It's a cloudy Easter Sunday here in Toronto. I'm just back in from my run, a longer leisurely one that's left me sweaty and happy. Funny how getting the blood moving usually gets the happiness current, the emotional qi, flowing too.
We had a celebratory supper last night, early because there was a small person E with us. The guys lit the Weber and we grilled bavette and then lamb, each drizzled with fish sauce and a little olive oil first. The lamb was in "steaks", cut from a leg, so there was a round of bone in the centre. It's a great cut, recommended to me by Dawnthebaker and her partner Ed. I'd also bought merguez from Sanagan's Meats. Those went on the grill and then we cut them up and dressed them with lime juice, fish sauce, and chopped shallots, making a kind of Thai salad, with mint leaves too, for colour and freshness.
I can imagine you thinking "that's a lot of meat!" Well, yes. Some of us like all of it; my kids don't love lamb, so the beef was aimed at them; and one friend can't eat chiles, so she had to skip the merguez. But we all had appetite.
As for the other elements: There was sticky rice, some black mixed in with the white so it was a lovely purplish handful, handy for scooping up a slice of lamb or beef or a piece of merguez with shallot. We oven-roasted beets and served them coarsely chopped, unpeeled. Jerusalem artichokes from QUebec roasted up quickly, and went out plain, looking like oddly shaped small potatoes. I made a sprout etc stir-fry, a made-up dish of chopped potato fried in mustard seed and turmeric oil and then joined by shiitake mushrooms from Ontario, and sprouted chickpeas and a new kind of sprouted seed combo now on the market here: fenugreek, lentils, and something else. It's a wonderful blend of soft (spud) and chewy, with great depth of flavour, especially when heightened with a splash of wine near the end.
At the sweet end, a friend D brought a chocolate pound cake she'd made with creme fraiche, that went quickly, thanks to the four twenty-somethings at the feast. Dawn had made a tart, a cross between cheesecake and custard, with ricotta, mascarpone? I think, and eggs. Delish. She put out a jar of poached apricots and we just balanced the fruit on the slice we were eating, each of us. It felt very sunny and Easter-renewal-ish that tart, and indeed the whole meal.
New sprouts, eggs, lamb, garlic chives from the garden that I chopped into a kumquat chutney, all these symbols of new life and springtime are heartening. But they'd have been a little sad and lonely if the weather had stayed as grim and chilly as it's been for most of April.
We got lucky yesterday though, with bright sun and temperatures at 19 or 20, T-shirt weather! I gardened in the back, cleaning up leaves and branches and packing them into recycle bags. It was too hot out there for clothing, so I worked in my jogging bra and pants, feeling the intense April sun beaming into me. Yes yes I need to be careful about UV on my skin, mustn't overdo it and all that. But oh the tonic of spring sun!
No wonder we had appetite last night for a good meal with friends and long discussions into the night. The other end of the evening came after midnight, when the Russian orthodox church down the street had its annual Easter Saturday procession: candles, priests in golden vestments, a huge crowd of people walking past carrying candles and icons and singing in Russian.. We stood by the edge of the road watching as they walked by, children and grandparents and everyone in between. Another year, another marker...
One of my kids asked me if I ever wished I believed so that I could take part in rituals like the one we were witnessing. "Not at all!" was my answer. It's remarkable to see people acting in concert, with an apparently common mind, but it is also at some level disturbing, don't you find? The coercion of the crowd is powerful and potentially very oppressive.
So, no thanks!
But a huge "YES" to spring and birdsong and short sleeves and bicycling, and children playing in the park, and strolling people chatting late at night in soft warmth.
Bring it on!
Showing posts with label bavette. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bavette. Show all posts
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Sunday, April 18, 2010
IMAGININGS AND TRAVELS IN TIME AND SPACE
Just thinking about time and space/distance... points in time and the passage of time because this is the week of Rick Smith's birthday, and also of the birthday of my lovely father-in-law Jack Alford, who died in the fall of 2003 and is so missed.
Jack comes up in conversation with the kids quite often, "Grandpa Jack would have loved to see that"..(or" know about that" or...) and always with a fond and regretful smile. And so as we think of him and talk about him we find ways of knitting together the gaps in time between then and now, between here and not-here. With Rick there's a space/distance issue too, for he now lives in southern Spain. He's far away (dare I say, especially this week with access to Europe cut off by plumes of volcanic ash?), but still present in our thoughts, still a subject of conversation from time to time.
In earlier times we could write letters and wait for a reply brought by mail boat from across the seas, or by train across the continent. There was no immediacy to those communications, and telegrams were only for crises, life-and-death events. Now we can be in immediate touch via the internet. But the physical person is still far away, and we still go through that process of imagining absent people, having them in our heads, their image without their actual physical presence. As we use new media to make and strengthen our large farflung networks of friends, and spend hours each day online writing emails or checking Facebook, we're constantly engaging in that act of imagining.
In earlier times we didn't have these daily internet prompts, but we still did the imagining, the conjuring up of people far away in space. And that ability to imagine the absent friend who is far away gives us the muscle to imagine and live with our feelings for and memories of people who are far away in time. We can sift through mental images, slices of life that lie stacked in our memories (haphazardly in mine; some people I am sure have much more organised mental filing cabinets!). It's a gift, and a huge pleasure.
The markers of time include various anniversaries, personal ones like birthdays, and national ones, like new years days, etc. Thai, Burmese, and Cambodian new year was this last week, on April 13-14. Last night I made a feasting supper with a bunch of people who know each other well and are very good company. It was a slightly late Song Kran (Thai new year) feast in spirit, a lot of fun.
We relied on Sanagan's for bavette (flank steak) that ended up grilled and sliced and dressed with sliced shallots and lightly fried winged beans and cucumber and plenty of mint and basil to make a yam neua, or Thai grilled beef salad; for free range chickens that yielded a chicken broth for later and succulent chicken meat for a Vietnamese chicken salad; and for the pork that was part of a green coconut milk curry, with round Thai eggplants and plenty of Thai basil and lime leaves. Akhawenzie's smoked fish was the star of a Cambodian-style green mango and smoked fish salad that helped sustain us as we prepared the main dishes. The other starter was that fabulous Thai-Lao invention, miang, this time a basic miang kham: a pinch each, to taste, of toasted grated coconut, chopped toasted peanut, lime, shallot, dried shrimp, ginger, and hot chile, go onto a lettuce leaf, get drizzled with a salt-sweet-pungent sauce, then folded up and popped into your mouth. It's a very "what could be bad?" combo. All it takes is a little chopping to make the small bowlsful of the ingredients...
I haven't mentioned yet the nam prik num, banana peppers, shallots, tomatoes, garlic, all grilled whole, processed to a coarse paste, and salted with fish sauce, nor the delish extras in the form of sips and tastes of drinks of various kinds: scotch from India and from Scotland, mescal from Oaxaca, Mekong whiskey from Thailand, Singha beer ditto, wine, coffee with sweetened condensed milk, and delicious Toronto tap water to wash it all down.
It was a little hard to imagine the heat of Thailand in April though, with the chilly cold that has been around for a couple of days here. The buds and flowers have all put themselves on hold; "please tell me when it's safe to come out further" you can imagine them murmuring to each other. But we're promised sunshine and slowly rising temperatures this week.
Which leads me back to places and people farther away, space/distance and time again: Catastrophes can be exciting, but let's all hope for an easing of that Icelandic ash plume, so that the painful disruptions of thousands of people's lives can wind down and get sorted out. It must be driving some people crazy, that they are unable to travel to a dying parent's bedside or to get home for the birth of a child or... let alone all the economic and personal plans that have been shattered.
We'll be hearing stories about this event for years. It will become a marker, like the massive electricity outages in the eastern US and Canada or the ice storm or other natural disasters that caused few deaths but managed to change people's lives in ways sometimes harsh and unpredictable.
Mother Nature reminds us from time to time that we are NOT in charge, just here on suffrance. It's up to us to figure out how well we can adapt and tune in to her vagaries and her power and her vulnerabilities.
Jack comes up in conversation with the kids quite often, "Grandpa Jack would have loved to see that"..(or" know about that" or...) and always with a fond and regretful smile. And so as we think of him and talk about him we find ways of knitting together the gaps in time between then and now, between here and not-here. With Rick there's a space/distance issue too, for he now lives in southern Spain. He's far away (dare I say, especially this week with access to Europe cut off by plumes of volcanic ash?), but still present in our thoughts, still a subject of conversation from time to time.
In earlier times we could write letters and wait for a reply brought by mail boat from across the seas, or by train across the continent. There was no immediacy to those communications, and telegrams were only for crises, life-and-death events. Now we can be in immediate touch via the internet. But the physical person is still far away, and we still go through that process of imagining absent people, having them in our heads, their image without their actual physical presence. As we use new media to make and strengthen our large farflung networks of friends, and spend hours each day online writing emails or checking Facebook, we're constantly engaging in that act of imagining.
In earlier times we didn't have these daily internet prompts, but we still did the imagining, the conjuring up of people far away in space. And that ability to imagine the absent friend who is far away gives us the muscle to imagine and live with our feelings for and memories of people who are far away in time. We can sift through mental images, slices of life that lie stacked in our memories (haphazardly in mine; some people I am sure have much more organised mental filing cabinets!). It's a gift, and a huge pleasure.
The markers of time include various anniversaries, personal ones like birthdays, and national ones, like new years days, etc. Thai, Burmese, and Cambodian new year was this last week, on April 13-14. Last night I made a feasting supper with a bunch of people who know each other well and are very good company. It was a slightly late Song Kran (Thai new year) feast in spirit, a lot of fun.
We relied on Sanagan's for bavette (flank steak) that ended up grilled and sliced and dressed with sliced shallots and lightly fried winged beans and cucumber and plenty of mint and basil to make a yam neua, or Thai grilled beef salad; for free range chickens that yielded a chicken broth for later and succulent chicken meat for a Vietnamese chicken salad; and for the pork that was part of a green coconut milk curry, with round Thai eggplants and plenty of Thai basil and lime leaves. Akhawenzie's smoked fish was the star of a Cambodian-style green mango and smoked fish salad that helped sustain us as we prepared the main dishes. The other starter was that fabulous Thai-Lao invention, miang, this time a basic miang kham: a pinch each, to taste, of toasted grated coconut, chopped toasted peanut, lime, shallot, dried shrimp, ginger, and hot chile, go onto a lettuce leaf, get drizzled with a salt-sweet-pungent sauce, then folded up and popped into your mouth. It's a very "what could be bad?" combo. All it takes is a little chopping to make the small bowlsful of the ingredients...
I haven't mentioned yet the nam prik num, banana peppers, shallots, tomatoes, garlic, all grilled whole, processed to a coarse paste, and salted with fish sauce, nor the delish extras in the form of sips and tastes of drinks of various kinds: scotch from India and from Scotland, mescal from Oaxaca, Mekong whiskey from Thailand, Singha beer ditto, wine, coffee with sweetened condensed milk, and delicious Toronto tap water to wash it all down.
It was a little hard to imagine the heat of Thailand in April though, with the chilly cold that has been around for a couple of days here. The buds and flowers have all put themselves on hold; "please tell me when it's safe to come out further" you can imagine them murmuring to each other. But we're promised sunshine and slowly rising temperatures this week.
Which leads me back to places and people farther away, space/distance and time again: Catastrophes can be exciting, but let's all hope for an easing of that Icelandic ash plume, so that the painful disruptions of thousands of people's lives can wind down and get sorted out. It must be driving some people crazy, that they are unable to travel to a dying parent's bedside or to get home for the birth of a child or... let alone all the economic and personal plans that have been shattered.
We'll be hearing stories about this event for years. It will become a marker, like the massive electricity outages in the eastern US and Canada or the ice storm or other natural disasters that caused few deaths but managed to change people's lives in ways sometimes harsh and unpredictable.
Mother Nature reminds us from time to time that we are NOT in charge, just here on suffrance. It's up to us to figure out how well we can adapt and tune in to her vagaries and her power and her vulnerabilities.
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