SPRINGTIME PLEASURES & PRESSURES

We're now past that big signpost April 1. Thirty years ago I started working as a lawyer in Toronto, for a firm now called Sack Goldblatt Mitchell, doing union side labour law. April 1 seemed like a good start day. Loved the people I worked with. That first year was hugely stressful; I doubted myself a lot and didn't dare tell anyone. Of course I discovered near the end of my first year, from a friend I finally confided in, that almost every lawyer in her or his first year of practice has these doubts and fears. it's not easy, doing things for the first time and feeling like huge errors lie in wait to ambush you!

Maybe all that stress is a good lesson for the rest of life, as in, nothing ever feels impossible again...or, "if I could do that and survive more or less mentally healthy, then I can figure out how to survive other things that life will throw at me..." You get my drift.

Warm weather has reappeared, though still with chilly temperatures at night. My friends up north say the sap has started running again (for awhile it got too cold and the flow stopped). I last wrote here on Friday, the day before I headed north for a cross country ski and lively supper with friends.

The ski was magic, with warm sun, melting snow but enough to cover the forest floor as I slithered along a stretch of the Bruce Trail. Shadows were sharp-etched on the snow, rabbit tracks and the odd fox or coyote track too showed that the still of the forest hid life of all kinds. By the time I turned and retraced my steps/glides/tracks the air had chilled a little, so the tracks, slightly melted in the sun on the way out, had re-iced. My trip back was much faster! - zippy and thrilling at times. I had one small fall and one near catastrophe as I slipped and nearly fell into a small rivulet I was trying to cross. No harm done, and that shot of adrenalin warmed me in the cool and gave a fun little edge to the end of the ski.

What is it about the pleasures of adrenalin? Of course I don't want that edge all the time, but the odd shot is a treat and a trip. I suppose it's like any other drug: harmful in overdose or over an extended period, but a real pleasure, sometimes a guilty pleasure.

I have written a little about this before, mostly because of bicycling. Now that the season has started for me (I am NOT hardy or agile enough to cycle in heavy snow) I'm reminded of the pleasurable edge I get from bicycling in the city. It's a rush to be so alert, so pushing myself. And I find it really satisfying too. A friend tells me it's the guy in me. Not sure if that's a full explanation! But there's certainly a competitive edge to it, me against the world? It's fun, completely fun, and leaves me speedy and exhilarated.

I just finished reading a remarkable wonderful history of Burma, written by U Thant's grandson and called the River of Lost Footsteps. He's a historian, raised Burmese but mostly in the US, so he tells the story from a Burmese perspective, but also set in a wider world context, and starting from the region's the earliest history, rather than just with the colonial wars. It's too easy to explain things in terms of just the last hundred or hundred and fifty years; doing that puts the analysis on the wrong track. I had had inklings of this truth, but reading the book gave me such a good perspective.

Burma has been a crossroads, and is certainly a geographical crossroads, but at the same time there have been periods of isolation and closed-offness. Now, with the full panorama to contemplate and digest, I have a better idea of the whys and wherefores.

I think I want to do some recipe retesting this week, to reground myself in the concrete, and to give myself time to take a distance from the history book. Only then will I be able to figure out what to say as background for the cookbook. Why do any of it? you ask. After all, for example, what italian cookbook deals with the history of Italy? So why do I feel compelled to engage with historical and geographical and cultural details??

Well because I think there's an interplay between history and politics and culture. And to understand the food culture of a place and a people, it helps to have a context, a wider and deeper context. We assume that people have a context for or knowledge of Italy or France (maybe we're wrong! Who was Cavour anyway? I can imagine someone asking, and why should I care?) and that therefore we don't need to be explicit about the historical and cultural background.

Southeast Asia is far away from North America and the western world. To the extent there's knowledge of Burma, it's mostly of the colonial and post-colonial kind, falsified by a focus on the immediate, perhaps, seen through a post-colonial lens, and usually filtered by non-local interpreters. I guess in a small way this Burma book will make me part of that cavalcade of outsiders writing about Burma. That's why it feels important that I anchor it in the specifics of food and then give it a framework that goes beyond the culinary and into the human landscape past and present.

One of the dishes I'm looking forward to working with this week is from the Kachin. It's unusual and hauntingly good, made of cooked small chunks of beef that are then pounded with spices and dry-fried. It's hard to describe, but not difficult to make. The end result is a deeply flavoured tender semi-pemmican, not a powder but in aromatic pieces. The Kachin, who are based in the north of Burma, Myitkyina being the capital of Kachin State, use herbs such as Vietnamese coriander and sawtooth herb in their cooking, and have many dishes that rely on steaming.

By the way, if you are heading to Rangoon, go have supper at Myit Sone, a Kachin and Shan restuarant near the Children's Hospital. (Myit Sone means confluence, for Myitkyina lies on the irrawaddy River just south of the confluence where its two source rivers emerge from their mountain trenches and join to form Burma's most important river.)

This post has somehow strayed from adrenalin and skiing and cycling to a restaurant recommendation in Burma. Oh well! Better than my dwelling on taxes, which is the other task that needs finishing. I've got a good start. I figure another day's work and then an evening to type things up, and I'll be ready to see the wonderful accountant who actually does my taxes.

Such a pity that the arrival of spring coincides with coercion, isn't it? There are exams when we're younger, and now there are taxes! But then I think to myself, what other time would be better? And there's no answer!

RIDING LIGHTLY AS THE WORLD TURNS

I started writing this blogpost late on Saturday night (despite the date on this post, it's now Monday the 14th).  Jon and Lillian (Ian's parents) had driven in from Grey County, getting here at about eleven in the evening.  They were bouncy still, so we went out for a walk in the warm night air.  Being out late on a Saturday night, watching the young people in couples and groups out on the street, led me to think about the Saturday night date, and all the hope and expectation and fear and worry that can go along with it, especially when we're young.  So when I got back in I stayed up late writing, and this is how I began:

"Here it is, Saturday night, the big night of the week, especially for young people, for heavy dates and taking risks and feeling free of the daily round.  I remember in February of first year university finding my roommate Nancy sobbing in our room one evening.  There she was, eighteen years old and a great person, attractive and popular, but in pieces.  Why?  Well, the tragedy was that for the first time since grade nine she had no Saturday night date. 

I was amazed, stunned is perhaps more accurate.  My high school life had been quite different from hers, almost date-free until the middle of my second-last year, and then once again date-free in my graduating year.  And now when I look back, all that social effort and worry on Nancy's part feels so imprisoning.  I was just an out-of-it kind of high school student, tall and awkward, so I never felt particularly entitled to a date, if you know what I mean.  And I'm grateful now not to have grown up too fast, not to have felt the huge pressure to be socially successful in high school, with all the attendant pressures (that I barely guessed at at the time) to be sexually active...

The Toronto International film festival (TIFF) is on right now, and yesterday I saw a very strong film called My Teheran for Sale which tells a story set in modern Teheran, amongst the young people, in their twenties, whose generation has been lost, squeezed out by the repressiveness of the current regime.  They go to illicit parties and make and listen to underground music, and develop plays and other theatre, and if they are caught are subject to imprisonment or whippings.  It's horrible.  And yet what is wonderful is the will to take the risks in order to try to live fully.  There's a sense of vitality that is irrepressible and heartening.  And this despite the hardships suffered by individuals as they struggle to breathe and expand their horizons, despite the regime.  Do see it if you can.

And on another topic, last Wednesday the guys all started classes.  A good friend, who is staying with us temporarily, was also due to start her first full day in the classroom this term (she's a high school math teacher) on Wednesday.  So I said I'd cook supper Tuesday night.  I bought a blade roast from Gerald at the Trinity Bellwoods market, and some yellow and green beans and two heads of vigorous romaine.  I got back from the market to find extras, good friends of the guys, who seemed pleased to stay for supper, so instead of cutting a steak off the roast and freezing the rest, I cut it into three steaks and grilled them all (over charcoal, on the domed  Weber, so simple and good).  

There were eight of us, in the end, and we almost licked the platter clean!  What a treat that meat was, freshly butchered, never frozen, and from a grass-fed cow raised in Grey County, two hours north of here.  I sliced it then dressed it in the usual Thai salad way with lime juice, fish sauce, some minced chiles, sliced shallots, and lots of fresh basil and mint (no coriander leaves on had).  We ate it with rice, the lightly cooked beans, and a huge salad.  And we all agreed that the meat was spectacular.

Tonight it was Ian's turn to cook, so he started early.  By late afternoon there was a huge batch of chocoalte chip cookies (he used good baking chocolate chopped up) and a skillet cake on the counter, keeping company with the Cretan biscotti he'd made two days ago.  And then for supper he cooked a huge stack of fresh corn (three cobs each), tender green beans I'd bought today from Ted Thorpe at the market, a cucumber salad (dressed with shredded shiso and mint, some Malden salt, and a little cider vinegar), and organic bacon from Grey County.  Everything tasted of itself, and it made us all so hungry!"

All that was all written on Saturday night.  Now it's Monday evening and in between we've had the most spectacular hot bright days and clear limpid nights with star-strewn midnight-blue skies.  Lovely!  I saw a wonderful experimental full-length documentary on Sunday morning, the film Jon and Lillian had come here to see, made by Phil Hoffman, a friend from Grey County who teaches film at York University.  He's a lovely guy, and very well respected too, by his peers.  The film is called "All Fall Down" and it was entrancing and sobering, beautiful, both its images and its soundscape, and also haunting.  And when the lights came up afterward, there were a bunch of people from Grey County, all delighted to have seen Phil's film.  It was such a pleasure to see them all in that unfamiliar place, a fairly alienating cinema complex...

Later I went with another friend to a documentary about a dynamic and extraordinary pair of performers from New Zealand, legends in their own time, called the Topp Twins.  They are so free, so themselves in every situation, and so creative and funny and serious, all at once.  A rarity at TIFF, the audience stood and cheered at the end of the film, so exhilarating was it.  

And tonight as I whizzed (well, it's all relative, but I was rushing along on my bicycle) through the warm night air, coming home from a Women's Culinary Network meeting, I had time to realise how lucky I feel these days.  This time last year I hadn't thought of getting out on a bicycle in the city.  And now it's getting to be second nature to head out on my red Diamond Back, a bike that I rode from Kashgar to Gilgit 23 years ago, yikes! and that I am absurdly attched to and sentimental about.  I fear theft, as any cyclist in Toronto does, but I feel so much more confident now out on the street, even in rush hour.  Yes, I will be careful, I AM being careful, helmet and all, but oh, the freedom!  It's just wonderful: autonomous and light as air.