The miracle of laptops means that I can be sitting here in the dappled shade in Kensington Market, sipping an americano, hearing the garbage guys as they rumble the wheeled trash cpntainers to the huge truck and then press the button that makes the truck whirr it away. This is a kind of village within a village, this corner of Kensington Market. I'm in front of a charming and important bookstore that recently moved here from the east side of downtown called This Aint the Rosedale Library. It's a Toronto landmark for many, a source for poetry, quirky travel and art books, and current culture of all kinds, and a pleasant place to hang around. Next door is Ideal Coffee, another classic, recently bought out, but still quirky and relaxed and full of conversations of all kinds. At the end of the short block are Shoney,'s brilliant thrift store for clothing, and 4-Life, a source of local food and food conversation.
I've been thinking about village and the connections that weave us together, people and places. On the weekend I went for a long bike ride with a friend. We headed south to the lake and then west, and farther west, across the Humber River. I had never been to the lakeside there, with its butterfly park and sheltered bays and marshes. What a treasure. The cooler lakeside climate means that flowering trees come out later than those in my neighbourhood a mile from the lake. This year the lakeside trees are still in bloom, for the storms that came through and ravished my neighbourhood plum and cherry and apple blossom were finished by the time the lakeshore trees came into flower. Next day, out on Toronto Island for a shape-note singing (glorious in the cottagey comfort of St Andrews Church, the doors open to the sun and spring breezes), I pedalled past lilacs and apple blossom, still safely in bloom by the cooling moderating lake. How lucky we are that there are microclimates. Like all differences of place and culture, they enrich us and make us notice and appreciate our surroundings.
Microclimates, I have been thinking, are like villages. They are intimate settings where life (plant life) unfolds in some kind of coherent unison. SImilarly in a city village like Kensington Market, with its daily pattersn of store openings and neighbour greetings and comings and goings of outsiders, has a coherence that weaves us together. It creates a sense of confidence in tomorrow and a warmth of belonging. We bloom in that warmth, just as our gardens come to life in the spring sunshine.
Back to bicycling: My trusty DiamondBack, dating from that incredibly lucky 1986 trip from Kashgar to Gilgit, over the Khunjerab Pass, is still alive and well. And I have gained confidence since I began to ride in the city a year ago. I have come to love whizzing along in the dark with my little mini flashing lights blinking front and back. At this time of year the geography of the city can be written in scents, especially in the soft damp evenings of this month of May. So when I can I choose routes that will take me past a particularly wonderful lilac-blooming corner or yard of lilies of the valley, or under a canopy of blooming chestnuts.
Bicycling has also expanded my horizons, taking me to new places, like my Saturday Humber Bay excursion. I'd been nearby, in a car, but on a bicycle I see and feel so much more.
It's great to break pattern. I often have to remind myself to do it though. I get comfortable with the walk I take to Spadina and into Kensington Market; I find myself following familiar patterns on my various jogging routes, shorter and longer; my thoughts and anxieties, too, follow often-tedious predictable paths! There's comfort in the familiar, but if we let it imprison us, then where are we?
The other day, somehow, and without consciously planning it, I found myself breaking pattern, and was wonderfully rewarded. I was on foot, not bicycling. I discovered a whole world in a narrow strip of land, the boulevard up the centre of University Avenue. Again, it's a place, or series of places, that we all rush past in cars, between stop-lights. As I walked up it (from Adelaide to Elm, just south of College) I discovered that it is thoughtfully designed, carefully gardened, and a distinctive set of environments that feel intact, because of trees and stone walls and artfulness, despite the cars rushing past.
I love discoveries, small and large, of places, people, ideas. So it's up to me to remind myself to look outside my box, my pattern, my expected path, and launch open-eyed into engaging with whatever comes next.
Showing posts with label 4-Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 4-Life. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Monday, May 10, 2010
DEEP-FRYING, AND THOUGHTS OF EUROPE AND LIFE
My hands are chilly as I write this, as if it were a wintry day. Along with many people, I've found it difficult and uncomfortable to adjust to the cold temperatures and wind and sleet and generally unfriendly weather of the last few days. Can this be May??It feels like an aggressive attack.
Context is everything, or at least matters so much, doesn't it? This weather in February would feel mild, if gusty. But now that we've been lulled into a relaxed basking in spring sunshine and warmth, we're undefended. The cold and wind have their way with us and we shiver and are tired and, if you're like me, we are hungry all the time!
Speaking of which, I have been deep-frying the last couple of days. It is a response to the cold, for sure, and also an important technique in some of the food from Burma that I am trying to figure out. Street snacks in Burma are often deep-fried, as in many other places, but it's more than that. The classic noodle dish, mohinga (rice noodles in fish or other broth with many options as toppings) often comes, at a streetstall, with the possibility of shrimp fritters or a kind of chickpea cracker-fritter, among other choices. It's about texture for sure, as well as taste and succulence. The contrast between the welcome tenderness of the rice noodles and the aromatic broth on the one hand, and crispy savory fritter-crackers crumbled on top on the other, is one of the major pleasures of mohinga in all its forms.
Today I tried shrimp fritters, two versions. In Rangoon they are flat and crispy, but I still haven't got them fine-tuned. Mine were lumpy and too thick, and not crispy enough. Back to the drawing board!
Another kind of deep-frying happened yesterday morning, and was a huge success. I have to go back another step: There's a kind of tofu-like food (that we wrote about in Hot Sour Salty Sweet) found in southern Yunnan and northern Burma and Laos. In Chiang Mai it's sold at the Friday Haw market (see my posts about the market from January I think, and late Feb too). Sometimes it's made of rice flour, but the Shan version, also found widely in Burma, is made from chickpea flour (known also as besan, or else as channa flour). (Besan is the flour used in the batter that coats pakoras, those deep-fried north Indian fritters. And besan is widely used in batters in Burma too.)
The "tofu" that is made from besan is a simple cooked batter. I'll put a recipe here when I have it completely tested and clearly written. It's made of besan and water and salt, and resembles a plain (unflavoured) version of that great Ethiopian vegetarian food called infirfir shiro (there's a recipe for it in Flatbreads & Flavors). In both, the proportions are one part besan to three parts water, by volume. The "tofu" sets after the slow-cooked smooth batter is poured into a pan and chilled for an hour. Then it firms up to solid and can be thinly sliced.
How to serve it? It's perfectly plain, flavoured only with salt, so it can be thinly sliced and dressed as a salad (shallot oil, fried shallots, chopped coriander leaves or mint or lime leaves, vinegar, a little soy or fish sauce and/or salt); or instead it can be deep-fried. Aha! It is spectacular as a deep-fried snack. I tried frying thin slices, and they were crispy and tender all at once; and I tried making slightly thicker pieces, in rectangles or triangles, and then the texture was a crsip surface and melting interior. All good, all terrific in fact.
I was so pleased with the results that I hurried over to 4-Life, in Kensington Market, to show Potz. I had told him about the besan tofu the day before and he'd said he wanted to see it and taste it. Various customers who happened to be there at the time had tastes of the salad and the deep-fried versions. The verdict was like mine: delish! And also, and this was interesting to me, people said things like, I feel there's so much soy product around, I am happy to be eating a tofu-like food that is NOT soy.
HMMM Do we go into business? No I don't think so. Let's just start making this at home.
I promise I'll post a recipe in the next week. Please send me a note of complaint if I am late!
And meantime, as spring has slowed to a halt, let's enjoy the freeze-frame (literally!) chance to have flowers that last more than a day and leaf-unfurlings that are now happening at a snail's pace.
On another subject entirely, last weekend marked the sixty-fifth anniversary of VE Day, the official end of the war in Europe. It was the start of new plans and ambitions for many, and the end of the road for others. Germany now dominates Europe economically, a different kind of victory, that comes with complicated responsibilities too. And this weekend, at last and belatedly, Germany and other EU countries finally came together to try to bail Europe out of financial catastrophe.
My father, who landed on the Canadian beach on the first day of the D-Day landings and made it all the way to Holland, where he spent nearly a year, would have been fascinated by the evolution of the world, especially as it is now playing out in Europe. I can't entirely imagine how he would have reacted to specifics, but he sure would have had opnions!
One of the huge losses, when we lose family and friends, is the loss of the chance to talk about the unfolding of events in our lives, both personal and large-scale political. Engaging in discussion with friends and peers and family is a huge treat for me. And I guess one of the positive things that comes out of the pain and loss we feel at the loss of a beloved of any kind is that we are driven to find new friends, new family, to share and engage with. Life goes on!
Context is everything, or at least matters so much, doesn't it? This weather in February would feel mild, if gusty. But now that we've been lulled into a relaxed basking in spring sunshine and warmth, we're undefended. The cold and wind have their way with us and we shiver and are tired and, if you're like me, we are hungry all the time!
Speaking of which, I have been deep-frying the last couple of days. It is a response to the cold, for sure, and also an important technique in some of the food from Burma that I am trying to figure out. Street snacks in Burma are often deep-fried, as in many other places, but it's more than that. The classic noodle dish, mohinga (rice noodles in fish or other broth with many options as toppings) often comes, at a streetstall, with the possibility of shrimp fritters or a kind of chickpea cracker-fritter, among other choices. It's about texture for sure, as well as taste and succulence. The contrast between the welcome tenderness of the rice noodles and the aromatic broth on the one hand, and crispy savory fritter-crackers crumbled on top on the other, is one of the major pleasures of mohinga in all its forms.
Today I tried shrimp fritters, two versions. In Rangoon they are flat and crispy, but I still haven't got them fine-tuned. Mine were lumpy and too thick, and not crispy enough. Back to the drawing board!
Another kind of deep-frying happened yesterday morning, and was a huge success. I have to go back another step: There's a kind of tofu-like food (that we wrote about in Hot Sour Salty Sweet) found in southern Yunnan and northern Burma and Laos. In Chiang Mai it's sold at the Friday Haw market (see my posts about the market from January I think, and late Feb too). Sometimes it's made of rice flour, but the Shan version, also found widely in Burma, is made from chickpea flour (known also as besan, or else as channa flour). (Besan is the flour used in the batter that coats pakoras, those deep-fried north Indian fritters. And besan is widely used in batters in Burma too.)
The "tofu" that is made from besan is a simple cooked batter. I'll put a recipe here when I have it completely tested and clearly written. It's made of besan and water and salt, and resembles a plain (unflavoured) version of that great Ethiopian vegetarian food called infirfir shiro (there's a recipe for it in Flatbreads & Flavors). In both, the proportions are one part besan to three parts water, by volume. The "tofu" sets after the slow-cooked smooth batter is poured into a pan and chilled for an hour. Then it firms up to solid and can be thinly sliced.
How to serve it? It's perfectly plain, flavoured only with salt, so it can be thinly sliced and dressed as a salad (shallot oil, fried shallots, chopped coriander leaves or mint or lime leaves, vinegar, a little soy or fish sauce and/or salt); or instead it can be deep-fried. Aha! It is spectacular as a deep-fried snack. I tried frying thin slices, and they were crispy and tender all at once; and I tried making slightly thicker pieces, in rectangles or triangles, and then the texture was a crsip surface and melting interior. All good, all terrific in fact.
I was so pleased with the results that I hurried over to 4-Life, in Kensington Market, to show Potz. I had told him about the besan tofu the day before and he'd said he wanted to see it and taste it. Various customers who happened to be there at the time had tastes of the salad and the deep-fried versions. The verdict was like mine: delish! And also, and this was interesting to me, people said things like, I feel there's so much soy product around, I am happy to be eating a tofu-like food that is NOT soy.
HMMM Do we go into business? No I don't think so. Let's just start making this at home.
I promise I'll post a recipe in the next week. Please send me a note of complaint if I am late!
And meantime, as spring has slowed to a halt, let's enjoy the freeze-frame (literally!) chance to have flowers that last more than a day and leaf-unfurlings that are now happening at a snail's pace.
On another subject entirely, last weekend marked the sixty-fifth anniversary of VE Day, the official end of the war in Europe. It was the start of new plans and ambitions for many, and the end of the road for others. Germany now dominates Europe economically, a different kind of victory, that comes with complicated responsibilities too. And this weekend, at last and belatedly, Germany and other EU countries finally came together to try to bail Europe out of financial catastrophe.
My father, who landed on the Canadian beach on the first day of the D-Day landings and made it all the way to Holland, where he spent nearly a year, would have been fascinated by the evolution of the world, especially as it is now playing out in Europe. I can't entirely imagine how he would have reacted to specifics, but he sure would have had opnions!
One of the huge losses, when we lose family and friends, is the loss of the chance to talk about the unfolding of events in our lives, both personal and large-scale political. Engaging in discussion with friends and peers and family is a huge treat for me. And I guess one of the positive things that comes out of the pain and loss we feel at the loss of a beloved of any kind is that we are driven to find new friends, new family, to share and engage with. Life goes on!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
