PUSHING THE LIMITS OF SUMMER, & MORE

The end of July this year feels like the end of summer. I’m trying to push the thought back, vigorously! Perhaps it’s just that after intense summer heat and monsoonal rains, the weather is cooler, a hint of autumn in mid-summer? Perhaps it’s that I have not been home for most of this month and was busy and under the gun with deadlines for much of June?

I’m back in Toronto, after a July full of travel and movement.  And I’m glad to be home, with no immediate plans to go anywhere farther than an hour out of town.

As I’ve reflected on the way this summer has spooled away and left me feeling I’ve missed out on it, I’ve come to realise that I think about summer much in the same way that I used to anticipate a weekend. That is, when I visualise the summer, I somehow have a feeling, a magical feeling, that it is of infinite length and contains infinite possibilities. When I worked as a lawyer, a time when weekends of one day or two were sharply etched beacons, on Thursday evening or Friday morning I would have a long loose list of all that I wanted to do on the weekend. And then come Sunday night I’d face once again the dismaying realisation that most of what I had imagined or visualised had not come to pass.

In the same way, summer in anticipation carries the promise of infinite possibility. This surely goes back to childhood, when summer was the liberation from the routines of the school year. And our school holidays were so long that summer did always feel wonderfully “infinitely” long and luxurious. Some part of me seems to expect that still.

Hence my feelings of dismay each year in late July or early August when I realise how much of the summer has passed by…and how little of it remains. It’s not the hot weather, it’s the feeling of long days and infinite possibility that is precious: time not measured out but available in generous dollops to spend with friends or reading books or just in blissful unawareness of its passing.

Yes, I guess I should grow up and stop this magical thinking…but I am rather attached to it. Better to have to face and swallow disappointment each year than to never have the exhilarating feeling that anything and everything is possible.

Speaking of possibility, it seems that some of us do not find it possible to engage with new technology. Those who can are a different species: they experiment with dials and instructions and figure out how to, for example make good use of their smart-phone. This was brought home to me the other day when I was in Maine. I was driving with my friend Nancy in her Prius and wanted to turn the fan off. “I can turn it down but I don’t know how to turn it off” she said. “It’s stupid because I’ve had the car for three years.” Some time later another friend, Ed, was with us in the car, and I suggested to Nancy that she ask him to figure out how to turn off the fan. He fiddled for a moment and bingo! there it was. Solved.

My theory about these things is that Nancy and I and many others like us, mostly not a young crowd, I admit, resist the kind of rat-in-a-maze learning, the trial and error button-pushing, that is required to explore and figure out our smart phones, computer programs, etc. I am happy to play around a little, to take a run at a tech problem. But the process of learning a series of steps that someone has designed? I balk. If someone tells me how to do it, I’m fine. But somehow I resist engaging with the trial-and-error- with-the-machine kind of learning that many people, especially the young, do effortlessly.

It’s lucky for me that I know a number of young people who are generous and tolerant and willing to bail me out of tech impasses. The most recent was a situation where I upgraded something on my Mac desktop and it resulted in my Word and related programs refusing to load. Argh! But there was a rescuer named Thomas, who kindly figured things out.

When I think about the why? of all this, I think it’s an impatience with a situation that requires trial and error but has little or no content or inherent interest to me, except the need to get it to work.

People like Nancy and me would like to be told or shown how to work our tech devices rather than being left to be beginners stumbling along. And because we refuse that process, we get further and further behind, we lose the skill to do trial and error figuring out, we become more dependent on others.

But in the kitchen both she and I are prepared to figure things out and work by trial and error. We both like that process. In the kitchen we are in search of understanding what’s going on, whereas with technology it’s all a blackbox. And so we lack both curiosity and patience for working out the how-to.  

Sorry to be so pedestrian in this post so far. But I've been mulling about these things and wanted to explore them on the page. 

I haven’t talked at all about the fun I had at the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan. I drove down with my dear friends Dawn Woodward and Ed Rek of Evelyn’s Crackers, and they and I and Nancy Jenkins of Camden, stayed with Barbara Sullivan, a wild and wonderful artist, and had loads of great conversations and engaged with each other and many more friends old and new.

We gave a tandoor workshop that was fun and oh-so-interesting for us as well as for those who came. So many people put their hand into the oven to slap a bread on the hot wall.  So many people gained confidence.

If you have an interest in sustainable agriculture, bread, milling, oven building, etc, then you should seriously consider coming to the Kneading confernece in Skowhegan next July, or else travelling to northern Washington State for the Kneading Conference West in the Skagit Valley this September. Being immersed in grain-related talk and learning is so satisfying. And grounding too.

Once you’re in Skowhegan, or in the Skagit Valley, you’re so close to sea coast and wonderfully beautiful natural environments (and great wild-gathered food), that it would be a pity not to take an extra day or two to explore. We ended up eating lobster at The Slipway in Thomaston Maine on Friday night – worth every minute of the long drive back the next day.

That’s the answer of course to the summer problem: just extend yourself, take risks, pack in as much fun and interesting activity as you can. Do not pace yourself. Don’t be sensible, if you have any choice in the matter. And suddenly summer becomes elastic, full of rich events and fruitful possibilities.

A SPEEDING FAREWELL TO LA BELLE FRANCE

In the TGV speeding north toward Paris. Fields of ripe pale-gold wheat punctuated by lines of bushy trees, the occasional village ith tints of grey and ochre,. Earlier, as we raced through Provence, there were fields of sunflowers, facing east and aglow, and the shining golden straw stubble of freshly harvested wheat, and then rain in Lyon at our brief station stop. The sun is back out now, the colours the slightly dull green of full summer, the grasses by the verge already yellow and drY.

I was sorry to say good-bye to the little stone gite this morning just before dawn, and to its owner, the graceful Elsabeth. I’d be happy to return. Things I’ve learned: Not to buy olives without tasting them, ever (I bought olives de Nyons at Tarascon market that looked fine, and I love Nyons olives, but were tired and tasteless); to get up before dawn to catch earliest light and coolness, a truth I know from elsewhere but needed to be reminded of; tht a simple sandwich of good baguette buttered with good ham is better than almost anything; that I would rather be in a town or a city, to people-watch and wander, then driving through countryside, however lovely; that cherries in Provence can be as delicious and amazing as Ontario cherries; that a good religieuse still tempts me where other sweets and pastries do not; that I really enjoy the polite phrases and “formules” in France that grease the wheels of everyday - “bonne journee Madame” on leaving a shop etc.; that citron presse is still my preferred drink at a café, by far.

And so, in the TGV, which somehow has no wi-fi, a curious omission in this ultra-modern efficient France, we’ve made our last stop; the next one is Charles de Gaulle airport, where there’ll be a bit of a dash to Air Canada.

I bought a book for the plane, this year’s winner of the Prix Femina, which so far is wonderful. It’s  a novel by Patrick Deville called Peste & Cholera, set across the first half of the twentieth century, in France and Vietnam, about a medical researcher who worked with Pasteur. I am already engrossed and enchanted.

Now posting this from the airport, before boarding the plane.

Adieu belle France…

MORE ON THE MILLIPEDES INVASION...

The following may well fall into the category of "things you never wnated to know". If so, just skip it and move along to something more appetizing.

Now that I have better computer access (power to the computer, plus some wi-fi at last) I've found out a little more about the black millipedes that seem to be swarming here, in the morning and again the evening 9described in my previous post). Here's a link: http://toutunmondedansmonjardin.perso.neuf.fr/EN/pages_EN/tachypodoiulus_niger_EN.htm
which explains that these common black European millipedes like damp places and calcareous soils. The photos give a good idea of what each one looks like, but not of how wild it is to see flocks of them moving across the terrace outside the house.

And here's an article about a black millipede invasion in Scotland:
http://www.scotsman.com/news/invasion-of-the-millipedes-1-1432060
Sounds ghastly.

The French name is Iule (pronounced ee-oule). The woman whose gite I'm staying in, Elisabeth, explained that they are around for about a month (it all just started) and that the problem with them began about ten years ago. That's when the authorities told everyone in Provence that they needed to cut their grasses and undergrowth, to reduce the risk of fire. Somehow this has led to a surge in the numbers of iules, and also to a displacement of them from the fields to the areas around people's houses.

Every place has its advantages and it downsides. Toronto has winter and snow and a few other issues. Provence, while beautiful and romantic, has scorpions and a few other goodies, including these non-biting, non-hurting but somewhat creepy millipedes.

JULY OCCASIONS IN PROVENCE

The cicadas are deafening this evening, as they have been since we got back here after five this afternoon.

I’m staying in a small beautiful very private gite not far from Aix-en-Provence. There’s a fresh water spring nearby (set between a pair of beautiful “platanes” -plane trees), a big meadow, a treed hillside, and a graceful classic stone farmhouse beside the gite, but facing the other way.

Other wildlife here declared itself this morning when I walked out shortly after sunrise: long sinuous crawling things like ambulatory black worms, both thred-thin and fatter, were moving purposefully over the pale terracotta tile terrace and up the stone walls of the gite, like a absract pattern of moving wiggling black lines. This afternoon after a day of heat, they were mostly gone, with the odd remnant creature that had made it to a shaded crack then starting to move again. I need to find out what they are. Did they all just hatch? Not possible given that they come in different sizes. Will they turn into winged creatures at some stage? Hard to imagine. They aren’t very caterpillary, too sheeny shiny and so black and unpatterned.

It’s the quatorze juillet, Bastille Day, here in France. The bunting and tricolores were hanging out in the nearby town of Pelissande late this afternoon. People were sitting drinking aperos in the place in the town centre, but that was the ony sign of life: all the shops, and all the boulangeries but one, were closed tight.

Some people must have been having big Sunday lunches or going for hikes in the Luberon or out fishing in the many streams that bring this hot dry country to life. And a lot of them, it seems, spent the day out bicycling up steep winding roads in the heat, in groups of two to thirty, most in trim little bicycling outfits and helmets, lean and fit. The Tour de France cyclists, meantime, made it up to the top of Mont Ventoux today in the heat; tomorrow they have a day off to recover, then Tuesday they head from Vaison to Gap. We came across a caravan’s worth of  media trucks and buses, all sports stations, lumbering up the hill to the town of Venasque. You can see Mont Ventoux from there. Perhaps the race stage had finished for the day and the media cameras were just looking for local colour, and a view of Mont Ventoux from afar – it looms so large compared to the rest of the country around.  In any case, whatever the reason for the trucks’ being at Venasque, I imagine it’s the closest I’m ever going to come to the Tour de France…

Today’s explorations included backroads to the town of L’Isle sur la Sorgue, which has a crowded busy flea market on Sundays…it is quite amazing to hear all the languages and to see all the stuff out for sale, from old boules balls to cleavers and chairs and ceramics and you name it… There are also food merchants of course. We bought a huge basket of beautful (and delicious) cherries, as well as zucchini, tender lettuce, a slender elegant cucumber, and a Cavaillon melon (irresistable at a market ony a few kilometres from the town of Cavaillon, of course).

We went on from there to the not-far Abbaye de Senanques, one of the best-known of France’s Cistercian abbeys. It’s not open to visitors on a Sunday, but people come anyway, as we did, to stare at the graceful buildings framed by field sof lavender and the grey rock of the surrounding hills. The lavender is in full intense purple bloom right now, and dotted with the silken sheen of small white butterflies, as well as some orangey ones that look like small monarchs. In between the rows of lavender the ground is palest yellow-white and stoney.

We were really hitting all the cliché tourist high-spots, and continued with a drive through and past the hilltop town of Gordes, now a chic pricy spiffed up place very crammed with cars and people. The ochre and purple-red town of Rousillon a few kilometres down the road was also busy, but had more life to it, and felt more welcoming. Cliffs of richly coloured dirt frame the town on its hill, unreal looking and memorable, even in the glare of early afternoon sunshine.

From there the drive to Bonnieux,  a small hill-town south of Rousillon that I wanted to visit because of its bread museum, was winding and forested, very calm, and very uncrowded. We’d left the extremely touristed trail at last. The Musee de la Boulangerie was open (last time I visisted, in 1988, it was closed) and beautifully full of interesting tools and documents and pictures. Highly recommended (along with the bread museum in the southern German town of Ulm, on the Danube).

By then it was time to beat a retreat…via Cadenet, a crossing of the Durance River, and thence to our small stone gite near La Bannet. The cicadas are a little less cacophanous now, their intensity lowering in the last fifteen minutes as the temperature has started to cool (it’s now after 7 pm and the sun is low in the sky). The laundry I washed when we treturned less than two hours ago is almost dry, I’ve eaten a huge number of cherries (no point kidding myself about how many, given the evidence of the pits and stems in the wide bowl beside me here on the terrace), and it’s time to open a bottle of chilled white wine and drink to La Belle France.

Tomorrow is my birthday, so perhaps I’ll drink to that too.

PS Because of connection problems, I didn't get a chance to post this on July 14. Now it is the fifteenth, so i can tell you that I did have that glass of chilled white wine and it was delicious...

SUMMER PLEASURES AND ANTICIPATIONS

Suddenly Toronto has become subtropical, with moist air, intermittent rain, and high temperatures. “At last” the garden smiles, as it bursts into action. In one week it’s gone from torpor (except the leafy greens) to full riotous growth. And as the lettuce leaves toughen in the heat and the rhubarb season ends (sigh!), the chiles and tomatillos, the zucchinis, cucumbers, and eggplants are in bloom and setting fruit. At last.

On Friday I drove north out of the city, leaving at noon just as the long-weekend (Canada Day) traffic was starting to thicken. Once I was in the country, it looked as if the rain we’ve been having so generously had drowned many crops: there were fields of wheat turning yellow with excess water, and low-lying spots covered with several inches of standing water. But farther north, past Shelburne and into Grey county, I was in a different climate zone, where the rainfall had been just right, for there the crops in the fields were standing tall and healthy.

I was on a mission: to do a little visiting with my 87 year old aunt and with friends, yes, but mainly to go and sing with a group of shape-note singers in Durham whom I haven’t seen for over a year. The occasion was a birthday, an excuse for people to make the effort to get together for a potluck as well as the sing.

We sat in a big-windowed living room surrounded by leafy hardwood forest as the evening sky grew pale, and after eating very well we sang and sang, renewing ourselves and connecting. There was a pause for cake with strawberries, and sparklers and champagne toasts outside on the deck, the we came inside and sang some more.

The sky had darkened past midnight blue by the time I left just before 11. I walked out into the damp-scented air of the forest, got in my little red car, and drove down the concession roads that led to the highway and thence to the city two hours away.

That sudden quiet when the car is turned off at the end of a journey, the lovely silence of arrival, is such a balm. As I walked through the garden from the garage I felt relieved to be home safely, but also refreshed and transformed as if I’d been away a week. That’s the power of music and of getting out of town. A change of scene, however brief, lets me see with fresh eyes.

And that’s always a good thing.

Now I have only two days to get my head in gear for my short trip to England and parts south. I’m headed to the Oxford Symposium next week, a three day conference of food and food history. This year the theme is Food and Material Culture. There’s to be a little sale of kitchen tools that people want to off-load. I have one strange spatula that I am prepared to part with, but I am bringing a couple of other tools for show and tell: a bread stamp from Kashgar that is made of bird feathers and a Tibetan butter box made of wood, the aroma of which transports me straight back to nomad tents. I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone else brings.

And I’m packing several wool sweaters, just to be sure, because I remember how wet and cold it was last year… Surely it will be better this time?

In the meantime I’m expecting friends for supper tonight. We’ll grill over charcoal – lamb leg steaks and some chicken too, as well as shallots and onions and perhaps some late asparagus if I can find any – and talk into the night. Summer is such a luxurious time.

MOVING FORWARD WITH GOOD MOMENTUM & OPTIMISM

Bright blue sky, new beginnings, and also the lovely regretted end of a pleasurable interlude: that’s how things look today.

Yesterday my younger kid Tashi graduated from the University of Toronto. His college, Victoria, had its Convocation in the afternoon, preceded by lunch sandwiches and things in the quad, a walk away across Queen’s Park. Four years ago Tashi and I and Fatema were there for Dom’s grad. Now it was Tashi’s turn to be gowned and standing tall, while Dom, Fatema and I looked on.

At Convocation the Dean of Arts and Science told us that about half the graduates had reported, as they enrolled for the first time four or five years earlier, that they would be the first in their family to get a university degree. We knew some of the other graduates too, and cheered and clapped for them as well as for Tashi. For all of us in Convocation Hall there was a lot to appreciate and applaud, as two by two the grads walked up steps to the stage to shake hands with dignitaries and receive their congratulations and good wishes for whatever they might do next.

And in the evening, as had happened four years ago, our dear friend Dina took us all out to supper, this time to an odd and comfortable place called Strada 241 on Spadina south of Dundas, for Italian eats.

But in between I had my last Foods that Changed the World class to teach at the university. So back I walked across the grassed  expanse of King’s College Circle, that two hours earlier had been peopled with black-gowned grads, colourfully dressed parents and friends, and the splashy medieval gowns of the senior professors, University President, et al. There were a couple of group frisbee sessions happening in the late afternoon light, all intentness and fluidity, and no hint of the formalities and solemnities of Convocation.

The classroom our continuing ed course was assigned to was in University College, an old grand building with nineteenth century tiling on the main floor and carved griffons of dark wood as newel posts at the foot of the stairs. I noticed afresh the age and imposingness of the building as I tried to imagine seeing it through the eyes of new students or of parents who had come from afar to watch the graduation and had no familiarity with the University of Toronto. These old institutions can be intimidating. And that can keep people away, which is not what we want for our society and community.

But I think it’s good that the ceremonies around Convocation are solemn and grand (with organ music ushering the graduates in, welcomes in Latin, etc). It is a big event, to graduate from university. A Bachelor’s degree is four years of your life or more, and often marks enormous changes in thinking and maturity. So it’s only right and fair that this passage through a significant portal be trumpeted and acknowledged. Hurrah to all!!

And now I’m getting to the regret. I have had such an engaging interesting time with this class over the last six weeks that I am sad to have the course over. This week I talked about coffee and then intoxicants: wine, beer, liquors, with the class. Then it was time to taste the various treats that people had brought. We agreed we’d all miss the class, that we wanted to continue our conversations and explorations. And so we discussed what a “second level” course could consist of.  There was a lot of enthusiasm for the idea. Now it’s up to me to figure out whether the School for Continuing Studies might be interested in a second food history course, and also when in the year I might be able to commit to being here for six or seven weeks running. Hmm

The treats I brought to our tasting were very simple. I promised the class I’d post a shorthand version of the what and how, so here it is:

sticky rice: white Thai-grown sticky rice mixed with a little black sticky rice to colour it and give it texture: soak together in cold water for 6 hours or as long as 18 hours, then place rice in a steamer over boiling water and steam until tender, about half an hour; turn out and cover with a damp cloth to prevent it from drying out. Eat with the hands.

“salsa,” called nam prik in Thai: an improvised version that riffed off the northern Thai nam prik num. Ingredients: whole garlic cloves, about 8; about 5 unpeeled shallots or instead substitute red onion cut into two halves if you have to; chiles, several fresh whole banana chiles or three or more dried red ones if you lack fresh (I had only one fresh, so used a combo); about a pound or more large cherry tomatoes or romas or whatever you have. All the ingredients except dried red chiles need to be grilled, or else dry scorched in a heavy cast-iron pan over medium high heat. Turn them frequently to scorch all sides (I use a separate pan for the tomatoes). Turn out shallots and garlic etc when well softened and let cool a little, then lift peels off and discard, along with any tough bits. Destem the fresh chiles. 

Then coarsely chop everything before food-processoring it or pounding it in a mortar. You want a coarse texture, not a puree. Add the tomatoes last. Season with salt, or a mixture of salt with a dash of fish sauce. I also included about a tablespoon of very coarsely ground black pepper.

Others brought delish homemade sweets: salted (Camargue salt) caramels; and raw cacao powder truffles with pureed goji berries, flax seed, coconut oil etc. There was also an offering of an interesting dark green and red new-to-me kind of tomato, komato, served with Guerande salt and slices of baguette. And I have left out a few things, I know…which others will remember.

I’m pleased that these endings – graduation, last class of the course, etc – lead us to think forward to what we want to do next. Life moves on, and so do our ideas and aspirations. It’s good to be pushed and stretched by the reminder that life is constantly changing. Challenges and difficulties and joys all lie just around the next corner.