IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT!

It's such a hot night that eveything is sticking: my forarms to the table as I type, my legs to the chair, and my brain to...I'm not sure what, but it's not an enhancer of clear thinking, for sure!

No complaints though. This house has a good cross-breeze, and anyway I like the feeling of sweating out all that's inside from time to time. It's like an ongoing sauna. The trick with the hot weather of course is the traditional wise technique of having a quick shower anytime you are feeling hot or sticky or fed-up or on edge because of the heat. Instantly you get a lovely little shiver as the wet clings to your skin when you step out of the shower. That momentary cooling from evaporation sends the heavy loggy feeling away and refreshes you. And somehow it makes everything manageable, creates an optimism, I find, so that the heat stops being oppressive and becomes just a bath of sensation to move through.

Bicycling helps too. The breeze from pedalling along is surprisingly cooling, so a bicycle rather than walking is the way to get around in the heat.

Had a question today from a friend who'd been told by a Vietnamese friend about a bitter leaf and flower that is around in the fall in Khmer parts of Vietnam, or maybe in Cambodia. I hadn't heard of it, but her question reminded me of the great spice (not herbs, not yet anyway) page by Gernot Katzer. He's exhaustive and quite meticulous. It's a great resource. Bookmark it so you can go to it any time you have a question. This link is to the SE Asia part, but you can move on from there:
http://www.uni-graz.at/~katzer/engl/spice_geo.html#asia_southeast

I went to Shape Note singing this evening (it's once a month in Toronto). What a treat. There's a southern Ontario sing in late August not far from Waterloo in an old Mennonite meeting house, a fab stone building. Before that there's a huge sing in Maine on July 30. These calendars of events that different people keep track of are like different maps laid over the months with their own linkages and contour lines and internal necessities. My map right now involves catching a plane to Kelowna tomorrow so I can visit my aunt Wendy, who is my mother's identical twin. It's always a struggle to decide to go see her, for though my mother has been dead for over thirty years, there's stil a wrench when I see my aunt, a pang and thoughts of how things might be different. And then I am pulled into her present and can let the pangs go, mostly.

The other event, now the fifth annual, but this will be my first time, is the Kneading Conference in Skowhegan, in northern Maine. There are two days of conference, designed to help those who want to to learn new skills, and it's followed by the Bread Fair, on Saturday. Dawnthebaker and I are going to drive down, a lovely trip through the Eastern Townships, ten or eleven hours from Toronto in total, at least that's what Google Maps tells me. I would have guessed nine hours or so.

I posted a couple of notes on Facebook about managing the heat. One of them is to get up early, cook something in the early morning, then put it in the frig. That makes supper an easy pleasure, cooked veg dressed as a salad, over cold rice for example. That was supper today (I had new beets, fresh from my CSA delivery and spectacular. The other is the smoothie made of fruit and not much else. Tashi made a raspberry one, adding in some mango that was around. He added just ice and a little honey, no milk product at all. It was a beautiful red. But then I got home and found the red currants, needing to be eaten. SO I cleaned them of stems and blended them to a gorgeous thick puree. I mixed it fity-fifty with the end of Tashi's smoothie, then added some gin.

Now THERE'S a summer drink! wow. Summer pudding is slices of bread that line a bowl, which is then filled iwth raspberries and red currents, covered with bread slices and a weight pressed down on top overnight. It's fab. SO I figure my drink is Summer Pudding Gin. But surely there's a more elegant name waiting to be discovered?

Happy showering and slowing down, everyone!

AND A FOOTNOTE: ANn Bramson had some good ideas about ways to strenthen the Burma book. I have now done those edits and reshapings and I sent the anuscript off yesterday. I've altered the title a little. Now it's:
RIVERS OF FLAVOR: RECIPES AND TRAVEL STORIES FROM BURMA

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT

In this hot humid weather, late on the last Monday in August, I can hear the voices of people outside, voices in the night. They're unaware of being overheard, all those people, I imagine. It makes an odd soundtrack, their interactions. The night is still and heavy, so even though the doors of the house are open front and back, to catch any breeze or hint of freshening air, there's not much coolness happening.

It's not easy to think in this heat, or indeed to do anything very ambitious or elaborate. Ambition just drops away. It reminds me of Ryczard Kapuscinki's book on Africa, in which he talks about how lucky northern peoples are to have cloud and cold weather as part of their year. He's writing about the enervating effects of heat and and of deprivation (inadequate food and/or shelter, etc).

I'm not complaining about this heat. In fact I'm enjoying it. But I also can be grateful that my deadlines are a little elastic and are fairly far off, so slippage, buffer days taken in heat-induced laziness and torpor, feels fine, not scary or highly risky. And when the weather gets cold and harsh this winter, we will be able to look back on this soft weighty hot night with pleasure and longing, and perhaps also a small question: was it really that hot and soft? or did I dream it?

I've been playing around with Burma recipes. A sticky rice treat, a kind of sticky rice bun filled with palm sugar and coconut and fried until golden and crispy on the outside, is my latest pride and joy.

But today I took a break from the doing and went tasting instead. I went with three friends to a small new Burmese restaurant on Bloor Street west of Dufferin. The Mohinga (classic Burmese noodle soup, that comes in various styles) was a bit of a compromise (no banana stem, the broth light on fish, etc) but still recognisable, and it was served with great care and with sparklingly fresh condiments and toppings including coriander leaves and shredded green onion. The outstanding dishes we tasted though were the thokes, or salads, a ginger salad and another, a real emblem of food in Burma, called laphet thoke. It's made of fermented tea leaves that have an enticing tart edge. They are combined with sesame seeds, peanuts, chopped shallots etc, in a distinctive and refreshing salad. Yum.

I need to find a source for fermented tea leaves, a source in North America, so readers of my Burma book, once it's out, can make this delish combo for themselves. I will ask the guy at the restaurant where he gets his, but also, all ideas or suggestions welcome...

On Sunday evening a few friends were over for casual supper. As well as two steask, eye of round (later sliced to make a simple beef salad, Thai-style), I grilled some shallots, tomatoes, and those small round pale green Thai eggplants (the size of limes, with a stem, each of them), about a dozen of them. Then I processed all the grilled veg to a coarse salsa texture in the food processor. A little salt and fish sauce was all it needed, though you could also add chiles. (I left the heat separate, in the form of the hot tart sweet chile sauce I've come to depend on, a classic from Burma. Its base is dried red chiles, and it's my staple condiment these days.) I've never seen those small green eggplants grilled, perhaps because they are mostly seeds rather than very fleshy, but they did make a great salsa, dark red and earthy. Leftovers were a pleasure on fresh rice the next day.

This post is kind of rambling and is spending more time on food than I have been doing lately here. Perhaps it's the heat, addling my brain into short thoughts without much connection?

One thing I do want to mention: I have come to realise that although I can read without reading glasses (as long as the light is good!!!), my reading is now slower because I am not seeing the print as clearly as before. It's time to admit this, to make reading glasses (cheapo's from the drugstore) part of my life, rather than ignored hangers-on in my purse. I don't like being dependent on glasses for this most basic and pleasurable thing we call reading. But I am lucky I can see, and that there are so many books I am eager to read.

Time to head for bed, for a little reading before I pass out in sleep (that lovely deep hot-weather sleep, almost drugged, it feels). Now to find my reading glasses...!...

Happy late summer everyone. And for those of you heading into a school year of packing lunches, my sympathy. It does eventually end, but not soon enough!!

SMALL CELEBRATIONS ON A HOT NIGHT

There's a lot to celebrate this evening. It's mostly small and domestic in some way, but nonetheless important.

First, and most lovely, the lilies are in full glorious bloom in the back yard, yellows and tender pinks and all tints inbetween. They're generous in their beauty, but only briefly with us, especially this year with the incredible heat we've had all week.

At the tedious end: I got a lot of paperwork done this morning, the kind of bill-paying drear that we all have to do and that piles up until we get bothered enough to deal with it. Another chore done today was renewing the car licence plate, a date that comes up every year or two in July, the month of my birthday.

Speaking of birthdays, my friend Trisha has hers in a couple of days, so I took her out to lunch today. It was a real pleasure to sit unhurriedly, talking of this and that, slowed right down by the heat, enjoying each moment.

Late this afternoon I finally made some major additions to the immersethrough.com webste. I am always nervous about the website stuff, though getting more at ease with it. The additions are to the new page, "Grand Manan Island". My friend Lianne who has a place on the island, suggested that we do an immerse session there, to entice people to discover and love the island as she does. So now we're launched, with a session planned for September 16 to 19, 2010, and also, at last, info about it all on the immersethrough website. Isn't technology wonderful? I am so pleased to be able to put a tick mark beside that job on my "to-do" list!

And finally, not just finally as the last of this list, but in the sense of “at last”, Tashi’s new computer came into being today. He’s now fully loaded, with a desk top that is silent and powerful, after going three months without his own computer (his laptop having crashed several weeks before his final exams). He has been sharing mine, when he’s here, and that’s fine, but kind of awkward too. I have felt constrained about working, having to wait until he’s done with the computer before I can, say, type in a recipe or check my mail or get writing done. He’s been graceful and appreciative throughout. But a computer is a very hard item to share, especially now that we are all so wired in, so expecting to be connected at all times.

To mark this last celebration-worthy item, Tashi took Dom and me to supper at John’s Italian Caffe, a small restaurant at the end of the street, (Tashi must be feeling most celebratory of all, for he’s now a free man, no need to seek favours or tune in to anyone else’s timetable on a computer.) The terraces outside the cafes and eateries on Baldwin Street were all full of people enjoying the soft hot night air, languidly sipping drinks, no-one in a hurry. And now we’re back home with doors and windows open to catch the breeze, and a fan on to help, each of us typing away at a different keyboard.

It’s so interesting, the independence we need with our computers, once we get hooked. The equivalent in an earlier era would be the notebook or journal I suppose, or no, not the paper, but instead the pen or pencil we would use to write with. Ballpoints democratised pens in a way, but even so we all remember having a favorite pen or pencil, right? Some of us still do. And if we had a favorite, then it was vital that the tool we depended on was with us and available all the time.

These days the tool most of us find vital is a computer: a keyboard and screen and usually internet connection too. (For many it’s a Blackberry or an I-phone; I’m behind a generation with my examples perhaps, but can only speak about what I know!) We want to control access, or rather, we want unlimited access, to our vital tool at all hours and without constraint. And we are used to having that. Consequently the idea of rationing computer time, or scheduling it, is almost unimaginable to most of us.

All of this takes my head in several directions: I think about the difference between having plenty, or unlimited access, and having to ration or share, whether it’s computer time or some other precious item, What difference does it make to the pattern of our days? to our awareness of others? (or not?)

It’s something to think about.

Meantime, I hope you’re staying cool, perhaps with Southeast Aisan style iced coffee: strong black coffee stirred with sweetened condensed milk, and poured over many ice cubes. It’s a favorite in this house. And don’t forget that the best way to feel good in the heat is to slow it down, and to shower often, three or four times a day, and always just before bed. Don’t towel yourself dry, just let the water evaporate. You’ll feel chilly!! What a treat at the end of a boiling hot day!