SOLSTICE EVE GREETINGS

Here we are on the eve of the solstice, the shortest darkest day of the year. I like it, for it marks the start of our climb back into the light.

Speaking of climb: I seem to have been lost in a tunnel underground for the last six weeks, so tied up with writing and recipe-testing for the book, and with some magazine work too, that I have been paralyzed and unable/unwilling to focus on writing here. My apologies for the long gap.

I got back to Toronto from the Caucasus on October 25^th. As always after a trip, I felt immersed in where I’d been, with echoes of language, people’s voices, the taste of all the food I’d eaten, the mental pictures of places and people, and unwilling to let all that go. And so I plunged into recipe testing and some writing too. I can now look back on those first post-trip weeks with satisfaction, because they produced a satisfyingly thick sheaf of recipes and also some cross-connections to earlier work. I still have a lot more to do of course. Yikes!

I’m now exactly six months from when I’d like to be sending the manuscript to Ann Bramson, my wonderful editor at Artisan. She has such a good sense of the shape of a book, and a marvellous aesthetic sense too, so that I know it will get pulled together and made beautiful as we work our way through the editing and design stages. That confidence I feel is an essential part of what keeps me on track.

In mid-November I went to New York for an overnight, to see Ann and to see a show at the Met that is due to close January 4, 2015: From Assyria to Ancient Iberia. It was spectacular, an exploration, through statues, cookware, jewelry, and other artifacts, of the cross-communication and evolution of cultures between the region of Assyria and ancient Armenia (known as Urartu) in the east to the Phoenicians and the Hittites, the Etruscans, and settlements on the Iberian peninsula (the Mediterranean coast of present-day Spain) all in the ten centuries before the Christian era.

If you have the chance, do go and see it. It explains the interstices between empires…whereas in school we learned about empire and conquest, this is about trade and communication of ideas, especially ideas of design and artistic endeavour. Fabulous. And encouraging as a sign of human perseverance and continuity.

More immediately, in the here and now of the solstice season, I did manage to get the garden dug in mild weather and the last chiles and arugula etc harvested. I’ve made quark stollen using mostly red Fife wheat (delicious) and Cretan biscotti, entirely with red fife, and candied lemon peel and candied turmeric. Next on my list are mandel melbas (thin fine almond biscotti).

But in the next few days I will be out and about, eating other people’s cooking and taking a break from the kitchen and from recipes and productiveness. I tell myself that it’s a good idea to change rhythm. And the seasonal celebrations give me a good excuse to slack off!

I hope that during the holidays you are going to have some time to kick back and read or play or be out with friends or do whatever your heart desires, without worrying about obligations. We all need a little respite from our daily round.

And raise a glass to the returning sun, once we pass the solstice tomorrow, in hopes that it brings us a more peaceful year and some joy and hope…

"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.

DEEP-DIVING INTO THE PLEASURES OF WORK

It's a humid morning here, the ground breathing dampness and fertility after last night’s torrential rain. I headed out early today for a quick intensive bike ride up a nearby hill. The route takes me through neighbourhoods lush and green, past morning joggers with their earbuds in, and labouring people whose work day starts at seven: garbage pick-up workers, construction crews, nannies.

Now I'm back, having had my airing. My blood is flowing and brain kicking into gear.

It's about time. I see from the date of my last post that it's been almost two weeks since I wrote here. Then we had just passed the full moon. Now we are waning and will soon be into the next lunar month. It's a big one, for this year the June new moon marks the start of Ramadan, the month of daytime fasting (no food or drink of any kind) and nighttime feasting, prayer, and celebration for observant Muslims. Going without food and drink for the long days here, when sunrise is early and sunset late, is an exercise in mindfulness I imagine, as well as a difficult physical feat in the heat.

How do people get work or any other chores accomplished? I wonder. It's hard enough to settle to a task in normal times, let alone with a grumbling stomach and low blood sugar. To fast well you have to be disciplined, and that means getting up early enough to eat well before dawn so that you are fortified for the long day ahead.

It's interesting to compare the different approaches to fasting in different religious traditions. For Christians fasting has usually meant doing without a particular kind of food: meat, or instead all animal products (no dairy or eggs and no meat). But somehow fish doesn't rank as animal, and so fish is permitted on fasting days. (Hence the classic tradition of European restaurants featuring fish on Friday menus, for Friday was the fasting day for Catholics, still is for some). 

I was in Georgia last spring during Lent, the forty-day fasting period before Easter when all meat and dairy are forbidden to observant Orthodox Christians. The rule has pushed cooks to invent fasting versions of favorite foods, such as khachapuri. On fasting days these flatbreads – normally filled with fresh cheese - are instead stuffed with delicious cooked beans. Home cooks and bakeries were also making cakes and other treats during Lent, using alternative non-dairy ingredients such as margarine and alternative recipes that didn’t call for eggs. That strategy seemed to me to go against the spirit of fasting. I mean, the cook might have had to be mindful, but the greedy eaters still were able to have their luscious cant-tell-it’s-any-different cake even in the middle of Lent.

In Islam, and in Judaism too, fasting means not eating at all between sunrise and sunset, then breaking the fast with a feast in the evening. This sounds much more convivial than obeying rules and trying to work around them for forty days!

I’ve been led astray by these explorations of different approaches to fasting. Sorry!

What I want to explore here is the difficulty of getting down to work, into work, focussed on work, immersed in work… You get my drift.

I find that when I have a clear succinct to-do list, a series of tasks, a set of must-do’s, then it’s not too hard to just work my way through them. But when the first job of the day is to decide what the day’s goals or tasks are, then things can get a little messy. Distractions abound, there’s no clear necessity to get a particular task done, and procrastination takes advantage of every opening.

I’m thinking about all this because of my Persian World book project. (The deadline for delivery of the manuscript is exactly a year from now: end of June 2015.) Since getting back from Kurdistan and then the Beard awards in NYC in early May, I have had six weeks of home time. I had imagined, when I was thinking about the shape of the year, that I’d use these weeks for work on the book. I have done, but only piecemeal, testing recipes, writing the occasional story, and researching history (while also watching history being made in Iraq).

But it was not until this week that I was finally able to make myself deep-dive back into extended long-stamina workdays focussed on the book. Suddenly I am deep inside it, reviewing my notes, writing, and “wearing” it in a full 360-degree way.

What stopped me from doing this earlier? I think that while there are outside obligations to others (in my case teaching a food history course once a week for six weeks, and a few other small bits of writing work) as a partial excuse, there’s something else going on.

It’s too easy to stay on the surface of a project, to skate around on it, rather than committing to being inside it. And that is because it takes serious effort to immerse and commit. And somehow I failed to put that work in, or perhaps I knew that it would be wasted, since I’d be pulled back out and into other necessities, so what was the point?

All of this may seem like pointless meandering to you. You may be very successful at setting tasks and then completing them. But for those of you who struggle to shape your work days effectively, I assume you too have had these experiences I am describing.

Another piece of the explanation, something that I console myself with, is that I am mulling things in my subconscious, putting pieces together, trying to make coherent sense of the massiveness of my project, and that I shouldn’t feel that nothing is being accomplished in these weeks of bits-and-pieces work. Hmm

We’ll see. All I can say now that I am embarked again (the last time was in November-December after I returned from Iran) is that I am loving the project. It feels rich and promising, the food is delicious, the issues and geography and history are fascinating. And above all the human layers with their warmth and distinctive cultural necessities are so engaging. I just want to roll around in all this and luxuriate in it, for a good uninterrupted stretch.

If I manage to do that kind of sustained immersion in the project, I will probably be writing here less often in the next two months. My first plane ticket in over three months will be a flight to the west coast in August for the wonderful Grain Gathering (formerly Kneading Conference West) north of Seattle on August 22 to 24. And after that…well I will need to try to re-immerse for a bit, before heading out for more travel research.

LEAVING FOR KURDISTAN WITH A SKILLET CAKE RECIPE TOO

I’m late posting this, and I’m under the gun, because I leave in a few hours to catch a plane to Istanbul, and then a connection on to Erbil, in (Iraqi) Kurdistan. I am so pleased to be able to go. It’s part of the research for my Persian World book.

I had hoped to travel to Azerbaijan for the book, leaving in late March, and then to go to Kurdistan. But the Azeri visa application process just got more and more complicated. I felt as if the embassy people were moving the goalposts, asking for more and more documents from the friend (a generous-minded American woman who is working in Baku) who had invited me. The Azeri visa process has been famously difficult for a long time, the government being paranoid, they say. 

But with current events, who can blame them? Azerbaijan, like Georgia, is a small country which borders on Russia. The events in Crimea were unfolding as I was applying for my visa…. And so I withdrew my application (rather than risk having it refused).

It’s always good to remember that we do not have the “right” to travel to other countries. It is a privilege. And so I am feeling very privileged to be setting out on this trip. I am due to land in Erbil, and then I will head to Sulaimaniya and Halabja. I don’t like racing around, so I don’t expect I’ll get further north to Dohuk and the region near the Turkish border. I’m just hoping to get a glimpse of home-cooking, and some glimmers of understanding about Kurdish and Assyrian food traditions.

A good friend here in Toronto spent time in Kurdistan two years ago and has passed along the names and info of some of her contacts. She was talking to women about their lives… I am grateful to have my passage eased. And a friend of hers who lives here, who is Kurdish, has also connected me with a couple of people, including his mother and sisters. I can’t wait!

Meantime, after a long delay, spring has truly sprung today, just as I am leaving. On Sunday too it was sunny and mild. A bunch of us who do shape-note singing got together to sing out of the Northern Harmony book. We were at my place, with the back doors open and the sun streaming in, just glorious.

I had a little food for singers to snack on, including bread from Woodlot, hummous from Evelyn’s Crackers, cheese from Cheese Magic and some pate from Sanagan’s. But I’d also put a little effort of my own into the food: I’d made skillet cake, a medium and a small one, using my usual somewhat casual approach. But the cake has evolved, as all recipes tend to do. I now use all whole wheat flour: Red Fife with a little La Milanaise whole wheat pastry flour, and my toppings in this season of little fruit are usally frozen cranberries, or other frozen berries (raspberries and/or blueberries).

Because some of the singers asked for the recipe, I’m putting recipe notes here, so everyone can have access:

You’ll want to have two bowls for mixing, and a ten- or eleven- inch cast-iron or other heavy skillet, or two smaller ones (I use an 8 and a 6) or you can use a cakepan that gives about the same area – about 80 square inches.

Preheat the oven to 400 F.

And heat the skillet on the stove-top, add oil and spread it well. Remove from heat. Make sure your butter is at room temp.

The proportions are simple:

In one bowl put 1 ½ cups whole wheat red fife flour, and ½ cup whole wheat pastry flour; or all Red Fife; or use all-purpose and pastry flour 50-50, as you please. Add 1 teaspoon baking powder and ½ teaspoon baking soda, and a ¼ teaspoon salt.

Spices I use are cinnamon, cloves, dried ginger… you could try a little nutmeg…

In the other bowl cream ¼ pound butter and 1 cup (I use brown) sugar, and then add 1 cup full fat plain yogurt. Add ½ teaspoon good vanilla if you wish. Whisk 4 eggs briefly and add them and mix well, then add the wets to the dries.

Stir just enough to mix them so that the flour is all wet.

Pour the heavy gloopy batter into the ready skillet(s)

Sprinkle on cranberries or other frozen fruit, or sliced apple or whatever pleases you. I sprinkle on a little extra sugar if using cranberries.

Bake at 400 (in the middle of the oven) for 15 minutes then lower heat to 385 until done (a skewer comes out clean), about another 30 minutes.

Let stand for five minutes to let the starches firm up, then turn onto a plate, (fruit side will be down) then place another plate on the under side and flip it back so it’s fruit side up.

Cake is better the day after it’s baked, but usually no-one waits around to test that assertion!

I hope this becomes an easy-to-remember staple in your house, just as it is in mine.