The leaves are drifting down in the drizzle, with pouring rain and high winds promised. Already the sidewalks near ash trees are paved with little golden leaves. But many trees will be stripped bare before their leaves have had a chance to thrill us with colour. Last year's autumn was such a spectacular one, I suppose we can't complain if this year is an off-year.
In my last post - mostly about the Mega Quarry and fabulous Foodstock - I said I'd write soon about some encounters I had in early October. The month started with Nuit Blanche, and I guess that first of October event was a preview of what my month has been since: a composite of often-chilly weather, friends old and new, and serendipitous encounters with people and art and food and new ideas.
A couple of days after Nuit Blanche I took a day flight to London on Air Canada, a huge treat, and headed into town on the Tube to stay at my cousin's flat near Victoria. There was time the next day for lots of conversation with him, and a visit to the British Museum as well as wanderings through Bloomsbury and Covent Garden and more.
The following morning I took a train to Devizes to visit a friend I'd met travelling in Burma. She took me to Stonehenge (I'd never been, so missed the hundreds of years when it was freely open; it's now visitable but only from a distance). The winds blew cold and fierce, across Salisbury Plain and the shifting sky was dramatic and beautiful, so that Stonehenge held its own, even with polite little fencing around it. There were lovely sharp shadows, intensely green rounded hills, and the wind, always.
The market in Devizes, which is on Thursday mornings, was charming, nd loaded with the best of English and Scottish fresh food, from raspberries and strawberries (yes really) to quinces; and from Whitby crab to Shetland scallops. We bought lots of scallops, still with their beautiful orange roe, and cooked them lightly with a little olive oil and garlic for supper. Not shabby at all! But even with that caliber of competition, the winner in the memorable food competition in Devizes for me was the butcher's shop Walter Rose's. It's stunning, small, beautiful, and with an astonishing selection of meats. I bought a pork pie, a deceptively simple-looking pork pie. And I have to say that the taste and texture of it haunt me still. What word to use besides delicious? succulent? perfect?
Back in London on Saturday, I headed out early to Borough Market, almost a cliche destination for food tourists. I'd been warned that it would be crowded, but early on Saturday it was anything but. The website is great, by the way. I ate fresh oysters - bracingly chilled and briny - from Mersea Island (in Essex); bought some Extra virgin olive oil from Greece, and some olives; ate a pain au chocolat, and then another; and also bought a delicious slab of Comte, aged 22 months, to take to friends.
Fortified(!) by treats I walked to the Tate Modern to see the newly opened Gerhard Richter retrospective, just dazzling and amazing, especially for someone like me who hadn't been very clued in about his work before. Here's the link to info about the show It's on until early January. And of course there's lots else to marvel at at the Tate Modern, if you have the stamina.
In the next couple of days I got to another two exhibitions, one on Degas at the Royal Academy, info here; and the other at the V&A, a huge retrospective view of the movement in art and architecture, music and design, called Post-Modernism. It was so enlightening to realise a little more about where aesthetic and design elements arose that we now take for granted. Here's a link to info about the show.
As if all that weren't enough, I had fun with food people too. One, whom I'll call Mrs Lemur, has a wonderful blog called The Lemurs are Hungry, here. I'd stumbled on it awhile ago, and made a couple of comments, so then we agreed to meet while I was in London. Have a look at the blog, which gives recipes that Mrs Lemur makes, often Thai or other Asian, always clear and interesting. Good writing generally. I met Kay Plunkett-Hogge, who is deeply knowledgeable about Thailand, having been raised there, and writes and teaches, also based in London. Her blog and website are here, lively, opnionated, wide-ranging.
I had the pleasure of a making a foraging expedition with the wonderful Anissa Helou, whose book on Offal has just been re-published. We headed north to Baldwin's, a butcher in the far north of London, north of FInsbury Park somewhere, in a largely Turkish and Kurdish area. Before the shopping we had to fortify ourselves with lachmajun, hot and delish. The butcher was very sweet, and also had a fantastic array of lamb and sheep and sausage and more... We picked up the order Anissa had phoned in, which included testicles, heads, a whole young lamb, brains, tripe, and more. Anissa needed it all to prepare a feast the following day. She wrote about the tripe in her blog Anissa, which I think all food people should bookmark.
I know, you think I've said enough about all this food and art and stuff in London. I have just a few more: I was so happy to be able to spend time with Jake Tilson, whose book about fish and seafood and a lot more besides - In at the Deep End - is now out. The writing, recipes, design, typography, art, and photographs are his - a spectacular achievement. His website is here. His partner, the amazing Jennifer Lee, is a ceramic artist, and her website is here. It's a place to marvel at her work...
Finally, I am always happy to see Richard Jung and his family. I had supper with them on my last night in London, which was extra-welcome because it was Thanksgiving Day in Canada. No, we didn't have turkey, thank heavens (not my favorite food at any time). Richard made all the wonderful natural-light studio shots for Hot Sour Salty Sweet; HomeBaking; Mangoes and Curry Leaves (where his black and white location shots also featured); and Beyond the Great Wall. I'm hoping he's available to shoot for Rivers of Flavor, my new book, about Burma. Meantime you can admire his work here.
I've come to the end of this link-littered post. Thanks for your patience: I so much enjoyed the opening out that my trip to London gave me that I wanted to pass it on.
And now I'm back in Toronto and listening to pelting rain outside. I'm happy to be snug and warm, grateful for the comforts and familiarity of home.
Showing posts with label Richard Jung. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Jung. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
FULL MOON BIRTHDAY THOUGHTS AND CONNECTIONS
Here it is my birthday, marked on some calendars in England as St Swithin's Day (or Swithun's). He was a bishop of Winchester in the tenth century. Traditionally in England it's a day for predicting the weather, the idea being that whatever the weather on July 15 there will be 40 more days like it. hmmm We need warmth still, I mean, we want to have the rest of summer wonderful summer, but we sure could do with some rain.
The other marker today is that it's full moon. In another half-cycle, two more weeks, it will be the new moon and the start of Ramadan. Markers, markers... They're useful points, like hilltops, from which we can look back over things and ahead prospectively. I have rather selective vision at such times: I tend to want to see and notice the positive and brush away or minimise the importance of the negative. I'm sure it irritates people sometimes. But on the other hand I am grateful to be this way by temperament. It makes rolling with things, accepting the rough with the smooth, much easier. I don't have to do much battle with myself.
While I'm on the positive, a couple of stories: Last week I pedalled up to the northern part of the city, near Bayview and York Mills. It was up and down but mostly gently uphill, an easier ride than I had expected and less than fifteen kilometres each way. I visited a friend in her lush garden and then went to a potluck lunch nearby. I'd cooked some portabello mushrooms with scapes and dandelion greens from the garden, to an intensely flavoured almost-black mass. Our host had not made a plan but relied on serendipity and the dishes people brought all worked beautifully together, as most often happens.
But the story is about an encounter I had on the way up. I saw a woman walking to a bus stop and thought I recognised her, so I stopped and called her name out. Yes in fact, she was EB, the mother of the guy I went out with in my last years of undergrad, in the seventies. I hadn't seen her since then. Amazing! She is such an intelligent and interesting person and here she is, still thriving, turning 90 (ninety!!!) next spring, and alert and engaged. She now runs a summer lecture program at the University of Toronto; they're lucky to have her. She said, "I'm older of course". And I replied "So am I!"
It feels like a miracle when there can be such reconnection, over decades. And it's also reassuring. There's so much change and shifting of landscapes as we go through life, that when we run into a continuity like that it can feel like a lifeline and an affirmation.
The other story is just to tell you that last night, with the day-before-full-moon moon rising in the bright evening sky, I was sitting with a couple of friends having a cocktail on the roof of the Park Plaza. It's a place that's seen many stories unfold, and anyone who has spent time in Toronto has a story or two connected to it. And there we were, with a front row seat as the city lights and skyline sparkled, framing the fat moon. Lovely luxury, to have summer evenings with bare arms and beautiful light, and good friends to share it all with.
Tonight there's a small feast at this house with friends, but I'm just a bystander. Dawnthebaker, is doing the planning and cooking. So generous. There's a bit of a time constraint, so we're starting early, because she and I and Tashi have tickets (booked by Tashi) for a screening of the last/ latest Harry Potter movie later this evening. (I've read all the books of course, because my kids were the perfect age for them, read them aloud aloud and to myself, but I've only seen a couple of the other films, maybe three.) I'm told we should line up an hour or more ahead, so we'll send some younger people down early and then Dawn and I can stroll over a little later. I don't think I've ever gone to the movies on my birthday, let alone to a blockbuster. Ha!
I'm getting down to the wire on book edits, which feels good. It's always difficult to do what's needed, which is: cut out the excesses, delete the extra recipes, trim in various places, so that the manuscript can be tamed into a book. I save the cuts of course. The cut recipes are fine, often really good, they're just too close to duplicates or unnecessarily complicated or whatever, to fit into THIS book. But they'll come in handy sometime, somewhere, I'm sure. So RIVERS OF FLAVOR is taking shape, in its own time in its own way. Books do that. And in New York my editor Ann Bramson is mulling what size and look the book should have, chatting to wonderful Richard Jung who wants to take the photos, though the budget is horribly tight, and generally visualising the next steps. Yikes! It's starting to feel real, already.
What a nice place to be, contemplating a new book on my birthday. This time next year, with luck, the first copies will be coming off a printing press somewhere.... lovely thought!
The other marker today is that it's full moon. In another half-cycle, two more weeks, it will be the new moon and the start of Ramadan. Markers, markers... They're useful points, like hilltops, from which we can look back over things and ahead prospectively. I have rather selective vision at such times: I tend to want to see and notice the positive and brush away or minimise the importance of the negative. I'm sure it irritates people sometimes. But on the other hand I am grateful to be this way by temperament. It makes rolling with things, accepting the rough with the smooth, much easier. I don't have to do much battle with myself.
While I'm on the positive, a couple of stories: Last week I pedalled up to the northern part of the city, near Bayview and York Mills. It was up and down but mostly gently uphill, an easier ride than I had expected and less than fifteen kilometres each way. I visited a friend in her lush garden and then went to a potluck lunch nearby. I'd cooked some portabello mushrooms with scapes and dandelion greens from the garden, to an intensely flavoured almost-black mass. Our host had not made a plan but relied on serendipity and the dishes people brought all worked beautifully together, as most often happens.
But the story is about an encounter I had on the way up. I saw a woman walking to a bus stop and thought I recognised her, so I stopped and called her name out. Yes in fact, she was EB, the mother of the guy I went out with in my last years of undergrad, in the seventies. I hadn't seen her since then. Amazing! She is such an intelligent and interesting person and here she is, still thriving, turning 90 (ninety!!!) next spring, and alert and engaged. She now runs a summer lecture program at the University of Toronto; they're lucky to have her. She said, "I'm older of course". And I replied "So am I!"
It feels like a miracle when there can be such reconnection, over decades. And it's also reassuring. There's so much change and shifting of landscapes as we go through life, that when we run into a continuity like that it can feel like a lifeline and an affirmation.
The other story is just to tell you that last night, with the day-before-full-moon moon rising in the bright evening sky, I was sitting with a couple of friends having a cocktail on the roof of the Park Plaza. It's a place that's seen many stories unfold, and anyone who has spent time in Toronto has a story or two connected to it. And there we were, with a front row seat as the city lights and skyline sparkled, framing the fat moon. Lovely luxury, to have summer evenings with bare arms and beautiful light, and good friends to share it all with.
Tonight there's a small feast at this house with friends, but I'm just a bystander. Dawnthebaker, is doing the planning and cooking. So generous. There's a bit of a time constraint, so we're starting early, because she and I and Tashi have tickets (booked by Tashi) for a screening of the last/ latest Harry Potter movie later this evening. (I've read all the books of course, because my kids were the perfect age for them, read them aloud aloud and to myself, but I've only seen a couple of the other films, maybe three.) I'm told we should line up an hour or more ahead, so we'll send some younger people down early and then Dawn and I can stroll over a little later. I don't think I've ever gone to the movies on my birthday, let alone to a blockbuster. Ha!
I'm getting down to the wire on book edits, which feels good. It's always difficult to do what's needed, which is: cut out the excesses, delete the extra recipes, trim in various places, so that the manuscript can be tamed into a book. I save the cuts of course. The cut recipes are fine, often really good, they're just too close to duplicates or unnecessarily complicated or whatever, to fit into THIS book. But they'll come in handy sometime, somewhere, I'm sure. So RIVERS OF FLAVOR is taking shape, in its own time in its own way. Books do that. And in New York my editor Ann Bramson is mulling what size and look the book should have, chatting to wonderful Richard Jung who wants to take the photos, though the budget is horribly tight, and generally visualising the next steps. Yikes! It's starting to feel real, already.
What a nice place to be, contemplating a new book on my birthday. This time next year, with luck, the first copies will be coming off a printing press somewhere.... lovely thought!
Sunday, July 10, 2011
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.
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.
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