"I CAN'T EVEN...": THOUGHTS ON DRAWING, & A SPUMA RECIPE

“I can’t even…” is a recent hot catchphrase, used by young people in their late teens and into their twenties, to allude to an impossible-to-talk-about kind of event or feeling. It’s a very useful tool, I find, especially as I plod away at my book project, nibbling at the edges, or sweating out recipe testing, or worrying about time and space, history and context. I’m often so enmeshed, “I can’t even…”

Meantime out in the immediate world we’re having a cool and well-watered summer. The garden is happy, drinking it up and greening. The exceptions are still the eggplants, which won’t set fruit without some assurance of warmth, an assurance only intermittent and thus not credible. The cucumbers and greens are thriving and continue to be sweet and appetising, at all hours and for every occasion.

I’m pleased because recipe testing for this Persian World book includes dishes that are traditionally accompanied by a plate of fresh herbs, such an easy task in summer time. The zip and zing of fresh tarragon and mint, basil and green onion is hard to beat. The mouth comes alive and everything tastes better, life itself in fact.

The other day a friend came by and I put a small plate of fresh arugula and tarragon on so that we could nibble at the greens as we chatted. They were so energising they made me feel as if my brain had added sparkle and energy.

What other ways are there of bringing ourselves to greater liveliness? Yes, yes, a good party, dancing, etc. I agree. But on a daily basis?

A number of close friends have urged me to try Vipassana meditation. They have gone to ten-day sessions, and each time return from them energised and radiant. I see the evidence, but just cannot imagine sitting still for ten days. Life feels too short! My attitude is short-sighted perhaps, but I’m stuck there.

This spring and summer I’ve stumbled onto a wonderfully accessible alternative, and that is drawing. I took a course in May-June, three hours every Wednesday afternoon for five weeks, and then a five days-in-a-row course just last week, both from Kelley Aitken, and both taught in the galleries at the Art Gallery of Ontario. A good drawing teacher, either in person or even in a book, teaches you to see differently. And once that happens, and you engage with looking and with transmitting what you see onto the page, well then you’re away!

It’s not about “I’m so terrible” or “See look how good I am at drawing!”. Instead it’s about concentrated focus on a non-verbal task. It’s like practising music, I suppose, or any other form of focusses attentiveness. I found I was losing myself in the process, in the best sense of “losing myself”.

And I found myself feeling relaxed and light as air (as wll as pleasurably tired) at the end of each session.

“Welcome to your meditation practice!” wrote a Vipassana-practicing friend on my FB page after I posted about the joys of drawing.

At the times when, as happens intermittently, I get overwhelmed by the scale of this current book project and all that I need to pull together, I can now opt out into a mind-cleansing place, and return refreshed, with better vision and insight (hopefully!).

And so, like those life-giving sprigs of fresh green intensity, my drawing pad and pencils can - and if I follow through they will - become an energiser, a wonderful option that is indescribably fruitful, in ways “I can’t even….”

RECIPE TALK: SPUMA

I bought some gooseberries at the market last Saturday. Dawn-the-Baker, of Evelyn’s Crackers suggested that I make “spuma” with them. What’s that? I asked. (She also suggested a gooseberry cake recipe in Jane Grigson’s FRUIT cookbook (a real treasure). And so I made both.)

Spuma is a real discovery for me, a chilled/frozen Italian dessert made with intensely fresh fruit syrup and egg-whites beaten to stiff peaks, that are folded together and then frozen.

My proportions were:

- 3 cups gooseberries (no need to top and tail them) cooked to softened with very little water and a scant 1 cup sugar, then pressed through a sieve into a bowl (discard the solids) and allowed to cool to room temperature;

- whites of 4 large eggs whisked (I used my Kitchen-Aid stand mixer) with ¼ cup sugar for less than 3 minutes, or whatever time it takes to get stiff peaks;

- a bowl into which I poured the meringue and then folded and gently stirred in 1 cup of the room-temperature gooseberry “syrup”/sweet liquid (I drank the remaining little bit of gooseberry liquid; what a tonic!);

- a plastic bag to cover the bowl tightly and a freezer to put it in.

After two to three hours you have a chilled cold dessert, delish over cake or fruit or on its own. There’s no dairy, so it feels light as air in your mouth.

AND A NOTE for next time: I found that the mixture had separated a little before it froze: there was more pale meringue on top and more gooseberry at the bottom of the bowl. Next time I will try stirring it gently after twenty minutes, when it’s partly frozen, to make sure it stays well mixed.

ANOTHER NOTE, for other fruit: If you are using raspberries or cherries, or peaches or plums, which are sweeter than gooseberries, try using only 1/2 cup sugar for 3 cups fruit. You can taste the syrup and adjust it of course, so go lightly on the sugar to test what you want. I like spuma on the less-sweet side. I find it more refreshing.

EMERGING INTO SPRING WITH THOUGHTS ABOUT FOOD FOR US ALL

A gusting breeze from the north is blowing scatterings of white blossom from a neighbour’s tree like confetti, across my small back garden. Behind, silhouetted against the clear blue of this morning’s sky, the giant maple that frames my western horizon is pregnant with leaf buds, not quite out. They look like they’ll burst forth by the end of today. I imagine them giving a great “at last!” as they emerge into the light and warmth.

All this new life is crying out to be written about, for spring here in Toronto is a good three weeks late: the magnolia blossoms have just come out downtown, the lilies of the valley in my front yard came through the dirt a week ago, only, which is the time they are usually in scented bloom, and the farmers’ markets are barely managing to meet everyone’s hunger for spring greens.

A slow spring can mean that we get the pleasure of fresh brilliant new green leaves and drooping subtly graceful maple and other tree flowers over a long stretch. But this year it feels as if we have been so delayed that we’ll leap straight into summer heat with barely a moment to enjoy the freshness. I hope not. And I am told that for those who grow grapes and make wine in Niagara and upper New York State, this late spring is probably a complete disaster: Even if there’s heat now, the fruit has not had the long time it needs to slowly grow and fill out, so the harvest will be meagre.

Mother Nature is pretty stressed right now. Even in unpolluted, more environmentally intact times she gave with one hand and took away with the other, producing feast and famine both. But now we seem to be headed for more of the catastrophic and less of the benign, depending on where we live and what we’re trying to grow or harvest.

My time in Kurdistan was a reminder of the small margins that many people live on, and of their vulnerability to food insecurity. The refugees from Syria that I met in a UNHCR camp there were relying on monthly supplies of basic staples: oil, bulgur, rice, salt, sugar from the World Food Program. The stack that was each family’s food allotment, a tall stack, was a visible measure of just how much food it takes to feed a family, and just how difficult the logistics of feeding the world can be if and when there are catastrophes of war or “natural calamity”.

As I went out to Kensington Market yesterday late afternoon to forage for supper (I had black-eyed peas cooked to tender, and a plan to test a Kurdish rice recipe, but needed some greens, a little chicken, onions, and some wine) the choices were dizzying. There is plenty of real food, in a raw, needing-to-be-prepared-and-cooked state here in North America. Our task as home cooks is to take on the challenge of shopping wisely and treating food with respect. And we need to push our families and friends to do the same.

The challenge in my household is getting people to delve for leftovers. We all cook from scratch (and yes, when I am here I do a large part of the cooking), but that’s the positive part of the food picture. Even though I have moved to clear glass containers, to make things more visible (and to avoid plastic), it hasn’t really improved things much. I am the only one who regularly turns to leftovers during the day, and there’s resistance to them even when they’re on offer for supper. Do any of you have this problem?

One approach to avoiding food waste, one that an aunt of mine used to take, is to make smaller meals, to avoid leftovers altogether. Make sure there’s plenty of bread and cheese etc to fill the gaps, but just put out less prepared/cooked food, so that it all gets eaten. But that seems so inhospitable to me. I like the feeling of plenty, the ability to welcome unexpected guests without stinting or rationing anyone. And so the leftovers issue continues to frustrate me.

Any thoughts?

I’m resisting the urge to buy vegetable starts (eggplant, peppers, cucumbers, etc) this weekend. It’s all very well for me to imagine too much of a burst of summer heat, but if we do in fact continue to have a slow cool spring, it’s definitely way too early to put out starts. The impulse to engage with spring and new life is so exciting, so energising, almost irresistible. And that’s perhaps because it feels like a connection to our ancestors, who did indeed live with want and Nature’s fickleness, and without the assurance of the generous food supply that we enjoy…

EARLY JUNE INTENSITIES

Yesterday at lunch, a group of friends and I raised a glass to the day’s clear skies and sunshine, greeting summer weather and basking in its warmth. We were eating sticky rice, marinated chicken hot from the charcoal grill, asparagus ditto, lightly dressed local salad greens, and a trio of made-by-my friends Thai dipping sauces as side-condiments. And we were eating with our hands, most of us, sensually and happily.

But alas we were prematurely optimistic, for today we’re back to drizzle and chill. The garden is happy, I suppose, in its greeness, but the cool temperatures are holding back the basil and chiles and eggplants, which still look a little shell-shocked even two full weeks after being transplanted. We tend, here in eastern Canada, to bemoan the fact that we have a very short spring season and leap straight from chilly into summer heat. This year is the great corrective, more like English spring than our usual, and lasting several months for a change. Perhaps this means that asparagus season will be extended, and salad greens will going on being tender for longer, rather than being heated into tough and bitter leaves by intense heat. The trick is to look for the side-benefits, right?

I wrote last week that old friends of mine were going to throw an engagement party at my house last Saturday and that I hoped for cool weather so the peonies could stay fresh until the party. Well I perhaps wished too hard, for we had very cold weather all week. But one happy consequence was what I’d hoped for: the two ancient peony bushes in my back garden are still in full aromatic white and pink bloom, spalshy against the bright green of ferns.

The engagement party was huge, and a huge success, for the weather gods smiled, the catering, by Dawn and Ed of Evelyn’s Crackers, was spectacular (all Thai, a lot of it vegan-friendly; the beef and chicken were locally sourced), the DJ’ing (two turntables, the works) by Ben Rothberg was astonishing and wonderful, and everyone was feeling celebratory, and happy to reconnect with the huge network of friends and family of the bride-to-be. Whew! The dancing went on until three… I owe my neighbours big-time for their patience.

A side-bonus to all the work of party prep is that my house is wonderfully clean and organised. There’s nothing like a deadline (and an obligation owed to someone else, rather than just to oneself) for getting chores done well and thoroughly. I feel spring-cleaned to the max.

And I’m also feeling a little wiped out today, as I try to gather my thoughts after the intensities of the week and the weekend. Time seems to be flying by suddenly. I have only two more classes to teach of Foods that Changed the World (I’ll miss the class; it’s been great); right after the last class comes the summer solstice; soon after that I leave to go to the Oxford Symposium, a huge treat; and by the time it’s over we’ll be well into July…  I find that when I’m tired my thoughts tend to rush ahead to anticipate, and when they do, time telescopes so that I feel the days rushing past beneath my feet dizzyingly. It’s not a useful way to feel.

The solution I’ve discovered is to retreat to the age-old technique of making lists, by hand, with a pen or pencil, on a piece of paper. It slows down that rushing forward, anchors me in the present, and generally makes me more realistic and calm. I think I’m due for another session of list-making!

THE CHALLENGE: BEING PRESENT IN THE PRESENT

When I went out on a brisk walk (my replacement for jogging now that my left-foot-ligaments are not up to the job) yesterday morning, I started with a short sleeved sweater on over my T-shirt. No, it wasn’t cold, strictly speaking, but twenty degrees Celsius and overcast IS chilly after the weeks of heat and drought we’ve had this spring-summer. The sweater soon came off, of course.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a morning jog-walk here. I’ve been away a lot, that’s part of it, but also, for the past eight weeks or so getting on my bicycle and pedalling up a steep hill on an early morning loop has been much more enticing than walking. Even in the heat a bicycle is cooling because of the breeze of movement, and it feels so rewarding to cover a lot of ground quickly.

Later on yesterday I cycled to have lunch with a friend, a pleasurable speedy adrenalined trip to College Street West, but when we got there the restaurant (a Portuguese churrasquerria with a leafy terrace) was closed. So we ended up at Golden Turtle on Ossington, a Vietnamese place of some renown that I had never been to. Lovely to sit outside in the shade, warm and comfortable - good second-best to being in Southeast Asia - eating crispy-edged banh xeo, beef pho with tendon and lung etc, and pork kho tu (spiced deep-flavored slow-cooked pork),

  

Back to the bicycle vs foot thing though: The disadvantage of being on my bicycle moving quickly rather than walking is that I see way less, especially since I’m often focussed on traffic and road details rather than on my surroundings. On the other hand, even on foot it's possible to miss a lot.

Today I headed out on foot early, this time to the passport office downtown to renew my passport (in Canada it’s every five years, so it comes up inconveniently often). There’s an energy and purpose to most of the pedestrians at that hour, primarily office workers by the look of them. They are all headed somewhere, and often hurrying to get there on time. 

Of course others had already been at work for an hour or more: the policemen, the road workers, the guys doing construction (tearing out and rebuilding the skating rink) in front of City Hall, the staff at the coffee shops, the streetcar drivers, the doctor coming off shift in scrubs. 

The exception to all the movement and purpose was the guy sitting on the sidewalk not far from City Hall with a tidy sign that said, “I don’t smoke or drink; I need money for food.” He was middle-aged looking, pale and tired. I am not proud of the fact that I was so entrenched in my goal of getting to the passport office ASAP that I passed him by. And then his sign reverberated with me for several blocks. I wish I had stopped and made a contribution to his day.

The failed encounter with the street guy makes me think that it’s not so much the speed of one’s passage that matters in many cases, as the quality of attention we give to the world we are moving through.  Though I took in the content of the guy’s sign as I hurried past, I was being more attentive to my need to get to the passport office than to what I was seeing before me. I failed to reflect on it, to really pay attention.

In contrast, on my previous day’s brisk walk I had had time and attention for the passing scene. I looked and looked and noticed changes and people and had time for thinking too: I wondered about a mismatched couple, she young-looking, and he, older, frowning and lumpy, walking down the street holding hands; I was shocked to see the big apricot tree on Robert Street gone, a tree that used to bear loads of golden fruit, but then sickened, and has now been cleaned out; walking past the flower-garden-framed house of a friend I caught sight of her through the window and had time to knock on her door and then go in for a coffee and a chat...and so on.

It’s a tricky balance, having ambitions for the day, future goals, and at the same time trying to be present to the present. One way is to take hold of each day with a slightly firmer grip. Am I saying I should be more responsible about my time management? Perhaps. Certainly more disciplined with myself.

After seeing a friend’s disciplined way of working (when I was staying in Cape Breton), I’m realising that I should try to manage my days a little more effectively. First thing in the day he gets up and writes (sits at his computer and works steadily) for about three hours, starting very early in the morning. And then the rest of  the day can happen in any way, for his hard work is done. 

A clear unambiguous early-in-the-day-before-interruptions kind of goal is the only sane way to be reliably productive, it seems.  And it should work for people like me, whose clearest highest mental energy time is the morning.

In general I am too apt to get distracted by email and small bits of tasks whenever I sit at my computer. Those are fine, and necessary (especially as I get ready for book tour) but I should leave them until after I have done my more difficult thinking. Instead, perhaps to avoid hard work, or road blocks in my writing or thinking, I let myself slip too soon into email multi-tasking and dealing with the bits and pieces debris that gets generated by e-media of various kinds.

But to take a step back, getting down to work on hard stuff first thing in the morning requires an ahead-of-time plan. What work? In what order? I need to make a list at night, then stick to it. So easy to write or to say; so challenging to follow through on.

I like the idea of embarking on new patterns and resolutions in this still green and growing time of year, rather than waiting for the classic New Year’s resolution time of year with its dreary dark days. 

I have no excuse for not following through. And yet I know I’ll need a kick-in-the-pants reminder of this resolution from time to time!

Meanwhile, to end on a more sensual note, I had a wonderful breakfast this morning after my passport excursion: some mixed grain bread I’d made a few days ago, toasted, then eaten with whey butter topped with slices of ripe tomatoes from the back garden and sprinkled with salt mixed with kelp and dulse flakes (a treat from Cape Breton). All the best kind of eating: home-made and fresh and rich with flavour.

FRESH EYES ON A CHANGING WORLD

It's a hot day in May, the last Monday of the month.

I cut some peonies this morning from the very old bushes in the garden (one has pink blooms, the other white with a splash of pink in the centre) and they're in a large vase (a spare Wayne Ngan creation from long ago) right by my laptop as I write this.  The odd musty perfume of the white ones is available for such a short time each year, so distinctive that it instantly takes me back to many other late-Mays.  I've put a tall multi-flowered spear of iris in the same vase, purple with somewhat garish golden yellow beards.  I didn't pick it, but instead found it on the ground, broken right off.  It's the work of the lumpy aggressive raccoons who patrol the city rooftops and gardens by night, like armored tanks, creating flattened tracks through the garden greenery.  And breaking beautiful things.  Argh!

But I'm not here to complain.  I want to start with an apology.  I discovered, now that I've finally sorted out some glitches with google, gmail, and blogspot, that there have been a lot of comments posted in the last two years (waiting for moderation) that I never knew about.  It's all too tedious to explain the how and the why, so I'll just say, my apologies for not knowing, and thus for not posting comments from a number of you.  They are now up...very delayed, but there at last.

This morning I watered the garden early, letting the hose stay on this place and then that for a long time to deep-water, in preparation for today's promised heat.  The wet in the garden softened the earth and so a few minutes later a robin came visiting.  He was looking for worms, and finding them.  And he seemed completely oblivious of me, or at least very unworried.  It gave me a chance to look at him freshly, to notice the small elegant details.  I always think of robins as large and lumpy (for those who don't know them the North American robin is a thrush, not the small robin of the UK), but that categorisation didn't do justice to this lovely lively character.  And so I stopped and looked some more, instead of just moving on.

Looking afresh, seeing freshly, hearing freshly...thinking with fresh energy rather than along the same old lines or with the same reflexes: these are ideals to aspire to.  We can't do it all the time, but I for one could be doing a lot more of it.  The world becomes a much more interesting challenging place, and we are much better able to appreciate its wonderfulness, when the senses are alert and in tabula rasa mode.

Another fabulous reminder of fresh attentiveness occurred last Thursday night at the Tafelmusik concert, the last of the season, at Koerner Hall.  Bruno Weil conducted first a Mendelsohn symphony, then Beethoven's third.  I felt I'd never heard either of them before, so fresh and new and nuanced and intricate and alive did they sound. The concert was transporting.  As we all walked out after, the tall flowers on the huge chestnut trees along Philosophers Walk gleaming in the late-evening dusk, I felt like the whole world had been created afresh.  My entranced awakened ears pushed my whole being to see and smell and think with fresh energy, without preconception.

How do do this more often? is the question.

I think that's what art and novels and music open up for us, in lucky attentive moments...

Meantime the watered garden has survived the heat and sun, the tomato and eggplant and pepper plants are looking perky, and so is the basil; the transplanted rhubarb droops, but I see fresh leaves, so perhaps it will come through.  There are shiso plants growing in various places (they volunteer each year), and parsley plants, and mint looking healthy.  And though my last remaining delphinium is looking ill (you win a few, you lose a few and the dry spring probably didn't help), the columbines are still colourful, the roses are just starting, and the peonies are radiant and aromatic.

Happy tumbling forward into June, everyone.

SPRINGTIME BREAKTHROUGHS- LOSING FEAR & LOVING IT

It’s still spring, and that means it’s still time for spring cleaning. There’s the ongoing need to retune the brain and the expectations (a kind of psychological spring cleaning), and there’s the practical very physical problem of the office that needs a clean. That second one is what I was engaged with today.

Finally, after what seems like a month of drought, we had rain today, just an ongoing drizzle, but enough to discourage thoughts of a long bike ride or other outdoor ambitions. And so, to the office.

Unrushed, because in denial that I was doing it, I actually managed to make decisions, throw things out rather than stacking them for later, sort piles of keepers, reshelve books… It didn’t seem like a lot of result for four hours work, but the fact is, what I did get done was going to take four hours sometime, if not today then perhaps on a beautiful sunny day, so better get it over with. So went my internal dialogue.

And now, this evening, I can see surfaces; there are no dread mysteries lurking and awaiting discovery, and I feel lighter.

Truly spring is wonderful.

Also, the crabapple tree out front, tall and generous, as wide as the yard, is in white beautiful bloom; the wisteria out back is coming into leaf and has some fat flower buds on it, hurrah! And today’s rain was enough to make the garden soil dark and moist, so that I finally felt it was OK to dig with the shovel and turn the soil. I had planted rye and clover as a cover crop; they’re now turned under. In the areas where I had done no watering last week, the soil six inches down was still bone dry; the rain had only penetrated a short way. But where I had watered, somehow the rain percolated through better.

The earthworms looked happy and energetic.

Now we need more rain, regularly every other day for about two weeks, to try to catch up a little. I’m told by farmers near Toronto that the rhubarb and spinach and asparagus is all looking sad because of lack of water.

Earth Day is now, just two days after the famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view and politics) 4-20, the day for promoting the legalisation of marijuana (or should I say the decriminalisation?). No arrests reported, and a good time had by all, I gather. Let’s celebrate by doing a rain dance or two, and starting to plant lettuce greens and other early seeds (some of you are way ahead of me, I know, but for those who aren’t…)

My new springing to life happened today, not in the garden but at the computer: I was putzing around with Lightbox, and started to use it to tidy up a skanned image (it started as a slide and is now skanned to be a digital image). Instead of being afraid, for the first time I just ploughed on, removing spots and dirt marks, altering the contrast etc. And when I’d done the image looked much healthier, and in fact much more like the original slide.

Slides, being material things, are always at risk of damage or tarnishing by dust or other dirt. And so enter the magic of digital processing. Presto-Chango, as a kids’ book has it, the damage and dirt are erased and the image is like new, better than new.

But the biggest wonder of all for me was to discover that I could do it and become fluent at it, lose my fear of messing up and just engage.

Why do these lessons take learning and re-learning? Every new thing is cause for anxiety of some kind. And then when, because of drink or tiredness (neither helped me this time) or just because the passage of time makes fed-upness (the thing that drove me), I just get on with trying it or doing it, whatever it is, from the new video camera, to tidying photos with Lightbox, to you name it, there’s a break-through. There’s no disaster; things go just fine.

In fact there’s a liberation, the discovery of a new skill is cause for jubikation and a feeling of freedom.

Maybe people who are afraid of cooking or baking feel this way once they try it. Or those who are afraid of driving, or bicycling in the city… We’re all prisoners to some degree of our anxieties large and small.

And so I am reporting here my liberation from the bondage of Lightroom anxiety and into the freedom to tidy up and edit my own photos, rather than having to cry “help!” to Nicole or some other young person with quick hands and confident expertise.

The transition from fearful pre-beginner to engaged learner is a magical one. I want to go on remembering that it’s always worth the pain of the anxiety, for that’s what in the end pushes me into new tasks, new challenges. It’s the not-knowing that’s an exciting (and irritating and painful) stimulus. There’s nothing special about knowing; it’s not-knowing that’s a source of richness, progress,, and insight.

aha!

AND A POSTSCRIPT: The BURMA book is getting ever-closer to being shipped off to the printer. There's a new cover design, great news, still being finalised but already a lovely leap ahead; and the photo picks are almost final. I am so grateful to be consulted through all this process; many publishers aren't nearly so considerate of their authors. Thanks, Artisan!

SUMMER DAYS WITH FRIENDS AND FAMILY

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.

MAKING HEADWAY IN THIS GREEN & FLOWERING TIME

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!