SPRINGTIME POSSIBILITIES, & A SWEET TREAT

I feel full to bursting with ideas and thoughts. That’s partly due to my once again having left a large number of days between posts and writing here. But it’s also perhaps because it’s springtime, with sharp light and new energy, and fresh thoughts, all of them seeking expression.

I’m caught with a lot of possible entry-points. One of them is my aunt’s birthday a couple of days ago, that took her to 91. She’s not in a place where she can appreciate it, having slipped into some verison of dementia a few years ago. And yet she lives on, walking and eating and responding a little to smiles and simple stimuli. Another is the distracted place I find myself in, with projects that take my thoughts in opposite and complicated directions. 

I am giving a talk on Burma at Cornell, another quite different demo-talk at the IACP in ten days, also on Burma, and yet another in Toronto on April 11. In between there is a story to write that takes me back to a butchered moose. And as a backdrop, I am waiting around until Nou-Roz (Persian new year) is over, so that I can hear whether or not I have a visa to Iran. If I do, I then need to sort out travel arrangements, including the finding of an appropriate “manteau” or light overcoat, the basic decorum required of women along with a head scarf.

This is not a complaint, quite the reverse. I am just trying to describe the kind of time travel and geographic and idea disorientation that sometimes grips me. It’s like a kind of drug trip or stoner experience. And that would be fine – “just enjoy it by letting go” – except that I also need to be solid, straight, focussed, in order to meet some deadlines and not mess up.

Still, it’s all fun too, that life can throw up all these sometimes contradictory messages and rhythms. It’s a learning and adapting process.

This evening I went to see a film. And it, the fact of it, was a huge reminder that it’s valuable if we can push ourselves beyond the boundaries of what we know and into taking chances and risking ourselves. The film is by my friend Kathy Wazana, and called THEY WERE PROMISED THE SEA. It’s a documentary that looks at the exodus of the Jewish population from Morocco after 1956, and especially in the early 1960’s despite their reluctance to leave, and the deep unhappiness of their Muslim neighbours to see them go. The picture of Muslim-Jewish neighbourliness and collaboration in daily life, including music, is powerful.

Kathy took on the film project even though she had never made a film before. Yes she had help and advice from friends and professionals. But the fact is, she embarked bravely to make what is a wonderful powerful and persuasive film, just because she felt it should be made. She has unearthed an important and unacknowledged part of Arab-Jewish history, and has made everyone the richer.

***

I wrote the above last Sunday, and now here it is already Friday. I’m back from Cornell, about five hours each way with the border wait-time (under half an hour), and stimulated by the conversations and interactions I had there. It is a treat to be with people who engage seriously with ideas. There were religious studies people, rice scientists, a government studies person, Southeast Asian specialists of other kinds…there at my talk, and a dinner the previous night, because they have an interest in Burma. I felt very welcomed, very lucky to be there.

Still no news on the Iran visa. And that means that I will probably end up using my April travel window to go to Georgia instead. Each starts with a direct flight to Istanbul (Turkish Airlines flies out of Toronto, so lucky). And Georgia gives visas on arrival, thank heavens, so that last minute planning should be OK.

In this mishmash post of the fragments on my to-do list, I should mention too that the BURMA book is headed into a second reprinting. I'm thrilled that people are finding it accessible and engaging. This time I’ve been able to make some some corrections and tweaks, which feels good. They come from new understandings I’ve gleaned about beans and peas, the dried ones that are cooked and eaten for breakfast in Burma.

And finally, last, but not least, I owe a recipe for my simple skillet cake to a reader who wrote to me several weeks ago, because I had referred to it in my “Global Pantry” column in the April issue of Cooking Light magazine. Here then are instructions, in a shorthand version of the recipe:

The cake is shallow, and not hugely sweet, so it gets eaten at all hours of the day and night as food rather than sugary treat. I usually put chopped apples on top; you can leave it without, or top with cooked rhubarb, leaving out most of the wettest juice, or with berries... It's a very forgiving cake. That's the point.

 Preheat the oven to 400 fahrenheit. Oil a wide cast-iron skillet (9 inch or 10).

In one bowl beat ¼ pound softened butter with 1 cup sugar (I like to use brown) until smooth, add 1 cup plain yogurt and beat a little (you can instead use canned coconut milk - my Global Pantry suggestion - with the juice of 1 lemon, an acid for the baking powder to work with), then whisk 4 eggs in a separate bowl and add them. Add a dash of vanilla if you want. Set aside.

In another bowl combine 2 cups flour (I use a mixture, usually 1 cup whole wheat pastry floour and 1 cup some blend, or else all-purpose or whatever you want), ½ teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon baking soda, 1 teaspoon baking powder, generous cinnamon, a dash or more of powdered cloves, and stir.

Whisk the wet again and then add to the dries and stir just until everything is wet.

Pour into the greased skillet, and if not topping with fruit, sprinkle on some brown sugar for crunch.

Put into the top third of the oven.

If topping with fruit, put in the oven and let cook while you core and slice four or five apples (I leave peel on, or partly peel them) or pears, or either with a few frozen berries… and mix in a bowl with a little brown sugar or maple syrup, and perhaps a squeeze of lime or lemon juice if you want.

After 15 minutes lower the heat to 385.

If topping with fruit, add it now: take the skillet out, gently strew the fruit on top, staying clear of the edges, and put back in to finish baking.

The cake will take 50 minutes, not quite an hour. Check it at 45 minutes…the edges will be starting to pull away from the sides. Do the skewer test, to make sure the centre is cooked.

Take out and let stand for ten minutes. Run and dull knife around the edge to make sure there are no sticking places, then place a large plate over and turn over, so it sits out on the plate. Use a second plate to turn it over, so it is fruit side up.

(If you didn’t use fruit, you might want to leave it upside down; you have a smooth surface if you want to ice it…; that said I usually prefer to have it right side up).

Happy spring, Easter, Passover, Holi, and Nou-Roz to all…

RHUBARB, ALMOND MILK, & NEW POSSIBILITIES

Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb.  For me it's a major contender for the title "Best of the intensities of spring."  The competition includes ramps, lilacs, lilies of the valley, the sweet aroma of cottonwoods in new leaf, the fabulous sharp light...

I'm staying this Victoria Day weekend with a friend at her new place north of Toronto, near a village called Dunedin.  Her house is built into the side of a hill, with air and wind and light in all directions.  The breezes mean that there are no flies or mosquitoes, and being up on a hill gives a full panoramic view of a ridge of the Niagara Escarpment to the south and east.  At night there's the vast starry sky.

Yesterday I went exploring early, before the heat (has the May long weekend ever been this hot?).  There's a branch of the Bruce trail nearby, starting with a wooden stile at the roadside just down the hill.  What a treat to be out in new-to-me country, with a trail to follow and birds and other morning sounds to keep me company.  There was some elegant easy boardwalk over a long swampy stretch, then a climb, a bridge across a creek, grassy fields, airy hardwood forest, sweeps of dark ploughed earth, expanses of grassy pasture...and layers of greening landscape overlapping off into the distance.

In one forested stretch clumps of ramps showed green and healthy, and out in the grass there were patches of strawberries in white bloom, flagging the spot to go back and seek them out in a few weeks.  This morning I took my friend and the other two who are staying up this weekend out on a walk on the trail.  We breathed in the air, listened to the forest, breathed it all in and felt grateful, and renewed.

My friend wants to have a garden.  But there's a problem: there are deer in these hills, tall white-tailed deer.  Three of them were grazing on a slope in front of the house a couple of days ago.  They caught sight of me as I came round the corner of the house and went leaping off, with huge bounds, but not running fast, their tails like white banners.  Herbs will be fine, but with deer around any garden greens, lettuces, etc are doomed.  We'll see if they like basil.  Does anyone know?  But at least on this sunny slope she'll be able to have lavender and the perennial herbs like thyme and tarragon and mint.  And she wants masses of lilacs... Spring will be a heady perfumed time up here next year if all goes well.

Along the trail we came upon some ramps (wild leeks) growing in clumps, and some intensely fresh mint growing near a stream.  We gathered dandelion greens and a few ramp; they'll all go into soup for lunch today, along with dried mushrooms.  And then we'll have mint tea to refresh ourselves before we head back into the city.

And rhubarb?  Well I brought some up from the city, grown locally, and cooked it up as part of supper on Saturday night.  We were four, eating local pork that had been spice-rubbed, grilled, then sliced, along with quinoa, and stir-fried amarmanth greens.  Wonderful.  Then some people dropped by yesterday and brought more rhubarb, which became dessert last night (sweetened with a mix of maple syrup and honey).

But of all the food in this rather rambling (blame it on a relaxing weekend ) post, the one I want to tell you about is not local: almonds.  My friend loves nuts.  She makes sure to wash them thoroughly, to avoid mould, then she dries them in a cool oven (at about 100 fahrenheit) overnight.  That's fine for walnuts etc.  But with almonds she goes one further:  She washes them, then soaks them for three days, changing the water each day, to get them to start sprouting.  Then it's easy to slip them out of their peel/skin.  She freezes the peeled almonds in batches.

The final goal is almond milk: almonds blended with warm water in a strong blender or osterizer make almond milk.  You can then add other fruits to them to make a smoothie.  But even more delicious was the breakfast she made for us yesterday:  Heat the freshly made almond milk in a pot, add oatmeal and cook it in the almond milk.  Then, and this will give you pause, whisk together a couple of eggs and stir them into the hot mass of oatmeal and milk.  When they're just cooked, serve in bowls, and add honey to sweetened a little, or fruit, if you want.

It sounds and reads and looks like a wild combo.  It's delicious, satisfying, a new horizon for me.

(One thing I loved about the oatmeal was that there was no milkiness to it.  I don't like fresh milk, and it doesn't like me much either!  To be eating oatmeal, which I like a lot, without having any queasy feeling, no milky bubble in my throat, was a revelation, a whole new oatmeal experience.)

Now to find organic almonds and start the soaking/sprouting process.

Sprouting...another springing-to-life idea.  How wonderful.

MAKING HEADWAY IN THIS GREEN & FLOWERING TIME

I apologise for not posting for nine days. I'm in the sprint-to-the-finish-line stage of my Burma book. Writing here feels like an easy pleasure, a welcome and unpermitted distraction you might say, so I haven't dared even think about it for more than a week. I have so much work to do! On the other hand, there's a lot done; it really feels like a book. What a great thing to be able to say that. Now I'm just obsessing about details, as always!

And with spring springing so beautifully, and slowly this year, there's lots to celebrate, even as I complain about how deep in my deadline trench I am!

Just an update about this and that: My lilies of the valley are still not quite out, so that makes them a full two weeks late. My trilliums, valiant survivors in the harsh city envirnment, have just finished. On the other hand the crab apple tree that spreads the full width of the front yard is in glorious show-offy bloom, delicately scented, like a dreamy miracle. And as I run in the mornings, these last damp and rainy days, the humidity carries the scent of blooming fruit trees, and the overcast light makes the colours pop. It's pretty psychedelic out there! The best I think is the fall of brilliant citron-yellow-green little tree-flowers from the maple trees. They carpet the dark-with-rain sidewalks in an incredible glowing blanket of colour. Yesterday at the end of the street someone had dropped a couple of pink flowers, almost magenta, onto the brilliant green. It was intense, a jolt for the eyeballs!

In the back garden my first lettuce greens are up, little green spots of hope, planted ten days ago as seeds and rained on since. It's an exciting time as I visualise the shape of the garden this year. I've been eating dandelion greens from the back, and garlic chives, stir-fried with a little turmeric and mustard seed, a great start to the day, ingesting greenness and life!

Speaking of life, this week I tried to see if I could get cooked soybeans to ferment the way it's done by the Shan and northern Thais...and it worked! It's a recipe for Shan (Tai Yai) tua nao, dried disks of fermented soybean paste. I cooked the soybeans on Saturday and by this morning they were fermented and sweet-smelling, so I added salt and ground them to a paste in the processor. The paste is delish, on its own and also when fried a little; now I have a stash in a jar in my fridge, there to play with.

Tua nao disks are available in markets in northern Thailand and Burma, but here if I want them I have to make them. Of course there are substitutes, such as fermented soybeans from China, and even miso paste, but I'm delighted to know that if someone wants to make them from scratch, it's easily doable. That's my big hurrah! for the day! I'll try shaping some disks and drying them out in a low oven (since the air is too damp right now to dry anything!) tomorrow.

I dropped by the AGO the other day (yes, I have been taking the odd break!) and saw the Inuit exhibition, a collection now donated to the gallery, of mostly modern (post 1970) pieces, but with some old too, to give context. There's a wonderfully expressive figure, standing, carved from whalebone, and some minimalist soapstone carvings, huge smooth blocks with just enough detail carved to make you see the bird or the musk-ox. They're weighty with seriousness and somehow heart-stopping. Whalebone is such an extraordinary medium, so alive and so varied in its textures. The Henry Moore pieces in a neighbouring gallery look like they too, some of them, are carved from whalebone, as if they are an extension of the Inuit work.

As the news out of Syria etc continues dramatic and troubling, I can't stop checking twitter (I use Tweetdeck, which at least simplifies and sorts the incoming) for news. The rhythm of that is of course directly opposed to my need to settle in to editing, writing the last bits of text, polishing, etc. But the alternative, to ignore what's happening, is not acceptable. It feels as if, even from this distance, we should at least be imagining and thinking about what is going on, don't you think?

Recipes, and food questions seem trivial next to political action and active suffering, but they are all part of life and all necessary, that's what I tell myself. After all, growing food and getting it on the table every day is what keeps people going, and allows them to find some self-respect when life is tough or oppressive. Or so it seems to me.

And the kitchen is a place we can all retreat to, in fact, and in our imaginations, when we're feeling squeezed. It's a place of comfort, a feeling of home, an emotional refuge too.

Maybe that's why in these last weeks I feel so tempted to flee the computer and retest recipes. Taking concrete action is often much easier than working away to shape a difficult paragraph or think through a complicated concept. And at the end of recipe testing there's food to eat, and to feed others, which feels a lot more valuable, often, than whatever ideas I manage to express on a page.

But now I'm whining. It's time to stop that!

Time instead to celebrate a lot of birthdays, R, and X, and E and D and lots more, I'm sure, whom I'm forgetting. They get to celebrate at this flowering lovely time of year, when all is promise and freshness and optimism. How lovely!

LOST AND FOUND, COLOUR AND LIFE RETURNING

The ides of March and the long shadow of Julius Caesar welcome us to spring... Here in Toronto, after some lovely sun, we’ve had three days of rain and drizzle and wind and more rain. The ground is sodden and the first dark-red-edged green tulip leaves are an inch or two above the ground, as are the pale pointed leaves of the clumps of iris in the back garden.

My friend Cassandra is here from Vancouver, staying over tonight. I made her a quick diabetic-friendly late supper (meaning low-carb): chopped fennel and radicchio stir-fried in olive oil flavoured with mustard seed and dried chile and ginger, topped with a fried egg. The egg is from Potz at the market, pale green-blue and fresh, almost too beautiful to crack open. There was some Bleubry, a Quebec cheese new to me, to follow. Cassandra manages her pre-diabetic state with diligence and care and real discipline. I so feel lucky to be able to be casual and unplanned about my eating.

Cassandra is heading to the Maldives tomorrow with her daughter to go diving, a big treat for them both. (She and I long ago took a diving course together, then went diving in Cozumel and in the Red Sea. I've let it drop, but she's kept her certification..) Her fins are packed! So as I sit here writing this, she is busy doing advanced check-in: Toronto-DC-Doha-Male on Qatar Airways. It all feels very exotic to me, a lovely escape from chores such as taxes, the next entry on my “to-do” list.

I’ve been slowly gathering myself together this last week, unpacking not just my bags but also my head, from my long weeks in Chiang Mai and Burma. There was the first brilliant red tender Ontario rhubarb at the market the other day, so I used it to top a skillet cake. The colour was just glorious and the cake vanished. I’ve also done some banking, amended the immersethrough website to show the dates for next year, done my laundry, and seen a few friends, but I have still not managed to find my Canadian SIM card. And that pattern, of some things achieved and others very much NOT done, is somehow a familiar one from other times of travel and change.

Misplacing the SIM card reminds me that loss and finding seem to have been themes of my days this last while. I wrote earlier here about dropping my money-purse at Muang Mai market and having it returned to me before I had even realised it was gone. Well the next loss was more worrisome: I got to Canadian immigration in Toronto, after my flight from Bangkok via Tokyo, and when I reached into my zip pocket for my passport it wasn’t there. Nor was it anywhere else in my handcarry.

The Immigration guy was fabulous, as I started to get flustered: “Don’t worry, he said, we have to let you in if we’re satisfied you’re a citizen, even if you don’t have a passport.” That felt good. “Just go straight dowstairs and talk to the Air Canada people. They can check if you left it on the plane.” I did, and they did, again very kindly and without condescension (for which I was grateful; I felt so stupid!!). And by the time my checked bag had arrived, they’d run back to the plane, retrieved my passport, and had it waiting for me.

The kindness of strangers is a wonderful thing. Time to pass it on!

Meantime the pot of daffodils a friend brought by a week ago is still in bloom, yellow and optimistic, and the almost garishly intense pink-red cyclamen brought by another friend is still a hot spot in the kitchen. All we need now is more spring warmth and sunshine outside too.

ENGAGING WITH THE WORLD AT HOME

Heat at last, promised for today and tomorrow, hurrah!   I was up in Grey County on the weekend, and only two nights ago there was frost, and then gleaming frosted grasses in the early morning, until the sun reached them and turned them bright green again.  Perhaps with the promised heat, the basil plants that are shivering here in the back garden will at last start to thrive.  Can't wait!

Our young friend Melissa is here from Chiang Mai visiting for several months.  She is a great addition to the household.  And she's wide-eyed out in the city, amazed at chilly rain (rain in Thailand comes after hot season, so it's far from the European style chilly spring rains we have had this month); at the tulips, now finishing, and glorious flowering trees of May (the ornamental plums in King's College Circle at the University of Toronto, just up the street, are in full magnificent deep pink bloom right now); at the pleasure of treasure-hunting for used clothing, in shops and in friends' piles of cast-offs...   

We are delighted Melissa is here, for we get to see everything freshly through her eyes.  And I love coming across pink (pink shoes, pink computer cover, pink socks, etc) in the house.  Pink is usually in short supply in this household of male people.  It feels like another kind of springtime.

May has also brought a nice surprise: we are one of the entries in the wide-ranging list of "Fifty Things We Love About Toronto" that is the cover story in the May issue of Toronto Life magazine.  For the magazine there's a nice cross-connect between our books' exploration of food cultures in ASia and elsewhere, and the food cultures in Toronto.

I've always felt so lucky to live here, and one huge reason is the richness of the culture here, multi-layered, and constantly evolving.  Of course that complexity and creativity is echoed in the food culture, which means I am always a beginner, always coming across foods I don't know in my local Chinese and Vietnamese groceries, or in the Ethiopian store in Kensington Market, or the South American stores along Augusta.  All those are within ten minutes' walk of the house.  It's hard to feel a need to go further afield, but when I do, to say, the wonderful Tamil shops along Parliament, I find lots of familiar produce and products, and again, also often feel like a beginner, ignorant of so much that is there.  (And notice that I haven't even mentioned, let alone described, the extraordinary food culture maps of the inner and outer suburbs here.)

What a luxury, to be reminded every day of how much there is to understand and of how little I still know.  And how lucky to be able to learn every day from my neighbours!  

So it's not just Melissa who is walking around amazed and pleased in Toronto...

PS A friend I ran into the other day at Wychwood Market (Saturday mornings near Christie and St Clair) told me she and her family had been very sick after eating undercooked (they wanted them crunchy) fiddleheads.  Then they googled and it turns out that the Ministry of Health says we should all know that fiddleheads must be cooked through (steam them, cook them in a little boiling water...).  So resist the impulse make them al dente.  Save that for carrots or broccoli or zucchini.