SOLSTICE EVE GREETINGS

Here we are on the eve of the solstice, the shortest darkest day of the year. I like it, for it marks the start of our climb back into the light.

Speaking of climb: I seem to have been lost in a tunnel underground for the last six weeks, so tied up with writing and recipe-testing for the book, and with some magazine work too, that I have been paralyzed and unable/unwilling to focus on writing here. My apologies for the long gap.

I got back to Toronto from the Caucasus on October 25^th. As always after a trip, I felt immersed in where I’d been, with echoes of language, people’s voices, the taste of all the food I’d eaten, the mental pictures of places and people, and unwilling to let all that go. And so I plunged into recipe testing and some writing too. I can now look back on those first post-trip weeks with satisfaction, because they produced a satisfyingly thick sheaf of recipes and also some cross-connections to earlier work. I still have a lot more to do of course. Yikes!

I’m now exactly six months from when I’d like to be sending the manuscript to Ann Bramson, my wonderful editor at Artisan. She has such a good sense of the shape of a book, and a marvellous aesthetic sense too, so that I know it will get pulled together and made beautiful as we work our way through the editing and design stages. That confidence I feel is an essential part of what keeps me on track.

In mid-November I went to New York for an overnight, to see Ann and to see a show at the Met that is due to close January 4, 2015: From Assyria to Ancient Iberia. It was spectacular, an exploration, through statues, cookware, jewelry, and other artifacts, of the cross-communication and evolution of cultures between the region of Assyria and ancient Armenia (known as Urartu) in the east to the Phoenicians and the Hittites, the Etruscans, and settlements on the Iberian peninsula (the Mediterranean coast of present-day Spain) all in the ten centuries before the Christian era.

If you have the chance, do go and see it. It explains the interstices between empires…whereas in school we learned about empire and conquest, this is about trade and communication of ideas, especially ideas of design and artistic endeavour. Fabulous. And encouraging as a sign of human perseverance and continuity.

More immediately, in the here and now of the solstice season, I did manage to get the garden dug in mild weather and the last chiles and arugula etc harvested. I’ve made quark stollen using mostly red Fife wheat (delicious) and Cretan biscotti, entirely with red fife, and candied lemon peel and candied turmeric. Next on my list are mandel melbas (thin fine almond biscotti).

But in the next few days I will be out and about, eating other people’s cooking and taking a break from the kitchen and from recipes and productiveness. I tell myself that it’s a good idea to change rhythm. And the seasonal celebrations give me a good excuse to slack off!

I hope that during the holidays you are going to have some time to kick back and read or play or be out with friends or do whatever your heart desires, without worrying about obligations. We all need a little respite from our daily round.

And raise a glass to the returning sun, once we pass the solstice tomorrow, in hopes that it brings us a more peaceful year and some joy and hope…

SOLSTICE THOUGHTS ABOUT OTHERS IN THE WORLD

The solstice has come and we’re now headed back into the light. It was hard to take in that realisty during the storm of freezing rain on Saturday night and Sunday. But by today, when the sun came out and we saw blue sky I felt a YES! things are already brighter.

Tomorrow is Christmas; it’s already come in many parts of the world. I’ve been baking today (after shopping for oysters etc for tomorrow) and the house is filled with warm smells of spices and baking loaves and cookies. But nearby there’s no baking going on, nor any cooking at all. I was reminded forcefully of that todqy by a guy who makes the pates and other charcuterie at Sanagan’s, my local butcher. I asked if he was cooking, or being cooked for, for Christmas. “There’s no cooking” he said. “We have no power.” He lives in the eastern suburbs of Toronto, the area hardest hit by the ice storm and its aftermath: downed trees, downed power lines and telephone lines, pumping stations and microwave towers out of commission, and so on.

Many are staying with friends, taken in for a meal or a bath or to sleep. But others may be without friends or without the means to call for help. And so the have and have-not divide is being expressed in new and painful ways here in the “first world” that is Toronto.

It’s sobering.

Meantime in South Sudan there is murder and desolating violence going on… And in the central African Republic, and along Burma’s border areas… How and why do we carry on in personal happiness and satisfaction when others are suffering?

I think it’s about survival. Most of us cannot live with a daily acknowledgement of the suffering of others. We wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning; it would drive us literally crazy.

But others, rare others, manage to take action. They include the extraordinary brave and imaginative wmen of Pussy Riot, as well as countless un-famous incividuals who toil in the trenches to make things better where they are.

I’ve just read a remarkable novel, a difficult book in its story and truths, and also an astonishing one. It’s by Anthony Marra and is set in Chechnya. I avoid scary movies and violent movies, but somehow I couldn’t put the book down. It spoke truth to me. The title is A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. And in it people struggle to be present to others, to help when help is painful to give and to receive, and when all effort seems hopeless.

A must-read.

I try to read a book of intensity and range at Christmas, fiction or non-fiction. And to have time alone. My first experience of a Christmas like that was in my mid-twenties. I had been included in another family’s Christmas, warm and welcoming, the previous year. It was right after my mother had died. I was grateful, but the whole experience was somehow alienating, as if I was trying to pretend that I was really warmed by the warmth of others.

And so the following year I had a Christmas Day on my own, a walk and a long good read (Paul Goodman’s book Growing Up Absurd). I needed to be face to face with my aloneness.

And now? Well now I wrap my family of friends around me for part of the holidays and for a good part of the year. But I treasure the time I have alone, often lonely, while travelling or just being wherever I am. And in those moments I try to look the despair of the world in the eye. It seems so important to acknowledge it and give it respect. And to think about how, in whatever way large or small, we can each try to make things better for others.

So that’s my wish for this solstice season, that we consider the pain in the world, that we give it our attention for a while, and then try to commit to some action to help with it, whatever we can manage.

SOLSTICE ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS

This run of fabulous summer weather is continuing, giving us soft nights where the air is skin temperature and everyone is out in the streets walking, chatting, hanging out at a bar or cafe.  I love pedalling in the dark through the soft air, whooshing along on my bicycle. It's so freeing.

These weeks in the daytime, along College and also on Bloor, the bars fill around lunchtime and are open to the street, so we can all see the action and hear the cheers and the groans: people are glued to large screens as they watch the next round of European Cup soccer.

Yesterday afternoon I walked past a small bar and got waved in. "Who are you supporting?" asked several guys sitting along the bar. I looked at the screen: Netherlands 1; Portugal 0. "Portugal" I said.  Huge smiles.  "Come, sit down! What will you have?" I demurred, needing to get home because guests were coming for an early father's day supper. "Next time!" they said cheerfully, and went back to the game. Later Portugal rallied to beat the Dutch and advance to the next round.  


I really must get out to watch a match or two this week.  Every two years we have this pleasure, either the World Cup or the European Cup, as fans settle in to watch the matches and cheer, and put flags on their cars and honk their way down the street when their team wins. Even-numbered Junes in Toronto are enriched by all this.

Meantime the annual pleasures continue to unfold: the peonies are done, but the tall red rose bush (more a skinny tree than a bush in fact) is loaded with rich-red heads, and the day lilies are starting to bloom. The tomato and pepper plants that went in four weeks ago are looking healthy; I've mulched the tomatoes in an effort to discourage blight. I've been eating scads of sweet and tender broccoli raab grown from seed this spring. And there's a tall kale plant that came through the winter and has tender grey-green leaves, great for quick stir-frying.  The red okra seeds that were planted at the same time as the rapini have not produced much growth. They may have needed more warmth to get started. And they also seem to attract slugs, so they're always hitting setbacks.Win a few, lose a few, is the theme of the garden and needs to be the motto of the gardener, or else s/he goes crazy.

Last night we had a mixed greens salad of leaves from all over the garden, from slightly mature romaine to oak leaf lettuce to some sorrel and tender spinach...Nothing better than fresh lettuce. But as it gets tough in the heat, I am starting to look forward to the first cherry tomatoes, still three to four weeks away probably. sigh.

Tomorrow I teach the last of my six classes on Foods that Changed the World. It has been such a pleasure, as well as lots of work. It makes me want to teach a second food-related course. I've been thinking about something that could explore fermentation and preservation "Putting Food By" kinds of things, from soy processing to cheese to wine and dried fruit to pickles in Japan and Korea, etc. You get the idea.

The question is, how to make it enticing for students? The whole subject of butter and milk products, not just cheese but also yogurt and its cousins, is a huge one. If you have any thoughts on this, on what a good course title and focus might be, please write to me. I find swimming in the large layered ocean that is humankind's relation to and inventiveness with food and food production to be infinitely fascinating. There is so much to wonder at and be amazed by.

And on a non-food topic, speaking of amazement: I went to see the latest Robert Lepage, Playing Cards (part 1 -  Spades) on Friday night. What a brilliant spectacle, linked stories and scenes miraculously stitched together on a round flexible stage. Unbelievable.  Yes he is a genius.

And back to food: I want to make boxty for the class tomorrow: potato flatbreads from Ireland.  there are many versions. The ones I'll make (from my recipe in HomeBaking) are delicious. They include cooked potato and grated raw potato, with wheat flour and some butter or bacon drippings. I'll make a batch of each so people can compare. And then we'll talk about coffee and wine and liquor and beer... Human beings have been brewing and fermenting and distilling beers and wines and spirits from grains and sugar since the beginning of time it seems.  What better way to sum up the history of basic foods over time?

DANCING FREEDOM AT MIDSUMMER

This is the first sunny morning for a week I think, maybe more. The birds are singing with pleasure. I feel like June has mostly slipped away in the clouds and rain, instead of sparkling and blooming as it usually does. Egads, here it is already the 26th!

The twenty-fourth of June is "Midsummer" in English tradition and St Jean-Baptiste, the fete nationale in Quebec. It's a day for bonfires and dancing, the solstice-season celebration, just as Saturnalia-turned-Christmas was/is the date to celebrate the returning sun at winter solstice time.

That urge to make a festival and let go cares at these significant turning points in the year is deeply embedded. And so maybe that's why this year we decided to have a dancing party on the 24th. What a great thing, to be able to dance and play with the doors open to the long-bright evening sky, voices soft in the summer air, the lush green of the garden a generous backdrop, enwrapping everyone in the oasis that is our small back yard.

Some people are picky about the music they'll dance to, while others dance to whatever is on.... And it doesn't matter. In fact, when the music's on and I'm dancing, not much else matters: I'm in the bubble and high of moving and feeling free of care and any thought really. I forgot that I'd had hurt in my left foot, I let go of worries about the edits I need to do on the Burma book, and all those others nagging things that can make me bog down and lose track of the big picture. High on endorphins? High on summer?

Maybe the joy of dancing is that we retrieve our freedom. It's freedom in movement, freedom through movement. Young E, now a few months past her fifth birthday, sure felt that freedom. She danced on her own and with others on the wide open floor, and instead of tiring, seemed to get more and more composed and happy, energised in the best way.

There were summer flavours to sustain us, as well as the music. The stars were the snap peas that Brenda brought down from her CSA farm in Grey County. She'd picked them that morning. We put out a huge bowl of them, raw and brilliant green, de-stringed but otherwise as nature (and Brenda!) grew them. They vanished. Other treats were two different boxes of home-made cookies; mountains of organic grapes, red and green ones (OK not local, but a great refresher after a stint of sweaty dancing!); a brilliant hummous topped with pesto; a creamy lush guacamole; three sauces from Burma, such taste hits; and more that I can't remember. Evelyn's Crackers, and lots of sticky rice - white with a little black mixed in for texture- were the backbone that held it all together.

People drink water when they dance, and yes wine or beer, but they're not pouring it back, so the gaiety doesn't get loutish or stupid, or morose! We had six young people sleeping over on Friday night... When I headed to bed at 3.30 most of them were still up and chatting in that comfortable post-party way, reluctant to lose the intimacy of the night. But as I drifted off I heard the first birds chirping: it was already time for the pre-dawn lightening of the sky.

It reminded me of a time in northern Finland long ago when, camped by a lake, a friend and I stayed up through the night to photograph the midnight sun as it made its circuit. It dipped north in the "nighttime" hours but never went below the horizon. The sounds of the forest went on without a pause. When summer is short and winter is dark, there's not a moment to waste.

If that's a metaphor for life, then engaging with it and enjoying what we have in the way of health and friends and meaningful obligations, while we have them, is what the dance of life is all about. We don't need dancing shoes! It just takes an awareness that the music's playing and the invitation is ours to accept...

ASSERTING OUR FREEDOMS, A SOLSTICE OBLIGATION

It’s been an eventful thirty-six hours, starting with stupid kitchen accidents and ending with serendipity. First the stupid accidents: I was trying to make myself useful to Dawn, who was preparing for a big catering job. She suggested I could shave fennel for her, for a salad, using a mandolin. Hers is a good one, and sharp. And believe it or not, but I had never used a mandolin before. You can guess the rest: I sliced my middle fingertip. Ouch! Yikes! Gauze and bandaid firmly on, I went back to my task, resolved to be careful. But I was still, in retrospect I now realise, using the wrong technique. You have to hold your hand flat, not grasp the vegetable you are slicing but instead just press it against the blade with your flattened palm. And so of course I managed to slice another fingertip, even more bloodily than the first (no, no blood on the food, don’t worry!!). More "ouch!" more "yikes!".

Since then, almost as if I had paid ahead for it, life has been wonderful in many ways. Dom and I drove to the airport and picked up Tashi and Duncan, hot off their charter flight from Rome, still bright-eyed, and very awake. Such a treat to see them and to hear them talk about their trip as we made and ate supper and hung around together.

And today, after a morning run and a long coffee with a friend, I did a market shop and then managed to get a recipe figured out on my first try, a yummy dish of chicken livers, cut into bite-size, and bathed in a thick rich “curry sauce”. I was trying to reproduce something I’d eaten in Hsipaw, in the Shan State, at a Burmese (rather than a Shan) restaurant. The chicken livers are tender and just cooked, the sauce has a depth of flavor that is surprising and inviting.

I hurried a little with the recipe because I’d promised to go help a chef here with a find-raising event tonight. When you’re feeding 300 people, you need a lot of hands just for plating/serving. And so, along with a crowd of others I carved beef and drizzled on sauce and put out slices of cheese etc, as the courses went out one after the other. The late afternoon and evening were clear and beautiful, the light sharp, so that everything glowed in a solstice celebratory kind of way. And the guests were happy and felt celebratory too, the food was so good, so beautiful.

My bicycle ride back, along paths in the forest, was peaceful, yes, but also a bit iffy, with only a flickering bike light in the dark. I was grateful that the moon, coming full, made small occasional patches of light through the forest canopy, so that I was able to pedal along tracks and finally up a steep path in the forest without incident and at last out into quiet residential streets.

But then the big city part of the trip was a huge contrast, Saturday night uptown, with lights and cars and revellers in summer frocks. From that scene in a few minutes I was in quiet again, as I pedalled through the University of Toronto, nearly home now. But then, and this is the serendipity, as I got to Queen’s Park, by the provincial legislature, at about ten o’clock, there was a big crowd, and live music. YES! Salif Keita and his band were playing in the warm summer night in the park. I propped my bike against a fence and started dancing, and they played and played...

So as I write, my feet are a little bruised from dancing barefoot for over an hour on rough ground, and I still have the music echoing in my ears, Salif Keita’s distinctive enticing voice and the drumming! How lovely.

Two sliced fingertips are nothing balanced against this fabulous twenty-four hours. And even without the serendipitous end to this day, the fact that I am free to ride my bicycle, to say yes to helping a friend, to poke around trying to figure out a recipe, to love my grown up kids and tell them so, these are the important things to celebrate. Today Aung San Suu Kyi turns sixty-five. There was a vigil in her honour, but also to remember all those who are not free, held a couple of evenings ago downtown. It was a sobering reminder of how precious daily freedoms are. We need to celebrate them and exercise them.

This coming week, as the men with guns descend even more intensely on this city (the G-20 are meeting here next weekend, so there are cement and metal security fences downtown and closures of institutions such as the university and galleries and banks etc, for four days to a week, and a general flight out of the city by all who can), is the time to assert our freedoms. For me that means NOT fleeing but staying, asserting normalcy in the face of the security hysteria and wild overspending that our conservative government is visiting upon us. I say NO to all that. I plan to bicycle around, to see friends, to refuse the powerful messages of fear.

Fear is the enemy of freedom, freedom of movement, of thought, of action, of creativity and imagination. In other words it’s the enemy of all that makes us human. So it’s a big NO to fear. That’s MY solstice resolution! Let the sun shine in!

As the buddhist monk who led us in a prayer at the vigil said, and we repeated after: “may we be free” - “may we be free”... “of enmity” - “of enmity”.

WARM FLAVOURS TO KEEP OUT THE COLD AND BRIGHTEN THE DARK

There's an aggressiveness to the cold temperatures of December here in Toronto, especially in contrast to the easy warmth of Chiang Mai. But at the same time the bite of cold air on my cheeks as I hurried along on foot this morning to meet some friends, the Sunday streets deserted, the campus at the University of Toronto people-less like a stage-set, was a great tonic. The world seemed to be saying 'Yes, you exist and so does the natural world and HERE, in this snap and burn of cold cheeks, this little shiver of a draught on the wrists because you've forgotten to pull your orange mittens up, is where we meet."

Winter. Tomorrow we turn the corner as we hit the shortest day and welcome the idea that the sun will return and the days will get longer. We have some months of winter cold and snow and ice, but at least we'll have longer days and eventually we'll start to feel warmer temperatures and see leaf buds forming on the trees.

This annual cycle in the northern climes is a lesson in patience and hope. The subtropical version, say in Thailand, is a three season cycle, where hot season is the killing time, when plants become dormant and the leaves have gone from many of the trees. There it is the monsoon rain that brings the world back to life; here it is the return of the sun, giving light and warmth too.

People from higher latitudes annually wait for the sun's return, and celebrate it with food and festivities, from Saturnalia to Christmas to Hanukkah. Tomorrow night in Kensington Market, a few blocks from the house, is the annual (it's been going for over 20 years now) Festival of Lights, with stilt people wearing mythic creatures' heads that sway above the crowd, children and adults carrying lanterns: light in the dark and excitement in the air.

Many of our foods of celebration at this time of year connect with the hope for a renewal of warmth and fertility, a new harvest, new life. At Ukrainian and Russian Christmas, there's kulcha, the wheat berry and poppyseed (often) and honey "soup", delicious ritual food that opens the Christmas eve feast. And there's also an egg-rich (yellow like the sun) Christmas bread, just as there is in Sweden.

I confess I've made none of the above this year. But I have been celebrating my return to Toronto and to friends and family with some winter cooking. I began, two nights ago, as a way of fighting jetlag-tiredness at eight in the evening, by making candied peel. I'd bought organic lemons and oranges and grapefruit, so it was easy, even in my dazed state, to peel them (cut off the peel at the stem end, then peel off tidy wedges) and then boil the peels in plenty of water for about an hour to remove bitterness. (I store the peeled fruit in a sealed plastic bag, ready to be eaten; all but the lemons have already gone.) I drained the peels then boiled them in more water for another twenty minutes or so. In another pot (non-reactive) I stirred three cups of sugar into one and a half cups of water and brought it to a boil, then let it simmer. Once I'd drained the peels again I added them to the syrup and simmered it for about an hour, pushing on the peels with a wooden spoon to immerse them.

The peels looked so gorgeous when I lifted them out onto parchment paper-lined baking sheets, all gleaming and rich-coloured, like stained glass. it's been two days, so they've dried out nicely and now I have most of them coated in extra sugar (put sugar in a paper bag and toss in the peels in batches so they get coated). The extra sugar stops them sticking to one another.

Freinds and visitors now have treats to snack on, and I have small beautiful presents to take to others. The leftover syrup, now beautifully citrussy, is delicious drizzled on ice cream for example, or just snuck, as a quickie spoonful, when the jar in the frig catches my eye. Of course it also makes a good glaze for fruit tarts. Hmmm - maybe I should move on to something like that next week?

The peels are also a reminder of earlier times, when precious oranges and lemons and citrons would arrive in northern Europe from the Mediterranean, just at the cold and dark time of year. What better way to make use of the whole fruit than by preserving the peel, with all its intense flavour? The English traditionally make mincemeat with the peel, and use it to flavour Christmas cakes and fruits cakes generally, and of course there's peel in many stollen, the German advent cake. Any other winter baking that you can tell me about that uses candied peel?

Perhaps made bold by the peel, and finding my Toronto kitchen reflexes again, I had slightly ambitious supper plans tonight that included a leekie pie. There's another welcome winter taste, those luscious leeks. After supper I used the leftover eggwhite to make lemon-zest macaroons then caught that cookbook bug (you turn the page and get inspired by the next recipe, and the next...). I was in HomeBaking, in the cookies section. So as I write there is the first stage (the loaf) of mandel melbas (four large eggs, a cup of toasted almonds, 3/4 cup of sugar and 1 1/2 cups all-purpose, all stirred together, then spooned into a loaf pan and baked at 350 F) chilled and waiting to be thinly sliced and rebaked (for fifteen minutes at 300 F) , and there are sweet Cretan paximadia, made with olive oil and wine and cinnamon and cloves, slowly crisping up in the oven.

I know they'll all get eaten, and quickly. And each bite of citrus peel or aromatic paximadia will connect us to warmth, and to the hope and promise of the solstice, that life will indeed be renewed again this year...