GETTING MOVING, IN ALL KINDS OF WAYS

This last day of July has started with great energy… what a thrill. And it’s all because I’ve retrieved a strategy that I’d carelessly let slip these last couple of weeks. I feel so much the better for it.

Here in Toronto we’ve had a cool summer, with frequent rain showers. It’s kept the gardeners happy, including me. But it’s also meant that mornings have often been a little discouraging weather-wise, cold and rainy. During the day I’ve found myself less energetic and also feeling chilled, as I sit inside, with the doors open, working at my laptop.

How silly! I thought to myself last night as I headed to bed. I’m cold and a little lethargic because I’ve not been getting my blood moving. My time to exercise and get revved up has always been first thing in the morning. It was the time-slot for running, lovely early-morning trots, until the ligaments in my left foot gave way a few years ago and brought that to an end. I replaced running with cycling or brisk walking, but somehow lost the pattern recently.

What a pleasure to have it back, that early morning energy! I headed out in the chill with a jacket on over my Tshirt and biking shorts topped by a short skirt. The air was fresh (more like September than late July) and the traffic still mild at 7. The intensely -green grass glowed in the slanting sun, the gardeners were out tidying at the university, the road-works people were already digging and laying pipes and moving dirt, a parks guy was riding a mower in the ravine as I headed up the Poplar Plains road hill, joggers cruised along sidewalks absorbed in their earphones and their effort, and dog-walkers were trotting and walking and sauntering everywhere I went, accompanying their assorted pooches.

That landscape of early morning activity, like a gently animated Breughel, is such fun to ride through, a reminder of the layers of life in the city.

And my ride felt great, both the effortfulness of the uphill and the thrilling whoosh of the trip back down the long curve of Russell Hill Road. I topped up the endorphins with a short stop at a small local exercise park, where I did seated arm lifts.

And now sitting by the open door, with a cool breeze wafting in carrying the scents of the garden and the sounds of morning birds, I can feel my blood moving and my brain working, both much more vigorously than yesterday. A quick jolt of activity, call it exercise or call it labour, or call it pleasurable excursion, is such a gift.

Happy end of July everyone!

"I CAN'T EVEN...": THOUGHTS ON DRAWING, & A SPUMA RECIPE

“I can’t even…” is a recent hot catchphrase, used by young people in their late teens and into their twenties, to allude to an impossible-to-talk-about kind of event or feeling. It’s a very useful tool, I find, especially as I plod away at my book project, nibbling at the edges, or sweating out recipe testing, or worrying about time and space, history and context. I’m often so enmeshed, “I can’t even…”

Meantime out in the immediate world we’re having a cool and well-watered summer. The garden is happy, drinking it up and greening. The exceptions are still the eggplants, which won’t set fruit without some assurance of warmth, an assurance only intermittent and thus not credible. The cucumbers and greens are thriving and continue to be sweet and appetising, at all hours and for every occasion.

I’m pleased because recipe testing for this Persian World book includes dishes that are traditionally accompanied by a plate of fresh herbs, such an easy task in summer time. The zip and zing of fresh tarragon and mint, basil and green onion is hard to beat. The mouth comes alive and everything tastes better, life itself in fact.

The other day a friend came by and I put a small plate of fresh arugula and tarragon on so that we could nibble at the greens as we chatted. They were so energising they made me feel as if my brain had added sparkle and energy.

What other ways are there of bringing ourselves to greater liveliness? Yes, yes, a good party, dancing, etc. I agree. But on a daily basis?

A number of close friends have urged me to try Vipassana meditation. They have gone to ten-day sessions, and each time return from them energised and radiant. I see the evidence, but just cannot imagine sitting still for ten days. Life feels too short! My attitude is short-sighted perhaps, but I’m stuck there.

This spring and summer I’ve stumbled onto a wonderfully accessible alternative, and that is drawing. I took a course in May-June, three hours every Wednesday afternoon for five weeks, and then a five days-in-a-row course just last week, both from Kelley Aitken, and both taught in the galleries at the Art Gallery of Ontario. A good drawing teacher, either in person or even in a book, teaches you to see differently. And once that happens, and you engage with looking and with transmitting what you see onto the page, well then you’re away!

It’s not about “I’m so terrible” or “See look how good I am at drawing!”. Instead it’s about concentrated focus on a non-verbal task. It’s like practising music, I suppose, or any other form of focusses attentiveness. I found I was losing myself in the process, in the best sense of “losing myself”.

And I found myself feeling relaxed and light as air (as wll as pleasurably tired) at the end of each session.

“Welcome to your meditation practice!” wrote a Vipassana-practicing friend on my FB page after I posted about the joys of drawing.

At the times when, as happens intermittently, I get overwhelmed by the scale of this current book project and all that I need to pull together, I can now opt out into a mind-cleansing place, and return refreshed, with better vision and insight (hopefully!).

And so, like those life-giving sprigs of fresh green intensity, my drawing pad and pencils can - and if I follow through they will - become an energiser, a wonderful option that is indescribably fruitful, in ways “I can’t even….”

RECIPE TALK: SPUMA

I bought some gooseberries at the market last Saturday. Dawn-the-Baker, of Evelyn’s Crackers suggested that I make “spuma” with them. What’s that? I asked. (She also suggested a gooseberry cake recipe in Jane Grigson’s FRUIT cookbook (a real treasure). And so I made both.)

Spuma is a real discovery for me, a chilled/frozen Italian dessert made with intensely fresh fruit syrup and egg-whites beaten to stiff peaks, that are folded together and then frozen.

My proportions were:

- 3 cups gooseberries (no need to top and tail them) cooked to softened with very little water and a scant 1 cup sugar, then pressed through a sieve into a bowl (discard the solids) and allowed to cool to room temperature;

- whites of 4 large eggs whisked (I used my Kitchen-Aid stand mixer) with ¼ cup sugar for less than 3 minutes, or whatever time it takes to get stiff peaks;

- a bowl into which I poured the meringue and then folded and gently stirred in 1 cup of the room-temperature gooseberry “syrup”/sweet liquid (I drank the remaining little bit of gooseberry liquid; what a tonic!);

- a plastic bag to cover the bowl tightly and a freezer to put it in.

After two to three hours you have a chilled cold dessert, delish over cake or fruit or on its own. There’s no dairy, so it feels light as air in your mouth.

AND A NOTE for next time: I found that the mixture had separated a little before it froze: there was more pale meringue on top and more gooseberry at the bottom of the bowl. Next time I will try stirring it gently after twenty minutes, when it’s partly frozen, to make sure it stays well mixed.

ANOTHER NOTE, for other fruit: If you are using raspberries or cherries, or peaches or plums, which are sweeter than gooseberries, try using only 1/2 cup sugar for 3 cups fruit. You can taste the syrup and adjust it of course, so go lightly on the sugar to test what you want. I like spuma on the less-sweet side. I find it more refreshing.

HEADING INTO NEW CHALLENGES & SAYING FAREWELL TO SUMMER

The school children and their teachers are back in the classroom and the weather is giving them a little help: it’s grey and cool here in Toronto today. Do you remember that little pit of anxious anticipation when you were a kid? Do you remember wondering what you were going to wear on that first day? On the second question, I remember the details of only one year: what I wore to the first day of grade six, a favourite cotton dress of fresh green and white. Hard to understand why some memories stick…

This big turning point in the year is always so freighted with anticipations of all kinds and regrets about the end of summer’s long days and ease. Last night – the eve of the change - as I have in the past, I had friends over for supper. The youngest is headed into grade two, and was a little anxious, but fundamentally happy and fine. The eldest was headed to school today as a teacher. Several more start university responsibilities in a week or two. And the rest of us just reverberated, mostly privately, with memories and echoes of Labour Days past.

All this was against a backdrop, or perhaps I should say foreground, of delectables: slices of charcoal grilled pork; small grilled Pakistani-style sliders; mizuna salad, oh so fresh; sticky rice, a mix of black and white that was chewy and satisfying (I just had the rice leftovers for breakfast); a chopped mix of grilled tomatillos, eggplant, and onions that was terrific, an improvisation; sauteed shiitakes; sliced heirloom tomato; parboiled yellow beans in vinaigrette, unchopped so we could eat them one by one in our fingers; boiled potatoes cut into large wedges and wok-fried with a little sliced fennel in turmeric-tinted olive oil. There was a pause while my prebaked pate sucree crust was topped with chopped peaches (the last of summer probably), wild blueberries, a little sugar, and a small amount of yogurt-egg mixture scented with nutmeg and dried ginger and then baked at 375 to a custard-tart loveliness.

And then there it was, a farewell taste of summer fruit to send us on our way into the school year, the travel year, the work year…

Some new things to announce: The Burma book is now available as an E Book, and so are the three regional Asian cookbooks that I wrote with Jeffrey Alford. There’s a deal on in September for each of the three that I’ve been asked to tell you about. Here’s the link: ecookbook-club

My pre-approval for my visa to Iran has come through. I’m hoping to go look and eat and taste and photograph food and markets and people etc in the month of October. It is so exciting, and yes of course also a little anxiety-making, given the tensions in the region. I can’t wait. But if I get to go I won’t be posting anything for the time I am there. I’ll leave a laptop in Istanbul, where I’ll have some days at either end. And meantime I’m trying to figure out my packing needs etc. All advice welcome, especially anyone who has been recently and at this time of year. I know about the need for a manteau and headscarf, of course…

And before that there’s the Kneading Conference West ( kneadingconferencewest) from September 12 to 14, in the Skagit Valley in northern Washington State; the Stratford Food Fair called Savour Stratford on September 21 and 22, where I’ll be doing various talkings and demos etc (culinaryfestival) ; and on this coming weekend the Longhouse Food revival in Renselaarville NY (SW of Albany 35 miles or so (longhouse).

It really does feel like the end of summer ease and flexibility and the start of a new work year!

SUMMER PLEASURES AND ANTICIPATIONS

Suddenly Toronto has become subtropical, with moist air, intermittent rain, and high temperatures. “At last” the garden smiles, as it bursts into action. In one week it’s gone from torpor (except the leafy greens) to full riotous growth. And as the lettuce leaves toughen in the heat and the rhubarb season ends (sigh!), the chiles and tomatillos, the zucchinis, cucumbers, and eggplants are in bloom and setting fruit. At last.

On Friday I drove north out of the city, leaving at noon just as the long-weekend (Canada Day) traffic was starting to thicken. Once I was in the country, it looked as if the rain we’ve been having so generously had drowned many crops: there were fields of wheat turning yellow with excess water, and low-lying spots covered with several inches of standing water. But farther north, past Shelburne and into Grey county, I was in a different climate zone, where the rainfall had been just right, for there the crops in the fields were standing tall and healthy.

I was on a mission: to do a little visiting with my 87 year old aunt and with friends, yes, but mainly to go and sing with a group of shape-note singers in Durham whom I haven’t seen for over a year. The occasion was a birthday, an excuse for people to make the effort to get together for a potluck as well as the sing.

We sat in a big-windowed living room surrounded by leafy hardwood forest as the evening sky grew pale, and after eating very well we sang and sang, renewing ourselves and connecting. There was a pause for cake with strawberries, and sparklers and champagne toasts outside on the deck, the we came inside and sang some more.

The sky had darkened past midnight blue by the time I left just before 11. I walked out into the damp-scented air of the forest, got in my little red car, and drove down the concession roads that led to the highway and thence to the city two hours away.

That sudden quiet when the car is turned off at the end of a journey, the lovely silence of arrival, is such a balm. As I walked through the garden from the garage I felt relieved to be home safely, but also refreshed and transformed as if I’d been away a week. That’s the power of music and of getting out of town. A change of scene, however brief, lets me see with fresh eyes.

And that’s always a good thing.

Now I have only two days to get my head in gear for my short trip to England and parts south. I’m headed to the Oxford Symposium next week, a three day conference of food and food history. This year the theme is Food and Material Culture. There’s to be a little sale of kitchen tools that people want to off-load. I have one strange spatula that I am prepared to part with, but I am bringing a couple of other tools for show and tell: a bread stamp from Kashgar that is made of bird feathers and a Tibetan butter box made of wood, the aroma of which transports me straight back to nomad tents. I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone else brings.

And I’m packing several wool sweaters, just to be sure, because I remember how wet and cold it was last year… Surely it will be better this time?

In the meantime I’m expecting friends for supper tonight. We’ll grill over charcoal – lamb leg steaks and some chicken too, as well as shallots and onions and perhaps some late asparagus if I can find any – and talk into the night. Summer is such a luxurious time.

GOOD-BYE TO JUNE, HELLO JULY!

It’s a balmy Saturday evening here in Toronto. But more notably, it’s the last day of June. What a turning point: moving day for some; the start of summer holidays for teachers all over the country; the heart of Pride Week; and the night before the start of a new year for doctors beginning a residency.

I said as much to a friend today, for I’d noticed the small rented moving trucks and U-Hauls all over town this morning as I pedalled around the otherwise empty streets on errands, and those made me think of the other June 30 markers. And we agreed that, no disrespect intended, it’s best to try to avoid needing a hospital in these first four to six weeks of summer, until the new residents find their feet. 

“Surely not!” said D who overheard this. “After all they’ve already had a lot of training!”  Sure probably, but not the same kind of specific on-the-job-training that they now face. Just as the smartest most capable first-year lawyer is still all at sea for awhile, floundering and trying to find her/his feet, so too with new residents.  We’re glad they get to learn on the job, real skills. And we know they’re supervised etc. It’s just that everything can take longer, and also there’s sometimes a certain confidence lacking.

That’s as it should be.

We don’t want people pretending a fake confidence, do we? We all want to be able to acknowledge that there’s a lot to learn and that it’s no shame to say, “I am not sure; I will ask my ..(supervising person)..”  Perhaps in fact we’re in safer surer hands when doctors are just starting out, and lawyers too, for that is when they know they don’t know. And that is also when there’s no shame in asking for advice.

The real risk comes when people are senior enough that they are embarrassed to ask for help or advice.

hmmm

Maybe I have it all wrong in what I wrote above. Maybe we should feel more confident in the weeks just after July 1, as we see the fresh young residents start on the next stage of their journey by learning on us!

Heard some intense Cuban music last night at Lula Lounge, with Jane Bennett. The music was great, but most amazing to me (and this just shows my ignorance of the scene) was the incredible salsa dancing on the dance floor. It was packed. And the fabulous intricate, rhythmical, and completely attuned pairs dancing were a sight to behold. Lovely.

The bicycle ride back along Dundas, catching all the lights, as happens so rarely, in the warm night air, with not much traffic (it felt like everyone except the salsa dancers had left town for the long Canada Day weekend), was exhilarating.

And so is the prospect of two more months of summer.

Happy July everyone.

PS Thanks to everyone who posted comments about and likes of the cover of the Burma book on my Facebook pages.  I'll post the book tour schedule when I know it in more detail... I'll be out and about with the book from late September until mid-November, which is to say that Artisan in the US and RAndom House in Canada are both doing a great job of supporting and promoting the book.

DANCING & SINGING & LEARNING IN SUMMER LIGHT

As I sit in a chilly breeze, by an open door and looking out at the green and growing garden under a clear blue sky, I realise that I often start these posts with the weather. Is it cultural? Some Anglo streak that insists on making itself felt? Perhaps in part, but it's also a reflection of just how much the sky and light and weather generally affect moods and plans and the feel of the city.

Speaking of moods, the break in the heat last Thursday night came just in time, so that Friday night a passle of friends could dance and chat and eat and drink in comfort well into the warm breezy night.  The mood was relaxed, happy, engaged...truly a first summer party feel.

Though dancing was the main event, with talking a close second, there was also what to eat: Fresh strawberries picked that morning in Grey County were a highlight, along with sugar snap peas organically grown there too. We ate the peas raw, almost like green candy, and whoosh! they vanished. On the cooked food front, there were two brilliant cakes, large generous cakes, by dawnthebaker assisted by Evelyn, of Evelyn's Crackers; and some chocolate brownies that disappeared before I even saw them; as well as grilled beef salad, the meat alluringly smoky tasting, I have to say, because of the way the charcoal fire burned, made from flatiron steaks from Sanagan's. I grilled mushrooms of various kinds and they were really the hit for me, because of the (always reliable) olive oil and fish sauce coating of flavour they got just before I put them on the grill. All they needed was a squeeze of lime juice to finish them.

There was some sticky rice left over, and not much else.  Clean-up was easy easy, with help, and done before 3 am. Ahhh

The late nights I used to keep in university and afterward are not as easy now. I mean, they're easy enough at the time, and fun, but the lingering afterward of sleepiness and dopiness at odd hours of the day is a little long - at least three days. It's like jetlag I guess: pleasures that are paid for later.  The easy answer is to make sure to get to bed in good time. But these long limpid-light evenings are irresistible, and so I find myself up and outside in the soft air until way past midnight, way past one, .... you get the idea.

Pedalling around with an old friend on Saturday evening for example, listening in for a half hour here and there to various offerings of the Toronto jazz festival, was a perfect way to linger through the summer evening and make every moment a pleasure. Then yesterday I took my bicycle to Ward's Island for an afternoon singing (shape-note singing) at the small beautiful church, over a hundred years old, made of wood, with generous clear acoustics. We sang with the doors open to the green outdoors. Every once in awhile one of the long trailing tour bus cart things would come by and pause for a moment in front of the church, the guide's amplified voice telling stories of the past to bemused? bored? sleepy? tourists.

At singing we sometimes sight-read a new-to-us song, most often sight-read with the benefit of having sung it before a few times, or often in some cases. We sing a capella and the harmonies are delicious, the syncopations of rhythm occasionally startling. Yesterday was a long packed sing; we tried all sorts of less familiar tunes. And by the time I was sitting at the dock gazing at the mirage-like view of acqua railings framing the city's skyline across the water, I realised I was pooped. Yes, my voice was a little tired, but more it was because of the concentration. Reading music and words and trying to stay focussed seem like easy pleasures, and they are, but/and at the same time they do take effort.

And so although yesterday was not a heavy day of work, last night I was ready to catch up on sleep and dream a long night away.

One more thing, to do with food: I have leggy broccoli raab in my garden, grown from seed. I snap off pieces and then watch them regrow. The same goes for the kale that lasted through the winter.  I chop stir-fry the greens, or float pieces in soup. But I also chop the kale and include it in tender greens salad. Delicious. Last night I did that, and also used it in a simple soup made with masur (red) dal. I tempered the soup with chopped spring onions and some ginger cooked in olive oil, along with a blend of freshly ground cumin and coriander seed, and a couple of dried red chiles. A dash of white wine left over from the party finished it nicely.

Last week I gave the last class of my six-week Foods that Changed the World course at U of T's School of Continuing Studies. I miss it already. There was a pattern of intense reading and thinking and organising for weeks beforehand and also every week all through the course, as I tried to sort out what to cover, and how.  I'll be giving it again next year, and hopefully will be able to do a second food-and-culture-related course too.  More when I know.  And my student feed-back was very good, which always feels great. The thing I learned from it that I will try to do better with next year is that I should have had everyone introduce themselves and give a little of their background. We had some amazing resources in there, and it was only by "accident" that we learned of the expertise and food-related history of the class members.

It's always good to have a clear idea of how to improve and do better next time. And it's a luxury to have a "next time" to work with. Happy summer everyone.

A SENSE OF PROMISE AS NEW HORIZONS BECKON

Nearly midnight on this first day of June.  As we approach the summer solstice the evening sky stays bright and lingers long, at least most days.  But not today.  It's been alternately drizzling and pouring all day, sometimes torrentially.  Gusts of wind every once in a while swept the rain almost sideways.  Umbrella corpses must be littering the sidewalks and entranceways all over the city.

I'm grateful to have had a full yesterday, including a long zippy outing on my bicycle last night, and a calm task-filled day today, with no need to brave the elements except to do small chores in the garden.

I've been sorting slides (yes, actual old-fashioned colour slides) all day, prompted by a need to find images to skan, so that I can show them to my Foods that Changed the World class this coming Tuesday and at the last class on June 19th.  Instead of showing a few each week, I've decided to show a batch to illustrate some of the things we've been talking about in the last three weeks.  That means I have shots of rice cultivation and harvest, bread ovens and flour mills (small hand-powered ones), old olive trees, oil mills (animal powered), and more.  As I sort through the sheets of slides, it's a pleasure to be reminded that I have a real depth of food shots.  I feel I'm getting reacquainted with them after a long time away.

I've been so immersed in Burma these last three years.  Now it's time to re-engage with images and thoughts of other places, and with other themes and ideas.  No, I'm not abandoning my interest in Burma, very much not.  But I need to reconnect to the wider world too.  How fortunate that I have the photographs, taken over the last decades, to remind me of the richness of the world, the extremes in which people live, and how much they can teach us.

As I look at flatbread-related images, for example, it makes me want to go and re-photograph in flatbread cultures, and also to extend my understanding.  Dreams of travel to Iran start to surface, and to Egypt, and why not Algeria? I think to myself.  It's too easy to stay comfortably inside the zone...the ideas and places that are familiar.  The familiar is endlessly enriching, for sure.

But I have a hunger to be out being vulnerable, to be in not-knowing situations, where I have no automatic responses and instead have to figure things out moment by moment.

Perhaps this yearning is connected to my having been at my university reunion last weekend, reminded by the aging faces all around me of how long ago graduation was, and of how easy it is to settle into routines and forget about new challenges.  I have to say it feels good to have the blood and imagination stirring.  I've been so caught up in Burma deadlines and the urgencies of last-minute checks and edits, that I've not had my eyes raised to the horizon.

Perhaps it's this rainy day that's freed me to reflect and ponder more abstractly about what comes next.

Perhaps it's the wonderful supper and conversation I had with two dear friends last night, challenging and lively, to celebrate one birthday, and to mark how much better each of us is feeling and doing, compared to this time last year.

The yearly markers, whether they're the annual cycles of the garden and the trees (these last ten days have been a time of elm seeds scattered like pale flimsy coins all over the street and into the house on stray breezes, and of pale fallen chestnut blossoms like left-over tossed rice after a wedding, decorating the gutters at the edges of the sidestreets), or personal anniversaries such as celebratory dinners with friends, keep us in line and allow us to keep track of our lives and loves.  And so I can say, as we head into June, and the green and fruitfulness (we hope) of summer, that life these days is looking and feeling very good and full of promise.

I hope you are feeling some of this kind of optimism and good energy.  It makes each day shine more brightly, makes a rainy day feel like a gift rather than a let-down, gives meaning to the simplest things.

POSTSCRIPT REMINDER: The transit of Venus is happening this coming Tuesday, June 5.  It's the last one for more than one hundred years...a sort of unimaginable length of time into the future.  For people in Toronto and the east half of North America, it starts in the late afternoon.  Here Venus starts to cross the sun's orb at 6.04 pm we're told.  It will take more than three hours, which means the sun will have set before the transit is finished.  In other parts of the world it will be visible finishing, at dawn (say in Southeast Asia).  Have a look on Google for more info about times, and also the safety glasses you need to protect your eyes (just as with an eclipse of the sun).  I'm going to rush up to Varsity stadium to see the first twenty minutes or so of the transit.  And I'll be thinking of the wonder and amazement that skywatchers have felt over the centuries when they have chanced on a transit of Venus.  (They happen about twice in a hundred years, we're told.)  Now to hope for clear skies!

THE DANCE OF THE FIREFLIES

A quick note on a soft summer evening... I'm just back in the city from a visit north to Grey County. All is green and growing there after the wet spring we've had, and pretty late too. The lettuce greens, the mizuna, the garlic scapes are all fresh and lush still.

Last night, after a sauna and swim in a swift cool river, we had food cooked over a fire (local sausage, scapes, chiles...) and several fresh green salads, and then we hung out eating mangoes and tasting Fifthtown Cheese, a hard aged cheese that was fabulous. But then the sky shifted from clear evening to a bank of grey and threatening clouds to the south. We worried about rain, but In the end the storm, and it was a deluge, stayed away from us. We heard the thunder and saw lightning, but the dense grey shafts that told us about pouring rain were safely south of us. Overhead the sky was a strange pale colour that gave off an eerie greenish-yellow light, but created no shadows. It made everything oddly flat, as if we were all figures standing in front of a painted backdrop. Nothing had any depth. It was disorienting and a little unsettling too. And meanwhile the backdrop to our strange light was the dramatic dark sky to the south.

Later still, after night had fallen, we walked down the hill and watched the fireflies, in a damp little valley, hundreds of them, thousands? It was hard to think of them as insects. They became magic points of light, fairies perhaps, or signals to extra-terrestrials. If a firefly is still, then its moment of brightness looks like a "dot". But if it's flying at speed while it's bright, then it looks like a momentary "dash" in the blackness. And so the dots and dashes flickered their messages to us in the magical dark. Far away to the northwest the sky had a last suggestion of brightness, the day's final adieu.

Early July magic.

KIDNAPPED BY SLEEP ON A WARM EVENING

It's Sunday night, dark and with the moon almost set. I've somehow lost a few hours. No I'm not hallucinating. We had supper, I did some rereading of my Burma travel journals, just checking this and that as I head into my final week of editing the Burma manuscript. And then sleep overcame me. Yes yes, perhaps it was the tedium of deciphering my own handwriting! Whatever!

Over two hours later I resurfaced, in that state of post-deep sleep paralysis that meant it took me another half hour to get off the sofa. Whew! I think I have to treat this as a second morning. I won't head out for a run (had a wonderful one this morning, long and easy) but I will try to knock some chores off my to-do list with my sort-of morning energy.

This weekend has already been productive. The big thing? yesterday I printed out a final draft of the Burma manuscript so a friend could read it through. This will be my last pass through and tidy up, and then off it goes... I now have a working title, by the way: RIVERS OF FLAVOR: RECIPES AND TRAVELLER'S TALES FROM BURMA

How does that look to you?

Getting that far ahead meant that I could at last do a little more in the garden. I have talked here about my plan to plant tomatoes in bags of soil, because of the blight problem in the garden soil. Now that's done, and we'll see how they do. It's not an attractive arrangement, for sure. The bags are all along the wall of the house in the side yard, so they won't get as much sun as plants do in the back, but the wall will hold in warmth and hopefully lengthen their season.; it should also give them some support. The other plants that I bought last week in Grey County are all planted: many kinds of chiles and basil and some cumin too, and after the heavy rains mid-week, they are looking better than perky and starting to grow.

Meantime on the flower side of the garden the irises are in full glorious bloom and the columbines too, lots of shade of blue and purple and all the in-betweens. Then late this afternoon the first peonies came out, creamy white edged with pink. A fab week for flowers...

Just started reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. It's quite amazing. Part of my mind's eye is living in Japan, with the motley Dutch trading community on an island off Nagasaki in 1799. Maybe that's what left me feeling dazed and needing sleep after supper. Hmm It could also be late payment for sleep deficit caused by the adrenalin of getting near the finish with the book. I have been pumped, for sure, unable to sleep more than five hours solidly each night. Not good!

I want to send a map in with the Burma manuscript. It's always good to be able to find where you are on a map, when reading about a new place. At least that's how I am. Do you feel the same way? A map makes it real somehow. Yes photos help, but the map is essential. That's next on my to-do list. It will have major rivers and cities and towns that are mentioned in the book. I'm using mostly the older names: Burma (not Myanmar) and Rangoon, not Yangon, for example.

Speaking of photos, I'm soon going to be able to (and I need to) start working on organising my digital photos, over two years' worth. I'm ashamed that I haven't done it until now, you're right. It's a big project and I knew it could side-track me, so I've left it for after I submit the manuscript. I've already got a list of some of the photos I like best, but they all need organising, using Lightbox. First I need to buy the program, then learn to use it. These transitions into new tech or new programs can be scary, of course, but since the pressure of the photos has grown so huge, I am not worried, just desperate to get started.

Meantime summer will be blooming and beautiful outside while I am insidel looking at this computer screen for hours. But at least the windows will be open, the fresh air pouring in, and the streets lively with summer ease.

Bring it on!

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER, I GUESS!

Aha!  We had to be firmly into August this year before the weather was hot enough to get the "heat bugs" buzzing.  So it was only yesterday, August 2, Ian's birthday, and Philly's too, that there was a hot afternoon and in the middle of that heat rising intensely off the ground and pouring down from the sky, suddenly, a buzz.  (cicadas, I suppose they are)

I'm not complaining at the time it's taken for summer to truly come.  I'd rather this than drought or pestilence.  And now we can be grateful, right?  Our garbage is due to be collected tomorrow (the municipal emplyees went back at a minute after midnight Friday morning), the sun is shining, and the tomatoes, even my lovely green zebras, are at last ripening into sweet tenderness.  yum!

My timing seems a little off then, for tomorrow evening I am booked to fly to Rome for nine days.  Wow!  I have never made a short trip to Europe in the summer, and the last time I was in Italy was for researching Seductions of Rice, as well as attending an Oldways conference in Puglia.  

Nancy Jenkins (such a great travelling companion, and a good driver too) and I drove up the east coast from Lecce and then stopped in to see a guy who was experimenting with growing upland rice in the Marche, and also old varieties of wheat (there's a story about him in Seductions of Rice).  We also headed into the Abruzzo where we had a terrific Sunday lunch at a small family restaurant in a stony hilltop village, then made it to Tuscany for a couple of days near Cortona.  From there it was a straight shot to the Po Valley, and the lovely green of the rice-growing area around Vercelli.  Along the way I remember seeing signs to Rome occasionally and pining at the idea that I wasn't going to get there on that trip.

This time I'm headed to Umbria to stay with friends, what a treat! but expect to have a couple of days in Rome at the end.  Yes, it's August, and lots of places are closed, and the population is all tourists, and, and...  But if I can get to the Villa Julia to see Etruscan wonders (somehow I've never been) and can wander a little, and maybe seek out again some of the wonderful mosaics I saw when I was last in Rome (in May 1977, yikes!) it will feel like an extra gift.  I remember loving the mosaics, and the feel, at Santa Agnese and Santa Sabina, so perhaps that's where I'll try to head.

And maybe there's no need for any ambition at all.  Just being and breathing in a place with layers of life is a way of connecting imaginatively, no?  

HEALTHY LOCAL AGRICULTURE MATTERS

It's a rainy Saturday morning, quiet, with only the sound of drips onto window ledges and spattering raindrops on leaves, and then that sprinkling lighter sound of fine rain as it hits the ground.  Out the glass doors at the back, open to let in the slightly chilly moist air, there's a wall of green.  It's the ivy on the garage, lushly in summer leaf, a green wall at the back of our compact garden.  I have the impression that if I had different ears to hear with, I'd also catch the slurping sounds of the growing tomato and pepper and cucumber plants out there, as well as the herbs, sucking up this fresh rain.  

The problem with a rainy Saturday morning is that it does the outdoor farmers' markets no good.  There are two major ones in central Toronto, at Brickworks and at Wychwood, both of them relatively new (in the past five years).  At Brickworks there's a huge roof over everyone, so the rain is a problem "only" because it is apt to discourage shoppers from turning up.  But at Wychwood vendors must rely on tents and canopies, and shoppers are stuck walking in the rain., so it's uncomfortable as well as discouraging.  Those who usually go by bicycle, like me, will most likely stay home, as I am doing today, writing this blog rather than pedalling through the lovely empty early morning streets.

The largest farmers' market here, long-established, is downtown, at St Lawrence Market, in the "north building".  The south building has a permanent market of fishmongers and cheese merchants and butchers, etc etc (open Tuesday to Saturday).  The north market is only on Saturdays, and is packed with vendors selling meat and cheese and vegetables and fruit, and bread and sweet baking, as well as some prepared foods.  There's no hard rule about local only, as there is at the outdoor markets, nor any requirement that foods on sale be organic or sustainably grown, though as consumers' awareness of those issues and labels grows, who knows?

The St Lawrence Farmers' Market is there year-round.  So is the Wychwood Market (it moves indoors in cold weather, into a beautiful galleria space in the refurbished TTC barns).  And so too is the Thursday market at Dufferin Grove, to the west of downtown.  So people who go to those markets can and do develop the habit of going each week ... and it is habit that can sustain a market.  In fact without it, the markets have to rely each week on consumers knowing about a particular market and then deciding to go.  Habit and necessity are much more reliable sustainers of farmers' markets than last-minute whim.

And why am I going on and on musing about this, as the rain intensifies outside?  Well once you've seen how hard farmers work, especially farmers doing family-farm-scale sustainable agriculture, the fact that that hard work is not enough, that they also have to cope with the vagaries of consumer behaviour at fledgling farmers' markets, makes you anxious for them, and in fact anxious for us all.

How can we make the essential-to-life work of farming a rewarding and rewarded part of our community?  How to keep this thing called sustainable local agriculture on track?

The local markets are one element.  And we need to get in the habit of relying on the markets.  But relying in what way?

In North America we are generally rushed and have the habit of doing "one-stop shopping", getting it all over with at one large comprehensive grocery store.  Most of us don't have the luxury of a European-style set of small specialty shops: the butcher, the fish monger, the cheese-seller, all within easy walking or driving distance.  The large grocery store is the substitute for that.  And so for us "reliance" on a market means we feel confident that we will find all the food we need to shop for all at the one location.

Very few of the farmers' markets can provide that.  There is meat, and vegetables, and fruit, but no dairy apart from a little cheese.  The only exception is the St Lawrence Farmers' market in the north building.  And what buyers can't find there they can get in the permanent south building market.  So the larger better established markets will, I hope, continue to function reasonably well for farmers and for consumers, but the very small ones will probably fade away, as the cost of bringing in food for an uncertain result becomes too expensive and discouraging an equation.  

Getting locally-grown and -produced food into grocery stores is the other important piece of the puzzle.  (I'm leaving aside for the moment the CSA (community-supported agricuture) movement, which is hugely important way of ensuring reliable markets for farmers; and also the resurgence of urban gardening (urban farming is the new buzzword)).  

It is happening.  Independent grocery stores like wonderful Fiesta Farms here in Toronto, are developing long-term relationships with farmers and stocking their shelves, especially in the produce section, with locally and sustainably grown food.  Hurrah!

All this is not just about Toronto, or other cities in North America.  Most industrialising countries face the conflicting pressures of on the one hand feeding people affordably in the short term (the most food at the cheapest price), and on the other protecting local food resources and local agriculture for the long-term future (emphasis on local and sustainable).

 

So the question remains:  How do we keep the local food scene vibrant?  How do we discourage the importing of foods that are displacing the locally grown versions ?  (Garlic from China, which floods the market in Thailand and Vietnam as well as in North America, undercutting the better-quality locally grown garlic, is the quickest example, but there are many others.)  This is the real "health issue"...

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It's still raining.  There was a heavy downpour and now we are back to drizzle.  I went out for several hours (a few paragraphs ago) to have dim sum with my friend Dina.  We found ourselves eating three-layer pork and other rich and hearty fare, as we sat in our sweaters - on June 20!  Bring on the hot weather, say I!!

And once it comes, the summer heat, I promise to be a little more light-hearted here.  Something about the chilly damp brought on this serious questing tone today.  Hope you stick with me nonetheless.

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A final note, that brings me back to the garden and the rain:  The garlic and shallots that are planted in odd spots around the edge of the garden have strong aromatic leaves that I harvest in handfuls, then chop and stir-fry.  Now their lovely curling scapes have formed, and those too I snap off, chop and stir-fry.  Other green candidates in the garden include arugula and tat soi. The fresh gathered greens are all part of a mid-morning addiction that starts with leftover rice put into in my favorite bowl of the moment and then set aside.  Into a hot wok goes olive oil, then a little mustard seed until it pops, then a fresh egg, which is fried and flipped over before being lifted out onto the rice.  The wok goes back on the heat and the chopped gathered green stuff goes in to get a quick hard dose of heat.  I turn it out onto the egg and rice, then squeeze on some lime juice and drizzle on some nam pla prik (fish sauce with hot chiles chopped into it).  Sometimes some torn fresh herbs (shiso, parsely, arugula...whatever!) go on top.  There's nothing better!

I have a feeling I may have written about this earlier.  Sorry if I'm repeating myself!