ANOTHER FULL MOON, ANOTHER DEPARTURE

“The hustle and bustle of Chiang Mai” is a strange concept, since the town, while busy with traffic and people marketing and eating and enjoying themselves, is not exactly an intense place. But it feels that way to me right now because I have so much on my plate. perhaps also I’m aware that I won’t be here for much longer, and so I am regretting the time I spend in my apartment working away rather than out appreciating the hereness of here.

No complaints, just sayin’!!

The close-work that pins me, with both pain and pleasure, is editing the first galleys of the Burma book. Pinch of Turmeric, Squeeze of Lime is feeling so good as a title, and so in synch with the contents of the book at many levels, that i continue to be delighted with it. ANd the look of the book is feeling good, and will be even better as more photos get placed etc. But in the meantime the pain part is that it’s running long and so I know that in the conversation I’m going to have with my editor Ann Bramson later this week, there will be some hard news. I know there are short pieces of writing that will need to go, and perhaps also a few recipes. Yikes! And I instead of course have a few I’d love to add, things I learned when I was again in Burma last November-December.

It’s always this way. The long geeky explanations that I am fond of, and the rambling stories full of detail, are not always a good fit with the demands of publishing. They’re better suited to conversation or internet blogposts like this one.

Today is full moon day, and an especially holy day for Buddhists here. Last night as we walked back through the old city the moon hung huge over us, waxing still, about to be full. The night was clear, and the stars bright. This morning’s dawn was glowing pink-orange on the horizon, a sign that the haze of late winter has started. No longer are shadows sharp-edged. Instead everything has a rounded softness to it.

I’ve talked about this before, but it seems to me that digital photography, with its ability to hsarpen and over-sharpen images, has affected how we see the every day. And now I find myself in revolt against sharpness, enjoying and seeking out the softer light and rounded contours it gives everything. I feel like I’m swimming against the current though.

And now it’s time to get in a small rented car and drive up to Fang for a couple of days. The light always seems lovelier up in the mountains...

OVERCOMING FEARS, and TRAVELS IN GREEN LANDSCAPES

I'm sitting in a nice corner hotel room in Glens Falls New York. It's been a long good day, following a beautiful day yesterday driving from Toronto to Charlotte, Vermont. I woke this morning at Susan Stuck's house, its beautiful old farmhouse proportions so welcoming, and felt rested and at ease. That's partly the effect of Susan's company, and the welcome embrace of her house, but also because I feel clear for now of the complications of the Burma manuscript, Rivers of Flavor. I've now reviewed the edited manuscript, made my own changes and rewrites etc, and just before I left home I got it all photocopied (in case the original gets lost along the way). Once I'm home, tomorrow night, I can package it up and FedEx it back to NYC.

Getting to this stage before I left Toronto yesterday was a huge boon. My head feels clearer and my step lighter.

I enjoy working hard at things. So why this pleasure at having finished this intensive stage of work? I think it's because I get anxious when I owe something to someone else. When I work hard at something for me, it's not so fraught. But when I owe the ms back within a certain time, it feels like a load. At the same time I think deadlines are desirable and useful things, constraints to keep me in line. But why this over-reacton to them? Why do they weigh so heavily? I suppose it is doubt, an undermining doubt that I will get done what I have undertaken, so I get impatient to be finished, impatient to be reassured that in fact I can and will come through in the way I need and want to.

And then I turn on the TV here and who is on? Aung San Suu Kyi talking to Charlie Rose, live on Skype. Amazing. Now there's a person who has come through. I'm sure she's had doubts, and fears. And yet she has delivered. She's talking now about democracy, clear-thinking, human rights...and the need to go step by step. An amazing world, this, in which a very closed-off place Burma can be linked to the rest of the world. This cross-linking feels like a powerful weapon against totalitarianism. She's talking about the need for awareness, the need for the rest of the world to follow what is going on in Burma, and to really pay attention. "We need change in the right direction that is steady and sustained." Listen to hear what the people of Burma want, and then help us get what we want: that's her request to the people of the rest of the world. "We need a better education sytem, better health care, a more open society...[in Burma]". "I had to learn not to let fear control me." "You have to get over the fear in order to get committed to your ideals."

It's a good reminder. Let go the anxiety, admit the fear and then try to shed it, in order to be free to take action, move forward, commit... Some people need a lot of courage, people like the demonstrators in Yemen and Syria, who are being shot at and tortured by their governments. But we all need some measure of courage every day, and that takes admitting that we all feel fear and anxiety from time to time. It's not shameful, just reality.

Thanks to everyone who came out this evening in Glens Falls to hear me talk about RIce and taste some rices, and ask questions. It was a lot of fun. I love engaging with people, especially about basic foods. So, as I say, many thanks, and to the Crandall Public Library too. I'm looking forward to my drive back across New York State tomorrow. The landscapes are so beautiful, the greens intense with all the recent rain, and the leaves just starting to turn. The Adirondacks frame the horizon here...and will keep me company for the first part of the drive. What a treat.

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.

A MONTH OF EDITS AND LIGHTROOM EXPLORATIONS

There's a pop-pop-popping happening, sporadically close to and then farther away, as people all over Toronto set off fireworks. The annual July 1 Canada Day celebrations are almost over...and summer is just beginning. Many friends are already out of town. Half of them seem to be in Cape Breton or PEI, eastern Canada anyway.

I'm still here though, now done with my deadline and moving in the freer air of edits. Ann Bramson has, as she always does, some good ideas about how to present the Burma book, how to get people turned on and tuned in to Burma. And as always I need to find more interesting titles for the recipes (just plain "beef curry" doesn't cut it! for example). It's a treat to have the manuscript written and the chance to re-enter it and shape it further. I am amazed, as always, with how much greater my perspective is now that I've had a few weeks away from it (and the suggestions from Ann to help me take hold of it freshly).

The other work on the immediate horizon, and I wrote about this on my facebook fan page, is that I have started to try to take hold of LightRoom, the powerful and not-always-intuitively-understandable program that helps sort images and also work with them. Thanks to N, a friend of Tashi's I am feeling more confident and have a starting-to-grow understanding of how to use the program to sort and engage with my Burma images. They're all digital, most in RAW and some in JPEG. I need to pull about four hundred, so the designer has images to choose from for the book. They'll be portraits and markets and scenes of various kinds.

The first task is to find the strongest images, and then make sure there's a balanced group of picks to send. I feel a long way from slides and the physical and damage-able fragility of slides. It's always scary to send them out. But digital images are (once I get used to the basic idea of how ephemeral they are, how dependent on electricity and modern stuff like computers) less "fragile. I can send them and keep them at the same time. It would have been a hard concept for our forbears to grasp, for sure.

Good food this week, from the growing thriving herbs in the garden, and tender leaf lettuce, to garlic scapes (those curving elegant tips of young garlic, so delish lightly fried). Grilled some bavette this evening and poached asparagus, and had our first new potatoes of the year. Hurrah!

Yesterday a friend retested two different fish curries and a chutney,as well as a fish head soup, all recipes from Rivers of Flavor, the Burma book. A squeeze of lime at the end made a huge wonderful difference to the soup, pulling it all together. And the fish curries reminded Dawn to interrogate me about whether I was putting info about sustainable fish and those others we shouldn't be eating, into the Burma book.

(By the way, Jake Tilson has a fish book just out in the UK, and in the US in September, called "In at the Deep End: Cooking Fish Venice to Tokyo." It should be a wonderful resource, and beautiful, for Jake is a designer and has really made the book, not just the words and pictures. I can't wait to see it.)

In answer to Dawn's good reminder, I will put the URL of a couple of sites in the Burma book, sites that people can now consult to know whether a particular fish species is endangered, etc etc. More later, when I get the info.

Had a crisis this week, small but distracting. I had a guy named Eric come and connect the water to the garage out back, but then it turned out there was a leak somewhere. Lots of digging later (by Eric and also by me) and the solution turned out to be to replace one stretch of pipe. But meantime, apart from the blisters on my hands, I've lost leaf lettuce and mint (as dirt got piled on them, or dug up around them, or both) and also a huge amount of ivy, for we had to cut ivy roots as we dug. Most of the dirt pile is gone, and the hole/trench filled in. And now there's water and good pressure.

The digging and then refilling of the hole reminded me of how hard hard labour can be. It's really wearing. And often very low-paying. But why do we pay so much for brain work and so little for work that uses up your body? I know, it's about value, and demand etc. But it is a harsh unfair reality that guys who labour with their bodies often get worn out. And many who work in offices could not possibly do labouring work, (though many go to the gym to stay fit). The temptation to disdain what you cannot do is powerful in our culture, maybe in every culture. hmmm

Meantime I'm pleased that even though half the ivy has been stripped off the back building (I did that once it had wilted overnight after we cut the roots), the change or loss is not devastating. Instead it gives us all a chance to look freshly at how the garden is organised and how we might change things.

Once again the only "constant" is that everything is in flux and will change, so it's up to us to handle the shiftings and gains and losses on this roller-coaster of life with equilibrium, and to enjoy the ride!

LOOKING FORWARD...

Still here in lovely Chiang Mai, the eastern hills a lilac blue against the early evening sky, and Doi Sutep looming large and blue to the west. I have some follow-up notes to the last couple of posts:
- My friend Cassandra liked the sound of the Chiang Mai Cosmopolitan (see my end of January posting), but is pre-diabetic, so avoids tonic water. She wrote to tell me that she infuses gin with real (as opposed to fake-flavoured) Earl Grey tea. Sounds like a good idea especially for people who find tonic too sugary. (By the way, Cassandra’s website is www.foodarazzi.com, an ongoing exploration of new ways for diabetics to enjoy food and eating.)
- I have heard from a number of friends who cry that buffer days are what they need, but can’t seem to structure into their busy-ness. Hmmm
- I had a comment from a woman named Bee, who with her partner Jai has a fabulous blog/website called jugalbandi, strongly anchored in South Asian food, but also very wide-ranging, intelligent, and generous. I loved their long exploration of oils and fats, at: http://jugalbandi.info/2010/02/pantry-audit-oils-and-fats/#more-15885

This morning’s trip to my Thai coffee "appointment" at Chiang Mai Gate market took me past a woman selling “miang”, fermented tea leaves, the specialty that Burmese overseas pine for and that they call “laphet” (pronounced lapay’). For five baht she sold me a small bag of olive green moist miang, topped with julienned ginger. She tossed a little coarse salt into a separate bag, to eat with it. I’ve been nibbling on it through the day, and sharing it with Fern, who is northern Thai and loves it.

The miang has a taste almost of sorrel, lemony. This is “miang som” which is pickled (“som” meaning sour). In nothern Thailand there is also “miang wan” meaning sweet. The third one in the family, the word for which I forget, is miang that has fermented a long time, so that it’s stenchy, at least to non-lovers of it. (I think of it as the miang equivalent of lustfiske, the fermented-in-the-ground fish of Sweden, or Limburger cheese or durian fruit: heaven to afficionados and “difficult” for everyone else.)

In Burma, laphet is the essential ingredient in a delicious salad called laphet thoke. The other ingredients vary but usually include fried garlic and peanuts and sesame seeds and soybean halves, as well as chopped fresh tomato and ginger. The ingredients are mixed and blended together, in one presentation, or they may be served in separate piles, so each person can pick up the blend s/he likes. It’s often eaten at the end of a meal, as a refreshing finish.

All of this is to say that I’m hoping to figure out an equivalent. It won’t/can’t be the same, but I would love to get that same mouth-watering acid-lemon taste, together with the lovely crunch of the fried ingredients and freshness of the tomato. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m increasingly thinking about how much recipe work and photo work lies ahead once I get to Toronto. I have at least backed up my photos onto a small hard drive (and I of course still have a film photographer’s reflexes, so I also keep my “originals” in the form of the miniature cards that go into the camera.) Once I’m back in Toronto I’ll do another back-up onto another hard-drive, and then hope that I’ve placated the e-gods sufficiently.

After that of course the images need to be sorted and labelled, the rejects tossed firmly into the trash bin, and the others tidied up. None of this is my favorite thing to do, not at all!

Compared to the computer and techie work on the photos, the recipe work and research feels extremely inviting, a great pile of yummy exploration for spring and summer. Hurrah!