, a grown version of how she had been when a child. What a privilege to be back in touch with someone I've always thought of as family. Yes, that was a special trip, twenty-four years ago, and now there's a chance to reconnect with it in a new way.

This coming weekend there's a Market Day up in Grey County, when the members of the Saugeen Trading Community come together to buy and sell; outsiders are also welcome of course. I'm going to head north for the day. It should be a good break from the manuscript and also a chance to pick up some heritage tomato plants and to reconnect with friends from Grey County whom I haven't seen enough of this spring.

The tomatoes will need to be planted once I get back to the city. I have three bags of soil, but need three more I figure, so that I can plant them in the bags (make slits in the plastic, stir the soil to loosen it, and insert the plant. Make a slit right beside the plant and put a small plastic cup in there with holes at the bottom. Water the plant regularly by pouring water in the cup, so it goes directly to the plant). Those are the almost verbatim instructions set out online for growing tomatoes or other plants in a plastic bag of soil. (I'm doing it because there is blight in the soil in my garden, argh!).

I'm sleepy this evening, not able to work on Burma. That'show I've managed to post this small blogpost. I took the evening off to go to listen to Monia Mazigh, Maher Arar's spouse, speak about current events in Tunisia (her home country), Egypt, Libya, Syria, etc. I am so glad to have heard her and seen her. She's a strong intelligent woman, deliberately provocative in her hijab, speaking fluently in English, her third language. Very dazzling.

meantime my only contact with all those shattering and amazing and awful events is to follow them on Twitter and read the links that are posted. And to hope that they have a positive and productive and peaceful outcome, sooner rather than later.

MAKING HEADWAY IN THIS GREEN & FLOWERING TIME

2011-05-17T17:40:00.005-04:00

I apologise for not posting for nine days. I'm in the sprint-to-the-finish-line stage of my Burma book. Writing here feels like an easy pleasure, a welcome and unpermitted distraction you might say, so I haven't dared even think about it for more than a week. I have so much work to do! On the other hand, there's a lot done; it really feels like a book. What a great thing to be able to say that. Now I'm just obsessing about details, as always!

And with spring springing so beautifully, and slowly this year, there's lots to celebrate, even as I complain about how deep in my deadline trench I am!

Just an update about this and that: My lilies of the valley are still not quite out, so that makes them a full two weeks late. My trilliums, valiant survivors in the harsh city envirnment, have just finished. On the other hand the crab apple tree that spreads the full width of the front yard is in glorious show-offy bloom, delicately scented, like a dreamy miracle. And as I run in the mornings, these last damp and rainy days, the humidity carries the scent of blooming fruit trees, and the overcast light makes the colours pop. It's pretty psychedelic out there! The best I think is the fall of brilliant citron-yellow-green little tree-flowers from the maple trees. They carpet the dark-with-rain sidewalks in an incredible glowing blanket of colour. Yesterday at the end of the street someone had dropped a couple of pink flowers, almost magenta, onto the brilliant green. It was intense, a jolt for the eyeballs!

In the back garden my first lettuce greens are up, little green spots of hope, planted ten days ago as seeds and rained on since. It's an exciting time as I visualise the shape of the garden this year. I've been eating dandelion greens from the back, and garlic chives, stir-fried with a little turmeric and mustard seed, a great start to the day, ingesting greenness and life!

Speaking of life, this week I tried to see if I could get cooked soybeans to ferment the way it's done by the Shan and northern Thais...and it worked! It's a recipe for Shan (Tai Yai) tua nao, dried disks of fermented soybean paste. I cooked the soybeans on Saturday and by this morning they were fermented and sweet-smelling, so I added salt and ground them to a paste in the processor. The paste is delish, on its own and also when fried a little; now I have a stash in a jar in my fridge, there to play with.

Tua nao disks are available in markets in northern Thailand and Burma, but here if I want them I have to make them. Of course there are substitutes, such as fermented soybeans from China, and even miso paste, but I'm delighted to know that if someone wants to make them from scratch, it's easily doable. That's my big hurrah! for the day! I'll try shaping some disks and drying them out in a low oven (since the air is too damp right now to dry anything!) tomorrow.

I dropped by the AGO the other day (yes, I have been taking the odd break!) and saw the Inuit exhibition, a collection now donated to the gallery, of mostly modern (post 1970) pieces, but with some old too, to give context. There's a wonderfully expressive figure, standing, carved from whalebone, and some minimalist soapstone carvings, huge smooth blocks with just enough detail carved to make you see the bird or the musk-ox. They're weighty with seriousness and somehow heart-stopping. Whalebone is such an extraordinary medium, so alive and so varied in its textures. The Henry Moore pieces in a neighbouring gallery look like they too, some of them, are carved from whalebone, as if they are an extension of the Inuit work.

As the news out of Syria etc continues dramatic and troubling, I can't stop checking twitter (I use Tweetdeck, which at least simplifies and sorts the incoming) for news. The rhythm of that is of course directly opposed to my need to settle in to editing, writing the last bits of text, polishing, etc. But the alternative, to ignore what's happening, is not acceptable. It feels as if, even from this distance, we should at least be imagining and thinking about what is going on, don't you think?

Recipes, and food questions seem trivial next to political action and active suffering, but they are all part of life and all necessary, that's what I tell myself. After all, growing food and getting it on the table every day is what keeps people going, and allows them to find some self-respect when life is tough or oppressive. Or so it seems to me.

And the kitchen is a place we can all retreat to, in fact, and in our imaginations, when we're feeling squeezed. It's a place of comfort, a feeling of home, an emotional refuge too.

Maybe that's why in these last weeks I feel so tempted to flee the computer and retest recipes. Taking concrete action is often much easier than working away to shape a difficult paragraph or think through a complicated concept. And at the end of recipe testing there's food to eat, and to feed others, which feels a lot more valuable, often, than whatever ideas I manage to express on a page.

But now I'm whining. It's time to stop that!

Time instead to celebrate a lot of birthdays, R, and X, and E and D and lots more, I'm sure, whom I'm forgetting. They get to celebrate at this flowering lovely time of year, when all is promise and freshness and optimism. How lovely!

GREEN AND MAY IN NEW YORK CITY

2011-05-07T23:44:00.005-04:00

Once again I’m writing here while sitting in an airport, this time JFK. I’m on my way back to Toronto from the James Beard Cookbook and Broadcasting and Journalism Awards that took place last night. It was, as always, a treat to see people I haven’t been face-to-face with for awhile. And it’s also a pleasure to have a little time in New York to get reminded of other worlds. This time I got swallowed up by the Metropolitan Museum. They have out-of-town memberships, which means that for $50 I can come and go as I please any time I’m in the city.

This trip I headed first to the Alexander MacQueen exhibit, stunning in its inventiveness and wild imagination, as well as its beauty...I hadn’t really understood what a conceptual artist he was. After that I stumbled on the Frank Stella drawings retrospective. In tall small rooms there were large black painted squares, transforming the room each time, altogether trippy and powerful., especially in combination. The impressionist modern Europe rooms I came to next were such a contrast, rich and warm, Berthe Morissette’s couple of paintings gleaming treasures, Manet Monet Sisley, all astonishing, ending with the drunkenness of Van Gogh.

It was time for an airing. Up onto the roof I went, where there are Robert Caro sculptures sharp-edged in the clear air and sun of a perfect early May day, the trees greening in the park below and the city skyline like an imagined landscape.

I wandered down then to see the Cezanne cardplayers, on its last week. It’s a small show about the cardplayer theme not just in Cezanne’s work but by others as well. The chance to compare similar paintings, usually hung in museums far from each other, and to see them side by side in temporary intimacy, is such a privilege.

Back out on the sidewalk under the leafing trees I headed up to the Guggenheim. The Art Gallery of Ontario has a complementary membership arrangement with the Guggenheim, so I was given a member’s ticket and could ramble up the spiral ramp, looking at the show of 1920 to 1918 works from the museum’s collection. I felt no pressure to see it all. When I’d reached my limit (fairly soon, because of all the time I’d spent at the Met), I strolled back down and out the door.

The next stop was at Kitchen Arts & Letters, storied cookbook store on Lexington between 93 and 94. I bought the fat and wonderful new Oaxaca book by Diana Kennedy, a book full of treasures lovingly unearthed and explained in words and photos and recipes. The book won Cookbook of the Year last night, for it is outstanding and remarkable. I can’t wait to try some of the recipes.

But in the meantime I’m heading back to the Burma book saltmine! I saw my editor Ann Bramson while I was here, and she was, as always, so encouraging and positive “I can’t wait to see the Burma book”... How lovely to have that good energy coming from her! Now it’s just up to me to do the subject justice and give her a good book to shape and edit.

I got to spend today in Brooklyn, along Atlantic Avenue and the side streets around: Court, Smith, Henry. Very beautiful and also very interesting to see the gentrification and changes in the neighbourhood. I hadn’t been to Atlantic Avenue for over ten years. Shocking how time flies... and how hard it is to get out of Manhattan!

Of course I had to eat some Yemeni food. The Yemen cafe has moved to an upstairs spot two doors away from where it was and in its place is another Yemeni restaurant called Hadramaut (after the region in southeast Yemen). I was there with Andrea Weigl, who was game to try anything and everything. The television was on, showing footage of the ongoing struggles for democracy in Yemen, and then talking heads. There were men in the cafe eating and watching the TV, but no women apart from us. We ordered Salta, a hot lamb stew with frothy fenugreek sauce in it (there’s a recipe for it in Flatbreads and Flavors, completely yummy). It came with two huge fresh tandoor breads, a clear soup and salad. We also ordered malokiah, cooked jute leaves, which came fresh-tasting and green and silky (some would say slimy), a nice complement to the lamb.

For a “dessert” we ordered a dish I’d never had, “Fatteh Date” it said on the menu (which should really have been fatteh tamar, tamar being date in Arabic). I know of fatteh as a layered savory bread dish, with chicken or legumes layaered with bread; this was described on the menu as a mixture of bread and honey and date. When it came it wasn’t torn bits of flatbread but instead a kind of semolina or coarse bulgur cooked with honey and date, not very sweet, and really delish. It had a slightly chewy texture, and looked like a semolina halwah that had crumbled a little.

Has anyone eaten this elsewhere? Highly recommended.

Usually at JFK while I wait for my Toronto flight I sit at the bar at the corner by the gate and have a draft beer. There’s often an interesting conversation or two to be had with other solitary travellers. But tonight with a bright sky outside and a load of Yemeni food in me, I don’t think I feel like a beer, or anything else to eat or drink. So I’ll just sit here and read my book. Or perhaps it’s time to do a little more editing on the Burma book, maybe on the soups chapter? All right, here I go!

PS The Conservatives and horrible Stephen Harper won a mjority; the compensation is that the NDP have over 100 seats - a first, and a wild swing. Now home and able to connect and post this... Lovely to come home to homemade chicken soup and rice, and DOm and Tashi and a friend, all cosy.

HAPPY MAY DAY! WITH FINGERS CROSSED FOR TOMORROW

2011-05-01T17:28:00.005-04:00

The birds are twittering in fine spring rain, the green is greening everywhere, and tomorrow we have the election, with its wildly lively energy (for once!) to look forward to and to survive.

I'll be with friends who have a TV (this house is without TV now), with our predictions on numbers of seats each party will win all tidily written down so we can compare then to the incoming results.

I was just sent a list of swing ridings, by a friend in BC, compiled by Catch 22 Harper; a group that is guiding people in their necessarily strategic voting (necessary if the Conservatives are to be held back). It's amazing to see the list of ridings where Liberal is the strategic vote, and those where NDP is; and it speaks to the likelihood of split votes and Harper's chance of sliding up the middle. It's so frustrating to be stuck with this first-past-the-post system when we have more than two parties and also have large regional fracturing of politics.

At least we have elections, elections that are reasonably clean and fair, though with the usual empty posturing and last-minute smearing. As we are reminded by events in the last three months in North Africa and West ASia, many people are without the right to express an opinion, let alone to vote, and many have lost their lives doing battle for those rights. So, the old rule "remember to be thankful for what we have" still holds, even when I feel like whining!

Sorry to rant and ramble... especially dreary for those of you who have no stake or interest in Canadian politics.

Meantime Labour and the Labour movement and workers' rights should be on our minds on this political day of remembrance. But all I can think about is the results coming in tomorrow night.

I bicycled to Wychwood Market yesterday, a ride up a steep hill in bright sunshine. Apart from looking around at all there was for sale, including some beautiful Jerusalem artichokes, and sweet potatoes, etc, I also hung out with Ed at his Evelyn's Crackers stall. People came by to taste the amazing crackers and shortbreads, handmade from local organic grains, and to chat.

One guy told me about his addiction to the Cheese Crackers, but then was buying two other kinds instead. It was like he was rationing himself. I remonstrated with him a little, reminding him that he might need to indulge himself while watching the election results Monday night. "Oh, he said, joking, I have a bottle of gin for that!" We laughed, but it did remind me of some of those deeply disappointing election nights when my democratic impulses and reflexes were tested and all I wanted to do was smash something or weep or ...

Here's hoping tomorrow is NOT like that!

SLOW UNFOLDINGS OF SPRING IN GUSTING WINDS

2011-04-28T15:21:00.006-04:00

The leaping green here, after only one warm day, is astonishing, especially in the cold and winds of today. Mother Nature is running to catch up, for everything is a week late or more. Today I saw magnolia blooms struggling out, a blue haze of scillas in several front yards, the first green leaves on the crabapple tree out front (hurrah!), and daffodils waving yellow in the gusting April winds. It's all so heartening, even as we all walk with our faces tucked in to keep them out of the intermittent cold rain and chilly winds.

Someday soon we'll be able to relax again, look around, and say "Oh, spring really IS here!" Does living in a four-season climate with cold winters and unpredictable springs make us tougher? more tenacious? Or does it just help us perfect our whining and complaining skills?? Hard to say!

As we come to the end of April (usually a softer month after March, but this year their roles were reversed), I'm ready to heave a sigh of relief that we're through it. Taxes are in and done with for another year, the last exams are being written today at the University of Toronto, leaving only marking and stray papers to be finished, winter coats and boots are partly put away, and then there's the garden. I've put manure onto the back garden, need to put on more, and am hoping all the rain is washing it in. The digging will be next week, hopefully in sunshine and warmth.

When May first comes, the worker's holiday celebrating labour all over the world except in North America, I'll be thinking of le premier mai in Paris. It's the fete des muguets, when everyone is buying and giving small posies of lilies of the valley and the air is perfumed, even the stale dusty air in the old Metro stations. My lilies of the valley in the front yard have been so shell-shocked by the cold that they are only just getting their pointy little shoots above ground. I'll let you know when I see the first blooms, but it won't be for another ten days, I'm betting.

Still on flowers and spring, today as I was finishing my run (two shirts, long pants, and a winter vest! to keep out the raw wind!) I came on a squirrel discard: a broken-off tender barely unfolding stem of chestnut leaves with an attached bud of chestnut flower. It's pale green and delicate, the infant foretaste of the confident tall "candles" of horse chestnut flowers and broad strong green leaves that the trees on my street will be flaunting in about three weeks.

Amazing to think that contained in the tender small bud and leaf of today is the full expression of leaves and flower and hard spiky chestnut. I guess it's no more amazing that the infant becoming the child... But it reminded me of how much I glance at without seeing. The wonders of spring, the foretelling of summer glories and autumn bounty, are all around us in this brief moment, if only we have the eyes, and time, to see.

Just saying!

I hope May is generous with you. And as I plod along with my Burma book, writing, editing, testing, I continue to be delighted to be working on it. The food is so creative and interesting, and distinctive, as well as delicious. I still don't have a title: any suggestions? Please feel free to make suggestions...

The other day I made two soups, both of which I'd been shown how to make in people's kitchens. A friend came by (my favorite situation: recipes tested and someone other than me to taste them!) and had a small bowl of each. She liked the first (Tashi loved that one, a Kachin Soup made with chicken and garlic and toasted rice powder) , and loved the second one (a bean thread soup, the broth flavoured with dried shrimp, the large dark red ones, and shallots, the noodles slippery and pleasing, definitely one of those "greater than the sum of its parts" magical soups). She's now asked me for the recipe. Now THAT feels good!

Happy end of April everyone.

CHERNOBYL ANNIVERSARY AND OTHER THINGS

2011-04-27T00:50:00.005-04:00

Just a quick note, on a day of rain and mist and flowers and birds pulling up worms. There's been a lot of talk about this being the twenty-fifth anniversary date of the Chernobyl disaster. Where were you when you heard?

I was in Lhasa staying at the Snowland Hotel. We had a little battery-operated short-wave radio and it was when listening to the BBC world service news that we heard about Chernobyl. It seemed unimaginable. And there was something about being huddled under quilts up on the "roof of the world" that made us feel far away from the dangers of Chernobyl.

We were wrong. No-one is far away from environmental dangers. As we watch the events unfold in Japan, we slowly come to realise that we're all in this together - what hurts you hurts me and hurts us all.

It's sobering, yes. But also a reminder that if we all have responsibility for each other, the other side is that we are not alone.

It's a good thought to warm ourselves with when catastrophes happen, or when we're feeling afraid.

And back at Chernobyl, the site has become a tourist destination. Hard to imagine. But then so is the concept of Auschwitz as a tourist site....

Meantime I've done another recipe count as I work my way through the draft of my Burma cookbook. I polish here, write a headnote there, rewrite and edit an introduction somewhere else. SO thrilling to be this far along. But as with a sewing project, or a carpentry project, the finishing takes an inordinate amount of time, and is less visible, than putting the basic structure in place. It's up to me to get all that tweeking and polishing right, with life and good energy, as well as good judgement and clarity.

Speaking of energy, it's hard to imagine the rigours of the campaign trail for the politicians out hustling here in Canada as we head into the final days of the election campaign. Amazing to see that the NDP is rocking the Conservatives. I am thrilled. But I'm not a good sports-fan, and nor am I a good political person: the suspense is awful, the idea of a Conservative victory is nauseating, and I have to admit to some deeply anti-democratic impulses when I think of Mr Harper and the Conservatives.

So here's hoping that the NDP win big, and that the Liberals also manage to unseat some Conservatives. I hope Elizabeth May and the Greens get some members elected too, and that the Bloc Quebecois is routed in most of Quebec.

Sorry for the local politics stuff, all of you who live elsewhere. But this is turning into a horserace, we hope, with a real chance to unseat the right wing destructive party that has been in minority government for what seems like ages. I voted on the weekend, at an early poll. And now we hear that turnout at the early polls has been very high. It's wonderful that people are voting and discussing and getting engaged.

Without proportional representation, elections in this fragmented multi-party country are always going to be frustrating. This one at least has turned interesting and energetic.

hurrah!

SPRINGTIME HAPPINESS AND FEASTING

2011-04-24T10:48:00.004-04:00

It's a cloudy Easter Sunday here in Toronto. I'm just back in from my run, a longer leisurely one that's left me sweaty and happy. Funny how getting the blood moving usually gets the happiness current, the emotional qi, flowing too.

We had a celebratory supper last night, early because there was a small person E with us. The guys lit the Weber and we grilled bavette and then lamb, each drizzled with fish sauce and a little olive oil first. The lamb was in "steaks", cut from a leg, so there was a round of bone in the centre. It's a great cut, recommended to me by Dawnthebaker and her partner Ed. I'd also bought merguez from Sanagan's Meats. Those went on the grill and then we cut them up and dressed them with lime juice, fish sauce, and chopped shallots, making a kind of Thai salad, with mint leaves too, for colour and freshness.

I can imagine you thinking "that's a lot of meat!" Well, yes. Some of us like all of it; my kids don't love lamb, so the beef was aimed at them; and one friend can't eat chiles, so she had to skip the merguez. But we all had appetite.

As for the other elements: There was sticky rice, some black mixed in with the white so it was a lovely purplish handful, handy for scooping up a slice of lamb or beef or a piece of merguez with shallot. We oven-roasted beets and served them coarsely chopped, unpeeled. Jerusalem artichokes from QUebec roasted up quickly, and went out plain, looking like oddly shaped small potatoes. I made a sprout etc stir-fry, a made-up dish of chopped potato fried in mustard seed and turmeric oil and then joined by shiitake mushrooms from Ontario, and sprouted chickpeas and a new kind of sprouted seed combo now on the market here: fenugreek, lentils, and something else. It's a wonderful blend of soft (spud) and chewy, with great depth of flavour, especially when heightened with a splash of wine near the end.

At the sweet end, a friend D brought a chocolate pound cake she'd made with creme fraiche, that went quickly, thanks to the four twenty-somethings at the feast. Dawn had made a tart, a cross between cheesecake and custard, with ricotta, mascarpone? I think, and eggs. Delish. She put out a jar of poached apricots and we just balanced the fruit on the slice we were eating, each of us. It felt very sunny and Easter-renewal-ish that tart, and indeed the whole meal.

New sprouts, eggs, lamb, garlic chives from the garden that I chopped into a kumquat chutney, all these symbols of new life and springtime are heartening. But they'd have been a little sad and lonely if the weather had stayed as grim and chilly as it's been for most of April.

We got lucky yesterday though, with bright sun and temperatures at 19 or 20, T-shirt weather! I gardened in the back, cleaning up leaves and branches and packing them into recycle bags. It was too hot out there for clothing, so I worked in my jogging bra and pants, feeling the intense April sun beaming into me. Yes yes I need to be careful about UV on my skin, mustn't overdo it and all that. But oh the tonic of spring sun!

No wonder we had appetite last night for a good meal with friends and long discussions into the night. The other end of the evening came after midnight, when the Russian orthodox church down the street had its annual Easter Saturday procession: candles, priests in golden vestments, a huge crowd of people walking past carrying candles and icons and singing in Russian.. We stood by the edge of the road watching as they walked by, children and grandparents and everyone in between. Another year, another marker...

One of my kids asked me if I ever wished I believed so that I could take part in rituals like the one we were witnessing. "Not at all!" was my answer. It's remarkable to see people acting in concert, with an apparently common mind, but it is also at some level disturbing, don't you find? The coercion of the crowd is powerful and potentially very oppressive.

So, no thanks!

But a huge "YES" to spring and birdsong and short sleeves and bicycling, and children playing in the park, and strolling people chatting late at night in soft warmth.

Bring it on!

NOODLING AROUND & LETTING IT HAPPEN

2011-04-17T16:47:00.004-04:00

How many of these blogposts have I written while in transit or on the road? I wonder. This afternoon I'm in the Ottawa ariport, waiting for a Porter flight back to Toronto Island. Outside we've had wind and rain and hail for two days, in intermittent and overlapping cycles, not great weather for flying in a small plane, but oh well!

I was up here to speak to a meeting of the translators and Interpreters of Ontario. No, I wasn't talking about language, strictly speaking, not the way translators use it, with precision and under pressure. I was talking about the language of food, and food as an aspect of culture and a window into culture. I made them noodles with sesame sauce, and a little side salad of diced cucumber with ginger and chives and coriander leaves, a fresh little contrast to the chewy noodles and rich savoriness of the sesame dressing. Before they ate they engaged with the noodle dough, shaping it into long stretched strands and little orecchiette shapes, etc, just a few of the noodles described in Beyond the Great Wall. And then as a digestif I showed some images from that part of the world...a way of putting different ideas in people' minds for when they hear the word "China". It was a lot of fun.

I realised though that these kinds of talks with food and images are a whole lot easier when there's good backup and in this case I had great backup, from the organisers of the event, from the chef whose kitchen I was in at the Cordon Bleu (Yannick Anton, a lovely guy), and from my friend Cameron Stauch, a chef and traveller, who had worked a full shift at Government House before he came and helped with all the prep and plating and clean-up at my event. Thank-you Cameron!

We went out after, with a couple of translator friends Po and Ilse, to a restaurant called I think Navarre, on Murray Street. Nice place. Then I headed out to Dunrobin to stay with my old friend from high school, Lianne, who is also trying to getting a weekend immersethroughfood program going on Grand Manan Island (have a look at my website www.immersethrough.com on the Grand Manan page).

The roads were sheets of water and sand, dirty and disconecerting... Lucky I am comfortable navigating in Ottawa, for everything looked creepy and kind of sinister in the rain and wind. Maybe it was just my tiredness, after a morning flight on Porter and a day of seeing my Alzheimers-afflicted aunt (in a very good mood, which was great) and good friends who live out on the farm that used to belong to my mother. It WAS a long day, now I recount all that, but full and satisfying too.

It made me realise again though that the over-anticipation that I wrote about recently is much better when it's kept under control. This time I tried to ride out the day,moving from thing to thing, and leaving a wide margin so I was never at risk of running late, but otherwise not worrying about the next thing while engaged with the previous one. It was GREAT. I just need more practice at it. And as always, it was a huge treat to see friends and loved ones...every time could be the last, and every time must be savored, right?

Of course without the good luck of having Cameron to help with prep, I would have been much more pushed for time at my event. So perhaps I should have been more worried ahead of time. But what good would worrying have done in any case? It achieves nothing, it just makes you tired.

Bring on this new era, I say. Let me start living more and more in the now. Yes, I have to plan what recipe I need to test tomorrow, and think ahead to buy the necessary ingredients, but I don't have to think and rethink it all, just make a plan, write out a note, and then do it.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to make Burmese-style rotie (flatbreads) and on Tuesday a Rangoon-style pulau, with goat or chicken, not sure. Maybe there should also be a vegetarian one? These are the questions that come up!!

And after that it's back to text, the intro, the chapter openers, the stories...and the history at the back of the book. It's all going well, and it's exciting to be in the middle of it, thinking about Burma past and present and future, and stories and places and people. But I can't linger, I have to keep moving.

Send me clearheadedness for these next six weeks please, a some more luck too. I know I'm going into debt here in the luck department, but...!

POSTSCRIPT: My cousin Jen, always clearheaded, reminded me yesterday that NOT anticipating can leave me a little short sometimes. In this case she meant that I should have told the translators and interpreters about the immersethrough sessions I'm doing in Chiang Mai next winter. The translators are a group who know about cultural immersion and engaging with another culture. Of course I forgot to say anything about immerse and, another of course: I don't even have business cards for immersethrough. So, another to-do to add to my list. Thanks for the reminder, Jen.

APRIL SUN & SHOWERS & THE PROMISE OF NEW LIFE

2011-04-10T21:13:00.004-04:00

In the warm optimism of yesterday's sunshine, springtime finally announcing itself, I drove out of Toronto and through the swooping hills north to Grey County. I had a great visit with my lively and wonderful aunt in Markdale and then headed over in the sunny late afternoon to Durham.

There was a contra-dance last night in the town hall in Durham, a lovely chance to catch up with friends. We danced and danced, to lilting music by Scatter the Cats of Owen Sound and area: fiddle, mandolin, double bass, irish flute... instructed and called to so that we found ourselves moving pretty confidently through the complications of the dances, getting hot and sweaty and happy as we did so. "We" were about 75 people, maybe more, of all ages, from small children to grandparents, of all descriptions, all there to have fun and also to help raise money for a local Waldorf-ish school called Edge Hill.

I spent the night at friends' whose house is in a forest. This morning, instead of yesterday's sun we found ourselves in dripping rain, with occasional flashes of lightning and rolling thunder. There are still no leaves on the trees, so the forest was all vertical lines and soft autumnal tones. Well, not entirely autumnal. There's a quickening in the trees, heavy buds on branches, a warmth to the bark on the willows, the occasional strand of green peeping up already from under the damp brown-tan-purplish layers of last year's leaves.

We had a sauna this morning, seven adults sitting on benches in a hot wooden room, the stove hissing when we tossed a little water on it. Every so often one or more of us would go out to stand in the cool dripping rain radiating clouds of steam. Fun! And such a cleansing feeling, all that sweat and open-pored skin in the cool moist air.

After a huge drink of water I headed down the misty road in the little red Honda Fit, feeling light as air. The last patches of snow were brilliant white against the soft tones of the damp fields. And rising from each snowy patch was a fine mist, the moisture in the air condensing in the colder temperatures above the snow. It's an eerie effect, that trailing mist. In the low-lying patches, at dips in the road, and over pools of water still ice-patched in places, there was swirling thick fog. Fields of corn stubble were rows of pale yellow on dark, like some ancient hand-writing on the curving landscape, with gleaming black crows as punctuation. And there were newly ploughed fields, the soil not brown, not black, but again that purplish brown-black of spring, promising life and fruitfulness.

I know that when I drive those roads again in two or three weeks there will be brilliant colour, not the muted tones of today, and no mist, no snow, no skims of ice still floating on shaded small ponds.

It all got me thinking about impermanence. Of course as I drove through it, my view of the landscape was constantly changing. But even if I'd been standing still, my view would have been melting and moving and transforming before my eyes. In these northern climes all of nature is change, especially at these "shoulder" times of year, when we lurch out of the grip of winter and into the promise of new life. It's miraculous.

Back in the city now I know that I must start digging up the back garden, feeding it some manure, and thinking about where to plant the early lettuce seed. I had problems with tomato blight last year, so I need to move things around. The tomatoes have to go somewhere new. But how to do that? there's a very small space, and not all of it with good sunshine. hmmm

My cousin Jennifer sent me a link about blight and suggested that I could grow tomatoes in bags of soil, so they don't come in contact with the infected soil in my garden. That takes more planning and discipline than I'm used to putting into my gardening. My approach tends to be more haphazard. But I should be treating the garden with more respect.

I had a conversation last night at the dance with a friend named Diane who is part of the seed-saving movement. Her task this year is to grow more than twenty plants, tomato plants of a particular heirloom variety, in a place at least 100 feet from any other tomato plants (to ensure the seeds from the new crop are not-contaminated by cross-pollination). She's on a farm, so she has the space, but she still has to cultivate and develop a whole new area of garden, a huge amount of work. If she can do that, and the other seed-savers can put their efforts into protecting heirloom varieties for the good of us all, then the least I can do is take good care of my small tomato crop. Right?

And finally, on the Burma book front: This evening i retested the balachaung recipe (a great side-condiment, with tamarind, fried shallots and garlic, lots of dried shrimp ground to a powder, all cooked together into an umami-laden must-have condiment. My mouth is watering as I write this!). And I made a deceptively simple staple I learned about in Kengtung, in the Eastern Shan States (just near where the earthquake was a few weeks ago). It's made of rice and peanuts cooked together and then ground into a smooth texture, rather like a polenta. Tashi loved it.

A couple of days ago I printed out a draft of all the recipes, organised by chapters and looking pretty complete. It's thrilling to have the recipes in a three-ring binder, easy to annotate as I retest. I feel I've turned a corner, and am on the home stretch.

As I write this Dom and Tashi are also on a home stretch, a different one, which is made up of exams and term papers, as the university year comes to an end. I'm on cooking duty for these weeks, my small contribution to their efforts. And they thank me and say they'll take good care of me as I get really close to my June deadline. I'll keep you posted!

OVER-ANTICIPATION; WHAT ABOUT LIVING THE NOW?

2011-04-09T00:01:00.005-04:00

It's just past midnight on Friday night. I meant to be in bed before now, but somehow... You know how these things can go, I'm sure.

This last week as I've been going places on my bicycle in the slightly warmer weather, rather than walking, life has taken on a whole new rhythm. And it's forced me to realise how much time I spend anticipating, rather than being in the moment. The most basic kind of anticipation, for me, is when I know I have to be somewhere at say ten o'clock, to meet someone or for an appointment, and that commitment becomes a big obligation in my head, one that I work to not mess up. "Messing up" means being late or forgetting whatever it is that I'm supposed to bring with me or remember. And so as a result I spend an undue amount of time making sure I have what I need, and then leaving way too early so as to be sure I'm not late.

How silly is that? And if I am going to wherever it is on foot, then there's an even larger chunk of time lost. But now, on the bicycle, I can leave at the relatively last minute and still make it to a meeting or whatever on time. No waiting for the streetcar, no half-hour walks...

The other day when I found myself leaving home late and still, after zipping along the busyness of College Street on my newly refurbished bicycle, five minutes early to meet a friend, I realised that I need and want to change my mental patterns and habits. I want to shed this sense of, yes, let's name it, this sense of urgency I have that makes me try to anticipate the future so "nothing goes wrong". It's ridiculous to be so bound up anticipating that the things I want or need to do right now don't get attended to. And I think it's pretty destructive too, in the long run.

I suppose it's some kind of control issue, do you think? And perhaps underlying it is an anxiety? Sounds about right.

As I was out for my run this morning (now there's something I don't have to think about ahead, just do!) I found myself trying to imagine how I would go about changing this pattern of over-anticipating. It seems to me that I need to look at what I am protecting myself against by doing all this obsessive anticipating. Is it the "dreadfulness" of being a few minutes late? of forgetting something and having to fix it later? So what? The world will not come to an end, after all, if I am late. So why am I acting as if it might?

The prescription, I think, and here I must apologise ahead of time to friends, is to deliberately try to stop caring about my own punctuality. I need to figure out how to let go of this thing. hmm

And if I aggravate some people by being late, well, it's not intentional, not directly. It's just part of my trying to learn how to live in the present more reliably. For as things are now, I feel I'm always struggling in the present to ensure that things go well later on in the day. But in all that anticipating the "now" gets lost. I've come to realise that this is why I often have extremely unproductive mornings (apart from my run and often some cleaning up). I can't seem to settle down to work because I'm thinking ahead to things I have committed to that are scheduled for later in the day.

Talk about fruitless.

This is an odd post. I'm not sure If I'll publish it or not. I'll just go back and have a reread, and then decide.

Before I do I should tell you that I did have a breakthrough today: I printed out new versions of all my Burma book chapters, and now have an updated hard copy of all my recipes to make notes on. It feels great. I can't work from the computer when I'm in the kitchen. It's just not the same as scribbling a note in pen on a piece of paper (usually the page the draft recipe is on).

Today I made the simple and magical sweet that is traditional in Burma at this Water Festival (next weekend) time of year. It's a rice dumpling, rice dough wrapped around palm sugar, then boiled until translucent and tender (they look like peeled lychees). When you bite in, the sugar inside is molten, smoky-tasting, and shockingly good. Aha!

I also made new supplies of pantry staples that I'll need for testing in the next couple of weeks, things like roasted rice powder, fluffy dried shrimp, roasted chopped peanuts, fried shallots, etc.

Armed with these I should be able to keep my momentum.

Once on-task and with a list of recipes to test, i hope I can avoid too much over-anticipating and keep my brain and ambition focussed on the immediate "things to do".

WIsh me luck!

And if you see me pedaling past quickly on my red Diamond Back, you'll know that I've managed to cut things fine, and now am hurrying to make up for not having anticipated!

SPRINGTIME PLEASURES & PRESSURES

2011-04-02T23:05:00.006-04:00

We're now past that big signpost April 1. Thirty years ago I started working as a lawyer in Toronto, for a firm now called Sack Goldblatt Mitchell, doing union side labour law. April 1 seemed like a good start day. Loved the people I worked with. That first year was hugely stressful; I doubted myself a lot and didn't dare tell anyone. Of course I discovered near the end of my first year, from a friend I finally confided in, that almost every lawyer in her or his first year of practice has these doubts and fears. it's not easy, doing things for the first time and feeling like huge errors lie in wait to ambush you!

Maybe all that stress is a good lesson for the rest of life, as in, nothing ever feels impossible again...or, "if I could do that and survive more or less mentally healthy, then I can figure out how to survive other things that life will throw at me..." You get my drift.

Warm weather has reappeared, though still with chilly temperatures at night. My friends up north say the sap has started running again (for awhile it got too cold and the flow stopped). I last wrote here on Friday, the day before I headed north for a cross country ski and lively supper with friends.

The ski was magic, with warm sun, melting snow but enough to cover the forest floor as I slithered along a stretch of the Bruce Trail. Shadows were sharp-etched on the snow, rabbit tracks and the odd fox or coyote track too showed that the still of the forest hid life of all kinds. By the time I turned and retraced my steps/glides/tracks the air had chilled a little, so the tracks, slightly melted in the sun on the way out, had re-iced. My trip back was much faster! - zippy and thrilling at times. I had one small fall and one near catastrophe as I slipped and nearly fell into a small rivulet I was trying to cross. No harm done, and that shot of adrenalin warmed me in the cool and gave a fun little edge to the end of the ski.

What is it about the pleasures of adrenalin? Of course I don't want that edge all the time, but the odd shot is a treat and a trip. I suppose it's like any other drug: harmful in overdose or over an extended period, but a real pleasure, sometimes a guilty pleasure.

I have written a little about this before, mostly because of bicycling. Now that the season has started for me (I am NOT hardy or agile enough to cycle in heavy snow) I'm reminded of the pleasurable edge I get from bicycling in the city. It's a rush to be so alert, so pushing myself. And I find it really satisfying too. A friend tells me it's the guy in me. Not sure if that's a full explanation! But there's certainly a competitive edge to it, me against the world? It's fun, completely fun, and leaves me speedy and exhilarated.

I just finished reading a remarkable wonderful history of Burma, written by U Thant's grandson and called the River of Lost Footsteps. He's a historian, raised Burmese but mostly in the US, so he tells the story from a Burmese perspective, but also set in a wider world context, and starting from the region's the earliest history, rather than just with the colonial wars. It's too easy to explain things in terms of just the last hundred or hundred and fifty years; doing that puts the analysis on the wrong track. I had had inklings of this truth, but reading the book gave me such a good perspective.

Burma has been a crossroads, and is certainly a geographical crossroads, but at the same time there have been periods of isolation and closed-offness. Now, with the full panorama to contemplate and digest, I have a better idea of the whys and wherefores.

I think I want to do some recipe retesting this week, to reground myself in the concrete, and to give myself time to take a distance from the history book. Only then will I be able to figure out what to say as background for the cookbook. Why do any of it? you ask. After all, for example, what italian cookbook deals with the history of Italy? So why do I feel compelled to engage with historical and geographical and cultural details??

Well because I think there's an interplay between history and politics and culture. And to understand the food culture of a place and a people, it helps to have a context, a wider and deeper context. We assume that people have a context for or knowledge of Italy or France (maybe we're wrong! Who was Cavour anyway? I can imagine someone asking, and why should I care?) and that therefore we don't need to be explicit about the historical and cultural background.

Southeast Asia is far away from North America and the western world. To the extent there's knowledge of Burma, it's mostly of the colonial and post-colonial kind, falsified by a focus on the immediate, perhaps, seen through a post-colonial lens, and usually filtered by non-local interpreters. I guess in a small way this Burma book will make me part of that cavalcade of outsiders writing about Burma. That's why it feels important that I anchor it in the specifics of food and then give it a framework that goes beyond the culinary and into the human landscape past and present.

One of the dishes I'm looking forward to working with this week is from the Kachin. It's unusual and hauntingly good, made of cooked small chunks of beef that are then pounded with spices and dry-fried. It's hard to describe, but not difficult to make. The end result is a deeply flavoured tender semi-pemmican, not a powder but in aromatic pieces. The Kachin, who are based in the north of Burma, Myitkyina being the capital of Kachin State, use herbs such as Vietnamese coriander and sawtooth herb in their cooking, and have many dishes that rely on steaming.

By the way, if you are heading to Rangoon, go have supper at Myit Sone, a Kachin and Shan restuarant near the Children's Hospital. (Myit Sone means confluence, for Myitkyina lies on the irrawaddy River just south of the confluence where its two source rivers emerge from their mountain trenches and join to form Burma's most important river.)

This post has somehow strayed from adrenalin and skiing and cycling to a restaurant recommendation in Burma. Oh well! Better than my dwelling on taxes, which is the other task that needs finishing. I've got a good start. I figure another day's work and then an evening to type things up, and I'll be ready to see the wonderful accountant who actually does my taxes.

Such a pity that the arrival of spring coincides with coercion, isn't it? There are exams when we're younger, and now there are taxes! But then I think to myself, what other time would be better? And there's no answer!

SPRING MAINTENANCE, & REFLECTIONS IN A SNOWY PLACE

2011-03-25T11:12:00.005-04:00

Last week I wrote about the full moon and an expectation of spring. By then I had grilled outside over wood and charcoal (beef, mushrooms, smoked pork chops), a sure sign of milder weather and rising hopes. But now six days later we're back in the deep-freeze, truly. It began with heaps of wet snow that cooled into lighter drier snow and blanketed the city, every telephone wire, fence-top, sidewalk, tree branch. The cat wouldn't set foot outsdie, and nor, it seemed would the city crews, who were NOT ploughing streets at all.

(We have a new and horrible mayor, anti-bicycle, anti-public transit etc; my theory is that he's going to point with pride to the money he's saved. Meantime we've had three days of clogged, then icy-with-sun-melt-and-refreeze sidewalks. I've seen several falls and lots more near-misses.)

SInce I was away for a chunk of the snow-season, it was kind of lovely to find myself yesterday afternoon walking across the great white snowy circle at the University of Toronto, the sun reflecting glaringly into my eyes off the pristine white. I was hurrying to meet a friend for coffee, and thinking, as I rushed across the circle on the student-created packed snow path, that the glare on my skin reminded me of long ago when people would sit outside in the spring with reflectors, tanning, in breaks from spring skiing. That feels so long ago. DO people still tan like that?

I had made an appointment last week in the warm weather to take my bicycle in for its spring tune-up, and cold and snowy yesterday was the day. The street was so icy I decided that discretion was the better part of valour. Feeling rather pathetic! I walked my bike to Urbane Cycle rather than risking a fall. And today I was able to ride it home, whizzing along on almost-dry roads (the sun, even with freezing air temperatures, is evaporating the snow and ice off the streets beautifully). The air was cold on my ears (no room for a hat under my helmet) but with a new rear derailer, new fromt tire, newly regreased front end, everything felt so smooth and easy; what a difference good maintenance makes!

That's a truth worth remembering in lots of contexts, not just bicycles.

On the night of the big snow day, Wednesday, I made a huge pot of beef stew, flavoured at the start, just before I put in the shallots/onions, with mustard seed, nigella seed, and some turmeric (into olive oil). (I find I use mustard seed and turmeric, a light dash, almost every time I use hot oil, except when stir-frying distinctly Thai or Chinese dishes.) I had potatoes from Marcus, brought to the house last week by Dawn and Ed of Evelyn's Crackers and still remarkably good, and some carrots from Quebec, as well as stewing beef from Grey County, bought at Sanagan's in Kensington Market.

A satisfyingly hungry crowd of young people (five in all) made short work of it. For greens there were very non-local wing beans ("tua plu" in Thai), bought at the Viet Grocery store on Spadina. They're long with frilled edges, and are best cooked in a little water quickly, like asparagus. I do them in a cast-iron skillet in an inch of water. When they're just cooked (about 5 minutes), I drain them and cut them into 1-inch lengths, then dress them in a light vinaigrette. Delish, and also beautiful.

This morning, with the temperature still freezing (wind chill of minus 15 at eight), I went for an early run. WInd pants, long underwear, three layers on top as well as hat and mittens: not my idea of springtime running gear! I needed it all, though was able to take off my mittens to cool down on the second half of the run. It felt so good to be out in the sun, breathing and moving freely. What a great thing that morning run is, a tonic that lasts all day.

Tomorrow I'm heading north for an afternoon of cross-country skiing and supper with a group of friends. I'd thought my one ski in December was all I'd get this year. So I suppose I'm ending this part of the post with the reflection that I've a lot to be grateful for, including this late snow...

Meanwhile in the wider world, there was an earthquake late Thursday, followed by many aftershocks, in the far eastern part of Burma's Shan State, just along the road from Mae Sai/Tachilek to Kengtung. I travelled that road last month, going up in a car and back south in a crowded bus. It passes through steep hills, and when it's in valleys, the hills on either side are beautiful and sweepingly massive, rather like the Jura or mountains in Tuscany. People in that region who live in villages have wooden houses, mostly, on stilts. In towns there are some brick and stone houses, often covered with plaster. The early reports talk of landslide danger, because of the steepness of the terrain and also, I imagine, because there has been a fair amount of rain in the region this March, very unusual.

Now we wonder whether the Burmese government will accept any help with this disaster, or not. The region is very cut off from central Burma, almost a different country, it seems. There are huge army camps (for the Chinese border, southern Yunnan, is not far away), and maybe that's who will end up doing the work of rescue and rebuilding.

And in Japan, two weeks since the earthquakes and tsunami, there is no relief from unfolding pain and fear, or so it seems. We can only hope that those who were stranded in the north have mostly been reached and given some form of shelter and support, so at least they are warm and fed. But who can tell what the end result of this kind of trauma is, for individuals who lost so much, and for the country as a whole? It seems reasonable to anticipate that emotionally and politically there will be aftershocks and tsunamis, in the public sphere as well as in the private.

Meantime Japanese fortitude and focussed attention to helping neighbours and getting life moving again are an example to us all. I don't mean just because of the astonishing stamina and "suck-it-up" determination involved, but also because it's an ongoing reminder not to take for granted our good fortune at being alive, whatever immediate pain or unhappiness we may be feeling from time to time.

I haven't even mentioned the other hot places, all painful and complicated, that feel my mind's eye: Cote d'Ivoire, where there's civil war and ethnic cleansing happening; Libya, say no more; Yemen and Syria and Bahrein and Morocco and... where change and hope and repression and fear are all blooming and struggling with each other. It's a humbling world out there.

All I can say is, bring on some peaceful resolutions, please, to these struggles.

SPRINGTIME FULL MOON THOUGHTS

2011-03-19T00:52:00.006-04:00

It's full-moon day today, with a big fat moon promised for this evening, the largest and brightest for some years they say. It was already huge last night. I have no idea why it would sometimes be brighter and others not... Whatever the wattage, the full moon has a magic, not measurable, just there. Wonderful.

Last night I was out with some old friends for supper at the Niagara Street Cafe. Such a pleasure to be with people with whom I don't have to edit or filter or in any way watch what I say. So often we make conversation with others, trying to reach out or to not offend or to put the other person at ease. All these goals are laudable, some more than others, but best of all is the luxury of full human to human communication without political or social worries. It's so much fun to just let go.

We ate slow-cooked Ontario lamb, and also some deep-fried frogs'-legs (from Ontario too? not sure) and duck confit and special Japanese-bred pork. There was a delicious parsnip soup too. It was a treat to have tastes from others' plates...

And after watching several old episodes of West Wing on the computer with Tashi, I headed for bed to read some more of my current book: The Man from Saigon. It's extraordinary, a vivid novel set in 1967 in Vietnam at the height of the war. The book is by Marti Leimbach; it's a Nan Talese/Doubleday book published in 2009. This copy is a bound galley lent to me by a friend. I can't remember reading about the book or seeing it in stores. Did it get noticed? Did it have any success? I hope so. Do go and look for it in a library or bookstore.

This week is new year (Nouroz) in Iran, a time just before the equinox when people eat green and growing things (sprouted wheat berries for example, and fresh herbs) and celebrate the return of the sun and new growth everywhere. New year in springtime makes a lot of sense to me. The Thais and Burmese and Lao have their new year in mid-April to mark the end of the death that is hot season and the arrival of the first rains that will bring the ground back to life...

Speaking of spring, I celebrated the arrival of warm weather this week by flinging open the doors of the house and spring cleaning. No, it's not glamorous, and it certainly didn't advance my word count on the Burma cookbook. But it did feel great. All rugs got aired and shaken and vacuumed, the floors washed, and some non-essentials purged. The house now feels relatively dust-free and refreshed. And a feeling of light airiness as light and warmth return is visible on people's faces as they walk down the street. Despite the harshness of news from the wider world there's a lovely optimism in the air here.

What a pleasure.

Who knows if this no-fly zone will help the democratic forces in Libya; let's hope it doesn't just lead to endless fighting and bloodshed. And let's hope that the beleaguered people in north-eastern Japan get more warmth and shelter and a measure of healing this week. We've all been so concentrated on the nuclear crisis that the living victims of the earthquake and tsunami have rather faded out of our consciousness. SImilarly, the democratic forces in Bahrain and in Libya continued to struggle and suffer this week without the encouragement of the eyes of the world upon them. It's heartbreaking and overwhelming.

Let's hope that there is dialogue rather than bloodshed that results in the end of autocratic rule in the Mahgreb... and let's rejoice as the sap continues to run, the birds return, the snow melt, the green return... There's such a sense of expectancy as all the signs of new life appear. They're like a fanfare announcing that the death that is winter is finally leaving for another year!

And don't forget to take a long pause to wonder at the full moon's radiance today.

LEARNING FROM CATASTROPHE, REACHING OUT

2011-03-13T15:12:00.006-04:00

I fnd myself, like many others I imagine, unable to tear myself away from checking twitter etc for breaking news about Japan. And so it was wonderful to hear a familiar voice addressing me directly from there, Elizabeth Andoh.

Elizabeth Andoh is a scholar of Japanese food and culture, a remarkable woman in many ways. She publishes an online newletter called A Taste of Culture. She just sent out an extra one, which is a gift to us all, for it grounds those of us far away in the human reality there in Japan. Here is some of what she says:

When the first huge, terrifying quake hit on Friday afternoon, March 11, I was in Tokyo preparing for a class the following day. Having lived through several large quakes before (including one in which I was trapped in an elevator for hours before being rescued), I knew what to do. Trembling (me, and the earth together), I went into automatic mode, shutting off anything that could cause a fire, propping open the front door and one other escape route in the kitchen (door frames can shift causing them to jam shut), donned my emergency kit-knapsack (containing flashlight, extra batteries, water, essential medications, money, identification papers, gloves, face mask, first aid supplies, extra sweater with hood). The initial quake lasted for several minutes -- it seemed as though it would never stop.

Still trembling (me, and the earth together), I turned on the emergency news channel and learned the center of seismic activity (the largest on record in Japan, currently revised at 9.0) was Miyagi Prefecture, on the Pacific coast, north of Tokyo. Gigantic tsunami (tidal waves) were predicted, and came... and keep coming. As do tremors of varying degrees (as I type this, my desk sways slightly in a minor aftershock).

Transportation and communication services have been widely disrupted -- frustrating and frightening. To conserve energy, limited and rotating shut-downs are being scheduled throughout the Kanto Plains area. At this time I have access to the Internet and grab the opportunity to make two requests:

Elizabeth goes on to tell those of us far away how we can best help: by donating to the Japanese Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders or CARE or International Medical Corps. And she also advises people who are in Japan that they should assemble an emergency kit for themselves, the instructions for which are to be found at href="http://72hours.org/index.html">72Hours.org

This reminder of the fragility of things, of life and terra firma even, is painful, even for those of us far away. And it's a good reminder. I know I don't have any kind of emergency kit packed. I just blithely continue day to day, assuming the sun will rise in the usual way tomorrow. It's a good idea to be prepared, not anxious, but just ready, so we can be less of a burden to others if disaster does strike.

And in the meantime, let's help those in trouble each of us in our own way, as we hope they would rush to help us in similar travail.

PATTERNS & FREEDOMS AS I WAIT FOR SPRING

2011-03-08T22:55:00.005-05:00

What a change of scene: temperature, light, people, oh and did I say temperature? It's COLD here in Toronto. I got back from Chiang Mai a week ago, then left for New York for three days until late Saturday night, so I feel like I'm only now getting settled back into Toronto. There was a thick beautiful coating of snow everywhere on Sunday morning when I woke up, making the light all pale and ghostly.

I had to leap to, rather than lying in, for the house needed tidying (Dom and Tashi did pretty well keeping things organised, but still, there was a little raggedness at the edges that needed dealing with). What was the rush? you wonder. Nothing heavy, but I was expecting a bunch of kids and adults to arrive around noon to celebrate E's fifth birthday. I made none of the food, just tried to organise the stage... no pressure, and it was fun: about ten kids and fifteen or more adults.

I wrote a blog entry in January about an ideal way of dealing with jetlag: read a great book (it was Wolf Hall that first book). Well now I have another coping strategy: be busy with fun things, like simple chores, undemanding parties, etc. The time goes by, I'm not tempted to fall asleep in the middle of the day, and it's all fun anyway.

The snow has melted a little in the bright noonday sun, but wind chill temperatures have been shockingly low: minus 22 yesterday morning for example. Once the wind died down the day turned beautiful, of course, warming and optimistic. But then again this morning, as I headed out on my first post-return jog, I found I was glad I had on windpants and long underwear, mittens, a headband, and a couple of layers on top too. Yikes! There were patches of glare ice in places, but mostly the sidewalks were dry. The cold wind made my eyes tear up, but that was the only difficulty I had.

I headed west to a new bakery-restaurant here called Woodlot. And then when I got there I realised I was echoing my Chiang Mai pattern. There in the early morning I often run through the old city to a woman who sells cafe buran, old-style Thai coffee, near the Chiang Mai Gate market. Here in Toronto I ended up like a homing pigeon, asking for coffee: a double espresso at Woodlot. The scene was different, bakers shaping loaves rather than the wacky traffic by Chiang Mai Gate, but there was the same black bite to the coffee, and the same pleasure at being out early in my running shoes.

It's odd this need for a destination. It comes and goes. Some mornings I am happy to make a loop, and to alter my route as I go, at whim. And other days, both here and in Chiang Mai, I am happiest having a destination and a purpose, a goal. I wonder what makes a particular day incline one way or the other. hmm... Food for thinking as I run next time.

That probably won't be tomorrow, for there's rain promised.

Instead I'll start in early on the next item on my to-do list: typing out my notes from my last weeks in Burma. I am feeling pumped, not sure why, about this Burma book. I think it's a relief to be at the stage where I am shaping the book, structuring it around stories and recipes, seeing where I still have gaps to fill. This is the fun part, for sure. I also have about twenty more recipes to figure out. Most of them shouldn't be a problem...or so it seems to me right now.

On this International Women's Day, the hundredth one, they tell us, I find myself wondering at the passing of time, and being grateful for all my freedoms. That I can sit here typing and know that this can be published and out in the e-world with a stroke of a key seems amazing. That I am uncensored, free to write what I wish, is a privilege many people don't have. And that I can vote, own property, raise my voice and be heard: now those are rights that my great-grandmother didn't have, not formally at least.

And so once again here I am counting my blessings...and waiting for spring to commit to arriving!

MARKING TIME & GETTING RECHARGED

2011-02-28T02:10:00.007-05:00

A quick end-of-February note, just before I fly off to Toronto. At this time of year there are so many markers, reminding me of people past and present, anniversaries of all kinds:

Today is February 28th, and if she were alive my mother-in-law Ann Hegewald Alford would be celebrating her ninetieth birthday today. She was a wonderful woman with a big heart, who loved books and meeting new people and thinking about the wider world.
My father was born on February 29, one of those special people who have a big birthday every four years and in between just a flicker at midnight for a birthday. He would be turning ninety-one tonight. A friend, Helen is another "29-er" who will have no day for her birthday this year.
Tomorrow the wonderful Evelyn turns five, and Michael, another child of friends and a gifted and lively musician I've known since he was born, is turning twenty-four.
The next day, March 2, was my grandmother's birthday. Since she was born in 1889, this day marks 122 years since her birth. It's amazing to think that we can span such a long time within the web of our family and friends. She was 25 when the first war started, an unimaginably long time ago in some contexts, and a mere yesterday in others..

And so it goes, the intensely peopled days of late February and early March.

It's great to be flying at this time of year: While spanning the globe and seeing things from different physical points of view, I also get to time-travel in my mind's-eye and view the world and events from different temporal locations.

Do you ever do this? It's a rich way of getting a new perspective on things, rather like drawing a map of the world with the south pole on top, or any other switching of normal orientation or perspective.

I'm feeling a little mediative right now, a familiar pre-departure state for me. It may also have to do with our visit to the monk at Wat Don Chang in Ban Chan, this morning. He is another "muscular buddhist", like the Sitagu Sayadaw I mentioned two posts ago. He is putting his energies into providing accessible high quality schooling to hilltribe children. He now accommodates 700 of them in dorms and classrooms, by his wat just south-east of Chiang Mai. I went today with Fern and Noi and new friends J and A, to get a blessing and just touch base. It's like getting a firm footing on the months to come, and I do feel blessed. He's quite a guy.

(And it turns out that A knows all about the Sitagu Sayadaw. She says that all Burmese know about him and that he has a large and growing international following. Good. We need more of this, so that the world connects to Burma and those in need can be helped directly.)

After the monk's blessing we were hungry (of course!). We went for khao soi at Mae Jam Paa - their fish version is especially wonderful - food for the body, now that the heart and soul were well taken care of.

TRAVELS & IMMINENT DEPARTURES

2011-02-26T21:29:00.004-05:00

Here it is nearly the end of February, and nearly the end of my time in Southeast Asia. I catch a plane Tuesday morning in Chiang Mai, change in Bangkok, then Hong Kong, and from there it’s over the pole to Toronto. Amazing.

This week was originally going to be a time to consolidate and reflect on what I learned in Burma on my last trip, to see friends, and generally to enjoy Chiang Mai. But a Toronto friend turned up, a friend with a long connection to Burma and pro-democracy-in-Burma advocacy, who had been refused a visa by the Burmese embassy in Bangkok. No fun. So I proposed that we try taking a little trip north to Kengtung, also known as Chiang Tung. It’s one of the old Tai city states, the capital of the Eastern Shan State, and lies directly north of Mae Sai and the so-called Golden Triangle area.

The thing is, even though it’s in Burma, the Burmese government treats it separately for the purposes of tourism. You can go in to that area by leaving your passport at the border and agreeing to take a “guide” with you. It feels restrictive, yes, but better than not going. There’s no cross-checking of information, so we made it in, no problem.

Kengtung the town is about four hours by car from the border. At the moment foreigners aren’t allowed to go any farther north; the next major town after Kengtung is Mengla, near the Yunnanese border, a town known for its wild-west casinos and drug smuggling, etc.

Kengtung is charming, set up in the mountians, surrounded by mountains and built on rolling hills around a manmade lake. The streets bend and undulate with the landscape, and everything is low-rise and human scale.

The people are mostly not Burman but predominantly either Shan (Tai Yai) or Tai Koen, speaking a language like the northern Tai spoken in Chiang Mai. There are also hill people, Akha and Lahu, living in town and in villages nearby. We had all kinds of encounters, in tea shops and at markets, as well as in temples and out on the street; we learned a lot and wallked a lot!

It felt like time travel to be there, as if we were in Thailand about forty years ago. There were motorcycles but few cars, and no electric lighting except by generators in individual houses, so the place was pretty dark and quiet by 9.30 every night. A small market by the guest house we stayed at came to life every morning at dawn and was finished before 9 am. Women there sold prepared foods as well as vegetables, including dishes I had never seen before. I was thrilled. And even better was that the women were very helpful, ready to explain how a partcular dish was made, or what a vegetable or herb was used for.

I loved the fresh rice noodles, called kao swe there (what in Thailand would be called guay tio). They’re eaten in a broth with blanched pea tendrils and a meat sauce, and lots of condiments, just as they are in northern Laos and in southern Yunnan. The regional cross-connections are thrilling. But in Kengtung there was also a kind of steamed rice crepe that was made using a noodle batter and flavourings. I can’t wait to try it at home, for it’s a delicious and inventive dish, a great addition to my Burma v=book, I’m thinking!

At the market the women gave me samples of everything to taste, from head cheese (wonderful) to silken tofu with ginger-sugar syrup to pickled greens to fermented bean paste (an essential and delicious flavouring, great for vegetarians). They were so generous.

These are people who live on very little, who make and grow their own food and their own luck, dare I say it. And they do it with warmth and grace. Once again, there’s that lesson of travel: travel teaches me a lot, and it’s not about the food as much as it is about the way people live day to day.

After a six hour bus ride back to the border and after paying off our guide, it was great to get our passports back and cross into Thailand. Getting back a full sense of autonomy, after being constrained by rules and checkpoints and a slight anxiety about transgressing unknown rules was a reminder that people living in Burma live with constraints much more binding and onerous than the ones we’d wilfully accepted when we’d chosen to travel to Kengtung.

....

There was a stack of letters in my inbox when I finally checked my mail once back in Chiang Mai (internet is slow to non-existant in Kengtung). Among them was a note from my cousin Psyche, a wonderful woman, telling me that our aunt, Wendy, my mother’s identical twin sister, who lives in British Columbia, had fallen and broken her pelvis. She has a ninetieth birthday coming up in August, but there’s a strong feeling in the family that she won’t live that long.

Last spring she broke her hip when the horse she was grooming moved over and she lost her balance and fell. In other words, she’s been very much a going concern until recently. The hip healed fine and she moved back into her house in the summer.

When I spoke to her in January, before leaving to come here, she sounded clear, a little frailer, but with energy and decisiveness still, and of course an uncanny echo of my mother, who died over thirty years ago. I’ve had a slightly difficult time with that since my mother died, getting reminded of my loss, of who is gone and who survived.

But now the last trace of that reminder, that echo, may vanish before I have a chance to see her again. I don’t want her to suffer endlessly, so it’s selfish for me to want her to recover from this. She’s been in her own house until now, thanks to support from her son who lives nearby, and from friends. But even if she recovers it seems as if she won’t be able to live on her own...

And what will that be like for her, living in a facility of some kind? Not what she wants. Not what any of us wants.

None of these questions are easy, none of these situations lend themselves to comfortable solutions. And the descent into less-than-autonomous living conditions lies ahead for most of us. What to do?

Perhaps my aunt will be able to let herself go. On the other hand there’s a toughness in her, a toughness inherited from both her parents, my grandparents, so I wouldn’t put money on her just lying back and letting go. Maybe instead she’ll manage to will herself to be gone...

I’ll keep you posted.

A SURFEIT OF RICHES TO ABSORB & APPRECIATE

2011-02-21T05:32:00.005-05:00

I'm feeling full-to-bursting, as we used to say after a huge meal when I was growing up. But at the moment it's not my gut that's full but my head and my mind's eye and perhaps my heart too. I'm just back from Burma. It's a pleasure to be back in the ease of Chiang Mai, but I feel a pang too. I'm missing the complexities and textures of my days in Burma.

I think iit's a good sign when I'm not ready to leave a place. That means I've dug in and found a comfort zone, taken local patterns into myself and in some small way become immersed and part of it all. What a luxury to be able to do that, in even a small way, in another country and culture. I've made friends in Burma, in Rangoon in particular, and learned my way around the city, especially many of the markets and small restaurants. It's hard to remember how little I knew and how intimidating Rangoon felt to me two and a half years ago.

Of course, on the other hand, as I've said before, the more I learn about Burma and the food cultures and other aspects of culture and daily life there, the more I realise I don't know. And that's healthy too, if sometimes unsettling!

On one front I've made some very slow progress: I've been slowly working on my literacy in Burmese. Because I'm an on again-off again kind of student of language, on this last trip I found myself sometimes sitting down for several hours practicing Burmese letters, and other times not being able to make myself open my notebook. But always there was a pleasure in trying to decipher, syllable by syllable, the street signs and menus and other writing I came across each day. The letters in the Burmese alphabet are beautiful, rounded and curving with the occasional squared off line, just fascinating to the eye.

The advantage of this nibbling away at the alphabet is that now I understand why Burmese is transcribed into English in the way it is. For example, the word for the currency is written "kyat" in our (Roman) aphabet and is pronounced "chat", approximately. It doesn't seem to make sense, until you learn that the combination of the Burmese letters that are pronounced "k" and "y", when written together in Burmese, becomes the sound "ch" (roughly). Aha! It's just like the English combo's "ch" and "sh". There's no rule that says that an h sound after an s should produce the English "she"; it's just a convention.

And all this leads me to think about our conventions and assumptions about ourselves and others. We assume before we know other languages that "sh" is always pronounced as we pronounce it in English. We don't understand why "ky" should mean "ch". SImilarly we don't understand why we shoud take our shoes off in the house or at the temple, when we are in say Thailand or Burma or India. From the other side, people from those countries are horrified at the idea that we DON'T take our shoes off. How dirty! they think (and I agree... but that's another topic, street dirt in the house...).

We also assume things about other people, all the time.. and often we don't get to find out how wrong we are. Today I had the pleasure of meeting a remarkable person (he would not characterize himself this way I'm sure) who is not "categorizable." I met him at the Irawaddy, the newspaper of Burmese people in exile, where he works as a writer and editor. He was imprisoned as a very young man, a student, for eight years. I can't imagine what it's like to be in prison, let alone to lose eight years of your life, at a young age. Yet here he is, doing productive work, not wearing bitterness on his sleeve but instead conducting himself with grace and humour and dignity. He has not lost his self-respect.

While I was in Dawei, a town in southern Burma that is sleepy now but about to have a deep-sea port developed nearby, I had another encounter with a remarkable person. In fact, I could say that I met a number of interesting people who are all connected to this amazing man, a monk who is a "muscular buddhist", you might say. What I mean is that rather than study and meditate only, he also believes that he should engage with trying to alleviate suffering. So on the one hand he gives public talks on the dharma almost every evening, and on the other he works to build schools and hos[pitals in underserved areas of Burma. He's also managed to connect to gifted doctors living in other countries; they donate weeks of their time and of their students' time, to working at the hospitals, treating patients and training local staff.

It's a brilliant strategy, for he is doing good not by being a political or elected person, but just by taking direct action, acting as a force for good in the country.

The organization is called Sitagu, and the monk, as a teacher and leader, is known as the Sitagu Sayadaw. Do go have a look at a website about it all, at http://sitagu.org/burma/

Full-to-bursting is how I started this blogpost, and writing about just a fraction of the thoughts this trip has given me makes me feel even fuller. More later. For now, as I head north for a couple of days with a friend to try to visit the part of Shan State immediately north of Mae Sai, in particular the old trading town and Shan principality of Chiang Tung (often written Kengtung in Burmese contexts), I'll go on trying to digest this richness... And I will remind myself again of how lucky I am to be able to engage with this part of the world, with all its complexities.

AND ON A FOOD NOTE: I went to Dawei for many reasons, one of them to taste Dawei mohinga, a uite different take on the dish. There the soup is much thicker than in Rangoon, more chile hot, with large pieces of lovely fresh fish in it, and some galangal too. One of the people with Sayadaw was a man from Rangoon who gave me the names and locations of several mohinga restaurants/stalls in Rangoon, as well as of a place called Osaka that makes a brilliant noodle dish called Shwe Taung Khao Swe. Delish! Now to figure it out for the Burma book!

HEADING INTO BURMA, BOOKS IN HAND

2011-02-05T13:13:00.001-05:00

Went off this morning at nine with Fern and Robyn and Dave and Mizuho to visit a remarkable monk south of town. This is the third year we’ve been to see him, to ask for help and receive a blessing. Each time I’m struck by his earthiness and penetrating attentiveness. And each time I feel buoyed by his blessing and the sense that I have been well launched into the new year. How lucky.

I’m due to catch a plane tomorrow afternoon, the direct flight from Chiang Mai to Rangoon. In that forty-five minutes the plane flies over the steep green treed ridges of mountains that mark the Thai-Burma border, over the Salween River and its tributaries, and finally over the flat rich rice-growing lands of the Irrawaddy Delta, before descending into Rangoon.

I’m booked into a different hotel, in a different part of town this time, slightly west of Sule Pagoda, the landmark that is the point of reference at the centre of downtown. Until now I’ve been staying east of Sule, about a mile east, and have come to know the area. I’m trying to take myself in hand by breaking pattern and getting familiar with a part of town I know less well.

I’ve got two weeks in Burma this time. What to do? Apart from seeing friends in Rangoon, I want to get out to somewhere, and haven’t figured out where. I may end up back where I started, on my first trip in Burma more than thirty years ago, in the summer of 1980. That would mean flying into Heho in order to spend time around Inle Lake. When I was there first there was only one place for travellers to stay. Now there are guest houses and hotels galore, and it’s a very popular tourist destination.

So why go there? you ask. Well, it’s beautiful, and it’s also relatively rural, so there’s a chance to be out in fields and to see daily village life and foodways. And there’s something rather wonderful about returning to a place, even if the return is disappointing often...

Until recently I had hoped to get to Dawei this trip, but I’ve been told that flights there are scarce. It’s on the coast well south of Rangoon. Road access by car or bus, as well as train travel into the Dawei region, are forbidden to foreigners. And why Dawei? Well, the food culture in southern Burma is quite different from that of the centre or of districts further north. Also, I’d just love to see that Andaman Sea coast and taste the different takes on mohinga and other dishes that I’ve been told there are in that region, known as Tenasserim. The name alone is enough to entice the traveller!

Tonight I headed out with Robyn and Dave (of EatingAsia) to eat Teochiuw rice soup with delish side dishes/accompaniments (pork various ways, greens, delicious pickly things that were a cross between vegetable and condiment) and then go on to listen to music. We went to Boy’s Blues Bar, on a side soi in the Night Market. Boy plays guitar and for a long time his band was the opener at the Brasserie. Now he’s got his own small bar, a pleasant place that is open-air at the back and cosy, with good acoustics and un-deafening sound. A nice place to check out if you find yourself in Chiang Mai. I pooped out at midnight, but the others were planning to head on over to the Rock Palace, upstairs above a Pizza Pizza in the Night Market, where a local band that does a great job on covers, a band called Nyok, was due on at 1 pm.

I have run out of steam; I don’t have much stamina when it comes to waiting around for a set to start! Instead I’m sitting here in the cool night air writing this blogpost. I’ll find some wi-fi tomorrow and post it up before I go to catch my plane.

In between, other visitors, Jacob and Tanu, are planning to turn up in time to have lunch... Not sure where we’ll head, but perhaps to the woman who sets up her grill until a tree at the southern end of the plant market. She makes astonishing grilled pork and grilled chicken, as well as great som tam (green papaya salad). It’s all best eaten with sticky rice, with good friends, under the shade of the giant tree, as motorcycles and trucks and tuk-tuks pass by on their way to and from the plant market, often carrying stacks of plants, or trailing trees.

And yikes! one more thing to cram into tomorrow: I haven’t got enough books to read for my Burma trip. A friend has lent me The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Will I like it? Hope so. Everyone else seems to find it very engaging. But apart from that and my basic “Learn Burmese” book, I have no other reading material to take. Backstreet Books, a great huge used bookstore few blocks away, is the solution. The only trick is going to be finding a moment to get there.

That’s tomorrow’s problem. For tonight, I need to get to bed. And I’m heading there happy that this year’s immersethrough group was wonderful, and that the whole week went well, with good energy. Everything is cleaned up and bare again in the kitchen apartment, so that it’s hard to remember how full of food and conversation and life it was just yesterday. Thanks everyone!

FAREWELL TIGER, & HELLO TO THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT

2011-01-31T06:07:00.007-05:00

it's the last day of January, the first day of this year's immersethrough week in Chiang Mai and north of here, and also this is probably my last post in the year of the Tiger, since the Rabbit is due to come loppety-lop into our lives on February 3. I have nothing against rabbits, in fact precious Dom is a Rabbit, but since my birth year is a Tiger year, I am sorry to see the end of another one.

One more the cycles remind us that there are things to look forward to and enjoy, and that there is also a time for them to be over, for us to move on. I'm moving on by remembering that this Tiger year has given me health and happiness, deepening friendships, a small but growing understanding of culinary and other culture in Burma, and an optimism that even if tomorrow is harsher or more painful than today, I have the resilience to weather hard times. Yes, that optimism may be misplaced. But I don't care, just am happy to be feeling this way.

Today we shopped in Warorot Market, now celebrating its centenary, and then came back to make, under Fern's mother's direction, a wonderful meal: gaeng om (a simmered layered-with-flavor beef soup/stew); gai nung (chicken pieces rubbed with a spice paste and then steamed to make a wonderful broth and tender meat); laap pla northern style (catfish minced with cleavers, then fried with aromatics, then mixed with separately fried heaps of of crispy fried garlic and the fish skin, and topped with more aromatics); gaeng pakat (Chinese kale in a broth flavored with pork ribs etc); ep moo (pork cleaver-minced and then mixed with lemongrass and other flavors, then shaped into small flat patties, wrapped in banana leaf, and grilled); and lots of fresh vegetables; all made and eaten with a great vibe. That's my immersethrough report! Very local doings here in Chiang Mai.

I feel rather cut off here from the huge world events of the last week: the turmoil and awakening in the Arab world. To stay with food, for a moment, apart from all else they have in common, the places where change has happened or is seething at the surface are all flatbread places: Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Lebanon.

When I was in Tunisia (for an Oldways conference and also to do research for the Flatbreads book), the place felt heavy, authoritarian, much more than Morocco. Once when I was in a car driving north of Nefta, not far from the Algerian border, the taxi driver had some great music on the radio. It was sufi/qawali music, being broadcast from Algeria. He made me promise not to tell, for that radio station was banned in Tunisia. He could be arrested. It was a small thing, in a way, but a reminder that people's lives and thoughts were not their own. And Mubarak's Egypt of course is notoriously oppressive. But for years Tunisia has often been referred to approvingly, in the media and by politicians, as stable. Does "stable" just mean "successfullly repressive?" It seems to, when it comes to US allies in the Arab world and in other places too.

How disgraceful.

Here I find myself on a political path in this post...how did that happen?

And as I write out here on Fern's balcony (she has wi-fi and I don't) I can hear a call to prayer, in the dusk, a call with elegance and intensity both. It's a good reminder. When I think of the people demonstrating in the streets of Cairo and elsewhere, and those injured and killed, I want to think of them not as an abstract mass but as human beings with feelings and aspirations, wanting the freedom to listen to the music they choose, to believe as they wish, to be safe under a secure rule of law.

Maybe the year of the rabbit will bring them that. Let's hope so...

And may the year of the Rabbit be a generous and fruitful one for all of you.

AND AN AFTERWARD: There's an article in the NYTimes by Ross Douthat that engages in a brief way with the guessing games played by the US and other governments about whether or not to intervene, to support repressive regimes for fear of worse, etc. It's here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/opinion/31douthat.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage

Basically everyone would like sure outcomes, but such things are not available...and often then, the US and others tend to stick with the devil they know rather than supporting uprisings, even when the devil they know is deeply authoritarian, undemocratic, corrupt, etc.

RUNNING THOUGHTS & CROSS-BORDER ISSUES

2011-01-28T04:03:00.004-05:00

There’s a bank of fog on the eastern horizon and some scattered mackeral clouds in the sky, tinted gold against the turquoise blue by the sinking sun to the west. It’s been a lovely day, like its predecessors, clear mostly, bright, and a lot warmer than a week ago, so that I can be in light cottons in the daytime and even into the evening. Running in baggy cotton shalwar-type pants (that date from Udaipur and a nice tailor there, in 2003) and a loose light cotton top before eight in the morning I am running with sweat by the time I’ve done my little two to three mile trot in the morning. The coldest of the cold season seems to be over, is what I’m saying.

Last Friday I headed north in a car with Fern and Noi, who is also from Chiang Mai, and an American friend visiting from Beijing. We stayed two nights at Fern’s lovely farm (checking things out before the immersethrough crew arrives) where the bougainvillea is in bloom, and the garden flourishes. We ate Jam’s wonderful Shan (Tai Yai) food one night and the second night brought home lots of eats from the Fang market and picknicked on it all, sitting by the fire outside.

Up north at the farm the mountains on the Burmese border are right there, dominating the western horizon and making the air cold, especially at night. It was strange and wonderful when I woke up that first morning to see my breath in great puffs and feel chilly when I ventured out from under the covers. There was dense fog in the morning, frequent in cold season up there. Everything becomes mysterious and dew drips from the trees and bushes. Eventually the sun breaks through and drives the mist away, and the world is transformed. Gone the mystery!

As I was running yesterday morning I was thinking about bad sidewalks and the pleasures of running. What makes it so great? There can be cars and exhaust, and hot or cold weather, and bad sidewalks, and yet it is still such a pleasure to just trot down the street. I guess endorphins truly are an addictive drug, and running is the easiest supplier of the drug, so there we go!

Speaking of pleasures, there’s a new Burmese restaurant in town, a place called D-Lo. Went there last Monday with a small crowd, including J and A, who were the ones who told me about the restaurant. By the time we pushed back our chairs, several hours of eating and conversation later, we’d tasted almost every salad on the menu as well as a number of curries. (Burmese salads are just brilliant. Naturally then, the salad chapter of my Burma book (manuscript due in June, book should be out in 2012) threatens to drown the rest. It’s a nice problem to have!)

D-Lo is so good that Fern and I think we’ll take the immersethrough group there next week for supper. Burmese is another piece of the northern Thai culinary landscape, less embedded than Shan/Tai Yai, but definitely connected. The more I learn here and in Burma, the more I know I don’t know, but at least I’m seeing more of the cross-connections, geo-political and cultural and culinary too.

The cross-connections in this complicated endlessly interesting region were the focus of a seminar I went to yesterday at Chiang Mai University. The Social Sciences Faculty is now putting on a series of talks and events relating to Burma, about one every two weeks it seems. The news about the situation in Burma is not common knowledge in Thailand. These seminars are a chance for university students and others to get informed. This one was titled “A Man Made Disaster: Implications for Thailand of Burma’s Health Catastrophe.”

In Burma the government surplus is in the billions of dollars but government spending on health care is less than one dollar per person per year. Most of that spending these days seems to be on buildings, not on services for patients, and most is in Rangoon and Mandalay. The consequence is that people in eastern Burma on the Thai-Burma border area, and also those in other border regions, have no health care at all. In eastern Burma the infant mortality is staggeringly high (30% death rate for children under five), and one woman in twelve dies in pregnancy or childbirth.

The seminar was concentrated not so much on these distressing statistics as on the fact that because of poor health care and lack of preventative medicine in Burma, and because of the war being waged by the Burmese army against the ethnic minorities in the border areas, diseases that have been all but eliminated in Thailand are endemic in the border regions, diseases like tuberculosis, filariasis (elephantiasis is one version of the disease), and malaria.

There are over two million displaced people from Burma in Thailand, and a constant flow of people fleeing across the border. It’s an ongoing humanitarian crisis. But even for those not moved by the plight of others, the situation bears thinking about: like it or not, the dire medical health situation in Burma can and will affect Thailand in a serious way sooner or later.

One group that’s working to try to help border populations is the Backpack Health Worker Team. They use volunteers from the communities that are being helped (Karen people in Karen areas, Mon in Mon areas, etc). The volunteers travel into Burma on foot carrying packpacks full of medical supplies such as vaccines, antibiotics, etc. It’s been going for nearly fifteen years and now serves hundreds of villages.

All this would not be necessary of course if the govenment of Burma were providing services or at least not waging war on the border populations. It’s one thing when there’s a natural disaster or endemic poverty; it’s another thing when the suffering is largely wilfully caused and avoidable.

How do people deal with their rage and anguish in this situation? Many flee to where the living is easier, and who can blame them? But many others become involved in trying to help, as teachers or community activists or Backpack volunteers or...

It’s all another reminder that a lot of the pain in the world is caused by people hurting people intentionally. Those of us not born into that kind of situation cannot imagine it. We can only try to stay aware and find our own individual ways of trying to help.

MORNING PLEASURES & A BOOK TO GET ABSORBED BY

2011-01-19T09:41:00.002-05:00

Sometimes a breakfast is so perfect that it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to eat anything else but that particular combo in the morning. There’s great bread lightly toasted and eaten with cold butter and home-made marmalade, and good coffee alongside; there’s my home-standard leftover rice with fried greens and fried egg on top flavored in various ways; there’s mohinga streetside in Burma somewhere, with fresh little crunchies to be stirred into a perfect broth and tender noodles; and today there was “jok”, what we in the west often call by its Hindi name “congee”, or else more prosaically call rice porridge.

I was out for a short jog at about seven this morning, the sun still hidden by dense mist on the eastern hills. (Tashi just asked me on the phone if running here in Chiang Mai is very different from running in Toronto (apart from the snow of course, he said). The answer is yes and no. Yes, it’s different because the sidewalks are rough and uninviting so I often run on the street, dodging oncoming cars when there are any, and watching for bumps and obstacles when I am forced onto whatever passes for a sidewalk. And yes, it’s different because the people who are out on the street give me a smile or a wave as I trot past, in a friendly inviting companiable way, whereas in Toronto I am as invisible as every other jogger. And no, it’s not different in a basic way: I am still stuck with myself, my thoughts and anxieties and uninteresting morning ponderings, including my thoughts about whether to take a break and walk rather than huffing and puffing on at a slow jog, all sweaty!)

A guy I met recently here told me that he does a brisk walk very early, before dawn, past the moat and north a bit to the “stadium” that is used by the PhysEd Department at Chiang Mai University. He goes round the track four times before heading home. I’d never been there and so decided to head out in that direction this morning. I took back streets and found my way to the stadium, ran once around, and then took a winding exploratory route back. Fairly close to home I came on a street-side stall run by an older couple, with pots on the boil, a sign that said “JOK” in Thai, and a couple of tables with plastic stools set out on the edge of the road.

I ordered a bowl of jok to eat there (the person ahead of me took his away in a heavy plastic bag), “sai kai, ka” - with an egg please. The woman took a large ceramic bowl in one hand and gave the huge pot a stir with the ladle in her other hand. She scooped up a full ladle of steaming hot smooth white rice porridge and poured it into the bowl, then set it down while she broke a fresh egg onto it. Then on went several more half-ladles-ful of hot jok, some pork broth with a few meat balls, and a generous sprinkling of chopped green onion and slivered ginger. The egg of course poaches in the middle of the dense hot porridge, so the trick is to leave it without stirring too much, until it has cooked enough for you. I like my yolk liquid and my white set, so it take several minutes.

As I waited for the egg to cook, I explored the table condiments: plain vinegar, powdered dried red chiles, sugar, and rice vinegar with a paste of minced green chiles and a little coriander in it. There was also a bottle of soy sauce and a full shaker of white pepper powder. I spooned on some of the vinegar-chile paste and then started to turn the thick soupy porridge, turning the edges in to the centre. Finally, a first spoonful went into my mouth, hot and steamy. Fabulous. And from there it continued, the egg yolk a rich country-egg orange, the strands of ginger warming on the tongue, and the mild green chile paste too... There’s something about the smooth thick texture of jok that is comfort food, like baby food anywhere perhaps?

It’s coolish here right now, especially in the morning, and so, though when I sat down I was hot from running, with sweat patches on the knees of my pants and on my back, I was already feeling chilled by the time the bowl of jok was in front of me. The hot soupy porridge warmed me right back up, a gentler version of the direct hit of hard liquor, hitting my gut and then travelling out to my extremities... Perfect winter food.

As I walked on home I thought about this question of perfect breakfast and wonderful streetfood. The thing is, a simple perfect breakfast at home is easy, manageable, but this streetfood, whether it’s mohinga or jok or some other wonderful breakfast, is not so simple. I mean it takes expertise. Part of the pleasure in eating it is that someone else has made it, and made it beautifully. I can just ask for it and it miraculously appears.

Yes, I would be happy to make good jok for myself and others. But that extra treat of being taken care of, especially when it comes to comfort food, adds a layer of pleasure that’s a whole other ingredient.

And speaking of ingredients, I have a new strategy for jet-lag, something I’ve fallen into by chance. Just before I left Toronto last Friday a close friend lent me her copy, soft cover, but still fat and very attractive, of the 2009 Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. It went into my checked luggage, as a book to savour rather than to glance through junk-book fashion on the plane. And so it was waiting for me when I unpacked, and into it I dived, head first.

An engaging beautifully written slightly challenging (keeping the names straight and trying not to miss out any of the lovely details) book is a great companion and walking-staff kind of assistance for the jet-lagged traveller, I discovered. I could read it without falling asleep, so I could stay up until a reasonable bedtime. And it could entice me out of an afternoon nap, when needed, so I stayed on track.

Beyond these rather dreary practicalities, it is the most fabulous book. My friend’s spouse had said he was irritated by the dangling “he”, for the author doesn’t dot every “i” in the course of the narrative, so who does “he” refer to in this sentence? is sometimes the reader’s question. But I found it clean, a wonderfully immediate read, with no obtrusive author’s voice in the way, no knowingness to mar the intimacy I had with the scenes as they unfurled in my mind’s eye.

It is truly stunning.

Of course there’s a wild disconnect between the court of Henry the Eighth (the novel is centred on the amazing Thomas Cromwell, who rose to power in that era) on the one hand, and present-day sub-tropical Chiang Mai on the other. That gap between the world I was transported to by the book and the place I was in when I raised my eyes made my dreaming quite disorderly and wild! But why not? since jet-lagged sleep can be so trippy anyway...

In ingredient terms, then, the recipe for long-distance travel includes melatonin (which I always forget about, but which really helps many people get to sleep, even when their sleep-cycle is out of wack); drinking lots of water on the plane and taking it easy with alcohol; having a comfy place to sleep your first few nights after arrival; and now, the last ingredient, having a fascinating book to sink into when you can’t do much else besides read or sleep and you don’t want to sleep just yet.

But I’d also say, don’t wait for a trip to get started on Wolf Hall. And if you can, read it slowly, luxuriating in the tapestry of it all and the style too. I rushed through it, and wish I had it to read all over again for the first time. Maybe in a year I’ll reread it, in a more leisurely way, and reimmerse. Now that’s something to look forward to.

Happy full moon everyone!

LAUNCHING INTO THE NEXT PHASE...

2011-01-14T10:35:00.005-05:00

Departures and transitions inform so much of this blog; sorry if it gets repetitive! And here I am at it again, for I'm writing this as I sit at the airport in Toronto, on a bright sunny day, waiting for a flight to Tokyo, and from there a connection to Bangkok AND Chiang Mai.

My friend and Honda Fit co-owner gave me a drive to the airport this morning, so generous. That meant I had a peaceful nicely paced early morning of clearing up odds and ends, the usual crowd of pre-daparture last things. In this case there were some jpegs to send to a new magazine that's starting up later this spring, Taste & Travel; a little laundry to get done (better than being greeted by it in six weeks!); last minute book-packing decisions (when in doubt take lots, is the basic rule for me; my friend D supplies me with mysteries etc of all kinds to race through on the plane, then in checked luggage I take more substantial books for once I arrive); writing a cheque to leave for this anticipated bill and that; leaving a long note for Dom and Tashi, still snug in their beds; feeding Silky the cat...

That stream of chores and errands and tidyings-up gave me time to think about why leaving is always difficult even as the horizon beckons. It's not just the thought of missing those I love, though that is huge of course. It's also a child's or maybe animal edginess about launching myself into the void. The daily round, wherever we are, is what we know and are comfortable with at the moment. The transition is a form of free-fall. Once begun, I find it exhilarating. But the immediate lead-up is a little fraught. I suppose it's a very mild version of what the sky-diver feels before launching herself out the plane door?

Now that I'm out the door, it all feels easier. I am starting to be able to look forward to what awaits in Chiang Mai and Burma, rather than being reminded of what I'll miss in Toronto.

I know that in December, just before leaving Chiang Mai to fly back to Toronto, I was having regrets about breaking my flow there, tempered by the thought that I'd be seeing Dom and Tashi and friends. And here I am playing the tape in reverse.

This morning I posted on Facebook a little thought about the good luck of being able to feel at home in more than one place. The other side of that is that wherever I am, and you must all be familiar with this, there are people missing, people who are far away, living lives elsewhere. We can't have it all. Of course not. But that doesn't stop the child in me from having trouble sometimes navigating these transitions, the times when something is lost as something is gained.

How selfish and self-centred all this thinking is! But I feel it's worth talking about, for surely each day we experience smaller-scale versions of the same thing: separations, rejoinings, choices of one place or person or course of action over another, which means we leave behind us a trail of "roads not taken".

Perhaps, to get to something concrete for a moment, perhaps that's why cooking can be a relief and pleasure for many people. Yes, there are choices to be made, but if we don't love the result we have the chance, often, to do it differently next time, to improve or change our choices. In cooking, unlike in life, there are second and umpteenth chances. And isn't that a wonderful thought!

FOOD FOOTNOTE: There's a brand of sprouts etc called KIND, I think, now selling sprouted chickpeas, a great food. In the Indian subcontinent, sprouted legumes (just two or three days of sprout, a tiny tail) are used to make salads. When they sprout the legumes become sweeter, as their starches are converted to sugar, and more digestible too.

I have been playing with the sprouted chickpeas, heating whole spices, Bengali style, in oil with shalllots or garlic, then tossing in the chickpeas and sauteeing a little, then adding some liquid and simering them until they get a little less chewy. A dash of soy adds depth, as does a splash of vinegar or wine or lime juice. The other day I stirred them into some cooked wheat, Senatore Capelli variety wheat that Potz had at 4-Life. It's now coming in from Italy, and cooks up like brown rice, with great flavour, in about thirty minutes.

All these experimentings with hearty flavours are pleasing in winter, and mushrooms and a little chopped carrot are great possible additions, ginger too of course. These cooking decisions are play, not fraught: "why not try this? or that?"

How to make life-decisions as pleasurable and un-loaded?? hmmm Still looking for the recipe for that!

GENEROUS FEASTS & ENCOUNTERS

2011-01-09T01:07:00.006-05:00

I've just walked in the door, through snow and chill, returning from a short trip to New York. Snow delays at both ends mean my flight arrived about two hours late, but somehow there was amiability rather than short tempers at the airport and on the plane, so it felt relatively painless. Another treat was a pleasurable conversation I had at a bar at JFK while waiting for the flight, with a young woman who was also headed to Toronto.

SO what about flight hassles, when the day's been so wonderful. Earlier today I got to the Met and saw the exhibit of photos by Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand. SOme are soft and tender, other formalistic; Georgia O'Keefe's hands and breasts and neck and everything; reflections and buildings and geometries, as the images moved through the first decades of the twentieth century. I loved the effects Strand got by using a gum something-or-other to add colour, hints of colour, to some of his black and white silver prints. I know nothing about printing techniques, but the results were haunting, some of them. The most famous image using this technique are the three versions of the Flatiron building print, each coloured differently.

It was a major shift of gears to walk from that into the Gossart exhibition. He was an early Renaissance painter from the Netherlands, late fifteenth and early sixteenth century (he died in 1532). There are Mary and Christ-child images, some very intimate-feeling, others more formal and stylized, but also portraits that are astonishingly humanistic and modern in feeling. Worth a long look, both exhibits, though a little indigestible viewed in the same visit (like eating oysters and chocolate ice cream in one sitting perhaps?)

In for a penny... so I hurried on to MOMA to see the "On Line: Drawing in the Twentieth Century" exhibition. It ends February 7; get there if you can. You begin with line and gesture, Picasso and Braque and then Jan Arp and Sophie Arp and lots of names I don't remember... Calder is there of course, line suggesting volume, and Agnes Martin and others in pure linearity but nuanced and thoughtful, deeply absorbing. Then the more recent works by still-developing artists are another surprise: Julie Mehretu's huge piece there grabbed me, and so did a huge layered hanging web of threads connected by small beeswax balls that hangs in the entrance to the show (artist's name not in my mind right now, sorry).

I am going on and on, apologies, but it was just one of those "art is so transporting!" days and I am still bursting with it, as you can tell.

My last stop before heading to JFK was to hang around in T's welcoming kitchen for an hour. Such a good friend. She fed me an array of yummy leftovers and made me a neatly wrapped sandwich to take on the plane. What a great thing to have when the plane is delayed, a prosciutto and dried tomato and mozzarella sandwich on multi-grain bread.

And there was a bonus to arriving late in Toronto: no line-ups at passport control.

I came rushing out of the airport at nearly midnight, my handcarry slung over my shoulder, to see the TTC bus just rolling past the terminal. I waved and the driver took pity and stopped for me. What a lovely thing that is, when a bus or streetcar driver stops specially! It makes me feel rescued, cared for, attended to. And tonight after that delayed exit from NYC, the driver's flexibility felt like a extra-welcome gift.

Now here I am snug at home with Tashi and with Silky the cat. No energy to make tea or do anything but lumber to bed, feeling grateful.

NAVIGATING ANXIETY WITH IMAGINATION

2011-01-03T23:12:00.006-05:00

Tonight is the new moon that marks the start of the last month in the Chinese lunar calendar...the last month of the Year of the Tiger, my birth year animal. I'll be sorry to see the tiger year go. it feels special, a birth year, and of course will only roll around again in another twelve years. Yikes! We'll all be so much older...

I discovered recently that the days of the week in Burma are also associated with animals. Every temple has a series of small shrines, eight altogether, each associated with a day-of-the-week birth animal. (Wednesday has two: morning is an elephant with tusks and afternoon an elephant without.) Everyone, at least every Buddhist, in Burma knows what day of the week she or he was born on. I had to google my birthdate to find out something that if I'd been born Burmese I'd have known from an earliest age: that my birth day is Saturday. Saturday's animal is a dragon. My friend Trisha, like my son Dom, is a Monday, a tiger. That means she's a Tiger by year and also by day. grrr!

All these associations get filled in, coloured you might say, by us, by the meanings we attach and the interpretations we choose. Any and every year sign or day of the week animal or horoscope sign can be read as good luck and a positive thing. We know of good attributes for each. We can also read in warnings about risks and hubris and all sorts of other dangers.

Somehow I associate all this with the idea of karma. We have a destiny perhaps, but we shape it too. Life is unpredictable, but full of potential, and so the idea of karma or horoscopes or fortune-tellers is that it's up to us to try to realise the good potential and avoid the harmful or less life-enhancing possibilities that are inherent in each of us and in many life-situations. Maybe that's what some of the churches of various kinds are trying to tell us, but they lock it into dogma that feels so unreal and binding that the wise-living part of the message seems to get buried most of the time. Too bad for all of us.

Especially when organised religion feels empty of meaning and unreal, we are driven to look for meaning elsewhere. And in our search for meaning and connection, we look for patterns. If I feel a closeness with someone, it's comfortable to relate that to the fact that we share a birth sign. Maybe our shared birth sign is in fact part of it. Or maybe somewhere way back we share an ancestor. Or is it pheromones? Or shared culture? It's funny this business of the people we choose, those we feel an immediate affinity for and those who feel much more like strangers.

I met a woman in the airport in Rangoon a month ago. We were trying to check in for the same flight - a plane to Chiang Mai. And it was one of those encounters with a stranger where there was instant connection, a meeting of minds, yes, but also of spirit somehow, though we come from very different places on the globe and different generations... Surely the possibility of meeting fellow-travellers or unknown cousins-in-spirit or sisters-under-the-skin is one of the things that keeps me looking around the corner and anticipating tomorrow. It's fun. And perhaps the connection lasts only a short while, or maybe, with internet, we stay in touch. It's a nice idea, not empty, the possibility of staying in touch, but that matters less than that initial sense of possibility and connection.

If I were in a room full of people born in the year of the Tiger, in the sign of Cancer, and on a Saturday, would there be a greater likelihood that we'd connect with each other than if the room was full of random people of every sign? I dpn't think so. But I do think that when we know there is an overlap of "destiny markers" such as birth year or sign etc with someone else, then we are predisposed to find and feel a connection with him or her. It breaks the ice. It makes us less strangers to each other; it gives us a relationship of some kind.

I'm not sure where this line of thinking is leading me. This naming of the years and the months is another way of giving time a geography, making markers for ourselves in the flowing stream of passing time, helping us feel less helpless occasionally. In earlier times, when the stars shone brightly without competition from electric or gas lighting, the stars kept people company and could be "mapped" and known in some way. Now we read about them but don't often see them. And for sure we don't generally know our way around the night sky the way our ancestors did.

Every map, every landscape, actual or metaphorical, that we learn to navigate, gives us confidence because it gives us a sense of context. And so the geographies of lunar months and years and weekdays, with their animal and other associations, like the saints' days of the catholic church and the calendars of feasts and fasts in the other religions, from Hinduism to Islam to Judaism, are human-invented structures that shelter us; they're maps that give us a sense of our place in time and social space.

A young friend of ours dropped by this evening. We got to chatting about her exam anxieties and her general anxiety, which is occasionally crippling. We talked to her about trying to treat exams as a game, doing anything possible to feel some control in what is an inherently coercive and stressful situation. (One way is by answering questions in reverse order or mixed order, for example.)

I guess that earlier conversation about managing anxiety about life is what led me on this exploration. Humankind's efforts to take charge of a feeling of destiny by making maps of time and assigning properties to days and months and years have been pretty successful for many people. They want to believe and they do believe, either in life everlasting or in the power of prayer or offerings, or in the possibility of rebirth in a better form of life. And all this belief makes the fear of everyday dangers less strong.

How amazing, the human imagination, that we have the power to rescue ourselves from fears. Of course if we lacked imagination and the power to anticipate, perhaps we wouldn't be crippled by fear and anxiety. So our weakness and our strength arise from the same source, from the very attribute that distinguishes us from animals: our power to imagine. How wonderful.

AFTER THOUGHTS: I've been out for a couple of runs in the cold weather of the last days. They're exhilarating, but not as easy as runs in milder temperatures. I came across a small article that explained that part of the difficulty is that muscles all over are less limber in the cold, so that everything, from leg muscles to those it takes to draw breath, are stiffer and less powerful. It's great to have an excuse for feeling a little feeble in winter! I've found too that the cold is making me ravenous. Today, for example, I had two fried eggs, not just one, on my leftover rice. I fried some chopped shallots in oil with a dash of turmeric and the usual mustard seeds, before adding the eggs (all in a wok). There was green from rau ram (Vietnamese coriander) leaves left over from the bunch I bought earlier to make chicken salad for the dancing party. It's a wonderful herb, and keeps flavour even when fried. On top went my standby Burmese hot-sweet-tart chile sauce (the bottle now nearly gone so it's time to make more; maybe tomorrow?).

LOOKING FORWARD TO NEW POSSIBILITIES

2010-12-31T17:48:00.005-05:00

Got a call around noon today from a friend in southern Thailand. She was in a bar and it was already past midnight and the year 2011 where she was, whereas I was wandering around a spare and nearly empty post-dance-party house, looking out at a mild last day of 2010.

It was another reminder, that call, that we can talk to each other across time and space, but each of us can be in only one place at a time. Sometimes as I read a description in a book. or as I daydream, I am transported to another place or situation or long to be elsewhere. But fact is, I am where I am (sort of a Popeye-ish expression!!) and not elsewhere.

We can yearn to "have it all", but in fact that's not possibile. We must accept that at any time we are who we are, where we are. If we want something different, then we have to make hard choices and exert ourselves to change things. There's no point whining and yearning! We just need to get out there and commit, take risks, do what's necessary to try to change those things we want changed.

This sounds preachy, and I guess it is. Sorry if I'm bugging you! But I've got more to say on this..

Whether it's political action and social justice, or personal transformation that we want, none of it happens without effort and commitment, and for most of it also we also need the help and support of friends and family and colleagues.

So let's make 2011 a year of building networks of mutual respect, affection, and effectiveness, so we can move forward with strength to work for whatever changes and transformations we feel are important.

And let's remember to have compassion for each other and to help each other as we are able to. In the end we're all in the same boat: Each of us is finding our way, making mistakes sometimes, of course, and needing help and mentoring and understanding as we muddle along.

HAPPY NEW YEAR, EVERYONE!

CROSS-COUNTRY TRAVELS IN GLOWING LIGHT

2010-12-28T20:31:00.008-05:00

Just back in the city after a wonderfully renewing thirty-six hours up north in Grey County. Friends were having a post-Christmas drop-in party yesterday, the weather looked clear (an unusual bonus at this time of year in Grey County), and I had people I wanted to see, so I headed out yesterday morning in the little red Honda Fit. I had cross country skis with me, a jacket and vest, wind pants, a fur coat, ski gloves and a hat, and other oddments of clothing, and well as presents for various people, and a bottle of wine.

There were some patches of wind-swept snow white-out as I drove up, but the roads were dry and I got to my first stop in Markdale easily by noon. My wonderful aunt, youngest of my father's four sisters, is now 82, a young, light on her feet 82. One of her older sisters died two weeks ago, the first of the four to go, and it's a hard thing to loose a sister, whatever your age, whatever hers. Still, there's a resilience that comes with age, and my aunt is plenty strong, good-humoured, and resilent. She's sharp as a tack and a treat to talk to. We gossiped and sipped soup, and then it was time for me to move on.

Next stop was friends north of Markdale who have a second home in a log house on a farm with beautiful woods, pine plantations and hardwood forests, and several ponds and swamps. It's especially spectacular in winter. We went out for a cross country ski, the snow perfect and fluffy with firm snow underneath. Part of the time we were following an already-broken trail, part of the time cutting across an open swamp or breaking trail through the woods. it was as if we were moving through a succession of marvelous rooms in a spectacular outdoor castle or mansion. Each vista was more lovely than the last. There was a plantation of straight-trunked pines, each patched with blobs of white snow, white on reddish brown trunks, lined up in hallucinatorily regular rows. One row was more widely spaced, and down it went a single line of ski tracks, an invitation to disappear into a linear fantasy, is how it felt.

The sun was sinking early, low on the southern horizon, as speckled clouds made sky patterns and the snow became gilded with a soft pink-yellow. It was only 4.30, but at this time of year, that's late in the day. Three of us slid stride by stride abreast across an untracked pond, into the fading warm light. What a magic time. Today my thighs remind me that it wasn't magic but muscle power that carried me through that snowy landscape!

And finally from there I headed west toward the party. The sky was a conflagration of pink-orange threaded with horizontal bands of deep blue-grey. Mesmerizing. But in less than fifteen minutes it had faded to pearl-grey, like a dowsed bonfire, not a spark left. I parked out on the road, then walked up a snowy lane to the party, where friends and a hot wood stove and food and drink and music blended into a sense of welcome and ease.

Later I drove back towards the city through the dark night. I stopped in at friends' whose house is always open and always generous. Lucky traveller, to be sheltered for the night with friendship.

Now I'm back home in Toronto, people from out of town have come by unexpectedly, and tomorrow I'll meet them at Ideal coffee and walk with them through Kensington Market, probably ending with a north Chinese meal at Asian Legend. After that it will be time to clear the rugs and make some food so that we can dance our way through the evening on the 30th with friends of all ages.

Next question: What food shall we make for the party? inari sushi perhaps, and sticky rice too (carbs give good energy for dancing), some cheese to go with Evelyn's Crackers made by Dawn and Ed, and nam prik num, and maybe a chicken salad Viet- or Thai-style...

AND A NOTE ABOUT A NEW BOOK: A few weeks ago I finished reading the latest book by Ma Thanegi, a remarkable woman, a witty and engaged writer who lives in Rangoon/Yangon. It's now available on amazon.com and it's called: Defiled on the Ayeyarwaddy: One Woman's Mid-Life Travel Adventures on Myanmar's Great River by Ma Thanegi, published by Things Asian Press.

WARMTH IN THE COLD STREETS, & A RECIPE

2010-12-26T18:03:00.004-05:00

Still clear and cold here, with slanting sun that warms in the middle hours of the day, but only a little!

I've had a cold for the last week or so, a completely predictable consequence of flying to Toronto from Thailand at this cold- and flu-season time of year. Finally yesterday, Christmas morning, I felt light enough in myself to head out for a small jog. What a treat.

I headed out late, at about 9.30, for it took me awhile to assemble a cold-weather outfit. In the end I unearthed odd bits of ancient clothing: I had on green wind pants with cotton tights under, and a ratty silk long sleeved undershirt topped by a windbreaker; over that I layered a funky bright red vest I bought ages ago in France, and on my head a purple wool hat. A neighbour who saw me at the end of my run, sweaty and messy, said "the Christmas jogger!" so like an overdecorated Christmas tree did I look, in my red and green and every other colour combo.

The run felt easy (the first one after a break often does feel (deceptively) easy). Sidewalks were dry with only a few little patches of ice. There was dry cold snow on the grassy areas in the university, but only a little, so the grass showed through in patches.

There was no-one around, hardly a car on the road, and all shops were closed. The only people I met were the occasional person walking a dog, two other joggers, and a couple of people riding bicycles (brr!!). I called out "happy Christmas" to everyone. Some had headphones on, or were otherwise tuned out, but most greeted me back. I felt as if we had a special task to assert warmth of feeling in the cold air and bare streets.

When I got to Kensington Market, all deserted, I came across four or five different solitary guys. Each was hunched into himmself, alone-looking. I was reminded that when you are alone on a holiday day, when you have no family or friends around, and perhaps nowhere safe to stay, the big holidays are bleak indeed. And that's even more true on a cold day when everything is closed.

But on Baldwin Street in Kensington Market I finally came on a place that was open, a small independent coffee shop. "Espresso Bar: All Day Breakfast" it said on the outside. I went in, not because I wanted a coffee (I needed to keep moving to get home; I thought if I stopped I wouldn't be able to pick up and keep running afterward), but just to say hello and thank-you to the young women who'd opened for business, giving people a place they could go for company and warmth. We chatted briefly, and then as I headed back out, in through the door came one of the lonely street guys. "Coffee?" "Yes please" he said with feeling.

The rest of my day, once I reached home, was lived in warmth and comfort, starting with a hot bath, then cleaning and cooking, then welcoming friends and feasting on all that they and we had prepared. I was grateful to have had my morning out, a chance to move my body and take in lungfuls of fresh air, a chance to see the city stripped of its busy-ness for once, and a reminder not to take anything for granted...

I hope your week, the lovely blank of time between Chritmas and new Years, is rich with friends and new horizons.

And in case you are still in the mood for cooking something sweet for yourself or for friends, here's another easy recipe for a biscotti-like treat, adapted from a recipe in HomeBaking, a book I worked hard on and now find especially useful in wintertime! This recipe is for paximadia, Greek twice-cooked breads, but these are sweet, a Cretan version of paximadia, made with olive oil and flavoured with wine and spices. Very simple to make, very easy to eat, so though in theory they keep well, you won't have a storage issue!!

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit and place a rack in the centre. Put out a large baking sheet. In a bowl stir together 1 cup of olive oil (preferably Greek) with 3/4 cup sugar (I like using demerara, for fun). Add the remaining ingredients and stir them in: 1/4 cup wine (white or red) and 2 tablespoons orange juice; 1 teaspoon each cinnamon and ground cloves; 1/2 teaspoon each baking powder and baking soda; and 3 cups all-purpose flour.

You'll have a pasty moist dough, a little crumbly. Turn it onto a work surface; cut it into four equal pieces. Shape each into a long flat loaf about 3/4 inch high, three inches across and eight or so inches long. Transfer to the baking sheet, lining them up side by side but not touching. With a knife or dough scraper make parallel cuts crosswise on each loaf, about 1/3 to 1/2 inch apart, and cutting down almost right through the loaf.

Place in the oven and bake for about 40 minutes, until firm. Take out and let cool for fifteen minutes, lower heat to 250, and cut through each slice mark to make individual cookies. Lay them on their sides (on one cut side in other words) and place back in the oven to bake for about 20 minutes, until very firm and dried out.

Let cool completely on a rack before storing in a cookie tin or jar.

I like dunking these in red wine, or eating them with a strong cheddar. They make a good house present too.